Survivalist - 23 - Call To Battle (12 page)

“Pull some clothes on, fast.”

The crime scene turned out to be a bar over in the immigrant section and the body she saw kind of spilled out of a synth-fuel drum someone was using as a garbage can. She’d never had bad dreams

about the corpse, but she’d never forgotten it either: all grey-faced and bloodstained and the left eyesocket empty and a knife sticking out of the dead man’s throat.

That was in the days when her lather worked homicide, before he’d transferred to, then been asked to run the Honolulu Tac Team.

Her father, Tim Shaw, his hat low over his eyes, stood talking with John Rourke beside an ambulance that was already filled with black synth-rubber body bags.

But none of the bags seemed filled all the way from top to bottom and, with a sickening feeling in her stomach, she realized the bodies of children were inside.

Her father stood five foot nine and was a heavy man, barrel-chested and broad-shouldered, not fat. Beside John Rourke, who was well over six feet tall and seemed as trim and fit as a professional athlete, he looked short. But Tim Shaw still looked like he could lick his weight in lions with both hands tied behind his back. And Emma Shaw knew that her father could do just that if he had to because, figuratively speaking, he’d done it lots of times before. She went up to her father and as he turned around, noticing her, she put her hands on his shoulders and kissed him lightly on the lips. She took a step back, looked at John.

“Hiya, kid,” her father said, forcing a litde smile which faded almost instandy.

“I heard. As bad as they say?” Emma asked him.

John Rourke answered. “Worse, I’d imagine, since we don’t have a final body count yet. At least eighty-three dead children so far and about fifteen adults.”

“I thought you were on leave?”

Emma Shaw looked at her father, smiled, said, “I am. Can’t you see?” She stuck both hands into the patch pockets of her dress and took a step back flaring its skirt as she did so. “Civvies.” She let the smile leave, since there was nothing to smile about. “You get ‘em?”

“You should have somethin’ better to do than come here, Emma,” he told her.

“I heard you were in a gunfight, so-” she left it hang.

“Half of ‘em got away, okay? Killed Linda while she was pursuit.” He lit a cigarette, murmuring, “Fuckin’ Nazis,” under his breath.

“Did someone tell her mother?”

That’s what Tm about to do,” Tim Shaw said, shaking his head and walking away.

“Come on, I’ll take you for a walk,” John suggested.

She let him take her elbow and start propelling her toward the palm trees and the surf beyond. There were evidence technicians working in the area, some of them people she knew who nodded to her or said “Hi” and then went back to their grim work. “Why did they do this?” Emma Shaw asked.

“Just to do it,” John Rourke told her. “It was a good target for a certain type of terrorist, the kind who doesn’t care about public image, just wants results. The children of some of the ranking military officers in the islands attend here, the children of a lot of the islands’ social elite go here, and there was no security. It was perfect for them. They just went through and systematically shot to death everyone they could, then set explosives. If your father and the dead police officer hadn’t arrived on the scene, more might be dead.

“Many of the campus’s buildings were destroyed and every one was at least partially damaged. The smell from the fires was still heavy on the air in those brief instances when the breeze off the sea subsided.

“At least, thank God, there was a field trip today,” John went on. “About a hundred and twenty children were away for the day visiting the Arizona monument; it could have been a lot worse.”

“Dadll get them.”

“Your father took out an entire van load of the men by himself with just a couple of handguns. He’s a brave man. You should be proud of him.”

“I am,” Emma said, nodding, “but that doesn’t mean I want him risking his neck like that. He could have contained them and waited for backup.”

“Possibly. Would you have?”

She felt the corners of her mouth beginning to rise in an involuntary smile. “Of course not.” She lowered her eyes, watched her toes as she walked beside him.

“I rest my case,” John told her as they started onto the beach. As if it were something he’d rehearsed, he said to her, “I had a nice time last night, by the way. Thanks for having me over. I must have seemed, well, awkward,” he said. “Not that I was ever terrific at so

rial functions, but I haven’t had much occasion over the years to relax.”

“You were fine,” she said, without thinking. She licked her lips.

