Survivalist - 21 - To End All War (14 page)

Aside from these female military personnel, Annie, her mother, and Natalia were the only persons who were armed.

She could see her mother sitting down, her pistol belt across her lap. Her mother sat down a great deal these days … the baby, of course. She could see Natalia pacing back and forth, smoking a cigarette, angry looks being fired at her because she was ‘polluting1 the scrubbed air.

Annie Rourke Rubenstein recalled the lines from John Milton: “Thousands at his bidding speed, And post o’er land and ocean without rest; They also serve who only stand and wait.”

She wasn’t standing, and she was, already, damned tired of waiting.

Darkwood looked at the dual display on the face of his Steinmetz chronometer. There was absolutely no reason in the world to want or need to know the time just now. His world was circumscribed by an open doorway in the belly of a flying machine thousands of feet over the water.

Whatever time it was in New Germany or in Mid-Wake or anywhere else was of absolutely no concern.

He supposed he studied the face of his watch because it was a familiar face. Sam Aldridge, Dr. Rourke, Paul Rubenstein, Michael Rourke—none of their faces could he really see. Each of them, like himself and all the others, was helmeted, effectively masked from familiar recognition, suited up, ready to throw body and soul into the air and plummet toward the ocean’s surface.

The ocean itself was unfamiliar to him. He had logged innumerable—or so it seemed—thousands of miles in the service of his country, but at no time had such service taken him out of the world’s largest ocean, the Pacific.

Water was water, salinity salinity.

Poets—and scientists to a degree—spoke of the waters of the ocean and the liquid content of the human body being alike. The poets pondered its significance, philosophized over the hidden meaning, while the scientists … What did the scientists do? They drew conclusions, of course, but only tentative ones because each mystery unraveled only led to another mystery still to be solved.

In the five centuries since the fall of old surface earth, neither poets nor scientists had solved very much. And, in their way, both poets and scientists were philosophers.” Men and women and children still died. Wars were still fought.

The sea took back its own, and if blood and seawater held so much in common, in the end, then, they became indistinguishable one from the other.

In the fuselage doorway, John Rourke called out through their headset receivers, “Be ready!”

Jason Darkwood studied the light over the door.

The light—still red—was unfamiliar, although he knew its purpose. Aboard this vessel, the Reagan, a shift to red meant that night vision was to be preserved for likely surfacing. Here, a shift to green meant that all one’s past and all one’s future would rest on how well packed was a piece of flimsy-seeming cloth called a parachute.

And, there were even holes in this terrifying thing, intentionally placed there. What if the holes were in the wrong spots, or there were just too many of them? He had been told from the first, when he had pushed to be released prematurely from medical treatment and to come along on this mission, that parachuting was quite routine. And he’d also known that, without him, assuming the first phase of the mission were successful, neither the second nor third phase held any real hope for success. This realization was not the fantasy of ego, although ego was good and necessary, but arose from an objective evaluation of their task.

The business about parachutes was roughly the same sort of thing they’d told him at the Academy the first time he’d put on wings and a hemosponge and gone out of an airlock.

And, after a time, survival and day-to-day activity in the water became routine.

But there were backups, things one could do underwater that one could not do, “Darkwood imagined, while falling out of an aircraft.

He’d asked John Rourke, “Doctor, what do I do—besides die, I mean —should my primary chute fail and my secondary chute fail?”

“It all depends, Jason.”

“On what, sir?”

“On how resourceful you are, how able to overcome fear sufficiently to act.”

“But what action is appropriate?”

“Why don’t you guess, and then I’ll tell you if you’re right.”

That had seemed fair enough certainly, and Darkwood carefully considered his response. But then Dr. Rourke clapped his hands together loudly. “What is it, Doctor?”

“I was just simulating the sound of your body impacting a hard surface without an open chute. A falling body accelerates at a speed of thirty-two feet per second per second, of course, and the initial height would — “

“I took too long?”

“You took too long.”

“So, assuming I bounced, how do I get my chute open?”

