Survivalist - 21 - To End All War (13 page)

“Where can Sarah go for safety?”

“John!”

“Don’t argue.”

“John?”

“No … not you, Colonel.”

“There is the bunker built by the Leader some years ago. It is several levels underground and well stocked. Dieter Bern goes there now.”

“Send a small unit for my wife, my daughter, Dr. Leuden, and Major Tiemerovna.”

“John!”

Rourke looked at his wife, held her close. “Where should I join you, Colonel? Itll take me about five minutes.”

“I will send a driver along with the personnel to accompany your wife.”

“Very good. You’ll contact Michael and Paul, then. See you shortly.” Rourke handed his wife the telephone receiver. She hung it up.

“Go ahead,” Rourke told his wife. “Tell me how a woman who’s pregnant should be out there at the front, wherever the hell that’ll be.”

“John … I love you.”

“I know.” And John Rourke drew his wife’s body against him. Why wasn’t there ever time? He held her, telling himself, as each second passed, just one second more… .

Michael Rourke slipped his feet over the side of the bed and stared at them under the wash of light from the lamp.

Maria put her arms around his neck, her face against his back. “I want to be with you, Michael.”

“You can’t.”

“I won’t get in the way!”

“I didn’t say that you’d get in the way. But I just want you safe, that’s all.”

Michael tried to stand up, but she held him more tighdy. “If you die, I want to die, too.”

“Maria, I’m not going to die.” His left arm ached, felt stiff, and the left cheek of his butt hurt from the tetanus/ antibiotic cocktail with which he’d been injected. “I’ll function better knowing that you’re safe. Colonel Mann said that Natalia and Annie and my mother would be with you, taken to safety. That’s where you belong.”

Maria began to cry.

Michael started to get dressed… .

There was no time for a shower, and he’d showered less than two hours ago, anyway, so John Rourke merely stood under the water, trying to come fully awake. He’d survived on less sleep and likely would again. And, en route to the coast, he might be able to grab a few winks, he hoped.

Sarah was talking to him, and from the sound of her voice he could tell she was brushing her teeth. “Can I get anything out for you, John?”

“A pair of black BDU pants, one of those black knit pullover shirts, socks, underpants … like that.”

“Take a sweater?”

“Sure. Sarah?”

“Yes?”

“I love you.”

“I know that,” his wife told him… .

Annie stormed, “Being a woman is perfectly fine, but the way men perceive women sucks.”

“Annie,” Paul tried to counter, half into his pants, just looking at her. “I can’t—”

She was stepping into a slip and pulled it up to her waist, then looked at him. “It’s Daddy, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

“I should be beside you and we both know that, but Daddy thinks-“

“Annie, for God’s sake! I want you with me, but I love you too much to put you into—”

“—danger? Be real, Paul.”

Paul finally had his pants up. “I don’t—”

“—know what to say?” And she came into his arms, her own arms going around his neck and kissed him hard on the mouth. “I love you and Fil obey you, but the obey part doesn’t mean I have to like it, or I forfeit my right to bitch.”

“Ohh . . “

And he held her so tightly she started to laugh, then said in a throaty voice he could almost taste, “I can’t breathe!” He kissed her… .

In one of her black jumpsuits, her revolvers buckled to her waist, Natalia Anastasia Tiemerovna just stood there. “This is your doing, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“I am not someone to be shunted off and—” “Yes, you are. If you should die, I’d-” “What, John?”

“Damnit.” John Rourke turned and walked away. Colonel Mann’s driver and the security unit that would usher the women to the bunker were already coming up the corridor.

John Rourke had the taste of Sarah still on his lips, the feel of her on the flesh of his hands. The door opened.

*

John Rourke had planned ahead.

A south wind shrieked across the landing pad set atop the mountain, lashing men and aircraft with a strength that was almost humanly vicious. Sets of lift tubes were positioned at the four cardinal points and men of the Allied commando force spilled from them, running, heavily laden with weapons and gear, toward their waiting aircraft. Within minutes, the aircraft would be airborne and more aircraft would take their place, and more men would hurry toward them, fill their fuselages, and the process would cycle through again.

