Survivalist - 24 - Blood Assassins (25 page)

But someone would be needed to deal with the enemy personnel still on the platform. “Violent,” Rourke said again. “Now!”

Forty-Six

Paul Rubenstein mule-kicked his left foot back and upward into the testicles of the armed man behind him and the man, at last, spoke. “You—” Paul’s right elbow snapped back and whatever the fellow had been about to say was terminated in the same instant. Paul’s elbow contacted teeth and bone and there was a squeal of pain.

John Rourke was a blur of motion. The little black A.G. Russell knife was in John’s right hand. It pistoned forward, burrowing into the neck of one man, then withdrew to thrust into the chest of another. John elbow smashed one man, knee smashed another. Paul realized he was needed more elsewhere. The radio receiver beside his ear was feeding him grunts and groans from the two Nazis who were still on the trolley platform. Paul twisted round on the little rubber-treaded step and, supporting himself on the chrome-plated grab rails to either side, swung his feet outward, catching one of the guards in the chest, slinging the man back into two more of the guards.

Even if Mentz and Spitz were Nazis, there seemed to be nothing slow-witted about Hauptsturmfuhrer Gunther Spitz. Spitz had already brought one of the guards down and was decking another with the butt of one of the peculiar-looking assault rifles the guards carried.

Paul Rubenstein jumped down from the trolley car, onto the backs of two of the guards, these men battling with Dr. Mentz, Mentz handling himself against them gamely enough, but ineffectively. Under his breath, Paul hissed, “Why am I helping this son of a bitch?” But there wasn’t time to ponder the question any further. Paul bulldogged both of the enemy personnel to the platform surface. He slammed one man’s forehead into the metal of the platform, shoving the second man away. As this man made to bring his rifle up, Dr. Mentz struck the fellow a sincere-looking but apparently wholly ineffectual blow to the jaw. The guard wheeled away from Paul Rubenstein, toward Dr. Mentz instead.

But Paul was already moving, hurtling his body weight from the rear against the guard’s left knee.

The guard stumbled, toppled forward, and Gunther Spitz buttstroked the man across the side of the head.

Four men were down inside the trolley, only the officer who led the party still in motion. John Rourke took steps to correct that problem, dodging the muzzle of the officer’s rifle, slapping it aside. Rourke thrust forward with his knife through the protective suit and just below the respirator unit, into the throat.

Rourke pulled back on the knife, Rourke’s right foot snapping upward, its instep catching the officer in the testicles. As the man’s body doubled forward, Rourke stabbed the knife downward just below the nape of the neck, finishing him quickly.

John Rourke stepped back, moved over the just-dead man and unlimbered his own HK-91 from another of the bodies, this one draped half over the back of a chair. It was suffocatingly warm inside the environment suit after the exertion, but Rourke had no way of knowing whether he could risk removing the protective mask, even for a few seconds, just to cool his skin. Not knowing, he dismissed the idea.

Rourke was already down the steps, racking the bolt of the HK just in case the chamber had been cleared. The already chambered round flew outward, onto the track bed.

But there was no need to fire. Between Paul and Spitz and Mintz all was quiet on the platform.

Rourke held a finger to his lips, signalling silence. Their radio transmissions might be monitored by the enemy.

Rourke jumped down from the trolley and onto the platform then from the platform to the track bed. He retrieved the rifle cartridge—he’d always believed in the old aphorism about wasting not and wanting not— then clambered back up to the platform.

John Rourke pointed toward the trolley, resisting the impulse to shout, “All aboard!” But it would have been inappropriate, at any event.

As they started up, Rourke removed the magazine from the HK. He reinserted the loose round he’d retrieved. There were two magazines bound together with a clip, giving him twenty rounds, then another twenty, very fast.

As he reset the HK’s safety and started about the business of separating the audioanimatronic motorman from the trolley’s controls, Rourke judged that he could well be needing all the firepower he could lay his hands on here. And that might well not be enough.

And the man who looked like, sounded like and claimed to be Generaloberst Wolfgang Mann climbed aboard.

Forty-Seven

Thorn Rolvaag needed sleep, but he needed answers still more. And analysis of the data at hand via computer modelling was the only hope.

