Survivalist - 23 - Call To Battle (26 page)

He spoke into his radio set as soon as the air flow was adjusted to his comfort. This is Rolvaag calling Navy 189 Charlie 18. This is Rolvaag calling Navy 189 Charlie 18. Come in Navy.” He forgot to say “Over,” so he added that lamely.

The pilot’s voice came back to him. “This is Navy Helicopter 189 Charlie 18, Doctor Rolvaag. Reading you loud and clear. Over.”

“Patch me in-” That was the correct term, he thought. “Patch me in at once to Doctor Rourke. I have what he’s looking for.” Rolvaag watched as the V-stol landed near the center of the crater. But only one man walked toward the aircraft. And it wasn’t the one who looked like a somewhat weaker version of John Rourke himself.

John Rourke stripped away the radio headphones. He stayed in the chair beside the console, staring at its buttons and dials and diodes as he told Paul Rubenstein, “Rolvaag has spotted them. One of them left by jump jet, but the others-six men, one of them Martin-stayed behind.”

“Where?”

Now Rourke stood up and looked at his friend. ‘The volcano.” Paul literally took a step back. The one-ohh shit.” John Rourke smiled at his friend, then looked at the communications officer who stood near the door. “Ensign?” “Yes, sir?”

Ensign Clyde was a pretty young woman in her very early twenties, light chocolate brown skin and the darkest brown eyes Rourke could remember combining to give her a look of wonderful innocence. “Ensign, I need your help.”

“Whatever the General would require, sir-“

“It’s a favor. This radio message. I know you have it on tape and it’s logged automatically on the computer. I want you to hold back on notifying base headquarters of the contents of this message for fifteen minutes.”

“But, sir, I-“

“Ensign. This will be an easy favor.” And John Rourke reached under his jacket and drew one of the twin stainless Detonics .45s, not actually pointing the gun at her, but letting her see it. “Now you can say I forced you to cooperate.” And Rourke looked at Paul. Tm taking a helicopter and going in. You keep an eye on the Ensign until fifteen minutes have passed.”

“Another way, John. You’re not going alone.” “He’s my son-1 can’t ask you-“

Tm your friend,” Paul reminded him. “You can’t stop me, even with one of those.” And Paul nodded toward the pistol. “But Michael’s arm’s still bothering him a litde. And I don’t think Annie or Natalia should come along.”

John Rourke felt the corners of his mouth raising slightly in a smile. It would be like the old days, the two of them, friends in life and friends to the death. “All right. But Rolvaag says the eruption is already starting. It could be hours or minutes before the top of that mountain blows, and he thinks that’s only a prelude to an even larger eruption.”

“Then we’d better get started. And the Ensign can accompany us to the airfield. Then she can walk back. That’ll give us fifteen minutes or more.”

John Rourke looked at Ensign Clyde and smiled. “Sorry, Ensign.”

Thorn Rolvaag could hardly see. The fumarole near where he had hidden to observe the men in the cone now spewed gas at such a furious pace that great clouds of the vile sulphurous mixture enveloped the mountaintop. But the interior of the cone, when he’d moved out, was still free of the gas, instead the winds still blowing the gas out toward the sea.

Although he considered his work done-he’d reported to Doctor Rourke, returned the favor done to him-he would have been forced to evacuate the position at any event, no choice left to him unless he wished to be killed.

The vents which lined the shield like great glowing veins had begun to spill forth magma. It was pahoehoe, fluid and fast moving. And, even as he moved along the shield now, it was necessary at times to change from his intended path, as geysers of magma would spout before him, brightly flaming liquid rock soaring skyward, raining down and scorching the ground, flowing before him as if the mountainside itself were his enemy, trying to trap him in its killing ground.

The oxygen mask was a blessing, because without it he would have been dead.

A lava flow was moving downward along the shield roughly from right to left in relation to Rolvaag’s line of travel. He jumped it, only about eighteen inches wide here, running now before he was truly cut off. He spoke into his radio again. “Navy, come in and get us. Come in and get us.”

Tm already on my way, Doc. Keep your radio open so I can home in on you. If you shoot off a flare, I’ll never see it. Be

ready, ‘cause Fm not anxious to wait. Out.”

Rolvaag kept moving, panting into the radio, “Carl? Do you have the pressure measurements?”

There was no response.

