Survivalist - 23 - Call To Battle

by Ahern, Jerry

  It was a cardinal rule of any clandestine operation that meeting times were to be met exacdy, neither early nor late; if a predetermined appointment could not be kept, the meeting was scrubbed.

  But, because he needed the detonators, Wilhelm Doring would wait.

  37

  Fleet Admiral Wilma Hayes’s helicopter was the finest and fastest of those made in the United States, equal to anything found flying for Eden City. The helicopter’s top condition-one speed was 500 miles per hour and it was nearly as maneuverable as a fighter aircraft, could outrun any helicopter gunship in the air arsenal of any of the world’s powers.

  It was precisely because of its excellence that Gruppenfiihrer Croenberg had included the machine in his escape plans. Rauph, driving the sedan, was as good with a helicopter as he was with a knife; he had flown Eden’s most comparable machines (almost as fast but vastly less maneuverable) and was completely versed in the literature of the Laimleer XI1 A. All that was necessary was to neutralize the Marine Corps personnel guarding the Admiral’s helicopter, then get it airborne and away.

  For the former task, standard procedures would suffice-security measures were rarely able to frustrate the intentions of those who were truly bold-and, for the latter, there was the planned diversionary action at the motor pool fuel dump. Had Croenberg selected the synth-fuel storage area which served Pearl Harbor’s fighter and gunship response groups, there would have been a substantially greater guard force with which the men he had detailed to the operation would be required to deal.

  Rauph turned the sedan into the side drive running parallel to the Admiral’s headquarters complex, the two Nazi saboteurs catching up to and throwing themselves inside, the helipad just beyond, not even a fence separating it from the rest of the compound. From the back seat, Martin began to ask, “Can’t we just drive off-“

  “If we drive, Martin,” Croenberg explained, without looking over into the back seat, “the moment your escape is detected, every helicopter, every car, every remote in the area will be watching for us. The chances would be substantial that we would be captured, you recaptured. And, we must get off the island. Were we to evade initial response efforts, every place of exit from the island would be sealed, coastal patrols increased, etc. It would be necessary for us to swim out to a rendezvous with a vessel. Possibilities for success would be doubtful at best and the very act would be fraught with peril to you.

  “But, by stealing the Admiral’s helicopter,” Croenberg continued, “we not only escape the base in an aircraft which will be almost impossible to catch but we escape the island as well. By the time fighters are scrambled in pursuit of us, we will have arrived at our destination, the helicopter will be set on auto pilot and dispatched over the open sea. As the helicopter is intercepted, it will be destroyed, by us. Therefore, there will be some resultant confusion as to whether or not you lived or died. That is to our advantage.”

  “I cannot wait, my faithful Gruppenfiihrer, to be rid of this disguise.”

  Croenberg looked over into the rear seat now, saying, “I assure you, Martin, that soon all of your vicissitudes will be at an end.” Indeed they would be. Croenberg added, “Forgive me while I confer with the personnel waiting to institute the needed diversion.” The sedan was fewer than one hundred meters from the helicopter and the guards surrounding it. Croenberg, his voice sounding low and guttural as he spoke for the benefit of the microphone concealed within his mouth, said, “This is Rescue Leader. We approach Objective Beta. Initiate action against your objective, then commence escape sequence. Out.”

  Fifty meters now, the sedan slowing.

  Croenberg had already reloaded the 7.65mm sleeve pistol …

  Thorn Rolvaag’s wife, Ellie, fed both Rolvaag and Betty Gilder a hastily prepared late supper of spaghetti with meat sauce, gar

  lie bread and red wine. The children, Daniel and Trixie, were already fed, off in the nearby recreation room watching their favorite interactive television program. Ellie picked at her food; waiting to eat with her husband, as had been her custom ever since they were engaged, always seemed to destroy her appetite.

  And she was as pretty as ever, Rolvaag thought, just looking at her.

  Ellie brushed a lock of dark hair away from her forehead with the back of her hand as she raised her wine glass. “So, you really have to go up there tonight?” Ellie asked.

  “I tried talking your stubborn husband out of it,” Betty said, smiling at Ellie, frowning at him, “but it’s that old Viking stock, I guess, makes him bullheaded.”

