Survivalist - 15.5 - Mid-Wake (3 page)

Some of the winged creatures were drawing their wings around them, folding them back, then slipping upward toward the light and vanishing inside the monstrous submarine.

He could barely keep his eyes open now, the light making his headache worse, making him want to stop the dream so he could sleep properly. The quarrel with Natalia had been part of the dream, he realized now. When she had told him she could no longer remain with him because of Sarah and the baby, when she had told him that this war would go on forever and their lives couldn’t go on this way forever. When he had told her that he needed her and she had started to cry and simply walked away along the beach and he had watched her instead of going after her.

Nightmare—losing Natalia would be the ultimate nightmare.

More of the winged creatures were vanishing into the light and now, his eyes hurting him, like an explosion going on inside his head when he looked at something intently, he could see something that looked at once

cylindrical yet coffin-like. It was being manipulated into the light. A claw—huge, gleaming in the yellow light, came out of the light and took hold of the cylinder and then raised it up into the brightest part of the light and the cylinder was gone.

Rourke kept watching, knowing somehow that the dream would end and he wouldn’t see what was beyond the light. Some of the bubbling, sausage-shaped things that the creatures had clung to were being raised into the light by the gigantic gleaming claw. He felt a change in motion around him and realized that he was being drawn closer to the light.

It hurt his eyes and he squinted them tight against it, the light getting brighter as he heard a clanging sound. The claw, he told himself. But as the motion around him stopped and then suddenly changed and he felt himself being drawn up into the light, John Rourke closed his eyes completely. He realized he was waking up and the dream would be over… .

John Rourke opened his eyes when he’d felt the pain in his arm, recognized it as some sort of injection device, not unlike—what was it not unlike? He couldn’t remember and as the sensation subsided he closed his eyes.

John Rourke opened his eyes. The pain in his head told him that he had made the wrong choice and he closed his eyes tight. There had been a huge claw hanging over his head. “That’s stupid.”

He opened his eyes.

A talon-like crane was suspended some dozen feet over his head, bright polished, of stainless steel or some similar substance, he decided clinically. The pain at the back of bis eyes and in his neck was less intense than it had been. He moved his right arm. His right arm didn’t respond.

He shook his head, the pain intensifying, but clearing his thinking. His wrists were bound behind him. He tested his ankles. They were bound as well. “Damnit,” he whispered under his breath.

“John?”

Rourke turned his head to the right—the pain seized him and he shut his eyes against it momentarily. “John!”

It was Natalia’s voice. He shook his head again, at once intensifying the pain and clearing his head of it. She lay some ten feet or so from him, bound hands behind her back, ankles together, but lying on her stomach. He lay on his back. A puddle of water was around her on the steel floor, and for the first time he realized that his clothes were wet and he too was in water. Beside her was a dull, gleaming-wet, black, cylindrically shaped coffin, the

lid open, a small window visible in the lid. Rourke shook his head.

It hadn’t been a nightmare at all. “Where—ahh—are you all right?”

“My head is throbbing—they gave you some kind of injection—I think they gave one to me too.”

“Ahh—let me—let me—where the—let me think,” he told her.

“I think they shot us with some sort of sleep-inducing darts. I remember feeling something hit my chest while I was fighting. But I don’t feel any sort of wound there and I can see my jumpsuit—there’s no hole there. And I started getting—like I was drunk. John—what’s happening?”

She was frightened. He could tell it from her voice. He’d heard it in her only a very few times before. “Hang in there,” Rourke told her, shivering now with the dampness and the air temperature. He twisted his head to the left. There was a massive, watertight door, closed. Rourke tried to move his body, pain spasming along his back and through his legs. But he shifted position. He could see a hatch opening, a large wheel at its center. “Were you awake at all when we were—ahh—”

“It was like a nightmare—those creatures with the wings and the big heads—did you see them?”

Rourke licked his lips, his tongue as dry as his lips. “Yeah—did you, ahh … Did you see something that looked like it was a submarine but, ahh—the size of an aircraft carrier?” Natalia nodded her head, turned her eyes toward the floor.

