by Ahern, Jerry
Sixteen
His methods were considered almost mystical by some, he knew, and the thought amused him, especially that they had remained so for more than one hundred twenty-five years. The key to his success at the operating table in procedures of the most extraordinarily delicate nature was the use of virtual reality techniques coupled with computer simulation, an area in which he had pioneered.
Computer simulations were employed in all manner of disciplines ever since the latter portion of the twentieth century, when virtual reality methodology was also developed. But the combination of the two was in its infancy then. Computer simulations were high-tech and complex, while virtual reality was still relegated to being little better than interactive video.
The concept of virtual reality was quite simple, but its perfect execution required equipment which, in the twentieth century, was not yet perfected. Virtual reality was a means by which a living human being could, via physical stimulation, mentally enter another
universe, which could be so believable that, when used properly and assisted by drug therapy, the subject could be convinced that he had actually been there physically. In its more conventional application, indeed what it was designed for in the first place, it allowed the subject to vicariously experience physical action inside a computer program.
In the beginning, there was cumbersome headgear, and one or two motion-sensor-equipped gloves, the headgear giving visual stimulation to the wearer’s eyes and ears and the gloves, linked as well to the computer program, allowing the program to read hand movements and simulate their results within the computer image which was also transmitted through the headgear.
It was possible, in the earliest days, for a person outfitted properly to reach to a “wall inside a room” on the computer screen and strike a “light switch,” none of which of course existed at all. The possibilities for the system, in the days Before the Night of the War, were seen as limitless.
In that respect, Deitrich Zimmer saluted those pioneering researchers; they had been quite right.
Through the use of virtual reality Deitrich Zimmer was able to perform simulated operations, actually perform them, not just rehearse. He had added his own special twist, and in it lay the reason why no one had yet attained his degree of perfection. Utilizing a high-speed digitized video-editing apparatus and wearing a complete body suit designed to read and translate his motor responses, he could even experience the sore feet and locked knees of standing for hours at the operating table. The video material was of actual patient operations, in all stages, both the successes and the failures. The programs which controlled the digitized video edits were keyed to his responses, constantly shifting to meet the demands of the situation.
It was bloodless surgery which could be done and redone until it was not only gotten right, but done perfectly. Appliances of his own design enabled him to expand his skills still further.
In some ways, however, the operation which he was about to perform—he had rehearsed it for more than a year—was his most delicate yet. Not only the life of the patient depended on it, but so did the life of his son.
His one last review—an edited video from his final and most successful virtual reality practice session— was complete. Deitrich Zimmer stood up from the console, activated the foot controls and signalled for his surgical assistants to begin.
Looking through the glass of the control booth, he could see the pace quicken as the personnel surrounded the table.
Zimmer activated the door control switch—again, foot controlled—and went through the doorway into the operating theater. Like the other personnel, he wore a state-of-the-art surgical environment suit, the design his own, physically matching the feel of his virtual reality suit, completely self-contained, even for breathing.
There was no possibility of contamination either way, from surgical staff to patient or patient to surgical staff.
Entry to the area containing the operating theaters was through a series of clean rooms employing air locks.
Dietrich Zimmer approached the table.
Below the neck, yet allowing for access to the heart, should that be required, the body was tented. Only a very small portion of the skull—six centimeters square—was shaved.
Zimmer made a last survey of his instruments.
He looked to each of his assistants in turn, getting eye contact and moving on. That each person was in top form was mandatory, because the operation would, perforce, have to move with total efficiency.
Lastly, he looked at the face of the patient. A mask would be placed over the face, allowing for instantaneous application of additional oxygen when required.
Sarah Rourke was rather pretty.
seventeen
She had just done the stupidest thing anyone in the military could ever do, volunteer.
“Oddly enough, Commander Shaw, if you had not volunteered I would have requested that you do so. I couldn’t think of a better pilot or wing commander.”
She didn’t know what to say. Finally, “Thank you, Admiral.”
