by Ahern, Jerry
Three men from each side of the wall hurled ropes over the wall, then rappelled at high speed into the courtyard, First-Unit personnel drawing back toward the main gates, sucking the majority of the Chinese defenders after them. Feyedorovitch magazined another forty rounds up the well of his AKM-96. Light machine guns had opened up on both sides of the wall, firing into the courtyard now, Feyedorovitch moving along the perimeter to better observe the demolitions teams. As two men from each team put down suppressive fire, the third laid out long gray ropes of Synthex along the ten-meter-high walls of the domed powerhouse, setting detonators.
But Feyedorovitch’s eyes were drawn away from the demolition teams—three men near the gates, one dressed in the effeminate style of Chinese leisure attire, and two others in faded, light-blue, close-fitting trousers, military-looking boots, and ordinary shirts. The Chinese was wielding what looked to be a captured AKM-96, one of the other two men, his forehead high and his hair obviously thinning, firing some sort of antique firearm that looked like a hybrid of an assault rifle and a pistol. But he
fired it with devastating effect. The third man was the tallest of the three and the other two men flanked him, black pistols in either hand, firing as the three cut then-way toward the powerhouse. The man with the two pistols—his thick hair blowing in the heat wind from the fires which burned near the gates—looked extraordinarily fit, lean yet powerfully muscled.
The pistols in the third man’s hand had apparently been expended of ammunition. He stuffed them into the wide belt at his waist and drew another handgun, this unlike anything Feyedorovitch had ever seen, yet its nature unmistakable. It gleamed in the light from the fires and when it fired, a tongue of flame perhaps fifteen centimeters in length licked from the barrel, the muzzle of the pistol rising as if from the concussion of the shot. Feyedorovitch realized the pistol had to be of immense power because, even with his AKM-96 on full-auto mode, its muzzle rise was minimal. And neither of the two men with the Chinese were Chinese.
The taller of the two non-Chinese men, the one with the fantastically powerful handgun, was nearing the demolition teams now.
Feyedorovitch spoke into his helmet radio. “Demolition teams—what is apparently some special defensive unit is closing with you.” Feyedorovitch raised his AKM-96 to his right shoulder, finding the tall man with the spectacular handgun in the rifle’s optical sight. As Feyedorovitch squeezed the trigger, the tall man vanished from his scope and a member of one of the demolition teams took the burst.
Feyedorovitch cursed under his breath, finding the tall man again. He could see him, staring up at the wall. As Feyedorovitch readied to fire, he recoiled, a tongue of flame leaping toward him as if through the scope itself. A chunk of the wall beside him ripped upward as he fell back.
Feyedorovitch, on his knees now, hands shaking as they grasped his rifle, saw the tall man, a knife in his right
hand-thp Q-lpAminor nistnl inverted in Viie left hanrl litre
some sort of mighty hammer as he attacked the demolition team nearest him. His knife hacked into one man’s throat, the butt of his pistol lacerating another man beneath the lip of his battle helmet. The Chinese and the man with the thinning hair joined him now, closing with the second demolition team.
Feyedorovitch shouted into his helmet radio. “Unit Two and Unit Three—concentrate all fire on the three men attacking the demolition teams by the walls of the powerhouse I” But as he said it, Feyedorovitch realized it was too late, Chinese defense forces seeming to rally from their impending defeat, pushing Unit One forces back through the gates, other Chinese defenders taking up positions of cover and concentrating heavy automatic weapons fire on the walls.
Feyedorovitch looked once more to the Chinese man and his two unorthodox companions. They had AKM-96s now, firing at isolated groups of Spetznas still inside the compound, the effect of their fire devastating. With a dozen men like these, Feyedorovitch realized, he could do anything.
He spoke into his helmet radio. “First Unit. Withdraw to the assembly point and control the main entrance into the compound to cover withdrawal of Second Unit and Third Unit from the wall. First Unit—break off now!”
Feyedorovitch began moving toward the outer edge of the wall. Three men had turned another easy victory in the long history of lightning raids against the Chinese coastal deployments into the first defeat suffered at Chinese hands since the raids had begun.
