Survivalist - 21 - To End All War (22 page)

But, for another hour or so, John Thomas Rourke had nothing to do but watch the sunset and the preparations for terminating this skirmish in what might still become Armageddon.

There had been a few skirmishes but nothing more, the majority of the Soviet land force surrendering without significant resistance when faced with German air power above, German troops on the ground behind them, and the captured Soviet Island Classers along the shore.

The problem of what to do with prisoners was a significant one. After seizing the Cons of two of the Soviet Island Class submarines, then flooding all compartments with the very gas the Soviets utilized as an intruder defense system—a knockout gas, nonlethal—the question of handling significant numbers of prisoners had first reared its head. After the surrender of a major Soviet land force, the situation became critical.

Camps were being set up, the problems of sanitation and medical care wresded with, security for the camps surprisingly the easiest of the complexly interlocking issues with which to deal. There was a valley some thirty miles inland from the coast, the climate benign enough because of low elevation, the surrounding ground high with clear fields of view. Minimal numbers of troops would be required to contain vast numbers of prisoners.

John Rourke, with Paul Rubenstein beside him, stood on a grassy slope overlooking a level area about the size often football fields, the valley where hourly more and more of the captured Soviet combatants were arriving only a few miles farther inland.

Twelve devices, each about the size and shape of a U.S. M-60 machine gun from the days Before the Night of The War, were being taken up into the hands of twelve persons, two among these Michael and Natalia.

All of the objects were hand-fabricated. Cost, Rourke mused, had to have been enormous, but under the circumstances was wholly academic.

In all, there were twenty-four of the rather unwieldy shoulder-fired energy weapons, each powered by a back pack unit which, with John Rourke’s limited knowledge of physics, seemed to closely approach the idea of harnessing naturally occurring plasma energy, as seen in ordinary lightning and ball lightning. And, there was a certain irony to this that escaped neither Rourke nor, he felt, his friend Paul Rubenstein, as they watched this second round of field testing.

“It’s interesting to see Michael firing that weapon, isn’t it, John? Lightning harnessed in his hands, yet it was lightninglike energy as the result of the ionization effect which nearly destroyed his world five centuries ago.”

“By plasma energy, mankind was nearly undone. Now, by plasma energy, mankind may yet be saved.” John Rourke nodded. He lit a cigar, watching the simple synth-fuel-powered flame of his battered Zippo. And synth fuel, after all, was nothing more than a synthetic copy of naturally occurring fossil fuel, a wheel striking a natural piece of flint, making a spark, igniting that fuel, and fire being tamed, at man’s command for his every whim.

No less amazing and nearly as basic in their obedience to the laws of nature, really, were these energy weapons. And, aside from the triggering device, they were no more mechanical than his Zippo.

Only the triggering mechanism was mechanical.

Based on the original Soviet Particle Beam technology developed in the years before The Night of The War, which was never fully implemented, the plasma energy had initially been used to accelerate particles. But with this current technology, the plasma energy itself became the weapon.

It was based on the theory of the glow discharge … the inverse of the principle utilized in magnetohydrodynamic power generation. By pulsing magnetic fields in the plasma, beams of energy in relation to the square of the magnetic field were achieved. The glow discharge occurred between two electrodes. Whereas during The Great Conflagration, high amounts of plasma energy from enormously powerful currents in the ionized atmosphere all but destroyed the planet,

the glow discharge based on a comparatively minimal current produced a degree of ionization that was controllable, and in conjunction with a rather imaginative application of Landau Damping to control wave amplitude, the result was a gun that discharged lightning bolts, rather like the shepherds of ancient Greece had imagined were hurled by an angry Zeus.

Ionizing the electrons near the cathode within the system activated plasma near the anode. What originally had charged ions for partical beam weaponry and was still being used by the Russians to generate laser beams now was able to combine the more conventional glow discharge into the more spectacular electric discharge arc. In chemistry or physics, the implications of such practical technology were nearly beyond Rourke’s imagining—everything from drive systems for spacecraft to an infinite power supply bypassing the traditional steam/mechanical engine. But the potential of this energy as a weapon was crystal clear.

Within months, at an accelerated rate of development, the power supply pack would be miniaturized, and rather than the ungainly shoulder-fired weapons being tested in this deserted field outside the German mountain city, there would be hand and shoulder weapons as convenient as cartridges in the high-capacity 9mm pistols and 5.56mm assault rifles in use five centuries ago.

