by Ahern, Jerry
More gunfire now, and the sounds of small explosions. Machine guns, she guessed, and the lighter sounds of
assault rifles.
Annie looked skyward, over Forrest Blackburn’s massive shoulders—he was a tall man, darkly good looking and well muscled it seemed. “Nazis,” she whispered.
Blackburn turned to face her. “Get back.”
Annie drew back inside the meager protection of Eden One. The shuttle crafts themselves from her brief view did not seem to be the object of the attack—but a half dozen helicopters, some men on foot, they were attacking, it seemed, the main portion of the camp.
“What the hell’s goin’ on?” Paul began, starting to rise.
“It must be the rest of the Nazis—with Colonel Mann gone, they must have found out why he’s gone and they’re attacking.”
“Gotta get out there,” Paul told her.
She started toward him, to try to keep him from getting up. But she heard Forrest Blackburn’s voice behind her and turned.
In his right hand he held a pistol—it was Paul’s battered Browning High Power. “I oughta thank those guys.” Blackburn smiled.
“What the—”
“Shut up, Rubenstein. The two of you—stay nice and still. No sense wasting energy with this computer. I can give you the information you need.”
“You,” Annie whispered.
“See, I don’t know if the computer would show me up as the most perfect background or not. But it might show that I knew Mona Stankiewicz. And it’d show that I went to college in West Germany. So the two of you might put two and two together and figure that while I was in West Germany, I got involved with the East Germans. Which I did. And that got me involved with the KGB. Which I did. But this—this is just perfect. With what I did to the computer’s personnel files these last couple of hours, nobody‘11 be able to really figure out anything. And if they
do, it’ll be too late. See, confusion is always the best ally. Your gun for example, Rubenstein. It’s a 9mm Parabel-lum. Some of the Germans, I noticed—some of the officers—they carry 9mms, maybe sentimental about the good old days five hundred years ago, huh, when they were killing Jews.” “You mother—”
“Shut up, Rubenstein. Initially Dodd and the others‘11 figure you and Miss Rourke were killed by the Germans. By the time anyone finds your bodies out there dead from fighting beside them, I’ll be long gone to the other end of the camp.”
“To report to that bastard Karamatsov,” Paul snapped.
“No, not really. I didn’t kill Mona for that—just to keep my identiy from being discovered. She was gonna fink on me. She didn’t care that she’d get herself in hot water. I guess you could count this as wartime—so that means I coulda been shot. Naw, I’m not running to Colonel Karamatsov.”
“Why did you frame Natalia?” Annie asked him. “It can’t hurt to tell us.”
“No special thing against her. She never met me—but I hadda kill Mona and Major Tiemerovna was the logical person since she was a KGB major and everybody knew it. The hatred was already there—it was easy for me to whip people up into a mob without them even knowing I was the one who’d done it. But I don’t owe any allegiance to the colonel. Karamatsov was willing to shoot me down with the rest of the Eden Project. I got other plans.”
“What?” Rubenstein snapped.
“Well, Captain Dodd—he dies during the attack here, see, and I become the leader. The leader of the Eden Project, for openers. My plans are flexible. Who knows after that? Now—both of you, outside.”
“Fuck you,” Annie snarled.
Blackburn reached out and grabbed at her, dragging her
against him, Annie hammering at him with her fists, but the muzzle of Paul’s gun raised toward her face. “It’s easier for me if you die outside,” Blackburn rasped. “And look at it this way—we all go outside, maybe I’ll stop a stray bullet, or you can jump me, Rubenstein.”
She watched, Paul starting slowly up from his chair— and then he threw himself forward as Blackburn shifted the muzzle of the pistol away from her face. Annie stumbled, falling backward toward the door. Paul and Forrest Blackburn were grappling over the pistol. Annie reached under her clothes for the derringer, drawing it, forcing her thumb down against the spring pressure of the hammer to get the pistol cocked.
Blackburn’s right arm was upraised—he slammed the Browning down against Paul’s head, Paul falling back. Annie stabbed the derringer forward—but Blackburn’s right foot snapped up as he wheeled toward her. The pistol flew from her hand.