He looked back once, saying into his helmet radio, “Second Unit. Disengage now! Third Unit—support Second Unit’s withdrawal with suppressive fire into the compound. Move out, Second Unit!”
Feyedorovitch hurled his rappelling rope over the wall, planting the Scatter Frequency Detonator, flipping the lock, setting the timer for three minutes, activating the detonator switch, then flipping back the lock into the closed position.
“Third Unit—disengage now! Move out!” He locked the carabiner on his utility belt into the modified figure-eight descender and started over the wall, slinging his rifle onto his shoulder to free both hands. He was over the side, his left gloved hand feeding rope, his right controlling the rate of descent. As he reached the ground at the outside base of the wall, he unsheathed his knife and cut himself free of the line.
A glance at his chronometer told him two minutes and eighteen seconds remained until the Scatter Frequency Detonator activated.
“First Unit—cover withdrawal of Second Unit and Third Unit until you receive my signal. Second Unit. Third Unit. Withdraw to beach. Move out now!” Feyedorovitch broke into a dead run, gunfire from the walls raining down on him now, the Chinese defenders having retaken positions along the wall, he realized.
He kept running.
Each Spetznas wore an explosives pack on his equipment belt, hard-armored against any known projectile. Within the pack was a micro-receiver tuned to receive a specific three-band combination signal. Feyedorovitch had activated a Scatter Frequency Detonator only once before, years ago during his first cycle of Surface Training when he had been recently commissioned as an officer of Spetznas. But during training, no one had died as the result.
When the Scatter Frequency Detonator activated, anyone of the Spetznas living or dead within a two-hundred-meter radius would be vaporized.
He kept running, a minute left. “First Unit—remove belt packs^I say again—remove explosives packs. I have activated a Scatter Frequency Detonator which will initiate demolition in fifty-seven seconds.”
He kept running. But he had at least given First Unit a chance. The ground rose sharply and Feyedorovitch and his Spetznas followed the rise, the smell of the sea beyond powerful, seductive, his eyes darting back to his wrist and thp diodp. count on his nhmtinmptor
As they cleared the rise, he knew they had more than the required safety margin. And he heard the first of the explosions, coming then with machine-gun rapidity. He kept running, seeing the ocean now, beckoning to him… .
Translucent wings. Bulbous heads. It was a dream. The creatures flew through the water. He saw them through his window. He had not dreamed since the Sleep, really. But this was a nightmare. He could not move. He could not wake up. Natalia was somewhere in the nightmare and he couldn’t remember where. He watched the creatures, their movement through the water which seemed to surround him—but he wasn’t wet—like birds through the air. There had been birds. But these birds were at once monstrous and graceful. His mouth was dry. His head ached so badly that he wondered if, when he awoke, it would still ache. The light in the water was not natural light, but lights emanating from the winged creatures’ heads and hands and—There were things like huge sausages that bubbled through the water. These too had lights. He decided to try to move his head and perhaps the dream would go away. He moved his head and could see more through the little window, and in the distance there was a great, black shape, substance out of shadow. He had seen something that big in the water before. But why was an aircraft carrier deep in the water here?
The creatures with th
e translucent wings seemed to be lining up, like some sort of bizarre military formation, and he tried moving his head again to see better through the window. He laughed at himself—this was one hell of a dream, he thought. Perhaps his perceptions of such surreality were so realistic because he hadn’t dreamed since the Sleep, not consciously anyway. His mind making up for lost time, he told himself. The creatures with the translucent wings and bulbous heads were definitely slowing now. The aircraft-carrier-sized thing was in fact a submarine, but of such monstrous proportions that in
itself it was a more fantastic element of the dream than the winged creatures. It seemed so long as he floated closer to it that he could see neither stem nor stern. An Ohio Class Trident nuclear submarine—he searched for details—was 550 feet. He shook his head and it hurt, badly. No, 560 feet. That was it. This was easily twice that length and— The beam of the vessel. They were starting under it, the winged creatures extinguishing their lights as a yellow light flooded the water now, Rourke squinting his eyes against its brightness.
