The End is Coming

by Jerry Ahern

  Beside him, as Rourke lit a cigar, was Paul Rubenstein, the younger man leaning against the counter. Rourke glanced at his friend—tired, worn from loss of blood. Rourke had inspected the wound—there had been little progress, almost none—but it was healing, and with the reduced level of activity would heal completely, he felt.

  “I still say—”

  Rourke looked at Rubenstein again. “No. With that wound—well, you know. But even if you didn’t have the wound, I’d leave you here. Who the hell is gonna take care of Sarah and Michael and Annie for me? There’s no one else I’d trust if there were somebody else around.”

  “So it’s you and Natalia against whatever the hell her uncle’s throwing you at?”

  Rourke chewed down on his cigar. “Yeah—I guess that’s the way of it.”

  “If you—”

  “Don’t come back—I can’t tell you what to do. You’re the best friend I ever had—in some ways, I guess, maybe the only one. You do what you think is best and it’ll be the best—it sounds stupid to say it, but I have faith in you—I really do,” and Rourke looked at his friend and smiled. . . .

  It had taken Natalia long to change, he realized. She appeared from the bathroom wearing what John Rourke had come, subconsciously, to con­sider her battle gear—a tight-fitting black jump­suit, nearly knee-high medium-heeled boots, the double-flap holster rig on her belt with the L-

  Frame Smiths bearing the American Eagles en­graved on the barrel flats. He could see the guns as she opened each holster in turn and checked the cylinders, then reholstered the revolvers and resecured the holster flaps.

  As she walked across the Great Room, he saw that she too wore additional armament—the COP Derringer was not to be seen, but the little four-barreled .357 Magnum would be in her purse—the massive black canvas bag she almost invariably carried. But on her belt was a Gerber Mk II, the sheath apparently specially made, black, efficient-looking, the knife’s handle material and the brass double-quillon guard betraying it as the Presenta­tion series variation—just as efficient as the more subdued-looking Gerber Rourke now wore, but prettier.

  She wore a shoulder rig he had never seen be­fore—not something designed for concealment, but a field rig. Under her right armpit was a small black-handled knife, hanging upside down in a black leather sheath—he guessed a Gerber Guard­ian, the tiny boot knife similar in size to his Sting I A. Under her left armpit, balancing the rig, was what he recognized as a stainless steel Walther PPK/S, hanging upside down like the knife, pro­truding through the upside of the holster a stain­less steel-looking—it could have been some type of aluminum—silencer, perhaps six inches long and the approximate diameter of a silver dollar. She saw him looking at it— “I had the silencer specially built—aircraft aluminum but very strong. The baffles need changing after every five hundred rounds or so—there’s no slide lock, but I had the recoil spring altered so it functions perfectly with subsonic ammunition. It’s very quiet that way—almost like a whisper. But with the regular recoil spring, like I have in it now, it handles 95-grain Hollow Points and it sounds about like a belch. I tested it a lot, but never used it in the field. In case we need a relatively silent shot, this should do it.”

  He saw Sarah looking at him—she stood beside Natalia.

  He walked over to the two women, his right arm around Sarah, his left around Natalia. He drew both women close. There was no need to say what he felt.

  Chapter Thirty

  Natalia behind him, they had ridden in silence on Rourke’s machine to the hidden aircraft. Like Rourke, she had carried two assault rifles, but both of hers were M-16s. As they worked now to remove the camouflage netting from the proto­type F-111, she spoke. “What will you do, John?”

  “About what your uncle has to tell us?”

  “No—about Sarah and about me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You love her—and she loves you—it’s plain to see for—”

  “She said the same thing about you,” Rourke said, stopping what he was doing, looking at her. “That she could tell I love you, and that you love me.”

  “And what did you say to her—if I can ask?”

  “I told her—well, I guess pretty much what I told you.” He chewed down hard on his cigar. “Paul is a fine man.”

