Survivalist - 22 - Brutal Conquest (17 page)

“Haven’t you seen Lance whats-it play you? I mean, even though the film was made in Eden and it’s loaded with propaganda … I mean, it was terrific.”

“What sort of propaganda?”

She didn’t answer for a moment.

“What sort of propaganda?” Rourke asked again.

She looked at him and smiled a litde sheepishly. “I thought you’d seen the thing. Well,” she began again,

“they have you spouting off a lot of anti-Semitic stuff… .” “What?”

“And your son-in-law, Paul Rubenstein … In the movie, he came from Jewish grandparents but disowned them, and what brought the two of you together was—”

“Don’t tell me” Rourke groaned.

“But don’t worry” Emma Shaw said brightly. “There’s a movie in production in Hawaii right now with Brad Lang—he’s a real hunk and he’s a pretty good actor… .” She must have realized what she’d just said, Rourke surmised, because what he could see of her cheeks past the oudine of her helmet seemed to be reddening in a blush. He found that sweet, somehow. “Anyway,” she went on, “I was reading that they wanted to film on location, but Eden wouldn’t allow it unless the government had editorial control of the script. They’d got this terrific guy to play Rubenstein, I understand. He’s an unknown, but they auditioned more than a hundred young actors until they found just the right one. Say, wouldn’t they owe you money … I mean, making a film about your life and everything?”

“Probably public domain. And, although some time I’m sure ill need to find a way of making money again, at the moment I have no need for it.”

She turned her head and looked at him. “You don’t know?”

“Don’t know what?” Rourke asked her.

She started to laugh. “It was in the Intell stuff I went through before the mission. You’re still on the roll of officers, as a brigadier general. That means they must owe you—”

Rourke laughed. “That was honorary, just something done at the time. I never took it seriously. I wore a uniform exacdy once, the night—”

Memories of that night, the night Akiro Kurinami and Elaine Halversen celebrated their wedding, the last night he’d seen Sarah alive, flooded back to him. He looked away from this talkative woman and studied the ground even more intendy.

If he had been a litde quicker, hadn’t let Sarah go to the clinic alone, hadn’t …

“What did I say?” Emma Shaw asked him.

“The only time I wore my uniform was the night my son—now Martin Zimmer—was born, my wife was shot in the head, and I wound up wearing quite a bit of my clinic’s construction materials all over me and went into a coma that I didn’t awaken from for one hundred and twenty-five years. They going to put that in the movie? How I screwed up?”

He still didn’t look at her and Emma was silent for a moment. John Rourke was beginning to realize that silence on this woman’s part was exceedingly rare, so he didn’t attempt to break it. As he expected, she did./“I did a term paper on you once. That was when the official version was that you and your family were all dead. As far as I understood it, your clinic was firebombed and you went inside to rescue people and were trapped in the debris from an explosion.”

“That’s more or less the way it happened, except I should have been there earlier and none of it—”

“I read that a heavily armed force of Nazi commandoes was responsible for it. What could one man have done?”

They were passing over the seven buildings that were the miserable excuse for a town, where John Rourke had shot it out with Mary Ann’s “old man” and a number of the fellow’s associates.

“I could have made a difference, Bear south from here, along that ridge line. Keep that to your right.”

She didn’t say anything for a moment, cleared her throat, then brought her radio up to her mouth. “Do not acknowledge this transmission by radio. This is Aloha Leader.” She recited compass bearings, then, “Prepare to enter into Mode Beta, I say again, Mode Beta, on my mark. Four. Three.” Her hands seemed to fly more rapidly over the Interceptor’s controls than the plane itself flew over the rugged terrain beneath them. ‘Two. One. Mark.” She pulled the Velcro tab and the mouthpiece for her radio fell away as she started the machine into a steep bank, the portside wing tipping downward, the aircraft’s attitude nearly ninety degrees to the hard deck. “Hold on, Dr. Rourke. We’re going right up one of Eden Defense Command’s sensor alleys for the next—” she consulted her instruments, “make that ninety-four seconds. Well be flying in a manner that will seem rather erratic to you, I’m afraid.”

As all the blood started moving to the left side of his body, he caught the edge of a wing tip through the starboard side of the cockpit over the right wing. The other two aircraft seemed to be flying off at tangents to this one.

