Survivalist - 22 - Brutal Conquest (11 page)

Torches the men had carried smoked and sizzled in the snow. Several of the horses had run off, but three of them remained, meandering about the fire zone as if nothing were happening.

The last man was up, darting out from the rocks behind which he’d hidden to one of the horses, firing a half-dozen shots from a rifle. None of the rounds struck anywhere near Rourke.

There was a decision to make. If Rourke shot the horse, he could easily shoot the man. But the horse had nothing to do with the problems between John Rourke and this man he had never met.

Life was precious.

John Rourke waited, keeping the scope settled on where he hoped the man would be. The horse was still between Rourke and his target.

This was taking too long.

Rourke made a decision, swung the muzzle of his rifle, and fired, bullets tearing into the snow and rocks inches away from the animal’s hind legs.

The horse bolted forward.

The man fell, sprawling into the snow.

John Rourke fired, killing the man.

Rourke waited.

There was no need to consult the Rolex on his wrist. He simply counted off seconds, surveying the bodies through his rifle’s scope, watching for the slightest sign of movement.

After three minutes had passed, John Rourke edged back from his perch and stood.

He would go down into the litde dugout valley and check the men. Any who lived, he would provide whatever emergency treatment circumstances allowed. If none lived, things would go more easily and more quickly.

He was shivering badly from the cold. Hopefully, he would find a marginally clean coat or jacket that would provide him some warmth.

He started down from the rocks, leaving his mounts where they were.

The one good result Emma Shaw could point to from the five centuries of warfare that had nearly destroyed the planet was the fact that a peculiar little fish known as the anchovy was apparently extinct. The thought of putting a fish on a pizza was disgusting in the extreme. Shrimp were okay, but not a fish. But she had read about the practice and seen old video movies in which the fish were actually put on pizzas. According to a boy she’d gone out with while at the Naval Academy, the anchovy was salty-tasting. He had been studying ichthyology, so she guessed that somehow his dissertation on the anchovy was valid.

This pizza, reasonably good, was also reasonably plain. She’d learned that in ports around the Pacific — one should never eat something unless it was unmistakably identifiable. Hence, this pizza had roast beef and onion over the cheese, along with green peppers. Sausage or ground meat was to be looked at with a jaundiced eye.

She drank cola because, although she had shore leave, her unit was on alert.

Marie, like Ward Aldridge a Marine captain, was saying between mouthfuls of pizza, “I don’t see any

choice. This asshole Martin’s a clearcut aggressor, got a war machine like this planet hasn’t seen in over a hundred years and he’s basically telling every world leader to go screw. We gotta take him out before he tries taking us out.”

“There’ve been lots of tin plate dictators,” Emma said, freeing another piece of pizza from the pan. “After a while, they get to be a reed problem, but by the time governments figure it out, it’s usually too late and the mistake costs a lot of lives.”

“Martin lives in Eden City, right? So why not put a lot of people into Eden City real fast and hit him? You Navy guys fly us in, hang around for a few hours, maybe take a little target practice on their antiaircraft installations, stuff like that, then fly us out again. Piece of cake.”

“Do they teach you guys that … in the Marines, I mean? To have egos like that?” Emma laughed.

Maria started to laugh and almost choked. “You saying we couldn’t do it?”

“Ohh, we could do it, but it’s not going to be that easy, Marie. He’s got manpower, technology, and no supply problems. Remember, we have to bring the war to him. The terrain is in his favor, too. So many mountains around there, short of nuclear weapons, how do you get at somebody so well entrenched.”

“Well, you Navy guys bob in there and dump a lot of conventional explosives.”

Emma stared at her piece of pizza. “And what do we respond with when he uses his nuclear weapons and his gas? The same? Why does history have to repeat itself?” She realized she was still staring at a piece of pizza, which was quite unlikely to provide her with an intelligent answer to her question.

Marie started to say something.

But their beepers went off simultaneously.

A trilling sound, like a bird whistling, would mean they were being called back to duty. This sound, a buzz, meant that someone else who was set for the same frequency was trying to make contact.

