Survivalist - 17 - The Ordeal (15 page)

“This was discovered years ago when one of our agents was captured and used it to escape the Second City and its demons,” Han Lu Chen shouted over the wind. “But he was seized with madness afterward, perhaps from the howling of the winds through the chimney. But who can say? He spoke of this place, spoke of climbing for what seemed forever, and then seeing the stars.”

“‘Seized1 with madness’?” Michael queried.

“Drugs administered to him, threats of torture and the torture itself. He died shortly after achieving his freedom. What lies below the chimney is uncertain except that in some way it is connected to the interior of the Second City.”

Michael Rourke studied Han’s dark eyes for a moment longer, then reached up to his head, pulled back his parka and tore away the dressing, leaving only the adhesive-taped bandage over his headwound now. Maria’s face seemed to show her visibly wincing. “We don’t have much time. We don’t know how much time, really, at all.” And he addressed himself to Prokopiev. “In your condition—”

“I can climb well enough to descend.” “What about getting out, then?”

“We will never get out. You know that and so do I. So do all of us. The question raises an academic concern.”

Maria Leuden’s eyes were watering. Michael told himself it was the wind, only the wind causing the condition.

And then he picked up the first of the ropes.

John Rourke stroked the blade of the Life Support System X over the sharpening stone while his daughter spoke, Natalia comfortably sedate, asleep, Otto Hammerschmidt smoking a cigarette, Paul Rubenstein staring into what passed for a fire, the Soviet equivalent of the German heater/cooker units. The unit, glowing yellow-orange, was at the center of their group, about a hundred yards from the cammie-netted helicopter gunship, beneath a natural rock outcropping, what little daylight there was barely noticeable under the bleakness of the heavy gray clouds that seemed to produce a never-ending supply of heavy, wet snow.

“So Maria made an educated guess. That if the people of the Second City worship a missile as a symbol of their god, they’d in effect call on their god to save them or avenge them, then launch the missile,” Annie concluded.

“After all these centuries, it would be a long countdown. The missile would have to be fueled and the original fuel might very likely have chemically decomposed if it weren’t stored in just the right manner. There could be all sorts of problems that a computer program—which has to be the only feasible means of achieving a launch under the circumstances—would have to deal with. And all that presupposes the missile’s fuel lines and everything else about it are still functional. But with the proper program and the proper ‘religious attendants’ to service the needs of the program, I suppose it could be done.”

“We didn’t kill enough people the first time?” Paul Rubenstein murmured rhetorically.

“I gather not,” Rourke answered anyway. “But no one there is like us. No one really remembers.”

“Like you,” Otto Hammerschmidt said suddenly. “Like all of you, you mean. Not even the Eden Project survivors remember. All they remember is going to sleep just as it was about to begin, then awakening when it was all over. All of you are the only ones.”

“Some few of the Russians,” Annie volunteered, “who took the Sleep with Karamatsov. They remember the Night of the War and everything afterward. I think Antonovitch is one of them and he’s their new commander.”

“The new Imperious Leader?” Paul interjected, a note of sarcasm in his voice.

“Indeed.” John Rourke nodded, feeling a smile cross his lips. When was the last time he had smiled?

“But Michael and I were still children,” Annie went on. “We saw things as children see them. Maybe we were luckier, luckier than the adults who saw their whole world end.”

“I read of it from both sides,” Otto Hammerschmidt began, as if talking to himself, his eyes seeming to follow the rising of the gray smoke from his cigarette. “The official accounts, and then the things we weren’t supposed to read. About the world before. It was madness that made it happen.”

“Madness begets madness,” Rourke observed. “Everyone wanted everything, and they wanted it for absolutely nothing. And no one wanted the responsibility for keeping things working, for guarding the basic things about humanity that were worth saving. It had to be someone else’s job, someone who was stupid enough to take the risks. Terrorism went largely unchecked. The nuclear arsenals had been stepped down. But no one addressed the problems which had caused the buildup in nuclear weapons to begin with. And no one searched for the common thread underlying the multiplicity of terrorist causes. The savagery that had existed ever since man

became man was still there, only expressed in different ways. BDUs replaced animal skins, assault rifles replaced battle axes. Nuclear arsenals replaced barbarian hordes. The savagery existed. It was ignored while everyone went on with their lives just as if it weren’t there at all. And while the major powers realized there was the potential for global destruction, the minor powers realized it too and that they could use this potential to their own advantage. Yeah, it was madness. Another name for it was ‘humanity.’”

