The Quest

by Jerry Ahern

  Rubenstein was pointing into the tall, widely spaced stand of pines in the backlot. “Colfax, a white-haired guy with a crewcut?”

  “Yeah—I think so,” Rourke shouted back over the rain.

  “He’s out there,” Rubenstein said, breathless sounding. “I saw him—must have heard us coming up and took off. You said he has heart trouble, that’s why he quit the astronaut program?”

  “Yeah,” Rourke answered.

  “Then we’d better hurry and stop him. I’m not sure, but either he’s got a funny way of running or he was holding both hands over his chest.”

  “My God!” Rourke shouted, already breaking into a dead run for the trees, “Get your bike and come on,” Rourke snapped over his shoulder. Rourke hit the tree line, his right hand curling around one of the narrow pine trunks, stopping, swinging around the trunk, scanning the woods right and left. He spotted movement, then saw a white-haired man running up the steeply sloping grade a hundred yards deeper into the pines.

  “Colfax!” he shouted over the drumming of the rain. “Colfax! Jim Colfax. I’m an American. I don’t want to hurt you. I’m here to help.” The man started running.

  Shaking his head, Rourke glanced behind him for Rubenstein and the bike, saw him coming and yelled, ‘”Over here—toward the slope, Paul,” then started running through the trees, dodging the sparse brush, jumping deadfalls, his feet slipping in the mud, catching himself on his hands, pushing to his feet and continuing to run. Rourke could see Colfax up ahead, see Rubenstein zig-zagging through the trees trying to cut Colfax off. “Colfax! Wait, man!” Rourke shouted, stopping, scanning the trees ahead, spotting the white hair, then starting to run again.

  Rourke missed a deadfall, half stumbled, and caught himself, slithering across the mud, then get­ting half to his feet. Rubenstein was at the far edge of the woods, and Colfax was running laterally to Rourke’s left along the slope.

  Shaking his head, Rourke picked himself up and started running. “Colfax—wait!”

  Colfax turned, started running again and, as Rourke started to shout once more, Rourke could see the white-haired, athletic man stumble and fall, rolling down the slope, his body slithering across the red mud of clay wash and colliding against a tree stump and stopping.

  “Over here!” Rourke shouted to Rubenstein, waving his left arm as he ran toward Colfax.

  Rourke dropped to his knees in the mud, lifting Colfax’s face to feel for a pulse.

  There was none. “The Eden Project,” Rourke whispered. The white-haired man’s eyelids rolled open as the head sank from Rourke’s hands.

  “Can’t you do anything?”

  Rourke looked up at the face belonging to the voice. “No, Paul—if I had a hospital or a trained cardiac team—maybe I could start the heart again. He was dead before I reached him. The eyelids just came open as a reflex action when I bent his head away. He’s gone.”

  “Then what’s up there—what’s the Eden Project, John?”

  Rourke set the white-haired man’s head down on the ground, closing the eyelids with his thumbs, then stood and stared up at the gray sky, rain washing across his face.

  He clapped Rubenstein on the shoulder, starting back toward Rubenstein’s bike. “The Russians’ll bury him.” Then, “What’s up there, hmmm? Cheer up, Paul, maybe it isn’t a doomsday machine or a weapon of some sort. Who knows—maybe the Eden Project is something that’ll do some good. Maybe.” Rourke almost repeated “who knows” but a wry smile crossed his lips. The last man who knew was dead.

  Chapter 42

  The Russians came, ransacking the house, search­ing the woods. Rourke and Rubenstein had com­pleted searching the house long before Reed had arrived, gone with Reed to a place of concealment on high ground in a cleft of rocks long before the Soviet helicopter’s whirring had filled the air and drowned out the rain.

  “I guess I can tell you,” Reed said.

  Rourke looked at him, then hunched back more into the rock, not bothering to watch the Russians anymore. He lighted one of his cigars, trying to shake the dampness in his clothing and in his bones. “Tell me what?”

  “Well—before I do—Fulsom. We used my radio. He wanted to do something for you. He’s got a con­tact in the Resistance up in Tennessee. Hadn’t said anything to you because he didn’t want to get any false hopes up. Got a message out last night before the raid and the Resistance man in Tennessee prom­ised he’d check around. Fulsom just had a feeling about it. Made me call in on their frequency. Well, guy owns a farm, his wife is the aunt of the only sur­vivor of the Jenkins family you mentioned. The guy was a retired Army sergeant. His son, anyway, just joined up with him, got wounded last night. They talked. Sarah and your kids are up at his farm—been there the last few days.”

  Rourke pushed away from the rocks. The cigar fell from his mouth, burning at his trousers as he brushed it away. “Where,” Rourke said, grasping Reed’s collar.

  “Here.” Reed handed Rourke a dirty, folded Ten­nessee highway map. “It’s marked—up near some place called Mt. Eagle in the mountains. You know it.”

  “What,” Rourke said absently, not even opening the map, just staring at it in his hands. “Yeah, Mt. Eagle, yeah, I know it.”

  “John, thank God.”

  Rubenstein threw his arms around Rourke, and Rourke slapped the younger man on the back.

  “Reed,” Rourke stammered. “Fulsom—can you thank him for me, will you—?”

  “I’ll see him. Just in case, I’m leaving Paul the radio set we have and some spare parts from the kit. You want to contact us, the frequency’ll be marked. One other thing.”

  “Yeah,” Rourke said, already standing at the edge of the rocks and staring down at the departing Russian troops. There was a small residual team up in the woods, carrying out the rubber bagged body of Colfax. “Looks like they’re going to give him a decent burial anyway.”

