Survivalist - 21 - To End All War (6 page)

“He was stupid or conceited enough to be carrying his party identification card on his body, and we found it when we searched him. His name was Hugo Goerdler.”

Maria Leuden, sitting on the couch, took off her glasses and began to speak, her voice low. “Hugo Goerdler is — was—one of the top-ranking men in the Party. He was prominent in the Youth, prominent under The Leader, likely was more prominent among the hard-liners. They will be after his killers.”

“We will be in no greater or lesser danger if we rejoin John and Paul and Michael,” Natalia said. “I vote that we leave here.”

Sarah stood and leaned against the wall. She looked very tired. “I think we were pushed into this; I thought that from the beginning. Sometimes, I guess, it’s very nice to feel protected, but we have a duty just the same as the men have. And I don’t even feel like saying something cute about men getting in trouble without us there to keep them out of it.”

Annie stood up, rearranging her robe. “If things come to a head, we should be where we can do the most good. I agree with Natalia that we won’t be any safer here. And if Daddy and Paul and Michael are in danger, we don’t have any right to try to keep ourselves out of everything just because we’re women.”

Natalia exhaled smoke, saying in almost a whisper, “A lot of this was because of me. But I learned out there that I’m back, like I was. Whether that’s for good or for bad, I’m not any more or less likely to crack up than I would have been before what happened to me happened.”

“Hen party’s over, then,” Sarah Rourke declared, feeling as if a burden had suddenly been lifted from her spirit.

The aircraft—a J7-V—came in almost diagonally over the pad near the main entrance of the mountain city that was the heart of New Germany in Argentina. And then it stopped.

It hovered as its engines changed orientation, then began to descend.

John Rourke looked below them.

A granite jewel in the midst of a verdant subtropical paradise, the mountain islands inside which lay the German city rose from the center of a garden landscape. But, unlike other times when Rourke had come here, no children played in the parklike grounds, no women in soft print dresses strolled after them, no scholarly-looking young men walked deep in thought.

Anti-aircraft missile batteries were set about the grounds instead, and all around were armored vehicles of every description from within the German inventory.

At each of the four corners of the pad onto which the J7-V was now setding were tanks, and surrounding each tank were infantry personnel.

Some distance back, well away from the aircraft, Rourke saw horse-mounted Long Range Mountain Patrol personnel, the men and the animals they rode all but lost inside the shade of the single canopy jungle that surrounded the park.

There was a gende lurch and the J7-V was landed. John Rourke checked the bandages over his hands … lighter, barely necessary now except to protect the wounds there. New skin was already beginning to form and, most impor-tandy, he could flex his fingers, hold a gun without opening the wounds and making them bleed again.

After getting the Atsack to a safe-enough location to risk rendezvous with Captain Hartmann’s forces in the field, they had flown direcdy to the field headquarters. News of the possibility of obtaining the Soviet weapon had already spread to New Germany and scientific teams were even at that moment preparing.

Two days were consumed with carefully dismantling the weapon for every conceivable form of photography, analysis, and data recording. Once the photos, X-rays, computer blueprints, and other data were assembled and the weapon itself was reassembled, it was dispatched to New Germany, along with the original copy of the materials sent to them from the Underground City’s military commander via the exiled Vassily Prokopiev.

Rourke spent several hours each of those two days undergoing skin grafts to his left hand, the grafted skin sooner to heal than the skin that had been scalded away.

Gratefully now, the J7-V landed, Rourke stood. The skin had been taken from the rear of his left thigh and he was still tender there.

Copies of the accumulated data were dispatched to New Germany by various other flights, over various routes, so that at least the data would certainly arrive in good order, even if something were to befall the Soviet weapon itself.