The computer room aboard the USS Cherokee, the United States Navy’s only floating laboratory, was immense, big enough to house the old mainframe computers of the mid-Twentieth Century. He’d seen a vid-tape of a still wonderfully funny film from that period, which had starred Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. In the film, there was such a computer (or more likely, a mocked-up representation). Other films of the period, as well as still photographs, had shown these huge machines which dominated entire walls, running on enormous reels of magnetic tape.

This room within the bowels of the submarine USS Cherokee was enormous not because of the computers but because of the number of very small laptop-sized machines like that on the desk before him. The room could service up to one hundred researchers each working at a separate task, each drawing (simultane

ously if need be) from the same memory banks, working independently or on line.

But Thorn Rolvaag was the only person in the room, his machine the only one turned on, his needs the only ones the memory banks served.

A man given over to panic would have looked at the enormity of the trench beneath the Pacific and declared in desperation that here, at last, was the beginning of the end of the world. If the trench kept spreading that was exactly what might result, of course. But, Thorn Rolvaag was not given over to flights of doomsaying. He saw a problem and took steps to correct it. Such would be thescase with this trench.

If it continued—it was expanding at an ever-growing rate—it would grow exponentially in length and, in a relatively short period of time, reach the end of the Pacific Plate and impact against the North American Plate, around the new coast of North America where, Before the Night of the War, the San Andreas fault had been. The resistance given by the North American Plate would either stop the fissure completely or, as Rolvaag assumed to be more likely, cause it to split and spread.

That was the scenario for terrestrial destruction, that the entire Ring of Fire would go. In that event, any number of deadly possibilities loomed, some scenarios clearly indicating that there would be the cessation of all life on the planet.

But, if the fissure could be blocked and closed before reaching the North American Plate, in a slow, controlled manner, then the fissure might be stopped.

Disaster might be averted.

The key to closing the fissure would be the successful employment of nuclear explosives. And that required no computer scenario. To convince the powers-that-be that nuclear devices could be utilized in a manner which matched their original intent—the peaceful use of atomic energy to create harbors, level terrain, help mankind—would be beyond Herculean. And it was frightening to realize that the United States, unless it used virtually every single nuclear missile at its command (including those seized from the Soviets more than a century ago, which would have to be upgraded for practical utility), would not have enough nuclear material to do the job.

Small nuclear charges would have to be placed all along the hundreds of miles which the fissure already covered, and every day that went by would add to that number of required charges. If the United States used its entire inventory of nuclear weapons, Eden and her Nazi allies would attack, and the United States and the other members of the Trans-Global Alliance would be powerless to stalemate Eden and the Nazis, subsequently powerless to repel the inevitable invasion. Because Eden’s stockpile of nuclear material would be intact.

Mankind was faced, Thorn Rolvaag realized, with its greatest challenge.

Weeks would go by before the attempt to halt the growth of the fissure could be made, even if full cooperation were assured immediately.

And, there would be a point of no return. If too great a quantity of nuclear explosives were utilized when the fissure reached the North American Plate, the same disastrous result would be precipitated as if the fissure reached the Plate.

Thorn Rolvaag thought of his wife and children when he closed his eyes. Even with his eyes closed he could still see the computer monitor’s screen. The scenario the computer was running was what he had mentally labelled Megadeath. It was the scenario which called for the chain eruption of the volcanoes surrounding the Ring of Fire and the total destruction of the planet Earth.

Forty-Eight

The main body of sensing equipment was gone, with the enlisted man who had worn it, taken away along with the other enlisted personnel.

But there was a small, hand-held sensing unit that Doctor Mentz had. John Rourke was forced by circumstances to rely on that. While Rourke piloted the trolley car along its single rail through a rust-colored metal tube toward he knew not what, Mentz took readings. “The atmosphere, aside from having rather high traces of ferrous substances, seems perfectly normal. There is no presence of gas.”

Rourke nodded, made his decision. Spaced every ten yards apart, there were glowing yellow lights, illuminating the tunnel, the lights inset directly overhead. These lights, coupled with the yellow headlight of the trolley itself, combined to make huge, ghostly looking shadows all around them, even inside the car (which was also illuminated in yellow lights). Rourke pulled off his mask.

