Survivalist - 19 - Final Rain (19 page)

“In a moment,” John Rourke went on, “we’ll be boarding the J7-V German aircraft. A tight fit for all of us, a first flying experience for many of us. And maybe that’s the point of why we’re here. Five centuries ago, mankind reached a height of technology where each of you, had you lived then, would have been so used to flying you have welcomed the chance just to catch a nap.”

There was some laughter, genuine sounding. John Rourke smiled. “We’ve been reduced to warring tribes by what, God only knows, might have been an accident simply because the two greatest powers in the world, then, so terribly distrusted one another that they were willing to risk annihilation just in case. Well, ‘just in case’ came. And, here we are. We can never put it right

again, the billions of lives lost, the billions more never born. But we can try to keep the insanity from happening again. I guess what I’m saying is that we’re warriors for peace, a peace that’s mandated by the forces of God or Nature, however you believe. Because, without it, the world will end for good this time. None of your children, your lovers, none of you will ever walk a beach again, watch a bird fly—they were truly beautiful—or ride a horse, pet a dog. Never, unless we win.

- “Should we hate our enemies?” John Rourke asked. “No. They aren’t any different, most of them. We want the leaders. To get to them, we’ll have to kill a lot of people, people in other times, in other places, we might have counted friends if we’d gotten to know them. The ultimate idiocy is warfare. But we’re in it, and no one asked us if we wanted it. And, to end it, we have to win it. And so we’ll board the aircraft. Some of us will be landed, a few of us will jump. We’ll fight. And some of us won’t ever come back.

“Every person here,” John Rourke said, looking at the cigar which was unlit in his hand, “volunteered for this. Except Paul and me.” There was laughter again. “If we win—and I won’t insult your intelligence by saying ‘when we win,’ just because we’re the good guys and it happens that way in books—but if we win, those of us who don’t make it will be remembered everytime someone draws a free breath. Not your name or mine. But what we did.” He cupped his’ hands around the Zippo, lit the cigar, a cloud of gray smoke exhaling from his mouth and nostrils, dissipating on the wind. “I think it’s time unit leaders got their men aboard the J7-Vs. You might not like American Georgia. Five centuries ago, I could have told you the climate was generally benign, the people were friendly, the laws livable and the scenery spectacular. Now, it’s just a battle that needs winning. Let’s go.”

Jason Darkwood, who was the highest ranking officer besides John, called, “Ten-hut! Hand salute!”

The men and women of the First Special Operations Group saluted John Rourke. Paul Rubenstein watched, almost sorry he wasn’t military so he could do it too.

Where was it, he wondered; but there was no time to wonder, only walk, dragging his left leg, an unnatural warmth there which sickened him when he thought of it.

His eyes would shift, moment to moment, between the gray of the path which he followed through the snow— was it a path at all, or only so in his mind? —and the child’s face. If she stopped breathing—And Vassily Prokopiev suddenly realized that this child of the Wild Tribes was more important to him than even the canister which contained the secrets of the particle beam technology.

Her life.

It was his obsession.

He recognized the signs. His toes no longer responded when his mind would tell them to wiggle. His skin felt warm, despite the winds which blasted it. He knew if he were to lie down, he would sleep forever.

And he dreamed while he was awake.

His mother, a face vaguely remembered, who would come to the state run facility where he, lucky one, had been privileged to attend. The first girl whose body he had touched below the neck and above the knee.

It was frozen almost off, would be useless to him forever, he thought. He couldn’t have urinated with it if he’d tried, let alone the other thing.

He kept walking.

He had thought, earlier, what he might do with the child. A home for her. It was said the Germans treated the people of the Wild Tribes with humanity, that there was some effort to re-civilize them. Surely, there would be a family of these people who would like to have such a beautiful child as their own.

He kept walking, all of that gone now, walking an end unto itself because, while he walked, he could not close his eyes for more than a few seconds and he could not die.

That was silly.

He could close his eyes and fall down and never know that he had fallen. Perhaps it had happened already and all of this was just a dream, a reliving of life’s horrors.

He suddenly remembered the first time he’d killed another human being.

It made a sadness well up inside him, but he was not afraid of tears. They would have frozen to his face.

