by Jerry Ahern
Deitrich Zimmer said, “You do not realize, do you. I am a clone!” He drew a pistol from the pocket of his lab coat.
Paul Rubenstein pulled the trigger.
Chapter Fifty-Six
The sirens sounding throughout the complex were almost a relief, because Michael Rourke was becoming physically ill from riding up and down in the elevator car with the five dead bodies. The propinquity to the late SS men was not what bothered him. Although he had never been motion-sick in his life (discounting a ferris wheel ride he’d had when he was a very little boy after trying to digest one too many items of junk food), he was feeling motion-sick now.
When he at last stopped the elevator on the level where he had first entered it, he swallowed, breathed a sigh of relief and leveled an energy rifle in each hand toward the elevator doors as they opened.
Men raced past him along the corridor, but no one seemed to pay attention to him. He used a knuckle on his left hand to hit a floor button—the top floor—and stepped through the doors as they began to close. The bodies were headed up. He was headed into the snarl of humanity around him. There was gunfire, the sounds of energy bursts and the sirens were even louder than before. Commands were being shouted everywhere.
Michael Rourke let one of the rifles fall to his side on its sling as he grabbed out for a young Unterscharführer passing him, almost slamming the man against the corridor wall in order to get his attention. “What is happening, Unterscharführer?”
“Enemy commandos, Herr Hauptsturmführer, have penetrated Landing Bay One. Everyone has been called to duty there.”
“Thank you,” Michael told him, shoving him away.
The explosives belted around Michael Rourke’s waist were the next order of business. Elevators were opening, disgorging armed men into the corridor. And, Michael had a flash of inspiration. He stepped into the first open elevator, let the door close, the car empty except for himself. As the car started up, Michael opened the panel and took manual control, stalling the elevator at the next highest level. He removed one of the explosive charges from his belt, peeled away the backing and clamped it to the panel—it was treated with self-stick adhesive. He set the timer for sixty seconds, reactivated the floor controls to bring him down, stepped through and at the same time hit the switch and pushed the button for the top floor.
There was another empty elevator going up just across the corridor from him. Bulling his way through a knot of enlisted SS personnel, he entered the empty elevator, let the doors close then repeated the process he had carried out with the first car. The explosives were powerful enough that they would destroy all the elevators on each side, once they detonated.
Mentally ticking off the seconds, he set this charge at forty-five seconds, so it would detonate fifteen seconds after the first one. He returned to the level where the Landing Bays were accessed and left the elevator, activating the explosive charge and hitting the top-floor button at the same time.
He wore four more explosive charges and was determined to put them to good use, walking as quickly as he could to the monorail station. After a few seconds, an empty car came, returning from depositing men summoned from the other landing bays.
The first explosion came from the elevator banks, shaking the surface beneath his feet, the walls vibrating with it. There was always the slight possibility that he might be causing the deaths of his friends by sabotaging the elevators and the monorail gondolas, but it was standard operating procedure in something like this to avoid any such mechanical means of traveling from one area to another because of the risk of being stuck between floors, or, in this case, between stations. Paul and James Darkwood would likely adhere to the dictum. He hoped.
Alone in the car, he programmed for the next station, set an explosive charge and, when he reached the next station, left, activating the charge. He’d felt the second detonation in the elevator banks.
He would have to go down to the takeoff and landing bay below him on foot or use the elevator cage—he opted for the former—then somehow find a way into the first landing bay. There would be mechanical access ports, he was certain. And, he had three more charges to use up.
So far, so good.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Martin Zimmer was a clone, too, of course; Paul Rubenstein realized when he had been suckered.
Darkwood held all the lab technicians at bay against the far wall and Paul Rubenstein, with the clone of Martin Zimmer in tow, stood before the vault door leading into the chambers beyond where the clones were kept.
And, he made a bet with himself.
