Survivalist - 12 - The Rebellion (21 page)

Together, Rourke and Natalia helped Sarah to her feet.

Natalia picked up two of the assault rifles, checking their condition of readiness, then one of the German pistols. Holding the German pistol under her left arm, methodically, as they walked now down the corridor, Natalia began reloading her revolvers, reholstering them. It was only as he turned around that he noticed Natalia’s dress— she had apparently used her knife and slit the skirt along the seam up to the waist for better freedom of movement, the slip slit as well.

Frau Mann clutched one of the machine pistols in both hands.

Her husband carried two of the assault rifles slung crossbody and a third in his hands.

Rourke edged past Wolfgang Mann, taking the lead now as they moved along the corridor. It would be a matter of moments until more of the SS personnel would begin flooding the corridor but at least, Rourke reflected, the five of them were better equipped now. Sarah—he could see the pain in her eyes, but she held the pistol ready as she walked, the purse sagging heavily at her left side, slung crossbody.

Rourke swung one of the assault rifles forward—from the plan of the first basement Wolf Mann had drawn for him before beginning the raid, the doorway ahead lead to the stairwell.

“I will go first. Perhaps if there are regular troops, I can reason with them.”

“Yeah—maybe,” Rourke agreed, but not feeling conviction for his words.

Rourke glanced behind them along the corridor—no one stirred. After turning the bend in the corridor it was no longer possible to see the dead they had left behind.

Rourke positioned himself beside the door, ready, Mann reaching out and turning the knob. The door swung inward—Rourke waited. Mann stepped through, his rifle, preceding him, the muzzle moving right and left, up and down, like a snake searching out prey.

“It is clear, my friends,” Mann called. Frau Mann started after him, but Mann called, “Wait, schatzie— let the Herr Doctor follow me.”

Rourke stepped through the doorway. It was a stairwell identical to the one leading from the first floor, but strange in that no stairs led upward. Mann was already moving downward, Rourke following after the German colonel slowly, peering down along the depth of the stairwell,

waiting—there would be security personnel waiting, too, he reasoned.

Helene Sturm screamed. “No, I know nothing!”

Herr Goethler bent over her, large medical forceps of gleaming stainless steel in his hairy right hand. “I will do this myself, Frau Sturm—unless you tell me everything that I wish to know. We know that a fifth column exists. We have known this for sometime. And from our inform-ant—

“Manfred,” she cried in anguish. Her own son.

“We know that Frau Mann, the wife of the standartenfuehrer, is somehow involved in the conspiracy as well. But I will make it easy on you—and your unborn children. Merely tell us that Frau Mann is involved in the conspiracy and you shall be unharmed, as will what you carry in your womb. We can obtain all the information beyond this when Frau Mann is interrogated. Now, admit to us that she is involved in this conspiracy. That her husband is the leader.”

“No.”

“Otherwise, Frau Sturm—” and Goethler brandished the forceps, and then she could no longer see them, feeling the cold of the steel against the lips of her vulva. She screamed. “I shall be forced to do something, mein frau, that we shall all regret.”

“If—” she was breathing hard. She felt a contraction— her babies. “If—if—if my babies die—it’s better—better than living in—in a society—where men like you—ahh!” First the contraction, and then the feel of the cold steel against flesh.

John Rourke heard the sounds at the base of the stairwell. Three of the SS security men coming through the doorway there from the main corridor of the second basement. Rourke flipped the railing, crashing down into the center of the three men, his right hand snapping out, the middle knuckles impacting the man on his right at the base of the nose, breaking it, driving it upward and through the ethmoid bone and into the brain, the SS man dying on his feet as Rourke wheeled left. Rourke’s right hand reached out, grabbing one of the SS men at the Adam’s apple, Rourke’s left elbow smashing back, bone contacting bone. As Rourke’s right hand crushed the Adam’s apple of the second man, Rourke’s right knee smashed up, into the crotch, and on the downward motion, Rourke kicked back and up, a double kick into the crotch of the third man.

Rourke wheeled left 180 degrees, dragging the second man by the throat and hurtling his limpening body into the body of the third man.

As the third SS man fell, Rourke’s left foot snapped out, the toe impacting just under the sternum, the third man’s body snapping back, the head slapping hard against the concrete of the floor.

