Survivalist - 21 - To End All War (8 page)

So, the thing to do was force the situation.

For that, she needed to make both Annie and herself appear as irresistibly vulnerable as possible —and very quickly.

The store was called “Olga’s,” and had, by far, the finest selection of any they had visited.

There was a beautiful white dress, but Natalia had no tan and the color would only have made her appear paler than she usually looked. She found the perfect thing in black, and despite her height, it seemed as though with a few quick alterations it would be ideal.

Annie had found a dress as well, also in black. “Ohh, we shouldn’t-“

“It will be fun, wearing the same color. Let’s try them on,” Natalia volunteered. There were closedike booths at the rear of the store, with doors similar to those used in restrooms, the doors starting about eighteen inches off the floor so the legs of the person behind them were visible.

The entire booth was constructed similarly, freestanding in a block side-by-side, each sharing a common wall with the next. They were positioned just a short distance from a rear wall of the shop, behind which probably lay some sort of storage area. The idea that had come to Natalia when they’d first entered the store was now something she was certain of.

They started toward the changing area, Natalia whispering under her breath, “There are five of them, I think, and they’ll try to kill us while we’re changing. You’re wearing boots, so you’ll have to be the maneuver element.” They stopped beside a table and examined junk jewelry. “When we get into the booths, we’ll be side-by-side. If we can’t get two next to one another, well find something else to look at and wait. When we get inside we talk, just loud enough so that anyone listening will know we’re inside. You get out of your boots and leave them standing in the exact center of the space, so anyone looking from the front will see them … think you’re in them. Ill keep talking to you after you’ve left and let my skirt drop to the floor.”

“Where am I going?”

“Crawl out under the back wall of the booth, lose yourself in the racks, and get a position of concealment from which you can observe the entrance and the booths. When the men rush in, open up on them and I’ll open fire from the booth. Well have them in a crossfire, neat and clean.”

“You could get killed.”

“Don’t worry; then I wouldn’t get to wear this dress.” “All right,” Annie agreed.

There were two booths side-by-side. Natalia and Annie walked toward them, entering them but not too quickly. Natalia closed the door behind her. “Annie?” Natalia said in a voice just loud enough to be noticeable.

“Yes?”

“Do you still have those black pearls?” Annie didn’t have any black pearls. “And I brought them with me, too!”

“Ohh, good! They’d look wonderful with your dress or mine.” Natalia looked toward the floor. Stocking-footed, Annie was crawling out under the back partition. Natalia kicked out of her shoes. “You know, it was really good luck coming in here, Annie.” She had the suppressor fitted stainless steel PPK/S American out of her purse, hanging it by the trigger guard on a hook on the partition nearest her right hand. She unbuttoned the waistband of her skirt, thumbed it down over her hips, and shrugged the garment to the floor around her ankles. She reached into the neckline of her blouse and tucked the solitary spare magazine she had for the PPK/S into the cleavage between her breasts. “I wish we’d known about this banquet tonight. I don’t even have any good shoes. We’re going to have to find some, Annie. What?” She paused for an instant, as if listening to Annie. “That’s a good idea!” She had one of the two evening gowns in her left hand (the one she wasn’t planning on buying, just in case it took a stray bullet) and her pistol in her right hand, the litde .380’s slide mounted thumb safety up and off. “Ohh, all right, you can use it, but I thought you didn’t like that scent.” She hoped, if the men were already in the store and listening, her conversation sounded vacuous enough. She peered through the crack between the door and the side wall, and she thought she saw men’s shoes near a rack of hostess skirts.

And then Annie, from about twenty feet away, to the right and nearer the front of the store, shouted so loudly she could have awakened the dead, “Now, Natalia!”

Natalia kicked the stall door open and threw herself left and down, going into a roll as the first shots came. Annie’s .45 boomed earsplitting in the confines of the shop, the chatter of an M16 starting as Natalia came up on her knees. Four men were clearly visible, a fifth on the floor already dead. Natalia’s right hand raised instinctively as she pulled the Walther’s trigger through double action and shot the man with the chopped-down Ml6 through the right temple.

