Countdown

by Jerry Ahern

  “But—” But what? Emma Shaw thought. Natalia knew more about this than Emma Shaw could ever hope to begin to understand. She let Natalia go on.

  “Deitrich Zimmer’s success with cloning would be impossible, as John pointed out yesterday, without the ability to somehow record the electromagnetic impulses within the mind in the same way that sound or image is recorded on magnetic tape. If we assume that technology to be wholly viable, then there is no reason to suppose that it could not be utilized for the purest form of what used to be called brainwashing.”

  “I know the term. The Russians used to—” Emma shut up.

  Natalia laughed. “Ancient history. Some of the agencies within the Committee for State Security of the Soviet as well as some elements within the GRU—that was Red Army Intelligence—utilized advanced techniques for extracting information. It was very ugly. Rarely was the attempt made to implant information, and in every case I ever heard of, never was such an attempt successful. The point is, Deitrich Zimmer could have fabricated the memories and downloaded the tape with the artificial memories in the same manner he would download memory into the blank mind of one of the clones. Sarah doesn’t merely imagine she remembers John trying to kill her. She really remembers it, even though it never happened that way. She has a real memory of the event happening in more or less the way that she described, and the implanted memory of John being the man who pulled the trigger. And, because the event really took place, only with someone else doing the shooting, she has all the ancillary memory to back up the induced memory.

  “The memory is real,” Natalia said, “but it is not what really happened. Trying to convince her of that fact would be essentially impossible.”

  “So, if it is the real Sarah we’re talking about—” Emma Shaw didn’t know what to say.

  “If this woman is really Sarah Rourke, we may be able to convince her that John never did what she remembers, demonstrating to her the technique by which Zimmer implanted the memories that she has. But, even though on a rational level she’ll know the truth, her memories will still be there. Zimmer’s technique is the most insidious thing I have ever heard of. We could not remove the memory without removing all of her other memories. We are powerless to erase what he has inserted.”

  “Then even if she realizes on a rational basis that John is guiltless, she’ll still remember him trying to kill her.”

  “Forever. Yes. When the opportunity presents itself, I hope that I am the one to kill Deitrich Zimmer. But, until then, you and I will have to be very strong, Emma, stronger perhaps than you have ever had to be. If Michael or Annie killed the clone of their father in order to save their real father, I have no idea what effect it might have on them. I don’t think we can have a doctor remove the heart from one living human being in order to save the life of another, even if the donor is a clone of the recipient. The ethics involved would be staggering.

  “I will kill the donor,” Natalia went on. “And you may have to—what’s the term? Damn! Yes. The football thing?”

  “The football thing?”

  “Run interference! You may have to run interference for me. The Rourke family tends to moralize quite a bit. Not Annie, really; she’s very practical. And Paul would never forgive himself. I will kill the clone just when the operation is about to begin. You may have to help me then. Do you have the nerve for it, Emma, in order to save John’s life?”

  “You love him more than you’ll admit, still,” Emma Shaw told Natalia Tiemerovna.

  Natalia Tiemerovna said, “Over the intervening years since I first became entangled with the Rourke Family, I’ve come to believe in the concept that there may very well be someone known as God. If there is, it would only be logical that He doesn’t place people into life haphazardly, that we all have some purpose. My purpose now can be to save a marvelous life, a life like no other life. And I alone have the ability to do it, to walk over to a sedated body that looks identical in every way to the body of a man I once worshiped—and still do in a way—and kill. Life on the cosmic scale is very much like life on the most minute scale.

  “There are some people whose mission or lot it is to do the things that other, better people cannot do. I’m one of those people, Emma Shaw. Can I count on you to help me?”

  “Yes. But John may hate us both for this.”

  “Hate us? John cannot hate. It isn’t part of his makeup. He doesn’t have the capacity for hatred. He might never forgive us, though. Are you willing to risk losing the man you love in order to save his life?”

  Emma didn’t have to think of an answer.

  It was nearly time for her to begin to climb, get to cruising altitude and start watching out for enemy aircraft and enemy missiles.

  “By your silence, I detect an answer in the affirmative.”

  “And we can count on Annie if we need someone else to help us?”

  Natalia said, “Yes.”

  Chapter Forty-Five

  If his parents could have seen him, they would have rolled over in their graves.

  But then, Paul Rubenstein recalled bitterly that they had no graves, would have died with all the rest of the people in Texas with the de facto President of the United States when the sky caught fire during the Great Conflagration.

  SS field uniforms were black, and there were collar tabs with the lightning-bolt runes of old. The cap insignia was the death’s-head, just as it had been, but set over the swastika.

  Paul Rubenstein wore the rank of Sturmbannführer, equivalent to a major, while Michael was a Hauptsturmführer, his rank equivalent to a captain. Appropriately, since James Darkwood was the only one who spoke acceptable German and, hence, would do most of the talking, Darkwood bore the single starburst of an Obersturmbannführer.

  “Boy, if my mom and dad could see me now,” Paul at last said aloud.

  “They’d be proud of what you were doing, Mr. Rubenstein,” Darkwood volunteered.

