Annie spoke. “But what could he have offered them in return, daddy?”
Her father looked down at her and smiled. “I’m just guessing, sweetheart, but I think the best thing he had to offer was a little legitimacy. He’d give the Nazis something they could work through, like in the old days when organized crime would buy into legitimate businesses or unions just so there was a front operation they could hide behind.” And the corners of her father’s mouth drew out and downturned, but, his eyes smiled. “We may be sitting in at the dawn of a new era in perfidy.”
Annie felt Paul’s fingers tense against her neck for the briefest instant. She took her drink from the table and swallowed half of it, then leaned her head against Paul’s right knee and closed her eyes for a moment.
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CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Michael Rourke had six full thirty-round magazines and two partially empty ones. The contents of these latter, as he quietly assessed the situation, his M-16 across his squatted legs, he combined into one magazine. At the distance, handguns were useless noise-makers and a knife was mere wishful thinking.
Fighting their way into the rocks on the far west end of the gap had been bought only through the wounding of another of the Chinese soldiers. But barricaded here as they were, it was impossible for the attackers on the west end of the gap to shoot down on them because of the overhang and the only enemy fire that could reach them was from the rocks on the eastern side of the gap. The range between the so far anonymous ambushers and the position from behind with Michael Rourke, Han Lu Chen, Otto Hammerschmidt and the others, including one of the wounded, returned fire was at least two hundred yards. There seemed to be no immediate danger of being attacked from the rear by the enemy force above.
Michael Rourke was reminded of the term “standoff and shared that insight with the Chinese intelligence agent and the German commando captain. “A ‘stand-off, as the term was used, was a situation in which neither party could gain the advantage, nor conveniently disengage.”
“That summarizes it well. Who are they, do you
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think?” Hammerschmidt rasped through a cloud of cigarette smoke. “This Mao character’s Mongol mercenaries or the Russians?”
“Russians, I think,” Han said softly. “The Mongols wouldn’t have been denied the blood sport of riding down on us, even for a tactical advantage. And the Mongols would have shot the horses. Whoever is up in those rocks — Russians is my estimate — wants the horses alive. Notice how carefully they avoided firing at you for example, Michael, when you brought your horse down and fired from behind it.” The animals they had ridden, and the pack animal, grazed some distance away, where the snow covering was thin and there was some sparse ground cover, brown and dead, but evidently sufficiently tempting to keep them from bolting further away beyond the gap despite the sporadically noisy interchanges of gunfire. “We cannot go forward, nor can we go back,” Han concluded with an air of finality.
Michael Rourke had rescued his rifle, his saddle bags, his water bottle and his sleeping bag, which was now warming one of the injured enlisted men. Inside the saddle bags was a medical kit, most of the contents already used in the preliminary treatment of the injured. Like his father, he had taken to carrying a musette bag almost constantly, inside it additional medical supplies which his father had carefully taught both he and his sister, Annie, how to use to stay alive. But advanced first aid training was not adequate to saving the lives of the wounded and the condition of the German who had been shot off his horse in the first instants of battle was deteriorating rapidly.
Michael Rourke, as a volley of automatic weapons fire from the eastern side of the gap subsided, shouted
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over the rock barricade, “Who are you?”
There was total silence, except for the eerie whistling of the wind among the jagged gray rocks surrounding them. But then a voice broke the silence, the English heavily accented, the accent unmistakably Russian, but the English none-the-less quite syntactically correct. “I am Major Vassily Mikhailovitch Prokopiev. I take it that you sue for surrender terms. To whom do I speak?”
“Bastard,” Hammerschmidt snarled under his
breath.
Despite the situation, Michael Rourke laughed. Then he shouted back to the Russian, “I am Michael Rourke.” He had debated whether or not, if these were Russians, to reveal his true identity; but to conceal it seemed pointless. The present situation was one step away from the grave. “We do not sue for terms that we might surrender to you, but instead offer you and your men a guarantee of fair treatment on condition of your surrender.”
