Survivalist - 23 - Call To Battle (6 page)

“Yes, Willy.”

Gunther-tall, blond, muscular and possessed of a ready smile-drew his pistol from beneath his sweater and went to stand beside the already closed door between the salon and the main companionway.

Wilhelm Doring looked at the others. They were so young to risk their lives; but their names would be immortal. “A review before we get started, hmm? So. Our purpose must be foremost in our minds! While the other units infiltrate Hawaii for open military action against the Americans, our purpose is at once more subtle and more important. Remember, in order for our work to achieve its necessary effect, the nature of our group cannot be discovered.”

“Willy?” Reinhardt Kleist was possessed of a voice that was high for a man, and the fellow was painfully aware of it. So he spoke in a whisper, and was sometimes hard to hear because of that.

“Yes, Reinhardt?”

“Willy, I was wondering. Has the, the device been tried?”

Wilhelm Doring smiled. “I have been waiting for someone to ask that question since we began training for this mission. And, I will assure you, the answer is yes. Suitable subjects were fitted with the identical device and death was instantaneous.” The “suitable subjects” were Icelandic sailors found shipwrecked ^off the coast of Eden, then flown inland to the training site. “So there is nothing to worry over in that regard.”

Reinhardt’s face lit in a smile of relief.

“Any other questions, then?” Doring asked, expecting none. And, there were none. “Good! Then we rendezvous as arranged for the equipment check.” He looked toward the doorway. “Gunther!”

“Yes, Willy,” Gunther nodded, making his pistol disappear beneath his sweater as he opened the door.

Wilhelm Doring looked at his wristwatch. In less than an hour, if these Russian pirates had any suspicions, it would no longer matter …

He sat at the far end of the couch, his legs crossed, a cigarette burning between his fingers. Emma Shaw carried his drink in her right hand, her own in her left. She was wearing the shawl now and she threw out the line as she handed John Rourke his drink. “I was a little cold.”

“Live in a home centered around a natural granite cavern like we did and you become used to a little chill in the air,” he smiled.

Emma set her drink on the coffee table, then dropped to her knees beside it, a few feet away from him. She arranged her clothes, drawing the shawl closer around her shoulders. She tried again. “My mother taught me how to crochet.”

“My daughter sews and things, a lot. Crocheting’s like sewing, I guess.”

“I don’t sew; I mean, I do buttons and hems and things, but I don’t make clothing.” She fired her best shot. “I enjoyed making this shawl, though.” Folding the shawl closer around her, she lowered her eyes.

“It’s pretty.”

“Ohh! Well, it’s pretty basic really,” Emma said, tugging at a length of fringe.

“You know, I have to tell you something, Emma.”

Still on her knees, practically at his feet, she leaned forward. “Yes, John?”

John smiled, inhaled on his cigarette. As he began to speak, he exhaled smoke through his nostrils. They flared a little when he did that and it looked wonderfully sexy. “Well, the old mountain men had all that fringe on their buckskins and a lot of people thought it was for decoration. But, it really wasn’t. Know what it was for?”

Emma Shaw sat back on her heels. “No, John. What was it for?”

He laughed. “Well, when something needed repairing-like a ditty bag or a piece of harness-well, they’d just tear off a piece of fringe and use it.”

She looked at him, looked at her shawl. She tugged at a piece of its fringe. “Can’t do much harness repair with dazzle yarn,” Emma said at last. “How did a Doctor of Medicine become a weapons expert and everything?”

“My dad was in the OSS-” He hesitated.

She smiled. “I know that one: Office of Strategic Services during World War Two, predecessor of the CIA. That’s what you were in, right?”

“Right.”

“John?”

“Yes?”

“You made the last toast” she said, raising her glass. John Rourke extinguished his cigarette, raised his glass, touched it to hers. “Here’s to getting to know each other better.” Someone should have yelled “Hussy!” at her, but Emma Shaw didn’t care.

Wilhelm Doring, Marie Dreissling beside him, Reinhardt Kleist, Gunther Brach and the eight others of the special unit-they were not even given a name, this for security purposes, only a radio call designation-moved aft along the portside of the Vladivostok Queen. When the wind which blew so strongly over the Russian pirate ship’s bow would momentarily abate, the smells of onions and sausage, unprocessed tobacco and cheap vodka wafted toward them from below decks.

