Survivalist - 20 - Firestorm

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  Title : #20 : FIRESTORM

  Series : Survivalist

  Author(s) : Jerry Ahern

  Location : Gillian Archives

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  Chapter One

  The grazing gunshot wound across John Rourke’s shoulder blades stung him more than hurt him, numbness setting in at the center of his back, but merely the body’s defense mechanisms against pain, his physician’s training made him realize. And he was cold, a combination of weather conditions and, he thought, possibly shock. There was no time after the battle to repel the Soviet attack against Eden Base for him to treat the wound, six or seven of the Elite Corpsmen who had escaped the battlefield having fled into miles of the long, narrow band of dense evergreen woods which struck northward toward the mountains like a scar, a frozen creek bed bisecting it along its length. But if it were shock setting in, he did what he could to minimize it, the hood of his parka up and secured, his coat closed all the way, gloves on. And he moved slowly, trying not to tax his strength, saving his body’s resources for what might happen when he found the KGB Elite Corpsmen.

  Rourke’s fists were tight on his M-16, his other guns reloaded, holstered. His eyes followed the fast-filling-in footprints in the snow. Six or seven sets of male footprints, so jumbled he could not discern the exact number. But had it been only these, he would have let the men go. German aircraft aplenty were available for an aerial search that would eventually discover them, despite the poor visibility from the falling snow and the coming of night.

  Eventually was the key word, however. There was a complication which imparted added urgency to the chase: An extra set of footprints. A woman’s. One of the women who had been among the Eden Base defenders and who had left the defensive position by the breach in the wall to join him in the counter-attack was not accounted for. No body lying on the battlefield or listed among the many wounded at the bomb-damaged field hospital.

  Her name, Rourke learned, was Maritza Zeiss, one of the West

  German members of the international astronaut corps which comprised Eden Base personnel. The tread pattern of the woman’s bootprints he followed matched that of the boots worn by Eden personnel, distinctly different than the tread pattern of the Soviet footgear.

  There was a German helicopter gunship landing near the re-entrant, the line of woods made into the snowpacked plain which led toward Eden Base and the road which had served as the Eden Project landing field. The ruined and, at least temporarily, abandoned German base was visible in the distance.

  John Rourke stopped there, the Mid-Wake submarine commander Captain Jason Darkwood shivering beside him. Tm used to more controlled climatic conditions, Doctor. Forgive the noise of my chattering teeth.”

  “Merely a natural body defense, the body trying to generate heat through motion. My teeth are chattering a little bit, too,” Rourke observed, watching the helicopter more intently now as his friend, Paul Rubenstein, exited it, running toward them out of the swirl of artificial blizzard created by the downdraft of the winning rotor blades.

  “You should be getting that wound treated, John!” Paul Rubenstein shouted as he jogged toward them jockeying his German MP-40 submachinegun and his M-16 back on their slings so he could close his coat.

  “News travels fast,” Rourke told his friend.

  The younger man smiled, a second later the smile vanishing behind the black knit toque Paul Rubenstein pulled over his head and face. “Well, I spoke with Elaine Halversen on the radio. She told me what you guys were up to out here. Sam Aldridge sent Lieutenant St. James’s platoon by chopper a few miles farther north. Michael’s with them. Aldridge figured to cut the Elite Corpsmen off.”

  “Good,” John Rourke nodded. “Well have to keep in radio contact so we don’t wind up shooting each other. ItH be dark soon,” Rourke observed, adding, “Or, I should say ‘darker”.”

  The weather had been deteriorating, if that were possible, throughout the day, conditions going from annoying to intolerable to dangerous. With the conventional avionics of five centuries ago, no helicopter would have dared fly. “Lef s treat your wound aboard the gunship, all right? Well make better time because of it in the long run,” Paul declared.

  John Rourke just looked at his friend. “Suddenly you’re the doctor?”

  Paul shrugged. “You know it makes sense.” Rourke nodded. “We do it fast,” then started toward the black German gunship …

  AMro Kurinami, looking as if he were about to pass out from exhaustion, knelt beside her where she sat with her back to the wall.

