by Ahern, Jerry
“Sarah’s right, boy, we need a man ‘round here,” Mary Mulliner said softly.
Sarah Rourke watched the sky, trying to pick the constellations of stars on the clear night air.
“Them Russians is buildin’ a big fort or base near where Chattanooga used to be,” the boy began again, his voice sounding artificially deepened.
“Chattanooga’s still there, Thad,” Sarah commented. “But all the people are dead. I don’t think you’d want to see Chattanooga; there was death just everywhere.” The thought of the neutron-bombed city—she assumed that had been what had happened—made her shiver. No men, no women, no children. The dogs, the cats, the birds, the grass was all brown and yellow, the trees were just there—but all dead. She shivered again. “You wouldn’t want to see Chattanooga, Thad,” Sarah said again.
“That big base the Russians is got,” Thad insisted. “Gotta stop ‘em before they get so all set up and everythin’ they can’t get stopped, you know.” The boy wanted reassurance, Sarah thought. She laughed—almost out loud. Men so often—at least some men—insisted women were so alike. Men were sometimes alike, too, she thought now, and she almost envied it. If John, her husband, were still alive—she wanted him to be—whatever John was doing now, he was consumed with it, she was sure. He was searching for her, searching for the children, fighting Communist soldiers perhaps, brigands very likely. Men found “toys” for their minds even under the worst circumstances, just from their role of being men. There was always something to do, to go up against.
She leaned against the post beside the porch railing and stared out across the dark expanse of the fields. Thad and her husband, John—their thing to do now was go and fight. Mary and herself, too, if she found John (when, she reminded herself, or when he found her). She would wait, care for the children, keep the home, clean the wounds, and go quietly insane each time she thought of John going out and perhaps dying. She stared up at the peculiar haze around the moon, wishing John were there to tell her what it meant. Was the world ending—the heat, the cold, the torrential rains, the red sunsets?
“Mary,” she said, her voice trembling slightly. “Mary, I’m going to leave in a few days because if I don’t—” she stood up and walked into the darkness, wishing she had a sweater, cold suddenly.
“If I don’t,” she whispered to herself and the night, “I won’t have the strength to do anything, but stay here.”
Chapter 29
Col. Vassily Korcinski hung up the radio telephone. He walked from his desk to the small mirror inside the open closet door, smoothed his white hair with his hands, and studied his face. Classic, he thought, chiseled. He couldn’t help but smile. Other than his own image, he thought, he was pleased that Varakov trusted him so.
He walked back to his desk, lifted the red telephone to his day room and waited. It rang less than once. A voice answered with the formal identification of place, rank and last name, and the inevitable “Sir!” He cut the man off. “This is Colonel Korcinski. Alert the counter-terrorist force to move out within five minutes.” Korcinski hung up the telephone, walked back to the closeted mirror and took his cap, adjusting it at a slight angle over his left eye, smoothing back the white hair, smoothing his uniform jacket under the gunbelt, opening the flap holster, working the slide on the pistol and chambering the first round, then setting the Makarov’s safety, the hammer down. Reholstering the gun, glancing once more into the mirror, he closed the closet door and started across his office.
As he opened the door into the hall, the sirens began sounding. He strode purposefully—he was conscious of himself and had always been—down the hallway, the sounds of running feet in the hallway of the journalism building and now his staff headquarters reassuring to him.
Narcissism, some called it that. He called it pride and realization of his destiny. He turned the corner into the side corridor, the glassed wall on one side looking out into the central square where the counter-terrorist force was already forming. He walked along the hallway, staring into the glass, seeing his own image half-reflected and superimposed on the glass over the figures of running armed men, motorcycle units, and troop vehicles. He walked to the end of the hallway and through the glass doors, adjusting his hat to a bit more rakish angle in the reflection, then started down the steps, his boots gleaming in the reflected artificial lighting.
