Earth Fire

by Jerry Ahern

  He twisted around, the M-16s making movement in so confined a space awkward, Natalia saying as he slammed the door closed, “We should be just a few minutes away from the bombproof doors leading into the hangar bays—if the doors are still opened.”

  “They’re gonna want to stop us, not just box us in, Rozhdestvenskiy had to figure on that. Unless he gets on a radio and tells them to close, they should be open—any­way—they can’t stop their supply shipments just for us—we gotta worry about that last van.”

  Exhausted, Rourke unslung the M-16s from his shoul­ders, leaning through the window. The van was closing, the LMG beginning to open up. Rourke fired the M-16, toward the windshield — but it would be bullet proofed.

  The slugs had no effect.

  “Give this thing all the gas it’s got,” he roared to Natalia. “And gimme the extra C-4 you took off the American cor­poral’s body. If those doors to the hangar bays are closed, it won’t get us through anyway.”

  “Agreed.” Natalia pushed her black canvas bag across the seat. “It’s inside.”

  Rourke opened the bag —a nightgown, a hair brush, a half-dozen speed-loaders for the L-Frames she carried.

  It wasn’t in the outside pouch. He zipped open the main compartment—the C-4, beside it tampons and a half-emptied carton of cigarettes. “Women,” Rourke murmured. He took the C-4, snapping the brick in half, then began knead­ing it in his hands, the other half returned to the bag. It was starting to soften.

  “I’d say hurry up, he’s closing on us.” Gunfire hit the wall to their left, a ricochet cracking more of the windshield, Na­talia making the truck swerve, then straightening. “The turn-off should be up here.”

  “Right. You let me off when you take it, then drive like hell for a hundred yards or so. And fast.” Rourke formed the C-4 into a mushroom shape—it was the consistency of the Play-Doh his children had used when they were small.

  “Here it is,” Natalia shouted, the truck skidding, the rear end fishtailing, Natalia downshifting, fighting the wheel, the truck turning, the cargo shifting behind them — Rourke heard the sound of glass breaking.

  One of the bottles of serum—had any of it survived?

  She turned the truck into the access corridor, Rourke swinging open the door, the truck slowing, Rourke jumping down, falling to his knees, shouting, “Get outta here.”

  The van was making the turn. Rourke waited, the van coming, the LMG starting to fire again, slugs hammering the concrete wall of the corridor.

  Rourke had the reloaded Python in his left fist. In his right the mushroom shaped chunk of plastique, soft at the top, very soft.

  He hurled the C-4, shifting the Python to his right fist, the C-4 hitting the grill at the front of the van, molding around the metal, sticking there.

  Rourke fired at the van—a miss, the van still coming, Rourke running, running harder than he had ever run in his life.

  To his right ahead was a small access tunnel. Rourke jumped to the walkway, vaulting the railing, stabbing the Python outward as a line of machinegun fire etched along the wall surface toward him.

  He double actioned the Python once, diving to the small access tunnel, the roar deafening as he covered his ears and hugged his forearms against the sides of his head — he could feel the force of the explosion tearing at him, feel the heat of it.

  The explosion died.

  Rourke got to his knees — part of his shirt had been torn away.

  He stood up, his hands shook.

  He stooped over, picking up the Python.

  He stepped to the end of the access tunnel. The van was a mass of twisted metal, still smoldering, the upholstery burning in patches along the road surface.

  Ahead of him, Natalia had stopped the truck. She was reversing, Rourke started to run to meet her.

  If the serum had survived—even a little of it, he could at least save Sarah and the children, Paul and Natalia—at least them.

  If the bombproof doors to the hangar bays were only open.

  He kept running, the Python still in his right hand.

  Chapter Sixty-nine

  The bombproof doors had been open—maybe he lived right, he thought. The door on the pickup’s passenger side wide open, Rourke hugged the doorframe, firing out first one, then the second of his two M-16s, cutting down per­haps a dozen of the KGB hangar bay personnel, the rest running back through the doors.

  Rourke jumped clear as Natalia slowed the pickup.

