Survivalist - 15.5 - Mid-Wake (23 page)

Trucks had taken them from the main camp to one of the smaller camps, Paul judging the travel distance as about two miles from the main camp. They had passed through the camp, tents erected there, but ordinary tents, not the fancy, hermetically sealed, climate-controlled kind used by the German forces and the similar ones used by the Russian forces. And there was a large crater around which the trucks transporting them had traveled, the

crater scopped out with mounds of snow-splotched dirt near the rim and heavy construction equipment parked beside the mounds.

And there were actual buildings, in various stages of construction, but all the shells at least looking nearly completed. And then there had been the trucks bearing the gas which Karamatsov had unearthed in Egypt and used against his own people to overthrow the government of the Soviet Underground City, the gas which acted only on males, causing them to become enraged animals obsessed only with killing.

Paul had turned his eyes away from the hole in the tarp through which he had viewed this and tried to think what it reminded him of.

As he marched now beside Otto Hammerschmidt in ragged formation toward the airplanes, he still tried to remember but could not… .

Annie Rourke Rubenstein slid her holsters forward a little and dug her hands into the slit pockets of her ankle-length, heavy woolen skirt. She was becoming impatient with waiting for the Chairman’s promised escort.

The Chinese guards inside the tunnel, which lay beyond the monorail platform on which she stood with a lovely, English-speaking Chinese girl, had more than once stared at her. The strange race, she supposed, or even the heavy clothes. Particularly the guns. The Detonics Scoremaster .45 her father had given her was at her right hip, the Beretta 92F 9mm at her left. The rest of her gear—her backpack, her heavy coat, her heavy shawl, her M-16— was piled on the platform near her.

“Ma-Lin?”

“Yes, Mrs. Rubenstein?”

“How long have we been here?”

“Five minutes, I believe.” And the Chinese girl consulted her delicate-looking watch by rolling back the storm cuff of her jacket. “Indeed. It is five minutes almost exactly since we disembarked from the monorail.”

Annie nodded. Ma-Lin wore heavy pants and a heavy sweater and a light, storm-sleeved jacket over the sweater, a knapsack and a long, heavy-looking, fur-ruffed coat on the platform near Annie’s own gear. “You didn’t have to come with me. I’m a married woman. I don’t need a chaperone.”

Ma-Lin smiled. “I was ordered to accompany you by the Chairman himself. And I was greatly honored to be chosen, Mrs. Rubenstein.”

“Do you work in Intelligence?”

Ma-Lin only smiled.

Annie felt the corners of her mouth turn down. An escort that wasn’t coming. A chaperone who was a spy. “Great,” she murmured.

“What is great, if I may be so bold, Mrs. Rubenstein?”

“What?”

“What is great?”

“Nothing’s great.”

“Then why—”

“I’m getting angry—and not at you. My husband and my brother are out there somewhere and they’re looking for my father and one of my ‘family,’ who are also out there.” A monorail car was coming in to the station. “And I’m just supposed to stand here and be calm and ladylike. That’s a pile of bullshit. And I’m just about—”

She wheeled toward the arriving car, the sound—not one of the mechanical ones—startling her, somehow filling her with hope. It was the sound of a dog barking.

Hrothgar, bounding toward her, almost knocking her over as the animal stood on its hind legs, trying to lick her face.

And then she saw him, his green tunic, the high boots, the staff that was almost as tall as he was. The Icelandic policeman Bjorn Rolvaag. He stood, filling the doorway of the monorail for an instant, then stepped from the car to the platform, the car shaking behind him, his massive weight gone from it. His voice was calm, even, and he smiled at her.

“Annie.”

Behind Rolvaag were a half-dozen Chinese troops in what looked like full cold-weather field gear.

Rolvaag whistled faintly, quickly, and Hrothgar bounded away from her, toward him. And she ran into Rolvaag’s arms and let him hug her tight.

Lisa, the U.S. Marine corporal—John Rourke had never caught her last name—crouched behind one of the specimen cases, a solitary red light illuminating the museum hall. The doors leading into the entryway were still open, the way Rourke had left them after making his escape from the shark pens.

