by Ahern, Jerry
**************************************
Title : #23 : CALL TO BATTLE
Series : Survivalist
Author(s) : Jerry Ahern
Location : Gillian Archives
**************************************
1
John Rourke stared down at his son, Michael. Rourke’s right hand held Michael’s right hand. “You’ll be okay, son. You did well.”
Michael was pale from loss of blood, almost fragile-looking, like the litde boy he had ceased to be. He forced a smile, nodded, said, “Thanks, Dad.”
John Rourke glanced at the two stretcher-bearers, signaled them to move out; they continued on their way, Michael between them, carrying him toward the medevac helicopter. The helicopter, one of several on the ground here, waited just beyond the patio, in the grassy yard between the house and still-burning garage, its rotor blades swishing lazily through the warm air.
The garage was very near the stables, but the stables were unoccupied, used only for storage. So far, crates of weapons and containers of explosives were all that had been found within the structure. A fire truck was parked between the stables and the garage. Its crew worked to extinguish the garage fire but, more importantly, strove to prevent the fire’s spreading to the stables and touching off the saboteurs’ explosives. The plastique itself would not detonate, of course, from flame alone; but other items stored within the stables might explode and then in turn cause the plastique to blow.
Natalia sat on one of the patio chairs. A medic was kneeling beside her, tending to the deep graze wound across her upper arm, just below the joint. Rourke himself had cursorily examined the injury, satisfying himself that it was minor.
When her wound was patched, she would follow Michael to the hospital at Pearl Harbor, Rourke knew. He would have preferred to
see her stay behind to assist in the preliminary evaluation of the captured intelligence data. Without her noticing him, Rourke studied her face. She looked battle worn and tired, but it was always beautiful. Michael was a lucky man to have her.
The two men and one woman whom Rourke had captured in the structure’s basement-he’d shot a fourth person-were seated on the far side of the patio. They had been about to burn computer printouts and degauss magnetic computer disks, thus destroying the information that was the very purpose of this raid to secure. The three were surrounded by several of the SEAL Team personnel under Lieutenant Commander Washington. Other prisoners, including the man who surrendered to Rourke, were martialed together near two of the Honolulu Tac Team vans. These vans, Rourke had been told, would be “loaned” to the Navy, in order to transport the captured personnel to Pearl for interrogation.
Paul and Annie, neither of them injured during the assault against the estate, disappeared into the basement record center moments after Rourke emerged from it in the wake of securing the house.
And now, John Rourke had absolutely nothing which required immediate doing. The cigar he’d lit in the basement was long since burned down and discarded. The magazines for his rifle were reloaded, as were the magazines for his pistols. The men and women about him-personnel from the Honolulu Tac Team and Washington’s SEAL Team-seemed flush with victory and each moved about as though he or she was on the most important mission imaginable.
Indeed, the battle was done. But their rest would be brief. The war with Eden still remained to be won or lost.
Perhaps what was gained here would retard that war’s start, an attack on the Hawaiian Islands centering on the new Pearl Harbor naval base, the attack’s intent much the same as a similar attack made on December seventh of 1941 by the Japanese: cripple the U.S. Fleet. But the attackers this time would not be flying Japanese Zeros. The attackers would be SS personnel, exiled from New Germany in Argentina, spearheading the forces of Eden, with a host of technologically advanced weapons at their disposal.
Eden was the new nation occupying the Eastern half of what, Before The Night of The War, had been the United States of America.
The United States of America, these days, more than six centuries after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and a postwar period which led inexorably to thermonuclear destruction, consisted of two states only. One of these states was composed of the Hawaiian Islands; the second was Mid-Wake. Mid-Wake was a domed community beneath the Pacific Ocean, almost equidistant between the islands of Midway and Wake, hence the name.