  Fewer than a dozen feet from her was the body of the man she’d shot, as he was about to shoot Akiro Kurinami in the back.

  Colonel Mann and Commander Dodd, on opposite sides of the body, stood over it.

  She could hear them talking, her eyes moving to the Trapper Scorpion .45 which was still in her hand, the slide locked back, open over the empty magazine. She’d shot the man until the gun was fired out.

  Since the Night of the War, she’d killed many people in defense of herself or defense of others. But there was something very different, scarily unnerving about this. The man she’d killed had clearly been about to cold-bloodedly murder Akiro.

  Why?

  Sarah Rourke tuned her thoughts, with some difficulty, toward the conversation continuing between Colonel Mann and Commander Dodd.

  “…that she was mistaken. After all, Mrs. Rourke is under considerable strain. She’s pregnant, and-“

  “Commander, if Frau Rourke indicated that she shot this man, Damien Rausch, an escaped Nazi criminal, because he was attempting to murder Lieutenant Kurinami, then that is exactly the way that it happened “

  *Tou keep saying he’s a Nazi of some kind,” Dodd said, shaking his head, “but how can you be sure? I mean, did you memorize the face of every one of the men in the Nazi party after it was deposed?”

  Wolfgang Mann sighed audibly. “There were two men at the hierarchy of the leader’s party elite. They were brothers. This man,

  Damien Rausch, and Freidrich Rausch, were (he very elite of mat elite. You have, no doubt, heard of the SS?”

  That was five hundred years ago, Colonel.”

  “But the pattern of organization within the Nazi party which dominated my nation until Hen Doctor Rourke assisted us in at last attaining freedom,” Wolfgang said, an edge in his voice that made Sarah think his patience was near its end, “was identical to that of the Nazi era in the 1930s and 1940s in Old Germany. The SS were the leader’s political police and eternal stalwarts.” And then he looked from Commander Dodd toward Sarah, Sarah’s eyes meeting his. The brothers Rausch were the most vile and despicable of the leader’s minions. They would never surrender their beliefs in the ultimate triumph of National Socialism. And, if Freidrich Rausch still lives, he will never surrender the desire to kill Frau Rourke for killing his brother.” It was cold there by the wall, the snow hard driven on the wind.

  Sarah Rourke shivered …

  Paul was right, of course. The alternating stinging and numbness was gone, John Rourke’s wound cleaned and treated. And taking a fresh parka from the gunship helped, one without the added ventilation made by the rifle bullet, helped against the cold nearly as much as the knowledge that the wound was even less serious than John Rourke had suspected.

  With Paul Rubenstein and Jason Darkwood flanking him, all three of them with their weapons at the ready, they moved through the woods now.

  As Rourke had feared, the footprints were harder to follow because they were harder to discern, the blowing snow filling them almost too rapidly. But here and mere, where one of the tall pines would break the wind
, there was sign.

  They kept going, the sparsely scattered footprints following the line of the frozen creek. It was rocky here, as if the creek bed were a gouge and the material moved aside for its creation had been strewn about haphazardly to either side of it.

  Rourke’s strength was returning to him as he got his second wind, beyond tired now.

  There had been no tracks visible for nearly a quarter mile and

  John Rourke was just about to concede that the fleeing KGB Elite Corpsmen and their hostage had gone deeper into the woods, leaving the course of the creek bed. But then, as his flashlight, one of the very powerful German ones, shifted right, Rourke saw something in the high, smooth rocks near the center of the creek bed. It was clearly a footprint.

  “Paul, give me a hand down there,” Rourke said, shivering as an errant gust of wind breached the left side of his parka hood when he turned.

  “You see something?”

  “I think it’s a track, there in the cleft in the rocks. Empty your M-16, Paul.”

  As John Rourke checked his M-16’s condition of readiness-he wanted it on safe for the climb downward-he moved toward the embankment. Jason Darkwood spoke into his radio set. This is Captain Darkwood calling scouting party. Come in. Over.”

