by Ahern, Jerry
Chills, but the kind from pain, not cold, traveled along his spine. He held her tightly against him… .
Michael Rourke stood up, all the eyes of the German officers and Rolvaag’s eyes, too, riveting on him. “My father is leading a force against the Soviets attacking Eden. We all know that from the radio traffic your own people have intercepted. But the Russians may know it too. I know we don’t have any orders to do it, but with a refueling stop in northern Canada, a dozen gunships loaded with every missile and machinegun and every man you can spare from this command, could surprise the Russians, maybe make a difference.”
Captain Hartman, one of Wolfgang Mann’s key officers, had flown over from the European Front to personally supervise the evacuation and relocation of the Hekla community, under specific orders from Colonel Mann himself.
He was scheduled to return to Europe, taking with him the bulk of his force, leaving a small but heavily armed helicopter assault group to see to the defense of the remaining Icelandic communities.
And, if a decision could be made, Hartman would be the one to make it.
Michael sat down.
Hartman stood. He walked toward the north wall of the hermetically sealed, environmentally controlled tent. On the wall was suspended a map of the world, similar to the familiar Van der Grinten projection. Hartman spoke. “Herr Rourke may have a point.”
Michael breathed.
“Colonel Mann applauds initiative; he also very strongly disapproves of disobedience to orders. However, such a force as you suggest, Herr Rourke, twelve gunships and an appropriate complement and men, materiel and fuel, might indeed have some impact. The most recent dispatches I am privy to indicate that a modest force, moving in three distinct elements, was dispatched from New Germany.” And he pointed to the map of South America, his finger coming to rest on what Michael had always called Argentina. “Logic dictates that one element would fly along the American Gulf Coast, here,” and he gestured toward Texas, “and another along the Atlantic Coast and up along the Savannah River, then down, the third element flying a relatively direct course from the staging area in the Yucatan to Eden Base, thus minimizing. the effect of any possible Soviet
interdiction. The logical route for the Special Operations Group led by Doctor Rourke is across the Pole, refueling unnecessary, down along the Great Lakes and directly to Eden Base, anticipating encountering Soviet resistance along the way since the Soviet staging area is in extreme Northern Georgia or the Carolinas.
“If, on the other hand,” Captain Hartman continued, tugging at his uniform blouse where his pistol belt had caused it to bunch up, “this small force Michael Rourke suggests were to fly from Iceland across the tip of Greenland but fly on to here,” and he gestured again to the map, “Hudson Bay, the gunships could then refuel and fly a central route, generally following the contours of the Mississippi River course to the base of what was Southern Illinois, then strike across the mountains over the site of the ruins of Atlanta directly to Eden Base, bypassing all likely Soviet intelligence, striking by surprise.”
“Can we do it?” Michael Rourke asked him.
“It would be a mission I could not order my pilots to carry out, but I could ask for volunteers.”
To a man, every officer around the table, pilots all, stood.
Michael Rourke looked at their faces, most younger than his own, some his age or older.
“Gentlemen,” Captain Hartman said, “it appears I have sufficient volunteers. We will draw lots, the winners accompanying Michael Rourke.” And then Hartman laughed, adding, “And walking that thin line between initiative in an officer and disregard for orders.”
There was laughter, forced.
Hartman walked over to the table, standing in front of Michael who stood now as well. “So.” “Yes.”
“I must leave with all good speed for the Urals. Somehow, I have the feeling that there may be surprises forthcoming from the Underground Soviet City and I must be with my command when the surprises reveal themselves.” He looked at his wristwatch. “Leave within the hour, Michael, so you will make it on time. And, good luck.”
Hartman extended his right hand. Michael took it.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
John Rourke stood on the beach, the surf behind him, the sky so deep a blue that it seemed impossible to imagine that an aircraft of any sort would penetrate it. He was dressed all in black, the wind blowing his hair across his forehead, at the height of his physical prowess, a man like no other.
