The Arsenal Page 2

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  of his run, Han and his guards behind her. He imagined Sarah would be coming but there was no time to wait for her and if he found something very ugly it would be better if he found it first.

  Revenge. It was the motive, of course. Natalia Tiemerovna had wielded the knife, but in the next instant he — Rourke — would have thrown both Vladmir Karamatsov and himself over the edge of the cliff to their deaths. To rid the world of Vladmir Karamatsov, John Rourke would have counted his own death a bargain. Karamatsov's forces there on the island had been killed or routed and his armies on the mainland had fled inland to regroup, perhaps under the leadership of one of his senior officers. And, though it would be likely that such an officer would welcome the ascent to power, such an officer would be bound by concerns for his image to attempt to avenge the Hero Marshal regardless of the cost in men or materiel. The Hero Marshal alive had been an unyielding enemy, a consummate evil. But dead, he was a holy martyr; and dead men were invinci­ble.

  The Chinese officer started to follow, with his lead element, into the corridor. John Rourke signaled the young man and his force back.

  It was quiet. There was no sound. And it was possible that the sounds of gunfire had not pervaded here and that ail was well. Possible. Unlikely. And Rolvaag and his dog, Hrothgar. The slightest sound which might not have stirred the Icelandic policeman would have stirred the animal who was always at Rolvaag's side.

  John Rourke wiped his left palm against the side of his robe, along his thigh. He licked his lips. He started down the corridor, slowly, the Trapper Scorpion .45 cocked, safety downed, close at his right thigh.

  Either everyone here was dead, or everyone here slept. Either there had been only one assassination

  18

  squad, or there were two or more. And, if there were two or more and all here were not dead, then the additional team or teams had not yet struck, would be waiting, perhaps poised to kill at this very moment.

  John Rourke stopped at the precise center of the corridor and stood, the gun still at his side. He raised his voice as loudly as he could and in Russian shouted, "John Rourke is alive. Your comrades in murder are dead. Which of you is hero enough to face me man against man? Or do you only lurk in cowardice to murder women in their beds? Three of your company fell to me. Because they were incompetent weaklings. Like you? Like the Hero Marshal who was so miserable a man that his own wife cut off his head? She should have cut off his testicles first, perhaps. Like yours are cut off." And then a man in black battle fatigues stepped from the doorway leading in to Natalia's rooms. He was tall, lean, in his left hand a submachinegun, his right hand sweeping the black BDU cap from his head, the hair blond beneath it but so close cut as to be hardly visible. He dropped the hat to the floor beside his feet, then bent his knees slightly and leaned the submachine-gun against the door. The Russian commando's right hand moved slowly toward the pistol at his right hip.

  Rourke shouted to the Chinese troops in what he realized was a poor rendition of their language but adequate to the task. "Do not interfere between this man and me!"

  The Russian slowly moved the flap away from his holster, with his first finger— the trigger finger— and his thumb taking the weapon free of its confinement. He settled the pistol into a combat grip at his right thigh. He nodded curtly. John Rourke nodded back. The Rus­sian's pistol was double action and the safety would be off. Cocked and locked, the Trapper gun Rourke held was more than an even match for the Russian's weapon.

  19

  Rourke spoke again in Russian. "The advantage is mine. So you go first. But one question. Are they still alive?"

  "Yes. But when the first shot is fired, they die."

  Rourke spoke so softly that his voice was almost a whisper. "You hold them prisoner?"

  "A special gas was used. They are unconscious."

  "Why was no gas used during the attack on my wife and myself?"

  "It was the decision of the leader of the men who were to kill you. The Hero Marshal meant much to him. The wife of the Hero Marshal would never have betrayed the Hero Marshal had it not been for your seduction."

  John Rourke felt the corners of his mouth downturn-ing. Then he spoke again. "There is no need for your men to die. They can walk out of here alive and unmo­lested. That is my pledge if you order them to withdraw before they take the lives of my family. You can join them or stay and fight me. Whatever you wish."