Blackburn jumped for her, Annie throwing herself across the cockpit floor for the pistol, Blackburn on top of her now, twisting at her left arm. But she was reaching for the derringer pistol.
Chapter Twenty-three
For the last twenty minutes by the luminous black-faced Rolex Submariner on Rourke’s left wrist, they had progressed in single file through a tunnel roughly the height and width of a sewer pipe, but uneven, bending, and at some times partially blocked by mounds of dirt and rocks. There was no light—Rourke thought of films he had seen over the years or watched by means of his VCR: in the darkest tunnels and labyrinths, somehow there was always a light source, and it was never totally dark.
But here it would have been, except for the synth-fuel-powered lanterns which Rourke, Sarah and Natalia carried. Two spares, as yet remaining unlit, were carried by Colonel Mann and Sergeant Heinz.
Rourke led the way, Mann behind him directing their course each time they came to a portion of the tunnel which segmented.
Rourke attempted, all the while, to memorize the rights and lefts they took—just in case the tunnel would be needed for their escape and Mann were not available to guide them. With his Gerber, he scratched arrows into the tunnel walls to mark the path, but placing the arrows to be intentionally misleading—marking the wrong passage rather than the correct one. Where there were more than two choices, he would mark the correct passage instead.
He hoped the result would be thoroughly confusing if
anyone attempted to follow.
At times, the air was close and foul-smelling, and at times it seemed as though there would be no air at all and the lanterns themselves would flicker.
But then the lights of the lanterns would steady, and their breathing too would ease and they would heighten the pace and continue on.
As Rourke checked his watch, he noted that the overall time so far spent in the warren of tunnels and caverns and cut shafts had been three hours.
As Rourke stepped out of the tunnel and into less confining space, a massive cavern opening, before them, he called a halt. He was on a tongue of rock which extended over a yawning precipice, the cavern ceiling perhaps some hundred feet overhead. At the base of the drop—perhaps a hundred feet below—a silver ribbon of stream gleamed dully as Sergeant Heinz flicked the single battery-powered search lamp from the cavern ceiling downward.
“We’ll rest here,” Rourke proclaimed.
Sarah walked past him toward the edge of the spit of rock, shining her lantern into the void. Because the mantle surrounding the synth-fuel flame was a lens rather than plain glass, the light was intensified and illuminated enough of the void to see that indeed nothing was there. “It’s beautiful—but it’s creepy,” Sarah announced, her soft alto echoing among the rocks. “And that’s creepy,” she added, the echo once again following her words.
Natalia sat down beside Rourke on a rise in the rocks. She leaned her head against his shoulder for an instant and Rourke smiled at her. It was written all over her face that she knew he and Sarah had made love the previous night— and he was glad she knew it. That morning, she had kissed his cheek and proclaimed, “I’m happy for you both,” and then walked past to saddle her horse. Now, Natalia said, “How much longer, Colonel?”
They spoke in English out of deference to Sarah who
spoke no German—and it had the ancillary benefit of aiding Sergeant Heinz.
“I think, Fraulein Major
, that another two hours remain before us. From here, we must travel downward, along a steep path that would be better traveled by goats—I have read of goats. They sounded marvelously interesting.”
Rourke laughed. “I used to eat goat every once in a while.”
Sarah took up the story. “We had this older gentleman who used to stop by the house and sell us hindquarters of goat. I finally got to where I’d barbecue it and we’d eat the goat ribs like regular ribs and the—”
“You ate goat?” Mann interrupted.
Rourke nodded. “Tastes pretty good too—a little gamy.”
“Gamy? I do not know the word.”
Natalia, her English virtually faultless, explained, “That means that there is a certain wild taste to it, not like something that is bred to be eaten. Deer is a good example.”
“Ahh, the hind—yes.”
Rourke thought of a line from Shakespeare that had always particularly amused him. “If a hart doth lack a hind, let him seek out Rosalind.” He looked at Mann’s uncomprehending expression. “I always thought it was an interesting double entendre—don’t mind me.” He grinned.
