by Ahern, Jerry
"What if they hit something?" Rubenstein called out.
"Then we maybe die," Rourke answered emotionlessly. He checked his speed; through the cockpit windshield the runway was blurring under him now. The Chevy still came, gunfire pouring from it, the mob suddenly far behind.
The pickup was closing fast.
Rourke checked his speed—not quite airspeed yet. The far chain-link fence at the end of the airfield was coming up—too fast. More gunfire; the pilot's side window spiderwebbed beside Rourke's head as a bullet impacted against the glass.
And Rubenstein was firing again as well, having ignored Rourke's admonition to strap in. The Chevy swerved; one of the men in the truck bed fell out onto the runway surface. The gunfire was heavier now, sparks
flying as Rubenstein's . slugs hammered against the pickup truck's body.
"Hang on!" Rourke worked the throttles to maximum, starting to pull up on the controls—a hundred yards, fifty yards, twenty-five yards, the nose starting up. Rourke punched the landing-gear-retraction switch, and as they cleared the fence top, the pelting of hot brass against his neck subsided, Rubenstein's gunfire having ceased.
"Thank God." Rubenstein sighed.
"Hmmm." Rourke worked the controls, opening his cow] flaps, trying to climb, gunfire still echoing from below and behind them.
He checked his airspeed—not good enough—then began playing the cowl flaps and the fuel flow. The airspeed was rising. As Rourke banked the aircraft hard to port, Natalia leaned half out of her seat, across his right shoulder, Rubenstein to his left. The Chevy, now far below them, had stopped. The men with rifles and shotguns in the pickup's bed were now minuscule specks, more a curiosity than a threat.
"Can I breathe now?" Paul Rubenstein asked.
Smiling, Rourke checked the oxygen system on the control panel, then nodded. "Yeah." Rourke decided to breathe, too. . . .
The controls vibrated under Rourke s hands as he sat a)one in the cockpit. Natalia had gone ah with Paul, to help him resecure some of the gear that had jarred loose during the overly rapid takeoff. The airfield tower had given him the weather—generally good, moderate winds, perhaps a few thunderheads, but at low elevations and unlikely to be encountered.
Rourke looked below the craft now, its shadow stark and black against the empti
ness that he saw. That expanse of wasteland had once been the Mississippi Delta region. Now, like the rest of the Mississippi valley from where New Orleans had been to its farthest extent north, the ground was a radioactive desert.
The Night of the War . . . Rourke could not forget it, and at last lighting the small dark tobacco cigar that he'd had clenched in his teeth for nearly an hour, he thought more about it. The anger of the men and women in the mob back at the airfield, even the reluctance of Reed to risk an American life to save a Russian life, no matter how valuable, how good—it had all started then, on the Night of the War.
The global fencing—the saber rattling—had ended long before anyone had realized and the nuclear weapons had been unsheathed and ready. The death ... all of the death in that one night, millions of lives lost. The pounding of nuclear weapons, which here, below him, had produced an irradiated vastness that would be uninhabitable for perhaps as long as a quarter-million years, had struck along the San Andreas fault line and brought about the feared megaquakes—but far worse than anyone, save the most wild speculator, had ever imagined. Much of California and the West Coast had fallen into the sea—more millions of deaths. The Soviet Army—the Soviet Union itself—was nearly as crippled as was what had been the United States. The invading Soviet Army, headquartered in neutron-bombed Chicago, had set up outposts in surviving major American cities and industrial and agricultural regions, outposts that not only contended with the growing wave of American resistance, but with the Brigand problem. Rourke felt a smile cross his lips as he exhaled the gray smoke of his cigar. Some
thing in common with the self-styled conquerors—the Brigand warfare, the pillaging, the slaughters.
