Survivalist - 22 - Brutal Conquest (18 page)

But Natalia was too fascinated to listen to standard touchdown talk.

She stared.

The docking bay was enormous. Well off in the distance, farther inboard, through the still-swirling waters, she could see more aircraft, as if waiting there.

She could not tell that aircraft belonged to Commander Shaw.

“Look around over there to your right and you’ll see Wally Theodore coming in,” Marie Hayes enthused.

Natalia Tiemerovna had always thought that once all sense of wonder was gone, it would be time to lay down and die. She felt that sense of wonder now. She could see the aircraft coming through the water toward them at what looked like enormous speed, landing .lights brightly illumined, the water seeming to part around it because of the speed at which it traveled.

Logically, she knew that speed couldn’t be too great, because the resistance of the water would have torn off the wings.

But still, she thought.

And then the Interceptor stopped, darker against the grey blackness, hovering there, then touching down as gendy as a bird might come to rest on a branch.

And it was on the deck.

Klaxons sounded, audible through the water.

There was a terribly loud groaning sound, and for

a moment, Natalia thought something was wrong.

But she was still looking toward the entrance to the bay. And in the diffused light she could see doors, enor-. mous like everything else here, starting to close, but not in any conventional manner.

Each door was like the iris of a camera, a series of comparatively small panels, fanning outward and sealing away the ocean itself. “Might want to swallow a litde. Sometimes they pressurize a litde too fast.” Marie Hayes repeated the admonition through her microphone, to the passengers aft.

Jets of compressed air blew against the water, lowering the level just above the cockpit canopy now, then rolling away on both sides.

Natalia swallowed hard to equalize the mounting air pressure, as Marie Hayes activated toggle switches on an overhead panel and tiny jets of air blew into the cockpit.

The waters around them receded now..

Natalia could make out the first aircraft, the one Commander Shaw flew.

Marie Hayes started out of her seat, saying, “We’re okay now, Major.”

“Natalia, please,” Natalia insisted.

“Natalia, then,” Marie smiled, shaking her hair free of her helmet.

Natalia unbuckled and followed Marie Hayes aft. None of the women rescued from the Land Pirates had ever flown before, as far as Natalia could determine. This must have been beyond belief.

“Okay, ladies. We’ll be able to open up in another couple of seconds. Now, the deck can be a litde slippery, and boy does it hurt when you fall on it,” Marie laughed. “So be careful stepping out.”

Natalia followed Marie to the door. Marie worked a manual control panel, verifying from a computer screen readout that the water level was below the aircraft’s fuselage.

Then Marie punched a button and the fuselage door began to unlock, folding inward and aft.

Marie stepped aside and Natalia stood in the doorway.

This was how she had imagined the future when she was a litde girl. Technology, vast and wonderful.

The docking bay was a hangar of huge proportions, an overhead vaulted and sprawling above, steel glistening and wet.

There was a pneumatic hiss and steps began folding out of the fuselage. Natalia took them, stopped on the last tread, and stared.

Air currents still blew across the deck, drying the larger puddles away, excess water channeled into gutters fore and aft.

Natalia stepped onto the deck.

She looked toward the Interceptor flown by the third pilot, Wally Theodore. Annie was stepping down from it onto the deck. Behind her was Martin Zimmer, with Paul close behind him, gun drawn.

Natalia looked toward the first aircraft.

John stood in the doorway. She knew him well. He was amazed, as was she.

John started down the steps, setting foot on the deck.

Natalia waved. John waved back. She looked up at Marie Hayes, then, asking her, “Do you think I’d be able to get permission to learn to fly one of these?”

“I don’t see why not, Major.”

That thought was delicious.

Natalia savored it.

In a few moments, there would be time enough to worry over everything else. Michael was safe, she knew.

Soon they would be together. Evidendy, Eden’s war plans were being accelerated. There were still the problems attendant upon trading Martin Zimmer to Deitrich Zimmer in return for Deitrich’s surgical skills being used to save Sarah. But, for now, wonderment was enough.

