Survivalist - 21.5 - The Legend

by Ahern, Jerry

  It was a chance he had to take.

  Darkwood swung there, then pushed upward, changing his hand positioning, getting his right knee over onto the landing, then clambering up, sliding beneath the hand rail.

  Darkwood rose into a crouch.

  He drew the Randall Smithsonian Bowie.

  On the balls of his feet now, keeping to the side of the steps along the near handrail to minimize any possible creak from the steps themselves, Jason Darkwood started down, the Bowie in a rapier hold, his left hand outstretched.

  He was counting on Mondragon’s training coming to the fore. If it were Sam Aldridge waiting down there, Sam would know what to do. But Sam was in Europe, fighting with the Mid-Wake contingent of the Allied force attacking the Soviet stronghold in the Ural Mountains.

  Would Mondragon have the presence of mind to wait for the precise instant that Darkwood attacked the guard at the middle of the steps, then attack the guard at the steps’ base?

  Darkwood focused bis concentration on the point of his knife, admiring its symmetry, the blade geometry which gave strength and beauty to it.

  The trick was to focus the mind on anything besides the man you approached. Somehow-it almost made one a believer in extra-sensory perception-it seemed that by concentrating on the target, the target was alerted.

  He was two steps up behind the man he was about to kill.

  There was no choice but to look at him now, the exact position of the sentry’s rifle, how to counter the gun’s being dropped or fired, all the nuances of the thing.

  Darkwood mentally shrugged, then jumped, grabbing for the sentry’s right ear with his left hand as he crossed the man’s body, Darkwood’s forearm going over the man’s mouth and jerking the head back as Darkwood’s right arm pistoned forward, driving the blade in his hand into the spine to kill as quickly as he could. Darkwood’s wrist moved with the vibration as steel met bone, pain moving up Darkwood’s right forearm.

  There wasn’t a sound.

  As Darkwood, leaving the knife where it was, grabbed for the body, the guard just below was turning around and Darkwood started to grab for the dead Marine Spetznas’ Sty-20 dart gun. But

  Mondragon had the second sentry,, hand over the mouth, Made into the chest, drawing it out again, slitting the throat.

  As Mondragon dragged the sentry down, Darkwood eased his man onto the steps.

  Darkwood licked his dry lips, braced his left knee against the dead man’s back, then wrenched the Bowie knife from the man’s spinal column.

  And Darkwood looked toward the landing and up along the length of steps toward the door to the harbormaster’s tower. So far, he thought, so good…

  The main gates were reinforced and there were deflection barriers before them and there was no way to drive around either.

  John Rourke twisted round, getting as low as possible to the staff car’s roof line as he aimed the rear-sightless energy rifle toward the gate, Natalia below him calling out, “On three! One …”

  There was a specially built platform that folded out of the passenger side front door, forming a step. Michael was on that step now behind the armor plated door, armed identically to John Rourke, but hopefully his weapon still possessed of an operational rear sight.

  “Two …

  The idea was a simple one, like the entire plan. Blast down the deflection barrier and the gate behind it, then get inside. “Three!”

  John Rourke fired for the center of the deflection barrier, Michael for the center as well, streams of blue light moving as bolts from their weapons, blindingly bright if looked at the right way, this another detriment to good marksmanship. John Rourke fired again as Natalia counted to three again, both of them aiming for the same spot in the deflection barrier, the center of the synth-concrete barricade already smoldering. The idea was to excite the atoms sufficiently. John Rourke smiled at the thought, that if the atoms in the deflection barrier were male, all that would have been necessary to excite them would have been for Natalia to smile.

  On three, Rourke fired still again, the deflection barrier shimmering where the beams impacted it. “Keep firing continuously until it goes!” John Rourke shouted, firing at will, realizing Michael

  was doing the same. Their wonder weapons weren’t destroying the synth-concrete of the deflection barrier and Paul wouldn’t be able to turn the staff car to avoid it.

