Free Survivalist - 19 - Final Rain by Jerry Ahern

at the controls.
    He checked oil pressure, fuel mixtures, tried remembering everything John Rourke had taught him.
    And a smile crossed his lips. “Trigger control, trigger control,” and he throttled out, the helicopter slipping, a tearing sound as ice beneath the floats cracked and separated and metal strained, a gust slamming the aircraft on the port side.
    “Trigger control,” he hissed, his hands like vises as they held to the controls and the chopper gradually started to rise.
    John Rourke opened his eyes. The klaxon was sounding. His fingertips tingled.
    Mechanically, he checked his watch. The Rolex seemed unscathed. He would heal. It wouldn’t. He sat up. An electric shock. “Dammit,” Rourke rasped.
    He’d been thrown half out of the compartment behind the access panel. He crawled back inside, finding the pliers and the tape.
    Wires to cut.
    Already, some of the circuits he’d disconnected had re-routed themselves. The countdown was continuing. And there was no time to even check how much time was left… .
    Annie Rubenstein was alone on the monorail train, the voice here, too, piped in over speakers inside the car. “Emergency …” She focused her attention on the waste processing plants the train passed in the tunnel leading toward the yellow dome. Some Mid-Wake people called the city itself the “octopus” even though there were only six “tentacles,” each tentacle a tunnel and, rather than a sucker at the end, a dome. The head, where she had escaped her guardians and boarded the yellow train, was the central core.
    The yellow station was coming up. Natalia …
    Wind sheer, he thought they called it, but whatever it was the wind was suddenly there and the German helicopter gunship was no longer under his control, banking hard to starboard, nose down, a sickening roar out of the rotor blades overhead, the gunship
    vibrating, shaking, trembling—like his hands. Paul Rubenstein tried to remember what John had told him. He didn’t know if he remembered or was guessing, and there wasn’t time to think.
    He gave the gunship full power, pulling back on the throttle, trying to bring up the nose… .
    The klaxon stopped.
    John Rourke’s hands froze over the wires. In the curiously accented Russian of the Soviet domed city under the ocean, a pre-recorded voice—female—an^ nounced, “Launch imminent. Launch imminent. Evacuate immediate launch area. Seal the bunker. Launch imminent.”
    “Shit,” John Rourke snarled.
    The destruct system was almost wired into the launch system. Almost.
    A length of blue wire traveled now from the destruct controls into the launch controls.
    To activate the destruct sequence, he had to fool the timer.
    To his feet, his legs and back cramping from having been crouched and bent so long, his fingertips still tingling from the electric shock.
    His eyes found the timer readout; time until launch was ninety-three seconds.
    No time to unscrew the housing around the timer, Rourke drew the Crain LS-X knife from the sheath at his hip and used the butt cap like a hammer, pounding out the housing, shattering the timer readout as he did, counting the seconds in his head now.
    With the pliers, he peeled back more of the housing around the timer.
    He dropped to his knees, climbing back behind the access opening to reach the blue wire. He. lifted it, careful not to jerk it and disconnect it where he had bridged it.
    “Eighty-seven seconds,” John Rourke said under his breath.
    The female voice was still reciting the warning. He fished the blue wire upward, toward the timer housing.
    An arc of electricity. John Rourke fell back.
    His head slammed against the flange for the panel. He saw stars, shook his head to clear it.
    To his knees, regrasping the blue wire. He started fishing it upward again… .
    In the distance, there was a shaft of yellow light and Paul Rubenstein could see smoke emanating from the tail sections of missiles.
    Where was John Rourke?
    As slowly as he could, he