Survivalist - 24 - Blood Assassins

by Ahern, Jerry

  “The Fuhrer’s remains were packed in ice and frozen, then the block of ice surrounding him was cut away from the rest. It was desired that this block of ice should never melt. A frozen storage locker was specially constructed, built to accomodate the block of ice. The storage locker was closed, then set inside a room. The locker and the room were refrigerated electrically, utilizing a closed system. The storage locker and the room were separately powered, so that in the event that one unit somehow failed, the other would continue on. The room itself was fitted with a backup system which would be actuated should the primary system fail. The facility was part of a larger complex.

  “In the years following, in the early days of the so-called Cold War between your country, Herr Doctor Rourke, and yours, Fraulein Major Tiemerovna, the mountain facility was expanded, becoming the first of the Presidential war retreats. In many ways, it was the best, although in the years following, the location was changed several times.

  “Too close to too many A targets,” John Rourke supplied, his cigar out, but still clamped tight in his teeth.

  “Indeed,” Zimmer nodded. “The facility was utilized for the storage of strategic materials.” “How do you know all this?” Annie asked him. Zimmer started to answer, but John Rourke answered for him. “After the war, the United States brought over a considerable number of German scientists, some of them former Nazis, but seen as potentially useful despite their previous affiliation. Evidently, at least one of those affiliations was not a previous one.”

  “Bravo,” Zimmer enthused. “Martin’s superior intelligence, indeed, is in no small part thanks to yours, Herr Doctor.”

  Rourke said nothing.

  Paul asked, “Then why did you guys wait until now?”

  Zimmer did not ignore the question. “Following what has come to be known as the Night of the War, there was of course no opportunity for centuries. The Leader, the man whom the revolution led by the despised Deiter Bern overthrew, was planning that his spiritual antecedent’s body should be recovered, and accorded the veneration which it so richly deserved.”

  “Pardon me while I puke,” Paul observed.

  Zimmer went on. “When Bern and his stooges seized control of New Germany, several of our leader’s most trusted men, myself among them, were able to escape or go into hiding. The records concerning the repository of the Fuhrer’s remains went with us.”

  “Why now?” Paul asked again.

  “Yeah!” Annie echoed.

  “In large part thanks to your mother, young woman.” Annie started to speak, didn’t. Rourke looked away from her, back into Zimmer’s

  eyes. “You see,” Zimmer continued, his voice like that of a patient schoolteacher explaining to a rather obtuse group of students something that should have been simply grasped, “Adolf Hitler’s remains were safe where they were. War is coming. Why risk their destruction? Unless there were something positive to be gained. And, because of the work which I accelerated in order to effect the operation on Sarah Rourke, saving her life, and Generaloberst Mann, in order to control him, I now have the ability to utilize the Fuhrer’s remains to fulfill his dreams.”

  “Some would call them nightmares,” Rourke supplied.

  “Many great prophets have been destroyed by those whom it was their intention to help, to save Jesus, the—”

  Paul took a step closer to Zimmer. “As you pointed out, I’m a Jew. But what you’re about to say is still a sacrilege.”

  Zimmer shrugged it off, went on. “As you will. With the Fuhrer’s DNA, and thanks to the surgical skills I have at last perfected, I can complete the work which I have already begun on Martin, altering those aspects of him which I could not have hoped before to alter. He will not just bear some few of the Fuhrer’s genes, distilled and weakened over the centuries, but he will become the Fuhrer. Adolf Hitler will be reborn. You will see to that or Sarah Rourke will be treated very badly indeed.” And Zimmer looked back toward his vehicle. “Projector!”

  John Rourke followed Zimmer’s eyes, Rourke’s hands reaching toward his guns as a panel within the front of the vehicle opened.

  “Watch out, Annie,” Paul snapped, pushing Annie behind him, moving the muzzle of his submachinegun toward Zimmer.

  “No, Paul,” Rourke said, then looked back toward the opening in the vehicle.

