Survivalist - 18 - The Struggle (3 page)

Louise Walenski was smiling like an idiot, almost laughing as she bumped into him. “Excuse me! Sir.”

Jason Darkwood was halfway over the flange for the watertight door leading to the Reagan’s bridge when he noticed her eyes. “Is something wrong, Lieutenant? Do I have my shoes on backward or something?” She laughed, running the free hand that didn’t hold her clipboard back through her pretty hair. He wasn’t wearing shoes at all, of course, but rather issue combat boots as he always wore with his Class B uniform. “Lieutenant?”

“Ohh, nothing, sir—I ahh—I was just really pleased that we caught onto that transponder signal in time to get them all out of the water. I think Lieutenant Mott did a great job with tracking. And Lieutenant Bowman, too, of course. Where would Communica

tions have been without Navigation, after all.”

“Words to ponder indeed, Lieutenant.” Darkwood continued on his way, through the companionway, through the next watertight doorway, and to the Con.

Lieutenant Junior Grade Arturo Rodriguez sang out, “Captain’s on the bridge!”

The Reagan’s bridge crew started to attention, or what was left of them, anyway; Darkwood called out the anticipated “Carry on,” then proceeded toward his command chair as the bridge personnel looked back to their stations.

Not only was his warfare officer, Lieutenant Walenski, missing, but so were Lieutenants Junior Grade Kelly and Bowman. Darkwood sat down, ran his fingers over the console arms, and looked at Sebastian, his tall, leanly muscled First Officer leaning over the illuminated plotting board. “Mr. Sebastian?”

“Aye, sir?” Sebastian answered.

“Where are the female members of the bridge crew? I literally bumped into Lieutenant Walenski—back there,” and he gestured behind him.

“You pose an interesting question, Captain” was all Sebastian responded.

“Interesting question,” Darkwood nodded. “Do you have an interesting answer?”

“No, sir.Not at all. The answer isn’t that terribly interesting at all.”

Darkwood stood up, took the three steps down, and stood leaning against the First Officer’s chair. “Even if it isn’t interesting, Mr. Sebastian, share it with me anyway.”

Lieutenant CommanderTJ. Sebastian’s eyes shifted quickly aft along the bridge and then to Darkwood’s face, Sebastian’s brown hands distending over the illuminated surface of the chart table as if it were one of the tactile sensitive video games with which television news broadcasters contended teenagers at Mid-Wake

were obsessed. “Actually, Jason, surprise!”

Darkwood started to speak when he heard laughter behind him, then Margaret Barrow’s voice. “Congratulations, Jason—Captain Jason Darkwood, Captain U.S.S. Ronald Wilson Reagan.” She held a radio-fax transcription in her left hand. Radio-fax messages were only possible when the ship was surfaced.

Behind him, he heard the click of the microphone which Sebastian used when relaying orders from the bridge. “Attention all hands; now hear this. This is First Officer Sebastian speaking.” Captain? Darkwood thought He was Captain of the Reagan well enough, but his rank was— He started to interrupt Sebastian. But Sebastian kept on talking, his voice echoing back through the open watertight doors, piped over the entire ship, Darkwood realized. “I have the honor to announce the promotion of Commander Jason Darkwood to the rank of Captain, with all honors and privileges pertaining thereto. All personnel performing nonessential ship’s functions, ten-hut!”

Margaret Barrow handed him the radio-fax, Department of the Navy orders signed by Admiral Rahn and countersigned by President Fellows, which wasn’t necessary to make the orders of promotion official but was quite an honor. More of an honor, though, was the collection of signatures on the reverse of the radio-fax. Every officer and man of the Reagan.

Sebastian held the microphone in his left hand, rose to his full height—which was substantial—and saluted. “Captain Darkwood. The microphone, sir.” He offered the microphone.

Darkwood took it, stared at it a moment.

“Go ahead, Jason,” Sebastian smiled.

Darkwood still didn’t know what to say. “This is— the Captain speaking, I suppose. Well. I really am a Captain. Not just a Captain. Nuts. A man couldn’t ask for a better crew. I’ve just been handed the radio-fax all

of you signed. I know I’ll receive the official document once we return to Mid-Wake, but this is the copy that I’ll always treasure. Lest I have to remind anyone, we have a submarine to run and our Soviet friends would be more than happy to take it off our hands if we let them. Thank you. Thank you all very much. Return to your stations.”