Hawaii, like virtually everything on the Earth’s surface, was swept clean of things manmade, scoured during the Great Conflagration, when the ionized atmosphere caught fire at dawn and burned away cities and governments and the men who had made them. Mid-Wake, a scientific base originally designed for undersea research and involved in experimental studies concerning the planned building of a permanent United States space station, was not destroyed.
The ancestors of the current residents of Eden survived as well, but by totally different means, making what transpired at Mid-Wake seem almost ordinary by comparison. The core of Eden’s population grew from the survivors of a group of one hundred and thirty-two persons who, preserved in cryogenic sleep, were launched into space on the very Night of The War. The shuttle fleet which carried them was a hfeboat for humanity, an Ark to return and begin civilization anew when the storm of warfare and its even more destructive aftermath abated.
Unfortunately, the Eden Project returnees brought back with them many of the same ills which had precipitated mankind’s near-total destruction before; principal among these faults were the lust for power at any price and the willingness to hate. These negative qualities were shared among only a few of the returning personnel, but as in the old adage about the rotten apple, so it was with Eden.
Today, Eden was controlled by a puppet dictator, a Nazi. Eden’s war machine was the most powerful and potentially deadly on Earth. Nuclear weapons were once again being built at a frantic pace, chemical and biological weapons were rumored to exist in Eden’s vast arsenals as well.
Six persons on the face of the Earth survived from the days Before The Night of The War: John Rourke’s son and daughter, Michael and Annie; the man who became Annie’s husband, Paul Rubenstein; Natalia Tiemerovna; Rourke himself; and his wife, Sarah. But Sarah was in cryogenic sleep, the only means of keeping her
alive.
On the night that their third child, a boy, was bora, Sarah was shot, the bullet entering her brain, lodging in so sensitive and remote an area that the projectile was accessible, perhaps, to only one man. That man was Doctor Deitrich Zimmer, the same man who shot her, the same man who kidnapped the infant to whom Sarah had just given birth.
That child was, these days, known as Martin Zimmer, the Nazi dictator of Eden. Because of sophisticated genetic surgery and the lies of Deitrich Zimmer, Martin-although he was all but physically identical to John Rourke and Michael Rourke-was no longer a Rourke, no longer the child Sarah had nurtured in her body for nine months.
Deitrich Zimmer twisted the boy, made him into someone to whom good and evil were not moral considerations, only useless abstractions for the weak.
Then, both Deitrich Zimmer and the boy utilized cryogenic sleep until the time was right to awaken-awaken to conquest.
But, before they slept, Deitrich Zimmer ordered his neo-Nazi followers to strike the supposed repository of the cryogenic chambers in which John Rourke and his family slept. Those cryogenic chambers, held at Mid-Wake, were destroyed. And, in Deitrich Zimmer’s supposition of victory, there was safety for Rourke and his family.
The night Martin was born and Sarah was shot, John Rourke himself was critically injured. Slipping more deeply into coma by the hour, the one hope of saving him and preserving Sarah - her conditio
n was inoperable-was a gamble, a slim chance that the coincidentally restorative benefits of cryogenic sleep might somehow keep her alive and sustain his life so that his body might naturally be able to rise above the comatose state.
Unbeknownst to him then, of course, his son, his daughter, his daughter’s husband and his best friend, Paul, and Natalia all volunteered to take The Sleep, in order that The Family might be preserved, somehow, someway in some future, whenever that would be.
And this was now, one hundred and twenty-five years after the night Sarah was shot, a world once again on the brink of self-destruction. John Rourke was one of six human beings to survive The
Night of The War and live into this present age, one of only six human beings who remembered what once was and its destruction.
And John Rourke had promised himself that, while he lived, he would fight to keep the destruction and the death from recurring.
“John?”
He realized he was staring off into the sky, and he turned to the sound of the voice, Natalia’s voice. “How are you feeling?” Rourke asked her, standing up.
She looked up into his face, saying, “I’ve been better, but I’ve been a great deal worse, too. I want to go to the hospital, just in case-“
“Michael needs you,” he finished for her.
