Survivalist - 15 - Overlord (9 page)

And there was no sign of Otto Hammerschmidt …

Otto Hammerschmidt had always enjoyed watching the videotapes from the twentieth century, especially the ones which were proscribed for viewing—it was like innocent sinning. In one such tape he had seen persons such as these. They were called barbarians. But, though the fur trimmed robes, the fur trimmed high boots, the long, curved bladed swords and the unnaturally small Asian horses were all much the same, in the videotaped film the barbarians had not carried guns. But these men did, unless the lone sentry who drowsed beside a snowswept rock a few feet from the remains of the massive fire which had drawn their attention during the night, had the only one.

He had always been a student of arms, and he recognized the general profile of the weapon held limply in the crook of the guard’s left elbow. It looked for all the world like a 7.62mm Type 68, which would have made it the Chinese counterpart of the antiquated but deadly efficient rifles the Rourke family still favored, the M-16.

There were six horses, and five sleeping men huddled near the fire wrapped in robes and blankets, plus the sixth man, the sentry.

The look of these men bespoke a dearth of technology, certainly such as would have been needed to survive the Night of The War and the Great Conflagration.

Their existence, then, was impossible, but here they were.

He had learned much recently about accepting the impossible as fact and then setting out to investigate what made it possible.

Hammerschmidt pushed himself up from the cluster of rocks behind which he had hidden, to peer more intently at the gear of the semi-sleeping guard. There was a belt pack radio.

“Fascinating,” Hammerschmidt murmured, exhaling, watching the steam of his breath cross his line of sight. The guard turned around.

The man started to his feet, shouting something in a guttural language that sounded like it could have been Chinese but was spoken badly.

Hammerschmidt had no real knowledge of languages beyond German and the mandatory English demanded of the officer corps —he was just guessing. But he didn’t have to guess that he had been detected.

The sentry swept his rifle up toward his shoulder. Hammerschmidt noticed a holster for a pistol on the man’s belt.

“Wait! I come in friendship!” He tried English first considering it more likely that a Chinese would speak English than German.

The sentry shouted again, some of the sleepers near the

fire starting to rise, grabbing up rifles from the ground beside them and pistols from beside their saddles where they had slept.

Hammerschmidt tried German — the same words had the same apparent lack of effect. “Scheiss!”

His mind raced. To kill one of these men could so damage the potential for contact as to—

One of the men coming up from a night’s sleep on the cold rocky ground fired a pistol, the pistol too, in the brief instant in which Hammerschmidt saw it, appearing for all the world like something belonging in a museum.

Hammerschmidt swung his assault rifle on line and sprayed, firing low, into the dirt about two meters in front of the sentry, the apparently sleepiest man of the bunch.

The pistol shot had missed by a wide margin, impacting one of the rocks about a hand’s breadth from Hammer-Schmidt’s left shoulder, Hammerschmidt dodging down and right.

He heard gunfire from behind him, starting to wheel toward it, realizing it had to be Michael Rourke and Maria Leuden, then keeping down …

Michael Rourke shouted to Maria Leuden, “Stay down,” as he swung the German assault rifle to his shoulder and fired, aiming for the partially burnt logs of the fire at the center of the —the Mongol camp. Great chunks of the logs— thick pine trunks —split and cracked and sparks flared, the five men nearest the fire starting to take cover, the sixth man, some sort of sentry dressed for all the world like someone from the army of Genghis Khan but armed with a Chinese Communist assault rifle, was still firing, either too brave to care or too dumb to understand. Michael somehow assumed the latter.

Maria Leuden was suddenly beside him, screaming and

Michael took his eyes from the German assault rifle’s sights and looked toward her, then followed her eyes toward the far left edge of his peripheral vision, then wheeled, turning toward the north, toward what she was staring at.

A cloud of snow, and perhaps dust too, rose in the distance, still diminutive figures of men and horses at its front, riding, now’ rifles firing into the air, what had to be war cries screeched into the wind.

“Holy shit —come on!”