Rourke twisted his body, rolling onto his right side, flexing his fingers and wrists to restore feeling. “John— they took it. The little Russell knife. They took everything. Some kind of metals detector. They swept both our bodies with it.”

“They—the guys from the beach?”

“They were wearing some kind of protective clothing— remember? I think it’s a wet suit.”

“Dry suit, more likely,” Rourke told her. “Those trans

parent wings—some kind of propulsion system. They could have a way of extracting hydrogen from the water and the hydrogen—”

Rourke heard the sound of clanging metal—he twisted his head left. The watertight door was swinging open, slammed against the bulkhead, bounced back, and a long, black-sleeved arm caught it. A man, tall, athletically built, stepped over the flange and framed himself just inside the doorway. His face was high-cheekboned, lean, almost deathly pale, his pallor a striking contrast to the dark one-piece dry suit he wore and the overall good health his physique suggested. Heavy, bushy, dark-brown eyebrows were knitted together in apparent thought. Above these a high forehead and close-cropped, thinning, dark-brown hair. Below these eyes that seemed so darkly brown they appeared black. His nose was large, slightly hooked, almost classically American Indian in appearance. His mouth was overly large and as he smiled—his eyes didn’t smile—his parted lips revealed such perfect white teeth that for an instant Rourke thought they were capped.

His voice was emotionless and very low. His Russian was curiously accentless and yet somehow strange. “Who are you:

Rourke’s mind raced. Natalia spoke, in German. “Who are you:

The man stepped completely through the doorway now and three other men followed him, all similarly black-clad. For the first time, Rourke detected subdued gold braid on the cuffs of the first man’s dry suit. Apparently a rank insignia. The man spoke again. “What language is this in which you speak?”

Rourke, in German, told him, “We speak German, of course. Are you speaking English?”

If they had been listening from the other side of the watertight door—Rourke was uncertain that it had been fully closed—or had the compartment bugged for sound … But then again, Rourke thought, if the man did only speak Russian, he might not be able to differenti

ate between English and German. “What do you want of us?” Rourke asked, in German again.

The first man turned to the other three and shrugged his shoulders, gestured them toward the compartment door. He passed through it over the flange, the other three following him, slamming the door shut again.

Rourke looked at Natalia. He gestured toward the doorway and she nodded that she understood, then said to him in German, “Who was that man?”

“Some sort of commander. I think I recognized him from the beach. Maybe they will realize,” he said loudly, “that this is some sort of insane mistake. Are you all right, my darling?”

Natalia looked at him and smiled.

The sound of the door again. Rourke twisted around to see. The first man appeared in the doorway again, and this time a man in what looked to be a Naval officer’s uninform was beside him. There was no way to tell specific rank, but judging from the lesser complexity of gold braid on the sleeves of the new man’s blue uniform tunic—without lapels, buttoned high to the neck with no shirt showing below it—he was of lesser rank. Nearly bald, slightly shorter, and considerably less fit-looking, the new man spoke in awkwardly accented German, as though he had never really heard German properly spoken. “You are both German nationals? How can that be?”

Rourke made himself smile. “Sir, this is some sort of mistake. Please release us. My wife and I meant your men no harm.”

The new man spoke in Russian, the same, curiously accentless voice. This new man was definitely outranked. He told the first man that indeed this man and woman appeared to be Germans. And that the man claimed the woman was his wife. The first man nodded his head thoughtfully, then walked over toward Rourke, rolling Rourke onto his stomach. John Rourke could feel the first man’s hands touch at the third finger of his left hand. The first man rattled off a question to the new man.

The balding man repeated it in German. “Why is it that you wear what it known as a marriage ring and the woman you claim is your wife does not?”

Natalia answered before Rourke had finished composing the lie. “It was several months ago—perhaps a year ago. We were exploring some old ruins much further inland and my hand became caught, and the only way to free it was to cut the ring from my finger. But in my heart, I will always wear his ring.” Rourke looked at her, the surreal blueness of her eyes, the love there.

He liked her lie better than his. He rolled onto his left side and told the newer man, “I demand that you release my wife and me. We have done nothing wrong. We were merely walking along the beach and your men set upon my wife, and I attempted to aid her and was also viciously attacked!”

