Survivalist - 21 - To End All War (24 page)

“Agreed,” Rourke nodded, his eyes focusing on the largest, tallest of the two hangars. Helicopters took up more room than fighter aircraft, and intelligence overflights made by the Germans confirmed Rourke’s visual observations. “That largest hangar, over there, should contain the helicopter gunships, plus some sort of fuel supply for them, the main fuel dumps sensibly enough behind us, to the east.” He gestured out the window, in the direction of the guard station. “The other hangar will contain fighter bombers. Michael?”

“Dad?”

“Get into the tower facility and kill everyone there, and then disable every piece of equipment you can find.” John Rourke handed his son the silenced 6906. “You have five pounds of German plastique on you. Break off half and give it to Natalia. You won’t need it all for the tower job.”

“Right.”

“Paul?”

“John?”

‘Tou take the hangar with the fighter bombers. Get in and

plant your plastique and get out. Meet Michael near the tower, then get to the vehicle here and drive to those bunkers over there. See them?”

There were anti-aircraft troops’ bunkers built to the far southern edge of the airfield. “Then what?”

“Sandbag yourselves in and wait for reinforcements. But before that, Michael, when you are about to enter the tower, and Paul, as you’re about to enter the fighter bomber hangar,” Rourke continued, handing Michael the two spare magazines for the 6906, “activate the signals on your wristwatches to call in the J7-V drone. That should lend enough confusion to the situation to mask your escapes and help us do the same. Then the paratroopers come and German air power, and everything’s rosy.”

Paul laughed under his breath. “Somehow—but, then again, maybe I’m just becoming a pessimist.”

Rourke leaned forward, clapping the younger man on the shoulder. “Maybe you are,” John Rourke told his friend… .

Natalia Anastasia Tiemerovna walked beside John Rourke listening to the click of her heels against the synthetic concrete slab that paved the prefab hangar’s floor. As she walked, she opened the buttons of her greatcoat. John’s coat was already open, his right hand inside the outer pocket.

The hangar was enormous. In staggered ranks of four, fdes twenty-five deep or better, there were fully equipped, apparently batde-ready Soviet gunships in greater abundance than she had ever seen before.

She wished, suddenly, that they could have brought with them at least one of the new energy weapons, because the helicopters were clearly so equipped. But, except for what they could carry on their bodies, the risks of detection were too great, and the energy weapons were too large and unwieldy for body carry. A day would come, she knew, when these energy weapons would be as portable and concealable as the handguns she wore in the specially tailored pockets of her greatcoat. But that was not a day to which she particularly looked forward.

Several officers, in black battle dress utilities, were standing around a large synth-fuel stove and talking. John started walking toward them.

It would start here, Natalia knew, because the hangar was too open to plant seven and one-half pounds of explosives in several different locations without being spotted, then just leave.

She began pretending to fumble in her purse, so she could reach the Walther quickly enough.

As they approached the Elite Corps officers, one of them— a woman—noticed the two senior officers approaching and called the group to attention.

John told them, “As you were, Comrades. What an excellent facility!”

The senior officer, a captain who looked to be in his late twenties, responded, “Thank you, Comrade Major. We are proud of our humble part in the defense of the Soviet.”

“As well you should be, as well you should be,” John nodded, smiling.

The female officer was staring at John. And what was in her eyes was clearly lust. As the woman’s eyes left Rourke’s for a moment and locked with Natalia’s, Natalia smiled. The woman looked away, back at John, her eyes all but undressing him.

The captain cleared his throat, asking, “How might we assist you, Comrade Major?”

“Ahh, you might assist us, indeed. In light of recent events in the batde against the new imperialism, it has come to the attention of the premier—whose office I have but recendy left—that there is the increased possibility of sabotage by Allied agents against the Soviet people. The Comrade Major who accompanies me”—and John gestured toward Natalia— “is an expert in such matters. If you might indicate to her quickly where the three most likely places would be that enemy agents might plant explosives in order to perpetrate the greatest harm to this facility, our work here would be vastly easier, Comrades.”

