Survivalist - 15 - Overlord (8 page)

“Jesus,” Rourke cried into the darkness.

He was trapped.

Annie Rourke —Sarah Rourke watched her, praying for the child. The gift the girl had was also a curse, perhaps more a curse than a gift at all.

“I can feel him, Momma —he’s trapped —he’s in darkness. He’s never been so tired. I can feel him thinking—about us and never seeing us again —Momma!”

Sarah Rourke held her daughter tightly in her arms. They were trapped under enemy fire, had no radio, were still at least a quarter mile from the rim of the volcano. And Annie Rourke had said a word which said it all, moaned the word like pain —ice.

“John!” Sara screamed her husband’s name until her throat ached with it …

Natalia Anastasia Tiemerovna felt something—Annie? She looked at Paul Rubenstein beside her, crouched near the

height of the cone, Russians in front of them, some still behind them, the defenders of Hekla counter-attacking now, Natalia and Paul pinned down. Natalia closed her eyes. “Where’s John,” she asked.

In her self-imposed darkness, she heard Paul Rubenstein saying, “Where the hell is he?” Annie …

Annie Rourke focused her concentration. If her father were in danger Natalia and Paul might be near by. Natalia … She whispered the word, “Natalia … Natalia … please, Natalia …”

He was sealed in the crevasse. The ice could have been feet thick or only inches thick. He didn’t know which. Rourke stood, balanced on the handle of the Crain knife, his legs cramping because he couldn’t move them, his feet falling asleep, losing all sensation. He tried wiggling his toes inside his boots but with the added numbing effect of the cold, they could barely respond. With the A.G. Russell Sting IA he chiselled at the ice over his head, hammering at the butt of the knife with the Pachmayr gripped butt of the Metalifed and Mag-na-Ported Colt Python from the holster at his right hip. The ice was chipping away, but piteously slowly.

The walls of ice groaned again. The last time they had made it such that he could not keep both shoulders level and still be able to move freely; this time it confined him still more.

He stopped hammering, his strength, his very ability to raise his hands all but ebbed away. The next time the walls closed, he would be crushed or forced to drop downward, abandoning any hope of survival. But his will had not ebbed away.

John Rourke could barely see, the darkness all but absolute now.

He had never cared to gamble at cards or dice —life was

too much of a gamble as it was, no matter how one planned ahead. And it was time again to gamble, the stakes all or nothing. If the ice were too thick —

He blotted thoughts of defeat from his mind. Again, his thoughts focused on Sarah, Michael, Annie, Paul —and Natalia. He loved two women. He might never see either of them again.

John Rourke wrapped the sling carefully around the blade of the Sting IA and pocketed it. Clinically, his years of firearms expertise summoned up, as though he were punching up a file in a computer. The .357 Magnum over the .45 ACP had the greatest hydrostatic shock value. It would be the Python then. He wasn’t looking to knock down the ice, but rather burst through it.

He drew himself downward; ironically, it was easier now with the walls having closed in around him, the ice making him shiver with the cold.

Rourke took his dark-lensed aviator style sunglasses from an interior pocket, placed them over his eyes. He was totally blinded. He removed the glasses, could barely see the section of ice he had chipped away at, memorized the range of motion needed and then replaced the glasses. As he clung to the ice wall, wedged there over the Crain knife which still supported his feet, John Rourke thrust the Python upward, the muzzle pointed by feel, the six-inch rocking gently in his fist as he fired, his ears ringing with it. He fired a double tap, chunks of ice toppling down around him. He fired another single round, then the last double tap, the cylinder empty.

Rourke could no longer hear even his own breathing. His ears were filled with hollow roars.

He removed the sunglasses, looking up. He could barely detect that some larger chunks of ice were shot away. Still no opening into the arctic night above him.

Rourke worked the cylinder release catch, thumbing it rearward, with his trigger finger pushing out the cylinder,

shaking the revolver over the abyss, the empty brass falling away. He felt in one of the musette bags, finding one of the Safariland speedloaders, ramming it by feel into the cylinder, against the ejector star, the cartridges dumping as he awkwardly held the revolver between his knees. He pocketed the speedloader. If he survived, it would be needed. He told himself he would survive.