The age of the “ray gun” had arrived.

John Rourke watched his son as the range was called safe for firing and Michael raised his weapon, took aim, and fired on a man-sized silhouette some two hundred meters distant. There was a laser sighting device mounted to the energy weapon, and if the laser beam could be settied on the target clearly enough to be seen, the target could be hit. In bright light, as was the case now, an optical sight built into the carrying handle was utilized. Michael leaned into the weapon and fired. A lightning bolt—pale blue in color and almost blindingly bright—discharged from the weapon’s muzzle, striking the target.

“Welcome to the future,” Paul observed.

“Yes, but ours or theirs?” And John Rourke nodded his head inland, toward the valley in which the Soviet prisoners were to be held until this war reached its inevitable conclusion. Just what that conclusion might be, who would win, was subject of so many variables that a scenario for its outcome was not readily apparent.

And if the Soviets launched nuclear weapons from their enclave beneath the Pacific, there would be no world remaining at all.

John Rourke examined the glowing tip of his cigar.

John Rourke stared down into the water thousands of feet below the J7-V in which he rode. It was the wrong ocean, of course, the Adantic rather than the Pacific, but he could imagine Jason Darkwood piloting the new Allied Fleet of commandeered Soviet Island Class submarines toward a rendezvous in the Pacific with the men of Mid-Wake.

But John Rourke’s affairs took him elsewhere. Jason Darkwood and the United States Marines of Mid-Wake, plus a core group of Allied Commandos, would assault the Soviet underwater facility in the Pacific, to interdict Soviet nuclear strike capability in support of Soviet land forces headquartered out of the Underground City in the Urals. And the Ural Mountains of Soviet Europe were John Rourke’s ultimate destination.

First, a strike at Antonovitch’s field HQnear where, five centuries ago, the Volga River had met the Caspian Sea. But the bombings had altered the course of the Volga, and the entire area from what had been the bed of the Volga to the still-flowing Ural River was now icy desert.

The Soviet Union’s greatest airfield was there, as well as the greatest concentration of personnel and equipment outside of the Underground City itself. At Gur’yev were assembled the armies once commanded by Natalia’s now-dead husband, Vladmir Karamatsov. At Gur’yev was the headquarters for the KGB Elite Corps. At Gur’yev were five armored battalions and two armored missile battalions.

With Gur’yev, there was no hope to counter the Soviet war machine.

Without Gur’yev, there was a chance.

Twenty-four operational plasma energy weapons against how many dozens or hundreds, perhaps … John Rourke looked away from the water, studyingthe charts on the screen of the German lap-top computer.

There was no other way than the way he had decided upon when first presented with the tactical difficulties involved.

John Rourke closed his eyes.

They sat around a rectangular folding table of considerable length. Natalia Tiemerovna studied the faces there. Wolfgang Mann looked exceedingly tired, spread too thin, much like the nation of New Germany he served. Paul looked almost anxious to be under way. Like her, with five centuries of warfare coming to a close, the prospect of peace—regardless of the dangers inherent in securing it—was so tantalizing that …Sheaverted her gaze from Paul as he looked up. They exchanged the briefest of smiles.

Michael. How like his father he seemed, growing more like John every day. And not just in looks—Michael Rourke had his father’s eyes, the high forehead and healthy shock of brown hair, the lined, lean face—but in his manner and his growing maturity.

John. John smoked a cigar, after first ascertaining that his smoking would not offend. He seemed unchanged—except for a litde grey—from the way he had looked when she’d first opened her eyes and seen him staring down at her in the Texas desert five centuries ago, unchanged from when she’d seen him that very first time in Latin America when he was still active CIA.

That very first time, he’d worn a white dinner jacket, looking ridiculously handsome. In the West Texas desert, he’d worn a light blue chambray shirt and faded jeans. This time, he was dressed in black—black knit shirt, black BDU pants, black lace-up-the-front boots.

And now John spoke, and the eyes of every man in the room —she was the only woman—settled upon him. These were tough men, hardened fighters, German Long Range Mountain Patrol commanders, German Commandos like Otto Hammerschmidt, men like First Chinese City Intelligence Commando Han Lu Chen and Icelandic policeman Bjorn Rolvaag.

