Survivalist - 24 - Blood Assassins (9 page)

the time it isn’t.”

Emma Shaw didn’t know what to say.

Admiral Hayes continued. “I’m not implying that your performance in training or in combat has ever been less than exemplary. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have made it past Lieutenant Commander a year ago. No, it’s just that you are one of those rare pilots who is naturally gifted at his or her work. That’s a handy thing, but it’s also a dandy way to overreach yourself. I don’t want you doing that here. The mission against the poison gas plant in Eden City will be dangerous enough. I checked your records. You’re fully trained on the new SR-901. It’s a lot of aircraft.”

Emma Shaw almost slumped in her seat. The SR-901, she had thought, was still experimental. She’d helped in some of the high speed maneuverability testing over the Phillipines, done two of the high-altitude check flights. It was the true descendant of the old Twentieth Century SR-71, but capable of Mach Nine and equipped with plasma cannons and every state-of-the-art weapons system they could pack aboard her. From a distance, this new Blackbird even looked like the old ones. “The SR-901, Admiral?”

“Do you have a problem with that, Commander Shaw?”

“No, ma’am. The 901’s the best there is.”

“You’ll be ferrying over your own aircraft. The route is to Australia, then the southern tip of Africa, then to Venezuela. That means flying through the Eden antiaircraft net around Cuba. Once you’re past that, it’s a straight shot to Eden City. You’ll have several tactical options for the return flight, depending on latest Intell. Are you in?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Admiral Hayes smiled. Emma Shaw just sat there, knowing she should be getting up out of her chair, leaving the Admiral’s office, but she was uncertain for a second whether or not her legs would work.

The old Thad Rybka holster carrying the Metalifed Colt Lawman MKIII .357 Magnum was positioned at the small of his back. The Smith & Wesson Centennial was inside the waistband of his black BDU trousers, suspended there on its Barami Hip Grip. The old Metalifed and Mag-Na-Ported six-inch Colt Python, rebuilt for him while he slept by gunsmiths at New Germany, could have been back on his right hip, but in the full flap holster there instead was the Metalife Custom Model 629 with its six-inch Mag-Na-Ported barrel. The 180-grain Jacketed Hollowpoint .44 Magnum round was the better choice for his needs these days. Someday, Annie or the children that she and Paul would someday have could inherit the Python. Michael was into the .44 Magnum as well, having little use for .357.

Rourke slipped the double Alessi rig onto his shoulders, the twin stainless Detonics CombatMaster .45s already holstered chamber loaded, hammer down, his usual preference. He normally used the old gunman’s trick of sacrificing the extra round over basic magazine capacity for the surety of feed derived when the top round was stripped out of the magazine into the chamber and the round beneath it edged slightly forward.

Two Milt Sparks Six Packs were on his belt, one

holding six standard length seven-round Detonics magazines, the other holding six six-round Detonics magazines. The Six Pack for the minigun magazines was given to him in the days prior to the Great Conflagration by Commander Robert Gundersen, skipper of the USS John Paul Jones, the submarine which had carried Rourke and Natalia to the Pacific Northwest, involving them in a bloodbath there which had nearly turned into a nuclear incident.

Either the full-sized or abbreviated magazines would work in the miniguns under his arms. The shorter magazines only worked in the CombatMasters, but not in the full-sized Scoremasters that he would carry holsterless in his waistband once they were on the ground in Canada.

He had been asked once why he carried so many handguns in preference to all other arms. Indeed, he had a rifle, the HK-91 in 7.62mm/ .308 (a better bet for him these days than his old CAR-15), and three knives, the twelve-inch blade Crain Life Support System X that he wore at his left side, the AG Russell Sting IA Black Chrome that he wore inside his trouser band near his right kidney, and a little Executive Edge Grande pen-shaped folding knife concealed in his jacket pocket. This was one of the items he recovered when he and Paul raided the museum exhibits at the Retreat.

But he liked handguns.

Before the Night of the War, one of John Rourke’s closest friends and a frequent shooting buddy was Steve Fishman of Augusta, Georgia. Steve, ex-Special Forces, was a fine martial artist, both practitioner and teacher, and more than proficient with any gun or knife one cared to put in his hand. On one of many pleasant shooting sessions with Steve—this time when Rourke was driving back to Northeast Georgia from a conference in Charleston, South Carolina—a mutual friend of Rourke’s and Fishman’s had been in the area as well. The friend, Hank, was a professional soldier and occasionally over a drink or a cup of coffee would tell a wild story or two about his adventures, invariably involving some insane joke supposedly accounting for the loss of his left eye, the socket covered with a black patch or by sunglasses when appropriate.

