by Ahern, Jerry
one-half centuries after the fact.
It was taken from among the weapons belonging to the Brigand bikers who had attacked the surviving crew and passengers of the jetliner aboard which he and Paul had spent the Night of the War. Aside from considerable wear on the finish, both gun and magazines were in pristine condition, not only well cared-for but very recently checked with the very latest analytical equipment for any sign of metal fatigue, stress fractures, etc. During World War II, considerable numbers of Nazi weapons were turned out in inferior condition, because of the exigencies of the struggle. This gun, however, was as perfect as if it had been made commercially. And MP-40s were among the finest submachineguns ever designed.
Made for the Nazis, the property and fighting companion of a Jew for more than six hundred years, it now guarded John Rourke as he entered the sanctum sanctorum of the new Nazi power which threatened the Earth with a war which might well be the last.
At close range, it could spray more lead than any other weapon Rourke had at his disposal. He had left Paul with his Heckler & Koch rifle in temporary trade.
“Not that I’m concerned about you, John, of course, but I’ve really become attached to this gun,” Paul had told him as they clasped hands.
“I never thought otherwise,” Rourke told his friend, that time the smile genuine.
The purpose of this visit under flag of truce was twofold: to see Sarah, making certain she was well; to be briefed on the details of Deitrich Zimmer’s mad bargain for her life—the retrieval of the remains of Adolf Hitler.
There were identical doors at the end of the corridor, black enameled with brass handles and hinges. Of the inverted Christian door design the larger, upper panel of each had inset at its center the swastika, surrounded by a circlet of oak leaves, both in brass, gleaming.
The junior officer at Rourke’s side knocked on the door at the left.
From within, the voice of Deitrich Zimmer responded, “Yes!”
The junior officer opened the door inward, Rourke stepping past him and inside, Rourke’s right fist tighter on the butt of Paul’s Schmiesser than before.
“So, Herr Doctor General! You trust me!” Zimmer stood at the center of a large conference room, the walls and floor and ceiling of the same synth-marble, in the same glowingly dark pattern. His hands rested on his hips and, as if costumed for some theatrical production, he wore riding jodhpurs above high, brightly shined boots. The trousers were black, the shirt which covered his upper body, white. Despite his age, Deitrich Zimmer was physically impressive in the extreme. “Welcome!”
“Trust you? Hardly. Where’s my wife?”
“Ahh, but first things first.” Zimmer was so far away that he needed almost to shout, Rourke the same. Zimmer started walking toward the furthest wall, Rourke—almost ambling—moving after him. “Your choice of antique firearms is interesting, Rourke. German, isn’t it? From the Third Reich?”
“You Nazis did build to last—in some things.”
Zimmer laughed, stopping before a small panel in the wall, folding it out. Within it was a console, and Zimmer was already working switches and dials as
Rourke stopped to stand beside him. Their eyes met, and Rourke was at once surprised to see that, indeed, Zimmer had two eyes. One had been sacrificed in order to make it appear that he had died instead of his brother. But the second eye seemed real enough. Rourke didn’t really want to know how it had been obtained.
The wall here was opening, huge panels—synth-marble was amazingly strong and could be plate-glass thin—pulling aside to reveal a video screen of vast proportions. Already a picture was appearing on the screen. “You will see your wife, Frau Rourke, very shortly. And, to show that I am not without feeling, I will afford you a few moments alone with her, more I daresay than you would afford me with my son, Martin. Cyanide gas! I would not have thought you so diabolical, my old adversary.”
“My son thought of it,” Rourke said truthfully, smiling.
“Perhaps he does not embrace ideals so lofty as your own. A Rourke, a realist. What a disarming thought.”
“He’s just less trusting,” Rourke told Zimmer.
Appearing on the video screen—John Rourke stepped back in order to see it more fully and in better resolution—was a mountain chain, the slopes, the peaks, the valleys within, all snow-covered. “It is perpetual glacier here.”
