Survivalist - 24 - Blood Assassins (17 page)

Once she located a port of some sort, it wouldn’t be that hard to find the local anti-Eden forces, or she could just connect her emergency beacon to a satellite dish and bring in the troops.

Of course none of these ideas might work at all but convincing herself that they would, Emma Shaw began to climb very carefully downward along the chasm wall in search of a cave in which to spend the night.

Thirty-Two

The Nazi V-stol touched down with amazing delicacy.

Immediately, the fuselage door was opened and Hauptsturmfuhrer Gunther Spitz’s personnel exited into the snow. The last of them was the mortuary sciences specialist, a man named Krause.

Snow was heavy here and deep in the niches and depressions, but the rock face itself was smooth and reasonably level, blown clean of snow in the nearly gale force wind. The wind was a further tribute to the pilot’s skills.

The glacial ice was far below them now. Here at the summit of the mountain they could see literally for miles. The only hint of civilization was the thought of that which might have survived within the mountain beneath them. If it had, it had remained untouched for six hundred and twenty-five years.

John Rourke, in his black arctic parka now, but the snorkel hood down and the front of the coat open so he could access his pistols, despite the cold, jumped down

from the V-stol. Unslinging his HK-91, then loading the chamber, Rourke started ahead, bending his frame into the wind as he trod over the plateau and toward the ultimate summit. The men fell in around him, Paul close beside him.

“There wasn’t anything at all?”

“Not a thing showed up on the aerial photography, nothing showed up on the aircraft’s sensors. Overflew it three times, then twice more for good measure, as you know.” Rourke shrugged his shoulders. “If they’ve got anything, it’s more sophisticated than anything anyone’s operating with, more sophisticated than anything we could imagine.”

“That’s crazy,” Paul observed. “No defenses, no detection devices.”

“Could be a community of pacifists,” Rourke noted, but not quite convinced that this was the reason for no apparent defenses, no radar or any sort of sensing equipment. “After the Night of the War and the Great Conflagration, God only knows what people who survived might turn to. They might view something as basic as self-defense as an intrinsic evil. Many persons claimed to believe that even prior to the Night of the War; and, of course, there were some very sincere Christian religious sects which held those beliefs. I always believed that brotherly love was something certainly to strive for, but that making self-defense moral anathema was tantamout to suicide.”

“And you think there’s a vent up here, for getting rid of poisonous exhaust gases? And that’s it.”

“Maybe. Either that vent provides us the access we require or we plant explosives and then have the

V-stol’s missiles or plasma guns detonate them. But that could cause a lot of death and destruction inside. So, hope there’s a vent, Paul.” The younger man nodded.

Snow crunched under Rourke’s boots as he dug in his heels against the gradually steepening grade. The wind which blew here on the mountain top was bitterly cold, but somehow very clean, refreshing, and because of that almost pleasant. The V-stol’s overflights had confirmed what the intelligence data had suggested very strongly—that there was no radiation danger here, that the air, despite its natural thinness at this latitude and elevation, was perfectly breathable.

In fact, it smelled fresher than he had remembered air smelling for a very long time.

But then John Rourke shouted, “Fall back! Fall back! Gas!” John Rourke turned, ran, Paul beside him, the younger man already staggering. One of the Nazis, the medical doctor, who was also a specialist in cryogenics, collapsed. And John Rourke would need him very desperately. Besides that, Nazi or no, the fellow was a human being. Rourke shoved Paul Rubenstein toward Gunther Spitz shouting, “Care for him or die!” Then inhaling deeply of what he hoped was good air, Rourke raced back.

If this were nerve gas, Rourke and everyone with him was close to dead already. Rourke grabbed up the doctor, hauled him into a fireman’s carry and turned, nearly stumbled, light-headed, then threw himself into a lurching run.

Paul seemed all right, from ahead started running back to join him. They met, Paul grabbing the man

from Rourke’s shoulder, taking the doctor over his shoulder. Rourke stumbled. Paul reached for him. Rourke shook his head, waved Paul ahead. Rourke pulled himself to his feet, then ran on.

