Survivalist - 17 - The Ordeal (16 page)

Michael Rourke had elected to be first through the chimney, delegating Han Lu Chen to be last since Prokopiev, with his injuries, might be more prone to difficulty and, if he fell, he would need someone roped to him from above.

As he moved downward, Michael looked up, Maria Leuden scrambling after him, movement through the chimney an arhythmic combination of climbing, careful walking, occasional crawling, the chimney comparable to a narrowly winding stairwell, but irregular, treacherous and, as the rock surface made it appear, a freak of nature rather than a contrivance of man.

No map, no layout however rudimentary existed of the chimney, and as they moved ever deeper, there was no sense of where they were, how far they had come, how much of the journey remained.

As Michael looked back below him and moved on, he saw the chimney abruptly twisting right; there was no real concept of north or south here without consulting a compass and, with no idea of the composition of the rock, a compass might prove useless anyway.

The chimney seemed to twist into a low-ceilinged shelf and Michael reached the shelf, then reached up to aid Maria

Leuden in her descent, his hands going to her waist as he almost lifted her downward.

She was in his arms the next instant, and her arms encircled his neck. “I love you.”

Michael kissed her quickly, then moved her aside farther along the shelf, helping Prokopiev down, too. “I do not wish to be kissed.” The Russian smiled, laughing softly.

Michael shook his head and smiled, feeling his cheeks slightly flushed. “I hadn’t been planning on it, Vassily—no offense.” And the Russian clapped him on the back and limped off to join Maria Leuden, Han the next down. “Don’t worry—I wasn’t planning on it,” Michael said cryptically, the Chinese intelligence agent just looking at him uncomprehendingly.

Michael Rourke took the German anglehead flashlight from where he had clipped it to the front of his parka, opening his parka as he used the light to explore the shelf on which they had stopped.

Maria was just ahead of him, whispering just loudly enough that he could hear her, “I think you should take a look at this, Michael.” Michael Rourke moved more quickly now, beside her, and as he put his arm over her shoulders Maria Leuden whispered, “I am glad you only kissed me.”

“Shut up,” he told her good-naturedly, then drew her against him and kissed her hair. He pushed past her then, saying, “What was it you saw that you wanted—” But he stopped, just letting the sentence hang.

Directly ahead of him, through a niche in the wall, was a door, tight against water or air, it seemed, like a submarine door closed—and opened as well, it seemed—by means of a locking wheel. “Get Vassily and Han,” Michael Rourke ordered, using the flashlight now as he dropped into a crouch beside the locking mechanism, examining it to determine age if he could.

It looked to be of familiar design, and the metal’s integrity indicated it was either relatively new or exceptionally well made. There was tarnish in evidence, but it rubbed off to a

dully gleaming brush finish under the pressure of his glove. Some sort of high-quality stainless steel with extreme surface hardness of perhaps a titanium alloy. The tarnish and the dust layer over it could have been the patina of centuries, or only decades.

Maria dropped to her knees beside him and he asked her, “What do you think? How old?”

But Han’s voice from behind him offered the first attempt at an answer. “They could not fabricate such metal as this now. It is why they utilize the old weapons or copies of them. The Glock 17s of the pre-war Chinese Army, fortunately for the Second Qty military forces, at least, were among the most durable of pistols, it would appear.” And as Michael looked over his shoulder toward Han, the Chinese hefted his own Glock, part of his standard Second City disguise but, Michael had noticed, something the intelligence agent seemed to carry otherwise as well. “The assault rifles were crude enough to be duplicated more crudely. But such as this door would be as impossible for them as the manufacture of a pistol like the one I hold in my hand. This door is from before the Dragon Wind, Michael.”

“‘Dragon Wind,’” Michael repeated. It was the Chinese term for the Great Conflagration, the fires which had consumed the sky and nearly consumed all life on earth. “Could this be—” He left the question unfinished.

“An access chamber into the missile silos,” Vassily Prokopiev said, as if somehow snatching Michael’s thoughts from the. air.

