Survivalist - 21 - To End All War (15 page)

Dr. Rourke, Michael, and Paul were close enough. Darkwood touched helmets with Rourke, the other two men touching helmets as well. “Tell everyone to make certain vision intensification is off. We have a launch imminent just ahead. Ill warn the advance guard. After the launch, join me.”

“Right,” Dr. Rourke said, wings beating faster now, swimming off immediately.

And Darkwood rolled again in the water, moving his wings as rapidly as possible now, propelling himself still faster through the water with hands and flippers.

His vision intensification was still on, but if it were not, he would be uncertain of finding the two advance guard personnel, at least one of them likely a German commando unused to the more subde nuances of his equipment.

Darkwood skirted around a towering rock formation and through a school of cod, the creatures scattering about him.

Just ahead, he saw two figures. He changed direction to intercept them, touching at his chest pack to disengage vision intensification.

And the launch came, concussion hammering at him this time, a column of white vapor and churning water, the missile breaking surface as Darkwood was thrown back, into the rocks, his helmet slamming into an outcropping of coral, the water around him obscured in darkness as schools of fish abundant beyond credulity passed around him, over him, beneath him, their bodies crashing against his.

Automatically, he had furled his wings, and if he had not, Darkwood knew, they would have been destroyed.

His ears rang, his senses reverberating with the sounds from the launch. He braced himself, knowing the second launch was coming.

And come it did, Darkwood huddled in the rocks and coral now, creatures rising from the depth in their frantic rush to escape the source of their terror. As he tucked back deeper into his shelter, sailfish, horse-eye jacks, rays, and sharks passed him, thudding against him.

The ringing in Darkwood’s ears persisted, but the concussion subsided. He pushed away from the rocks, dodging back as a large shark grazed past him.

Darkwood unfurled his wings, swimming toward the last position where he had seen the two advance guards.

He risked vision intensification again, scanning right to left, seeing one of the men, wings shredded, body twisted at an unnatural angle. Darkwood signaled down toward the man. A quick examination confirmed what logic had already suggested—dead. As quickly as he could now, before another launch, he began quartering to search for the second man.

Maria Leuden screamed and Annie grabbed the girl into her arms, dropping with her to her knees, just holding her as the mountain around them trembled and the platform on which they were sheltered gendy swayed. Annie threw up the shawl that was around her shoulders, pulling it over her own head and Maria’s as dust sprinkled down on them from the cavern ceiling above.

The low rumbling sound that had begun as barely a murmur, then grown, roaring, was subsiding now.

They were under attack.

Was it nuclear?

Annie Rubenstein told herself they’d be dead now if it had been.

Her husband, her brother, her father. Was it that they had not reached the Soviet submarines in time? Or …

But no pain cut through her, and she knew inside herself that if any of the three of them were to die, she would feel death as if she, too, were struck down. “Michael’s fine, Maria! Take it easy,” Annie reassured the girl who knelt, trembling, beside her. “Well be safe here, too.”

Safe, while above them the city itself might be in ruins, and soon Soviet surface forces would be attacking.

Annie looked along the platform. Her mother was beneath a table, on hands and knees. Natalia stood almost defiandy, the hood of her jacket raised, protecting her hair from the falling dust.

Annie hugged the girl closer. Maria whispered, “I wish there was something that we could do, but we cannot! It is terrible to be a woman.”

Annie said nothing, holding the girl.

Her father had taught her, many years ago, and Paul’s very existence confirmed, that life, was indeed, what you made it. Her eyes caught the eyes of her mother. They merely looked at one another across the dozens of women who sat or knelt about the platform, letting their fate rest in hands other than their own.

Her mother smiled.

Her mother nodded almost imperceptibly. Annie held Maria tighter, because she wouldn’t be holding the girl for long.

the rest of the attack force.

A body spiraled downward along the north wall of a narrow canyon about a thousand yards from the portside hull of the nearest Island Classer.