“Carl? Answer me, damnit.”

But there was no response. Rolvaag, his breath coming so fast he was afraid that he would hyperventilate on the oxygen mixture, scanned the shield below him, for some sight of Carl Bremen. If the young man had gotten into trouble, gotten hurt, Rolvaag knew he would never forgive himself.

The ground only a few yards ahead of Rolvaag split and the mountainside trembled. Rolvaag fell. Magma rolled up with more force than Rolvaag would have imagined possible, spouting into the purple smoke already engulfing the mountainside and flowing like white water over rapids across the slabs of volcanic rock it dislodged, pushing them along with tremendous force, tearing loose every rock and boulder in its path.

“Carl. I need you to answer me. The helicopter is coming in to get us. But I need you to answer me.”

There was still no answer.

As Rolvaag moved, he realized suddenly that he was lost, that the entire landscape had so violently and suddenly altered that there were no landmarks. And fear, cold and sickening and overpowering seized him, and his breathing was so rapid now that he was becoming light headed. “Carl!”

There was still no answer.

Thorn Rolvaag stopped dead in his tracks. He forced his breathing to slow, spoke as calmly as he could into the radio microphone before his lips. “Navy, can you hear me?”

“Reading you Loud and Clear, Doc. If you hold to your current position, I’ll find you. Keep talking me in. Then we can find Mr. Bremen together. Over.”

“That seems like a good idea.”

“Glad you see it my way Doc. Keep talking. Whafs your favorite baseball team? Over.” “The Oahu Eagles.”

“Terrific pitcher, Oakton. If he could hit as well as he throws he’d be the top man in the league. Whatchya think about Staddler? Over.”

“Staddler’s okay. My kids like Staddler because he’s so young. Needs seasoning.”

“Fm right over you, Doc. Look up and you should see me. Over.”

Rolvaag could hear no ambient sound except the explosions of rock surrounding him. It was a battiefield, and nature was the enemy. But, as he looked up, he thought he saw the clouds of gas swirling in a regular pattern. Then there was a beam of light, bright but indirect, like something seen through a dirty window. “Do you have a searchlight on?”

“That’s us, Doc. We’ll let down a ladder. Don’t try climbing out, just secure yourself to it with your extraction harness and we’ll get you out of here, get you down safe, then get you aboard and we go after Bremen, okay? Over.”

“Okay. Yes. But hurry. Bremen must be in trouble.”

“Affirmative that, Doc. But we’ll find him. Hang in there. Over.”

Rolvaag had no choice …

The helicopter John Rourke stole, a gunship specially fitted for combat land/sea rescue, was equipped with diving gear, not only the hemosponges and suits with which Rourke had become familiar since his first encounter with the civilization of Mid-Wake, but also conventional tanks. Rourke knew the purpose of these; small, about the length of a Twentieth-Century policeman’s nightstick and only roughly twice the diameter, they were for emergency air supplies when there was no time to don full gear, or for giving an emergency air supply to someone in the water. While Paul, who had turned into an excellent pilot, considering his brave but rather inauspicious beginning, flew the craft toward the island of Hawaii, John Rourke checked the air tanks to make certain they were fully pressurized. In conjunction with gas masks, he could jury-rig breathing apparatus for them. Because the eruption would foul the air where they were

going.

Thorn Rolvaag leaned against the wall-it was called a bulkhead, he remembered-and watched hell unfold beneath him as a frighteningly vivid panorama of fire and ash and sulphurous fumes and molten rock reached up into the night toward them. And, somewhere down there, Bremen was in trouble if not already dead. Rolvaag, still sweating from fear and exhaustion, spoke into the radio. “Carl, find some way of signaling to us, please. You can hear me. I feel it. I know you can hear me. Find some way of making a signal.”

But, what could Carl Bremen do? A flare would go unseen, even the brightest flare.

Rolvaag shouted forward to the crew of the Navy helicopter. “There must be some way!”

“This Mr. Bremen, Doc, he pretty sharp with electronics?” It was the pilot who called back to him. And Rolvaag got to his feet, unsteady, unsteadier still because of the turbulence surrounding the helicopter. But he started forward. The pilot, a black man named Butler, began again to speak. “Assume he can hear us but we can’t hear him, right? Otherwise, we’re really outa luck findin’ him. But what if we can talk him through changing his radio around so he can’t receive, but he can send. Then he can talk us in. Hell feel cut off, but we can find him. He’s probably scared shidess by now, so youH have to prep him for it, but if you figure he trusts you enough, maybe this’ll work.”

