Survivalist - 15.5 - Mid-Wake Page 25

  “Negative on that—not with this man. If I started telling you everything that’s wrong with him just by looking at him, he’d be dead by the time I finished.”

  “Right.” Darkwood sprinted across the deck toward the squawk box, Stanhope’s belt radio already in use up to Sick Bay. He reached the squawk box on the far bulkhead and hit the push-to-talk button. “Bridge, this is the Captain. Sebastian. Be ready to implement the most expeditious course possible to Mid-Wake. There are injuries down here requiring medical facilities beyond our onboard capabilities. As soon as the Soviet Scout subs are away and destroyed, implement it at once.”

  “I will proceed to carry out your orders, Captain.”

  “Sebastian—Aldridge is alive. He’s back.”

  Sebastian didn’t answer for a moment. “Please convey my felicitations to Captain Aldridge and that I look forward to congratulating him personally on his escape.”

  “I certainly will—Captain out.” Darkwood leaned against the bulkhead for a minute. A civilian American doctor named Rourke, armed to the teeth. A hero. But where was he from?

  Margaret Barrow was administering a shot to him while one of her nursing staff was getting an IV going, his stretcher already in motion toward Sick Bay. From the man’s apparent condition, there might not be much time to get the answers.

  And somewhere at the back of his mind, it all sounded

  familiar. A doctor of medicine named John Rourke who was a hero’s hero. Something from the early history of Mid-Wake.

  He hit the squawk box again. “Computer. This is the Captain.”

  “Voice print identity confirmed. Proceed, Captain Darkwood.”

  “Identify name John Rourke, doctor of medicine. Involved in some heroic action in the early history of Mid-Wake.”

  “Processing.”

  Darkwood waited.

  The English butler voice came back through the squawk box. “Rourke, John Thomas, Biographical Extract: Rourke, John Thomas, doctor of medicine, weapons expert, survival expert, former case officer prewar United States Central Intelligence Agency, presumed deceased during period of atmospheric fires which consumed earth surface and destroyed terrestrially based life-form’s following massive ionization effect as result of nuclear exchange during World War III. Exploits of John Thomas Rourke chonicled by Commander Robert Gundersen, USN, after his vessel, the USS John Paul Jones, docked at Mid-Wake following commencement of World War III. Gundersen—”

  Darkwood knew the rest of the story. He had studied it in history classes. And he smiled at the thought as the stretcher with the severely injured, almost certainly dying man passed him. Of course, this couldn’t be the real Rourke, just a similarity of names. What made him smile was that he had flunked a history test because he had spelled Rourke with an a rather than a u.

  His past was coming back to haunt him.

  He still had the computer on the squawk box. “Computer. Physical description of Rourke, John Thomas.”

  “Processing,” it answered, interrupting itself.

  Then, “Rourke, John Thomas, physical description as follows: exact quotation from Commander Gundersen’s memoirs entitled ‘A Warrior’s Recollections.’ ” The com

  puter gave the publication data. ” ‘John Rourke stood well over six feet tall, lean, well-muscled. A high forehead, but naturally so because his hair was thick, healthy, dark brown with a touch of gray when I knew him. He was soft-spoken, and I remember he seemed to move with the grace of a cat, and both his speech and his manner implied that there was tremendous energy beneath the surface of this man, as I later found out there was indeed, a tremendous energy coupled with immense, almost superhuman self-control. Rourke’s hands were the hands of a pianist or a surgeon, and I later found out that he was indeed both, although I only had the opportunity to witness the results of his surgical abilities. He was light-sensitive, he once told me, which accounted for the dark-lensed aviator-style sunglasses he wore whenever he was in natural daylight. The sunglasses, a thin, dark cigar, and his Detonics .45-caliber pistols were his trademarks. These pistols—two of them worn in a double shoulder holster and with black rubber grips—were always with him, and his abilities to save life with his surgical skills seemed at parity with his abilities to end life with these pistols as his instruments. John Rourke epitomized many things to me—courage, tenacity, resolve. Over the years, my early impressions of him have only deepened to conviction. He was the finest and truest American I have ever met, bar none. May God rest his soul.’ Physical description of Rourke, John Thomas, ends.”

