Survivalist - 24 - Blood Assassins Read online

  Fifty-Four

  More personnel and equipment were arriving almost by the minute, landing at areas at the four major points of the compass. Deitrich Zimmer’s plans were not on schedule, they were ahead of schedule. It would be dawn soon, and merely because it was the classic moment (his personnel were equipped with state-of-the-art night vision accessories), then the attack would begin.

  Everything was, at last, coming together.

  The conspirators within the Nazi Party would soon be eliminated, the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, would soon be begun and very soon—computer simulations projected a victory within seventy-two hours—he would possess what was the ultimate power, the power to create and manipulate life.

  Within his airborne command post were only the most trusted of his personnel—and the traitor, Graham, who had brought him the knowledge of this power’s existence.

  Graham sat over the portside wing, staring out into the yellow-orange line along the eastern horizon. Deitrich Zimmer engaged the fellow in conversation, standing up from the couch on which he had lain to rest. He walked toward Graham, saying to him, “And so, you are ready for history to unfold before your eyes?”

  “Yes, Doctor. It will be wonderful. The destiny of the white race finally fulfilled.”

  “Yes, indeed,” Zimmer said in agreement. There was white and there was white. Graham, like the others within the mountain redoubt from which Graham had escaped, was the product of mongrelized inbreeding and, as such, was not as pure as he supposed.

  The city within the mountain was a fluke, really, an accident.

  Zimmer sat down on the opposite side of the table from Graham, studying the man’s features. The dark eyes, the too black hair, the very pale complexion. There was a definite Slavic influence, and the name itself was from the British Isles. No racially pure fellow this.

  “Coffee, Graham?” “No, Doctor, thank you.”

  Zimmer nodded, signalling to an aide that he alone wanted coffee.

  The coffee arrived. Zimmer added cream to it, the color, the taste, almost everything about the coffee changing as he did so. That was the way with race. Once purity was violated, it could not be regained.

  Zimmer, however, liked cream in his coffee. He sipped at it.

  The city within the mountain had come about in the oddest way. “Tell me again, Graham, how your civilization came to be.”

  Graham took odd delight in this and Zimmer’s eyes were tired from staring at computer terminals. He stared at his coffee while Graham began to speak. “Well, like I said, Doctor Zimmer, our ancestors were white people, Christians all, and decent. We were tired of everything that was going on in America. Negroes were getting jobs and white men weren’t. Jews were helping them. And women were being encouraged to be shameless sluts. It was time to do something.” Graham was reciting the history of his people, something out of a schoolbook. “Folks who spoke up about what was wrong were branded. My people were being persecuted because they were God-fearing white men. We had to act or perish.”

  “An inspiring story—that’s why I never tire of it. Go on, please,” Zimmer told him, sipping again at the coffee.

  “What ^ou call the city within the mountain we call New Jerusalem. There weren’t many of us at first in New Jerusalem. When the war started between the Commies and the Jew-controlled United States, well, it looked like it might be the end of white people everywhere. But some of our people had worked for the Jews in government, like secret agents, hating them all the while but pretending to do their bidding. And they knew about New Jerusalem; it was called the ‘Alpha Site’ because it was the first war retreat for the United States. Even though the war retreat was considered too vulnerable to a direct strike, and was moved later, the

  Alpha Site was kept up as a storage facility for important government documents and things the conspirators who ran the United States government didn’t want known—like the remains of Adolf Hitler being there.

  “And our people,” Graham went on, his voice a sad monotone, “were able to successfully infiltrate the staff that maintained Alpha Site. When it seemed that the War would be inevitable, our people took over Alpha Site. Before we had to lock down to avoid radiation, there were one hundred and seventy-nine good white Christian people inside.”