Dr. Rourke laughed then, lighting one of his cigars. “What would you do if your equipment malfunctioned underwater?”

Darkwood smiled, saying, “Well, fix it, of course.”

“Right. The problem with a parachute isn’t usually the chute itself. Either it won’t open at all or at least not properly or, when it does, it becomes tangled up. In the latter case, if there’s time, cut away your primary chute if you think you’ll need to. ItH give you something else to think about until you hit.”

“And in the former case?”

“Manually start the chute, but in such a way that you don’t mutilate it or tangle it.”

“It sounds like dying is simpler.”

“Well, it happens more often,” Dr. Rourke told him.

Jason Darkwood touched at the Smithsonian Bowie now. At least he could try… .

The light went green. “Geronimo!” He vanished from the doorway.

Why had his father, an eminendy sensible man, shouted such an inane expression? Because thousands of other men had shouted it as they dove out of airplanes?

He thought of a better thing to say. “Shit!”

Ahead of him, Paul shouted the same thing—“Geronimo!”—then jumped.

Michael Rourke approached the doorway, his eyes on the light. It would be red for at least …

It went green.

He jumped.

“Shi-i-i-i-i-it!”

He felt like an idiot.

He shut off his radio, as per instructions. But now Michael Rourke was spinning and he knew he shouldn’t be spinning. Then he remembered to stop shouting into his helmet and deafening himself, and to use his arms and legs to stabilize himself.

It would have been worse if it were night, because now at least he could see some of the others coming after him through the doorway. His body twisted and then he could see nothing but the whiteness of the clouds all around him, couldn’t see his father, couldn’t see Paul, either.

And then he was through, the clouds like lowlying fog, and suddenly he reached a crest of ground. But instead of lying below him, it stretched above him.

Below him he saw his father and his friend. They were so near that if he had been able to maneuver halfway de-cendy, Michael told himself, he could have reached out and touched them, linked hands like he’d seen skydivers doing in videos at The Retreat.

His chest pack.

He remembered to look at it. Plenty of altitude remained according to the digital altimeters, which were in perfect synchronization. There was plenty of time before he’d have to open a chute. He was falling, but so remarkably slowly he realized he was smiling, enjoying the sensations. How wonderful it would have been to do this without every square centimeter of his body being covered.

Euphoria.

That was what it was. The German sergeant with the

stumbling English—however halting, vastly better than Michael’s still-meager German—had told them, “When in the air dropping through there is sometimes the feeling in English called as euphoria—mispronounced—whereby the parachute-dropping man is much very excited and does not his own descent control happens.”

On one level of consciousness, Michael Rourke realized he was no longer thinking clearly. But God, it was so beautiful and so free, like the birds he remembered from his childhood. And he felt tears rising in his eyes, for the birds, for all of them, except that the comparative few the Germans had released and those meager numbers in zoological confinement were gone forever.

He saw his father, or was it Paul?

Normally, the height discrepancy would have been dead …

Dead, Michael Rourke thought.

Euphoria.

Euphoria had been making love with Madison, his once and forever wife. And if he were dead, and what he’d been taught as a child, sometimes questioning but sincerely wanting to believe were true, when he was dead, he would be reunited with her, see their child.

Did dead people see?

Would their child forever be a child, or were all spirits one age and therefore ageless? His eyes drifted over the water. How lovely it was! Peaceful.

And how beautiful were the chutes opening above him.

“Above me,” he murmured inside his helmet. “Above me? Above me!”

His eyes shifted to the two altimeters. He was almost … Michael Rourke triggered his primary chute, the main chute blossoming above him, jerking him upward, sucking the breath from him for a moment, the smaller chute out, the lines surrounding him suddenly stiff.

His hands reached up; his eyes looked downward. The surface was rushing away, slowed, just seemed to hang below him, and then he started tugging at the lines as he’d been instructed to do, to guide his descent as the water rose to meet him.

Already, one of the chutes was on the water, under the water, and gone. A second chute.

