Survivalist - 19 - Final Rain (12 page)

Hrothgar bounded out of their midst and lunged.

As the Soviet officer wheeled toward the dog, Michael Rourke let his knife fall, ripping the second Beretta from beneath his left armpit.

He stabbed it toward the Soviet officer.

Hrothgar’s body impacted the Soviet officer, hurtling the man downward.

As the man raised up on one elbow, the dog’s jaws inches from his throat, Michael pulled the trigger.

The single pistol shot reverberated off the walls, Michael’s ears ringing with it oddly.

Hrothgar stood, poised to strike.

The Soviet officer’s head slumped back, the pistol falling from his fingers to the carpeted floor.

Madame Jokli stood.

Michael Rourke’s right hand lowered.

Bjorn Rolvaag lowered his sword.

Michael couldn’t help but think, “Now what?”

The airfield was covered with snow. Wolfgang Mann’s squadron of J7-Vs had landed in a precise circle and, engines running and waiting, she noticed, synth fuel to burn, as Colonel Mann’s own aircraft touched down.

Colonel Mann emerged from his mobile communications center as the flight crew began opening the fuselage doorway. There was an odd look in his eyes and he seemed very tired. “The base here is ours, but precious few of our personnel remain able to fight to any great degree. Another Soviet attack from the air in force and the base will be overrun. I’m ordering complete withdrawal to Eden Base itself. Portable breastworks and additional anti-aircraft batteries are being flown in from New Germany, the attack there temporarily stalled. That’s the only way reinforcements here have become possible. Would you care to disembark, Sarah? You will be perfectly safe.” And then he smiled, but the smile wasn’t for her, really. She could feel that. “But why should I say something like that to you? If I had a single platoon of men who displayed your courage, I could conquer the earth if I were so inclined. But what good would there be in that?” And he looked away as he reached out his hand for her elbow.

Sarah let him take it.

With her parka hood up and her parka zipped to her neck and the heavy arctic gloves, she was still cold as thev steDoed

through the doorway and onto the small, low steps.

The dull roar of the J7-Vs’ engines surrounded them, punctuated only by the howling of the wind.

Snow touched her cheeks and the tip of her nose.

Colonel Mann offered his arm and she took it. They began to walk. His arm seemed to radiate a tenseness.

There was activity in the main shelter which still stood largely intact, but gone were the heat machines which kept the runway surfaces clear and warm. She remembered coming to the base in Lydveldid Island, wearing her Icelandic skirts and cocooned in her shawl.

It was very different here, and likely worse there. Michael. It was impossible to tell him not to go. He was too much like his father for that. Maria Leuden would find that out.

Colonel Mann was speaking to her and she realized she wasn’t listening to him at all. “I’m sorry, Wolfgang, I just was lost in thought, that’s all. How’s Elaine Halversen?”

“She is working inside. I thought you might like to see her, but for a time she will likely be engaged in the happy task of realizing that her young lieutenant still lives. There has been so much death.” He looked away from her, surveying the airfield across which they walked. “There are adequate medical facilities remaining here to deduce the specific nature of his injuries. They are supervised by none other than a gentleman already of your acquaintance, Doctor Munchen.”

“He’s here?”

“Yes,” Mann nodded, tugging at his uniform cap. It was cocked at a slightly rakish angle, almost making him look like Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in the movie The Prisoner of Zenda. Why was she thinking that? He didn’t look at all like Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.

“What were you saying before I asked about Doctor Halversen?”

“I was merely remarking on something of a personal nature. It is best left unsaid again.”

She stopped walking, taking back her arm. “Try me,” she told him, her chin cocked up so she could see his eyes better and look almost into them.

“I was saying, Frau Rourke, how truly I enjoy your company, and that I did not wish to presume, but I consider you a friend. A man like myself has few real friends.”

“Thank you.” She watched his Adam’s apple, which wasn’t particularly prominent, rise and fall, as though he were swallowing. There were tears in his eyes. The wind? “What else were you saying?”