“Shall we get started again, my friends?”
“Why not.” Rourke nodded, standing, taking up his lantern and his eight-hundred round box of .223.
“It is better I think that I take the lantern and lead the way,” Mann announced.
Rourke handed him the lantern.
“Herr Doctor—perhaps you should be last.”
“My thinking exactly,” Rourke agreed.
And Mann started ahead, back along the outcropping of rock that formed a peninsula in the air space and down, his lantern a beacon which Rourke could follow along the
corridor of darkness through which they descended, Rourke following after Natalia, Sarah behind Sergeant Heinz.
The lantern Natalia carried illuminated the rocky downward path sufficiently that Rourke could see to walk. But, beyond the shaft of diffused yellowed light, Rourke could hear the sounds of tiny rock falls—they would begin but it seemed as though they would never end. On a rational basis, he knew that they had to.
And he could hear quite gradually building the rushing sounds of water, cascading over the rocks in the underground river bed below.
He imagined that in the time prior to the fires which had consumed the sky, the caverns had likely teemed with bats.
But like all other wildlife—whether beautiful or, like the bats, touching a buried nerve in the racial subconscious which inspired revulsion—they would be gone.
They kept walking, the pathway angling more steeply now, once Rourke reaching out grabbing for Natalia as she started to lose her footing, the yellow of the lantern she carried arcing maddeningly through the darkness.
They walked on. It was necessary now at times because of the narrowness of the ledge to move sideways, scraping the back against the rock surface, arms and hands and fingers splayed along it for the added fractional inch of purchase, inching ahead rather than really walking at all.
They travelled for what seemed to Rourke like an hour— but when he checked the face of his Rolex, it was only half that time. And suddenly the ledge widened and gave way to an apron of rock that bit deeper into the rock face. By stooping over it was possible to keep back from the very edge.
After several more minutes, the rock surface widening still, Rourke could see Wolfgang Mann’s lantern swinging back and forth, and Rourke almost knocked Natalia down, bumping into her as Mann brought their file to a halt.
Rourke followed the light then as Mann drew back further still from the edge into what seemed like a shallow cave mouth, the shape, as Rourke took Natalia’s light for a moment and moved it in a gradual arc around them, roughly like a shell.
He watched the light, how it seemed to linger for an instant in the darkness, and then disintegrate.
John Rourke could hear Mann’s voice. “We rest here, hmm?”
“Right,” Rourke agreed, all three of the lanterns set down now, the five people forming a ragged circle around them.
“We shall be soon turning, not so much downward as we have been moving, but along a pathway which is at times horizontal, and at times, from our perspective, diagonally ranging upward. It is very narrow. But there is a further complication once we enter onto this path. I discovered it as a boy but fortunately in such a manner that I myself was not discovered. The rocks—they form a natural whispering gallery here. The effect is at its greatest at the height of the path, and then decreases after several hundred yards to where it will no longer be a concern. But while we travel through the whispering gallery, we must maintain total silence—even our breathing will be slightly audible. If a loud noise were to be made, all could be lost. The gallery at its height forms what appear to be tiny fissures in the mountains into which we are crossing. And near the opening of these fissures, there is a guard post. I placed one there years ago. I realized the tunnels were a potential route for an enemy. But I did not elect to have the tunnels sealed, perhaps envisioning in the future some use such as we indeed make now of the tunnels. So posting a sentry station there was the logical answer. They would hear us clearly if anything were said above the sound of the softest whisper. I gave no contingency plans in that event, but I would assume that they would begin firing through the
vents and downward. It would be possible with the hard rock surface that bullets would ricochet and strike us. The noise of gunfire would most certainly deafen us, and perhaps cause rock slides which would indeed kill us by hurtling us off the path into the abyss.”
“I can see why these caverns never became a tourist attraction.” Rourke smiled.
“Quite so, yes.” Mann laughed. “I suggest that we rest here for a few more minutes before pressing on with our journey. Once we are through the whispering gallery, the path is wide and level and it is less than a mile by your reckoning to the entrance into The Complex.”
