Survivalist - 23 - Call To Battle (13 page)

Croenberg despised the American society which flowed around him; when citizens were armed, they were impossible to control. Superior military force could subdue them in large numbers, of course-guns were no match for tanks and missiles and gunships-but as long as there were arms there would be underground resistance, attacking from within. All of the successful dictatorships of history had begun by disarming the citizenry; such action was an indisputable prerequisite to subjugation.

Croenberg walked on, eager to get away from the terminal, to make his rendezvous.

Over the last forty-eight hours, his own handpicked team of SS personnel had infiltrated Hawaii singly or in pairs on a succession of commercial flights originating in Europe, twenty-four men in all. And the operation was totally sterile, unknown to the Wilhelm Doring unit which was doubdess responsible for the massacre at the school, about which he’d heard while watching televised newsbroad-casts from Hawaii; it was also independent of the larger, less specialized commando teams which had already penetrated or soon would penetrate the islands.

He called this specialized unit of twenty-four the Sigma Group.

The task for which he had quiedy and nastily assembled them was

vital to the success of National Socialism: “rescue” Martin Zimmer from Pearl Harbor Naval Base, then very qriedy kill him …

Emma Shaw locked the door as soon as she was inside. She always locked her door before bed, of course, whenever she stayed at her little house; but, frequentiy, the door was unlocked throughout the day and well into the night. She had never thought about it before.

She kept her purse with her instead of setting it down as she went about her house from room to room, making certain that no one lurked in a closet, or for that matter even hid under her bed.

By the time Emma Shaw was through and satisfied that her home was unoccupied except for herself, she felt at once satisfied and silly. Still carrying her purse with the gun in it slung from her shoulder, she went to the bedroom closet and got down the box in which she kept what she sought.

She raised the lid and looked inside, There were several objects wrapped in rags. She unwrapped the largest of them. Beneath the wrappings was a .45 automatic, a stainless steel Colt identical to the one her father carried, given to her, in fact, by her father.

Wrapped in a second bundle were three spare magazines. Still a third bundle contained three more. There were two plastic boxes of ammunition, containing one hundred rounds each.

The gun would need cleaning, lubrication. She hadn’t fired it, even touched it in more than a year. She could take it out back of the house and put a few rounds through it just to make certain she could still hit what she aimed at with the pistol.

With his talk of Nazi revenge, John Rourke had scared her silly.

There was the possibility he might be missed at lunch, that Wilbur Nash might habitually eat with a circle of friends, albeit Plant234 did not seem much like a friendly place. On the other hand, in a short while, all ordinaryplant routine would be disrupted: Then it wouldn’t matter.

The chemical mixing rooms were at the center of the Plant structure, the building itself taking up two entire square blocks of Eden City, the roadway going around the facility. The building’s shape, when seen in aerial photographs, was that of an impossibly large rectangle, flat-roofed and grey, like a depression in the ground on which the city itself was built, encircled on all sides by higher structures. To the north, those were the residential apartments where the higher-level employees such as Wilbur Nash lived; to the south those structures were dormitories where the factory labor slept, showered, ate. It could hardly be called living.

To the east were the loading docks and beyond those and a parking lot for trucks and cargo helicopters was the perimeter.

There was a fence nine feet high and surmounted by razor wire. This fence contained the entire facility, which occupied, including Plant 234, four square blocks. And to the west lay the metals shops, the plastics facilities and storage warehouses.

Plant 234, built on one level only, at its highest point was perhaps fourteen feet above the ground. Within the structure there were tunnels rather than corridors, allowing workers and higher-level personnel to move from one area of the plant to another without having the slightest idea what went on around them.

James Darkwood moved through one such tunnel now. There had

been a guard at the end of the tunnel, armed only with an alarm device, weaponless. James Darkwood, without a drug kit by means of whichhecouldhave rendered the man temporarily unconscious, was forced to kill the guard rather than risk having the fellow awaken and alert plant security.

Plant security personnel, dressed in voluminous black coveralls and black hooded facemasks, were indeed armed. Supervisory personnel, as Darkwood pretended to be, wore white, while laborers wore blue. Prisoners were rumored to be used here as test subjects. Darkwood absentiy wondered what color they wore.