Rourke touched the woman on her bare left arm, then started forward in a low crouch, the AKM-96 tight in both fists. They had entered through a back door leading from a narrow stairwell into a small office, perhaps the office of the curator, a partially completed exhibit drawing on the desk along with trays of paperwork. When they had entered the gallery, Rourke had noted with satisfaction that the watertight door he had secured between the shark pen area and the display hall was still secured.

They had left Aldridge and the remaining escapees to continue on toward the submarine pens and escape, Captain Aldridge vowing that once he and his band had reached the dome beneath which the Soviet fleet was housed, they would create the noisiest and most attention-getting diversion possible.

Martha had estimated the travel time, unless they encountered serious resistance, as under fifteen minutes.

Rourke stood beside the doors now, the entry hall just beyond. He had counted seconds, not trusting that there would be sufficient light by which to view the face of his watch.

“Now,” he whispered, stepping through the doors slowly, the Soviet rifle in a hard-assault position.

He started to turn toward Lisa, to call her out, but the

black Marine was beside him A bank of three red emergency lights bathed the entry hall in blood-tinged gray shadow, the entrance to the walkway and street beyond nearly as dark.

And suddenly, Rourke realized what he had done. In disabling the primary lighting system, he had turned off the artificial sunlight, however it was made to work, which illuminated the domes. Outside, beyond the doors, it was “night.”

Hugging the wall as he moved, he started for the doors, Lisa beside him. As yet, there was no sound of the diversionary action promised by Aldridge. “Don’t worry,” Lisa hissed beside him, the top of her curly-haired head not quite even with his shoulder. “Captain Aldridge‘11 deliver, doctor. Pretty soon, you’re gonna have one hell of a disturbance.”

“We’re gonna need it,” Rourke told her.

He had formulated a plan, if it could be called that. But he needed panic for it to work.

They were beside the doors leading to the walkway now and as he reached to touch the doors, he heard the sound of an explosion… .

Natalia had been allowed to leave the bed, Kerenin sending in two female Marine Spetznas, both women powerfully built and armed with Sty-20 pistols. She had been given nothing to wear, and so she had wrapped the blanket from the bed around her, then used the bathroom. After all the time waiting, it was difficult to do what she had to do, the presence of the two armed women making it worse. One of the women smiled at her. It was not a smile of friendship, but more like a smile of lust. Natalia told the woman, “You would have to kill me first, sergeant. And then Major Kerenin would be very angry with you.” Natalia had closed her eyes then, pretending no one was there, at last relieving herself.

The women flanked her now on either side as they started back from the bathroom along the small hall

toward the bedroom. If these were a senior major’s accommodations, she would not have been eager to see enlisted barracks.

The moment the two women had first entered the bedroom, the smiling one watched while the other woman cut the bonds which had trapped Natalia in the bed—for how long?—Natalia had determined this might be her best possible chance for escape. The unsmiling woman wasn’t that much taller than she, although considerably heavier. But the uniform would serve.

Her blanket tight around her now, she stopped beside the bedroom door, the smiling woman reaching past her to open the door. An alarm sounded, from somewhere beyond the confines of the apartment. The smiling woman hesitated, looking toward the apartment door further along the hallway. Natalia did not hesitate.

The blanket would have to fall.

Natalia’s right hand caught the smiling woman’s right wrist, Natalia’s right knee smashing up into the elbow joint, the heel of Natalia’s left hand hammering up and out against the base of the second woman’s nose, killing her instantly. The smiling woman screamed, falling away, a Sty-20 pistol in the woman’s left fist, a curse on her lips.

Natalia wheeled half right. Still unsteady on her feet, her right hand went to the doorknob for support as the sole of her left foot snapped out, catching the smiling woman’s gunhand and knocking the pistol clear of her grasp, the Sty-20 skidding across the bare floor. Natalia’s left foot slapped out again, the heel of her foot contacting the smiling woman’s throat, crushing the larynx. The smiling woman gasped, choked, Natalia getting her balance as the door knob against which her right hand rested fell away and she herself started to fall, inward, into the bedroom.

Her right shoulder hit the bedroom floor.

To her feet—almost. The muzzle of an assault rifle, inches from her face. “Major—you are very good!” Kerenin’s voice. Natalia started to go for the muzzle of the assault rifle, but there was a popping sound and some

thing struck her right breast and she screamed.