  Then there was a flicker of light, but not like that of an energy weapon. And then, there in the air, as if floating, John Rourke saw his wife, in perfect dimension. She was as he had seen her in cryogenic sleep, at peace. There was a flicker, and he saw her from the waist up, tented from the forehead down. Another flicker.

  What he saw was inside her brain, microsurgery in progress.

  And there was a flicker again. And Sarah lay in a bed, a portion of her head bandaged, but her eyes open, as though looking at him.

  Her lips moved.

  Although there was no sound, he could tell what word she spoke. His name.

  “A hologram,” Natalia whispered, stating the obvious.

  “You see, I do not lie to you. Sarah Rourke lives.” Zimmer said almost cheerfully. “And thanks to me alone. Whether or not she continues to recover— and she recovers well—is entirely up to you. A small unit of men will be dispatched with you, to obey your orders to the letter until the remains of the Fuhrer are brought to me here. The traitor Mann is yours, ta accompany you, whatever. I have no further use for him unless you elect that following the return of the

  Fuhrer’s remains I should remove the control device within him.”

  Zimmer walked toward Mann, stared at him, but addressed what he said to John Rourke. “I can, always, order him to kill himself. You might like that, Herr Doctor. I understand the man is in love with your wife. If he kills himself, and if you succeed, of course, you can have her all to yourself. Whatever you wish. You will find me very much the romantic. Perhaps you still secretly yearn for this Russian woman, or that American pilot. We have spies who—”

  John Rourke was already moving, grabbing Zimmer by the shoulder, twisting him around. There was the clicking of energy weapon safeties. Zimmer shouted, “Nicht!” Then he looked John Rourke in the eye. “Strike a nerve?’

  “You think you’ve won.”

  “I have. I have read everything there is to know about you, Herr Doctor. Despite all your abilities, you are a slave to your emotions. You will get me my prize, you will return Wolfgang Mann to me in order that I may effect his salvation. You will hold out hope that I will restore both your wife and Mann to you, knowing full well that you perhaps destroy what little happiness might remain to you before my forces crush the Trans-Global Alliance and lay waste you and everyone like you. You are hopeless, Herr Doctor.

  “Brave, resourceful, but pitiably predictable. You will adhere to an abject moral code of right and wrong, no matter how ludicrous the application of that code, nor how self-destructive—you will not deviate from it. The troops I send with you are not to ensure your cooperation, but merely to assist you. Your cooperation is already assured.

  “I have won, and you would be a liar if you said otherwise.”

  John Rourke said nothing.

  Twenty-Five

  Her “Blackbird” shrieked over the confluence of Gulf and Atlantic waters where six centuries ago there had been peninsular Florida, before the earthquake following the Night of the War had severed it from the rest of the continent, and dropped it into the sea. Water rose on either side of her slipstream in whitecapped waves of enormous height, a deep trench opening below her fuselage. Her aircraft did not summon the Hand of God to part the waters, however; it only displaced the waters.

  Land now, and terrain following here was not nearly so beautiful, so spectacular, but terribly more dangerous. She was roughly equidistant between what had been Tallahassee and Jacksonville, but was now only among the most jagged coastlines she had ever observed. Early warning systems required her to climb ever so slightly, then bank almost into a right angle to the surface, flying nearly perpend
icular in order to minimize her aircraft’s profile to computer-linked sensors.

  Emma Shaw actuated her holographic targeting headsup, the display appearing in her windscreen. Plant 234, where Eden City under the direction of its Nazi masters used human beings as quality control test subjects in the fabrication of poison gas, was clear in every detail, however minute, looking exactly the way that it would when she overflew the real target.

  She would be killing some innocent people, she knew, those test subjects that the American agent James Darkwood had not freed, or those new test subjects brought in since his daring escape. And, doubtless, some of the personnel at the factory worked there involuntarily.

  But the mission had been designed, at greater risk to pilots like herself, in order to minimize civilian casualties.

  Eden pilots would not, at least officially, care.

  Emma Shaw had never ascribed to the philosophy first espoused by a Catholic bishop during the Albigensian Heresy in the Thirteenth Century: “Kill them all; the Lord will know his own.” Or, its more vernacular equivalent, “Kill ‘em all; let God sort ‘em out.”

