War Mountain

by Jerry Ahern

Why hadn’t Dr. Zimmer just killed the Rourke family, instead of cloning them? If there was time and opportunity to take cell samples while they were in cryogenic sleep, then there was certainly an equal amount of time and opportunity for a lethal injection, even something as simple as a hypodermic filled with air that would cause an embolism when the air bubble reached the heart.

  Dr. Zimmer had some sort of master plan, she knew, and he wasn’t about to reveal it to anyone, except perhaps to the real Martin, who hadn’t been out of the headquarters, as she understood it, for more than a year, his cloned doubles filling in for him.

  What if Dr. Zimmer just died of a heart attack or something? Perfectly natural causes, she thought. He’d have to have told somebody. That only made sense.

  But then the chill came again, making her body twitch with it. What if Dr. Zimmer would never die because he had had himself cloned, and would simply replace organs as required and, if necessary, simply have his mind programmed into a waiting clone kept in suspended animation, having a new, young body? He could go on forever, until time itself ended.

  Martin, too, could live forever.

  And, Almost-Sarah realized, so could she, if she did things just right and was very, very smart.

  Chapter Two

  Wolfgang Mann was instantly alert, but didn’t move. He had been lying on the quite comfortable cot in his padded cell, sleeping, but sleeping as he had always when in a combat zone, on one level of consciousness still alert to what was around him. The soft tones of the combination on his cell door being worked were what had brought him fully from sleep, but he pretended to sleep still.

  The door opened outward and he could not help himself as he exclaimed, “My God, Sarah!” She half stumbled into the cell and Mann was to his feet instantly—catching her in his arms before she fell—holding her there for an instant—helping her to the other cot. “Sarah! You are alive!”

  “Wolf? Wolf? Is it really—”

  “Yes. I grew up an atheist, learned of God, and still I did not know. But I was praying, actually praying, that somehow you would be alive, that the cryogenic process had—but the bullet?”

  Sarah’s eyes looked past him. “Dr. Zimmer. The same bastard who shot me and took my baby—he saved my life, Wolf. I don’t know why. But he’s got to be up to something. But he operated on me and took out the bullet. I don’t know when that was, but I’ve been in a kind of hospital up until just a few minutes ago. One of the doctors said I was well, my old self, said I could join my friend.”

  “Sarah!” Wolfgang Mann felt like a fool for not being able to say anything else but her name, but love could make men fools, he knew, or make them heroes.

  Now that she was here, it was time for the latter if somehow he would be able to save her life.

  His own life did not matter.

  “How are you, Wolf?”

  “Me?” Mann laughed, took his cigarette case and his lighter, the only personal possessions they had left him, then lit a cigarette. “I had a terrible headache when I first came out of the Sleep, and I was very weak, of course. But, you, you are alive, you seem your old self. I thought you would never recover, and that—”

  “Did you really think that?” Sarah asked him, touching his face, her hand cool against his cheek. “Then why did you Sleep? And was it just you?”

  “No, your husband was critically injured, but perhaps he has been restored as well. As to Michael and Annie and Pau!—”

  “Maybe we’ll all be together again, if we ever get out of here. But why did you take the Sleep, Wolf?”

  Mann inhaled deeply on his cigarette, looked away, stood up, paced beside his own cot. “Suffice it to say, Sarah, that I was a very lonely person, my wife dead, my battles fought—at least so I supposed. And—”

  “Be honest with me, Wolf. Maybe this is all the time we’ll ever have.”

  Wolfgang Mann turned around and looked at her. “All right. So, I will speak from my heart. I found myself fallen in love with you, which was hopeless, I knew, but I could not help myself. So, I took the Sleep in the hope that someday I would be near you, hear your voice, feel your touch—” And Wolfgang Mann laughed, the sound of it bitter to him. “And, here we are, are we not? The ultimate irony, hm?”

  He looked away from her, not certain of his self-control, certain only that he was a fool.

  Chapter Three

  Alan Crockett’s horse, Wilbur, shook its massive head as Crockett reined him in. “Easy boy.”

