by Jerry Ahern
If they did not make it to the ground, he would carry on, just as he had. If someone believed in the soul, of course, then death was inevitable.
Had Zimmer believed in that concept, however, his life would have been totally different. Fortunately for him, he did not. It was obvious that John Rourke did.
Deitrich Zimmer logged these thoughts in a conventional way, by speaking into a disk recorder. In all but the most severe of situations which could result from the craft going down, the disk would survive.
Deitrich Zimmer would survive, regardless of how severe it might be . . .
By the time they were across the river and nearing the Nazi headquarters, which was probably one of several such facilities dotted around the globe, John had told them, it would be dark. Some of the defenders of the complex might still be able to act with limited capacity, and therefore it would be necessary for them to approach with stealth.
The immediate problem was the construction of a simple rope bridge over the raging torrent sweeping through the gorge before them. The river separated the plateau snow field and the slopes from the mountain beyond. They traveled this circuitous route because John was still wary that if they were detected too early, enough of the personnel inside the complex might be able to act that some contingency plan or another would be carried out against Sarah’s and Wolfgang’s lives. So close to nearly certain success, there was no sense in taking chances.
During the construction of such a bridge—an interlacing of ropes strung over an obstacle, but requiring someone to string it—it was fortunate indeed to be a woman, Natalia Anastasia Tiemerovna thought. She could have built such a bridge as well as any man and better than most, but she didn’t object to being pampered under the circumstances, being left to watch the gear on the side of the fast-running watercourse, with Annie to keep her company while John, Paul and Michael did the wet, cold work.
“I feel like a shit just sitting here,” Annie told her as she came to sit beside her.
“Don’t, Annie. Men feel themselves better-suited to such work and they feel better about themselves sparing us any involvement. It’s a male bonding thing. I’ve always found it odd, you know,” Natalia mused, lighting a cigarette, “that certain things are too physically demanding for us. I remember the time that Vladmir and I posed as an American couple. It was a true education. I would go to the supermarket wearing some nice little pair of slacks and a sweater or something, and have my list, and coupons and all of that. It amazed me, when I watched people, that a man who wouldn’t think of going through a door ahead of a woman, and would blanch—”
“Your English is beautiful.”
“I’ve just been reading a great deal in all my spare time,” Natalia laughed, winking. “But a man who wouldn’t think of letting a woman do anything which might be physically exerting saw nothing odd in the idea of a woman carrying two sacks of groceries while she had a baby in her arms who was kicking and wiggling and screaming.”
Annie smiled, looked out over the river. “They’re making progress. And, they almost look like they’re having fun, in a weird sort of way. You were right.”
Natalia was looking in the same direction. John was into the water, waist deep, Michael leaning precariously over a rock, Paul stringing rope. “They are having fun. It’s very much like a group of women all cooking together or making a quilt,” Natalia observed. “Or, watching children.” She looked at the glowing tip of her cigarette and stubbed it out. When she married Michael, and he made her pregnant, she wouldn’t smoke at all until after the baby was born.
Chapter Forty-Six
He was baiting the Nazi, not attempting to commit suicide. So, when Tim Shaw reached the high valley above Emma’s little house, he kept to its perimeter, the going a little slower there because the ground was less even, the tree cover—mostly snow-laden pines—more dense. But, it was safer as far as a sniper shooting him would be concerned.
Unless Eddie had gone back on his word, there wouldn’t be any police personnel for miles, leaving things wide open for the man Tim Shaw hoped was stalking him even now. If this idea failed, then Shaw’s nameless adversary would go right on killing innocents . . .
Camouflage stick across his cheekbones, over the bridge of his nose, across his chest in a lightning bolt pattern, along his arms, too—he would show the American policeman the true nature of war and the warrior, show him before the fellow died what would hopefully be a lingering and miserable death.
For some reason, perhaps the uncomfortable similarities between camouflage stick and makeup, Wilhelm Doring thought of the woman, Marie Dreissling, dead in her own blood, body slumping limply from the toilet into the sink, her face white, the color drained from her along with the blood through the artery she cut in her thigh. It was all the inane creature was good for, and possibly the first sensible thing she had ever done, as well as the last.
The little training Marie had been given before accompanying them on their disastrous mission to Hawaii had included close-range killing techniques. She had used such a technique on herself. Wilhelm Doring doubted she would have had the courage or ability to use the technique, or any other, on the enemy.
Excess baggage, he was glad to be rid of her, even if it meant that he could never again return to the apartment. There had been nothing to do with the body, and even if there had been, her blood was everywhere, spurted all over the bathroom walls and floor and saturated along the carpet in the room beyond.
And, the apartment might be an academic issue at any event. This policeman, however stupid the breed, was clever. Perhaps neither of them would ever leave these mountains and the policeman, Tim Shaw, would also be victorious. If so, then so be it.
One less enemy for National Socialism.
And one less man who had shamed the Reich through his ineptitudes.
