by Ahern, Jerry
The second van was in motion now, starting out of the parking slot, wheeling into a tire-screeching reverse.
But electric cars could only do so much from a standing start.
Shaw was into the near edge of the parking lot now and he ran toward the first car, one of the German jobs from Argentina, so lightweight it sideslipped in a good crosswind. The body was synth-glass resin, he knew, but the engine block was steel. Shaw dropped beside the right front wheelwell, the block and the suspension system and the tire itself were all that would protect him.
As the van picked up speed, Tim Shaw punched the Colt up, bracing it on the synth-glass resin right front fender. It nearly buckled under the force of his arms. He fired, two rounds, then two more, then two more, all aimed for the center of the van’s windshield over the driver’s face. The first two rounds made the windshield spiderweb, the next two shattered the synth-glass, and the last two nailed the driver as the van started to swerve.
The van struck the curb edging the parking lot and bounced over it, tearing across the grass, through a flower bed, then stopping dead against the trunk of a palm tree. The van’s synth-fuel load exploded, Shaw tucking back, the pressure wave blowing his black fedora from his head.
Five men piled out, a sixth man falling from the passenger side of the front seat, clothing aflame.
Tim Shaw made a tactical magazine change, eight rounds in the .45 now including the one that was left in the chamber. Under different circumstances, he would have run up to the man who was on fire, attempted to extinguish the flames. There was no chance for that now and he didn’t even have the inclination to give the man a mercy shot-Shaw had his last loaded magazine up the well of the Colt.
Two of the five men fired energy weapons toward him, one of the plasma bolts striking the hood of the little German car behind which he crouched. The car vibrated with the impact, blue static
charge flowing across the bumper, the only exposed part that was at least partially steel.
Shaw, still in a crouch, edged back, the .45 shifted to his left hand, the three-inch barreled Smith .38 Special in his right. He punched the .38 and the .45 forward simultaneously, firing each once, taking down one of the two men firing at him. The other three staggered away, offering no resistance.
The second man fired again, the ground beside Shaw’s feet seeming to explode as the energy bolt struck.
Shaw dodged right, ran forward. As the man swung the muzzle of his energy rifle, Shaw fired both guns, then fired them again and again, drilling the man down to the ground.
Two rounds in the httle .38 and five in the .45.
Shaw ran past the man he’d just shot, past the man who was screaming while he burned to death, not a bullet to waste on him.
Two of the other three were rurining, the third man stumbling, falling, picking up his energy rifle to fire. As Shaw got in easy range, he stabbed the .45 toward the man and fired, putting a bullet into the man’s head, bone chips, blood and brains spraying out the other side. “Lucky shot for me, asshole!” Shaw shouted, running on.
The two who were trying to escape were nearly into the trees and Shaw stopped. The nearer of the two threw down his weapon and raised his hands. “I give up, man!”
“Wait here!” Shaw kneecapped him with the .38 and the man fell to the ground screaming. Shaw ran forward, snarling “Son of a bitch!” Shaw kicked the energy weapon away with his right foot, slammed the .45 across the top of the man’s head with his left hand.
One man left, running into the trees and a man who’d talk if he wanted painkillers for the knee.
This last guy was dead but didn’t know it.
Shaw sprinted after him into the trees, one round left in the .38, four in the .45.
The thing about energy weapons was that they telegraphed their shots. Shaw heard the crackle and threw himself flat as the trunk of the palm tree nearest to him took a hit and slivers of bark flew everywhere. Shaw was up, cutting left through the trees.
He could see fleeting glimpses of movement now as the last of the men dodged through the trees and toward the sand and the surf beyond. Shaw fired the .45, ripping out a chunk from the trunk of a palm near the man but not hitting his target. “Serves me right for usin’ my left-shit!” Shaw ran forward, trying to look to his right for his quarry and look down for his footing. He tripped, caught himself, kept running.
