by Ahern, Jerry
“But the Eden Project shuttles landed finally, safely,” Annie said at last. “And after a while, it was realized that Karamatsov had even had the gall—”
“Gall?” Ma-Lin shook her head. “I do not know this word.”
“The nerve, the audacity.” “Audacity.” The girl nodded.
“But a kinda bad audacity,” Annie told her. “He’d put one of his own men aboard the Eden Project shuttles. There was a big battle when the Russians attacked the German soldiers who were helping us and the Eden Project personnel—”
“And the Germans had a community similar to ours, but in a place called Argentina in South America,” Ma-Lin said, as if reciting a fact learned from a book.
“Yes. My father helped them and they helped us. And there was this real big attack.” Annie gestured with her hands. “And during the attack, this guy named Forrest Blackburn, who really was a KGB agent all along, had tried framing Natalia—”
“He had a picture of Major Tiemerovna?”
“No.” Annie laughed. ” ‘Framing’ means to implicate with false charges.”
“Yes! I understand.”
“Okay—anyway, he tried using the battle as a cover for his own escape. He kidnapped me and stole a helicopter. He kept me all tied up and he was telling me how he was going to rape me and if—if I didn’t let him, then he’d kill me or give me to the Russian soldiers he was going to and let them all take—take me.” Annie shivered. She had shivered then too.
“And Mr. Rolvaag, the policeman with the dog and the green clothing—he saved you from this other man?”
Annie shook her head. “Maybe from something almost worse—I don’t know. But Blackburn needed fuel and supplies and he stopped and he opened up a Soviet supply cache buried before the Night of the War. He refueled the helicopter and we went on. He had to stop for the night. And he stopped in Iceland. There was just nothing there—just—just—ice and cold and I was terrified. And when he came at me in the night, I took his knife and I killed him with it.” Annie stopped talking and looked out the window, realizing that her body was trembling and her voice was trembline too… .
There was an officer’s mess tent but Michael Rourke avoided that, instead walking past the command tent as often as he dared as part of an irregular patrol of the camp he had established for himself.
As yet there had been no sign of his father or Natalia.
It was on his third pass of the command tent that he stopped.
Standing in the flap of the command tent he saw the “Hero Marshal,” a man sane men would call a murderous animal. Vladmir Karamatsov, in shirt sleeves and dark slacks and high boots, a shoulder holster under his left arm, stood at the opening to the command tent.
Michael judged the distance.
Karamatsov just stood there.
The distance was under twenty yards.
With either or both of the military Beretta 9mms under his uniform tunic, Michael Rourke could have taken him at twice the distance.
The man on whose orders his wife, Madison Rourke, and his unborn child had been murdered just stood there. He was speaking with a colonel, the two of them just talking.
Michael Rourke started to reach under his tunic, one of the buttons opening under his gloved fingers.
His father, John Rourke, had told the story once or twice of a man he had known who had, before the United States had entered World War II, had the opportunity to kill Adolph Hitler. The man had been standing less than thirty feet from the Beast. The man had been armed, had killed before when he had had to kill. But his orders were not to kill Hitler.
Hitler had lived, lived to slaughter millions.
Michael’s right hand was beneath his tunic now.
His fingers curled around the butt of one of the Berettas. He wore tight-fitting, thin gloves. He had shot while wearing them. Often. They would not inhibit his marksmanship.
The man Michael’s father had told him about had been a Jew and after the war, when the truth of what Hitler had done was no longer hidden, the man had taken the same gun he had carried that day when he could have shot Hitler and shot himself. He had not killed himself, Michael’s father had told him, but instead he had shot himself in his gun hand so that the hand would be forever useless.
The last time his father had seen the man, he had worked for one of the agencies which had searched the world for the missing war criminals. His right hand was withered and dead.
Michael’s fist tightened on the butt of the Beretta.
Karamatsov still stood there, talking, orating perhaps on his greatness, his plans for world conquest.
Vladmir Karamatsov just stood there.
Michael Rourke wondered if someday he would shoot his own right hand.
But he had come as a rescuer, not an assassin. He turned, walked away, but looked over his shoulder once more. Not to memorize the face. He would never forget it, would see the face in his dreams.
He whispered to Karamatsov, “Someday, I’ll be back— as an assassin.”
Michael Rourke walked away.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Captain Sam Aldridge ignored the fact that some of his people were not part of the Corps. He also ignored the fact that some of them were not even Americans, and those for the most part spoke no English.
He raised the AKM-96 in his right hand and shouted, “Marines! Follow me!” And he broke into a dead run toward the fences which barricaded the submarine pens, Marine Spetznas personnel barricaded behind the fences, packing crates, and the bodies of their fallen comrades used as cover now.
He kept running, the men and women around him shouting, screaming, their weapons firing. The defenses here were impressive, but built to repel any attack which might come from the huge lagoon beneath which the submarines and the Scout subs traveled to enter and leave the Russian stronghold. The defenses were not designed to thwart an attack from behind, from within the stronghold. And as he opened fire now, his first two bursts cutting down a Marine Spetznas officer, he was not oblivious to the fact that, had his soul inhabited a Russian body, he might have been one of them, one of the Marine Spetznas. He was convinced that being a Marine, a fighter, was his karma, in his blood.