“Certainly, Comrade Major. But, may I ask, three locations? Why?”

And John lit a cigarette—for an instant she thought he’d use his American-made Zippo, but he did not—leaned forward toward the captain and, in a tone that was almost conspiratorial, certainly confidential, told him, “We know for a fact, Comrade, that a group of Allied agents is active in this immediate vicinity even as we speak. We even know the amount and type of explosives they carry. The explosives are German plastique, in the quantity of slighdy over fifteen kilograms.”

“Comrade Major! Should that quantity of explosives be used against this facility, it could wreak almost total destruction.”

As John exhaled, he told the captain, “That is most certainly their intention, Comrade, preparatory to an assault on this entire facility. The three most potentially damaging locations, if you would, Comrade, as quickly as possible, since there is not a moment to lose. And, since I have taken you into our confidence, disclosing the amount of explosives to be used, it might further facilitate our work if you might suggest to the Comrade Major how the fifteen kilograms might best be employed as concerns their most effective use.”

“Yes, Comrade Major!” There was such a tone of gravity to the young captain’s voice that Natalia almost felt ashamed of John for taking advantage of him so. Almost. The captain turned to her and bowed slighdy, saying, “Comrade Major, if you would accompany me.”

“Thank you, Comrade.”

The other officers fell in a few steps behind them as the captain took them across the hangar, between two of the ranks of gunships, and toward a doorway. The sign on the door indicated that explosives were stored on the other side. “Tell me, Comrade, what type of explosives are there here and in what condition are they stored?”

“Missiles, Comrade Major, for use with our gunships in combat.”

“I see. And are they armed?”

“Ohh, certainly not, Comrade, but to facilitate their replacement when many sorties must be flown in rapid succession, the detonators are stored in the same room.”

“Highly susceptible to sabotage,” Natalia nodded. “You have done well to show this to me. Would you say that the fuel storage area on the opposite side of the hangar is another likely spot for these saboteurs to plant their explosives? And she gestured gracefully toward the opposite end of the building, beyond where the officers had originally stood.

“Indeed, Comrade Major, if I may be so bold,” he smiled, his eyes very pretty, very dark, “I have studied the use of explosives in my off hours, and were I one of these Allied saboteurs, I would merely divide the fifteen kilograms, five kilograms here and ten there, by the fuel. The resultant explosions would wash the entire structure in flaming synth fuel and collapse the main support walls, destroying everything and everyone inside.”

She looked at John as he spoke. “I believe that is all we need to know, Comrade.” And his left hand started moving toward the buttons of the uniform blouse he wore beneath his greatcoat.

Natalia looked at the young captain, asking him pointedly, “Comrade, I wish your most honest answer to this next question.”

“Yes, Comrade Major?”

“If you were given the opportunity to save your own life while your comrades died, would you take it?”

He looked positively hurt and Natalia felt very sorry for the sincere young man. “Comrade Major! I assure you that I would never—”

She smiled her best smile, as her right hand came out of her purse, her fingers closed around the butt of the Walther. “You are a true credit to the officer corps of the Soviet Union and I am sure, someday, would have earned with great honor the Order of Lenin.”

Then she shot him cleanly where the bridge of his nose met his forehead, so the bullet would penetrate the brain immediately and he would die instandy, painlessly.

As she wheeled round, there was a loud crack, but oddly muffled-sounding, as John’s right hand swung up still inside the greatcoat pocket and he fired his litde enclosed hammer revolver into the throat of the officer nearest to him, turning

left a little and firing again, killing another of the men with a bullet to the chest. His left hand was already drawing one of the full-sized Detonics Scoremasters from under his uniform blouse. He thumbed back the hammer and shot a third officer in the head at point-blank range as the muzzle of Natalia’s suppressor-fitted PPK/S swung onto the forehead of the sole female officer.

There was a pistol in the woman’s hand, pointed at the back of John Rourke’s head.

Natalia fired first, killing her.

John had a ScoreMaster in each hand now, firing the gleaming stainless steel .45’s into the remaining officers, putting them down.

Natalia put a second round into the head of one of the men who wasn’t yet dead.

