Survivalist - 22 - Brutal Conquest Read online

  John Rourke reached for the helicopter’s first aid kit in the same moment that Michael did. And he looked at his son.

  Rourke considered himself luckier than most men. Michael was fine and good and strong, courageous. And Annie, his sister, was the epitome of aU that was worthwhile in a woman—courageous, resourceful, loving. John Rourke had two children in whom he took great pride.

  3

  They stood beside the skeleton of the helicopter that had brought them here. Still smoldering, it provided a modicum of needed warmth.

  Annie was helping the women who had been rescued from the Land Pirates prepare for the arduous journey that lay ahead. The women now found themselves plunged into a survival situation more potentially deadly than their previous captivity. Natalia, perhaps suffering from a mild concussion but under the circumstances well enough to travel, kept an eye on Martin.

  That she would use a gun, if necessary, to stop Martin from escaping was something John Rourke did not doubt for a moment.

  Rourke’s cigar was nearly burnt out now.

  The cold was intense.

  Michael and Paul, stripped down to ordinary pants and heavy sweaters, like John Rourke, had surrendered coats and snow pants to the women in an effort to prolong stamina and guard them against exposure.

  When they presented their plan, John Rourke realized they had evidendy worked this out in advance and were ganging up on him.

  “This is potentially suicidal, Michael,” John Rourke declared, watching his son’s eyes.

  “You got a better way of buying time, Dad?” Michael retorted blundy.

  “You can’t do it, John,” Paul declared. “You don’t have much grey in your hair, but you’ve got enough. Michael now looks basically like you did when we first met on The Night Of The War. And that’s exacdy what Martin Zimmer looks like. That flesh wound Michael picked up in his left thigh is the only thing, and he figures he can fake his way around it.”

  “No, damnit,” John Rourke told them both.

  “At least hear me out, Dad,” Michael said, still adamant. “If I can make them think Martin’s been shot up a litde and is all pissed off, they’re not going to press by giving me some kind of identity quiz. As soon as they get me, give me medical attention and everything, I can order them to get me back to Eden so I can coordinate efforts to nail you guys … or something like that. I’ll have to make it up as I go along. But I can convince them, make them believe I’m Martin. Once I reach Eden, I can slip away and meet you guys at the safe house.”

  There was a safe house, set up by Allied Intelligence, on the outskirts of Eden City. Just how safe it might prove to be was another question.

  “The leg wound won’t cut it; too many people saw you get hurt Michael.”

  “Exactly, but that’ll work, Dad. Somebody shoots me in the leg again. Michael took one round, that’s assuming any-onell remember. Zimmer can have two bullet wounds. I tell them the aircraft crashed—they can see that with their own eyes—and that I stole a gun and took a couple of rounds before I was able to escape. With the helicopter gutted, I can tell them the fire started as soon as we hit the ground and that’s how I was able to pull it off, in the confusion.”

  “You can’t make them think you’re Martin, Michael,” John Rourke insisted.

  “All I’ve gotta do is be surly, right? Somebody asks me something I can’t answer, I complain about my leg hurting or the head wound, and tell whoever it is to shut up. That sounds like my brother.” And he looked toward where Natalia kept Martin at gunpoint. “I can aim the search and de

  stroy teams in another direction, buy you time. Otherwise, the best we can hope for is a standoff as soon as the Land Pirates and the Eden armed forces catch up with us, with us holding Martin while those women we freed die of exposure. What choice do we have, Dad?”

  John Rourke looked at Michael, looked at him hard, then stared at Martin Zimmer, who was some distance away.

  “I don’t like it either, John, but it’ll work,” Paul said. “I don’t like it a bit.”

  “If you can hold on to Martin” Michael said, “then you can use him as a bargaining chip with Deitrich Zimmer, maybe force Deitrich into operating on Mom to get that bullet out of her brain. That’s why you want Martin. You’re not going to kill him, no matter what he is, because he’s your flesh and blood and Mom’s flesh and blood, just like Annie and I are.”

