by Ahern, Jerry
Rourke rose at his full height now, tiredness forgotten for the instant. His eyes peered into the grayness— another footprint and another, and a similar track, only slightly larger, partially obscured one of the originals.
“Two men running, either away from something or chasing each other. The footgear though.”
Natalia stood beside him, a small flashlight in her left hand, its beam aimed toward the snow. “That is not Russian. Or German.”
“No—there’s somebody else out here.”
“That’s impossible, John—I think—I don’t know.”
John Rourke nodded only. He wanted a cigar but not badly enough to remove his gloves and open his coat to get one.
Rourke instead told Natalia, “Shut off the flashlight. Let’s follow these a while if you’re up to it.”
“All right,” she whispered.
Rourke looked at her. “You sure?”
SIT’ “
1 m sure.
He nodded, then started ahead, following the footprints slightly higher into the rocks now, the lead prints and ones pursuing—it had to be that—veering off left, in the same general direction as the tracks of the Soviet APC. The lead tracks were becoming more erratic now, the pursuing tracks longer strided than before—whoever was chasing the first person was getting closer, Rourke surmised.
A fall—a hasty movement to get up—running on.
Rourke hissed to Natalia. “Your PPK/S with the silencer—get it out.”
“Yes.”
Rourke reached to his right hip for the Python, easing it slowly from the leather, moving ahead more slowly now. The tracks rose along a ridgeline within the ridgeline they now followed.
John Rourke froze in his tracks—a sound, a sound like something he hadn’t heard for five centuries. Animal—almost. A scream like something wounded.
Natalia stepped closer to him.
Looking at her for an instant, Rourke isolated the sound as it came again, the shock of hearing it so great that the direction of its origin hadn’t registered with him the first time.
He broke into a dead run across the snow, Natalia behind him, running in the snowshoes never easy, but
more difficult because of the unevenness of the terrain, running along an embankment’s course, then up.
Rourke stopped. Two men nearly naked, their skins rough and leathery, their bodies strangely non-human, but very human, clad in strips of bark woven into ill-fitting tunics. One of them was powerfully built, the other slight of build, but wiry—they were locked in what had to be combat to the death, both men grasping, fighting over a Russian assault rifle.
“Here—” And Rourke stabbed the Python toward Natalia, taking the PPK/S from her right fist, half skidding, half running down the snow-covered embankment.
No silencer was perfectly soundless—this one on the PPK/S wasn’t either. Rourke fired the pistol into the ground between the feet of the two men, both of them jumping back, Rourke’s eyes tracking the assault rifle—it was in the hands of the larger of the two men. Rourke worked the PPK/S’s safety to drop the hammer and tossed the gun airborne, “Natalia!”
Only amateurs or fools in movies threw guns around, especially loaded ones—amateurs or fools or people too desperate to have the time to do anything else.
Rourke launched himself forward, diving for the midsection of the bigger of the two men, Rourke’s left shoulder impacting the wall of muscle that was the man’s chest and abdomen, the assault rifle flying from the big man’s hands into the snow.
He could hear the pop of Natalia’s silenced pistol again—there was no time to look to see why. The big man’s fists hammered down across Rourke’s back, Rourke not letting go, his gloved hands welding to the big man’s hips, Rourke throwing his weight left and down, the big man going down with him, Rourke on
top.
He caught a whiff of breath—it was foul. Rourke’s right fist snaked upward, into position and then laced the big man across the jaw.
Rourke felt his knuckles almost break.
The head he’d struck snapped back, the teeth bared now, a hand crushing at Rourke’s throat, a hand with a grip like a bench vise.
Rourke’s right knee smashed up—if it was human and he was sure it was, then it had to have testicles— the big man howled as Rourke’s knee impacted and Rourke felt the squish of flesh. The man’s left hand grabbed at Rourke’s chest, closed over a handful of arctic gear and Rourke was airborne, crashing down into the snow, rolling, but awkwardly because of the snowshoes.
