Survivalist - 23 - Call To Battle (7 page)

“Fine. Then say by some miracle it becomes an ideal world. What then?”

“I’d like to explore it, see what’s out there. And if we ever got a space program going-which we won’t in my lifetime because we’re too busy trying to survive-see what’s out there as well. But Td probably try to bring my medical education up to the level of the present century, then go back in the doctor business,” Rourke concluded.

Emma said nothing, just impaled a strawberry.

As Rourke drowned a banana slice in the chocolate, he said, “A lot derjends-everything, really-depends on whether or not Sarah can be saved now. And Deitrich Zimmer’s the only man who can do it, it appears, if indeed he can.”

“What would you do if the bullet in her brain can’t be removed, if she can’t be awakened, John?”

“Once that’s certain,” Rourke told her, “that no process currendy known could save her, Fd take The Sleep again, stay with her until the day that she can be brought back.”

Emma put down her fork. She said, “Even considering everything, your wife’s a lucky woman.”

John Rourke smiled. “I know you meant that as a compliment, but I don’t know how lucky she is to have me for a husband; sometimes, I think I’m a curse to her. But she’d do the same for me, I know.” Rourke exhaled, took a sip from his drink. “But there’ll be a way of making Deitrich Zimmer do what has to be done.”

Then?” Emma rocked forward, her elbows on the table, her chin resting in her tiny fists.

Then Zimmer and Martin will have to be stopped.”

“You’d kill your own son.” There was no hint of reproof or even shock in her voice, just the statement of fact. That was something Rourke liked very much about her; Emma Shaw was a realist.

“Not willingly,” Rourke rasped, clearing his throat, taking another sip of his drink.

Dead men lay everywhere aft of the superstructure.

Two of Doring’s own band were wounded, but neither seriously. Marie attended them as Reinhardt led a team to set the charges that would sink this vessel to the bottom. Such had been Doring’s plan all along; the opportunity presented by Captain Dimitri’s attack actually heightened the potential for effectiveness.

Gunther Brach, with two of the men, kept the remainder of the pirate crew pinned down below decks with energy weapons fire so that the demolitions party and the boat party, which Doring himself led, could go about their business unmolested.

Doring, on the floating jetty beside the rusting hull of the antique vessel, looked to the main deck and shouted up, “We are ready down here!”

“Laying the last charges now, Willy!” Reinhardt called back.

Had they been able to depart the Vladivostok Queen without incident, they would have lain off just over the horizon and two of the men would have gone back using scuba gear and laid magnetic charges on the hydrofoil and laterally along the underside of the hull. The effect would have been to rip the vessel open and sink ft in two halves, fore and aft. The advantage provided them under the present circumstances was significant: by skillful placement of the charges, the pirate hydrofoil could be made to collapse in upon itself. It would sink faster that way and there was a vasdy reduced chance of any survivors.

Doring had realized that if, somehow, Dimitri and his crew

could have seen any profit in contacting the authorities at Pearl Harbor and alerting them, that a party of Nazi commandos had quietly infiltrated the islands, they would have done so. This had been obvious from the first. As they had crossed the Tropic of Cancer, Doring came to the realization that Dimitri, instead of seeking some dubious reward for betraying them might be contemplating a more direct assault on them. That had happened.

Dimitri, disarmed and not yet fully bled to death from his gaping wound, still knelt on his own deck, howling curses into the night in a multiplicity of languages. Doring patted the hilt of the dagger which he had retrieved from Dimitri’s crotch. The blade as an extension of his hand had done its work well.

Doring looked to the boats. All three were inflated, silent twin outboards mounted, gear stowed.

Doring ordered, “One of you stay with the boats. The rest of you, follow me up top. We get the wounded.” Had his two wounded men been in serious condition, he would have killed them personally. They would have expected that, just as he would have. In the event of his death, Reinhardt had the command.

As Doring reached the main deck and swung through the gap in the rail, he saw Marie, her blue eyes wide, her skin more pale than usual. She was just completing a bandage. Women were ill-suited to anything but domestic or basic clerical duties, but a female was necessary to the operation and Marie was as good as any. Once the team became known to the American authorities in the Hawaiian Islands, security would naturally be tightened. A woman, uninvolved direcdy in the raids, would be able to move more freely than a man. Her English was perfect. He gave her that.

