Survivalist - 18 - The Struggle (13 page)

Signs of a scuffle in the snow. With the point of the Gerber MK II he habitually carried he cleared away freshly fallen snow very gently, finding some traces of

blood. Beside the trail, someone had either sat or fallen. In other places, too many footprints, only partially drifted over, obscured body prints.

A fight involving a dozen men or more. After that, the footprints that he had followed intersected here, either joining or following the participants. These footprints in some cases overlayed the earlier prints. Two different patterns in the boots, only two, clearly indicating two military groups. He could kick himself for not memorizing the sole patterns of the Mid-Wake combat boots.

He looked to right and left, up and down the trail and in the rocks above. Clearly, one type of the footprints had come from the region where the gray smoke—still rising near the horizon—originated. And now those footprints along with many others, the second tread pattern in substantially greater numbers than the first, moved toward the smoke again.

Paul Rubenstein slung his M-16 behind him, loosening the sling of the Schmeisser submachine gun. At close quarters, it was the better choice. And it would be close quarters crossing through the forest—it was impossible to think of it as jungle with the snow. But crossing through rather than taking the ridgeline trail might get him to the source of the smoke ahead of the force taking the trail.

He left the trail, careful to blend his own footprints in as best as possible with the melange of footprints already there, doubling back, leaving the trail at the first opportunity where his doing so wouldn’t be immediately and obviously noticeable. If John Rourke decided to follow him, that was a different story. Where the terrain allowed, he kept to a jog trot, time slipping away …

*

John Rourke, an M-16 chamber loaded on either side of him, sat cross-legged on the cabin floor of the German gunship. He was stripping and cleaning his pistols, one at a time. Both of the Detonics mini-guns were already finished and he started the first of the two full-sized Detonics Scoremasters. He removed the magazine, worked the slide to verify visually and tactilely that there was an empty chamber, then drew the slide rearward until the slidestop and disassembly both lined up, then pushed out the slide stop. He took the slide forward on its rails, removing it from the frame, then set to separating recoil springs and guide rod from the barrel, then removing the barrel from the slide. With his German-duplicated Break-Free CLP, he began swabbing out the bore. A detailed stripping was not necessary.

The Island Class Soviet submarine. Why was it here, he wondered? The smoke was the key. Perhaps the Soviets had merely surfaced as they might routinely do and some sharp-eyed person on the sail had noticed the smoke coming from the center of the island. Perhaps only a lightning strike. But John Rourke doubted that.

He suspected a scenario that might fit: either Mid-Wake or their Soviet antagonists had established some sort of base on Iwo Jima and the two forces were in conflict, perhaps accidental. If some full-scale operation were in progress, why was the Soviet submarine surfaced? And, to the best he could determine with equipment aboard the gunship, why was there only one? There was no sign of the smaller submarines of Mid-Wake at all in evidence.

He wiped off the parts, then began reassembly. In the days of normalcy (what little of that there had been), one of his favorite things to do in an off moment (what little of those there had been) was to read the latest gun magazine.

One of his favorite writers, Jan Libourel, had always struck him as an erudite man. Perhaps, Rourke reflected, that was because his own opinions often coincided with Libourel’s. As Rourke reloaded the Scoremaster, then began to safe and disassemble the second one of the two full sized .45s, he realized oddly that he missed the days of normalcy very much. Petersen’s Handguns, which Libourel edited, could never be delivered to his door by the postman—he had no door except the rock slab which masked the entrance to the Retreat. And, there were no more postmen.

It was necessary to seek the higher ground, and not much ground was higher here except those places where a mountain goat might well have moved comfortably, but no other creature. Damien Rausch, two of his men flanking him, clambered along a narrow ledge, moving slowly upward, Kurinami lost from sight here. Rausch’s field glasses—fortunately still cased— slammed against the rock wall. He kept climbing.

At last, the ledge narrowed, leveled slightly, a sick feeling in the pit of Rausch’s stomach beginning to dissipate slightly. The snow made the footing treacherous and if he had fallen from the ledge— He would have to make his way down, but he dismissed thoughts of the descent until the descent would be upon him.