As Shaw neared the far edge of the treeline, he saw the last man-and the man saw him. The man wheeled toward him, spraying plasma energy bolts toward Shaw across the sand. Shaw fired, men fired again, his second round from the .45 catching the man in the crotch. The man fell, but still fired his energy rifle. Shaw fired the last round from the .45, into the man’s upper body between the right shoulder and the neck.
The energy rifle flew from the last man’s hands and his body slumped back into the sand.
Shaw, the .45 locked open and empty in his left hand, started forward, ramming the pistol into his belt. Shaw reached with his left hand into his trousers for the little Seecamp DA .32 auto he carried in a pocket holster.
A gun in each hand, Shaw came up from the last man’s injured right side. The man shouted, “You can’t kill me, mother fucker! You’re a cop! You figure IT1 talk or somethin’. Hider forever, man! Sieg Heil!”
Shaw dropped to one knee beside the man, raising the muzzle of the little .38 revolver toward the man’s left temple. Shaw smiled. Tve already got somebody wholl sing better than you could, asswipe. Heil Hitier? Fuck Hider! And you too.” Shaw averted his eyes from the coming blood spray and double-actioned the .38’s trigger.
16
Whoever this fellow was behind the wheel of the police car which had followed them ever since leaving the school compound, he was the best driver Wilhelm Doring had ever seen.
No matter the speed, no matter the turn or twist in the highway-they moved along a coastal road with hairpin curves so tight that at times Doring felt certain they would go over the side and crash on the rocks below-the pursuit car maintained a constant distance of approximately one hundred meters.
The scanning monitor set under the dashboard of the van was locking onto every imaginable law enforcement and police frequency. The Honolulu Tac Team was en route. In a matter of moments, helicopters and additional police vehicles would close on them. As if it were an omen of this, a remotely piloted video drone swept over the highway, crossing toward them. Doring took up his energy rifle and fired at it, missing, firing again, missing again. But the drone pulled back.
At last, the van turned onto a straightaway.
Doring looked into the back of the van. Hans, whose face was a mass of blood from a wound sustained when the plainclothes policeman had fired through the rear windshield, knelt beside the still-closed rear door of the van. “Are you ready, Hans?”
“I await your order, Willy!”
Doring turned around, looked at the road ahead, straightaway for another half-mile. He turned his head to his left, ordering, “Bring the vehicle to a complete but controlled stop on my command!”
“Yes, Willy.” “Hans, be ready!” “Yes!”
Doring looked at Gunther Brach. “Stop now!” Then he shouted to Hans, the vehicle already slowing dramatically, the brakes squealing, “Fire!”
Doring twisted around in his seat. The doors at the rear of the van flew open outward. The flamethrower Hans fired was pneumatically powered and under such pressure that it could project a tongue of burning synth-fuel more than one hundred meters against a wind of up to fifteen knots.
At the moment the burning synth-fuel struck the hood and windshield of the police car, Doring stepped all the way out through the passenger-side door and onto the road surface. He brought the 40mm grenade launcher which had been between his legs up to his shoulder. He fired, then fired again and again.
Flames already engulfed the police car, making a rushing, crackling sound on the wind. And now the explosions from the detonating grenades bracketed the vehicle. Doring shifted the gre
nade launcher to his left hand, clicked his heels and saluted his dead adversary, a worthy opponent.
“Drive!” Doring shouted, slamming the passenger-side door shut. The van was already moving. He threw down the 40mm grenade launcher, retook his energy rifle, firing through the open window toward the video drone. But the little machine bobbed and weaved and evaded his fire. “Hans-the flamethrower. Hit the drone!”
“Yes, Willy!”
The doors at the rear of the van were still open, and Hans raised the nozzle from the flamethrower and fired. Doring looked away, shouldered his energy rifle again, firing toward the drone, forcing it toward the tongue of flame rising toward it.
As the drone banked away and Hans fired again, flame and drone met and there was a fireball as synth-fuel within the drone’s tanks exploded.
“It is good!” Hans shouted.
