Survivalist - 17 - The Ordeal Read online

  The van was moving inexorably nearer to the plateau, the hermetically sealed German tents seeming barren, lonely there, the few men of the temporary garrison in full battle gear, their solitary anti-aircraft emplacement sandbagged and manned, men with assault rifles at the entrance that would pass them through the electrified perimeter.

  The tents were so few as to be missable from high-altitude observation unless one were specifically looking for them, and extrapolating the flight path of the Soviet gunships, they would have passed out of visual range of the base. Hence, the few men here were still alive and there was still hope that Colonel Mann and his J-7Vs could do something.

  The chairman of the First Chinese City spoke to her for the first time since they had entered the van. “I am hopeful, Mrs. Rourke, that there is some chance. My city will be in ruins within the hour if the aerial attack is not, somehow, forced to cease.”

  The security waved them through and the van continued on until it stopped before the largest of the few tents arranged with geometric precision here on the plateau.

  To have returned to the First City, despite the fact that it would have taken considerably longer to get there, would have

  been pointless. The Chinese here had a substantial and well-equipped army, but nothing to combat airpower except will and courage.

  The chairman rose and began to alight from the van, Sarah gathering her skirt and following after him. He helped her down.

  A young German officer—a lieutenant—came to attention, saluting them, offering his hand to the chairman who received it, bowing as he offered his hand to her. He held her hand briefly as if it were something very fragile. He’d evidently never seen her fire a gun, wrangle a horse, butcher a chicken or change a diaper.

  A stiff, cold wind was blowing over the plateau; the two German gunships that serviced the tent base vibrated on their moorings. She cocooned the heavy Icelandic shawl tighter about her, grateful for the length which brought it nearly to her knees.

  “I have been in radio contact with my colonel, Herr Chairman, Frau Rourke.”

  “And?” She couldn’t help herself; the word spilled out of her.

  The German officer—he was young, blond, blue-eyed, perfect-looking—made a great show of shooting the cuff of his uniform blouse and looking at his wristwatch. “In precisely five minutes and forty-three seconds, the Herr Colonel’s personal aircraft will touch down. The Herr Colonel has requested, Frau Rourke, that one from among this party join him aboard the J-7V to facilitate targeting recognition factors once the squadron has reached the site of the First City prior to engaging the enemy.”

  She wanted to kiss him. Instead, she said, “I’ll go.”

  The chairman of the First Chinese City merely sighed.

  If there were anything to pre-natal predestination, what would the child she carried inside her become, Sarah Rourke suddenly wondered. She smiled at the thought. Because she

  already knew. Like her son, like her daughter, this child, male or female, would be a Rourke. “Is there someplace where I can go to the bathroom before Colonel Mann lands? Pregnancy does that to you.”

  The young German officer looked taken aback.

  Sarah Rourke shrugged her shoulders and smiled.

  Chapter Two

  “Your hands are crushing me,” Annie whispered up at him softly, gently.

  Paul Rubenstein realized that they were. But he held his wife anyway, slightly easing the grip his hands had on her shoulders. She was kneeling beside her brother, treating the headwound Michael had sustained at the hands of the forces of the Second Chinese City. An errant gust of wind played with her long hair. In the distance, beyond the confines of the black-hued, bare rock cave’s overhang, the sounds of battle raged on. A few feet beyond Michael lay the Russian officer, passed into something more like sleep than unconsciousness. When they had reached the cave, the Russian had murmured in well-spoken but heavily accented English, “Why did he try to save me?”

  Paul Rubenstein had had no answer for the man.

  Black smoke filled the sky to the north and west. All of it reminded him of the prophecies of Armageddon in the Christian New Testament.

  They had hidden the Specials, their New Germany-crafted high-tech weapons-equipped motorcycles, deeper within the cave. But much of what was needed for the weapons pods to be functional had been expended during the raid against the Second Chinese City which had resulted in Michael’s and the injured Russian officer’s rescue. There was an adequate supply of synth fuel, but there was nowhere to go. Enemy forces

  seemed to surround them totally.