Rourke shifted off the slings for the two M-16s, sitting in the darkness. A woman’s hand moved along his thigh and felt for his left hand. He closed his hand over it—but he could not be certain if the hand were that of Natalia or that of his wife.
Chapter Twenty-four
“Tell me, Herr Rubenstein—this penchant for being hit on the head—how have you dealt with it over the years?”
Paul Rubenstein tried to sit up. Dr. Munchen was smiling. “What the—”
“Lie still, my young friend. Although your surgery seems unaffected and if anything heals marvelously well, you need to rest after this latest hit on the head.”
“He didn’t—didn’t hit me—yeah, he did. That—Blackburn—where—” Paul pushed Munchen’s hand away and sat up. “Where the hell—aww, shit.” He touched at his head where his own pistol had crashed down against it. He remembered it all now. “Annie—where’s Annie?”
“The battle—it goes on. Standartenfuehrer Mann’s troops who were left here with the Eden Project fight to repel the forces under Haupsturmfuehrer Sturm. The idea of fighting their own comrades—it is very difficult. But, I realized that you and Fraulein Rourke were nowhere about.” He smiled—but the smile was somehow a grim smile that conveyed no happiness. “Unfortunately—”
“Unfortunately what?” Rubenstein began, trying to stand, but Munchen placed his hands firmly on Paul’s shoulders, Paul Rubenstein sagging back against the bulkhead.
“One of the Soviet helicopters.—it is missing. After I found you unconscious I theorized that Fraulein Rourke’s
efforts had perhaps flushed to light—” Rubenstein’s editorial training from before The Night of The War once again surfaced and he thought of badly formed metaphors. “What?”
“The fraulein—I believe that she has been kidnapped by the Russian agent who murdered the unfortunate Fraulein Stankiewicz.”
“I—” Paul again started to his feet, Munchen helping him this time, Paul swaying with a sudden dizziness and sagging toward the bulkhead, Munchen supporting him. He thought of the iro
ny of it—that a man in a Nazi uniform should be helping him, a Jew. And he realized in its totality for the first time that John Rourke had been right. These Germans, men who wore the wrong uniform and were trying to change that. Rubenstein looked Munchen squarely in his bright blue eyes. “Doctor—it was Forrest Blackburn. And if he stole a chopper it means he abandoned his idea of killing Dodd and taking over as the leader of the Eden Project.” Rubenstein shook his head and it hurt. He realized he wasn’t talking straight, realized it from the puzzled look in Munchen’s eyes. Paul Rubenstein began again. “Did—did any of you—” He sagged back against the bulkhead, slipping to his knees, Munchen guiding him down.
“Herr Rubenstein, you must rest.”
“No,” Paul whispered. “Don’t you see? Blackburn. He’s the Russian agent. He’s got Annie—gonna kill her— but—” He shook his head to clear it, the pain enlivening him and at once weakening him again. He tried to think. “Okay, follow me if I make sense. He was gonna kill us both—blame some of your people. It was just when the attack began. My pistol—he had my pistol. A 9mm, like some of your officers still carry. Was gonna kill us and blame your people, then kill Dodd and take over—to lead the Eden Project. But, ahh, if he stole a chopper, ahh, then something went wrong. If—maybe—maybe Annie’s
still alive and with him.”
“I am sure that Fraulein Rourke is still alive, Herr Rubenstein. Dr. Hixon and I, we tended to the wounded, dragging some of them nearer to the road surface and away from the heaviest concentrations of fighting. I witnessed as the Soviet helicopter screwed itself into the air. There was no one shooting at it. It circled and traveled toward the north. I came looking for you—and outside the shuttle craft, Jane Harwood, she was shot in the chest. I tended to her wounds and progressed inside—and I found you.”
“Then Jane Harwood must’ve come looking for us when the shooting started—and he gunned her down.”
“But she will live, Herr Rubenstein. A medical technician who accompanied me attends her even now.”