The screen, once fully exposed, was nearly the size of the original Cinerama screens John Rourke remembered from his youth. In those days, of course, three projectors, working in crossfire side to side and down the middle for the center screen, operated in synch in order to give a motion picture size wider than any film stock. Rourke recalled thrilling to Lowell Thomas travelogues, promising himself that someday he too would see the exotic places of the world, never realizing what that promise would be like when it was fulfilled. “What is it you really want, Zimmer?”
Zimmer laughed. “I am that transparent?”
“No, just the situation. If this is such an easy trick, why don’t you send some of your Alpine troops in there and just get the body out of cold storage and bring it back and start whittling? Figuratively speaking, of course.”
Zimmer laughed again, almost sincerely it seemed. “There is a problem, potentially, with which none of my men can effectively deal. There is a society within the mountain.”
“A society,” Rourke repeated. “And?”
“The remains of the Fuhrer are within the mountain complex, but I do not know where. Hence, I cannot blast my way inside with a large force, because the result might be the very destruction of that which I seek. For six hundred and twenty-five years, what might be a very American civilization—in the sense of your age—has survived, and, it would seem, flourished in almost total secrecy within. The only hope for discovering the location of the Fuhrer’s remains, then safely getting them away, is likely to be blending in with this society. My men, unaided, cannot do that. You, on the other hand, and even the Jew, Rubenstein, are the most ideally suited men on the face of the earth.” And Zimmer laughed again, clearly struck by some irony. “I am giving you the trump card, as I believe it is said, in the trade for your wife. You will have not only my son and heir, the future leader of the world, but the
man whose remains are to me the single most important thing on the face of the Earth,”
John Rourke, as his eyes surveyed the aerial video of the glaciated mountain range—forbidding was too mild a word for it—realized that Zimmer, with his proposed unholy bargain, had perhaps given him more than a trump card, the proverbial Ace-in-the-hole. If Zimmer discovered that Martin was, in fact dead, there would still be a chance to get Sarah alive without losing Michael.
The mountains, weathered by six more centuries of unremitting natural assault, were less soft in shape than their origin would have suggested, craggy and rugged in the extreme. Already, Rourke had picked what he thought might have been the logical location for the original entrance, but it was only a guess. “I’ll need all the intelligence data you can get me. Everything. Nothing held back. And if you insist on dispatching your own troops, they will have to be under my orders. If they are not, they can’t kill me—you know that—or you’ll never get what you want. But, I can kill them. We won’t be going into that mountain for a bloodbath, merely to get the job done. Understood?”
Deitrich Zimmer smiled again. “I might grow to like you, Herr Doctor General.”
“I sincerely hope not.”
Zimmer shook his head, laughed almost good-naturedly. “You must understand, of course, that when this temporary alliance of ours has served its purpose, the truce is over.”
“This isn’t a truce, Dr. Zimmer; it’s merely the blink of an eye. I never fancied selling my soul, nor even loaning it out. I’ll see you dead if I can.”
“I admire your candor, Rourke. You know that my feelings are the same.”
“We’ll need to preserve the body. After so long, exposure to the elements might cause insta
ntaneous disintegration.”
“Indeed,” Zimmer nodded, stroking his chin as though he wore an invisible beard. “I have planned for that. I have planned for everything. Any weapons, equipment, whatever—personnel!”
“An expert in cryogenics, I should think, would be in order, and an ordinary mortician. And a doctor, besides myself. Those personnel and whoever else you feel you have to send along to watch.”
“My entire resources are at your disposal, Rourke.” And Zimmer extended his hand.
Rourke didn’t take it.
Zimmer didn’t move his hand. “Not to friendship, but to a gentleman’s agreement.”
“Not that you’re a gentleman,” but John Rourke, shifting his left hand to the butt of one of the Scoremasters he had cocked and locked—faster but not his usual carry—released his grip on the pistol grip of the submachinegun. “To your honoring the bargain.”
