by Ahern, Jerry
The sled was at the ramp, moving along it.
Zimmer, his right shoulder paining him badly, gave the half
track sled full power forward.
The Jew Rubenstein clung on for a few seconds longer, then fell off, into the snow, hopefully to his death.
The half-track sled was into the run now, and before air power could come after him, he would be gone.
Despite his pain, Deitrich Zimmer smiled.
The world would be changed forever.
Twenty-one
They cornered the dozen Nazis between their own unit and a group of German Long Range Mountain Patrol personnel, the Nazis throwing down their weapons and raising their hands.
Michael Rourke, a Beretta in one hand, his M-16 in the other, walked toward the twelve, Natalia beside him.
“Ask one of them in German where’s Zimmer and the baby.” Michael ordered.
Natalia repeated his question, but as one of the Nazis started to answer, Otto Hammerschmidt, who had been talking to someone on his radio, interrupted. “Michael. The infant child is dead and Zimmer has escaped. Zimmer murdered the baby.”
Michael Rourke turned toward Otto Hammerschmidt.
Michael blinked.
Natalia Tiemerovna began to cry, then screamed, “God damn them!”
Michael Rourke turned toward the Nazi who had been about to speak, shoved the muzzle of his rifle against the man’s face. “Please, Herr Rourke! Please-“
Michael pushed the muzzle of the rifle into the Nazi s mouth.
Tears filled Michael Rourke’s eyes. His right hand trembled.
There was a strong fecal smell, and the Nazi’s eyes were so wide that they looked about to somehow fall out of their sockets.
Hammerschmidt’s voice. “Michael, do what you must.” Natalia screamed, “Do it! What is the use!? Do it!” Michael Rourke pushed the muzzle of the rifle in deeper. The man was gagging, choking. Michael Rourke closed his eyes. His mother. His father.
Now the brother he had never seen.
Michael Rourke could feel his father’s voice inside his head, but he couldn’t hear any words.
He took the muzzle of the M-16 from the Nazi’s mouth. His voice tight, the words hard corning, Michael Rourke rasped, “Thank the God you don’t believe in, you’re not Deitrich Zimmer.”
Twenty-two
In days and nights of tireless searching, there had been no sign of Deitrich Zimmer.
The best specialists that New Germany had to offer in the field of mortuary science had done all that could be done, and still the litde child’s coffin was closed, most of the head disintegrated from the hydrostatic shock and concussive force of the bullet
Deitrich Zimmer had planned the child’s murder. That was obvious, because the round he used in the German pistol was not even intended for use in a handgun, merely the same caliber and dimensions, but a tracer that was fired from small tank mounted cannons out of an overbarrel spotting rifle.
It was a marvel that the gun, badly damaged as it was, had not totally shattered when Zimmer fired it.
The cemetery was a quiet place.
The Christian minister from Lydveldid Island, who spoke in a language Michael Rourke could not understand, performed the service.
Clouds gathered on the horizon, deep gray and menacing.
His sister and Natalia on either side of him, Paul with them. Michael Rourke stared at the open grave.
The casket was so small, the grave so small.
The child had never really lived, never known a kind touch.
In halting English, the minister said, “I commit the body of John Thomas Rourke, Jr., to this earth in the hope of everlasting resurrection.”
Natalia and Annie wore black civilian clothes, as did Paul and Michael. Annie wept. Visible in Natalia’s eyes were the tears she
was holding back.
Michael Rourke was cried out for the moment.
The casket was lowered into the ground.
“He was a litde child and he’s with the angels now,” Paul murmured.
Because of their upbringing, Annie, when first reaching the baby, had baptized him with the water of her tears in the hope of his soul being freed to enter Heaven.
Michael supposed he would have done the same. Annie whispered now, “1 baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”
She wept loudly, her body racked with tremors as Paul folded her closely into his arms.
Michael approached the grave, took up a handful of the soil of New Germany. He threw it into the grave, over the coffin. The vault lid was ready to be lain.