Whether Hank’s stories were true or not, John Rourke and Steve Fishman enjoyed them. And one thing Hank could do as marvelously well as his eyepatch jokes and the recounting of his adventures was shoot.

This one day, then, Rourke had been shooting his twin stainless Detonics .45s, Steve Fishman his much-engraved, ivory-gripped Beretta 92SB Compact 9mm and Hank a Metalifed Browning High Power with worn-smooth black rubber Pachmayr grips. Rourke was returning from teaching a security course when he made the stop-off in Charleston, then the subsequent trip to Augusta and consequently had all his working handguns with him. Hank remarked, “Now Steve there has his Beretta and I’ve got my Browning and my TEC-9, but you’ve got enough handguns to fill Steve’s store.”

Steve owned an Augusta gunshop which was literally a Mecca for police, federal agents and security professionals from all over the Southeast. Rourke smiled at Hank’s remark, saying, “I doubt I’ve got enough handguns to fill even one shelf in one of

Steve’s display cases.”

Steve laughed, adding, “But I wouldn’t mind if he tried.”

Hank persisted. “You know my background. I get along on this Browning and the TEC-9 and an M-161 get in country, if that.”

John Rourke lit one of his thin, dark tobacco cigars. “I’ve always realized the importance of long guns, and made myself satisfactory with them.”

“Satisfactory?” Steve Fishman exclaimed, laughing again. “I’ve seen you with that Steyr-Mannlicher SSG, remember? You could shoot the whiskers off a gnat with that 7.62.”

“Gnats have whiskers? What do they shave with?” Hank asked, lighting a Camel with a Zippo windlighter nearly as battered as John Rourke’s own. Hank removed his eyepatch so quickly and deftly, substituting a pair of dark lensed sunglasses that, even had Rourke been trying, he could not have seen the one-eyed man’s disfigurement.

Rourke laughed, forcing it a little. “I’m being serious, guys. Both you guys were Special Forces, all that. Me, well—”

“Spook stuff,” Hank said, nodding, alluding to Rourke’s background as a case officer in the Central Intelligence Agency.

“Yeah, but not that,” Rourke told them “I just trained myself for the long gun being a luxury. Most people these days don’t expect close-range firearms combat, right? Because at close range you can get killed too easily. But most gunfights take place at a distance of a few feet to a few yards. So, you walk in close and you’ve got firepower. Rifles don’t get you in close. And, like they say, the fastest reload is a second gun, or a third or a fourth or fifth.” Rourke smiled.

“You’re a gunfighter,” Steve Fishman said with an air of definitiveness.

They went back to their shooting, Steve eventually turning in the best twenty-five yard group of the day.

Rourke wasn’t certain at the time whether or not Fishman had intended the remark as a compliment or not. Over the intervening years, however, Rourke had come to accept Steve Fishman’s remark as a statement of fact.

John Rourke was a gunfighter.

This would be a gunfight when they got on the ground in Canada, pitted against Deitrich Zimmer’s people. That was the only option, because there was no other choice.

As he caught a glimpse of himself in the closet door mirror of his BOQ apartment, John Rourke reflected that if he was a gunfighter, he was dressed for the part.

Eighteen

The old days were back.

Dressed in one of her black jumpsuits and a pair of high black boots, Natalia Anastasia Tiemerovna buckled on the double-flap holsters carrying the matching stainless steel Smith & Wesson Model 686s, the twin L-Frame .357 Magnum revolvers given her by the President of the United States more than six centuries ago. Round-butted, action-tuned and with the barrels flatted by revolversmith Ron Mahovsky, each bore a proud American Eagle on the right flat.

She put on the Null shoulder holster with the suppressor-fitted stainless Walther PPK/ S .380. John’s philosophy of handgun combat was contagious, she suspected. He used multiple guns, minimizing his necessity to reload. He was better at it than she, but his technique was perfected over a longer span of years. She had not gotten into multiple gun use until the L-Frame Smiths were given to her.