Darkwood handed the microphone back to Sebastian. Sebastian said, “The Captain is receiving his cake.” Darkwood looked at Sebastian, then looked toward Margaret Barrow. Behind the ship’s doctor stood his Warfare, Sonar, and Navigation officers, Warfare holding an impossibly large sheet cake with chocolate frosting on top and Sonar and Navigation holding plates, napkins, and a funny-looking knife Darkwood assumed was designed for cutting cakes. “Slices will be available during the regular mess schedule. That is all.”

“It’s hot, sir,” his Warfare officer warned him.

“I’ll take that into consideration, Lieutenant,” Darkwood nodded, smiling, feeling embarrassed and slightly tongue-tied. Sam Aldridge and Tom Stanhope appeared on the bridge behind his female bridge personnel, Aldridge grinning, laughing both at him and with him.

Margaret Barrow leaned up and kissed him on the cheek. “I’ve got that Russian woman to look after, Jason. All the best.” And she turned and ran off, past Walenski and the cake that had been decorated too hurriedly; frosting was gooing in the middle where the temperature was still too warm and all the bridge crew knotted around her.

“Ahh—”

“Captain. May I suggest that Lieutenant Walenski continue her supervision of the cake and undertake its equitable distribution to all members of the bridge crew and the remainder of the ship’s company after you

have made the initial cut?”

Jason Darkwood wasn’t quite certain what Sebastian had said, but he agreed with it anyway and Lieutenant Junior Grade Bowman smiled at him as she handed him the odd-looking knife…

A piece of cake on a saucer in his left hand, Jason Darkwood pushed through the door into Margaret Barrow’s sick bay, past Lieutenant Stanhope’s Marine guard, telling the corporal, “As you were.” The young girl (a Rourke) who’d been the only one conscious when the Reagan had surfaced answering the transponder now lay asleep—sedated, he guessed—on one of the beds, at the opposite end of sick bay from the Russian woman. Darkwood had never seen the Rourke girl before, but he had seen the Russian woman. The Rourke girl—her name was Annie Rubenstein—was exceedingly beautiful. The Russian woman, Major Tiemerovna, was exquisite. Tossing and turning as she was beneath the blanket, restraints crisscrossing the bed, she looked somehow very tragic. In the third occupied bed was a man, resting comfortably it appeared. Obviously military, he looked like a blond and blue-eyed version of black-skinned, brown-eyed Sam Aldridge.

Margaret Barrow came out of her office.

“Brought me my cake?”

“Brought you your cake,” Darkwood nodded. “It’s very good. Taking the welfare of the crew as my utmost concern, as I always do, I realized it’d be necessary to have two pieces myself just to make certain it was entirely suitable. Then I carefully checked with Sam Aldridge, who, as it turned out, is quite the connoisseur of cake. He liked it, too.”

“Well, if the Marine Corps approves, gee-whiz.”

UTT______ .*-o«

She tasted the cake. “Mmm—it is good. Well, let’s see. Machinist First Class Hong—he had the blood blister, remember? Well—”

Darkwood smiled. “Right. Hong’s a fine man. I was more concerned about women.”

“You never change,” she smiled too sweetly. “Let’s see. Mrs. Rubenstein voluntarily accepted a sedative once I told her that Major Tiemerovna was stable and that she’d be of greater value to the Major if she were well rested once the Major awakened.”

“How about Major Tiemerovna?”

“That’s another story altogether, Jason. I’m no psychiatrist, but from what Mrs. Rubenstein told me, Major Tiemerovna’s a pretty sick woman.”

“Give me a best guess.”

She shrugged her shoulders and eyebrows in unison. It looked kind of sexy, Darkwood thought absently. But Margaret Barrow always looked kind of sexy anyway. “It probably started as what you or I would call a psychosis—”

“I use that word all the time. Tell me in easy to understand words, Maggie.”

She shrugged—just her shoulders this time—as she perched on the edge of a surgery table. “From what Mrs. Rubenstein said and from my own limited observations, the Major seems to be suffering, among other things, from manic depression, but locked into the depressive state. Like I said, I’m no shrink. She’s a very sick woman. Total disorientation, obviously experiencing hallucinations, catatonic most of the time. There’s nothing I can do for her except monitor vital functions, keep her cleaned and bathed and sedated until we reach port. In layman’s language, she’s gone off the deep end, Jason. And after what she’s evidently been through—some sort of battle, as Mrs. Rubenstein put it.”

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“And the man?”

“He’s Captain of Commandos Otto Hammerschmidt of the Republic of New Germany in Argentina. That’s what he said before I sedated him. And he’s got very fast hands,” she smiled. “He’s going to be all right, though.”

