Survivalist - 24 - Blood Assassins Read online

  There was a voice shouting over a blue and white plastic bullhorn. “This is the police. You are ordered to throw down your weapons! Stop the trolley at once!”

  All of this—including the words said over the bullhorn, which came and went in a Doppler effect—

  was a blur as the trolley sped past. Gunfire came toward the car. Rourke shouted, “Fire over their heads!” And Rourke dropped the trolley window. “But!”

  “Just do it, Spitz!”

  Rourke triggered off a string of shots from the HK-91, firing into the roof of the trolley station, the roof more decorative than functional. Spitz fired an energy pistol.

  A string of small fires started as the energy bolts impacted the station, and Rourke suspected that what looked like wood was, most likely, some form of plastic.

  Then the trolley was past the station and there was no more gunfire.

  Two windows had been shot through. There was a bullet hole in the seat beside Rourke.

  “What was all that? It looked—”

  “Normal?’ Rourke asked. Paul’s radio transmission still echoing in his ear. “Pull off your headgear, but keep it handy.”

  They would need to talk.

  “Should I slow us down?”

  “Yes. Good idea.” John Rourke had changed magazines in the HK, was reloading the partially spent one from the clipped-together brace he had removed. Safing the rifle, he set it aside, leaned between his thigh and the seat. With the little Executive Edge pen-shaped folding knife from his pocket, Rourke dug the bullet from the seat. When he had the bullet, even before he put the knife away, he found himself just staring at it.

  “What is it?’ Spitz asked, joining them at the front of the trolley car.

  “This, Spitz, is rather like having a dinner party and finding out that one of your guests happens to be a Neanderthal. This is a 158-grain Round Nosed Lead .38 Special.”

  “I do not know a great deal about firearms,” Spitz admitted freely.

  “Briefly the .38 Special round which got everyone discontent with the .38 Special by the late mid-Twentieth Century is this round. Underpowered, prone to ricochet, terrible manstopper, it was the standard police service round in the United States for decades.”

  “John?”

  Without looking at his friend, Rourke’s eyes still on the recovered bullet, he said, “What is it?”

  “My eyes were pretty much on the track here, but did I see what I thought I saw?”

  John Rourke smiled, “Middle America sometime in the last quarter of the Twentieth Century? Looked like that to me.”

  “What?” Spitz asked.

  John Rourke’s mind raced. There was no way in which the three of them could fight off an entire civilization. When the attack by Zimmer’s forces began, there might be the chance to escape in the confusion. “Here’s what we’re going to do. When Zimmer sent us in here, he said something about Paul and me being able to blend in with the society here. I dismissed the remark—sort of a typical thing for a racist to think, that people with similar backgrounds will all behave similarly. But I realize now that Zimmer had inside word on this place. Which is good for us, because that means there must be a way out that one or

  two or three men could take. We just have to find it.” And Rourke outlined his plan.

  The SS personnel Zimmer had sent to accompany John Rourke and Paul Rubenstein had not worn uniforms, but instead cold-weather casual clothes. The trolley was parked near what appeared to be an access into the trolley tunnel. John Rourke stripped away his protective clothing, stuffing it into the teardrop-shaped rucksack which had been on his back. The rifle would be another matter. But it wasn’t an immediate problem.

  Beneath the protective gear, Rourke wore snow-clothes over boots. Aside from the fact that he was sweating in them, because it was too hot with them, they were sartorially inappropriate as well. He stripped these away. Beneath the snow gear Rourke wore a long-sleeved black knit shirt and black slacks bloused over combat boots.

  John Rourke had planned ahead.

  Paul Rubenstein had done the same. Paul was already stripped down to a grey long-sleeved knit shirt and black slacks.

  Rourke took his battered old brown leather bomber jacket from the teardrop-shaped rucksack, pulling it on over the double Alessi shoulder holster that he wore. Paul was setting his second Browning High Power into a black ballistic nylon double Tri-Speed shoulder rig. Rourke had one of these at the Retreat. This one was a duplicate of the Twentieth Century original acquired from—who else?—Lancer.

  Rourke had the snow gear and environment suit packed into the rucksack.