The balding newcomer spoke in hushed tones at some length to the tall, athletic-looking man. The first man crossed the compartment again and stepped half over Natalia, one leg on either side of her. Rourke shouted at him, “Leave my wife alone, sir!”

The other man translated.

The taller man knotted his fingers in Natalia’s almost black hair and drew her head up, her back arching. She let out a little scream, Rourke uncertain if it were contrived or genuine. Rourke started to speak. The first man, still holding Natalia by her hair, said in Russian, “Tell this man that I think he and this woman are liars. And that I wish the real truth from them or I will cause them a great deal of pain.”

Rourke tried to place a suitably puzzled look on his face as the balding man laboriously and less than one-hun-dred-per-cent accurately translated his superior’s threat. Rourke intentionally made his breathing shallow so his voice would reflect fear. “Please—do not hurt my wife so! I will tell you anything you wish. But I can only speak the truth. We were walking along the beach.” The balding man began a running simultaneous semi-translation. “We are survivors from a community in the Western Hemi

sphere which lived for many centuries underground after the great war between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Many of us— many of us—we left our homeland in these last centuries and began exploring the world in order to seek out any others like ourselves who might have survived.” His mind raced. “We were elated when we discovered that some Chinese apparently survived there along the coast.” He tried to think if there could have been anything he or Natalia might have had which could have linked them to the Chinese. He licked his lips. He kept talking, keeping his breathing intentionally shallow, his words intentionally fast. “We were about to approach the Chinese. We had lost most of our belongings during the recent blizzards. We had eaten the last of our food and were nearly out of ammunition. We had no choice. Are the Chinese your enemies?” It was time to stop giving information, however spurious, and start getting some.

As the running translation wound down, Natalia spoke. “My husband is telling you the truth. We are pleased that you have found us. We wish to be your friends, to tell our people that other people still survive on the face of the earth.”

The balding man was catching up on the translation again and Rourke caught the first man’s eyes as “face of the earth” was translated for him. And the first man began to howl with laughter.

After several seconds—Rourke’s palms were sweating— his laughter subsided. Still smiling—but his face, not his eyes—he said to the balding man, “Tell them that they are either very innocent of who we are, in which case their interrogation will be long and painful and useless, or they are very good liars. In which case they will have the opportunity to tell the truth as convincingly perhaps.” And the tall man stalked from the room laughing again.

The balding man began translating into his sterile, fumbling German. John Rourke’s and Natalia Anastasia Tiemerovna’s eyes met. He saw real fear in her eyes and imagined she saw the same in his eyes. Bound, weapon

less, beneath the sea, and prisoners of a Russian-speaking enemy force that by all rights could not exist and was possessed of technology that, on the surface at least, appeared vastly superior to anything ever experienced.

The balding man completed his translation and left, the watertight door swinging to behind him.

“We won’t escape this—will we? We won’t,” Natalia whispered.

Rourke didn’t answer her because if he told her what he felt, she wouldn’t like the answer at all… .

The wind whipped the skirts of Han’s black dragon robe. Maria Leuden thought of her own skirt and realized that subconsciously her left hand already had her skirt under control. The wind that noisily buffeted Han’s garment was cold and there was a heavy mist on the air, the mist visible as long streaks of gray against the whites and yellows of the flashlights Han, the Chinese security personnel, and both Paul and Michael held in their hands.

She had given up on holding her flashlight. It was in the wide, deep slash pocket of her arctic parka, her right hand buried in the pocket beside it, her left hand freezing like her legs.

She dogged after Michael, feeling more like his puppy at times like these than his woman. She had become acquainted with the concept of dog following master from Bjorn Rolvaag, the Icelandic. Rolvaag and his dog were inseparable, Hrothgar his master’s shadow. Rolvaag and Hrothgar now explored further along the beach on then-own, the perenenially green-clad Icelandic policeman always solitary except for the dog, which sniffed at him, nuzzled against him, while he himself was almost invariably silent. Bjorn Rolvaag gave the impression of considerable intelligence, but since she spoke no Icelandic and he spoke neither German nor English, it was impossible to converse with him beyond a smile or nod.