Rourke had his face turned into the wind, relishing its freshness, his eyes still burning from lack of sleep. And he would need alertness. He turned his head to the right. The sun was still low on the horizon.

Colonel Mann approached, accompanying Jason Darkwood. Rourke massaged his hands as he looked away, then back toward them. There was the low whine of another J7-V taking off vertically, then reorienting and streaking away toward the east.

Over the sounds of aircraft, and the booted feet and sofdy clinking equipment of running Allied Commandoes, Wolfgang Mann said, “Field Intelligence indicates a large Soviet force is positioning itself for attack on the Complex, John. We have very litde time.”

Rourke only nodded.

Jason Darkwood said, “If we’re successful in achieving our objective, Colonel, any Soviet ground attack can be all but neutralized.”

“And, if we are not,” John Rourke almost whispered… .

Natalia—perhaps the tight black jumpsuit she wore enhancing that image, Sarah thought—paced like a caged cat. Sarah Rourke looked from Natalia to Annie. Annie stood by the bunker doors, rocking on her boot heels. As she rocked, her skirt swayed in rhythm to her motion, back and forth. Sarah dug her hands into the pockets of her BDU pants and looked down at her body. The BDU blouse was very fully cut, but her abdomen was very fully swollen. And, over her abdomen’s greatest extension, the closures were very tighdy stretched.

She walked across the room. It was actually more like a cave above their heads, at the very edge of upward penetration of the light. The highest point of the ceiling was perhaps sixty feet overhead, but a mere twelve feet overhead was stretched an interlocking network of beams, similar beams rising from the floor to meet them, the floor really a platform set over the cave floor itself. The platform, its perimeter defined by these upthrusting beams, was like a vast proscenium stage.

As she reached the nearest of the edges, she looked down. The cave floor was some six feet below, and when she craned her neck, she could just make out support beams beneath the platform. These, like the beams crossing overhead and those rising out of the platform itself to mate with the overheads, were all fitted with devices resembling huge automobile shock absorbers like those she’d seen five centuries ago in late night TV commercials when waiting up for John to return home.

She had read, in science magazines of the period, about the work being done to earthquake-proof skyscrapers and public buildings. And, indeed, it seemed as if this platform that formed the living and working area within the bunker was constructed to withstand all but direct collapse of the granite cave surrounding them, regardless of what the earth beneath them should do.

She looked back along the platform. And she could see, very well defined, the partitioned-off living quarters, office space, storage areas, and the like. There was more storage, the young German officer who had accompanied them had recounted, this deeper within the bowels of the qave itself, these storage areas laser cut from the living rock. Food, water, medical supplies, weapons, and ammunition … everything necessary to survive for an extremely protracted period of time without ever returning to the surface. Air scrubbers, as well as a small greenhouse area under artificial lights, would keep the oxygen supply fresh.

It was so much like The Retreat, she suddenly realized, and maybe that was why she shivered here… .

John Rourke pulled on the trouser portion of the one-piece dry suit, already wearing the issue black Mid-Wake surface suit beneath it. The J7-V flew onward toward the coast. In less than fifteen minutes, they would be bailing out, joining personnel already on the ground.

Rourke stood up, taking die double Alessi shoulder rig with its twin stainless Detonics pistols from the seat beside him, shouldering into it. The litde stainless autoloaders were chamber empty now, as was his custom with a Colt/ Browning style auto during an air drop. Without removing the guns from the leather, one at a time he pulled the magazines, checked that they each carried six rounds, then reinserted them up the butts. Clipped into one of the pockets of the surface suit was the little A.G. Russell Sting IA Black Chrome. Rourke now pulled the dry suit the rest of the way up, over the surface suit’s integral SAS-style leg holster, one of the Detonics ScoremastePs secured there. The second Scoremaster was in a water-and pressure-proof pouch in the small pack he would don with his underwater gear. No room this time for his revolver, what additional room there was taken up by spare magazines for his pistols.

He pulled the dry suit all the way up, closing it at his throat and rolling over the collar.