He reached the base of the steps, turned left, pushed briskly through the double-glass doors, and took one last glance. He stepped out onto the brick porch and walked down its length, surveying the men, the officers saluting as he passed. Korcinski returned the salutes with a studied casualness. He could see his aide running up to him, bringing his greatcoat and his swagger stick. He stopped, letting the man hold the coat for him. Korcincski left the collar up, the coat hanging open, the swagger stick under his left arm as he pulled the skin-tight leather gloves over his manicured fingers.
He slapped the swagger stick against his right thigh, glancing with great drama at the watch on his wrist. It was only four minutes, and the men were already assembled, the troops boarded into the trucks, the motorcycle patrols mounted, his staff car waiting.
He stepped to the edge of the porch, speaking at the top of his voice, carefully listening to it for the tone, the life in it. He liked the way it resonated through the square, the stone buildings making it reverberate as though he were speaking from some far loftier height.
“We have been notified of a full-scale terrorist assault to be conducted at a location not far from here.” He liked to preserve an element of mystery, the very ambiguity he’d learned to imbue his men with a sense of the importance of it all. “We are to contain the terrorists until their ammunition is exhausted, then to take them in hand-to-hand combat and preserve as many of their lives as possible. There is one man—he is tall, his hair is dark, rising from a high forehead, he frequently wears sunglasses even at night—he will be wearing several handguns and be skilled in their use. No one man is to attempt to take him—squad action only. If any man kills this man, he will himself be shot. This man, at all costs, must be taken alive and as uninjured as possible. I can explain no further for reasons of security. We will move out toward the helicopter staging area and supply depot.” He stood then, quietly, surveying the faces of his men, then shouted, “We toil for the liberation of the workers of the world, and for this reason we ourselves are invincible!” A cheer—spontaneous he thought—went up from the assembled troops and he waved the swagger stick in his gloved hands. He had always admired the incantation the Nazis had used: spirit was important. He saluted the swagger stick against the peak of his hat and strode toward the steps at the far side of the brick porch leading down to his men, his staff car,—and to his destiny.
Chapter 30
Rourke stared at the moon and the curious, ghostlike haze around it. He shuddered slightly. The night was cold, the air here on the river was damp and chill, but the shudder was for some other reason he couldn’t quite define. He glanced skyward at the haloed moon. The shudder came again and he knew why.
The water of the river made tiny, wavelike lapping sounds against the hull of the rubber boat as in silence and darkness Rourke’s boat and three more similar to it stayed to the middle of the river, searching the blackness and shadow on the right bank for. the outlet of the storm drain. In the darkness, he felt the safety on the CAR-15, checked the security of the twin stainless Detonics pistols in their shoulder holsters, checked the security of the flap on the Ranger rig holding the Metalifed Government .45 on his hip. He forced himself to slow his breathing. He was nervous; the mission held something that smelled bad to him, tasted foul. There was something very wrong with it, and it wasn’t just the poor planning or the inexperienced people. He half-wished Paul Rubenstein had been well enough to come along. At least he trusted Paul, and for what Paul lacked in experience, he compensated well in intelligence and initiative.
Rourke pulled up the collar of his leather jacket, snapping closed the second highest bu
tton on the off-white cowboy shirt he wore beneath it. He snatched off the sunglasses, securing them in his shirt pocket, squinting as his eyes adjusted to the difference in light. He almost laughed aloud; if he hadn’t been so sensitive to light all through his life, he would have thought it symptomatic of radiation sickness. He checked the closure on the canvas musette bag hanging from his left side over the M-16 Bayonet, the closure on the Bushnell Armored 8 x 30s hanging from his right side. The bottoms of his jeans were rolled in with blousing garters over the tops of his combat boots—stuffing the pants in the boots had always been uncomfortable to him. He remembered once, years earlier, having fought his way five miles in subfreezing temperatures through more than two feet of fresh snow on foot—the drifts had been as high as his thighs and he had fallen several times—then the pants had been tucked into the boots to keep the snow out. He had made it then and he thought that somehow he’d make it tonight. He had to. He had come to think of it as a quest—no less important than a search for the Grail, for any treasure ancient or modern—more important because it was a human quest, to find the three surviving humans who meant the most to him in all the world, the woman he had always loved, the son, the daughter—each child part of him and part of her.