Rourke saw Annie looking at him oddly.

He knew the reason for the look.

His knife stoned, Rourke wiped lubricant over it lightly. “We have to solve two problems immediately. The helicopter has to get out of here with Natalia and get her to some at least reasonably safe location where she can begin to receive treatment. Michael and his party will need support if they’re going up against the Second City in an attempt to prevent them launching or just detonating a nuclear warhead. The solutions available to these problems are limited. Aside from Natalia, Otto and myself are the only two people among us who can pilot a helicopter. Which means that Otto is the logical person to fly Natalia out. Logic also dictates that he’s best off not undertaking such a task alone. Annie. Paul— you both should—”

“No,” Paul Rubenstein said very flatly. “You’re looking at this as a potential no-win situation, so you’re intentionally excluding me—”

“And me,” Annie chimed in.

“You are excluded,” Paul said commandingly as he looked at her. Annie’s eyes hardened for an instant, but then softened, her glance the embodiment of the term “mixed emotions,” Rourke thought. “But I’m not. Granted, Otto will need help; a woman is tailor-made to the situation. But you’ll need help, too, John.”

John Rourke looked at Paul Rubenstein. He remembered when all the others had betrayed the trust of the passengers

after the air crash in New Mexico and the desperate trek across the desert to seek help, only Paul Rubenstein had risen to the occasion. And ever afterward they had been friends, comrades in the true sense of the word, not its Communist perversion. “I’m very proud that you’re my friend,” Rourke said simply, then got to his feet. “Let’s get going then, since it’s settled.” And John Rourke caught up his things and started for the helicopter.

The man she had beaten half-senseless with the butt of the STG-101 assault rifle was Russian, separated from his unit, his uniform torn, a grazing wound on his left thigh, disoriented and very talkative when he was promised repatriation and given medical care. And he looked at her, while she listened to him speaking Russian (of which she could barely understand a word) and listened to one of the commandoes translating. In his eyes, when they met hers, was fear. It seemed ludicrous to suppose, but perhaps he had decided to talk because he’d been afraid they would turn him over to the crazy woman who beat people with rifles rather than shot them. ‘

The voice of the translator—she wondered how good he was—droned on, the phrases coming in jerky bits and hard-to-relate pieces. “That he was—he was part of a machinegun crew. Yes. They set up a defensive perimeter after taking one of the—I don’t know the word. The train that runs on one rail. But one of these stations and they were attacked from two sides and he and his friend were suddenly alone. They took to one of the train cars and got so far as the next station before the power went out, and then tried to escape, but were driven deeper into the city. His friend was killed by some person with a knife. He was already shot and he found this tunnel, then hid here. He didn’t know that it was a tunnel leading out, rather thought it was part of some new construction. He didn’t understand that

the city was built, buried, then later gradually dug out, as he realizes now from having been forced into the tunnel deeper than he had planned, in order to evade capture. There are Chinese outside—inside—the tunnel and there are small Russian teams on search and destroy missions moving everywhere in the city. It is a slaughterhouse in there.”

Sarah Rourke turned away from the translator (really more a paraphraser) and the Russian captive he spoke for and looked into the gray blackness ahead. Chinese soldiers, friendly forces, did indeed await. But so did Russian terror teams.

She knew this tactic. Small units, ready for suicide if need be, killing everyone they could find. It was just such a team that had invaded the cone of Hekla in Lydveldid Island and caused the death of her daughter-in-law, Madison, and Madison’s and Michael’s unborn baby.

“We should get going. Hear the rest of what he has to say later. We can’t wait any longer.”

Sarah Rourke looked at Wolfgang Mann. “I agree—Sarah. Yes.” It was in the set of his face, visible despite the vision-intensification goggles he wore, visible despite the fact that the goggles themselves obscured his eyes from view. He knew what she was thinking.