  Emma Shaw’s gloved hands tensed as she felt Crockett’s body go tense under them. They were riding double and the only way successfully to do that was to hold on to the one who was in the saddle; in that way a horse was very much like the Harley-Davidson motorcycle John Rourke had told her about.

  Crockett swung his right leg over the horse’s neck and slipped down from the saddle. Emma pushed herself over the cantle and into the saddle, where the bedroll was tied in front of the horn. But as Emma Shaw started down, Crockett told her, “No, you stay mounted and wait here for me. If anything goes wrong, all the information I’ve collected these past three years and haven’t been able to get back as intell to ONI in Honolulu is on laser discs in my saddlebags. It’ll be your job to get it to the rendezvous. There’s a map in the saddlebags, too. My last position—the camp from last night—is marked. If you can fly one of the new Blackbirds, then you can pilot a horse to a set of ground coordinates, okay?”

  “Not okay at all, Professor Crockett! If that’s who you really are!” She jumped down from the saddle, Wilbur skittering away a few feet. “We’re in the middle of a war zone, enemy forces—we don’t even know whose—all round us and you’re going off somewhere? Bullshit!”

  “Look, Commander. You are not in charge of me! Is that clearly understood? In fact, one of the principal tenets of my agreement with your Navy—”

  “My Navy!”

  “Whoever’s Navy, then, but one of the operating principles agreed upon at that time was my complete autonomy to function however I saw fit while in the field. Is that clear to you, Commander? I didn’t vanish from sight three years ago in order to get myself killed recklessly in what amounts to the final hours of my mission, so if it’s some female instinct that’s causing you such concern—”

  “Look, Jack—”

  “It’s Alan, as you well know, Miss Shaw.”

  “Touché, already!”

  “Fourteen days, Commander, is just enough time to get ourselves killed if we hide with our heads in this proverbial sand.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Alan Crockett exhaled loudly, shaking his head as he told her, “Prior to the Night of the War, as it’s commonly called, there was indigenous to Africa a great bird called the ostrich, its plumage at one time so much sought-after by foolish women as a means of adorning even stupider hats that the creature was nearly driven to extinction.”

  “I know about ostriches and I don’t wear funny hats, Mack!”

  “Alan, Miss Shaw. The name is Alan. My point, however, doesn’t pivot on whether or not your particular concept of fashion happens to include silly hats. I am saying that we cannot afford to go through this territory blind to what there is around us, and that if we do we will surely perish. Each time I go out to reconnoiter, there is a chance, however slight, that I will not return, hence my warning.”

  The noise which had stopped them originally was increasing. It sounded as though somehow the size of the military force at the height of the high canyon wall to the south had grown almost exponentially. “Fine, then I’ll wait, but be careful.”

  “That is most touching, Commander,” Crockett smiled, his moustache making him look like a character out of a Victorian novel when he did so. She was not about to explain to him that she would have said the same thing to anybody, but assumed he knew that. “I’ll return, but should I somehow be prevented from doing so, follow the map, reach the LZ in time and not before and don’t forget about Wilbur. He’s a fine animal.”

&n
bsp; “The last horse that got special treatment after the death of his rider, if memory serves,” Emma Shaw told him, “was the one belonging to George Armstrong Custer. And, we all know what happened to him, don’t we?”

  “And touché to you, madame.” Crockett took one of the two long guns from the protected saddle scabbards, one of these on either side of the rig. She had noticed the guns earlier, when they’d first seen daylight on the canyon floor, commenting to him that he had a rather odd choice in armament. He’d told her, “Not really. The guns are ideal for my circumstances.” One of the guns was like John Rourke’s rifle, a Lancer duplicate of the Heckler & Hoch HK-91 in 7.62mm NATO (so designated because it at one time was the official cartridge of the pre-War alliance). The other rifle was a .54-caliber Hawken, fitted with a percussion lock. He patiently explained, obviously thinking she knew next to nothing about guns, “You see, at times over these three years, I’ve run out of ammunition for the HK, once even for my revolver. And, it’s no trick to run out of percussion caps, even though I can make them. But, it’s far simpler to be able to switch from a percussion lock to a flintlock. I can fabricate my own powder in the field, if need be, you see, and flint can be obtained as well. So, I’m never without a firearm.”