Michael tucked back down, waited. Laughter reverberated from the rocks on the eastern elevation of the gap, but that was to be expected. Without changing position, Michael shouted back, “Go ahead and laugh, Major Prokopiev. When my father, Doctor John Rourke, and the rest of the German-Chinese force arrives, let’s hope you’ll find that amusing as well.”
Michael Rourke said nothing more, but neither was there any more gunfire. He felt it might be wise to explain the American term “bluff to his compatriots. But he’d save that for later. “If the Russians weren’t interested in shooting our horses,” he began, looking at Hann and Otto Hammerschmidt, “then the logical
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inference, if we can assume they aren’t all dedicated animal rights activists, is that they require the horses, which may, in fact, be the purpose of the attack. Clearly, they’re in what would have to be considered enemy territory with Mao’s armies on the loose. What if our friends up in the rocks need our mounts in order to escape a pursuing force from the Second City? Hmm?”
“That would make sense” Hammerschmidt said, almost as if to himself. “What if we shot the horses?”
“If there is a Second City army pursuing these Russians,” Han said hastily, “I would be loathe to encounter them on foot. Assuming we do make it out of this, some of us at least, horseback is our only chance. And if these Russians have somehow provoked Mao’s wrath, we may not even have the opportunity to show the peace banner and be laughed at and disregarded. We will be slaughtered before they come sufficiently close to read it.”
Michael followed Han’s eyes to the rocky surface at the approximate center of the gap. The meticulously embroidered banner lay there, flapping in the wind, useless. “If they want our horses, they’re trying to get to a rendezvous. Helicopter gunships, probably. This could be a reconnaissance patrol for a larger force. Shit,” Michael rasped.
The stalemate was still unchanged, despite having possibly deduced a rationale for it.
He gambled again, raising his voice to shout across the gap to the Soviet commander. “Prokopiev! How close is the army from the Second City? Think they’ve heard the gunfire yet? Think they’re going to come more quickly now? Think you have a chance alone against them? We’ll shoot our horses first!”
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There was a long silence, punctuated only by the wind, Hammerschmidt lighting another cigarette, Han’s eyes darting nervously to the opposite side of the gap.
And then Prokopiev’s voice came. “Will you meet with me down there beside your banner?”
Michael looked to the floor of the gap where the banner lay, then up into the rocks on the eastern side.
“Once you step out into the open, what is to stop them from cutting you down?” Hammerschmidt whispered hoarsely, snapping his cigarette butt from his fingers.
“If we do not do something,” Han said softly, “we shall all be dead. But I will go instead,” Han declared.
Michael Rourke looked at both men, then back toward Prokopiev’s position. “Five minutes. You come armed and so will I, and that way if anyone tries any treachery, the other will assuredly die.”
“Agreed, Rourke. Five minutes.”
Michael consulted the time as he leaned his M-16 against the rocks behind which he crouched, then began removing the spare magazines for it from his gear. He ripped one of the Beretta 92F military pistols from his shoulder holster, perfunctorily checking its condition of readiness even though he already knew it, re-holstering it, performing the same operation with its twin. “I’ll leave my rifle. There wouldn’t be time to use it out there. If Prokopiev brings a rifle, so much the better. Slower to get into action.” He withdrew the four-inch Model 629 from the holster at his side, opened the cylinder. UI don’t know what’s going to go down out there, so be ready to follow my lead.” He closed the .44 Magnum revolver’s cylinder, re-holster-ing it as well.
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“I should go — ” Han insisted.
“No. You know your way out of here. You can speak Chinese in case we do get to Mao’s forces or they get to us. If I can convince him my father is coming, after what my dad and Natalia did to Karamatsov, it might buy us out of here. And Prokopiev wouldn’t have reacted so quickly if he didn’t have some sort of force from the Second City breathing down his collar. No —this is the only way.”