  "We all came, Doctor Rourke, knowing we would never leave."

  John Rourke only nodded. When the first shot was fired, the executions of his daughter, his son, his best friend Paul, Natalia and Doctor Maria Leuden would begin.

  "John! You can't—" It was Sarah, shrieking the words.

  He kept his eyes on the Russian commando. In Chi­nese, he shouted, "Keep her back!" Then in Russian, he said, "Let us begin."

  The bone leading across the back of the hand to the Russian's first knuckle —Rourke could see it vibrate slightly between the first and second dorsal interosseous as the trigger finger started to tense. John Rourke swept the Trapper Scorpion .45 up on a clean arc to just above waist level, his thumb wiping off the safety, his trigger

  20

  finger flicking back once. Rourke was already racing toward the Russian commando as the Russian lurched backward along the corridor, his pistol discharging into the floor, his eyes wide open in death, blood gushing from his mouth.

  Rourke shouted in Chinese, "Quickly! Into each room!" And subconsciously, he had already made his own choice. Michael was, after all, a man. And Natalia, the woman he loved like he had loved no other — but — He stepped into the open doorway of Annie and Paul's apartment, the residual smell of gas vaguely nauseating, seeing three men with submachineguns, seeing Annie and Paul still in their bed as though asleep, seeing all of it as though it were some tableau frozen in time, the submachineguns rising, one of the men turning toward the doorway into the corridor, another of the men turn­ing away. The distance across the sitting room was fifteen feet. Rourke's right hand moved, the Trapper .45 bucking once in his fist as his right arm moved to maximum extension. He shot first at the man who was neither turning toward the doorway nor away, a chunk of flesh and bone beside the man's left ear bursting away from the head. Rourke's right arm arced right, toward the man turning away from the doorway. And Rourke fired, the bullet impacting the left eye. Rourke's right arm swung ninety degrees left and he fired again, the third man bringing his submachinegun on line toward Rourke. There was no time to dodge or duck or take cover. Rourke just fired, into the gaping open mouth of the third man, the head snapping back and the body going limp as the submachinegun opened up and cut a swatch across the far wall. Clinically, Rourke knew he had severed the third man's spinal column.

  He dismissed the man mentally, the submachinegun still spraying into the wall as Rourke wheeled toward the doorway. The Scorpion had a six-round magazine and

  21

  Sarah loaded the chambered round off the top of the magazine just as he did with his Detonics pistols and that meant only two rounds were left.

  He crossed the corridor, again choosing, he hoped, not for life or death. Michael and Maria Leuden — Natalia would have wanted him to do that.

  The Chinese security people were nearly to the door­way of Michael's and Maria's apartment but Rourke was through the doorway first. Three men. Three subma­chineguns. All three pointed at the unconscious forms of Michael and Maria on the bed they shared. John Rourke stabbed the pistol toward the furthest of the three assassins and fired, the man's head snapping away and his body following it as the submachinegun sprayed across the wall and then into the headboard of Michael's and Maria's bed, the front of the assassin's face bloodied and deformed. Rourke moved the pistol left and fired at the second assassin, the right eye gone as the body slammed back against the wall and the submachinegun fell from his hands onto the bed. John Rourke was already running, hurtling himself toward the third man, the pistol, slide locked open, empty, turning in his right hand. As Rourke's body impacted the third man, Rourke's right hand hammered down, the butt of the handmade pistol smashing down along the crown of the skull and across the bridge of the submachinegunner's nose, Rourke's body slamming the man into the wall, the submachinegun between their bodies, discharging, Rourke's right knee slamming upward to find the groin, the thumb of his left hand puncturing the assassin's right eyeball, gouging and ripping, hooking, Rourke drawing the man's head toward him, then punching it into the wall, again and again and again, the submachinegun stilled, Rourke letting the body fall away, fluid from the eyeball mixed with blood, dripping from Rourke's left hand as he turned toward the bed. Michael and Maria

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  were unscathed.