  Paul smiled, looking at Darkwood in the full-length mirror the three of them shared. “Only if I got a chance to get the words out of my mouth before they started to tear me limb from limb,” he countered.

  Michael forced a laugh. “I’m finding myself wishing I’d insisted that Maria Leuden had spoken German to me instead of using her English.”

  “Maria Leuden?” Darkwood said.

  “A woman I knew, very well, before Natalia and I became—” And he paused.

  Quickly, Paul inserted, “Fortunate we had enough uniforms without bullet holes in them.”

  “Allied Intell has been collecting enemy uniforms since the start,” James Darkwood said, buckling on his pistol belt. “And don’t think we haven’t used them before.”

  Paul Rubenstein grabbed up his borrowed arctic parka and started for the door …

  Darkwood Naval Air Station controlled the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean to the west. Smaller than the Naval Air Station itself was Hapgood Naval Base, attached to the Naval Air Station, a facility for servicing submarine craft in the Allied armada. Although other forces had navies, the United States Navy was the only true naval power, and it ruled the seas.

  But, with the increased technology of the present, even the deepest diving craft was vulnerable to attack from the air. The possession of air power was not a sole prerogative of the United States.

  As the three men walked toward the briefing area, the temperature a balmy sixty degrees, the wind warm off the Arabian Sea, James Darkwood discussed in layman’s terms a sketchy breakdown of force tables as the war was about to begin in earnest. “We have them outgunned, of course, between the United States forces and the forces of New Germany, adding to that the other Allies. Most people discount the Australians, for example, but really they have a tough little airborne unit and although they don’t have many aircraft, their pilots are good. If it comes to an all-out land war, we’ll win. If it’s decided under the sea or in the air, we’ll win. The only two really effective weapons in the Nazi-Eden Alliance, with the temporary
destruction of Eden’s chemical and biological weapons facilities are terror and nuclear.”

  “There’s little difference between the two,” Michael Rourke observed. “Nuclear weapons are merely instruments of massive terror, brandished for the purpose of terror.”

  “Oh, you’re right there, Michael,” James Dark-wood said, “but the added factor is that the Nazis have shown us, quite pointedly, that they’ll employ nuclear weapons if needed.”

  “During World War II,” Paul Rubenstein mused aloud, “the reason Hitler didn’t have nuclear weapons was that he didn’t believe in their potential. Imagine, what it would have been like if Hitler’s scientists had been able to perfect a V-2 type weapon which could have been launched even from occupied France, to impact the Eastern Coast of the United States, and the payload had been even the most primitive sort of nuclear device. It would have been vastly smaller than the bombs the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to end the war in the Pacific, but such a weapon would have turned the tide of the war.

  “No one in the United States, even at the highest levels of government,” Paul went on, “would have known the exact capabilities of the weapon system, so no one would have known where Hitler could strike next. The demoralizing effect alone could have won the war for him. If he’d been able to field a hundred such long-range rockets armed with primitive, dirty atomic warheads, he would have won the war. What a world it would have been after that.” Despite the pleasant temperatures, Paul Rubenstein shivered at the thought.

  “We’re faced with the same possibility now, really,” Michael observed.

  “Indeed,” Darkwood agreed, nodding his head. “I remember reading in the history books that after World War II there were Nazi groups all over, calling themselves various things, in the United States going under the title of white supremacist extremists and like that. And people didn’t really take them all that seriously.”

  Paul laughed bitterly. “If there had not been a war between the superpowers, if we’d avoided all of that, there would have been a rise in National Socialism again. The population of the United States, because of the baby boom following the war, was aging. By the early decades of the twenty-first century, it would have been necessary to open the United States to massive immigration from abroad for the simple fact that without it there wouldn’t be a work force, with half the population over retirement age. That alone would have been all the trigger the Nazis needed to get them rolling with the disenfranchised. It’s curious that that Nazis actually needed us.”

  “Us?” Darkwood repeated.

  “Jews. Hitler and his elite needed a scapegoat for Germany’s woes following World War I and the onset of the Great Depression. They needed a scapegoat in order to galvanize the emotions and the interests of a country they intended to use for their own purposes. It would have been the same if the Night of the War hadn’t interrupted it,

  “Nazism is a cancer,” Paul went on. “But it can’t be cut out, because it’s the formalization of race hatred. And that’ll always be there with some people. Today we have Deitrich Zimmer and his new Reich. Let’s say that we defeat him. Fine. In some future, probably not as distant as we’d hope, there’ll be another Deitrich Zimmer and another Nazi movement. It may call itself by another name or use the old name, but the message of hatred will be the same and the desire to kill those who are different will be the same, too. We can cut out a Nazi growth, think we’ve destroyed the problem for good. But when we least expect it, the growth will be there again, infecting everything it touches with death.”

  “Sobering thoughts,” Darkwood said. “And why do we bother, then?”

