Survivalist - 21.5 - The Legend (2 page)

The result would be obvious. A computer operator could locate, track and destroy each of the Soviet gunships at whim merely by locking a missile onto each individual gunship’s auto-navigation evasion program. By the time the Soviet pilots caught on that their own evasive action was homing a missile on to them, it would be too late. Eventually, the better pilots would realize what was happening, but by that time, it would be too late to save the majority of the Soviet gunships.

“You’ve got it,” Paul agreed, checking the screen “So, let’s try it out.” He crossed to the other side of their private corner of the tower and took up the radio microphone, beginning to signal to Michael Rourke who was airborne over the ice more than five miles downrange…

This is Sitting Duck, reading you loud and clear. I will commence evasive pattern starting now. Sitting Duck Out.” Michael Rourke punched in the standard Soviet evasion program and watched as his instruments, on auto-navigation, suddenly seemed to have a mind and will of their own, moving the Soviet helicopter he flew to a higher altitude and commencing a zig-zag pattern.

On his iiKoming radar, in what seemed like seconds but was at least a minute, he saw the predicted missile, the blip very small at first, but growing larger and larger by the microsecond. And the Soviet machine which he no longer piloted saw it, too.

He thought of his talk with his father before taking off. “You’ve gotten pretty good with one of these things, Michael, but never mink you’re too good. Once the missile is on target and the machine

is responding with evasive action and the missile seems locked on regardless, cut out of the auto-nav mode, dive the machine and call in to Natalia and Paul to give the destruct code for the missile. You don’t need that thing crawling down your neck to prove the system works.” “I can handle it, Dad.”

His father smiled. “I know you can handle it. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be doing it.”

Michael Rourke hadn’t quite understood his father’s meaning with that remark, realizing full well that John Rourke could have meant it several ways.

He checked his instruments again. The Soviet gunship was playing out its heart, really, and Michael Rourke could feel that in his stomach, the climbing, the diving, the rapid direction changes. But the growing blip of missile still moved inexorably nearer to the center of the green screen with the yellow grid. And the radar screen itself was that center.

He decided to hang on a while longer, really giving the new system the test it deserved. If the system worked, coundess allied lives could be saved, because the Soviet gunships would, themselves, call on target the missiles sent to destroy them.

Michael Rourke watched the blip, the blip growing larger because it was coming closer.

In his peripheral vision, he saw the snow, the sky-the sky was just a darker white-and, at last, he saw a contrail.

“Sitting Duck to Guardian Angel, Sitting Duck to Guardian Angel. Come in, Guardian Angel. Over.” Michael Rourke switched off auto navigation and cancelled auto pilot interlock, starting the gunship into a high speed dive. “Sitting Duckto Guardian Angel. Come in, Guardian Angel. Over.”

“This is Guardian Angel, reading you loud and clear, Sitting Duck. Over.”

“Execute destruct sequence now. I say again, execute destruct sequence now. Over!”

Michael Rourke had let the missile get too close, he realized. And he banked the Soviet gunship hard to starboard, starting a maximum acceleration climb to avoid the consequences of his error in judgment. The missile itself was visible as a blurred streak of darker gray against the sky, a snow white contrail snaking after it,

zig-zagging maddeningly but ever nearer.

At the high point of his acceleration, Michael Rourke dove, the missile visibly streaking past him just over his main rotor. He glanced right, the missile making a near right angle turn, still homing in.

Michael Rourke grabbed for the knife given him in Lydveldid Island by old Jon, the Swordmaker. It was an identical duplicate, copied faithfully over five centuries, of the Crain Life Support System I, smaller than his father’s original Life Support System X in both blade and handle. And now, it was his only hope. There was something wrong with his auto navigation system, had to be, and in another second or two the missile, still homing in on him, would be remotely exploded. The concussion, at this range would be great enough to damage the Soviet chopper Michael Rourke flew and bring the machine down.