“There is, as you are aware, a resurgent Neo-Nazi movement. I have long been aware that I am considered among its principal targets for assassination. During the attack—” The tears flowed, not freely, but in abundance over his high cheekbones, his eyes filled with them. “She worked to aid the wounded. A man came up to her—a soldier nearby was killed as well. The man escaped. He shot my wife in the head and neck three times and she died.”

Sarah Rourke sucked in her breath so rapidly it sounded like a scream. “My God, Wolfgang.”

“She was a fine woman, a very—” He bit his lower lip, his voice coming hard now. “It is why - why I wished, wished to walk, Sarah. I cannot—the men cannot see me—”

She reached and held Wolfgang Mann’s hand. She wanted to fold him in her arms.

“Walk with me,” she whispered, holding his hand very tightly. He raised his head, the wind and snow lashing at his tear-streaked face. Erect, shoulders thrown back, he only nodded, holding to her hand so tightly she thought that her hand would break.

The half-track truck’s fuel tank registered well below half remaining and Vassily Prokopiev stopped the vehicle and climbed out into the snow, instantly chilled.

He walked through the drifted snow, toward the vehicle’s rear, pulling open the tarp just enough that he could reach inside the bed from the rear bumper, climbing up, taking out one of the canisters of synthetic fuel.

He drove without a full knowledge of his destination, only that he drove to the west. Soon, he would encounter German lines. What he would say to the Germans to prevent his being shot and killed he had no idea of, but the canister in which the plans for the particle beam technology were contained had to be given to Doctor Rourke.

There was no doubt of that.

As he filled the receptacle with pellets, he heard the sound again, only aware now of having heard it a first time at all. It was a low moaning sound.

Carefully, he kept his hands at their task, filling the synth fuel chamber to capacity, closing the cap, then capping the container as well.

He looked around him as he started back toward the rear of the half-track. “Idiot,” he cursed at himself. The assault rifle, the rest of his gear, all of it was inside the cab of the half-track where it was nice and warm, the engine still running there. All he carried on his body was the Czechoslovakian CZ-75 9mm pistol, the antique given him by Comrade Marshal Antonovitch, like a father might give to a son.

He had never fired the gun. But he drew it now, freeing it from the holster as he bent into the truck bed to replace the still partially full canister of synth fuel. Yet he kept the pistol under his coat.

He dropped to the snowy ground, tugging the tarp closed, securing it awkwardly but satisfactorily with one hand.

Choice. Run for the cab of the half-track truck, drive off and escape whatever made the moaning noise. There. He heard it again.

Or go and look.

It sounded a human cry and, except for wildlife released around the now destroyed Second Chinese City, there should be no animals roaming free on the continent.

Human.

Perhaps a soldier, separated from his unit.

He could not leave a fellow soldier, regardless of his army, to die here in the cold.

“I am armed!” Prokopiev called into the swirling snows. “If you require aid, I will give it. Do not be afraid, but if you attempt to harm me you will surely die!”

He spoke in Russian. To have tried English, with which he wasn’t all that terribly comfortable, would have made no sense. A soldier out here would have to be Russian or German and he knew no German.

There was no response.

Vassily Prokopiev was freezing cold, but more of the cold was from the inside of him.

He walked toward the sound, into the swirling cloud of snow and airborne ice.

There was seismic sensing equipment of an elaborate, almost antique-looking kind, wood trimmed, and brass fitted, and the brass highly polished. Madame Jokli stood before it. Michael Rourke held his bandaged left upper arm. Feeling was beginning to return and, with the feeling, pain.

There was movement on the needle of the seismograph, black scrawl in its wake across the unfurling roll of white graph paper. “There is going to be an eruption, Michael, an eruption of Mt. Hekla.”

Outside, Soviet troops were massing, visible through the windows. Michael fumbled with his stiff fingers as he reloaded the spent magazine for his Berettas, the other pistol, from which he’d expended only a single round, already replenished. And then Madame Jokli began again to speak, but this time in her native Icelandic, Bjorn Rolvaag and three other Icelandic policemen in the room with them. Out of thirty-five members of the constabulary, eight had been killed outright, two more dying of their wounds in the moments immediately following penetration of the building. Five others were wounded, none so seriously they couldn’t walk with a little assistance.