If the man were still alive—one of the Germans—he would surely die if he did not regain consciousness and slow or stop his descent.

As Darkwood hovered over the abyss, he felt a tap at the side of his helmet, thinking for a moment that a fish or something … It was Dr. Rourke. As their helmets touched, Rourke said, “You lost a man down there. Could he still be alive?”

“We lost a marine in the last detonation. That’s a German in the canyon. If the German’s alive, he won’t be much longer. Keep the men sheltered while I go after him. After the next launch, approach the submarine, going for the stern. If I’m not back—”

“No. You’re the only one who can pull off this mission. I’ll go after him. You lead the men toward the submarine. Fil catch up. Remember, I’ve gone in through the aft airlock before. Plus, as a doctor, maybe I can do something for the man to save his life. Go on.”

There wasn’t time to argue, because each second took the hapless German to greater depth and brought the next missile firing that much closer. Darkwood said, “All right, Doctor, good luck,” then clapped John Rourke on the shoulder. Rourke nodded almost imperceptibly, cocooning his wings around him as if he’d been diving with this equipment all his life, launching himself over the side of the canyon and into the abyss.

Darkwood watched after him for a split second more, then accelerated the beating of his wings, starting back toward

By using his flippers, arms locked against his sides, hands flat against his thighs except when he moved them slighdy as stabilizers, John Rourke spiraled downward, keeping the pace of his descent within reason, but moving as rapidly as he could while still giving his suit the time to equalize pressure.

Below him, he could no longer see the man. Rourke touched at his chest pack, starting vision intensification again, well enough below the level of the nearest of the Soviet vessels that he felt he could risk it, even if firing were imminent.

Still no sign of the injured or unconscious—probably both—German commando.

Rourke activated magnification, following the heads-up navigational display in his helmet face plate to keep his orientation.

In the center of the face plate, where magnification had its effect, he saw a shape, odd-looking against a rock formation another sixty or seventy feet below him, but barely discernible despite magnification and vision intensification. Rourke slowed his descent still further.

He cocooned his wings, clinging to the rocky walls of the canyon, careful where he rested his hands despite the strength of his gloves. In these waters, there could be anything. There was a type of sea snake found in the Pacific— perhaps still found there, because deadly things had a habit of survival—whose bite always proved fatal, because the venom acted so quickly on the central nervous system that the victim expired in seconds, before any sort of medical procedure could even be begun.

John Rourke planned ahead. As he moved diagonally down the rock face, he reasoned that the next missile or missiles would launch soon and he had no idea what the shock wave might do in the confined space between the canyon walls. And so he clung to them.

And now the shock wave came, the noise of at least two

detonations rolling over him with it. Rourke’s body was punched into the canyon wall, his hands barely able to still cling to the rock outcroppings.

Below him the dark shape moved, and Rourke realized it was, indeed, the man he sought. The man lay on the edge of an abyss even greater than the canyon, a trench of major proportions, running along the seafloor like a scar, toward the north and to the south.

Fish swarmed about Rourke, over him, around him as he held to his purchase against the canyon wall, large pieces of die very wall itself dislodging above and around him, rolling downward into the already churning waters surrounding him.

More rocks dislodged, a full-scale avalanche now. John Rourke pushed himself off from the canyon wall, no other choice now for his survival, letting his wings partly out, with his hands and his feet pulling him downward through the water and toward the German commando. The water moved with such violence, unexpected currents grabbing him, twisting him, that progress downward was slow. And as Rourke rolled through a spiral, above him he saw the upper portion of the rock wall shearing away in enormous sheets.

Rourke flexed and allowed the suit’s wings to spread to full span. He kicked as powerfully as he could. To save the German and himself, he had to outdistance the rock falls or be pounded down into the depths of the trench, from which neither he nor the German commando would ever emerge alive.

