by Ahern, Jerry
“A lot of the terrain was given a beating since The Night of The War, and in some places-a lot of places in these islands-the terrain was pretty rugged to begin with. Electronic sensing gear is so high-tech these days, if we had a helicopter waiting to come in anywhere within a mile or more, the bad guys’d know it. This way, we can move in fast, silently, and we have such a low sensing profile, we don’t usually get spotted. Once the bad guys are on the beach, we can get down there in seconds.”
“They can shoot at you,” Paul noted.
“Hard to hit a fast-moving aerial target. Anyway, we can shoot back. You wanna fly one?” Ed Shaw grinned.
Paul grinned back, “Only if I have to, Ed.”
John Rourke racked the action of his HK-91, chambering one of the 7.62mm Boatails. He moved into a kneeling position. The safety on, he settled the rifle to his shoulder, surveying the beach over the rifle’s iron sights. Theirs was a waiting game now, waiting until the commando team started up onto the beach. When the enemy fought its way past the rocks, through the surf, their equipment suddenly feeling as though it weighed twice as much as it had, their breathing hard and rapid, their attention focused only on making it through, getting onto the beach, then it would be time to strike.
War wasn’t a sporting proposition.
3
Nearly an hour passed. Rourke’s head was starting to ache slighdy from the eyestrain caused by constantly peering out over the ocean, both with unaided eyes and through the borrowed pair of German field glasses he was using.
Nothing relieved the sea’s surface except the occasional bird. Many species of wildlife, birds included, were preserved over the centuries at Mid-Wake, Lydveldid Island, New Germany and at the Chinese First City, the creatures subsequendy released to the wild. This was, at first, done under controlled conditions. Such controls had long since vanished. Although the diversity of species was vasdy reduced, the numbers among those species extant were growing steadily. Rourke found that wonderfully encouraging.
Far in the distance, the normal naval traffic could be observed, but veering off from the coast of Molokai here and toward Oahu. Much of this was military, the majority originating in an American port, but there were some Chinese and Australian vessels as well; and, of course, Russian freighters. The Russians, although they had only paramilitary police units for domestic security, and a Coast Guard, were very active in merchant shipping. Eden vessels rarely came nearer to the Hawaiian Islands than just close enough to engage in electronic espionage, a role the Soviet Union had always played with much gusto in the days Before The Night of The War.
The Tac Team personnel worked so much with the SEALs that they were able to identify each vessel by profile. The Tac Team personnel were, as was usually the case with such units, on the
young side. The oldest among them was Ed Shaw, somewhere in his middle thirties, Rourke guessed, and Shaw was their commander in field operations such as this.
There were other personnel that belonged to the Honolulu Tac Team, Tim Shaw, who was Ed’s father and Emma Shaw’s father, too, among them. Many of these men, as Rourke was able to ascertain, were older, but not all of them. The Tac Team worked as a street unit and for SWAT and HRU applications. Depending on the gravity of a particular situation, both elements functioned together or separately. These younger men, in snatches of conversation Rourke overheard, would joke about the older guys (their most polite way of referring to them), but Rourke noted a distinct hint of respect, as well.
There were periodic low-frequency radio checks with Lieutenant Commander Washington’s SEAL Team personnel. The same story came from their observation post: Nothing.
To relieve the monotony, Rourke took one of the spare bootlaces from his musette bag and showed the Tac Team personnel how to make one of the old OSS string holsters, a trick he’d learned years ago, Before The Night of The War, from one of his best friends. One merely tied the ends of the shoelace together-a bootlace was a little long for the thing but he wasn’t about to cut it-and formed a circle, this made into a double loop. Then, one slipped the pistol-Rourke used a .45 volunteered by one of the Tac Team men-within the loops, inside the trouser band. Loosen the knot, then tighten it to fit and trim away the excess. That was all there was to it. The loops kept the pistol from sliding down inside the pants when the string holster was cinched up properly. In an emergency, the holster could be discarded and no one would give it a second look.
