Survivalist - 24 - Blood Assassins Read online

  “Uh-huh,” Rourke nodded.

  “But I suppose you’ve planned ahead, have a long-term supply laid up.”

  “Uh-huh,” Rourke nodded.

  Emma Shaw puffed on the cigar again. “Figured out what’s on your mind yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Want to hear what’s on my mind?” Emma asked him. “Sure.”

  “You feel like you could burst inside? Because of what’s happened?”

  Rourke didn’t answer her.

  “Do you feel so sad you almost want to die?”

  John Rourke took back his cigar, inhaled the smoke deeply into his lungs. He looked out into the night. There was a beautiful, albeit not majestic, view. “Nice just standing out here in the fresh air,” Rourke said.

  “Sarah is dead. Natalia is Michael’s woman. You’re lonely. Everybody has somebody, except you. Do you want me?”

  John Rourke turned around and looked at her. “What?”

  “Do you want me, John? Like I want you, John? I love you. I don’t expect you to love me back, but maybe it wouldn’t hurt to be held, to let whatever happens happen. I mean, maybe I’m awfully brazen or callous, with your wife just dead. And I’m sorry. But with the

  war coming, maybe I’ll be dead, too. Or you. I admit you’ve given it a good try, but even you’re not immortal. I’d like to have you, however you’d like to have me, John.” And she looked away from him, shook her head, seemed to force a little laugh. “There! I’ve said it.” She exhaled loudly, then barely whispered, “And you think I’m a slut or an opportunist or—”

  John Rourke snapped the cigar into the gravel beyond the porch, his hands going to her shoulders, turning her around. “I think you’re a marvelous woman. I respect you—”

  “Ohh,” she whispered, looking down.

  John Rourke still held her shoulders. “That’s not what I meant,” he told her.

  Her face turned up toward his and her grey green eyes met his eyes squarely. “Then maybe you should tell me what it is you do mean, John.”

  John Rourke almost whispered, “I don’t know what I feel, what I mean, but you were right. Being with you, I mean, uhh—”

  “Are you going to kiss me, John?”

  “I was thinking about it.”

  “Well, then whenever you’re ready.” Emma Shaw whispered.

  John Rourke, his hands moving down across her arms, to her waist, settling there, drew Emma Shaw up and toward him, lowering his face to hers.

  He looked at her.

  He folded her into his arms.

  John Rourke touched his hps lightly to Emma Shaw’s lips, then crushed her against him, his mouth hard against hers, her mouth opening beneath him, her body going limp in his arms, molding against his thighs, his abdomen, his chest.

  The fingers of John Rourke’s left hand knotted into her hair, cocking her head back. Her mouth drew out into a thin, beautiful smile. He kissed her throat. Her hands, bound within his arms, touched at his face.

  His fingers wove more deeply into her hair, the nape of her neck in the crook of his left elbow, the fingers of his right hand splayed over her, rising from her waist and across her back. Rourke bent over her, kissed her mouth, her cheek, then her mouth again.

  He let her go, but only a little.

  She lay in his arm, her breathing reduced to short rapid panting.

  John Rourke swept Emma Shaw up into his arms, cradling her there against his body.

  Wilhelm Doring watched as the old man from the little diner—Luther Haas, the ranking Nazi intelligence controller in the Hawaiian Islands—conversed with these racially objectionable persons he had hired as assassins. Doring watched and he listened. “You all know what to do, as we have discussed. Nikita, why don’t you go over it once more, hmm?”

  “Right, Mr. Haas.” Nikita was a tall, broad-shouldered expatriate Soviet, involved in the drug trade here in the islands and credited, as Luther Haas recounted it, with several contract murders on behalf of the party, and many more which he privately arranged. “We close in from both sides of the house and get the woman and anybody else inside. Just shoot ‘em

  down dead. Don’t blow the damn place up or nothin’, cause we want that son-of-a-bitch cop Tim Shaw to know he fucked with the wrong people this time.”

