Survivalist - 24 - Blood Assassins (13 page)

She would be killing some innocent people, she knew, those test subjects that the American agent James Darkwood had not freed, or those new test subjects brought in since his daring escape. And, doubtless, some of the personnel at the factory worked there involuntarily.

But the mission had been designed, at greater risk to pilots like herself, in order to minimize civilian casualties.

Eden pilots would not, at least officially, care.

Emma Shaw had never ascribed to the philosophy first espoused by a Catholic bishop during the Albigensian Heresy in the Thirteenth Century: “Kill them all; the Lord will know his own.” Or, its more vernacular equivalent, “Kill ‘em all; let God sort ‘em out.”

She was past the early warning sensors and returned to standard horizontal flight, approaching from the southeast toward what had been Montgomery, Alabama, almost to what had been Birmingham before she realized it at the classified speed at which the Blackbird flew.

She punched up the course correction, vectoring through a steep bank to starboard toward the water-filled crater lake which had once been Atlanta.

At Atlanta, she would dogleg the Blackbird almost directly south toward Eden City. Her wing consisted of nine pilots beside herself, each flying his or her own course to the objective. But only three of the aircraft— hers was one of the three—were set to penetrate within Eden City defense systems and strike Plant 234, the remaining seven pilots attacking those defense systems themselves.

Plant 234, of course, was set in a residential area, the other factories in its immediate vicinity producers of innocuous necessities—processing milk, baking bread, one even engaged in the legitimate manufacture of pharmaceuticals.

Lake Atlanta was nearly upon her, and she began the dogleg, paying scrupulous attention to course coordinates on the penetration program. Passing over the lake, once again whitecapped waves rose in her aircraft’s wake, as if somehow she flew between two magnificent waterfalls which were able to defy the force of gravity and flow upward.

She backed off a little on the Blackbird’s speed, so she wouldn’t outrun her missiles should Eden City get up fighter aircraft after her—because, despite her stealth capabilities, Eden City defense systems would acquire her in—she ticked off seconds—five, make that four.

There were the remains of what had once, she recalled from her topographic briefing, been a great civilian airfield, just south of the crater lake. A few isolated patches of runway surface were visible in strips among the mounds of wind-driven snow and sparse wintry vegetation and just before she blinked she thought she detected a few isolated framing ribs from an aircraft, lying there like the bones of a dinosaur.

She was into the approach to Eden City’s Plant 234.

In the same instant, her incoming alert buzzers started going off. Eden City had aquired the Blackbird sooner than she had thought. The irony of a United States Navy pilot flying a combat mission over enemy territory in Georgia, what had once been part of the United States, did not escape her.

The voice of her battle’ computer was speaking through her helmet’s integral headset, its voice annoy-ingly calm. For female pilots, the voice was synthesized into sounding male, for male pilots the opposite. Perhaps that was to prevent chattiness, keep a certain edge to the discourse. If she had not known that the voice was not real and never had been, she could have fallen in love with it. “Commander Shaw, we have thirty-three seconds on my Mark to impact from the first incoming Spider Seven. I recommend evasive—”

“Out-thought you again, Gorgeous.” She banked to starboard, rolled and started climbing. She could outfly her own missiles and she could outfly the Spider Sevens. Spider Sevens, possessed of eight (same number as the legs of a spider) multiple independently targeted warheads, surface to airs, were principally dangerous in the fact that their individual warheads functioned independently, and it seemed (in virtual reality computer simulations, at least), erratically. In order to successfully defeat a Spider Seven, one had to dive into it, bypassing the main body of the missile and threading one’s way among the eight warheads at almost the precise moment of release.

Her aft video—she was climbing nearly vertically— displayed what she had feared, a second Spider Seven. The odds of defeating a single Spider Seven in an aircraft as fast as this were basically on her side. With two, however, if the Spider Sevens fired their warheads synchronously, the odds were suddenly and radically skewed the other way. Intentionally, she avoided calling up the numbers from Gorgeous. She didn’t need to know them in order to know that she was in trouble.

“A second Spider Seven missile—” “I know, Gorgeous. You just relax and let me do the flying.”

