Survivalist - 15 - Overlord Page 15
“Yes —don’t touch anything yet. Let’s get up closer.” He started to close the distance between himself and the machine, Natalia sweeping the German explosives sniffer ahead of them over the snow and ice, the tone it emitted even,
unchanging. If the tone’s pitch increased, explosives would be near. As she swept toward one of the weapons pods, the tone increased, Rourke saying, “That’s normal, isn’t it?”
“Yes. If the tone gets any higher, we’ve got something out of the ordinary.” As she continued the sweep and moved the device away from the weapons pod, the tone dropped in pitch. She elevated the device and swept it over the skin of the craft, near the hatchway. There was nothing. She reached out to work the door.
Rourke pushed her back, safing the M-16 then taking the butt of it and rapping it hard against the door. Nothing happened.
He let Natalia work the door handle as he worked the safety back to the auto position.
She threw open the door, stepping back, Rourke thrusting the muzzle of the M-16 through the opening and inside.
The frozen body of a dead man lay in the widest beam section of the fuselage. But the dead man wasn’t Michael. It was one of the German aircrew, and from the rank, he assumed it had been the gunner.
“Throat slit, it looks like.”
“Yeah.”
“Nothing’s been touched and it doesn’t — ” she peered inside. “There’s no sign of the pilot —or anyone else.” “No. Run the sniffer.”
She swept the interior of the fuselage from the outside, then nodded to him and he helped her step up and inside, Rourke following after her, his eyes narrowing as he scanned the interior more closely. There appeared to be no damage to the instruments, almost as if whoever had killed the gunner had wished to keep the helicopter in good condition — for use?, Rourke wondered.
“Did you sweep the corporal’s body?”
“Yes —and he doesn’t look rigged. But don’t turn him over. I want to check first.”
“All right,” Rourke nodded, but dropped to his knees
beside the dead man. With the conditions of extreme cold, even a detailed autopsy might not accurately fix time of death. There was a bruise on the man’s lower left cheek which appeared to have been incurred just prior to death. With his gloved right hand he felt at the back of the dead man’s neck, just above the hairline. The German military wore their hair short and he could see most of the bruise easily enough. “I think he was hit with a rifle butt or something like it. On the face, then on the neck.”
“His throat was slit after he died,” Natalia said over her shoulder, Rourke looking up at her.
“That’s the way the wound to the throat looks. And the lack of bleeding seems to go along with that. He was stone dead and someone either slit his throat because they were too dumb to know for sure or just out of the desire to do it.”
“Who, John? An advance party from Vladmir’s force?”
Rourke considered her words for a moment. Then, “I don’t think so. For one thing, they would have stolen the helicopter or destroyed it.”
“Whoever it is, I don’t think we’ll find the pilot’s body outside.”
“Neither do I —he’s probably a prisoner.” And John Rourke wondered at the fate of his son. When Natalia had asked about Michael as a baby, Rourke had started remembering things he hadn’t remembered in years —the real years, the ones he had lived, not the centuries he had slept. It was too easy to forget that because a son was a grown man, how it had been once. He closed his eyes for a moment. “We’ll find him,” Rourke told Natalia. And though he cared for the welfare of the pilot, that wasn’t whom he meant …
Akiro Kurinami struggled against the ropes which bound his wrists and he could do nothing, the knots positioned so that he could not reach them with his fingers.
He had heard no sounds other than his own breathing and
the periodic actuating of a heater. Apparently his captors didn’t wish him to freeze to death. The blindfold puzzled him. It seemed obvious that they intended to kill him if he revealed the information they sought. Perhaps the blindfold was only for the purpose of further inducing terror.