  “Exactly, Nikita.One thing more. You will carve a swastika on the dead body of Shaw’s daughter. Then get out of there. Now, you and your men be on your way. And remember that the man with her is John Rourke. He did not survive all these years by being inept, hmm? Heil Zimmer!”

  “Yeah, sure thing, Mr. Haas,” the very American-sounding Russian said, nodding his head and shaking his shoulder-length blonde hair as he walked off.

  Doring looked after Nikita, watching as he walked down the hillside toward the ten men waiting for him. All of them were armed with caseless projectile firearms, not a plasma energy weapon among them. The house that Commander Shaw had lay across a narrow valley which looked like it might once have been a river course. Through binoculars, Doring had watched the disgusting scene between Rourke and the woman. And, how appropriate it would be to have this despicable Rourke fellow turn up dead in this love nest with his little Naval officer whore!

  When Herr Haas had insisted on contracting a revenge plot against the American policeman, Inspector Shaw, for the deaths of half of Doring’s commando team, Wilhelm Doring had been against it. He and his four men were more than adequate to the task (He discounted Marie Dreisling completely). But Herr Haas had insisted that Doring not risk the remainder of his unit in an unplanned operation, and that speed of retribution was required. Hence, Nikita and his drug friends.

  But now, having seen Doctor Rourke, Wilhelm Doring felt even worse about at last agreeing to Herr Haas’s plan. These eleven scurvy fellows were easily too many to deal with Fraulein Commander Emma Shaw. Were they enough, however, these street ruffians, thugs, to deal with the almost legendary Herr Doctor John Rourke?

  To have gone with these men would have been madness, however. If they were good, they could succeed on their own. If they were not and he accompanied them, they would succeed only in getting him killed, perhaps.

  So, he waited, Luther Haas lighting a cigarette. They stood together, each watching through night-vision binoculars. Rourke and the woman would be inside the bedroom by now.

  John Rourke’s hands moved over her body, his touch easy, gentle as he slowly removed her clothing.

  At last, she was naked. She thought she should be trembling or something like that. But, instead, she felt safer, happier than she had ever felt before.

  John was stripped to the waist. And he was magnificent. Shoulders almost terrifyingly broad. His arms and his chest veritably rippled with muscles at his slightest movement. Her hands caressed his bare back, powerful, hard. The hair on his chest was more than partially grey. But it was the only bodily sign that he could have been much more than thirty years old, even though she knew that biologically he was closer—one

  side or the other—to forty. His stomach was flat, muscled and hard, too.

  There were no scars on his body and for a moment she was amazed that with all his near-death encounters—just those talked about in the history books—he remained unscathed. But she remembered a property of cryogenic sleep (biology was never one of her strong-points in school). It was discovered that cryogenic sleep had a restorative effect on the human body, curing minor illnesses, even healing the skin as if the body, given time to rest, could repair itself.

  “What are you thinking, Emma?” John almost whispered, bending over the bed, his hands on her again, his hps brushing hers.

  “How good you look and how much I love you,” she whispered back.

  John smiled, kissed her lightly again, then stood up. “Are you sure?”

  “Uh-huh. Never surer of anything in my life. You?”

  “Yes,” he whispered, starting to open his trouser belt.

  “Wait a minute,” she told him. And she knelt up on the
bed, her hands going to his waist. “You undressed me. Let me undress you.”

  “If you want,” John said, smiling easily. But there was a far-off look in his eyes, sadness mingled with loneliness. And more than ever, she wanted this to be the best moment in John Rourke’s life, just as she knew that it would be the best moment in hers. She started to undo his belt, her hps touching at his abdomen, at his chest* at his throat, her bare body against his chest, her breasts hot, her nipples feeling so hard she could barely stand it.

  Emma Shaw had told herself in that first moment that she was able to think after he kissed her for the first time that she would be more than foolish to suppose he would be hers for ever, stay with her always.

  But John Rourke was at least a little bit hers now. And she would be bis for as long as he wanted her, and after that, too. There was never a man like this in all her life, probably not in all the world.