Stowed away in her gear for their mission to Great Slave Lake was the Lancer copy of the SIG-Sauer

P-226 which she had recently acquired and thoroughly shot-in. The P-226 was her favorite of full-sized 9mm Parabellums Before the Night of the War, and would ride in her belt or in the pouch she’d had built into her arctic parka when they were on the ground.

She picked up the Bali-Song, flipped open the clasp and did a fast opening and closing, locked the clasp and secured the knife in the pocket along the seam by her right thigh.

Natalia took one last look in the mirror. Her hair, just past her shoulders, was down. When she got into combat, she would probably bind it back if there were time. For the moment, it was fine as it was.

Her duffle bag was already aboard the aircraft, so all she had to carry was her big black purse which could be converted into a day pack, and her rifle, this an M-16. Carrying two cartridge revolvers and an M-16 these days, of course, was like carrying a brace of Colt 1851 Navy .36 caliber percussion revolvers and a Henry rifle in the days Before the Night of the War. But, she didn’t care.

She slung her purse to her left shoulder and the rifle crossbody on its sling, left shoulder to right hip, pushing it rearward and carrying it muzzle down along her back. The sword she’d had made up just prior to taking this last Sleep was strapped to her duffle bag, just in case.

Natalia let herself out of the BOQ apartment she shared with Michael, but Michael was, of course, not there. He was being readied for the Sleep. His appearance had been subtly altered by means of state-of-the-art makeup techniques to make him appear even more physically identical to the now-dead Martin Zimmer—Michael’s brother—than Michael had been before.

As Natalia walked alone along the corridor, she remembered the first time Michael had taken the Sleep, how she had given Michael and his sister, children then, the injections of cryogenic serum, to allay potential guilt for their parents should the formula, computed to their body weights, be incorrect and the results disastrous. Now, Michael was chronologically older than she was, her lover, the most accomplished and at once gentle lover she had ever known.

As she rounded the bend of the corridor, she saw Paul and Annie waiting there for her. Paul was all in black, after the fashion of the Mid-Wake battle dress utilities of more than a century ago, the style of dress John had recently adopted as well. Along with his other weapons, Paul carried his inevitable German MP-40 submachinegun, the Schmiesser as it had been erroneously called throughout its history. His subgun was even more of an antique than her M-16. Annie, ever disliking trousers of any sort, wore a midcalf-length full skirt of heavy Oxford grey wool, combat boots, and a long-sleeved, round neck sweater, the white cuffs and little white collar of the blouse she wore beneath it visible. Annie’s double holsters were at her hips, one carrying a Beretta 92F 9mm, the other a Detonics Scoremaster .45. As with Natalia herself, there was an M-16 swung to Annie’s back.

Paul and Annie nodded and abreast, Paul at the center, Annie on his right, the three of them walked down the corridor.

John would be waiting for them out front.

As they reached the base of the staircase, the open expanse before the double glass doors of the BOQ visible, they stopped. John stood just on the other side, and with him stood Emma Shaw.

Natalia felt herself smile. John and Emma were apparently deep in earnest conversation. Natalia silently wished Emma Shaw better luck with John than her own had been.

For the briefest instant, John took Emma Shaw into his arms kissing her quickly, her body molding against his. They broke, holding hands for a second longer; then Emma Shaw ran down the steps and away.

She was already in her flight gear, and Natalia surmised that Commander Emma Shaw would be a part of the assault on Eden City’s poison gas production facilities; it was her type of mission, demanding a pilot with consummate skills and nerves of steel.

After a respectful moment, Natalia said to Paul and Annie, “Let’s go, shall we?” And she started ahead.

Michael Rourke sat on the edge of the cryogenic chamber. His feet this time touched the ground. His father stood near him saying, “When you wake up, all of this will be over.”

“One way or the other,” Michael added, nodding his head. “The timer works. I checked it myself.”

John nodded to him.

Natalia had checked the timer, too. Normally cryogenic sleeping chambers were designed—clocklike—to awaken the sleeper. This timing would be critical. Were something to happen to the rest of them or even if they were merely separated, the timer might well be Michael’s only chance at survival.

Built into the base of the coffin-shaped chamber was a secret compartment, only accessible from within the chamber itself. Within this compartment was an arctic parka and snowpants, emergency survival gear and weapons also included.