Tears.

They did not.

He tried to blink them away. A sound. Avalanche. So loud.

It was them! More of the cannibals, wanting the child’s flesh. Vassily Prokopiev moved his feet more rapidly, the sound louder, no rocks or snow blocking his way. Louder still.

Running. .

He was amazed at himself! He could still run! He fell.

“Little one!” Vassily Prokopiev said through cracked lips.

A light.A voice. Very loud. One of the Judeo-Chris-tian angels, coming to claim the little girl. Surely not

him. There would be no place for him. The light failed, was gone.

He wept, holding her, assuring himself of her breathing. She was so very hot and his arms were so very stiff that he could not have released her had he wanted to.

Sleep had him.

But then something moved him. Words he could not understand. The language of angels? Then words he understood, but angels spoke very bad Russian. “Pree nee michtye ehta!”

Something warm in his throat and he felt he would vomit it up if he could ever swallow it. He tried sitting up.

“Lazheetyes!”

He fell back. “Nye byespakoityes.”

He tried asking them, where she was, because his arms moved and they shouldn’t have moved at all if he’d still held her.

Maybe his lips did not work, or his tongue. Again, he tried to sit up, again, in that terrible Russian he now realized was spoken by angels, he was told to lie down, not to worry.

He heard her cry.

He opened his eyes.

Not angels. Germans. Did the Germans do the terrible things that it was said they did? Would they kill a small child? He was inside an aircraft of some type, large. And another German, his helmet off, his eyes smiling, dropped to his knees. In his arms was the little one. She was crying.

To cry, it was necessary to live.

Vassily Prokopiev could now sleep.

Snipers —Wolfgang Mann estimated at least a dozen —harassed the German troops as the breastworks were finally closed. Incoming mortar fire, at first erratic, grew in intensity. One of the Eden shuttle craft was slightly damaged. Sarah Rourke, the sleeves of her black BDU blouse rolled up past her elbows, assisted the German and American doctors in preparing for the wave of casualties to come, so far two deaths and five woundings of varying degrees of severity, easily handled by the medical staff.

She knew that John would be coming.

But if he would be coming soon enough was the key… .

Michael Rourke sat on the long bench, Rolvaag on one side of him, a German lieutenant on the other, Hrothgar lying across Rolvaag’s feet.

Michael had twisted to the side on the bench, a medic rebandaging the wound to his left arm.

The whirring of the rotor blades overhead, the steady thrumming of the wiper blades over the bubble sur

rounding the cockpit, the static of the radio receiver, punctuated by urgent messages in code, the occasional electronic moan which sounded so much like someone dying that it made the stomach churn—all factors combined to make an atmosphere at once soporofic and so maddening that sleep was impossible, except for Bjorn Rolvaag and his dog.

The sword had been given to Madame Jokli and, once again, Rolvaag only carried his staff. Warfare wasn’t that serious, Michael supposed, so the carrying of a blade (not to mention a gun) wasn’t justified.

When the medic was through, Michael Rourke sat back, trying to read. The book was the pilot’s manual for the J7-V, Maria translating it for him a segment at a time.

Maria.

He held her in his arms when he told her he was going off to battle, sending her with Hartman, safer at the front than she would be with him, out of sheer dint of numbers.

“I love you,” she told him.

He kissed her, told her he loved her. He wondered what it was that prevented him from marrying her? Had it been a mistake to marry the first time? Had he brought Madison to her death, and their child?

Any woman who married a Rourke, he sometimes thought, would have to be very much in love, because she was beginning a life of loneliness and partings. He sometimes wondered if he was too much like his father.

Michael Rourke closed the manual and tried to sleep. He knew it wouldn’t work, the sleeping. He wanted the other thing to work very badly because he loved Maria very much… .

John Rourke had the copilot’s seat of the J7-V, but he surrendered it, moving back along the fuselage toward where Jason Darkwood sat, hands glued to the armrests of his seat. “Captain?”

“Ahh, Doctor Rourke. How do you stand flying long distances? That helicopter ride, well, that was different. But this goes on and on and all there is around you is nothing.”