As he changed magazines in his pistols, John told her, “Plant those explosives.”

John Rourke walked across the hangar floor, a ScoreMaster in each hand, eight-round Detonics extension magazines in the two .45’s, a total of nine 185-grain jacketed hollow points per pistol.

He looked back once and saw Natalia, on her knees, her suppressor-fitted Walther beside her, just inside the doorway of the shelter in which the missiles for the gunships were stored. He’d watched as she shot out the lock. She was setting the first of the two explosive charges now.

In the distance, in this few seconds’ lull before the shooting started, he could hear the sound of the drone J7-V coming in across the airfield to strike. With any luck, Aldridge would already be ashore, having knocked out the battery there, and the second battery would have been taken care of by Otto Hammerschmidt.

And Paul and Michael would be nearly through with their demolitions work.

A senior sergeant with an assault rifle in his hands ran toward John Rourke from the far side of the hangar. “What has happened, Comrade Major?”

“Saboteurs, Sergeant.” John Rourke shot the man in the chest and again in the head, then walked on.

Men were streaming toward him from the rear of the hangar, armed with pistols and crowbars and large wrenches. As the first wave of them neared, John Rourke raised both ScoreMasters to shoulder level and began firing. He shot a man holding a pistol, sending the body spinning back into two other men. He shot another Elite Corpsman with a pistol. In Russian, John Rourke shouted toward two men charging toward him with nothing more than crowbars. “Turn back or I will shoot!”

They did not turn back, nor had Rourke expected them to do so. He fired, killing both men almost simultaneously.

There was gunfire from behind him, rippling across the synthetic concrete slab, some stray bullets ricocheting into the chin bubble of one of the helicopter gunships.

John Rourke turned around, firing both pistols in tandem, knocking down and killing the man firing at him.

John Rourke turned back toward the wave of angry, indif-ferendy armed workmen. As one of them fired a pistol and missed—the range was too great for most men with a handgun—John Rourke began to systematically empty both ScoreMasters, putting down four more of the men before they turned back, withdrawing to cover.

The ScoreMasters empty, John Rourke stabbed them into the trouser band of his uniform pants, their slides still locked open over the spent magazines. He drew from first the right, then the left of the two holsters on the Alessi rig under his armpits, the twin stainless Detonics Combatmasters filling his hands, thumbs jacking back the hammers. This time, each pistol was loaded with seven rounds. His fingers flexed around the worn black checkered rubber Pachmayr grips.

From his left, a man charged toward him with a large wrench, shouting in Russian, “You will die, saboteur!”

The pistol in John Rourke’s left hand fired once.

The man fell down dead.

Out of the far right corner of his peripheral vision, John Rourke could see Natalia, running across the width of the hangar toward the fuel storage area. He was about to shoot a man coming up on her with a pistol, but Natalia shot and killed him first.

John Rourke continued walking, toward the leading rank of Soviet gunships. Two men charged toward him, one firing a handgun, the other with a wrench in each hand. John Rourke fired on both men, putting them down.

The killing would stop soon, one way or the other, Rourke told himself.

He kept walking, the pistol from his right hand going into his waistband for a moment, cocked and locked. He took advantage of the momentary lull, buttoned and then pulled the empty magazine from one of the ScoreMasters, and replaced it with a fresh eight-rounder. He redrew the litde Combat Master, fired into the face of a man racing toward him with a crowbar, and killed him.

Rourke performed the same operation for the second ScoreMaster, redrew the second Combatmaster. He was nearing the forwardmost rank of gunships.

Two men charged him, both of them firing handguns, a bullet tearing through the skirt of Rourke’s greatcoat. He emptied both Detonics miniguns into the men, then stuffed the pistols, slides locked open, into his waistband, drawing the two ScoreMasters. His right thumb swept down the slide release, the slide of the pistol in his right hand snapping forward, stripping and chambering the top round out of the magazine.

He turned the second ScoreMaster in his left hand, bringing his left thumb around to the left side of the pistol, dropping the slide stop, then regripping the pistol properly.