  Rourke didn’t wait to have the transmission relayed to him, starting down over the ice-coated rocks of the creek bank, Paul Rubenstein wedged above him, holding an emptied M-16 by the buttstock as Rourke edged downward, moving bis hands along the front handguard then down along the barrel toward the flash deflector.

  The footing was dangerously uncertain and Rourke moved slowly, cautiously. To break or twist an ankle now would benefit no one. He could faintly hear Darkwood. “We’re proceeding as planned, Lieutenant. What’s your status? Over.”

  There was nothing for it but to drop the remaining three feet to the level of the creek unless he wanted to climb back up and start down again with a rope. Rourke elected to jump, letting go of Paul’s rifle, coming down in a crouch on the ice-coated dirt and gravel, slipping, catching himself on both hands, his rifle’s buttstock banging against a rock.

  Cautiously, Rourke moved to a standing position, his eyes, now with the aid of the flashlight again, shifting back and forth over the stream bed, trying to place the cleft of rock he had seen from above from this different perspective. He had it, walking very slowly out onto the frozen ripples of the creek surface. His M-16, still on safe, was in his left hand, Rourke tapping gently against the surface of the ice with its muzzle, like a blind man might have used a cane five centuries ago.

  Today, mere were still persons who were blind, but none who could not see, with the possible exception of the Wild Tribes of Europe. Both the technologies of New Germany and of Mid-Wake had arrived at the same methodology, utilizing video sensing lenses in what looked largely like ordinary sunglasses, the micro-circuitry in the frames processing the signals and translating them to electro-magnetic impulses readable within the vision centers of the optic thalmus. He’d been fortunate to read three papers on the subject, two in English and one, translated for him from the technical German which was so difficult that it was impossible to enjoy without the translation.

  Rourke ceased walking and musing simultaneously as his eyes focused on the imprint revealed in the snow-filled niche in the rocks under the yellow-white beam of his flashlight. It was a deep handprint, the length of the digits and the overall span of the hand, taking into account that it would have been gloved, clearly belonging to a woman.

  Rourke raised his voice to a loud whisper, but of sufficient volume that Paul, who was watching him, would be able to hear. “They crossed the stream. Come on.”

  Chapter Two

  The snow fell more lightly here in the tall pines, the boughs above him weighted almost to the breaking point. Occasionally, a bough would partially collapse under the weight and snow by what seemed the bucketful would fall, covering his parka hood, his shoulders, his equipment.

  He circumscribed a small clearing clockwise, Paul Rubenstein doing the same, but counterclockwise.

  Rourke rolled back the storm sleeve of his parka, his right hand cupping around the lens of the flashlight, nearly covering it as he turned his back toward the far side of the clearing. The Rolex on his wrist confirmed the count he had kept in his head. Five minutes had passed. A radio communication from Lieutenant St. James had, only moments before that, confirmed what Rourke’s tracking, easier here in the deeper woods on the far side of the stream, had intimated. The Elite Corpsmen were tiring, slowing. From a vantage point among high rocks nearly a mile away, using sophisticated light-gathering binoculars, Lieutenant St. James’s Marines had spotted the group. Eight persons in all, translating to seven Elite Corpsmen and their female hostage. They had stopped to rest.

  As Rourke switched the beam off his flashlight and turned around, Jason Darkwood promptly entered the very edge of the clearing, half its width behind Rourke’s own position now.

  The instructions to Lieutenant St. James had been simple. Advance in a long skirmish line, making a lot of noise, forcing the quarry to either move back the way they had come or take a defensive position.

  Either way, their backs would be turned in the direction from which Rourke, Paul Rubenstein and Darkwood were coming. Darkwood’s crossing the clearing more or less openly was insurance. Unless the Elite Corpsmen were imbeciles, they’d be watching their backs and spot Darkwood.