This demonstrated, they returned to the boredom of waiting. Rourke lit a cigarette, in the confined space of the rock niche preferring it over a cigar because so many of the Tac Team personnel were nonsmokers, a self-discipline Rourke commended.
An hour and a half was gone, still nothing in sight on the ocean’s surface. A squall line was forming to the north, blue-black thunderheads rolling in rather quickly, low over the water.
Ed Shaw suddenly said, “Maybe we got it wrong, or somehow the SS found out we hit the estate and they cancelled the insertion or-“
“Think again, Ed,” Paul almost whispered. Paul was looking through the electronic imaging telescopic sight of a counter-sniper rifle one of the Tac Team personnel carried. “Try about two o’clock on the surface, maybe two hundred yards out.”
John Rourke dropped into a prone position beside Paul, his elbows set on the rock, the German field glasses to his eyes. Around them were the sounds of field glasses being uncased, gravel crunching as men repositioned themselves with equal haste. At first, Rourke saw nothing, so he put the glasses down, focused his eyes on the approximate spot, then raised the glasses and tried again.
This time he saw something on the surface of the water, only an irregularity, unidentifiable, but somehow out of place. Paul was saying, “Ifs a snorkel. Someone near the surface, maybe reconning the beach.”
The optics were treated, of course, but Rourke ordered, “Glasses down, everybody. Pull back. Ed, tell Washington, and tell him to have his men do the same.”
“All right,” Shaw said. “We got ‘em.”
Just because the SS commando unit was coming toward the shore, there wasn’t proof positive of victory. Rourke decided not to burst any bubbles, however, so he didn’t mention that at the moment…
Dark shapes moved near the surface of the water, breaking the foam-flecked crests of the waves with their bodies. Rourke’s eyes squinted against the light as he watched them over his iron-sighted rifle. “Be patient,” John Rourke counseled the men around him. The storm clouds were rolling in more rapidly now Rourke gave the weather system between five and ten minutes before it crashed over the beach.
There were telltale clicks, scrapes and ripping sounds within the cavelike niche of rock here in the cliffs, too soft to be heard more than a few feet away, the sounds those of safeties being checked, equipment snaps and buckles double checked, hook and
loop fasteners being resecured, a knife blade given a few last-minute honing strokes.
The radio frequency shared by the Tac Team and Washington’s SEAL Team was continually open now, because if the SS commando unit moving out of the water and onto the beach had not picked up a transmission by now, they would not pick it up at all. The danger, of course, had been that they scanned. Rourke would have done so, moving such a large body of men. These SS personnel apparendy had not. A tactical error, and everyone made one from time to time; only occasionally were they critical. Similarly, Rourke would not have brought such a group in without cover of darkness, even in so remote and little-frequented a spot as this.
But, this latter would not be a tactical error, rather circumstances imposed by the inescapable exigency of some rendezvous that could not be set for a more advantageous time.
Fortunately, those problems he mentally enumerated were those of the SS unit’s commander, not John Rourke’s. But John Rourke’s problems were sufficient without borrowing those of someone else. The size of the SS unit was impressive, vastly larger than Rourke had anticipated. All told, he estimated there were some sixty men in d
iving gear reminiscent of the underwater equipment he had first used with the heroic men of Mid-Wake more than a century ago, but obviously further advanced.
To his credit, Ed Shaw did not ask, “What the hell do we do now?” But the question was implicit in his tone when he murmured, “More than we thought, huh?”
Their numbers-the Tac and SEAL Teams combined-amounted to a rough half of those of the enemy.
John Rourke glanced at Paul Rubenstein, saw the worried look in his friend’s eyes as Rourke advised Ed Shaw, “Get the rest of your people and Washington’s people ready to move out. All the men with these powered hang gliders? How safe are they?”
“Pretty safe, if the operator does his part.”
“Controls pretty simple?”
“Just a joystick. Push it forward and you nose down, pull back-“
“I get the idea. How about lateral orientation? Side to side?” “Yeah.” “And speed?”
