Survivalist - 24 - Blood Assassins (12 page)

John Rourke very suddenly had an icy cold feeling in the very pit of his stomach.

Mann walked toward them without blinking, without acknowledging them, the high-cheekboned face expressionless.

Mann stopped a few feet from them.

“What is wrong with him?” Natalia whispered, tak

ing a step toward him, the M-16 in her hands shaking slightly.

“I had originally programmed your Generaloberst to kill Herr Rubenstein as a—”

“What?” Rourke rasped, walking between Zimmer and the others, going up to Mann.

“As the Jew, I naturally felt Herr Rubenstein was the least important among you. But, since your introduction of the cyanide gas, I decided to alter that program. Generaloberst Mann is quite harmless to you now. See?” And Rourke’s eyes flickered toward Zimmer as Zimmer looked at Mann and commanded, “Kneel in the snow, Herr Generaloberst!”

Wolfgang Mann dropped to his knees.

“Kiss the boot of Herr Doctor Rourke, Generaloberst!”

Wolfgang Mann lowered his face toward John Rourke’s feet, but John Rourke dropped to his own knees, grabbing Mann’s head, drawing Mann’s head against his chest, his eyes scanning over Mann’s scalp beneath the close cropped hair. There was a spot closer cropped still, but there was no scar. Mann tried pulling away from him, tried carrying out Zimmer’s order. Rourke held him tighter, but his eyes shifted upward toward Zimmer.

Zimmer was laughing. “He is quite perfected.” Then Zimmer called toward the vehicle which had brought him over the snow, “Send out the captured American pilot.”

For a moment John Rourke held his breath. There was an answering reply, and as Rourke looked toward the vehicle, a youngish woman—Emma’s age—stepped from the vehicle. Wearing only a dark blue knee-length shift, barefoot and seemingly oblivious to the cold, she walked toward them. “Stop, Lieutenant Klein,” Zimmer called.

It was then that John Rourke noticed the pistol in the woman’s bare right hand.

“Put the pistol to your head and pull the trigger, Lieutenant Klein.”

John Rourke was up, moving, running toward her, a blur of motion beside him as Paul and Annie started toward the girl.

The pistol was an ordinary cartridge arm, and in the same instant as the shot echoed across the frigid air the left side of the girl’s temple blew out and away from her head, and her body began to crumple lifelessly into the snow.

John Rourke stopped running.

Annie and Paul passed him.

John Rourke looked at Natalia. The muzzle of her weapon had shifted, now halfway between Wolfgang Mann—his face was in the snow, his lips trying to kiss the boot that was no longer there—and Zimmer, who was laughing.

John Rourke said nothing.

Zimmer very abruptly stopped laughing. “You see, Lieutenant Klein was an earlier experiment. She was really very automationlike. On the other hand, Generaloberst Mann, Herr Doctor General Rourke, is perfectly natural in everything he does, unless I order otherwise. If you fail me, Herr Doctor General, I will reenter the brain of your wife and she will be like this, ready to obey my slightest whim, even at the cost of

her own life.”

Rourke started walking very slowly, across the glacier, toward Zimmer.

Zimmer kept talking. “On the other hand, if you cooperate, assuming Martin is well, I will not only restore to you Sarah Rourke but I will disable the device within the brain of Generaloberst Mann.”

John Rourke’s face was so close to Zimmer’s face when Rourke stopped walking that the glowing tip of Rourke’s cigar was inches from Zimmer’s skin.

Zimmer kept smiling. “I should inquire concerning your other son. He is well?”

John Rourke said, “Yes.”

“I take it he was otherwise occupied? I do not see him with you.”

“Michael suffered an arm wound in an assault against a group of Nazi saboteurs a little while ago. It was a knife. There was risk of infection.” Rourke did not lie, because all of what he said was true enough. Zimmer would draw whatever conclusions he might.

“I almost asked myself if you would attempt, Dr. Rourke, to substitute your boy for mine.”

“And what did you almost answer yourself?” John Rourke said, exhaling, breathing, actually feeling lighter in spirit than he had for some time. The truth did that.

“You would not allow the boy to be so foolish, because then you might indeed have your wife restored to you, but your son would be in my hands.”

“A man would have to be a fool to risk losing so much of his family,” John Rourke almost whispered.