“Commander Shaw, I am required to inform you that the odds—” “Either shut up or shut down, Gorgeous.” “Yes, Commander.”

She wouldn’t have liked a flesh and blood man that she could tell to shut up like that and he would do it.

The Blackbird reached one thousand feet under operational ceiling, her hands torquing the yoke, her heart praying that the Blackbird’s hydraulics wouldn’t spasm, would respond. Out of the climb, now, almost into a flat spin, Emma Shaw throttled out into a full power dive.

Gorgeous was saying, “Spider Seven One and Spider Seven Two in process of releasing independently targeted warheads, Commander Shaw.”

“No shit, Sherlock—hang onto your microchips.”

“I am monitoring, Commander.”

“Don’t talk to me like that; you know it gets me all wet.” Despite her pressurized flight suit and the cabin’s engineering, sheer speed drove her lips back from her clenched teeth. Over the red-glowing nose of the Blackbird when the wisps of cloud parted for an instant, she could see two shapes suddenly turning into

more shapes than she could count.

“You are at thirteen percent over recommended maximum speed for—”

“You know I’m slightly triskaidekaphobic—shut up.”

“Yes, Commander.”

Emma Shaw murmured the word wimp under her breath, but not so loudly that Gorgeous would hear her; after all, computers had feelings, too.

The crew of an entire submarine could not be risked. With three volunteers, instead, Thorn Rolvaag descended over the subsurface volcanic vent in what was the world’s most high-tech state-of-the-art deep dive submersible, the Bathyscaph Woodshole named after the scientific center in Massachussetts which, centuries ago, had served as home base to what were then the best of the best in diving bells. An ordinary submarine could now descend to those earlier depths with relative impunity. But the pioneering efforts of the early explorers of the deep sea were undiminished.

Thorn Rolvaag was reminded of the expression so popular among young people centuries ago (he had first encountered it in a sociology course he had not wished to take): “Bummer, dude!” This was, indeed, the very essence of the phrase; he was several thousand feet down within a trench unknown until recent decades and he could only see by means of video. No transparent material—even the best of alloy infused resin synth—could be trusted to withstand the pressures here, their per square inch rate almost incalculable in numbers that meant anything.

But from his seat, he could summon up video from almost any possible direction. And it was what he saw below him, running through the center of the trench and almost due eastward with an almost negligible northward cant along the tropic of Cancer, which obsessed him.

It was a volcanic vent, glowing so brightly that the video persistently flared white.

An enormous crack, extending as far as the video eye could see.

The Spider Sevens were in full release. Emma Shaw ignored Gorgeous as he ignored her. She kept telling him to shut up—maybe he had guts after all—and he kept telling her that she was redlining and that the odds against pulling out of her dive were growing exponentially.

Her fists were locked onto the yoke, knuckles pounding within her pressurized gauntlets, heart pounding within her chest, her chest feeling the weight of the fast-approaching earth crushing in upon her. She would auger into the icy ground in under fifteen seconds at this rate of speed.

In three she would be into the cluster of warheads.

She’d rehearsed it in her mind, even done it once in a simulator (and racked up the simulator for three days), but there was no guarantee—

There was a crack as she pulled up the Blackbird’s nose, airbraking, the aircraft shuddering around her.

Through it, climbing the Shockwave she’d made as she changed course, rolling away from her in a wave. Levelled off. “Hang on, Gorgeous!” Full throttle.

The warheads which had surrounded her at the instant she airbraked were detonating now from the shock wave.

All she had to do was outrun the explosions. By then, she’d be back over Alabama and have to start the run on Eden City over again.

Twenty-six

John Rourke walked slowly, evenly.

The corridor here was of polished synth-marble, the floor, the walls, the ceiling, black, marbled in white and in various shades of grey.

As he passed them, black uniformed guards of the SS saluted him.

The junior officer who walked at Rourke’s side remarked, “The Herr Doctor General must realize that rank, regardless of whether or not the man holding it is the enemy, is to be respected always.”

Rourke glanced at the man and smiled, the smile a humoring one, not because there was anything about which to be happy.

