Survivalist - 23 - Call To Battle (18 page)

Deitrich Zimmer raised his eyes, from the beautifully shining faces of these men, looked above them to the ceiling of the hall, the cross which was poised to roll forward on its right angled legs, set in white on a field of red.

And, behind him, set into the black marble wall, the To-tenkopf, in highly raised bas relief of finest silver, itself the symbol of purity.

And now Deitrich Zimmer raised his hands palm outward, extending them from the podium as he smiled beneficendy on these his stalwarts.

After several minutes, the chorus subsided, the black-uniformed men took their seats and Deitrich Zimmer spoke, his voice soft, low, beautiful, he knew. “My fine young men. After these all too brief moments together, you will go forth on a -mission of incalculable importance to Aryan destiny. You will attack the cryogenics facility in what is so obscenely called “New Germany.” You will find inside this heavily guarded enclosure the worst of all traitors to the Reich, Wolfgang Mann; and, sleeping beside him, whore that she is, the woman who is mother to our beloved Martin, herself the wife of the greatest of all enemies of the Aryan people, John Rourke.

“The temptation will be great, my fine young men, to go beyond the carefully defined parameters of your mission; do not yield to such temptation.

“Once your historic quest has been realized, the way will be clear for the inheritors of the power and the glory of Adolf Hider-Sieg!”

“Heil!” The chorus thundered toward him, every man to his feet, right arm outreaching, hand thrust forward.

Deitrich Zimmer motioned for the young men to be seated and they were. All was silence. Then Deitrich Zimmer spoke again. “The way will be clear at last for the Aryan race to bring order to the chaos of this hideously mongrelized planet. As your beautiful children and devoted wives one day soon

walk in peace and in sunshine, it will be because of what you do. There will be no fear that your mothers and wives and sisters and daughters will be bestialized by their inferiors, no longer will the bastard servant dare raise hand or voice against his biological master.

“The dream of our glorious Fuhrer whose blood flows in the very veins of my son Martin will be at last realized and the epoch of mankind’s greatest achievement will have begun. And it will flourish for a thousand thousand of years! Sieg!”

“Heil!”

“Sieg!”

“Heil!”

“Sieg!”

“Heil!”

Deitrich Zimmer brought them once again to order. “You will soon go forth to your destiny! And the greatness that is the true Aryan Germany is in your hearts and shall be there forever and forever!

“Heil Hitler!”

The auditorium walls, the platform on which he stood, his very eardrums rang with the chorused cheers.

There was a mountain trail she liked to walk when she wanted to think. This property, not the house, had been her parents’ property when she was a little girl and Emma Shaw had walked this trail the day she learned her mother was dead. She’d walked it again before deciding that instead of doing policework or something else that was still today a more normal occupation for a woman, she wanted to be a Navy fighter pilot. She’d walked the trail again when Hank Walsh had asked her to marry him and she thought she might be pregnant with his baby. She hadn’t married him and she hadn’t been pregnant, either, just very late.

Emma Shaw, the .45 chamber empty and stuffed into the waistband of her blue jeans, her T-shirt covering its presence, walked the trail again. It wasn’t a steep trail, nor was it any more or less picturesque than anywhere else in the mountains here, but it was hers.

Her father had wanted to give her the property when she’d told him she wanted to build a house here, perhaps feeling sorry for her that she might end up an old maid and trying to show his love for her. But she’d purchased it from him instead, and at a fair price, too. But she’d taken his offer of simple interest.

Her trail was really her trail, even to the point of being paid for.

John Rourke.

Midway along her trail’s length, Emma Shaw sat on her rock.

She took a cigarette from the pack stuffed into a hip pocket of her jeans, took her disposable synth-fuel lighter, fired the cigarette and inhaled.

There were certain times in her life she’d felt downright stupid being a woman, like the time with Hank Walsh and the baby that wasn’t. If she’d married Hank-he was nice, kind, considerate-just because she was pregnant, she would have been trapped by her biology. If she’d had an abortion, which she felt people had a right to choose for themselves (she chose to think it was not for her), she would have been trapped again by her biology.