He stared at the coffin of the brother he had never known. This is the wrong place to say this, John, and the wrong time, too, I guess. I can’t even promise you Fli get your murderer. But Til promise you that you’ll never be forgotten.”
Annie and Paul stood beside him.
Michael was wrong, because the tears came again and very hard, harder than be had ever experienced them.
Natalia put a hand on his shoulder and another on his arm.
Michael Rourke could not promise his brother revenge, but he would try.
Part Three
A New Order
One
Akiro Kurinami’s office was spartan, and thus typically Japanese. A polished rock was the only adornment on the table that was his desk. The heat within the recently completed public building worked well, and Dodd was almost warm, but the heat was slightly noisy. Kurinami said. “Sit down, Commander.”
“Thank you, Mr. President.” Dodd took the folding chair opposite Kurinami’s desk. Like many of the furnishings of Eden, the chair was from New Germany. What didn’t come from New Germany or occasionally from Mid-Wake was scavenged from the shuttles themselves or put together from the Eden Project stores. There was talk that the Russians were interested in a trade agreement with Mid-Wake. New Germany and Eden and that Kurinami himself had suggested it because of the Undergound City’s vast manufacturing potential.
Kurinami smiled as he spoke. “I cannot help but wonder at the odd turn of events. Corrimander. As much as I puzzled over why you stepped out of the election I now wonder more why you have volunteered the idea that since more of this continent is habitable than Europe, we should open ourselves to immigration from the Russian cities and the Chinese First City. It is a remarkable idea, and noble as well, but-“
Dodd made himself smile. “I felt our young nation needed unity. I did what I felt was best for Eden in stepping down. Now I feel our young nation needs strength. Ifs the American tradition to open our shores to all who wish to come here in peace. But you still believe that Tm some sort of enemy, don’t you, an enemy of Eden?”
Kurinami laughed. “Eden. The name sticks, does it not?”
“Yes.”
“I do not know how to feel about you, Commander. I believe that a man can have a change of heart, that a man can sacrifice private ambition for public good, no matter how strongly that ambition drives him. I was speaking with the Chairman of the First Chinese City. As an ally, as a friend, he saw your proposal as one that would serve to end divisiveness in the future, make the whole world closer to being one.”
“We have vast expanses of land within what was the United States. land which can bear life, be productive. There is industry to restart, building to do. For all of that, we need people. You must believe me, Akiro,” Dodd said, nodding his head, smiling, “making a new world order is my ultimate goal. I know you’ve said that encouraging new thinking is just what we need. Well, I took that to heart. And with the returnees from Mid-Wake planning to move here to the western regions, well, it just seemed natural that this land should become an international homeland for all of humanity. My ambitions, however you interpreted them, however personal they may have seem, were other oriented, aimed at accomplishing the goal of rebuilding our planet in the most expeditious way possible. I hope you’ll come to see that someday-in fact, Mr. President-I know you will, that th
e goals I outlined had a purpose greater than anyone imagined.
“I’m here to say,” Dodd concluded, “that you can count on me to work for a new order with all my energies.”
Akiro Kurinami leaned back and smiled.
Commander Christopher Dodd just smiled.
Two
Michael Rourke swung down out of the saddle, dropped to one knee and traced the outline of the horseshoe print with his finger in the dust. Is it the same shoe, Michael?”
“Cast off a litde with a deformed nail head. Yeah.” Michael Rourke stood and stretched. He stared toward the setting sun, but averted his eyes slightly, the glare bothering him. He was stiff and tired from hor-sebaclting through these wastelands where once there was rain forest and now there was encroaching oesert.
Pauls saddle creaked and he stepped down, rubbing his backside a litde. The Germans have a plan for this place.”
Michael Rourke smiled. “Yes, they have a plan for everything, God bless them. Use plasma energy to melt sections of the mountain snows and bring waer back to the land so the trees they want to plant will grow.”
“All I know is that Fm tired of the air everywhere being as thin as something at the top of a mountain.”
