by Ahern, Jerry
Rourke stood up from the rock on which he had again seated himself, then started back toward camp. More of the Germans had trickled in but they seemed, like their international counterparts from Eden One and Eden Two, only obsessed with giving themselves terminal neck injuries by staring skyward at the helicopter guards and vying for the first glimpse of Eden Three.
Rourke moved through the camp, returning the nods and smiles from Eden personnel, walking toward the tent in which Michael and Paul were recovering from then-injuries. He glanced upward—Natalia’s helicopter hovered virtually overhead. Rourke had memorized its fuselage number. Rourke knocked on the tent pole and waited. The flap opened. Sarah. She smiled at him, her gray-green eyes holding a warmth in them that Rourke felt happy to see again.
“Hi.”
“Hi—you look tired. But you look pretty.”
“The tired part I’ll agree with. Come on in,” and she held open the tent flap for him and Rourke stepped through and inside. The walls and ceiling of the classic shaped military tent diffused yellow light in the darkness, the darkness otherwise unbroken except for a single Coleman lamp which burned on the table set between the two beds.
“Father Rourke.” Madison smiled, looking up at him from where she knelt on the tent floor beside Michael’s cot. Michael appeared to be asleep. “He rests well. The wonderful medicine of the German doctor—it seems to be working.”
Sarah, beside him now, whispered, “It’s working on both of them.”
“Don’t talk about me as though I weren’t here.” Rourke looked toward the voice, into the shadows on the opposite side of the table. Paul Rubenstein—awake. On the tent floor, curled up in a sleeping bag, seeming impossibly small, Rourke saw his daughter, Annie. “She’s asleep,” Paul whispered to him.
“You’re supposed to be asleep.” Rourke laughed.
“Look,” Sarah began, her voice low. “I’m going to find something to eat. Madison hasn’t eaten since yesterday afternoon and neither have I.”
“Didn’t anybody bring you anything? I made certain someone would. I’ll—”
“One of the Eden people did,” Sarah interrupted, “but I was changing one of Paul’s bandages and Madison wasn’t hungry. So Annie ate it all.”
“Wonderful—what a kid.” Rourke grinned. “I’ll keep an eye on things here. Give Madison an airing too.”
“All right,” and Sarah turned to speak to the blond-haired girl who was her de facto daughter-in-law. “Come on—buy you breakfast.”
“Buy?”
“Never mind—come on,” and Sarah reached down to
Madison and took the younger woman’s hand and helped her to stand. Rourke noted that Madison looked stiff from lack of movement. The girl brushed her blond hair back from her face and smiled. “John,” Sarah began. “We’ll be ten minutes—that OK?” “It’s fine, Sarah.”
Sarah only nodded, then still holding Madison by the hand, exited past the tent flap, letting the flap fall back closed behind them.
Rourke sat down on the canvas camp chair beside the table and let his eyes become more accustomed to the light. He looked to his son. Michael was breathing evenly, regularly. And then Rourke heard Paul’s voice. “Thanks— for saving my life, John. Again. You have a real problem breaking habits—you seem to save my life all the time.”
Rourke let himself smile. “Best friends are hard to find, buddy.”
“Sarah was telling me about the Nazis.”
“They’re Germans, Paul. They just call themselves Nazis—lack of a better term.”
“I’m a Jew—so maybe I can’t be too objective. You really trust this guy Mann?”
“I think I do—but I’ll plan ahead just in case I find that I can’t.”
“So what’s the deal with him?”
Rourke wanted to relight his cigar—but he didn’t. The smell might awaken Michael or Annie. “Basically, he’s involved in a sort of palace revolution against somebody he refers to as the leader—very Hitlerian type, it seems. You wouldn’t like the guy.”
“Touche.” Paul laughed.
“Anyway—Mann promises to help us out against Karamatsov if we help him out in his revolution. And I’m elected.”
“Argentina?”
“Yeah, hear it’s lovely this time of year.”