If love for a member of the opposite sex was a function of biology alone, which she didn’t think it was, she was trapped now. She’d considered the concept of love quite often, as she imagined all women did, or at least the ones she knew. Love was a combination of biology, spirituality, the mind (whatever that really was) and factors she didn’t think anyone really understood at all, least of all herself.

Emma Shaw loved John Rourke.

The sun was setting and she could see it a little bit from her rock on her trail on her portion of the mountain. By craning her neck, in the morning she could watch the sun rise, and at dusk watch it set.

Loving John Rourke was even dumber than considering marriage to good old Hank Walsh. She just flat out hadn’t loved Hank. Maybe her situation was dumber now because she was in love. And John Rourke was like no one else. He was married, and that wasn’t a problem easily surmounted under ideal circumstances. That his wife lay in a coma in cryogenic freeze, never aging but with a bullet lodged inoperably in her brain, made matters even worse. Emma knew that even if she hadn’t had a conscience-which she did-the situation was impossible.

Add to it John’s very nature, the fabric of his being.

Love him, yes, but be blind to him, no.

When she was growing up, she tried living up to the image, later the memory of her mother, to her father’s hopes and expectations and dreams for her, then to the other pilots, the really good ones. She’d had her heroes, her role models. John Rourke, although he wasn’t conscious of it, was his own hero and role model. He lived up to himself.

Either as cause or effect-Emma Shaw wasn’t certain-John Rourke saw himself as an objective entity, not subjectively. John Rourke did or didn’t do something because John Rourke should or shouldn’t do that thing. Then, he did it or didn’t do it, depending on what John Rourke should or shouldn’t do. He analyzed, evaluated.

Emma Shaw stubbed out her cigarette (filterless, there was nothing to police that would spoil the environment) and lit another, something she almost never did. She liked Natalia very much. Natalia was gutsy, pretty (prettier than Emma Shaw had ever been on the best day of her life), everything a man would want in a woman, especially a man like Doctor Rourke. John had loved Natalia, Natalia had loved John. They probably still loved each other, but Natalia was Michael’s woman (Emma Shaw at once hated and envied the idea of “being someone’s woman,” as if somehow a woman were transmuted into property).

Why wasn’t John more-Emma Shaw verbalized her thoughts. “Why wasn’t he pissed off?” But neither the setting sun which shone down over her trail and her rock in long purpling orange streaks nor the fiery gold clouds nor anything at all answered her.

Granted, Michael Rourke was John’s son, but still and all, she thought, John could at least have been angry at the situation if not at Michael and Natalia.

So, here he was, born over six hundred and fifty years ago, living by his own measure (she liked that, even though it irritated her), abandoned by the woman he loved and faithful to a wife who was just this side of dead.

But John’s problems were in the real world, at least.

Her problem was her own stupidity. As Emma Shaw exhaled smoke through her nostrils, she started to laugh. At least now if she became an old maid, she had a reason, pining for a love she could never have.

The helicopter descended through the deepening shades of purple into darkness, landing on a grassy patch at the center of an enormous quadrangle that was the exact center of the University complex. All about the four sides stood buildings modeled in Greek Revival style. Fog rolled in from the sea, not heavy, almost ghostly, and the columns, the statuary, took on what was almost the aspect of another time and place. The rotor blade downdraft made the wisps of fog curl back upon themselves, rise, then dematerialize, ghostly-seeming that way as well.

Paul Rubenstein was the first to jump down, ducking needlessly beneath the swirling blades from force of habit, John Rourke just behind him.

Standing well away from the chopper, Paul saw his wife, his brother-in-law, the woman who would, it seemed, someday be his sister-in-law, Natalia. And Tim Shaw and his son, Ed, both from the Honolulu Tac Team were there as well.

Paul smiled to himself, wondering if these men were ever off duty. John and he never seemed to be off duty, Paul Rubenstein reflected.

The Schmiesser in his left hand, Paul fell in step beside John, walking toward John’s daughter, his wife, taking her into his arms, kissing her quickly. “How’d that stuff work out today with helping Inspector Shaw?”

“Ohh, it was very interesting; I got to see some really neat parts of Honolulu and we may have gotten some leads on this man named Yuri who’s a Nazi sympathizer and a drug dealer, too, you know? It was very interesting.”

