“Horst! Horst!” The call came from near the edge and Rourke dropped to his knees, the muzzle of the M-16 swinging up. “Horst!”
Paul Rubenstein dropped down beside him. “They’re German, Paul” Rourke hissed, Paul Rubenstein’s eyes widening beneath the snow goggles that he wore.
Rourke peered warily over the edge.
Again, the voice came, “Horst!” Then, a split second afterward, in German, the command to take cover.
Rourke shouted in German as well, leaning slightly over the edge so his words would carry. “Who are you?” But Rourke tucked back, no words answering him, only gunfire, a fusillade of assault rifle bullets ripping into the rock beside Rourke’s face, Rourke averting his eyes, Paul Rubenstein snarling something at once incomprehensible yet abundantly clear in intent. The German MP-40 submachinegun was stabbed over the edge, firing a long burst downward toward the warren of ledges and overhangs below.
More assault rifle fire, Rourke stabbing the M-16 over the edge, firing it out in a long, ragged, zigzagging burst, then pulling back, Paul beside him. “What the hell do we do now?”
Before Rourke could answer, there was a barely audible hiss, but the sound, despite its lack of volume, sufficiently different from the constant wailing of the
101
wind and the tinkling sounds of blowing ice pellets that he heard it. Rourke threw himself toward Paul and dragged them both down, the mountaintop around them vibrating under the impact as — it had to be one of the rockets —the explosion came, so loud Rourke’s ears rang with it, his body so shaken that his skeleton almost resonated with it.
Rourke pushed himself up, clumps of snow tumbling from the hood of his parka, his rifle half-buried in it.
Rourke’s right hand found the Python, no time to reach the Detonics Combat Masters under his cold weather gear, ripping the Metalifed and Mag-na-Ported Colt .357 from the leather, more snow impacted around the area of the trigger guard. Rourke pulled down his toque and blew it out, swinging the muzzle on line toward the edge of the drop as the first of the climbers became visible. Rourke double actioned the revolver once, into the chest of the first man.
Paul Rubenstein was moving now, the Schmeisser gone as he sat up, Rourke seeing him at the far left edge of his peripheral vision. Paul’s hands filled with the M-16 that had been slung on his back, an uneven burst cutting across the snow in front of the second man to rise to the mountaintop, the man’s M-16 already firing. But as the second man stepped back, his balance went and he started to careen backward, Rourke firing into the man’s throat, the body sailing back over the edge.
Three of the climbers remained. No more were coming, but heavy assault rifle fire was coming from over the side, peppering the lip of the summit, ricochets bouncing off the rocks around them as Rourke staggered to his feet, the Python clenched in his right fist, his left hand groping in the snow for the M-16 . . .
Annie Rourke Rubenstein had started into the snow
102
when the vibration of the explosion had rung through the Retreat walls like a clapped bell, throwing her arctic parka on over her sweater, an M-16 in each hand, Kurinami behind her. She had run to the monitor console, the lens of the camera at the summit partially obscured with snow and ice; but she was barely able to see her father and her husband, collapsed as a shower of snow and rock debris rained down around them, the fireball of some tremendous explosion still dissipating skyward. She shouted to Elaine Halversen now as she ran through the interior doorway, “Close the doors — keep the Retreat closed unless you see us on camera and we’re all right!”
Kurinami had no coat, but his right hand held an M-16, his left a Beretta 92F, a knife almost as impossibly long as her father’s LS X sheathed beside his left hip.
Annie didn’t know exactly what she would do as she exited through the doorway, the cold biting into her like steel, her hands almost instantly numbing on the pistol grips of her rifles. They had been waiting beside the entrance to the escape tunnel which led to the top of the mountain when the explosion had come, and suddenly she had realized that waiting was no longer possible. Her glimpse of the video monitor had confirmed that.
She was running now, her hair blown across her face and over her eyes like a heavy veil, running toward what before the Awakening had been the garden in which she had grown the tobacco for her father’s cigars. “Rolled on the hip of a virgin,” he had teased her afterward. She was not any more, and there had been no more time to make cigars. But from the vantage point of the garden spot, she would be able to lay down a heavy volume of fire onto the mountain’s face where the climbers had been. If they were the origin of the explosion —logic dictated they were — perhaps she could prevent a second one. She slipped and fell, her mouth filling with snow, her hair
103
wet with it, her hands now so totally numb that she wondered on one level of consciousness if she would still be able to pull the triggers of her weapons. She pushed herself up, stumbling, fighting her way forward through the drifts, Kurinami just ahead of her. “The garden! Fire up at them from the garden, Akiro!”
Did he know where the garden was? Yes —he would have seen it when he and Elaine had first visited the Retreat when they were the first man and woman to return to earth from the Eden Project shuttles. Inside herself, she had always thought it was so romantic that Akiro and Elaine had fallen in love, that they planned to marry, like Adam and Eve in a way, the first man and first woman.
She kept running, falling again, pulling up the hood of her parka as she rose, the hood filled with snow and spilling down the back of her neck where her hair had blown over, down inside her sweater and under her blouse, chilling her still more. Annie picked herself up, kept running.
She could hear assault rifle fire, as if far away and above. Was it her father and her husband, answering the fire of the climbers, or the climbers themselves?
And then she heard the crack of a neat three round burst from an M-16, the crack of it on the cold air over the keening of the wind earsplittingly loud.
Akiro Kurinami, firing toward the mountainside and the climbers there.
Annie half-stumbled to her knees near him, shouldering one of the M-16’s, dropping the other into the snow, trying to move her right thumb enough to work the selector, getting it to the auto position, then moving her right first finger against the metal of the trigger, flesh blistering to metal. She opened fire toward the rock face, Kurinami’s rifle blazing beside her. The distance was too great for any real accuracy. And the angle was
104
bad. She kept firing anyway, hoping for a lucky shot .
John Rourke had the M-16 in his gloved left fist, Paul Rubenstein beside him, the volume of gunfire increased from the rock face, some of it strangely hollow, almost distant.
“Annie?” Paul hissed through chattering teeth.
“Come on!” Rourke was up, slipping once, catching his balance, moving toward the edge now, Paul Rubenstein beside him. If Annie was firing at them from the ground, it would be a matter of seconds before the climbers would utilize one of their rockets against her. And this time, the rocket couldn’t help but claim its target.
Rourke fell prone by the edge of the rock face, ramming the M-16 over the side, firing it out, Paul beside him, doing the same.
Rourke peered over the edge for an instant, then gunfire tearing into the rocks beside him. But he saw three climbers remaining, the leadman suspended from a rope cramponed into the rock face perhaps a hundred feet down. Another of the men was —awkwardly — readying one of the rocket tubes for firing.
Rourke rolled onto his back, pulling his toque back up over his mouth, his chin numbing with the cold.
The second man he had killed with his knife — the body, partially covered with blown up snow and rock debris —lay only a few feet from him, eyes wide open in death and slowly covering with fallen snow, the haft of Rourke’s knife and the double quillion guard and the blade stem almost cross-shaped over him.
Rourke handed off his M-16 to Paul Rubenstein, stabbing the Python into the flap holster and closing it. Then he skidded on his knees toward the dead man,
105
wrenching the knife free. “Paul! I’m going down — to cut their rope. Get both of those loaded and cover me. It’s the only chance.” Rourke sheathed the knife.