“Schmidt. Mueller. Stay fifty yards behind the video probes. Be alert!” And he turned to the remote probe operator, his video panels switching on. “I want those things moving quickly. We have no more time to lose. Get them going quickly. The rest of you, standard formation. Take him along. If he cannot walk, make a chair and carry him. He is not to be turned over to the Chinese, as has been promised.”

There was a look of panic in the Russian boy’s face. And added to his natural fear, the fact that he could see virtually nothing farther away than the extent of his arm because he had no night-vision equipment. For a moment, she felt sympathy for him. And she felt guilt because her heart should be hardened to him.

She turned away and chose not to look at him again. She blamed her feelings on her pregnancy. “Stupid.” “Frau Rourke?” “Sarah.”

“Sarah. What is stupid?”

“I am; we are; they are. Stupid,” she told Wolfgang Mann.

Otto Hammerschmidt was not the smoothest flier in the world, Paul Rubenstein decided, but seemed more than adequate to the task at hand. And the moaning emanating from Natalia was like the sounds of a restless sleeper, not displeasure with the ride. Her head lay across Annie’s lap, over a blanket. Periodically, spittle dribbled from Natalia’s partially open mouth and Paul Rubenstein looked away as Annie, his wife, cleaned it away. That Natalia had come to this. He shivered. Was this, perhaps, in store for them all, the pressure causing them to snap, break?

The strain of it was evident in John Rourke’s ordinarily calm face, the corners of John’s mouth drawn down low, his cheeks deeply seamed, the brow beneath his high forehead drawn together and down, the eyebrows arched as he alternately looked at Natalia then looked away, a look of powerlessness in his eyes that Paul Rubenstein had never seen there before, despite what normal men would have considered insurmountable odds, impossible difficulties.

Suddenly, Paul Rubenstein was consumed with a desire that he knew was insane, to take Annie away from all of this, find somewhere on earth where there was peace and just live his life there with her, raise children— He closed his eyes for an instant and when he opened them, Annie was looking at him, love in her eyes for him.

Had she read his thoughts?

Perhaps she had. He smiled at her.

Otto Hammerschmidt’s voice broke the moment. “We are nearing the landing zone.” Implicit in his words, though unstated, was the admonition to be ready for a quick jump-off so Hammerschmidt could get airborne again and take the liberated Soviet gunship out without being seen by either of the combatant forces.

Paul had turned his eyes forward when Hammerschmidt called to them, and now he looked back toward where Annie still cradled Natalia in her lap. John bent over Annie, kissed his daughter’s forehead, then knelt beside the two women, John’s right hand gently, tentatively touching Natalia’s cheek. And then John bent over her troubled face, touched his lips to her cheek, then stood, walking to the fuselage door, bracing himself there, ready. For what, Paul Rubenstein wondered?

He dismissed the thoughts of what lay ahead of them, stood, making a last check of his gear; then, holding to the rope guides stretching back along the length of the fuselage, he went to Annie, knelt beside her, took her face in his hands, kissed her once, hard, on the mouth. She whispered to him, “Come back to me.”

“I will,” he told her, hoping he wasn’t lying.

Hammerschmidt’s voice called back again, that they were touching down in sixty seconds.

Paul Rubenstein looked at his wife, then at Natalia, then once again at Annie. “I will,” he told her, then stood, moving more abruptly than time constraints required, joining John beside the door.

The helicopter started to settle, lurching slightly in the crosswinds of the heightening snowstorm, John wrenching the door back. The wind of their slipstream and the storm itself seemed to be sucked into the gunship as though filling a vacuum, and Paul Rubenstein fell back against it slightly, clawing his hood into position.

The gunship landed and Paul looked back once, Annie, still protecting Natalia, huddled near the lashed-in-place German

Specials, a smile on her lips, her eyes sad.

And then Paul turned and jumped, after John Rourke, the snow so heavy now it was like a wash of tiny needles of ice against his face.

He hit the ground, not too hard, John almost lost already in the swirling whiteness of the downdraft. He was up, moving, following John Rourke as he had followed him for five centuries and knew he would follow him until the day he died. And a smile made his chill-numbed face feel alive for a moment. Heroes and sidekicks. John Rourke was the hero. Paul Rubenstein had once described himself as John’s “faithful Jewish companion.” Some things never changed …