“It’s even thinner there,” Michael agreed. Whenthey hadattackedthe Nazi redoubt, part of the reason for the gas masks was that they were connected to small compressed oxygen units which bled in a richer mixture to their normal air supply. Otherwise, unused to the horribly thin air at the higher altitudes, they would have been incapable of sustained physical exertion. “Maybe their plan will work, at least to start.”
Paul bent over to stare at the hoofprints on the ground. “Still six sets. Has to be Nazis, to be out here.”
“Has to be,” Michael agreed.
But, as he looked up, he noticed Paul Rubenstein was no longer looking at the footprints, but was looking at him. “What happens if, assuming we nail these guys, none of them knows anything about Zimmer? You know ni go on as long as you want to, so will Annie and Natalia.
But you can’t spend your whole life in pursuit of revenge. Your Mom and Dad wouldn’t want you doing it. For six months now, weVe been alternately going through every Nazi era record in New Germany and all the stuff that was found at their mountain hideout, then going into the field to pursue the next set of leads.
“We’ve lolled or captured twenty-six men,” Paul continued, “and not a one of them, even under drugs, has known anything about Zimmer’s whereabouts. I don’t think we’re going to get him, Michael, even if we devote the rest of our lives to it.”
Michael said nothing.
Paul wenton. “Likelsaid, we’re all with you. You think we’ve got a chance of getting this schmuck, fine, youll never see me quit. But, if we don’t, just spend the rest of our lives doing this, then what?”
“What do you mean?”
There’s a world out there your father and mother would be busting their butts to rebuild if they were with us. You know that. All you’re doing is becoming an expert on neo-Nazis and a great hand at tracking people down, but that’s not doing anything to make this place a better place. If Zimmer surfaces anywhere, hell be arrested or shot. With Akiro running Eden, we don’t even have to worry about Dodd anymore.”
“I wonder. Anyway, we still owe him.”
“Kill Dodd and even Akiro will say ifs too much, Michael. Akiro pulled the plug on the charges against Natalia and the rest of us. Sure, Td like to twist Dodd’s head off and crap down his neck, and if you say we should do it, Fm with you, just like Annie and Natalia are with you. All Fm saying is that maybe there are some better things we should be doing, things John and Sarah would have wanted us to do. Like, whatever happened to you pursuing a medical education?”
“So I can find out my father’s and mothef s conditions are hopeless? I already knowthat, Paul. Anyway, every time Fm in New Germany, almost invariably I bump into Maria. With her marrying, ifs even more awkward than before.”
“How about Mid-Wake?”
Michael Rourke shook his head. “No. I could give you a bunch of reasons why I don’t want to live there, but in the final analysis, they’re all an excuse. I want to see the world, see what’s out there that we’ve missed. Being a doctor worked for Dad, but I can’t save lives with one hand and take lives with the other. I could never be the doctor he-“
There was a silence. He’d almost said ‘was’.
Paul broke the silence, saying, “You can do anything you set your mind to, Michael-“
Michael Rourke laughed, telling his friend, “Look, you may have been born a couple of decades before I was, but chronologically, Fm older than you are. And Fm not your seventeen-year-old nephew or something, who just decided to getatattoo and dropout of high school.”
Paul grinned, shook his head, said, Touche, Michael.”
The point is, I know what I don’t want to do. At least that’s a start.” And Michael looked along the trail, the hoofprints vanishing in the distance over the rise “And I know we probably won’t find Zimmer, Paul. And sometimes I wonder what Fd do if I did. Mom and Dad never taught me to commit murder, but God, Fd never forgive myself if I didn’t kill the bastard. How he could do that, murder a baby-Jesus, Fm - ” Michael bailed his fists, inhaled to keep the tears from coining, because sometimes they stiU did
“If we find him. well kill him, and we both know that, whether it’s murder or not, who cares? It can’t be a moral consideration to kill a man like Zimmer. But if we don’t find him, yet spend our entire lives looking for him, maybe well be giving him another kill to his credit, hmm?”
