Survivalist - 21.5 - The Legend (18 page)

Michael started moving again, and Natalia Timerovna ran beside him.

Five

Her knees were tucked nearly to her chin, and she sat stock still, her skirt pulled down as far as she could get it, against the bone chilling cold of the night.

Annie Rourke Rubenstein felt her father’s mind.

She sensed horror, outrage, anguish, despair.

And she felt this, too.

Paul had been talking a lot lately about a baby, and she wanted Paul’s baby very badly. But now-She exhaled, steam rising from her breath despite the scarf tied loosely over her mouth against the chill.

Despair, despair over a bright future dashed to darkness and ashes.

She wanted to ask God why it was that after all her mother and rather had endured, the Night of the War, the wandering in search of each other, the dangers, why couldn’t they now have some little time of happiness?

Instead of something that was worse than death.

The chances were very poor, Doctor Munchen had said, that anything would be able to be done for either of them. They would be placed in cryogenic sleep (risky in itself under the circumstances) and kept on the edge of life until, in some future time, something might possibly be done for her mother and (even more doubtful) for her father if he showed signs of emerging from the coma.

There was a limit beyond which people could endure. Natalia reached that limit and snapped, only because of her inner strength being able to survive it at all and return even

stronger.

Someday, that limit would be reached for Michael, for Paul and for herself.

It was her father having reached that limit and not ever knowing it which had brought this about, thrown him so deeply into himself that he could not be revived.

Maybe the German and Mid-Wake doctors and the Russian specialist would be able to do something, find some miracle.

But niiracles were not the province of men.

And what of the baby? Her brother? Assuming they found the child alive, she and Paul would raise him, of course, one day tell him about his real parents, teach him-Tears began to flow from her eyes and her nose began to run and she pulled away the scarf, searched for a handkerchief.

But Paul knelt beside her. handed her his handkerchief, and folded her into his arms very tighdy …

Dodd »as ax in his ent. That was clear without even entering it. because there were no guards.

“Where could he be^” Natalia whispered.

Michael Rourke looked along the street, past the new construction, toward the soft white shapes in the far distance. “There:

The Eden Project Shutde Fleet.

“Akiro said Dodds taken over one of the shuttles as his administrative headquarters, closed the cargo bays, had the interior changed around. He’s there. Waiting for us.”

Natalia, her face visible in the starlight, a sparkle in her very pretty eyes, said, “Then at least we do not have to worry about who we have to kill, do we?”

Michael Rourke didn’t disagree …

It was as if they’d been gone forever, but on the other hand it seemed as though they hadn’t been gone at all. Annie Ru

benstein welcomed the distraction from her thoughts, from her involvement with her father’s mind. Reaching him was impossible, but she could still ‘read’ his feelings. Confusion, anger, a sense of being lost.

Quickly, Michael and Natalia briefed them concerning where Dodd was not and logically had to be.

Then, as quickly as they could, they moved out, Bjom and his dog moving just ahead of them because Hrothgar might sense a trap, humans would not.

After more than twenty minutes of trudging through the snow drifts, they rested, Annie sinking down beside her husband in a cluster of low rocks, keeping her head down. She took the opportunity to re-tie the scarf that was over her bead against the cold, then made a last minute check of her weapons.

Anyone inside the shuttle with Commander Dodd would be fair game, except Dodd himself. He had to be taken alive.

And, although no one had said anything, there was the very real possibility that the baby would be there.

Both the necessity of keeping Dodd alive and the possibility that the baby might be there precluded going in shooting. She had worked over the computers aboard the shuttle fleet, knew the typical shuttle layout very well, as did her husband, her brother and Natalia.

Bjorn did not, but Bjorn and his dog would remain outside, to cover them, alert them to more of a trap than they already expected. Attacking the craft would be a tactical nightmare.

Annie was getting tired of nightmares …

Deitrich Zimmer looked down at the baby.

It was asleep in a packing crate cradle.