John Rourke smiled, sat down beside him. “Years ago, you would have thought traveling by air was about as natural as driving a car.” And then John Rourke laughed at his own words. “You know, a personal automobile.”

“When I was a kid, the idea of having a car fascinated me,” Darkwood said, the pressure of his fingers against the armrests visibly lightening. “I wanted a Ferrari. I used to watch all the old video stuff I could get my hands on, just to see the cars. But I wanted a Ferrari. There was some policeman in Hawaii, I think, and there was another, a private detective or something in Florida before it fell into the sea.”

Rourke didn’t smile. He’d been there when it happened. “The cop was in Miami and his Ferrari was white. The private detective was the one in Hawaii, and his car was red.”

“Yeah, that’s it. What kind of a car did you drive, then, Doctor?”

“A station wagon or a pickup truck.”

“A station wagon? Yeah, wait a minute. The boxy ones people always had in their driveways in videos that were set in the suburbs. And people who lived in rural areas drove pickup trucks. There was this one that I saw in a video, and the wheels had to be as tall as a man and—” John Rourke kept listening out of politeness, but memories of the life before weren’t his

torical trivia to him. It was something that would never come back… .

The shelling became worse, a mortar round destroying one wing of the modular hermetically sealed, climate controlled aggregation of tents that had been set up as the field hospital.

Using plastic sheeting, Sarah Rourke worked with Elaine Halversen and three other women to reseal the opening, the wind blowing through with icy intensity.

And suddenly, Elaine started to cry. “He said he was strong enough to hold a gun. And he’s up there somewhere on the wall.”

“Akiro will be all right.”

“I think we’re all going to die; I just have this feeling.” And Sarah Rourke took Elaine Halversen into her arms, rocking her, the wind blowing through the breach in the tent wall. If help didn’t arrive soon, Elaine would be right… .

Damien Rausch saw his face and turned away. It was Akiro Kurinami, alive. He dropped into a crouch on the walkway there, the wind and blowing snow swirling around them. He removed the magazine from his rifle, pretending there was something wrong with it.

It was a stroke of luck that he had made it to Eden Base, the helicopter he and his ill-fated party had used to reach the area near the Retreat so well camouflaged that it was never discovered by the J7-Vs of the Germans or the long-range gunships of the Soviets. Luck, possibly bad luck in light of the fact that he was trapped here now, trapped in Eden.

After the night of freezing there in the rocks near

Doctor Rourke’s Retreat, he’d been faced with escaping the advancing Soviet forces. He could have entered the Retreat if he’d had the proper explosives available to him, but then what? He went back to the German helicopter instead, the gunship one of the helicopters given over by the German command to Eden Base for its use.

He flew back, told Dodd most of what had happened. But by that time, the area was swarming with German personnel under the command of the traitorous Wolfgang Mann.

He could have escaped the base, but to where?

Anti-Nazi forces all around him and more coming ins Soviet forces virtually surrounding Eden Base by then, in stronger numbers now.

It would be very easy to shoot Kurinami off the wall. The Japanese naval aviator moved very stiffly, evidently taking a bullet in his side there at the Retreat of Doctor Rourke.

But he would have to wait until the heat of battle to do it. And the heat was turning up. In the distance, to the north, through the telescope mounted on his rifle through the carry handle, he could see a growing force of black Soviet gunships, a solid wall of black that would be falling down upon them. It would be ironic, Rausch realized, if he and everyone else here were killed, fighting in this battle.

But the historic destiny of National Socialism would only be postponed, never stopped. He pulled up the hood of his parka, closer around his face as he resumed his position on the wall. Kurinami would not realize he was here, not until it was too late.

Sarah Rourke, her coat closed over her swollen abdo

men, her pistol belt in place, an assault rifle in her hands, moved along the base of the breastworks, her eyes searching for a German officer so, through him, she could find Colonel Mann..

She had decided something. They didn’t need her tending the sick, but they needed people who could shoot because there were a significant number of Eden personnel whose only experience with a gun was familiarization firing when they entered some branch or another of military service, or the familiarization given the Eden personnel five centuries ago before they left. None of them had survived the heat of battle as she had, none had fought like she had.