Survivalist - 24 - Blood Assassins (30 page)

Fifties.

The woman stopped for a moment in front of the window of the women’s clothing store, adjusted a seam in her hose and walked on. Rourke passed the shop, passed the Mountain Market and stopped at the animal hospital window. It was much too early for regular office hours, of course, but there was some sign of activity within.

He went past the animal hospital, his eyes on the park across the street. There was no sign of Paul or the Nazi officer, Gunther Spitz. Letting Spitz off on his own was dangerous, of course, but Rourke saw no other way in which to cover enough ground in a short period of time.

Rourke stopped at the Library, studying the donors’ plaque beside the main door. The names were all good

Anglo-Saxon ones, and not a single woman’s name appeared except as “Mrs.” with her husband’s first name instead of her own.

Here was a static, very stratified society, both in the figurative and literal sense of course. People knew their place here, did what their parents had done and made certain that their children would do it, too.

Juxtaposing the time on his Rolex with the time difference here, it was already almost seven-thirty A.M.

The streets were filling, more horse-drawn wagons and more carriages, some apparently private, some for hire. And bicycles, not just police but young people, the girls in bobby socks and petticoated full skirts and sweater sets, the boys in loafers, white socks and baggy trousers, hair slicked back.

A time warp.

The 1950s may have been the “good old days” to people who had never lived them, but John Rourke remembered them, albeit with the selective perspective of childhood. Air raid drills in school. Unemployment. Steel strikes. Two wars just over. Segregation was still in the law in many areas. Society was artificial. In that respect, the 1950s were perfectly recaptured here.

It was time for the rendezvous in the park.

John Rourke, lest he be arrested for jaywalking, returned to the corner, waited for the light, then crossed.

The 1950s, like the forties and thirties, had one significant advantage: men’s suits. They were tailored of heavier fabric and worn looser, which made the concealment of firearms vastly easier. John Rourke wore six under his clothes, and the suit was merely taken off the rack. He smiled at the thought. The trouser legs had been in the rough, not cuffed. He’d found the sewing machine in the back of the shop and cuffed them himself, not only the suit that he wore but the ones which Paul and Spitz wore too. There was a sewing machine at the Retreat; Annie had used it to make all her own clothes. When Rourke installed it there, he taught himself how to use it so that he would understand its workings should he have to service it from the spare parts he had stocked.

This had not been planning ahead, but a lucky accident instead.

Rourke was across the street now.

He entered the park, no sign of Paul or Spitz yet.

From fragments of casual conversation and items in the newspaper, little details one who was trained in the piecing together of information might interconnect, he was relatively certain that they would find the rest of their party—Spitz’s soldiers—in Level One, Sector A. That was above them. Level One, Sector A was the seat of government, and most particularly where this community’s self-styled “FBI” was housed.

He’d known numerous real Federal lawmen Before the War, FBI personnel included. To a man, they would have cringed at being compared to what likely went on here—repression.

The hedges in which the long guns, the one-man helicopter like device and their other unmanageable gear were stashed seemed untouched. But Rourke did not approach them.

As he turned back toward the street, he spotted several bicycle-mounted police officers collecting near the corner.

And wagons, black and enclosed, drove up, their

horses reined in quickly, men clambering out of the backs through black double doors, the men in riot gear.

The staircase to the side of the library—Paul was there, starting out, but then falling back.

John Rourke’s palms sweated.

He had judged wrong: Spitz was not only more vile but more stupid than John Rourke had supposed.

In the very moment when he thought the name, he looked toward a carriage which had just reined up near the curb. Sitting in it, beside a chubby-looking, rather officious-seeming man, he saw Gunther Spitz. Two uniformed policemen sat opposite them.

And Spitz stood up, extended his arm toward John Rourke, pointing Rourke out.

John Rourke turned on his heel and ran the few steps to the hedges and threw himself up and over, rolling across the grass in his new suit—but it was some synthetic which felt like wool and seemed sturdy enough. Rourke reached into the hedge, pulling against the rain poncho in which the HK-91 and the other gear was wrapped. He would need all the weapons he could muster.