  She was past the early warning sensors and returned to standard horizontal flight, approaching from the southeast toward what had been Montgomery, Alabama, almost to what had been Birmingham before she realized it at the classified speed at which the Blackbird flew.

  She punched up the course correction, vectoring through a steep bank to starboard toward the water-filled crater lake which had once been Atlanta.

  At Atlanta, she would dogleg the Blackbird almost directly south toward Eden City. Her wing consisted of nine pilots beside herself, each flying his or her own course to the objective. But only three of the aircraft— hers was one of the three—were set to penetrate within Eden City defense systems and strike Plant 234, the remaining seven pilots attacking those defense systems themselves.

  Plant 234, of course, was set in a residential area, the other factories in its immediate vicinity producers of innocuous necessities—processing milk, baking bread, one even engaged in the legitimate manufacture of pharmaceuticals.

  Lake Atlanta was nearly upon her, and she began the dogleg, paying scrupulous attention to course coordinates on the penetration program. Passing over the lake, once again whitecapped waves rose in her aircraft’s wake, as if somehow she flew between two magnificent waterfalls which were able to defy the force of gravity and flow upward.

  She backed off a little on the Blackbird’s speed, so she wouldn’t outrun her missiles should Eden City get up fighter aircraft after her—because, despite her stealth capabilities, Eden City defense systems would acquire her in—she ticked off seconds—five, make that four.

  There were the remains of what had once, she recalled from her topographic briefing, been a great civilian airfield, just south of the crater lake. A few isolated patches of runway surface were visible in strips among the mounds of wind-driven snow and sparse wintry vegetation and just before she blinked she thought she detected a few isolated framing ribs from an aircraft, lying there like the bones of a dinosaur.

  She was into the approach to Eden City’s Plant 234.

  In the same instant, her incoming alert buzzers started going off. Eden City had aquired the Blackbird sooner than she had thought. The irony of a United States Navy pilot flying a combat mission over enemy territory in Georgia, what had once been part of the United States, did not escape her.

  The voice of her battle’ computer was speaking through her helmet’s integral headset, its voice annoy-ingly calm. For female pilots, the voice was synthesized into sounding male, for male pilots the opposite. Perhaps that was to prevent chattiness, keep a certain edge to the discourse. If she had not known that the voice was not real and never had been, she could have fallen in love with it. “Commander Shaw, we have thirty-three seconds on my Mark to impact from the first incoming Spider Seven. I recommend evasive—”

  “Out-thought you again, Gorgeous.” She banked to starboard, rolled and started climbing. She could outfly her own missiles and she could outfly the Spider Sevens. Spider Sevens, possessed of eight (same number as the legs of a spider) multiple independently targeted warheads, surface to airs, were principally dangerous in the fact that their individual warheads functioned independently, and it seemed (in virtual reality computer simulations, at least), erratically. In order to successfully defeat a Spider Seven, one had to dive into it, bypassing the main body of the missile and threading one’s way among the eight warheads at almost the precise moment of release.

  Her aft video—she was climbing nearly vertically— displayed what she had feared, a second Spider Seven. The odds of defeating a single Spider Seven in an aircraft as fast as this were basically on her side. With two, however, if the Spider Sevens fired their warheads synchronously, the odds were suddenly and radically skewed the other way. Intentionally, she avoided calling up the numbers from Gorgeous. She didn’t need to know them in order to know that she was in trouble.

  “A second Spider Seven missile—” “I know, Gorgeous. You just relax and let me do the flying.”

  “Commander Shaw, I am required to inform you that the odds—” “Either shut up or shut down, Gorgeous.” “Yes, Commander.”

  She wouldn’t have liked a flesh and blood man that she could tell to shut up like that and he would do it.

  The Blackbird reached one thousand feet under operational ceiling, her hands torquing the yoke, her heart praying that the Blackbird’s hydraulics wouldn’t spasm, would respond. Out of the climb, now, almost into a flat spin, Emma Shaw throttled out into a full power dive.

