Survivalist - 15 - Overlord (24 page)

“About five hundred and fifty miles,” Rubenstein said. “We’ll never make it in time.”

“The trains, sir,” the chairman said, “will travel at speeds in excess of 250 kilometers per hour.”

“The Tokaido Bullet Train —Holy God,” Paul Rubenstein whispered.

“What is this?” Maria Leuden asked, her curiosity forcing her to interrupt.

John Rourke looked at her. “Before the Night of The War, the Japanese had conventionally powered rapid rail service consisting of hundreds of trains —two hundred and two, I believe — which ran in regular service at surface speeds in excess of 155 miles per hour. Everything changes and

nothing changes,” he smiled.

Michael’s eyes were elsewhere for an instant as she looked up at him. “About four hours or a little better. We can work it out to the minute,” he volunteered.

John Rourke lit his cigar.

His voice was, again, like a whisper. “We’ll need troops, if you can spare them. I don’t know how many of Karamatsov’s people are in those six gunships. We’ll just have to pray that in four hours he can’t locate the warheads and get them moved and get airborne or we’ve lost it forever. Once the Russians have nuclear weapons again, the game is up. Karamatsov will use them. And now I’ve gotta do something I don’t want to do.”

John Rourke looked at the chairman. “How long, considering the weather, before we can be aboard one of those trains? There literally isn’t a minute to lose. And will they travel at high speed under these conditions?”

The chairman spoke in Chinese with Han, Han running to a telephone located just inside the tunnel mouth. It seemed an eternity to her as she looked from Michael to his father, to the chairman, to Paul Rubenstein, then back to Michael. But when Han returned she realized it was perhaps no more than three minutes.

The chairman nodded and Han addressed them all.

“I have been informed that indeed the train can run unimpaired and, on order, can be readied for boarding in less than ten minutes. The train can be reached within five minutes utilizing the monorail system. One hundred crack troops under the command of the Intelligence Service will be in full batde gear and at the train within twelve minutes. I will personally command them.”

John Rourke only nodded. He took the microphone from the enlisted soldier standing beside the radio. If he — Rourke —was cold, he didn’t show it, his parka open, his hood down, his cigar clamped in his teeth. “Courier, this is Watchman. Come in. Over.”

Natalia’s voice came back, the static worse this time. “This is Courier, Watchman. Reading you with heavy static. Over.”

“I have to ask you to do something that I could regret for the rest of my life. There is strong reason to believe our friends are about to unearth thirty-three thermonuclear warheads, Natalia. Paul and Michael and I are coming with a large force to stop them, but won’t arrive for four hours or a litde over that. They can’t be allowed — ” He stopped for a moment.

Natalia’s voice came back over the radio. She knew enough about radios to realize they were broadcasting on one band, receiving on another. “John. I’ll love you with the last breath of my body and after that. I understand.”

John Rourke handed the microphone to Paul Rubenstein and shook his head. Maria Leuden watched the father of the man she loved, a father who a moment ago had seemed young enough to be his brother and was, in fact, that young. But as he closed his eyes, John Rourke now suddenly looked very old and alone.

She never wanted that for Michael, his son.

She had picked the two most competent of the security team, the commander who was a lieutenant and a corporal. They were preparing the Specials. Since there were only three of the motorcycles, only three could go.

Natalia Anastasia Tiemerovna girded herself for batde. The shoulder holster with the stainless steel Walther PPK/S American was in place, the Walther’s silencer affixed. She snapped it out, giving the silencer a good luck twist to make sure it was secure, then reholstering it in the Ken Null holster.

She had removed her gunbelt when she had taken the copilot’s seat for added comfort. She now put it on, securing the double billeted belt with the matching black leather Safariland full flap holsters. She checked each of the twin stainless Smith & Wesson L-Frame revolvers in turn, the guns custom action-tuned and polished, the four-inch barrels slab sided and American Eagles emblazoned on the right barrel flats by Metalife Industries as a gift to Samuel Chambers who eventually became the first and last president of United States II. He had given them to her for her efforts in aiding with the evacuation of combatants and civilians from doomed peninsula Florida five centuries ago. She holstered the guns.