Two more days had been spent in travel, stopping first at Lydveldid Island to confer with Madame Jokli and her staff concerning the latest developments in the war; and, of course, to renew the friendship held by the entire Rourke family for Bjorn Rolvaag. The Icelandic policeman asked to accompany them to the fighting. Rourke conveyed to Rolvaag as best he could that they were on their way back from the active front in Eastern Europe to New Germany. But Rolvaag accompanied them in any event. They continued on to near Eden Base, where the women were waiting for them. Although he questioned the wisdom of their leaving The Retreat, he would be glad to have their help and, on one level at least, felt more at ease if they were near …

that if something occurred to endanger them, he would be there rather than unknowing and thousands of miles away.

John Rourke could not escape the feeling that things were now coming to a head, a climax. As to the outcome, he could not predict.

Michael walked aft from the J7-Vs cockpit, announcing, “I just got off the radio. They want us inside quick. One of the Long Range Mountain Patrols reports Soviet troop movement toward the seacoast. There’s some thought to the effect that the Soviets of the Underground City might have already affected their alliance with their counterparts near Mid-Wake and some sort of seaborne attack might be in the offing.”

John Rourke took one of the thin, dark tobacco cigars from the pocket of the faded blue shirt he wore beneath his battered brown bomber jacket. He rolled it across his teeth, setding it unlit at the left corner of his mouth. “If the alliance is already working, going inside might not help much.” Then he started toward the fuselage door. Paul was already opening it, and when the almost uncomfortably bright sunlight washed into the cabin, Rourke squinted against it. There were German military personnel waiting, an honor guard with assault rifles at order arms, and other military personnel as well, from among the number of these latter several assisting the rest of the way with the egress steps. Rourke reached to one of the patch pockets of his jacket, extracting the dark-lensed aviator sunglasses he hadn’t needed very much in the blizzardlike conditions to the north. He needed them now.

He moved onto the steps, his pack in his right hand. One of the German junior officers reached for it and Rourke let him take it. An M16 was secured to the pack, Rourke’s gunbelt was slung over his left shoulder.

From behind him, Paul said, “God it’s bright out here!”

Rourke reached into his jeans, took the battered zippo from his pocket, and rolled the striking wheel under his right thumb, thrusting the tip of the cigar into the lighter’s blue-yellow flame. He inhaled.

The main entrance to the city lay before them, armored vehicles nearly blocking it and positioned to do so rapidly. The blast doors were half closed. More than five times the usual number of guards were stationed there. Just on the exterior side of the entrance stood a military band.

Despite the dark-lensed glasses John Rourke wore, when he looked upward, he squinted against the light. From the air, as the J7-V made its approach, he had detected litde additional fortification of the German city. But, from ground level, able to see beneath the overhangs that were blasted or laser cut into the mountain’s exterior, the city’s level of preparedness seemed considerably heightened. Anti-aircraft and anti-armor missiles were located at regular intervals on three levels, and logic dictated that the armament totally surround the mountain in a staggered tier effect.

Michael and Paul flanked him now.

The band began to play, striking up “The Star-Spangled Banner” as the commander of the honor guard formed on either side of Rourke, his son and his friend calling the unit to present arms.

Striding toward the aircraft from the edge of the landing field, with several junior officers and a number of civilian official-looking men in tow, was Col. Wolfgang Mann.

Colonel Mann, supreme military commander of the armed forces of New Germany, saluted. “Herr General!”

John Rourke, uncomfortable with the rank imposed upon him by the president of Mid-Wake, didn’t know what to do for a moment. To salute in return, he thought, would be silly. He wore no uniform and considered his rank an honorary tide more than anything else. Colonel Mann held the salute. John Rourke at last nodded, saying, “Thank you, Colonel,” and Mann lowered the salute.

A litde girl with long blond ringlets and a very serious expression in her pretty blue eyes was shoved forward out of the crowd of dignitaries. She was so tiny that John Rourke

hadn’t even noticed her until that instant. She wore a frilly white dress, like something for a formal birthday party. And, in her hands she held flowers. She presented them to him, more or less forcing them toward his hands as he crouched down to her. “And thank you, too,” John Rourke smiled… .

