Survivalist - 17 - The Ordeal (2 page)

In his own language, the only language he had ever known and ever seen any purpose in knowing, he shouted, “Halt where you are! This is a place for sick people to become well, not a place for the likes of you!” The Icelandic tongue was rich in literature, was beautifully spoken. The coming of the Rourkes, the coming of the Germans, the warfare with the Russians, the hospitality of the Chinese in their flower-shaped First City—nothing compelled him to learn a tongue different from his own.

The Russian woman—she was very sweet and very sad and,

perhaps even more because of that, so very beautiful—the Russian woman, Major Tiemerovna, could converse with him and he with her, although it was awkward. But it was adequate.

It would have been nice to speak with Annie Rourke Rubenstein, though.

Bjorn Rolvaag dismissed such thoughts from his mind.

The black-uniformed men—Soviet KGB Elite Corps commandoes—were approaching slowly, their rifles and pistols drawn, perplexed looks in their eyes and faces. Should they shoot this man? He smiled at such thoughts. But of course they should. Because once a few of them came within range of his staff, he would begin soundly cracking their skulls.

The Russians spoke to him. He understood enough of that, although it didn’t sound pretty as it did when Major Tiemerovna spoke to him. But he understood enough of that to know that they meant to kill him. There again lay the superfluity of language.

He had known that much just looking into their faces.

Bjorn Rolvaag moved into the center of the corridor, his staff still in his hands.

A soldier who looked barely teen-aged lunged at him with the naked muzzle of a rifle and Rolvaag dodged him easily, although the sudden motion made his head ache and caused the floaters to return. He had hardly realized before that they were gone.

The boy soldier lunged again and Rolvaag took a half step left and moved the staff twice, but fewer than ten degrees outward, the base of the staff impacting this bothersome little enemy in the groin once and once on the tip of the jaw. The Russian felt flat on his back in the middle of the corridor.

A soldier raised his rifle to his shoulder.

Rolvaag started to confront him.

From behind him, he heard more of the impossible to fathom Chinese words.

But he thought it might be wise to take cover. In one fluid

motion, his staff swept outward and brought the rifleman down at the heels. Rolvaag flattened his own body on the corridor floor, his head swimming with pain, his right hand holding his staff, his left hand clutched around the neck of the Russian whom he was choking to death. Gunfire rang through the corridor all around him, but most heavily from behind him. Guns were so terribly noisy.

Booted feet ran past him, the clanging of military equipment, the gunfire again.

He looked at the second Russian’s face. It was purple enough and he let go.

There were bloodstained white trousers in front of him, now, and Rolvaag looked up along their length and then up the body contour—a female body contour—and into the prettiest Chinese face he had seen here.

She smiled at him as she dropped to her knees beside him.

She told him something he didn’t understand.

He told her she was very pretty, knowing she would understand him no more than he had understood her.

She was trying to help him stand up.

And so he did that, but his head hurt very badly; not, he confessed to himself, so badly that he needed to hold on to her quite so tightly as he did when she helped him back into his room. But almost…

They had all moved into one van, presenting less of a target on the road leading to the site of the soon-to-be-begun German outpost, lest the Soviet gunships should return.

But Sarah Rourke doubted that they would—not until they were through destroying the First Chinese City.

In the distance, the high plateau rose ahead of them, stretching for miles, it seemed. But she knew the area to the last foot, having tramped across it at the request of Colonel Mann and worked with one of his engineering officers and a

staff of men to do rough sketchwork preparatory to an overall plan for the base. At first, she had thought Mann’s corresponding with her personally by military messenger might have been something put together by her husband, John Rourke, and the commander of the Forces of New Germany in Argentina, just to keep her busy. But it hadn’t proven out that way. It had seemed logical to Mann that with a professional artist available on the scene—albeit her professional experience was from five centuries before and in the rather left-handed field of children’s literature—the preliminary sketchwork could be handled with adequate efficiency. She had never so labored over drawings since the acceptance of her first published illustrations.