“Great. Sounds like you had a lot more run than we did,” Paul told her, smiling good-naturedly, folding his arm around her.

After a round of handshaking, they walked along the north edge of the quadrangle, the science hall, looking like an enormously proportioned temple, rising out of the fog ahead of them.

“Well be passing my car,” Tim Shaw said. “You guys wanna drop your reachers in the trunk or somethin’?”

“Reachers?” Annie repeated quizzically, before Paul could ask what Shaw meant.

John laughed. “1930s gangster slang for a rifle or any kind of long gun, really.” And John raised his HK-91 in his right hand for a moment. “My ‘readier’!”

They stopped beside the trunk of Tim Shaw’s unmarked police cruiser, Shaw opening it, John putting the HK-91 inside, Paul resting his MP-40 submachinegun next to it. There were several other long guns inside, as well as attache-sized high impact plastic cases, likely for handguns. A hardplate flak vest, a riot helmet and shield, a bullhorn and more miscellaneous police-related gear filled out the rest of the trunk space. “Ready for anything, huh?”

Tim Shaw laughed, saying, “Well, ya never know what might go down, Mr. Rubenstein. Take today, for example. We could have needed some of this gear if it’d gone down differentiy.”

Tim Shaw closed the trunk lid. They returned to the quadrangle and resumed walking toward the science building. Michael and Natalia, who hadn’t gone to the car with them, stood on the steps, waiting. Every time Paul saw the two of them together, he could not help at once feeling happy for them and sad for John. John had planned it this way, of course, from the moment they entered the cryogenic chambers at the Retreat on the morning of The Great Conflagration. Perhaps he’d planned it well before that; it was something he and John had never discussed in that regard.

Knowing that a significant possibility existed that the shutde fleet which comprised the Eden Project, the hope of mankind then, might never return to Earth after its five-century voyage to the edge of the solar system and back and unaware or at least uncertain that anyone else on the face of the planet survived, John had planned for the only thing practical. He would allow his then-young children, not even teenagers then, to awaken before the rest of the sleepers, John spending five years working with them, teaching them, preparing them, then himself returning to The Sleep.

John had planned for Annie to marry his best friend; that occurred. He had planned, however reluctantiy, for Michael to wed Natalia. That had not taken place. When the Awakening came, Michael was away from the Retreat, investigating what he thought might be a sign of the returning Eden Project. Instead, Michael discovered a survival community and met beautiful, sweet litde Madison.

They eventually married. She was murdered by a KGB Elite Corps suicide squad during an attack on the Hekla community at Lydveldid Island. And, when she died, her-and Michael’s-unborn baby died with her.

All the while, John and Natalia loved each other, but John would never be unfaithful to his wife, Sarah. It seemed as if Sarah and John patched things together, were making their marriage work. Sarah became pregnant by John. After the war with the Soviet Union at last ended-the world was full of life, as it turned out, and just as full of the same old causes of violent death-a commando unit of neo-Nazis attacked John’s hospital at Eden Base, now the site of Eden City. They nearly killed John. In essence, if not in fact, they did kill Sarah.

The child Sarah carried picked that moment to be born. Sarah, facts indicated at the time, had given birth to the baby entirely unaided. She was shot in the head, the bullet lodging deep within her brain-inoperably deep. Her child, the boy who grew up to be Martin Zimmer, was kidnapped.

Deitrich Zimmer tampered with the infant child’s genetic makeup, in some manner or another which Paul did not fully

understand, grafting genes taken from the body of one of Adolf Hitler’s blood descendants to the boy’s own. And Zimmer raised young Martin, who was thought to be dead, as his own son and taught him racial hatred, how to use terror, how to be the perfect Nazi. Through the use of cryogenics Deitrich Zimmer and Martin Rourke Zimmer survived to an era suitable for young Martin’s iron-fisted rule.

Allied doctors determined mat the only chance John Rourke had to survive, to keep him from dying as he slipped ever more deeply into trauma-induced coma was to return to The Sleep. As for Sarah, she was physically alive, but could not be revived with medical means available then. Perhaps Deitrich Zimmer could have done it then, and perhaps he could now, genius that he was. His abilities in microsurgery were then unrivaled and were since unequaled.