Survivalist - 15 - Overlord Page 17

  Contented, Michael had returned to his apartment, showered, attempted to leaf through a book. Rolvaag, despite being nearly as long without sleep as Michael, had been sitting in the spacious waiting room at the end of the hall reading as Michael had entered and called out to him. The dog had stirred, Rolvaag had waved, then returned to his book, one of the Icelandic volumes Michael had arranged that Rolvaag could borrow from the chairman’s private library. If the chairman spoke Icelandic, he had not evinced it at the dinner party.

  The book was a nineteenth century English novel, and though Michael had read other works by the same author, it

  did not capture his interest.

  Sleep was what he needed, but it wasn’t in him.

  He thought of Maria Leuden. She would probably be asleep by now.

  In less than twelve hours, they would be leaving to link up with the helicopter and find out why it had gone out of radio contact.

  He began to pace the bedroom.

  He looked at the two Beretta 92Fs in the double shoulder rig hanging on the headboard post. He could always clean them again, but the interval since the last cleaning had been so short that powder residue could not have sweated out of the bore and the cleaning would be essentially useless. The 629 hadn’t been cleaned since he had used it against the Mongols.

  He started for the elaborately painted cabinet in which he had stowed his pack and his other gear. He opened the double doors. He closed his eyes.

  He closed the doors and leaned heavily against the cabinet.

  He was naked except for a pair of underpants and he walked back toward the bed, skinned into his blue jeans and the shirt he had just worn and ripped both Berettas from their leather, stuffing them beneath his shirt butts, outward against his kidneys.

  Michael Rourke started from the bedroom, across the sitting room, snatching up the key from beside the door, opening the door, slamming it overly hard behind him. He didn’t worry over the lock. If it locked, he had the key. But the door and the lock were so flimsy no one with any determination would have been kept out.

  Down the corridor.

  Michael Rourke stopped at the door, so much like his own.

  He knocked at the door.

  He waited.

  He started to turn away. The door opened.

  Maria Leuden wore a blue silk-looking robe, tied about her waist, her glasses on, her eyes huge seeming behind them, her left hand pushing her hair back from her face.

  “Michael-1-“

  He stepped inside the doorway, his hands touching at her waist, then his arms encircling her. “I love you,” she whispered.

  Michael Rourke brought his mouth down on hers, molding her body against his …

  When they reached the top of the rise, it was at first hard to tell how far away the fire really was because of its size. But after some observation, Rourke decided the captors of the pilot were a little over a mile distant.

  He pulled the helmet from his head, taking the radio from beneath his parka. “Rourke to Courier. Come in. Over.”

  There was static, then the voice of the pilot. “This is Courier, Herr Doctor. Come in. Over.”

  “I’m leaving this frequency open. Are you ready to fly, over?”

  “Ready, Herr Doctor. My copilot stands by. Over.”

  “I estimate your ETA—” Rourke rolled back the storm sleeve and looked at the luminous black of the Rolex Submariner on his wrist. “ETA in sixteen minutes from liftoff. Rourke out.”

  He pocketed the radio, leaving the frequency open to serve as a homing beacon.

  He replaced his helmet, his ears numb with the cold from the brief exposure, the shield before his face steaming, then the steam starting to dissipate as he spoke to Natalia and to Paul. “With them out in the open like that, we won’t be able to accurately judge their strength until we’re right up on

  them. There shouldn’t be more than eight or nine at any event. We need the pilot alive. That’s why we’re here. And we need one of whoever they are alive to find out who they are. Like we planned it, up the middle, Natalia gets the pilot. Right?”

  “Like we planned it,” Paul answered.

  “Yes,” Natalia murmured.

  “Nice and slow until we’re close. Once the superchargers on these bikes kick in, they’ll hear it. Now we sit here for twelve minutes.” He slung his M-16 forward, removing the magazine, working the action several times to be certain the cold hadn’t adversely affected it.

