by Ahern, Jerry
“Shut up,” he told her good-naturedly, then drew her against him and kissed her hair. He pushed past her then, saying, “What was it you saw that you wanted—” But he stopped, just letting the sentence hang.
Directly ahead of him, through a niche in the wall, was a door, tight against water or air, it seemed, like a submarine door closed—and opened as well, it seemed—by means of a locking wheel. “Get Vassily and Han,” Michael Rourke ordered, using the flashlight now as he dropped into a crouch beside the locking mechanism, examining it to determine age if he could.
It looked to be of familiar design, and the metal’s integrity indicated it was either relatively new or exceptionally well made. There was tarnish in evidence, but it rubbed off to a
dully gleaming brush finish under the pressure of his glove. Some sort of high-quality stainless steel with extreme surface hardness of perhaps a titanium alloy. The tarnish and the dust layer over it could have been the patina of centuries, or only decades.
Maria dropped to her knees beside him and he asked her, “What do you think? How old?”
But Han’s voice from behind him offered the first attempt at an answer. “They could not fabricate such metal as this now. It is why they utilize the old weapons or copies of them. The Glock 17s of the pre-war Chinese Army, fortunately for the Second Qty military forces, at least, were among the most durable of pistols, it would appear.” And as Michael looked over his shoulder toward Han, the Chinese hefted his own Glock, part of his standard Second City disguise but, Michael had noticed, something the intelligence agent seemed to carry otherwise as well. “The assault rifles were crude enough to be duplicated more crudely. But such as this door would be as impossible for them as the manufacture of a pistol like the one I hold in my hand. This door is from before the Dragon Wind, Michael.”
“‘Dragon Wind,’” Michael repeated. It was the Chinese term for the Great Conflagration, the fires which had consumed the sky and nearly consumed all life on earth. “Could this be—” He left the question unfinished.
“An access chamber into the missile silos,” Vassily Prokopiev said, as if somehow snatching Michael’s thoughts from the. air.
“I think it could,” Maria Leuden volunteered.
“It might well be fitted with an alarm,” Han suggested.
“Five centuries old?” Michael asked.
“He is right,” Maria said. “It wouldn’t function anymore, would it, Michael?”
“Let’s find out,” Michael almost whispered, his fingers curling over the wheel and closing. He tried turning it, realized then that not only dust and tarnish had collected over the five
centuries since its installation, but corrosion as well, despite the gleaming quality of the metal.
He gripped it more tightly, Prokopiev throwing his left hand to it, Han Lu Chen reaching across Michael’s bending back, grabbing hold of it, Maria’s comparatively tiny hands taking hold of the wheel as well. “Together!” Michael Rourke hissed.
And the wheel turned with a squeaking sound so loud that Michael thought it could wake the dead. And who knew what might be behind the door, for that matter?
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The valley that spread before them and fronted the Second Chinese City could have been a biblical prophet’s nightmare of Armageddon. Armageddon, perhaps, but not a nightmare, John Thomas Rourke knew. Because it was reality.
Had the lucky ones, indeed, been those who had died on the Night of the War? And if that had been World War Three rather than World War Last, then was he witnessing the” beginnings of World War Four? Or, like World War Two in perspective against World War One, was it only a resumption of warfare merely briefly suspended?
He remembered history classes he had taken while completing the first four years of his university training. It was possible to trace World War Two’s beginning all the way back to the Franco-Prussian War, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor back to Theodore Roosevelt’s heavy-handed mediation of the settlement between the warring powers in the Russo-Japanese War.
History was an interlocking grid of wars, separated only by brief respites during which the antagonists might realign and re-arm.
Was the five centuries of the Sleep merely this?
“What are you thinking?” Paul Rubenstein asked him.
John Rourke looked away from the valley where Soviet ground forces and Second City Chinese forces battled to the death, where black Soviet gunships skimmed over the living
and all living vanished in their wake, like angels of death. “That nothing has changed. It’s time we were going.” And John Rourke began moving back from the rocky overlook, the first few yards on knees and elbows until it was safe to stand and there was no risk of silhouetting himself against the gray sky. The threat of discovery from accidental aerial observation, however real, was a threat which could not be countered, only judiciously ignored.
They moved along the rim of the valley, ever nearer the mountain which was the heart of the Second Chinese City, where his son and the others had gone.
At any moment, if Maria Leuden’s educated guessing proved correct, a missile might be launched, or the very mountain itself might explode as one or several nuclear warheads were detonated within it.
And, if the scientists were correct, the already fragile atmosphere, not yet recovered from the fires that nearly burned it away entirely five centuries before, would be dealt the death blow. Without planetary engineering techniques not within the technical grasp of a mankind for five centuries devoting all effort merely to survival, life on the surface of the earth would simply, irrevocably end, forever. The species Homo sapiens would have eradicated itself totally from the memory of the universe. Perhaps, if other life existed elsewhere, one of the robot probes of the Voyager type might someday be discovered-and traced back to its planet of origin, a derelict rock devoid of all atmosphere and life.
John Rourke, the snow falling as heavily as before, his right gloved fist balled tightly to the pistol grip of his daughter’s M-16, his best friend beside him, continued moving toward the mountain.
