Countdown

by Jerry Ahern

  Rourke smiled. “There are six of us, and that should be sufficient. Suit up gentlemen.” They would take the ropes in moments, as soon as Natalia signaled she was ready. Rourke shoved back his hood and started pulling the black toque over his head …

  Natalia Tiemerovna gave one last look toward the gauges on her panel. Then she looked through the helicopter’s bubble toward the mountain’s base. She shook her head, exhaled. Annie, sitting beside her, said, “They’ll be all right.”

  “We love all three of them, don’t we?”

  Annie laughed softly. “They know it.”

  Natalia only nodded. John, Michael and Paul, along with the three volunteers from Commander Washington’s force, waited, ready to move. The six men were stripped of their arctic parkas, attired in black combat boots, black BDU pants, black sweaters and black hoods, these latter with a window at the center of the eyes, but the eyes covered with snow goggles. They looked like they should be freezing, but to a man they would be wearing thermal gear beneath their outer clothes—she’d been with Michael when he’d donned his, telling him that he looked cute.

  Annie asked, “Are you ready to signal them?”

  “No, but I suppose that I have to.” She turned on the cabin lights, then turned them off, then on, then off, then on, then off again.

  There was an answering series of flashes from one of the six men at the base of the mountain, then within seconds they started the climb.

  Chapter Six

  Paul Rubenstein wrapped his fists around the rope and started with his right foot against the rock surface. Perhaps a hundred yards above him, John Rourke and the German commando, Schmidt (who was also an experienced climber) had let down two ropes, so he, Michael and the two SEAL Team men, Moore and Jones, could follow. By the time they reached the location of the first tie-off, John and Schmidt would be well along toward the next level, perhaps already have attained it.

  John had planned the climb as a general—he was one, after all—might plan a battle; but, in this case, the terrain and the enemy were one in the same …

  John Rourke’s left foot was levered into a niche of rock, the rock coated with slick ice, as was the rope Rourke trailed behind him. His right foot perched on one of the improvised pitons, Rourke reached up, another of the pitons in his left hand, a heavy-headed hammer—not a proper climber’s hammer, but a substantially sized claw hammer from the machine shop—in his right.

  The hammer was ice-coated and, as he struck at the piton, ice flew from it and the rock surface. Involuntarily, John Rourke averted his eyes, but the snow goggles he wore were shatterproof. He struck the piton again, then again, then once more. The piton was in as deep as it would go. Slipping the hammer into an improvised loop on his pistol belt, then locking it in place with a hook and pile strip, Rourke took solid hold of the piton and tugged.

  It held; at least so far.

  Playing his body weight between the crack in the rock surface and the piton on which his booted right foot rested, he simultaneously pulled with his arm and pushed with his leg.

  Because of the uncertainty of the equipment, the horrendous visibility (it would have been impossible to tell if it were night or day, the sky a black nothingness and wind-driven snow swirling about him) and his unfamiliarity with the rock surface, he was taking the climb in the slow, painstaking way, relying as little as possible on the rock face, as much as possible on the pitons.

  Standing to his full height now, his safety line looped into the last piton he’d driven, Rourke reached to maximum comfortable extension, retrieved his hammer and began to stake another piton into the living rock.

  The piton was driven, tested, and Rourke pulled himself up, moving like a spider along an only partially finished web, his left foot up to the next piton, his right foot searching for purchase in the rock, the last piton he’d driven was at waist level now.

  He looked to his left, for Schmidt. The German commando was perhaps fifty feet below him, but apparently doing well. Rourke paused for a breath, exhaled, eyeballed a likely spot for his next piton, then retrieved his hammer. He would repeat the process until he reached the next likely place to pause and was nearly out of pitons. As Paul, Michael, Moore and Jones followed, they would extract the pitons Rourke and Schmidt had left behind, then secure them into the rope so Rourke and Schmidt could haul them up and begin again.

