Darkwood realized. But how had the Russians learned of Iwo Jima’s secret? And how fast could a counterinvasion force be assembled. Aside from Sam Aldridge and a comparative handful of Marines, surface warfare experience was minimal. Had the Soviets been training for surface warfare at an accelerated pace?
He remembered some of the stories told by Doctor Rourke and Major Tiemerovna. Soviet armored vehicles and helicopter gunships. He shivered, and not from the cold, because the synth-wool sweater and the rapidity of his movement were doing their work.
Iwo Jima was a secret—but what if the secret it held were something no one at Mid-Wake had imagined.
Sam Aldridge, whose hobby had always been the western novels from the twentieth century, the movies of the period, all of that, stopped. “I think this is human urine, here.”
There was an aggregate of bright green leaves with yellow fluid puddled in them. Maybe it was plant sap. Darkwood bent closer, smelled it. He looked at Aldridge. “If you tell me ‘many horses pass here’ or something—but you’re right.”
They weren’t alone.
Chapter Sixteen
The specially modified German gunship’s course followed north of and parallel to the Tropic of Cancer. Still there was no relief in the weather, snow falling, higher than normal winds (but not so high as to seriously hinder airigation) and lower than normal temperatures. An hour earlier, they landed on one of the smaller islands, snow accumulating on the tropical foliage. They used the landed time to check the gunship’s systems, top off the synth-fuel and take a hasty meal of German freeze-dried rations, not as tasty as the Mountain House foods Rourke stocked at the Retreat, but just as nutritious. And again, they were airborne, Rourke giving Paul the stick as they flew on over the ocean.
Time dragged. Everywhere Rourke looked, everything seemed the same. If they were able to contact Mid-Wake, the American colony built as a scientific research station before The Night of The War, and Annie and Natalia and Otto Hammerschmidt had not been heard from—Rourke shivered. As any normal man, the initial impulse John Rourke had when he became a father was to think that a daughter was wonderful but a son was just a little bit more wonderful. And, as any normal man who was not
A group of six men in the black uniforms of Marine Spetznas moved in single file along a rough trail cutting southward through the snow-splotched jungle, their AKM-96s slung to patroling carries. The trail wound along a sprawling ridgeline and, almost a half mile away from them, through his binoculars, Darkwood could see their faces clearly. They didn’t look like Americans at all, Whatever Americans looked like. Perhaps a mile farther back along the trail over which the six men moved, gray smoke rose skyward in a ragged column.
It was the smoke which first drew Darkwood, Aldridge, and the rest of Aldridge’s Marine contingent into the island’s more densely vegetated highlands.
The snow was deeper here, as well; and more snow was falling, larger flakes, bafflingly beautiful and diverse to Darkwood and the others who had never seen a snowfall in anything but an old film from five centuries ago, before their ancestors had come to man the scientific station of Mid-Wake and been stranded there by events beyond their control. A scientific research station between the islands of Midway and Wake, aimed at furthering man’s knowledge of space-station construction and deep space travel, suddenly became the last actual outpost of the United States of America. A President, a bicameral legislature, a microcosm of the macrocosm. But it never snowed there.
As Jason Darkwood crouched behind a tall, wide-trunked, shallow-rooted tree he had no hope of identifying, he tasted another snowflake. There and gdne. He looked at the tree, looked it up and down. There were many trees in Mid-Wake, all selected for their superior abilities to produce oxygen from carbon
He remembered some of the stories told by Doctor Rourke and Major Tiemerovna. Soviet armored vehicles and helicopter gunships. He shivered, and not from the cold, because the synth-wool sweater and the rapidity of his movement were doing their work.
Iwo Jima was a secret—but what if the secret it held were something no one at Mid-Wake had imagined.
Sam Aldridge, whose hobby had always been the western novels from the twentieth century, the movies of the period, all of that, stopped. “I think this is human urine, here.”
There was an aggregate of bright green leaves with yellow fluid puddled in them. Maybe it was plant sap. Darkwood bent closer, smelled it. He looked at Aldridge. “If you tell me ‘many horses pass here’ or something—but you’re right.”
They weren’t alone.
Chapter Sixteen
The specially modified German gunship’s course followed north of and parallel to the Tropic of Cancer. Still there was no relief in the weather, snow falling, higher than normal winds (but not so high as to seriously hinder airigation) and lower than normal temperatures. An hour earlier, they landed on one of the smaller islands, snow accumulating on the tropical foliage. They used the landed time to check the gunship’s systems, top off the synth-fuel and take a hasty meal of German freeze-dried rations, not as tasty as the Mountain House foods Rourke stocked at the Retreat, but just as nutritious. And again, they were airborne, Rourke giving Paul the stick as they flew on over the ocean.
Time dragged. Everywhere Rourke looked, everything seemed the same. If they were able to contact Mid-Wake, the American colony built as a scientific research station before The Night of The War, and Annie and Natalia and Otto Hammerschmidt had not been heard from—Rourke shivered. As any normal man, the initial impulse John Rourke had when he became a father was to think that a daughter was wonderful but a son was just a little bit more wonderful. And, as any normal man who was not
A group of six men in the black uniforms of Marine Spetznas moved in single file along a rough trail cutting southward through the snow-splotched jungle, their AKM-96s slung to patroling carries. The trail wound along a sprawling ridgeline and, almost a half mile away from them, through his binoculars, Darkwood could see their faces clearly. They didn’t look like Americans at all, Whatever Americans looked like. Perhaps a mile farther back along the trail over which the six men moved, gray smoke rose skyward in a ragged column.
It was the smoke which first drew Darkwood, Aldridge, and the rest of Aldridge’s Marine contingent into the island’s more densely vegetated highlands.
The snow was deeper here, as well; and more snow was falling, larger flakes, bafflingly beautiful and diverse to Darkwood and the others who had never seen a snowfall in anything but an old film from five centuries ago, before their ancestors had come to man the scientific station of Mid-Wake and been stranded there by events beyond their control. A scientific research station between the islands of Midway and Wake, aimed at furthering man’s knowledge of space-station construction and deep space travel, suddenly became the last actual outpost of the United States of America. A President, a bicameral legislature, a microcosm of the macrocosm. But it never snowed there.
As Jason Darkwood crouched behind a tall, wide-trunked, shallow-rooted tree he had no hope of identifying, he tasted another snowflake. There and gdne. He looked at the tree, looked it up and down. There were many trees in Mid-Wake, all selected for their superior abilities to produce oxygen from carbon
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