Time might, already, have run out.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Michael Rourke was the first through into the light, the light brilliantly white where it emanated from the base of the cylinder to which the air-and watertight door had opened, the cylinder itself extending downward seemingly without end. Here the light was gray, but by contrast to the pitch blackness through which they had moved, the blackness broken only by the beams of their flashlights, it was bright enough. Michael clicked off his German anglehead light and pouched it to his belt.
“Come ahead,” he whispered, stepping down onto the rungs of a ladder which began here and extended downward toward the light. Above him, there was the solid face of the cylinder’s top. As he had entered, he was initially fearful that the cylinder itself might be a missile launching tube. But capped as it was there, it could not have been.
Maria stepped out and he helped her onto the ladder rungs. He had tested them with his full body weight while still clinging to the door frame with both hands. It seemed completely sturdy.
“What is this?” Maria asked him.
“An access tube, maybe to the missile tubes. But the ladder points that way.” The tube seemed almost polished and he wondered if it were closed at its base with another door similar to the one through which he and now Maria had just passed. But this door had identical-seeming opening hardware on the
interior, identical except for an almost total lack of tarnish.
The air inside the tube had been stale-smelling, and when he had finally, with the help of the others, gotten the door open, there had been a popping sound, almost like the sound of a corked bottle of wine being opened in one of his father’s videotaped movies at the Retreat.
Michael moved down along the ladder, Maria immediately above him, and Prokopiev passing through the porthole after her, Michael moving farther down along the ladder as Han Lu Chen, the last pe
rson, clambered through and onto the rungs just above Prokopiev. They were still roped together and Michael mentally opted for maintaining the arrangement. The rungs seemed sturdy enough but he intellectually refused to assume that the next one he stepped on would not give way. And he thought of his father’s often heard words, “It pays to plan ahead.”
Keeping his voice as low as he could and still be heard, Michael announced, “This is apparently an access tube. We’ll follow it down until it plays out or branches off. If that Chinese agent got out this way, we should be able to get in. Han—close the door behind us and lock it.”
“Yes,” the Chinese intelligence agent answered, then set to swinging the hatch closed behind them. There was another popping sound, asthough the gaskets surrounding it were self-sealing. Michael wondered fleetingly if the stagnant air supply would be enough to get them to their destination with the hatchway closed. But with it open, there was enhanced risk of detection should the shelf on which they had found the door be part of some regular guard route.
“Sound—even the sound of my voice—could travel a great distance in an environment such as this, so we have to keep sound to a minimum once we’ve started because we don’t know what’s below us. Ready?”
There were nods of assent. Michael started down.
Chapter Thirty
Suddenly, there was motion all around her and there was gunfire and Sarah Rourke threw the muzzle of her STG-101 toward what she perceived as the enemy and prayed she was right as her finger touched the trigger, a loud burst and a bright, but small-diameter, flash, the gunfire making the self-compensating vision-intensification goggles she wore “blink,” shutting down luminence as the brighter flashes came. It was like the old silent movies she had seen in museums and on television, the motion broken, distorted, jerky.
The STG-101 bucked in her hands, figures in line with its muzzle going down. And suddenly Wolfang Mann’s voice was shouting in the bones of her inner ear from the radio set, telling her, “Move ahead quickly, Frau Rourke! I am with you!” And she heard as other orders were being shouted back and forth, the screaming of one of the commandoes as he died. The robot video probes were zigzagging erratically as if suddenly they had lost all control and, when she looked back, it was the man who controlled them who was going down, dead, the monitor panels on the steady mount in front of him aflame, sparks crackling from them.
She ran, almost tripping over one of the robot video probes as it came toward her left ankle like some angry little dog.
A hand reached out for her and she thought for an instant it was Wolfgang Mann or one of the others, but in the other hand was a Soviet assault rifle. She fired first and the man’s body
rocked back out of the edge of her peripheral vision.
There was no way to keep count of the number of rounds fired, the cyclic rate so rapid.
She fired again as a figure fired at her, the tunnel floor in front of her ripping and shredding under the multiple impacts. The forty-round magazine was empty or the gun was jammed. In the semi-darkness and the confusion, with people all around her trying to kill her, there was no time to find out.
She worked the bolt for the under-barrel grenade launcher and actuated the self-contained triggering mechanism within the magazine itself, firing at a concentration of the Russian kill squad blocking the tunnel. The STG-101 bucked in her fists, there was a brilliant flash, and her ears rang with the concussion.
She found another magazine for the STG-101 and released the spent or partially spent one, letting it fall to the tunnel floor, ramming the fresh one up the magazine well, tugging at the charging handle, letting the bolt fly forward.
If the gun fired, it hadn’t been a jam. It fired, another of the Russians going down, two more of them dodging clear of her.
Wolfgang Mann’s voice.“Into the area past the explosion. Hurry! Then we use the grenade launchers! Hurry!” He wasn’t talking just to her, she realized, running again, working the bolt for the grenade launcher, chambering a fresh round.