  John Rourke kept moving …

  Annie had learned to do two things at once at a comparatively early age, sitting in front of a television screen and watching one of the many video tapes her father had suggested that they watch, while at the same time working on her embroidery. If the tape required intensive viewing, she would crochet, something she could do without looking at all, really. She crocheted now, her eyes on the mountain wall, the blizzard raging around the tied-down helicopter.

  She didn’t know what she expected to see. She knew what she did not want to see: A body falling from the mountainside.

  Natalia smoked, stared, made the occasional comment, then stared some more.

  The shawl Annie crocheted would be a present for her mother, when her mother eventually awakened.

  And, after her mother awakened, everything would end for their Family as a true family. Annie Rourke Rubenstein knew that her mother would leave her father, over the death of Martin, the son who had been born to Sarah Rourke an instant before Deitrich Zimmer shot her, kidnapped and raised a Nazi by Deitrich Zimmer.

  To save the lives of Paul and Natalia and a wounded man, Annie’s father fought with Martin and Martin fell to his death through the open door of a helicopter into a river of volcanic lava below.

  Martin was dead.

  So was the marriage between her parents.

  Eventually, Sarah Rourke and Wolfgang Mann would get together; Annie knew that. And, when that happened, for her father’s sake, she hoped that he would find happiness with Emma Shaw.

  But Wolfgang Mann, a truly fine individual, heroic and strong, she would never call “father,” nor Emma Shaw, equally heroic, “mother.”

  They would all be good friends—civilized.

  The Rourke Family would cease to exist.

  Annie’s eyes stared into the night. Annie’s fingers worked the hook and the yarn. Annie’s soul ached. When this was over, she wanted Paul to make her pregnant.

  Chapter Seven

  John Rourke’s clothing crackled as he moved, ice forming on his arms and legs each time he paused, the ice on the granite surface of the mountainside thick and slick, making each movement more incredibly dangerous. He was cold, and not just on the outside.

  There were those who contended that men and women who involved themselves in dangerous activities knew no fear. Perhaps that was true, but Rourke doubted so. When there was time for it, the men and women he’d known Before the Night of the War, and since, who had displayed conspicuous courage in times of great danger had all known fear as well.

  Fear was a normal human response. Those who had to go on in spite of fear merely became skilled at conquering it. John Thomas Rourke did not know how skilled or unskilled he might be in that regard, but the cold feeling in the pit of his stomach was something he had known before and, if he lived, would know again—fear. He went on, clambering along the ice-slicked rock face, the wind howling, strong now, vision obscured by the swirling of the snow. The only way that he would know he had reached the steeply angled summit would be by the orientation of his body to the ground.

  The only plus to the miserable weather conditions was that the enemy would be less able to detect the assault visually. Electronic sensing equipment was another matter, however.

  John Rourke kept moving, driving in a piton, pulling himself up, getting a fresh foothold, equally precarious to the last, then driving in another piton.

  At what he gauged as perhaps a hundred yards below the angled summit, Rourke found a rock chimney. He knew its location from previous reconnaissance of the mountain face, and discovering it less than a yard above him now
meant that he was, indeed, close to the summit, but he was also a good one hundred feet to the north of his originally planned route.

  There were two choices now confronting him. He could rope his way laterally, back a hundred feet or so and thus return to the planned route. Or, he could climb the chinmey. Schmidt was still well below him, the other climbers—Paul, Michael and the two SEAL Team men, Moore and Jones, further below still. Everyone else would have to rope back, too. And that, under the circumstances (both atmospheric and topographic) could be insanely dangerous.

  If they came up through the chimney, the burden for the men below him would be easier, and—of considerable importance under the deteriorating conditions—protect them from the elements. But the climb for him would be tougher in one respect. As he automatically squinted against the driving sleet and snow in order to view the chimney through his goggles now, despite their protection, he could see that the chimney surface was glass-slick from ice. If he used the methodology he had employed so far successfully, however tediously in the earlier portion of the climb, attacking the chimney would mean leaving the men exposed, unmoving, possible sniper bait and certainly at the mercy of the elements. If he climbed in the accepted fashion, he would save time but dramatically increase his own chances for disaster.