  Graham paused, as if he had just recited something holy. “And we nearly died, our people, but through perseverence and the work of our scientists, we survived. There are over thirty thousand of us now.” And Graham lowered his voice. “But the leaders are afraid, now. They made up the war, and they kill our good young men to keep up making people think we can’t go outside. They’re afraid that we’ll flourish on the face of the Earth and their power will end. It’s a little clique of men, Doctor Zimmer. Some of my friends and me figured that somehow our leaders became corrupted, that they don’t really believe we’ll conquer the Earth.

  “We kept hearing the rumors that there wasn’t really a war, that there wasn’t really an enemy. We didn’t know what to think. And then one of the pilots from the scouter planes—they live in separate quarters because they might be contaminated from the outside, least we were told that—this pilot got word out to an old friend of his. He said there weren’t any negro and

  Jew armies outside.

  “That’s how our network started,” Graham said, a look of pride glowing in his eyes. “With the help of some of the other pilots, we got to see some aerial photos. There were cities, that real big one you call Eden, Doctor. But New Jerusalem wasn’t surrounded by enemy armies. And the glacier disappeared when you went further south. And the air was clean and fit to breathe, not poisoned.

  “And that’s when the plan was made. Five of us were supposed to go to the ‘Front,’ and we knew then that there wasn’t a Front at all, and that some of us would be taken away and executed. We knew that because we had a man who got to talk to one of the Summit Guards. They’re the Elite of the Elite, like I told you, Dr. Zimmer. Turned out, though, that the Summit Guards don’t guard anything except our own boys brought up there through some sort of elevator. Then they killed our boys. This Summit Guard was sick of it.

  “So,” Graham said, “when our unit was going to move up to the Front—like I told you, nobody but the officers had a map or a compass and units were always exfiltrated at night—the five of us in the unit figured to make a break for it and see if maybe there were other good white people like us out there.”

  Deitrich Zimmer took a last swallow of his coffee. “Fortunate for you and your people that you survived.”

  “And that you’re the greatest doctor in the world, Dr. Zimmer!”

  Zimmer smiled indulgently.

  When Graham was discovered wandering on the

  glacier, Graham’s feet were frozen and gangrenous. He’d been attacked by Land Pirates and left for dead rather than a bullet or an energy pulse being wasted to end his life. It was the Eden Defense Forces which found him, and through a stroke of pure luck (one of Zimmer’s own liaison officers working with Eden Defense Forces) Graham’s feverish babbling about a hidden city to the north was overheard and reported.

  Zimmer personally flew to Eden, made up some story on how, he could use the hapless fellow in his research and took Graham back with him.

  Coincidence.Or, synchronicity. Deitrich Zimmer’s lifelong involvement with the perfection of human genetic engineering had exposed him to vague references to the brainwave research of Doctor Horace Patterson, conducted during the Twentieth Century. Other data had convinced him of the existence of “Alpha Site” as the repository of various items— including the remains of Adolf Hitler—which the United States government had wished to preserve but keep secret. Logic suggested that the results of Doctor Patterson’s research would be there as well.

  And, out of the blue, along came Thaddeus Graham, a discontented private soldier with racial theories more rigid than Zimmer’s own, from a society that could easily be conquered and then set to work in his own behalf because it already sh
ared his political ideals.

  All that remained was to penetrate it, “liberate” it from its rather bizarre leadership and absorb it, rather the way the Third Reich had absorbed Austria in 1938.

  He would be welcomed. He might even appoint Graham as some sort of administrator, either that or kill him and have him posted as a martyr, whichever seemed best at the time.

  Deitrich Zimmer looked out the aircraft window he and Graham shared and Zimmer squinted his eyes against the advancing sunrise. In moments, his attack on the facility at the entrance that Dr. Rourke had so kindly and stupidly found for him would begin.

  Fifty-Five

  Alan Crockett led his horse Wilbur along the river bed, Emma Shaw walking beside Crockett.

  The river bed here at the base of the gorge was still in grey darkness, like a room in daylight with all the curtains tightly drawn and light seeping in through cracks. But above them, to the east, it was nearly full daylight.