The big man was up, doubled half forward, Rourke to his feet, breathing hard—the big man charged like a bull. Rourke sidestepped, wanting to kick, unable to do so with the snowshoes, instead launching his full body weight against the man’s right side in a slam, hurtling the bigger man down. Rourke’s right elbow snapped back, into the side of the head, then again into the neck. Rourke came to his knees now, balling both fists together and clubbing them downward and across the man’s jawline, the knife edges of both hands together tight like the business end of a sledgehammer.
The big man’s body sagged—to be on the safe side, Rourke rolled back and away, grabbing for the Gerber Mkll at his belt. No pistol was near enough, the rifles lost in the snow as he’d first dove toward the man.
“I have him covered, John.”
Rourke edged back on his knees along the snow, climbed to his feet. He sheathed the Gerber as he looked around.
Natalia smiled—he couldn’t see her mouth for the scarf which covered most of her face, the sparkle in her blue eyes all that showed the smile at all. “His name is Jea—and he speaks a kind of French that sounds like what you Americans used to call Hog Latin.”
“Pig Latin,” Rourke automatically corrected. And he looked at the slighter of the two men, at the woven bark clothing, the bark strip footgear. “Enchante,” John Rourke bowed. “Je suis John Rourke, mon ami.
The man smiled—sort of.
Chapter Nine
Michael Rourke had gotten no sleep.
The keffiyeh had been a good idea, the sun already hot and not mid-morning yet. He lay prone on a ridge of dune more than a half mile distant from the Great Pyramid, Doctor Maria Leuden surprisingly durable enough to be beside him. Michael Rourke had used a bayonet fitted German assault rifle stabbed into the sand as a “tent pole” and used the jellaba as a lean-to rather than aerobe, huddled under it except for the portion of his head and hands needed for using his binoculars, huddled under it with Maria Leuden. Michael Rourke’s eyes studied the surveyor’s transit at the left side of the wall of the Pyramid which faced him.
“They’re about ready to put it into position.”
“I hope they hurry—it is very hot.”
Michael Rourke looked away from the binoculars and at Maria Leuden beside him. “I’m sorry if I’m a little abrupt.”
“I understand it is a family trait.”
“Touche,” he smiled. “But—well—we’ve been
fighting this war longer than you and your people. This thing with Karamatsov—it’s not a military action to us—to me. It’s a personal thing. He’s almost killed my father and mother and sister and Paul Rubenstein and what he’s done to his wife—death is too good for him. What he did to my wife—” “And to you.”
“You mean gut shooting me and leaving me to bleed to death?”
“I don’t mean that—not that.”
Michael looked away, through the binocular tubes, focusing one level of his attention on the surveyor’s transit he watched. Captain Otto Hammerschmidt would be watching the other one. Another level of his consciousness focused on Maria Leuden’s words. “He’s robbed you of the only personal life you’ve ever known. You were always dislocated from humanity— that is clear. I have read our data on the Rourke family. Forced to be an adult from your earliest childhood, forced to be responsible, to be competent. Never a chance to release, to be off guard. And then finally, that one night—you let your guard down a little. Or you believe that at least�
�and your wife and unborn baby were killed.”
Without looking at her, he almost whispered, “I see that you and Doctor Munchen took the same correspondence course in psychiatry—” Correspondence ? Course ?”
“Through the mail—but you don’t have any mail, do you? I got mail when I was a little kid. Christmas cards and birthday cards from relatives. And I bought some books at school once and I wound up on a mailing list for somebody and I used to get stuff mailed to me that you’d just look at and throw away. My mother told me there were things called junk mail—things mailed to you that you didn’t want to
bother reading but the mailman had to deliver anyway and you’d just throw them in the wastebasket unopened. But now there isn’t any mail at all.”
“Do you remember what it was like to be a child?”
