Survivalist - 24 - Blood Assassins (16 page)

Nothing needed to be said further. With the suddenly heightening volcanic activity in the Hawaiian islands, and the discovery of a new El Ninio well off what had been the coast of Ecuador, this new trench might indeed be the harbinger of the end, not manmade this time, but certainly man assisted.

And, here he was, going in search of the remains of the body of Adolf Hitler, an unholy mission in a wholly selfish cause.

And nagging at John Rourke still, was a question the answer to which he might not realize until it was too late: Why had Doctor Zimmer returned Wolfgang Mann and why—certainly not out of any desire to do the decent thing—had Deitrich Zimmer performed the life-saving surgery required by Sarah?

Although he had been at the top of his class in medical school more than six centuries ago, John Rourke’s skills by comparison to medicine of today were more analogous to those of a crafty tribal shaman. But could it be possible that in the very act of restoring Sarah Rourke, Zimmer had done something even more despicable than when he had originally shot her one hundred and twenty-five years ago?

John Rourke clapped Paul Rubenstein on the shoulder, unbuckled his seat restraint and left Paul, walked aft along the fuselage and sat down beside Wolfgang Mann. Paul looked back once, then took out his diary.

Before Rourke could speak with Mann, Gunther Spitz called out to Paul, “And, what is it that you do there, Jew?”

The muscles around Paul’s eyes tensed slightly, but

Paul smiled as he responded, “Well, damn Nazi, I tell you—”

Hauptsturmfuhrer Spitz’s entire body seemed to tense. Paul’s left hand was under the table, near the butt of his second Browning High Power.

Paul continued to speak. “I’m writing a log, as it were, a diary but, more than that, a history. After a section is filled in by hand, it’s transfered to a universally translatable hard disc. Someday, there’ll be a record of what has happened since the Night of the War. A personal record. Documents such as this can be invaluable to the historian. I began it after our airliner crashed during the Night of the War, before your great-great-grandfather was a tickle in his father’s pants.” And Paul smiled broadly. “And, as to being Jewish, I am. And proud, too. We survived, despite what your spiritual antecedents tried doing to us during World War II. We helped to build a better world. We helped to promote understanding. You did nothing but destroy. To the enlightened man, Jew, Christian, Moslem, the label doesn’t matter, really. It’s what a man or woman does, who they are as a person, not anything else that truly matters. I’m sure, for example, that if I looked really hard—although admittedly it would be challenging—I might even be able to find a Nazi who didn’t deserve to be exterminated from the face of the Earth.”

Spitz nearly tore away his seat restraint, rose abruptly from his seat.

John Rourke’s hands were near his waistband, ready to touch the two Scoremasters there. But, this was Paul’s play and Rourke would only interfere if his friend needed him.

As Hauptsturmfuhrer Gunther Spitz stared across the aisle, Paul—looking for all the world like a gunfighting gambler from a western movie—moved his left hand forward under the table. The second Browning High Power was tight in Paul’s fist, the hammer back. “To keep from punching a hole in the aircraft, I’ll keep all my shots in your chest. Your move.”

Gunther Spitz just stood there, limbs shaking with rage.

His men, collecting around him, were ready to follow his lead.

Paul said nothing, merely kept the pistol still under the table—aimed at Hauptsturmfuhrer Gunther Spitz’s center of mass.

Gunther Spitz snarled, “Our hour will come, Jew.”

“Any time, Nazi.”

Gunther Spitz nodded to his people and sat down again, rotating his chair in order to put his back to Paul, perhaps as a show of defiance.

When John Rourke looked back at Paul the High Power had already disappeared.

Rourke turned to look at Wolfgang Mann beside him. They sat on a U-shaped couch much like a conventional Twentieth Century sectional sofa, positioned just forward of the aft bulkhead, behind them one of the lavatories, the galley area and some storage space. Since John Rourke cared nothing for the company with the exception of Paul and Wolfgang Mann, and he knew that neither man was bothered by cigar smoke, Rourke took one of his thin, dark tobacco cigars from the outside patch pocket of his bomber jacket.

