Survivalist - 15.5 - Mid-Wake (33 page)

Han led the way inside, and as he moved his lantern she realized there were two other tents.

The interior of Han’s tent was just as she had expected, warm, comfortable, and yet militarily austere. All at once she was warm and she took the shawl from her head and shoulders and folded it neatly, still standing just inside the hermetic seal. “I see that the rider who went on ahead of us has briefed you,” Annie said quietly.

“That you wish to rescue your husband and brother and Doctor Leuden, assuming they require it.”

She opened her coat and swung back the coattails on both sides. The gesture worked for men. At her right hip was the Detonics Scoremaster .45, at her left hip the Beretta 92F. “I assume they require it.”

The Chinese looked at her for a moment, then smiled. “May I offer you refreshment, Mrs. Rubenstein?”

“I will feel more refreshed when I am given information.

“Very well, madame.” She liked the sound of that word. “The Russians are very strong here. Some while ago, helicopters were brought in, very large machines; and my men were able to detect that people were being carried in aboard them. The people were young and old, male and

female. There were children. All of them were naked. A force of Soviet soldiers herded them across the snow. I presume to some sort of short-term internment and perhaps eventual death. Much is going on in the Soviet base, but from the distance which prudence dictates, it is impossible to tell in great detail. It is clear that something must be done and very quickly, Mrs. Rubenstein. But what? Without the data that would have been the natural result of the foray made by your husband, your brother, and Doctor Leuden, I am like a blind man standing in the middle of a great hall with bottomless pits on all sides, into which I will easily fall if I take one false step.”

“You have a nice way with words, Mr. Han.” Annie stood her ground by the doorway. “But we have to do something. One thing I learned from my father was that it is better to move forward with prudence than to stand still.”

“Your father—he should have been Chinese.”

“It is my sincere hope you will be able to discuss that interesting observation with him at some future date. Get me as close to the Russian camp as we dare and then we’ll figure out what to do.”

“Very well, Mrs. Rubenstein,” and Han bowed slightly to her.

“But before we go, may I use your bathroom?”

He smiled and gestured toward the portion of the tent where she knew the chemical toilet would be. As she started toward it, she considered that men did not know how lucky they were to be able to urinate standing up in the middle of nowhere without getting their legs wet.

The entire thing was a disaster, Michael Rourke was beginning to realize. He had come in search of his father. So far, he had lost his best friend, Paul Rubenstein, and if he were not extremely careful, he would lose Maria Leuden. And the realization grew by the day that he loved her very much.

His father had taught him to persevere, but that sometimes that meant withdrawing and taking a different approach. It was time for a different approach now.

He had started walking back toward the truck, Maria in her Russian uniform beside him. “We’re leaving here,” he said almost under his breath.

“What? But your father and Natalia—and what about Paul and Otto?”

He stopped walking for a moment and looked at her, his eyes passing over her then and shifting about the camp. “Paul and Otto know that we might already have gone. They’ll get out. And anyway, I’ll be coming back. This isn’t the way. I know where Karamatsov is, and if he knows where my father is, Fll convince him to tell me. And if he doesn’t, all of this is useless anyway. Walk with me to the truck and don’t stop for anybody. And if something goes wrong, you get on that truck and drive like hell. I can take care of myself.”

“Perhaps I know that you can,” she answered, then began to walk.

Progressively, over the past several hours in the camp, hours spent moving about, searching for some clue that

his father and Natalia had either arrived or soon would, Michael Rourke had been becoming more uneasy.

Aside from the obvious factor that this was a Soviet camp and to be caught here would mean quite literally a fate worse than death for both of them, there was something else, almost intangible, in the air. Nervous looks in the eyes of the officers and some of the senior noncoms, idle chatter among the men that he could not understand but which sounded—somehow on edge.

The truck was in sight now and Michael quickened his pace slightly, the number of trucks parked here increased from when he had last been in the area. “You drive—only stor> if I tell you to,” Michael hissed.

“Yes, Michael,” Maria whispered.