Perhaps there was a poetry to justice after all.
All along, Wilhelm Doring had underestimated his enemy, until now, he had believed what his training officers had told him, that Americans were soft, easily terrified, prone to defeatism because once their pretty lives were disrupted they would not know how to react except in panic. That had not proven true at all. It seemed that the average policeman here, certainly if a member of some elite SWAT unit, was a highly motivated fighting man. What he might lack in finesse, he made up for in energy.
When Doring left the apartment, he took with him only those items which were essential equipment for combat. The knife which was lashed in an inverted carry to his web gear over his heart, a Fairbairn-Sykes pattern, had its edges sharpened to where he could wisk the blade over his arm and the hair would fly away. At his right thigh he carried an energy pistol, the latest and best made in Eden. His rifle was the official countersniper weapon, the G-70S, selective fire, firing the 5.62mm caseless armor-piercing T-56 cartridge. Additionally, he carried a weapon under the muzzle of which he thought Inspector Tim Shaw of Honolulu’s Tactical Squad might appreciate dying. It was a Lancer copy of the Remington 870 police shotgun, the design dating from Before the Night of the War . . .
It wasn’t that age was catching up to him—although he suspected that he was old enough to be his adversary’s father—but it seemed prudent to take a break. Shaw found a convenient niche in the rocks a few yards above the perimeter of the valley above which he walked and plunked his gear down and his body beside it.
Before doing anything, he set out a device called Perimeter Guardsman. It was a low-scan microwave detection and ranging system which, when set properly, would alert him if anything anywhere near the size of a man were approaching within two hundred yards. For a sniper, two hundred yards was close. But, the niche protected Shaw somewhat from that contingency at any event.
He debated whether or not to smoke. Cigarette smoke might betray his position, but so would sharp eyes. “Fuck it,” Shaw muttered to himself, but he’d light up later, anyway.
A more modern man than himself would have taken a nourishing trail mix from his gear. Ti
m Shaw preferred candy, milk chocolate from New Germany. It wasn’t the expensive kind sold in the exclusive shops, but the type which was found in convenience stores and supermarkets. None of that mattered, since he liked the taste of it.
If the opportunity presented itself, he would like to get the name of his adversary; why, Shaw really didn’t know, except perhaps that the fellow had his. Fair was fair.
He felt strangely out of touch, no radio, no pager, nothing that would facilitate contact with the outside world. He had intentionally done it that way, because contact with the outside would be a crutch and, if he were to fall back on it, might cost him his quarry.
The day was crisp and cool, the perfect day for the out-of-doors.
Shaw finished half the candy bar, then closed the foil around the remainder, saving it for later. He’d stopped at Ziggy’s Deli and gotten Ziggy to vacuum pack a half dozen sandwiches for him, just in case. And this seemed like a just-in-case situation. it didn’t matter which one he picked, because all the sandwiches were the same. Hot pastrami on white, which made a lot of people cringe. The pastrami would taste better on something besides white bread, everyone always told him. Shaw always shrugged it off. After a bite of his sandwich, he took a bite of the kosher pickle.
Guys who were Jew-haters like these Nazis were nuts, he thought. Not to mention all the ordinary, normal things Jewish people did, but where would the world be without real delicatessens?
Chapter Forty-Seven
They approached the wall from five different directions under cover of darkness. With the sun gone, the cold was numbing and the wind more biting than it had been throughout the long day.
Paul Rubenstein’s left hand was on the Schmiesser’s pistol grip, his right on the pistol grip of his M-16. He could not see the others—his wife, his brother-in-law and his two friends, John and Natalia—but that was basically the idea, that they come at the fortress’s main gate in such a manner that if one of them were spotted the others wouldn’t be. So far, however, there had been no signs of activity within the Nazi headquarters, nor on the walls.
From a distance, the structure had appeared quite modern—which it was, of course—and formidable. It was formidable, to be sure, but the architecture of the place more resembled that of a castle than that of a present-day military installation. The place looked medieval, with its vaulted turrets and its rugged grey stone.
But the walls looked black now.
A moon periodically bathed the snow field before it in pale blue-white light, but there were so many high clouds scudding on the wind that it was only necessary, during these periods of brightness, to drop to the nearest position of concealment and wait a moment or so, then continue on.
The snow field, under normal conditions with a garrison capable of fighting back, would have been an ideal killing ground, barren of any true cover.
But within two hundred yards of the immense front gates—these an even darker black, so dark that they were like night—there had yet to be any sign of resistance. Even possessed of the knowledge of John’s bio-warfare attack on the facility, Paul Rubenstein was still nervous.
As he neared what he judged to be about seventy-five yards from the main gates, he saw Natalia, running along beside the south wall, keeping so close to its blackness that she was more shadow than substance.
He kept going.
John and Michael would be using a plumb-line firing device to launch ropes to the top of the wall, then scale the wall from opposite ends, reach the summit and come toward the main gates.