“Twenty-five miles per hour, tops, but you’ve gotta ride the thermals or you crash like a stone. You’re not thinking-” “Yes I am,” John Rourke nodded …
Fully five minutes had passed, Rourke strapped into the harness for the powered glider. He thought, sometimes, when he encountered technology so radical as this, that he had to be dreaming, that this was all a nightmare and, when he awoke, he would still be aboard the jet passenger liner on The Night of The War on his way to Atlanta, Georgia, and none of this was happening at all, but rather all of this was a figment of his imagination, engendered merely by something which disagreed with him in the airplane food.
It would have been a nice thought, in most ways, except for Paul and Natalia, and the wonderful friends his now adult children, Annie and Michael, had become for him. And so many other fine people he had met, such as Jason Darkwood, Sebastian, General Varakov, and some of the other Russians, too.
And, oddly, he thought of Emma Shaw.
She was a marvelous girl.
John Rourke readied himself near the cave entrance, ready to soar like an eagle over the beach or fall flat on his race and die like a turkey with clipped wings.
But life itself, as he’d learned the hard way, was nothing short of a gamble.
4
John Rourke jumped into the void beyond the ledge. As he glided outward, he pushed his body upward with his hands and arms, securing his feet into the break-away stirrups. In the next instant, he pulled the throttle two thirds back, the bank of miniaturized ramjets which were set in the wedge-shaped wing above him firing. Rourke started to climb after one sickening instant of dropping like a stone. In that instant, he could not help being reminded of the Greek legend of Daedalus and Icarus, and wondering if fate had cast him in the juvenile lead?
But the powered hang glider rose and there was not an ounce of wax in the contraption, to melt as he soared upward and toward the sun. And the sun was obscured by the gathering storm clouds.
He banked slowly, instead, testing, coming to port and out over the beach. The ramjets were silenced and, except for the natural whooshing sound made by his wings as they cut the air, there was no other noise except for a continuous, low-intensity hiss.
His headset rang in his ears, “We’re moving in!” It was Washington’s voice, and Rourke certainly hoped the SEAL Team commander and his men were moving in. It could become very lonely very quickly for four men flying over this beach, set against fully sixty heavily armed enemy personnel. And, he was confident that all of the commandos would be men. Nazis, as well as being racist, were generally by philosophy sexist as well.
There were Tac Team personnel on both sides of John Rourke now and they started a gradual power dive toward the beach. “Fire at will,” Rourke ordered. “Fire at will!” He’d known a man, years ago, who’d always made a joke of that, perennially quipping, “What’s everybody got against Will, anyway?”
Rourke had traded weapons with Paul Rubenstein, swapping the long-range capable HK-91 for the more maneuverable German MP-40 submachinegun and its faster cyclic rate.
Rourke fired as he and three other of the Tac Team personnel soared over the beach. The men below them started to return fire, but Rourke was through the first pass and over the water before any enemy fire could come close to him or to the three other men from the Tac Team. Shooting accurately from the powered hang glider was, he discovered, even more difficult than shooting accurately from a moving horse, and that was next to impossible. But the horse analogy stood him in good stead as he suddenly realized what his tactics should be.
He banked the powered hang glider in a gentle arc to starboard, less than thirty feet over the crests of the waves, more than half a magazineful remaining in Paul’s submachinegun.
Shaw’s men and Paul Rubenstein were roping their way down the cliff face on power descenders, but the swarm of SS commandos on the beach were concentrating their fire toward the men in the powered hang gliders, John Rourke at their center.
Rourke and the three men with him made another pass, and this time Rourke adopted the technique so well perfected by the Confederate cavalrymen of The War Between The States. He waited until he was at almost point-blank range-in this case, perhaps thirty feet-and stabbed his weapon toward the target. This same method-using the handgun at saber range during the Civil War and at close pistol range now-worked. Rourke brought down three of the SS commandos as he throttled back and banked to starboard, just avoiding the rock face of the cliffs.