  “You think you’ve got this whole thing psyched out,” John Rourke said, nodding his head. “You … and you, Paul. Gang up on me, right?”

  “It’s logic, John.”

  John Rourke looked at Paul Rubenstein, then nodded his head. Without looking at his son, he said, “YouH need to swap clothes with Martin. Well have to measure exactly where that first bullet went in in relationship to Martin’s left trouser leg, so we can put a bullet hole there that will correspond. Then well have to smear some of the blood from the fresh wound onto the old hole.”

  “Natalia already said she’d fire the shot,” Michael said.

  “Ohh, you got her in on this, too, huh? Is Annie in on this thing as well?”

  Paul looked away and Michael just smiled. …

  His chest was bigger than Martin’s. His biceps were also larger, and his triceps were better developed. And, when they exchanged clothes, he noticed something else: Martin was not circumcised. At the time that Michael Rourke was born, popular wisdom held that it was sound medical practice to circumcise all boys. So he had been circumcised.

  Martin, of course, had warned him, “With that Jewish thing that they did to you—I have read about the practice, don’t be fooled—the first time anyone sees you—”

  “Well, tell me, brother Martin, you run around in the nude a lot in front of your soldiers? Didn’t think you were that kind of a-“

  “Laugh while you can, Michael. Laugh while you can.”

  Michael looked down at himself. The clothes were a decent enough fit, he supposed, but not to his liking. The trousers weren’t too sturdy-looking. The shoes, rather than boots, expensive-looking but not too practical. And the shirt, which had litde dots in the material, looked more like something a woman would wear. “You know, you may look like a Rourke, Martin, may have the same genes, the same blood, the whole thing, but do you know what a real Rourke would have done?”

  Martin said nothing for a moment, then shrugged his shoulders as he buttoned on Michael’s shirt. “No, what?”

  “You don’t want this impersonation to succeed, right? So you should have done something to make these clothes of yours unwearable.” Michael grinned at him. “Here’s a good Twentieth Century word for you, Martin—chump.”

  “What’s a chump?”

  “Somebody who acts stupid, Martin. Like you, buying all this Nazi garbage from Deitrich Zimmer. Why don’t you—”

  “—straighten out, Michael?” Martin asked, then laughed. “You and Dad and sister Annie and that disgusting Jew she’s married to would—”

  Michael Rourke took a step closer to Martin Zimmer. “Annie’s husband is the best friend I have in the world. He’s more of a brother to me than you’d ever be, asshole.”

  Michael grabbed up his sweater before Martin could put it on. Let Martin freeze. The sweater could help to keep one of the women a litde warmer. Michael Rourke knew a bit more about Martin now, having listened a litde more closely to how Martin talked… .

  “Ill do it,” Annie said to her.

  “I am fine. My eye is steady, and so’s my hand,” Natalia declared.

  Then Natalia looked at Michael. He was standing there, waiting, just a few feet from her. He started to laugh, saying, “This is great, just great.”

  “What’s great?” Annie asked him.

  Natalia just looked at him.

  Michael Rourke said, “The girl I love and my sister. What are they doing? Arguing over which one of them is going to get to shoot me!”

  Natalia closed her eyes, then opened them, took a deep breath, released it, and said, “Stan
d perfecdy still, Michael.” She inhaled again, releasing only part of the breath this time. Then she steadied the gun between her knees, her elbows pressed outward as she sat on the ground, her eyes almost level with where she was going to put the shot.

  Her .380 caliber Walther was the lightest caliber of any of the guns they had. She cocked the hammer, then slowly started the trigger squeeze.

  When the gun went off, her ears rang and Michael fell down into the snow.

  4

  If the enemy didn’t show up reasonably quickly, he would freeze to death, Michael Rourke decided.

  He walked as best he could, to keep the blood circulating in his feet. But the two leg wounds, Natalia’s shallower than the first, were hurting badly and walking was becoming increasingly more difficult for him. His head wound, unbandaged, ached. His father had examined it, pronouncing it superficial. But it didn’t hurt less because of that.