The jacket had recently been cleaned, and rapidly so after being impregnated with volcanic ash during the abortive attempt to rescue young Martin, an affair which had resulted in his son’s death. Rourke shook his head in disgust. The tip of the cigar was already excised. Rourke placed the cigar between his teeth and flicked open the cowling of his battered old Zippo windlighter. He rolled the striking wheel under his thumb, the lighter’s blue yellow flame rising at once. Rourke held the flame beneath the cigar, drawing the fire up into it. Once the cigar was lit he exhaled, then rolled it to the corner of his mouth. “It is good to see you again, Wolf.”

“And you, John.”

“Tell me, Wolf, what do you remember concerning the time after you were awakened.”

“Why do you ask? Surely, you have experienced the same sensations.”

“Curiosity. Please, indulge me.”

Wolfgang Mann cleared his throat, lit a cigarette. “It was very bewildering at first.” And then he laughed a little. “I was thirsty and, no matter how much water I drank, I could not slake my thirst.”

“Are you thirsty now, Wolf?”

“No; I am fine. Why do you ask?”

“Curiosity. Cryogenic sleep affects every person differently. I felt terribly stiff.”

“I did not, oddly, but I would have thought that I would.”

John Rourke merely nodded, then closed his eyes. Thirst, beyond wetting one’s mouth, was not really a problem after cryogenic sleep. Neither of the children—they were adults now, of course—had ever complained of it, nor had Sarah, or Paul or Natalia. Rourke had never experienced it either. On the other hand, thirst was common after some types of anesthesia. And muscle stiffness—from the inactivity—was intense. One felt weak as the proverbial kitten following awakening. Yet Wolfgang Mann had not experienced this and, indeed, the Generaloberst’s walk as he had approached their aircraft earlier had seemed more or less normal. Yet Mann had been decidedly fuzzy-sounding, as if drugged.

One of the keys to Deitrich Zimmer’s successful microsurgery was the appliances he constructed, then used—surgical tools of his own creation.

John Rourke respected that rare thing known as genius wherever he happened to find it, and Zimmer possessed it. Had Zimmer somehow found something else to do with his tools?

John Rourke opened his eyes.

Wolfgang Mann had returned to gazing out the window. There was nothing to see but clouds, beautiful to be sure but repetitive, always the same.

John Rourke flicked ashes from his cigar into one of the ashtrays permanently set into the coffee table, anchored to the floor in front of him. He took from his clothes the primary map he would use of the terrain surrounding the mountain enclave. It was an aerial recon photo transposed over a topographical map. From the look of things, it would be an easy enough climb to the presumed site of the main entrance, but that would not be the way to get inside, a fact which no doubt had not eluded Deitrich Zimmer. One could not, after all, just knock, then announce, “I’m sorry to bother you, but I’ve come to pick up something you

probably don’t know you have—the remains of Adolf Hitler?’

No, Rourke almost verbalized. Entry to the facility would have to be through some more subtle means.

He was experienced with this sort of arrangement, of course. His own Retreat (now a museum in Eden), the Soviet Underground City in the Urals of more than a century ago, New Germany’s heart in Argentina.

All of these facilities, including his own, had one central theme, that the outside and the inside were hermetically sealed away from each other, at least to begin with. That this civilization had not come out onto the surface again either meant that it—the civilization itself—had collapsed or that their system was so efficient as to preclude any necessity of venturing onto the surface. A true underground city, as the Russian and German facilities had been until the atmosphere outside was sufficiently restored.

Perhaps, although that seemed incredible, these persons had no idea that the surface was, at least for the moment inhabitable, had been so for well over a century and a half.

If the entire facility were sealed and there was no interchange between the inside and the outside world, then the only means of access would be explosives. John Rourke had planned ahead for that.

But what he hoped to find instead, was some sort of service entrance, perhaps for the removal of waste gases, but for whatever reason a connection between the outside and the inside.

And the heat signature near the very top of the mountain well to the north of what appeared to be a vast, gently sloping plateau, suggested just that.

He hoped.