The van was moving inexorably nearer to the plateau, the hermetically sealed German tents seeming barren, lonely there, the few men of the temporary garrison in full battle gear, their solitary anti-aircraft emplacement sandbagged and manned, men with assault rifles at the entrance that would pass them through the electrified perimeter.

The tents were so few as to be missable from high-altitude observation unless one were specifically looking for them, and extrapolating the flight path of the Soviet gunships, they would have passed out of visual range of the base. Hence, the few men here were still alive and there was still hope that Colonel Mann and his J-7Vs could do something.

The chairman of the First Chinese City spoke to her for the first time since they had entered the van. “I am hopeful, Mrs. Rourke, that there is some chance. My city will be in ruins within the hour if the aerial attack is not, somehow, forced to cease.”

The security waved them through and the van continued on until it stopped before the largest of the few tents arranged with geometric precision here on the plateau.

To have returned to the First City, despite the fact that it would have taken considerably longer to get there, would have

been pointless. The Chinese here had a substantial and well-equipped army, but nothing to combat airpower except will and courage.

The chairman rose and began to alight from the van, Sarah gathering her skirt and following after him. He helped her down.

A young German officer—a lieutenant—came to attention, saluting them, offering his hand to the chairman who received it, bowing as he offered his hand to her. He held her hand briefly as if it were something very fragile. He’d evidently never seen her fire a gun, wrangle a horse, butcher a chicken or change a diaper.

A stiff, cold wind was blowing over the plateau; the two German gunships that serviced the tent base vibrated on their moorings. She cocooned the heavy Icelandic shawl tighter about her, grateful for the length which brought it nearly to her knees.

“I have been in radio contact with my colonel, Herr Chairman, Frau Rourke.”

“And?” She couldn’t help herself; the word spilled out of her.

The German officer—he was young, blond, blue-eyed, perfect-looking—made a great show of shooting the cuff of his uniform blouse and looking at his wristwatch. “In precisely five minutes and forty-three seconds, the Herr Colonel’s personal aircraft will touch down. The Herr Colonel has requested, Frau Rourke, that one from among this party join him aboard the J-7V to facilitate targeting recognition factors once the squadron has reached the site of the First City prior to engaging the enemy.”

She wanted to kiss him. Instead, she said, “I’ll go.”

The chairman of the First Chinese City merely sighed.

If there were anything to pre-natal predestination, what would the child she carried inside her become, Sarah Rourke suddenly wondered. She smiled at the thought. Because she

already knew. Like her son, like her daughter, this child, male or female, would be a Rourke. “Is there someplace where I can go to the bathroom before Colonel Mann lands? Pregnancy does that to you.”

The young German officer looked taken aback.

Sarah Rourke shrugged her shoulders and smiled.

“Your hands are crushing me,” Annie whispered up at him softly, gently.

Paul Rubenstein realized that they were. But he held his wife anyway, slightly easing the grip his hands had on her shoulders. She was kneeling beside her brother, treating the headwound Michael had sustained at the hands of the forces of the Second Chinese City. An errant gust of wind played with her long hair. In the distance, beyond the confines of the black-hued, bare rock cave’s overhang, the sounds of battle raged on. A few feet beyond Michael lay the Russian officer, passed into something more like sleep than unconsciousness. When they had reached the cave, the Russian had murmured in well-spoken but heavily accented English, “Why did he try to save me?”

Paul Rubenstein had had no answer for the man.

Black smoke filled the sky to the north and west. All of it reminded him of the prophecies of Armageddon in the Christian New Testament.

They had hidden the Specials, their New Germany-crafted high-tech weapons-equipped motorcycles, deeper within the cave. But much of what was needed for the weapons pods to be functional had been expended during the raid against the Second Chinese City which had resulted in Michael’s and the injured Russian officer’s rescue. There was an adequate supply of synth fuel, but there was nowhere to go. Enemy forces

seemed to surround them totally.

Otto Hammerschmidt and Han Lu Chen stood guard in the rocks above the overhang; Maria Leuden stood with her hands in front of her, one resting in the other, a look of total helplessness on her ashen face. Paul wondered absently whether she wished her doctorate were in medicine now rather than archeology.