There were ample supplies of baby formula among the Eden stores and, basic creatures that they are, the baby was easily enough calmed.

With this baby, he could rule the world.

Zirnmer’s academic background lay in genetic surgery.

However important environment was, the genetic stamp was the key. Environment could not mold what was not there. Yet, with the proper environment, and judicious tampering with certain genes, the base material, the raw clay, could become something extraordinary-beneath the hands of the proper sculptor.

And he was such a man.

This child, so physically perfect, the offspring of a man he had never seen except in a moment of violence, of a woman he had shot in the head, this child had locked within it, a potential that was extraordinary.

The tendencies toward such things as academic brilliance, athletic sirperiority, creativity, inventiveness, all these were inherited, to be capitalized upon or suppressed within a given environment

His attempts to improve upon nature were what drew him into the Leader inner circle, what made him realize that there truly was such a thing as racial superiority.

But even that could be improved upon, and a race of true supermen created, not men who merely professed to be so.

With this child, that race would be born, would spread its seed over the planet would bring about an age like none in history, would someday spread its seed among the stars and eclipse the glory of this mystical force, the weak called their God …

He pushed back the hood of his parka, despite the ski-toque he wore, his head cold in the night air.

During the brief period of peace while he had tried to determine what he would do with his life, Michael Rourke spent much of the time in New Germany, trying to convince himself that Maria should be bis wife.

At last he asked her, then in nearly the same breath he walked away from her.

It was being a cad, to use an old word he’d heard first ■ one of the videotapes at the Retreat, had to look up in one of the dictionaries in order to ascertain its meaning, at that age been shocked at the implication.

He was certain Maria was not pregnant (her menstrual cycle had just begun), so he wasn’t being as rotten as that. Had she been pregnant with his child, he would certainly have kept his peace, said nothing, taken her as his wife.

But he had known real love, and although for a time, wbes there had been an absence of violence, he had convinced hia> self that he could setde for less.

Here, on the edge of life or death again, he realized it was better to have the real thing or nothing at all.

He looked down at the M-16 in his gloved hands. The cah-ber-5.56mm-was vasdy less than ideal, but he had settled for the rifle out of convenience; he would have preferred something better.

There was no comparison, really between an inanimate object and a human being, but the principle was the same. Maria was as fine a woman as a man could hope to meet, loving and, sometimes it seemed, devoted beyond credulity. To ha*e stayed with her would have been cheating her even more thai-cheating himself, because she desired the same fervor in return.

Beside him, Natalia asked, “What are you thinking about. Michael?” He looked at her. “My rifle.” She nodded approval at that.

And, he wondered, wondered if something that had touched at his consciousness fleetingly before, something he had shoved from his thoughts, was partially at work within him “My favorite rifle, before the Night of The War was the Heckler & Koch, the G-3 or the 91, the semi-, it didn’t really matter which. One rarely uses a rifle in the full-auto mode if one’s a decent marksman.”

“Yes.”

“So, the battle rifle or the sporting rifle, to me it was much the same. A solid cartridge in a solid action. I had a G-3 with a scope on it, once, and it was the most accurate rifle Td ever used. John likes his bolt action, which is fine-” And her voice caught.

Michael looked at her, told her, “My father will survive this. He’s that way. Sometimes I think he’s immortal.”

Natalia laughed softly. “No. He’s very mortal. For a time, I thought he was not, and then I realized he had to be, or I could not have loved him in the way that I did.”

“What are you going to do, now, I mean?”

“Live for the moment, Michael.”

“How do you see me?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, do you still see me as a kid? Like I was when we first met? You know, chronologically, Fm a year older than you are, even though I was born almost two decades later.”

“Try explaining that to someone,” and she laughed softly again. “1 don’t see you as a little boy. I don’t think 1 did even then, although you were one. When I learned what you did the morning after the Night of the War, to save Sarah from those people who attacked your farm, I realized this was a man inside a boy’s body and the body merely had to catch up. But you are not your father.”