“Just remember something, Commander. In one respect, I’m letting you go against my better judgement.”
Emma Shaw looked at Admiral Thelma Hayes and realized that she blinked.
Admiral Hayes’s eyes softened and she smiled. “Nothing to do with your abilities, Commander. I realize there was something between you and Dr. Rourke. And, well, with his wife perhaps back in the picture, I didn’t want your mind on anything besides your mission. I’m not trying to interfere in your personal life, but I’ve known you on and off for years, and followed your career in naval aviation. You’re a hot shot, and sometimes that can be great, but most of
the time it isn’t.”
Emma Shaw didn’t know what to say.
Admiral Hayes continued. “I’m not implying that your performance in training or in combat has ever been less than exemplary. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have made it past Lieutenant Commander a year ago. No, it’s just that you are one of those rare pilots who is naturally gifted at his or her work. That’s a handy thing, but it’s also a dandy way to overreach yourself. I don’t want you doing that here. The mission against the poison gas plant in Eden City will be dangerous enough. I checked your records. You’re fully trained on the new SR-901. It’s a lot of aircraft.”
Emma Shaw almost slumped in her seat. The SR-901, she had thought, was still experimental. She’d helped in some of the high speed maneuverability testing over the Phillipines, done two of the high-altitude check flights. It was the true descendant of the old Twentieth Century SR-71, but capable of Mach Nine and equipped with plasma cannons and every state-of-the-art weapons system they could pack aboard her. From a distance, this new Blackbird even looked like the old ones. “The SR-901, Admiral?”
“Do you have a problem with that, Commander Shaw?”
“No, ma’am. The 901’s the best there is.”
“You’ll be ferrying over your own aircraft. The route is to Australia, then the southern tip of Africa, then to Venezuela. That means flying through the Eden antiaircraft net around Cuba. Once you’re past that, it’s a straight shot to Eden City. You’ll have several tactical options for the return flight, depending on latest Intell. Are you in?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Admiral Hayes smiled. Emma Shaw just sat there, knowing she should be getting up out of her chair, leaving the Admiral’s office, but she was uncertain for a second whether or not her legs would work.
The old Thad Rybka holster carrying the Metalifed Colt Lawman MKIII .357 Magnum was positioned at the small of his back. The Smith & Wesson Centennial was inside the waistband of his black BDU trousers, suspended there on its Barami Hip Grip. The old Metalifed and Mag-Na-Ported six-inch Colt Python, rebuilt for him while he slept by gunsmiths at New Germany, could have been back on his right hip, but in the full flap holster there instead was the Metalife Custom Model 629 with its six-inch Mag-Na-Ported barrel. The 180-grain Jacketed Hollowpoint .44 Magnum ro
und was the better choice for his needs these days. Someday, Annie or the children that she and Paul would someday have could inherit the Python. Michael was into the .44 Magnum as well, having little use for .357.
Rourke slipped the double Alessi rig onto his shoulders, the twin stainless Detonics CombatMaster .45s already holstered chamber loaded, hammer down, his usual preference. He normally used the old gunman’s trick of sacrificing the extra round over basic magazine capacity for the surety of feed derived when the top round was stripped out of the magazine into the chamber and the round beneath it edged slightly forward.
Two Milt Sparks Six Packs were on his belt, one
holding six standard length seven-round Detonics magazines, the other holding six six-round Detonics magazines. The Six Pack for the minigun magazines was given to him in the days prior to the Great Conflagration by Commander Robert Gundersen, skipper of the USS John Paul Jones, the submarine which had carried Rourke and Natalia to the Pacific Northwest, involving them in a bloodbath there which had nearly turned into a nuclear incident.
Either the full-sized or abbreviated magazines would work in the miniguns under his arms. The shorter magazines only worked in the CombatMasters, but not in the full-sized Scoremasters that he would carry holsterless in his waistband once they were on the ground in Canada.
