Survivalist - 23 - Call To Battle (17 page)

At the height of the ladder, Darkwood hooked his left forearm through the second from the top rung and grasped his rifle. With his right hand, he shoved upward on the hatch, letting it fall over open.

No plasma energy bolts lit the darkness.

Darkwood started up through the hatchway, the escapees clambering up behind him. “They’re coming!” a voice shouted.

Darkwood was onto the roof, no security personnel in sight. “Hurry it up. Take deep breaths and hold them until you’re on the roof. They’ll use gas,” Darkwood called back down into the tunnel. Partially naked men and women were piling out of the hatchway, half crawling over one another. Darkwood pulled off his protective hood and the mask, throwing it away, the night air assaulting his nostrils, his lungs, making his blood rush with its cool freshness, giving him the sensation of lightheadedness.

Darkwood stepped back, closed his eyes, tried adjusting to the lower light level.

There was only one hope of getting out alive.

That was to make it to the loading docks and steal a cargo helicopter. He thought of his ancestor, Jason Darkwood. In Jason Darkwood’s later years, memoirs were penned. In them, Jason Darkwood told of his first flight aboard an aircraft, how it had at once frightened and exhilarated him.

What would Jason Darkwood have thought if he’d known that one of his descendants was qualified as a pilot, on both fixed wing and helicopters?

James Darkwood smiled. Jason Darkwood would probably have enjoyed it. That the last?”

“Yeah-that’s all of us,” a woman shouted back to him.

“You two guys,” Darkwood ordered two of the younger men. “Get the hatch closed and try to jam up the mechanism for the locking wheel. Buy us some time. You with the rifle,” he told the older teenager, “Stay with them just in case.” Darkwood looked around. Several more of the escapees had weapons they’d acquired in the lower level of Mixing Room Nine. “Anybody with an energy weapon, stick close to me. We’re going over to the edge of the roof. Any resistance we encounter near the loading docks, we have to take care of quickly, then we’re stealing a cargo chopper and flying out of here. Any questions?”

The older man to whom Darkwood had given a rifle asked, “You fly?”

“No, but I know how to run machines that do,” Darkwood grinned. “Let’s go!” And James Darkwood started running in the direction of the loading docks.

They encountered no resistance on the roof of Plant 234, but by the time they reached the west side of the structure, overlooking the loading docks and the parking area beyond where over-the-road transfer trucks and cargo helicopters were parked, there was considerable activity.

Eden Military Police cars were in sight converging on the complex. In no time at all, James Darkwood realized, there would be helicopters as well. Then his luck, which had been running rather well and better than he had any right to expect, would run out. The cargo helicopters were slow, lumbering beasts to get airborne. Once airborne, because of the great engines required to handle the enormously heavy loads they usually carried, they maneuvered slowly, but they could cover straight line distances quickly.

There would be a chance, a very decent one, to escape.

If, however, gunships closed in on the loading dock and parking area, one of the cargo choppers would never get airborne and Darkwood and the men and women he’d freed would be doomed.

There was no time left to consider alternatives or ponder his fate should he fail. “Follow me!” Darkwood commanded, clambering over the edge of the roof and dropping to the sloping roof which covered the loading dock, skidding along its surface toward the roof of a cargo trailer. Darkwood hit the cargo trailer’s roof hard, rolled, caught his breath. Some of the freed prisoners were already following him.

Darkwood hauled his energy rifle up on its sling as he climbed to his feet.

Dockworkers shouted at him. Black-uniformed plant security personnel turned their weapons toward him. James Darkwood, still on the roof of the trailer, fired his energy rifle at the nearest armed man, cutting him down. Energy bolts impacted the roof of the truck, crackling across its metal framework, melting the plastic where the bolts struck. Darkwood jumped to the loading dock, rocking the butt of his rifle into the jaw of one man, hammering the muzzle down over the skull of another. He stepped back, firing into a knot of men coming for him.

Energy weapon fire came from the roof of the trailer, the older man whom Darkwood had armed cutting down some of the dock workers and security personnel. Darkwood jumped from the loading dock, shouted to the older man, “Rally everybody and follow me toward the choppers!”