“Quickly! Away from here,” Willy ordered.
And then he started to laugh …
The video drone was police operated, and through its eye Tim
Shaw and two uniformed police officers had just seen Linda’s car destroyed, Linda inside it.
It seemed only a second later that the drone itself was targeted and the picture was totally lost.
Tim Shaw stalked away toward the trees. He’d only had a few seconds to look inside the school before the arriving fire and emergency personnel had forced him out of their way. In one classroom alone there were fourteen dead children, the bodies of some of them still smoldering from energy bursts at what must have been point-blank range.
Shaw took off his hat. He turned his face toward the incoming wind off the sea. He leaned heavily against a palm tree, the heel of his right hand hammering against its trunk.
The little kids.Patrolman Linda Wallace.
His entire body shook with rage.
“Fuckin’ Nazi bastards,” Tim Shaw hissed, the tears spilling from his eyes and onto his cheeks.
17
She hadn’t expected to see John Rourke, or maybe she had and that was really the reason why she’d come in the first place, why she stopped to change out of her jeans and into a sundress. Emma Shaw had no trouble getting through the police lines around Sebastian’s Reef Country Day School; she’d been showing up at police investigations ever since she was a little girl and her mother died and sometimes her father had no place to leave her.
Emma Shaw was careful where she put her sandaled feet, picking her way around puddles of water, over lines of interwoven fire hose and splotches of foamy white chemical residues from fire-extinguishing equipment.
She’d seen her first dead body-aside from the ones kids always saw at funerals and her mothers dead body, of course-when she was twelve. No one had wanted her to see it, least of all her father. The call had come in late at night and her brother, Ed, was off visiting a friend and spending the night there. She’d made a pathetic little dinner for her father, which he’d made a great show of enjoying (he must have had the toughest stomach in the world in those days, she’d often thought since), and he’d just put her to bed when he knocked, came back into her room. “Hey, kid, I gotta check out a crime scene. Can ya stick right close to me and don’t touch a thing?”
“Sure, daddy!”
“Pull some clothes on, fast.”
The crime scene turned out to be a bar over in the immigrant section and the body she saw kind of spilled out of a synth-fuel drum someone was using as a garbage can. She’d never had bad dreams
about the corpse, but she’d never forgotten it either: all grey-faced and bloodstained and the left eyesocket empty and a knife sticking out of the dead man’s throat.
That was in the days when her lather worked homicide, before he’d transferred to, then been asked to run the Honolulu Tac Team.
Her father, Tim Shaw, his hat low over his eyes, stood talking with John Rourke beside an ambulance that was already filled with black synth-rubber body bags.
But none of the bags seemed filled all the way from top to bottom and, with a sickening feeling in her stomach, she realized the bodies of children were inside.
Her father stood five foot nine and was a heavy man, barrel-chested and broad-shouldered, not fat. Beside John Rourke, who was well over six feet tall and seemed as trim and fit as a professional athlete, he looked short. But Tim Shaw still looked like he could lick his weight in lions with both hands tied behind his back. And Emma Shaw knew that her father could do just that if he had to because, figuratively speaking, he’d done it lots of times before. She went up to her father and as he turned around, noticing her, she put her hands on his shoulders and kissed him lightly on the lips. She took a step back, looked at John.
“Hiya, kid,” her father said, forcing a litde smile which faded almost instandy.
“I heard. As bad as they say?” Emma asked him.
John Rourke answered. “Worse, I’d imagine, since we don’t have a final body count yet. At least eighty-three dead children so far and about fifteen adults.”
“I thought you were on leave?”
Emma Shaw looked at her father, smiled, said, “I am. Can’t you see?” She stuck both hands into the patch pockets of her dress and took a step back flaring its skirt as she did so. “Civvies.” She let the smile leave, since there was nothing to smile about. “You get ‘em?”
“You should have somethin’ better to do than come here, Emma,” he told her.
“I heard you were in a gunfight, so-” she left it hang.