  Michael Rourke took some litde consolation from the fact that if he died, until enemy medical personnel were able to take a retinal print and check his DNA, he might very well have everyone convinced that Martin had died instead. Unless someone who knew better noticed his circumcision. Such a deception, even in death, would slow up the search for his father, his sister, Natalia, and Paul. He’d considered that possibility before but had never mentioned it to anyone.

  It had been hard enough as it was, getting his father to agree to this potentially suicidal charade.

  He’d been talking to himself as he walked and waited, trying to think like Martin Zimmer and talk like Martin Zimmer. Fortunately, the former proved impossible, but he convinced himself he was really getting the hang of the latter. Martin’s voice, essentially identical to his father’s and his own, was just a litde nasal, and he strung words together almost as if he had learned English as a second language, however well. Before his father and mother became so criti

  cally injured that their only hope for survival had been cryogenic sleep, Michael had learned a good bit of German.

  Natalia spoke it fluendy and so had Maria Leuden, the girl with whom he’d slept, the girl he’d kept as his mistress but had realized he didn’t love. And suddenly Michael Rourke stopped walking.

  It was the first time he’d actually thought of Maria Leuden since awakening from cryogenic sleep, to discover that his mother was still deep in a coma but that his father, whose brain wave patterns had returned to normal, was being awakened as well.

  And, he realized now, one hundred twenty-five years later, Maria was dead and so were her children, if she’d had any.

  His father had kept a considerable collection of books at The Retreat, some of them science fiction. Michael Rourke remembered reading one that was about a time traveller. The man had gone forward into the future, but everyone he had known and loved was long dead and gone when he got there.

  Michael Rourke was luckier than that man.

  Yet, he promised himself, someday, if he made it out of this, he would go to New Germany and find Maria’s grave. And he would take Natalia with him. He would put flowers on Maria’s grave. It hadn’t been love. There was love with Madison, his wife who was killed so long ago. And there was love, even more intense, with Natalia. But he had cared for Maria Leuden. …

  It consumed the better part of an hour for them to reach the height of the rift valley wall, and John Rourke had no way of knowing if, when they reached there, it would be radiation free. On both sides of the rift valley there were hot spots, which would remain hot for centuries to come. Any living thing that ventured there would die, sooner or later, as a result. But there was also a trail on this side, information about which Natalia and Annie had extracted—how, he didn’t want to know—from Boris, the head of the slavers, whom they had kidnapped for the specific purpose of getting that information.

  Parts of the trail, a secret route without risk of residual radiation hazard, came very close to the rift valley wall, while other parts were several miles to the west.

  If they arrived at the height of the wall in a hot spot, they would have to go down again, continue along, then try the climb again. He would not put the women through it a second time unless he was sure, but time was against them and he’d taken the chance, a calculated risk he could confirm or deny with the radiation meter.

  John Rourke left Annie, Natalia, and the twenty-four women about fifty feet below, and with Paul beside him, he took the climb. And, of course, he left Martin.

  “You’re worried about Michael. We’re all worried about him, John.” Paul clung to a spit of rock, his feet wedged against the rocky shale below it. Each time he moved, however slighdy, some of the shale—about the consistency of fresh gravel—slipped.

  “I know that,” John Rourke almost whispered, testing the foothold he had before pushing himself up. “He’s tough. He’s got a good head on his shoulders. If anybody could pull it off, Michael could.”

  “Was he right? You plan to trade Martin?”

  “If Deitrich Zimmer is too old to perform an operation on Sarah, if his hand isn’t steady anymore, then he would have taught someone else his techniques, just in case he needed them or Martin needed them in order to stay alive.”

  “Suppose he saves Sarah’s life? What then?”

  John Rourke looked at his friend. “I’ll keep my word and release Martin to him. And then I’ll hunt them both down and kill them.”

  John Rourke kept climbing.

  5

  “Martin? It’s me, Gunmen”

  Michael Rourke looked at the face of the man who spoke. It was a plain face, the only feature that was remarkable—quite remarkable—being the eyes. They were a bright blue, a lighter shade than Natalia’s but nearly as striking. And they were set with epicanthic folds.