  “Not that I want to,” Rolvaag said, picking up a piece of garlic bread. “But Doctor Rourke took me over to see all this Navy brass and I told them about Betty’s and my Diversion Theory and-“

  “I had nothing to do with it,” Betty said, slightly reprovingly. “You’re the brains of the operation. All I said was that I thought the Diversion Theory was brilliant, that it would indeed be possible to redirect lava flow and reduce the force of the actual eruption.”

  “If Kilauea is about to erupt, Thorn,” Ellie began, “you don’t have to be up there. You can monitor everything-“

  “No, see, I need pressure readings, sweetheart” Rolvaag tried to explain. “Pressure readings have to be taken in situ. It’s just like taking somebody’s blood pressure; you can’t do it without touching the arm.” His wife had been a nurse so she should be able to identify with that.

  “You can get an accurate blood pressure reading by other means than putting a cuff on somebody,” Ellie pointed out.

  “Well, I can’t test vent pressure without being there. There’s a chopper taking me up. They drop me off and pick me up a couple hours later and I’ve already called my data back and it’s crunching through the computer. Simple.”

  “He’s not going alone,” Betty said in Rolvaag’s defense. “Carl Bremen-the graduate student?-he’s going to go along.”

  “What about all these Nazi terrorists, Thorn?” Ellie insisted. “I don’t like the idea of you being God knows where with all these-“

  “There’s no reason in the world why any Nazi terrorist would be on the volcano,” he told her, cutting off her argument he hoped. Thorn Rolvaag felt as if he were the object of attention at an inquisition, except in this case the intentions behind the questions were loving. “I’ve got constant radio contact ability and I carry a pistol.”

  “Take your other gun.”

  “The shotgun’s too cumbersome to lug around when I’ve got the momtoring equipment.”

  “Then the other one,” Ellie-who knew less about firearms generally than he did-insisted. “The one that looks like a submachinegun but isn’t.”

  The SP-89; fine, Til take that.” He could sling it to his shoulder and get it out of the way easily enough, and with two thirty-round magazines clipped together he wouldn’t have to burden himself with bringing spare magazines along. “And Carl carries a gun, too.”

  “I don’t know much about guns, but I know graduate students can’t afford good ones,” Ellie said, then sipping again at her wine.

  Thorn Rolvaag didn’t know what kind of gun Carl carried, but with any luck he wouldn’t have the occasion to have to find out, either.

  Above the noise of the television broadcast, Thorn Rolvaag could hear Hrothgar and some of the other dogs barking from the kennels. But animals could often sense things men could not, sense impending earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, other natural disasters, even storms. Rolvaag took a last sip from his wine, not finishing the contents of the glass. Tonight he would have to be very clearheaded. And he tried to ignore the barking of the dogs, because he knew what caused it…

  The walkway between the buildings was narrow, as if space were at too great a premium to bother with convenience. But, casual observation from above would be more difficult, so Tim

  Shaw didn’t complain about it. Instead, three of the Tac Team men with him, he made his way along the walkway, staying as close as they could to the building wall, to further frustrat
e any chances of being detected.

  When, at last, they reached the rear of the building, Shaw signaled a halt, then rasped into his radio, “Okay. We’re at the back. Eddy, remind your guys one more time we got maybe twelve bad asses in there, so be cool.” Using infrared sensing from a video drone flyby-he’d had a buddy in narcotics call it in-they were able to tell from body heat signature registers that only the third floor had any apartments with more than three people in them. It stood to reason that the Nazis would stay together, Shaw hoped. At the near side of the third floor, the drone gave a reading in excess of three persons. Beyond that, because of the materials used in the building, it was impossible to get a precise figure. There could have been ten people in the apartment.

  And, of course, the apartment could have been occupied by a family of four. In that case, back to square one. But, Shaw didn’t think so. Yet, because of the chance that there weren’t any bad guys in the apartment at all, it wouldn’t be practical to break in and start shooting. A check of the package boxes in the lobby showed nobody at all living on the third floor; that was suspicious in itself since housing in this part of town was hard to come by and this character Stroud, who owned the budding, probably wanted to keep it rented so he could make money.