  As he started up into the rocks along the canyon wall, she was going to ask him why he had taken the Hawken, his powderhorn and a possibles bag instead of the more modern cartridge weapon and some spare magazines, but Emma Shaw already knew the answer.

  It was because she was a “girl” and he was a “gentleman” and, in the event he did not return, he was leaving her with the more practical of the weapons, under the circumstances at least.

  Emma Shaw stroked Wilbur’s muzzle, her eyes following Alan Crockett’s movements as long as she could.

  She’d learned also that Crockett was never without an ultrasmall vid-disc camera, and he would record whatever he saw at the summit for subsequent analysis. He was, of course, just doing his job by risking his neck, in much the same manner she’d nearly gotten herself killed during the bombing run on the gas factory at Eden City.

  Crockett—and she was convinced he really was Professor Alan Crockett—was sometimes called “a modern-day John Rourke” and the comparison was apt. Although she didn’t find him as desirable, she did find him nearly as irritating.

  Chapter Four

  Paul Rubenstein awakened John Rourke carefully. He’d learned more than six centuries ago, in the immediate aftermath of the Night of the War, not to go up and just tap him on the shoulder when they were in dangerous circumstances. He merely whispered, “John.” And John Rourke’s eyes opened instantly.

  But, he didn’t sit up. The only detectable movement was the muzzle of a gun, this time in his pocket. It would be the little Smith & Wesson revolver John had lately taken to carrying in addition to his regular guns. “What is it?”

  “Apparently Zimmer’s SS Alpine Corps is looking for additional entrances to the mountain. Anyway, eight men are coming right toward us, about a half mile down.”

  John Rourke sat up, exhaled, then seemed to inhale quite deeply. As he exhaled, he spoke, “We’ll have to be very silent about it, if we can’t avoid a confrontation. Any word on a pickup, yet?”

  “No, not yet.” As soon as they’d taken this position on the mountainside and had the opportunity of surveying the terrain on the other side—it was suitable if the pilot knew his stuff—they’d called in for a V-Stol pickup. Helicopter transport would be too slow if detected, never have a chance to escape the fighter aircraft from Zimmer’s force, which was still assembling outside the mountain community.

  “I’ll have a look,” John told him, getting up into a crouch and starting to take out his binoculars.

  Paul Rubenstein settled back against a rock and waited, wishing he still smoked.

  This had all started out badly. First, of course, Sarah was shot in the head moments after delivering a child during an attack by the Nazis on Eden City more than a century ago, John himself was so critically injured as well that the only chance for either of them was cryogenic Sleep. They were placed in the Sleep in hopes that they would be kept from slipping closer to death, and that possibly the Sleep’s restorative powers would at least help bring John back.

  That happened, but there was still no hope for Sarah when all of them took the Sleep. Except for Sarah and Generaloberst Wolfgang Mann—no one talked about it, but it seemed obvious that he loved Sarah and volunteered for the Sleep in order to be with her if or when she someday awakened—all of them had awakened just a short while ago. They found the world once again on the brink of war and destruction. And John, always respectful of Sarah, left Wolfgang Mann in the Sleep in the event that she would someday wish to return the German officer’s love.

  Then, of course, there was the business with Martin, the son stolen from John and Sarah just after his birth, thought dead, but in reality kidnapped by Deitrich Zimmer, raised as Zimmer’s son, genetically altered so that his makeup not only included that of his birth parents but also of one of the blood relatives of Hitler.

  And then the current crisis. Michael was in cryogenic Sleep, pretending to be Martin, who was now dead, dying accidentally when he and his father, John Rourke, fought. Martin was a brutish dictator and had, in the final moments before he fell from the open fuselage of a V-Stol, attempted to kill everybody aboard the aircraft with which he and the others had just been rescued from death.

