Survivalist - 15.5 - Mid-Wake (17 page)

“You mean the whole thing? The war?”

“Yeah. You know, I started keeping a diary, right after the crash there in New Mexico. Before that, really—on the plane when I figured I was probably going to die. And then your dad and I got together and he taught me how to ride and shoot—so what if they were motorcycles and automatic weapons instead of horses and sixguns. He’s a good man—the best. If he’s dead and we find out who ahh—who—you know … If he is, you’re gonna have to move awful fast to beat me to the bastard. You know what I mean, Michael?”

Michael Rourke only nodded.

Paul Rubenstein’s eyes returned to the track they followed, a road of sorts but only by dint of use, the snow all but gone here, the ruts deep. He imagined they would get deeper when the weather warmed if that ever happened. Winter had gone on forever.

And ahead now, he could see the gates in the outer deflection barrier. Michael called to Maria Leuden and Otto Hammerschmidt in the rear of the truck. “Watch out—we’re hitting the first guard post.”

Maria’s voice came back. “Are you sure you’ve got it right?”

“No—but we’ll find out, won’t we,” Michael whispered.

Paul began braking, the controls of the half-track truck at first difficult to master, a cross between the German mini-tanks and a standard truck in practice. But the vehicle was slowing smoothly enough.

Paul was suddenly seized with mild panic. Karamatsov’s army numbered in the thousands, but what if this guard post harbored someone who had a terrific memory for faces and didn’t remember seeing a captain who looked like Michael Rourke?

Paul’s palms were sweating as he finally brought the vehicle to a stop just a few yards from the passage through the first deflection barrier.

Two guards approached, the senior man saluting. Michael returned the salute smartly, but not too eagerly. Paul mentally shrugged. The guard asked for orders. Paul understood that much Russian. Michael relayed the command to Paul and Paul took the orders from the seat between them and passed them to Michael defferentially, Michael passing them out the window. Maria Leuden, claiming her reading knowledge of Russian was good enough, had read the orders, interpreting the contents as she went. Paul hoped her reading knowledge was as good as she thought.

The sentry seemed to be taking considerable time with the orders. Michael said something in carefully enunciated Russian which Paul only vaguely understood as being an insult. The sentry handed in the papers. Paul breathed. Michael gestured for the truck to be driven on, the sentry stepping back, not checking the rear of the truck—Maria and Otto were hidden behind crates of synthetic fuel there.

Paul eased the vehicle forward, not wanting to appear too eager. It started to stall and he backed off on the accelerator and then fed it gas again. The truck moved forward smoothly.

They were through, heading toward the secondary barrier—but there would be a perfunctory check there, observation having proven that during the intervening hours since they had first reached the camp. They were inside. He thought that it was probably true—the Lord watched over fools, drunks, and Irishmen. And add to that Jewish sidekicks.

There was another energy barrier, directly blocking John Rourke’s way into the prison complex at the center of the security level, three guards armed with Sty-20 pistols on the opposite side of the barrier. He approached at a brisk walk, both hands behind him, the twin Detonics mini-guns cocked and the safeties off.

“Halt! Identify yourself!”

Rourke doubted the Sty-20s would successfully penetrate the energy barrier, but was confident the loads in his pistols would—identical duplicates of the load that had been his favorite before the Night of the War, the Federal 185-grain jacketed hollow point. There was no time like the present to search for scientific truth, he decided. He stabbed both pistols toward the man who had spoken over the crackling energy barrier and fired, the barrier crackling maddeningly for a moment, the guard’s body rocking back and skidding across the floor, twisting over onto his front, a smudge of blood where the exit wounds had contacted the floor surface.

Rourke shouted to the two men left standing. “Comrades—lower the barrier and let me pass and you will not be killed. Now!”

Rourke could see the barrier control on the wall to his right, their left, no plexiglas cubicle here. The two remaining guards exchanged glances. John Rourke took a step closer to the barrier. One of the two men shouted to him, “If we do not lower the barrier, you will not be able to get

inside.”