Michael Rourke realized, as he grabbed Maria Leuden, shoving her along beside him, then finally the woman breaking into a run —the men around the campfire hadn’t hidden from his gunfire, but from seeing the same thing she had seen.

And none of it —none of it at all should have existed. Maria Leuden beside him, he ran, toward Hammerschmidt—but after that … “Run!”

John Rourke opened his eyes. He almost whispered, his throat parched as he spoke, “I must be in heaven —I’m surrounded by angels.”

His wife started to laugh, his daughter hugged him and Natalia Anastasia Tiemerovna closed her eyes and audibly sighed.

“What the hell’s that make me?”

He turned his head to track the voice —his ears were still ringing—and that was a mistake because when he moved his head began to ache maddeningly, his neck stiff, every muscle in his body seeming to come alive at one moment and scream at him to cease whatever idiocy he was attempting. He found the voice, already knowing its owner. It was Paul Rubenstein. “Don’t ask,” he smiled, closing his eyes with the pain …

Paul Rubenstein walked from the room at the Hekla base German military hospital and into the corridor where Dr. Munchen was waiting, after having summoned them from his office that John Rourke was reviving.

Munchen’s usually cosmopolitan look of reserve cracked into a smile. “Your marvelously lucky friend will be impos

sible to hold down here in the hospital in another few hours. I’d like to keep him for observation, but it probably isn’t necessary. Let him go home this evening—”

“Where’s home,” Paul Rubenstein smiled.

“A point well taken, Herr Rubenstein. But between all of you see if you can get him to drop by tomorrow —at his convenience of course. But my best medical opinion and my instinctive reaction is that he will be unimpaired by his ordeal except for some minor stiffness for a few days and some minor, temporary hearing loss.”

“Thank God,” Paul Rubenstein murmured.

“Yes — but also thank Herr Doctor Rourke for his tenacity while waiting for your God to point the way to his deliverance.”

Paul Rubenstein started to laugh …

The wind of the desert blew cold and Akiro Kurinami stood staring into the night, shivering a little but not yet ready to return to his tent, shared with a Spanish biotech specialist named Juliano Alverez de Zaragoza, as fine a combat helicopter pilot as ever lived. Alverez de Zaragoza had died in combat with the now defeated, now vanquished Soviet attack force.

But they would be back. Four other Eden personnel had died, several others had sustained minor wounds, eighteen Germans dead and many others wounded.

How many of the attacking Soviet force had lost their lives was impossible to gauge.

The Russians were a threat from without.

But a threat from within somehow worried him vastly more.

The missing rifles, the other supplies. And there was Commander Dodd’s cavalier attitude toward it all — or was it studied disregard, he wondered. The thought made him shiver all the more and he turned, startled, when he felt the

touch at his shoulder, so lost in thought he had heard no approach in the night.

He turned toward the touch — the chocolate brown skin of Elaine Halversen was somehow well defined in the moonlight, accentuating her cheekbones, making her appear more beautiful than he normally perceived her. He realized on an objective level that she was merely pretty, but subjectively —

“A penny for your thoughts, Akiro.”

He folded his arms around her and smelled her hair. He was familiar with the Americanism and whispered against her, “They have insufficient value, I think —not worth the penny.”

“Ahh, but I have a yen to know,” and she laughed at her bad pun and he held her more tightly against him.

“I’m worried. We shouldn’t be sitting out here in these tents while construction is going on for a permanent base. We could have delayed construction for a week and completed temporary fortifications that could have been cannibalized later. But we didn’t. And the missing weapons and supplies — Dodd didn’t really seem to care at all when I spoke of them with him.”

“He was probably concerned about the attack, that’s all,” Elaine told him. “You know —I mean I’m changing the subject,” and she stepped back from him, holding both his hands out at arm’s length. “Wrhen I was a little girl I traveled through this part of Georgia. It was never like this. There were people, road signs —there were even signs that said only white people could use a drinking fountain or a bathroom. Wasn’t that silly?”

“What about Japanese — we are neither white nor black.”

She seemed to ponder his remark, then laughed a little, a soft laugh that he had come to enjoy hearing very much. “I don’t know if you would have been treated like a white man or a—well —they called us colored people, and sometimes worse.”

