by Ahern, Jerry
“Hey. Michael!”
“Should be two more, Paul. I got one over here.”
“One more. I got a guy with my knife.”
Michael Rourke shifted position, slowly, carefully. The sixth man could have been two hundred yards away or more and had one of them under a starlight scope. Which gave Michael Rourke an idea. He shouted to Paul. “How do you think some eggs would go right now?”
“Egg” was a slang term he’d picked up from his father for flash-bangs, sound and tight grenades. Through a starlight scope, the flash of a sound and light grenade would be as blinding as the flash of a nuclear weapon. He remembered the Night of The War, when the flashes from the bombs which destroyed Adanta were like sunrises.
If Paul caught his drift—
“We could get killed.” Paul caught it, apparently.
“Not we. me. Don’t worry.”
“Worrying’s part of my ethnicity. You say when.”
Michael Rourke studied the terrain surrounding them. Flat,
ideal for a sniper in almost any direction, but if the guy were really good-and this had to be a hit team-he’d take the best spot not only for a shot but also for a getaway in case things went wrong.
That meant the sniper was to the north, where there was a narrow pass that a well-thrown explosive device could block, if the need arose.
Michael Rourke put on his ear protection, then the glasses which, in darkness like this, made him almost blind. He kept his gaze trained on the fire, which through the protective glasses merely looked like a dull glow.
Taking up his rifle, Michael came from cover, starting toward the fire as if to examine the bodies of the three dead men there.
There was no timing this thing. If he waited too long, he’d be dead. When he was halfway to the fire, which should be just the perfect mixture of light and dark for the sniper’s starlight scope, Michael Rourke shouted, “Now, Paul!”
In the same instant as the first grenade hit, there was a shot, (atoning Michael Rourke across the left kidney as he threw himself down at a tangent to what he anticipated-correctiy-was the sniper’s line of fire.
Michael Rourke squinted his eyes tight, the light flashes still visible through his eyelids despite the protective eyewear. His hands were cupped over his ears, but still the high pitched whistling made his ears ring and vibrate.
And he was in terrible pain …
Opentown wasn’t large in area, high rise prefabs-four stories high-serving as housing and consuming several grid squares of the city, the recreation area where the bar was the only part which stretched out seemingly aimlessly into the wasteland. The factories and offices which supported the bio-project were on the opposite side of the housing area.
After a run to the end of the alley, across one of the ultra-wide streets and up along it for another fifty yards, Jessup turned a corner and stopped in front of Opentown’s sole private gymnasium. He started inside. “What the hell are you doing?” Natalia
called after him.
“Too many crooks. This is where I park my wheels.”
He went through the door. Natalia, her gun back in her purse, pushed a lock of hair back from her forehead and followed him.
“You can sweat in here, pump real iron” Jessup said over his shoulder.
She was the only woman in a room full of men, all of them close to naked-gym shorts and athletic shirts-and their bodies dripping sweat. It wasn’t climate controlled, large fans turning lazily overhead, just moving air, not freshening it.
What used to be wolf whisties came toward her and she was about to step back through the door onto the street, when she saw Jessup disappear behind a curtain. Then she heard a sound, familiar, yet not.
The curtain was pushed away and Jessup straddled out a motorcycle which looked hauntingly similar to the ones that the German forces sometimes used. “I love this thing,” Jessup called to her.
But evidently the men in the gymnasium did not. “The damn synth-fuel stinks. Bob, damnit,” another American voice called out. It belonged to a man doing inclined bench presses, his biceps and triceps so large they almost looked more than human.
Jessup robed the machine slowly past her, stopped, looked at her and smiled, saying, “Wanna get the door, lady?”
Natalia got the door, stepped out onto the pre-fab synth-concrete sidewalk, letting the gymnasium and its smell of sweat fade from her consciousness. “Where did you get-“
“German guy, works in hydroponics. Wanted me to teach him diving. “>e kinda worked a trade. He says it’s surplus. Ever ride one of these things?”