  She opened the button at the waistband of his trousers.

  There was a very soft sound from beyond the room as John’s Hps touched hers, her face in his hands.

  His body went rigid.

  Over the sound, not over her.

  His hps moved to her cheek, to her ear. “We’re not alone.”

  She didn’t have a cat. Pests like mice and rats had gone from most places on the Earth over six centuries ago when the sky caught fire in the Great Conflagration. John had closed the door behind them as he’d carried her into the house, so no bird or squirrel (such animals were returned to the wild more than a century ago and thrived) had followed them in.

  She looked over into his eyes, then looked away and glanced to her right, but without moving her head. He was right. They were not alone. Her .45 was in the great room by the front door. Her Lancer pistol was on the kitchen table; she’d disassembled it for cleaning then gotten caught up in the television broadcasts about Sarah Rourke and not reassembled it yet.

  If she’d believed in spirits roaming the Earth she

  could have convinced herself it was Sarah Rourke out there, come to prevent them from becoming lovers.

  John Rourke’s little pistols—every school kid grew up knowing they were Detonics .45s—were still in their shoulder holsters, on the chair in front of her dressing table, the chair halfway between the foot of the bed and the door. His little knife, the black double-edged one he usually carried inside the waistband of his trousers, was with the guns.

  The noise had been from beyond the doorway, in the great room.

  “When I tell you to, you drop to the floor, Emma. And grab my shirt as you do. I’m going to my guns. If there’s trouble, run for it. Get to the car and get out of here.” His right hand left her body for a split second, then returned, something cold in it as he pressed his hand against her left breast.

  She realized it was a coded entry car key, the one to the electric car in which he’d driven here.

  John slid his hand down along her body to the left cheek of her rear end and she felt the coded entry key slipped under her between the flesh of her bottom and her calf.

  She looked into his eyes as his hands started to tense on her. “I really love you.”

  He touched his hps to her forehead. Then he rasped a single word, “Now!”

  His hands were gone from her in the same instant as he spoke, his body a blur of movement racing away from the bed and toward the chair where his guns lay. For a split second, Emma Shaw was powerless to move.

  The bedroom door was already open.

  Two men came through, submachineguns in their hands. John wasn’t going to make it to his guns. Emma Shaw screamed, turning her naked body fully toward the two armed men, her hands cupping under her breasts. Not because she was frightened. She was that. But if she could divert their attention for a split second, get their eyes on her instead of him.

  John’s right hand clasped to his belt buckle, ripping his belt from the trousers loops, snapping it outward, toward the face of the man nearest to him. John’s left hand reached out to the double shoulder holster for his guns. Grabbing it near the center of the harness, he swung both pistols outward.

  The military belt’s brass tip struck the first man across his eyes knocking him back, his submachinegun firing into the bedroom ceiling, huge chunks of plaster falling down around him as he stumbled to the floor.

  The two pistols John swung in the shoulder holster hit the second man on the side of the head. John kicked the first man in the face.

  Emma Shaw rolled off the bed grabbing for John’s black knit shirt with one hand, the coded entry card for the electric car with the other. But she had no intention of using it.

  She pulled the shirt on over her head stuffing her arms into the sleeves, the garment impossibly large for her. Under the circumstances, since she had nothing else even close—her clothes lay on the floor on the other side of the bed—the shirt’s size—and more importantly its length—was an asset. As her head emerged from inside the shirt and she looked over the

  top of the bed, she saw John Rourke use a classic judo throw on a third man just through the door, John’s right hand catching the man’s gunhand wrist, pinwheel-ing the arm, rolling the man over and down.

  John had his double shoulder holster in his left hand, was reaching with his other hand for a submachinegun which lay on the floor next to one of the men, unconscious or dead. But as John Rourke reached for the gun a line of bullets tore into the floor from the submachinegun of a fourth man.

  From behind her, Emma Shaw heard one of the bedroom windows shattering.

