Survivalist - 18 - The Struggle Read online

  Aldridge signaled his men into a standard assault V and Darkwood used wings, hands, and flippers to drop in beside Aldridge in the spot left for him, settling back to wing motion only to conserve strength as they moved ahead, the PV-26 strapped to his back. Aldridge’s Marines towed buoyancy-compensated sleds, aboard the sleds Soviet AKM-96 rifles, a favorite for clandestine operations because the weapons were nearly as good as the American assault rifle and the ammunition could be scavenged in the field in operations against Soviet personnel. It was standard aboard Mid-Wake vessels that a substantial (not equal) number of AKM-96s and the American rifles were carried. Also aboard the floats were explosives and other gear that might be needed. Since there was no Army in any conventional five-centuries-ago sense, the

  Marines with Navy assistance were it and had to be ready for whatever contingency arose. Darkwood had often thanked God that they habitually were.

  He moved his wings in steady rhythm, the best way to make easy progress, working his chest pack controls periodically to make the shift from vision intensification to magnification when something curious on the bottom attracted his attention. There were fish here, not in abundance, certainly, but in significant variety. According to the latest scientific studies in ichthyology conducted with the help of the Navy, the marine population nearer to the surface was increasing rapidly, water quality steadily improving. If the Soviets launched one of their submarine-based nuclear missiles, all of that would likely end.

  The bottom began shoaling rapidly, at times Darkwood helping himself along by actually touching the bottom and pushing himself ahead. The Marines towing the buoyancy-compensated sleds were having considerable difficulties moving them along and Darkwood and Aldridge fell back, physically assisting in propelling the sleds forward.

  Jason Darkwood checked the luminous black face of the dual display Steinmetz on his wrist. It had cost him “big bucks” as Sam Aldridge had put it, but the watch was worth it. They had been in the swim for better than twenty minutes. They kept going, coral outcroppings rising like stalagmites in the photographs Darkwood had seen of terrestrial caves.

  The shoaling became more dramatic, more pronounced, and Darkwood signaled Aldridge and his Marines to lay back while he swam ahead.

  After another two hundred yards, Darkwood broke surface, not breaking atmosphere this time, instead actuating the defogging control for his helmet. Nothing on the beach. If all were normal, then where were the

  commando trainees? He had not just imagined the black-clad Soviet Spetznas troops.

  Darkwood tucked under the surface, hovering for a moment, then swimming back toward Aldridge and the others. He signaled them ahead.

  As they swam, Darkwood and Aldridge unlimbered their P-26 shark/ antipersonnel guns.

  The bottom rose rapidly, the current stronger above them, Darkwood moving on knees and elbows more than swimming, at last rising into a low crouch, breaking surface, Aldridge beside him. Darkwood hit his defogger, he and Aldridge and two other of the Marines covering the rest of the landing party who had to hand-carry the buoyancy-compensated sleds. And all of this was made the more difficult because there was no time to break atmosphere and the environment suit now worked to suffocate the wearer. Darkwood punched off vision intensification, realizing he was squinting with the added light on the surface.

  Holding his breath, he ran now, a few paces behind Aldridge and the other Marines as they stormed up the beach, into a rocky niche twenty or twenty-five yards ashore.

  Darkwood sank to his knees, breaking atmosphere instantly, the usual nauseated feeling momentarily displaced by the sheer necessity of gasping for breath.

  He tore off his right glove. As he tried to breathe, he reached to the hermetically sealed container pouch on his environment suit. His right fist grasped the butt of the U.S. Government Model 2418 A2. He bit off his left glove and racked the slide, chambering the top 9mm Lancer Caseless off the fifteen round magazine. “So— lovely here, huh? Tropical island. A little falling snow.” His breath steamed as he spoke. “And a temperature somewhere around freezing. Hey—my idea of a perfect vacation spot, right?” The other men were arming from

  the buoyancy comp sleds, assault rifles passed to them in a chain, the P V-26s still held because of the perceived need for silence.