Despite the crashing of the surf and the numbers of men, there was no trouble hearing his voice. Paul Rubenstein stood at the rear of the group, knowing that he was watching history, the journal he kept increasing in its fascination for him. These were the moments which would determine mankind’s destiny.
“Some of us, individuals, have fought together before, side-by-side. You, Han Lu Chen,” and Han, hatless, his eyes raised, nodded solemnly. Translators murmured among the Chinese, the Germans, too. “And you, Captain Hammerschmidt.” Otto Hammerschmidt clicked his heels and bowed his head for an instant. “And Captain Sam Aldridge of the United States Marine Corps.” Not to be outdone by the German, Aldridge drew to stiff attention, unmoving. “And you, Captain Jason Darkwood, commander of the USS Ronald Reagan.” Darkwood grinned and gave a half salute, his damnably thick curly hair blowing in the wind. Paul Rubenstein laughed at his own thoughts. “And, I’ll remind you, gentlemen and ladies, that a captain in the United States Navy is a field grade officer.” There was some laughter, most suppressed and mostly from the Marines, Aldridge looking back at his men harshly. The Mid-Wake forces were ranked into two platoons, at the head of one, Lieutenant Tom Stanhope of the Reagan, the head of the other, Lieutenant Lillie St. James of the Wayne. Aldridge stood at their head, beside on his right, Jason Darkwood. There were three squads of the Chinese Intelligence commandos under Han’s command beside them, the Chinese flanked on their opposite side by the Germans, Otto Hammerschmidt at their head, an entire platoon of commandos. “And then, of course, the man I consider my brother, who also happens to be my son-in-law—” Paul Rubenstein felt his face start to flush, despite the cold. “Paul Rubenstein. The president of Mid-Wake gave me the rank of brigadier general. That’s fine, I suppose, but you men are military commanders. I’m not. But if you’re looking for someone to speak for me in my absence, it’s Paul. His word is mine. We’ve fought together for five centuries, he and I.
“In a moment,” John Rourke went on, “we’ll be boarding the J7-V German aircraft. A tight fit for all of us, a first flying experience for many of us. And maybe that’s the point of why we’re here. Five centuries ago, mankind reached a height of technology where each of you, had you lived then, would have been so used to flying you have welcomed the chance just to catch a nap.”
There was some laughter, genuine sounding. John Rourke smiled. “We’ve been reduced to warring tribes by what, God only knows, might have been an accident simply because the two greatest powers in the world, then, so terribly distrusted one another that they were willing to risk annihilation just in case. Well, ‘just in case’ came. And, here we are. We can never put it right
again, the billions of lives lost, the billions more never born. But we can try to keep the insanity from happening again. I guess what I’m saying is that we’re warriors for peace, a peace that’s mandated by the forces of God or Nature, however you believe. Because, without it, the world will end for good this time. None of your children, your lovers, none of you will ever walk a beach again, watch a bird fly—they were truly beautiful—or ride a horse, pet a dog. Never, unless we win.
- “Should we hate our enemies?” John Rourke asked. “No. They aren’t any different, most of them. We want the leaders. To get to them, we’ll have to kill a lot of people, people in other times, in other places, we might have counted friends if we’d gotten to know them. The ultimate idiocy is warfare. But we’re in it, and no one asked us if we wanted it. And, to end it, we have to win it. A
nd so we’ll board the aircraft. Some of us will be landed, a few of us will jump. We’ll fight. And some of us won’t ever come back.
“Every person here,” John Rourke said, looking at the cigar which was unlit in his hand, “volunteered for this. Except Paul and me.” There was laughter again. “If we win—and I won’t insult your intelligence by saying ‘when we win,’ just because we’re the good guys and it happens that way in books—but if we win, those of us who don’t make it will be remembered everytime someone draws a free breath. Not your name or mine. But what we did.” He cupped his’ hands around the Zippo, lit the cigar, a cloud of gray smoke exhaling from his mouth and nostrils, dissipating on the wind. “I think it’s time unit leaders got their men aboard the J7-Vs. You might not like American Georgia. Five centuries ago, I could have told you the climate was generally benign, the people were friendly, the laws livable and the scenery spectacular. Now, it’s just a battle that needs winning. Let’s go.”
