Survivalist - 17 - The Ordeal (17 page)

Wolfgang Mann’s voice.“Into the area past the explosion. Hurry! Then we use the grenade launchers! Hurry!” He wasn’t talking just to her, she realized, running again, working the bolt for the grenade launcher, chambering a fresh round.

She fell, almost touching the grenade launcher’s trigger, legs and arms splayed out on the tunnel floor, something dead inches from her face, human once, but the left side of the face blown away.

On her knees, her rifle still in her hands. Hands grabbed at her under the armpits and she screamed, trying to twist the muzzle of the rifle toward whoever it was— “Sarah! Hurry!” It was Mann beside her, almost lifting her straight up, half carrying her ahead as she ran beside him, his hands at her elbows.

They zigzagged to avoid a body, jumped over another, Sarah nearly losing her footing in the sudden slickness that she knew

had to be blood.

And they were past the point at which they were attacked, Mann shouting orders over the radio for using the grenade launchers. Sarah’s was already ready to fire, and as the others formed around her and Colonel Mann and opened fire, she opened fire as well, her eyes squinted against the bright flashes as the grenades exploded. The tunnel seemed to shake with the successive multiple impacts, stray gunfire from the enemy force, then nothing but the crackle of flames as bodies burned.

She could smell the flesh and it sickened her, would have made her vomit, she knew, if she hadn’t smelled the same thing before. “Reload,” Mann ordered. She was already doing that, having exhausted the magazineload of grenades.

It was Schmidt speaking now. “The Russian prisoner died in the initial exchange, Herr Colonel.”

“Poor bastard,” Mann’s voice cut in. “Other casualties?”

A short litany began, three dead including the remote video probe operator, and one wounded, but not so seriously he couldn’t go on.

“We must find those Chinese troops. We are severely outnumbered here. Hurry on!” And he was propelling her forward. She kept her trigger finger outside the STG-101’s guard, but kept the tumbler set to auto, ready …

“I am getting confusing radio reports,” Otto Hammerschmidt called back along the fuselage. “There is so much radio traffic—wait.”

Annie brushed a strand of hair bsck from Natalia’s face, Natalia’s eyelids blinking rapidly as though she were dreaming. The drug-induced sleep had seemed deep for a time, but now Natalia seemed more restless by the moment.

Hammerschmidt called back again. “The First City is partially under attack, the Soviet forces combined to the main entrance and to several key sections within the city, including the government complex. Our base that was going under

construction was overrun and Colonel Mann has taken personal charge. Those Communist assholes—excuse me— but they’re in for trouble now, with the Herr Colonel running things!”

Natalia’s eyelids still flickered, only more rapidly now. Dreaming …

His fingers touched the nape of her neck and found the hooks and eyes that closed the halter there and opened it, and as Natalia watched her own image in the full-length mirror, John Rourke behind her, the upper portion of her white dress fell away and her breasts were bare and she crossed her arms over her chest, covering herself with her hands, the nipples of her breasts hard-feeling and erect to her. His mouth came down on her neck and she shivered.

John—somehow the tuxedo he’d worn was gone—turned her around in his arms and he was naked. Her dress fell from where it clung at her hips, surrounding her ankles, obscuring her feet, and she realized that she, too, was naked. The hair of his chest felt wonderfully rough against her skin as she unfolded her arms, baring her breasts to him, and felt the first instant of contact between their bodies.

And Natalia started to cry as his lips touched her face …

Annie Rourke Rubenstein still studied Natalia’s face, the eyelids moving more violently now, and, to Annie’s amazement, tears flowing from Natalia’s eyes and along her cheeks. Annie closed her eyes, somehow feeling like a voyeur.

John Rourke had planned ahead.

A ragged-looking group of Mongols, in a depression near the base of the mountain guarding a tunnel entrance Rourke was able to discern only because of the heat-sensing unit he had stripped out of one of the Specials, was slaughtering one of their own wounded. With the sensor, with which he had scanned the base of the mountain, he had been able to determine the location of the tunnel from several hundred yards away, then with Paul Rubenstein beside him had moved as close to the tunnel as possible for more detailed, visual observation. It was then that he had first seen the Mongols, known that the sensing device had revealed an actual entrance. Again with Paul beside him, he worked his way closer.