He closed the cylinder, taking the revolver again in his right fist. The ice walls shuddered, closing around him again. Rourke turned sideways, the walls against his chest and back. The pistol overhead, he worked the trigger as fast as it could be double-actioned, the howling roar in his ears intensifying, the pelting of chunks of ice intensifying, his glasses pocketed, his eyes averted, closed.

The Python was empty.

John Rourke looked up.

Moonlight.

Rourke rammed the Python into the full flap holster at his right hip, closing the flap so he wouldn’t lose the revolver. The Crain knife—he must get it. The walls of ice started to shudder, closing, faster now, Rourke pushing himself up, finding the Sting IA in his right pocket, gouging it into the ice overhead, holding to the sling.

He let his feet slip from the handle of the Crain knife, using almost the last of his strength to pry it free of the ice, then throw his arms up sideways in a ragged arc and thrust the knife into the ice overhead. He pulled himself up, still holding to the sling with his right hand.

He pulled —his head pushed through the crack in the ice.

The crevasse was shuddering closed.

John Rourke wrenched the Crain knife free of the ice as he thrust his upper body into the sub-zero night, a strange warmth rushing over him. He rolled his body free, his legs barely responding, jerking at the sling which was still attached to the Russell knife, the smaller knife arcing up and out of the crevasse as the crevasse sealed, the ice beneath

Rourke’s body shuddering violendy, Rourke sagging to his back, his left fist still clutching the Crain knife. “American!”

The English was bad, but it was heavily accented with Russian and Rourke couldn’t hold that against the speaker.

He saw the man, one of the Soviet assault rifles in both the man’s fists, the man less than six feet away, levelling the rifle to fire.

The Life Support System X was not made for throwing, was not balanced for throwing. A good man, Rourke’s father had once told him, could underhand anything from a kitchen knife to a shortsword at small distances. Rourke snapped his left hand and arm forward as he rolled toward the man, his left hand loosing the haft of the Crain System X, the foot long blade snapping into the moonlight between them, burying itself in the Soviet soldier’s chest as the assault rifle sprayed into the ice. John Rourke tried to stand, but couldn’t. His eyes started to close.

Paul Rubenstein had elected to go, Natalia providing covering fire for him with two of the M-16s, friendly forces to close for use of the grenade launcher. “Ready?”

“Ready,” Rubenstein answered, swinging the M-16 forward on its sling.

“Now!” Natalia shouted, Paul Rubenstein pushing up from the crouch and sprinting away from the rocks behind which they had taken cover, heavy light machinegun fire coming at him as he dodged and ran, the sound of Natalia with an M-16 behind him.

He was making toward the sparsest portion of enemy resistance behind them, going back to look for John Rourke. Natalia told him that somehow she sensed Annie and somehow she sensed that something was wrong about John. She didn’t know how or why.

And Paul Rubenstein ran. The Soviet forces were nearly finished, but fighting to the last man as Rubenstein had anticipated they would, as John Rourke had soberly predicted, bitterly predicted. It seemed ingrained in the Soviet military mentality to fight until resistance was no longer possible, then to continue to fight. He wondered if it were a subconscious racial memory of the Sege of Stalingrad, or just indoctrination, or perhaps both. He kept running, two

Soviet troopers opening up from behind an ice ridge to his left. Rubenstein threw himself down, firing, spraying into the ice ridge, huge chunks of ice flying; Rubenstein found one of the German grenades, baseball shaped and copied after American grenades he had seen in movies —how long ago. He pulled the pin, hurtling the grenade toward the ice ridge, then pushing up to his feet and running again as it exploded, knowing the damage it would do.

He kept running, nearly clear of enemy fire now, a few straggling Soviet soldiers still to be seen, some fewer of them wounded. Rubenstein started shouting. “John! John Rourke! Where are you?” It seemed inconceivable to him that something could have happened—he realized subconsciously that he thought of John Rourke as being like an immortal, somehow impervious to death. “John!” The thought chilled him more than the bone chilling cold of the night.

He saw something—far to his right, farther away from the volcanic cone. Paul Rubenstein threw himself into the run. The clothing color was wrong for the Soviet troopers or even the Germans — white snow smock, but part of it pulled up, black winter gear revealed beneath it in the moonlight, the body tall, even fully reclined as it was —a man well over six feet in height, long limbed.

