Free Survivalist - 20 - Firestorm by Jerry Ahern Page A

answering!”
    “Dead.One Marine and one German Commando dead on post five and probably more between there and Darkwood’s room. He’s good. He’s so good he’s scarey. We’re gonna get him. Hear that, Rausch? We’re gonna nail your ass.”
    Rourke could hear Sam Aldridge’s breathing as Aldridge opened the frequency again. Aldridge was running …
    Jason Darkwood stood in the doorway’s threshold, his left hand balled into a fist to keep his robe closed at his throat, his entire body trembling with cold and the dizzy feeling in his head. He called into the swirling snow and the darkness beyond the meager cone of white light from the doorway, his form silhouetted in it. “I know you’re out there. You want to kill me, then come ahead, you shit!”
    Darkwood stepped through the doorway …
    John Rourke had planned ahead.
    If Freidrich Rausch had access to one tape recorder, he had equal access to many. If Freidrich Rausch realized that the first tape recorder would be discovered, he might assume that no one would in turn assume he would utilize a second tape recorder in the same way as the first, to draw someone to it, but this time for a totally different purpose.
    John Rourke punched through the doorway into the vacant patient room across the central courtyard and opposite from the identical quarters occupied by Jason Darkwood.
    Rourke ran to the window, pushed back the curtain. Jason Darkwood stood in the snow, just outside the open doorway leading from his room, shaky looking. It could be a reaction of adrenaline with the medication Doctor Munchen had administered to aid in Darkwood’s recovery.
    And at the edge of the shaft of light flooding over the snow through the open doorway, inside the room, behind Darkwood, there was the figure of a man.
    John Rourke couldn’t risk a shot.
    Rourke looked to his right, the sliding hospital bed table so much like those used five centuries ago the nearest heavy object to hand. He grabbed it, wresting it free of the bed with his right hand as his left hand reached out for the door handle. He could hurtle the table through the open doorway into the courtyard and distract -
    Rourke almost touched the door handle.
    The flashlight from his belt. He grabbed it, letting the table rest against the wall.
    Rourke dropped to a crouch beside the door handle, in the beam of the flashlight seeing the wires, the same as before, an obvious invitation to cut them. But, tracing them to the nearest outlet, Rourke saw another set of wires,4he first set a blind. As he moved, his right foot slipped a lhtle and as he shone the flash over the floor he detected a puddle of water, a wire set in its center. He followed the second collection of wires back toward the door handle; if he’d cut the first and obvious set, the second set would have gotten him.
    John Rourke was out of time. He shoved the flashlight into his belt as he raised to his full height and swung the M-16 forward on its sling.
    He could see Darkwood starting to turn around as the shadow of the man who stalked him obscured a portion of the shaft of light in which Darkwood stood.
    John Rourke fired the M-16 through the synthetic transparent panel which served as a window to the courtyard, blowing it out in huge jagged chunks, spraying the 5. 56mm bullets across the base into which the glass-substitute was set so he could scramble through without ripping his clothing and the flesh beneath it to shreds. Darkwood was already wheeling toward the sound of gunfire, but not toward the shadow.
    The M-16 empty, John Rourke let it fall to his right side on its sling, his right hand grasping for the butt of the six-inch barreled .44 Magnum revolver at his right hip.
    He drew, starting the trigger squeeze as his right arm raised to shoulder height and his left palm cupped around his right fist.
    The figure stepped out of the shadow, fully backlit now, a sinister silhouette with some sort of crossbow shouldered and ready to fire.
    The figure-it