Paul Rubenstein spied his wife, moving flush along the northern stretch of the wall which flanked the gates.
For the last several minutes, he had been paralleling a roadway which connected the headquarters to a single airstrip, this apparently for landing and take-off of cargo lifters without vertical take-off and landing capabilities. There was a landing pad atop the portion of the structure which was at the height of the mountain, this apparently for the V-Stols and helicopter traffic.
The headquarters could not have been as immense as it appeared, because the gates at the mountain’s base were close to two thousand feet below the summit. John had been taken in by aircraft and had left the same way, never reaching the base of the mountain. If it were somehow sealed away from the upper level, it was possible, however remotely, that there were still operational forces at this level.
That was a scary thought.
He stopped some fifteen feet from the gates and waited as Natalia and Annie worked their way toward him.
And he waited, too, for the gates to open . . .
John Rourke rolled over the wall and dropped into a crouch in the shadow beyond, the Crain LS-X knife tight in his right fist.
The complex was as still as death.
And John Rourke was suddenly afraid, that he had somehow miscalculated and that the strain of encephalitis lethargica he had utilized had somehow taken hold more quickly and that the vaccine which he carried with him would not save the lives of the people within—and not just the lives of his wife and Wolfgang Mann. If he had miscalculated, he would be a mass murderer. To kill in combat was one thing, but to kill this way would be beyond excuse.
He started moving, listening for any sounds which might provide a clue as to the condition of the garrison. He saw nothing, no lights, and periodically, he had to stop to reorient himself because the darkness was so total.
When the moon shone, he stopped, concealing himself within a niche at the height of a downward-descending stairwell. Beyond this wall on which he waited, there was no parade ground, in fact there was very little open area at all. There were several structures—blockhouses—likely associated with command and control functions for entry security. There were two bombproof doors leading into the mountain itself, and what lay beyond these was anyone’s guess. He theorized, however, that there were powerful and very fast turbo elevators, toward the height of the mountain.
Rourke continued on as clouds obscured the moon again. On the wall, as he’d climbed, the wind had cut through him, despite his state-of-the-art arctic wear. But part of the sensation of cold was nerves, he knew. What was about to transpire would determine the future course of his life, and to a large degree the lives of his son and daughter. If he could successfully rescue Sarah—and assuming that she was, indeed, recovering from an operation which had brought her out of a near-death coma—and if he could save Wolfgang Mann, he was sealing his own fate as surely as if he were a Japanese warrior about to commit ritual suicide.
There would be no turning back from this.
Wolfgang Mann was honorable, and had circumstances been different, and something between Wolfgang and Sarah even started to develop, Wolf would have come to him. The same, obviously, went for Sarah. But John Rourke was not blind to the affinity each had for the other.
If Sarah’s happiness would best be served by her leaving him—
The thought was something he rejected. He would think about this when the time came that decisions had to be made. Now, he was intent on saving the lives of two people, one of whom was a friend, one of whom was the woman he’d vowed to love forever.
Chapter Forty-Eight
In exactly seventy-two minutes, according to the continuous fuel expenditure summary from her onboard computers, she would have to order her twin squadrons down out of their patrolling formation—which was a violation of a general order in the event of nuclear attack—or watch as her comrades and she herself started falling from the sky when vapor would no longer keep them flying.
Emma Shaw muttered one of her father’s favorite words beginning with the letter f as her eyes alternated between video and what she could see with the naked eye. Some few fighter planes and V-Stol cargo jobs were getting airborne, but there was still no radio signal from the base, or at least none that her own equipment or that aboard any of the other members of her squadron could receive. She made a decision, which would only shorten her own fuel supply and not that of the others and, if
she were careful, and stayed out of the patrolling formation, she could more or less make up the fuel she’d expend.
She started into a long, slow sweep of the tower, another practice which was severely frowned upon, although “buzzing the tower” was regularly done at higher speeds. Emma Shaw did not have the fuel to waste.
Unlike aboard the Blackbird she’d flown in the attack on Plant 234, there was no sexy-voiced computer companion to keep her company, and she missed “Gorgeous,” fully intending—if she could take care of the little matter of living long enough—to wangle things so that the next time she flew a Blackbird she’d have the same program. Gorgeous was a little spineless, but okay in a pinch.
As it was, however, her own eyes and warning buzzers were her only means of keeping track of what was going on in all directions around her, her only means of preventing herself from crashing into something taking off.
She wanted level flight when she passed the tower, and as little speed as possible so that she might be able at least to catch some glimpse of what was going on inside.
Way below the minimum altitude over the hard deck, she started making the pass.
It was then that she noticed something at the far edge of the field which had been too small for her to notice from her operational altitude: a man, arms extended, in his hands—flags. Semaphore signals. Semaphore signaling was still taught, but rarely taken seriously past a test or two at the Naval Academy, because so much of Naval aviation these days was from submersible carriers, and semaphores were impossible.