“If you do not lower the barrier, you will not live past the count of ten. Either of you. One … Two … Three … Four …” The guard nearest the barrier control hesitated, but the second man didn’t. He went to the barrier control and activated it. The barrier crackled and vanished. John Rourke stepped through, saying, “Close the barrier now. Do it.” The same man activated the control once again and the barrier crackled to life.

John Rourke thumbed up the safety on the Detonics .45 in his right fist, ramming it into his belt. He drew the Sty-20 he still carried in the uniform hip holster. He dropped the safety. “I am a man of my word, comrades. Sit—both of you. Hands behind your heads. Now—or it is this!” And Rourke gestured with the Detonics .45 that was still in his left hand. Both men sat, hands behind their heads. Rourke shot each in turn once with the Sty-20 and, as the men started to recoil from the impacts, shot each of them again to keep them asleep for a long time.

One of them fell back and, a second later, the second man fell.

Rourke safed, then holstered his own Sty-20, relieving the two sleeping guards of theirs, the gym bag that had been under his arm getting two more of the pistols. He went to the man he’d shot for real, taking the dead man’s pistol as well, placing it in the bag, which went back under his arm. Thoughtfully, the Russians had provided him with a map, a layout of the prison center on the wall beside the barrier control. Cell blocks, interrogation rooms, re-education centers, medical research. The last smelled. Rourke studied the map a moment longer so he could place its significant points firmly in his short-term memory, then started moving again—toward medical research.

There would be guards arriving at any instant, even if the prison were largely automated, as he suspected. The gunshots would have been heard. He broke into a run. His stomach growled and he tried to remember when he had last eaten. But he keDt runnimr… .

Olav Kerenin, his head pounding with pain, his left arm, like his head, bandaged, but the arm the result of a brush with death from one of the sharks, leaned heavily against the side of the Gullwing he had commandeered, his own stolen, since found, crashed. “Where is he!” He hammered his good right fist against the vehicle’s roof, Boris Feyedorovitch beside him, talking into a communicator. “Well?”

Feyedorovitch’s voice was calm. “Olav—you should rest. I can settle this matter.”

“What did you learn?”

“Very well—gunshots. Live ammunition. As you suspected, he has evidently penetrated the security complex.”

“I increased the guard—how could—”

“There have been several personnel found already whom he has shot with sedative darts. There is substantial reason to believe he is dressed as one of us.”

“But—how substantial?”

Feyedorovitch almost groaned. “Three of our personnel were found in the hedges not far from Monorail Station 17, two of them stripped of their uniforms, the third—”

“Two?”

“One of the Spetznas stripped of his uniform is a male of approximately the same height as this Wolfgang Heinz or whoever he is. The other guard was a female. Approximately the same size as the female prisoner. I checked. May I suggest—”

“What?” Kerenin snapped.

“May I suggest, comrade major, that security be asked to put out search teams. We do not have enough Marine Spetznas personnel available to us to cover all three domes—and if he has already left the security complex, we will not know for several minutes more.”

“No,” Kerenin said simply. Then he started under the Gullwing, telling Feyedorovitch, “Coordinate from here. I go to my quarters. If he plans to attempt to free the woman, he will come there.” Kerenin could not bring in

security. If it were learned that he in fact knew this Wolfgang Heinz to be the American John Rourke—if the triumvirate were to discover this … Kerenin shouted to his driver. “My quarters! Quickly!”

John Rourke heard the new alarms starting, his left hand on the door handle for the room marked “Medical Research.” The plexiglas in this door was frosted over. He pushed the door inward, letting it swing. He could see a typical laboratory beyond and, with one of the Detonics pistols in each fist, stepped through, dodging left. But no one appeared to be inside. The lights were on. There was a strong smell, like acid.

In Russian, he called out, “Is anyone here?” He heard muted sounds from the far end of the laboratory beyond what looked to be more or less standard double doors, the kind that swung open and closed. Rourke started toward the doors, passing ranks of large plastic cabinets of the type in which his and Natalia’s weapons had been kept.

