Survivalist - 15 - Overlord (10 page)

He looked back, the distance to the pursing band of horsemen not having narrowed. Reason told him their animals would be slowing from the prolonged gallop. But gunfire was coming from the horsemen again, assault rifles, bullets churning the snowy ground beneath his animal’s hooves.

About two hundred yards ahead across the barren plateau, dotted here and there with isolated stands of pine and low brush, were the other two men from the campfire, one of them hanging low in the saddle as though wounded, but his horse galloping ahead unimpaired.

The little man who had gestured for Michael to follow was veering his mount toward the other two ahead of them, Michael doing the same now, not eager for their company but eager to know their destination. The gunfire from behind him was intensifying, as were the shrieked battle cries of the riders, the sound of their animals’ hoofbeats — there were at least two dozen of the pursuers — like thunder. And Michael Rourke smiled to himself—the “thunder of hoofbeats” was an expression he had always thought trite.

Apparently it wasn’t, the ground seeming to rock with it, his ears vibrating with it. Clumps of snow and bits of rock

and dirt streamed up around him from his animal’s hooves. He had noticed as he had clambered aboard the horse that its hooves were shod.

He could hear the animal’s breathing, feeling it as the animal moved. The largest of the horses at the camp, it was still smaller than he remembered horses being from the days before the Great Conflagration, and it should have been the other way around since he had been only a boy then and not fully grown. But what the animal lacked in size it seemed to compensate for with stamina. Like the Indian ponies he had read about. And he wondered if these men who looked for all the world like Mongols transplanted from some distant epoch would do like the Indians had done, ride their animals into the ground, slitting a vein for the moisture of blood while the animal was still on the move, and when it dropped and died, cutting off meat to eat raw as they ran on.

Michael twisted in the saddle to look back, his pursuers not hanging back. If these men rode their animals into the ground, he might soon find out.

He kept riding …

Maria Leuden let Hammerschmidt help her down from the breadloaf-shaped rock to the rocks beneath it, but looked back once through the cloud of snow and dust of the riders. But it was too distant now. She stood beside Hammerschmidt.

“Fraulein Doctor—we must move as rapidly as possible. More of these men may be in — “

He didn’t finish his words as she screamed and drew back, Hammerschmidt wheeling around, swinging his assault rifle up, Maria Leuden going for the pistol at her belt. It was one of the antiques like the Rourke family carried, something called a Beretta or something and she tried getting the flap of the holster open to help Hammerschmidt as the five men dressed like the horsemen and the men from the campfire fell

on him, his rifle discharging into the rocks, the butt of one of the five men’s rifles swinging outward suddenly and catching him at the side of the head. She had her pistol free and she remembered to move the safety catch up as she tried to stab it toward the nearest of the five men.

He was her height, nothing more, but seeming huge under his layers of fur trimmed coats, his deep yellow face lighting with what seemed like a grin, a wicked looking long thin mustache starting at each side of his mouth and curling under his lips as his mouth opened and he shouted something at her. She recoiled from him, nearly losing the pistol. He was laughing at her as he reached out for her. She pulled the trigger of her pistol but he knocked it aside and blood spurted from his left cheek and he let go of her for an instant, then hammered his right fist forward and she felt an awful pain and knew that she had let go of the pistol, knew that she had lost. And she was falling …

He had read his chart, the technical medical German hard to get through but understandable enough. The chart confirmed his self-diagnosis. It essentially boiled down to exhaustion and muscle fatigue. John Rourke reflected it would not have taken a medical genius to deduce that. But Munchen was a more than competent physician. Rest, relaxation—it was what any doctor would have ordered. Rourke would allow himself a night of it. But there was still the question of the ultimate destination of Karamatsov’s army in Eurasia, and Michael’s quest for the destination which had taken him far into unexplored regions of Asia.

The resiliency of humanity to survive the unsurvivable had ceased to astound John Rourke, but rather in an odd way inspired him. His own resiliency this time had been pushed to the limit—or nearly, he told himself.