  He could barely see the four men below Schmidt, Schmidt spiderwebbing his way upward a piton at a time.

  Rourke made his decision.

  He started snaking down a rope to Schmidt …

  Icing conditions were worsening rapidly. “Will you be able to take off in this?” Annie asked her.

  “I don’t know, Annie. But, I’m not going to wait until the last minute to find out,” Natalia told her.

  Vicious crosswinds assaulted the open ground before the mouth of the entrance into the mountain. Natalia felt genuine sympathy for the men of Commander Washington’s force who had to endure the wind unprotected. Visibility was obscenely bad. Before she went airborne, Natalia fully intended to construct some ruse by means of which she could entice Annie out of the helicopter. There was no sense in both of them risking their lives in the assault on the mountain summit. In a worst-case scenario, Michael and Paul and John might be killed as well, which would mean that Sarah’s family would all be taken from her. That would be too much to ask any person to endure if it could be avoided.

  Natalia once again activated the helicopter’s deicing system, asking Annie, “Monitor de-icing for me, will you? I want to check my gear just in case we have to ditch.”

  “Sure thing.”

  Natalia looked to her weapons. Her customary twin stainless four-inch L-Frame Smiths, 686s with American Eagles on the barrel flats, were holstered in the double-flap rig which rode just below her natural waist. The Bali-Song knife, rather than pouched in the leg of her jumpsuit along her left thigh, was in the pocket of her parka.

  Her left leg was moving better; and, if circumstances forced her to, she could move reasonably normally on it. The German painkiller was doing its work well.

  In addition to the revolvers, beneath her open parka was the Ken Null shoulder holster with the suppressor-fitted Walther PPK/S. She had one other handgun with her, a Lancer copy of the SIG-Sauer P-226 9mm. This rested on the map console beside her, but would be shoved between her pistol belt and her abdomen once she was airborne.

  Natalia looked over Annie’s shoulder. The deicing system, at least according to the panel readouts, was performing as it should.

  The true test lay in the flying, which she would begin shortly enough …

  Paul Rubenstein made a cradle for himself out of two sixty-inch lengths of 2500-pound test nylon webbing, anchoring the ends to pitons, thus allowing his body to rest as he waited on the cliff face, nothing below but darkness and certain death should he fall.

  He had gone over the details of the climb with John Rourke, and knew now full well that the delay in reaching the summit had to have been caused by John’s somehow missing the intended path, easy enough to do in near-zero visibility.

  There was a rock chimney which had appeared in the recon photos. If John were climbing that now, in order to make up time and get the rest of them off the cliff face sooner, he was at considerable risk. The chimney of rock would be ice-slicked and deadly.

  For the billionth time since he’d stopped smoking years Before the Night of the War, Paul Rubenstein wished he hadn’t. But he laughed; even John’s old Zippo windlighter would have been hard-pressed to keep a flame in this.

  Chapter Eight

  The sole of John Rourke’s left boot slipped and he started down the chimney, hands groping for a hold, gloved fingers slipping over the ice-slicked black granite, outcroppings of rock pummeling him.

  He thrust his right foot outward and locked his leg. He’d either break his leg at the knee or stop. With a bone shuddering lurch, he stopped.

  John Rourke exhaled, closed his eyes, inhaled, his hands—palms outward—already wedged against the rock on either side of him. Rourke assessed his body for damage, not finding any readily apparent; he opened his eyes once again, then looked up. Some fifty yards of the rock chimney still needed to be traversed, counting the yardage he’d lost when he slipped.

  He paused, wedging himself more securely, then finding a piton. He took the hammer from the improvised loop at his pistol belt, slightly altered his position and tried taking a swing. There was little room for movement of his arm, but with great difficulty he was at last able to anchor a piton.