“Over there, past those rocks and weeds,” Rourke heard Fulsom rasp. Rourke shook his head, searching out Fulsom in the darkness, finding his silhouette, and then seeing in what direction the man pointed.
Rourke, his night vision better than most because of light sensitivity, could see the outline of the upper right quarter of the storm drain’s circular entrance clearly. Rats, snakes, wolf spiders possibly—he set his jaw, staring at the entrance as two of Reed’s men, doing the rowing on Rourke’s boat, changed course from the center of the river toward the marshy, muddy bank.
As the rubber boat skidded into the mud, Rourke was already on his feet and going over the gunwales, the sounds of critters on the land and things in the water something he listened intently for.
Rourke approached the storm drain entrance, Reed beside him and Fulsom behind Reed. Rourke glanced back toward the entrance.
“What the hell is that?” Reed whispered, pointing toward a silver glinting sphere from something reminiscent of thread.
“It’s a spider nest. See ‘em in trees and branches a lot.”
“Hell,” Reed rasped, starting to take the bayonet from his belt and hack at the nest.
Rourke caught his wrist, looking at him hard in the moonlight. “If it were blocking the entrance, fine, if it were in our way, fine—never kill anything unless you have to—there’re enough things you have to kill these days.” Rourke sidestepped in front of Reed and glanced around him, then took his Zippo and flicked it lit, lighting one of his small, dark cigars, and glanced at the luminous face of the Rolex on his wrist in the light of the flame, then moved the blue-yellow fire toward the entrance, up and down and from side to side, inspecting the tunnel beyond the lip of the storm drain.
“What do you think, Mr. Rourke?” Fulsom asked, his voice low beside Rourke.
“My first name is John. What do I think about the storm drain? Maybe a nice place to visit, but ...” Rourke let the sentence hang, his gloved left hand pushing away cobwebs at the top of the storm drain as he ducked his head to step inside.
He could feel his feet squishing the mud in the darkness. He closed the Zippo and reached into his belt under his leather jacket, snatching the Safariland Kel-Lite and pushing the switch forward with his thumb. As the light filled the storm drain, he could see it glinting on what looked to him like eyes beyond the light and in the shadow ahead, he could hear scurrying and the high-pitched scratchiness of bats.
“What the hell is that?” Reed asked, suddenly beside Rourke, stooped slightly as Rourke was.
Rourke started to answer, but Fulsom, there too, said, “Bats I think.”
“Bats!”
“They’re small—not the vampire kind. If you were a peach or a pear you’d be in trouble.” Rourke added.
“Whew! That’s a relief,” Reed muttered.
“Yeah,” Rourke told him. “Just don’t let ‘em scratch you or bite. They carry rabies sometimes.” Rourke started forward, hearing the shuffling of feet behind him from the rest of the sixteen man commando force. Two of Reed’s men and some of Fulsom’s—including Darren Ball—were waiting with the boats.
“Bats! God, betcha there’re snakes, too,” Reed muttered.
“Most poisonous snakes won’t kill you, just make you damned sick—unless you have a reaction to the venom,” Rourke consoled Reed, flashing his light ahead across the reddish brown mud, swatting at cobwebs with his free right hand, the CAR-15 slung across his back, muzzle down.
The storm drain’s height was six feet, the diameter, and there was a simple choice Rourke decided—either walk through the deepest and slipperiest of the squishing mud and duck your head a little or walk to the side on angle and move half-stooped. He chose the muddy water and mire.
Shuffling along through the storm drain with Rourke’s flashlight and two others at intervals along the seventeen man single-file column the only illumination, Rourke paced himself, trying to judge the distance, not trusting wholly what Fulsom had described as a mile’s walk. A rat scurried across Rourke’s left foot as the tunnel the drain formed took a slight bend along an elbow of pipe then curved at a right angle, then started slightly upward.