Michael Rourke took the knife in his right fist and, awkwardly working the machine’s controls with his left, hammered the butt of the Crain knife against the auto navigation console, smashing into it. Michael Rourke wheeled the nine-inch blade knife in his fingers and stabbed into the wiring, the knife flying from his grip, the helicopter’s control consoles starting to smoke.

The missile shot past him as he wrenched the helicopter out of the dive and slipped to port.

The missile exploded now, the machine rocking, trembling around him.

But the controls still worked, although all electronics were dead. The important thing Michael Rourke thought, smiling was that he was not…

The temperature inside the hermetically sealed tent was, he knew on a rational level, comfortable; yet, in contrast to the outside temperature, it seemed stiflingly warm. He clamped his cigar between his teeth, just keeping it there rather than lighting it.

He was entering a moment, as it were, for which he had been waiting five hundred years. The Night of The War had come, despite the fact that those persons who considered themselves wise and informed had proclaimed that peace was at hand and that World War Three would never occur. And, after The Night of The War,

there had been no time to do anything but react. First, the search for his wife and children, with his unexpected but welcome ally, Paul Rubenstein, who was now not only his best friend but his son-in-law. Shortly after begirining his search for his family, he had met Natalia, and his world changed again. He remembered her from the espionage game they had both played out in Latin America, but on opposite sides. And, Natalia too had become bis friend and ally and something more. He was in love with her, and she with him. But that fact had no bearing on his search for his family.

He found them, barely made it into the Retreat with them alive before the ionization of the atmosphere took full effect and the sky literally caught fire. Deliberately while his wife, Sarah, his friend Paul and Natalia too, rested through the centuries in cryogenic sleep, John Rourke awakened, awakened his children, taught them, then returned to the Sleep. He at once performed a disservice to his wife, for which he could never make amends, and do the right thing. She lost her childhood, but now Michael, their son, and Annie, their daughter who was now Paul’s wife, were adults, fully capable of shouldering their share of the burden of survival and of helping to propagate the species.

But, the Eden Project, mankind’s supposed last hope, returned, and over the course of the days and weeks and months following the Awakening from cryogenic sleep in the safety of The Retreat, John Rourke’s ‘family’ was no longer alone on the earth, the Eden returnees, others as well who had, by various means, survived the holocaust. Including two colonies of the enemy, survival communities of KGB-led hardline Soviet Communists still intent on world domination, even at the risk of global destruction.

John Thomas Rourke looked around the table as his son, Michael, approached the table, then sat down. Although everyone told John Rourke that he and his son looked sufficiently alike to be twins, Rourke only considered that well-meant flattery. Yet, because of the tricks with human aging he had played through use of the cryogenic chambers, although their birthdays were decades apart, there Avas now less than a decade’s gap between their actual ages. He looked directly at Michael Rourke. “How’s your knife?”

“Didn’t get hurt, Dad.”

Wolfgang Mann, already seated, said, “Doctor, the meeting is yours.”

John Rourke nodded to his son, exhaled, then sat down, saying, “Gentlemen, this will be our last briefing before those few of us who are going inside move out. I don’t know the overall attack plan of Colonel Mann, nor do I desire to know it. Should any of us who will be entering the Underground City be taken alive, such knowledge could endanger too many others. So, this will be a little one-sided.

Timed to coincide with the Mid-Wake attack on the Soviet Underwater Complex,” John Rourke went on, “it has been the intent since events began shaping up for what is about to occur that, in order to minimize casualties, commando raids would be launched simultaneously on the Underground City and the Soviet Underwater Complex just before the main attacks take place. My team and I will be leaving - ” John Rourke rolled back the cuff of the black knit shirt that he wore to read the face of the Rolex on his left wrist- “in approximately fifteen minutes. It is our intention to penetrate the Underground City, utilizing the energy weapons created especially for that purpose as based on the Soviet technology. Once inside, we will fight our way toward the central control complex, where, according to our most recent intelligence data, we should be able to locate and neutralize both the main entrance controls and the primary radar system which coordinates surface to air missile responses.”