  Paul laughed again. “You know perfectly well why we bother to fight, don’t you? Decent men and women have two choices when confronted by evil incarnate: turn your back and await the inevitable or fight. Mankind has spent thousands of years trying to avoid confrontation with evil, and unsuccessfully, too. We let evil grow to the point where it becomes harder and harder to stop, just hoping against hope that somehow it will fade away and we won’t have to fight it. But always, in the end, we have to take a stand. That’s always the way.”

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Despite the circumstances, Annie Rubenstein was amused. It was odd watching men having their faces made up.

  The three closest physical matches—bone structure, height and frame size—were picked from among the officers killed or captured at the Nazi facility in Canada, then their identity papers taken. The theatrical makeup expert who worked on her husband, her brother and James Darkwood was a veteran of intelligence work. Although her full-time career was in Hawaii in the movies, she freely admitted as she worked that the occasional jobs for Allied Intelligence were both more interesting and more challenging.

  Tall for a woman, a little past middle age and exceedingly pretty with short, wavy dark hair with just a touch of grey, her name was Helen Gould.

  Natalia was assisting her, cutting a roll of paper-thin bandagelike material into short strips of approximately six inches in length, then rolling each strip. Two containers of water sat on the table beside her. Before Helen Gould began all three of the men had been told to scrub their faces with soap and water then rinse as well as possible. After doing so, their faces were blown dry with hair dryers. Helen Gould talked as she worked. “What I’m doing is using some of the same technology that we employ when we are making a life mask of an actor for a stunt man to use when he’s performing something really dangerous that the actor can’t do himself but the face has to be seen.

  “The problem here that’s different from my movie work is that a life mask that I might make for a stunt man only has to approximate the actor’s features when seen quickly and from a distance. Cutaway shots that would show a true close-up on the face are filmed afterward and inserted at critical points within the action. So, when you get the chance to see the actor’s face for a real close-up, you’re really seeing the actor’s face and not the life mask.

  “So,” she went on, “that’s why I said a moment ago that these occasional jobs I do for Allied Intelligence are a lot more challenging.”

  Annie watched as Helen Gould worked soap into the eyebrows of the three men. As she worked she explained, “I have to build up their bone structure subtly, which means I have to do some plaster of Paris work, which means I have to make molds of their faces. If I didn’t use the soap, when I remove the plaster of Paris mold, I’d remove the facial hair as well.”

  “Ouch!” Paul said in mock pain.

  Annie laughed and said, “As my husband always said, he doesn’t have that much hair to begin with. Why are you making a life mask, though, if it wouldn’t stand up to close scrutiny?”

  Helen Gould answered quickly saying, “The man that your husband is supposed to be, for example, has a much lower forehead. In order to achieve that effect on your husband’s face I have to build up the forehead area. The life mask is a form for me.” She began rubbing a substance which reminded Annie of Vaseline into Paul’s facial skin.

  “Soon, you’ll all be beautiful,” Natalia said, smiling.

  “I think the word you’re searching for, Major Tiemerovna, is ‘uncomfortable’—soon we’ll all be uncomfortable,” Darkwood announced.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Emma Shaw’s eyes squinted through the magnifier as, frame by frame, she reviewed the video taken by high-altitude observation flights over the now-confirmed site of the Nazi headquarters near what was once Katmandu. The mountains themselves seemed as innocuous as mountains could be. Visual imagery provided no discernible clue that there was anything here but snow-capped granite crags, surrounded by glacial ice and snow, yards deep.

  She told the computer, “Add thermal imaging.”

  The computer responded, Emma raising her head from the magnifier and staring at the frame she’d just examined. There were heat signatures everywhere, some of them barely visible, a few of them quite hot. If Deitrich Zimmer’s forces were using an airfie
ld—and they had to be, because the mountain crosswinds would be dangerous for helicopter use, and the only access into the mountains would have to be by air—the aircraft had to be flying in and out by terrain following.

  Putting herself mentally into the position of one of these Nazi or Eden pilots, she plotted approach paths to every one of the larger thermal signatures, confirming her gut reaction at last that the largest of these thermal signatures was the access opening into one of the mountains. And, she laughed. Zimmer was running an operation very familiar to her, only translated to land, whereas she was used to the same thing at sea.

  The mountain which she now studied in greater detail was like a submerged carrier, like the Paladin which she had just left. And, there were access tunnels, the mouths of which opened and closed to admit returning aircraft or allow exit on a sortie. Then, the tunnels were sealed until needed again.

  She had seen thermal signatures like these before, but of United States submersible carriers. And the signatures showed the takeoff and landing bays.

  With no clearly present airfield, Paul Rubenstein would have a difficult time, and that would be after fighting what would have to be killer crosswinds in order to reach the right coordinates. If whoever monitored access to the landing bays refused access to the solitary Nazi gunship which Paul would be flying, there would be no place to land and the whole plan would have to be abandoned.

  This was a dicey plan, dicey beyond belief, but so reckless an endeavor that it was the sort of thing no security force could plan against. That was the only consolation.

  As to what was going on inside the mountains, where everything was located, how what she imagined as a series of tunnels could interconnect portions of the complex, she could not hazard a guess from the observation photos beyond the fact that the smaller heat signatures, so faint they were only visible through digitized enhancement, had to be air exchanges.