He had had several American friends when he was a boy in Japan and he had played blindman’s bluff, as they called it, and never really liked it because there was always someone who—Akiro Kurinami thought of something he had not thought of for years. It was a trick he had learned as a boy. His uncle was a police inspector and he had asked his uncle, begged him, to let him see his handcuffs. His uncle had laughed and put the handcuffs on his wrists and Kurinami, always the agile athlete, had promptly worked his wrists beneath his rear end and up along the underside of his thighs and slipped his legs through the handcuffs to the delight of everyone watching. He had asked to be allowed to do it again, but his father had sternly said it was very undignified and he had not been allowed to do it.
He considered the memory of his father and felt that under these circumstances his father would not object. Kurinami began flexing his stiff shoulder and arm muscles, trying to loosen them, working his legs as well …
Vladmir Karamatsov had ordered the meeting for the short interval while the central element of his force stopped for refueling, the lead element moving ahead, the rear element paused as well. He remembered the Americanism, “leapfrogging”, as the most apt description for what he was doing. This central element would become the lead element for the next leg of the journey.
Before him, in the open, a cold wind cutting across his exposed skin with the sharpness of a razor, stood Colonel Ivan Krakovski, a man he did not trust except for ruthless-ness which nearly rivaled his own. With Krakovski stood
fifty members of the new Elite Corps, Krakovski at their head.
“You may stand at ease,” Karamatsov shouted over the keening of the wind. “I have something to tell you. Doubtlessly, you have heard by now rumors that we go to obtain the nuclear stockpile of the People’s Republic of China. I will tell you things which you need to know before setting out on your mission.
“Before the Night of The War,” he began, “the Chinese emulated the preparedness of the Soviet people, and constructed two cities, a third under construction but never completed, lost to time. The Chinese had a formidable nuclear arsenal, not nearly so formidable as that of the people of the Soviet, or our enemies in the United States, but substantial. The Chinese realized that sheer force of numbers of their people could not win a war against the superior technology and the superior will of the Soviet war machine. And so, it was decided that these cities would be built. And, ten per cent of their nuclear arsenal was taken off line and placed deep in an impenetrable storage vault, in the event that the two cities which they had designed to survive should find their very existence threatened …”
The Chinese premier had barely touched his food. Maria Leuden watched Michael, trying to resist reading his thoughts. But the thoughts were sometimes of her, and when he looked at her he would sometimes think the word ‘privacy’ and she would close her eyes and force herself to think of anything, from the color of the silk or silk-like slippers she wore on her feet to the way the frogs which closed her green Chinese dress had been so awkward to close, to the flower arrangements which seemed everywhere in the long, narrow, rich wood-grained walled banquet room in which they now sat, before a black lacquered table on chairs that at once seemed delicate yet very comfortable.
The Chinese premier began again to speak. “Our leaders planned with great wisdom. They realized that in a post-holocaust environment, loyalties could well be sacrificed in the lust for power, for domination of the ruins, as it were. And so, the secret to the location of the vault in which thirty-three state of the art nuclear weapons were cached was broken into three parts, the leadership of each of the three cities entrusted two of the parts, thus in the event that one of the cities was destroyed and the location of the nuclear warheads was needed, two of the cities would have the ability to jointly find the cache.”
/> The chairman paused and Michael, seated across from Maria Leuden and beside Bjorn Rolvaag, asked, “Was it considered that in such a manner it would be possible for two of the cities to join in league against the third?”
“But if each city had possessed only one portion of the secret, then the destruction of one city would have resulted in the secret being forever lost. There is an expression in English, I believe—‘The lesser of two evils’?”
Michael nodded, Rolvaag struggled with his chopsticks, though Michael had taught him their use as he had, indirectly taught Maria Leuden.
The chairman continued to speak. “The Maoist reactionary government of the Second City clearly wishes to possess our two portions of the secret, and with these and their two portions, have all three.”
“Two plus two equals three,” Michael smiled.