  “I’ll find us a plane. You get those doors sealed—the mechanism’s over there,” and he pointed to the far wall.

  He started running across the hangar bay, searching for the right aircraft, sufficiently large to handle the cargo, suf­ficiently fast to get them where they needed to go, with little enough landing field required to put her down.

  That the hangar bay doors had been open told him one thing — Rozhdestvenskiy would be waiting to stop them on the field above.

  He found the plane, stopping before it — a substantially modified Grumman OV-1 Mohawk of the type used in Viet­nam. He ran to it, to begin pre-flighting. Already, the bombproof doors were closing behind him ...

  It wasn’t the perfect aircraft, it required too much run­way space for landing, but he could set it down on a high­way and then taxi it off the road. With luck he’d make it close enough to the motorcycle he had left behind, hidden in the trees near the field he had used when he’d landed the prototype jet fighter, the same craft they had used to fly to Chicago to see Varakov.

  With the truck back near the cargo doors, and Natalia’s help, he had loaded his backpack, the six cryogenics chambers, the six spare parts kits for the chambers, the six moni­toring consoles, the six spare parts kits for the monitoring equipment—and the one remaining jar of the serum—the others destroyed.

  Rourke sat at the controls now, the plane ready as it would ever be, Natalia working the elevator controls.

  Overhead, the sky was darkening. At any moment, the bombproof shields would slide in place automatically, blocking the elevator shaft.

  There had been no sounds of gunfire from the field above, and as the overhead section of the runway slipped further and further apart, there was still no sound.

  His only sensation was the purple darkness.

  He looked out. Natalia ran to board the aircraft, jump­ing, the elevator already in motion, Natalia reaching the el­evator and running for the aircraft.

  She was aboard, Rourke hearing the sounds of the hatch being closed.

  “I’m all set,” she called out, breathless sounding. Rourke nodded, both M-16s loaded, his pistols checked. Natalia took up her position by the co-pilot’s controls, two M-16s beside her. There would be no way to have a protracted gun battle from the aircraft—it would be take-off or lose.

  Rourke raced the engines, the plane starting to inch ahead, the elevator nearly to the level of the field.

  Already, he could see KGB Elite Corps ringing the open­ing for the elevator pad, M-16s in their hands. Behind them, Jeeps fitted with RPK light machineguns.

  Rozhdestvenskiy’s face in the lights of the field as the ele­vator pad settled.

  Rourke hit both engines, starting ahead, Rozhdest­venskiy’s voice loud over a bullhorn, “Surrender now and you will have merciful deaths. If you force us to destroy the last of the cryogenic serum, you will take weeks to die in agony, Rourke. Hear me. And you will watch Natalia Tiemerovna die first. I will flay her skin an inch at a time, I will have my men rape her before your eyes. Surrender or face this.”

  He could run down the men with the airplane, but the bodies were so densely packed together that they would eventually block the aircraft’s wheels. The Jeeps formed a solid wall beyond that.

  They were trapped.

  “Be ready to fight,” Rourke whispered. “I can’t get us off the ground. And I’ll kill you just before it ends—Rozhdest­venskiy meant what he said.”

  Natalia whispered, “Yes.”

  “Turn one of your M-
16s against the bottle of the serum. Do it now.” Rourke still had almost full power to the en­gines, ready for take-off. “Damnit,” he swore.

  He saw Rozhdestvenskiy’s face, the KGB colonel stand­ing in the front passenger side of one of the Jeeps, his left arm casually draped over the RPK—he was smiling.

  Perhaps, Rourke thought, before they swarmed over the plane, he could get off a shot to kill Rozhdestvenskiy.

  He—Rourke—and Natalia and, the ones who had died had won in a way, Rourke thought. Rozhdestvenskiy and his men were doomed without the serum. Perhaps succes­sive generations of them could breed inside the Womb until it was safe to return to the surface, perhaps somehow they would not be so horribly evil. That the Womb still was capa­ble of hermetic seal was the only defeat. His own death. Na­talia’s death—considering they had destroyed Rozhdestvenskiy’s plans for survival—these mattered little. Paul. Sarah. Michael. Annie. That they would die, that he had failed them consumed him, burning in him, angering him.