If the society within the mountain had grown, progressed, if for nothing else than the cleaning of their environment, they would have such a waste gas cleaning vent. There was no data to support Rourke’s theory beyond the suggestion of a heat signature but he clung to that nonetheless, his best hope.

Thirty-one

According to technical specifications, her flight suit would protect her, keep her comfortable to temperature extremes to twenty degrees fahrenheit, and was windproof, of course.

Evidently the temperature was lower.

Emma Shaw was cold.

She wasn’t freezing, yet. But, she wasn’t comfortable either.

Nothing but snow and ice.

Her primary chute was folded and partially stowed in its pack. The high-strength windproof synth-silk could be utilized for a variety of purposes—she might make it into a coat in a little while—and the paracord could prove useful as well in a survival situation.

Her Lancer pistol was still in the issue holster, but the Government Model .45—she’d been hanging around John Rourke too long, and her father too, Emma Shaw thought—was in her hand, chamber loaded, cocked and locked. Emma still wore her helmet, as it would protect her head from the effects of

the cold, and the oxygen mask was still in place, but switched from the oxygen supply to filtering environmental air. This warmed the air a little before she breathed it.

Snow crunched under her flight boots as she traversed what seemed to be a vast, featureless plain. By her survival compass, she was moving northward, only because according to her escape map—it was printed on synth-silk and tied around her throat now for warmth—there were human habitations to the north that were not under control of the Eden government.

She could survive a few nights out here if she had to, and as it appeared now she would probably have to do just that, but eventually Eden forces would track her down, before her own people could get there to extract her. Alone, here in the wilderness, her grey flight suit sticking out like a sore thumb against the whiteness of the landscape, she could not help being discovered.

At last, after walking for what she judged was four miles or so, Emma Shaw stopped. She shouldered out of her flight harness and began to utilize the parachute. Using her survival knife she cut a neck hole and two wrist holes in double thicknesses of the synth-silk parachute. In this manner she would be warmer and less visible from the air. She wore a transponding device which would home in rescue forces, so she didn’t need to be observable. And the parachute would still be large enough to utilize as a shelter, if it came to that— the tube shelter in her survival pack somehow was probably not warm enough. In order to have ready-made guys for the shelter, she cut off only a portion of the paracord, weaving what remained attached into modified hangman’s nooses. The rest of the cord she coiled and stuffed into her harness pack, out of which the chute had originally come.

When she cut the holes in the synth-silk chute she did so in such a manner that nothing was excised. Therefore with the emergency sewing materials in her survival kit, she could close any holes if need be, should the weather turn really severe.

Emma made herself a cold meal using the rations sparingly. She had a four-day supply, but how was she to know if that would be enough?

Eyes casting down to glance at the radiation counter in her chest pack, she trudged onward again warmer somewhat (once she got moving again) with her synth-silk poncho. From above she might look like some giant, mobile mound of snow.

After what she judged to be another mile the terrain started to break up and simultaneously rise. And there, ice was more prevalent than snow. She was deep into the glacier now.

Another mile onward—she was becoming very tired and needed to rest, perhaps eat again, the cold multiplying the effect of the exertion—and the land just stopped. Before her lay a chasm, incredibly wide and more importantly, seemingly impassable.

At its center, perhaps two hundred yards below, coursed a river, blue and silver like a ribbon.

Emma Shaw was beginning to worry that sometime during the various twists and turns and bumps and jars her body had endured, she might have done some real damage to herself. Her head ached. That could be shock, even a mild concussion, or maybe a compression fracture.

At least, as best she had been able to discern before picking herself up off the ground, nothing seemed broken.

What to do, she wondered.

And then, as she scanned the far wall of the chasm in detail through her small field glasses, she realized what her best chance might be. If she could take the near wall downward, perhaps here, as in the far wall, there would be caves. If she could rest, perhaps for the night, she would feel better, warmer too. A fire might even be possible.

And the river itself might be her way out. It seemed free flowing enough. As a part of her standard kit there was a single-person inflatable life raft. The things were cramped and not the sort of boat one would use for a pleasure cruise. But she might be able to use the raft to carry her downriver. This river eventually would flow to the sea.