“A portion of our force under the command of United States Marine Captain Sam Aldridge will attack Gur’yev from the northern shore of the Caspian as a separate element, but that attack will not commence until our job at the base has been taken care of. When Aldridge and his force—they’re all Mid-Wake Marines and skilled at diving procedures and have trained as much as time has allowed in lightning-fast penetrations against shore-based targets—but when they hit, they’ll knock out the anti-aircraft emplacements along the shore itself. Our task is two-fold.

“Major Tiemerovna, Paul Rubenstein, my son Michael, and I will penetrate within the base itself. Meanwhile, Captain Otto Hammerschmidt—ohh, I’m sorry, Major Hammerschmidt of late,” and John nodded deferentially toward Otto Hammerschmidt, recendy promoted. “Major Hammerschmidt and Mr. Han, meanwhile, with the assistance of Officer Rolvaag, will lead an attack against the second of the two primary anti-aircraft facilities, this to the north of the Gur’yev base. Their task will be relatively similar to that of Captain Aldridge—to knock out the anti-aircraft defenses so that after Natalia, Paul, Michael, and I have done our work, German paratroops can hit the main portion of the base itself, under the command of Major Hartmann, also recendy promoted.” And again John nodded, this time at Hartmann, de facto field commander for the German forces in Europe. “As Major Hartmann’s personnel strike, Colonel Mann will personally lead a force of J7-Vs and helicopters against the base.

“Just as important as knocking out the anti-aircraft facilities is preventing as many Soviet aircraft as possible from scrambling, getting airborne. That is the task Natalia, Michael, Paul, and I will undertake. From the Soviet prisoners taken during the fighting in New Germany, we’ve been able to assemble uniforms. From Soviet ID and orders, technicians at New Germany have been able to produce identical duplicate identification and cut new orders that will cover the four of us getting into the base. We hope.”

There was a hint of subdued, very forced laughter.

John went on. “Natalia’s Russian is perfect and mine is good. If we were going against the Soviet underwater complex, we’d have greater problems because the progress of the Russian language there over the centuries since The Night of the War has been considerably different and the Russian spoken there is a distincdy different-sounding dialect. Both Paul and Michael have acquired a sufficient amount of Russian to carry on basic conversations, and both of them understand more than they command as a spoken vocabulary. So we should be all right in that department as well. With uniforms, ID papers, orders, and the language, unless we are recognized by some other means, we’ll make it onto the base.

“Once into the base, we’ll proceed to the airfield.” John reached into a musette bag on the table in front of him, opening a jewelrylike box and taking from it what appeared to be an ordinary issue Soviet military wristwatch. “Each of the four of us will have one of these, in the event we are separated or something else unforeseen arises to keep us from functioning together as a unit. Once again”—and John nodded toward Colonel Mann—“we can thank German technological ingenuity. These are Soviet wristwatches on the outside, and like their more normal counterparts they tell time—not too well.” There was laughter, John smiling. “They indicate temperature, barometric pressure, and background radiation readings. Unlike the actual issue watches, however, each of these is equipped with a onetime-only use radio transmitting device.”

John demonstrated, removing his Rolex Submariner, then placing the Soviet watch on his wrist in its stead. As he took the watch away from his wrist, he turned it so the segment of the band with the locking clasp was upward. “The band itself looks synthetic, like those used on the Soviet issue watch, but is, rather, a metal alloy. It will serve as a projection antenna for the radio signaling device which is actuated by pulling the stem outward past the set position and then winding it.”

There were blank looks on the faces of everyone in the room except for Paul and Michael. “In the days prior to battery-operated watches,” John explained, “watches were mechanical. My watch, for example, is what was called ‘self-winding.’ Merely picking up a Rolex once a day will keep it running. But more basic watches required that at least once in every twenty-four-hour period the stem of the watch—as the Soviets use here merely for setting—had to be rotated back and forth until spring tension was such that the stem could be rotated, or wound, no further without forcing it. ‘Winding.’ We will wind the watch until it achieves maximum tension, and when that tension releases, the radio signal will have fired. That signal, from Natalia’s or Michael’s or Paul’s or my Soviet watch, will be received—we hope, again—by Colonel Mann’s forces. At that time, a drone J7-V will overfly Gur’yev field and bomb it. The drone will be shot down, most likely, but whether it is or isn’t, the resultant dislocation should provide cover for us to reach our primary objective with the explosives we’ll be carrying. Then we have to blow up a bunch of aircraft.”