by Jerry Ahern
THE SURVIVALIST
#26
COUNTDOWN
Books by Jerry Ahern
The Survivalist Series
#1: Total War
#2: The Nightmare Begins
#3: The Quest
#4: The Doomsayer
#5: The Web
#6: The Savage Horde
#7: The Prophet
#8: The End is Coming
#9: Earth Fire
#10: The Awakening
#11: The Reprisal
#12: The Rebellion
#13: Pursuit
#14: The Terror
#15: Overlord Mid-Wake
#16: The Arsenal
#17: The Ordeal
#18: The Struggle
#19: Final Rain
#20: Firestorm
#21: To End All War The Legend
#22: Brutal Conquest
#23: Call To Battle
#24: Blood Assassins
#25: War Mountain
#26: Countdown
#27: Death Watch
The Defender Series
#1: The Battle Begins
#2: The Killing Wedge
#3: Out of Control
#4: Decision Time
#5: Entrapment
#6: Escape
#7: Vengeance
#8: Justice Denied
#9: Deathgrip
#10: The Good Fight
#11: The Challenge
#12: No Survivors
They Call Me the Mercenary Series
#1: The Killer Genesis
#2: The Slaughter Run
#3: Fourth Reich Death Squad
#4: The Opium Hunter
#5: Canadian Killing Ground
#6: Vengeance Army
#7: Slave of the Warmonger
#8: Assassin’s Express
#9: The Terror Contract
#10: Bush Warfare
#11: Death Lust!
#12: Headshot!
#13: Naked Blade, Naked Gun
#14: The Siberian Alternative
#15: The Afghanistan Penetration
#16: China Bloodhunt
#17: Buckingham Blowout
THE SURVIVALIST
#26
COUNTDOWN
JERRY AHERN
SPEAKING VOLUMES, LLC
NAPLES, FLORIDA
2014
THE SURVIVALIST
#26 COUNTDOWN
Copyright © 1993 by Jerry Ahern
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission of the author.
ISBN 978-1-61232-290-2
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This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Contents
Author’s Note
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Author’s Note
For those who came in late …
In the latter part of the current era, John Thomas Rourke, Doctor of Medicine and former Covert Operations Officer in the Central Intelligence Agency, plied the trade at which he was most expert of all: he wrote and taught in the fields of survivalism and special weapons and tactics.
His motto was then and still is, Plan Ahead. To that end, although Rourke hoped that mankind would avoid all-out warfare, he planned for the opposite, investing virtually all his resources in the construction, fitting and stocking of an elaborately planned survival facility which he called the Retreat.
While Rourke was returning by commercial airline from a training exercise (in Canada for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police), the unthinkable occurred: global thermonuclear war.
Civilization stopped.
In the immediate aftermath of the Night of the War, Rourke became fast friends with a young magazine editor named Paul Rubenstein. What Paul initally lacked in skill, he compensated for with courage, resolve and the quickness and willingness to learn. The two friends set out across the ravaged landscape in search of John Rourke’s wife, Sarah, and their then-young children, Michael and Annie, hoping to find them and bring them to the comparative safety of the Retreat.
Along the way, John Rourke and Paul Rubenstein saved the life of an enemy agent whose skills were a perfect match for Rourke’s own, her name Major Natalia Anastasia Tiemerovna. Events soon forced Natalia to the realization that the government in whose name she had fought for so many years was the enemy of mankind. A woman of honor and conviction, she became Rourke’s and Rubenstein’s unswervingly steadfast ally and friend.
So began a chain of events which has lasted in print for approximately a dozen years as this is written and continued over the course of 625 years in the lives of what has come to be known as “the Rourke Family.” The Rourke Family has survived holocaust, endured through cryogenic Sleep, and fought on in the cause of freedom and humanity. The children, Michael and Annie, have grown to adulthood; but, through the manipulation possible with cryogenics, they are chronologically the contemporaries of their parents, as well as of Natalia and Paul Rubenstein.
Three men and three women, they are the only remaining survivors from the twentieth century, in a far distant future disquietingly like the past.
Humanity is numbered only in the millions, but beginning once again to take hold of the planet, to mold nature to its will. The biosphere’s wounds are nearly healed. But data surfaces concerning an environmental crisis of unprecedented magnitude, threatening to destroy the very fabric of the planet.
And, the spectre of global warfare looms once again. The enemy is a resurgent Nazi movement. At its head is Dr. Deitrich Zimmer, a man of unparalleled brillia
nce and skill, of unmitigated ruthlessness and malevolence.