John Thomas Rourke submitted to a physical examination—but merely a cursory one—in order to satisfy the captain of this vessel, his host, that a little cold weather and some time in the Wildlands was not potentially fatal. But it was done more to convince twenty-two of the women that letting a real doctor examine them was not tantamount to ritual suicide. Mary Ann numbly did what she thought was expected of her, and the twenty-fourth woman, injured during the crash of the helicopter, was either equally as compliant or fatalistic enough to realize she had no real choice.

The exam over, Rourke found a shower and stood under it for a very long time, washing his hair and body several times before he really felt clean. Fresh clothes from his pack, his face clean shaven, he felt like a new man.

He, Annie, Paul, and Natalia were scheduled for a flight to Hawaii, leaving within the hour, but there was a briefing scheduled before that in Captain Rahn’s office.

John Rourke arrived before any other members of The Family and was immediately ushered into Rahn’s office. Rahn stood at attention behind his desk, beginning the conversation with, “General Rourke, I must apologize for not being available to welcome you personally. …” He came around the desk and offered his hand.

Rourke took it, interrupting and saying, “Captain, I’m aot really much used to being called a general, simply because I never considered myself to be one. And any and all apologies are accepted. I knew your ancestor, Admiral Rahn. He was a fine and intelligent man. I was very pleased to learn that his family has carried on such a splendid tradition of service to the country.”

“Thank you, sir. Would you care for a seat?”

Rourke nodded and sat down.

Captain Rahn sat down as well. He started to speak, but there was a quick rap on the door and the secretary, a pretty enough young woman, opened the door and announced, “Major Tiemerovna and Mr. and Mrs. Rubenstein, sir.”

Rourke stood for the two women, waited until handshakes and pleasantries were exchanged and the women were seated, then sat down again.

Captain Rahn stood and walked across the room toward a good-sized video screen, mounted on an interior bulkhead. He glanced at a diver’s watch on his left wrist and seemed to compare it to a military time diode counter beneath the screen. “There is a video transmission from Fleet Admiral Hayes, just about now” The screen came alive and there was static. “We’re still working on scrambling high security satellite video, and sometimes it’s like this. My apologies.”

The picture cleared, not perfecdy, but rather like UHF antenna reception on a sunny day. It was perfecdy visible, if rather imperfect in resolution. The woman on the screen—somewhere in her middle fifties, as Rourke judged her—was attractive, and the resemblance between Admiral Hayes and her niece, whom Rourke had met briefly in the landing bay, was pronounced.

“Dr. Rourke. this is a true privilege, sir.”

Rourke assumed the video screen somehow had a built-in camera and that just like something out of a science fiction movie, they could carry on a conversation as if they were in the same room. “The pleasure is mine, Admiral. May I introduce my family. To my right is my daughter, Annie, Mrs. Rubenstein. Beside her, her husband and my friend, Paul Rubenstein. The lovely woman to my right is Major Natalia Tiemerovna.”

“This is like strolling through the pages of a history book,” Admiral Hayes said, smiling. John Rourke was beginning to feel like a cross between Methuselah and one of the mammoths in General Verakov’s office without walls in the Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History. Admiral Hayes went on, saying, “I’m looking forward to meeting with all of you personally at Pearl Harbor. I’m at Mid-Wake for the moment but should arrive in Hawaii shortly after all of you do. I have a lovely house overlooking the ocean. I was born in Mid-Wake, and I have a fondness for the ocean. I’d love all of you to come and share the view with me and dinner as well, at your earliest convenience.”

“I’m certain, Admiral,” Rourke said, “that I speak for my entire family, my son Michael as well, when I say that it would be our privilege and we eagerly await your invitation.”

She smiled.

Rourke smiled.

“What are your plans concerning Martin Zimmer?” she asked at last.

“He goes with us,” Rourke answered flady.

“He is the head of state of Eden, Doctor. Are you sore-“

The man who raised him, Admiral Hayes, unless I am ■ustaken is the only man in the world who has a prayer of saving the life of my wife. When I first was awakened from cyogenic sleep after emerging from my coma, I made it my business to research as quickly as possible what progress medical science had made in the years while I slept, ladeed, that progress was astonishing. However, to the

best I was able to ascertain, medical science had not perfected the skills necessary—surgical procedures, shall we say—that would enable my wife to be brought back among the living.