Darkwood moved slowly along the tunnel toward Mixing Room Nine, hot, perspiring inside his protective clothing, smelling his own body odor; fear always smelled.

At the midpoint in the tunnel there was a ladder leading upward to a hatch, presumably set into the roof. Darkwood glanced behind him and ahead. There was no one in the tunnel, so he took the gamble. He climbed up the ladder, as carefully as he could, considering the dim ambient lighting, inspecting the hatch for any signs of linkage to an alarm system. As best he could determine, there was nothing.

Looking down first, he fixed his attention on the hatch, starting to wheel open the lock. The hatch, the tunnel itself, all served to remind him of a submarine. He shook off the thoughts, concentrating on his work.

After more than a full minute, he had the hatch unlocked. Once more inspecting both visually and by feel for signs of an alarm system and having the same happily negative results, James Darkwood very gentiy pushed upward on the hatch. It gave without resistance and with very little noise. He let the hatch lower into position.

Then Darkwood started down the ladder.

Back into the tunnel, James Darkwood walked on, toward Mixing Room Nine.

The City of Honolulu was like a glittering jewel, new and shining under the afternoon sun. There were private automobiles everywhere and the only personnel in military uniforms seemed obviously off duty. There was the occasional police car, the occasional remote video drone flying over the street to monitor for traffic accidents.

But, there was no security.

“You know,” Croenberg said to the man who drove him, a particularly reliable young Untersturmfuhrer, “considering that the Americans must know something of which Eden is about, I marvel that life merely goes on here.”

The Untersturmfiihrer-his name was Helmut Kraus-wheeled the electric car into a right turn off the boulevard along which they’d driven since leaving the airport and into a street with denser traffic. “Itislikethiseverywhere, Herr Gruppenfiihrer. We will crush them.”

“Yes, my young friend, but first the matter for which we have all come here needs taking care of, does it not? Eden’s leader and our inspiration must be freed from his jailers. Who knows what evil these Americans might plan for young Martin Zimmer at the moment we attack?”

“Yes, Herr Gruppenfiihrer, this is true.”

“You and your fellows have verified the details of the plan?”

“Yes, Herr Gruppenfiihrer. The proper uniforms are secured, the vehicles, all is in readiness. Even as we drive to the temporary headquarters, thejdentity papers are being remanufactured so they will be fresh, not yet reported as stolen. We will strike, Herr Gruppenfiihrer, tonight at the customary dinner hour for personnel of the Pearl Harbor base.”

“It is good,” Croenberg remarked …

Michael Rourke freed his arm almost immediately from the sling he’d had to wear when he left the hospital. The cut was already partially healed and there was very litde soreness. Fortunately, the knife he’d stopped was both clean and very sharp.

Natalia walked silently beside him as they reached the beach. He’d asked her to stop the car, parking along the shoulder so he could get out and stretch his legs. A strong wind blew in from the sea and, despite the heat of the sun, the air temperature seemed quite pleasant and cool. “Were you ever in Hawaii, Natalia?”

“What? Before The Night of The War? No. Never. It is very beautiful.”

“Yes. People used to refer to Hawaii as Paradise-I can see why. Boy, if Adam and Eve got kicked out of a place like this, told they could never return-” He didn’t finish the thought. Instead he took Natalia’s left hand in his right and they walked across 1he sand. Natalia was barefoot, holding her sandals in her other hand.

“The sun feels good,” Natalia remarked. “I remember going to the Black Sea a lot with my uncle when I was a litde girl. I wish you could have known Uncle Ishmael, Michael. He was so kind and good and strong.”

“From what my father has said about your uncle, I think dad took a liking to him from the first.”

“He was a soldier, you know?” Natalia went on. “And he had his duty as a patriotic Russian, and he did it well. But he never lost sight of his humanity. That came first and he shaped his sense of duty around that.”

“I think he was a pretty good surrogate father, too,” Michael told her, letting go of her hand and putting his arm around her shoulders. Natalia leaned her head against his chest. “You were lucky to have him.”

“Michael?”

“Yes?”