  John Rourke kept firing, feeling the power pack that was strapped to his back starting to warm. He kept firing. The barrier glowed now, vehicles behind it exploding, metal fence struts just beyond it melting. John Rourke kept firing, Michael firing too.

  If he ever built another Retreat and natural granite was unavailable or impractical, this synth-concrete would be ideal. It was the material’s density, Rourke realized, that made the synth-concrete disintegrate. His thoughts were cut off as he fired, a group of Soviet Elite Corps personnel almost literally throwing themselves across the barricade, firing automatic weapons.

  Paul swerved the staff car as Rourke fired toward the Elite Corps personnel, missing. But Rourke swung the muzzle of the energy weapon left, firing again, Michael firing too, now, and the rattle of Natalia’s submachine gun from below. Bullets whined off the deflection barricade, two of the Elite Corpsmen going down, the beam from Rourke’s energy weapon striking two of the men, their bodies torching for an instant, then vaporized.

  Michael’s energy weapon was aimed again at the barricade, and firing. Rourke fired too, the staff car mere meters from it.

  The deflection barrier seemed to glow brighter than it had, and there was a crack louder than the heaviest caliber rifle shot John Rourke had ever heard, and the glow turned into an arc, the synth-concrete barrier exploding.

  Rourke’s ears rang from the cracking sound, but he could faintly hear Paul’s voice as Paul shouted, “We’re going through!”

  Bullets zinged and whined off the staff car’s coach work, what was left of the glass in the vehicle shattering. John Rourke swung the muzzle of the energy weapon in his hands toward the greatest concentration of Elite Corps personnel and fired …

  The remaining four Marine Raiders mounted the steps, their Soviet AKM-96s, ready. Once inside the harbormaster’s tower, guns could be fired with relative impunity as concerned the integrity of the dome above, on the other side of which was the sea. But the noise would alert Marine Spetznas personnel nearby of an attack,

  and that was to be avoided if at all possible, lest the important element of surprise be lost. Jason Darkwood was on the right side of the door at the height of the steps, Lance Corporal Mondragon on the left.

  The lead man of the four Marines returned Darkwood’s 2418 A2, Darkwood press checking the slide, confirming the still-chamber were in loaded condition.

  And Darkwood gave the nod, the last of the Marine Raiders in place.

  Mondragon and one of the other men readied their rifles, three of the Marines with specially prepared gas grenades. Mondragon was already lacing a strip of black adhesive against the doorlock, connecting power leads to the battery pack brought up by one of the other four Marines. It was an offshoot of the technology used by the terrestrial Soviets in the construction of their energy rifles. The same plasma energy could be used to melt the lockplate on the doorway.

  Darkwood stepped over the railing, down two steps along the outside. He watched as Mondragon powered up, hissing under his breath to the three grenadiers, “Be ready. Masks up!” Darkwood pulled his gas mask from the the bag at his side, snapped it over his face, popping the cheeks and making a seal.

  There was a crackle, then a muted pop and a clang as the door’s lockplate fell away.

  “Grenades!”

  Each of the three Marines with the gas grenades hurtled a pair of the grenades each, the instant the word left Darkwood’s mouth. Rifles ready now from the three grenadiers, Darkwood and Mondragon and the sixth man broke through the doorway, ST Y-20 pistols in hand. Darkwood fired one of the Soviet dart pistols point blank into the ches
t of a burly figure coming at him through the cloud of gas, then fired a second and third dart, putting the figure down.

  Marine Spetznas personnel were rising from their consoles, staggering blindly, eyes streaming tears, coughing, starting to collapse, grasping for belted weapons as they fell.

  Darkwood crashed the butt of his pistol down across the neck of a man, wrestled a woman down, snatching her gun from her holster.

  The harbormaster’s tower, with no bloodshed inside, was taken, but it had to be secured.