The winged creatures were hovering near the light—and they did look like giant insects, more than birds, he thought, flying around the light for its warmth and brightness. He doubted he would remember the dream, had never really made a conscious effort to remember a dream. Dreams had nothing to do with reality, he had long ago convinced himself, and because of that, they were of little concern except that they sometimes ruined a valuable sleep cycle.
Some of the winged creatures were drawing their wings around them, folding them back, then slipping upward toward the light and vanishing inside the monstrous submarine.
He could barely keep his eyes open now, the light making his headache worse, making him want to stop the dream so he could sleep properly. The quarrel with Natalia had been part of the dream, he realized now. When she had told him she could no longer remain with him because of Sarah and the baby, when she had told him that this war would go on forever and their lives couldn’t go on this way forever. When he had told her that he needed her and she had started to cry and simply walked away along the beach and he had watched her instead of going after her.
Nightmare—losing Natalia would be the ultimate nightmare.
More of the winged creatures were vanishing into the light and now, his eyes hurting him, like an explosion going on inside his head when he looked at something intently, he could see something that looked at once
cylindrical yet coffin-like. It was being manipulated into the light. A claw—huge, gleaming in the yellow light, came out of the light and took hold of the cylinder and then raised it up into the brightest part of the light and the cylinder was gone.
Rourke kept watching, knowing somehow that the dream would end and he wouldn’t see what was beyond the light. Some of the bubbling, sausage-shaped things that the creatures had clung to were being raised into the light by the gigantic gleaming claw. He felt a change in motion around him and realized that he was being drawn closer to the light.
It hurt his eyes and he squinted them tight against it, the light getting brighter as he heard a clanging sound. The claw, he told himself. But as the motion around him stopped and then suddenly changed and he felt himself being drawn up into the light, John Rourke closed his eyes completely. He realized he was waking up and the dream would be over… .
John Rourke opened his eyes when he’d felt the pain in his arm, recognized it as some sort of injection device, not unlike—what was it not unlike? He couldn’t remember and as the sensation subsided he closed his eyes.
Chapter Two
John Rourke opened his eyes. The pain in his head told him that he had made the wrong choice and he closed his eyes tight. There had been a huge claw hanging over his head. “That’s stupid.”
He opened his eyes.
A talon-like crane was suspended some dozen feet over his head, bright polished, of stainless steel or some similar substance, he decided clinically. The pain at the back of bis eyes and in his neck was less intense than it had been. He moved his right arm. His right arm didn’t respond.
He shook his head, the pain intensifying, but clearing his thinking. His wrists were bound behind him. He tested his ankles. They were bound as well. “Damnit,” he whispered under his breath.
“John?”
Rourke turned his head to the right—the pain seized him and he shut his eyes against it momentarily. “John!”
It was Natalia’s voice. He shook his head again, at once intensifying the pain and clearing his head of it. She lay some ten feet or so from him, bound hands behind her back, ankles together, but lying on her stomach. He lay on his back. A puddle of water was around her on the steel floor, and for the first time he realized that his clothes were wet and he too was in water. Beside her was a dull, gleaming-wet, black, cylindrically shaped coffin, the
lid open, a small window visible in the lid. Rourke shook his head.
It hadn’t been a nightmare at all. “Where—ahh—are you all right?”
“My head is throbbing—they gave you some kind of injection—I think they gave one to me too.”
“Ahh—let me—let me—where the—let me think,” he told her.
“I think they shot us with some sort of sleep-inducing darts. I remember feeling something hit my chest while I was fighting. But I don’t feel any sort of wound there and I can see my jumpsuit—there’s no hole there. And I started getting—like I was drunk. John—what’s happening?”
She was frightened. He could tell it from her voice. He’d heard it in her only a very few times before. “Hang in there,” Rourke told her, shivering now with the dampness and the air temperature. He twisted his head to the left. There was a massive, watertight door, closed. Rourke tried to move his body, pain spasming along his back and through his legs. But he shifted position. He could see a hatch opening, a large wheel at its center. “Were you awake at all when we were—ahh—”
“It was like a nightmare—those creatures with the wings and the big heads—did you see them?”