“Yet, Dr. Deitrich Zimmer possessed these skills more than a century ago. He still does. As long as I have Martin Zimmer, I can force Deitrich Zimmer to save the life of my wife. Without Martin, my wife is doomed to cryogenic sleep … perhaps for years, perhaps for decades, perhaps forever. I have no choice.”

“What if, I were to order you to release him?” Admiral Hayes asked, her smile faded.

“Order away, madam, no offense intended. Hell be released prematurely over my dead body.”

“Mine as well,” Natalia added.

“Ours,” Paul said.

Admiral Hayes’s smile returned. T understand, through a similar conversation with your son—who has just landed at Pearl, by the way—that Martin Zimmer is also your son?”

“My wife was shot in the head by Deitrich Zimmer only a few moments after bearing our third child. That child was a boy. Deitrich Zimmer kidnapped the infant son— only a few hours older—of Lieutenant Martha Larrimore, one of the Eden survivors. It was assumed Lieutenant Larrimore’s child died in the clinic fire and explosions. That was not the case. When Deitrich Zimmer murdered a baby before the eyes of my children, my son-in-law, and Major Tiemerovna, it was erroneously assumed that the baby was the child to whom my wife gave birth. DNA typing and other similar tests were not available.

“In reality, the son of Martha Larrimore was murdered instead,” Rourke went on. “Zimmer raised Sarah’s and my son as his own, inculcating Nazism in the lad, but also tampering with his genetic structure somehow. My knowledge of genetic micro-surgery is a bit remiss, I’m afraid, but I intend to add to it at my first opportunity.

“However, you may rest assured I have no intention of murdering Martin Zimmer,” Admiral Hayes’s eyes narrowed as Rourke added a cautionary “—for the moment. If I am able to make a deal with Deitrich Zimmer, I will keep my part of the bargain. Martin will be returned. But since I helped to bring Martin Zimmer into the world, I feel it incumbent upon me to help rid the world of his evil. My eventual intentions are not at issue currently. I hope I have fully answered your question.”

Admiral Hayes did not smile. “For the record, Doctor, should we attempt to have Martin Zimmer returned to Eden, you would prevent it to the best of your ability?”

“I would endeavor to prevent it, Admiral, to an extent you might not be able to well imagine. This I swear.”

Admiral Hayes smiled enigmatically, then merely said, Until later then, sir.”

Hawaii. Palm trees on the white sand beaches, unspoiled highlands rich in vegetation, snow-capped mountains and a live volcano building more of the islands every moment.

He had never before visited there.

His father had evidendy been a fan of Tom Selleck and, at The Retreat, had several episodes of the actor’s long-running television series recorded, along with numerous of his films. The television series was set in Hawaii. Until now, that was the only image of Hawaii Michael Rourke had had.

The palms still swayed, but the breezes were apparendy not quite so balmy. Aloha shirts were in evidence—there were civilian employees at Pearl Harbor—but this traditional attire was augmented by a windbreaker over it or a turtleneck under it.

In one case, Michael Rourke actually saw an aloha-patterned sweater.

He had wanted to walk, to stretch his legs after the long and boring flight from New Caracas to Honolulu. A technique was used, apparendy commonplace now, that he remembered as a young boy reading about in a science magazine. The aircraft on which he had traveled merely climbed into the upper atmosphere, then reinserted, reducing flight time dramatically.

But it was still too long. He wanted to be active, to move about, to work the kinks out of his wounded legs.

Although he experienced a litde pain as he moved, the stiffness was worse.

When he’d requested some time from the navy brass who’d met him, just to walk about the base and familiarize himself with the place, he’d also asked, “Will I start a small riot carrying a gun?”

Several of the navy personnel laughed. One of them, a lieutenant commander in Intelligence, told him, “Mr. Rourke, Mid-Wake encouraged an armed tradition as a means of staying alive. Since moving to the surface, that tradition has been reinforced. Now, in the city, weapons are usually carried concealed, except for an assault rifle or a shotgun in the window of a truck or van. But on the base, everyone’s armed. You can’t get onto the base without a security pass, military or civilian. So feel free.”

And he bestowed on Michael a plastic-laminated identity badge labeled “V.I.P. Visitor,” then printing out Michael’s same as well.