  For the moment, his gunbelt went around his waist, but that would have to be stashed away too if this thing he planned were to work.

  “I do not like this,” Spitz proclaimed.

  “Don’t worry; you should love these people,” Paul observed.

  Spitz made a mocking laugh. “Yes, but you will not, heh?”

  “None of us will, if you open your mouth with a German accent,” Rourke noted. “Let us do the talking if we make it that far.” Spitz was stuffing a pistol beneath the ski sweater that he wore. The pistol was another Lancer, presumably a duplicate of the Walther P-88 9mm Parabellum. “Get that when the Lancer warehouse in New Germany was broken into?” Rourke had heard it mentioned by Emma Shaw’s father.

  Spitz smiled enigmatically, saying nothing.

  Paul pulled on a leather jacket. “Ready.”

  “You and Spitz take care of the trolley.”

  “This is a disgrace,” Spitz remarked.

  “Nazi or no, Dr. Mentz struck me as a good soldier. I think if he were able to comment, he’d agree.” Paul said.

  Spitz just shook his head, but started for the trolley.

  Rourke caught up his gear, slinging the rucksack over his left shoulder, the rifle in his right hand. And, he started into the accessway.

  Fewer than three yards into it, he required light. From his bomber jacket, Rourke took a small size mini-Maglite loaded with German batteries (they had a projected life of two thousand hours of use, and an anticipated shelf life in excess of seventy-five years,

  hence would last longer than John Rourke thought that he would, especially given the current circumstances). With the little flashlight shielded by his left hand, Rourke moved cautiously along.

  While he investigated this little tunnel Paul and Spitz would be completing the rigging of the trolley. Dr. Mentz’s body would be left in it. The audioanimatronic motorman might be remotely disabled. Instead Mentz’s body would be lashed to the controls, his weight keeping the deadman’s switch—a quite literal description in this case—from activating and stopping the train. Enough explosives were set that the trolley and anything near it would be all but vaporized. The charges were preset for three minutes.

  From beyond the mouth of the accessway, Rourke could hear the trolley starting out.

  Ahead, in this barely shoulder-width tunnel, Rourke saw nothing within the beam from his flashlight except more tunnel. He moved on, reminding himself that it had to lead somewhere.

  Fifty

  John Rourke had guessed right, on both accounts. The accessway, indeed, led out of the trolley tunnel. And as he had suspected, the trolley tunnel (after they had covered the distance between the hidden entryway and the mountain itself) had been leading them not in a straight line, but progressively downward. The trolley system, it appeared, went from ground level to some point far below, too far for Rourke to clearly discern as he looked over the edge into the manmade abyss. And perhaps, he was better off not knowing at the moment.

  Above, however, the central core—it was buttressed expertly at every level—seemed to narrow. It was more than optical illusion. Perhaps it narrowed to a tunnel leading upward? But to what? What John Rourke supposed was a death chamber from which the lethal hallucinogenic gas was expunged into the atmosphere?

  Racism and murder. It was a stupid simile, Rourke realized, but they went together as n
aturally as ham and eggs—except they were poison.

  There was a chasm to cross, only eighteen or twenty

  feet wide here but wide enough that it could not be jumped by anyone but an Olympian with a good deal of luck. On the opposite side was a metal-runged ladder leading upward and downward periodically terminating when it reached one of the core levels. And some fifty or so feet above and a nearly equal distance below, there was a covered synth-concrete-looking span, perhaps a pedestrian walkway from one of the trolley stations.

  But the nearest of these walkways was at least a hundred yards away laterally. How was this tunnel, at the mouth of which he crouched, accessed?

  Two things happened simultaneously and John Rourke did a third. He heard Paul and Spitz coming up behind him arguing. He saw a man armed with some sort of submachinegun-sized weapon flying toward him harnessed within some sort of personal minicopter and John Rourke dove back into the tunnel in order to silence Paul Rubenstein and Gunther Spitz and avoid being seen.

  As Rourke threw himself back, from just below the lip of the tunnel mouth, a platform began moving outward.

  “Quiet! Stay down!” Rourke rasped to his friend and their unlikely ally.

  This was how the accessways into the trolley system were reached, by these personal helicopter devices.