“Marie. Help put the wounded into the boats.”

“Yes, Willy.”

He gave her that, too; she was properly obedient. Reinhardt approached, smiling. “The charges are set, Willy.” “Good.”

“I will able to radio detonate from two hundred meters away. We will be safe from any flying debris. There are little redundancies built into the charges so that even if one of them is moderately skilled, neither can the charges be disarmed nor neutralized. So!”

“Good!” Doring nodded. Then he went to stand before Captain Dimitri. The pirate captain’s body was so bent over that his forehead rested against one of the deck plates. “Captain. We must leave you now. But it was a pleasant voyage. And you shall have the ultimate sea captain’s honor. I have always read that the captain must go down with his ship. This you will do.”

“Fuck you!” The sound of Dimitri’s voice was more animal than human now, and so low that it could barely be heard over the lapping of the sea against the hull of the Vladivostok Queen.

“That is a trait of which I would never have suspected you, Captain. But, if you wish to fantasize-” And Doring smiled as he walked away. He shouted over his shoulder, “Gunther! When we are safely aboard the inflatables, withdraw.”

“Yes, Willy!”

He’d shaken her hand.

Her right arm hung limp at her side.

From the small porch, she could watch the taillights of his car as they became smaller and smaller and smaller. In another moment, they would disappear.

A wind blew strong and cold down from the mountains, tugging at her clothes, at her hair. The shawl across her nearly bare shoulders not too terribly heavy, Emma Shaw was cold. But she stood there alone on the front porch, watching the vanishing taillights anyway.

She had made the ultimate mistake any woman could make: She was in love with a man who was totally unattainable; but that was not the reason that she loved him. There was no reason to it, and that, more than anything, at once terrified her yet convinced her that what she felt was very real, perhaps her ultimate reality. And that terrified her even more.

It was unthinkable that John Rourke would suddenly take her into his arms and ravage her body as he’d ravaged her soul almost from the very first instant she’d seen him.

Emma Shaw could no longer really see the lights from his car, but she stood there anyway.

The wind raised her dress. She made no move to touch the skirt, to hold it down. Her arms hung so limply at her sides now that the shawl had slipped from her shoulders, clung to her only at her elbows. “John,” she whispered to the night. She’d always enjoyed the writings of Albert Camus, the Twentieth-Century French existentialist. A story she’d always remembered was his classic, The Unfaithful Wife,” but she was not about to bare her body to the stars on the roof of some desert hovel. And, it wasn’t as if she hadn’t bared her body on a few occasions before.

She wanted to strip away her clothes, wear only John Rourke’s arms around her. That would be enough, forever. But he wasn’t here. And, he wouldn’t be. The Faithful Husband.” If she were a writer, she could write a story about him, a man garbed in the righteousness of his fidelity to a wife who was all but dead.

Yet Emma Shaw could not bring herself to hate Sarah Rourke. She envied her. And that was funny, envying a woman who had slept for one hundred and twenty-five years in suspended animation, with a bullet in her brain that in all likelihood could never be removed.

And Emma Shaw shivered. The thought that crossed her mind made her feel colder and more alone than any wind or any night. John, when Sarah could not be brought back, would re-enter what he so offhandedly called The Sleep and wait with her.

While John slept with his almost dead wife, she-Emma Shaw-might sleep with others, but never sleep with him. And the great love of her life would quite literally pass her by. When he reawoke, she would be dead, gone, hardly a memory.

Or, worse.

He would reawaken, about forty or so as he was now, and she-Emma Shaw-would be alive and old and near death and John would come to visit her, laugh with her about this dinner tonight, pat her gently on a wrinkled hand, perhaps brush his lips against her cheek.

And then death would be a blessing.

She was conscious in that instant that tears were flooding her eyes. She could have turned her eyes into the wind, made them go away. But, she let them flow from the rims of her eyes and across her cheeks. She tasted the salt of her own

tears on her lips. It was bitter. .