“Quite, young man. Indeed, two and two do equal three in this context. And with this sum, the leader of the Second City would spread his barbarism over the face of the earth. If the world beyond our city is as you tell us, Michael Rourke, the three segments of the secret could well be the goal sought after by your vile sounding Marshal Karamatsov. The great majority of the thermonuclear devices held by the People’s Republic of China were never used and are hidden in their silos and storage bunkers beneath the ground and might well
be usable to someone ingenious enough to find them. With the thirty-three warheads dangling over the collective heads of the peoples of earth, at his leisure, an unscrupulous man might be able to locate the remaining more than two hundred and fifty warheads. Indeed, it is said by some that in the cache of the thirty-three weapons, there is a map by which could be found the remaining weapons.”
“A sword of Damocles,” Maria Leuden said, speaking for the first time since they had seated themselves around the black lacquered table and begun their meal, the chairman seated at its head like a father.
“World War IV,” Michael Rourke almost whispered. “World War Last.”
She put down her chopsticks, having lost her appetite for the appealing looking vegetables and thin strips of fowl …
Ivan Krakovski watched the Hero Marshal, hadess, his black hair moving in the wind, his figure straight and tall and imposing, his dark eyes burning with the fire that inspired those about him. The Hero Marshal Vladmir Karamatsov spoke again. “And so, under the leadership of our trusted Comrade Colonel Krakovski, utilizing the information I alone possess from before the Night of The War, you fifty will go forth to the secret hardened site where ten percent of the Chinese warheads can be found. You will inspect the warheads, ascertaining that they can safely be moved, and then rendezvous with our force at the predetermined coordinates Comrade Colonel Krakovski will possess. Go forth in the name of the Soviet people to the greater glory of scientific socialism, to fulfill our historic destiny. I will speak with Comrade Colonel Krakovski alone.”
Krakovski called the Elite Corps to attention, and as the Hero Marshal retired, he turned to the captain beside and slightly behind him. “You will prepare for the mission.” He
did another about face and angled off after Marshal Karamatsov. Already, in his mind, he was composing how he would record this moment for posterity. For surely, this was the greatest of all moments in the history of the Soviet people and it had been entrusted to him. And he wondered why, because clearly the Hero Marshal seemed jealous of his abilities.
The Hero Marshal had stopped beside his command helicopter and Krakovski approached, saluted, and then followed the Hero Marshal beneath the slowly turning rotor blades and inside.
No pilot sat at the controls. The Hero Marshal seated himself in the copilot’s chair, but it seemed odd because Krakovski had never seen the Hero Marshal fly.
“Krakovski. I am entrusting you with something of vast importance, as I am sure you understand. Sit down.”
Krakovski took the pilot’s seat, studying the Hero Marshal’s face.
Karamatsov looked away, snow starting to fall almost lazily, but then caught up in a gust of wind, swirling cyclonically, then lazily falling once again. “You will be tempted, Krakovski, to keep the power of these weapons for yourself, as well any man might be. But you do not know the secrets which I know which will enable their use if need be, make them the palpable threat to humanity which I intend they be. If you do my bidding and remain loyal to me, you will eventually know these secrets and share with me power greater than even you can imagine there could be.
“I had,” the Hero Marshal continued, now turning, looking at him, “foreseen much of what might transpire. My great enemy, John Rourke, it is said has an expression he uses often. ‘Plan ahead’,” the Hero Marshal said, slipping into English. He cleared his throat as if to cleanse the words from his mouth. “I foresaw and planned that one day I would triumph. That day is nearly at hand. The setback at the gates to the Underground City was a costly one, one for
which I can again give credit to John Rourke. The gas which we still possess will enable us to easily overwhelm small forces or fortified positions, but the power contained in the vault of the Chinese traitors is an irresistible power which can sweep continents to our will. If you keep faith with me, you shall triumph with me. If you betray me, you will never know a night’s sleep again, for someday I will vindicate myself even though it might cost my own life. Do you understand me, Comrade?”
Krakovski understood and said that he did.