That this Martin Zimmer, if a clone was truly identical once the mind of the original was downloaded into its brain, would be just as cowardly as the original. Paul shoved the muzzle of the suppressor on Natalia’s Walther against the Martin Zimmer clone’s nose. “Do you want to die?”
There was no answer, except in the eyes.
Paul glanced at the locking mechanism for the vault door. “Will your handprint activate the lock?”
“Only Deitrich Zimmer’s handprint will do that. And he is not here! You lose.”
Paul Rubenstein smiled. “I don’t think so. You know who I am? I’m the Jew, Rubenstein. And I’m going to find it especially nice to leave you alive, if you cooperate, so you can tell everyone how Deitrich Zimmer screwed himself.”
There was a look of panic in the Martin Zimmer clone’s dark eyes. “What do you mean?”
“A clone is physically identical to the original, right?”
“Yes, but—”
Paul Rubenstein looked again at the hand-shaped panel on the locking mechanism. “Even if Deitrich Zimmer isn’t here, his hand is.”
Paul Rubenstein jerked Martin Zimmer away from the vault door and back into the main section of the laboratory …
Lieutenant Christakos’s SEAL Team personnel were holding both the control center and the main access into the hangar bay. Battle-dress utilities used by the Nazis were equipped to be converted into chemical-biological-radiological warfare protection suits, once a hooded mask, gloves and overboots were added, and the SEALs as well as Natalia, Emma and Annie Rubenstein were so outfitted. It was only a matter of time before the Nazis would employ gas, of course, and the commando team was already using it.
Nerve agents were not held in the Allied Inventory, on moral grounds, but knockout gases of various types as well as chemical irritants and smoke were available.
Despite the protection of her suit and her hooded mask, Annie Rubenstein felt strange, moving about in clouds of gas and smoke. While the twelve members of the SEAL unit held, she planted explosive charges on the aircraft in the takeoff and landing bay. These, coupled with the heavier explosives wired into the gunship in which they had arrived, would not only destroy the entire hangar area, but damage the bay next door and, with any luck, destroy the complex’s entire electrical system.
The gas and smoke situation was one-sided. Although the Nazis would eventually employ it, unless the enemy was able to rig blowers, it would do no good. The takeoff and landing bay door opened to the north wind across the Himalayas, all of the gas and smoke utilized was being blown toward the rear of the takeoff and landing bay and into the access area surrounding it, only these rearmost sections of the bay itself affected.
Annie glanced at the Nazi wristwatch worn over the wrist of her left protective gauntlet as she set the timer on the latest explosive package. Unless radio detonated sooner, the charge would go in ten minutes, leaving about nine minutes or a little more than that for them to get airborne, leaving eight minutes or so for her husband, her brother and James Darkwood to get back with the clone.
“Damn,” she murmured under her breath, her own voice sounding odd to her within the confines of the mask.
She started for the next-nearest aircraft, taking out her last charge and stripping away the self-adhesive back …
It was the most grisly act Paul Rubenstein had ever been forced to commit, but he did it. Wearing goggles an
d gloves and using an electrically operated surgical saw, he cut off the right hand of the dead clone of Deitrich Zimmer.
Wrapping the bloody stump in plastic or something like it, he pulled off the goggles, then set down the hand to remove the gloves.
Martin Zimmer stood speechless in front of the laboratory technicians. “Lucky it wasn’t your handprint we needed,” Paul told him. “Come with me. James, get the knock-out gas ready for our friends here as soon as we’re on our way.”
“Right,” Darkwood responded, then raised his voice, saying in German, “I want everyone to move into the office there on your left. Slowly, hands still raised. Any false moves, and I will shoot. Understood? Move, then.”
Paul Rubenstein stopped at the vault door, the severed hand of Deitrich Zimmer’s clone in his right hand, Natalia’s pistol in his left hand, the pistol aimed at Martin Zimmer.
He set the hand against the panel, pushing the stiffening fingers into position.
The panel lit.
The door opened.