  As Rourke crouched beside his suddenly silenced companions and the armed man in the flying rig hovered over the just-extended platform, Rourke glanced at the Rolex on his left wrist. The three minutes would just about be up.

  The armed man touched down with a little jump, the blades from the unit into which he was harnessed thrumming suddenly more slowly. The explosion shook the very fabric of the accessway. The enemy soldier or whatever he was wheeled toward them with his weapon.

  John Rourke drew the A.G. Russell Sting IA Black Chrome and dove toward the man. If he fired, the man and his flying rig would tumble off the platform extending from the tunnel mouth and the flying rig would be lost.

  John Rourke kept his body low, avoiding the rotor blades. Rourke’s left shoulder impacted with the gun and the man at waist level, the weapon discharged, sounding for all the world like a suppressor fitted HK submachinegun, flat, barely audible. Rourke’s little knife gouged deep into the man’s upper abdomen and angled upward into the sternum to Rourke’s right and the man’s left.

  There was a groan from inside the gas mask the man wore and the body fell limp beneath Rourke.

  Rourke pushed himself away from the body. It lay half extended over the platform, the rotor blades from the bizarre personal flying rig clear of any contact with the platform, the rig apparently wholly undamaged.

  “What have we gotten ourselves into?” Paul hissed.

  John Rourke wasn’t quite certain, but it seemed like the combination of an unfathomably ugly future and an eerily familiar past…

  When both John Rourke and Gunther Spitz found

  themselves imsisting on using the flying rig, Rourke realized the sound of reason when he heard it and let Paul have his way. Paul was harnessed into the flying rig, standing halfway out along the length of the platform. Around his waist was the climbing rope which had been lashed to Rourke’s rucksack.

  Should the flying rig prove inoperable to someone not trained on it, Paul would cut the power and ball himself inward in order to avoid the blades. The rope— unless he fell so rapidly that the rotor blades would still be moving with sufficient force to sever it—would save him from a fall to his death.

  “You sure you want to do this?”

  Paul looked at him and smiled. “No; I’m sure I don’t want to do it but I’m closest in build to the guy we took this off, so it seems logical.”

  John Rourke ducked below the rotor blades and clasped his friend’s right hand in both of his. “Good luck.”

  “I’ll try to make it to the lower crossover if something goes wrong. Otherwise—”

  “Otherwise,” Rourke said, nodding, “get across to the other side and tie off the rope.” Above them by about twenty feet and on the other side of the chasm formed between the central structure and the outer shell where they stood now was what appeared to be an opening into one of the levels of the central core.

  As Rourke stepped back and Paul Rubenstein powered up, Gunther Spitz said the most curious thing. “Good luck, Jew.”

  And Paul Rubenstein answered saying, “Right.”

  The rotor blades slicing through the air at what looked like full power, Paul half-stepped, half-lifted off the platform.

  And there was a sickening feeling in the pit of John Rourke’s stomach when, for an instant, his friend nearly vanished from sight. But then Paul—jerkily not smoothly like the dead man from whose body the flying rig was taken—rose, started across the chasm.

  Fifty-One

  Emma Shaw awoke feeling a human hand over her mouth. Her pistol was in her right hand—the .45—and she nearly had the hammer back when she heard Alan Crocket’s overtly sexy-sounding whiskey voice rasping to her. “Keep still; I have to silence my mount. We have company up above; don’t move.”

  And the pressure over her mouth eased. She rolled onto her abdomen, smelling smoke. What had remained of the campfire was evidently just struck, snow that was still not fully melted to water heaped over it.

  And, above her, she heard sounds too, now.

  Machine sounds.

  Aircraft, perhaps, but if so at considerable altitude. Motorized vehicles definitely, and close.

  To her knees, her tiny right fist was balled tighter on the butt of her pistol.

  She was still fuzzy from sleep and the exhaustion which had come before—that was why she hadn’t awakened when the noise began. And three questions dominated her consciousness. What kind of man called

  his horse Wilbur? Why did she now think of this man as actually being Alan Crockett, who was supposed to have been lost at sea after all? And what army was making the noise at the height of the gorge above them?