  He roped into it, insurance against another fall. There was the temptation to work his way upward the rest of the way by using pitons, but he was at least out of the killing wind. Paul, Michael and the others were not.

  Exhaling hard, then inhaling, Rouke started up once again, wedging himself, then pushing, then wedging again. Rock chimneys were climbed this way, by alternately wedging and then freeing the body, but not usually with ice so slick as this. He kept moving.

  When he judged he had gone another five yards, he stopped, anchored another piton, then roped into it. Insurance again.

  And, again, he began to climb.

  Once he reached the top, he would let down rope, and the others could climb along the rope after him, joining him at the slope before the summit. Once the first of the five were up the chimney, Rourke would set to driving pitons along the slope and webbing rope, but as silently and unobtrusively as he could.

  He would be in sight of the enemy if they cared to look.

  The matter of electronic countermeasures was something for which he could not compensate, why timing would be critical with Natalia’s chopper flight. But there was a fact which he had to face, that Natalia might not be able to get airborne in these terrible winds and visibility. If she could not get airborne and launch the explosives-laden remote video probes she had aboard, there would be no distraction to mask the last phase of the assault.

  And the fight would be there, on the slick, sloping granite above the cliff face.

  The thought made John Rourke even colder.

  He kept climbing, stopping again in order to drive another piton, roping into it, then moving on once more. The volume of firearms he carried on his body had, at times throughout the climb, been burdensome. But, once he reached the summit, he would be glad for them, perhaps more than he realized.

  Rourke kept climbing, glancing above through the swirling snow and into the impenetrable darkness.

  There was a chance that the climb had already been detected, that the Nazi commandos in position on the summit were merely waiting to strike.

  He could not dismiss that thought, try as he might. Rourke just kept climbing …

  Thirty-six Eden fighter aircraft closed from the west on the crippled base as Emma Shaw, her engines near to flame-out, had been forced to land.

  The refueling process seemed to be taking an eternity, but while it was in progress her V/STOL was being fitted with additional forward missile pods on both wings. The added weight would slow her down, but only for a litt
le while. She would lose the missiles quickly enough.

  “Ready, Commander!” Her canopy was already closing as Emma Shaw returned the thumbs-up signal and started taxiing for the field. The sky overhead was filled with explosions, missiles and aircraft streaking everywhere, her own two squadrons and the enemy aircraft at times nearly colliding, it seemed, as she observed. And darkness with heavy overcast made things worse. Despite the electronics with which her aircraft was equipped, she was the kind of pilot who preferred to actually fly, not ride.

  The field over which Emma Shaw taxied her V/STOL fighter was already pockmarked with craters and, if she were not careful, she’d intersect with one and her aircraft would be crippled. Landing, if she had that opportunity, would be dangerous in the extreme.

  At last she turned into the nearest runway; there were no tower orders to worry about. Emma reminded herself that she was used to taking off from carriers, whether on the surface or beneath it, and that runway distances here on land were a luxury.

  To have made a vertical takeoff under combat conditions would have been suicidal, leaving herself crippled for precious seconds. “Oh, shit—here we go,” she hissed through her teeth, starting to throttle out.

  An enemy aircraft swept over the field, strafing it just ahead of her. A service vehicle overturned, its fuel supply exploding, with burning synth-fuel spraying across the field. She kept increasing speed.

  Her fists were balled so tightly on the yoke that she could feel every stitch in the seams of her gloves.

  A missile exploded to her left, blackening a portion of her canopy and—she hoped—doing no other damage.

  Two enemy fighters were zeroing in toward her from the far side of the field. One of her own squadron was on their tails, but Emma Shaw could not help.

  Or, could she? she wondered.

  “Let’s pretend this is a carrier,” Emma Shaw snarled, then throttled full out. “This is Bulldog Leader, Bulldog Pups. Momma’s comin’ back home to get those nasty bullies. Cover me!”