Michael Rourke’s feet hit the water, and he seemed to fall forward into it as a wave crashed over him and down, down he fell. He tapped at the quick release fixture for the parachute harness, but then suddenly he was suffocating. He was rolling, thrashing… .

And he activated the controls for the hemosponge and his helmet systems came alive. The wings he’d never tried folded open from his back and he moved through the water, like a bird on the air.

John Rourke was grateful for the time he’d allocated to learn the diving systems of Mid-Wake, grateful because the experience had been at once enlightening and enjoyable, and grateful now because he felt nearly at home as his wings furled and unfurled and he glided through the water, hovering there, his wings beating gendy, the air processed by his hemosponge fresh-tasting enough, his body warm but pleasandy so in his black dry suit, all helmet systems operational.

He switched to vision intensification, and fewer than fifty feet below the surface, the difference was so instandy pronounced that his eyes automatically squinted against the light.

The sea was life, he realized.

Because, unlike the land, all around there was life in abundance. Two Adantic bluntnose jacks, both large for the species, about a foot in length, swam past him, golden yellow, their second dorsal fins quivering. His eyes followed them and he was startled when, at the far left corner of his peripheral vision, something moved snakelike toward him. As his hand reached for the Crain LS-X, his wings fluttering to draw him back, Rourke smiled. The silvery creature was merely a cutlassfish.

Paul moved through the water toward him, another jack giving the younger man a wide berth.

From above, wings moving erratically still, Rourke saw his son. And, in the next instant, the surface was as alive as if a school of sharks were feeding, parachute packs sinking downward toward the ocean floor as wings unfurled and black helmeted men, Sty-20 pistols in their hands, swam downward.

John Rourke signaled with his hands, and the translucent-winged men of the attack force floated through the water toward him.

Darkwood. Darkwood tipped his helmet against Rourke’s own and Rourke could hear his voice. “I’m home, Doctor. The parachute ride wasn’t that bad, but I’ll take the water over the air any day.”

John Rourke answered saying, “You have a beautiful world. If we’re successful, perhaps your people will someday be able to benefit from its full potential.”

Darkwood seemed about to speak, but then Paul joined them, touched helmets with theirs. “Michael had a litde difficulty, but he’s fine. All our people from the J7-V are accounted for.”

“Pass the word then. We’ll follow Darkwood.” Rourke told his friend.

“Right.” And Paul was gone.

Darkwood seemed to be checking a compass, then touched helmets again. “If the German intelligence was correct, and we air-dropped pretty close to our target, like they say in the old western movies, ‘thataway’!” And Darkwood gestured into the gloom below them and north.

“Thataway,” John Rourke echoed.

The men of the team were already organizing themselves, using a wedge formation it appeared, standard Mid-Wake procedure. Two of the men swam ahead, as an advance guard, Rourke knew. Just as planned.

Darkwood’s wings spread and he seemed to glide downward in an easy roll. Paul and Michael flanking him, John Rourke followed.

The water around him vibrated.

Jason Darkwood half furled his wings, hovering, feeling the shock wave build, strike, pass, the sensation like a gen-de slap. The others would guess at what had happened, he knew, and there was no time for a conference. Just behind him, Dr. Rourke, Paul Rubenstein, and Michael Rourke waited, Sam Aldridge and the rest of the force behind them in a larger wedge, all hovering.

Darkwood unfurled his wings fully, gliding ahead through the water, using hands and flippers sparingly to conserve his strength, not fully recovered from his wounds but nearly so. The fatigue factor was something he had considered before deciding to volunteer, but again personal circumstances could not be helped. He was needed to do what had to be done.

Darkwood touched at his chest pack, shifting from vision intensification to magnification, always the wise choice first, lest one inadvertendy focus in on something so bright that the intensified light was momentarily blinding. But, although there were shapes ahead, there was no bright light source. He added vision intensification to magnification.

And he saw the hull of a Soviet Island classer ahead, one of the more than three dozen missile-launching ports open but closing now as another two opened. Immediately, he switched off magnification and altered the beating of his wings, rolling, using both hands and flippers now as rapidly as he could.