Survivalist - 22 - Brutal Conquest (13 page)

Women’s equality had come a long way in six hundred years, but there was still the possibility that someone in long hair, a skirt, and heels wasn’t quite intimidating enough to make these guys release their hostage and drop their guns.

Her father and her brother had taught her that once the guns came out, talk was limited, if not nonexistent, so she said nothing else, just kept the muzzle of her gun as steady as she could.

The terrorist spokesman—he was thirty or so and had a face that belonged to the psychopathic axe murderer in a horror movie—shoved Marie Hayes away from him. She stood there for a second, shrugging her jacket back up onto her shoulders but not walking off.

“Civilian authorities?”

Emma Shaw still didn’t move her gun. “My word as an officer and lady.”

“Lay ‘em down, guys! Do it!” The man bent over and set his energy pistol on the pavement, then raised his hands over his head.

Hesitandy, Marie started walking toward Emma Shaw.

The other terrorists started laying down their weapons as well.

Emma Shaw shouted, “Mr. Fong!” “Yes, ma’am?”

“See to it that these individuals are properly disarmed and that they are turned over to the civilian authorities as I promised. Confiscate their weapons and any pertinent documents on their mission. And get them photographed so we can throw their pretty faces into the computer.”

“Yes, ma’am!”

Marie was nearly even with Emma now, and Emma Shaw started to lower her pistol. Marie was shaking her head, “Ohh, Emma, I almost pissed in my panty hose.”

Emma Shaw uncocked her weapon and called out to Ward Aldridge, “Captain Aldridge!”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Please take over here.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Then Emma Shaw holstered her weapon. Marie Hayes, her voice a litde shaky-sounding, said, “You look kinda green. But maybe it’s just the neon

lights, huh?”

“Remember about your panty hose? Well, I did pee mine.”

And she wanted to throw up.

Then the beeper on her belt started signaling, not the trilling sound this time but the buzzing sound. She was being called to duty.

She could throw up out the window of the car on the way back to the docks.

Her damp panty hose would have to wait a while.

The armored personnel carriers hadn’t moved for well over an hour and a half. Neither had Paul Rubenstein.

But men in arctic gear were now starting to emerge from the rear doors of both vehicles, heavily armed.

Presumably, commanders and technicians were still inside.

They would be running sensor scans, Paul Rubenstein theorized, for thermal register, sound emissions, radar, and the like.

And they had to be on to the fact that someone was waiting down in the defile, or they would not have sent men out but instead would have pursued the hoofprints in the snow leading off and away from the site. But they did not know exactly where, had no fixed position. For if they had, their vehicles would have been in motion and in pursuit. That they had not pursued the preponderance of hoofprints leading off toward the town, to which the rather curious Mary Ann had led John and Natalia, was a very bad sign.

The scenario was clear to Paul Rubenstein, but he hoped it was not that obvious to the enemy personnel.

Either John or Natalia had come back with horses, evidently not even a wagon judging by the marks in the snow. When whichever one of them it was spotted the armored carriers coming up, some of the horses were

cut loose, giving tracks to follow. The other horses were taken into the defile.

Paul estimated that, at best, John or Natalia and those other horses were five hundred yards from the enemy personnel who were now fanning out into the snow.

Three of these men were clearly Land Pirates, as evidenced by their garish garb and more basic weaponry, their affiliation obvious. The other six were either Eden Defense Forces or Nazi, and he was beginning to think there was such a faint line separating the two that it was almost nonexistent. The six were better uniformed and better armed and, somehow, seemed to move with more evident precision and purpose.

From what he knew about their vehicles, the standard operating crew consisted of a commander who doubled as back-up driver, the driver who doubled as engineer/ weapons controller, and the navigator, who also operated communications and sensors.

That meant that besides the nine men starting toward the defile, there were likely six more, three inside each vehicle.

The vehicles themselves possessed a long litany of weapons capabilities, from energy cannons to missiles and, it was theorized, gas diffusion as well. Their armor, as best he could understand it, was vastly better than the most sophisticated U.S., Soviet, or British armor of the late Twentieth Century.