  He replaced the magazine, wishing he could have lit a cigar, but the cold was a more powerful motivator than habit.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  John Rourke had judged the time needed to cross slowly to within two hundred yards of the camp and then accelerate into the camp as about three minutes. If these people had not stolen the helicopter or damaged it, there was substantial reason to believe they were not familiar with aircraft to any substantial degree, if at all. The fact that they rode horses, the inefficient but deadly means with which they had dispatched the gunner, all pointed to a certain primitiveness.

  He wondered.

  Rourke checked the face of his Rolex. It was nearly time.

  He spoke into the helmet microphone. “Let’s start out nice and slowly,” and he throttled up and let the machine rumble forward, Natalia moving into the center position, Rourke to her left, Paul to her right, Rourke checking the gauges on the Special’s instrument panel. He ruled out using the explosive charges which could be expelled from the bike, and with the rising force of the wind and the snow it drove, smoke would have been of little effect.

  These were hardy men he would soon face, living here, camping out of doors in weather so horrible severe. But he realized he could never be so naive as to regret killing them any more than he regretted killing anyone. He had known a man once who had told him something invaluable about

  killing. “Once you get to liking it, there’s only one more kill you should rack up — yourself.” He had known men to whom the advice should have been meaningful.

  They had crossed half the expanse separating them from the campfire, Rourke increasing speed slightly, Natalia and Paul following his lead.

  He armed the twin machineguns in the fairing.

  He consulted his wristwatch — the helicopter would be due, barring the unforeseen, in one minute, the J-7V timing itself to sweep in from the opposite end of the plateau sixty seconds after the helicopter. He swung the M-16 slightly forward, charging the chamber, leaving the safety set to safe.

  “Now,” he whispered, revving the machine, giving it what he still mentally called “gas,” the speedometer bouncing upward, the supercharger kicking in with a loud whine.

  Men were rising from around the fire, great mounds of snow falling from the lean-to shelters in which they had protected themselves, Rourke seeing the outline of rifles coming up.

  He fired a burst with both faring machineguns, intentionally firing wide to the left of the camp to avoid inadvertently killing the captured German pilot, Paul’s machineguns doing the same. Natalia accelerating past them dead for the center of the camp, Rourke giving the machine full acceleration, the Special skipping over the hummocks of snow and the rocks beneath them, Rourke twisting the fork, cutting into the camp to the left of the fire, not using the machineguns, stabbing the M-16 forward, working off the safety tumbler and firing into the moving shapes of men.

  A bullet whined as it ricocheted off the faring, Rourke firing another burst. A man shape bundled in blankets —and furs? — brought a rifle that looked modern yet looked oddly familiar to his hip, tongues of flame flickering from it as Rourke fired again.

  The man went down. As Rourke wheeled the Special, he saw Natalia in the center of the camp, a man swinging a

  burning club toward her, snatched from the fire. She dodged, the Special she had been dismounting collapsing against her. Rourke throttled out, riding from the camp, Rourke arcing it in a tight loop, wrestling the fork as he accelerated the machine out of the curve of the
loop, aiming himself and the machine toward the center of the camp, the motorcycle lurching beneath him, Rourke letting go, diving from it and tackling the man with the burning club as he swung it down toward Natalia.

  Rourke hammered the man into the snow, the fire extinguishing with a loud hiss, the man wriggling away from him, Rourke rocking back, the M-16 too far back to get fast enough as the man drew his pistol. Rourke drew the Python from the flap holster at his hip and doubled actioned it twice, then twice again, the man’s body snapping back into the fire.

  Rourke was up, to his feet, wresding the Special free of Natalia. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes —winded —yes—” He left her, stabbing the revolver into its holster, the helicopter roaring in overhead, machinegun fire strafing the snow on either side of the camp, the defenders of the camp screaming in panic, some dropping to their knees, others running.

  A man dove from the shadows beyond the fire, a long bladed, curving sword in his right hand, Rourke dodging back.

  But Rourke realized he wasn’t the man’s target. The sword was raised, ready to hack down into a long, formless looking shape at the opposite edge of the fire.

