Survivalist - 15 - Overlord (2 page)

With a still smaller force, the Germans monitored the movements of Karamatsov’s army. Had there been only one force of Russians, it would have been difficult to attack, the odds perilously high in favor of the enemy. But with two enemy forces and those friendly forces divided, the possibility of attack was non-existent.

Observe, occasionally harass, try to outguess—it was the only strategy allowed them now. That, and learning their destination.

The Icelandics had no army, no weapons of war except those provided by the Germans since the recently inaugurated alliance, no fighting men except the men of their largely ceremonial police force.

At Eden Base, there were teachers, construction specialists, medical and biological sciences personhel, agriculturalists, astronauts all, almost the last survivors from before the Night of The War. The Eden Project itself was a last ditch survival scenario for the best and brightest of humanity when the unthinkable occurred. Some indeed were among the best and brightest, Rourke mused. Akiro Kurinami, Dr. Elaine Halversen, some others. But some had no more to offer the desolated earth than did the Karamatsovs or the short-sighted, hard-headed men who had allowed the Kara

matsovs to thrive, to grasp power and run with it.

John Rourke had not stayed with the German army which doggedly pursued Karamatsov. There had been no imperative. He had flown, instead, direcdy to the Hekla Community in Iceland where Sarah, his wife, had remained.

John Rourke had held Sarah in his arms as they stood in the snow and stared at the all but obscured cross which marked the grave of Michael’s murdered wife, Madison, and of the unborn child she had carried. Once, as Rourke had held his wife, his hand had touched at her already slightly swelling abdomen and he pondered the fate of their unborn child. His grown son, Michael, his grown daughter, Annie, and her husband, Rourke’s best friend Paul Rubenstein, had stood with him there. And beside Michael, a look of not belonging but wanting desperately to belong in her eyes, had been the German archeologist Fraulein Doctor Maria Leuden.

Natalia too had been there. The look Rourke had seen in Maria Leuden’s eyes was one with which John Rourke had considerable familiarity. He had seen it so often in Natalia’s eyes.

Madison Rourke and her unborn child had been casualties in the growing war for the future of mankind, a war which had begun five centuries earlier when the super powers had launched against each other, a war that had nearly claimed all life on earth, when the very atmosphere had ionized and the sky had turned to flame, the flames rolling across the skies of earth with the rising sun.

Then five centuries had passed, Rourke and his wife and his son and daughter and his friend Paul and—and Natalia—having survived in cryogenic sleep, awakening to await the return of the Eden Project Fleet to bring life again to earth.

But there had been life within the earth—the Germans in their mountain redoubt in Argentina, a people stifling under a resurgent Nazism and literally gasping for the breath of

democracy; the survival communities of Iceland, the always peaceful island spared from the Great Conflagration by a freak of nature within the Van Allen belts, dedicating themselves to peace and learning; the Soviets in their Underground City in the Ural Mountains, preparing to return to the surface of the earth after five centuries of readying for conquest, their leader one who had survived the intervening five centuries by cryogenic sleep, as had Rourke and his family, their leader Vladmir Karamatsov, and with him a few selected members of his KGB Elite Corps.

There was other life as well —the community called “The Place” from which Michael, Rourke and Paul and Natalia aiding him, had rescued the girl Madison, unknowingly rescued her for an early grave in a land which she had never heard of, the victim of a war which had begun five centuries before her birth.

Madison’s birthplace had been a survival community as well, but ill-prepared physically or emotionally for survival. Rourke at times wondered what mass graves archeologists of some future epoch would uncover, mass graves that were to have been mass shelters, survival redoubts. And there was, at least, one survival experiment which had gone equally as wrong but through totally different means. The result was what were called by the Soviets “The Wild Tribes of Europe,” their bodies malformed, malnutritioned, their intellectual development all but arrested, the last remnants of a French survival community which had left its shelter and returned to the surface too soon, the background radiation from the Night of The War still too high. They had resorted to primitivism, the kind earliest man had arisen from.

Rourke had found himself thinking often now that perhaps these men and women of The Wild Tribes were the incarnate destiny of all mankind.