The German was closer now, Rourke’s arms going to maximum extension with each stroke, but the currents still so strong that for every foot of downward progress, he was pushed back at least half that distance, sometimes more. He glanced over his right shoulder, the rocks tumbling toward him in what seemed to be slow motion, like something out of a dream. If he merely cocooned his wings, letting the currents he fought draw him upward, chances were good that he’d survive.

But, as he gazed downward again, the German’s body was about to slip over the edge.

John Rourke forced himself downward, grabbing at rock outcroppings, tugging himself past them for the last microsecond of speed.

There was another missile fired above him, but from farther away this time, another of the submarines from the Soviet armada opening fire on the German mountain city.

A sheet of rock slipped past him, twisting with the powerful currents, missing Rourke’s left shoulder by inches.

There was no time to look above him. He shifted off magnification. Rourke kept swimming, pulling himself over a hummock of coral, reaching out his right hand and grabbing for the German commando as the man’s body slipped over the edge and into the abyss. Rourke’s right shoulder nearly dislocated under the sudden strain, his body twisting round as he fought to get a better grip on the man. And as Rourke’s body orientation shifted, he saw a wall of rock crashing downward toward them, nearly on them.

There was no time to check the German’s body to determine if the man were alive or dead. Rourke merely held to the body as tighdy as he could and kicked off from the rock ledge and over into the abyss, cocooning his wings around him, letting the current seize them both.

Tons of rock crashed down onto the ledge, the ledge itself crumbling, all of it falling over into the abyss.

The current in which they were caught crossed through another, a whirlpool effect, Rourke’s body and that of the German commando twisting in it, pummeled by its force. And then the second current had them, icy cold even through the dry suit, sucking them downward so rapidly there was no time to reach out and grab for something to hold on to, nothing to do but ride with it.

Their bodies spun in around the central vortex, nauseat-ingly quickly, dizziness grabbing at Rourke’s consciousness now. And if he passed out, John Rourke knew, he would die here in this current, drawn even deeper into the abyss.

time would be lost in reaching the hoped-for penetration point, but there was no choice if they were to survive.

And Darkwood swam now, toward the underside of the Island Classer’s hull… .

Darkwood led the commandos forward, his eyes on the missile deck of the nearest Island Classer. If a missile were launched now, the shock wave would kill them.

And where was John Rourke? Had he been caught in the maelstrom of the multiple launches that had taken place seconds ago? If he had been, was he dead as logic suggested?

It was, somehow, impossible for Darkwood to imagine that, after all this time, these incredible perils that John Rourke had endured for more than five centuries, the man would be lost in an undersea tempest.

But there was no time left to think any further, because new hatches were opening on the missile deck of the nearest of the Island Classers, and any of the other ones—there were at least two more—might launch at any second. Exposed as they were, moving toward the Island Classer’s stern, they would be killed. Once beneath her hull, however, they could take shelter there.

The fatigue was beginning to take its toll on Darkwood, and on one level of consciousness he was telling himself that he should not have come, as yet less than fully recovered from his wounds. But there had been no alternative. He kept swimming, no longer able to conserve physical energy and let wings alone propel him through the water, but forced by the necessity of time to actively swim, using hands as well as feet.

His eyes drifted to the Steinmetz on his wrist and he risked vision intensification to read it. There should be another launch in seconds.

Darkwood made a command decision, instructing the wedge of divers beginning on either side of him to veer off toward the underside of the Island Classer’s hull. Precious

John Rourke had nearly blacked out.

Thoughts of his children, of his wife, of Natalia came to him fleetingly, leaving just as quickly. Tired. If he closed his eyes … But John Rourke told himself, ordered himself, not to do that, because if he did, this time there would be no cheating death. The hemosponge would go on functioning almost infinitely. But the pressures at the depths to which the current would drag him would crush him.

And now, even with vision intensification on full, so litde light penetrated within the abyss that Rourke could barely see the rock walls along which he sped. But on one level, deep within his consciousness, John Rourke’s mind raced faster than his body. There had to be some way in which to stop this headlong lunge toward the depths of the abyss before he blacked out and was powerless.