He kept running, to the locked fence now, his Marines with him, swarming over the fence gates now, a slug in his
thigh—but only a grazing wound, he told himself. He was at the top of the fence, flipping it, dropping down onto the back of a Russian armed only with a Sty-20. The Russian took the impact, Aldridge told himself, his right knee hurting him. Aldridge was up, his rifle butt splitting the Russian’s skull. His people were over the fence and he started forward again, toward where the Scout subs were kept. He could run one of those, he thought, and so could most of his people. But to take one of the monster subs would have been hard enough, to run it impossible without the skills.
With the Scout subs, maybe at least a few of them would actually get away. He kept running, shouting, “Come on Marines! This isn’t some damn walk to the chow line! Hubba-hubba!”
Ahead, he could see the water… .
There were armored personnel carriers streaming from the dome for the military complex, but the energy barrier had to be down, John Rourke told himself, cutting the levers into a sharp right and stomping the APCs accelerator pedal all the way to the floorboards. The APCs rear end fishtailed. Lisa knelt beside him, holding onto him as he had made the turn, but now reloading his pistols for him. “We have guns like these. The officers carry them for ceremonial stuff, like parades. I didn’t think anybody actually shot ‘em.”
“Just think of me as an antique collector,” Rourke told her, his eyes riveted to the video screen by which he guided the APC.
The tunnel leading from the command complex was nearly choked with APCs, and Rourke was going against the flow. “Hang on again—I’m using the sidewalk. The only way.” And Rourke angled the massive vehicle right, bouncing the curb, sweeping aside a Gullwing that had evidently pulled onto the sidewalk for
safety. The Gullwing flipped up and rolled into the path of an oncoming APC. Rourke kept driving. He could see the point
where the energy barrier could be activated, a Gullwing coming through.
Rourke kept driving. “What the hell are we doin’ when we get inside?”
“Straight for the officers’ residences on our left. I get out and go inside after Natalia and—”
“Hey—that sounds like a Russian name.”
Rourke grinned, but kept his eyes on the video screen. “She’s a major in the KGB—but she retired five hundred years ago, and she was on our side even before that.”
“What?”
“You’ll like her—don’t worry. But you stay—” He sideswiped another APC, the jar to the superstructure of their vehicle and to his body bone-shattering.
Rourke kept driving. “You stay inside and wait for me. Gimme about ten minutes tops. If we’re not out, we won’t be coming out.”
“I got your magazines loaded. You’re just dead even. No more of that funny ammunition in the box.”
“Right. How are you for activating some of the weapons console on this sucker, huh?” Rourke took both pistols back from her in turn and stuffed them into his belt, the Sty-20s discarded already. He didn’t have time to shoot people twice and then wait around for them to fall asleep.
“I can do it. These aren’t too different from some of our stuff. If I could read the damn language.”
“Whatchya need, Lisa?”
“That one.” And Rourke took his eyes from the video screen for a split second. “That’s fire control. The one next to it arms the system. You guys got death rays yet?”
“Death rays?”
“When I was a kid I used to see Buster Crabbe as Buck Rogers. He was transported into the future and they had death rays.”
“We don’t have any death rays. Neither do the Russians.”
“Maybe it’s a good old-fashioned cannon. Any idea?” “Wanna find out?”
“Sure,” Rourke told her. “But common sense mitigates
against it. Right now we’re an APC going against the flow of traffic, maybe for some reason. We open fire, we’re the enemy. So hang in there.”
The energy barrier was dead ahead, some kind of Marine Spetznas traffic cop waving them to stop. Rourke regretted the fact the vehicle didn’t have a horn. He kept driving, the Marine Spetznas jumping aside just before the APC Rourke drove would have flattened him, Rourke crashing against the plexiglas booth for the guards and pitching it into the roadbed. He kept driving, but slowed, waiting for a break in the Gullwing traffic so he could cross and get to the far side of the dome.
“Those things just keep coming.”
“Officers who don’t want to miss the chance for promotion in battle. The hell with it—hang on again,” And Rourke worked the levers to cut the APC into a hard left, crossing the flow of traffic now, batting aside the Gullwings, the APC slowing, then lurching ahead.
“You’re drivin’ over it!”
“Only because it was there.” He brushed aside the last of the Gullwings and was on open road, the officers’ residence he wanted dead ahead, just as he had remembered it, just as Kerenin had told him.
If Natalia was there—he closed his eyes for an instant and prayed. If Natalia was there, Kerenin would be too. If he hadn’t been killed by the sharks. Rourke stomped his foot to the floorboards, the APCs engine whining… .
Annie said, “I’m sorry—but just talking about it then …”
“There is no need for you to continue, Mrs. Rubenstein.”
“Maybe I should continue, though, Ma-Lin.” Annie licked her lips. “After Blackburn tried to—well—after that, ahh—I was scared to death and there were these sounds out there in the snow. I was making myself pants out of one of the blankets and I was going to try to find some way out. But I knew I was the next best thing to
dead. You see, I didn’t know how to fly the helicopter but I knew enough to know I couldn’t get it off the ground. And I knew there just couldn’t be anybody alive there—in Iceland, I mean. And I saw this thing—I’d gone outside, you know? How maybe sometimes you’re too frightened to go out and look at what’s frightening you but you’re more frightened not to?”