There was a tongue-shaped outcropping. It would overlook where Kurinami had stopped, where somehow the entrance to Rourke’s mountain survival retreat had to be.

Rausch moved out along the outcropping, at first in a crouch then to his knees and elbows, crawling the last few yards through the cold wetness of the snow. A vicious wind howled, ghostly sounding through niches in the rock below and above and all around him.

Rausch uncased his binoculars, began to adjust the focus as he settled them on the Japanese Naval Aviator.

The Japanese was rolling away some large boulder. Beside Rausch, one of his men whispered, “Should we—”

“No—wait.” Rausch lowered his field glasses for an instant, blew the snow from the objective lenses, raised them. Now Kurinami had moved left, was bracing his body against a flat stone, pushing against it. The man looked incredibly tired, bone-weary. Rausch bet with himself and won. Kurinami collapsed to his knees beside the rock. But still, the Japanese threw his weight against it, standing as the rock began slightly to budge.

And as the rock moved, the ground beneath the Japanese’s feet began to sink. Rausch blinked. A segment of the mountain wall behind Akiro Kurinami began to move inward. The Herr Doctor’s lair.

Kurinami stumbled toward the opening, disappeared through it. Rausch used his radio. “Close in! Close in now! Quickly!”

A red light filtered through the snow, washing the ground before the opening in the mountain wall.

Rausch’s stomach knotted again as he pushed himself to his feet, ran in a low crouch and then came to his full height, leaving the outcropping, the men who had accompanied him barely keeping up with him.

Rausch reached the rock ledge, took each step with care and with all the haste caution would allow, reached the narrower portion of the edge. The footing was impossibly slick and the snow-slicked rock wall provided little handhold for him. He moved downward along the ledge nevertheless skidding, slipping, catching his balance, freezing in place for an instant of fear, then forcing his legs to move again.

He reached the base of the ledge, jumped, came

down in a crouch in deep snow, spit snow from his lips, ran around the side of the rock wall.

There it was, the opening, red light still flooding the snow-packed ground, the depression still in the ground where a portion of it had lowered when the Japanese pushed the squarish rock.

“We have him, Herr Rausch! We have the Japanese officer, Herr Rausch!” The shout came from inside where the red light originated.

Rausch slipped once, caught himself, ran, reached the opening, stepped through.

An enormous set of double doors. They were made of steel or some other type of metal, looking to be electroplated as well. They were massive. Some type of sensors; he was uncertain of their purpose. They were mounted into the living rock. There was a video camera. Its housing appeared antique.

There were combination dials on the doors. He had seen photographs of such devices. They were not electronic, had to be worked precisely to open unless the doors which they sealed shut were blown down.

The Japanese lay in a heap before the doors, unconscious or dead. The doors were closed.

Rausch’s fists balled closed, then open, then closed again. His stomach still churned from the descent. He was slightly affected by heights, always had been, usually conquered the fear more easily. He walked toward the man he’d left in charge, stared into his gray eyes for a long moment, then backhanded him across the mouth with his open hand, driving the man to his knees. “Idiot!”

And Rausch turned to stare at the doors.

Michael Rourke stood in the open entrance for the airlock of the hermetically sealed tent, Maria Leuden shivering beside him. A J7-V was going airborne.

Impulsively, Michael Rourke waved after it, wondering if he would see his mother ever again, ever know the child she carried in her womb who would be his sibling.

“Michael?”

“You’re cold. I’ll take you inside.” “I love you, Michael.”

Michael Rourke turned toward her, his arms enfolding her. She raised her head, her lips slightly parted. He bent his face over hers, looking into her eyes for a moment. They were beautiful eyes. “I love you, Michael.”

His mouth touched gently at hers, then harder, his arms crushing her against him, his lips touching her throat, her hair, her coat opening. He opened his. She pressed her body against him and he closed his coat around them.