Paul Rubenstein looked back at his wife when she spoke. “It looks like superficial bleeding. But we don’t have any way of telling whether or not it’s anything more. Daddy always told me that you treat what you can find and try to treat what you can’t. I wish he were here,” Annie whispered.

Paul Rubenstein took this as no reflection on his own talents or abilities, such as they were or weren’t. That John Rourke, Michael’s and Annie’s father, his best friend, would be an asset under any circumstances was a foregone conclusion. Two men in need of medical treatment only underlined the imperative.

But John Thomas Rourke, Doctor of Medicine, survival and weapons expert, the very embodiment of the phrase “Socratic man,” wasn’t here.

After they had begun to effect the rescue of Michael and, coincidentally, saved the Russian officer as well, Natalia had been injured somehow and John Rourke had delegated her Special to Han Lu Chen, taking Natalia aboard his own. They had been forced to escape via a different route. And nothing had been seen of them since. Natalia had been hospitalized prior to going on the rescue mission, declared herself well, seemed her old self—or had she? Paul Rubenstein wondered.

The radios in their helmets worked perfectly and, logic dictated, so did those in the identical helmets worn by John and Natalia when they were last seen. Yet John and Natalia couldn’t be raised, meaning something was very wrong or they were out of range.

Already, Paul Rubenstein planned to combat the second possibility.

But what disturbed him—more even than their current

plight in the middle of what seemed like full-blown warfare between Soviet Air Cavalry and the hard-line Communist surface armies of the Second Chinese City—were the remarks of Han Lu Chen concerning Natalia. That she had seemed * totally unaware of what was happening, could only murmur John’s name, that something seemed so terribly wrong about her.

And as all of them had fled into the mountains to escape the battle, Annie had said to him through her helmet radio, “I can feel something—it’s Natalia, Paul.”

Paul Rubenstein dropped to his knees beside his wife. Her hands had begun gently to dress Michael’s headwound. “What did you mean about Natalia?”

“Before?”

“Is there something now?”

“She’s very sick. I can feel her thoughts inside of me and they’re meaningless. The only thing I do … understand … the only thing I do feel strongly enough to understand besides that is sadness, that she’s so filled with sadness. It’s like she’s inside some deep pit and she can’t quite see the top, knowing that there’s something still outside beyond it. She’s afraid.”

He stared into his wife’s eyes. She wasn’t looking at him, wasn’t looking at anything.

It was a different sort of vision.

And, though she’d always had it since adulthood, perhaps before, a chill ran along his spine. Such an ability—or curse— frightened him. And he knew it frightened Annie. “Where is she, Annie?”

Annie’s eyes didn’t flicker, although she blinked. “Cold. Very cold. I can feel Daddy’s thoughts near to her, but it’s like a bad radio transmission. I can just tell that he’s there. What’s in her is so strong, it’s like—” And Annie bent her head forward, her face going down into her hands as she began to weep.

The voice made him jump slightly and he began reaching for the battered Browning High Power in the tanker holster

beneath the open front of his arctic parka.

“This woman—your wife—she sees through the mind?”

Paul folded Annie against him, turned and looked at the Russian officer. The man was sitting up, his head lolled forward, both hands to it as though he were in pain or very tired, what Paul could see of the face nearly as pale as death.

“Yes. She does,” Paul Rubenstein answered.

“Can she see the future, too, then?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I have no such abilities, sir. But for us, here, no special talents are needed. We are all dead. We breathe and move about and hope. But, in the end, we are all dead certainly.”

Paul Rubenstein didn’t say anything to him after that.

He just held Annie close to him.

The Russian was, most probably, correct.

Natalia’s eyes, the incredible blueness of them—but they only stared emptily, as though looking through him, not seeing him.

John Rourke held Natalia’s nearly naked body close against him and had for some time, but still she trembled. It was not the hypothermia his physician’s instincts had first feared, the result of the Special crashing over the edge of the precipice into the icy, raging waters from which he had pulled her. It was something inside her that made her shake, something inside her that was keeping the warmth from his body from warming her.