Ma-Lin smiled, Annie realizing she had struck a responsive chord in the girl. “Anyway—so I went outside. I had Blackburn’s pistol and I know how to use a gun. My daddy taught me. So I went out, and I don’t really remember what happened to me. I was just so terrified that I couldn’t think and all of it was like a nightmare. But I woke up and I was in this cave and I was under all these quilts and there was a fire going and there was this dog—Rolvaag’s dog, Hrothgar. And there was this man. It was Bjorn Rolvaag. He saved my life. He found me out in the snow. I would have frozen to death, but he found me, saved me. And he took me to his city.”
“The Hekla Community inside the volcano,” Ma-Lin noted.
“Yes—Lydveldid Island. My mother’s still there. She’s carrying a child—just like Madison did,” and Annie Rourke Rubenstein closed her eyes. “Madison,” she whispered… .
John Rourke already started hitting the brakes as the APC rolled over the curb and onto the lawn fronting the officers’ residence. “Remember—stay here.”
“I came along to help you find your way inside— remember? I was there.”
Rourke looked at the Marine corporal. “Lisa,” he whispered. “I thought it over. You go inside there, you might never come out again. I couldn’t have gotten this far without you and if you stay with the APC and I do get Natalia out, then at least we’ve got a chance to reach the submarine pens and maybe make it out. If I leave this thing unattended, I can’t count on it being here to get us
out. You understand?”
“Yes, doctor,” and she leaned up to him, her arms going around his neck tight, her lips touching his cheek. He held her for an instant. “Don’t get killed.”
“I don’t intend to.” Rourke smiled. “You’re a good Marine and a fine woman. Now, hang tough and give me ten minutes. Need my watch?”
“No—I can keep track of the time.”
Rourke released her and started up through the hatchway, Lisa calling to him, “All clear forward—and aft too. At least on the video screens.”
Rourke kept going, calling back to her, “Lock the hatch from the inside and check that all other entryways are secure.”
“Yes, sir!”
Rourke slammed the hatch behind him and moved across the APCs superstructure, one AKM-96 slung beneath each arm now, a full carrier of magazines and both Detonics pistols loaded and ready to go, the Crain Life Support System X hanging at his left side. He made a mental note to find high-tensile-strength nylon cord if he got out of this alive so he could rewrap the haft of the Crain knife fully. He jumped from the superstructure of the APC to the grass which fronted the officers’ residence.
The entire military command dome seemed almost empty. A Gullwing was trying for the tunnel, perhaps to join the battle by the submarine pens. The red emergency lights were a little brighter here, and there were more of them. He broke into a dead run for the main entrance. Lisa had told him one valuable piece of intelligence as they had eluded the APCs on the street and made for the tunnel leading into the dome here. All field-grade officers were given top-floor apartments. Kerenin was a major… .
There were a half dozen of the Scout subs at dockside in the pens and Aldridge—after setting up a ragged but, he hoped, sufficiently effective defensive perimeter—had
asked for volunteers who felt they could crew the little subs. There was a sufficient number to handle half again as many subs as were available. He had ordered them to board, assuming the Scout subs were empty of crew but not taking any chances, sending a party armed with AKM-96s ahead into each of the craft first.
He had been mentally logging the minutes. Rourke was taking his sweet time rescuing his friend.
And Aldridge made a decision. “Martha!”
“Captai
n!” The woman ran from the edge of the dock toward him, one of the Soviet rifles in her right fist. “Sir?”
“Look—I got somethin’ to do. You’re in charge here. You got the rank for it anyway with me gone. Now—get everybody aboard the Scout subs and pull in your defensive people when the last hatch is gonna close, then get away from the docks so you’re ready for the deep-water passage. Make a formation so you can defend each other, then get through that tunnel into the lagoon for the main sub pens. If you encounter one of the Soviet monster subs, get the hell out. If you don’t, wait for me as long as it seems practical.”
“Where you going, captain?”
“After Rourke. Like he said about the lady. She woulda done the same for him. Well, he did the same for us.” “Need some volunteers?”
Aldridge grinned. “Didn’t you ever learn, Martha? Only assholes volunteer.” Aldridge slipped his rifle forward on its sling and broke into a jog trot toward the fence. When he reached the fence, he looked behind him. The Chinese who had served as their guide, two of his Marines, and another Chinese, the one who spoke English and was probably some kind of spy, were tailing after him.
“What the hell are you doin’ here?”
It was the English-speaking Chinese who spoke. “You are their commander, not mine. And, at any event, we volunteered. These rifles are useless once our people are aboard the small submarines. So …” The Chinese smiled.
Aldridge just shook his head and kept moving.
There were two Marine Spetznas guards at the desk inside the foyer beyond the plexiglas doors. Rourke had crouched beside a hedgerow, seeing them although they were unable to see him. There would be other entrances, but the guards would need terminating in any event in order to make an effective escape.