Then Buder turned to his copilot. “Jim, get up and give the man a chair.”

The copilot vacated his seat and Rolvaag sank into it. “But I don’t know if I could change a radio around. Maybe I could, but I don’t know if I could talk him through it.”

“I can. You start talking to him on your radio, then when you figure it’s time, turn him over to me, Doc. It’s his only chance.”

Rolvaag nodded. He controlled his breathing as best he could, then switched his radio on. “Carl, this is Thorn Rolvaag. I want you to listen to me very carefully. And Tm praying that you can listen to me”

Beside Rolvaag, Buder sat bolt upright in his seat. “We’re losing oil pressure in the main rotor. Strap in, Doc! We’re goin’ down. Jim! Get a Mayday out with our position!”

Great plumes of smoke and ash, alive with particles of molten rock, flared thousands of feet upward into the night, illuminating the volcano’s shield and almost the entire southern portion of the Island of Hawaii. Below Rourke and Rubenstein now the wreckage of the Navy helicopter whose transmissions they had heard-a Mayday signal-was lit by the spewing volcanic vents surrounding it.

It was a question of immediacy.

Paul landed the helicopter as near to the crash site as possible in the event there were serious injuries, but it was necessary as well to keep two other considerations in mind: First, that the landing site was safe for the moment from the effects of the eruption and second that the actual landing could not be observed from within the cone, where Thorn Rolvaag had indicated that Martin and the others were located.

There was nothing to guarantee, of course, that they were still there. Indeed, remaining was folly. But, Rourke had to check, could not run the risk of losing Martin. But, to have allowed Ensign Clyde to alert the base to the fact that Martin had been located would have precipitated even greater difficulties. If the Navy located Martin and the commando unit, there was always the possibility that Martin would be killed. And, if the base were alerted, there would be no preventing Michael, Natalia and Annie from coming to the scene.

By now, of course, Ensign Clyde would have reported the message and what subsequendy happened. The base would have scrambled helicopters to come after them and, doubdess Michael, Natalia and Annie would be along.

Rourke made it that they had their fifteen-minute headstart and nothing more, and the few minutes’ time they had been on the ground was cancelled out by the amount of time it would have taken Pearl Harbor to scramble choppers to go after them.

The HK-91 slung from his shoulder, its pistol grip tight in his right hand, the ScoreMasters thrust into the waistband of his trousers, John Rourke kept to the right side of the rocky defile they paralleled. Paul Rubenstein, his German MP-40 submachinegun in his right fist, walked on the left. Their weapons, aside from Rourke’s twin stainless Detonics CombatMasters, worn in the old double Alessi rig under his battered brown leather bomberjacket, and the little A.G. Russell Sting IA Black Chrome (Rourke always carried the two Detonics Mini guns and Sting IA) and Paul’s Browning High Power, had been stowed in the trunk of the FOUO car Rourke had driven. Rourke’s full-sized ScoreMasters, Rourke’s two-inch barreled Smith & Wesson Centennial and his Crain Life Support System X knife and Paul’s second High Power and the old Gerber Mkll fighting knife, weapons that had helped Rourke and his friend survive as long as they had them coupled with the intelligence to use them properly, were too much to carry in this new, “civilized” world.

Here, on the face of Kilauea, there was no civilization, only the struggle to survive. When the Mayday signal had come from the crashing helicopter carrying Rolvaag, neither Rourke nor Rubenstein had questioned the necessity of what had to be done first. There was the immediate risk of lives at stake. Martin would have to wait.

Using a portable direction-finder from the rescue helicopter’s equipment stores, set to the open frequency signal of the downed chopper, John Rourke guided them ahead, homing in. And, just ahead, in the flare from a rupturing vent, Rourke saw the machine.

The pilot was good at his work, John Rourke reflected. Through the radio built into the gas mask John Rourke wore, he said to Paul Rubenstein, “Over there, about two hundred yards,

almost obscured by that rock uplift. See it?” It was closer to Rubenstein than it was to Rourke.

“I see it. It looks like the cabin area is intact, but what I can see of the rest of it looks like the tail section’s sheared away and the-look, down there.”