She swung the muzzle of the PPK/S, Annie’s .45 and Natalia’s .380 discharging almost simultanously, killing a third man holding a Beretta 92F in both hands as he was just turning to fire on her. The last two men broke for the doors.

Annie fired, then fired again, one of the men pitching forward through the window glass and onto the sidewalk. But he picked himself up, stumbling into a run at the heels of the other man.

Natalia was already running after him, jumping over one of the dead men, careful of her stockinged feet as she ran past the broken glass into the pedestrian walkway. The few private vehicles were already knotting into what would pass for a traffic jam here, and jaws dropped as faces turned toward her … a woman in a blouse with only the bottom part of a silk teddy covering the lower portion of her body, a gun in her hand; Natalia, never considering herself an exhibitionist, laughed at the thought. The wounded man tripped and fell, pushing a pistol toward her as a female pedestrian near him screamed.

Natalia moved into a crouch and held the Walther in both hands as she fired. The sound of the suppressor-fitted pistol’s report was best compared, she’d always thought, to the sound she’d first heard five centuries ago while posing as an American housewife on an assignment for the KGB. It sounded identical—to her, at least—to the loud plop made when one cracked open a tubular package of oven-ready biscuits against a countertop.

She fired again, then again, hitting the man in the throat and the left eyeball, all three shots killing ones.

The last man turned toward her and fired. Natalia dropped to the pavement, running her nylons as at least two shots sang past her. Annie screamed from behind her, “Watch out! He’s got a hostage!”

Natalia was changing magazines for the PPK/S as she rolled over the curb and into the street, coming up on both knees, the pistol at maximum extension of both arms.

“Don’t!” Natalia shouted to the fifth man.

The last of the assassins sent against her and Annie, thinning hair visible under what these days passed for a man’s fedora, held the muzzle of a Beretta 92F to the head of a woman about Natalia’s own age, the woman very obviously pregnant and very obviously terrified.

Police and soldiers were filling the street, orders barked in strident German, the assassin unwavering as he held the woman before him as a shield. Annie, stocking-footed, was walking forward slowly, her ScoreMaster .45 held in a point shoulder position.

A German officer shouted to Natalia, ordering her to drop her weapon. Natalia shouted back to him in his own language. “I am Natalia Tiemerovna! Do not interfere here or your Colonel Mann will hear of it! Dispatch personnel to locate Sarah Rourke and her party; there may be a similar assassination team ready to assault them. Do it now!”

And she proceeded to ignore his further protestations as, slowly, she got up from her knees, the muzzle of the Walther still aimed at the assassin’s head. “Damned hat,” she murmured under her breath. Without the hat, she could have gotten a clear enough idea of the actual size of his head so she could shoot him there. “Annie! Come up slowly and keep to your side.”

“Right”

The assassin, in surprisingly good English, shouted to her, “If you attempt to—”

“To do what?” Natalia screamed back at him. “Youll kill her? Then youll die! If you don’t lay down that pistol now, then you will die. If you do lay it down, I promise you your life—if you cooperate.” She was trying to read what kind of man this was. Was he insane enough to kill the pregnant woman hostage and go down in a hail of bullets? Or was there enough rationality left to him that he would take this one chance? If she could keep him talking, even just a litde longer, there was always the chance he might surrender, but a better chance still that she could make a killing shot.

The Beretta he held … how had they gotten these American military weapons that had been stored for the returning Eden Project? The Beretta was cocked, his right first finger inside the guard and resting against the trigger. A shot to the elbow would have the best chance of success against an involuntary reflex triggering the shot to the head of the hostage.

“I will kill her, Fraulein Major!”

“Then I will kill you. You are not dealing with police, the military, anyone in this but Annie and me. We don’t negotiate, listen to demands. You will surrender or you will die here, Nazi!”

“Don’t come any closer!”

Natalia felt that she was close enough. “Let her go and you live; my word as an officer!”

There was indecision in his eyes.

But Natalia had decided. “Annie!”

As Natalia called Annie’s name, to momentarily distract the assassin —she hoped —she triggered the shot from the Walther, the bullet striking the underside of the man’s elbow, the Beretta flying from his grasp as the pregnant woman screamed. The assassin fell back, his left hand sweeping up from under his jacket.

