Survivalist - 24 - Blood Assassins (31 page)

The man’s flying rig started spinning, twisting and contorting, pieces of the tail rotor flying everywhere. Two things happened almost at once. The man’s flying rig impacted the far wall of the chasm and explosed, a black and yellow fireball belching up hot and fast, Rourke veering his own machine away from it. And a piece of flying debris struck John Rourke’s main rotor. The rotation speed immediately dropped, and the machine began to drop as well.

The remaining two enemy personnel in flying rigs arced toward John Rourke. As Rourke looked up, he saw Paul firing the shotgun. The man in the rig nearest to Rourke took a hit, man and machine slamming into the far wall, exploding.

John Rourke fired his submachinegun toward the last man.

Bullets whined off the metalwork of Rourke’s flying rig. And still, it was falling. As the last man started a pass, Rourke fired what he judged to be the last few rounds left in Paul’s submachinegun. Rourke and his opponent were so close that their rotor blades nearly touched. The burst from Paul’s submachinegun struck across the handlebar control, sparks flying, bullets ricochetting upward and downward, peppering the man’s chest and abdomen. Rourke banked left, still falling, the now-dead man’s machine plummeting downward and downward into the seemingly bottomless chasm between the spiral and the outer wall.

Rourke’s machine sputtered and stalled, started. Rourke’s eyes shifted over the controls in a frantic search for some means by which he could avoid his enemy’s fate, a killing fall into the chasm.

•There was a fuel mixture control. Logic dictated that it would increase oxygenation, hence the burn rate. Rourke throttled back one quarter, then turned the mixture control to full rich, simultaneously cutting

power to half on his tail rotor, then throttling the main rotor all the way out as he angled his body toward the inner wall.

With a wrenching that tore at his spine, the flying rig lurched upward and began twisting so strongly that Rourke felt his lips curling back from his teeth. He was turning with the machine with the increased power from the main rotor and the diminished tail rotor revolutions, spiraling upward toward the ceiling above.

Explosions were rocking the interior of the mountain now, but Rourke was only vaguely aware of them, the sheer force of his movement pushing him toward blackout. In seconds, he would impact against the ceiling and crash.

The fingers of his right hand edged across the bar to the platform control. It had to be dismounted, aimed. There wasn’t time for any of this, he was telling himself, but not to try was to give up, the abdication of life. His fingers closed over the remote and he wrenched it free, stabbing it outward, punching the control constantly, unable to see if he was having any effect, extending any of the minilaunch platforms used as takeoff and landing pads for the flying rigs. They wouldn’t be everywhere, might only be on the outer wall side.

He had not experimented with the platforms. Paul had not used one when Paul utilized the flying rig to cross the chasm.

John Rourke was nearly to the ceiling and nearly unconscious. He kept punching the platform control unit with his right hand and cut all power to the rotors with his left.

Still spiraling, he started to fall.

His right hand let go of the remote and his left fist punched against the quick release for the harness which was against his chest.

And he was free of the flying rig, tumbling, everything around him a blur now, black, edged with unconsciousness and nausea.

His arms flailed and hands groped.

The fingers of his left hand touched at synth-concrete. His body slammed against something hard and bounced away from it, no longer spiraling, just dropping. Rourke’s hands clawed at the wall.

His right hand caught at something and the falling stopped for a fraction of a second.

He thought he heard Paul’s voice.

He wasn’t sure.

His right hand was holding something, like a ledge.

The blackness was closing around him. John Rourke swung his left arm outward and arced it upward, his left hand catching hold.

“Damn stupid of me,” Rourke rasped.

He could barely breathe.

He looked up, nausea and fear gripping him tighter now, cold and wet on his flesh, because he had the chance to think.

As Rourke’s eyes focused, he almost laughed. His fingers were locked over the lip of one of the four foot walls; all of his efforts with the remote platform activator were for naught. He looked down. There were platforms open everywhere on both sides of the chasm, but he wasn’t near any of them.

Rourke looked up again. He was three levels down, and smoke billowed from the two highest levels. There was no sign of Paul.

Rourke looked at himself, his “liberated” suit in tatters.