  “The hell with this. I’ll blow up the damned plane all over them—hold on—don’t shoot the serum bottle yet,” and Rourke throttled forward, the aircraft starting to move.

  “Surrender, Rourke!”

  Rozhdestvenskiy couldn’t hear him, but Rourke shouted it anyway, “Bite my ass, you bastard!”

  He gave the plane full throttle, the KGB guards moving back, but the Jeeps unmoving, the machinegunners moving their weapons into position. It was all about to go.

  An explosion, louder than anything Rourke had ever heard before. He looked to his left—the top of the moun­tain—a mushroom shaped ball of fire rising skyward—and in its light on one of the twin gantries there, a figure. Some­thing about it—it had to be Reed. And in the instant of light, draped across Reed’s body nearly to the top of the gantry but not quite reaching it, blew an American flag in the heat wind.

  Rourke gave the craft more throttle, the Jeeps starting to move now, Rozhdestvenskiy nearly falling from his perch beside one of the RPKs, the vehicle streaking away from the mountain. Already, Rozhdestvenskiy was screaming through the bullhorn, “You will die for this —”

  “That’s just like a neutron bomb, that’s why they’re run­ning like hell to get out of here—hang on,” and Rourke pushed the throttle all the way forward, working the flaps, steering the craft along the field, threading his way through the maze of running men and fleeing vehicles, the end of the runway nearing as he straightened out. Only one vehicle followed them—the Jeep Rozdestvenskiy had been on, Rozhdestvenskiy driving it now—a pistol in his hand, fir­ing. Rourke gave the aircraft full throttle, the barricade fences coming up fast.

  In the sideview mirror of the fuselage, Rozhdestvenskiy, the Jeep skidding, Rozhdestvenskiy’s face twisted with rage, his mouth open, screaming words Rourke didn’t need to hear to understand.

  The barricade fences—full power, the nose coming up. “Hang on,” Rourke rasped, Natalia answering nothing, the nose staying up, the barricade fences beneath them now, Rourke hitting the landing gear, hauling it up, banking the aircraft—and as he turned it, the top of the mountain was a ball of flames, the particle beam weapons gone, Reed gone, the flag gone.

  On the field beneath them, the Jeeps and figures of run­ning men were like something seen through a microscope.

  The neutron radiation would have been minimal and the likelihood of contamination remote. He felt no ill effects, nor apparently did Natalia as he looked at her.

  “We made it,” she whispered.

  “He’ll come after us, try to find the Retreat—he’ll come.”

  Rourke said nothing else. It was full night and the world might end before dawn the next day was through.

  Chapter Seventy

  Colonel Nehemiah Rozhdestvenskiy leaned against one of the Jeeps, staring, staring at his mountain without a top, his mountain that no longer could be hermetically sealed, the Womb that was now useless to him.

  One of his officers, Captain Andreki, was calling to him. “Comrade Colonel—the radiation—we must escape before it can reach the airfield—when the cloud settles—”

  “I will kill him, then I will die. But I will kill him. It is Doctor Rourke who has done this. And it is Rourke who will die for it. All radar installations which still function are to search for his plane. All ground forces are to search for it above them. We shall take whatever means at our disposal and go to northeastern Georgia. We shall search the moun­tains there throughout the night. We shall find this Retreat, we shall destroy it, destroy Rourke and Major Tiemerovna, destroy Rourke’s family. We shall have the last victory—we shall have the last victory—”

  He realized that Captain Andreki was leading him away—but he would pursue Rourke—and inside him he knew this would be the last night of earth.