Natalia had vaulted the stairwell and was beside him now, the German machine pistol in her hands.

Rourke swung the assault rifle at his right side forward

on its sling, wrenching the partially open door past a dead man’s errant left foot, then stepping slowly into the corridor.

No one. Rourke started ahead, Natalia moving on bare feet beside him, her stride as long as his now. Rourke glanced back once at Mann, Sarah and then Frau Mann. Sarah turned half around, covering the stairwell as they moved along the corridor, deeper into the bowels of the second basement.

“The interrogation room—it should be at the end of the corridor. There is a questioning room. Quite comfortable. And then a second room beyond it. It is supposedly an emergency medical facility,” Wolfgang Mann murmured, Rourke not looking back at him. “But for some time there have been rumors of hideous experiments performed there by Herr Goethler and the youth.”

Rourke licked his lips once—they were dry.

He drew his sunglasses from his face, putting them away, squinting for a moment against the artificial lighting.

“If they have Frau Sturm’s children—they’re likely in the outside room,” Rourke hissed to Natalia.

“We can go in together. I will protect the boys.”

“I’ll take out any other guards not directly threatening them. And then we rush the second room—very fast.”

“Agreed.”

“Get Sarah to back us up—once we hit the second room, she keeps the boys safe if we find them.

“Right,” and Rourke glanced toward Natalia as she sprinted back along the corridor. Her sheer stockinged legs seemed impossibly long—beautiful.

He turned his eyes toward the end of the corridor, quickening his pace now—because something inside him told him that he should.

John Rourke started to run. He smiled. Perhaps Annie’s sometimes uncanny sixth sense was catching, perhaps The Sleep had something to do with it. He threw himself into

the run, Natalia sprinting up along beside him now, the door closer, Rourke letting the second assault rifle forward now, almost to the door.

There was no time to worry if it were locked.

He fired both assault rifles simultaneously, the lock plate cutting out of the door, Rourke kicking it inward with his left foot, Natalia just after him as he looked right—three men and a tall, thin, effeminate looking boy smoking a cigarette. Rourke emptied both assault rifles into the three men. The boy dropped the cigarette onto his bare legs and screamed as he picked up one,of the German machine pistols. Rourke drew the Python as he let both assault rifles fall empty to his sides, double actioning it once, then again as he side-stepped right. The boy’s body crumpled and fell.

Gunfire behind him—the burping of a machine pistol, Rourke wheeling toward it, the Python tight at his right hip. Natalia’s machine pistol’was cutting down three men, Rourke double actioning the Python twice more to help put down the third.

Three little boys, looking less than two years apart in age, their bodies stripped of all clothing, then tied with what looked like wire, stickball gags in their mouths.

“Goddamned animals,” Rourke rasped. To the door now leading to the interior room, Natalia beside him, the twin Metalife custom revolvers in her hands, in Rourke’s hands the twin Scoremasters.

The door had a large knob. Rourke stuffed one of the pistols under his right armpit, cocked and locked, reaching the doorknob with his left hand.

He turned the stainless steel knob under his fingers, the feeling of the steel cold, like death.

The door was free—Rourke kicked it inward as he regrasped the second Scoremaster.

A woman, her clothes bunched up to her crotch, her abdomen huge seeming as she lay on a steel surgical table, her panties cut away, her stockings cut away, blood spray

ing from her crotch as she screamed, a man leaning over her with forceps, another dropping lit matches onto her face as she screamed, a boy—tall, effeminate-looking like the boy outside—one of the youth. The boy’s hands were knotted in the woman’s hair, twisting it, ripping out handfuls of it.

Natalia screamed, “Bastards!”

Rourke’s Scoremaster fired into the body of the man with the forceps, the body already rocking as Natalia’s machine pistol opened fire. Rourke shifted the muzzles—a shot from each pistol, blowing out the eyes of the man dropping the matches into Helene Sturm’s face.

He shifted again—the boy screamed like the woman, picking up a surgical knife, hammering it downward toward Helen Sturm’s throat. Rourke’s pistols fired again, a double tap from each into the right forearm, nearly severing it, the knife clattering harmlessly to the blood-drenched table surface, the scream again issuing from the boy’s lips. Natalia’s machine pistol was emptying, the body pirouetting, stumbling, collapsing against the wall behind it, sagging downward, streaks of blood trailing over the dully gleaming stainless steel.