“I think it could,” Maria Leuden volunteered.

“It might well be fitted with an alarm,” Han suggested.

“Five centuries old?” Michael asked.

“He is right,” Maria said. “It wouldn’t function anymore, would it, Michael?”

“Let’s find out,” Michael almost whispered, his fingers curling over the wheel and closing. He tried turning it, realized then that not only dust and tarnish had collected over the five

centuries since its installation, but corrosion as well, despite the gleaming quality of the metal.

He gripped it more tightly, Prokopiev throwing his left hand to it, Han Lu Chen reaching across Michael’s bending back, grabbing hold of it, Maria’s comparatively tiny hands taking hold of the wheel as well. “Together!” Michael Rourke hissed.

And the wheel turned with a squeaking sound so loud that Michael thought it could wake the dead. And who knew what might be behind the door, for that matter?

The valley that spread before them and fronted the Second Chinese City could have been a biblical prophet’s nightmare of Armageddon. Armageddon, perhaps, but not a nightmare, John Thomas Rourke knew. Because it was reality.

Had the lucky ones, indeed, been those who had died on the Night of the War? And if that had been World War Three rather than World War Last, then was he witnessing the” beginnings of World War Four? Or, like World War Two in perspective against World War One, was it only a resumption of warfare merely briefly suspended?

He remembered history classes he had taken while completing the first four years of his university training. It was possible to trace World War Two’s beginning all the way back to the Franco-Prussian War, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor back to Theodore Roosevelt’s heavy-handed mediation of the settlement between the warring powers in the Russo-Japanese War.

History was an interlocking grid of wars, separated only by brief respites during which the antagonists might realign and re-arm.

Was the five centuries of the Sleep merely this?

“What are you thinking?” Paul Rubenstein asked him.

John Rourke looked away from the valley where Soviet ground forces and Second City Chinese forces battled to the death, where black Soviet gunships skimmed over the living

and all living vanished in their wake, like angels of death. “That nothing has changed. It’s time we were going.” And John Rourke began moving back from the rocky overlook, the first few yards on knees and elbows until it was safe to stand and there was no risk of silhouetting himself against the gray sky. The threat of discovery from accidental aerial observation, however real, was a threat which could not be countered, only judiciously ignored.

They moved along the rim of the valley, ever nearer the mountain which was the heart of the Second Chinese City, where his son and the others had gone.

At any moment, if Maria Leuden’s educated guessing proved correct, a missile might be launched, or the very mountain itself might explode as one or several nuclear warheads were detonated within it.

And, if the scientists were correct, the already fragile atmosphere, not yet recovered from the fires that nearly burned it away entirely five centuries before, would be dealt the death blow. Without planetary engineering techniques not within the technical grasp of a mankind for five centuries devoting all effort merely to survival, life on the surface of the earth would simply, irrevocably end, forever. The species Homo sapiens would have eradicated itself totally from the memory of the universe. Perhaps, if other life existed elsewhere, one of the robot probes of the Voyager type might someday be discovered-and traced back to its planet of origin, a derelict rock devoid of all atmosphere and life.

John Rourke, the snow falling as heavily as before, his right gloved fist balled tightly to the pistol grip of his daughter’s M-16, his best friend beside him, continued moving toward the mountain.

Time might, already, have run out.

Michael Rourke was the first through into the light, the light brilliantly white where it emanated from the base of the cylinder to which the air-and watertight door had opened, the cylinder itself extending downward seemingly without end. Here the light was gray, but by contrast to the pitch blackness through which they had moved, the blackness broken only by the beams of their flashlights, it was bright enough. Michael clicked off his German anglehead light and pouched it to his belt.

“Come ahead,” he whispered, stepping down onto the rungs of a ladder which began here and extended downward toward the light. Above him, there was the solid face of the cylinder’s top. As he had entered, he was initially fearful that the cylinder itself might be a missile launching tube. But capped as it was there, it could not have been.