He was almost to the double doors, thinking that perhaps he had made a moral misjudgment of the Russians. He heard it an instant before it happened and started to dodge, something enormously heavy impacting his left arm and throwing him down to the floor, the cocked and locked .45s skating from his hands across the smooth hard floor. As he rolled right, he saw it—a man, huge by any standard, lunging for him. Rourke started for the Sty-20 in his holster, the man’s ham-sized hands on him, wrestling him up from the floor, shaking him so violently that Rourke couldn’t reach the Sty-20. Rourke’s right knee smashed up, impacting the man’s crotch, the grip on Rourke’s upper arms loosening, Rourke falling away from him, skidding back across the floor.

John Rourke drew the Sty-20, fumblingly, his arms tingling from the man’s vise-like grip. He was at least six feet six, and the chest was so large Rourke couldn’t estimate it. He had seen adult black bears in the Georgia mountains that looked smaller and less formidable—and friendlier. John Rourke pushed himself to his feet, the Sty-20 finally in his right fist. The gym bag had fallen to the floor. The big man—in white tunic and white pants, a laboratory worker perhaps—had a beaker in his hand and threw it, Rourke ducking, the beaker shattering against Rourke’s right hand, the Sty-20 falling as Rourke’s flesh started to burn.

Acid.

John Rourke lunged toward the laboratory sink inset at the center of the table that ran the length of the room down its center, with his burning right hand hurtling a double of rack of test tubes toward the man as the charged, the man swatting them away. But Rourke had the water turned on, his right hand beneath it now, flushing off the acid. The man’s body slammed into him, Rourke’s abdomen taking the impact against the lab table top, Rourke’s left elbow smashing back, hammering into the bear-sized man’s abdomen, a rush of sickeningly sweet breath against Rourke’s left cheek and the left side of his neck. Rourke’s left leg snapped back, the heel of his liberated Marine Spetznas boot contacting bone as Rourke slid between the man’s body and the counter top.

The flesh of John Rourke’s right hand had stopped smoking, but the pain was killingly intense. He backed away.

The big man turned toward him. He reached to a rack running down the center of the laboratory table, taking down first one, then a second hypodermic, the syringes of huge proportions and opaque, the needles themselves several inches long. He gave each needle a test squirt, opaque liquid geysering from the needle tips. As the liquid contacted the floor, the floor started to burn.

John Rourke reached to his belt for the Life Support knife.

The giant charged, the needles plunging toward Rourke’s face, Rourke dodging left, the skin of his right hand blistering now and one of the blisters popping, Rourke involuntarily sucking in his breath against the pain. But in his right fist he held the knife. There was no opening and Rourke edged back. A solid jab from one of the needles and he would be dead.

The man came at him again, surprisingly agile for someone so massive, and clever too. Because as John Rourke feigned with the Crain knife, the man anticipated him and stabbed outward with the hypodermics, Rourke swatting at him with the knife just to keep him away.

Rourke’s eyes found his guns on the floor. He edged toward them, nearly tripping over the Sty-20 that had been bathed in acid along with his hand. The gun was partially melted away. But it was some type of plastic for the most part, he told himself. His right hand was blistering more now.

The big man charged and Rourke threw himself left, onto the floor, skidding across it, his left hand grasping one of the twin Detonics stainless pistols, his left thumb sweeping behind the tang, dropping the safety, sweeping back as he rolled, the big man diving for him now. John Rourke fired, then fired again, the man’s body lurching, but still coming. Rourke fired again and again, then emptied the two remaining rounds into him, the man staggering. Rourke shoved the pistol into his belt, the slide still locked open over the empty magazine, both hands going to the haft of his knife. Some of the blisters on the back of his right hand burst as Rourke swung the steel, just sidestepping one of the acid-filled hypodermics, the knife’s primary edge contacting flesh, Rourke’s full body weight behind it, the momentum of the huge man who wanted him dead pushing against it. The head severed, blood spurting in a red wash, Rourke turning his eyes away from it, his fists still locked on the knife. Rourke fell to his knees. The head rolled past him on the floor.

Rourke hauled himself to his feet. His second pistol. He crossed the room, nearly losing his footing in the blood.

He picked up the second pistol, giving it a quick visual examination. It was undamaged. He clenched it tight in his left fist as he moved toward the still-running sink, immersing his hand beneath the jet of water, tears welling in his eyes from the pain.