For it was after the war that both the best and worst of humanity had risen to the fore. The best—Paul, certainly. The young Jewish New Yorker had never ridden anything more challenging than a desk, never fought anything tougher than an editorial deadline. Now, in the few short weeks since the world had forever changed, Rubenstein had forever changed as well. Tough, good with a gun, as at home on a motorcycle as he had been in a desk chair. Even in the short period of time that had elapsed, Rourke had noted the definition of his musculature, and the different set to the eyes he continuously shielded behind wire-rimmed glasses. The wonder, the excitement, were all there as they had been from the first with each new challenge; but there was something else— a pride, a determination derived just from having survived, from having fought, from having surmounted obstacles. In those few short weeks, Rubenstein had grown to be the best friend Rourke felt he had ever had— like a brother, Rourke thought, feeling himself smile again. An only child, he had never been blessed with a natural brother. But now at least he had one.
And Natalia—the magic of her eyes, the beauty that he would have felt hopelessly inadequate to describe had the need arisen to do so. Rourke had first met her before the war—a brief, chance meeting in Latin America when she had worked with her now-dead husband, Vladmir Karamat sov. Rourke had been a CIA covert operations officer; Karamatsov had been the same thing—but for KGB, the Soviet Committee for State Security. And Natalia had been Karamatsov's agent. Then, after the war, there was the staggering coincidence of finding her,
dying, wandering the west Texas desert, herself the victim of Brigand attack. The feelings that had grown between him and the Russian woman, despite her loyalty to her country, despite her job in the KGB, despite her uncle—General Varakov, who was the supreme Soviet commander for the North American Army of Occupation. "Insane," he murmured to himself.
And then another chance meeting. Rourke had been pursuing the trail of his wife, Sarah, and the children, lost to him on the Night of the War. Rourke let out a deep breath, feeling the tendons in his neck tightening with the thoughts. "Sarah," he heard himself whisper. The meeting—the meeting with the girl named Sissy; the seismological research data she had carried regarding the development of an artificial fault line during the bombing, something that would reduplicate the horror of the megaquakes that had destroyed the West Coast, but would instead now sever the Florida peninsula from the mainland.
For all the destruction and the death, it had proven again that there still remained some humanity, some commonality of species. For with President Chambers of U.S. II and General Varakov, a Soviet-U.S. II truce had been struck to effect the evacuation of peninsular Florida in the hope of saving human lives.
The job finished, the truce had ended and a state of war existed once again.
Rourke shook his head. War. Sarah had always labeled his study of survivalism, his knowledge of weapons—all of it—as a preoccupation with gloom and doom, a fascination with the unthinkable. It had torn at their marriage, separated them, and now, despite the fact that they had promised each other to try again for the sake of
Michael and Annie, for the sake of the love he and Sarah had always felt for each other, it was war that had finally separated them.
Rourke remembered it; he hadn't wanted to leave, to give the lecture to be delivered in Canada. Hypothermia—the effects of cold. The world situation had been already tense; but Sarah had insisted, so she could get herself together, to try again with him. It had been there, in Canada, that Rourke had at last learned of the gravity of the situation rapidly developing between the United States and the Soviet Union. He had been aboard an aircraft nearly ready to land in Atlanta, near his farm in northeastern Georgia, when he had heard over the pilot's PA system that the first missiles had been launched. Then that night—the night that had lasted, it seemed, forever, and nothing ever the same afterward.
He shivered from the memo
ries: the crash after the plane had been diverted westward, the struggle to survive afterward with the injured passengers, the useless-ness of his skills as a doctor to the burn victims in Albuquerque—then the slaughter of the passengers by the Brigands.
"Brigands," he murmured. He glanced at his watch; the black-faced Rolex Submariner showed that he had been lost in his reverie for at least ten minutes, perhaps longer. He checked the instruments, then the ground below him—now a nuclear desert, a no man's land where once millions had lived, worked, tilled the soil—nothing now. Not a living tree, or a blade of grass that wasn't brown or black.
His cigar was gone from his teeth and he checked the ashtray, realizing he'd extinguished it. Rourke shook his head, silent—tired. . . .
Reed started to stub out his cigarette, but didn't. Cigarettes were getting harder to find. He kept smoking it, then looked up across the littered table from his cup of coffee. "What, Corporal?"
"Captain, your pal, Dr. Rourke—he's gonna have trouble, sir."