Natalia pulled three pins from her hair and shook it loose, put her hands down along her thighs and tugged her dress up almost to her hips as she straddled the machine behind him. “Yes.”
“Fine. Electric car, it can’t go too far into the wasteland, and it can’t match this for speed. We go in a likely direction, and if we don’t see the car, just circle the city until we do.”
“It could be in the city, too. Let’s go.
“This thing’s damn fast, ma’am. You’re gonna have to hold on
tight.” Jessup looked at her and smiled.
Natalia shook her head and laughed. “I suppose you are right, Bob.” She put her arms around his stomach and held him. Tight enough?”
“Ma’am, if you held onto me any tighter I might just start fhinkin’ about forgettin’ about that electric car and your Nazis and ask you up to my room. Hang on, now!”
The motorcycle jumped the curb and was into the dirt street with a roar …
It was a deep crease in the fatty area behind the rib cage and, aside from bleeding a lot and hurting even more, didn’t appear serious to him. Holding his side, he ran as best he could, in the direction of the rifle shot, relying on the sniper’s temporary blindness to be total.
Paul, unharmed and starting out well north of the fire anyway, was ahead of him.
And he heard Paul shout, “I got liim! Michael!”
Michael Rourke stopped trying to run and just stood there in the darkness, hurting. And he called back to Paul Rubenstein, “Keep him for me!” With considerable effort, he forced himself to walk.
Six
A circuit around the city showed no sign of the electric car with the damaged right rear render, so they turned back in toward Opentown. toward the pre-rab housing units. Bob Jessup was a decent motorcycle rider, especially good considering he had to be a beginner. He took his turns very cautiously, which she considered a tribute to his good sense. Rather than trying to impress her with his daring, he was trying to get them to their destination, wherever that turned out to be, alive and uninjured.
The glasses she wore helped her eyes against the dust-they were coated with it-but her hair felt gritty and knotted as they turned into the housing area.
One of the units was reserved for office personnel and visiting military’ and civilian VTPs, the other units for the workers. And there was crime here, like there was on the recreation strip. Aside from the fact that the buildings were vastly shorter and she was five hundred years removed from the Twentieth Century, she was reminded of her one and only visit to an inner city Federal Housing Project. That was in Chicago, a few years before the Night of The War, and Vladmir had been negotiating with a Chicago street gang to precipitate summer rioting.
There was never a deal struck, the following summer going by peacefully in the city.
But she remembered the look of the place still, like a jungle with wild things preying on the inhabitants and the visitors equally.
It was that same look, that same feel here.
Bob Jessup stopped the motorcycle as they turned the corner of a dirt street.
Evidentiy, he saw the electric car with the damaged fender at the same time she did …
Michael Rourke sat on a rock, twisting the sling of his rifle in his hands as Paul cleaned the wound near his left kidney. “You are lucky, very lucky.”
All skill; I practice dodging bullets for a h
alf hour each day.”
“Yeah, right,” Paul laughed.
The sniper, bound hand and foot with plastic restraints, writhed on the ground, groaning.
“After I came up on him and realized he wasn’t kidding, I put the restraints on him and put some salve on his eyes. Had to sit on him to do it, though. He must’ve thought I was trying to torture him or something. Asshole. There.” And Paul stepped away.
Michael Rourke touched gingerly at his back, a large bandage in place and the smell of the German antiseptic/healant spray still heavy on the air. Michael started to stand, then thought better of it, pain and stiffness gripping his back when he tried to move, even a little. “Tell him who we are so he knows for sure we’re going to kill him if he doesn’t talk. At the distance, his hearing didn’t get affected.”
Paul looked at Michael in the light of the lantern, then nodded.
Paul dropped to one knee beside the sniper, grabbing a handful of the man’s jacket front, telling him, “You know who we are; that’s why you and your friends led us around, to try and kill us. If you know who we are, you know well kill you if you don’t cooperate.”
