Survivalist - 19 - Final Rain

by Ahern, Jerry

  When they made love, she could feel his thoughts as surely as she could feel his body and they pleased her.

  The dreaming was nothing she could control, and only occurred when someone she cared about was in terrible danger. If, someday, the danger would subside, the dreams would go. If, someday, there were peace.

  But the other thing, reading people’s thoughts like some phony magician from a videotape movie. She would never do that again, she promised herself, knowing that was probably a lie. But the more often she did it, the more easily she could do it.

  Her father’s IQ was extraordinarily high. Her mother’s was, as well. Both she and Michael, tested as children, had been in the upper percentiles nationally. She’d found that out going through things at the Retreat, by accident.

  Maybe that had something to do with it.

  The explanation the German military surgeon—and her friend—Doctor Munchen had offered made no sense.

  She closed her eyes.

  Let Paul sleep.

  Michael Rourke watched as the last of the gunships disappeared over the horizon. A squadron of J7-V vertical takeoff and landing fighter bombers was due in within the hour, to take off the last of the refugees to other communities in Icelandic volcanoes where there was no danger of eruption. Colonel Mann’s people were bringing in more sophisticated seismic apparatus to aid these communities in pre-planning against possible eruptions.

  But Hekla, the capital of Lydveldid Island, was gone, forever.

  The mountain still erupted, lava rolling in great yellow tipped red streams down the sides of the new cone which was forming, gas and ash spewing skyward in column-like plumes, the clouds they formed obscuring the sky.

  He hugged his borrowed German parka closer around him, staring toward one particular lava flow. It crossed over the ground that was the Hekla cemetery, where his wife and his child would now be entombed forever beneath it.

  Bjorn Rolvaag stood beside him, the dog, Hrothgar, between them. Michael’s left arm hurt from the deep, grazing wound he’d sustained.

  Rolvaag, after a long time standing there in his customary silence, clapped Michael on the shoulder. He said one word: “Friend.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Christopher Dodd’s eyes flickered in the light of the battery-operated lamp. “There’s no reason that Mrs. Rourke should be out here with us, Colonel.”

  “If she wishes to accompany us, Commander, she is free to,” Wolfgang Mann said matter-of-factly, dismissing Dodd.

  “Well, certainly, but I meant, Colonel, it’s so cold out here and the Communists might strike at any moment and after all, well, God, she’s pregnant.”

  Sarah Rourke didn’t look at him. Looking at something she despised was a useless occupation.

  They inspected the breastworks as they were being erected to form a fortified perimeter around Eden Base, the breastworks composed of bombproof synthetic materials, interlocking into a grid which would become a prefabricated stockade wall fourteen-feet high, with firing positions along a walkway seven feet above the ground where men could stand and shoot down against an enemy assault. Below the level of the walkway were fortified machinegun positions and additional firing loops through which assault rifles could be aimed at advancing forces.

  She felt like a bit character in some dramatization of a James Fenimore Cooper novel; all that was missing the woods-wise scout—her husband, John Rourke—and red coats for the German Army. Dodd and the Eden personnel were clearly the embattled colonists here. The KGB Elite Corps would play the parts of the attacking Indians. But in this case, the Indians were as well armed as the defenders, considerably outnumbering the defenders as well. And the Indians had helicopter gunships which didn’t need to breach the wall, could merely fly over it, and grenade launchers and mortars took the place of flaming arrows.

  “Those additional reinforcements. You say they’re not all German, Colonel?”

  She looked at Dodd as Wolfgang answered him. The cold ate through her, but she would no sooner let Dodd see her give up and seek shelter than she would slit her wrists. “It is the first expedition for a new Allied force proposed only hours ago by Doctor Rourke himself. It will be composed of some German elements to be sure, but Chinese troops and personnel from the American underwater complex at Mid-Wake will be represented as well. Doctor Rourke will lead the force.” Wolfgang Mann looked at his wristwatch. “It should be departing within the next four hours.” He had to raise his voice, a helicopter coming in from the center of the compound, one of the huge German cargo choppers. “So. We must hope that the Soviet attack does not commence until after the arrival of these additional reinforcements. If it does, we must hold Eden Base using your own personnel, the reinforcements which are arriving from New Germany, all of us fighting together.”

  The helicopter, fitted with a sky crane, was lowering an anti-aircraft gun into position and she felt Wolfgang’s hand at her arm, gently restraining her.

  John would be coming.

  Here.

  In one way, it filled her heart with happiness, but in another way it filled her mind with trepidation. He would come and he would go. It was always like that for them.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  There was a knock at the door of the office he’d been given to use. “Come in,” he said without more than casually looking up as the door opened. In full uniform, cap under his arm, was Jason Darkwood. “Good to see you, Captain Darkwood.”

  “General Rourke.”

  “Yeah, right,” John Rourke laughed. “I want to go along, Doctor.”

  John Rourke looked down at the maps spread over the illuminated table. “You get high marks for directness, I’ll say that. But, there’s no time for a submarine to reach the coast of Georgia.”