Annie Rourke Rubenstein lay in the crook of her husband’s arm. Neither of them was asleep. She was wet between her legs from him, and she nuzzled closer to him in the darkness, holding him, him holding her. “Paul?”

“Yeah?”

“I love you.” His lips touched her forehead. Annie started to cry, turned her face against Paul’s chest, murmured, “Hold me tighter?”

“What’s the matter, Annie?”

“I was thinking about daddy, how lonely he must be? Well, I just can’t-I just can’t-“

“Hell get Deitrich Zimmer, get Zimmer to help her. He’ll use Martin. John can do it.”

“First momma, then Natalia. Daddy doesn’t have anybody, Paul. He’s alone every night. He’s-” She could no longer speak, just hold and be held.

Paul whispered, “I know, baby.” He held her and his lips touched her hair and Annie closed her eyes but didn’t sleep …

She sat, hugging her knees close to her, her eyes riveted to the pirate ship Vladivostok Queen. Willy had told her to watch.

Marie Dreissling shivered, despite the blanket one of the men had thrown over her shoulders. The wind was blowing up, making the swells roll higher and the troughs deeper and her stomach churn.

The men aboard the Vladivostok Queen -all of them-would soon die. Marie Dreissling knew they were enemies, but they were human beings. That was why she was glad to be a woman. Such a decision as this, to kill these men, was a decision she could never have made. That was something only a man could do.

“All right, now, watch, Marie. The explosions will have a ripple effect, sawing the damned ship in two,” Reinhardt said. Marie Dreissling watched.

Men knew about such things, determined who should live and who should die.

She blinked because the chill and the velocity of the wind were making tears rise in her eyes. And, when she blinked, she missed the first explosion. But, she could hear it, and as she opened her eyes, she saw the second, then the third.

She had expected flames, pieces of burning debris, perhaps a mushroom-shaped fireball rising into the night sky, turning the darkness to day. But there were only bright flashes and muted banging sounds and then there was a horrible groan, like the noises Captain Dimitri’s bowels had made as he at last fell prone to the deck just as she had gone down the ladder to board her inflatable.

The engines of all three inflatables purred into life.

The sea churned more wildly.

The port and starboard sections, then the fore and aft sections of the Vladivostok Queen began to fold inward. And the vessel seemed to rise up in the water, as though it were human, drowning, grasping for one last chance at life.

The three inflatables were hydroplaning now and the rolling of the seas felt less pronounced in her stomach.

And the Vladivostok Queen sank beneath the waves.

John Thomas Rourke felt little like sleeping.

He spent some time keening the edge of the Crain Life Support System X knife, then touching up the A.G. Russell Sting IA Black Chrome’s edges as well. He took his vintage copy of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged from his suitcase and picked up where he’d last stopped rereading when other matters had drawn him away.

He read that for a time, but could not concentrate.

He thought of Sarah, and the inevitability of his future should he live long enough to meet it. By the time the day came that Sarah would be restored to him, young Martin Zimmer, their son kidnapped at birth and raised by the Nazi Deitrich Zimmer, then genetically altered to mirror the image of Deitrich Zimmer’s idol, Adolf Hitler, would be dead. John Rourke would have to see to that in one manner or another. Precipitating the death of his own son, however evil and vile that life had become, would be the second most difficult thing he would ever have to do.

For all that Deitrich Zimmer had done, the ultimate responsibility for young Martin being in the world was John Rourke’s, his and his alone. He alone had made Sarah pregnant with the child. And, but for the circumstances of the child’s birth, Sarah might well have been beside him. They could have lived out the rest of their lives, he and Sarah, in relative normalcy.

And, together, they would be in their graves by now, knowing nothing of this future which the begetting of Martin Zimmer helped to create.

The most difficult thing, even more than taking the life of young Martin, would be telling Sarah that he had done it, and losing her forever as the consequence. She would assume, as any mother would, that somehow Martin could have been changed back, for the good. But what Deitrich Zimmer had done to the boy, through the combination of genetic surgery and the environment in which the boy was raised, was irreversible, except perhaps by surgically or chemically neutralizing the personality centers of Martin’s brain.