  But maybe Stroud made his money by renting to special clients.

  The third floor had all the earmarks of a Nazi safe house.

  Tim Shaw said into his radio, “We’re goin’ in. See ya up top.” Then he signaled the three men with him and started around the corner toward the fire elevator. They didn’t dare activate it, because it might be noisy and creak, since the machinery was old. But they could scale the ladders flanking it on either end, and by that means reach the third floor. After that, whatever went down would be a crapshoot that he hoped wouldn’t turn into a turkey shoot with him and his men as the targets…

  The Marine guards lay dead and Rauph sat at the XllA’s contools, the main rotor increasing revolutions. Through his transceiver, Croenberg monitored a garbled mixture of breathing and occasionally intelligible sounds, while his men attacked the motor pool fuel dump, planting demolitions, suppressing resistance. These men not only aided Croenberg’s own escape along with Martin, Rauph and the other two SS men accompanying Croenberg, but they aided their own escape as well. If all went well, the fuel dump explosions would alert base security, then if Martin’s absence was not already detected, it would be. Someone would realize the Admiral’s high-speed helicopter was missing and all attention would be focused on that. Meanwhile, Croenberg would be getting away in the helicopter and his men who attacked the fuel dump would escape in the confusion, then dissolve into the Nazi commando units already in place on the island.

  An unexpected assist to Croenberg’s intentions was coming from the heavy volume of air transport takeoffs, wholly unanticipated but entirely welcome. The more crowded the air space surrounding Pearl Harbor, the more difficult it would be for the Naval authorities to scramble a fighter squadron, even given that virtually all fighter aircraft were jump capable, could take off and land vertically.

  Young Martin was still shackled-There is no time now, Martin. You must be patient, I implore you!”-he occupied the copilot’s seat. Croenberg, despite his rank of Gruppenfiihrer, did not consider himself above the task at which he was currendy employed. He assisted two SS men in deploying the helicopter’s door gun. It was a PEM-7, the finest in power, range and accuracy of the light plasma energy cannons in the arsenal of the Trans-Global Alliance. The door gun on the other side was being treated similarly by the two men picked up at the gate.

  Mounting it between the doors as they did, there was a full 360 degrees of possible rotation, allowing them to cover and cross both sides of the helicopter’s fuselage.

  With any luck, they would never need it.

  Rauph’s voice came to Croenberg through the intraship communications channel, the receiver for this in Croenberg’s left ear. It is my pleasure to report that the aircraft is prepared for takeoff, Herr Gruppenfiihrer, awaiting your order.” “Very well. Get us out of here, Rauph.” “Yes, Herr Gruppenfiihrer!”

  And the aircraft slipped forward and began to rise. In what seemed like a mere instant, the helicopter was airborne, skimming over the Fleet Admiral’s Headquarters Building. Further inland, Croenberg could see the smoke and glowing bright orange fires from the synth-fuel dump against the night sky, where base firefighting equipment was racing toward it.

  38

  John Rourke drove the borrowed For Official Use Only sedan with only the scantest portion of his concentration. The Nazi attack on the school bothered him greatiy, not only in its actuality as an act of heartless brutality but as a symbol of the times. After more than six centuries, what had actually changed?

  The Earth’s population was the merest fraction of what it once was, yet human life was valued more cheaply than ever.

  When he someday was able to restore Sarah, what sort of a world would he be giving her?

  As he buttoned down the driver’s-side electric window, the sirens he’d heard for some time while approaching Pearl Harbor’s main gate became suddenly piercingly louder. “I wonder what’s going on,” Annie asked rhetorically. To his right, from the direction of the motor pool, there were explosions, and heavy black smoke rose into the darkness, obscuring the base’s artificial lighting. Fire equipment raced along the intersecting street just beyond the main gate.

  After Doctor Rolvaag’s briefing on the impending volcanic eruption, they had spent their time discussing with Admiral Wilma Hayes the role the Navy’s submarines could play in implementing Rolvaag’s Diversion Theory. Rolvaag himself left, for a quick meal and the gathering up of his gear, then a helicopter ride to the volcanic summit. Admiral Hayes introduced Rourke and his family to various Naval personnel and civilians whose expertise might dovetail into the project.

