Survivalist - 24 - Blood Assassins (22 page)

“In a manner of speaking,” Rourke said, nodding to his friend.

“Letters? What do such things—”

Rourke looked at Spitz. “What if your people have been so intent on finding an entryway to the mountain redoubt that they have ignored the obvious, hmm? What if, instead of an entryway into the mountain itself, there are access tunnels coming into the mountain from underneath? The material like synth-concrete which was used to construct the cap over the gas outlet piping could just as easily be utilized to build tunnel walls. What if your aerial observations were so committed to looking for the subtle that the obvious was ignored?”

“Passageways,” Spitz said.

John Rourke glanced at Wolfgang Mann. Mann seemed attentive, but there was a look in his eyes that seemed inexplicable. And suddenly, John Rourke realized that not only had the Nazis ignored the obvious in their search for the subtle, but so had he. And a chill, more properly called an involuntary paroxysm, ran along John Thomas Rourke’s spine and made the hairs on the back of his neck feel to him as if, indeed, they were standing on end.

Rourke exhaled.

Paul said, “Then we should go airborne and utilize the colder evening temperatures to assist us in looking for heat signatures from tunnel openings which might be hundreds of yards, maybe even miles away from the base of the mountain.”

Rourke looked at the pilot, then the copilot.

“Gentlemen, you’ve worked a long day. Can we do a few hours of high altitude observation before calling it a night?”

The pilot answered for both men. “Yes, Herr Doctor!”

John Rourke stood up, adjusting the positioning of his Scoremasters in his belt. “Good. We’ll all help however we can, of course. I can spell either one of you on the V-stol’s controls—for level flight only, however, since I’ve never checked out on one of these. While the inhabitants of the mountain, if they are aware of our presence, await our doing something with the explosives we’ve set, we’ll look for another way inside.”

Spitz smiled. “You are, indeed, Herr Doctor, magnificent!”

John Rourke said nothing.

Forty

Her father had always told her she was reckless, and she could almost hear Tim Shaw’s voice in her ear telling her, “Watch out you don’t break your damn fool neck, kid—excuse my language.” And the thought of her father just then brought a smile to Emma Shaw’s hps as she angled her way into a little defile, wedged herself there for a moment and rested. The little campfire was closer now, but it didn’t seem much larger. Whoever had set it wasn’t building it up for the night, perhaps was letting it go out.

The fire was her beacon and, just in case the fire was about to extinguish itself, Emma Shaw started moving downward again, trying to quicken her pace as much as she dared.

She heard the sound of a horse again, the clicking of hooves on rock and soft whinnying in the night. As Emma Shaw worked her way downward, picking her way with great care because the rocks were sharp and unevenly spaced, she felt warmer. And, it was more than her own exertion. Her father had always kidded

that girls never sweated, only glistened. She’d kept the joke going with him over the years. Now, she was “glistening” quite heavily. She kept moving.

In addition to the sight of the fire, there were now two other sensual keys, both its smell—good, actually— and its crackle, almost friendly in the night. Soon, there was still another smell, one which was unmistakable. It was the smell of freshly made coffee.

Soon, Emma was able to discern shapes just at the boundary of the firelight, one of them very large, the horse. The other seemed to be a man. This latter moved about, as if tending to chores in some regular pattern. The smell of the coffee was stronger.

A small stone dislodged under her left foot, then started a cascade of stones down into the gorge and Emma Shaw froze, realizing that she might have alerted whoever it was beside the fire. And she was relatively certain that it was only one person. But the person’s movement pattern seemed uninterrupted.

She waited, crouching there uncomfortably amid the rocks, her eyes focused intently on the fire. The man shape seemed to settle in, back toward her, she realized, because the figure’s outline was silhouetted by the flame. She could make out no detail, only blackness.

By the face of her wristwatch, she ticked off the minutes, seven going by before she felt that it might be safe to move again. Then, move she did, but more slowly and cautiously now, feeling each step out lest she cause more sounds in the night. She reasoned that perhaps the rolling of the river—there were small rapids all along its length in either direction as far as she had been able to see before dark—had obscured the noise, thus leaving whoever it was beside the fire

unalerted to her presence. Emma Shaw hoped.