She started for the driver’s side of the cab and Michael started for the rear of the truck, to make certain that nothing had happened there and to get to the passenger seat. He was halfway back along its length when he saw the major he had seen earlier, the man whose orders had precipitated Paul and Otto’s leaving.

Michael saluted. The major didn’t return it. The major began talking. Michael tried to look interested. The Major’s eyes …

Miehael licked his lips.

The major took a step back, his hand going to his belt for the pistol there. There was no choice.

Michael’s left hand snapped forward, the gloved middle knuckles formed into a ridge of bone, impacting the base of the major’s nose, breaking it, driving the bone up into the brain. It was a technique his father had taught him for silent, virtually instantaneous killing. The bone in the nose would break the ethmoid bone and … The major’s body started to collapse, blood smearing out beneath his nostrils and across his upper lip, Michale’s hands reaching out, catching the Soviet major under the armpits, and propping him against the side of the truck.

In the next instant, Maria Leuden was beside Michael, her voice a frightened whisper. “I saw in the mirror—

Michael!”

“Get back in the truck,” Michael ordered, looking around them now to see if the deed had been witnessed. There was so much activity that for the moment at least, the killing seemed to have gone unnoticed.

Michael’s left arm went around the major’s waist, his right hand at the major’s right elbow, and he propelled the dead man toward the rear of the truck, moving his lips as though in conversation, but merely reciting the Gettysburg Address under his breath. By the time Michael had him to the rear of the truck he was into Hamlet’s soliloquy.

Nothing unexpected in the truck bed. Michael looked around himself. No one watching that he could detect. He shoved the major against the truck, then bent low, letting the major collapse over his left shoulder, then packed the body into the rear of the truck. “Sleep tight, Mother.” Michael grinned, then closed the tarp. The truck’s engine started and the belch of the exhaust shocked him for an instant.

He resumed his circuit around the truck, ready to reach under his uniform for the twin Beretta pistols. But there was no provocation for it.

He climbed up into the cab beside Maria, the engine purring nicely now.

“Drive carefully, slowly, so you don’t attract attention. But don’t stop for anybody unless I say so.”

“Yes, Michael.”

She started the truck moving… .

The track along which they had entered the base camp area was glutted with traffic now and Michael told Maria Leuden to take the turnoff toward the helicopter pads. In the distance on their right there was brilliant light. “What is that, Michael?”

“I don’t know—be ready to slow down or stop. Keep going for now.” He debated whether to unlimber his pistols for faster use or keep them concealed. He decided on the latter for the moment, his eyes still drawn toward

the light.

And a childhood memory returned to him. His father and mother had taken him and his sister to a traveling carnival or circus—he couldn’t remember which. And they had ridden all the rides and his father had won prizes for both of them at the sharpshooting concession on the midway and then it had been time to go because of something or another—maybe school the next day. He couldn’t remember that. But he and Annie had sat in the back of the station wagon, Annie hugging the stuffed dog their father had won for her, he and Annie both looking back toward the carnival, his stomach hurting a little from the mixture of cotton candy and soda pop. But Michael hadn’t wanted to disclose the stomach ache to his father or mother because they had both warned him that he had been eating and drinking too much.

And he remembered how all the lights there in the middle of a dark nowhere at the edge of some Georgia cow pasture had made it look as though a spaceship had landed or something. And these lights now. Not a spaceship, certainly, nor a carnival or traveling circus either.

“Slow down a little, Maria,” he told her.

The lights shone down from guard towers and bathed the fences in glare, the fences made of barbed wire or perhaps some modern-day Soviet equivalent. There were tents inside the rectangle of wire and yellow-white light. But beyond the tents, inside a smaller fenced area, he could see massive structures of concrete and beside these, parked, trucks, the cabs linked to the massive cylinders of gas …

“Holy God,” Michael Rourke whispered, realizing what • it was that he saw.

Boris Feyedorovitch stood at attention before the three bored faces of the triumvirate.