Rourke stopped, his light hitting a swarm of bats hanging from the top of the drain, ducking as they whistled and whined overhead, one of the men screaming, Reed starting to bring his M-16 to bear and Rourke swatting it down, but saying nothing. They moved on, roaches everywhere on the floor of the drain near the edge of the mire, feeding on the bat droppings, perhaps, Rourke thought.
After several more minutes, Rourke stopped, flashing his light behind him, searching for Fulsom’s face, seeing the terror in the eyes. Abner Fulsom said, “I’m a little claustrophobic. Place gives me the creeps.” “I don’t think anybody exactly likes it,” Rourke almost whispered. “I make it we’ve done a mile—no end of the tunnel is in sight. How much further?” “My brother laid the drain, told me about it—said it was just about an even mile.”
“And it lets out in a small culvert at the edge of the parking lot, then dips back under the lot toward the shopping center itself?” “Yeah, that’s what he said,” Fulsom whispered.
“Where’s your brother now?” Rourke snapped.
“Dead. He was in Atlanta when the bombs or missiles or whatever hit it—”
Rourke exhaled hard. “I’m sorry.” He turned and shone his Kel-Lite back along the storm drain. Without saying anything else, he started walking again. If Fulsom’s memory were correct, Rourke judged, then the culvert should be coming up soon. He swung the CAR-15 from his back, slinging it under his right arm, suspended from his right shoulder, his fist wrapped around the pistol grip.
After another five minutes, Rourke stopped, cutting the light.
“Back flat against the wall,” he rasped, then started edging forward. There was light—dim—but light none the less, up ahead. He moved toward it. The smell in the drain had been bad, but here it was worse, the drain partially clogged and the water several inches deep. He edged up along the side and stooped as he went forward, grateful for the insect repellant he had used. There were swarms of small flies and mosquitoes, some of them, he wagered with himself, carried sleeping sickness.
The tunnel took a slight bend around a right-angle elbow joint, and Rourke stopped again at the mouth of the tunnel, a heavy-looking grillwork over the drain opening beyond and a V-shaped cement culvert visible in the moonlight ahead.
Rourke moved as silently as he could toward the grating, peering beyond it into the open, smelling the comparatively fresh night air, breathing it in deeply. The grille was set into the mouth of the drain, forming a grid of squares eight inches roughly on each side, a thin layer of cement holding it in place, a slightly wider opening at the top and bottom and eac
h side where the grid of steel didn’t quite fit—an afterthought, he guessed.
Rourke heard no noise outside—nothing. The quiet seemed ominous to him. He edged back into the drain, taking a deep breath of the fresher air before he did. He stopped where Reed, Fulsom, and the others crouched along the side of the drain beyond the elbow.
“I need a couple of bayonets and a couple of good-sized rocks. Going to have to hammer our way out.” “Why don’t you use that bayonet you got,” Reed snapped.
“I paid for mine—yours is issue—we’ll use yours,” Rourke told him quietly. “And let’s get going. Time’s against us.” Rourke glanced at his watch. It was just past midnight, and they still hadn’t even penetrated the base.
Reed barked an order to one of his two men and after a moment, two bayonets and two paving bricks were handed up along the line. “Come on,” Rourke said, distributing one set of the tools to Reed.
With the Intelligence captain behind him, Rourke started forward again toward the elbow, through it and then, slowly, toward the grating at the end of the storm drain. Reed started to chisel at the cement and Rourke stopped him, raising a finger to his lips for silence and listening to the night sounds and listening for some sign of activity by the Russians. It was as if the place were deserted, Rourke thought, and that was all wrong. He was tempted to turn back, but realized then that any chance of the Resistance people or the Army Intelligence people helping to find Sarah and the children would be gone. Pausing for another moment, swinging the CAR-15 out of the way, Rourke set the point of one of the borrowed bayonets to the bead of cement and drew back the paving brick in his right hand.
“Watch your eyes for chips,” Rourke cautioned Reed, then smashed the paving brick down against the butt of the bayonet, a two-inch fragment of the cement bead breaking way and falling into the muddy water in which they stood. In an instant, Reed was chiseling away at the opposite side.