He had been asked once why he carried so many handguns in preference to all other arms. Indeed, he had a rifle, the HK-91 in 7.62mm/ .308 (a better bet for him these days than his old CAR-15), and three knives, the twelve-inch blade Crain Life Support System X that he wore at his left side, the AG Russell Sting IA Black Chrome that he wore inside his trouser band near his right kidney, and a little Executive Edge Grande pen-shaped folding knife concealed in his jacket pocket. This was one of the items he recovered when he and Paul raided the museum exhibits at the Retreat.
But he liked handguns.
Before the Night of the War, one of John Rourke’s closest friends and a frequent shooting buddy was Steve Fishman of Augusta, Georgia. Steve, ex-Special Forces, was a fine martial artist, both practitioner and teacher, and more than proficient with any gun or knife one cared to put in his hand. On one of many pleasant shooting sessions with Steve—this time when Rourke was driving back to Northeast Georgia from a conference in Charleston, South Carolina—a mutual friend of Rourke’s and Fishman’s had been in the area as well. The friend, Hank, was a professional soldier and occasionally over a drink or a cup of coffee would tell a wild story or two about his adventures, invariably involving some insane joke supposedly accounting for the loss of his left eye, the socket covered with a black patch or by sunglasses when appropriate.
Whether Hank’s stories were true or not, John Rourke and Steve Fishman enjoyed them. And one thing Hank could do as marvelously well as his eyepatch jokes and the recounting of his adventures was shoot.
This one day, then, Rourke had been shooting his twin stainless Detonics .45s, Steve Fishman his much-engraved, ivory-gripped Beretta 92SB Compact 9mm and Hank a Metalifed Browning High Power with worn-smooth black rubber Pachmayr grips. Rourke was returning from teaching a security course when he made the stop-off in Charleston, then the subsequent trip to Augusta and consequently had all his working handguns with him. Hank remarked, “Now Steve there has his Beretta and I’ve got my Browning and my TEC-9, but you’ve got enough handguns to fill Steve’s store.”
Steve owned an Augusta gunshop which was literally a Mecca for police, federal agents and security professionals from all over the Southeast. Rourke smiled at Hank’s remark, saying, “I doubt I’ve got enough handguns to fill even one shelf in one of
Steve’s display cases.”
Steve laughed, adding, “But I wouldn’t mind if he tried.”
Hank persisted. “You know my background. I get along on this Browning and the TEC-9 and an M-161 get in country, if that.”
John Rourke lit one of his thin, dark tobacco cigars. “I’ve always realized the importance of long guns, and made myself satisfactory with them.”
“Satisfactory?” Steve Fishman exclaimed, laughing again. “I’ve seen you with that Steyr-Mannlicher SSG, remember? You could shoot the whiskers off a gnat with that 7.62.”
“Gnats have whiskers? What do they shave with?” Hank asked, lighting a Camel with a Zippo windlighter nearly as battered as John Rourke’s own. Hank removed his eyepatch so quickly and deftly, substituting a pair of dark lensed sunglasses that, even had Rourke been trying, he could not have seen the one-eyed man’s disfigurement.
Rourke laughed, forcing it a little. “I’m being serious, guys. Both you guys were Special Forces, all that. Me, well—”
“Spook stuff,” Hank said, nodding, alluding to Rourke’s background as a case officer in the Central Intelligence Agency.
“Yeah, but not that,” Rourke told them “I just trained myself for the long gun being a luxury. Most people these days don’t expect close-range firearms combat, right? Because at close range you can get killed too easily. But most gunfights take place at a distance of a few feet to a few yards. So, you walk in close and you’ve got firepower. Rifles don’t get you in close. And, like they say, the fastest reload is a second gun, or a third or a fourth or fifth.” Rourke smiled.
“You’re a gunfighter,” Steve Fishman said with an air of definitiveness.
They went back to their shooting, Steve eventually turning in the best twenty-five yard group of the day.
Rourke wasn’t certain at the time whether or not Fishman had intended the remark as a compliment or not. Over the intervening years, however, Rourke had come to accept Steve Fishman’s remark as a statement of fact.