As if she anticipated his question, Emma Shaw told him, as the Interceptor started leveling out, “We’re so fast, Doctor, that my wingmen will take up positions better than a mile off in each direction. That way, a sensor fix won’t catch all of us, and whoever might get caught has a better chance of evading a hit, a lot more maneuvering room, and the possibility that one or both of the other two aircraft can disable an incoming. But, relax,” she said, the Interceptor finally in level flight. “We can outrun any missile they’ve got, at least as far as we know. And we can maneuver right alongside one.”

“Let’s not do that unless we can’t avoid it, okay?” Rourke smiled.

Emma Shaw laughed. Her laugh wasn’t one of those meaningless titters some women made no matter what was said, but a genuine laugh. Tm not implying we’re invincible, but if we can avoid getting picked up by two missiles at once, we’ve got a real chance of evading a hit. And, with any luck, we’ll get in and out without getting spotted. At least, so far so good.”

Terrain following, they were at relatively low speed, but he estimated they should be spotting Annie, Paul, Natalia, and the others in under sixty seconds, unless something had gone radically wrong… .

Annie Rubenstein looked up.

“Ohh, God,” she whispered. There was a black shape coming in fast from the north. It was an aircraft but looked like none she had ever seen before. It was the shape of a fighter plane but considerably larger, its wings—although it was hard to tell from her perspective—almost appearing to be swept forward. “Paul! Natalia! Overhead!”

She choked up on the reins of the two horses she led, following the aircraft with her eyes as it streaked overhead. In the distance, she thought she heard the sounds of other aircraft. If these were enemy planes, they were done for.

As her eyes followed the aircraft—it was banking to starboard now, almost unbelievably rapidly—she saw the faces of the women who rode the horses she led.

There was terror in their eyes… .

Natalia ran beside Martin Zimmer, urging him to move faster by prodding his rib cage with the muzzle of her assault rifle. “Now. Get down here!” She half shoved

him into the snowbank, throwing herself down beside him, bringing the butt of the assault rifle to her shoulder. “Try anything and I will kill you,” she told him.

But Martin Zimmer only laughed. The aircraft was touching down on the snowfield in the V-stol mode.

Paul Rubenstein dropped down beside his wife, telling her, “Now you stay here.” He didn’t bother telling her when to shoot or not to shoot. She was as good at this sort of thing as he was, possibly better. He kept to a crouch as he ran along the ridge of rock and snow, his eyes on the aircraft.

The plane was unmarked, a dull matte black.

Steam blew off its engine cowlings.

A door opened on the portside of the fuselage.

Paul Rubenstein threw himself flat into the snow, the Schmiesser up to his shoulder. Range was satisfactory to use it, and he was more confident with this weapon than with any of the new long arms they were given.

A man stepped out of the doorway.

“Hi, honeys, I’m home!” The voice was that of John Rourke. Paul Rubenstein started to laugh.

It was the first time John Rourke had seen this coastline from the air in any real detail, and it shocked him.

On The Night Of The War, the major fault lines in California slipped and there was earthquake activity beyond measurement, much of California falling away. Mountain passes became fjords like those in Norway, lowlying desert became ocean, millions of people died.

Port Reno, Nevada was at the butt end of a long fjord, which was among the busiest shipping areas in the world, the fjord and the harbor into which it led a natural protection against storms. It was also the perfect place for submarines.

The newest vessels of the United States fleet were a magnificent sight to behold. They were enormous by any previously considered standard, but size aside, their versatility was what amazed John Rourke the most. The vessels combined the attributes of submarine and aircraft carrier at once, and they were capable of surface or submerged operation with equal grace.

They were the concept of the fighting seagoing ship taken to an inevitable conclusion, which began centuries before the birth of Christ. “What a Viking or a Phoenician would have done with one of these,” John Rourke remarked to Emma Shaw.

“Like they say, *You ain’t seen nothin’ yet,’ Doctor.” She took down a small microphone that nested in an over

head console. “This is Commander Shaw. All personnel please check seat restraints. We will be accomplishing air-sea transition in approximately two minutes.”

“Transition,” Rourke repeated. “As a physician six centuries ago, when I used the word transition, it usually meant that the termination of pregnancy was imminent and the expectant mother, if her husband was within earshot, occasionally became rather nasty.”