  “Thank you, computer—request satisfied.” Darkwood broke into a dead run, shouting over his shoulder to Aldridge and Stanhope, “I’m going to Sick Bay if you need me!”

  He ran into the companionway, and at that intersection took a left. Maggie Barrow and her people would have taken the freight elevator. They’d be there by now. He took the vertical conveyer, swinging out of the shaft as it reached the upper level and running along the companionway toward Sick Bay.

  He entered the reception area. Office equipment was being pushed aside to make room for the wounded being

  brought in. “Captain—can you give me a hand?” one of the nurses called out. He nodded only, throwing his weight behind the desk, helping the woman move it across the deck and against the bulkhead. “Thanks, sir.” “Anytime, Helen.”

  Darkwood entered the surgery, Margaret already at work. He hung back, his eyes searching and finally finding what he had sought. The man’s Russian uniform and his weapons were piled in a corner and Darkwood went to the pile. The uniform was one of the newer ones, ballistic fabric used in its construction. But soft body armor did little to protect against an assault rifle. He picked up the knife. He drew it from the scabbard. The blade was easily a foot long, and marked on the left flat was “LIFE SUPPORT SYSTEM X” with a circled “R.” It was a twentiety-century manufacturer’s trademark symbol. There was the word “CRAIN,” the circled “R” symbol again, and beneath it the stick figure of a bird. Ornithology had never been his passion, but he assumed the figure represented a crane. He flipped the knife over. On the rightside blade flat, just beneath the massive double-quillon guard, the steel was marked “Prototype,” and beneath that “01.” He resheathed the knife, making a mental note to get Louise Walenski to have one of her Warfare people oil the knife and do something with the sheath. It looked to be actual leather and was sodden.

  He took up the double shoulder holster. It was leather as well. He looked at the actual holsters and they were marked “Alessi.” He assumed it to be a manufacturer’s name. It took a moment to deduce how to extract the guns from the holsters, but he did so one at a time, prying apart the snaps which closed the pistols into the holsters by securing through the respective trigger guards.

  The pistols were of bright metal, presumably stainless steel or titanium, very much like the knife. The grips were black rubber, checkered, but much of the checkering worn smooth. With use, he presumed.

  A quick glance at the muzzles—he had always been interested in antique weapons—confirmed that these were

  .45s. A chill moved along his spine. He did not attempt to disarm the weapons, handling them carefully instead. The guns were nearly each other’s twin. The one from the holster that would have ridden beneath the right arm was marked on the left slide flat “DETONICS .45,” and in smaller print beneath it “COMBAT MASTER.” The right slide flat bore no markings. The second pistol. The top line on the left slide flat was as the first, but the words “Combat Master” were engraved in script beneath it. He turned the gun over. On the right-hand slide flat, beneath the ejection port, there was a facsimile signature engraved. It read “John Rourke.”

  Jason Darkwood set down the pistols. A descendant of the original man spoken of in Gundersen’s memoirs? Or somehow …

  Darkwood exhaled heavily as he crouched there in the corner. As he stood up, he heard one of the nurses assisting Maggie Barrow saying to her, “Doctor Barrow— did you
see this? It’s a vaccination mark, I think.”

  “Come on—they haven’t used vaccinations that produce a mark like that on the arm—let me see that—damn. It can’t be a vaccination mark. That’d be like finding an operational compact disc player outside the New Smithsonian. Help me with this retractor.”

  Jason Darkwood looked back at the two guns there with the pile of blood-stained clothing. “Holy shit.”

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Paul Rubenstein stood in the gathering darkness, watching as the last of the people from the cargo helicopters was herded into the camp. He, Otto Hammerschmidt, and about three dozen others from the contingent of Soviet troops under the command of the abrupt and— Paul had learned—heartless major had been detailed to guard the interior of the fenced perimeter within which the meager tents were enclosed. The tents were now packed with naked prisoners. Paul doubted there was room in the tents for anyone even to sit, let alone lie down.