The others were huddled about the aircraft, coughing, but apparently unharmed. As Rourke joined them, he sagged to his knees in the snow, breathed tentatively. The air smelled normal not sweet. “Back into the aircraft. Seal everything. Hurry!” Paul was the first up, the Nazi doctor over his shoulder still.

And John Rourke cursed his carelessness. He was, after all, looking for an outlet vent where poisonous gases generated by industry or waste management could be purged from within. Perhaps this was a defensive system, perhaps not. Either way—it had achieved the same purpose.

And he had found what he had detected from the photo reconnaissance. “We suit up before we venture out again. Come on,” Rourke ordered.

He could have gotten them killed.

They hurried into the aircraft, John Rourke suddenly realizing that his face was beaming with a smile. On the floor of the aircraft, in what formed a center aisle between the comfortable lounge chairs and the small work tables, Paul had the Nazi doctor lying flat and was administering coronary/ pulmonary resuscitation.

Hauptsturmfuhrer Gunther Spitz just stared in amazement …

Emma Shaw’s eyes squinted against the darkness. At last she closed her eyes and counted to ten, then opened them again. The .45 in her hand felt as comforting as the teddy bear she’d slept with as a little girl. But when she was little, she never let teddy go first. She let the .45 go first, holding it out ahead of her as though it were some sort of magic talisman, very much like a teddy bear, and would keep the evil of the darkness away.

But unlike when she was a little girl, it wasn’t imaginary monsters of which she was afraid, but men or animals. She’d heard that bears and wolves had been released into the countryside by the Eden City officials, to restock nature. That was fine, but she didn’t care to have a chat about ecology with either. And because the government of Eden seemed almost intent on disaffect-ing the population, large numbers of persons had either formed independent and sometimes quite primitive societies outside Eden’s direct sphere of influence and gangs of Land Pirates and solitary roving thugs roamed at will in the wilderness areas. These latter might be worse than wolves or bears.

Some things had not survived the Great Conflagration, and as best she could tell among those were bats. She realized full well that the majority of these flying mammals were thoroughly harmless creatures but she wouldn’t have enjoyed finding this cave to be full of them. Their very representation in an old book or in some of the vid films from the twentieth century made her skin crawl.

But the cave, more of a deep niche in the rock, seemed uninhabited.

Emma Shaw shone her handflash and inspected the cave in greater detail. There was no debris to show that

wild creatures had used this as a home. And she could see why. It was a little cramped. She could stand up, but only barely. Someone the height of John Rourke would have been forced to stoop over.

There was a solitary rock, almost inviting in its way, begging her to be seated on something besides cold snow and ice. She accepted the invitation and sat on the rock. It didn’t feel half bad. Her .45 was in her right hand, the flashlight in her left. If she got out of this— WHEN! Emma Shaw reminded herself—she might decide to come back here someday and take the rock back and put it in the living room of her house.

She could always paint it, stencil it. Some women did that sort of thing.

Most women didn’t do this sort of thing. She sat on the rock, exhaled.

The cave would have to do.

The first order of survival after remembering not to panic was to keep one’s body in shape, whether that meant food or water or warmth or shelter. She had everything for that.

She took a swallow from her emergency water ration but only a small one, then took out a partially eaten high energy bar, slowly, almost savoringly consuming the rest of it. And she thought.

Over the course of her several miles of walking, she had considered just where she might be. The Blackbird’s airspeed indicator had gone off the gauge when she activated the rear firing rockets. And she had already been at maximum, the aircraft’s wings glowing red from heat despite the frigid air temperatures. It seemed clear that she was exceeding what the aircraft was built for, and the classified maximum speed was staggering to contemplate. She read a story once about a pilot who so exceeded the speed of ordinary aircraft that he travelled through time. That was impossible at least as far as she knew. But she had travelled through a considerable distance.

The terrain feature beside which she rested in this nichelike cave was not on the map—at least not the map of the southeastern portion of the North American continent.

Had she overflown her area of operations by such a considerable margin that she was in what had been the Northeastern United States?