He hoped …

Jason Darkwood broke surface under the dome of the lagoon, cocooning his wings around him. High clouds hung beneath the dome, clouds of water vapor and God only knew what else, clouds that were always there, giving the air above the appearance of being a sky. But on the other side of the dome was the sea, the entire Soviet Complex on a ridge beside an undersea volcanic vent providing its geothermal power source.

Far away beneath the sea, sharing the same volcanic vent for the same purpose, lay Mid-Wake, the American undersea colony established five centuries before, only a moment in history before The Night of The War.

Jason Darkwood, Captain, United States Navy, Commanding United States Attack Submarine Ronald Reagan, had gambled, and with the twenty-three U.S. Marines of his commando team, he’d

won. The computer banks of the most recently captured Soviet Island Class submarines contained the latest safe route into the lagoon which was the harbor and central decking area for the Soviet Underwater Complex. The gamble was that the Soviets who controlled the complex would not have had the time to change the route beneath the dome and into the lagoon in time.

There was always the possibility that the Soviets had, of course, left the route unchanged as part of a trap, but the purpose such a trap might achieve was unfathomable to him, and the risks were great. He could have brought two hundred men in with him, or more than that.

A slip up had been on the part of the Soviet Marine Spetznas who coordinated security for the Complex. That he’d made it into the lagoon and stuck his helmet up above the surface without getting his head inside of that helmet blown off was concrete evidence of that.

Now, Darkwood was tired of holding his breath-the hemo-sponge through which he breathed under the water was useless in atmosphere-and he was as certain as circumstances allowed that he and his men were undetected. So, he ducked under again, allowing his wings to unfold, then twisting his body into a downward roll, toward the shoaled area just beneath the main dock.

His twenty-three commandoes waited for him, in a classic wedge-shaped defensive posture, their liberated Soviet shark guns poised and ready.

With hand and arm signals, Darkwood communicated that all above seemed well and his intention, as planned, to assault the dock-now.

The Marine lieutenant-Stanhope from the Reagan-and two Marine sergeants broke off toward the other dock ladders, taking five men apiece, five men falling in behind Darkwood himself.

The old, rusty AKM-96 that had been there the one previous time he had entered the Soviet Underwater Complex was still there, if anything rustier. Darkwood wondered if the Marine Spetznas trooper who had lost it had finished paying for it yet. And, he smiled. With the wages the Marine Spetznas were paid in the lower enlisted ranks, he seriously doubted it.

One way or the other, today, he hoped to bring that man debt relief…

Soviet uniforms would have availed them no element of surprise, and certainly no entry to the Soviet Underground City in the Ural Mountains, because the Soviets would be using daily issue passes and regularly changed code phrases. Of that, John Thomas Rourke was sure. With the Allied Army camped virtually on their doorstep, they would have been fools to do otherwise.

But, on the plus side, Soviet uniforms would get them to the main entrance unmolested.

The system they used was exacdy the same which had worked successfully for them at Gur’Yev. Paul drove the ATV staff car, Michael sat beside him, Natalia sat on the driver’s side in the rear passenger seat, John Rourke beside her, all of them in appropriate Soviet uniform attire. The exception this time was they were more heavily armed, and secreted under the rear seat and behind it were explosives and the four German-made energy weapons.

Paul turned the staff car onto the icy road heading toward the outer boundary gate for the Underground City, Soviet vehicles all around them, Soviet air power-fighters and gunships-in the sky above them.

As they settled onto the road, the outer boundary gates just barely in sight and several minutes away on the ice-slicked roadway, Paul held up a tape recorder, the small, hand held kind businessmen five centuries ago had sometimes used for dictation.

As he pushed the play button, then looked back at John Rourke and smiled, the music started. The sound quality left much to be desired, but the message the music made was clear.

They were driving through the New Mexico desert five centuries ago in a red ‘57 Chevy, unwittingly on their way to their first real fight side-by-side at a wrecked jetliner against Brigand bikers. It was the same music playing now through the little tape machine as had played through the Chevy’s tape deck then.

The Beach Boys.