“You will bring me the frozen remains of Adolf

Hitler. From those remains, I will gain the genetic material with which to recreate him.”

“What sort of horror or science fiction have you been into recently, Zimmer? Robbing graves? Building a Frankenstein’s monster?”

“No, a savior.”

Twenty-Four

Lifeless-looking, Wolfgang Mann stood on the glacier, almost at attention.

Deitrich Zimmer, hood up now against the growing cold, a cigarette lit between his gloved fingers, said, “At the close of World War II, when the Fuhrer knew full well that he would be hideously tortured at the hands of the Allied invaders, and that all sorts of confessions of lies would be attributed to him, he did the courageous thing.”

“He shot himself in the head with a Walther PP series pistol,” Natalia whispered.

Zimmer smiled. “You know your history, Fraulein Major. The Allies knew, however, that even in death the power of the Fuhrer would only continue to grow. So that his body might not become the object of the veneration it so deserved in future generations, it was spirited out of Germany aboard a B-17 bomber, flown to a secret airfield in the eastern portion of the United States, then taken by truck in dead of night to a

location in the northern portion of the state of New York, near what was then the St. Lawrence River. It was a mountainous area. Deep within the mountain there was a storage facility.

“The Fuhrer’s remains were packed in ice and frozen, then the block of ice surrounding him was cut away from the rest. It was desired that this block of ice should never melt. A frozen storage locker was specially constructed, built to accomodate the block of ice. The storage locker was closed, then set inside a room. The locker and the room were refrigerated electrically, utilizing a closed system. The storage locker and the room were separately powered, so that in the event that one unit somehow failed, the other would continue on. The room itself was fitted with a backup system which would be actuated should the primary system fail. The facility was part of a larger complex.

“In the years following, in the early days of the so-called Cold War between your country, Herr Doctor Rourke, and yours, Fraulein Major Tiemerovna, the mountain facility was expanded, becoming the first of the Presidential war retreats. In many ways, it was the best, although in the years following, the location was changed several times.

“Too close to too many A targets,” John Rourke supplied, his cigar out, but still clamped tight in his teeth.

“Indeed,” Zimmer nodded. “The facility was utilized for the storage of strategic materials.” “How do you know all this?” Annie asked him. Zimmer started to answer, but John Rourke answered for him. “After the war, the United States brought over a considerable number of German scientists, some of them former Nazis, but seen as potentially useful despite their previous affiliation. Evidently, at least one of those affiliations was not a previous one.”

“Bravo,” Zimmer enthused. “Martin’s superior intelligence, indeed, is in no small part thanks to yours, Herr Doctor.”

Rourke said nothing.

Paul asked, “Then why did you guys wait until now?”

Zimmer did not ignore the question. “Following what has come to be known as the Night of the War, there was of course no opportunity for centuries. The Leader, the man whom the revolution led by the despised Deiter Bern overthrew, was planning that his spiritual antecedent’s body should be recovered, and accorded the veneration which it so richly deserved.”

“Pardon me while I puke,” Paul observed.

Zimmer went on. “When Bern and his stooges seized control of New Germany, several of our leader’s most trusted men, myself among them, were able to escape or go into hiding. The records concerning the repository of the Fuhrer’s remains went with us.”

“Why now?” Paul asked again.

“Yeah!” Annie echoed.

“In large part thanks to your mother, young woman.” Annie started to speak, didn’t. Rourke looked away from her, back into Zimmer’s

eyes. “You see,” Zimmer continued, his voice like that of a patient schoolteacher explaining to a rather obtuse group of students something that should have been simply grasped, “Adolf Hitler’s remains were safe where they were. War is coming. Why risk their destruction? Unless there were something positive to be gained. And, because of the work which I accelerated in order to effect the operation on Sarah Rourke, saving her life, and Generaloberst Mann, in order to control him, I now have the ability to utilize the Fuhrer’s remains to fulfill his dreams.”

“Some would call them nightmares,” Rourke supplied.

“Many great prophets have been destroyed by those whom it was their intention to help, to save Jesus, the—”

Paul took a step closer to Zimmer. “As you pointed out, I’m a Jew. But what you’re about to say is still a sacrilege.”