Rourke had wanted to stay with Sarah, but could not, and because of her pregnancy, she could not accompany him. He had first returned to the Retreat in the mountains of

northeastern Georgia, taking Michael with him, Paul and Annie staying behind in Hekla with Sarah, Maria Leuden staying with them.

There had been no desire to visit the site of Eden Base — there was bad feeling still there which had not healed. But soon he would have to return, for the forthcoming wedding of Kurinami and Halversen, friends he valued.

At the Retreat —he could only spare two days and a night —he had resupplied, both the Retreat and himself, bringing to it cases of the German manufactured ammunition for his handguns and long guns, the ammunition manufactured to be the duplicate of the Federal ammunition he had trusted and used and with which he had originally stocked the Retreat. Thousands of rounds now—the Germans made for him as much as he wished — he secreted with Michael’s help. New food supplies, new tires for his vehicles which the Germans had manufactured to the tolerances he had specified, new belts, new gaskets, everything that in five centuries could have become damaged or potentially unusable he now replaced, the Germans willing to meet his every need with their manufacturing expertise. As their leader Deiter Bern had said, a small reward to be given to a man who had almost single-handedly brought New Germany democracy. And, most sought after of all the fresh supplies, fresh meat, bombarded with radiation to kill bacteria and then frozen for storage.

Michael had asked, “Why are you doing this? Re-stocking the Retreat?”

And, John Rourke had told his son, “It pays to plan ahead.”

Michael had asked nothing more.

Rourke had taken some necessities from the Retreat as well —more of the cigars Annie had faithfully made for him. They somehow tasted better than the non-carcinogenic types the Germans produced, several thousand of which were now stored in the Retreat in his freezers. A new lensatic compass,

his broken during the fighting at the Soviet Underground City, an occurrence he had only realized long after it had taken place.

And a new knife.

They had flown back from the Retreat to Iceland, then with Paul and Natalia as well, Rourke and his son had returned to the icy wastelands of Europe, Rourke first briefing Sarah and Annie as to the new supplies he had laid in at the Retreat.

And then Michael, Maria Leuden, and a team of German commandos, had gone on ahead.

Rourke’s head ached from staring through the binoculars, as he had almost without stop for more than an hour, with no sleep in the last thirty hours, with the fatigue of combat so recently endured.

Rourke looked at Natalia beside him as he set the binoculars down on the snow-covered rocks in which they crouched. “You watch that recon patrol for a while.”

“Why don’t you take something for your headache, John?”

Rourke only nodded. He carried painkillers with his medical kit, but the kit, his musette bag with its spare magazines and other necessities and his assault rifle were at the base of the rocks with the Germans who waited there out of sight of the Karamatsov army or the slow moving reconnaissance patrol which was attempting to rejoin it.

Instead, Rourke unsheathed the knife he had taken from storage at the Retreat from the heavy, black leather scabbard on the belt of his Levis. He had saved this knife for Michael, but with the knife given Michael by old Jon at the Hekla Community, Michael would have no need of it. He began to unscrew the knife’s buttcap.

He felt Natalia’s eyes for an instant and he looked over to her, but she had already looked away, peering through the German field glasses she had adopted. But she spoke. “It’s curious.”

“What’s curious?”

“That knife the old gentleman at Hekla gave Michael —a copy of the knife that you had saved for Michael, only smaller. But a copy of the same maker’s work. I mean, it is a strange coincidence.”

“Quality endures,” Rourke nodded, slipping the transparent plastic tube from inside the knife’s hollow handle, uncorking one end, the end nearest the painkillers, the water purification tablets and the antibiotic tablets.

Inside the knife’s hollow handle, he had placed other items of possible necessity: a spare extractor that would fit either of the twin stainless Detonics pistols he carried, or for that matter, fit the Scoremasters now frequently carried in his belt; hooks and sinkers (an old survival” habit) in the event somewhere on earth fish still remained, the nylon cord which wrapped the machined steel tube that formed the handle the necessary line; a sealed plastic capsule of lubricant; waterproof and windproof matches; an emergency suture.

