Survivalist - 15 - Overlord (16 page)

John Rourke started down the corridor and Paul closed the door, leaning heavily against it. He heard Annie’s voice in the darkness. “Come and make love to me quickly.”

“All right,” he answered her, walked toward the bed and put down his pistol. He came into her arms and she drew the covers up over them both …

John Rourke knocked at the door. The door opened, Natalia beautiful in the pink floor length nightgown, a shawl pulled around her shoulders, her left hand going through her almost black hair, the surreal blueness of her eyes somehow tinged with something that reminded him of sadness. In her right hand was the stainless American Walther PPK/S with the custom silencer at the muzzle. Rourke smiled inwardly at the thought: If Natalia Anastasia Tiemerovna, Major, Committee for State Security, Retired, were forced to shoot someone at such an ungodly hour she would do so without awakening the neighbors.

“What is it, John?”

She didn’t ask him inside. Even at Hekla, people talked, he realized. “We have to go. Do you want to stay here?” “Do you want me to come with you?” “Always.”

“Then I will, of course.” “Twenty-five minutes, on the steps.” “Yes.”

“You look beautiful.”

“Twenty-five minutes,” she repeated.

“Yes,” and he smiled at her and turned back down the corridor toward the room he shared with his wife. He realized he loved them both, as equally as one man could love two women. And he realized what it was doing to all three of them.

He walked into the rooms he shared with his wife, closed the door behind him and closed his eyes, hearing Sarah in the shower.

Michael Rourke had pictured it as something like the Soviet Underground City had appeared. But it was not.

The Soviet Underground City had been, when seen from a distance like this, merely a utilitarian tunnel, much like the railroad tunnels he remembered seeing as a boy and some of which still survived after a fashion today.

He saw the Chinese city first as they reached the summit of an almost unnaturally circular range of moderately high, jagged peaks. Beneath them in the valley was where it lay, rising out of the ground like some sort of magnificently geometric flower, segmented, each segment vastly large, a half-dozen segments already visible, others (he imagined perhaps a dozen in all) partially uncovered. The city had been buried, he realized, built, buried within the valley under what would have been millions of tons of dirt and rock, and was now, perhaps over the space of decades being uncovered.

“It’s beautiful,” Michael Rourke told the Chinese beside him as Michael rested his hands over the steering wheel and stared. The fully uncovered segments were a dark cream color, like the petals of a rose. Annie had grown some. Beside two of the fully uncovered segments were pagoda-shaped structures, some apparently completed, others seemingly under construction. The once buried segments of the city were forming the basis for a new city that was emerging before his eyes. Heavy equipment moved dirt and rock and

what appeared, from the distance, to be thousands of men and women moved about the structure, working to complete them.

“I thought you had no fuel.”

“Our heavy construction equipment is electrically powered, and must be recharged every several hours. We have electricity in abundance. Originally, our reactors were fission powered but in the third century of our confinement beneath the ground, fusion was at last conquered and we have clean, safe power to supply all our needs.”

“How did your people get outside — if the city was buried, as it appears?”

“There are entrances throughout the mountains here, many of them since re-sealed, American. Many of them were large enough and designed to accommodate the transfer of construction vehicles like those which you see now. It was all planned by our leaders five centuries ago. And, thank God, it was successful.”

Michael Rourke looked at Han and felt himself smile. “Yes —for all of us,” and he started the vehicle down along what appeared to be a service road leading to a paved highway perhaps a quarter mile further down along the gently sloping side of the valley. The road was only one lane wide, but there was sufficient room on both sides of it to be broadened should it become necessary to do so. His father would like these people. They planned ahead.

Behind him, as he drove, Maria Leuden knelt in the vehicle’s bed, Otto Hammerschmidt’s head in her lap, Rolvaag and his dog with them there as well, Hammerschmidt sedated against the pain of his burns; some of the German spray which promoted healing had been used on his burns, but Hammerschmidt was feverish, the sedation necessary against what Michael judged must have been excruciating pain.