  Otto Hammerschmidt and Han Lu Chen stood guard in the rocks above the overhang; Maria Leuden stood with her hands in front of her, one resting in the other, a look of total helplessness on her ashen face. Paul wondered absently whether she wished her doctorate were in medicine now rather than archeology.

  Paul Rubenstein looked back at his wife when she spoke. “It looks like superficial bleeding. But we don’t have any way of telling whether or not it’s anything more. Daddy always told me that you treat what you can find and try to treat what you can’t. I wish he were here,” Annie whispered.

  Paul Rubenstein took this as no reflection on his own talents or abilities, such as they were or weren’t. That John Rourke, Michael’s and Annie’s father, his best friend, would be an asset under any circumstances was a foregone conclusion. Two men in need of medical treatment only underlined the imperative.

  But John Thomas Rourke, Doctor of Medicine, survival and weapons expert, the very embodiment of the phrase “Socratic man,” wasn’t here.

  After they had begun to effect the rescue of Michael and, coincidentally, saved the Russian officer as well, Natalia had been injured somehow and John Rourke had delegated her Special to Han Lu Chen, taking Natalia aboard his own. They had been forced to escape via a different route. And nothing had been seen of them since. Natalia had been hospitalized prior to going on the rescue mission, declared herself well, seemed her old self—or had she? Paul Rubenstein wondered.

  The radios in their helmets worked perfectly and, logic dictated, so did those in the identical helmets worn by John and Natalia when they were last seen. Yet John and Natalia couldn’t be raised, meaning something was very wrong or they were out of range.

  Already, Paul Rubenstein planned to combat the second possibility.

  But what disturbed him—more even than their current

  plight in the middle of what seemed like full-blown warfare between Soviet Air Cavalry and the hard-line Communist surface armies of the Second Chinese City—were the remarks of Han Lu Chen concerning Natalia. That she had seemed * totally unaware of what was happening, could only murmur John’s name, that something seemed so terribly wrong about her.

  And as all of them had fled into the mountains to escape the battle, Annie had said to him through her helmet radio, “I can feel something—it’s Natalia, Paul.”

  Paul Rubenstein dropped to his knees beside his wife. Her hands had begun gently to dress Michael’s headwound. “What did you mean about Natalia?”

  “Before?”

  “Is there something now?”

  “She’s very sick. I can feel her thoughts inside of me and they’re meaningless. The only thing I do … understand … the only thing I do feel strongly enough to understand besides that is sadness, that she’s so filled with sadness. It’s like she’s inside some deep pit and she can’t quite see the top, knowing that there’s something still outside beyond it. She’s afraid.”

  He stared into his wife’s eyes. She wasn’t looking at him, wasn’t looking at anything.

  It was a different sort of vision.

  And, though she’d always had it since adulthood, perhaps before, a chill ran along his spine. Such an ability—or curse— frightened him. And he knew it frightened Annie. “Where is she, Annie?”

  Annie’s eyes didn’t flicker, although she blinked. “Cold. Very cold. I can feel Daddy’s thoughts near to
her, but it’s like a bad radio transmission. I can just tell that he’s there. What’s in her is so strong, it’s like—” And Annie bent her head forward, her face going down into her hands as she began to weep.

  The voice made him jump slightly and he began reaching for the battered Browning High Power in the tanker holster

  beneath the open front of his arctic parka.

  “This woman—your wife—she sees through the mind?”

  Paul folded Annie against him, turned and looked at the Russian officer. The man was sitting up, his head lolled forward, both hands to it as though he were in pain or very tired, what Paul could see of the face nearly as pale as death.

  “Yes. She does,” Paul Rubenstein answered.

  “Can she see the future, too, then?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I have no such abilities, sir. But for us, here, no special talents are needed. We are all dead. We breathe and move about and hope. But, in the end, we are all dead certainly.”

  Paul Rubenstein didn’t say anything to him after that.

  He just held Annie close to him.

  The Russian was, most probably, correct.