  He watched her eyes in the darkness—another day was coming soon, the horizon pink with it in the east, chain lightning crackling across the sky there.

  “Is that what you want—for me, for him?” Na­talia asked, turning away from the plane, lighting a cigarette for herself.

  “No,” Rourke sighed. “I’m just saying it.”

  “This is a strange situation, John—silly, sad—all at once. If you had met me before you’d met Sarah, and then met Sarah later, I think we’d be talking about the same thing, wouldn’t we?”

  Rourke looked back at the fuselage of the jet. He nodded. “Yeah.”

  “I learned some things about myself tonight—when you read my uncle’s letter.”

  “Look—”

  “No—let me finish.”

  Rourke nodded only, lighting his cigar with the battered Zippo that bore his initials—he turned it over in his hands, feeling the engraving for the ini­tials under his thumb. “So say it.”

  “How much my uncle loves me—it doesn’t mat­ter that he isn’t really my uncle—he is my uncle. And Paul—I don’t know how it feels to be a Jew, but I am one—half, at least. The way he reached out and held my hand when you read that part of my uncle’s letter. And Sarah—she felt for me, about my mother and father dying. My uncle had always told me it had been an accident.”

  “You never checked?”

  “I never saw any reason to—I guess that I was naive.”

  Rourke walked over to stand beside her, finding her left hand in the darkness, holding it tight.

  “And about you—I learned a lot about you,” she whispered. “That you really love me the same way you love her. That I could be a wife, a mother—that because of what I am and what I did sometimes—that—”

  Rourke held her against his chest in the dark­ness.

  It was insane. General Varakov had spoken as though the world would end. The lightning tracked across the sky.

  But his only thought was that he loved two women—he realized now—equally.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Sarah Rourke watched the man she had just met—he was younger than she, she guessed. She fixed a drink for him—Seagram's Seven and ice—and a drink for herself. Her husband’s taste in liq­uor was as exciting and varied as his taste in women’s clothing. If someone at the Retreat didn’t like blended whiskey—and it was her favorite blended whiskey— they were out of luck.

  “Good thing you’re not a Scotch drinker,” she called out to Paul Rubenstein, forcing a smile.

  “Yeah—good thing,” he nodded.

  He was sitting in the sofa in what she had learned was called the Great Room. As she picked up his drink and her own, she sipped at hers briefly, studying the kitchen. “A microwave oven—God,” and she felt herself smile. It would be good to cook again. Really cook.

  She left the kitchen, walking down the three steps into the Great Room, setting Paul’s drink down in front of him on the coffee table on a coaster, then sitting down at the farthest corner of the couch from him. She tucked her legs up under her, tugging at her borrowed skirt, smoothing it over her thighs—thinking about the woman to whom it belonged. The label in it was a label she had never even considered affording before The Night of The War. And the woman—she rode with her husband through the night, to do some­thing or other that Sarah didn’t quite understand. She sipped at her drink again. Paul Rubenstein seemed nervous to her.

  “Is there something wrong?”

  He looked at her, pushing his wire-rimmed glasses up on the bridge of his nose—it seemed more than a nervous habit with him—a preoccu­pation.

  “No, Mrs. Rourke.”

  “It’s Sarah, Paul�
��call me Sarah, please.”

  “Sarah,” he nodded, picking up his drink, tak­ing a swallow of it.

  “There’s something bothering you—is it that John left you here to stay with us and—”

  “He couldn’t have taken me the way my arm is—no. That just happened. It’s not his fault—so I guess—”

  “But there’s something bothering you,” Sarah insisted. As she moved her right hand, setting her drink down on a coaster on the end table nearest her, she saw the picture of herself and the children on the far side of the couch. Near Paul Ruben-stein. She remembered when the picture was taken—they had just—

  “I, ahh—” Rubenstein began, interrupting her thoughts.

  “What?”