An attractive young female officer, an aide to Colonel Mann, announced that the J7-V carrying Sarah, Natalia, Annie, Maria Leuden, and Bjorn Rolvaag had just landed safely. Then the aide retired from the room and Dieter Bern, his fragile-looking frame bent over the table at the center of which were placed the Soviet energy weapons— the one obtained by Jason Darkwood from Mid-Wake, the second secured by Rourke, Paul, and Michael —said, “What a frightening object. Is it not, mein hernn?”

Paul said, “But how much more frightening in the hands of the enemy alone.”

John Rourke looked at his friend, nodding in agreement. “Sir, do your scientists think that the weapon can be duplicated in time to be of some use?”

Dieter Bern’s eyebrows shrugged as he looked up.

The room was a formal meeting hall left over from the days of Nazi rule here, overlarge for their purposes, elaborate in the extreme. Black marble quarried in the mountains, Rourke had been told once, comprised the floor and the ceiling, gray marble with yellow gold molding adorning the walls, an immense crystal chandelier suspended on chains from the ceiling direcdy over the, by comparison, simple dark-stained wooden table around which they were clustered.

Dieter Bern, his voice reedy-sounding from age, at last answered verbally. “Much to my personal regret, but out of necessity, our scientists labor long into each night in the design of weapons. As you no doubt are aware or at least suspect, Herr Doctor, we have even developed thermonuclear warheads and are near completion in the development of long-range delivery systems. At the present, our weapons are crude by comparison to those that your generation used five centuries ago to nearly eradicate all life on earth. But, if the Soviets launch against us, we will at least be able to respond.”

” ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ is the term, sir” John Rourke responded. “Many persons at that time saw considerable meaning in the English acronym the first letters of those three words form.”

“Mad” Wolfgang Mann said solemnly.

Rourke nodded, staring at the energy weapons. “If this device can be perfected in time for use by your troops and the forces of Mid-Wake, these energy weapons may give us the tactical and strategic advantage necessary to prevent that first launch. As we all know, as doubdess your scientists know, even the most modest nuclear exchange could so violently upset our currendy quite fragile atmospheric envelope that all life on the surface would perish once again, and the planet would never heal itself. Would life beneath the surface forever be life at all?”

Dieter Bern splayed his long, age-gnarled fingers along the table. “Already, my friend, some of our scientists are laying the foundation necessary to support research into planetary reengineering, much the same as was discussed in the context of the planet Mars before warfare between the super powers so radically changed the course of human history.

“The principles would be, more or less, the same,” Bern concluded, “only quite a bit simpler to bring about.”

John Rourke lit the cigar he’d placed in his mouth upon first entering the room. He turned the battered Zippo windlighter over in his hands as he exhaled, then looked first at Dieter Bern, then at Wolfgang Mann. “We’re talking perhaps as long as a century to accomplish something such as that, at least in the light of your present technology. And planetary engineering, from what litde reading I did in the

field five centuries ago, worked marvelously well in computer models. But none of those models, even if they were available to you, would be accurate because of the obvious differences in the two planetary bodies. Plus, there’d be the radiation factor to consider … how those portions of this planet currendy uninhabitable and other portions which might be made so in a new nuclear exchange would bear on the desired results. In the final analysis,” Rourke told them, “it’s a tremendous gamble. Granted, it may prove necessary, but that possible option having to be exercised should be avoided at all costs.”

The table was an elongated rectangle, and Michael had stood silently at the far end for some time. He walked around the table now to be nearer to the devices as he spoke. “If your scientists could push this device to its logical limits, a weapon that could be hand carried and fired and powered by a backpack unit of some type, we could utilize the weapon as a means of obtaining not just battiefield parity, but also a true advantage. What would happen, for example, if my father and Paul and myself, along with your top people and the top people from Mid-Wake, were to penetrate the Soviet Underground City … take it and hold it?

“The Soviet forces would be cut off from supply,” Michael said, answering his own question. “And, with more of these weapons in the field in German hands and in the hands of the Allied Commando Force that’s been formed, we might be able to neutralize the Soviet conventional threat. If we launched a similar attack on the Soviet underwater complex, we might have a chance at effectively interdicting their use of submarine-launched missiles.”