  In order to make Deitrich Zimmer think that his “son,” Martin, was still alive, and thus trade for Sarah’s life and the life of Wolfgang Mann, the deception was attempted. For all Paul knew, it was still holding up. But, once again, Deitrich Zimmer had turned things to his own advantage. Rather than a simple trade of Martin for a lifesaving operation, there were extra conditions.

  Zimmer, perhaps the most brilliant surgeon who had ever lived (he himself had survived for more than a century in cryogenic Sleep), was the only man who could remove the bullet he had placed in Sarah’s brain, this her only conceivable hope of returning to life beyond the Sleep.

  But Zimmer had other plans, and they involved John leading a mission to a mountain redoubt in upstate New York where once there had been a presidential war retreat and now, as they learned, there thrived a survival community purporting to be the United States government. In reality, it was a racist society based on the principles of Aryan supremacy and had promulgated a lie for centuries: that the outside world would not support life and that heavily armed forces consisting of Blacks and Jews constantly assaulted the community. To sustain the lie, the leadership of the community routinely executed select numbers of soldiers, “casualties” in a war which did not exist. This also served to keep population to manageable levels.

  Somehow, Deitrich Zimmer had found out about this, and learned also that the remains of Adolf Hitler were brought to the mountain facility immediately after the Nazi leader’s body was discovered in the ruins of the Führer Bunker in Berlin at the close of the War. The retrieval of these remains was Deitrich Zimmer’s announced intent, in the hopes of somehow recovering useable DNA. But Zimmer’s real reasoning became apparent when the clone of Wolfgang Mann, who accompanied John, Paul himself and the others on the mission, revealed the coordinates for a secret entrance leading into the mountain community.

  Zimmer wanted conquest.

  Paul shook his head, at once shocked yet filled with wonder at the mere fact that Deitrich Zimmer had been able successfully to clone another human being. The cloning process was simple enough, in theory. Each cell of the human body contained the genetic fingerprint of the whole. In theory, at least, the possiblity of duplicating a creature as complex as a human being was always possible, however unlikely. But Zimmer had really done it.

  And, what haunted Paul Rubenstein now, was how and why? To clone Wolfgang Mann, Zimmer needed cell samples. The only way to have obtained them in time to “grow” an adult of similar age (barring that Zimmer had also discovered a means by which the agin
g process could be accelerated) was to have taken the samples years ago, decades ago. That meant that Zimmer would have obtained the sample material while Wolfgang Mann and all of them slept in their cryogenic chambers at a secret location in New Germany.

  If Zimmer had access to Wolfgang Mann, he had access to all of them.

  And the idea made Paul Rubenstein’s skin crawl. Was there another of him out there, like the clone of Wolfgang Mann ready to die for his Führer, Deitrich Zimmer? And of Annie, too?

  As John moved back from the ledge overlooking the mountainside, Paul Rubenstein wondered aloud: “Is there another John Rourke?”

  Chapter Five

  John Rourke drew in the snow with his gloved fingertip. “Eight of them, coming up along this defile, with some type of sensing equipment in-use by two of them. The other six have their weapons in patrolling carries. The two with the sensing equipment are armed, of course.”

  “Four each is stiff odds if they’re on the move and we have to be silent.”

  “Agreed, Paul,” John Rourke told his friend. “If you can think of a viable alternative, I’d love to hear it.”

  “Unfortunately, there isn’t one. We can’t let them get above us, because, if they do, they could spot us inadvertently. Nor can we let any significant amount of time elapse between the beginning of our operation and terminating all of them. Otherwise, they’ll call in for help and we’re screwed.”

  “There are a couple of places which might be suitable for an ambush, one in particular,” and he referenced his map in the snow with an X to mark the spot . . .

  The lead element was approaching, slogging slowly up the incline through thigh-deep snow, none of the party equipped with snowshoes, so the going was slow because their hands were occupied and they could not use their ski poles. But these were experienced alpine-trained troops and they moved well on their skis despite the limitations.