Helene Sturm screamed as she turned her burn-splotched face toward the blood-streaked wall. “Manfred!”

Vladmir Karamatsov left his machine, feeling the warmth of the Argentina sun against his face. It was nearly sunset. His hat was in his hand and he thought better of what it should perhaps suggest to his officers and so he replaced it on his head, broadening his stride as he drew nearer to Krakovski and Antonovitch, the two majors striding toward him as well. They would intersect, he judged, at almost the exact center of the broad, grassy plane which was currently the helicopter landing field, the landing field for the jet fighter craft on the opposite side of a range of low, grassy hills to the west.

He stopped walking, so his field officers would have to approach him.

Krakovski and Antonovitch continued walking, stopping a few feet from him, simultaneously raising their right hands in salute.

Vladmir Karamatsov returned the salutes. “Gentlemen,” he began, his voice upraised over the insect sound of the beating of the helicopter rotors. Over the keening of the wind the rotor blades only served to increase in force, the wind blowing hard from the north.

But the wind was warm on him still. “The potential for great victory lays before us. At dawn, our forces shall be properly assembled and we shall assault with full intensity

this Nazi stronghold. Ground troops, helicopter gunships, jet fighter aircraft. I believe the Nazis coined the term— blitzkrieg. And this it shall be.”

“All is in readiness, Comrade Colonel,” Antonovitch began. “I have seen to it that surveillance data, photographs, revised maps—all are being properly disseminated to line commanders. Gunships are being programmed with the topographic features of the Nazi stronghold and its environs even as we speak, Comrade Colonel.”

Krakovski spoke—Karamatsov disliked the younger of his two majors. “Comrade Colonel, the jet fighter craft under my command are refueling. Their weapons consoles are being programmed with Comrade Major Antonovitch’s data even as we speak. My gunship crews are preparing their machines for battle. The ground forces are even now moving into their staging areas. All is in readiness but for your command.”

Karamatsov studied the young major who wrote poetry. “Excellent—you have both performed admirably and it shall be reported so to the Central Committee. I have received word, by the way, that I have been promoted. Marshal.”

“Congratulations, Comrade Marshal Karamatsov,” Krakovski blurted out.

Antonovitch saluted, “Congratulations, Comrade Marshal.”

Karamatsov allowed himself to smile. Antonovitch tentatively extended his right hand—Karamatsov took it. Krakovski did the same—Karamatsov clasped it with his left hand. Their hands still clasped, arms entwined over each other’s, forming an irregular X-shape, he told his senior officers who themselves would now be in line for colonel-cys, “Victory—over the entire earth shall be mine, mine.” That, Karamatsov thought, or the alternative.

Akiro Kurinami and one of Mann’s men, a Private Gessler, had moved back from the overlook of The Complex, taking the steep dusty trail that Mann had explained was carved from the jungle for just such a purpose—troop movement. Kurinami didn’t envy a soldier moving upward along it with a full pack. He pushed his hair back from his eyes, shifting the M-16 to his left hand. Gessler spoke no English, and Kurinami spoke no German. He hadn’t even entertained the thought of conversing in Japanese—for Gessler to have known it would have been as likely as Gessler knowing ancient Aramaic. They signalled intentions instead by hand and arm signals, and now Gessler did just that.

Kurinami stopped, edging back slightly.

He heard movement as well.

Kurinami shifted the M-16 to a hard assault position, his thumb finding the selector and moving it to full auto.

A uniformed man broke from the jungle cover where the road took a bend, Kurinami started to fire.

And then he breathed. The uniform—it was German. And the face, more importantly, was one he recognized. The officer under the command of Wolfgang Mann who had travelled with them.

The private, Gessler, came to attention and did a rifle salute.

The German officer, Hauptsturmfuehrer Hartman, returned Gessler’s salute. And then in what Kurinami considered Hartman’s all but perfect but somewhat strangely pronounced English, Hartman, saluting Kurinami politely, said, “Lieutenant Kurinami—all is in readiness.”