  John Rourke began moving again, slowly, silently, drawing the Life Support System X from its sheath at his side, his gloved hand fisting it in a rapier hold as he moved through the snow …

  Jason Darkwood’s palms sweated inside his heavy gloves. He’d done the thing every midshipman learned not to do: volunteer. He was the best man for the job because he was the least experienced in surface warfare, a novice compared to veterans like Doctor Rourke and Mr. Rubenstein.

  Rubenstein was an interesting guy, Darkwood thought. Talk about truth to the old expression of not judging a book by its cover. Paul Rubenstein wasn’t short, but he wasn’t exactly tall, either. His hair was thinning badly. He didn’t seem overtly muscular. And suddenly, as he walked (hopefully obviously, since if he were running the risk of getting shot it should be for a good reason) he found himself thinking about Rubenstein’s very pretty wife, Annie. Doctor Rourke’s daughter, she had the Rourke way about her, commanding, yet she was marvelously feminine and very refreshing. Mr. Rubenstein was a lucky man.

  Darkwood stopped beside a tall tree with snow on its bark. Snow fascinated him, the very look of it, its taste on the tongue.

  He realized that this, the reality of life, was something everyone at Mid-Wake missed, most without ever realizing it. In five centuries of living beneath the sea in a domed complex, traveling within the city or, for persons like himself who were part of Mid-Wake’s defense forces, traveling by submarine, but always within a controlled environment, generations had been spent this way. But with Mid-Wake’s unavoidable involvement now in the surface war against the Russians of the Underground City in the Ural Mountains, it was the end of an era. .

  In one respect, that was good. The stringent, voluntary population control (with the help of five centuries of war casualties) which had kept Mid-Wake numbers manageable for five centuries would someday, perhaps soon, be unnecessary. There was an entire world to populate, to know, to experience.

  And, if he lived that long, he wanted very much to be part of

  that. Unexplored seas. And, what shores did they kiss? Good thoughts.

  He resumed walking, the M-16 he’d grabbed up from the hands of a dead Eden Base defender still unfamiliar to his hands.

  Darkwood compromised, shifting the assault rifle into his left hand, drawing the Mid-Wake issue pistol. He knew what a 9mm Lancer Caseless would do to an enemy from firsthand experience, the M-16 only through observation.

  The 2418 A2 had a solid feel to it, largely psychological he knew, but much of warfare, much of survival was psychological
.

  Somewhere in the woods on either side of the clearing which he skirted, Doctor Rourke and Mr. Rubenstein were closing on the enemy.

  If he couldn’t tell exactly where they were, did that mean the enemy couldn’t either?

  The enemy. For five centuries, the people of Mid-Wake had fought the forces of the Soviet underwater complex which shared, ironically, the same undersea volcanic vent as a source of geothermal energy.

  There were some in Mid-Wake, Darkwood had heard, who blamed Doctor Rourke for involving Mid-Wake in the war on the land, with these new Soviet enemies. But these were the uninformed who let one too many drinks do the talking for them, or were mindless to begin with. Once the Soviet Navy had nuclear missile capabilities, as had been proven conclusively, a broadening of the five centuries long war was inevitable. There was no danger of direct nuclear attack on Mid-Wake, the serendipity of that shared volcanic vent geothermal power source the mitigating factor there. But Soviet Island Class submarines armed with nuclear missiles could have destroyed the Mid-Wake fleet, leaving Mid-Wake powerless to resist Soviet invasion by any other means than flooding.

  The flooding of Mid-Wake was a popular topic among some of the very old. Once, when the Soviet Marine Spetznas had attacked Mid-Wake in force, better than seventy years ago, it was said that when all had seemed lost, when it seemed the people of Mid-Wake were close to extinction, the government had been on the verge of flooding the city, stopping the Soviets, killing everyone, collapsing the domes under the pressure of the sea around them.

  It would have come to that because, with the Soviet collective system and selective genetic breeding it was possible for the Soviets to produce a disproportionate number of male offspring, the vast majority of the Soviet forces, both Naval and Marine Spetznas, male. Not only was the Soviet population greater, but its percentage of fighting men out of all proportion to actual population numbers.

  Inevitable.

  Darkwood reached the midway point in the clearing.