  As Darkwood moved toward the control panels, he ordered, “Administer the injections and make certain they’re disarmed and cuffed.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  Special sedation kits had been prepared for the tower personnel, and plastic disposable cuffs were brought along to bind the tower personnel, hand and foot.

  “Secure the tower, Mondragon! On the double!”

  “Yes, sir!” And Mondragon began shouting orders to the remaining four Marines from the raiding party.

  The door leading to the steps was closed. Already, two of the Marines were stripping off their penetration suits, beneath them Marine Spetznas uniforms already worn so the guards on the steps could be replaced.

  No gunfire, no alarms, nothing to indicate that the other raiding parties were faring poorly in their work seizing controls of other parts of the port facility. The gates to the mini-sub pens might already be closed.

  Now the hard part, Jason Darkwood thought, as he sat at the sonar net controls and tried to determine which dials and switches to work to shut down just half of the sonar net. If he killed the entire net, alarms would automatically sound. If he killed the wrong side, the Reagan and the other vessels coming in after her would activate the sonar system and the entire Underwater Complex would be on alert in a matter of moments.

  Darkwood rubbed bis thumbs against the tips of his fingers, then started working the controls…

  The control center for the Underground City’s antiaircraft defenses, according to intelligence data that was as impeccable as could be, was located just beyond the main personnel access tunnel which fed directly into the city itself.

  Paul Rubenstein wheeled the shot-up staff car to a halt just inside the gates, the tires smoking, smoke streaming from the seam where the hood met the fenders on ail sides of the engine.

  As he stepped out of the car, he shrugged the German MP-40 submachine gun forward on its sling, racking the bolt and opening fire as Elite Corps personnel from just inside the gates, streamed toward

  them.

  John was still atop the car, firing the energy weapon again, a beam of the bluish white light, like a bolt of lightning, flkkering from the weapon’s muzzle and outward, like the hand of death, vaporizing a half dozen of the Elite Corps troopers as they closed toward the staff car.

  Natalia rolled out of the passenger seat, another of the energy weapons with her, but the backpack not yet on. With the backpack beside her, she opened fire toward a knot of Elite Corps electric cars, power arcing off their batteries as the beam would strike, the cars exploding in the next instant.

  Paul scrambled into the back seat, getting the last of the four energy weapons, pulling on the backpack harness, powering up.

  John was off the car now and, shoulder to shoulder with Michael, advancing on the Elite Corps guards. It was only a matter of time-minutes at best-before Soviet energy weapons would be brought to bear against them.

  But Paul Rubenstein was already moving, Natalia on her knees near the rear of the car, getting her arms into the pack straps, Paul helping her to at stand and get the pack into position. She buckled up, Paul doing the same as he checked the energy weapon’s power level.

  Full.

  “Let’s go, Paul,” Natalia urged.

  Natalia at his left, Paul Rubenstein started forward, widening the arc of fire John and Michael had begun, the access tunnel into the city less than a half of a city block from them now …

  The moment Nicolai Antonovitch had waited for had arrived.

  And he was still uncertain what to do.

  Centuries before, he had sworn allegiance to a madman who had wrested from what could have been an era of peace and global cooperation, a holocaust unlike any in human history.

  The office was soundproofed, but there had been three calls, and the red light on his desk was flashing, indicating that an incursion against the city was underway.

  He typed a last few words into the computer on the disk that he had begun when the light first started flashing several moments ago.

  To prevent the irnmediate recognition of his words by Soviet personnel, yet attract the attention of any Allied personnel who might subsequently locate the disk, he wrote in English. It was more difficult for him, but that could not be helped. “I discovered that then Colonel Vladmir Karamatsov, in conspiracy with higher ranking officers among the Soviet General Staff who were in sympathy with the policy of war against the West, personally ordered the airborne firing of a stolen nuclear missile from an unmarked Soviet aircraft at the Tallinn radar installation on the Gulf of Finland. As the missile struck, a prefabricated tape was broadcast, as though coming from the Tallinn installation, that an American B-52 had penetrated Soviet air space and had launched what appeared to be a Cruise-type missile.