  She wriggled out of her sleeping bag. Perhaps her senses cleared a bit because another question reared its very ugly head. Had whoever it was up there seenthem? Emma Shaw shivered, lying to herself that it was just the sudden exposure to the night air making her so cold …

  Gloved hand over hand, John Thomas Rourke worked his way upward along the tied-off rope.

  Beneath him, if he slipped, he calculated there was at least a thousand feet before his anticipated trajectory would bring him in contact with one of the crossovers. And kill him.

  John Rourke kept moving.

  Paul, the submachinegun in a ready position but his eyes on the rope, crouched on a narrow ledge beside a low camel-colored synth-concrete wall.

  Rourke looked below and behind him, Gunther Spitz waiting to cross after him, guarding their backs. For the moment it was in Spitz’s best interests to cooperate, be a loyal (however ephemeral) ally. The moment would come when Spitz could not be counted on, and Rourke counted on that.

  Paul reached out toward Rourke now and Rourke clambered toward his friend’s hand, grasping it at last, fingers barely touching, then hands locking over wrists. Rourke pushed himself off as Paul braced himself. In the next instant John Rourke was crouched beside him. “A lesser man would say he was getting too old for this shit,” Paul observed.

  “Or possibly just a brighter man,” Rourke answered smiling.

  As Rourke signalled toward the accessway, Gunther Spitz swung onto the rope. Rourke loosened the sling on his HK, bringing the rifle to a close crossbody hold. Rourke’s thumb poised beside the selector, ready to move it from safe to fire.

  Spitz seemed admirably fit, moving quickly, agilely. Paul said, “I’ll give him that—he’s in good shape.”

  Rourke smiled again. “Not to mention in his mid-twenties.”

  “Excuses, excuses. My mother used to say that excuses weren’t worth the powder to blow them up.”

  “Everybody’s mother used to say that,” Rourke noted.

  “Did your mother make chicke
n soup with little matzoth balls?”

  Rourke choked back a laugh. “The soup, yes, but you’ve got me on the matzoth balls.”

  Spitz was at the midpoint over the chasm now. Paul was watching him, so Rourke slowly, cautiously peered over the low wall. As he had approached, the angle had been wrong to see anything. Now, however, he had a reasonably unobstructed view. The wall was some four feet high. There was a sidewalk, wide enough to be a driveway just beyond it. It bordered the wall and, on the far side, a park. The park was green, inviting, tree-dotted. There was a bench, a drinking fountain. Beyond the park lay another sidewalk, this one of more conventional width.

  And beyond that lay a street. On the street moved

  horse-drawn wagons and carriages, the clatter of the animals’ hooves sounded almost melodic. Some pedestrian traffic crossed from one side of the street to the other. Rourke followed with his eyes.

  On the far side of the street began a system of streets, it seemed, extending—it appeared—inward, toward the hub.

  Lining the street directly opposite John Rourke’s position was a woman’s clothing shop, on one side of it a store bearing a sign which read “Mountain Market.” To Rourke’s right of the market lay an animal hospital. Beside that was what appeared to be a public library. Beside the library was a stairwell, treads leading up and down.

  There was a street sign, Rourke trying to make it out without pulling his binoculars. At last he thought he had it. It read “Sector A, Level Five.”

  Rourke’s eyes drifted back toward the windows of the women’s apparel store. He had never been much of an observer of women’s fashion, but the clothing he was able to see seemed somehow reminiscent of the sort of thing the Beaver’s mother or Donna Reed would have worn, dresses with what seemed to be buttons down the front to the waist and full skirts which looked packed with petticoats beneath. And the mannequins all wore little hats.

  “Take a look,” Rourke suggested to his friend.

  But Paul was busy helping Gunther Spitz off the rope, Spitz murmured grudging thanks. Attached to Spitz’s belt was a second cord. It was knotted across the chasm to the tail of the hitch they had used for tying off the rope on which they crossed. Rourke took this cord and gave it a brisk sharp tug. The knot, just as Rourke had hoped, pulled free and the rope started to the wall. Paul and Spitz caught at it, pulling it up from the near end as quickly as they could. “And now?” Spitz asked.