“To that, then. And now, you would like to see your wife. We can resume with the details later.” “Yes. Later,” John Rourke almost whispered.
Twenty-seven
Greater love had no man for another, Annie realized. Paul, as her father had left, merely said, “If we must do this thing, we will do it.”
She put her arms around him, held him, let him hold her.
Her husband would, with the enlightened self-interest of a man who valued friendship and honor above what was to him personally despicable, go forth to rescue the body of the man who had nearly been the executioner of his people—had caused the deaths of six million Jews, some perhaps his relations, however distant—the man who would have exterminated every Jew on the face of the Earth had he triumphed.
Paul would do this because Paul was John Rourke’s friend.
Annie Rubenstein stood silently at her husband’s side, waiting for her father to return. And her right hand held tight in her husband’s left, she clutched the hand of a man who defined to her the heroic and the good …
Natalia Anastasia Tiemerovna lit a cigarette.
It was amusing to her that the lieutenant who had been left in charge of the Alpine troops seemed so fascinated with her. Yet she knew it was not her beauty—to have denied that she possessed beauty would have been fatuous—but rather her sex. Nazis believed that women were inherently inferior to men, of course. In that way, the Communist regime in which she had risen to the rank of major, had been little different. Women were treated as inferiors. Her own successes—those not attributed to the devil incarnate who had been her husband—were the stuff which would have made a man a colonel at the very least. Until the Night of the War, she had been a captain only, and that in all probability as a sop to her uncle, one of the Soviet Union’s most powerful generals.
She had watched her uncle, Ishmael Varakov, as he watched the dissolution of the Soviet Empire.
The disastrous warfare with Afghan rebels—the Soviet Viet Nam—and the economic crises which followed, then the revolution, growing, unstoppable, except by men like her husband, Vladmir Karamatsov. He had the formula: death.
Then the rising tide of the independence movement within Turkmen and Uzbek, and the weapons and munitions and medical supplies and food which fed it from Afghanistan. Then—
Natalia flicked ashes from the tip of her cigarette.
Who had precipitated the missile strikes that Night of the War so long ago which changed everything for ever?
Would she ever know?
Natalia inhaled, exhaled quickly, stared back at the young lieutenant who marvelled at her so.
The Blackbird was invincible now.
A half-dozen men with assault rifles firing full auto in a random pattern from the street below her might kill it, but no missile could. The Spider Sevens could not be used at this altitude, nor could any conventional antiaircraft system, missile or shell, touch her. Of course, after she got her missiles delivered over Plant 234, she would have to try to make it out alive. That would be tricky.
She flew mere yards over the rooftops of Eden’s skyscrapers, her avoidance scanning systems on alert for the mundane things which could destroy the Blackbird—a radio broadcast tower, a satellite-receiving array, a rising spire. Well away yet, using magnification on her forward scanning video, there was a vast parking lot visible. There were loading docks.
Emma Shaw’s headsup before her was flashing the primary target entry points.
Gorgeous announced, rather sanctimoniously she thought, “Commander Shaw, missiles are armed for firing at pretargeted coordinates and coded launch sequence program has commenced.”
“Keep me informed, Gorgeous.”
“Yes, Commander.”
These days, being a fighter pilot was like being a delivery driver with a dangerous route. An entire pod of missiles was pretargeted to the coordinates they
needed to strike. Laser guided and video monitored, all she had to do was get their launching pad, her Blackbird, into exactly the right position for launch and they would do the rest themselves. It would have been possible to autopilot her way from this point, but it went against her grain to do so, any implication that a machine was somehow more judgementally capable than a human being offensive by its very nature.
Seconds only until target positioning.
“Final stage of firing sequence ready to commence Commander,” Gorgeous told her. “At your mark.”
If she’d machined it in, the thing wouldn’t have been at her mark, merely when the navigational computer, and the weapons computer got their “heads” together. But that was so sterile. Some pilots, of course, preferred it that way, easing their consciences when it came to the responsibility for the missiles their aircraft launched.