They had recovered Hammerschmidt’s clothing and weapons, as well as those things of Marie Leuden, but neither

wore their original clothes, Hammerschmidt’s body unable to support the contact against his skin, and Maria Leuden declaring that the clothes would have to be sterilized before she would even touch them. Michael had loaned her a shirt and a pair of pants, miles too big except in the leg length, which was nearly right when rolled up six inches or so. She was quite tall for a woman. She had wrapped herself in the ultra thin survival blankets provided for them by the Ger-. man quartermasters.

As yet, Michael had mentioned nothing to Maria Leuden of the fact that the radio transmission he had sent to her and to Otto Hammerschmidt, in addition to being picked up by Bjorn Rolvaag, should have been picked up by the pilot and door gunner of the German heliocopter which had brought them into this area and which should still be less than seventy-five miles away. That the messages had not been intercepted, indicated to Michael that the Mongol warriors of the Second City, which Han had described in more graphic detail than his own city, might indeed have been more active in the area than Han suspected.

But Michael had not been asked how they had gotten to the general area of the Greater Khingan Range in northern Manchuria and he had not volunteered the information. If the helicopter and its crew, or for that matter the helicopter alone, still existed, it might be useful to keep its presence a secret. He trusted Han but had never considered it deceitful to be prudent.

He could see railroad tracks now, and steam operated locomotives coupled to massive flat cars; and, leading from some of the flat cars, ramps. Michael assumed the Chinese had a source of coal to run the steam locomotives.

They reached the single lane highway and Michael turned down onto it toward the city, the road looping the valley several times before reaching the level of the city, but the drive easier and faster for Hammerschmidt than going crosscountry. He slowly felt out the acceleration, driving the

vehicle faster than he had ever driven it, but at what he considered a safe speed. It was gradually warmer as the vehicle descended, Michael throwing back the hood of his parka and freeing one hand from the steering wheel to open his coat. “Why did your people pick this area, Han —for the construction of their city?”

“The rail lines which once serviced Harbin were easily extended to service the construction site in those days and, it was felt, even if the more disastrous possibilities became reality following a nuclear war, the railroad beds would still exist and perhaps the rail lines themselves. As it happened, the beds indeed existed but were buried beneath generations of ice and snow and it required many years of work with explosives to make the new beds beyond our valley. We were able to construct rail lines leading to the sea and hope to construct ships. But this will not be in my lifetime. At least I presume not.”

His voice sounded off slightly and Michael asked him, “Is something wrong?”

“Do your people have sea power?”

Michael saw no sense in a lie and evasion was a lie under some circumstances. It was not the same as just not mentioning the helicopter. “No —we don’t. We could, I suppose. But there hasn’t been time. Why do you ask?”

“There have been incursions, coming from the direction of the sea. Attacks on a distant outpost we have established by the Yellow Sea. It was thought wise for us to have a military presence on the seacoast. We have there a small town as well. For the most part the wives and families of military officers and the men who work on the new fusion generator systems live there. And this is where, someday, we will build our ships.”

“Where do you mine your coal?” Michael asked. And Han began to laugh. “For the locomotives you run, I mean?”

“They are steam engines, but require no coal. The water is heated by fusion generators, American. We may have no

synthetic fuel, but we are not entirely without resources.”

Michael asked a question he had been dying to ask since he had field stripped the Chinese rifle. He slowed for a curve in the road and then began again to accelerate. “Why is it that you utilize arms from five centuries ago, and in such a poor condition?”

“Isolated as we were, there was no need for the mass production of arms, although we had the capability. When we re-emerged, it was practical to arm our military forces with the weapons from before the Dragon Wind, but as we realized we had a fierce and implacable enemy in the Second City, it became necessary to revise these plans. And the production of arms was begun. We have a well-equipped army, but to equip our Mongol mercenaries with the newer weapons would betray them as being in our employ. So the old weapons are still issued.”