They were walking down toward the surf, and she wondered why he’d brought her here. Then he began to speak again, “You should be careful on your own, might even want to cut your leave short.”

“I don’t understand.”

“This could be the group of Nazis that penetrated the island early this morning; and, if it is, that means they’re quite efficient. It would only be logical for them to try to strike back at the police officer who killed their compatriots. You’d be a logical target. Do you travel armed?”

The idea was quite unsetding, that she might be a target for vengeance-minded terrorists. She swallowed, patted her purse, said, “Lancer 2570 A2 Compact right here. Same thing a lot of the Honolulu PD, Tac Team and SEAL guys use.”

“A lot of the Tac and SEAL people use .45s, too. Like your father.”

Tvegota.45.”

“Good. Keep the Lancer handy if you need a high volume of fire; it’s a great gun, even if it wasn’t available in my day,” John told her, smiling a little. “But you might want to have the .45 handy, too. Tm prejudiced, of course. A good 9mm Parabellum round is just about as effective in terminal ballistics as a .45 ACP, but I’ve always liked a bigger bullet. The point is, you’re vulnerable, especially off base. So, be careful.”

Even though Emma Shaw knew she should feel warm with the sun on her bare shoulders, she suddenly felt very cold. When she shivered, John put his arm around her shoulders, but he said nothing more.

Croenberg studied his own visage in the airliner’s bathroom mirror. His normally deepset grey-blue eyes looked back at him a watery brown (contact lenses) and not so deeply set at all because of the makeup on his face. He wore a steel grey wig that was literally taped to his cleanshaven scalp beneath. The suit that he wore - pale blue -was cut tighdy at the shoulders and subtly padded near the waist to help disguise both his height and his physique, making him appear shorter, stoop-shouldered and slightly potbellied. Current men’s fashion made the look even easier, because jackets and trouser legs were tighter.

Croenberg checked the glued-on mustache-it was secure-and replaced the glasses. The glasses, a mild prescription and not just ordinary window glass, gave him a headache, but were necessary. He wore prosthetics of course, as well, to aid in altering his appearance, and these were uncomfortable. It was a long airplane ride from New Moscow in the Ural Mountains to Honolulu, better than an hour. In the days prior to orbital insertion flight, hundreds of years ago, air travel must have been even more maddening because of the protracted times involved.

The prostheses which fattened his cheeks beneath the makeup made the real skin beneath itch; that and the prosthesis under his shirt and trousers, covering his abdomen, which further enhanced the image of being potbellied made him perspire.

But prosthetic fingerprints alone would not have been enough to get him through United States customs passing himself off as Boris Luvov, agricultural researcher from Russia. The faces of most major

figures in the SS were well-known, that of SS Gruppenfiihrer Ernst Croenberg particularly so. And everywhere in the nations of the Trans-Global Alliance, security personnel would be watching for him and the others of the kameraden, ready to arrest or kill on sight.

Croenberg left the restroom, returned to his seat and buckled in. The sky was clear and all he could see below the aircraft as it descended was the blue ofthe sky and the water. Soon, the islands themselves would be visible, the foam-crested surf lapping against perfect white sandy beaches.

Paradise-to some, but only for a little while longer.

“What can I get you?”

“Nothing.” He would get what he wanted himself, and that was to make this Inspector Tim Shaw pay dearly.

Wilhem Doring watched the television, sipped at the coffee from the cup Marie had given him.

The camera panned-in what seemed an almost sexual fascination with the wreckage of the second van-over the body-bagged men who had been its occupants. Then there was a cut, and a heavyset but fit-looking man in his fifties became the focus of attention. He wore a narrow-brimmed, high-crowned hat, the front of the brim turned down and the hat low over his eyes.

In the eyes, there was a look Doring had seen often, the look of the wolf.

This man was identified as Inspector Tim Shaw, head of the Honolulu Tac Team, who singlehandedly shot it out with the terrorists who attacked Sebastian’s Reef Country Day School. This one man had killed all the occupants of the van except one, whom he “subdued.”