Marie had her beeper out first, switching off the sound and punching up the antenna. “This is Captain Hayes. Come in.”

The words that came back were hard to hear with the beeper beside Marie’s right ear, but Emma Shaw recognized the voice. It was Ward Aldridge… .

Two of the blankets, Eden military surplus, seemed marginally clean. The coats of the dead men were either threadbare or full of holes, in most cases both. John Rourke took the two blankets and cut holes through their centers, then pulled them on like ponchos, one over the other. He cinched them around his waist with his gunbelt, to hold in some warmth.

Of the weapons the dead men had carried, none were of decent quality except for one rifle. The weapon was old, from the last war, and less than a half-dozen rounds of ammunition for its solitary magazine were on the owner’s body.

Rourke left the weapons, freed the horses, and led his own mounts up along the ridge to a point where it flattened out a little and there was less danger of a slip. He swung up into the saddle on the little mare.

Both animals were rested now, and while he’d tethered them during his attack on his pursuers, he’d put on their feed bags as well.

Nothing would compensate for the cold and the du

ration of the ride, but under the circumstances, the animals were fit enough. John Rourke started north again.

Emma Shaw kept her slice of pizza in her left hand so she could get to her gun with her right as she walked beside Marie Hayes, trying not to look hurried, back across the street that divided the strip, toward the place with the all-nude review where Ward Aldridge had gone and was now looking at potentially serious trouble.

The Intell people, rumor had it, believed that Eden had groups of terrorists working as part of a worldwide network, their mission to disrupt and destabilize through as violent a means as possible. There were prominent people being assassinated all over the Allied world. There were robberies, bombings, and the occasional kidnapping for ransom.

A group of guys who had Eden Defense Forces written all over them had drifted into the strip joint over the last forty-five minutes and, according to Ward Aldridge, looked to be heavily armed.

Everyone in the Wildlands who could afford to buy a weapon traveled armed, and those who could not afford to made one. Those who went weaponless often paid a high price.

Emma Shaw and Marie Hayes reached the other side of the street, Emma’s eyes moving along the curb, looking for signs that something was about to go down.

Aside from a couple of military surplus internal combustion vehicles parked on the opposite side of the street from the strip joint, there was nothing out of the ordi-j nary. Internal combustion vehicles were common enough in the Wildlands, where population density was light and ■ electric recharge stations might be few and far between. j

Even with a poor miles-per-gallon ratio, something in the fifties or so, enough synth-fuel could be carried to cross the width of the continent from one of the farthest points west, like Port Reno, to New Charleston on the j east coast. j

Emma finished her pizza and tossed the last bite of crust into a trash can.

In another time and another place, the logical thing for Ward Aldridge to have done would have been to call j the local police with his suspicions. But many places in j the Wildlands had no law enforcement at all because j there was no law. Port Reno had cops, but they were j worse than any criminal could be, a mixture of ex-Eden ; Defense Forces personnel and other men, probably some of them onetime Land Pirates. They enforced the edicts of the casino and skin parlor owners, not any sort of { law. i

Like a small, private mercenary army, they worked j solely on behalf of their employers. And, the trouble ? was, again according to Allied Intelligence, the Port Reno Constabulary might well be in league with the Eden-backed terrorists. As a free port of call and with the largest airport facilities west of the rift valley, Port Reno was a transfer point for almost everyone traveling from one point on the globe to another.

Two burly men, obviously armed with large energy pistols slung to their bodies, stepped into the doorway as Emma and Marie started inside. “If you’s comin’ to f hook, gotta see—”

Emma looked at the one who’d spoken, a six foot or so Chinese with a shaved head and rippling muscles under his Hawaiian-style shirt. “Look at me, big man,” Emma Shaw told him. “What’s this uniform insignia read? Commander, United States Navy. See that?”

The Chinese stepped away, and Emma and Marie passed by him and the second door guard, into the strip joint.

Ordinary logic would have dictated that when Ward Aldridge realized there was the potential for trouble, he’d have walked out. Emma had always respected Ward’s judgment ever since she’d first met him as an upper classman at the Academy, and his judgment was not in question here.