In her backpack was the Walther P-38 9mm she had ‘liberated’ from the Place, the place of Madison’s birth. Pretty Madison, who had carried Michael’s baby, who had died so senselessly. Soon all who lived on the battered earth might die.

She put the pistol under her belt against her abdomen.

She hugged her arms to herself, shivering with cold. But it was not cold in the cabin of the J-7V. It was the cold within herself.

She checked both M-16s carefully.

She pulled on her parka, then tied the silk scarf over her hair, the second scarf over the lower portion of her face.

Natalia Anastasia Tiemerovna, daughter of a Russian ballerina and a Jewish Soviet dissident, raised as the niece of the commanding general of the Army of Occupation of North America, Ishmael Verikov, wife by act of insanity to the Hero Marshal of the Soviet Union Vladmir Karamatsov—Natalia Anastasia Tiemerovna, Major, Committee for State Security, opened the fuselage door and stepped into the howling winds of the blizzard. But she knew where she was going—to meet her fate.

It was comfortably warm inside the train, Rourke stripped off his parka and sweater, the seat opposite him occupied by his guns and gear.

Natalia—if she too died —

He exhaled so loudly that Paul, seated opposite him, in the aisle of the passenger car, looked across at him. Rourke simply looked away.

He was tired of it all. Very tired of it. War, for as long as he could remember. When he had been in the CIA as a case officer, he had fought terrorists and those who would steal his nation’s secrets. When he had left CIA and freelanced to teach and write, it had always devolved to him teaching in the field and that had always meant —

Then the Night of The War had come. And since then —

John Rourke began the mechanical things which were needed, which logic decreed he do. He began with the twin stainless Detonics mini-guns he had carried —for how long? Their principal designer had been an old friend and designed a .45 ACP pistol which was as ultimately reliable as such a machine could be because he knew the same things Rourke knew. The Python, its action more watchlike than other revolvers of its type and demanding more careful maintenance, but unmatched for what he carried it for,

accuracy. The Scorernasters he had taken from the Place, from where Michael had taken his bride who was now dead.

One by one, all of the guns he checked and, satisfied, put them down.

The two knives which had saved his life the last time — in the crevasse. The custom Crain Life Support System X. The little A.G. Russell Sting IA black chrome which he had carried almost as long as the little Detonics pistols.

Faces. Friends. Memories.

John Rourke sat alone. He had learned throughout his life one thing. For him, it was a natural state. He closed his eyes and leaned his head back. He would not sleep.

Vladmir Karamatsov had cursed the night because the snow had become so heavy that his helicopter gunships were grounded and his vehicles could barely move along the roads and his army had ground to a halt.

He stood in the radio truck, the static making it hard to hear. He strained his ears, wanting not to miss a word.

Ivan Krakovski’s voice came to him, like a longed-for spirit in the night. “We have located the cache and are proceeding at this hour with removal of contents. Conditions too severe for flight. Have located train tracks and a high speed train. This is part of a Chinese civilization found near the site of the cache.

“Train personnel,” Krakovski’s voice continued, “indicate larger city to northeast of current position, some one thousand kilometers. Storm seems to be breaking from the north. Can you pick us up? Over.”

“Tell him to go on. I wish to know more,” Karamatsov snapped to the communications officer, the officer repeating his words into the table top microphone.

Krakovski’s voice resumed. “Intend load contents of cache aboard high speed train and proceed northeasterly at best speed. Will keep this frequency open. Requesting airlift approximately five hundred kilometers from current position

when weather breaks. Leaving small complement with helicopters in the event weather information incorrect and storm breaks from south. Awaiting further orders. Krakovski over.”

Karamatsov thought for a moment. The weather had been breaking from the north. He had been told that in a matter of perhaps an hour he could risk getting gunships off the ground and taking them northward.

He took the microphone from the table and held it in his hand. “This is Karamatsov. Proceed with train to position five hundred kilometers northeast of your current position. Maintain constant radio contact. Am sending gunships within one hour to circle north of the storm and retrieve your personnel and your cargo. Was it all there?” He forgot to use the right words. “Over,” he added lamely.