When he looked beyond the doorway, he understood the concept of hell …
Emma Shaw had placed her last charge and, well enough away from the swirling gas and smoke, she climbed up onto the wing stem of the Nazi/Eden V/ STOL she had chosen for herself and the clone to ride in.
She looked at the Nazi wristwatch she wore as she climbed down into the cockpit. Five minutes remained for Paul Rubenstein, Michael Rourke, James Darkwood and a clone of John Rourke to arrive. In three minutes, eight of the SEAL Team personnel (one to pilot Darkwood, one for each of the Rourke Family, and one each for the remaining SEAL personnel, since the aircraft were two-seaters only) would break off from holding this position against the Nazis and go to their predesignated V/STOLS. She had selected, quickly checked for readiness, then assigned eight planes in the first moments after the seizure of the control center. All the other aircraft were sabotaged with explosives.
She started warming up the engines of the V/STOL, Natalia and Annie instructed on how to do it as well, each of them warming up another aircraft. Between the three of them, all nine aircraft that would be needed would be readied for takeoff …
The explosive charge he had set aboard the monorail gondola exploded overheard, bodies and parts of bodies, some of them aflame, tumbling out of the granite “sky” which was the interior of the takeoff and landing bay. Michael Rourke had found what he hoped was an access door into the next bay, and the fact that a dozen Nazi commandos were huddled near it in protective CBR clothing only seemed to confirm his supposition.
A dozen men, all heavily armed.
He had energy rifles and he had his two Beretta pistols.
He knew what his father would have done with a dozen men blocking his path.
And, Michael Rourke smiled.
He picked his way across the rail tracks separating the main portion of the landing bay from the access doorway and the twelve men. The men had turned around briefly, glancing toward the origin of the explosion above. If there had not been panic in the takeoff and landing bay from all the activity in the bay next door before the explosion, there was now. Men ran everywhere, emergency equipment converged on the area of the burning wreckage. Several aircraft were in flames, the debris having set them afire.
In another few seconds, two of his three remaining explosive charges would detonate, taking a synth-fuel storage area up, hopefully without consuming the entire bay and killing him.
Near the access doorway, there was what appeared to be a massive electrical junction box. If he could blow that with his last charge, he might prevent any pursuit at all, sabotaging the means of opening the takeoff and landing doors. Because, unless someone else had found the means by which to sabotage the doors, nothing had been done to them. He could not reach the door here and he had not been in the third takeoff and landing bay.
As Michael Rourke neared the access door, he let both rifles fall to his sides on their slings, taking his pistols in his hands, safeties off, the hammers drawn back to avoid wasting the time necessary for the longer, heavier double-action pull on the first shots.
About fifteen feet from the twelve men, Michael Rourke stopped.
The explosion came, nearly throwing him to his knees, the granite beneath him shaking, the sound of the explosion deafeningly loud.
He said nothing. No other sound but the echo from the original explosion and the sounds of the smaller explosions now coming in rapid succession could have been heard.
The men turned toward him, almost as one.
Michael Rourke smiled.
The nearest of the men started to swing the muzzle of his assault rifle on line with Michael’s torso and Michael fired, stabbing the pistol in his right hand toward the man’s throat. A man shouted something, but Michael could not hear the words. The gun in Michael’s left hand fired once, into the man’s chest.
The others were raising their weapons.
The first finger of Michael’s right hand twitched, then the first finger of his left, then his right again, then his left, then his right, then again his left.
Bullets and energy bolts whizzed past him. Michael kept firing, emptying the twin Beretta 92Fs into the remaining men until, at last, all twelve men were down and the slides of both pistols were locked back open, the guns empty.
Michael Rourke quietly said to himself, “At last I have the knack.”
Chapter Fifty-Eight
White as ghosts because the sun never touched them, eyelids shut, the spectres of himself and his wife and his brother-in-law and Sarah Rourke and John and Wolfgang Mann and even of Deitrich Zimmer and Martin Zimmer were suspended in what looked like spider webs, hung like meat ready to be devoured, each inside a cryogenic chamber of evidently advanced design, swirling clouds of bluish white gas surrounding them.