“When this is all over, can we just go somewhere? Anywhere, even one of the out islands, but just the two of us?”

“Sure we can, sure,” Michael said to her, touching his lips to her hair. It was soft, and smelted like fresh flowers. He stopped walking and so did Natalia. He turned her around to face her. He raised her chin and looked her in the eye. “I love you. Want to marry me?”

“Uh-huh,” Natalia whispered, then just leaned her head against his chest again, her arms limp at her sides …

Tour drivin’ gives me the creeps,” Tim Shaw told his son, Ed.

“Why? You taught me how to drive when I was a kid! You always said I was a good driver.”

“No, ifsnotthe way you drive; it’s what happened to the last person who drove me. Pull up over here.”

Shaw’s son, Shaw’s own second-in-command in the Honolulu Tac Team, was the best police officer Tim Shaw had ever worked with. When Ed’s slot came open, Tim Shaw wrestled long and hard with putting him into it, however, because it would look like nepotism. For a while, after Ed was in the job and just getting settled, there had been some talk of that, a father putting his son into a better-paying more responsible position that would eventually lead to the son’s taking over the father’s job when the father someday retired.

But once Ed proved himself in the job, the talk stopped.

Tim Shaw was proud of that - that Ed had made the talk stop by just doing his job better than anybody else could.

Ed cut off the engine.

Tim Shaw picked up a radio unit, spoke into it, “Give call sign. Leaving the car at Fifth and Mauna Kea. Shaw and Shaw Out.” He dropped the radio set into the left hand pocket of his raincoat (his revolver was in the right pocket) and stepped out of the car. Ed was already out on the street side. Along Mauna Kea Drive, forahalf-mile in either direction from where they stood, was the immigrant section of Honolulu, a self-made ghetto. Most immigrants to the islands-and there were thousands of them each year - made a place for themselves, got decent jobs, good housing. But there were some-like the ones surrounding Fifth and Mauna Kea - who brought their old lives in the reforestation camps of Brazil, in the tent villages of France, in the Reactionist communities of Russia, and all the ills of everywhere else, and they lived the same way they always had.

Volunteer charitable organizations, church groups, everybody and his brother tried making Fifth and Mauna Kea and what surrounded it just an unpleasant memory by stretching out a helping hand; but not too many here took helping hands; they would rather cut them off.

Mauna Kea Drive was, aside from being the most dangerous part ofHonolulu, almost as much a tourist mecca as Waikiki. Every street

leading off Mauna Kea was like another country; the people who lived here had brought both vice, and a good sense of marketing. A tourist who made it through the area without being rolled had a really good story to tell when he got back to New Germany or Russia or China or Australia. One street was a Russian sidewalk bazaar, another like a Chinese market, another as bawdy and loud as one of the reforestation camps. “So, who are we lookin’ for, Dad?”

“Russian guy by the name of Yuri.Runs designer drugs all along Mauna Kea. He’s half German, usually hangs out along Sugar Street.” Sugar Street was the toughest of” the mim-neighborhoods along Mauna Kea. Germans, Russians, some Eden refugees, all of them at one time or another filtered through the reforestation camps in Brazil where it seemed like living in another world, if living was the right word for it. Eight years earlier, Tim Shaw had flown to Brazil to serve extradition papers on a man wantedfor murder in Honolulu. He never brought the man back to Hawaii because the guy escaped from the Brazilian jail before Shaw got there. Tim Shaw traveled around for a week with a Brazilian police inspector, a German guy named Klein, just to see if the murder suspect could be recaptured. In that week he saw more of the reforestation camps than he ever wanted to see again.

There was no morality, no law, and the scum of the earth worked there, slogging through the mud, planting trees, moving on, planting more. Some of the terrain was so rough that no machinery could get in and manpower alone was the only solution. And no one clamped down on the reforestation camps because as the earth’s population grew almost exponentially now, without a new rain forest, in another hundred years or so the oxygen levels would be so depleted that life would be imperiled. Anyone willing to live in the reforestation camps-and spend an eight-hour shift sometimes in mud up to one’s knees just planting seedlings - was cut a lot of slack, no matter how rotten the person was.