  Several times throughout the afternoon, Otto Hammerschmidt had grabbed his arm and held him back— several times when there had been whippings, beatings, when mothers had been forced to trudged naked through the snow carrying their howling and dying infants.

  And Paul had waited.

  Reason had told him that to act rashly would be to act uselessly. The prisoners who were destined for extermination would not be served by his martyrdom, but rather by intelligent action.

  Otto Hammerschmidt stood beside him, slapping his hands against his upper arms, stomping his feet against the cold. Paul Rubenstein was numb to it.

  The massive concrete structures at the far end of the camp—which his Jewish heritage and gut reaction told him were crematoriums—were at the moment devoid of activity. But, throughout the last hours of the afternoon, there had been considerable activity there. Piping had been laid and the segments of concrete had been sealed against leaks. The temperature was droooine now with thp.

  sun, and he wondered how many of these people would survive to die the next morning.

  And he had no intention of waiting that long to find out.

  “We have to arrange an escape for these people.”

  Otto Hammerschmidt had said it and Paul Rubenstein looked at him oddly. A German and a Jew posing as Russians and guarding a death camp together. “What do you have in mind, Otto?” Paul whispered, looking back into the camp. The major was nowhere to be seen now and, aside from the crying of infants, the occasional scream, all from inside the tents, there was only the growing howl of the wind.

  “We find the strongest among them and get them to help us. We arm them—”

  “What will the rest of the guards be doing, Otto?”

  Hammerschmidt swore softly. “I suppose we must do it ourselves.”

  “Yes.” Paul Rubenstein looked toward the crematoriums because he had heard engine noises. And he closed his eyes against what he saw. He recognized the cylinders of gas being brought near them on huge trucks now. This was no modern variant of Zyklon B but, however un-imagineable, something even worse. These were the same type of cannisters that had carried the gas Vladmir Karamatsov’s forces had used against the Soviet Underground City, the gas which only affected males, working with their hormonal structure to turn men into blood-lusting creatures of destruction.

  He had seen it work. Seen men turn on their female comrades, even each other, killing until they themselves were killed or died of exhaustion from their murderous rampages.

  It was this gas that Karamatsov was planning to use on his helpless prisoners. Perhaps as some test, or perhaps only because he wanted to watch it.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Sam Aldridge took a gulp from his coffee cup, medicinal whiskey Jason Darkwood had expropriated from Sick Bay. “Go slow on that stuff, Sam.”

  “Yeah,” Aldridge breathed.

  Darkwood stood up and walked from the small sofa across the cabin to his desk, turned around to face Aldridge again, and leaned against the desktop as he spoke. “So—what happened?”

  “Everything?”

  “Tell me about this Rourke guy.”

  Aldridge laughed. “He made some joke about being five hundred years old—God bless him. He risked his life for us like crazy—then this. Shit.”

  “You said he was going back after a woman.”

  Aldridge nodded. “Must be some woman. Maybe one like him. Wherever he’s from.”

  The few old planes that were left had gone out in search of terrestrially based life and, aside from some data concerning the Chinese—never anything conclusive—there had been nothing. No evidence. But perhaps that was why some of the planes had never come back, Darkwood mused. “You think he’s telling the truth, Sam? I mean, about being a five-hundred-year-old American?”

  Sam Aldridge had been sipping at his whiskey and now he swirled it in his coffee cup, setting the cup down, Darkwood watching him intently. “Well, Sam?”

  “Remember Lincoln’s remark when they told him Grant was a whiskey-drinker? Well, if John Rourke’s five

  centuries old, I’d like to know his brand of whiskey too. That man’s good. He is so good it would scare me to death if he was a bad guy, ya know? He’s like a machine—deadly efficient. But compassionate too. I gotta say, if Rourke’s an American, however old he is, he’s the finest American I’ve ever met.”

  Darkwood was struck by his friend’s words—almost the same words used five centuries ago by Commander Gundersen to describe the original John Rourke. Were they really one and the same?

  The com box on his desk buzzed and he hit the switch. “Darkwood here.”

  “Jason—this is Maggie. I’ve gotta talk to you.”

  “My place or yours?”