Rourke licked his lips, his tongue as dry as his lips. “Yeah—did you, ahh … Did you see something that looked like it was a submarine but, ahh—the size of an aircraft carrier?” Natalia nodded her head, turned her eyes toward the floor.
Rourke twisted his body, rolling onto his right side, flexing his fingers and wrists to restore feeling. “John— they took it. The little Russell knife. They took everything. Some kind of metals detector. They swept both our bodies with it.”
“They—the guys from the beach?”
“They were wearing some kind of protective clothing— remember? I think it’s a wet suit.”
“Dry suit, more likely,” Rourke told her. “Those trans
parent wings—some kind of propulsion system. They could have a way of extracting hydrogen from the water and the hydrogen—”
Rourke heard the sound of clanging metal—he twisted his head left. The watertight door was swinging open, slammed against the bulkhead, bounced back, and a long, black-sleeved arm caught it. A man, tall, athletically built, stepped over the flange and framed himself just inside the doorway. His face was high-cheekboned, lean, almost deathly pale, his pallor a striking contrast to the dark one-piece dry suit he wore and the overall good health his physique suggested. Heavy, bushy, dark-brown eyebrows were knitted together in apparent thought. Above these a high forehead and close-cropped, thinning, dark-brown hair. Below these eyes that seemed so darkly brown they appeared black. His nose was large, slightly hooked, almost classically American Indian in appearance. His mouth was overly large and as he smiled—his eyes didn’t smile—his parted lips revealed such perfect white teeth that for an instant Rourke thought they were capped.
His voice was emotionless and very low. His Russian was curiously accentless and yet somehow strange. “Who are you:
Rourke’s mind raced. Natalia spoke, in German. “Who are you:
The man stepped completely through the doorway now and three other men followed him, all simil
arly black-clad. For the first time, Rourke detected subdued gold braid on the cuffs of the first man’s dry suit. Apparently a rank insignia. The man spoke again. “What language is this in which you speak?”
Rourke, in German, told him, “We speak German, of course. Are you speaking English?”
If they had been listening from the other side of the watertight door—Rourke was uncertain that it had been fully closed—or had the compartment bugged for sound … But then again, Rourke thought, if the man did only speak Russian, he might not be able to differenti
ate between English and German. “What do you want of us?” Rourke asked, in German again.
The first man turned to the other three and shrugged his shoulders, gestured them toward the compartment door. He passed through it over the flange, the other three following him, slamming the door shut again.
Rourke looked at Natalia. He gestured toward the doorway and she nodded that she understood, then said to him in German, “Who was that man?”
“Some sort of commander. I think I recognized him from the beach. Maybe they will realize,” he said loudly, “that this is some sort of insane mistake. Are you all right, my darling?”
Natalia looked at him and smiled.
The sound of the door again. Rourke twisted around to see. The first man appeared in the doorway again, and this time a man in what looked to be a Naval officer’s uninform was beside him. There was no way to tell specific rank, but judging from the lesser complexity of gold braid on the sleeves of the new man’s blue uniform tunic—without lapels, buttoned high to the neck with no shirt showing below it—he was of lesser rank. Nearly bald, slightly shorter, and considerably less fit-looking, the new man spoke in awkwardly accented German, as though he had never really heard German properly spoken. “You are both German nationals? How can that be?”
Rourke made himself smile. “Sir, this is some sort of mistake. Please release us. My wife and I meant your men no harm.”
The new man spoke in Russian, the same, curiously accentless voice. This new man was definitely outranked. He told the first man that indeed this man and woman appeared to be Germans. And that the man claimed the woman was his wife. The first man nodded his head thoughtfully, then walked over toward Rourke, rolling Rourke onto his stomach. John Rourke could feel the first man’s hands touch at the third finger of his left hand. The first man rattled off a question to the new man.