  “I don’t mean by submarine. I want to go along as a member of the assault team. I understand that you’re the man to ask about it.”

  “Look, Captain,” Rourke began again, lighting one of the thin, dark cigars. “You’re too valuable commanding the Reagan to risk as a member of the assault team.”

  “The same argument holds true for you, right? Maybe I should have come to attention and saluted, General?”

  John Rourke laughed again, Darkwood putting down his hat, leaning over the table as Rourke sat down. “If President Fellows wants to call me a brigadier general, that’s his business. Why do you want to go along? I mean, you’re good at surface warfare. We both know that. But this is a two-pronged airborne assault. Has nothing to do with submarines; there’s no time to plan it properly and the assault force has never fought together before.”

  “I know all that, Doctor,” Darkwood smiled, giving a full shot of teeth. “For one thing, it sounds like a good fight. But that’s not the real reason. If a lot of my function in the days to come will be working hand-in-glove with the assault teams, I have to know how they operate.”

  “Flimsy,” Rourke smiled. He liked Darkwood.

  “Flimsy, I grant you. I’m on the beach until we start hitting those island bases the Germans are spotting for us. Meanwhile, a battle so important we scrap everything and insert ourselves into it because we have no other choice has come up. I think I should be there.”

  “So, you don’t really have a reason,” John Rourke grinned, studying the tip of his cigar. “Right?”

  “More or less, that’s the spirit of the thing, I suppose.”

  “What’s Admiral Rahn say?”

  Darkwood looked down at his hands. “Well, he considers that I’m on detached duty from the regular Navy to your Special Operations Groups at any event, so I decided I should talk to you first.”

  “So, if I say it’s okay, you can go to Admiral Rahn, right?”

  “That’s pretty much the way I’d planned it.”

  John Rourke stood up. “I owe you a few favors. Seems like an odd way to repay them, but it’s all right by me, Jason.”

  “Thank you, John—or is that General John?”

  Rourke clapped Darkwood
on the shoulder and they both laughed. It had always struck John Rourke as a terribly odd characteristic of his sex that, in times of impending danger, the slightest thing would be cause for raucous laughter, as if the laughter would somehow

  ward off the evil. There were obvious therapeutic effects for the psyche, to be sure, but it was almost more than that.

  Darkwood left. John Rourke returned to his maps. A force of men who had never fought together, most of whom could not speak any language but their own, the majority of whom had never seen an aircraft outside of a five centuries old film on video let alone flown in one, thrust into temperatures well below freezing against a highly trained force, the Elite Corps of the Soviet Union.

  And then there was Commander Christopher Dodd. With Dodd for their ally, they might well be better off turning their backs to the enemy.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  There was a fire. When he opened his eyes, he saw the fire. But, with his eyes opened or closed, he felt the fire burning in his head.

  His body was racked with chills.

  And Vassily Prokopiev realized he was naked.

  He lay there in the snow.

  The child.

  He moved his head slightly and there was an explosion of pain which nearly brought on the blackness again.

  The child.

  He could see feet covered with pieces of blanket, leggings made of uniform sleeves. And he saw a pair of feet in his boots, but the boots on wrong, the left on the right foot. It was maddening to watch.

  The child.

  And now he knew what awakened him. The child screaming.

  It was being held down on the far side of the flames.

  Some of the Wild Tribesmen, he’d heard rumors, had resorted to cannibalism.

  As he strained his eyes to see past the flames, he saw something which almost made him scream. It was a bone the size of a man’s thigh.

  He remembered now.

  He’d been struck with a human bone. Why was the child screaming? He forced his eyes to focus.

  The child was being held down on the other side of the fire.

  Several of the leathery skinned men were bent over her. Were they raping her, the beasts?

  And he saw the flicker of steel as fire flashed off it, a Soviet bayonet.

  He knew why the child was screaming when he saw one of the Wild Tribesmen, the instant after the little girl uttered a hideous scream, raising a strip of white flesh to his mouth.

  Prokopiev got to his feet. He didn’t know how. He stumbled as he lurched past the flames, reaching down into the snow and catching up the human thigh bone.

  He crashed it downward across the face of the man eating the flesh of the living child.

  Her screaming never stopped.

  Hands reached for him and he moved, wheeling first toward one of the Wild Tribesmen and then the next, wielding the thigh bone, striking foreheads and jaws and the crowns of skulls.

  A knife flickered toward him and he felt a horrible burning. He backhanded the human bone across the forearm of the Wild Tribesman holding the knife, then struck at the man’s face again and again and again.

  He was tackled from behind, falling toward the fire, his left leg passing through the flames.

  He rolled across the snow, hearing his own screams as if they were distant from him, disembodied.

  Five meters from him, he saw his pistol belt and the CZ-75 Marshal Antonovitch had given to him.

  He was up, a bone smashing down across his right shoulder, paralyzing his right arm. He fell, his left hand reaching for the pistol.

  His fist closed over it and his thumb pulled back the

  trigger. As the bone swiped down for his skull, he fired, then fired again and again, the face of the man who was trying to kill him seeming to disintegrate.