  Rourke sprayed the M-16 into swordsman, the .223 bucking in his right fist, the swordsman’s body spinning, falling away.

  Natalia was beside him then, both her revolvers in her Fists as she approached the formless thing on the ground.

  Rourke let the M-16 fall to his side, opening his parka, ripping the twin stainless Detonics pistols from the leather.

  “John,” Natalia screamed over the roar of the helicopter

  overhead. The downdraft making a blizzard which swirled around them. “He’s alive. It’s the pilot.”

  The J-7V streaked overhead, dipping its wings, the slipstream around it tearing at Rourke’s face and hair as he pulled the helmet from his head.

  And he dropped to his knees beside one of the dead men. For all the world, the man looked like a Mongolian warrior.

  “Right place, wrong time,” he said under his breath.

  And then he heard Paul Rubenstein. “I got one! I got one!” And Rourke looked around, Paul Rubenstein dragging a man through the snow by his heels.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Natalia spoke to the Mongol, having tried several different dialects of Chinese, none of which she considered herself speaking well, until at last there had been some flicker of recognition in the man’s eyes.

  He seemed terrified, she thought, terrified not at anything a rational man would have feared, but at being taken inside the German helicopter gunship.

  “Now that he knows this thing flies, he is afraid of it, more so than of any of the guns he has seen, or any of us.”

  John Rourke said to her, “Ask him if he knows what happened to Michael.”

  She tried the dialect that had seemed to stimulate recognition. And he answered her, in such a rapid fashion that she could barely understand every third or fourth word he spoke.

  “He says, I think, that he knows nothing about anything.”

  She watched John’s face as he lit his cigar, the cigar having been in the left corner of his mouth unlit for some time now. “I’m going to ask him why, if he knows nothing, he tried killing the pilot,” she said, then proceeded to translate her own question as best she could.

  The Mongol didn’t answer.

  She looked at John Rourke. He winked and looked at Paul

  for an instant. She sat back.

  Paul stepped forward, taking the black catspaw handled Gerber Mkll from his belt, almost shoving her aside, grabbing the Mongol by the front of the man’s tunic-like shirt, the knife in Paul’s right hand going to the Mongol’s throat. “Then Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,” he snarled. “And Mary had a little lamb! And what about Mother Goose!” He shook the man and brandished the knife, Natalia looking for the look of fear there.

  She found it, then stood, grabbing at Paul, making herself sound frightened, saying to him, “You almost started me laughing, Paul! That could have been terrible! You could have at least said something threatening to him!”

  Paul, with overly dramatic reluctance, she thought, stepped back, feeling the blade of his knife and smiling wickedly, John making a show of holding him back.

  She looked meaningfully into the eyes of the Mongol and told him, as best she could, that she would let the man with the knife carve him to pieces as he had wanted to do, would not be able to stop his vile temper, if the Mongol remained silent.

  He told her that he was a soldier of the Second City. He told her he knew nothing about the tall man’s son or a woman with green eyes or a man with blond hair or a huge red-haired man with a dog that looked like a wolf or a cart on wheels that needed no horses to pull it. He told her he would tell her nothing more.

  She asked where the Second City was.

  He said the evil man with the knife could kill him, but he would never tell.

  She recounted this to John Rourke.

  Paul started into his evil man with the knife act again, but John pulled him back.

  John turned instead to the pilot of the helicopter, the copilot of the J-7V. “Take her up—just straight up into the air and hover.”

  “Yes, Herr Doctor!”

  The rotor blades, which had turned lazily before, began to beat in earnest.

  She could feel it in her stomach as the aircraft began to rise, the look of terror in the man’s eyes rising with the regularity of an altimeter.

  John Rourke, his voice low, told her, “Translate for me. And tell him I mean it, because I do.”

  Natalia began to translate.