Sarah sat asleep in a chair by the foot of the bed, cocooned in a shawl. Annie had gone, with much protest, to seek out

Munchen to get his agreement to release him from the hospital. If Munchen did not agree, Rourke would simply release himself. His gear was stowed in the closet-like cabinet beside where Sarah slept, all except for the two knives he had used to extricate himself from the crevasse. These were on the small, utilitarian stand beside the bed. He reached for the larger of the two, the Crain System X, his neck, his left shoulder, his left forearm coming suddenly alive with pain as he moved. But his left fist closed over the knife.

The plateau had begun gradually dipping into a flat, natural ramp, leading downward. Michael Rourke urged his animal onward, a few of the pursuing horsemen having fallen away, their animals going down under them as Michael soon feared his would. The gunfire was more sporadic now, and the distance between Michael and his pursuers having widened by at least a hundred yards. The added freshness of his mount had been the telling factor, he realized, but now his own animal was nearly as dead on its feet as theirs seemed to be. But he kept the animal moving, its brown eyes bloodshot, red-rimmed, froth of sweat and spittle heavy on its muzzle, a spray on the slipstream of icy air around him, but his body hot with the exertion and from the heat of the animal.

The gap to the two men who had left the campfire first had closed as well, Michael riding almost neck and neck with the dark amber colored little man who had signalled that he follow. Michael’s body did the work, his mind elsewhere, assessing his options — there seemed to be none at the moment, the countryside too open even to hope for breaking off, his ultimate goal still, if he survived, to follow these men to their base, their home.

But he also assessed the men with whom he rode and those

who pursued, trying to form some logical reason which would account for their presence here, their very existence. And were these men somehow linked to Karamatsov’s march into Asia?

The man beside whom Michael Rourke rode was small in height, but seemed well-developed enough that malnutrition didn’t appear to be a problem. The fur trimming of his clothes and the animal skin robe in which his body seemed all but engulfed, part of it trailing behind him on the wind, even the horse he rode, the saddle on which Michael rode, made of leather—all these factors bespoke animal life in such apparent abundance that its by-products could be used for simple, ordinary things. There was a water bag lashed to Michael’s saddle, of animal skin, the fur rubbed away in spots, the contents no doubt frozen with the temperature, judging from the stiffness of the water bag. The bridle ornaments as some of the saddle trimmings were of silver, the silver worked into designs of Zodiac-like symbols and representations of animal heads. That all this had survived five centuries seemed unlikely, the silver work beautiful, but crude.

He smiled ruefully to himself—had his father been here in his stead and had Natalia accompanied his father, no doubt Natalia would have been conversing with these people by now in Chinese which he felt certain would be one of her many languages, gifted polyglot that she was. He spoke English and Natalia had begun teaching him some Russian and before—before Madison had, had died —before that he had begun learning some Icelandic. Kurinami had taught him a few expressions in Japanese. He doubted that his vastly less than meager knowledge of one principal Oriental language would be of any assistance with what was probably a dialect of still another.

He carefully took in each detail of his riding companion and tried using the details to construct a more complete overall picture. The clothing was almost too perfectly like

that of the classic movie or history book Mongol warrior of ages past, almost as if copied or kept as some uniform for religious or cultural reasons. He had seen a flash of a saberlike blade, and the workmanship had seemed, at least from a distance, to bespeak quality. The rifles were either five centuries old or lovingly made duplicates of the originals; he could not be certain which without close range examination. The pistol he had seen one man brain another with was another story, clearly recognizable as something from close before the Night of The War, but perhaps also a copy. The pistol had appeared to be a Glock 17 9mm. Somewhere in his readings he seemed to recall that the Chinese army had begun issuing these as military standard before the unthinkable had become history.

Perhaps these strange men had a stockpile of pre-war weaponry from which to draw.

His attention was drawn back to the precarious reality of his own situation. The two riders in front of him were slowing, one man’s horse dropping to its knees, rolling over into the snow, the other horse stumbling on ahead a few paces as its rider dropped easily from the saddle, then standing, swaying, falling over—dead, he presumed.