  He edged his bare behind across the snow, three of them coming for him now, two with knives, one with a burning log from the fire.

  He fired, blowing out the left eye of the one with the log.

  But the two with the knives were on him. He fired, fired again, a sudden spasm of pain across his abdomen. He fired. He fired, the second of the two with knives falling down.

  The howl of the wind.

  The crackle of the logs in the fire.

  He tried to stand up.

  Pain washed over him, but he fought the darkness which was coming with it. “Little one!” To his knees.

  Vassily Prokopiev couldn’t stand. He crawled, the pistol still cocked in his left fist, blood spilling onto the snow from his abdomen. He couldn’t see her.

  But then he saw her, her body bluing with the cold. Screaming again. She was alive.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  John Rourke and Paul Rubenstein walked side by side, along the sub pens’ main wharf, the sail of the recommissioned Island Classer USS Roy Rogers rising like some huge monolith above the sails of the smaller Mid-Wake vessels.

  Men and some women walked all around them, eight or sometimes ten abreast, the wharf blocked from shoreward to seaside, like John Rourke and his son-in-law and friend, each person carried or wore his weapons, carried a pack with a few necessary belongings. Each was dressed in black battle dress utilities. There was no time for training as a unit, no time even for standardization of uniforms beyond those for the personnel of Mid-Wake.

  There was laughter and loud talk. One man whistled. One of the women—Marine Lieutenant Lillie St. James, security officer of the John Wayne—hummed a sad little song under her breath.

  Marines.

  Naval personnel.

  All now were members of the First Special Operations Group, and those who lived would form the nucleus of the attack force with which the allies would fight back.

  They were bound for the surface where German helicopter gunships would land on the missile deck of the enormous Island Classer and ferry them to a nearby island where Mid-Wake personnel, along with German engineers, had spent the last several hours preparing landing and departure zones for the J7-Vs which would fly them over the North Pole toward North America.

  And from there to the staging area.

  Along the route, they would be joined by a token force of Chinese Intelligence Commandos, under the command of Han Lu Chen. Some of the German personnel accompanying them were destined for the unit.

  Rourke turned his head, his eyes finding Otto Hammerschmidt, pain etched in Hammerschmidt’s face, too soon out of the hospital, but to have left him behind would have been dealing him a more mortal blow than death could ever have been.

  Enough of them were left behind… .

  Annie Rubenstein watched the live television coverage as the First Special Operations Group moved along the wharf. “The Star-spangled Banner” was playing. A moment before, Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” had played.

  She looked away from the television monitor—it,was nearly two yards diagonally and hung as flat against the wall of the hospital room as a photograph or a painting—and turned her eyes toward Natalia.

  Doctor Rothstein said she was doing well, that the sedation was all but eliminated.

  She slept.

  Annie smiled.

  She looked back to the television screen.

  There was her father, well over six feet tall, the high forehead, the few touches of gray in his dark brown hair not noticeable on camera, his twin Detonics .45s in the shoulder holster he always wore, over a black knit shirt. His backpack and his coat were carried in one hand, his

  rifle in another.

  And there was Paul, her Paul, her very own. Not so tall, his hair thinning, his shoulders not so broad, his legs not so long, but his stride as confident.

  She loved him.

  “Don’t die, either of you, please.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  He had bandaged the little girl before he’d bandaged himself, but that might have been a mistake. He was light-headed from loss of blood. Massive blisters had arisen on his left leg and, as he fought the clothing onto his body
, some of them burst and he nearly fainted from the pain.

  He sat, rocking her by the fire, the dead surrounding them, not certain what to do. The sky was too overcast to see stars and the tribesmen who had attacked them had either discarded his pack or never taken it from the half-track. In either event, he had no compass.

  Reaching the half-track, if he could, was his immediate goal, but he doubted the vehicle would be anything more than a shelter. The ignition switch was turned off, but the dome light was left on and in this terrible cold, might likely have drained the batteries. The girl ran a fever and he thought that he likely did himself.

  But there was another reason to reach the half-track, survival aside, even survival of the child. Secreted in the half-track was the canister containing the data on the particle beam technology entrusted to him by Marshal Antonovitch to deliver to Doctor Rourke.

  Much of his own clothing was ripped or blood drenched, but with scraps of clothing and his own boots—his feet crawled in them after removing them from one of the cannibals he had killed—he had covered his body, everything that was warm and cleanest of the rags covering the little girl.

  When he stood, his abdomen ached, but the wound there didn’t seem deep, just bloody, a slash rather than a puncture. His leg pained him more, from the burns when his leg had passed through the flames.

  Vassily Prokopiev realized two things: The child’s parents had not been cannibals, too undernourished for that; and, if he didn’t set out for the half-track, in whatever direction it was, right now, he would never leave the campsite alive.

  With the girl—she had passed into sleep or unconsciousness—nestled in his arms, his right arm still half numb, he started to walk, his pistol freshly loaded and ready.

  One step.Another. Another.

  The snow was very high.

  The little girl’s face seemed to radiate heat.

  His leg.