“What do you mean?”

“Have you read much tragedy, Michael?”

“Shakespeare, the Greeks, yes.”

They waited, just the two of them, because they had split into two units for better fire and maneuver function, and waited about two hundred yards from the shuttle, its lights yellow glowing against the palpable icy blackness, there beneath the stars. The shuttle, white, was matte-finished against the shimmering whiteness of the snow.

“The principal character in a tragedy always has a fatal flaw, like MacBeth’s ambition. Your fathers flaw is his perfection. He is beyond human. Or is it just that after all this time I

never understood him.”

He was grateful she used Is’ rather than ‘was’ in reference ID his father. “Dad’s human,” Michael laughed, shaking his head, the smile staying after the laugh went. “He’s as uncertain as anybody, but he never shows it. I know I’m not my father. Fm part of each of them, mom and dad, and Fm both and neaher of them. Annie’s that way, too. She’s mom and she’s dad and she’s both of them at once and neither one of them at all because she’s herself.” And then he said something he had not planned to say at all. “Until my father’s back, you remember something, Natalia; you remember that you are not alone. Fm not my father, but Fll protect you just as he would have done*

And she looked hard at him. It was odd watching her eyes. He could not see their surreal blueness, but only a mercins darkness against the white of her flesh, precious litde of that visible beneath the black silk scarf which swathed her lower face, an identical scarf bound over her head and hair, leaving only a wedge of her face visible where one scarf stopped and the other began.

“I don’t think of you as a litde boy,” she told him, pushing back her hood now.

Michael said nothing.

He shifted his gaze toward the approximate position where Annie and Paul should be. After a moment, he saw a flash of red light, no more than a pencil thin pinpoint. It was Annie’s Taurus Pt-92 with the laser sight. She carried the gun as a special purpose weapon, and had used it when she and Natalia had defended the Retreat against another group of neo-Nazis.

Michael made his own signal, using the mini-Mag-Lite from his jacket pocket. There was an answering flash of red.

He looked at Natalia now. “It’s up to us.”

“Fm with you.”

Michael nodded, partially unzipping his German arctic parka, drawing out the Beretta 92F pistols from the double shoulder holster he wore beneath it, removing the fifteen-round magazines from first one then the other pistol, inserting

twenty-round 93R magazines in their stead after first striking the spine of each magazine against the palm of his hand to make certain the 115-grain 9mm jacketed hollow points were seated as they should be.

He pocketed the fifteen-round magazines, stuffed the two handguns between his gunbelt and his abdomen. The four-inch .44 Magnum Smith & Wesson was in the crossdraw holster between his navel and his left hip. He regioved, but only with the thinner liners, thumbing the M-16’s selector to auto.

Natalia was right that a batde rifle should be rarely used on auto, but he would be using his rifle like a submachine gun, for sweeping.

“Let’s go.”

Snow crunched beneath his boots as he started from their place of concealment behind a low ridge. Over their parkas, each of them wore a white snowsmock, but further precautions would have been useless.

The enemy knew they were coming, just not precisely when …

Paul Rubenstein edged along the dunes of drifted snow, the Schmiesser in his left hand, the M-16 in his right, his wife in his footsteps, a yard behind him when he looked back.

John was almost dead, and might remain that way, if he lived at all, for days or months or years or decades-perhaps centuries.

He would miss his friend more in those times to come than he did now, he knew, and to gauge a loss more acute than that, which he already felt, was incalculable.

John was friend and brother and mentor.

And Sarah, the deliberateness of what had been done to her, sickened his spirit.

This night, he wanted the enemy to be there, well-armed and ready, and he wanted to kill as many of them as he could.

That would not undo what had been done, and his motives

in wanting the confrontation were purely selfish, he knew, but it would feel good to kill these people, take some measure of revenge, however minuscule. How many of their lives lost forever would compensate for the loss of John Rourke or Sarah Rourke for even a second in infinity?