The vessel’s captain, who called himself only “Dimitri” and a half-dozen of his crewmen stood all the way aft of the superstructure near the opening in the rail with the ladder leading downward toward the small dock rigged there. From that dock, the inflatables would be activated and rigged with their silent running outboards.

Dimitri and his men were visibly armed, as they always were, and if Dimitri had it in mind to kill his passengers and steal their belongings-weapons, explosives, the inflatables themselves, all useful in his pirate trade-now would be the man’s moment.

In the last fifty years, then accelerating in the decade just past, piracy on the high seas had flourished. As shipping grew, so did the pirate fleet. As the pressures of potential world warfare mounted, the powers which could have quelled the pirate trade were too involved in their own matters to look to it seriously. The majority of the pirates were, of course, Russian, many of them the descendants of the people of the Soviet Underwater City, conquered by the Americans of Mid-Wake more than a century ago. But many were disaffected men and some women, these latter known for their brutality, from among the populations of other world groups, including even some leathery-skinned descendants of the Wild Tribes of Europe.

Wilhelm Doring stopped a few feet forward of Captain Dimitri. “Greetings, Captain. Soon, you will be rid of us.”

“Yes, but I shall miss having such intriguing passengers as yourselves, and not to mention well-paying. We’ve come to see you off.” Within the scope of Wilhelm Doring’s experience, Dimitri’s voice was only comparable to the sound made when a file was rasped over coarse metal, only it was deeper. “As I offered, we can always lay off the islands and wait for your return.”

“As before, Captain, the offer is well-intended, I know, but unnecessary. If we leave the islands, we will be using different transport.” Doring sensed that there were more of Dimitri’s men nearby. And, logic dictated it. Dimitri and his men were armed with cutlasses and knives and at least two handguns each, but only two of them carried energy rifles, these slung almost casually. If Dimitri was intent on killing his departing passengers and stealing their belongings, he would have more men ready to step in.

The Wild Tribesman, Rene, who was Dimitri’s first mate, was nowhere to be seen. And Rene had been eyeing Marie Dreissling ever since they first joined the vessel. Odds were that Rene and a dozen more of these seaborne brigands were lurking somewhere above, in the rigging which shadowed the superstructure, guns charged, knives and cudasses keen.

Doring kept Marie well back from him, between him and Reinhardt. And he started forward toward the opening in the rail. The butt of the energy pistol carried in the tactical thigh holster on his right leg almost touched Doring’s fingertips.

Dimitri took a step forward. “Esteemed passengers, I must say a proper farewell.”

“I am sure,” Doring said, nodding.

Dimitri extended his hand to Doring. Doring’s right arm arced slowly upward. They clasped hands, as if in friendship. “My young friend. I wish you fair seas to the islands and that, whatever your secret mission is about, it goes well and you live to tell of your exploits to your great-grandsons.”

“And I wish to you, Captain Dimitri, all that within your heart you wish to me.”

Dimitri, who was left-handed, had probably done this a dozen, or a hundred times before.

Wilhelm Doring, on the other hand, although right-handed by birth, had trained himself to be ambidextrous in all things except writing (which he could manage with his left hand but did poorly). Doring sensed the body movement, the resetting of the shoulders, the tightening of Dimitri’s grip. Doring’s left hand grasped the hilt of one of the several knives he carried. This one was patterned after the Fairbairn-Sykes commando knives of more than six and one-half centuries ago. The blade was slender and double-edged, designed for close-range killing.

Doring freed the knife from the inverted sheath sewn into the lining of his open battle vest.

Doring’s left fist tightened against the double quillon guard of the knife. He punched the blade forward and upward, coming in below the level of Dimitri’s belt and the body armor vest which the pirate captain habitually wore. As the steel penetrated, Doring jerked back, still grasping Dimitri’s right hand, throwing the big Russian off balance. Dimitri’s own blade missed Doring’s abdomen by inches, skating off Doring’s armored battle vest as Doring twisted right.

Doring shouted to his band, “Now!”

At the far right edge of Doring’s peripheral vision, he could see Reinhardt shoving Marie back and out of immediate danger, then swinging up his energy rifle to fire.

Doring let go of his knife as he twisted his right hand free of Dimitri’s grasp. The big Russian was down to his knees, doubling forward to the deck, screaming, “Kill them!”