  “He’ll tell me the location of this Second City, he’ll tell me everything he knows he thinks I might want to know …” And he paused as she caught up with the translation. “He’ll tell me everything right now, or …” She translated, huddling into her parka as John Rourke tugged open the fuselage door, the wind and snow swirling inside like needles of ice. “Or 111 throw him out into the air and he will fall to earth and die in such an evil way his spirit will know no peace. Tell him.”

  She told the Mongol. And the Mongol dropped to his knees, one of the German security team starting to grab for him, but Natalia waving him back. The Mongol touched his forehead to her feet.

  She closed her eyes, hearing John Rourke closing the fuselage door.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Ivan Krakovski had taken personal charge of navigation for the fleet of six helicopter gunships, trusting no one with the coordinates given him by the Hero Marshal.

  For a short while, the fleet of gunships had passed out of the teeth of the blizzard, but now the snow swirled around them maddeningly, crusting over the bubble, Krakovski taking the controls of the gunship for a time to relieve the pilot of the strain. The windshield wipers raced crazily, but could not compete with the rate of snowfall and wind driven snow as it lashed against the machine, the five other machines barely visible even by their running lights.

  The Hero Marshal had told him that the cache of some thirty Chinese weapons was near the city once called Lushun, in what had once been a mine, the interior of the main shaft reinforced with concrete and steel and capped like something the Hero Marshal had called a well. Krakovski had not asked what this “well” thing was, assuming he would recognize it when he saw it.

  It was cold, and colder still from the feeling of fear which he unashamedly admitted consumed him. The machine which he flew was buffeted by winds of what he estimated to be gale force, and the controls had to be manipulated with the greatest precision, not just to keep on course, but to keep

  from being thrown into an uncontrolled spin and the machine destroyed.

  He used the radio and ordered all pilots to transfer controls to their copilots for periods of at least thirty minutes while they rested from their ordeal.

  He would find the coordinates, but if the storm intensified, he doubted he would be able to take off. And the Hero Marshal and the destiny of t
he Soviet people depended on him …

  Michael Rourke studied Maria Leuden’s face in the gray light of the room in which they lay. And his thoughts were consumed with his dead wife. It was not rationalization. She had cherished life and would wish him to do the same. Had he celebrated life by invading Maria Leuden’s loins, or had he merely satisfied lust, he asked himself. He was drawn to her, and for the first time since Madison’s death, there had been a moment when he had felt real happiness. Maria Leuden had cried as she held him, Michael for the first time appreciating the sadness which had consumed her as well. The rape she had endured years before, the scorn of her lover because somehow he had blamed her for it or not having the grace to die during the process. She had whispered to him, it was the first time she had ever been loved willingly by a man and he had wondered at how close she had been to her fiance. It was then she had cried, her body trembling beneath his, and her very trembling drawing him deeper into her — spiritually as well, he wondered?

  It was more than unnerving to consider loving a woman who could read your thoughts. If Annie could actually read what Paul thought, she never alluded to the fact. But with Maria, he had known from that first moment aboard the aircraft taking them to Egypt that she could see inside him. He wondered if it had brought him closer to her, or kept him away.

  Madison’s body had been more beautiful and he doubted he would ever see a woman who could compare to her in her beauty or her compassion. But he realized, he loved this woman now as well.

  He pushed away the sheet and as he started to rise, Maria Leuden came softly against him and he held her in his arms for a time, kissing her lightly on the forehead.

  There was something he had to do. And he needed to escape the sensation of being beside her.

  Michael Rourke left the bed and skinned into his pants and shirt, taking his two pistols as well. He left her apartment and walked as quietly as he could down the corridor. Rolvaag and his dog were nowhere in evidence and Michael assumed that at last the giant man in green had retired. Michael let himself into his rooms and stripped away his clothes, showering quickly, his body still remembering Maria Leuden’s touch. He towelled his hair as dry as he could make it, then dressed in fresh Levis and fresh shirt and his arctic gear, except for the parka which would be too warm to wear until he left the petal. He had a pass from Han .which would allow him to come and go at the main entrance.