Twenty policemen armed with swords, two women (Madame Jokli, President of Lydveldid Island, and her maid, an older woman), a dog that physically more closely resembled a timber wolf, a twenty-first policeman armed with a sword and a staff and a twenty-second man—Michael himself—armed with three handguns, an assault rifle and a knife could not withstand the assault which was coming inevitably against them.

“When, Madame President, should the eruption take place?” Maria Leuden might still be in the tunnels, escape pipes for the volcanic lava that had last flowed centuries ago.

“That is hard to say. Seismography is not a specialty for me, Michael. But I have observed this equipment each day for many years and I would guess, at least, that the eruption—see how the pattern increases in magnitude—that this eruption should take place soon.”

“Geologically soon, or soon in the temporal sense?”

She smiled. She was very pretty and, in her youth, was likely breathtaking. “In the temporal sense. How much you are like your excellent father, Michael. The people here, both ours and theirs, must be warned to evacuate.”

“Onto the ice sheet?”

“Many will die, perhaps most. But all will die here. The explosives they used against us. To the far side of our community, there is a bomb crater some thirty feet wide, nearly half as deep. That is the largest, but there are several such craters. They have disturbed the earth, and the earth is about to retaliate, I think.”

“Madame Jokli, this-” They were trapped. The KGB Elite Corps personnel outside would not believe her story about impending volcanic doom. There were helicopters. He could fly one, if he could steal one, but no one else here could. Then he should play God, if somehow he were given the opportunity, merely take off with Madame Jokli, her maid, Bjorn Rolvaag, of course Hrothgar, perhaps one or two others, leaving everyone else to die.

He could not do that.

But if Maria had already left the tunnels, had gone to rejoin the bulk of the German commando force, small though it was, which Wolfgang Mann had left with them, there was a chance.

“Madame Jokli. Do you have the components here by which we might construct a powerful radio transmitter? It wouldn’t be necessary to receive, just make a signal powerful enough to reach over the height of the cone and to what remains of the German base.”

“It might be done. You are thinking?”

“There are very few German aircraft remaining that can be flown, I understand. But combining those with the Soviet gunships, it might be possible to save your people when the eruption comes. But everything else would have to be left behind, I’m afraid.”

Madame Jokli smiled indulgently at him. “Michael. The people are Lydveldid Island, not the furniture, not the silverware, not even the library. If you can do this thing, you will have done something truly great. We can attempt to build such a radio. But there is little time remaining.”

And Madame Jokli looked at the seismographic readout, then out through the windows toward the massing Soviet troops.

She was right. There was very little time. But his father had taught him never to give up.

If they were successful, he would be leaving something behind as well. She lay in a grave just outside the cone, their unborn child in her womb.

The refitting of the Island Class submarine Arkhangelsk, informally but officially recommissioned the USS Roy Rogers, was going well. Sometimes inaccurate, always hard to read, Soviet instrumentation was being removed, replaced with state-of-the-art instrumentation of the type found aboard the finest vessels of the Mid-Wake fleet.

Jason Darkwood sat in the command chair, T.J. Sebastian standing beside him. “It’s only temporary, Sebastian. The Roy Rogers,” and Darkwood let himself smile, “needs a good skipper. You’re the best man for the job.”

“I prefer the Reagan, Jason. This floating behemoth is an abomination by comparison.”

“Yes, but she’s the biggest and best troop carrier we’ve got and as soon as the last of the Soviet missiles are removed from her tubes, she can carry out what we don’t sabotage, my friend. It’s a job that needs doing.”

Technicians, male and female, moved everywhere. “Begging the captain’s pardon, but we need this chair,” a chief petty officer interrupted.

Darkwood grinned, slipped out of the chair. The chief immediately set about directing two ordinary seamen to begin unbolting it from the deck.

“Our electronics can’t be fitted into their chairs,” Sebastian explained. “So, it appears, I will get a brand new chair.”

“See! Things are looking brighter already. Let’s adjourn to your cabin before they decide to move me out of here.”