At last, she was nearly to the bottom of the gorge, her improvised backpack made from the parachute pack weighing heavily on her, her right hand sweating inside the insulated glove. In her right hand, which was balled into a fist, was the .45 automatic.

She started to ease her way down to the comparatively level surface of the river bank.

There was a series of four clicks and a man’s voice from behind her saying, “Stop where you are.”

Emma Shaw came close to pissing in her panties.

Forty-one

Emma Shaw’s mind raced. He used English, not one of the bastardized dialects of the Land Pirates. The way the words were said, there was a definite sign of education, again totally atypical of the Land Pirates. And, a Land Pirate would have shot first, because in the darkness and with her helmet on, she would most likely be mistaken for a man.

Emma Shaw decided to risk it, spinning around to her right, her thumb sweeping down the .45’s safety. She was nearly fully turned around when something hard struck her on the shoulder near the right side of her neck and her arm went suddenly numb and she started to go down.

Her gun fell from her fingers, but she launched her weight against the legs of the man who had just struck her and they both fell onto the snow-splotched rocks. She head butted the man, and as her helmet made contact, she heard him exclaim in a kind of low growl, “Damnit!”

Then something was grabbing hold of her helmet,

snapping her head back and dragging her up to her knees simultaneously, her helmet pulling free of her head, her hair falling out from beneath it, a fist—it seemed huge—coming toward her face.

And it stopped.

“A girl!”

Emma Shaw seized the opportunity, crossing toward his jaw with her bunched up left fist, his head tilting away in order to dodge the blow, her fist missing the underside of his jaw, catching him at the flat of the bone just forward of the ear.

He was better at this, she realized in one fleeting instant as his left arced up toward her and darkness swept over her after an incredible flash of light.

“But time is of the essence, is it not?”

Rourke didn’t look at Spitz, still watching the instrument array. But he answered him. “Your Fuhrer’s remains have been inside the mountain, according to Dr. Zimmer, since immediately following the conclusion of World War II. That was in the middle of the fourth decade of the Twentieth Century. I shouldn’t think a few hours will make much difference after almost seven centuries, would you?”

Spitz seemed to sigh. “I suppose not, Herr Doctor.”

“Why don’t you get some rest; we’ll all need it, whether we blast our way in or we find a tunnel—”

John Rourke didn’t finish what he had been about to say. As the pilot tacked tangentially outward to the two mile mark, John Rourke’s eyes detected a heat signature on the thermal scan …

John Rourke sat at the V-stol’s copilot controls, his eyes scanning the instrument readings for any sign of a heat signature. This was their fourth sweep, and even John Rourke was beginning to despair of finding the theoretical tunnel openings. The craft was fifteen miles out from the mountain’s center.

One of the Nazi enlisted personnel brought him a cup of coffee and Rourke nodded his thanks, then sniffed at the coffee before sipping at it. It smelled like nothing but coffee.

“Take it out another two miles only.” Rourke told the pilot.

From behind him, he heard Spitz’s voice. “I am beginning to think, Herr Doctor, that your idea, however clever, is mistaken.”

“Perhaps,” Rourke said, sipping again at his coffee. “Perhaps not. Time will tell, as the saying goes.”

Emma Shaw opened her eyes but did not move. Her head was resting on something and she was stuffed inside a thermal sleeping bag identical to her own, but it didn’t quite smell right. There was nothing bad about the smell, but it was different, a hint of tobacco about it.

As she turned her head to the right—her jaw hurt a httle—she saw the figure of the man whom she’d fought. She still couldn’t see his face. “Sorry I decked you, Commander Shaw,” he said.

Her hands moved over her clothes inside the bag and she found that her Lancer pistol was still holstered to her body. He couldn’t have missed it.

Her name he would have gotten off her helmet.

Emma Shaw debated about reaching for the second

pistol. After a second or so, she asked, “Who are you?”

“Long story, really. The name’s Alan Crockett.”

Emma Shaw laughed. “Yeah, right.”

“Ever dawn on you, Commander, that there are some things for which military training is not always the answer? Well, that’s why I really am Alan Crockett and I’m not in Hawaii, but I’m here instead.”

“Alan Crockett died three years ago.”

