Survivalist - 21 - To End All War

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Title : #21 : TO END ALL WAR

Series : Survivalist

Author(s) : Jerry Ahern

Location : Gillian Archives

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Fiery fingers hissed above the high mountain plateau, groping upward into the night’s icy blackness. Cadaverous hulks of twisted steel and titanium alloys were at the base of each towering plume of flame, glowing brightly in the burning synth fuel that, moments earlier, had powered the mighty Soviet war machines. But now the Russian armor, like once fearsome prehistoric beasts, lay dismembered, sprawling and inert.

For a moment only, John Rourke remembered Natalia’s uncle, Ismael Varakov, commanding general of the Soviet North American Army of Occupation, and his office without walls in the museum in Chicago so very long ago. Dominating the center of the museum floor were the reconstructed skeletons of two massive beasts, now extinct.

The fires formed a wall, seemingly impenetrable, a flickering, yellow-orange artificial horizon. And they surrounded John Rourke, Michael Rourke, and Paul Rubenstein.

Thick trailers of blue smoke raced over the snow-packed rock and debris-strewn landscape on heat-fed frigid winds. Everywhere, blemishing and pockmarking its fire-tinted whiteness, were bits of burning wreckage, ranging in size from the minute to the immense, nearly all that remained now of the armada of T-91 tanks, armored personnel carriers, and the battleship-sized mobile missile-launching platforms all, that is, except for their glowing skeletons.

John Rourke, a thin, dark tobacco cigar clamped in his teeth, moved his right hand. It hurt badly from the burns he’d sustained from the live steam, bleeding in some spots where the skin had cracked. He thrust it back into a side pocket of his parka.

And he was cold, colder than he could ever remember having been.

Flames of Rourke’s own creation, necessary to burn an escape hole through the Plexiglas-like substance that armored the gunner’s dome of a Soviet missile-launching platform, had nearly devoured him. The flames had burned away large portions of his arctic gear, despite the clothing’s fire-retardant protection. But the drifts he’d plunged into, when jumping clear of the huge machine as it rolled over the edge of the great plateau, had extinguished the flames. The out-of-control missile platform rolled and tumbled, destroying itself as it plummeted into the abyss beyond. Rourke burrowed into the snow to save himself from incineration, obtaining what protection he could as the other enemy machines around him exploded, targeted by the missiles from the mobile launcher he had just evacuated.

As the snow melted into icy water, it permeated the linings of his parka and snowpants, saturating his arctic gear and the sweater and batde dress utilities beneath. And now the wetness was penetrating to his skin, causing him to shiver almost uncontrollably. Each second that elapsed chilled the dampness into ice. Progressively, his body temperature was dropping. Rourke’s medical training and his common sense told him that he must find shelter, must strip off his refreezing garments before hypothermia set in hard enough to kill.

John Rourke had a design change in mind for the German winter gear. Since fire was such a hazard under arctic conditions, the clothing could be made to self-fuse to a mid layer, thus being self-sealing over the lining, affording at least some protection to the wearer from direct exposure to harsh temperatures after the flames were extinguished.

He made a mental note to mention these proposed design modifications for cold weather gear to the engineers of New Germany in Argentina.

But now, staying alive was the more urgent matter. He threw away the cigar. Smoking would only further compound his body’s attempts to normalize temperature in any event.

Rourke reached for the energy weapon he had risked his life to obtain. But Paul was already picking it up from the snow beside Rourke’s feet. “Come on,” John Rourke shouted over the crackling of flames, the howling of the wind. And, orienting himself, he started into a jog trot toward the German armored vehicle he had dubbed “At-sack,” the massive machine barely visible against the snowfield as an odd-shaped mound, the synth-fuel fires burning dangerously close to it.

Paul and Michael fell in on either side of him, Rourke calling out to his son, “Did you turn the systems back on?” If Michael had not, the Atsack would only be a windbreak, but otherwise nearly as cold as the natural environment surrounding them.

“Everything’s up and ready. And, with enough speed up, we can roll through those fires without burning the treads,” Michael shouted, realizing that his father’s hearing would be impaired for a while longer, at least.

Rourke knew that, only nodding now. The double exertion of running and shivering was beginning to tax strength that was already depleted as a result of the batde to take control of the Soviet missile platform and to capture the coveted energy weapon. As they neared the mounded snow, the outiine of the Atsack took on greater definition. The full-treated, all-terrain vehicle was taller than a single-story house from the days Before the Night of the War, the wedge-shaped titanium plow taller than any man, reminiscent of the cowcatchers on the nineteenth-century steam locomotives that had once plied the western frontier.

The Atsack’s rear access was closed, as it should be. Rourke pulled his right hand from his pocket, using it more for balance than for anything else, most of his right glove having been burned away in any event. To have touched the bare metal would have cost him more skin.

And he climbed now, up the tread and toward the portside ladder, shuffling snow from the rungs as he moved, gingerly sliding his flame-burned left hand along the vertical stanchion.

He reached the height of the Atsack’s superstructure, tugging at the hatch, throwing it back. Desperation and exhaustion drove him, powered him, Rourke knew. Paul and Michael, navigating the Soviet energy weapon between them as they climbed, were just below him, mounting the superstructure. The energy weapon was about the size of a prewar M60 machine gun, and about the same heaviness. Paul had it now as Rourke started down through the hatchway, into the airlocking chemically, biologically, and radiologically sealed antechamber. Michael slid down the ladder’s verticals, jumping to the floor just behind Rourke.

The energy weapon was being passed down, Michael taking it, then Paul coming down the ladder, not so rapidly but quickly enough. As Paul passed beyond the hatch, he slung it back. Rourke hit the powered locking unit controls, the hatch securing.

Then John Rourke activated the air scrubbers.