This one-Doring bet that it was Fletcher, who had seemed the least dependable of the volunteers from the Islands - was expected to provide the police with valuable information concerning the occupants of the second van, who escaped after taking the life of Patrolman Linda Wallace.

They showed a picture of the woman, and Doring was frankly amazed that any woman, particularly one from an inferior race, could have driven as well as she did. Although she looked dark-skinned, she was probably quite mongrelized, Doring guessed, and that accounted for her skillfulness and daring.

“Can I get you more coffee, Willy?”

“No,” he replied.

The man whom James Darkwood had replaced at Plant 234— Wilbur Nash-was a quality control inspector, which made it all the easier for Darkwood to move about the plant without attracting undue attention. A quality control inspector went about inspecting for quality, and that meant looking over shoulders. There were, however, places within the plant that Nash, whom Darkwood impersonated, was not authorized to enter. Only the highest grades of security clearance were given admission there, and then only as required.

These were the places to which James Darkwood most earnesdy required access.

These were the chemical mixing rooms.

It was further to Darkwood’s advantage that he only needed to rely on the efficacy of the makeup with which he’d disguised his appearance up to a certain point, the makeup enabling him to make a near-perfect match to Wilbur Nash for the initial entry to the plant. After passing through a robing station barely fifty feet inside the plant entrance, all personnel here wore protective clothing which covered them from head to toe, this over their regular outer garments.

The tricky part, if James Darkwood survived that long, would be leaving the plant, because although the original facial similarity to Wilbur Nash was strong, they were nothing alike in body shape and Darkwood was taller. Again, he would be relying on the average person’s lack of recognition of detail. If he was expected to be Wilbur Nash, people would see him as Wilbur Nash, unless something occurred to cause them to view him differently.

If someone who knew Nash intimately saw James Darkwood, the game would be up.

But Darkwood’s immediate concern occupied most of his thoughts for now, and that was how to gain access to the chemical mixing rooms without raising some sort of alarm.

And, try as he might, he could think of no way of doing that. But access had to be gained. An entire Allied fighter group stood by, waiting for the data Darkwood could only learn by entering one of the mixing rooms. If biological agents were being produced there to be borne in chemical weapons, then Plant 234 had to be bombed out of existence. But, if they were not, the potential cost to the fighter group from Eden City’s state-of-the-art antiaircraft defenses could not be justified.

For more than a year, there had been cryptic suggestions in intelligence data that Eden scientists had discovered a way of combining chemical and biological warfare methodology in a way never before attempted. Bio warfare, historically, was inefficient in the airborne context, with the potential for either covering vast and unpredictable expanses on errant winds or settling almost immediately to the ground. Furthermore, in the modern era, it was fast and relatively easy to produce massive quantities of inoculant against a specific disease or combination of diseases.

The frightening potential, if Eden possessed the rumored technology, was that chemical carriers would support the biological agent, releasing it in timed doses; and, over this period of time, the chemical carrier would act upon the biological agent, mutating it in unpredictable variations which could not be inoculated against. Some of the chemical carriers were lighter than air, hence would remain airborne for a considerably longer period of time, while some were comprised of heavier elements and would immediately fall to earth, hence again the unpredictability.

Such a bio warfare attack could not effectively be fought, so it had to be countered before it was launched.

Yet the compound in which Plant 234 was set, was placed in the center of one of Eden City’s poorest and most populated areas. Precision hits would be required to prevent an attack on the plant from turning into a bloodbath of the innocent.

Throughout the first half of Wilbur Nash’s shift, James Darkwood went about the mechanics of Nash’s job, at the same time

trying to discern what bits and snatches of useful intelligence data he could, but his thoughts were chiefly focused on what he should do. By die time the lunch break came, he had made up his mind.

Almost everyone at the airport was armed, it seemed, the private citizens with handguns discreetly holstered at their sides or poorly disguised beneath shirts left out of the trousers, the security personnel with energy rifles slung under their arms and Lancer 9mm case-less pistols or the somewhat more cumbersome energy pistols in security holsters at their waists.