His shoulders ached. He shook his head and spasms of pain shot through it. But the pain brought him back fully to reality.

And he started climbing upward. As he got his right arm over the wall, then started hauling his body after it, Paul was there. “You almost died!”

“I know.”

“That was crazy! And then there you were, hanging onto this wall! Know what happened to your hat? You wouldn’t want to know.”

John Rourke was over the wall, half-collapsed into his friend’s arms. More explosions. The smell of smoke. Muted screams, the frantic clopping of horses’ hooves. Gunfire and energy bursts from above.

He looked at Paul. “So? What happened to my hat?”

“You’re the luckiest man alive. A rotor blade sheered it away when you jerked free of the flying rig. An inch lower and it would have trimmed away the top of your head.”

“Probably could use a haircut anyway.” And Rourke rose to his full height, leaned against the wall and against Paul. “How much trouble we in?”

“The police are poorly armed. But the defense forces—or army or whatever—have a lot of firepower. Their tactics look like a Chinese firedrill in the making, but I think Zimmer’s probe got more than it bargained for. Zimmer’s people got into Level One from the tunnel—must be what happened to Spitz’s force. They were brought straight in and we were taken downward by trolley. What passes for the FBI here is on Level One, but near as I can make out military headquarters is several levels down. Anyway, Zimmer’s forces are being driven back. We’re gonna be trapped.”

Rourke pushed away from the wall. “Take some of this stuff, huh?” and he started dividing his burdens with Paul. “Toward the center of Level Five I saw a kind of spiraling street.”

“I saw it too, but from Level One.”

“Fine—ever steal a carriage?”

Fifty-Seven

The briefcase discarded, his clothes stuffed into his musette bags, his boots knotted together and slung over his shoulder and his leather jacket on instead of the tattered suitcoat, John Rourke ran along a service alley on Level Three, toward the street out front. Paul Rubenstein ran beside him.

Rourke’s right hand was bleeding a little still, his skin scraped from the encounter with the wall, but when he had the time he’d use one of the antiseptic/rapid-healing sprays and bandaged it. Now he was running out of time.

As long as the battle raged, there was a chance of escape. Once it stopped, they would be trapped in the city.

The explosions still came, but more distant. Part of that was because they were near the inner core of Level Three, .not at its outer edge. But the explosions were less frequent now, too.

The city itself was like a living organism, seemed seized with panic. Riot police battled civilians in the

streets. There were overturned carriages and wagons and some small fires, perhaps from natural gas, perhaps electrical.

Zimmer’s forces had not penetrated far, but they had disrupted this city’s apparently fragile infrastructure so severely that all the 1950s-style self-control was gone, the panic of upwelling suppressed anxiety replacing it.

As they reached the street, coming out between a ma and pop style restaurant and a hairdressing salon, Rourke spotted a horse-drawn cab, the driver and two policemen fighting on the curb. One of the policemen tried to jump aboard the cab, but the driver pulled him down, fighting him back onto the sidewalk. Near to the cab were two bicycles.

“The cops are trying to steal that guy’s cab!”

Rourke looked at Paul and nodded. “Let’s prevent them from doing that, and take it ourselves. Come on!” And Rourke broke into a dead run down the middle of the street, Paul beside him. Rourke’s HK rifle was in his right fist and he stabbed it toward the men fighting at the curb, shouting, “Everybody back up!”

Paul covered them as they stepped back, while John Rourke climbed into the driver’s box.

Rourke let bis rifle fall to his side on its sling, grabbing a pistol from his belt and pointing at the two policemen and the cab driver. “Stay back and you won’t get hurt. Try to stop us and you’ll die. Simple as that.”

Paul scrambled up into the passenger compartment and Rourke handed off his rifle to his friend. “Use it if you need it, Paul. Keep them covered while I get us out of here.”

Then Rourke started backing the team—a nice-looking matched pair of bays, looking more like saddle stock than harness animals—and got the cab fully into the street. There was a long-handled whip. Rourke pulled it out of its receptacle in the boot.

The spiraling roadway at the core was straight ahead. And John Rourke cracked the whip over the animals’ heads and shouted, “Gyaagh!”