She was beginning to think so.

And these days, this was essentially uncharted territory.

Some settlements were here, and there were supposedly some few gangs of Land Pirates. That was all. The land was too forbidding for anyone to wish to claim it, although it was—technically speaking—under the control of Eden.

She wished she’d studied geography with more enthusiasm when she’d been in school. Perhaps she would have been able to recognize what river this was which flowed outside. And through what area it passed.

Mentally Emma Shaw stuck to her plan, however, holding fast to its eventual efficacy. Even in the harshest of climates, where a river met the sea there was at least some sort of settlement, however small. If she followed this river long enough she would reach the sea, reach that settlement. Then she could effect her

own rescue.

Failing a belief in that, she was stuck.

There was no sign of game, a fact which at once both heartened and dismayed her. In the absence of game, there’d be no predators. But without game she would run out of food all too soon. Then what, she asked herself?

Stuck. No food. No hope.

Her best chance would be that the Land Pirates got her, and decided she was too pretty to kill—and Emma Shaw smiled thinking there was a fat chance of that.

Thirty-Three

The V-stol, on Rourke’s orders, went airborne again, moving back several miles distant from the mountain top. With the help of the restored Nazi doctor, a man named Mentz, John Rourke took blood samples from each of the men of the party, himself included.

John Rourke had planned ahead. In order to preserve the cursed remains which they sought, it might be necessary to have chemical analysis equipment. For that reason, among other items, there was a computer, which was designed to sniff and otherwise scan trace elements and identify their nature. The blood samples were run through the computer, its monitor flashing up the entire chemical composition in less time than it took Rourke to light his cigar.

“What is this?” Mentz began. “These elements—”

“It’s just what I thought it would be, at least in part,” John Rourke said very slowly, his voice almost a whisper. “Paul? Take a look, will you.”

After a second, Paul Rubenstein was beside him.

Rourke vacated his seat before the terminal and Paul slid in. “Look familiar? Think 1960s.” “LSD?”

John Rourke smiled. “Not in the traditional formula, but evidently gasified and with carriers. Yes.”

Doctor Mentz asked, “You mean the halucinogen?”

“Yes. Apparently, unless there’s some other reason for it that I can’t begin to comprehend, somebody down inside the mountain likes to keep people happy— whether they like it or not—and kill them at the same time. Other elements of the formula were clearly poisonous, and lethally so.”

John Rourke called forward to the pilot, “Captain— have your copilot take over. I need a conference.” He might need more than that…

Wearing a chemical decontamination suit with full self-contained respiration was rather like wearing scuba gear, but on land it was grossly uncomfortable. It was light in weight, to be sure, but one was forever conscious of wearing it.

Paul Rubenstein didn’t like it.

It was toward dusk when the V-stol touched down again and they disembarked, their weapons at the ready, the pilot ordered to go airborne and select a suitable safe landing site, then wait there to be contacted or return in twenty-four hours.

This time they were more careful in approaching the site of the supposed vent.

Various members of the party were equipped with everything from heavy weapons to ultrasensitive devices for sensing everything from radiation to gas to high frequency sound or light.

There was a great deal of chatter in German going on in his ear through the helmet mounted radio. Paul Rubenstein could not understand it, but he knew that John could, and perfectly (although John did not speak German as well as Natalia). Natalia was a veritable polyglot, naturally gifted in languages, with the accents to match.

They passed the point where the gas had overtaken them the first time and Paul Rubenstein could hear the voice of the Doctor, Mentz, saying in English, “My corpsman reports that we are in a cloud of gas identical in composition to that which we identified before. It is becoming more dense.”

“Thank you Doctor.” John Rourke answered. “Please maintain the English language updates for the benefit of Mr. Rubenstein.”

“Of course, Hecr Doctor.”

Beside John, Wolfgang Mann walked along, spryly enough, Paul Rubenstein supposed. Yet there was still something odd about the once Colonel, now Generaloberst. Perhaps it was muscle or joint stiffness, after the cryogenic sleep, but his mannerisms held the hint of almost mechanical detachment.