Zimmer shrugged it off, went on. “As you will. With the Fuhrer’s DNA, and thanks to the surgical skills I have at last perfected, I can complete the work which I have already begun on Martin, altering those aspects of him which I could not have hoped before to alter. He will not just bear some few of the Fuhrer’s genes, distilled and weakened over the centuries, but he will become the Fuhrer. Adolf Hitler will be reborn. You will see to that or Sarah Rourke will be treated very badly indeed.” And Zimmer looked back toward his vehicle. “Projector!”

John Rourke followed Zimmer’s eyes, Rourke’s hands reaching toward his guns as a panel within the front of the vehicle opened.

“Watch out, Annie,” Paul snapped, pushing Annie behind him, moving the muzzle of his submachinegun toward Zimmer.

“No, Paul,” Rourke said, then looked back toward the opening in the vehicle.

Then there was a flicker of light, but not like that of an energy weapon. And then, there in the air, as if floating, John Rourke saw his wife, in perfect dimension. She was as he had seen her in cryogenic sleep, at peace. There was a flicker, and he saw her from the waist up, tented from the forehead down. Another flicker.

What he saw was inside her brain, microsurgery in progress.

And there was a flicker again. And Sarah lay in a bed, a portion of her head bandaged, but her eyes open, as though looking at him.

Her lips moved.

Although there was no sound, he could tell what word she spoke. His name.

“A hologram,” Natalia whispered, stating the obvious.

“You see, I do not lie to you. Sarah Rourke lives.” Zimmer said almost cheerfully. “And thanks to me alone. Whether or not she continues to recover— and she recovers well—is entirely up to you. A small unit of men will be dispatched with you, to obey your orders to the letter until the remains of the Fuhrer are brought to me here. The traitor Mann is yours, ta accompany you, whatever. I have no further use for him unless you elect that following the return of the

Fuhrer’s remains I should remove the control device within him.”

Zimmer walked toward Mann, stared at him, but addressed what he said to John Rourke. “I can, always, order him to kill himself. You might like that, Herr Doctor. I understand the man is in love with your wife. If he kills himself, and if you succeed, of course, you can have her all to yourself. Whatever you wish. You will find me very much the romantic. Perhaps you still secretly yearn for this Russian woman, or that American pilot. We have spies who—”

John Rourke was already moving, grabbing Zimmer by the shoulder, twisting him around. There was the clicking of energy weapon safeties. Zimmer shouted, “Nicht!” Then he looked John Rourke in the eye. “Strike a nerve?’

“You think you’ve won.”

“I have. I have read everything there is to know about you, Herr Doctor. Despite all your abilities, you are a slave to your emotions. You will get me my prize, you will return Wolfgang Mann to me in order that I may effect his salvation. You will hold out hope that I will restore both your wife and Mann to you, knowing full well that you perhaps destroy what little happiness might remain to you before my forces crush the Trans-Global Alliance and lay waste you and everyone like you. You are hopeless, Herr Doctor.

“Brave, resourceful, but pitiably predictable. You will adhere to an abject moral code of right and wrong, no matter how ludicrous the application of that code, nor how self-destructive—you will not deviate from it. The troops I send with you are not to ensure your cooperation, but merely to assist you. Your cooperation is already assured.

“I have won, and you would be a liar if you said otherwise.”

John Rourke said nothing.

Twenty-Five

Her “Blackbird” shrieked over the confluence of Gulf and Atlantic waters where six centuries ago there had been peninsular Florida, before the earthquake following the Night of the War had severed it from the rest of the continent, and dropped it into the sea. Water rose on either side of her slipstream in whitecapped waves of enormous height, a deep trench opening below her fuselage. Her aircraft did not summon the Hand of God to part the waters, however; it only displaced the waters.

Land now, and terrain following here was not nearly so beautiful, so spectacular, but terribly more dangerous. She was roughly equidistant between what had been Tallahassee and Jacksonville, but was now only among the most jagged coastlines she had ever observed. Early warning systems required her to climb ever so slightly, then bank almost into a right angle to the surface, flying nearly perpendicular in order to minimize her aircraft’s profile to computer-linked sensors.

Emma Shaw actuated her holographic targeting headsup, the display appearing in her windscreen. Plant 234, where Eden City under the direction of its Nazi masters used human beings as quality control test subjects in the fabrication of poison gas, was clear in every detail, however minute, looking exactly the way that it would when she overflew the real target.