  The man was an officer in the Eden defense forces. The embroidered name tag on the parka he wore read “Hong.”

  “Gunther,” Michael Rourke murmured, nodding. He made the first syllable of the man’s name sound more like the word goon than the word gun.

  Then Michael said nothing for a long moment, collecting his thoughts. The last thing he remembered was sitting down, because he was so tired and his legs hurt so badly from the gunshot wounds. The wounds were minor, superficial scratches, but there was still pain. That pain returned to him now, as did the full import of why he was looking up into this strange man’s eyes.

  Michael Rourke forced himself to sit up, the man named Gunther Hong and two other men, one an officer, one a senior noncom, assisting him. A fourth man, another senior noncom, brought blankets, laying one over Michael’s lower body and wrapping the other around his shoulders and upper body. “What happened to you, Martin?”

  Michael Rourke coughed, then cleared his throat, all of this unnecessary but calculated to plant an idea into the minds of these men. That idea was that if Martin’s voice sounded just a litde off, perhaps it was because he was coming down with something. Then Michael said, “There was a sudden storm. The Russian woman at the controls of the machine. She could not manage to land the thing properly. There was a fire. I grabbed a gun and jumped when we neared the ground. One of the bastards shot at me. I got these, damnit.” Then he decided to try Martin’s personality. “Did you think I was waiting out here, freezing to death, merely for the pure joy of it?”

  “Well, no, but we-“

  “Where were you?”

  “We couldn’t follow by aircraft and—” “Help me up,” Michael snapped. “We have a stretcher, Martin,” Gunther Hong volunteered.

  “I will walk!” The men visibly recoiled from him for an instant, then started to help him stand. Feeling returned rapidly to the wounds in his legs, but his feet were numb and so were his hands. His head ached. He knew that was from the cold as well, his body rattling with the chill as a means of generating warmth. “I will need a doctor to tend to my injuries. We leave for Eden City at once. See to it,” Michael ordered. “The swine escaped, but they cannot have gotten far. I want the search concentrated to the southeast. They
will think we anticipate an attempt to reach their coconspirators in Eden. What they do not know is that I heard the younger of the two who look like me saying that they had transportation waiting to take them to the Gulf Coast. They will move east to escape the rift valley, then likely move direcdy south.”

  “Wouldn’t they try to get to Eden? …”

  “These men with my face. The older one of the two is John Thomas Rourke. He has survived for over six centuries, man! He has accomplished this by doing the unexpected. You have your orders. Now follow them!”

  Michael no longer had to feign anger. The pain in his legs sparked the real thing with each step he took closer to the nearest of the massive batde machines… .

  As Martin Zimmer, he was given the commander’s cabin aboard the mobile fortress. The cabin was under no circumstances spacious, but it was more than adequate for one man. Rather than a bunk, the bed was a full-size one. And Michael Rourke leaned back into it now, his eyes closed as the Eden forces doctor, who seemed competent enough, tended his wounds.

  Gunther Hong, whom Michael now realized was Martin’s personal military advisor and held the rank of brigadier general, stood at the bedside. “You should take something, Martin. For the pain.”

  Taking something for pain might also loosen his tongue, and Michael Rourke couldn’t risk that. “No. As soon as this is finished, I must get to Eden.”

  “We will be out of the rift valley and in one of the Safe Zones in twenty-seven minutes. There is a highspeed aircraft that will touch down at the same time. You will be in Eden in less than two hours, Martin. But why-“

  “With John Rourke alive, there is no choice but to act at once.”

  “Perhaps I should contact the Herr Doctor, Martin.”

  Michael Rourke looked squarely at Gunther Hong. Did Hong mean Deitrich Zimmer? But there was no way to ask, and if he even seemed interested in the subject, that interest might betray him. Instead, he snapped at the doctor, who was cleaning the gunshot wound given him by Natalia. “Clumsy fool! You are causing me discomfort.”