Michael closed his eyes. “Yeah—we rode horseback a lot, and sometimes it was cold, and sometimes it was raining and lots of times Momma wouldn’t eat because she’d tell us she wasn’t hungry and after a while I realized it wasn’t that—just that the food was running low. There was a dog I played with on a farm, but the farm was attacked by madmen and there was fire and I was using a rifle a lot and I killed people and this older woman there—she screamed a lot. And I learned a lot about the human body—I saw human bodies bleed after I shot into them or stabbed a knife into them. And I never got frightened of seeing dead people, because I saw so many of them. I saw dogs fighting over half-rotted human arms and legs. So— ahh—”
“You are hiding from me. Why?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You are attracted to me—as I am to you. But you feel that your wife has just died and to allow yourself to feel anything for me would be wrong somehow. True?”
“I don’t know.” And mercifully, they began to adjust the surveyor’s transit. “Look—they’re getting ready.” He had learned while watching the Germans building their base outside Mt. Hekla in Iceland that a surveyor’s transit was no longer as simple a device as it had been in the books of which he had first heard of the device, as it had been in films where he had seen one employed. His father had a transit and John Rourke had used it to lay out the garden plot outside the Retreat. It had seemed a needless formality to Michael at the time, but he realized now that his
father had been trying to whet his or Annie’s appetite to learn its use. Michael had obliged. So had Annie.
But these devices used no ordinary light and no simple eyeballing of measurement—if the Soviet transits were like those used by the Germans, and outwardly they appeared to be, they emitted a measured beam of laser light and for an operation such as this, where two transits would be used to locate an exact spot, each transit would give a diode readout for precise distance and when the beams crossed, give the readout at the nexus of the beams. Using such a system, their potential for error was slightly less than a centimeter at a mile, again judging by the German counterparts.
He had first intended to monitor the positions of the transit, but had in the moments just after dawn devised a still better plan. Mortars were in place that would fire smoke rounds on cue and near the mortars but not too near were German transits, remotely operated which would lock onto the nexus of the Russian transit beams and pinpoint the exact spot for the Germans.
There would be a small show of force by German gunships, then the gunships would flee to the south, a direction that would lead any Soviet pursuit craft away from the German camp and the location of whatever it was Karamatsov had come here to the desert to find.
Lieutenant Milton Schmidt would lead this element, even picking up the mortar crews just to add icing to the cake, hopefully giving the illusion that the smoke was preparation for a hit and run attack. If the secondary laser beams of the German transits were sighted, the ruse might be discovered. But there was a more than substantial chance they would not be.
After the skirmish, with the Germans in withdrawal, Karamatsov would be free to seek out his
prize with even greater urgency since there was a verifiable enemy presence.
A voice in his ear through the radio set he wore, the earpiece leading up from the radio unit at his belt. “Ready,” the voice of Otto Hammerschmidt came through.
*‘Ready,” Michael whispered, taking the set from his belt, depressing the push-to-talk button and whispering in it.
There was the possibility that the Russians would have heard the transmissions—but even if they had, it would be unlikely they would have the time to act.
Michael Rourke had learned that life was not a gamble, but a carefully calculated risk—he could not recall his father ever putting it that way, but it was the way his father lived.
Michael reached up to the rifle, the rifle propping the jellaba over them against the sun. He tugged the sheathed bayonet free of the material, the jellaba collapsing over them.
He rolled onto his back, squinting against the indirect light of the sun.
He removed the bayonet from the rifle and handed the bayonet to Maria Leuden. “Here—have a knife. Have a rifle as a matter of fact.” He shrugged into the jellaba and refocused the binoculars across the sand, toward the Great Pyramid. The laser transits were emitting light in the red, intermittently.
He could see flashes, like bloodied shadows as vagrant gusts of wind would drift dust-devils of sand around them.
The timing of the smoke would be critical—but the Germans had a device that served as a light agitation sensor. At least they had explained it as such. To Michael Rourke it sounded like a fancy term for a laser light detector.
He hoped. He watched.
He could hear Maria Leuden breathing beside him.
“Why haven’t they fired yet?”
“It’s not time yet—be patient. Patience is a virtue.”