  Darkwood stripped away his environment suit, his black penetration suit worn beneath it. He shivered a little, grateful he’d brought the black synth-wool battle sweater with him. It was styled after the Wooly Pully sweaters popularized by the British Commandos during World War Two. And it was usually too warm to wear. He felt this time would be the exception. He took the hood from the compartment on his left thigh, pulled it on over his head, only the center portion of his face exposed. The spare magazines for the 9mm Lancer Caseless were still in his environment suit. He pulled them free, secured them to his chest pouches, replacing the fifteen-rounder with a thirty, putting the nearly full fifteen-rounder into the pouch at his thigh which formed the gun’s holster. The handmade fighting knife he used was still sheathed to his environment suit. He resheathed it to the right calf of his penetration suit. He secured the grenade array to his left thigh, standard high explosive, smoke and sound/light.

  He pulled the sweater on over his head. Fortunately, it was a V-neck to allow him access to the pouches on his chest pack and large enough. “You look like Lara Lynn,” Aldridge quipped, cupping his hands in front of him as if they were supporting huge, pendulous breasts. Lara Lynn, aside from her other show-biz talents, was the hit of Mid-Wake entertainment for a less subtle reason, to which Aldridge referred.

  “Thanks a bunch, Sam. Better than freezin’ my ass off.”

  “I hear ya,” Aldridge nodded.

  Standard procedure for a penetration was that the suits, wings, helmets, and, if buoyancy comp sleds were used, those, too, were towed back to the relative, safety

  of the water. Two of Aldridge’s men were still in environment suits, helmets off, and as some of the other Marines began carrying the sleds back down the beach, security on either side of them, these two still in their environment suits rehelmeted, got a thumbs-up signal from Sam Aldridge, and ran after them.

  Darkwood, Aldridge beside him, watched as the two men brought the sleds beneath the surface, then disappeared beneath the surface of the lagoon as well.

  With the environment suits, of course, they could stay under water forever until they died of old age, boredom, or starvation. The suits were even designed so the wearer could urinate while wearing one, the urine storing in a pouch built into the leg of the suit. The starvation part was a potential problem, but the men could take turns breaking surface, then break atmosphere long enough to get down a nutrition pack.

  Marines were taught to do that sort of thing, so Darkwood dismissed their problems. He had enough of his own.

  “So, Jason—where’s this training center supposed to be? They asked me to come here, never told me where it was.”

  “It should be well inland. That’s all I know. The psych people figured that the best way to acclimate these guys to surface warfare was to get them as far away from the water as practical, so psychologically they would get used to a strictly terrestrial environment. So—we go inland and look for signs of the Marine Spetznas ahead of us.”

  “I’m sending one of the penetration teams around to the far side of the island to look for that Island Classer. If they don’t see one, then what?”

  “Hell if I know,” Darkwood admitted as he shifted into his pack. “We improvise. Either that or I see an eye doctor when we get home.” He had seen what he had

  seen. He knew that.

  Darkwood took one of the AKM-96s and a bandolier of spare magazines, slinging the bandolier cross-body, right shoulder to left hip. He holstered the 2418 A2, secured it, then checked the action on the AKM-96. It was typical, sloppy but reliable. He rammed the magazine home.

  Sam Aldridge was briefing one of the penetration teams for the tour around the island.
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  Darkwood stared ahead into the dense island growth. Palm trees, traditional jungle vegetation, pine trees, snow in the pine boughs. He judged the wind and temperature combined to be making a wind-chill factor about ten degrees or so below freezing. He pulled on his gloves.

  “Ready,” Aldridge said, suddenly beside him.

  “Let’s go,” Darkwood nodded. They started out of the rocks, across the sand, into the odd-looking jungle. Men fanned out ahead of them, rifles slung, PV-26s in their hands for silent killing if needed.

  If this were a full-scale Soviet invasion of the island, there was nothing to do but observe and get the hell out, Darkwood realized. But how had the Russians learned of Iwo Jima’s secret? And how fast could a counterinvasion force be assembled. Aside from Sam Aldridge and a comparative handful of Marines, surface warfare experience was minimal. Had the Soviets been training for surface warfare at an accelerated pace?