Now, seventy-five yards (approximately) from the Mongol position, John Rourke brought the M-16 to his shoulder, set to semi only, knowing Paul’s rifle was set to auto and aimed toward the Mongol position as well, to back him up if he missed.

But John Rourke did not plan to miss.

Six men, discounting the seventh man on the ground who was being repeatedly stabbed with the Mongols’ sabers, kicked by their fur-ruffed booted feet, spat upon—one of the Mongols even blew his nose on the injured man. Perhaps the man had demonstrated cowardice, perhaps some other undesirable trait, Rourke conjectured. But it was equally possible the

Mongols were just amusing themselves with someone who was dying anyway.

“Here we go,” Rourke rasped, getting the farthest of the six men in his sights, then gently squeezing the trigger. With the first one, there was always more time.

The M-16 jumped slightly, the tinny sound of the action that was so noticeable when the weapon was fired semi-auto, and the farthest of the six standing Mongols fell.

As Rourke swung the Colt assault rifle’s muzzle onto his next target, he considered the moral imperative that the already dying seventh man imposed: that he be helped. Rourke fired again, the second man’s arms and hands flying outward, his saber sailing through the snow-filled air as his body slapped back into the rocks.

The third man was moving. Rourke fired. He stopped moving.

The fourth man was shouldering his assault rifle. “John— he’s—”

“I know,” Rourke almost whispered, firing again, the Mongol’s rifle falling from his hands, his head twisting around, his body seeming to be dragged after it, falling.

The fifth man was running toward the tunnel the heat-sensing device had picked up. John Rourke tickled the trigger once again, the fifth man’s body skidding off balance, forward, the man’s hands grasping toward the small of his back as he fell.

The sixth man fired his assault rifle, spraying it into the rocks where John Rourke and Paul Rubenstein were, missing them by a good ten feet. John Rourke thumbed the selector to auto. “Help me out.” As Rourke fired, Rubenstein fired, the sixth man’s body racked with hits, twisting, lurching, slamming into the rocks behind him, his assault rifle still spraying, but skyward now, his right arm twisting with the torque, the gun finally falling as it fired out empty.

John Rourke was already moving, half diving into a snowbank, Paul coming after him.

Although the sounds of the battle between the Soviet attackers and Second City Chinese defenders were everywhere, the remote possibility existed that sounds of this brief battle might somehow be detected and bring more of the Chinese or, worse still, KGB Elite Corps commandoes.

As Rourke ran, he looked to right and left through the swirling snow, his eyes squinted against the huge flakes. No one was coming. He signaled to Paul to break left as he broke right, ramming a fresh magazine up the M-16’s well, coming onto the concealed mouth of the tunnel in what some called a pincer formation, from the sides, closing on the objective. Rourke’s right hand was numbing with the cold, but he hadn’t trusted to a glove and there had been no time to replace it once removed.

They reached the Mongol position almost simultaneously, Rourke stepping over one of the dead bodies to aid the seventh man. But the eyes, wide open, staring upward, were already splotched with snowflakes.

Rourke exhaled over the eyes to melt the snow, then closed the lids. There had been no need to tell Paul to cover him; such was implicit. As Rourke looked up, then stood, Paul was methodically checking each of the other six. Rourke aided him.

“Mine are all dead.”

“Mine, too,” Rourke told him. Rourke looked behind them, toward the nearest location where there was a great concentration of troops from both sides fighting. But still, no one came.

Rourke safed his rifle and let it fall to his side on its sling, then found his glove.

“If I were starting a Glock pistol collection, I’d be in business. Same for the assault rifles. The sabers look terrible, almost as terrible as the rifles. No documents.”

“I’ve got a Glock 17 at the Retreat. Fine pistol. Really durable, too. As I suppose the very existence of these proves. Leave the bodies—no time anyway,” John Rourke concluded, walking quickly through the trampled-down snow toward the

concealed entrance his sensing device had shown was there, working his hand into the glove as he walked, opening and closing his hand to restore proper circulation.