"He had trouble—remember? Hell of a lot of good we were to stop it." He looked back at the cigarette and noticed that the skin of his first and second fingers was stained dark orange. Reed wondered what the stuff in the cigarettes did to his lungs. He shrugged and took another drag; then through a mouthful of smoke, he said, "What kind of trouble? He's got a radio. We can contact him."
"A storm system—it just moved in, like it was out of nowhere, sir."
"He's a fine pilot. He'll fly over it," Reed answered, dismissing the problem.
"But, Captain?"
Reed looked up at the red-haired young woman again. "What, Corporal?"
"You don't understand, sir," she insisted. "See. It's a massive winter storm system—it was just there. You
know the weather's been crazy—"
"Winter storm system? Have you weather people ever figured out you can learn a hell of a lot by just looking out the damn window?" Reed checked his wrist watch, thinking of Rourke for an instant and envying Rourke the Rolex he habitually wore. "An hour ago it was in the sixties—snowstorm?"
"Sir . . . please," the red-haired woman said.
"Yeah." He nodded, tired from going more than a day without sleep.
Standing slowly, he stubbed out the cigarette and looked around the place—some officer's club, he thought. One lousy window. He walked across the room, lurching a little because of sitting so long in one chair, tired. He staggered against the back of a chair. A Marine lieutenant started to his feet, saw Reed, then looked noncommittal. Reed shrugged it off, reaching the window. "I need a good couple hours sleep, Corporal."
"Yes, sir." The red-haired woman nodded.
Reed pulled back the heavy curtain. Staring outside, he whispered, "Holy shit!" He judged the depth, at least four inches of snow; a heavy wind was blowing what had fallen back into the air. Drifts were mounting against the tires of a jeep outside by the walkway.
"Yes, sir. That's it, sir," the red-haired woman echoed.
Reed looked at her. "It's impossible! It was like spring a few—"
He looked back out the window. It was no longer like spring.
The sleet was coming in torrents now. Sarah huddled beside the children under the overhang of rocks, a pine bracken to her right, as she stared down into the valley. The pines made a natural windbreak for herself, Michael, Annie, and the horses.
Across her lap, resting on her blue-jeaned thighs instead of the children's heads, was the AR-—the one modified to fire fully automatically when she put the selector at the right setting, the one almost used to kill her the morning after the Night of the War, the one she'd taken from the dead Brigand and used to shoot out the glass window in the basement of her house in order to set off the confined natural gas there after the gas lines had begun filling the house following the bombing—to blow up her own home and the men inside it who had tried to rob, to kill, to rape.
Priorities were odd, she thought, as she raised her left hand from Annie's chest where it had rested and tugged the blue-and-white bandanna from her own hair. Before the Night of the War—rape, it would have been a top priority. But now losing things had somehow become unconsciously more important as she considered life.
Rape would be a horror—but it could be overcome. Death—it might well be more than expected. But to be robbed, deprived of food or horses or weapons with which to fight—this was worse than death, and rape of the spirit more foul than any rape of the body.
She looked to her right. Michael was sleeping, his body swathed—like Annie's—in blankets against the bizarre and sudden cold. Michael would be turning eight soon, and already he had murdered a man—a Brigand who had tried to rape her. par She studied his face. It was John's face, but younger, though appearing no less troubled. She could see the faint tracing of lines which in adulthood would duplicate the lines in the face of his father. She could see the set of his chin. She thought of his father's face, the quiet, the resoluteness, the firmness. She found herself missing that—the steadiness with which John Rourke's infrequent life at home had provided her.
She watched the valley, the impromptu-appearing Brigand encampment there, pickup trucks sheltered with tarps, and motorcycles, these, too, covered—covered better than her children.
The sleet had begun to stream down from thegray-blue skies more than two hours earlier. Sarah had quickly led the horses—the children mounted on her husband's horse, Sam—up and away from the low valley now below her.