Emma Shaw didn’t like death on her hands, but there was no sense in playing morality games, either.
She brought the Blackbird’s nose up, on perfect level for the preprogrammed altitude the weapons would require. Far below and to her left, off the portside, lay Plant 234.
A glance to the headsup, Gorgeous almost panting in her ear, Emma Shaw intoned, “Five … four … three … two… Mark!”
Firing was instantaneous, the video display at the center of her headsup activating in the same microsecond. She watched, because that was the prudent thing (and, of course, what she was supposed to do). The video display was off the lead missile, whose function was to blow a hole in the target, the principal damage to the site to be done by the follow-ups. The video display from the first missile automatically cut off just prior to detonation, the display picking up video signals now from the last of the missiles.
The first missile detonated, blowing out a segment of Plant 234’s roof and west wall. Contrails from the following missiles were lost inside the smoke and dust cloud. Then, one after the other, in perfect series, explosions began rocking the structure, to its very foundations, it seemed as, one after the other, the missiles impacted.
Had she blinked, she would have missed the final seconds of video as the last of the missiles closed on Plant 234, or what remained of it. The building was folding in on itself, great billowing mushroom-shaped clouds of black smoke rising, enveloping it.
Video display was gone and, in the same instant, Gorgeous announced, “Firing sequence complete, Commander,” and Emma Shaw banked the Blackbird into a steep rolling dive to starboard.
Twenty-Eight
There were no obvious observation devices in the spacious, windowless sickroom. The room was pleasantly lit, the lighting’s source hard to determine. For a moment, John Rourke intentionally observed these little details, avoiding looking at his wife there on the bed.
But he turned to look at her.
Sarah Rourke was five foot seven, not extraordinarily tall for a woman of these days, yet tall enough, and definitely tall for a woman born more than six and one-half centuries ago. But she looked very, very small, very fragile, covers—a white sheet and yellow waffle-knit blanket—pulled up to just under her little chin. Her chest rose and fell regularly, evenly. John Rourke walked over to the bed,
let Paul’s Schmiesser—Paul had called the MP-40 that for so long, Rourke subconsciously thought of it by that name himself— fall to his side on its sling.
Sarah’s head was bandaged near its crown, her auburn hair—very long and still possessed of the three
gray hairs she had almost always had—visible beneath and in stark contrast to the white bandages.
Her eyelids were closed and she looked either very peacefully asleep or drugged, because they did not flutter. She was, Rourke knew, the latter. Deitrich Zimmer, her physician, had told him so and there was no reason to doubt that.
There was a solitary tube up her left nostril, and there was a solitary IV tube connected to her left arm.
“Sarah.”
There was, of course, no response.
John Rourke sat on the side of the bed, reached beneath the covers and held her left hand. Her pulse was regular, strong.
He whispered hoarsely, “I’ll always love you,” as he closed his eyes against the tears which came now so uncontrollably…
Deitrich Zimmer would have considered himself inhuman had he not been moved. The optical fibers built into the very walls of the room allowed him to select any of various angles from which he could observe John Rourke sitting beside Sarah Rourke holding her hand, weeping.
Zimmer whispered to the vid-screens, “Soon she will be restored to you, my old enemy, as healthy and well as she ever was, only more so. Your wife will be perfect in every way for you and for me, but even more so for me.” And then he laughed. “You’ll find her a new woman.”
Twenty-Nine
The Eden fighter aircraft were upon her almost before Gorgeous was able to announce them. But in combat, one didn’t stand on protocol. Emma Shaw banked the Blackbird into a barrel roll, the three leaders—they were the only ones of the enemy squadron close enough to get at her for the next couple of seconds—overflying her. “Give me manual on my guns Gorgeous,” Emma Shaw hissed through clenched teeth as she pulled the Blackbird so rapidly out of the roll that for a split second she almost wondered if her kidneys would continue on down to the deck.