He began another pass, the submachinegun nearly empty, again waiting until he was close. The enemy on the beach was
trying to hit a moving target, and when holding his fire until he was close, minimizing the inherent difficulties of his firing position, he at least had a stationary target.
The Schmiesser, as Paul called it, was empty at last as John Rourke flew over the waves, banking again, turning on the thermal toward the beach.
From his right, coming in low over the sand, John Rourke saw another group of men flying powered hang gliders, six more, SEAL Team personnel, Lieutenant Commander Washington leading them. The SEALs, despite their demonstrated preference for cartridge arms as handguns, were carrying s»bmachinegun-sized energy weapons, of a type Rourke had never seen before in action.
These guns were in action now.
Their cyclic rate, if that were the proper terminology for an action containing no moving parts in the conventional sense, was slow. But as Rourke witnessed while the wedge of SEAL Team personnel fanned out across the beach, their firepower was devastating. And these men, well-practiced it seemed in firing from their moving platforms, used a similar technique to his own.
Rourke changed to a spare magazine, then throttled forward and left, swooping down nearer the beach.
As he started to pick a target, the volume of fire heavy now from the commandos, at the far left edge of his peripheral vision, he saw Ed Shaw hhnself take a series of energy bursts to the hang glider wings, the wings catching fire, their ram jets immediately flaming out, Shaw spiraled downward toward the sand.
In the next instant, as Ed Shaw lay sprawled there stunned, unconscious or dead, a half-dozen of the SS men swarmed over him. Firing into them, if Shaw were somehow still alive, would ensure the Tac Team leader’s death.
Rourke banked the powered hang glider steeply to port, throttling back, then radically forward on the joy stick, climbing, then descending, swooping over the beach, low, with the butt of Paul’s German MP-40 racking one of the SS commandos across the jaw, shooting another with a short burst in the chest and neck.
He was nearly over the six commandos who fell upon Ed Shaw, Rourke’s left hand poised over the emergency release for the glider harness, the submachinegun hanging at his side on its sling.
It was imperative to gauge the distance as accurately as possible, so the momentum of his body would carry him into the knot of men, but he would be clear of the powered glider.
He hit the release lever, his shoulders wrenching, the sensation like that of the sudden deployment of a parachute a
fter uncontrolled free fall. His body twisted, his arms reaching out.
His body slammed into and over three of the men, the SS men stumbling, falling, Rourke rolling onto one, kicking another in the face.
The powered hang glider was soaring upward as Rourke caught sight of it for an instant; then, it veered sharply downward, crashing against the cliff face, the synth-fuel exploding, a fireball rjelching upward.
Rourke was up, to his feet, his right hand on the pistol grip of the submachinegun, arcing the weapon upward on its sling. Rourke rammed the Schmiesser’s muzzle into the throat of a third one of the commandos.
Rourke wheeled toward the remaining three.
Shaw was alive, his clothing partially consumed with flames, his hands on the arm of one of the commandos, the commando’s wetsuit aflame as well. Shaw and the SS man-both of them were on fire-grappled over a knife.
John Rourke wheeled half left, and with his right foot snapped a double Tae-Kwon-Do kick to the SS commando’s left rib cage. The force of Rourke’s kicks sent the man hurtling over Shaw and into the sand. As the man rolled, the flames consuming his wetsuit extinguished. John Rourke moved toward Ed Shaw, but Shaw was to his feet, starting to run, panicked, Rourke realized.
John Rourke had seen other good and brave men lose it when their clothing was aflame, and Shaw had lost it. John
Rourke dodged past the two remaining SS commandos, throwing a body block against Ed Shaw, knocking the Tac Team leader into the sand, rolling him over onto the flames, then rolling him over again. Rourke scooped up handfuls of sand, hurtling them over the still burning portions of Shaw’s clothing.
There was a blur of movement, Rourke dodging right as the buttstock of an Eden assault rifle smashed downward, glancing off Rourke’s left shoulder.
Rourke turned half around, punching Paul’s submachinegun forward, jerking back the trigger, spraying out half the magazine, killing the man, then emptying the Schmiesser into the sixth man.