“Right!”

James Darkwood ran. Two plant security personnel came up on his left and before they could fire, Darkwood fired. He kept running. He felt no remorse at having fought with the dock workers; these were not slave laborers and they have to realize they worked at a chemical weapons plant. If they could sacrifice their morality, he could sacrifice their lives if necessary. He ran on, nearing the far end of the parking lot.

A military police car was driving toward him at high speed.

Darkwood brought the energy rifle to his shoulder, stopping dead, firing at the windshield. The plasma bolt struck and the windshield shattered, the Eden Military Police car swerving, spinning, rolling over.

Darkwood ran for the nearest of the cargo helicopters. “Please, God!” Darkwood murmured as he reached for the door handle. The machine wasn’t locked. “Yeah!” Darkwood climbed up, looked aft, saw no one, went forward, dropping into the pilot’s seat. He flipped the toggle switch for power and the control panels began to light. He’d never flown one of these, but all the controls were marked in English and the basic design of the cargo helicopters was similar to that of military transports, and he’d flown one of those on several occasions just for fun. This was not fun.

The helicopter fuselage began to vibrate as he started the main rotor. He started the tail rotor then. The wheels on which the chopper stood were self-chocking; he’d checked that as he boarded. He left his wheels chocked, his eyes on the tachometer diode readouts for the main and tail rotor engines.

Time was his greatest enemy. At any second, Eden gunships might close him off, or military police vehicles cross into the lot and open fire.

As he looked through the windscreen, James Darkwood could see his band of half-naked evacuees, running, hobbling, some helping to half-carry others, coming toward the machine. Gradually, only a little more quickly than he should, Darkwood started building RPMs. Oil pressure and temperature gauges were showing well, the ambient temperature outside in his favor there.

At the far end of the parking lot he saw a military police car, then another, then another. “Shit.” Darkwood checked his gauges. He couldn’t get airborne yet even if he tried. But he could move.

Darkwood activated the controls unchocking forward wheels, then aft, the chocks folding up into the wheelwell housings. Oil pressure and temperature were rising. He checked pitch controls. He had full response. James Darkwood released front and rear parking brakes and adjusted main rotor pitch, increasing tail rotor RPMs. The cargo helicopter started to move forward across the parking lot, not like an aircraft but like some huge lumbering bus with undersized wheels instead.

The military police cars were closing. Those few of the escapees who were armed opened fire on the vehicles, crippling one, but the others were still coming.

Darkwood opened the portside vent window, shoving the energy rifle which leaned beside him through the open port. It was no good, though, because he could not get low enough to

take a sight picture and still remain in the pilot’s seat. He left the muzzle of the weapon to protrude through the vent anyway, concentrating full effort on the aircraft.

He was almost afraid to look up beyond the immediate area surrounding the craft, afraid that he might see gunships and it would all be finished.

Behind him, he could hear the escapees clambering aboard. “Strap yourselves in. Keep that portside door open in case we have to fire.”

All but five or six of the freed prisoners were aboard now, Darkwood confirming that he had sufficient pressure and temperature, had sufficient RPMs.

“Everyone is aboard!” The voice which called to him was that of the younger man. “We can use the energy rifles and-“

“Don’t engage a target once we’re off the ground unless you have to. We need to get away, not wreak devastation!” “Wreak devastation,” Darkwood almost verbalized-crashing into something important was the most damage of which they would be capable.

Darkwood changed pitch and increased main rotor speed. The machine started airborne, sweeping upward with all the perceived grace of a giant rock with stubby wings. But, they were up.

Darkwood throttled out still more, climbing and slowly accelerating.

He saw something over the horizon and his heart nearly stopped. But the light pattern, as he realized in the next second, originated from a fixed wing craft. Not even Eden Security Forces would be stupid enough to send in a fixed wing fighter aircraft, because it could do nothing except bomb and strafe a ground-based target and there had been no time for the security forces to get a fighter scrambled.