Michael Rourke rolled the reins of his horse between his hands, looked then at Paul. A man Michael Rourke had never heard of, before the attack on the hospital, was responsible for the near death state in which his father and mother now existed, would perhaps exist forever. And the murder of their child.
“Ahttletongerr
Paul just shook his head. “Yeah, well look a Me longer. But, I tell you, if we’re still saying this years from now, well-I don’t know.”
Michael Rourke caught the horn and swung up into his saddle Indian fashion.
Paul mounted more deliberately. Then they both continued along the trail.
Three
The desert was gone and it was night and he was inside a house. He recognized it. It was the sprawling farm house they had lived in before The Night of The War.
But, it wasn’t then, before The Night of The War, because at the dinner table, along with Sarah, there was a grown up Annie, a grown up Michael, and Natalia and Paul were there, too.
On either side of his empty dinner plate were his guns.
Sarah said to him, “Have you seen the baby, John?”
“No, I haven’t.”
She just smiled. When he looked down, his plate was no longer empty. John Rourke looked more closely at the plate, because what was there was not food, but the United States.
It looked like the outline of the North American continent as it would be seen from space, and there were lights twinkling everywhere and, as he looked more closely and started to mention what he saw to the others at the table, all around him there was blackness, except for the outiine of North America in the distance.
And the lights.
But the lights were different now, growing in intensity. As he stared, the lights were flashes, mushroom shaped clouds erupting everywhere, brilliandy bright, more and more of them, their light obscuring the shape of the continent, one flash after another after another after another and John Rourke looked around him.
He was sitting in an airplane.
The airplane rocked, lurched, seemed almost to twist.
A woman screamed.
John Rourke knew what was happening.
It was The Night of the War and he was condemned to relive it.
Four
The city, of more than two thousand people, had grown up almost overnight; or, more accurately over sixty nights or so. Four months
ago, there had been nothing but desert where the Amazonian city of Manaus had once been, a wasteland where alternately hot and cold sandy winds blew and nothing of great consequence besides insects and rats lived. Like all of northern and central Brazil, when the fires came which burned the sky in the Great Conflagration, the rain forest had been wiped out, and with it the moisture.
The Amazon and its major tributaries, like the Negro, still flowed, to be sure, but they were not rivers that were the arteries of a once thriving nation, not highways through the greatest green area on the face of the earth, merely water. There were fish, mostiy bottom dwellers, but fewer species because the sun beat down without mercy in the daylight hours, since nothing grew here. At night was the cold. No life along the river, only eroded deserts too vast to contemplate.
Many tributaries no longer flowed, and it was part of the German plan for re-greening the Amazon and eventually re-oxygenating the atmosphere to free water frozen in mountain ice for irrigation of the high mountain deserts.
And what once had been Manaus on the River Negro, in north central Brazil, was now the boomtown for the new ecology.
The figure she was following, ArmandGruber, was a nonentity of a man, really, but for now he was the most important man in the world to her.
He turned into the Utile pub-like bar that was packed with mustered-out German soldiers working in the bio-project, some Chinese engineers and a few people who looked like they could be Americans from Mid-Wake. There was talk that soon there would be Russians here, and she did not long for their presence because
when Natalia Anastasia Tiemerovna wanted to hear her native tongue that badly, she could always talk to herself.
Natalia glanced at her mirror image in the shop window and primped her light brown hair and adjusted her glasses. Then she looked back down the street. This was the bad area of Opentown, as the name of the new Manaus translated into English. The jobs as police/security for the city paid litde compared to the hard labor or the tech jobs, so law enforcement personnel were hard to find and there wasn’t enough lawlessness (openly) to bring in the army. Built of pre-fab units, with streets wide enough to easily handle four lanes of construction traffic if needed, the bad section of Opentown was the only place where the people who worked in the new industry which had arisen here, could come to unwind. Annie followed Gruber into the bar the previous night and got away with just a few black and blue marks from pinches on her posterior.