Paul Rubenstein did not like this new world very much. Even after one hundred twenty-five years, the present was too much like the past. Only the players had changed. The world was on a war footing again, and what civilization there was seemed retrograde in the extreme.

For the past hour and a half, while his limbs were gradually numbing with the cold, he had been considering his options. There were few.

John was a good enough marksman to take on nine heavily armed men with virtually any firearm, and much the same could be said for Natalia; but he was not. With the Steyr-Mannlicher SSG, he would have stood a good chance. With his Schmiesser, if the distance had been half what it was, he might have tried it. But he was close to being out of effective range for the 9mm Parabellums his submachine gun fired. If he’d had an assault rifle, it would have been iffy at best.

So, sniping was out.

Once he started something, whichever one of his friends was down in the defile could be counted on, of course, to assist, but timing might be critical.

The only option he had not ruled out was the direct method.

That involved getting inside one of the armored personnel carriers and taking it over. There were, after all, nine men outside, but only three men in each of the armored personnel carriers.

“What am I doing here?” Paul Rubenstein asked himself. And then he smiled, because he knew the answer to the question… .

Martin Zimmer said, “I am cold.”

“No shit, Sherlock. Join the club. If you weren’t such an animal, none of us would be here in the first place. How can you live with yourself?” Annie finally asked him.

“Look. You are my sister. I will not see any harm come to you. And even though you have chosen poorly for a husband, because this Rubenstein is your husband—despite the fact that he is Jewish—I will spare

his life. If you cooperate, that is. Otherwise, I will .not be responsible.”

Annie looked at him and smiled, even though her cheeks were so cold it hurt to do so. “Give it a rest, Martin,” she told him… .

Mary Ann looked about ready to pass out.

Natalia Tiemerovna’s fingers were so cold she wondered if she would be able to successfully operate her weapons.

But she lay still, almost motionless.

She could hear the sounds of booted feet crunching through the snow, coming toward her.

Her mission was, thus far, a failure. She had a total of six horses, a half-dozen blankets, and five coats, these latter taken from the bodies of the men John had killed in the saloon.

By now, after all the time that had passed, many of the women freed from the Land Pirates would be suffering severely from exposure. And, it was always possible, with the armored personnel carriers positioned as they were, that Paul and Annie and the freed women would just stumble upon the enemy, into a disaster.

But she had another thought now. What if Paul and Annie were considerably closer than she had thought? What if even now they, too, were aware of the enemy vehicles?

Did she have an ally out there, perhaps ready to strike?

But what could be done? No weapon they possessed would have any effect against the APCs. The modest amount of explosives available would cripple one of the machines, but only if detonated against a tread or detonated from inside… .

Paul Rubenstein had one pound of the latest German plastique. And he had a plan.

“It’s a planned demonstration,” Manfred Kohl said mat-ter-of-factly. “We cannot get involved.”

Men and women, looking for all the world perfecdy normal except for their sixties-style mod clothing—Nehru jackets, Mao caps, bell-bottom trousers, miniskirts, boots—were moving through the street, carrying torches and placards. The signs dealt with such standard anti-Semitic propaganda themes as Jewish conspiracies, Jewish financial manipulation, Jewish anti-government sentiment,
etc.

Michael Rourke remembered once, as a boy, seeing a KKK demonstration. He’d asked his father and mother why the men were dressed in robes and funny pointed hats. His mother had said, “Some people hate, and when they see other people who don’t, they don’t like it. They want to make the other people hate, too.”

These people hated. These demonstrators hated whether the hatred was genuine or staged. The intent was the same.

They were trying to make other people hate, too.

Moving slowly because of his wounds but moving nonetheless, Michael Rourke turned off into the side street, flanked by Manfred Kohl and James Darkwood.

He had other work this night.

The satellite uplink had been made, the message sent, and the business at hand was to get out of Eden City alive so he could fight what grew here, not stay and make some futile gesture—like running up to a demonstrator and pulling the picket sign from his hands, and tearing it up—and then die.

Eden Defense force personnel and police were everywhere tonight… .