The team lunged forward and the cab was off into the street, Rourke’s body thrown deeper into the box. But he kept his balance, half standing, feet spread wide apart, the reins in his left hand, the whip in his right. He’d driven a farm team once in Indiana and he’d ridden horseback ever since his childhood and considered himself a good horseman, but bis knowledge of wagoneering was limited.

He didn’t mention that to Paul.

Across an intersection now, nearly colliding with an overturned produce wagon. Policemen were dismounting their bicycles, opening fire. “Discourage them, Paul!”

Paul fired a burst from his submachinegun. Then he shouted to John Rourke, “What are we going to do if we get out of here?”

“Ditch the cab and the team and steal a vehicle from the Nazis, that or an aircraft. They should be in a row out there if we’re lucky. We couldn’t do anything else. We don’t have clothes for the temperatures we’ll encounter. Hang on!” And Rourke slowed the team, took it into a turn and they headed into the spiral at the core.

It was steep here, well paved, wide, but the turns quick and Rourke kept the team at the best speed he could. He had to save them for when they reached the

tunnel leading out, because it was then that he would need all the speed they had.

They reached Level Two, passed it and went on.

The walls here were decorated with murals depicting the counterfeit warfare between the forces of this city and hordes of evilly drawn black men with savage looks in their eyes, amid them hawk-nosed grey-complected men with leering expressions, driving the black men onward.

The team was running evenly, not seeming to strain. As Rourke turned them into what he guessed was the final bend, ahead of the cab, half blocking egress from the spiral, he saw men in the environment suits of the military personnel who had captured them at the city entrance. The men were in a pack, not a formation, firing indiscriminately it seemed toward whatever lay beyond. “Stay down, Paul—and be ready!”

Rourke hauled the reins close against his chest, twisting his body against them, the team turning, arcing right, straight toward the soldiers. Rourke cracked the whip in the air over the horses’ ears and they dashed ahead at top speed.

The fighting men of the city within the mountain fell away in a wave on both sides. There was some gunfire, the rattle of Paul’s submachinegun part of it, but John Rourke could not divert his attention from the team long enough to look back. He cracked the whip again.

They were into Level One now, fires burning everywhere, smoke billowing outward from buildings on both sides of the street here. Bodies of men and some horses were strewn about, as though discarded. Rourke cracked the whip again. Men in Nazi uniform, evidently the ones who had been in battle with the men from the city Rourke had just passed, started running from the path of the team. There was more gunfire.

As Rourke hauled the team round a curve and through an intersection, he nearly lost control, tugging hard on the reins, swerving the team in order to avoid an overturned wagon which was on fire in the middle of the street, half blocking it. The front wheel on the offside hit the curb, rolled over it. The cab nearly overturned.

They kept going.

Ahead lay a barricade, intense fighting around it. And John Rourke saw their chance. On the other side of the barricade, perhaps five hundred yards distant along the tunnel opening beyond the barricade were two armored Nazi staff cars. The barricade was the problem, but John Rourke shouted to Paul, “We’re shooting our way through! It’s the only way!”

“I’m with you, John!”

John Rourke put the whip into his teeth, drawing one of his ScoreMasters with his right hand, thumbing back the .45’s ring-style hammer. And he thwacked the reins over the horses’ backs, urging them onward toward the barricade.

Small units were in knots everywhere, exchanging fire, energy pulses and projectile ammunition. Smoke, grey and acrid and foul, obscured everything to Rourke’s right, two buildings on fire there. The team tore forward, Rourke crouched in the box, nearly but not quite seated.

And they were into it, Rourke relying heavily on the element of surprise. But he had no choice. As men raised weapons toward the cab, Rourke fired toward them, little hope of hitting anything. The horse on the

right faltered, nearly dragging the other horse down. But, it ran on, a wide bloody crease across its neck. An energy burst impacted the pavement in front of the team and the animal on the left reared, Rourke firing his pistol into the road surface behind the animal’s hind legs, the horse bolting onward. Bullets tore into the box.

The sounds of Paul’s submachinegun, then Rourke’s HK-91, boomed out behind Rourke. A man—one of the Nazis—ran toward the charging team, about to fire his energy rifle. Rourke emptied the ScoreMaster into the man’s chest.