  “John, they’ll think maybe you found out before Colfax died. The Russians’ll want you. They want to know what the Eden Project was—almost more than we do. And you were right about that traitor—looks there’s someone in Chambers’s advisors who works for the Communists.”

  Almost disinterested, Rourke stuck out his hand. Reed took it. “I’ll be seeing you, Captain. Say good­bye to your men for me, huh?” Then, turning to Paul, Rourke said, “I’ll have Sarah cook you the best meal in the world at the retreat. I’ll see you there as soon as I can get them back.”

  “Sure, John—hey, John?”

  Rourke turned and looked at the younger man.

  “If something goes wrong, just—”

  “It won’t,” Rourke said, smiling and snatching up his CAR-15. “It won’t.”

  Chapter 43

  It was dark, cold, raining still and the roads slick as Rourke turned off the highway and into the mountain passes. It had been a fool’s play taking what had once been the Interstate, but the fastest route. He’d dodged a Russian roadblock perhaps seventy-five miles back, then taken to the Interstate again.

  The farm where Sarah was staying was less than twenty miles ahead according to the map.

  Rourke passed a farm house, a demolished sand­bag fence crumbling around it, the roof burnt off, and no signs of light or life in the rainy darkness.

  He traveled on past dense woods, higher into the mountains, and saw a yellow light in the darkness. Rourke checked the map with the flickering blue-yellow flame of the Zippo, stopped and stared at the yellow light, lighting one of his small cigars and keeping the smoke cupped under his left hand as he stared past the darkness.

  Sarah—he remembered the last time they had made love, just before he had gone to Canada just a few days before the night of the war. They had decided to try again. His passion, as she called it, for guns, for planning for disaster, for studying sur­vivalism had been the undoing, she’d said so often, but she had been willing to try again, to see somehow if the two of them could resolve his plan­ning for the inevitable with her yearning for peace. He re
membered the look and smell of her dark hair, the gray-green eyes. He stared up at the starless sky, rain bathing his face. He remembered kissing her in the rain and how she tasted.

  And there would be Michael, just six, but a man in so many ways already, the best of Sarah and the best of himself. And little Annie, four, small, beautiful, prone to too many tears and bizarre, but lovely laughter. Annie.

  Rourke chewed down on the cigar butt, turned the bike toward the light and searched the trees for a path, found one and took the motorcycle across the field, the rain driving harder now.

  Rourke stopped the jet-black Harley, kicked out the stand and dismounted, walking through the sloshing mud toward the small porch, the light—yellow and warm looking in the darkness—from a kitchen ceiling fixture. They ap­parently had a generator of their own, Rourke thought almost mechanically.

  A dog barked, but not the howl of a wild one, and he stepped to the door and knocked. The door opened, the small porch flooded in the yellow light, and a red-haired boy in his mid-teens stood, his left arm in a sling and a pistol in his right hand.

  “Relax, son,” Rourke almost whispered, seeing the older woman behind him. More to the woman than the boy, Rourke said, “I’m John Rourke. Are you Mary?”

  The woman nodded.

  “My wife, Sarah—my boy, Michael—my daughter, Annie? I’ve come for them.”

  “Oh, my God,” the woman said, tears welling up in her eyes and streaming down her cheeks.

  Rourke said nothing.

  “She was worried about you. I offered that she could stay, or at least leave the little boy and girl here after what she did for my sister’s girl. I offered.”

  “Where are they?” Rourke whispered, staring down at the woman into the yellow light framing her just past the doorway, rain dripping from his face and hair, the light making him somehow lighthead­ed, around his eyes, and in his throat a tight feeling coming.

  “She wouldn’t—wanted to go look for you. Back into Georgia. She left this morning—”

  “Horseback?” Rourke asked, his voice funny sounding.

  “Yes—one for her, one for the boy and girl, and one for their things.”

  “Armed?” Rourke asked, the tight feeling grow­ing in him.

  “An AR-15 that somebody converted to full auto and a rubber-gripped .45 pistol,” the red-haired boy said.

  “Are they well? No one had been injured?” Rourke asked as though filling out a report.

  “Fine—healthy—nothin’ wrong with ‘em I reckon,” the woman stammered.

  “Toward Georgia, you said,” Rourke asked. “Any idea of the route?”

  “I think she was gonna take the old highway that runs along the Interstate, you know it,” the boy with the red hair said.

  “Yes—thank you—and thank you, ma’am. We’ll never forget your kindness. Should she come back before I find her—her and the children—keep her here. And you, son,” Rourke said to the red-haired boy, his words hard now, “if she ever does, or you hear of where she is or where she’s been, get the Resistance to contact Army Intelligence in Texas. Somehow.”

  “Yes, sir,” the boy stammered, straightening his shoulders.

  “Good night, ma’am,” Rourke said to the woman named Mary.

  Wringing her hands on the floral-print apron she wore, she whispered. “God bless you and let you find them.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Rourke said, forcing a smile, turning, walking down from the porch. He stopped by the Harley, the rain falling in sheets.

  He was glad the woman hadn’t asked him to stay. She’d known, he felt, that he wouldn’t.

  This morning—gone. Rourke sank to his knees in the mud beside the Harley, his lips drawn back, star­ing up at the lightless sky. “Why!” he shouted.

  Rourke climbed up from his knees, realizing some of the wetness on his face wasn’t the rain, mounted the motorcycle, kicked up the stand, balanced the machine with his feet out of the mud ruts and throttled up as fast as he dared in the rutted field leading back toward the road.

  He passed through the trees, turned back onto the country road, watched the rain in his single headlight, and gunned the Harley into the darkness, screaming, “Why!”

  -End-