  He remembered some of the stories told by Doctor Rourke and Major Tiemerovna. Soviet armored vehicles and helicopter gunships. He shivered, and not from the cold, because the synth-wool sweater and the rapidity of his movement were doing their work.

  Iwo Jima was a secret—but what if the secret it held were something no one at Mid-Wake had imagined.

  Sam Aldridge, whose hobby had always been the western novels from the twentieth century, the movies of the period, all of that, stopped. “I think this is human urine, here.”

  There was an aggregate of bright green leaves with yellow fluid puddled in them. Maybe it was plant sap. Darkwood bent closer, smelled it. He looked at Aldridge. “If you tell me ‘many horses pass here’ or something—but you’re right.”

  They weren’t alone.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The specially modified German gunship’s course followed north of and parallel to the Tropic of Cancer. Still there was no relief in the weather, snow falling, higher than normal winds (but not so high as to seriously hinder airigation) and lower than normal temperatures. An hour earlier, they landed on one of the smaller islands, snow accumulating on the tropical foliage. They used the landed time to check the gunship’s systems, top off the synth-fuel and take a hasty meal of German freeze-dried rations, not as tasty as the Mountain House foods Rourke stocked at the Retreat, but just as nutritious. And again, they were airborne, Rourke giving Paul the stick as they flew on over the ocean.

  Time dragged. Everywhere Rourke looked, everything seemed the same. If they were able to contact Mid-Wake, the American colony built as a scientific research station before The Night of The War, and Annie and Natalia and Otto Hammerschmidt had not been heard from—Rourke shivered. As any normal man, the initial impulse John Rourke had when he became a father was to think that a daughter was wonderful but a son was just a little bit more wonderful. And, as any normal man who was not

  A group of six men in the black uniforms of Marine Spetznas moved in single file along a rough trail cutting southward through the snow-splotched jungle, their AKM-96s slung to patroling carries. The trail wound along a sprawling ridgeline and, almost a half mile away from them, through his binoculars, Darkwood could see their faces clearly. They didn’t look like Americans at all, Whatever Americans looked like. Perhaps a mile farther back along the trail over which the six men moved, gray smoke rose skyward in a ragged column.

  It was the smoke which first drew Darkwood, Aldridge, and the rest of Aldridge’s Marine contingent into the island’s more densely vegetated highlands.

  The snow was deeper here, as well; and more snow was falling, larger flakes, bafflingly beautiful and diverse to Darkwood and the others who had never seen a snowfall in anything but an old film from five centuries ago, before their ancestors had come to man the scientific station of Mid-Wake and been stranded there by events beyond their control. A scientific research station between the islands of Midway and Wake, aimed at furthering man’s knowledge of space-station construction and deep space travel, suddenly became the last actual outpost of the United States of America. A President, a bicameral legislature, a microcosm of the macrocosm. But it never snowed there.

  As Jason Darkwood crouched behind a tall, wide-trunked, shallow-rooted tree he had no hope of identifying, he tasted another snowflake. There and gdne. He looked at the tree, looked it up and down. There were many trees in Mid-Wake, all selected for their superior abilities to produce oxygen from carbon dioxide through photosynthesis beneath miniature artificial suns. Terrestrial botany was a specialty he had never studied. Few did. The broad, bright greeitleaves

  above him sagged beneath the weight of accumulated snow. Aldridge knelt beside him. “What do you think, Jason? Take ‘em?” Aldridge’s remark brought Darkwood’s mind back to the situation at hand. And he momentarily regretted that because he wanted to remember the taste of snow, the feel of it.

  “Yeah.But quietly if we can, Sam. We’ve got them outnumbered, but a firefight could turn that equation inside out real quick.” Here in the highlands of the island, it actually was like some Paradise, like what the protestors insisted the entire surface of the Earth was within the Temperate Zones.

  “I assume you want somebody to talk,” Sam Aldridge continued.

  “Yeah, that’d be nice, Sam—and I don’t feel like having them activate those self-destruct charges they carry on their bodies and taking us with them. Rifle butts and fists, knives if you have to. And don’t forget about me.”