“No. Alan Crockett was made to appear to die—and it will be exactly four years ago in another month.”

“That’s crazy,” Emma Shaw said, sitting up too fast and her head aching a little because of it. She moved her jaw. No teeth felt loose or damaged, but the jawbone was a little tender. “What the hell would Alan Crockett be doing out here?”

“The phrase is ‘military intelligence,’ which, as we all learn eventually, is an absurdity because the two words are mutually exclusive.”

His voice did sound like Alan Crockett’s voice, now that she thought of it. She had attended a series of lectures he’d given for the Navy survival school, on wilderness survival after going down. But Alan Crockett died in an avalanche while on a field training exercise in New Germany. His body was never recovered. “How come you’re not dead?” Emma Shaw asked. “And where’s my gun?”

“Here’s your gun,” he told her, turning around and handing it to her. As he offered the .45 to her, butt forward, the light from the fire caught his face and she could see it clearly. He had a mustache, wavy hair poking out beneath a broad brimmed hat. And the bridge of his nose had a bump where it looked like it might have been broken once, but never given over to cosmetic surgery. He looked like Professor Alan Crockett. “And I am here, Commander, I daresay, to advance the same cause in the service of which you are here. We’re doing our patriotic duty for Uncle Sam. In my case, that meant pretending to die so I could move about unmolested in North America. In your case, I suspect it was a little less planned. Bombing run?”

“To get away from some missiles I had to trash my aircraft.” •

“Flying a Blackbird?”

She wasn’t going to tell him that.

He laughed after her long pause. “I’m really not an enemy, Commander, but you can be as secretive as you like—if that makes you feel more comfortable.”

“What did you hit me with?”

He laughed again. “My fist, and I am very sorry; the blow you delivered wasn’t exactly a love pat, though.”

“No.” She flexed her fingers around the butt of her just returned gun.

“I emptied the chamber by the way for safety.”

She nodded her head. “What’d you slug me with, when you hit me across the shoulder?”

He was still crouched by the fire, the smell of coffee from the pot near him sensually overpowering. “This.” His right hand moved and just as if it had appeared there by magic his fingers were curled around the butt of a long barrelled handgun.

Emma Shaw had seen enough old cowboy videos to know what it was that he held in his hand. It was a six-shooter. She’d seen them at Lancer’s showroom. And something started to click at the back of her mind, something from one of Alan Crockett’s lectures. She repeated it aloud. “When you are in a survival

situation, you want your weapons to be as easily user-serviceable as possible. Therefore, those which are overly complex should be avoided.”

“Not quite a direct quote. I would have said ‘one’ rather than ‘you’. And which handguns did I recommend?”

“All the old ones.”

“Hardly. But all of the ones which I did recommend were, indeed, replicas of original cartridge arms.”

“The Government Model .45—”

“Yes, and evidently you heeded my advice,” he said.

“Someone else’s advice,” Emma Shaw told him—it was John Rourke’s advice, actually. And her father always used one.

“Then your someone else is wise.”

“He’s not my someone else.” But Emma Shaw wished that he was. “So I thought revolvers were complicated,” she said, hurriedly changing the subject.

“They are, inherently, more complex mechanisms. Some, however, are quite easily serviced. Colt Single Action Army, Lancer reproduction, of course, but made to my own specifications.”

“So, you know a lot about Alan Crockett. That doesn’t make you Alan Crockett.”

“No, it doesn’t,” he sighed. “Why don’t you just call me Alan, and we can worry about the Crockett part later? All right, Commander?”

“Emma.”

“E. Shaw. Emma, then. Were you planning on killing me and stealing my horse?” “I thought I might.”

“How about having some coffee? It’s decaffeinated.” “Coffee out here. Real coffee.” It smelled marvelous, but she wasn’t about to mention that.

“Once every sixty days, I make it my business to be at one of several specific sets of predesignated coordinates. Supplies are waiting for me. If I need something special, I’m out of luck. It’s always the same. So, no herbal tea, I’m afraid.”

“Very funny,” she told him. She racked the action of the .45, just to see what he’d do. His shoulder tensed slightly beneath the huge winter coat that he wore, but other than that there was no reaction. His gun was already put away inside a black leather flap holster on his right thigh.