Indeed, some of the clones were only partially whole, missing limbs, one of them—a clone of Deitrich Zimmer himself—missing an eye.
This was an organ bank, a place where replica human beings were kept in cryogenic Sleep, their minds blank slates upon which Deitrich Zimmer could write at will, and whatever he wished.
With the walking, breathing, already sentient clone of Martin Zimmer beside him, Paul Rubenstein stopped before one of the chambers. It was marked, “John Thomas Rourke #11” and within it was an exact duplicate of John Rourke at his present age, every detail—the greying hair at the temples and in the sideburns, the greying hair on his chest—everything perfect.
“You are devils, or your progenitors are, I suppose,” Paul Rubenstein told the clone of Martin Zimmer. “Help me get him out of here.”
“You will never reach Landing Bay One alive, Jew.”
Paul Rubenstein told him, “We had a variety of possible plans in mind before we came here. Each of us is carrying sound and light grenades, each of us carrying knockout gas, each of us has a gas mask, we’re heavily armed. We have explosives. But, aside from the CBR gear as a precaution, I think all we’ll need is you. You see, I know who you are, or what you are, but the SS personnel between us and Landing Bay One, as you call it, don’t. Do they?”
“I don’t know what you—”
Paul Rubenstein put the gun to Martin Zimmer’s head again. “Get the picture?”
Then he stepped back and Martin Zimmer’s clone began to open the cryogenic chamber.
Paul had promised himself that he would destroy everyone here, and he would, but he would not sleep quite the same again.
Because, as his eyes moved over the bodies waiting here in stasis for Deitrich Zimmer’s whims, his eyes rested on a clone of his wife, Annie. Just as beautiful, with just as much potential to be warm and brilliant and funny and wonderful and loving and inspirational.
And, he was going to kill her.
While Martin Zimmer worked with the cryogenic chamber holding John Rourke #11, Paul Rubenstein peeled away the self-adhesive backing for the first of the explosive charges he would use …
Michael Rourke set the last of his
charges on the interior of the junction box. This was a nexus for what were probably miles of cable, and through this junction box, the power between this and the takeoff and landing bay beyond flowed.
He would end that in—he checked the Nazi wristwatch he wore—forty-five seconds.
He tried the door, made certain that it would open, pulled down the mask and the hood, sealed the mask, popping the cheeks, then flipped the timer switch.
With a caseless ammo assault rifle in each hand and two more strapped to his back—courtesy of the men he’d just killed—Michael Rourke stepped through the doorway …
James Darkwood ordered the laboratory technicians, “To the floor. Pack everything over you that you can. Chairs, cushions from the chairs, get under the desk, the tables there, do anything that you can to protect yourselves. I will be using a type of harmless knockout gas. Then there will be a series of explosions. If you obey me, you will probably survive. If you do not, you will surely die.”
The technicians began scrambling for cover. Darkwood fingered the knockout gas grenade in his left hand …
John Rourke #11 was barely conscious and Martin Zimmer’s clone supported him on one side, Paul Rubenstein pulling the clone’s right arm across his shoulders to support him from the other side.
The timers were set for the explosions to start, in under ninety seconds.
When they reached the doorway, Paul Rubenstein did not look back.
He could not.
“Stop here,” Paul ordered, then pointing the gun still at Martin Zimmer’s clone, he got John Rourke #11 over his right shoulder in a fireman’s carry, rising to his full height, Natalia’s Walther unwavering on its target. “We’re on our way.”
They walked through the doorway, Paul Rubenstein ordering Martin Zimmer’s clone to close the vault door behind them. He told the clone, “Think of it this way. You’ll be the only clone Doctor Zimmer will have left. You’ll be important.” He waved Martin Zimmer’s clone across the laboratory, James Darkwood lobbing the gas grenade into the office enclosure the moment his and Paul’s eyes met.