The Family, John Rourke at its head, must fight to survive or die. And, if they fail, mankind will be nothing more than a lost chapter in the pages of time.
Jerry Ahern
Commerce, Georgia
Prologue
Almost-Sarah, or was she Sarah? She had Sarah’s memories.
Was it only programming? Where did the input from another living being’s memory begin and the reality of true memory start?
The gunfire. She recognized that plainly enough. It made her remember the birth of her third child, a little boy—or was she remembering …
It was clearly the sound of a pistol shot, nothing else.
And her husband’s little office was suddenly a very vulnerable place, with too many windows, no secure door, very little potential for covered positions from which to return fire.
Sarah Rourke’s right hand groped for the Trapper Scorpion .45 in the pocket of her German arctic parka, the garment draped over the back of her husband’s chair.
The pistol’s chamber was already loaded and she thumbed back the hammer as she stood.
Pain shot through her, from groin to chest.
She was cold and hot at once.
Fluid burst from her, spraying downward between her legs and onto the floor, her water bag broken.
Her knees went weak.
As she upped the safety on the .45 and doubled forward over the desk, choking back a scream, she realized the baby was coming early …
Sarah Rourke, her pistol clutched in her right hand, fought against the cramping which seized her, consumed her. She was dragging herself along the floor now, into the corridor, dragging herself because she could not walk. The first of the explosions had knocked her to the floor.
On her knees beside the corridor wall, she sagged, felt the movement of the baby.
It had to be a boy, racing to the sound of battle just like his father had always done, but not now!
She tried to get to her feet but could not rise.
Smoke filled the corridor, acrid-smelling, filling her lungs and the baby’s bloodstream, too, she knew.
But the back door to the hospital, the emergency entrance, was only a few yards away, she told herself, only a few yards.
Where was John? Natalia? Where was Natalia?
Sarah Rourke leaned with her back against the wall, her legs squatted beneath her.
On one level of consciousness, she told herself that American Indian women—African women, women for centuries had delivered their own children this way.
But that level was very small and very far away.
Her fingernails gouged into the wall and she shrieked her pain to the flames around her, the smoke making her cough and gag, but the baby’s head crowned, blood oozing along her thighs, her flesh ripping.
“John!”
The baby.
Something enormous was pushing through her, tearing at her, sending waves of pain through her body no matter how she tried to regulate her breathing.
“John!”
More pain than she had ever known, and then it was gone, and blood and fluid dripped from her, but her baby’s head was out. She bore down with her shoulders, her rib cage, her pelvis, pushing as hard as she could, unable to move her hands to help herself lest she fall.
She drew herself in and pushed down.
Movement.
A shoulder. It had to be. She pushed. And she could feel her child alive and moving and she let herself slide down along the length of the wall as her hands grasped for the baby, drawing the child—her child, John’s child—the rest of the way from her body.
As she raised the new life toward her—a boy—he simultaneously screamed and urinated.
“Very impressive, Frau Rourke.”
Tears filling her eyes, she looked up toward the mechanical-sounding voice.
It had come to her through some sort of mask.
Her baby’s body was slick and at the same time sticky, the umbilical cord still attached, blue and pulsing.
The man who had spoken to her had a gun in his hand. “This is for your crimes against National Socialism, Frau Rourke.”
She screamed, “John!”
She saw a flash from the muzzle of the gun …
Did the possession of memories endow the possessor with the reality of the object or event remembered?
She was faintly aware of being in her husband’s arms, but he wasn’t her husband, or maybe he was. And she felt safe from the gunfire. But, didn’t she want to kill this man? She could not remember that now.
Where was her baby boy, the child she’d birthed in the instant before what was almost death? For Sarah? For Almost-Sarah? Almost-Sarah, a clone of the original—or was she Sarah?
Were the memories hers or only stolen?
She felt tears in eyes that she was, as yet, too tired to open.
Chapter One
On one level, John Thomas Rourke was truly convinced that the woman whom he held cradled in his arms was, indeed, his wife. She not only looked and felt, even sounded like Sarah (in the instant that she had called his name before lapsing again from consciousness), but the womanly smell of her was distinctly Sarah Rourke. Yet, the doubt which Deitrich Zimmer had planted in Rourke’s mind concerning her identity was something Rourke could neither escape nor ignore. And, if she were not Sarah, he might well be carrying the instrument of his death.