“I like your color very much.” And Kurinami drew her

close to him again, staring skyward as he held her. It was silly that she called herself black. She was brown and so much warmer than the night …

The shrieking riders were closer now. Michael Rourke realized that he and Hammerschmidt and Maria Leuden were all but ignored as the six men from the fire which had originally drawn them up onto the plateau frantically saddled their mixed-breed horses. Snapping a frenzied and largely symbolic shot toward the riders, two of the six swung up into their saddles. One of the men still on the ground who had been wrestling his rearing mount, abandoned the animal, vaulting up behind one of the already mounted men, bashing the man in the side of the face with a pistol butt, then goading the animal ahead as he threw himself over the can tie of the saddle, his feet never finding the stirrups as the animal leaped ahead.

Michael looked at Maria Leuden, then at Hammerschmidt. “We’ve gotta see where they’re going and find out who those other guys are. Otto —keep down here with Maria and then as soon as everyone’s past, get’ the hell back down into the valley. I’ll use my radio to keep in touch. Good luck.”

He started up from his crouched position behind the rocks where Hammerschmidt had taken shelter, Hammerschmidt giving him a nod. But Maria Leuden reached out to him, her hands touching his face, one of them gloved and itchy from wool, the other soft, cool more than cold. “Come back,” and she kissed him hard on the mouth.

For some reason, he realized, he would always remember the look in her gray-green eyes at that instant. “I will,” he whispered, not knowing if she heard him, not knowing why he said it. He broke into a dead run toward the last three of the men from the fire, the largest of them starting aboard the largest of the animals. Michael angled toward him, slinging the assault rifle behind him, jumping.

Michael’s hands reached for the man’s neck, peeling him away from the saddle, the animal the man had been about to mount rearing, Michael dodging left to avoid its flailing hooves. The big man came up in a roll, hurtling himself toward him. Michael spun left, his right foot snapping up and out, impacting the fur clad man at the throat and then at the forehead with the last beat of the double kick.

Michael turned, looking for the horse, seeing it, seeing the band of horsemen not far off now, knowing that in less than a minute they would close. Michael started for the horse, grabbing at the one piece rein, dragging the horse down by the bit in its mouth, the horse falling, Michael stepping back, throwing his right leg across the animal’s saddled back as it rose, stumbled, regained its footing and reared. He tensed back the reins, digging his heels in, the animal bucking once, then starting to leap ahead and away from the band of horsemen, jumping the all but dead night fire.

And suddenly Michael felt a terrible weight pulling him from the saddle, twisting his head left, craning his neck, straining to see from the far edge of his peripheral vision. It was the man whose horse Michael had just stolen, clinging to the assault rifle, the sling from which Michael had suspended the German assault rifle crossbody now strangling him, pulling him from the saddle of the galloping horse beneath him. Michael’s left fist snapped outward, hitting the man’s face, but not dislodging him. Michael reached to his belt with his left hand, finding the butt of the knife old Jon the swordmaker had given him, unsheathing it, nearly losing it as the horse dodged some low rocks. Michael brought the knife up in his left hand — there was time for one thing only. In seconds, he realized, the pressure of the man’s weight against the rifle and then the sling which was already gouging into Michael’s neck would be so great as to pull him free. If he hacked outward with the knife and missed the man who clung to him, there might not be a chance to do anything else. He brought the knife up to where the sling

was taut but away from his body and slashed, the sudden release of pressure almost causing Michael to pitch forward over the animal’s neck, almost making him lose his grip on the knife. But neither happened, Michael half hanging over the right side of the saddle, the reins gripped in his right fist, the knife in his left, the rifle and the man who had clung to it gone. Michael looked back as he righted himself in the saddle, the band of horsemen less than fifty yards behind him, the last of the two men from the fire galloping past him. And for some reason, the little, dark amber skinned man in fur robes and astrakhan hat was howling with laughter. The man signalled the universal gesture for follow me and Michael, sheathing his knife, dug his heels in and lowered himself in the saddle, the horse surging ahead.