Survivalist - 24 - Blood Assassins (32 page)

The man fell away, the right front wheel of the cab rolling over his body.

Rourke stabbed the pistol into his trouser band, its slide still locked open. And he grabbed at the whip, cracking it over the ears of the team. “Gyaagh!” They were nearly to the barricade now, a knot of soldiers from the city storming toward the cab, evidently to seize it and the team as their own means of flight. Rourke cracked the whip across the face of one of the men who was jumping for the box, driving him down.

The whip back in Rourke’s teeth, the reins transferred to his right hand, he grabbed for the still-loaded second Detonics ScoreMaster. He punched its muzzle toward the face of a man grabbing for the reins of the offside horse. Rourke fired, then fired again, killing the man.

The horses ran wildly now, of their own volition, not from Rourke’s urging he knew, running it seemed to get away from the gunfire and the energy weapon bursts and the smoke and fumes. More gunfire from the passenger compartment. A man charged toward the team from the front. Rourke could not fire, upping the ScoreMaster*s Safety, stabbing it into his belt. As the animals started to turn their heads, Rourke cracked the whip, driving the horses over the man, trampling him. There was a hideous scream, the cab bouncing wildly as it careened over him.

A Nazi jumped toward the box on the right side, Rourke lashing at the man with his whip in the same instant that there was a burst from Paul’s submachinegun.

Rourke cracked the whip over the ears of the froth-soaked team, driving them onward, faster.

They were past the barricade, into the tunnel.

There were Nazis here, most of them retreating, some senior noncoms supervising them. But whatever swell of victory was being felt by the defenders here would vanish with the next attack, because this had only been a probe to feel out the city’s defensive capabilities; from the paucity of equipment and personnel on the Nazi side, that was obvious. A knot of Nazi personnel raised their energy weapons almost in unison as Rourke drove the team near them. Rourke shouted, “Paul! On our left!” and put the whip back into his teeth, redrawing the second ScoreMaster. Rourke fired it out toward the men as he heard the heavier cracking of the HK-91 from behind him. Two of the Nazis were down, the others breaking and running.

Rourke belted the empty pistol, and as he looked forward grabbing at his whip, there was a blur of motion at the far right edge of his peripheral vision. A man in Nazi uniform, his bulk tremendous, sprawling over John Rourke and knocking Rourke back into the box’s seat. The whip fell from Rourke’s teeth as the

wind was knocked out of him by sheer force. A ham-sized fist hammered toward Rourke’s face, Rourke blocking it with his left forearm, his arm numbing for an instant from the impact. Rourke’s right knee smashed upward, impacting flesh. There was a groan, the smell of hot breath, the Nazi’s body slumping back.

Rourke threw his body toward the man, both of them on their knees, hammering at each other as they tried to stand. Rourke’s right fist pistoned forward, once, twice, a third time, hammering at the man’s abdomen. The Nazi noncom’s right crossed Rourke’s jaw, snapping Rourke’s head back. Rourke stumbled, reached out, catching a handful of the man’s uniform with his left. As Rourke threw his weight forward, he freed his fingers from the uniform, bunched his hand into a fist and short-armed the man with a left across the nose, smashing it. Rourke’s right came up, catching the Nazi just under the tip of the chin. Rourke backhanded his left across the man’s mouth, knocking him out of the box, between the team and the cab itself. The cab lurched as it rolled over the Nazi noncom’s body.

Standing full upright in the box, Rourke cracked the reins over the animals’ backs, shouting, “Come on! Come on! Faster!”

One of the armored staff cars Rourke had spotted was already in motion, escaping the tunnel to join a flow of vehicles well ahead of it. Rourke urged the animals onward, a spray of sweat from them like mist on the air. The armored staff car was picking up speed. Paul had read the intelligence data on these vehicles. Their gear ratio gave them horribly slow pickup, but they could top out over one hundred miles per hour on smooth, level surfaces. “Paul—jump for it! Be ready! Gyaagh horses! Gyaagh!” They were nearly even with the staff car, but in seconds its engine would outpace the team.

Rourke edged the cab closer. The staff car’s turret hatch opened on top, a man with an energy rifle sticking up through it, about to fire. “Look out, John!” Paul shouted, firing a long burst from his Schmiesser. The Nazi’s body snapped back, the energy rifle still in his hands, firing upward into the tunnel ceiling. In the distance, Rourke could see the interior boundaries of the airfield taxi zone, some from the number of this eclectic collection burning or already gutted to blackened ribs.