The men unslung their assault rifles, the first man pulling his kneeling horse fully down, the flash of a blade, the animal’s head twitching upward, then sagging down, both men dropping behind their animals.

The man who rode abreast of Michael Rourke started slowing his own mount, the animal faltering slighdy as it slowed. Michael had no intention of slashing his animal’s throat. Animal life was still a rarity to him and the animal might be saved.

But abruptly, he realized he would have no choice to make, his animal starting to fall, its eyes wide open, a sound like that of regurgitation coming from deep in its throat, a mixture of blood and food leavings pouring from its mouth as Michael hurtled himself clear and into the snow. The

animal’s head raised once and then fell. Michael drew the .44 Magnum 629 from his belt and double actioned the revolver once, into the horse’s brain. He started to run then, the riders in pursuit bearing down toward him, Michael discharging the revolver toward them, then emptying the cylinder of the remaining four shots as he threw himself into a dead run toward the two men who hunkered down behind their dead mounts. The third man, who had ridden beside him, sprang from his saddle as his faltering animal neared the other two, a blade appearing in his left hand, the blade catching a flicker of sunlight, then all but lost in a spray of red as he slit the horse’s throat and dropped to cover behind its body even as it fell. Michael angled right toward the third man.

He holstered the emptied 629 as he ran, reaching first with his right hand and then with his left, snatching the Beretta 92 F 9mms from the double shoulder rig he wore, the shoulder rig like his father’s but different, his own personal design. He thumbed up both safeties, jumping up, spinning around, bringing both pistols on line with the leading horsemen and firing, horses rearing, men going down, gunfire ripping into the snow at his feet. He turned, ran, snapping off two more shots over his shoulders, diving up, crashing down behind the dead horse beside the man who had ridden next to him. As Michael Rourke looked up, he saw the muzzle of the man’s pistol staring at him, and above the muzzle of the pistol, above the hand which held it, the eyes.

Michael nodded his head toward the enemy riding down on them and the eyes of the little man filled with laughter and he turned the pistol away, firing it toward the riders. Michael Rourke edged up beside him doing the same, emptying both pistols, the leading edge of the band of horsemen turning back under the hail of pistol and automatic weapons fire, some of their horses stumbling, faltering, going down, men dropping behind the fresh carcasses

and firing assault rifles and pistols.

As Michael Rourke rammed fresh magazines home in each of the Berettas, he noticed something. The man beside him had perfect, white teeth. Michael raised up slightly behind the body of the dead horse. The pursuers still mounted were urging their horses into what, if memory served, had been called a skirmish line in books he had read and films he had seen which dealt with horsemounted cavalry.

And suddenly, the Mongol beside him said in oddly pronounced but syntactically perfect English, “Save your pistols until they are closer.”

Michael Rourke looked at the man, feeling his jaw drop. “Who the hell are you?”

“You had to be Russian or American — I hoped it was the latter. My name is Han Lu Chen. And I’m not one of these, but the other two over there think I am. If we survive this encounter, we can speak at greater length. And your name?” He added the question as if it were a polite afterthought.

“Michael Rourke. Nice to meet you.” And Michael turned his attention toward the skirmish line, the horses were advancing slowly, blowing steam and sweat, Michael keeping one eye on the mounted men and the other on the box of loose 9mms taken from his musette bag, his hands almost mechanically reloading the spent magazines for his pistols. The skirmish line started to advance more rapidly, Michael noticing Han Lu Chen bringing his assault rifle up to the shoulder. Michael began reloading the cylinder, rammed the speedloader into the ejector star and pocketed the empty loader. Ammunition for his handguns was abundant because of the cooperation of the Germans, but not abundant here. He carried a box of fifty 9mms in addition to the already loaded spare magazines and three loaded speedloaders for the .44 Magnum revolver, all this in the musette bag slung under his left arm. The rest of his spare ammo was in his backpack, the backpack with Bjorn Rolvaag back at the

German vehicle in the valley — how far away? Maria Leuden would be there by now, with Otto Hammerschmidt.