She fell, almost touching the grenade launcher’s trigger, legs and arms splayed out on the tunnel floor, something dead inches from her face, human once, but the left side of the face blown away.
On her knees, her rifle still in her hands. Hands grabbed at her under the armpits and she screamed, trying to twist the muzzle of the rifle toward whoever it was— “Sarah! Hurry!” It was Mann beside her, almost lifting her straight up, half carrying her ahead as she ran beside him, his hands at her elbows.
They zigzagged to avoid a body, jumped over another, Sarah nearly losing her footing in the sudden slickness that she knew
had to be blood.
And they were past the point at which they were attacked, Mann shouting orders over the radio for using the grenade launchers. Sarah’s was already ready to fire, and as the others formed around her and Colonel Mann and opened fire, she opened fire as well, her eyes squinted against the bright flashes as the grenades exploded. The tunnel seemed to shake with the successive multiple impacts, stray gunfire from the enemy force, then nothing but the crackle of flames as bodies burned.
She could smell the flesh and it sickened her, would have made her vomit, she knew, if she hadn’t smelled the same thing before. “Reload,” Mann ordered. She was already doing that, having exhausted the magazineload of grenades.
It was Schmidt speaking now. “The Russian prisoner died in the initial exchange, Herr Colonel.”
“Poor bastard,” Mann’s voice cut in. “Other casualties?”
A short litany began, three dead including the remote video probe operator, and one wounded, but not so seriously he couldn’t go on.
“We must find those Chinese troops. We are severely outnumbered here. Hurry on!” And he was propelling her forward. She kept her trigger finger outside the STG-101’s guard, but kept the tumbler set to auto, ready …
“I am getting confusing radio reports,” Otto Hammerschmidt called back along the fuselage. “There is so much radio traffic—wait.”
Annie brushed a strand of hair bsck from Natalia’s face, Natalia’s eyelids blinking rapidly as though she were dreaming. The drug-induced sleep had seemed deep for a time, but now Natalia seemed more restless by the moment.
Hammerschmidt called back again. “The First City is partially under attack, the Soviet forces combined to the main entrance and to several key sections within the city, including the government complex. Our base that was going under
construction was overrun and Colonel Mann has taken personal charge. Those Communist assholes—excuse me— but they’re in for trouble now, with the Herr Colonel running things!”
Natalia’s eyelids still flickered, only more rapidly now. Dreaming …
His fingers touched the nape of her neck and found the hooks and eyes that closed the halter there and opened it, and as Natalia watched her own image in the full-length mirror, John Rourke behind her, the upper portion of her white dress fell away and her breasts were bare and she crossed her arms over her chest, covering herself with her hands, the nipples of her breasts hard-feeling and erect to her. His mouth came down on her neck and she shivered.
John—somehow the tuxedo he’d worn was gone—turned her around in his arms and he was naked. Her dress fell from where it clung at her hips, surrounding her ankles, obscuring her feet, and she realized that she, too, was naked. The hair of his chest felt wonderfully rough against her skin as she unfolded her arms, baring her breasts to him, and felt the first instant of contact between their bodies.
And Natalia started to cry as his lips touched her face …
Annie Rourke Rubenstein still studied Natalia’s face, the eyelids moving more violently now, and, to Annie’s amazement, tears flowing from Natalia’s eyes and along her cheeks. Annie closed her eyes, somehow feeling like a voyeur.
Chapter Thirty-One
John Rourke had planned ahead.
A ragged-looking group of Mongols, in a depression near the base of the mountain guarding a
tunnel entrance Rourke was able to discern only because of the heat-sensing unit he had stripped out of one of the Specials, was slaughtering one of their own wounded. With the sensor, with which he had scanned the base of the mountain, he had been able to determine the location of the tunnel from several hundred yards away, then with Paul Rubenstein beside him had moved as close to the tunnel as possible for more detailed, visual observation. It was then that he had first seen the Mongols, known that the sensing device had revealed an actual entrance. Again with Paul beside him, he worked his way closer.
Now, seventy-five yards (approximately) from the Mongol position, John Rourke brought the M-16 to his shoulder, set to semi only, knowing Paul’s rifle was set to auto and aimed toward the Mongol position as well, to back him up if he missed.
But John Rourke did not plan to miss.
Six men, discounting the seventh man on the ground who was being repeatedly stabbed with the Mongols’ sabers, kicked by their fur-ruffed booted feet, spat upon—one of the Mongols even blew his nose on the injured man. Perhaps the man had demonstrated cowardice, perhaps some other undesirable trait, Rourke conjectured. But it was equally possible the
Mongols were just amusing themselves with someone who was dying anyway.
“Here we go,” Rourke rasped, getting the farthest of the six men in his sights, then gently squeezing the trigger. With the first one, there was always more time.
The M-16 jumped slightly, the tinny sound of the action that was so noticeable when the weapon was fired semi-auto, and the farthest of the six standing Mongols fell.
As Rourke swung the Colt assault rifle’s muzzle onto his next target, he considered the moral imperative that the already dying seventh man imposed: that he be helped. Rourke fired again, the second man’s arms and hands flying outward, his saber sailing through the snow-filled air as his body slapped back into the rocks.