The sniper, a Nazi, simply managed to say the word, “Jew” and tried to spit at Paul, but Paul backhanded him across the face before he could. Paul looked over his shoulder, exchanged glances with Michael, then looked down at the sniper. “Yes,
I’m a Jew. And if you don’t understand enough English to understand what I’m about to say, you’re shit out of luck. If you know all about Nazis and Jews, you probably heard that your kind, five centuries ago, were blamed for killing six million of us. You were told that was a lie, that the photographs of the dead were from the bombings of Dresden. They weren’t.
“Now,” Paul almost hissed, “you may not believe that your kind killed six million of my kind, but I believe it and thafs all that matters because Tve got a gun and you don’t. Aside from the fact you tried killing my brother-in-law and me, aside from the fact that your boss maybe killed my wife’s parents, aside from the fact that your boss murdered an infant, aside from the six million dead Jews you fuckin’ Nazis racked up five centuries ago, I just don’t like your face.
“And, if you don’t talk, teE us where Zimmer is,” Paul went on, his voice more an animal-sounding snarl, Tm going to shoot your balls off one at a time. Understand balls, Nazi? Testicles?” Paul looked at Michael and winked.
Michael Rourke looked away so he wouldn’t laugh.
He heard the sound of Paul’s Browning High Power being drawn and the hammer being cocked back, heard Paul say, “That’s the sound of my gun. Wanna hear another sound?”
Then Michael heard the sniper say, “I will tell you, please. Please!”
Seven
“You said you had a gun.”
“Yeah.” Bob Jessup reached down to his left trouser leg and pulled something that looked like a chopped down version of the Mid-Wake issue Lancer 2418 A-2. “Got a friend makes these. A lot of Marines carried ‘em for backup.”
“Umm,” Natalia nodded, stepping away from the bike, aware of bis eyes on her. “What are you staring at?”
“Your legs, ma’am. God, they’re the longest things Fve ever seen.” Her dress was still bunched up, but as she walked it would settle and to move to do something with it now would only be provocative. “Heidi your real name?”
Tm Natalia Tiemerovna.”
“You? Holy shit! I saw you once, but your hair-“
“It’s dye that washes out.” She took off the fake glasses and dropped them in her purse, taking out the Walther and its suppressor, then threading the suppressor onto the PPK/S’s extended barrel.
“You really on the trail of some Nazis?”
“One in particular, and this man we’re following might lead me to him. The man we’re following is named Armand Gruber. The man I am after is Deitrich Zimmer, the man responsible for what happened to John and Sarah Rourke and the murder of their baby.”
“We gonna kill ‘im?”
Natalia turned and looked at Bob Jessup as she gave the sup
pressor a good luck twist. “When I find him. But understand this, that I will kill Zimmer. I am the only one who should.” “Why do you say that?”
Natalia ran her free hand back through her hair, feeling the grit and dirt, but tellling herself she would wash it soon. “If you know who I am, then you know why. We want to see who Gruber is talking with, and what is going on. You wait for me to tell you what to do or you wait here, understand?”
“You’re a Major, right?”
“I was, yes.”
“Well, ma am, I was a sergeant. So, I guess Fm used to takin’ some orders. But one thing.”
Natalia was studying the budding in front of which the electric car with the dented fender occupied a space in the parking lot. She was only half-paying-attention. But she heard him and said, “What one thing?”
“You’re a woman and Fm a man-” She started to groan, but instead of what be could have said, he said something that was almost sweet “If there’s trouble, anyway, don’t go tellin’ me to stand back or armhin’, because Major or not, Bob Jessup doesn’t let a woman take a bullet for him, see.”
She looked at him. smiled, said, “All right, Bob Jessup.”
They started walking across the parking lot, toward the main entrance to the pre-fab housing unit She ran the numbers in her head. Four floors, fifty apartments to a floor, it would be impossible to knock on every door with any hope of finding who Gruber had come to meet.