  “Mine—I’ve got too many people down here to leave them for long.”

  “Rourke—he’s, ah …”

  “That’s what I’ve gotta talk to you about. How much longer until we dock at Mid-Wake?”

  Darkwood consulted his watch. “A little over an hour. Will he make it that long?”

  “Come down and talk to me about it. They’re waving me over to another patient now. So take about ten minutes, Jase.”

  “Right.”

  The transmission was gone and Darkwood stared at the com-box for a long time afterward… .

  He had given her more than ten minutes and still had to wait for her once he had arrived in Sick Bay.

  He sat in her private office now, watching as she poured herself a glass of her own medicinal whiskey. “Want some?”

  “Looks bad for the Captain to drink on duty—but you go ahead.”

  “Doesn’t look too hot for the ship’s medical officer either—but what the hell.” She took a long swallow from a coffee cun and set the CUD down, then scrunched UD onto

  the top of her desk and tucked her legs up, pulling her uniform skirt down over her knees. “Is he gonna live?”

  “I don’t know. I think he’s built like a rock. And he’s been shot before. That’s evident from some scars. That’s in his favor, because shock and trauma can be just as big killers. Those new Soviet uniforms with the built-in soft armor took the spin out of those 4.86mm rifle bullets, so the bullets just penetrated and never exited, and they didn’t do as much internal organ damage as they could have. He lost a lot of blood. Some of the bullets I just flat out can’t get out—with these,” and she raised her hands toward him, backs outward, fingers splayed. “Someone who specializes in delicate surgery and has the right team assisting—maybe she could. I don’t know. I mean, anybody could take ‘em out and kill him. The head wound was just a deep graze. The acid burns on his hand will heal quickly enough. Apparently that spray Sam mentioned that was found in his shoulder bag is some kind of combination antiseptic and accelerated healing agent, like our Dermi-Flex 2. Even smells similar. The arm wound isn’t much. But the abdominal injuries—shit. I lasered the bleeders but I couldn’t get half the bullets out— couldn’t get near them.”

  “Maggie,” Darkwood said softly. “That’s no
t what’s bothering you.”

  “No.” She took another sip from the coffee cup. Darkwood was beginning to feel out of place. Aldridge. Now Margaret Barrow. Everybody had a coffee cup except him. “Do you have your appendix?”

  “Of course I don’t. Nobody has an appendix anymore. Just a useless organ that can work like a time bomb inside you.

  “The appendix has been removed from every infant born at Mid-Wake in the last four centuries.”

  “So—so he still has an appendix. Did you remove it?”

  “No—I didn’t think I had the right to and as far as I could tell there was nothing wrong with his anyway. My nurse found a vaccination mark—”

  “I was there.”

  “There hasn’t been any such thing as a vaccination mark for centuries, Jase.”

  “A vaccination mark and a healthy appendix don’t make him five hundred years old either.”

  “No—but he’s not one of us, he’s not a Russian. I can tell their surgical procedures a deck away. And he’s not Chinese.”

  Darkwood leaned back against the bulkhead. “Then he is a surface dweller from some other American community. Do you realize what that means?” He pushed away from the bulkhead and walked across to stand beside her. She rested her head against his chest. “It means we’re not alone,” he told her.

  Five hundred years old or middle thirties like the man looked to be. An American. Not from Mid-Wake. But from the surface of the earth.

  Jason Darkwood touched his fingers to Maggie Barrow’s hair and she looked up at him, her green eyes tired looking but pretty. “Hold me—tight.” And she stood up and came into his arms.

  He held her tight… .

  “I was speaking with one of the Chinese, through Machinist First Class Wilbur Hong, Jason. According to the Chinese—who was not terribly eager to speak with a non-Oriental but did appear comforted at having Mr. Hong translating—the Chinese have quite a flourishing culture on the surface. The Chinese knew nothing of our mysterious friend Rourke, but did know that others may well exist on the surface as well. There are at least two Chinese cities and possibly a third, though that is likely only rumor. The First City, as this Chinese calls his homeland, is most curious in its design, rather like the petals of a flower, the various segments of the city in fact being called petals—”