  “I gotta talk—I shouldn’t, ahh—” and he ex­haled loudly—too loudly. It was as though some­thing were bottled up inside him and just about to escape—she waited, listening, as she moved her hand back from her drink suddenly aware of the fact that for the first time in—how long?—she wasn’t wearing a gun, she was wearing a skirt. She sat on a comfortable couch, in a secure place.

  “I think we’re going to be friends, Paul—the children really seemed to take to you. And I think—well—I think, so did I—you can tell me—sometimes just telling somebody is—”

  He stood up—too quickly she guessed, because she saw him touch at his left arm as he walked be­hind the couch and stood beside the glass-front gun case—there were empty spots in the case now. All she could hear was the water as it spilled down the falls at the far end of the Great Room and into the pool there. She had no idea where it came from, or where the excess water went, because the pool seemed less than three feet deep—a mother always checked the depth of water her children would be playing near.

  Paul Rubenstein started to talk then. “Before I met your husband,” and his voice sounded slightly breathless to her, pain perhaps, but maybe not his arm. And his words were very hurried. “Well—I was just riding a desk in New York City. I had a girl—but New York isn’t there anymore and nei­ther is she. And I guess—shit—” and he turned around and stared at her, his eyes wide. “If what Natalia’s uncle talked about is right—and maybe the world ends but somehow we just go right on living—what the hell am— “ he turned away, her last glimpse of his face showing her that he seemed to be biting his lips, almost physically holding something back.

  “That you’ll be lonely,” she whispered. “I know that feeling, Paul. John has me and he has Natalia and you have no one.”

  He looked back at her, saying nothing. She watched his eyes.

  There was nothing she could say. She closed her eyes.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  General Ishmael Varakov sat at his desk in his office without walls amid the splendors of the mu­seum. He stared at the mastodons from the dis­tance.

  Two extinct creatures fighting each other in death.

  He shook his head slowly.

  Reports.

  No trace of Natalia or of the American Rourke, or of the young Jew who had accompanied Nata­lia. As if all three had disappeared from the face of the earth.

  He felt a smile cross his lips—an ironic smile, he thought.

  His feet hurt, and shoeless under his desk, his toes wiggled.

  Reports.

  There was no trace of the American Rourke’s wife and children either. Clandestinely, Varakov had been searching for them for weeks, as further inducement to Rourke—and because it was the de­cent thing, he supposed.

  Reports.

  Karamatsov’s ghost, Rozhdestvenskiy, had suc­ceeded at the Johnson Space Center. Varakov’s agent inside the KGB had verified that Rozhdest­venskiy had recovered what was presumed to be the serum and twelve of the American cham­bers. The American chambers could be compared to the Soviet chambers, the Soviet chambers modi­fied if necessary. The serum, if Varakov under­stood the way of it, would be enough for thousands.

  Reports.

  All available army units were being mustered to a central staging area near the Texas-Louisiana border. A final battle with the surviving forces of U.S. II, but not for victory, for slaughter. But not even for that, he realized—simply to keep the army preoccupied, lest the true nature of The Womb be discovered and the horrible, final decep­tion that it constituted.

  Reports.

  The small band of GRU and army personnel whom he trusted were in place, waiting. They did not know the mission, nor did they know the purpose. But to activate them without his niece and without the American Rourke would have been useless.

  They might wait, never activated, until the End.

  He stood up, heavily, slowly.

  He began to stuff his feet into his shoes, watch­ing Catherine as she slept curled up in the leather chair beside his desk. She had wanted to be with him, because dawn had been coming.

  But dawn had come and gone.

  And they both lived, at least for another day.

  He began to walk, his feet hurting him badly be­cause he had slept so little, rested so little.

  He walked to his figures of the mastodons, studying them as he did in the museum’s shadows. The building was nearly deserted. Some army functionaries, some KGB to keep Rozhdestvenskiy posted as to his—Varakov’s—actions.

  Nothing more. Soon, nothing at all.