Maria stepped out and he helped her onto the ladder rungs. He had tested them with his full body weight while still clinging to the door frame with both hands. It seemed completely sturdy.

“What is this?” Maria asked him.

“An access tube, maybe to the missile tubes. But the ladder points that way.” The tube seemed almost polished and he wondered if it were closed at its base with another door similar to the one through which he and now Maria had just passed. But this door had identical-seeming opening hardware on the

interior, identical except for an almost total lack of tarnish.

The air inside the tube had been stale-smelling, and when he had finally, with the help of the others, gotten the door open, there had been a popping sound, almost like the sound of a corked bottle of wine being opened in one of his father’s videotaped movies at the Retreat.

Michael moved down along the ladder, Maria immediately above him, and Prokopiev passing through the porthole after her, Michael moving farther down along the ladder as Han Lu Chen, the last person, clambered through and onto the rungs just above Prokopiev. They were still roped together and Michael mentally opted for maintaining the arrangement. The rungs seemed sturdy enough but he intellectually refused to assume that the next one he stepped on would not give way. And he thought of his father’s often heard words, “It pays to plan ahead.”

Keeping his voice as low as he could and still be heard, Michael announced, “This is apparently an access tube. We’ll follow it down until it plays out or branches off. If that Chinese agent got out this way, we should be able to get in. Han—close the door behind us and lock it.”

“Yes,” the Chinese intelligence agent answered, then set to swinging the hatch closed behind them. There was another popping sound, asthough the gaskets surrounding it were self-sealing. Michael wondered fleetingly if the stagnant air supply would be enough to get them to their destination with the hatchway closed. But with it open, there was enhanced risk of detection should the shelf on which they had found the door be part of some regular guard route.

“Sound—even the sound of my voice—could travel a great distance in an environment such as this, so we have to keep sound to a minimum once we’ve started because we don’t know what’s below us. Ready?”

There were nods of assent. Michael started down.

Suddenly, there was motion all around her and there was gunfire and Sarah Rourke threw the muzzle of her STG-101 toward what she perceived as the enemy and prayed she was right as her finger touched the trigger, a loud burst and a bright, but small-diameter, flash, the gunfire making the self-compensating vision-intensification goggles she wore “blink,” shutting down luminence as the brighter flashes came. It was like the old silent movies she had seen in museums and on television, the motion broken, distorted, jerky.

The STG-101 bucked in her hands, figures in line with its muzzle going down. And suddenly Wolfang Mann’s voice was shouting in the bones of her inner ear from the radio set, telling her, “Move ahead quickly, Frau Rourke! I am with you!” And she heard as other orders were being shouted back and forth, the screaming of one of the commandoes as he died. The robot video probes were zigzagging erratically as if suddenly they had lost all control and, when she looked back, it was the man who controlled them who was going down, dead, the monitor panels on the steady mount in front of him aflame, sparks crackling from them.

She ran, almost tripping over one of the robot video probes as it came toward her left ankle like some angry little dog.

A hand reached out for her and she thought for an instant it was Wolfgang Mann or one of the others, but in the other hand was a Soviet assault rifle. She fired first and the man’s body

rocked back out of the edge of her peripheral vision.

There was no way to keep count of the number of rounds fired, the cyclic rate so rapid.

She fired again as a figure fired at her, the tunnel floor in front of her ripping and shredding under the multiple impacts. The forty-round magazine was empty or the gun was jammed. In the semi-darkness and the confusion, with people all around her trying to kill her, there was no time to find out.

She worked the bolt for the under-barrel grenade launcher and actuated the self-contained triggering mechanism within the magazine itself, firing at a concentration of the Russian kill squad blocking the tunnel. The STG-101 bucked in her fists, there was a brilliant flash, and her ears rang with the concussion.

She found another magazine for the STG-101 and released the spent or partially spent one, letting it fall to the tunnel floor, ramming the fresh one up the magazine well, tugging at the charging handle, letting the bolt fly forward.

If the gun fired, it hadn’t been a jam. It fired, another of the Russians going down, two more of them dodging clear of her.