“Yes.”
“We’ll be fine here. Make sure your arm gets looked at, too. Won’t hurt.”
“No,” she nodded, smiling, and then she leaned up to him, standing on her toes, and kissed his cheek. “It’s starting again, isn’t it,” Natalia almost whispered, “everything like before? Are people crazy?”
“We won’t let them be crazy this time,” John Rourke promised her.
Natalia gave him a brief smile, then started across the patio, toward the grassy area beyond and the choppers waiting there. Rourke followed her with his eyes. He still loved her, and she loved him, he realized. The only thing that was changed was that she realized she loved Michael more, what he-John Rourke-had always wanted for her and for Michael. But now that it had happened, he felt the loneliness of his life more acutely than he had ever experienced.
If-once-Sarah had the operation she needed, which still only Deitrich Zimmer could perform, all would not be happiness. Because Rourke would have to stop Martin Zimmer and Deitrich Zimmer from taking the world beyond the brink once again. And that would most likely mean killing Martin, their son, Sarah’s child.
Years ago, in order to ensure survival, he had tampered with the cryogenic chambers, allowed the children, Michael and Annie, to grow to adulthood while he and Sarah and Paul and Natalia slept on. And in the process, he denied Sarah her children, seeing them grow up. When Sarah awoke, she all but cursed him for what he had done, depriving her so. And now, once she was restored, he would do worse, kill the child for whom she had nearly died when she brought him into the world.
Sarah would never forgive him.
John Rourke was used to loneliness, self-inflicted, and it would not end, perhaps it would never end for him. And however inured he was to loneliness, he did not like it.
“John!”
Again, he realized he was staring off into the sky. The voice he turned to was Paul’s. “Yes, Paul?”
“We’ve got problems, John. Annie and Fve been going through the printouts that were all piled up there in the middle of the basement for them to burn. There’s a reference to an SS commando unit. It’s coming ashore on Molokai-” and Paul rolled back the cuff of his windbreaker. “In less than a half hour, if they’re on schedule. They couldn’t have been alerted to what was going on here, so they should still be coming.”
John Rourke started walking toward the younger man, asking, “Any indication this is the first prong of the invasion?”
“No. From what we could pick up, it looks like they’re coming here to soften up things, terrorism.”
John Rourke looked at the black-faced Rolex on his left wrist. It was almost as old as he felt. “Get Ed Shaw and Lieutenant Commander Washington. Tell them. Have them get some people together. Til arrange transportation.”
It was starting again.
2
Aboard the helicopter gunship, John Rourke changed to what he considered more suitable-and less flashy-clothing. He removed the garish Aloha shirt he’d worn when he disguised himself as a German tourist in order to get one of the estate guards down to the front gates. Less than two hours ago; all that seemed an eternity away.
His hair was still dyed blond to go along with the disguise, but the dye would shampoo out. Yet, there was no time to do that. He changed into black jeans, a long-sleeved black knit shirt-he pushed the sleeves up almost to his elbows-then started to pull on his boots.
Paul was reloading magazines for his German MP-40 submachinegun. The others aboard the helicopter-thirty men, in all, from the Honolulu Tac Team and Washington’s SEAL Team based out of Pearl Harbor-saw to their weapons as well. Like SEAL Teams from the Twentieth Century, these SEALs seemed to have rather eclectic tastes in weaponry. The issue military pistol these days was an energy weapon, but these men did not carry the issue weapon. Instead, their sidearms were cartridge arms.
And he found the particular type most curious.
During the latter portion of the Twentieth Century, considerable controversy raged between those who were afficionados of the Colt/ Browning-style .45 ACP and everyone else. John Rourke had periodically found himself on both sides of the issue, and occasionally in the middle. His own personal sidearms of preference were Colt/ Browning-style .45s, reduced drastically in size and manufactured by the original Detonics firm. Yet, he often carried a revolver as
well, and sometimes the 9mm Parabellum cartridge suited a particular tactical need and he used it.