  She wheeled round one hundred and eighty degrees, grabbing the lamp from the nightstand and hurling it toward the man coming through the window. The lamp struck him in the head and he stumbled toward her. To her feet, Emma Shaw rotated ninety degrees right, snapping her left elbow out from shoulder level, impacting the man at the right temple.

  She tried grabbing for his gun but another man was already at the window stabbing his submachinegun through it and toward her. Emma Shaw launched herself over the bed as the submachinegun opened up, bullets tearing across the bed, into the carpet as she hit the floor and rolled.

  John at last had one of his pistols free, stabbing it toward a man levelling a submachinegun at John’s chest. Emma Shaw almost screamed for real this time, her heart in her mouth. John fired first.

  Ears ringing, the smell of gunpowder hanging on the air like an invisible foul-smelling cloud filling her nose, Emma Shaw reached out and rolled, grabbing for the submachinegun John had reached for instants earlier. As her hand closed over it—she recognized the submachinegun as a Lancer copy of the HK MP 5, considered the best of the best among brass cartridge submachineguns—the man beside it reached out and grabbed at her.

  John Rourke’s booted right foot kicked out and connected with the man’s face.

  Then John was hauling her to her feet and toward the shattered window. The man beside it threw the muzzle of his submachinegun toward them and John fired twice, the man’s face instantly smearing with blood and his head snapping back.

  John Rourke let go of her arm, shoving her toward the window, telling her, “Be ready to use that!”

  As she brought the submachinegun up into a firing position, at the far right edge of her peripheral vision she saw John shifting his little .45 from his right hand to his left, catching up the submachinegun belonging to the man he’d just shot with his right. The submachineguns were the SD variant with integral suppressors. The other guns she’d seen were Lancer versions of the Uzi, these not suppressor fitted.

  John stabbed the HK submachinegun toward the window, shouting to her, “Head down!” She dropped to her knees, careful as she could be to avoid the glass shards. John’s weapon fired and Emma Shaw looked up. A man at the window was dead, his body falling back.

  “Run for it!” John sprayed out the submachinegun toward the bedroom door. Emma Shaw ran for the window, starting to clamber up. But John swept her up

  into his left arm, half throwing her through the shot-
out window.

  She dropped to the ground, stumbling, getting to her feet.

  John vaulted through, reaching down to the dead man just beside the house wall, grabbing up the dead man’s submachinegun.

  The little .45 was in his waistband. The two submachineguns in his hands sprayed back through the open window.

  “Now watch your bare feet!”

  She ran beside him as he ran, seeing him hurl away one of the submachineguns—empty she assumed—and redraw the little Detonics .45 from his trouser band.

  They ran along the wall of the house, toward the front, where John’s car was parked—her own car was garaged and impossible to get to, she realized.

  As John turned the front corner of the house, Emma Shaw beside him, three men rose up from behind the F.O.U.O. vehicle in which he had driven here, toward which they had been running. Submachineguns in the hands of the three men opened fire. Chunks of the outside wall shredded under the impact of the bullets and John knocked her breathless, slamming her back against the wall behind the corner.

  He stabbed his submachinegun around the corner, firing a short burst. Then he flattened himself against the wall beside her. “You all right?”

  “Sure. I’m more than half naked. Some damn assholes shot up my house and I’ll just bet I won’t get you to get me back to bed.”

  “You’re a wonderfully candid person,” he told her, smiling.

  “What are we gonna do, John?”

  He smiled, said nothing for a moment, then, his eyes following the downspout near them, said, “I’m going to give you both submachineguns. You watch out behind you. Don’t know how many there are. I’m going up on the roof. Fire a couple of shots, not more than three if you can manage that short a burst. You don’t have more than a dozen rounds left in this.” He handed her the submachinegun.

  “What are you gonna do on the roof?”

  “Kill those men.” Then, as if to himself, more like thinking out loud rather than talking, he added, “Wish I had some pliers.”

  “Pliers?!”

  But John Rourke was already moving …