  Chapter Seventy-one

  General Ishmael Varakov listened to her words, carefully. “Moscow is gone. The radio was full of static and then for an instant it cleared. All the radio operator could say was ‘fire’—and then there was nothing more, not even static, not a sound as though—”

  “Enough, Catherine. It has begun. Come stand beside me and we shall talk. You can tell me of your childhood per­haps. We have one night in which to tell each other all that we might ever wish to tell each other,” and he smiled at her, taking her hand, slowly walking from his desk toward the figures of the two mastodons at the center of the museum’s great hall. His feet hurt. “When I was a boy, all was in tur­moil. Russia had suffered defeat at the hands of the Japa­nese and the old Czar and his family liked more to play tennis and to have parties than to care for the people. Lenin was always on the lips of the people—he is here, he is there. There was much hunger. And then of course the First World War, which was to be the war to end all wars, but so many of our soldiers never returned and then the era of Kerenski, and that failed, and then Lenin finally took charge and there was fighting everywhere. I was only very young after all that and I remember the horrors still as though I had seen them myself because still my family spoke of them, still whispered of them when there was darkness. And the Sec­ond World War—in which I fought—Stalin was a fool to ever trust the Nazis. And then they turned on us and tried to destroy us and later we destroyed them. All this—you would think, Catherine, that with all the millions who died in the First War, the many who died during the Revolution, the millions who died during the Second War—you would think that we would have learned something, Catherine, something to tell young people like you that would magi­cally make you understand how stupid and useless it all was. But did we?”

  He stopped walking, looking into her eyes. “You are a pretty young girl. I do not still understand why you would so favor an old man by loving him. But I am glad that you do. Sit and tell me about your childhood.”

  He sat near the feet of the mastodons, Catherine sitting beside, but more perched on the edge of the vinyl covered bench than actually sitting. “I did nothing interesting, Com­rade General—it is a very boring story—there is nothing in­teresting about me— “

  “How wrong you are,” and he held her hand.

  Chapter Seventy-two

  He had landed the aircraft on a stretch of straight high­way, then taxied it off the road and into a field before it had been able to go no further.

  Natalia had gone on ahead, to the original take-off site they had used with the prototype fighter. Rourke’s Harley was hidden there.

  And Rourke had worked while she had been gone, get­ting the eighteen smaller crates offloaded from the plane, getting the six coffin-shaped crates which contained the cry­ogenic chambers nearer to the hatch.

  He had field stripped his rifles one at a time, cleaning them. He had cleaned the Government Model, the little Lawman, the six-inch Python. He had touched up the edges of his knives. He had done everything to avoid thinking.

  It was already the new day beyond the ocean—and soon—He somehow knew that it was the last day.

  A plan had already formed, a plan to so
lve the unsolve­able.

  But it meant putting himself in the position of God—and it was an uncomfortable thought.

  He loved Sarah. He loved Natalia. He loved them equally—at least he told himself that—and he loved them differently.

  It was the only way to solve it.

  He closed his eyes. There was no need, no desire to sleep. If all went well and they were able to utilize the cryogenics equipment and the last precious bottle of the serum, he would sleep for nearly five centuries. If it did not, he would die. In either event sleep now was unimportant.

  In the distance now, he heard the sound of the trucks, the familiar sound of his own camouflaged Ford pickup truck. The less familiar sounds of the truck he had borrowed from Pete Critchfield, the Resistance leader; Rourke would never return it.

  He wondered if Natalia had told Paul and Sarah and the children what would happen at the next dawn. Had she told Paul the story Reed had recounted of the death of Paul’s parents?

  He somehow doubted that she had. It was, after all, his responsibility.

  One could escape one’s enemies, but never the ultimate enemy of being the one who was responsible.

  He closed his eyes again. There was no need to see the trucks as they approached. And he wondered how he would begin it. Would he look at Michael and Annie and tell them, “Your lives are forever to be changed—forever.”

  Chapter Seventy-three

  He didn’t know why the KGB was evacuating the city. There were still regular army troops, but they fought every­where throughout the city with the people he and the others of the Resistance had freed from the detention camps.

  That death was inevitable did not escape him, but not from his wounds at least. He rested in the back of the van they had taken from the Russians, a police van. Through the open doors, he could see Marty approaching, carrying something.