The team was running even with the armored car. Rourke glanced back and saw Paul jump. Paul caught hold of a grab handle, his feet dragging for an instant. Another man appeared at the turret hatch, a pistol in hand. As the man aimed his pistol toward Paul Rubenstein, John Rourke’s left hand darted under his battered old brown bomber jacket, to the Detonics minigun under his right armpit. Rourke tore the little stainless steel .45 from the leather, thumbing back the hammer as he drew, then firing cross body toward the Nazi in the turret. Rourke’s bullet struck the man in the face and he fell, rolling over the hood of the staff car and down to the tunnel floor. Paul pulled himself up, aboard at last.

Rourke safed the little Detonics and shoved it into his left front trouser pocket, then gave the reins one final crack, hauling right on them. Rourke balanced himself on the edge of the box and the seat, then threw down the reins and jumped. He missed his mark,

landing hard, sprawling over the armored staff car’s hood. His hands grasped at the barrel protruding from the gun turret above him. He clung there, the hood surface steeply angled, hard for his feet to find purchase there.

Paul was up by the hatch, firing downward.

Rourke hauled his body up, clambering over the gun barrel and onto the turret, beside his friend at last.

Rourke reached to the small of his back, grabbing for the old Metalifed Colt Lawman .357. It was the perfect gun under the circumstances, short-barreled against a close quarters scuffle, and powerful, loaded with 158-grain semijacketed soft points. Paul fired a last burst downward, nodded, shouted, “Ready!”

“Cover our backs!” And John Rourke grabbed to the turret ladder and vaulted through into the hatchway the revolver in his right fist, his left hand clinging to the rung of the ladder.

A half-dozen dead bodies littered the interior of the armored staff car, some of them officers.

A man, bleeding badly, sat at the automobile-like controls of the machine. He twisted round and began raising a pistol.

Rourke shouted in German, “Do not make me shoot!”

But the man punched his pistol forward, toward Rourke’s chest.

Rourke fired first, double actioning the .357 only once, slamming the driver’s body back against the control panel.

On the video monitor by which the man steered, Rourke saw the burning wreckage of one of the aircraft coming up fast—too fast. Rourke stabbed the stubby .357 into his hip pocket as he threw himself forward, then wrestled the dead man away from the steering controls. The armored staff car was nearly into the flames.

Rourke cut the yoke hard left as he shouted to Paul, “Hold on tight, Paul! Hold on!” The armored staff car veered suddenly left, away from the burning aircraft, into the tunnel roadway.

Rourke dropped into the driver’s seat and stomped the accelerator control pedal, the armored staff car picking up speed.

From behind him, he heard Paul Rubenstein asking, “And now? Zimmer’s headquarters after we find an aircraft?”

There was the sound of the hatch closing as Rourke turned the staff car into the flow of traffic, minitanks, more staff cars, a few trucks. There was comforting anonymity here. On the indicator panel in front of Rourke, the hatch’s sealing was confirmed and the environmental system automatically kicked in, a rush of pleasantly warm air surrounding Rourke.

Ahead lay the mouth of the tunnel, Nazi vehicles and foot soldiers funneling through it. It would be easy to continue to mingle with them, avoid detection—except for serial markings, all the staff cars looked alike. Already, Rourke was slowing down, letting the staff car drift to the rear of the force. He would break off at the first opportunity after they were outside.

John Rourke was thinking aloud. “We’ll have to get in touch with the SEAL Team that’s shepherding Natalia and Annie near Zimmer’s headquarters, have them get the women and Michael out of there.”

“But what about Sarah?And Wolfgang Mann? We’ll

have to go in after them; Zimmer might kill them for spite.”

Rourke nodded his agreement. “With that SEAL Team helping us, and assuming Zimmer’s down to a significantly reduced garrison at his headquarters, it shouldn’t be too bad. And after we get Sarah and Wolf out, then we destroy the place if we have to, or hold it as a staging area against Eden.” Soon, Eden and its Nazi allies would attack. With any luck Eden City’s bio-warfare facility was already destroyed, perhaps setting back the timetable for the attack on Hawaii—Hawaii and the United States forces assembled there, the true linchpin of the Trans-Global Alliance.

It was war again. John Rourke put one of his cigars between his teeth, but he didn’t light it. “And then we come back here, Paul, to stop Zimmer before he makes himself invincible and we’ll never be able to stop him at all.”