For she had seen the Brigands already, heard their vehicles, their laughter and shouts, felt the fear they always made her feel. She had tethered Sam and Tildie, then wrapped the children in their blankets and in hersas well. Now she sat, huddled in an incongruously feminine woolen jacket, on two saddle blankets spread over the bare rock. She was freezing with the cold.
She looked away from the Brigand camp below. There were perhaps a dozen of them, a small force by comparison to some she had seen, almost encountered. She looked instead at the faces of Michael and Annie, trying to remember the last time she had seen either child really play. Not on the offshore island where they had hidden from the Soviet troops in Savannah. But at the Mulliner farm. The children had played there. Mary Mulliner had ...
Sarah looked down at herself, the rifle across her blue-jeaned thighs. She had worn a dress at the Mulliner farm much of the time, slept in a warm bed at night, worn a nightgown. The children—they had run with the dog Mary kept, forgetting the times they'd run from wild dogs.
There was Mary's son; he fought with the Resistance against the Soviet Army. And the Resistance would have ways of reaching Army Intelligence. If John had gone to Texas near the Louisiana border, as the intelligence man in Savannah had told her, then Mary's son would have a way of contacting John, of letting him know. . . .
She hugged her knees close to her chin, watching the faces of her children; there was little happines in them. But there would be happiness again.
Suddenly, desperately, she wanted to be rid oi her rifle, rid of her war of nerves with every strange sound in the night, rid of the worry.
Her eyes closed, she imagined herself, in her borrowed dress, living at the Mulliner farm, living like a person again.
She opened her eyes, gazing down at the valley. The Brigands—they would rob, kill, rape her if they guessed her presence. But they would leave eventually. If she
turned north, despite the storm, she could reach Mt, Eagle, Tennessee in a matter of days. Texas was farther away than that—farther away. Sarah Rourke closed her eyes again, trying to forget the Brigands and see the faces of her children, playing.
But instead, in her mind all she could see was the face of her husband, John Thomas Rourke.
"These are all the reports, Catherine; there is nothing fresh from the radio room?"
"There is nothing fresh from the communications center, Comrade General,"
the young woman answered him.
Varakov looked up from the sheaves of open file folders littering his desk, into Catherine's young eyes. "I love the way, girl, that you correct me—communications center it is, then." He slammed his fist—heavily and slowly—down on the last of the file folders he'd opened, then stared at the desk. Nothing concretely showed that Natalia, his niece, was safe.
"Comrade General?"
Ishmael Varakov looked up at the young secretary again. "Yes, I worry over Major Tiemerovna. I would worry over you, too, I think because I tend to feel like everyone's father. When one reaches my age, girl, he feels that way. You may, too, someday. Now leave me. You have,"—he looked at the watch on his tree limb-sized wrist—"you have gone with little sleep for three days, I think. Each time that I call you, you are here— and that is impossible if you go off duty to sleep. You will
be of no use as my secretary in the hospital. You are off duty for twenty-four hours. Go and sleep, Catherine." Varakov felt mildly proud of himself for remembering her name.
"But, Com—"
She didn't finish what she started to say, and as he looked at her, she averted her eyes downward, her long-fingered hands with the plain nails clutching the steno pad in front of her at the waistline of her skirt.
"You mean well—to help me. It is more than you do your duty; you are a friend, Catherine. And that is too valuable a commodity to waste. Sleep—I order you that. You will obey me."
She stood very straightly—too straight to be comfortable, Varakov thought—then answered him. "Yes, Comrade General."
"You are a good person—go." He looked down at his desk, hearing her too-low heels clicking across the museum floor. He looked up after her once; her skirt was still too long. He would mention it again to Natalia to tell the girl. It would be better for a woman to mention such a thing.
"Natalia," he whispered.
Was she alive?
As best he could piece together from the fragmentary reports of the Florida evacuation, Natalia had been with Rourke, working to save the last of the refugees near Miami. The last Soviet report had indicated seeing Natalia and Rourke on the field with a group of older American men and women. Minutes after that, according to high-altitude observation planes, the final shock wave had apparently taken place, the Florida peninsula had broken up and—Varakov hammered his fist down on the desk, stood