Natalia had wanted him alive. There was no choice now, her body already moving, her right first finger already squeezing back against the trigger. The PPK/S discharged, Annie’s .45 firing a microsecond after it. The assassin’s left hand held a second Beretta. He triggered a shot into the sidewalk in the same instant that his body rocked back, a bullet hole where his right eyeball had been and a second wound in his throat just under his chin. Natalia’s second bullet hit her original target, the man’s right temple.

And then the police and the military were all over him, the pregnant woman pulled away as though she were still in danger.

Natalia looked to the left, then the right. Annie was stepping back. Natalia interposed her thumb between the

Walther’s hammer and the rear face of the slide and worked the safety to drop the hammer, rolling her thumb out as it fell.

She exhaled.

The meeting had already dragged on interminably, it seemed. Antonovitch waited for a break between sentences and interrupted the principal of the three triumvirate members. “Comrades, it would seem to me, if I might interject, that a very simple situation confronts us.”

All three of the triumvirate members looked at him. Across the table from him, Dr. Alexsova smiled, the smile pretty, her eyes boring into him.

Antonovitch pressed on before one of the other two triumvirate members began another long monologue or the leader resumed the one that Antonovitch had just interrupted. “We are all Communists, we are all Russians, so why do we waste valuable time and energies in this debate? Already, I have been given to understand, several vessels of your submarine fleet have crossed through the Drake Passage and have stationed themselves in the South Adantic off the Argentine coast.”

The naval officer sitting beside Syedana Alexsova interrupted, saying, The area which you refer to as the Drake Passage, Comrade General, is known as the Stalin Passage.”

Antonovitch smiled. Hard-line Communists, the same as he dealt with at the Underground City. They had to be, to memorialize a dictator like Joseph Stalin. “As you say, Comrade Admiral, the Stalin Passage. But, with your vessels in position for attack on New Germany, would not all of our interests be better served by planning what should transpire rather than debating future global politics?”

The head of the triumvirate, as dour-faced and grey a man as Antonovitch had ever seen, answered, “Comrade General Antonovitch, we are aware of the military urgency to which you alude. But we are not mercenaries, righting for. a cause

because of some Capitalistic profit motives, nor do we send our gallant young Communists into battle merely in answer to a request. No. There must be covenants between our Communist brothers on the land and ourselves, because without such agreements, our fleet will not fire, will not support your land forces. And, without our thermonuclear weapons, Comrade, the people of your Underground City cannot triumph … will go down in defeat.”

Antonovitch lit a cigarette, partially because he wanted one, partially because he knew that smoking irritated the head of the triumvirate. “Comrades, must I remind you that if we, your brothers—as you have so generously referred to us—should be defeated, then the combined forces which will have engineered that defeat will be able to turn their free attentions to you, in aid of their ally Mid-Wake. And then what? With backs to the wall, you will utilize your nuclear warheads, and if the evidence our scientists and the scientists of our enemies have amassed proves true, you make the Earth forever uninhabitable. Not just the surface atmosphere will disappear, but the oceans themselves will vaporize this time. How long would your underwater complex last here? A few seconds? No. The only way in which there can be a Communist victory without bringing about the destruction of humanity as a species, Comrades, is by combining our forces now, utilizing your submarine fleet as the launching platforms for missiles carrying conventional warheads, to devastate our enemies and bring them to their knees. Otherwise, we are all dead, all of us on both sides.”

Antonovitch did not like the way in which Svedana Alexsova just looked at him.

By the time John Rourke heard what had happened, he also had full information concerning the results of the assassination attempt. There had been no team dispatched after Sarah and Maria, and the killers sent to murder Natalia and his daughter Annie had themselves been killed.

He dressed for the ridiculous dinner party being held in his honor, better things to do than this. “Temper,” Rourke told himself. Even though he was, technically, a general, he had no uniform—nor would he have worn one if he had. Hence, he fell back to the uniform of formal dinner parties for nearly six centuries now, the tuxedo.