His eyes still on the horizon for gunships, Darkwood praying all the while he wouldn’t see one, he turned the chopper toward the mountains north of the city. He could ditch in the snows there and get help. Darkwood operated on a big assumption, of course, that Eden City’s considerable air defense system, which was designed to keep enemy aircraft from successfully reaching the city, would be essentially ineffective at preventing an aircraft from leaving. Eden City was, after all, much like a prison.

“We made it!” It was one of the women shouting the words, then shouting them again. “We made it!” There followed a chorus of cheers, mostiy for him, people patting him so vigorously on the back that once he nearly lost control of the throttle. Then the singing started, patriotic songs to the United States.

Eden, on the other hand, had its own national anthem; but it was terrible to listen to.

There was another landing of a commando group, some forty or so men strong, but John Rourke, Paul Rubenstein and Commander Washington and his Pearl Harbor SEAL Team reached the beach site on the other end of the island of Hawaii too late to intercept them. The Honolulu Tac Team hadn’t accompanied Rourke, Washington and the SEALs, busily engaged instead in tracking down the unit responsible for the attack on the Country Day School at Sebastian’s Reef.

As Rourke went airborne again in one of the SEAL Team helicopters, intending along with the other choppers to make a grid-by-grid aerial search, a radio message came in from Michael. Rourke flipped to the proper frequency as he was notified, saying, “Go ahead, Michael. Over.”

“Dad, there’s something big going on at the University. I You’ll want to be in on it. Over.”

“What? Another terrorist attack? Over.”

“Negative that, thank God. A briefing. All I know is it’s supposed to be really important, something to do with an impending volcanic eruption. And youll be interested in meeting the college professor doing the briefing. His name is Rolvaag. Ring a bell? Over.”

Bjorn Rolvaag had saved Annie’s life more than a century ago, then fought at their sides thereafter. With his faithful dog Hrothgar and his mighty staff in his powerful hands, Rolvaag, ever silent, ever placid had been both friend and ally in the very best sense of those words. An Icelandic policeman who spoke no English and preferred the windswept Arctic wastes to civilization, Rolvaag was the sort of man John Rourke had always respected as a true hero. “This professor, if he’s a descendant of Bjorn Rolvaag, has a lot to live up to. Ill be there. When? Over.”

“In about twenty minutes. Rolvaag and this other scientist, a Dr. Betty Gilder, are supposedly still assembling data. Meeting’s at the University science center. Your pilot should know how to find it. Over.”

“Hang on a minute. Over.” Rourke moved the microphone away from his lips and shielded it with his hand as he shouted to the pilot beside him. “Can you get me to the University science center in twenty minutes?”

“Sure can, General. Land you right in the quadrangle, sir.”

Rourke nodded, flipped the microphone back in front of his mouth. Til be there. See you. Out.”

Rourke waited for his son Michael to sign off, then switched back to the intraship frequency. And he stared at the mountains. They seemed distant right now, but under the wrong set of circumstances, they might seem all too terribly close.

The repository for the cryogenic chambers in which Sarah Rourke, Deitrich Zimmer’s son Martin’s natural mother, and Colonel Wolfgang Mann slept so touchingly side by side had been recently moved to enhance security-greater precautions required, it was presumably felt, in the light of the imminence of warfare between Eden and the rest of the world.

For the purposes of what Deitrich Zimmer intended, the new location was vastly better than the old one.

Immediately upon learning of Martin’s capture, Deitrich Zimmer pulled the best of the best among those who proudly wore the Sigrunen, the top men to be had from both the Sicherheitsdienst and the Sicherheitshauptamt; the only one from this former unit unavailable to him was Wilhelm Doring, since Doring had already left for his assignment in the Hawaiian Islands.

In the end, however, Deitrich Zimmer had thirty-six superbly trained and totally dedicated officer and enlisted SS SD personnel.

They stood before him now in this small auditorium within the SS complex beneath the glacier, bounded to the southeast by the vast icefield of Great Slave Lake, to the northwest by the subglacial Mackenzie River. The very existence of this facility was known only to the SS and to each man who, because of a need to know, was told of the facility’s existence. It was called, simply, “Hafen.”

The thirty-six, as well as Deitrich Zimmer’s aids and advisors, held their upraised right hands in salute, their voices responding in Greek-like chorus, “Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!”