Emma Shaw laughed. “We’re airborne now, of course, and we could land on the deck of one of the vessels that is surfaced, but our orders are to land on one that isn’t.”

“We’re going to land on a submerged runway?”

“We’re going to land in a submerged dock, Doc,” she grinned.

“How?” John Rourke asked.

“Interceptors are versatile, as I told you. We can shift from air mobile to sea mobile, consequendy the aircraft becomes a mini-sub of sorts. But Interceptors aren’t designed to be used as submarines, of course. What the dual capabilities mean is that we can travel underwater and dock underwater. Look at it in the context of a naval battle. We’ve got enemy ships all around us, right? What’ll we do to launch aircraft to attack those surface ships and save everybody’s bacon?”

Before John Rourke could hazard a guess, Emma answered her own question. “Easy. We launch our planes while submerged. The planes travel out of the batde zone while in the underwater mode, then accomplish a sea-air transition into the air. Now, a missile can knock out a conventional aircraft trying to get away from a conventional aircraft carrier, because the aircraft is so much involved in takeoff procedures and it’s traveling relatively slowly along a fixed path. We’re out the door and gone before they know it, and when we come out of the water, we can be at Mach II in under sixty seconds.”

She checked a timer on her console, then announced through the hand microphone, “I know none of you have done this before, but trust me, we’ll be fine. Sorry there aren’t any portholes for you to look out, because even after all the times I’ve done this, I still feel like saying Svow.’ Remember, don’t undo seat restraints until we are docked and I give the okay.”

She renested the microphone. “I’ve never been pregnant so I don’t know much about that other kind of transition, but I’ll take your word for it, Doctor.”

“So long as you know about this kind, 111 be perfecdy happy,” Rourke said honesdy.

The water was coming up fast and it didn’t look as though the Interceptor was slowing at all… .

Marie Hayes was a pretty girl, her softly arranged hair, parted at the middle, so brown it was almost black. Her skin was flawless and fair, her eyes as dark a brown as her hair. She looked almost fragile, and despite the helmet that covered her hair now and the mannish-looking flight suit and bomber jacket she wore, she seemed terribly feminine.

Natalia Tiemerovna occupied the copilot’s seat beside Marie Hayes. But her eyes weren’t on Marie Hayes at all. After the first few minutes of being airborne, Natalia decided that she and the eight freed captives were in perfecdy safe hands.

She reminded herself of that now as Marie Hayes murmured to her, “We’re accomplishing air-sea transition, Major. Don’t be alarmed. When I told our passengers there was nothing to it, I meant it. But it is kind of fun.”

Natalia reserved judgment on that. The aircraft piloted

by Commander Shaw seemed to skate over the water, then disappear in a great white foamy wake.

Natalia braced herself as Marie Hayes leveled off, then dipped the Interceptor’s nose slightly. “Hittin’ the salt deck, Major. The fun starts now.”

There was a thud, like a rough touchdown in a commercial aircraft, and suddenly a wake of ocean water surrounded them to port and starboard. The Interceptor’s nose cut through into the apex of the wedge and downward, water rolling over the canopy surrounding them.

Marie Hayes’s hands were virtually flying over the controls as Natalia glanced toward the woman for reassurance.

The ocean surrounded them, but they were still moving, almost as fast, it seemed, as before, broad arcs of landing lights illuminating the water ahead, schools of fish scurrying from their path.

The Interceptor banked, just as it would in the air, course correcting.

And ahead of them, there was an incredibly bright light.

The light grew brighter and brighter. And there was a shape behind the light, hulking, enormous.

Then they were past the light, the Interceptor slowing almost imperceptibly at first.

The shape took greater definition now. More lights spread ahead of them.

The shape was an enormous flooded docking bay, what little she could see of the color rust-brown except for the runway surface.

And now the Interceptor slowed dramatically, then stopped, moving forward only slightly in the current it had generated, touching down on the runway surface.

Marie Hayes snatched her microphone from the overhead nest. “We’ve touched down and everything is fine. We have one more Interceptor to bring in, then the com-, partment will be pressurized. That’ll take a few minutes. For safety’s sake, please keep belted in.” Then she turned toward Natalia. “See? A snap. But it’s neat.” She put her helmet microphone to her lips and spoke into it.