But there was no time for worrying about the situation now, too much to do. Another three dozen of Deitrich Zimmer’s SS commandos were holding the top of the mountain where their helicopters had originally landed. No Trans-Global Alliance air-power was forthcoming, either, Commander Washington announced.
“And why is that?” Paul Rubenstein asked him.
Commander Washington’s chocolate brown skin, already slightly greyed from the cold, became suddenly, subtly greyer. “There’s been a nuclear attack on our forces located in Upstate New York,” he said very softly. “No casualty count yet, General—Doctor Rourke—and Mr. Rubenstein, and no information at all except that it happened. No yield size, nothing. All we do know is that the detonation was probably an air burst, the most deadly technique for battlefield use.”
Annie made the sign of the cross.
“Not only the most deadly,” John Rourke said, almost as if speaking to himself, his mind focusing on the implications of Commander Washington’s words rather than the surroundings, “but the most efficient, too. An obviously greater effect from blast—shock wave, heat wave, light—but minimized fallout, enhancing potential for the enemy’s friendly forces to function in the battlefield environment as quickly as possible after the detonation, and with some degree of impunity if the proper precautions are taken. Before the Night of the War, the Russians actually trained for postnuclear battlefield combat. It would seem logical that our Dr. Zimmer and his Nazi hierarchy had their field forces doing the same.”
Natalia, with her wounded left leg being attended to by a medic, was seated, leaning her back against the living rock which comprised the wall surface of the control center at the base of the Nazi mountain headquarters. She looked at Commander Washington, then at John Rourke, then started laughing. It was a hollow laugh, the kind that sounded on the edge of tears or insanity.
Rourke was walking again, still carrying Sarah, nearly out the doorway, to the halftrack waiting outside; but, he just stopped. His wife—he would operate on the assumption that she was his wife, until and unless circumstances proved differently—lay somewhere between sleep and unconsciousness in his arms and the world was collapsing around them. Personal concerns, once again, had to be put aside. And, except for those five years he’d spent raising his son and daughter in the Retreat, he had known nothing beyond mortal conflict ever since the Night of the War. He was becoming increasingly tired of having no life other than that. Even those five years had been years of sadness, and fear, too, but there was true and profound satisfaction in taking two childr
en and seeing them through their first steps into an adulthood such as no child had ever experienced before or since. Michael and Annie had been small children on the Night of the War, surviving into a future John Rourke could never have imagined.
“We’ll need aircraft, then, in order to anticipate a wide range of contingencies,” Rourke announced, his words a long exhalation of the exhaustion within him. He threw back his shoulders, his jaw setting, telling himself that it was time to go on, to do, to make things better than they were and that personal concerns mattered little if at all by comparison. “That means we neutralize the enemy personnel above, capture their machines if possible, meanwhile securing this base. If a general nuclear exchange results from the battlefield detonation to which Commander Washington referred, this place might be our only sanctuary, the food and supplies here our only means of survival.” Rourke looked at his son, telling him, “Michael, take your mother and—”
“I’m not leaving. I’ll carry Mom to the halftrack, but I’m not going anywhere after that. I’ve got work to do here. She’ll be cared for; we both know that. And, as soon as this facility is secured, we’ll have her back here with us.”
Rourke only nodded, respecting his son’s judgement.
Before John Rourke could speak, Natalia said, “I’m not going to be very fast on my feet, John, but there is quite a bit I can do regardless of this.” And she gestured to her leg wound. “Perhaps fly that helicopter the Nazis so kindly left us. My leg will work well enough for that.”
And John Rourke started to laugh.
“I’m staying, too, Daddy,” his daughter, Annie Rubenstein, announced. “I’m still fast on my feet.” And she looked at Natalia and smiled. “We pretty much started out in all of this together and we’ll keep at it until we finish it or die trying.”
Paul hugged her.
“Fine,” Rourke said at last. “Then, let’s see if we can get Wolfgang Mann conscious, so he can help, too. As soon as he’s got his faculties about him, we could benefit from having a real general to give us some advice as opposed to only an honorary one.” Rourke considered the military rank conferred on him more than a century ago at Mid-Wake, however sincerely meant, as real a qualification for military leadership as being appointed a Kentucky Colonel, Before the Night of the War. And, Rourke looked pointedly at Commander Washington who had made reference to the rank. Washington shrugged his shoulders and smiled, as if to say, “Touché.”