  Sam Aldridge grinned at him and nodded…

  With Aldridge and four other Marines, the rest of the force waiting a hundred yards farther up the trail, Jason Darkwood slipped into the foliage overlooking the trail from the highground, waiting. There was a joke that had been going around ever since it was first discovered five centuries ago that the Soviet Union had a base beneath the Pacific Ocean as well, a base considerably larger, more technologically advanced (at the time), and better populated: One American can lick any dozen of the Commies. Darkwood imagined the joke was really older than five centuries, but surprisingly the joke became an operational principle. With more men at his disposal, why had Sam Aldridge only asked for four volunteers (everyone volunteered and

  Aldridge took his pick) and left the remainder of the men under his Sergeant. Still more bizarre, Darkwood had said nothing, simply gone along as one of the six. Six Americans, five of them Marines, versus six Soviet Marine Special Forces personnel was taking unfair advantage—if you believed in the joke.

  Three of the Marines moved up a dozen yards or so along the trail, Aldridge and Lance Corporal Lannigan staying in position beside Darkwood, flanking him. The palms of Darkwood’s hands sweated inside his gloves as he grasped the AKM-96 more tightly.

  Six against six, or seventy-two lying in ambush for six—if you believed the joke.

  He peered between two snow-laden leaves, the sounds of snow crunching under the booted feet of the Marine Spetznas detail. He’d read in books about the sounds of snow crunching under boots, not noticed the sound beneath his own boots or those of Aldridge’s Marines, noticed the sounds now. He could see the face of the lead man, not necessarily the leader because of his position in the file, but obviously the leader because of his rank. He was a Sergeant.

  The remaining five men were younger, not as experienced-looking, not as tough-looking either. Sam Aldridge tapped Darkwood on the shoulder, pointed toward the Sergeant, then tapped himself on the chest and nodded. Darkwood shrugged his shoulders and eyebrows. If Sam Aldridge felt he had to brace the toughest-looking one of the six, good for him.

  Coming.

  They didn’t seem to like each other, either that or they were tremendously disciplined, each man’s face set in a neutral expression, no idle chatter, no laughter.

  Jason Darkwood looked at Sam Aldridge, figuring Aldridge would take the lead, make the first move since his chosen target was the man to get. Aldridge flexed

  Aldridge took his pick) and left the remainder of the men under his Sergeant. Still more bizarre, Darkwood had said nothing, simply gone
along as one of the six. Six Americans, five of them Marines, versus six Soviet Marine Special Forces personnel was taking unfair advantage—if you believed in the joke.

  Three of the Marines moved up a dozen yards or so along the trail, Aldridge and Lance Corporal Lannigan staying in position beside Darkwood, flanking him. The palms of Darkwood’s hands sweated inside his gloves as he grasped the AKM-96 more tightly.

  Six against six, or seventy-two lying in ambush for six—if you believed the joke.

  He peered between two snow-laden leaves, the sounds of snow crunching under the booted feet of the Marine Spetznas detail. He’d read in books about the sounds of snow crunching under boots, not noticed the sound beneath his own boots or those of Aldridge’s Marines, noticed the sounds now. He could see the face of the lead man, not necessarily the leader because of his position in the file, but obviously the leader because of his rank. He was a Sergeant.

  The remaining five men were younger, not as experienced-looking, not as tough-looking either. Sam Aldridge tapped Darkwood on the shoulder, pointed toward the Sergeant, then tapped himself on the chest and nodded. Darkwood shrugged his shoulders and eyebrows. If Sam Aldridge felt he had to brace the toughest-looking one of the six, good for him.

  Coming.

  They didn’t seem to like each other, either that or they were tremendously disciplined, each man’s face set in a neutral expression, no idle chatter, no laughter.

  Jason Darkwood looked at Sam Aldridge, figuring Aldridge would take the lead, make the first move since his chosen target was the man to get. Aldridge flexed

  bis fists over his rifle and sprang up from his crouch, hurtling himself through the foliage and down into the trail in a cloud of suddenly displaced snow, moving as if his legs were made of coiled springs, landing on his feet in the center of the trail less than a yard from the Soviet Sergeant.