  Rourke heard submachine gunfire from the next suite of rooms— Natalia.

  The nearest dead man's submachinegun. Rourke caught it up, jumping over the corpse as he ran toward the corridor, then toward the sound of the gunfire.

  But it was already over.

  Three black-clad Soviet commandos lay on the floor just beyond the bedroom doorway, clustered around Natalia. She lay on the bed. Rourke shoved his way past the Chinese guards, then sank to his knees beside her bed, his right hand abandoning the submachinegun, touching at her throat. There were no visible wounds. And his fingertips felt her pulse.

  John Rourke closed his eyes for an instant, then ran from the room, into the corridor. Chinese guards milled about the entrance to the Bjorn Rolvaag's room. John Rourke shoved past them. Three of the black-clad com­mandos were dead on the floor. The huge dog, Hrothgar, lay at the foot of the bed; sprawled half out of the bed, a pool of blood around his face, was the Icelan­dic policeman. Rourke looked at the pistol in his hand. Its butt was matted with blood and hair. He set it
down on the floor as he dropped to his bare knees beside the man.

  The killing was done and it was time for other things.

  23

  CHAPTER TWO

  He had seen too much of hospitals lately, John Rourke thought. And he realized as he thought it that such a thought was strange for a doctor. There had been his own confinement and the virtually miraculous cura­tive powers of the medical personnel at Mid-Wake. There had been the time spent there while Michael and Annie and Paul and Sarah and Natalia had all been examined to see if, as it had been with him, the death of radiation-linked cancer lurked within them as well. But he had been the only one in whom it had been discov­ered and ever since it had been found and cured, he had felt reborn. He had been near death when he had taken a stomach full of assault rifle fire, lost great amounts of blood, nearly expired from shock before anything else could have claimed him. But as miraculously as the medical personnel of Mid-Wake had saved him, he had rapidly healed. Once it was safe to do so, he had begun a regimen of physical exercise more strenuous than any he had undertaken since the Awakening.

  He had stayed at Mid-Wake for weeks afterward, learning all he could of their advanced techniques, at his side the German officer and physician, Doctor Mun-chen. Munchen had spoken of dire rumors heard of Eden Base and the power struggle that was inexorably leading to confrontation between Akiro Kurinami and Commander Dodd.

  What had struck John Rourke then and what he

  24

  pondered now as he waited in this Chinese hospital, his wife beside him, was that mankind had learned so little. The entire world had been nearly destroyed. Out of greed, envy and distrust. Greed, envy and distrust were growing again. And when they were again harvested, would the world this time survive?

  He smoked one of the non-carcinogenic cigarettes the Germans made, the package taken from Natalia's suite. It was too confined here to smoke one of the thin, dark tobacco cigars that were his favorites.

  The gas used to quell any possibility of resistance to the assassins was still being analyzed, both from blood samples taken from Annie, Paul, Michael, Maria and Natalia and from the unmarked canisters found on the bodies of the dead Russians. The origin of both the gas and the men was frighteningly clear. Indeed, some one or more of Karamatsov's senior officers had taken charge of his armies and was leading them. Where? To what ends? It was vital that no link be allowed to form between the Soviet forces on land and those of the Soviet underwater complex which still battled the friendly forces of Mid-Wake in five centuries of unabated sub­marine warfare. Such a link would give the Soviets on land unlimited access to nuclear weapons. Already, Rourke suspected, the Germans would be working to produce nuclear weapons as a counter-measure to the missing elements of the Chinese nuclear arsenal should the land-based Soviet forces locate them.

  History was repeating itself. Santayana had put it best: "Those who do not learn the lessons of history shall be forced to relive them." No one had learned the lessons as well as Sarah, Annie, Paul, Michael, Natalia and himself, the only six persons on earth who had lived through the era of the holocaust, discounting the few who had taken The Sleep with Karamatsov and who still served Karamatsov's memory. The Eden Project survi-

  25

  vors had escaped earth the moment the thermonuclear nightmare had begun, returned to the ruins of earth only after its voracious appetite for death had been sated, its thirst for blood slaked. They had never known the death.