He had misjudged Spitz but John Rourke had formulated a plan lest Spitz should perpetrate some treachery, such as he had.

Gunther Spitz’s voice rang out across the park, shouting, “If he is there, the other filthy Jew cannot be far away!”

The corners of John Rourke’s mouth raised in an involuntary smile. He could think of no finer man on earth than Paul Rubenstein, his best friend and his daughter’s husband.

Quickly, as the uniformed police in full 1950s-style riot gear—helmets and clubs and revolvers and shotguns but no visible body armor—ran in formation toward him, John Rourke checked his rifle, making certain it hadn’t been spiked and left as a trap. It was as he’d left it, one of the hairs from his own head over the closed breech.

Rourke slung it, slung on his musette bags, Paul’s as well, the combined weight considerable with the loaded magazines and loose ammo, but he could afford to leave nothing behind. He opened the sling on the HK rifle, ran the sling through the briefcase handle, then resecured it.

His gunbelt, with the Model 629 and the Crain LSX knife—he strapped it around his waist under his now open suitcoat. Screwing his fedora down tightly on his head, Rourke grabbed up the flying rig and Paul’s submachinegun. The poncho was Nazi issue and Rourke didn’t worry about leaving it behind.

As the policemen started to close, Rourke rose to his full height from behind the bushes, racked the bolt on the Schmiesser and fired, a long ragged burst cutting into the front rank of the riot police, putting down four of the men, the rest scattering, falling back.

Rourke ran, his burdens slamming against him, slowing him, ran for the low wall overlooking the chasm which surrounded the spiral of the city. He glanced back once as he heard shots. Paul was firing a pistol from each hand, cutting down the riot police from behind, drawing off their fire. Rourke turned as he ran, firing the submachinegun again, taking out another two men with a short burst. If Paul saw where he was going, Paul would have to realize what he planned—Rourke hoped.

Rourke reached the wall, putting down the flying rig, firing the German MP-40 submachinegun empty, taking out another three men. Pistol shots rang toward him now, Rourke letting the Schmiesser fall to his side on its sling, grabbing the ScoreMasters from his belt, thumbing back the hammers, returning fire.

Tear gas grenades were lobbed toward John Rourke, but there was no time to fish out the lightweight, ultracompact protective suit or the mask from his belongings. He fired again, killing two more of this twisted society’s riot police.

In the same instant, there was an almost deafening roar from above.

Deitrich Zimmer’s attack had begun …

Paul Rubenstein drew back into the stairwell, bullets whining against the synth-concrete surrounding him. John would try the flying rig as his means of escape, Paul realized. A fresh magazine up the butt of each pistol, Paul Rubenstein stabbed the guns around the corner and fired high, no desire to shoot at innocent, however perverted, civilians. He tucked back as more gunfire poured toward him. There was no way he could cover John without knowing the precise moment in which John would attempt to use the flying rig.

It was time to withdraw.

Ten rounds left in each pistol and more spare magazines secreted on his body, Paul licked his lips, screwed his “liberated” fedora down tight on his head and took off in a dead run up the stairwell, hoping some of the riot police would follow him.

As he hit the landing, he saw a flash of blue uniform.

Paul threw himself flat and rolled, a shotgun blast impacting the wall beside which his head had been a split second earlier. Paul fired, a double tap from each pistol, putting down two uniformed riot police, their bodies sprawling down the stairwell toward him. As Paul pushed up to one knee, two more men charged down toward him, revolvers in hand. Paul fired, catching one man with a double tap to the chest and thorax, the second with a shot to the abdomen and the left side of the chest, over the heart.

Paul thumbed up the safety on the pistol in his right hand, grabbed for the shotgun from the dead man nearest him, taking hold of it at the pump, snapping it to rack it. At the same time, he twisted his left thumb round behind the second High Power’s tang, upped the frame-mounted safety, belting this pistol as well.

He had been taught survival in battle by the man who should have written the book on it. Never leave weapons behind you which can be used against you again. He grabbed up the police revolvers, shoving them into the side pockets of his suitcoat. He scavenged ammo for the shotguns and the revolvers as quickly as he could from the bodies of the men near him.