Air —seemingly cold, despite its obviously greater warmth than its exterior counterpart —flooded the compartment with a roar. Rourke swallowed to equalize the mounting pressure in his ears.

Finally, the green light indicator flashed on.

Rourke activated the interior hatch controls. There was a pneumatic sigh, then the hatchway opened.

John Rourke started downward and through, the comparative warmth suffocating to him.

He dropped the rest of the way down the ladder and into the Atsack’s ready room. As he crossed out of the way of the ladder base, he unbuckled the black leather gunbelt at his waist, snaking it, together with the .44 Magnum revolver and LS-X survival/fighting knife, to the surface of a bulkhead-mounted three-man-wide seat.

Immediately, Rourke dropped to his knees, clumsily stripping his arctic parka from his body with his burned hands. With his left hand, he drew first one, then the other of his Scoremasters from his trouser band, setting the gleaming stainless steel .45’s beside his gunbelt. His sweater, like a prewar Woolie-Pulley, was heavy with half-frozen water.

Rourke tore away the snow goggles that hung around his neck, then pulled off the toque that covered his head and threw it down. And, at last, he removed his sweater.

He tugged the litde Smith & Wesson 9mm with the suppressor and slide lock free of his clothes, placing the pistol on the seat.

Michael was in the ready room, taking the captured energy weapon from Paul, who was coming down the ladder after him. Paul jumped the last few rungs, skinning out of his parka and goggles, still wearing his toque and snow pants. He bit off his outer gloves, grabbing down the self-heating thermal-insulated blankets from the racks on the opposite bulkhead. “Well have you warm, John!”

Rourke rasped, “The hell with it,” but not to his friend. He drew the little A.G. Russell Sting IA Black Chrome from its sheath just inside the waistband of his trousers, running one edge along the expendable laces of his boots, severing them rather them untying them. He put the knife down beside the other weapons as he kicked free of his boots.

Already, his left hand was tearing open the burn-tattered snow pants. His BDUs beneath them were soaked in melted snow. Rourke pushed the snow pants down, then the BDUs, dropping to the floor in his underpants. Michael kneeled down beside his father, grabbing the snow pants by the bottoms of the legs and pulling on them. “When you were a kid, I’d undress you for bed sometimes,” John Rourke told his son. “Never quite —quite this hurriedly.” Rourke’s teeth were chattering.

As Michael started on the BDU pants, Paul was there, taking the double Alessi shoulder rig from Rourke’s body, then helping his friend’s progressively shakier fingers with

the buttons at the top of his black knit shirt. Rourke tugged the shirt upward and off, Paul throwing one of the blankets around the man’s shoulders and back, rubbing him with it to dry him, to warm him.

The blanket used natural electric currents within the body to power its heating elements —an electric blanket that never needed plugging in.

Michael pulled off Rourke’s socks, taking up a second blanket and throwing it over his father’s legs, wrapping it around them. “I’ll microwave coffee.” As Michael stripped away his parka, he exited the ready room.

Paul changed the blankets on Rourke’s upper body, wrapping another one tightly around his friend. “Keep that closed. How you doin’?”

“Freezing.Fine.”

The younger man only nodded, starting to massage Rourke’s legs and feet. “Any numbness?”

“No. I’m just—just so — ” John Rourke’s concentration was going. He only wanted to sleep.

As if Paul somehow understood that, Rourke’s friend shouted to him, “No sleep until we get some warm fluids into you. Right?”

John Rourke barely nodded, barely whispered, “Right.”

Paul changed the blanket on Rourke’s legs. “Michael! Get in here!”

Rourke fought to keep his eyes open, exhausted from shivering, forcing himself to … And then Michael and Paul were on either side of him, chair lifting him between them, holding the blankets around him. Michael ducked John Rourke’s head as they crossed through the bulkhead door into the Atsack’s main compartment. They placed him on one of the lower foldout crew bunks, wrapping the blankets tightly around him. Already, the blankets were starting to heat up. Paul elevated Rourke’s head, while Michael held the cup of coffee to his father’s lips. “It’s hot, but not too hot to drink.”

Rourke tried to nod. He sipped at the coffee, letting it wash down his throat, feeling it burning inside him.

“Drink it all and then sleep,” Paul ordered.

Rourke drank more of the coffee, thinking maybe then they’d let him close his eyes.

The blankets were quite warm now, and even though he was still shaking with the cold, he told himself everything would be all right—if only they’d let him sleep.

Some called it a sixth sense.

Natalia Anastasia Tiemerovna, Major, Committee for State Security of the Soviet (Retired), didn’t know what it was called. But in times like these, she had it; and, when in the past she’d ignored it, she’d at least been lucky enough to live to regret it rather than not living at all.

Annie signaled a stop, saying, “I’ve got to adjust this strap.”

Natalia nodded, easing down her half of the improvised travois they’d made, upon which lay the likely dying German officer they’d rescued. The man and his gutted helicopter had been bait to draw her and the other women out of The Retreat, into the hands of Freidrich Rausch, the brother of Da-mien Rausch, whom Sarah Rourke had killed.

The neo-Nazi personnel who had waited for them, sucking them into the trap with the plaintive messages from a dying aviator, had almost been too easy to kill, Natalia told herself.

And none of them had been Freidrich Rausch.

Of that, she was certain, because Freidrich Rausch would not have been easy to kill at all. Rausch had eluded John Rourke, and that in itself said something quite considerable about the man.

So, where was Rausch?

The answer, she realized, as she adjusted her parka hood against the snow, which seemed to fall unendingly, and against the wind, which roared over the lonely road they struggled up toward The Retreat, was that Freidrich Rausch was watching them. She knew it in her bones, in her soul.

That was the sixth sense impression she felt.

And the dilemma Rausch’s presence presented was a clear one.