“Half of ‘em got away, okay? Killed Linda while she was pursuit.” He lit a cigarette, murmuring, “Fuckin’ Nazis,” under his breath.
“Did someone tell her mother?”
That’s what Tm about to do,” Tim Shaw said, shaking his head and walking away.
“Come on, I’ll take you for a walk,” John suggested.
She let him take her elbow and start propelling her toward the palm trees and the surf beyond. There were evidence technicians working in the area, some of them people she knew who nodded to her or said “Hi” and then went back to their grim work. “Why did they do this?” Emma Shaw asked.
“Just to do it,” John Rourke told her. “It was a good target for a certain type of terrorist, the kind who doesn’t care about public image, just wants results. The children of some of the ranking military officers in the islands attend here, the children of a lot of the islands’ social elite go here, and there was no security. It was perfect for them. They just went through and systematically shot to death everyone they could, then set explosives. If your father and the dead police officer hadn’t arrived on the scene, more might be dead.
“Many of the campus’s buildings were destroyed and every one was at least partially damaged. The smell from the fires was still heavy on the air in those brief instances when the breeze off the sea subsided.
“At least, thank God, there was a field trip today,” John went on. “About a hundred and twenty children were away for the day visiting the Arizona monument; it could have been a lot worse.”
“Dadll get them.”
“Your father took out an entire van load of the men by himself with just a couple of handguns. He’s a brave man. You should be proud of him.”
“I am,” Emma said, nodding, “but that doesn’t mean I want him risking his neck like that. He could have contained them and waited for backup.”
“Possibly. Would you have?”
She felt the corners of her mouth beginning to rise in an involuntary smile. “Of course not.” She lowered her eyes, watched her toes as she walked beside him.
“I rest my case,” John told her as they started onto the beach. As if it were something he’d rehearsed, he said to her, “I had a nice time last night, by the way. Thanks for having me over. I must have seemed, well, awkward,” he said. “Not that I was ever terrific at so
rial functions, but I haven’t had much occasion over the years to relax.”
“You were fine,” she said, without thinking. She licked her lips.
They were walking down toward the surf, and she wondered why he’d brought her here. Then he began to speak again, “You should be careful on your own, might even want to cut your leave short.”
“I don’t understand.”
“This could be the group of Nazis that penetrated the island early this morning; and, if it is, that means they’re quite efficient. It would only be logical for them to try to strike back at the police officer who killed their compatriots. You’d be a logical target. Do you travel armed?”
The idea was quite unsetding, that she might be a target for vengeance-minded terrorists. She swallowed, patted her purse, said, “Lancer 2570 A2 Compact right here. Same thing a lot of the Honolulu PD, Tac Team and SEAL guys use.”
“A lot of the Tac and SEAL people use .45s, too. Like your father.”
Tvegota.45.”
“Good. Keep the Lancer handy if you need a high volume of fire; it’s a great gun, even if it wasn’t available in my day,” John told her, smiling a little. “But you might want to have the .45 handy, too. Tm prejudiced, of course. A good 9mm Parabellum round is just about as effective in terminal ballistics as a .45 ACP, but I’ve always liked a bigger bullet. The point is, you’re vulnerable, especially off base. So, be careful.”
Even though Emma Shaw knew she should feel warm with the sun on her bare shoulders, she suddenly felt very cold. When she shivered, John put his arm around her shoulders, but he said nothing more.
18
Croenberg studied his own visage in the airliner’s bathroom mirror. His normally deepset grey-blue eyes looked back at him a watery brown (contact lenses) and not so deeply set at all because of the makeup on his face. He wore a steel grey wig that was literally taped to his cleanshaven scalp beneath. The suit that he wore - pale blue -was cut tighdy at the shoulders and subtly padded near the waist to help disguise both his height and his physique, making him appear shorter, stoop-shouldered and slightly potbellied. Current men’s fashion made the look even easier, because jackets and trouser legs were tighter.