The Hero Marshal entrusted him with the map coordinates which would lead him to the thirty-three nuclear warheads. The cyclones of snow intensified and the black of the Hero Marshal’s eyes deepened …
Akiro Kurinami lurched forward and his face impacted heavily against the hard surface and his breath left him in a rush, but his hands were in front of him. He lay there for an instant, regaining his breath, then moved his hands to his face and pulled away the blindfold. He squinted against a light which was not there, in total darkness except for the glow of the electrically powered heating unit at the far corner of the enclosure. But he was certain it was a room.
His teeth found the knots of the ropes which bound his wrists and he began to gnaw at them.
Elaine — he had to save her, to free himself before the men who had taken him prisoner and even now would be bringing her here returned …
Paul Rubenstein had found them. He hadn’t believed his eyes. Now, John Rourke and Natalia Tiemerovna stood flanking him, staring at the ground.
“These animals are small—Asian horses. They’re shod. One of them,” and he outlined one set of hoofprints in the snow with the tip of his right index finger,” was carrying
double, or an extraordinarily heavy rider. But I prefer the latter.”
“The pilot,” Natalia whispered through the scarf which masked the lower portion of her face.
They had found the remains of a fire nearly a quarter mile from the abandoned helicopter, John Rourke having deduced that the captors of the pilot had spent the night there after seizing him. Paul had agreed with John’s logic. Had the men who had taken the pilot stayed there before attacking the helicopter, their fire would have been clearly visible and given the pilot and copilot either time to lift off or in some other way ward off the attack, the gunship heavily armed. At the least, time for a distress signal.
John Rourke rose to his full height, taking the German radio from beneath his parka. The cold was intense and earlier John had expressed concern that the batteries for their radios might be ill-affected by it.
John Rourke spoke into the self-contained microphone. “This is Rourke. Rourke to Courier, come in. Over.”
The J-7V was designated with the code name “Courier.”
There was the crackle of static and the voice of the copilot came back. “This is Courier. Receiving you. Over.”
“Courier —I want those three crates opened and have the security team start preparing the contents. Rourke out.”
In a strange way, Paul Rubenstein had found himself looking forward to this.
Michael had eaten the dinner, not enjoying it although the quality of the food was impeccable. The conversation had turned his appetite.
The chairman had been required at another meeting, had left the dinner table with profuse apologies and requested their presence for a late night drink in his private apartment.
He had looked even more tired when he had rejoined them.
The room in which they sat, a library, was modestly furnished, almost spartan, except for the books it contained. The languages were in most cases recognizable to Maria Leuden or to Michael himself, and Rolvaag had smiled when he had spied several books in the Icelandic tongue.
There was a smallish, low table around which they clustered, the table black lacquered like the dinner table, but covered with glass and pressed between the glass and the table surface dried flowers of some sort, or perhaps they were silk. Michael was uncertain.
The chairman had spoken of many things, most trivial, but at last, making a tent of his fingers and placing the tips
of his index fingers to his eyelids, he addressed a question which Michael had been searching to introduce throughout the evening but had not.
“It was called Lushun before the Dragon Wind obliterated it from the face of the earth,” and he made a sweeping gesture with his hands and his great, somehow sad eyes opened. “Of all nations, China’s loss was perhaps the greatest, our population all but totally destroyed. When we determined some years ago that it would be to our interests to have available ships with which to cross the seas, Lushun was determined as the place to undertake this endeavor. We have small ships there even now, but no true ocean-going vessels as once crossed the waters. To facilitate this program, we constructed a rail line to reach Lushun, completed several years ago. But a short time after we established a presence at Lushun, the attacks began. Men came out of the sea, heavily armed but in small numbers, placing explosives, killing. It was debated whom these men might be, perhaps Americans, perhaps others. None has ever been captured and those few killed in battle with us have never been identified, except as Westerners. It was debated as well that we might best serve our goals by abandoning our port. I personally spoke against this, although I have no love for warfare. The reactor was nearly completed by the time the next series of attacks came and it soon became the target for these mysterious interlopers. Perhaps they will some day attack in force, or perhaps they cannot.”