Finding the entrance proved no challenge, a steel door— stainless, of reasonably good finishing qualities—was hidden half-heartedly at the rear of an out-of-place-looking stand of pines. Some boughs were broken where the tunnel had apparently been used recently. He examined a partially broken bough and from the liquidity of the pine sap, especially considering the cold weather, he judged within hours.

Rourke called to Paul. “Bring me one of those sabers— whichever one of them looks the stoutest.” There was no reason to get his knife full of pine tar again. He turned, waiting for Paul to join him. As Paul ran up, Rourke took the saber from him, eyeballing it for an instant, then stepping slightly back from the stand and with a few downward cuts, hacking away a sufficient number of the pine boughs that they had clear access to the tunnel door beyond. He took the saber and tossed it javelin fashion into a snowbank a few feet away.

The door was, as expected, closed.

A ring handle was in place to the far left of the door, equidistant between top and bottom. John Rourke reached for it with his right hand as he heard Paul changing magazines in his M-16, Rourke’s own rifle bunched tight in his left fist.

Rourke moved the door slowly open, inward. There was a terrible stench, strong-seeming even as the snowladen wind dissipated it.

Dull yellow light glowed faintly in the distance, between the meager light cast inward through the door, and the yellow light, nothing but blackness.

Rourke’s right hand closed over the butt of one of the German anglehead flashlights. “Watch out.” And Rourke depressed the switch, shining the light into the darkness of the tunnel. As quickly as he flicked it on, he flicked it off.

“What’s the matter?” the younger man asked him. “What did you see in there?”

John Rourke flicked the light on again and he told Paul Rubenstein what he saw. “Human bones. Come on. Close the door behind you and mind you don’t trip on a femur or something.”

John Rourke stepped through the doorway, shining the light about him on all sides now. Oddly, he didn’t instantly see a femur, but he saw human bones of all other descriptions. His left boot inadvertently rested on an anterior segment of a human skull. Human vertebrae crunched under his feet as he moved ahead.

“My God,” Paul whispered.

“No—I think it has something to do with their god.” Rourke moved into the darkness. And from deep within the darkness ahead through which they had to pass, he heard something that sounded like growling.

Sarah Rourke’s temples hurt from the sudden absence of the pressure associated with the vision-intensification goggles. But here, in the light of a vast recreation hall beyond a kitchen in which they had taken cover as one of the Soviet murder squads passed, there was light enough and wearing them was no longer required. She pocketed them in the BDU jacket, immediately setting to checking her rifle as the commandoes (only nine remained?) under Wolfgang Mann’s command set to checking ways in and out.

As she satisfied herself as to the condition of her weapon, she suddenly realized she was terribly hungry. But there was nothing to eat, despite the fact she had just passed through a large, modern kitchen and that she was in a hall where, like as not, banquets were often held. All the weight of her rucksack was ammunition. A solitary canteen of water was on her belt. She didn’t want to drink because, if she did, she might have to urinate and where could she do that? Sarah Rourke shook her head, disgusted. Where were the Chinese?

Wolfgang Mann’s voice came to her through the radio and echoed her own thoughts. “Where are our Chinese friends?”

“I hope they brought Chinese food with them,” Sarah told him. And then she shut off the radio. In the hall, they were close enough that they could speak to one another naturally. “I’m turning off my radio,” she announced to anyone within earshot. Perhaps the radio chatter was giving her the headache.

There were two other sets of doors, besides the set through which they had entered, out of the kitchen, and a pair of Colonel Mann’s commandoes flanked these doors now, preparatory to opening them, she assumed. One man from each team placed a suction-cup-like device, several inches in diameter, against the doors, the black rubber piece functioning like the bell to something analogous to a stethoscope, listening devices to detect what might lie beyond the doors.

There was considerable risk that the Chinese unit they were to have met had encountered one of the roving Soviet patrols, been killed or captured or even just delayed. Which would mean scrubbing the mission or penetrating the government center themselves without reinforcements and making the attempt to rescue the chairman of the First City on their own.

He was a decent man, the chairman, if somewhat naive, and deserved their best efforts.

She heard a snapping of fingers, started to speak aloud as she turned toward the sound, then, on impulse, hit the button to reactivate her radio. She nodded toward Wolfgang Mann, saying softly into the microphone, “I’m receiving.”