John Rourke’s right fist was on the butt of the gun he had borrowed from Paul Rubenstein. The gun had an interesting history. It was an original German MP-40 submachinegun, evidently brought to the United States as a war trophy by a returning World War IIGI. Whether or not the gun had ever been made legal was another question, but a moot point more than six and

one-half centuries after the fact.

It was taken from among the weapons belonging to the Brigand bikers who had attacked the surviving crew and passengers of the jetliner aboard which he and Paul had spent the Night of the War. Aside from considerable wear on the finish, both gun and magazines were in pristine condition, not only well cared-for but very recently checked with the very latest analytical equipment for any sign of metal fatigue, stress fractures,
etc.
During World War II, considerable numbers of Nazi weapons were turned out in inferior condition, because of the exigencies of the struggle. This gun, however, was as perfect as if it had been made commercially. And MP-40s were among the finest submachineguns ever designed.

Made for the Nazis, the property and fighting companion of a Jew for more than six hundred years, it now guarded John Rourke as he entered the sanctum sanctorum of the new Nazi power which threatened the Earth with a war which might well be the last.

At close range, it could spray more lead than any other weapon Rourke had at his disposal. He had left Paul with his Heckler & Koch rifle in temporary trade.

“Not that I’m concerned about you, John, of course, but I’ve really become attached to this gun,” Paul had told him as they clasped hands.

“I never thought otherwise,” Rourke told his friend, that time the smile genuine.

The purpose of this visit under flag of truce was twofold: to see Sarah, making certain she was well; to be briefed on the details of Deitrich Zimmer’s mad bargain for her life—the retrieval of the remains of Adolf Hitler.

There were identical doors at the end of the corridor, black enameled with brass handles and hinges. Of the inverted Christian door design the larger, upper panel of each had inset at its center the swastika, surrounded by a circlet of oak leaves, both in brass, gleaming.

The junior officer at Rourke’s side knocked on the door at the left.

From within, the voice of Deitrich Zimmer responded, “Yes!”

The junior officer opened the door inward, Rourke stepping past him and inside, Rourke’s right fist tighter on the butt of Paul’s Schmiesser than before.

“So, Herr Doctor General! You trust me!” Zimmer stood at the center of a large conference room, the walls and floor and ceiling of the same synth-marble, in the same glowingly dark pattern. His hands rested on his hips and, as if costumed for some theatrical production, he wore riding jodhpurs above high, brightly shined boots. The trousers were black, the shirt which covered his upper body, white. Despite his age, Deitrich Zimmer was physically impressive in the extreme. “Welcome!”

“Trust you? Hardly. Where’s my wife?”

“Ahh, but first things first.” Zimmer was so far away that he needed almost to shout, Rourke the same. Zimmer started walking toward the furthest wall, Rourke—almost ambling—moving after him. “Your choice of antique firearms is interesting, Rourke. German, isn’t it? From the Third Reich?”

“You Nazis did build to last—in some things.”

Zimmer laughed, stopping before a small panel in the wall, folding it out. Within it was a console, and Zimmer was already working switches and dials as

Rourke stopped to stand beside him. Their eyes met, and Rourke was at once surprised to see that, indeed, Zimmer had two eyes. One had been sacrificed in order to make it appear that he had died instead of his brother. But the second eye seemed real enough. Rourke didn’t really want to know how it had been obtained.

The wall here was opening, huge panels—synth-marble was amazingly strong and could be plate-glass thin—pulling aside to reveal a video screen of vast proportions. Already a picture was appearing on the screen. “You will see your wife, Frau Rourke, very shortly. And, to show that I am not without feeling, I will afford you a few moments alone with her, more I daresay than you would afford me with my son, Martin. Cyanide gas! I would not have thought you so diabolical, my old adversary.”

“My son thought of it,” Rourke said truthfully, smiling.

“Perhaps he does not embrace ideals so lofty as your own. A Rourke, a realist. What a disarming thought.”

“He’s just less trusting,” Rourke told Zimmer.

Appearing on the video screen—John Rourke stepped back in order to see it more fully and in better resolution—was a mountain chain, the slopes, the peaks, the valleys within, all snow-covered. “It is perpetual glacier here.”