  Chapter Three

  Natalia’s eyes, the incredible blueness of them—but they only stared emptily, as though looking through him, not seeing him.

  John Rourke held Natalia’s nearly naked body close against him and had for some time, but still she trembled. It was not the hypothermia his physician’s instincts had first feared, the result of the Special crashing over the edge of the precipice into the icy, raging waters from which he had pulled her. It was something inside her that made her shake, something inside her that was keeping the warmth from his body from warming her.

  It was something far worse.

  He had been trained as a physician, not a psychiatrist. But piecing it all together over the past weeks, over the past days, now— It was suddenly, piteously, abundantly clear.

  For a physician without the proper cross-training in psychoanalysis to indulge in speculative diagnosis based on manifested symptoms of mental disorder was just as likely to be amazingly accurate as asking a television repairman—but there were no such persons, he imagined, these days—to diagnose the origin of persistent abdominal pain.

  But here, in the middle of a war, cut off from everyone but each other, he was the only game in town.

  Natalia Anastasia Tiemerovna, Major, Committee for State

  Security of the Soviet, Retired, was perhaps as seriously mentally ill as one could become. She had lost all touch with reality. She was in the depths of a depressive phase he wished he did not interpret as classic manic-depression.

  The affair at the Soviet underwater city, where she had faced imminent death at the hands of her psychotic husband, had been brutalized, the victim of heavy-handed drug-induced interrogation sessions, threatened with torture, witnessed his—John Rourke’s—own apparent death, been rescued, learned of his—Rourke’s—survival, then intentionally placed her own life in jeopardy all over again for the good of others. The fight between him and Vladimir Karamatsov. Both of them—he and Karamatsov—at the point of death. And then, using a knife, wielding it with both her tiny hands like some sort of medieval broadsword, she had cleaved her husband’s head from his body.

  He remembered her face, then.

  And then the assassination attempts in the First Chinese City. Nearly killed again. But before that, after that, the depression, the tears she had unsuccessfully attempted to keep hidden.

  And the summoning of will, in what he realized now was a manic state, when she had forced herself along with them on the mission to save Michael, but the depressive stage tugging at her throughout it all. And, finally, the violence, Michael nearly killed, nearly torn limb from limb at the hands of madmen.

  Unlike the rest of them—himself, his wife, his son and daughter, his daughter’s husband Paul, all survivors from five centuries ago and the days before and after the Night of the War—she had no one.

  And he, himself, Rourke realized, had done that to her.

  Natalia loved him. He loved Natalia. He loved his wife, Sarah. And Sarah carried his child.

  Honor.

  Cold. Collapse.

  His arms bound more tightly around her, one of the twin Detonics .45s in his right hand. She kept repeating his name, over and over, lifelessly.

  John Rourke wept.

  Chapter Four

  Colonel Mann’s hands on the control yoke of the J-7V reminded her of a lover’s hands, caressing something of which he was very fond, very possessive.

  She could hear his voice through the headset he had provided her. She sat beside him in the co-pilot’s seat in the J-7V’s cockpit. “This is Iron Cross Leader. Red Leader, do you copy? Over.”

  The voice of the right wing commander came in with surprising clarity, but Sarah Rourke realized that her knowledge of radio was several centuries behind the times. Perhaps it wasn’t even radio, but some sort of microwave transmission. “This is Red Leader, Herr Colonel. I am reading you. Over.”

  “This is Iron Cross Leader. Red Leader, you are to execute. I repeat—execute. Do you copy? Over.”

  “This is Red Leader. Affirmative. Execute, Iron Cross Leader. Red Leader out.”

  “Iron Cross Leader out.” In an instant, the right wing commander’s element broke off in a steep bank toward the north. Colonel Mann’s voice began again. “This is Iron Cross Leader. Black Leader, I say execute. Do you copy? Over.”

  The voice of the left wing commander, younger sounding, higher pitched, almost feminine in a way, came back. “This is Black Leader, Colonel. I copy execute. Black Leader out.”