Around his waist, he secured the Mid-Wake issue combat belt, a Soviet STY-20 dart gun on one side, his fighting knife on the other, various medical and survival and repair pouches attached across the back and front. He carried his Crain Life Support System X knife with the twelve-inch blade in the sheath he’d had fabricated for him at Mid-Wake, the sheath made from the same material as the ones Darkwood and the other Mid-Wake personnel used for their own knives, many of these custom knives like his own.

Darkwood’s knife was of particular interest, Rourke thought, an identical duplicate of the Randall Smithsonian Bowie Darkwood’s ancestor had brought to Mid-Wake five centuries ago, the original on display at the New Smithsonian at Mid-Wake.

Rourke looked across to the opposite side of the fuselage where Paul and Michael geared up. Each checked the other’s equipment. As Rourke started into his, Jason Darkwood came up, offering, “We can check each other, Doctor.”

“Fine.”

Darkwood nodded, picking up Rourke’s kit. “I know this in theory, but frankly, jumping out of one of these flying machines scares the shit out of me.”

“It’s never something one becomes easily used to, Jason. Parachuting can be fun when the purpose is fun. When one’s bailing out into combat, on the plus side, there can be more serious considerations.” And Rourke smiled. “The enemy can always shoot you out of the sky.”

“Ohh, boy,” Darkwood grinned, Rourke looking at him over his shoulder. “I suppose you’re as at home falling through the sky as I am underwater.”

Rourke shrugged his shoulders, but not in response to Darkwood’s remark, merely to better setde his harness.

The parachutes were jury-rigged by the Germans to accommodate the necessity to quickly, almost instandy, move out underwater. Because of that, the standard German parachute harnesses were coupled to the standard Mid-Wake underwater gear, but the parachute packs quickly separable, each compensated for negative bouyancy, so the discarded chute and attendant packs would sink to the bottom as rapidly as possible.

The individual components were as tested and reliable as could be possible for batde gear, but they had never been used before in tandem.

“Your wings seem secure,” Darkwood told Rourke. “Is everybody certain the covering will break away when we drop the parachutes?”

“Theoretically,” Rourke smiled.

“Yes, theoretically,” Darkwood groaned… .

They stood by the open fuselage door.

John Rourke looked down the line behind him. Paul. Michael. Darkwood. Aldridge. Han Lu Chen of the First Chinese City. Otto Hammerschmidt. There were ten other men, five of them like Hammerschmidt, German Long Range Mountain Patrol or Commando, the remaining five United States Marine Corps from Mid-Wake.

Of the sixteen men waiting in the doorway behind John Rourke aside from Rourke himself, only Hammerschmidt and his five men were experienced jumpers, and only Rourke among them had ever bailed out over water.

Rourke held to the straps and leaned out a litde to peer through the open fuselage doorway. The cloud layer through which they flew parted here and there, and beneath that, the ocean far below seemed still. But, unless the German intelligence data was wrong, beneath the surface lay an undisclosed number of Island Class submarines of the Soviet Fleet. And in hours—unlikely—in minutes, or even in seconds, the Island Classers would launch their missiles against the Capitol of New Germany and a fourth World War would begin in earnest, or the Third World War would end.

Annie Rourke Rubenstein sat at the farthest interior edge of the platform, her feet over the side, swinging. When she swung them back, she could not see them because the hem of her skirt flared outward slighdy, and when she swung them forward, she watched them intensely.

What was she doing here?

Her husband, her father, her brother, and her many friends—because they were men, they were outside of this granite coccoon, preparing to fight or fighting already, trying not to die but perhaps dying already.

And because she was female, she was here, in as much safety as they could provide.

Women were physically smaller, of course, or usually so, at least. And, all things being equal, they were possessed of less upper body strength. Generally, men could run faster.

She had never wished to be a man, always quite content with her womanhood, more so —ohh, so much more so — since becoming Paul’s wife. But she was never content with the idea men had about women, that they were to be excluded.

She pulled her feet up and turned around, bringing her knees almost to her chin. There were no men here. There was not a single one.

Only wives of high-ranking officers, the daughters of those wives, the female relatives of the political elite, and a number of female German military personnel, presumably to assist the female civilians or perhaps to guard them in the remotely possible event of the mountain’s being overrun and the vault doors sealing them inside somehow occurring.