A pouch on the outside of the sheath body accommodated a small sharpening stick and a still smaller magnesium ingot, a few shavings of the magnesium sufficient to ignite a fire even in conditions of extreme dampness.

The painkillers were essentially the modern equivalent of extra strength acetaminophen tablets.

Medicine had made great strides through the research of the scientists of New Germany in the five centuries since the Great Conflagration. But headaches, along with the common cold, athletes foot and warts still eluded comprehensive cure.

The technology for delivery of medication to the system had also advanced. The painkiller tablets were as small in size as the water purification tablets.

He needed no water to swallow the pills.

“Satisfied?” Rourke asked Natalia, smiling.

“Yes,” she murmured. “How much longer?”

John Rourke glanced at the black-faced Rolex Submariner on his left wrist. It was twelve past the hour. “Three

minutes.”

Natalia nodded, her eyes still seemingly glued to the binoculars.

It was a psychological victory which they hoped for, and a tactical victory in that however much Vladmir Karamatsov’s march could be slowed was that much more time in which to anticipate his final objective and somehow take steps to counter it. Time for Michael to perhaps locate Karamatsov’s objective.

Rourke eyed the Rolex again. A minute and a few seconds remained. He turned his body around, crouching now to peer over the rocks, but not using the binoculars. It was too early in the medication’s cycle for the headache to even begin to subside.

With the naked eye, the snake of Karamatsov’s column appeared more wormlike, and the twenty-four men of the second reconnaissance patrol seemed little more than stick figures as they struggled upward to reach the ridgeline. He was almost glad the time had nearly arrived. The exertions of the stick figures, in vain, would soon be ended.

Rourke looked still again to his watch—the sweep second hand was moving inexorably toward the twelve.

Faintly, perceptible to him perhaps only because he listened for the sound, came the whining roar of German fighter aicraft, the entire squadron of six which had been sent from Argentina to aid their efforts against the Russians. Rourke had not yet flown one. And six were all the Germans could spare, attempting to defend their own homeland in what had been Argentina, Eden Base in Georgia in what had been the United States and the people of Iceland, all from possible attack from Karamatsov’s as yet unaccounted for forces in the Western Hemisphere.

Rourke craned his neck toward the sound, not bothering with binoculars, seeing the gradually growing dark shapes coming in low over the horizon, like streaks of black smoke, growing disproportionately large as they passed overhead,

Rourke’s eyes following them. “Duck!” Rourke commanded, pulling Natalia down, his right arm coiling around her shoulders, drawing her head against his chest. But he kept his own face just by the lip of the rocks, so he could see.

The six fighter aircraft fired their machineguns, strafing the twenty-four man patrol, the stick figures scattering like leaves before a strong wind, the bodies tumbling along the defile, battering against the rocks below, all but one of the six aircraft flying on, the sixth fighter breaking off, half-barrel rolling, banking steeply, flying back. Rourke held Natalia tighter. The fighter swept low, a contrail from one of the missile pods beneath the portside wing, and suddenly the defile seemed almost to vaporize, the fighter streaking over it as the black and orange fireball belched upward, the fighter vanishing in the direction of the five other fighters, toward Karamatsov’s column.

John Rourke swept the binoculars up, peering through them, Natalia fully erect beside him now, Rourke standing as well, explosions starting in the distance. It would be hit and run, a single pass along the length of the column, then a return pass and then gone. But it would slow the inexorably advancing snake as it made its way —toward what, Rourke wondered?

Michael Rourke stepped down from the German jeep-like vehicle almost before it had stopped, the gravel still crunching beneath its wheels as it settled, crunching beneath his combat boots as he stepped away, his left hand coming to rest on the butt of the four-inch Model 629 Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum. He moved his hand away. It was becoming a habit and somehow he had always found himself resisting the formation of habit.

The granite spires and upswept walls of the Greater Khingan Range rose before him, an offset spinal column separating Inner Mongolia from Manchuria, separating one near subarctic expanse of nothingness from another. They had rolled the jeep-like vehicle from its carry position inside the largest of the three helicopters that morning and decided to examine the terrain from the ground as opposed to the method, the search pattern, which had been used since they had first set out.