“But—”
“Just watch.” Michael Rourke just watched. When the battle started, he would move, but not yet.
There was a flash of red stronger than before—he heard a whooshing sound and a dull thudding explosion.
There was a puff of heavy gray smoke, then suddenly clouds of the smoke billowed across the near face of the pyramid, and even with the naked eye, Michael Rourke could see the shafts of red laser light as they fired pencil thin lines across the expanse of desert and to the west.
“Have it!” The voice in his ear was Captain Hammerschmidt’s.
Michael grabbed at Maria Leuden’s right arm, half dragging her to her feet and after him, running, skidding, nearly falling along the windward side of the dune and down to the waiting SM-4, the Jeeplike vehicle’s engine already running, Hammerschmidt’s sergeant at the wheel. “Jump—quick!” He half lifted Maria Leuden into the rear seat, snatching the German assault rifle from her as he got one foot inside the front passenger seat and shouted to the sergeant, “Schnell!” }
“Schnell!” the non-com laughed, stomping the accelerator pedal, the SM-4 spraying waves of sand behind its rear wheels as it slipped left, then started forward along the length of the dune. Hammerschmidt’s voice in Michael’s ear again. He was giving coordinates, Michael relaying them to Maria Leuden—a map flapped like a sail in her hands, in
the slipstream around the open SM-4.
“I’ve got it—a little over two kilometers—that way, sergeant!” And she gestured to the left of their line of travel.
“Yes, Fraulein Doctor,” the man shouted back over the wind, cutting the wheel hard left, the SM-4’s rear end fishtailing. Gunfire, mortar fire—the diversionary attack of Lieutenant Schmidt, fireballs rising in the distance near the Pyramid. When Michael Rourke had broached his plan, Maria Leuden had insisted on one thing—that the Great Pyramid in no way be harmed. With modern German surveying devices and x-raying techniques. Its mysteries might finally be yielded and to destroy it would have been doubly wrong. Michael had agreed.
He twisted in the seat, looking past her now at the billowing smoke behind them. Overhead now, German gunships crossed low over the dunes, missi
les firing. But the Soviet force was too large for the attack to be more than a gesture now.
“To the left—about thirty degrees, sergeant.”
“Yes, Fraulein Doctor!” The wheel cut again, the rear end slipping in the soft sand, digging in, skidding left then right, then the SM-4 accelerating.
Michael peeled away the keffiyeh, letting the wind catch at his hair, running his hands back through it, then stuffing the keffiyeh down inside his open shirt front as he slipped his arms from the jellaba.
He reached into the back seat—his M-16. He drew it up, across his lap, resisting the urge to cycle the action and chamber the top round off the thirty-round magazine already in place—in the bouncing and jostling SM-4, the chance of accidental discharge would be too great.
“About five degrees to your right, sergeant!”
“Yes, Fraulein Doctor,” and the SM-4 skidded its
rear end left more than the front end turning right, the waves of sand around it again as the tires dug in, then the sensation of being compressed against the seat back.
On their right, he could see another of the SM-4s— it would be Hammerschmidt coming. To the west, he could see a line of the German mini-tanks his father had first told him of, that he had seen for himself the first time in the desert here the previous evening. They were purposely cutting oblique angles to the target area picked up by the German laser transits, to avoid leaving tracks that the desert winds might not quickly enough erase. And it was imperative to be out of range of Soviet gunships when they went off in pursuit of Lieutenant Schmidt’s force.
The sound of explosions and gunfire was more distant now, the billowing smoke of the explosions, the occasional black and orange fireballs merely specks on the horizon. He glanced toward the SM-4’s speedometer—approximately one hundred kilometers per hour—Michael mentally translated to miles—something between fifty-five and sixty was rough but good enough.
“We’re almost there—it should be that dish-shaped valley to the east of us.”
He glanced back to Maria Leuden—the German assault rifle was across her lap and in the sash around her waist was thrust the sheathed bayonet.