Jason Darkwood, who was the highest ranking officer besides John, called, “Ten-hut! Hand salute!”
The men and women of the First Special Operations Group saluted John Rourke. Paul Rubenstein watched, almost sorry he wasn’t military so he could do it too.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Where was it, he wondered; but there was no time to wonder, only walk, dragging his left leg, an unnatural warmth there which sickened him when he thought of it.
His eyes would shift, moment to moment, between the gray of the path which he followed through the snow— was it a path at all, or only so in his mind? —and the child’s face. If she stopped breathing—And Vassily Prokopiev suddenly realized that this child of the Wild Tribes was more important to him than even the canister which contained the secrets of the particle beam technology.
Her life.
It was his obsession.
He recognized the signs. His toes no longer responded when his mind would tell them to wiggle. His skin felt warm, despite the winds which blasted it. He knew if he were to lie down, he would sleep forever.
And he dreamed while he was awake.
His mother, a face vaguely remembered, who would come to the state run facility where he, lucky one, had been privileged to attend. The first girl whose body he had touched below the neck and above the knee.
It was frozen almost off, would be useless to him forever, he thought. He couldn’t have urinated with it if he’d tried, let alone the other thing.
He kept walking.
He had thought, earlier, what he might do with the child. A home for her. It was said the Germans treated the people of the Wild Tribes with humanity, that there was some effort to re-civilize them. Surely, there would be a family of these people who would like to have such a beautiful child as their own.
He kept walking, all of that gone now, walking an end unto itself because, while he walked, he could not close his eyes for more than a few seconds and he could not die.
That was silly.
He could close his eyes and fall down and never know that he had fallen. Perhaps it had happened already and all of this was just a dream, a reliving of life’s horrors.
He suddenly remembered the first time he’d killed another human being.
It made a sadness well up inside him, but he was not afraid of tears. They would have frozen to his face.
Tears.
They did not.
He tried to blink them away. A sound. Avalanche. So loud.
It was them! More of the cannibals, wanting the child’s flesh. Vassily Prokopiev moved his feet more rapidly, the sound louder, no rocks or snow blocking his way. Louder still.
Running. .
He was amazed at himself! He could still run! He fell.
“Little one!” Vassily Prokopiev said through cracked lips.
A light.A voice. Very loud. One of the Judeo-Chris-tian angels, coming to claim the little girl. Surely not
him. There would be no place for him. The light failed, was gone.
He wept, holding her, assuring himself of her breathing. She was so very hot and his arms were so very stiff that he could not have released her had he wanted to.
Sleep had him.
But then something moved him. Words he could not understand. The language of angels? Then words he understood, but angels spoke very bad Russian. “Pree nee michtye ehta!”
Something warm in his throat and he felt he would vomit it up if he could ever swallow it. He tried sitting up.
“Lazheetyes!”
He fell back. “Nye byespakoityes.”
He tried asking them, where she was, because his arms moved and they shouldn’t have moved at all if he’d still held her.
Maybe his lips did not work, or his tongue. Again, he tried to sit up, again, in that terrible Russian he now realized was spoken by angels, he was told to lie down, not to worry.
He heard her cry.
He opened his eyes.
Not angels. Germans. Did the Germans do the terrible things that it was said they did? Would they kill a small child? He was inside an aircraft of some type, large. And another German, his helmet off, his eyes smiling, dropped to his knees. In his arms was the little one. She was crying.
To cry, it was necessary to live.
Vassily Prokopiev could now sleep.
CHAPTER FIFTY
Snipers —Wolfgang Mann estimated at least a dozen —harassed the German troops as the breastworks were finally closed. Incoming mortar fire, at first erratic, grew in intensity. One of the Eden shuttle craft was slightly damaged. Sarah Rourke, the sleeves of her black BDU blouse rolled up past her elbows, assisted the German and American doctors in preparing for the wave of casualties to come, so far two deaths and five woundings of varying degrees of severity, easily handled by the medical staff.