As they passed through the doorway and into the club, she saw the reason Ward had called them on their beepers rather than walked out. There were at least three dozen servicemen in the bar, enlisted men who were, by Port Reno regulation, unarmed. Since Eden Forces and Allied Forces used the port, the Port Reno businessmen had decreed that no uniformed personnel could be armed while in the city. United States regulations dictated that all commissioned officers be armed at all times, so the enlisted men and women traveled weaponless and the officers broke the Port Reno regulations by order, trying to watch out for the enlisted personnel.

A good seventy-five percent of the people on the club’s floor were male. Nude dancers performed on a carousel stage that slowly revolved into and out of view, some obvious hookers and the nearly nude waitresses representing the female side. Emma felt out of place, not to mention looking it, her outfit consisting of medium-heel low-quarters, nylons, khaki A-line skirt, khaki uniform shirt, her A-2 jacket, and her hat. The hat, a classic cloth envelope that dated back to World War I and

looked stupid on nearly everyone who wore it, especially a woman, was tucked into her uniform belt.

Marie, who had a peculiar fondness for hats, wore hers with her hair piled on top of her head beneath it, just like a girl out of a World War II movie.

Except for the nude dancers, some of whom wore feathers, and the waitresses, who wore skimpy transparent halter tops and bikini bottoms, the rest of the women were dressed in the current fashion. In the magazines, it was called “Neo-Sixties.” The look took three routes. There was the basic look, that just meant that skirts were way shorter and sometimes a funny hat was added, or instead of a dress at all a skintight jumpsuit was worn (Emma liked those). Then there was the sweetheart look, which meant that even with the short skirts the attire was overall very lacy and frilly. Lastly, there was the really avant-garde. This latter style made all the women who wore it look like hookers, at least to Emma Shaw’s way of thinking. Their outfits consisted of micro-mini skirts, usually of a fabric made to resemble leather, textured stockings, and thigh-top high-heeled boots. All this with a skimpy top and lots of junk jewelry made the amateurs awfully hard to distinguish from the professionals. Most of the other women she saw here were into micro-minis and boots, and if her first assumption that they were hookers was incorrect, they certainly dressed the part.

Emma followed Marie toward one of the two long bars. The bars were set at an acute angle, forming an apex-less triangle, the entrance itself where the apex would have been. The revolving stage formed the base. The dance floor, together with ridiculously small round tables, filled the area within the triangle, with loud disco music blaring from speakers the size of small aircraft.

The idea behind the positioning of the bars was obvious. Anyone who sat at either one could see the show on the revolving stage, either by swiveling around on his stool or by looking over the bar into the system of mirrors behind and above the respective bar.

Ward Aldridge occupied a stool by the entrance on the right-hand side. He must have been watching the two women approaching in the mirrors. As they joined him, without turning around, he asked, “Buy you ladies a cola?”

“Sure … hey, our kidneys are up for it,” Emma said, sitting down beside him on the right, Marie taking the stool on his left.

Ward Aldridge didn’t have to point out the men he thought appeared suspicious. Emma Shaw was already spotting them herself. It amused her to consider that she was probably the only serviceperson in the place, aside from Marie, who wasn’t staring rapdy at the stage. As she worked her eyes over the bars and the table area, searching for the questionable patrons of the type Ward Aldridge was worried over, she saw servicemen, mosdy marines and some sailors, all of them unarmed if they abided by regs. Not to do so could mean disciplinary action.

If an Eden terror squad were planning a hit on the place, it wouldn’t be the first time that American servicemen were their victims. There had been an incident in Rio de Janeiro on the South American Adantic coast three weeks ago in which fifteen Allied service personnel—Americans from Mid-Wake and Hawaii and Germans—were killed and forty-three others wounded. Although Eden disavowed the action, even condemning it at the Geneva talks that seemed to always be going on, Eden terrorists had to have been responsible.

She was a fan of the great detective novels of the Twentieth Century, and the terrorist act in Rio fit the