Doring’s left hand was already moving his energy rifle into position, his right flexing to recover circulation as he grasped his pistol. There was a blur of motion to his left. Some of Rene’s men, he surmised. Doring fired his pistol indiscriminately toward the knot of Russian pirates which had surrounded Dimitri as he wheeled half left and fired the energy rifle toward the blur. Indeed, it was a man, then another and another, cutlasses and energy pistols in their hands. In the light of the swaying lamps here near the rail, their faces looked yellow and tightly drawn into masks of hatred.

Two of the pirates fell. Then, as Doring stepped back, something struck the energy rifle from his grasp, the weapon swung on its sling and crashed against his left thigh.

Doring wheeled left. There was a whooshing sound as steel sliced air and Doring ducked.

It was Rene, the leathery-faced Wild Tribesman, first mate to Dimitri. In Rene’s right hand was a cutlass, in his left a pistol. The pistol fired now. Doring flinched, his pistol off line; there was no chance to fire in his own defense. But in the same instant, the body of one of the pirates fell between Doring and Rene, the pirate-already dead-taking the shot.

There were bursts from energy weapons all around him now, and the ringing of steel as cutlasses and knives did their work.

Marie screamed, “Willy! Look out!”

Doring had his pistol up, to fire. As Doring leveled the weapon, Rene’s cutlass swiped toward him. Doring dodged, but the cutlass caught the pistol less than an inch forward of the trigger guard. It was a backstroke of the cutlass, so instead of breaking Doring’s wrist, it tore the gun from Doring’s hand. Doring stumbled over a body.

As he fell to his knees, his right hand found the hilt of a cutlass, the weapon fallen to the deckplates. Rene’s cutlass swept down toward Doring’s head and Doring arced the cutiass up. The massive curved blades locked for less than a second. Doring dodged back, to his feet now, his left hand groping for

the pistol grip of his energy rifle. But Rene charged, hacking with the cudass and Doring had no choice but to use the only weapon to hand. Their blades locked, parted, locked again.

Rene’s cutlass moved with the alacrity and unpredictable agility of a snake, feinting toward Doring, withdrawing, flicking forward again. But Doring blocked each thrust; and he did it, however effectively, less than gracefully, while Dimitri’s Wild Tribesman first mate was an obviously accomplished swordsman.

The rate of energy weapon blasts was so rapid that it was impossible for Doring to tell one shot from the next. Everyone around him was in motion, a confusion of hands and arms and legs and falling bodies.

Doring’s left hand found the pistol grip of his energy rifle and he stabbed the weapon forward now, blocking Rene’s downwardly hacking cudass with his own blade as he fired the rifle point blank. Rene’s center of mass seemed to collapse into itself and there was the smell of burning flesh …

The smell was overpowering. This current epoch so much replicated the 1960s that it sometimes felt uncanny. Although the shape of the vessel was a little odd-rather like the barrel of a smallish deck cannon-within it, over a dancing candleflame, chocolate melted. Emma was making fondue.

Fresh strawberries and thick slices of banana were set out on two smallish plates, one to either side of the vessel itself at the center of the coffee table.

Rourke sat on the couch. Emma Shaw knelt on the opposite side of the table. She stabbed a piece of banana with one of the small-tined, long-handled forks. Rourke speared a strawberry. “What will you do when this war with Eden has come and gone, John?”

“Wait for the next war,” Rourke said honestly.

“That’s a terrible thing to say,” she almost whispered, her eyes focused on her now chocolate-dripping banana slice.

Rourke immersed his strawberry. Tm speaking from experience, Emma, not from preference. After we ended things with the Soviet Union, I started up my clinic, my hospital. My wife and I were living together, our baby was due. Aside from Commander Dodd and the political strife which he was attempting to generate within Eden, things looked positive. It’s almost as if mankind can’t live without strife, though. Perhaps it’s some fault in our genetic makeup. There are some people who will risk everything-of theirs and everyone else’s-in order to try for power over mankind. Nazi, Communist, doesn’t matter really. “A rose by any other name …” The result’s the same.”

“You’re a pessimist,” she told him.

Rourke smiled as he ate his strawberry. And through a mouthful of chocolate and strawberry he told her, “You’re almost right; I’m a realist. The intent is different, but the result’s the same, Fm afraid.”