She knew that John would be coming.
But if he would be coming soon enough was the key… .
Michael Rourke sat on the long bench, Rolvaag on one side of him, a German lieutenant on the other, Hrothgar lying across Rolvaag’s feet.
Michael had twisted to the side on the bench, a medic rebandaging the wound to his left arm.
The whirring of the rotor blades overhead, the steady thrumming of the wiper blades over the bubble sur
rounding the cockpit, the static of the radio receiver, punctuated by urgent messages in code, the occasional electronic moan which sounded so much like someone dying that it made the stomach churn—all factors combined to make an atmosphere at once soporofic and so maddening that sleep was impossible, except for Bjorn Rolvaag and his dog.
The sword had been given to Madame Jokli and, once again, Rolvaag only carried his staff. Warfare wasn’t that serious, Michael supposed, so the carrying of a blade (not to mention a gun) wasn’t justified.
When the medic was through, Michael Rourke sat back, trying to read. The book was the pilot’s manual for the J7-V, Maria translating it for him a segment at a time.
Maria.
He held her in his arms when he told her he was going off to battle, sending her with Hartman, safer at the front than she would be with him, out of sheer dint of numbers.
“I love you,” she told him.
He kissed her, told her he loved her. He wondered what it was that prevented him from marrying her? Had it been a mistake to marry the first time? Had he brought Madison to her death, and their child?
Any woman who married a Rourke, he sometimes thought, would have to be very much in love, because she was beginning a life of loneliness and partings. He sometimes wondered if he was too much like his father.
Michael Rourke closed the manual and tried to sleep. He knew it wouldn’t work, the sleeping. He wanted the other thing to work very badly because he loved Maria very much… .
John Rourke had the copilot’s seat of the J7-V, but he surrendered it, moving back along the fuselage toward where Jason Darkwood sat, hands glued to the armrests of his seat. “Captain?”
“Ahh, Doctor Rourke. How do you stand flying l
ong distances? That helicopter ride, well, that was different. But this goes on and on and all there is around you is nothing.”
John Rourke smiled, sat down beside him. “Years ago, you would have thought traveling by air was about as natural as driving a car.” And then John Rourke laughed at his own words. “You know, a personal automobile.”
“When I was a kid, the idea of having a car fascinated me,” Darkwood said, the pressure of his fingers against the armrests visibly lightening. “I wanted a Ferrari. I used to watch all the old video stuff I could get my hands on, just to see the cars. But I wanted a Ferrari. There was some policeman in Hawaii, I think, and there was another, a private detective or something in Florida before it fell into the sea.”
Rourke didn’t smile. He’d been there when it happened. “The cop was in Miami and his Ferrari was white. The private detective was the one in Hawaii, and his car was red.”
“Yeah, that’s it. What kind of a car did you drive, then, Doctor?”
“A station wagon or a pickup truck.”
“A station wagon? Yeah, wait a minute. The boxy ones people always had in their driveways in videos that were set in the suburbs. And people who lived in rural areas drove pickup trucks. There was this one that I saw in a video, and the wheels had to be as tall as a man and—” John Rourke kept listening out of politeness, but memories of the life before weren’t his
torical trivia to him. It was something that would never come back… .
The shelling became worse, a mortar round destroying one wing of the modular hermetically sealed, climate controlled aggregation of tents that had been set up as the field hospital.
Using plastic sheeting, Sarah Rourke worked with Elaine Halversen and three other women to reseal the opening, the wind blowing through with icy intensity.
And suddenly, Elaine started to cry. “He said he was strong enough to hold a gun. And he’s up there somewhere on the wall.”
“Akiro will be all right.”
“I think we’re all going to die; I just have this feeling.” And Sarah Rourke took Elaine Halversen into her arms, rocking her, the wind blowing through the breach in the tent wall. If help didn’t arrive soon, Elaine would be right… .