  He looked at the battling giants, battling in death. “Marx was right about history,” he whis­pered in the darkness.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Colonel Nehemiah Rozhdestvenskiy stood in the unopened doorway of the commandeered Lear executive jet, staring through the porthole in the pressure door at the airfield and beyond it Chey­enne Mountain—The Womb.

  The Lear finally stopped its movement under him, settled as he peered out on the central eleva­tor pad. And a new sensation of movement be­gan—lowering.

  There was brilliant sun like a halo around the field as he stared through the porthole, then a flicker of darkness, shadow, and then the bril­liance of artificial, more yellow light.

  The copilot was suddenly beside him, working the controls to open the door, the door pushing outward, passenger stairs folding out automati­cally, before him as the down motion stopped.

  Commander of the North American Branch of The Committee for State Security of the Soviet, Colonel Nehemiah Gustafus Rozhdestvenskiy—he was keenly aware of who he was, what he was—looked to his blue-black uniform’s left shoulder—the green shoulder board bearing the tri­angular formation of three stars denoting him as full colonel, KGB, had a speck of dust on it. He flipped it away with his white-gloved right hand.

  Before stepping outside—the band already playing the national anthem—he glanced at him­self in the lavatory door mirror near the exit.

  His nearly knee-high black jack boots gleamed with the richness of their leather and the labor of his aide. The brass of his buttons and the buckle of his gold parade dress uniform belt caught the overhead lighting, sparkled. His medals—not all of his medals, for to wear them all would have shown a lack of taste, something he despised in others of his rank or above, something he detested in men beneath his rank—followed the line of his left lapel, plunging in a sharp angle from the uni­form above his left breast toward his belt. The red collar tabs high on his lapels, the redness of the wide band that encircled his uniform cap—he ad­justed the angle of his cap to where it dipped slightly over his left eye.

  Rozhdestvenskiy turned from the mirror, glanc­ing neither to right nor to left, stepping through the doorway, standing on the top step of the egress, raising his right hand in salute, the voices of the assembled troops raised in chorus, his own joining their voices: “Soyuz nerushimy respubliks-vobodnykh. ...”

  The hammer and sickle—he stared at it as it waved in the breezy downdraft from the elevator opening above him.

  The men—their uniforms worn proudly, the 7.62mm Kalashnikov rifles with bayonets fixed held at high port across their chests, all eyes turned as the men—more than a thousand strong—all looked
at his face.

  Still holding his salute as the strains of the So­viet national anthem died, he turned fully to face his troops.

  Smartly—so they would know how he meant it—he snapped away the salute—to them.

  Rozhdestvenskiy descended the steps, Major Revnik, his executive officer, striding forward, sa­luting as he called out in stentorian tones, “The troops are assembled, comrade colonel!”

  Rozhdestvenskiy returned the salute smartly, starting forward, Revnik falling in step to his left.

  Faces—young, healthy, strong, dedicated. Men. And ranked behind them, in white blouses and black skirts with red neckerchiefs tied at the throats of their blouses, were the women. A thou­sand strong as well—the finest and best and strongest and most beautiful.

  The men, armed, ready, the women—all were ranked in identical formations on both sides of him as he walked the length of the underground hangar bays of what once had been North Ameri­can Air Defense Headquarters—NORAD.

  Now, The Womb.

  Tanks—the massive T-72—ranked endlessly be­yond them as far as he could see.

  In the distance, he viewed the generating equip­ment for the particle beam weapons that formed their air defense and that would make them ulti­mately masters of the earth.

  Standing at the far end of the ranks as he walked, in the exact center, was a solitary young woman. In her arms was a bouquet—roses, he thought.

  He walked toward her, seeing her face, her flowing black hair—her eyes were dark, her figure exuding the radiance of health.

  Rozhdestvenskiy stopped.

  The woman stepped toward him.

  “Comrade colonel—the loyal women of the So­viet Union who have been honored by their selec­tion to perpetuate forever the noble spirit of the triumphant peoples of the State salute you!”

  She handed him the bouquet. She leaned up and kissed his left cheek and his right cheek.