“One of the reconstructed Nazis, huh.”

“That’s not nice to say, Jason!”

“Fine.”

His ship’s company now included a German officer, the daughter of the twice legendary hero Doctor John Thomas Rourke, and a Major in the Soviet KGB who was gorgeous even if she was looney at the moment, both women five centuries old and ‘holding.’

And the Reagan was farther away from Mid-Wake than he wanted to consider.

He asked Margaret Barrow, “You wouldn’t like to come to my cabin and celebrate my promotion, would you?”

She leaned back and rocked on one heel. “How?”

“I meant maybe just a cup of coffee and some conversation.”

“You want to be treated for mental illness, too?”

He smiled. “Can’t blame a guy for trying, Maggie.”

She smiled back. “I’d blame me if you succeeded. But yeah, I’ll come. If it’s more than coffee.”

“Are you suggesting we examine and possibly test the medicinal liquor stores to confirm that no chemical breakdown has taken place which might alter its effectiveness?”

“Who’d you get that line from?”

“I’ve been studying circumlocution with Sebastian.” And she laughed and came into his arms. Darkwood’s eyes drifted toward Major Natalia Anastasia Tiemerovna. He’d learned firsthand that she was one hell of a woman.

He looked awav.

A transponder signal relayed to him, the transponder given to Doctor Rourke when he left Mid-Wake, as an emergency device, the signal picked up on satellite buoys. A terse message from Mid-Wake command to respond. A search that was less than an hour, but seemed like more to pinpoint the source of the transponder. One of those helicopters on the bottom, shot all to hell it appeared. On the surface of the Yellow Sea, two women and a man, only one of them conscious (the young woman) and keeping the others afloat.

She had her father’s guts, certainly.

And clinging to them just as dearly as the human beings were the weapons. More antiques, not dissimilar to what Doctor Rourke carried, his Detonics .45s.

Why was the helicopter shot down? Had the war on the surface of the Earth which Doctor Rourke had told them about and which they had experienced first hand for a brief time heated up?

The Rourke girl—Mrs. Rubenstein—had seemed past exhaustion, but hadn’t seemed anywhere near to giving up.

Surface dwellers were strange, certainly, but in many ways they were little different from the people of Mid-Wake. They were driven to survival, and driven by it.

“What are you thinking, Jason?” Margaret Barrow asked, pushing a little way from him. “It isn’t about me, is it?”

“No. But it isn’t about anyone else.” He looked at her and smiled. “Are you going to eat the rest of that cake? I mean, it would be a sin to let it go to waste after all the effort everyone put into making it.”

She turned around, took the plate off her desk, and handed it to him, but she didn’t say, “If that doesn’t take the cake.” He would have.

Colonel Wolfgang Mann, de facto supreme commander of German forces in the field, stood, the tips of his splayed fingers touching to the tabletop, its black mirror finish reflecting a distorted image of him as he spoke. “The Soviet offensive is continuing. I have just received a communique that Soviet forces have consolidated their position in Lydveldid Island, within the Hekla Community itself, and have totally destroyed our base outside Hekla. Soviet troops are apparently massing for another attack on Eden Base. Meanwhile, a small but very mobile force continues to harass efforts in New Germany to resupply forces in the field and, because of the presence of this force, substantial reinforcement of our troops in the field is out of the question. Yet, we have sustained significant casualties. In the same report from our installation outside Eden Base, to which I alluded a moment ago, I was informed that the Japanese Lieutenant Kurinami was reported shot down in battle against the Soviets during a raid on their staging area. Kurinami is missing and presumed dead. As concerns the whereabouts of Frau Rubenstein, Fraulein Major Tiemerovna, and Captain Hammerschmidt, I have fifteen helicopters

and three J7-Vs in the air over the Yellow Sea searching for the downed gunship or even some sign of wreckage. So far, there is no sign.”

The Chairman of the First Chinese City rose from his black lacquer chair, several dark bruises visible on his face, his normally patent-leather-looking hair slightly disarranged, his eyes weary. “So many things, Doctor Rourke, have been done by you and your family for our people. I am ashamed I can do no more than offer you what meager resources still remain at my disposal.”

He had said nothing, everything. John Rourke tented his fingers to keep his hands from trembling. Michael Rourke, Maria Leuden beside him, entered the conference room unannounced. He looked at his son and the German archaeologist. Michael took a seat at the far end of the table, Maria standing beside his chair. Her devotion to Michael bordered on slavish-ness, but Rourke pushed the thought of that away. His son’s relationship with the woman—pleasant, intelligent—was none of his business.