The second shotgun would be more than he could handle comfortably and there was no sling for it. Setting down the first shotgun, he cleared the second shotgun’s chamber by working the slide release lever near the trigger guard—the gun was a copy of the Remington 870—and then inverted the gun, smashing it against the wall. Its synthetic stock splintered away. Paul flung the gun down the stairwell after him, then started up again, the first shotgun in his hands.

Beside the bodies of the second two riot police, Paul

paused, taking their revolvers and the loose ammo from the pouches on their belts. There were no police radios.

He kept going, the guns in his pockets dragging his suitcoat down at the shoulders.

He reached the next level. There were four police bicycles there, but no visible signs of more police.

Paul Rubenstein started up the next flight of stairs…

There were more explosions, now, every few seconds, at times the synth-concrete of the city spiral trembling under his feet. Sirens, like the ones from the 1950s which sounded once each week with clockwork precision for testing, sounded now, and the street behind the riot police, cordoned off, was the sight of a panic. Men and women poured from shop fronts and along the sidewalks.

Now was his chance, and he stepped from cover to the wall.

John Rourke was into the flying harness, eyeballing the controls while he pushed his gear as clear as he could. There was a central shaft which split into an off-angled Y shape. The frame was like a man’s bicycle, the main strut rising straight upward to the main rotor past maneuvering controls set up like a solid triangular shaped handlebar. The secondary strut, to which the perchlike rest/seat was attached, extended aft, the tail rotor set into its end.

The rotor blades fanned upward and outward when powered up.

Riot police were closing on him now in a flying wedge, their revolvers and shotguns blazing. With projectiles impacting off the wall near him, John Rourke stepped over and onto the ledge. The added weight of his burdens might be too much for the little craft. If it was, he would plummet to his death.

If he stayed where he was he would be shot to death.

John Rourke jumped, both hands on the control bar. There was a sickening rush before the rotor blades fanned out, the machine evidently not designed for so abrupt a start. As the blades opened, began to spin, there would be no hope. Keeping his legs rigid, elbows tucked in, he brought the machine to full power.

And no longer was he falling. But, he wasn’t actually flying, either, more gliding and straight toward the wall on the opposite side of the chasm.

It was then that John Rourke made a decision.

Testing the controls gingerly but rapidly, he started the machine upward, nearly attaining the height of the level he had just left before the wedge of riot police reached it and started firing. Rourke stabbed the Schmiesser toward them and fired a long, ragged burst, no hope of accurate fire while he was strapped into the zigzagging machine. But the riot police, unused to automatic weapons, it seemed, or any real combat either and without body armor, fell back.

The explosions John Rourke had heard, felt, came from above. Level One, Sector A had to be on ground level. As he and Paul and the others had been led to the trolley and the rest of Spitz’s men had been led off in a different direction, they would have been taken straight ahead to Level One.

And that was where Zimmer’s attack would originate, of course, because it was the only site for which

Zimmer had coordinates.

And it would be the only way out.

John Rourke kept the machine climbing, at last seeing Paul’s face peering out over an identical wall to that on the level he had just left. But this was the ground level. And black smoke billowed out over the wall. Concrete dust fell everywhere in the chasm surrounding the spiral city now, and large pieces from the ceiling above were collapsing into the chasm. Rourke dodged the machine this way and that as best he could to avoid the rotor blades being struck.

Gunfire came at him from below, but he was powerless to respond to it. Above him, he could see Paul stabbing a shotgun downward, firing toward the personnel firing at him from below. The flying rig was straining at full power. But John Rourke was nearly there.

From his right there was a blur of motion. A man appeared, then another and another, in flying rigs identical to his own, but these men were unburdened with additional pounds of equipment and they knew their machines’ capabilities, Rourke realized.

As the nearer of the three made a pass toward him, a submachinegun in the fellow’s hands, John Rourke swung Paul’s submachinegun forward, punching its muzzle toward the man. Rourke and the enemy trooper in the flying rig fired simultaneously. Rourke’s burst of submachinegun fire struck across the tail rotor strut and into the tail rotor itself.