“This is Krakovski, Comrade Marshal. Affirmative. Contents of cache as expected. No map. I say again, there was no map. Over.”

Karamatsov threw the microphone to the table and stormed toward the doors of the truck, throwing them open, snow and cold and wind almost consuming him as he shrieked his rage into the night.

The Specials had been built for rugged terrain and high snow, but not for this, the going slow, so very slow, sometimes the drifting snow forcing them to dismount and struggle ahead, on foot, virtually carrying the machines only so they could ride again when the drifting was less great.

Time was fleeting and it was her obsession. If Vladmir were to possess thirty-three nuclear warheads, he would rule the entire world or destroy it.

An hour into the crossing to the point where the Soviet gunships had landed, she ordered a halt.

There was the perfunctory encoded radio contact with the J-7V, no fresh news of John Rourke and the fabulous sounding high speed train, no fresh news of any change in the radar profile the J7-V was barely able to hold of the six gunships.

The German corporal came to her and offered her hot coffee from the thermos-like canteen he carried and she took a sip of it, telling him, “Thank you,” leaving the scarf down,

struggling to light a cigarette if she could only fight the wind long enough. The German corporal cupped his hands over hers and the lighter and, by sucking in her breath as hard as she could the instant there was flame, she had the cigarette lit. “Thank you again.”

“You are most welcome, Fraulein Major.”

He was practising his English on her, she knew, English a requirement for the officer corps of New Germany and, with the war, the chances for attaining rank faster, better. He had a nice face, what she could see of it. She offered the cigarette to him.

“No thank you, Fraulein Major—I do not cigarette smoke.”

“You do not smoke cigarettes, not ‘do not cigarette smoke’. Okay?”

“Yes—okay, Fraulein Major.”

“How old are you, corporal?” They were sitting in the shelter of some rocks, precious little shelter, his lieutenant scouting ahead at the man’s own request.

“I have nineteen years, Fraulein Major.”

“You are nineteen years old —not what you said.”

“Thank you once more, Fraulein Major,” and he laughed, then told her, “Forgive my talking, but I think that the Fraulein Major is very beautiful.”

She leaned toward him quickly and touched her lips to his cheek and then pulled away. “Thank you, Corporal,” she told him.

It was time to go and she stood up, dragging heavily on the cigarette. If her calculations were correct, in twenty minutes the gunships and the rail line near which they had landed should be in sight …

It was a rail terminus, she realized. Several train cars and what appeared to be an engine, long, sleek, drifted with snow, stood off on a siding beyond a small, low prefabricated

building and beside that a tower, which she assumed oversaw the switching. A second engine was hissing steam on what appeared to be the main track, several transport cars and what might have been passenger cars already coupled to it, Soviet personnel boarding the train. She realized she was too late. With the night vision turned on, through the German binoculars she could clearly see a vast crater some two hundred yards beyond the rail line itself, apparently freshly blasted since much of the dirt was still uncovered by snow. It was here then that her husband’s personnel had found their thermonuclear warheads.

Beyond the crater, the sea rose in a mighty fury, whitecaps gleaming with what seemed their own luminescence, on the near side of the isthmus, less than a hundred yards from her, a lake, whitecaps here too, the lake’s farther shore further than she could reach even with the aid of the powerful German optics.

The corporal whom she had helped with his English was at her left, the officer at her right, the three of them crouched beneath the crown of a small ice-slicked ridge, her body shaking with cold but the shaking still managable, survivable.

What transpired below seemed clear to her. The storm precluded the possibility of safely taking off with the cargo of nuclear warheads aboard. Logic dictated that the alternative to evacuation of the site would have been fortifying it against attack until the weather cleared. Logic. But perhaps the Soviet commander was privy to meteorological data to which she was not. The rail line could go only northeast from here, and if he knew the weather were breaking from the north, and if the front were as distended as it appeared, then it would be logical to assume that even now some of her husband’s gunships from the main body of his force significantly to the north and west, would be able to get airborne. Circumstances suggested a rendezvous to collect the thermonuclear devices. She could not imagine her husband wasting