John Rourke was a gunfighter.
This would be a gunfight when they got on the ground in Canada, pitted against Deitrich Zimmer’s people. That was the only option, because there was no other choice.
As he caught a glimpse of himself in the closet door mirror of his BOQ apartment, John Rourke reflected that if he was a gunfighter, he was dressed for the part.
Eighteen
The old days were back.
Dressed in one of her black jumpsuits and a pair of high black boots, Natalia Anastasia Tiemerovna buckled on the double-flap holsters carrying the matching stainless steel Smith & Wesson Model 686s, the twin L-Frame .357 Magnum revolvers given her by the President of the United States more than six centuries ago. Round-butted, action-tuned and with the barrels flatted by revolversmith Ron Mahovsky, each bore a proud American Eagle on the right flat.
She put on the Null shoulder holster with the suppressor-fitted stainless Walther PPK/ S .380. John’s philosophy of handgun combat was contagious, she suspected. He used multiple guns, minimizing his necessity to reload. He was better at it than she, but his technique was perfected over a longer span of years. She had not gotten into multiple gun use until the L-Frame Smiths were given to her.
Stowed away in her gear for their mission to Great Slave Lake was the Lancer copy of the SIG-Sauer
P-226 which she had recently acquired and thoroughly shot-in. The P-226 was her favorite of full-sized 9mm Parabellums Before the Night of the War, and would ride in her belt or in the pouch she’d had built into her arctic parka when they were on the ground.
She picked up the Bali-Song, flipped open the clasp and did a fast opening and closing, locked the clasp and secured the knife in the pocket along the seam by her right thigh.
Natalia took one last look in the mirror. Her hair, just past her shoulders, was down. When she got into combat, she would probably bind it back if there were time. For the moment, it was fine as it was.
Her duffle bag was already aboard the aircraft, so all she had to carry was her big black purse which could be converted into a day pack, and her rifle, this an M-16. Carrying two cartridge revolvers and an M-16 these days, of course, was like carrying a brace of Colt 1851 Navy .36 caliber percussion revolvers and a Henry rifle in the days Before the Night of the War. But, she didn’t care.
She slung her purse to
her left shoulder and the rifle crossbody on its sling, left shoulder to right hip, pushing it rearward and carrying it muzzle down along her back. The sword she’d had made up just prior to taking this last Sleep was strapped to her duffle bag, just in case.
Natalia let herself out of the BOQ apartment she shared with Michael, but Michael was, of course, not there. He was being readied for the Sleep. His appearance had been subtly altered by means of state-of-the-art makeup techniques to make him appear even more physically identical to the now-dead Martin Zimmer—Michael’s brother—than Michael had been before.
As Natalia walked alone along the corridor, she remembered the first time Michael had taken the Sleep, how she had given Michael and his sister, children then, the injections of cryogenic serum, to allay potential guilt for their parents should the formula, computed to their body weights, be incorrect and the results disastrous. Now, Michael was chronologically older than she was, her lover, the most accomplished and at once gentle lover she had ever known.
As she rounded the bend of the corridor, she saw Paul and Annie waiting there for her. Paul was all in black, after the fashion of the Mid-Wake battle dress utilities of more than a century ago, the style of dress John had recently adopted as well. Along with his other weapons, Paul carried his inevitable German MP-40 submachinegun, the Schmiesser as it had been erroneously called throughout its history. His subgun was even more of an antique than her M-16. Annie, ever disliking trousers of any sort, wore a midcalf-length full skirt of heavy Oxford grey wool, combat boots, and a long-sleeved, round neck sweater, the white cuffs and little white collar of the blouse she wore beneath it visible. Annie’s double holsters were at her hips, one carrying a Beretta 92F 9mm, the other a Detonics Scoremaster .45. As with Natalia herself, there was an M-16 swung to Annie’s back.
Paul and Annie nodded and abreast, Paul at the center, Annie on his right, the three of them walked down the corridor.
John would be waiting for them out front.