  Rourke showed his I.D. and those of the others with him to the sentry computer; and as he did so, one of the Shore Patrolmen on

  duty there saluted, spitting out a stream of words so rapidly that Rourke had to concentrate in order to follow him. “Begging the General’s pardon, sir, but I have orders from Commander Washington to respectfully request that the General come to the Base Brig at once, sir, where it has just been discovered, sir, that the VIP prisoner held there has escaped, apparendy aided by a commando team which has stolen the Admiral Hayes helicopter and sabotaged the motor pool synth-fuel dump in order to create a diversion.”

  “Martin, free, damnit!” Michael hissed.

  “Thank you,” Rourke told the breathless-sounding Shore Patrolman. Then he took back the proffered I.D.s for himself, Paul, Michael, Annie and Natalia, and he stomped the electric car’s accelerator pedal to the floor as he threw the cards onto the seat between him and Paul. If Martin escaped them, all hope of forcing Deitrich Zimmer to perform the operation Sarah needed so desperately would vanish with him.

  John Rourke just missed a fire truck as he took the hard left turn …

  Out.”

  Emma Shaw pulled off her helmet, the wind tearing at her hair again. If Martin Zimmer had escaped, John’s plans to save his wife might be dashed. She shouted to the driver over the slipstream, “Hurry it up, damnit!” But if she were ordered to shoot down the machine, could she do it? Because killing Martin Zimmer would seal Sarah Rourke’s fate, perhaps forever. If she fired at the aircraft and missed, would it be intentional, however subconscious?

  “Shit,” she said.

  Her helmet radio started blaring simultaneously with the radio in the transport vehicle. The entire briefing just ended had dealt with the rescue operation-for persons on the big island, Hawaii-from the impending volcanic eruption and her adopted Wing’s part in it. And Emma Shaw had been assigned to copilot a fighter aircraft of no use in the operation. But the radio instructions caused the transport driver to crank the wheel of the vehicle in which she rode into a tight right turn and head toward the other end of the field, near the side runways
where porters were already readying the takeoffs.

  She ran her fingers through her just-curled hair and pulled on her helmet so she could talk. “Commander Shaw to Pearl Angels Three. Commander Shaw calling Pearl Angels Three. What’s going on? Over.”

  “This is Pearl Angels Three control, Commander Shaw. Admiral’s helicopter stolen by suspected enemy commando unit. The Wing’s going after it. Martin Zimmer may be aboard. YouH receive instructions once you’re scrambled. Now, get off the air!

  39

  Information was already coming in that a black prisoner had accompanied the men in dress whites who had boarded and off-lifted Admiral Hayes’s helicopter. That there was no reason for the murder of the man they found in the cell was obvious; the Nazis had simply done it.

  They wanted Martin to look like Seaman Langley, but why this?”-Washington asked. John Rourke looked at Commander Washington, then back at the body of Seaman Langley. “He would have been out of the Brig and back to duty in another day, for God’s sake. What’d he do to them?”

  Langley’s throat was slit from ear to ear and his eyes stared glassily toward them across the floor where his body lay beside his bunk. “Not a thing. They just like killing people.”

  Rourke stood up from the crouch, walked over to the dead man and stood beside him. “Will your Shore Patrol investigators mind if I close his eyes?”

  “I, uhh, I don’t think so.”

  Rourke nodded only, bent over the man, closed the mans eyelids, murmuring under his breath, “Rest in peace.” Rourke rose to his full height again. He looked at the others standing there with him inside and just outside the cell enclosure. “If they’ve taken Admiral Hayes’s helicopter, they’re making a run to one of the other islands. And surface vessels large enough for them to land a chopper on would be too easily spotted and neutralized. They may be daring, even reckless, but they’re not stupid, our adversaries, so they won’t be likely to try ditching in the ocean and making a submarine pickup. And the comparatively few subs that Eden has are small and wouldn’t be any match for the United States fleet head on. If the Nazis are planning on using a submarine to get away, it would have to pick them up after they were safely landed and some time had passed. They’d know that right now we’d have every aircraft and every submarine at our disposal looking for them and an Eden sub wouldn’t make it through the grid.