  They followed the sounds of the army which had passed them in the predawn hours of the morning. Above them, as she looked up, there were squadrons of high altitude V-stol and helicopter aircraft. There was, of course, some miniscule chance that two human beings and a horse might be detected moving thousands of feet below, but that risk had to be run.

  They would have been no safer, Alan Crockett had explained, had they stayed put. Emma Shaw agreed. If this were some sort of battle rather than a training exercise and any Trans-Global Alliance forces were committed, it might be possible to link up with them and escape this place.

  Maybe.

  Or, they might be walking into something neither of them could anticipate.

  Each step they took brought her closer to the coastline, however. And, once she was there, it would be possible in one way or another to get off the continent. That kept Emma Shaw raising one foot after the other as she picked her way along the rocks. The horse with the funny name, of course, had to have the clearest portion of the riverbank lest it break a leg. Evidently, Crockett would feel better having to shoot her than his horse, Emma Shaw thought…

  Annie Rourke Rubenstein awakened. Natalia was “sitting” guard beside the cryogenic chamber in which Michael slept. Annie had awakened several times during her brief respite from guard duty, hearing the sounds of military movement in the darkness around them.

  As she looked outside, however, through one of the aircraft windows, she saw no change. The same tracked vehicles which had been posted around the aircraft ever since her father and her husband had left were there now. A few troops moved about on whatever business they had, but didn’t look to be up to anything important.

  It was almost as if the aircraft and the people aboard it were being ignored.

  Annie looked away from the window, looked at Natalia—Natalia looked tired, drawn—and said as much.

  “I’ve been thinking that, too, Annie,” Natalia said, lighting a cigarette as she stood up. Annie caught her friend’s eyes as they glanced toward the transparent top of the chamber, looking at Michael, Annie’s brother and Natalia’s lover. “I think that Dr. Zimmer has somehow achieved his purpose for bringing us here in the first place, that our staying behind with the cryogenic chamber is somehow less important than John and Paul going off on Zimmer’s mission to find Hitler’s remains.”

  “Seems like an awful lot of trouble for what’s left of a body after six and a half centuries. Can’t be much,” Annie suggested.

  “Enough for Zimmer’s genetic research, maybe. I don’t know. But, I know I don’t like this. There’s something wrong.”

  Natalia echoed Annie’s own thoughts, but there was nothing for it now but to wait and see—and pray for her father and her husband, and Natalia and Michael and herself, too.

  Fifty-Six

  John Rourke’s eyes shifted from side to side as he walked down the street. Life started early here, it seemed, men dressed as factory workers gradually filling the streets. Rourke, Rubenstein and Gunther Spitz had split up, were searching the various levels of this cylindrically shaped city within a mountain. They would rendezvous—Rourke checked his wristwatch— in another ten minutes at the park at the original level and sector coordinates where they had entered the city.

  As the early morning wore on, more persons dressed in business clothes, as Rourke himself was dressed— suit and necktie and hat—entered the streets as well. Rourke stopped in a coffee shop and had a cup, listening to the talk, glancing at the newspaper, spending some of the modest amount of money he had lifted out of the cash register at the men’s store.

  The cigarette leavings policed up, the alarm system reactivated, some time might elapse before the nocturnal visitation and the removal of three suits, three

  shirts, three ties and three belts and hats would be noticed. Similarly, he didn’t clean out the cash register, merely taking pocket change.

  The first time necessity in the line of duty had forced him to steal (a civilian car in Nicaragua), his conscience had been terribly troubled. Certainly, it was for what he perceived as the greater good, but that didn’t ease the result for the man whose car it had been, nor would it now for the owner of the men’s haberdashery.

  Rourke’s perusal of the newspaper proved about as interesting as reading any sort of propaganda with a dash of home town gossip thrown in. Circulation figures for the newspaper indicated that some twelve thousand copies were regularly sold.

  Rourke had already mentally estimated the population here to be in excess of twenty thousand, and the circulation figures only seemed to support that number or better.

  The coffee wasn’t bad.