She got to her knees. She could see Kerenin’s booted feet, hear him whisper. “We have a variety of special-purpose rounds for the Sty-20, major. The one I just used is a special psycho-de-inhibitor that is combined with a mild muscle relaxant. The sensation is supposedly quite pleasant, really.”

Natalia threw herself across the floor toward him. And then she started to laugh as she spread out her arms like wings and cooed, “I am flying!”

Kerenin was talking to her, but she didn’t understand about what. But she knew that his hands were on her breasts… .

Paul Rubenstein’s feet were cold, just standing there in the snow within fifty yards of the cargo helicopters. Their rotors had shut down. The windows were steamed and he could not see inside.

The abrupt major who had stopped Michael, Otto (beside him in the ranks now), and himself had two other officers with him, the junior officers shouting commands Paul Rubenstein could not understand. The forward ranks broke off left and the ranks just in front of him and behind him started right, Paul joining the men around them, Hammerschmidt still beside him. He ran, not knowing where, but as part of a herd, after a second or so detecting some order in the chaos. The leading ranks had broken up by squads to ring the cargo helicopters to the north side of the field, and the element Paul and Otto Hammerschmidt were part of doing the same with the helicopters on the south end of the field.

Semicircles were formed near the cargo doors, the doors opening now. Junior officers were everywhere, shouting commands, running from one squad to the next, Paul, Hammerschmidt beside him, joining the rest of the men in their squad in fixing bayonets, then going to high port.

The cargo doors opened.

Men. Women. Children. They were all Chinese. They

were all naked. They were all pushed through the cargo doors and into the snow.

Paul Rubenstein felt tears welling up in his eyes.

He now knew what the camp they had passed reminded him of.

Inside himself, under his breath, he whispered, “God of Abraham, let this not be so.” But he knew that it was.

More orders were shouted, Hammerschmidt’s elbow prodding him, and Paul advanced on the naked people, their bodies shaking in the cold like leaves in the wind. Rifle butts were hammered into naked backs, kicks were leveled against naked legs, spittle was fired from the mouths of some of the Soviet soldiers into the startled, frightened faces. And the naked people—there were hundreds of them, some of them crying, some of them talking as though they were trying to say this was all some terrible mistake, some of them as saucer-eyed as an epicanthically folded eye could be—were prodded forward across the snow, the helicopter crews shoveling human excrement from the insides of their machines. Women held infants, the infants’ bodies blue-tinged with the cold, some of the infants trying to suckle.

Gradually, the naked people were all herded together as they marched on, close to one another, Paul realized, for warmth. A woman fell, dropping her baby, and Paul started toward her to help her, stopped, realizing what he was doing, another of the guards running toward her, kicking at her, brandishing the bayonet toward her baby. The woman caught the baby in her arms and ran stumbling into the herd.

“God of Abraham,” Paul said again under his breath. He was a Jew marching naked human beings through a snowfield toward a death camp.

And his body shook with rage… .

“What are you doing, Boris Feyedorovitch!?”

As Feyedorovitch jumped inside the Gullwing, he

shouted back to the KBG head, “I am using my brain instead of waiting for orders! Try it sometime, comrade!” And he shouted to his driver, “The submarine pens. Now!”

The Gullwing started ahead, bumping across the greenway and over the curb, just missing one of the armored personnel carriers Feyedorovitch had ordered to the pens as well.

He spoke to his driver, but he was really thinking out loud, he knew. “We have been tricked. That radio communication. This Wolfgang Heinz or whoever he is—he speaks Russian, I would wager. And he tricked us. Curse him!” And Feyedorovitch started to laugh. Whoever he was, this tall, lean, courageous man had so far outsmarted all of them. And Olav Kerenin would be hard put to explain it all away. “Faster!” And the Gullwing moved ahead… .

John Rourke stepped through the doorway from the People’s Institute for Marine Studies and onto the walkway. Alarms were sounding, even more loudly, it seemed, than before. The street between the walkways was jammed with fast-moving Gullwings, most of the Gullwings—they had running boards*—with armed men hanging from either side of them. And many of the soldiers carried AKM-96 assault rifles. He tucked back into the doorway. “What the hell do we do now, Doctor Rourke?”