Survivalist - 22 - Brutal Conquest (26 page)

With both Detonics mini guns in his fists, Rourke started back to the patio.

He heard Natalia racking the shotgun.

Rourke turned in toward the house. A dozen or so of the men here, saboteurs sent to destroy from within, to soften for the attack, still returned fire from the grounds between the patio and the garage. Lieutenant Commander Washington’s men and the Tac Team people, Paul with them, Rourke knew, seemed to be everywhere.

Rourke approached the house, peering through the shot-out window, then stepping over the sill. “Be careful of the broken glass,” Rourke cautioned the two women.

He came upon Michael, examing him quickly but thoroughly. One major wound on his left forearm, a knife cut, tied off with a tourniquet. Blood loss. Shock.

Natalia—he wondered how she’d gotten over the window sill in her short skirt—was beside him. Rourke looked at her. “Hell be okay. Find something to keep him warm. Get the medics.”

Annie was trying to get through the window but not doing a very good job of it with the broken glass all around the frame. Rourke set his pistols on the desk, reached through, and scooped his daughter up into his arms, setting her down inside the room. “Help Natalia with your brother. Hell be all right.”

John Rourke picked up his pistols, then started across the room, back into the corridor.

There would be a room.

One special room.

There always was.

On the way toward the basement—he knew there was one from the architectural plans—he acquired another assault rifle and loaded the magazine, with only four rounds remaining, into the action of his H-K.

The entrance to the basement was not easy to find but not all that difficult, either, since from historical data concerning the house as it was used while headquarters for the Trans-Global Alliance, he knew where the interior walls should be. When he found one that should not be there, he assumed—correcdy—that it masked access to the basement.

After a moment, he found an electronic release and a panel opened, revealing a reasonably wide stairwell going straight downward.

Rourke took the stairs slowly, the twin stainless Detonics pistols, hammers lowered and chambers loaded, thrust into their holsters, the German assault rifle in his left hand, the semi-automatic H-K 91 in his right.

A man jumped into view at the base of the stairs, an energy pistol raised in his right hand. Rourke fired a burst from the litde assault rifle, cutting the man down.

He reached the base of the stairs.

Another man was nearly through a metal door. Rourke shot him once with the H-K, the man’s body collapsing between the door and the door frame, blocking it open.

Rourke approached the door, kicked it inward, and stepped aside.

“Do not kiU us!”

Rourke said nothing.

Another voice. “We will tell you—”

Rourke shoved the muzzle of the H-K through the doorway. “Step into the open, hands in the air above your heads, nothing in your hands!”

Through the crack, he could see two men and a woman, all of them with empty hands raised.

Rourke took the chance, kicking the door inward all the way, stepping over the body and inside.

There was a fourth person in the room, a stack of computer disks on a table in front of him, the hum of a degausser from beside him. “Step away!” Rourke ordered.

The man wiped a disk across the degausser as he aimed a pistol toward Rourke.

John Rourke shot the man dead, the body sprawling over the table.

There were about twenty or thirty disks on the floor, but a stack of at least fifty or sixty were still on the table. Documents were heaped in the center of the floor, but no one had set them afire yet.

John Rourke looked at the walls. Maps, partially torn down. Computer terminals still showed map displays.

“Will you kill us?” It was the woman with her hands raised over her head—she was pretty in a severe sort of way—who asked him.

“No.” In this room he had what he wanted—invasion plans, maps, lists of agents, almost certainly. “There’s no reason now,” John Rourke told her.

He safed the H-K, letting it fall to his side on its sling. He did the same with the litde German assault rifle, but set that weapon on the table near him. He drew one of the twin stainless Detonics pistols with his right hand,

with his left taking a thin, dark tobacco cigar from his shirt pocket, its end already cut. He found the battered old Zippo lighter in his pants pocket, lighting the cigar in its blue-yellow flame.

The woman—she still stood there with her hands raised—said, “You can never win. We will be victorious. Your cause is hopeless. You can never win!”

John Rourke smiled as he exhaled smoke through his nostrils, the cigar clamped tightly in his teeth. The fight was just beginning, but the Eden government and its Nazi allies were like a cancer on the face of an Earth given a second chance. A cancer was treated or killed or cut out, but never ignored. “We can win. Wait and see,” John Rourke told them. “Wait and see, and well surprise you.”

He began to tear away the lifemask from his face, and he noticed the woman’s eyes. After a moment, she gasped, “It is John Rourke!”

After all, he thought, he had promised a surprise. But this wasn’t it.