Michael started into the final straightaway which would feed into the city itself, Han saying to him, “The first petal, there —turn into the access route.”

“The first petal?”

“Does it not remind you of a flower, our city?”

Michael only nodded, slowing, taking the turn, then accelerating only a little. He expected security at any moment to come crashing abruptly down on them, but none had yet and none seemed forthcoming. “How do you guard this place?”

“You will soon see.”

Michael didn’t like the tone of the remark, and slowed the vehicle still more. The access road was leading into a tunnel which seemed to feed into the “petal,” as Han had called it.

“You should stop this conveyance here, American. Go no further.”

Michael realized in the next second that Han did not comprehend how brakes worked, the front end of the vehicle slamming into something that seemed impossibly nonresi-lient, sparks flying, electrical current flashing from the hood

of the German machine, the instruments on the dashboard going wild, beginning to smoke. Michael shuddered as the vehicle lurched backward, taking his hands involuntarily from the wheel, the “conveyance,” as Han again had called it, dead.

“What the hell-“

“You did not stop rapidly enough, American,” Han groused.

Michael Rourke looked at him. “Do you know the expression ‘Shove it up your ass’? What the — “

Maria Leuden shouted forward, “What is happening?” Bjorn Rolvaag’s dog growled menacingly.

Alarms were sounding now, armed men appearing from inside the tunnel which seemed to lead inside the petal, the assault rifles they carried decidedly different in profile from the five centuries old weapons he had seen earlier.

Han stepped out of the vehicle and began speaking in a loud voice, one of the armed men, but carrying a pistol and apparently an officer, signaling the others to stop their advance. Michael’s hands were on the butts of his Berettas beneath his coat. He didn’t draw them.

Han stopped speaking to the soldiers and turned to face Michael as Michael climbed out, the two staring at each other across the dented and wrinkled hood. “The current will be shut off momentarily,” Han smiled. “I told the officer in charge you are the ambassador from the United States of America and that the woman, the injured man and the green clad giant are your staff. We can clarify the details later.”

Michael shrugged, then started toward the rear of the vehicle to start moving Otto Hammerschmidt.

He wondered if Rolvaag’s dog, Hrothgar, had been elevated to ambassadorial rank as well?

Everyone pulled guard duty from time to time and Akiro Kurinami, not liking it, didn’t resent it. He imagined it was simply his turn to be unlucky.

The guard posts were divided equally among the Germans who supported their otherwise untenable position at Eden Base and the Eden personnel, every other post German, every other post Eden. Because of the international composition of the Eden astronaut corps, few called themselves Americans.

Kurinami, huddled in his parka, gripped the M-16 that was slung to his body merely by the pistol grip, his gloved trigger finger alongside the trigger guard. He expected no trouble. The German surveillance devices would have detected it. But guard tours were necessary — as John Rourke would have put it, “It pays to plan ahead.”

Soon, he would see John Rourke again, and Paul and Annie, and Sarah, and of course Natalia Tiemerovna. What an exquisite creature, he thought.

They would come for the wedding.

He had drawn perhaps the most remote of the guardposts and with the heavy snow that had begun a few hours before, visibility was less than a hundred yards. But it was, in one respect, a good time for security. Every guard would be

awake and moving, patrolling his post, since it was the only way to keep from freezing. The abrupt change from cold to below freezing with snow had been unexpected. But he supposed that with the radical change in the earth’s environment, the unexpected was to be expected. Had it been less nearer to dawn, he doubted he would have been able to see his hand in front of his face.

His thoughts focused on Elaine Halversen, soon to be Elaine Kurinami. Thinking of her somehow kept him warmer. Someday, he knew, they would both look back on this as they told their children of the early days of the return to earth, of having to stand guard in the middle of what could soon turn from a heavy snowfall into hard blizzard conditions, and the children would stare at them, agape at such an existence —

He thought he saw something moving as a gust of wind cut through him like a knife and temporarily cleared the air of snow.