He held her, his eyes moving toward the night sky, the J7-V’s running lights all but lost in the swirling snow surrounding the tent, filling the night.

In moments, with Rolvaag and a small team of German commandos and a unit of volunteers who survived the Soviet assault on Hekla Base, he would go into the night. Rolvaag, as best they could understand him, told of something that might have been tunnels, lava flows which led beneath the cone.

Michael Rourke kissed Maria Leuden hard on the mouth.

Her hps touched at his cheek. He could barely hear her as she whispered, “I love you, Michael Rourke.”

“I love you, Fraulein Doctor Leuden,” and he held her very tightly. Someone would come, tell him it was time to move out. He would wait until then, holding her.

Paul Rubenstein realized that he was tiring less than normally he would have. In the tropics, the air was normally more dense, more oxygen rich, and, despite the generally thinned atmosphere, the correlation held true. Physical activity was easier.

He reached a rise above the ridge, below him seeing the trailing edge of a column of men, the column disappearing behind a wall of trees.

Another column was clearly visible, the column of smoke. He would reach it before these men, whoever they were, reached it. He uncased the German binoculars, was still unable to see what lay at the base of the column of smoke, what its origin might be, because it originated above bis current position.

Paul Rubenstein cased the binoculars and ran on. What a peaceful scene, he thought—a jungle filling up with snow, snow which might be radioactive. John had used the gunship’s sensors to make atmospheric samplings and they had shown negative results, but there was always a chance that the snow in some new cloud might contain radioactive dust particles. And why was it snowing where normally—what was normal? he didn’t really remember—where normally

the weather was eternal summer.

“Skiing on the beach at Waikiki,” Paul Rubenstein said to himself aloud, quickening his pace …

The sensors monitoring the network of automatic electronic systems, which both kept track of the mechanical condition of the gunship and protected it from tampering with everything from electrical charges through the gunship’s skin to an explosive device equivalent in impact to several sticks of dynamite, also served as a perimeter alarm.

The German gunship’s perimeter alarm system was activated now.

John Rourke put down the gunship’s shop manual; it made for difficult reading in technical German, but with the aid of a solid dictionary and the video display supplement which overlayed one system into another and put the systems into motion where appropriate, it was intelligible.

He stood up, hitting the control panel switch to begin warming the synth-oil in the crankcase, then peered through the Plexiglas where the snow covering allowed. The interior surface of the glasslike substance was designed to resist fogging. It seemed to do that well. He supposed someone not born in the twentieth century would simply have activated the video displays fed from the cameras mounted beneath the main rotor, rather than just try to look out something as ordinary as a window. But old habits died hard.

He saw nothing.

This didn’t console him.

One of the Scoremasters in his right fist, he sat at the consoles and began activating the gunship’s systems for take-off. Before the Night of the War, a constant source of amusement for him had been movies in which

the hero or bad guy ran up to an aircraft sitting unattended on some lonely runway, jumped behind the controls, switched on the engines and took off, just as someone might have done with an automobile.

He checked the video monitoring system. There was movement farther downstream, shifting patches of black amid the green of the leaves and the white of the snow. “Hmm.”

He began checking systems, his eyes alternating from the control panels to the video monitors. Paul carried with him one of the German individual field radios. About the size of the Motorola units twentieth century police officers carried, it attached to the belt, wires traveling up along the torso. The wires ended in a small vibration-sensitive unit which could transmit or receive human speech, giving the unnerving feeling that someone was alternately behind your back or reading your mind.

Paul probably wasn’t wearing it. Rourke activated the radio. “This is John—come in, Paul. Do you read me? Over.”

There was nothing but static.

Paul was supposed to contact the gunship once he reached the source of the smoke. They had agreed on nothing else. Rourke’s eyes moved once again to the monitors. His right hand moved to his breast pocket, extracted a cigar, the tip previously excised. He rolled the cigar into the left side of his mouth, clampingdown on it with his teeth. “Paul—this is John. Do you read me? Over.”