Rourke’s face felt suddenly cold, and the rush to his

senses made his head swim. He controlled his breathing carefully as he instructed, “Unsuit as much as you need to for whatever additional weapons and gear you think you’ll need then resuit, wearing those materials on the outside. The chance for contamination will have to be run.” And that was the real danger. The more Rourke considered what had been encountered atop the summit, especially in light of the shoulder brassards worn by the soldiers here, the greater was his certitude that the lethal hallucinogenic gas was utilized as a means of execution, not as a weapon. The suits the men had worn, although there had been no time for detailed examination of one of the dead, seemed to be entirely superfluous, at least from any practical considerations.

A society isolated from all the rest of humankind for well over six centuries would have developed its own immunology and perhaps its own diseases, to which other humans would not be immune. That was obvious—the more restricted the gene pool, the better the chances. Several genetically related diseases, for example, had been outbred at Mid-Wake. Among blacks, for example, sickle cell anemia had ceased to exist.

Paul was beside Rourke already stripping down enough of the protective suit which he wore to access the Browning High Powers, his knife and other gear.

While Rourke still controlled the trolley he called back to Spitz. “Spitz, those sealed orders. Will you open them now and read them to us?”

Spitz said, “And if I am ordered to keep the contents from you, Herr Doctor?”

“You’ll have to make that decision yourself. I need to know what’s inside. I will know. We didn’t come here for some crazy genetic scheme based on cloning Adolf Hitler. That may be a fringe benefit as your Dr. Zimmer sees it, but not the real reason. That should be obvious by now. We came here because of this place, not Adolf Hitler’s remains. If those remains are here, they’re only a secondary objective to Zimmer. When this fellow claiming to be Wolfgang Mann announced those coordinates to the pilot of the V-stol, our mission here was done. Zimmer sent us as decoys, to find the way into this place so Zimmer’s personnel can follow us and penetrate the facility themselves. You have to understand that by now.”

“You are, it would appear, correct, Herr Doctor. But surely Herr Doctor Zimmer’s plan need not be readily discernible to us. We only serve—”

Paul, out of his mask by now, said, “Give it a rest, huh? What’s the matter with you? Your Herr Doctor Zimmer sent us all out to get killed, and you don’t care? I admire loyalty, but there’s loyalty and then there’s stupidity.”

“I will open the orders.” Gunther Spitz declared, not sounding as though he had warmed to the idea at all. But perhaps despite being a Nazi, the man had some semblance of common sense. John Rourke glanced back over his right shoulder in the same instant that Spitz took from beneath his tunic a device about the size of a pocket calculator: It opened almost like a book. As it did so, there was the faintest hum.

Rourke was already turning his eyes back toward the tunnel but from the corner of his eye he saw Paul starting to move. And then Dr. Mentz shouted, “Hauptsturmfuhrer!”

Rourke instinctively dodged and dropped shouting

to Paul, “Look out!”

There was the pulse of a high-yield energy weapon. Rourke released the controls of the car, wheeled. The deadman’s switch was already starting to slow the car. Paul crouched midway between Rourke and the rear of the car near to the steps.

“John!” Paul threw one of the two Browning High Powers he carried and John Rourke caught it—it was the second gun—not the battered old one Paul had carried since just after the Night of the War. Rourke racked its slide knowing that Paul would never have thrown the gun had it been chamber loaded.

Hauptsturmfuhrer Gunther Spitz was flat on the floor of the car. Dr. Mentz lay over him, the center of Mentz’s back burning from the close-range shot. And Mentz was obviously dead, the smell of burning flesh only slightly more nauseating than the exposed spinal column. There was a small energy pistol in the right hand of the man claiming to be Wolfgang Mann. Paul was shouting, “Hold it, Mann!”

The imposter stabbed the pistol toward Paul. John Rourke fired over Paul’s shoulder hitting the man who claimed to be Wolfgang Mann twice in the chest, then twice more in the thorax, Rourke’s ears ringing with the flat cracks of the 9mm Parabellums in the confined space.