  Gorgeous was saying, “Spider Seven One and Spider Seven Two in process of releasing independently targeted warheads, Commander Shaw.”

  “No shit, Sherlock—hang onto your microchips.”

  “I am monitoring, Commander.”

  “Don’t talk to me like that; you know it gets me all wet.” Despite her pressurized flight suit and the cabin’s engineering, sheer speed drove her lips back from her clenched teeth. Over the red-glowing nose of the Blackbird when the wisps of cloud parted for an instant, she could see two shapes suddenly turning into

  more shapes than she could count.

  “You are at thirteen percent over recommended maximum speed for—”

  “You know I’m slightly triskaidekaphobic—shut up.”

  “Yes, Commander.”

  Emma Shaw murmured the word wimp under her breath, but not so loudly that Gorgeous would hear her; after all, computers had feelings, too.

  The crew of an entire submarine could not be risked. With three volunteers, instead, Thorn Rolvaag descended over the subsurface volcanic vent in what was the world’s most high-tech state-of-the-art deep dive submersible, the Bathyscaph Woodshole named after the scientific center in Massachussetts which, centuries ago, had served as home base to what were then the best of the best in diving bells. An ordinary submarine could now descend to those earlier depths with relative impunity. But the pioneering efforts of the early explorers of the deep sea were undiminished.

  Thorn Rolvaag was reminded of the expression so popular among young people centuries ago (he had first encountered it in a sociology course he had not wished to take): “Bummer, dude!” This was, indeed, the very essence of the phrase; he was several thousand feet down within a trench unknown until recent decades and he could only see by means of video. No transparent material—even the best of alloy infused resin synth—could be trusted to withstand the pressures here, their per square inch rate almost incalculable in numbers that meant anything.

  But from his seat, he could summon up video from almost any possible direction. And it was what he saw below him, running through the center of the trench and almost due eastward with an almost negligible northward cant along the tropic of Cancer, which obsessed him.

  It was a volcanic vent, glowing so brightly that the video persistently flared white.

  An enormous crack, extending as far as the video eye could see.r />
  The Spider Sevens were in full release. Emma Shaw ignored Gorgeous as he ignored her. She kept telling him to shut up—maybe he had guts after all—and he kept telling her that she was redlining and that the odds against pulling out of her dive were growing exponentially.

  Her fists were locked onto the yoke, knuckles pounding within her pressurized gauntlets, heart pounding within her chest, her chest feeling the weight of the fast-approaching earth crushing in upon her. She would auger into the icy ground in under fifteen seconds at this rate of speed.

  In three she would be into the cluster of warheads.

  She’d rehearsed it in her mind, even done it once in a simulator (and racked up the simulator for three days), but there was no guarantee—

  There was a crack as she pulled up the Blackbird’s nose, airbraking, the aircraft shuddering around her.

  Through it, climbing the Shockwave she’d made as she changed course, rolling away from her in a wave. Levelled off. “Hang on, Gorgeous!” Full throttle.

  The warheads which had surrounded her at the instant she airbraked were detonating now from the shock wave.

  All she had to do was outrun the explosions. By then, she’d be back over Alabama and have to start the run on Eden City over again.

  Twenty-six

  John Rourke walked slowly, evenly.

  The corridor here was of polished synth-marble, the floor, the walls, the ceiling, black, marbled in white and in various shades of grey.

  As he passed them, black uniformed guards of the SS saluted him.

  The junior officer who walked at Rourke’s side remarked, “The Herr Doctor General must realize that rank, regardless of whether or not the man holding it is the enemy, is to be respected always.”

  Rourke glanced at the man and smiled, the smile a humoring one, not because there was anything about which to be happy.

  John Rourke’s right fist was on the butt of the gun he had borrowed from Paul Rubenstein. The gun had an interesting history. It was an original German MP-40 submachinegun, evidently brought to the United States as a war trophy by a returning World War IIGI. Whether or not the gun had ever been made legal was another question, but a moot point more than six and