  And this time, the earth's atmosphere was too delicate a fabric to withstand another assault. All life, all hu­mankind, would perish.

  "What are you thinking about? You should see your face. It looks like some sort of mask —rage, fury. What are you thinking, John?"

  John Rourke looked at his wife. A voice was calling over the intercom in Chinese, summoning a doctor if his recently acquired yet still meager knowledge of Chinese served. Rourke said to her, "Some used to say that after a nuclear war, the living would envy the dead. Remem­ber?"

  "I remember"

  Except for his wife and children and Natalia and himself, there was no one else who could have remem­bered.

  The Chairman himself entered the waiting room, bowing deferentially to Rourke and his wife, then look­ing Rourke square in the eye as Rourke stood. The Chairman was an aesthetic looking man, tall and thin, immaculate, with penetrating eyes that showed neither hardness nor emotion. "I am pleased to report, Doctor Rourke, that our doctors indicate that the condition of your children, Mr. Rubenstein, Doctor Leuden and Major Tiemerovna improves by the minute. The effect of the gas, I am told, is merely temporary. Even now, your daughter is returning to consciousness. But I am also advised that it might be well to allow your daughter and the others to rest for some time lest they suffer from undue exertion. The Icelandic policeman, Rolvaag, is an exception. Although he was also gassed, apparently

  26

  because of his great size, the gas took effect more slowly and he was subdued with a blow to the head. His condition is guarded. I took the liberty of anticipating that you might indeed have concern for the welfare of the dog which is his constant companion. The veteri­nary center relays the information that the animal is well."

  Rourke was about to speak as the door into the wait­ing room opened again, the German Captain Otto Hammerschmidt entering, the shoulders of his uniform parka wet with melted snow, his blue eyes pinpoints of light as he doffed his cap and ran the fingers of his left hand back through his militarily short hair. "Herr Chairman. Herr Doctor Rourke. Frau Rourke. I have only just heard — "

  The Chairman responded. "All are well, save for Mr. Rolvaag who has sustained head injuries and whose condition is guarded, Captain Hammerschmidt."

  Before Hammerschmidt could speak, Rourke did. "What have your security people ascertained concerning the Russians who penetrated the First City, Mr. Chair­man?"

  "Several guards at the perimeter and at the tunnel were, unfortunately, liquidated barbarously. By this means, the interlopers were able to gain access to the Petals and to yours and your family's respective apart­ments. Steps have already been taken to increase the efficiency of the guard. But I fear this shall not be the last attempt on your persons."

  "They've reorganized quickly," Hammerschmidt said under his breath, almost as though thinking aloud. "We ought to pay them back in kind, I think," Hammer­schmidt added, raising his voice a little.

  John Rourke looked at Hammerschmidt, saying nothing . . .

  27

  He had given Sarah a mild sedative that was safe for her to use even with her pregnancy, one of the drugs he had learned about at Mid-Wake. She had taken it under protest, but he had convinced her she needed the rest. Her pistol freshly loaded and left beside the bed, he left her, Chinese guards at the door of this new suite of rooms where she slept, their original apartment was a melange of the blood and gore and bullet holes, a me­mento of violence.

  John Rourke sat in the small conference room, Otto Hammerschmidt opposite him across the black lacquer table. John Rourke lit the thin, dark tobacco cigar that he had kept clenched in his teeth since leaving Sarah asleep.

  "I have the word that you sought from Colonel Mann, Herr Doctor."

  "And?"

  "Deiter Bern has authorized the production of nu­clear weapons as a possible defensive measure against the armies of the Soviet."

  "That's insanity."

  Hammerschmidt's eyes flickered. "He has the welfare of all peoples at heart, Herr Doctor, I am also told that it is his full intention to share this technology with the personnel of Eden Base and with the Icelandic's. It is only self-defense."