“Shit! John!”

Paul Rubenstein let the assault rifle fall to his right side on its sling, grasping the Schmeisser from where it was suspended at his left side, throwing back the bolt, ready for close range work, whatever came. “John!”

He skidded to his knees on the ice, half calculated, half miscalculated, slipping. He fell face forward, his face inches from the unconscious visage of the tall, lean man. The face was gray, seeming lifeless. John Rourke’s face.

“John!”

Paul Rubenstein crawled toward his friend, his left glove coming off, ripping it away with his teeth. His hands

touched at Rourke’s face —cold as death. “John! Answer me! John!”

Behind him, he heard movement. Rubenstein wheeled there on his knees beside the best friend he had ever had, the man he loved more than a brother—There was a dead Russian, a knife impaling him through the chest, the knife John Rourke had started carrying since the last quick trip John and Michael had made to the Retreat.

Beyond the knife-dead soldier was a figure, moving, then another. Two Russian soldiers, advancing out of the shadow beyond a rising ice ridge.

Paul Rubenstein threw his body over that of his friend to protect him, throwing the Schmeisser on line with the enemy soldiers, inside himself screaming at the senselessness of this, all of it, killing men who were total strangers. “Die! Fuck you!” Rubenstein triggered a burst from the subgun, then another and another, the two bodies going down, then still rocking with the hits as he kept firing until the Schmeisser was empty and still. Rubenstein drew the battered Browning High Power from the tanker holster beneath his parka as he almost ripped it open, setting the pistol on John Rourke’s chest, shrugging out of the jacket, then folding it around John Rourke as he raised his friend’s lifeless seeming form into a sitting position, the body cold, stiff—rigid? “John! Damnit, answer me! John!” Rubenstein gripped the High Power in his right fist, hugging his friend’s body to his, trying to give John Rourke the warmth of his own body.

“Natalia! Help me! It’s John!” He kept screaming for her, praying inside himself that John Rourke would say to stop the noise, would at least stir. But there was no movement. “John! Damnit, don’t die!” And he rocked his friend’s body against his to give him warmth.

It was stupid to move in the darkness, but the light they had seen, like a fire but where a fire should not have been, had been impossible to ignore. There were fires of course, a lightning strike. But this fire — something different about it, Michael Rourke had felt, resisting the thought that he had felt it intuitively. He left the mysticism to his sister, Annie.

The fire —it had to be investigated.

Michael Rourke glanced behind him, the thin line of pale yellow along the horizon almost imperceptibly wider than it had been a moment earlier; nearly dawn. His eyes shifted to Bjorn Rolvaag and Rolvaag^ dog in the valley below them, placidly sitting beside the German vehicle.

Then Michael’s eyes shifted to Maria Leuden. She clambered along the rock face beside him, her pale cheeks flushed red with the cold and with exertion in the thin atmosphere. Her gray-green eyes met his. Michael looked away. He had no desire for the eyes of a beautiful woman now, half hidden behind glasses.

Ahead of them by a few yards was Otto Hammerschmidt, the German commando captain, holding his rifle in a hard assault position when the terrain allowed, Hammerschmidt hatless as was Michael Rourke, despite the cold, Hammerschmidt’s blond hair moving with the vagaries of the icy

wind.

Maria Leuden started to speak, Michael putting his right index finger to her lips in a gesture for silence. As he glanced at her she nodded comprehension and they continued moving.

Hammerschmidt disappeared over a large, breadloaf-shaped rock, the granite surface splotched with snow, Michael quickening his pace, Maria Leuden keeping pace with him. He admired her tenacity.

Michael reached the breadloaf-shaped rock and started searching for toeholds for his boots, clambering up then, but slowly, peering over the top of the rock surface. A gust of wind from the high plateau, which now spread almost endlessly before him assaulting his exposed skin with tiny specks of ice. He squinted against them, his eyes averted from the wind, turning his head to follow the vast expanse of the plateau with his eyes.

And then he saw what he knew Otto must have seen. He closed his eyes, tight —but not against the ice and wind. He opened his eyes. What he had seen was still there, though it shouldn’t have been there.