  “Because of this missile firing and the taped message, presumably a last message from the crew of the facility before it was obliterated with a direct nuclear strike, Moscow was alerted to American nuclear attack and responded with a retaliatory launch.

  “That night, Vladmir Karamatsov precipitated what was nearly the total destruction of humankind. I have borne this knowledge for some time now, and it eats away at my soul. Now, the masters of this city plan a pre-emptive nuclear strike against our allied enemies from the missile tubes of the nuclear submarines based in the Pacific.

  “If this should occur, all of humanity will most assuredly be destroyed. The atmospheric envelope is too fragile to sustain even one high megatonnage range nuclear detonation according to the computer models of our best scientists. Yet, the leadership of the Underground City ignores the danger. I cannot. For this reason, I shall now betray Communism in order that I do not betray my country.”

  He filed the data, then extracted the small hard disc and pocketed it in his uniform tunic.

  He stood up, belting on his pistol.

  Presumably, when he’d sent plans out for the energy weapons, he had been successful, because, clearly, this type of weapon was being utilized now by the attack force. A small group, although there was no information concerning identities, he wagered with himself that Doctor John Rourke, and perhaps Major Tiemerovna as well, were among them.

  Antonovitch walked to his door, unlocked it, opened it.

  Two junior officers stood open-mouthed in the outer office. “Comrade Marshal-the city-” “1 am aware of such matters, Captain.” “But orders-“

  “You will both accompany me.”

  He walked past them, trying to ignore the questions they shouted after him, into the corridor beyond the outer office. He hoped the two were following him, simply to keep them from other duties. Men and women ran along the corridor, many of them armed, others carrying computer discs, still others seeming just confused.

  Antonovitch turned off the main corridor and toward the office of the Premier.

  Only the Premier himself could give the order that must be given now…

  Natalia Tiemerovna paused just inside the tunnel entrance, John and Paul and Michael exchanging fire with an Elite Corps Unit which had pursued them from beyond the main gates. She kicked out of the low heeled shoes that went with her uniform, throwing down first one then the second of the two shoes that had been stuffed into the interior pockets of her greatcoat. They were the modern-day German equivalent of high fashion track shoes, closed quickly enough with the hook and pile fasteners. And, she could run in them.

  She kicked the uniform shoes away and picked up her weapon, starting down the
tunnel ahead of the three men, toward the control center at its opposite end. As soon as the radar system was down, the Underground City’s air defense system would be neutralized and the Allies would be able to attack.

  It was poor tactics to run on ahead, but it was also a compulsion, a need within her to which she had no choice, other than to respond.

  Ever since she had started thiriking for herself, started fighting on the side that was right in this war which had lasted now for five centuries, something had nagged at her soul. And perhaps it had nagged at her soul even before then.

  If the Soviet cause had been wrong, if Communism was a lie, a terrible deceit perpetrated on the impoverished masses, could there be any other immediate cause for the nuclear terror which had all

  but obliterated humanity?

  And she had been a part of it, a small part, but an important part. She had worked to subvert the western democracies, had worked to further Communist revolutionary aims throughout the world, had done her part and more. She had the decorations-she still possessed them-to prove it.

  She was ore of the precious few women to achieve field grade rank. No doubt, part of that was because of her uncle, Ishmael Varakov, who subsequently became Commander of the North American Army of Occupation. Part of that, too, was her then-husband’s influence.

  But she’d been good, very good, and distinguished herself in what then she had thought was service to the Soviet people and the downtrodden of the world.

  It was her fight more than it was anyone’s fight.

  If she helped to start it, she should help to finish it. And, if she died doing this, then another problem was solved.

  She had no death wish, but death was preferable to being alone, and once this war ended, John and Sarah could enjoy the blessings of peace, raise the child that was even now in Sarah’s womb.