Cartridge arms of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries were only from two sources, these days: original pieces of enormous collector value (like the guns Rourke himself wore) and reproductions made by Lancer.
John Thomas Rourke assumed none of the SEALs carried original antiques, but to a man they carried Colt/Browning-style .45 ACPs.
What made him smile was the thought that if, somehow, those staunchest of the staunch supporters of old Slabsides could have known that, nearly seven centuries after the first .45 Auto rolled off the line as the original 1911, the same basic gun was the choice of an elite unit such as this, they would have smiled, too.
There were knives of every description, most of these based on familiar designs as well, Bowies, tantos, Big Ugly Ones, double-edged commando daggers of the Fairbairn-Sykes or stouter Randall patterns.
The pilot’s voice came over the intercom. “We are approaching the L.Z. Touchdown in five.”
John Rourke slung the double Alessi rig which carried the twin stainless Detonics CombatMasters across his shoulders, then looked to the rest of his weapons …
They’d exited the chopper in admirable time, the Tac Team and SEAL Team personnel-they trained together often-functioning smoothly as a single unit, setting up perimeter security the instant after the chopper was on the ground, maintaining that security as Rourke, Rubenstein and the others, Ed Shaw and Lieutenant Commander Washington among them, reached the treeline, then covered the security element’s withdrawal.
The grass here was high, untrammelled, whipping wildly back and forth in the cool downdraft of the rotor blades, the palm fronds moving as well.
Once they linked up, they split again, but into two operational teams, Rourke and Rubenstein staying with Shaw and his Tac Team personnel, moving northwesterly toward the beach, which was more than a mile distant…
*
Over the intervening centuries since John Rourke had first visited Hawaii, the coastlines of the islands had changed radically, on account of natural volcanic growth and on account of the generally lowered sea levels-a result of glaciation in the northern hemisphere-which had sigmficandy increased the collective Hawaiian land mass. Now, there were high-ranging cliffs, more like the English coast near Dover tha
n anything John Rourke had seen here centuries ago.
They stopped to rest and reconnoiter at the height of these cliffs, where the coasdine lay more than a hundred feet below them, rugged in the extreme, with black rocks like a fortress wall against the attacking breakers, the waves advancing, retreating, assaulting the land again. This was not the sort of coastline John Rourke would have chosen for a clandestine landing.
The potential for arriving unseen was significant, but even more significant was the potential for arriving dead unless every man jack of the SS commando unit was a superb swimmer and reckless in the extreme.
Rourke said as much to Paul Rubenstein and Ed Shaw. Shaw responded, saying, “They couldn’t have picked a more remote spot. No one comes here. The occasional fishing vessel or pleasure craft might lie well off the coast, there,” and Shaw gestured to the west. “But they won’t have the risk of bumping into military personnel, civilians, anyone. We’ve trained on cliffs like these, but the surf down there is too wild to risk a man’s life in a training exercise.”
John Rourke looked at his watch.
Washington’s team should be in position.
And, in ten minutes, it would be within the window for the arrival of the commando unit.
“We’d better move out,” Rourke advised.
“Agreed,” Shaw nodded, then began signaling his men.
There were niches within the cliff faces, perhaps once volcanic pipes, now the haunts of the occasional seabird-wildlife was returning, in some cases in significant numbers-or merely empty holes in the bleached rock. In one such hole, John Rourke, Paul Rubenstein, Shaw and two of the Tac Team men stopped, the other ten men moving on, to find similar positions here midway along the cliff faces over the rockstrewn beach below.
Shaw and the two other Tac Team men began unlimbering their powered hang gliders.
John Rourke watched Paul’s face. The expression there was one of skepticism, but Rourke said nothing. After a moment, Paul asked Shaw, “Why do you guys use those things? They’re like a kite with a lawn mower motor!”