  “Iron Cross Leader out.” The left wing element banked right

  and down, passing beneath them, going toward the north as well. Ahead, a ring of black Soviet helicopter gunships encircled the exposed petals of the flower-shaped First Chinese City. Fires were everywhere and ant-sized figures darted along the ground. An explosion belched upward toward them. She heard Mann’s voice telling her, “Please do not be frightened, Frau Rourke. This aircraft can both outmaneuver and outspeed the Soviet gunships and, thanks to recent innovations of our engineers, outgun their aircraft as well. Rest easily. Please alert me to any particularly sensitive areas where our fire might precipitate greater damage that we might prevent, if you will.”

  “Certainly, Colonel Mann.”

  “Thank you, Frau Rourke.” Another explosion that seemed just off the tip of the right wing—starboard, she mentally corrected. “This is Iron Cross Leader. Iron Cross element, execute. I say again, execute. Keep with me. We’re going in.” Colonel Mann glanced to his left, then with an element of sternness in his voice she was unused to, said, “Hoffsteder— tighten up!”

  “Yes, Herr Colonel.”

  “Remensehneider—take the two over the water tower-shaped object.”

  Sarah Rourke had a slight sensation of motion in the pit of her stomach and, had it been later in her term, she would have blamed the baby. “Colonel—that funnel-shaped area to your left. That’s the main entrance into the city. From there, Soviet troops could utilize the monorail system to reach any part of it.”

  “I understand, Frau Rourke. Thank you.” Already the plane was beginning to dive. She realized her nails were gouging into the armrests of her seat. “This is Iron Cross Leader. Jahns— watch my tail. Do you copy? Over.”

  “This is Iron Cross Three. I copy, Iron Cross Leader. Over.”

  “Iron Cross Leader out.”

  Seven Soviet gunships formed an arc several hundred yards

  back from the entrance to the tunnel through which access to the First City was gained, mini-guns licking tongues of flame toward barricaded defenders there, missile contrails zigzagging white plumes of smoke across each other, small explosions belching upward with every-other-second regularity by the entrance itself. Sarah wondered how long the Soviet armada could keep it up without running out of ammunition.


  The J-7V barrel-rolled and as she sucked in her breath in what felt as if it would become a scream, Mann’s voice reassured her through the headset, “Forgive me, Frau Rourke. An enemy gunship. I shall prevent such an event reoccurring.” She watched his fingers move over the weapons console, like the hand of an artist, a toggle switch flipped, a button pushed. There was a slight vibration and she realized he had fired a missile. Her eyes were mesmerized by its contrail, and one of the Soviet gunships in the arc of seven suddenly seemed to stop-frame in mid-air, then vaporized, a black and red fireball expanding outward in all directions. The J-7V banked sharply left—to port, she told herself—and the fireball vanished from her field of vision. His hands moved again. Two of the Soviet gunships rotated a full one hundred eighty degrees, mini-guns blazing.

  But her eyes followed the tracer rounds from the J-7V’s machine guns, streaks of white and orange against the gray blue of the sky, the farther of the two Soviet gunships suddenly on fire. The J-7V banked sharply to starboard, Mann almost cooing to her, “Forgive me again, Frau Rourke—should this prove—”

  “No—I’m fine—the baby, too.”

  “You are most gracious, Frau Rourke.” Another tremor through the aircraft, a contrail, a streak of machinegun fire, the second Soviet gunship suddenly losing tail control, chunks of the tail rotor flying in all directions, a puff of gray smoke, then a black ball of smoke, orange tongues licking outward hungrily from inside it, then a fireball and the Soviet gunship was gone.

  The J-7V banked to port and climbed, Sarah Rourke pressed back into her seat, the sensation not at all unpleasant, not like a roller coaster ride, more like a gentle nudge. When Annie and Michael were little, she and John had taken them to a carnival and Michael had eaten so much and John would only go on the little children’s rides if any and she had taken them on the roller coaster and been so sick! “Colonel!”

  “I apologize again, Frau Rourke—alert me should you experience difficulty.”