As it turned out, Emma Shaw had the time to change her panty hose anyway. She had been waiting in Captain Edmund Rahn’s outer office for nearly ten minutes.

At last, his secretary answered an intercom—Emma Shaw could not hear the conversation, hard as she tried— and then looked at her and said, “Captain Rahn will see you now, Commander Shaw.”

“Thank you, Seaman,” Emma told the woman.

She approached the door, knocked, heard the perfunctory “Come in,” and entered.

Emma walked across the room and came to attention before Captain Rahn’s desk.

He said and did nothing for several seconds, then at last, as if suddenly remembering she was standing there, he looked up for a split second and said, “As you were, Commander. Take a seat.”

“Thank you, sir,” she responded, then took the chair just opposite him, setting her hat in her lap. She had a terrific impulse to clear her throat and break the silence, but she didn’t. She just waited.

After what seemed to her like an eternity but realistically was only a minute or so, Captain Rahn—he was terrific looking, she thought—set down his pen and looked up from the documents he’d been perusing. They were In-tell printouts. She’d seen enough of them over the years to recognize them at a distance. “I’ve just received orders

from Admiral Hayes, personally. By the way, you did well with that mess you caused in Port Reno. I’m willing to forget the incident ever happened.”

•Thank you, sir,” she said, not meaning it.

“Admiral Hayes has been in touch with Allied Intelligence HQ. It seems there’s Em extraction that needs handling just west of the rift valley. I assume you’re familiar with Dr. John Thomas Rourke?”

In spite of herself, Emma Shaw laughed. “No disrespect, sir, but who isn’t?”

“A few people in the upper echelons have known this for quite some time, but Dr. Rourke did not die, as the rumors went… .”

“What? I mean, sir—”

“Dr. Rourke was critically injured, as goes the story, but he did not die. Dr. Rourke and his near-legendary family, the very same people my great-great-great-great-grandfather, Admiral Rahn, worked with one hundred and twenty-five years ago, are alive—or at least they were a httle less than twenty-four hours ago.” “But Dr. Rourke and the others would be—” “No, Commander Shaw, they would not be old. They survived by means of cryogenic sleep. I understand, from Admiral Hayes who has seen Dr. Rourke personally, that he looks like a man in his late thirties. He is physically unchanged from photos taken of him at the conclusion of the War with the Soviet Union. The same goes for his family, with the exception of his wife who remains in cryogenic sleep, and a German officer who joined them. Dr. Rourke, his son, his daughter and her husband, and the Russian woman who served so valiandy with Dr. Rourke, Major Tiemerovna, are all out there. Well, not the son. He is working with Commander James Darkwood, whom I believe you know.” She knew him all right, having graduated with him from the Academy. James Darkwood was one of her best friends in the world. “Commander Darkwood, as you may know, is on detached duty to Allied Intelligence. But, Dr. Rourke, his daughter, her husband, and Major Tiemerovna are on the west side of the rift valley. Without extraction, their situation is considered hopeless.” “Yes, sir,” Emma Shaw said.

“This is not something I can order you to do. But, if you volunteer and can find a sufficient number of other volunteers to undertake the mission with you, youU be entirely on your own. We will officially disavow this mission should you be shot down and killed or captured by the Eden Defense Forces. Aircraft are being readied now, all markings removed, added armament pods installed.”

“If I get them out, sir, bring them back here?”

“If you succeed in your mission, Commander, you will return here to refuel, drop off any wounded, then fly immediately to Pearl Harbor, where you will receive further orders.” Captain Rahn had been looking at everything but her face, as was his habit, not just with her but with everyone, when he did a preliminary mission briefing. But now he looked her straight in the eye. His eyes were so powerful she had to blink. “I envy you this opportunity, Commander Shaw. And, should you accept, I caution you that Dr. Rourke still holds the rank of brigadier general, that was conferred upon him at Mid-Wake by the president personally more than a century ago.”

“Consider me volunteered, sir.”

Captain Edmund Rahn stood up. Emma stood up, too. He walked around the desk, extended his right hand to her, and said, “Good luck, Commander.”