The face in the middle changed expression and words came from between the flaccid lips. “The Sverdlovsk has been retrofitted with the new surface-searching scanning array, I have been given to understand.”

“Yes, Comrade Chairman. I believe this is true.”

“The woman who claims she was an officer of the Committee for State Security and is the wife of this Marshal Karamatsov—she lives?”

“Yes, Comrade Chairman. She was overpowered by use of Sty-20 pistols. Even now, she is regaining consciousness.”

“She is well-guarded?”

“My own men, Comrade Chairman.”

The eyes in the face seemed to wander for a moment. “It is our decision,” the Chairman said, his eyes appearing to refocus, “that you be given personal charge of the following mission. Utilizing the enhanced capabilities of the Sverdlovsk, locate the base of this Marshal Karamatsov. Take to him a photograph of his wife. Entice him to return with you that a possible alliance to our mutual benefit may be discussed. His land armies, if indeed they exist, could well be the missing element we have required for our conquest of the Chinese and eventual conquest of

whatever other peoples may have survived on the surface. Giving him his missing wife and telling him of the death of his nemesis, this Rourke person, may indeed be the means of approaching him. This Rourke, the American— he is dead indeed?”

“He could be nothing else, Comrade Chairman. I personally shot him in the head. He was already wounded. There was much blood found in the late Colonel Kerenin’s apartment, and the blood was typed to indicate that it was not Kerenin’s. Colonel Kerenin died valiantly, Comrade Chairman.”

The Comrade Chairman said nothing for a moment.

“You are now a colonel and will replace Colonel Kerenin as commander of the Marine Spetznas. The Sverdlovsk awaits you, colonel.”

Boris Feyedorovitch stiffened his back. “Your orders will be carried out, Comrade Chairman.”

But the eyes were already all but lifeless again.

Colonel Boris Alexeivitch Feyedorovitch smartly executed an about face and strode from the great hall… .

An ambulance monorail had been waiting on the emergency track for them as soon as the Reagan had docked in the sub pens, had sped along the blue tentacle of the marine and naval studies area with the dying John Rourke in a life-support tube. It breathed for him to save the exertion of energy. It monitored heart and other vital signs, as well as brain-wave patterns. Robot servos were poised over him, laser-targeted, controlled entirely by the computer which ran the life-support tube, ready to inject adrenalin or other substances which might preserve life until he reached the surgeons. She had sat with the tube-tech, watching Rourke’s face. It was a strong face. A handsome face. And she had had a hard time imagining this man dead, but logic and her own medical experience dictated otherwise. “Can Remquist do the operation?”

“Yes, doctor, I believe he’s scheduled for it as soon as the support work-up is done.”

“I wish you didn’t have to wait for that. Everything’s in those records and what isn’t can be tapped into off the Reagan’s medical console.”

“That’s not my decision, doctor,” the tube-tech said, flashing his even white teeth. He had a cap job and she had never found that appealing in a man. He had curly hair, as Jason Darkwood had, but she had curled her own hair often enough to recognize the difference between beauty services and natural. His was beauty services all the way. Jason’s hair—it was a dark brown—had that disorganized, rumpled laziness to it that was real.

She realized she was disliking the tube-tech because he was telling her what she had known he would tell her, and that it made no common sense at all that a dying man should be denied treatment until tests she had conducted were conducted again to the satisfaction of a man who was a genius as a surgeon and a total failure as a human being.

She had observed Doctor Wilson Remquist at his work on several occasions when she herself had been a student. He worked tirelessly to save his patient, not for the sake of the patient but because of the challenge factor. So perhaps he would work in that manner to save the life of this enigmatic Rourke, because in her medical career she had never seen someone so close to death yet still alive.

The ambulance had used the emergency rail all the way until reaching the Hub, then diverted from the emergency rail, which had been under repair there, to the defense rail, then back to the emergency rail after leaving the Hub, and along the yellow tentacle toward medical.

In a long, even stretch there in the yellow tentacle, she had looked behind their car and seen a car speeding after them on the defense rail—it would be Jason, she knew.