  Some persons smoked. Rourke smoked as he walked, but a cigarette because he had seen no evidence of cigars.

  By the time he reached the original level and rendezvous time was near, John Rourke had discerned many bits of intelligence. He stood on the street corner, waiting for the mechanical walk sign to go on, watching the horse traffic and the bicycling policemen—they travelled in packs—and listening to the street noises. Except for the absence of internal combustion vehicles and the presence of clopping hooves, this little town built in a spiral within a mountain seemed very familiar to someone born in the United States in the middle of the Twentieth Century.

  Except for the news stories.

  Those kept coming back to him. There was, supposedly, a bitter war raging outside the mountain, the entire economy, the entire society was on a war footing. There were posters in shop windows urging that people buy war bonds. Race, according to the papers, was the basis for the conflict. And race seemed a constant topic of idle conversation in the streets. Not a solitary black or brown or yellow or red face was in evidence.

  A woman stepped up beside John Rourke at the curb. She wore a blue dress with a full skirt, the dress was made from a white polka-dot fabric. A little blue hat was perched atop her head, her hair short and tightly curled. Almost involuntarily as the light changed and she stepped off the curb, Rourke shook his head.

  Fifties.

  The woman stopped for a moment in front of the window of the women’s clothing store, adjusted a seam in her hose and walked on. Rourke passed the shop, passed the Mountain Market and stopped at the animal hospital window. It was much too early for regular office hours, of course, but there was some sign of activity within.

  He went past the animal hospital, his eyes on the park across the street. There was no sign of Paul or the Nazi officer, Gunther Spitz. Letting Spitz off on his own was dangerous, of course, but Rourke saw no other way in which to cover enough ground in a short period of time.

  Rourke stopped at the Library, studying the donors’ plaque beside the main door. The names were all good

  Anglo-Saxon ones, and not a single woman’s name appeared except as “Mrs.” with her husband’s first name instead of her own.

  Here was a static, very stratified society, both in the figurative and literal sense of course. People knew their place here, did what their parents had done and made certain that their
children would do it, too.

  Juxtaposing the time on his Rolex with the time difference here, it was already almost seven-thirty A.M.

  The streets were filling, more horse-drawn wagons and more carriages, some apparently private, some for hire. And bicycles, not just police but young people, the girls in bobby socks and petticoated full skirts and sweater sets, the boys in loafers, white socks and baggy trousers, hair slicked back.

  A time warp.

  The 1950s may have been the “good old days” to people who had never lived them, but John Rourke remembered them, albeit with the selective perspective of childhood. Air raid drills in school. Unemployment. Steel strikes. Two wars just over. Segregation was still in the law in many areas. Society was artificial. In that respect, the 1950s were perfectly recaptured here.

  It was time for the rendezvous in the park.

  John Rourke, lest he be arrested for jaywalking, returned to the corner, waited for the light, then crossed.

  The 1950s, like the forties and thirties, had one significant advantage: men’s suits. They were tailored of heavier fabric and worn looser, which made the concealment of firearms vastly easier. John Rourke wore six under his clothes, and the suit was merely taken off the rack. He smiled at the thought. The trouser legs had been in the rough, not cuffed. He’d found the sewing machine in the back of the shop and cuffed them himself, not only the suit that he wore but the ones which Paul and Spitz wore too. There was a sewing machine at the Retreat; Annie had used it to make all her own clothes. When Rourke installed it there, he taught himself how to use it so that he would understand its workings should he have to service it from the spare parts he had stocked.

  This had not been planning ahead, but a lucky accident instead.

  Rourke was across the street now.

  He entered the park, no sign of Paul or Spitz yet.

  From fragments of casual conversation and items in the newspaper, little details one who was trained in the piecing together of information might interconnect, he was relatively certain that they would find the rest of their party—Spitz’s soldiers—in Level One, Sector A. That was above them. Level One, Sector A was the seat of government, and most particularly where this community’s self-styled “FBI” was housed.