But there were only four stairwells, one at each corner of the building, and no elevators. From the center of the corridor, someone could watch all four stairwells (not easily, but satisfactorily, if the floor plans were like those used in the building where she stayed with Annie) and keep watch on the parking lot outside.
“Here is the plan, Bob. I will take the top floor. You take the second floor. If you see someone coming out into the parking lot and getting into the car-“
“The little guy and the hooker with the blonde hair?”
“Probably, but possibly just the little guy*. Anyway, if you see him but he didn’t pass you we know he spoke with someone in an apartment on the first floor. If you see him coming down toward the second floor and I didn’t see him, we will know his meeting was on the third floor. You uaterstand?”
“So, we let him go and go after whoever it was he met?”
“That is the idea. Fifty apartments on each floor, that still will not be easy.”
“Twenty-five apiece,” he grinned.
They had parked beside a fence and near one of the large electric trams which took men to the bio-project, so there was little chance they had been seen from one of the upper floor windows. “I will go in first,” she said, setting down her gun, pulling her hair back and putting it up quickly in a litde bun. “Follow me after five minutes or so. Keep your gun handy, but we cannot kill Gruber, just in case this leads us nowhere. Do you understand?”
“Any chance my buyuf you dinner?”
Natalia looked down at her shoes and her ruined stockings and then up into his face. She laughed, telling him, “If this helps me to kill Deitrich Zimmer, Bob Jessup, I will buy dinner for you. And that’s a promise.”
Eight
The man had evidendy been raking his discomfort, but when Michael Rourke moved his father’s Zippo lighter back and forth a few feet from the man’s eyes, the pupils did not track the flame. Temporarily at least, the man who, with his five associates, would have killed them was, indeed, blind.
Paul and Michael exchanged glances. Then Michael asked the question that had been eating away inside of him. “Were you part of the attack on the hospital? Tell us everything.”
“I had rwthing to do with the attack on your family, Herr Rourke. Believe me. I was hired by Herr Doctor Zimmer to get you to follow us here and kill you. That is all!”
“What’s Zimmer planning and where is he?” Paul insisted. The man cleared his throat. After a
long pause, he said, “You must promise me that you will protect me from Zimmer. You must promise me-“
“If you help us, well help you. What if we brought you back to New Germany and got your eyes fixed and made a big deal out of how you told us everything you could about Zimmer and his movement, hmrn? What do you think Zimmer would do to you then? What’s your name, anyway?”
“Decker, Horst Decker.”
“All right. Decker. Stop wasting everybody’s time. What’s it gonna be?” Michael asked.
“Yes, yes, all right. But you must-“
“We’ll see you get protection,” Paul told him.
In the light from the lamp, as Michael moved it closer, he could see the man’s face, sweat dripping down it despite the cool wind here. This was sheer terror, plain and simple.
“Herr Doctor Zimmer was leaving for the place called Eden.” Michael Rourke swallowed hard. So did the Nazi. “One of the Herr Doctor’s lieutenants talks a great deal when he drinks. Herr Doctor Zimmer was going there. But that is all I know, Sirs.”
“Eden,” Paul said slowly. “The perfect name, and the perfect place for a snake.”
Michael Rourke only nodded, his wound hurting …
The whole evening was turning into an incident out of some piece of lurid hardboiled detective fiction, and ruefully Natalia realized she was the babe. When she heard the shot, she drew her gun from her purse and started running across the parking area and toward the front door of the four-story building. The shot was very light, from a medium caliber pistol, but very-close.
She looked back once. Bob Jessup was mounting his motorcycle, not coming after her. “The hell with him,” Natalia said under her breath, the sound of his motorcycle rising behind her.
She saw the blonde with the tight black vinyl skirt. Where was Armand Gruber?
The woman was running from the foyer, into the dirt parking lot. Natalia shouted to her in German, “Stop where you are!”