“Even with this miracle what’s-it they sprayed on my wounds—”
“You won’t be able to come,” Rourke finished for him. “Natalia?”
“Probably.” Rourke nodded. “Maybe Kurinami and Halverson—back-up on the outside for us. Couldn’t very well get a black woman and a Japanese man to pass for Germans that easily. Natalia’s a logical choice—if she doesn’t speak German, I’d be very surprised.”
“And of course you speak German?”
“Not well—I’ll get by.” Rourke nodded, his voice low. He watched Annie as she slept—he envied the peacefulness of her face. She was very pretty and he was very proud of her. “She’s a hell of a girl—you take care of her while I’m gone.”
“Maybe Dodd can marry us—you know, captain of a ship and all that—I love her.” And then Paul laughed. “You’ll be my father-in-law.”
“Hmm,” Rourke murmured.
“I mean it—it’s, ahh, all right?”
Rourke studied his hands for a moment. He didn’t look at Paul as he spoke. “You and Annie—if you have a daughter some day, you’ll know what I mean. But a man has a daughter, and you can’t help thinking about what kinda guy she’ll marry. You know—God help the son of a bitch if he harms a hair on her head, will he love her as much as you do—like that. Well, with you I don’t have to worry. And no, you can’t marry her—until I get back so I can give the bride away.”
Paul Rubenstein laughed. “So—what you want us to do while you’re gone—start building a new world or what?” Rubenstein laughed again. “It really does hurt when I laugh.”
Rourke looked at the younger man and just shook his head. “No, I think the Eden Project people have their own plans for our brave new world. You just keep an eye on
what’s happening and keep them out of trouble. You should be up and around on a limited capacity in the next few days—Doctor Munchen and Doctor Hixon‘11 both be looking after you. Get Michael rolling again as soon as he’s able. The two of you—and you’ve got more experience— make sure Michael understands that. He’s got his father’s ego. Just keep an eye on things and don’t interfere unless what they start to do is impossibly stupid. Ohh, and keep after Michael to teach Madison more with her driving. And you work on her marksmanship or get Annie to help. If Michael takes care of it alone, Madison‘11 be running around with .44 Mags just like he does.” Rourke laughed.
“Four of you—I don’t like it,” Paul began.
“Don’t change the subject—we’ll be fine down there. You just make sure you’re well enough to go with me after Karamatsov and his men when I get back. You and Natalia and me—it’ll take the three of us. And I don’t like involving her in it.”
Paul Rubenstein said, lowering his voice, “You didn’t know—that Karamatsov stayed alive was a miracle. He should have been dead that day on the street in Athens.”
“Miracle?” John Rourke stared at his friend. “No—my stupidity maybe. But not a miracle. I’m no theologian, but I somehow don’t think Karamatsov qualifies for a miracle. This time when I do find him—only a miracle could keep him alive.” And John Rourke stood up. “This time I’ll be sure.”
Chapter Six
John Rourke had waited for the red-haired girl named Mona Stankiewicz—but it had been no good. Bone tired, he had asked Akiro Kurinami, “Look—there’s a girl supposed to come by and see me. Ask her if it can wait. And if it can’t, wake me up, huh? Otherwise, let me catch a few hours.”
Kurinami, who had set a folding canvas chair, outside the tent earlier and had been reading technical manuals when Rourke had approached, had agreed, moved his chair from in front of the tent he shared with six others and placed it outsid
e Rourke’s, then said, “Of course.”
Rourke had passed inside to the tent, checked his blankets—he would have been happy to find an insect or a snake—and then sat down on the edge of the cot and untied his combat boots, pulled off his socks, shrugged out of the bomber jacket and the shoulder rig, then laid down.
Mona Stankiewicz called across the dried, caked mud ruts toward the tent front. “Akiro—you see Doctor Rourke? That’s his tent, isn’t it?”
“He is asleep. He was very tired. Are you the one who was coming to see him?”
She had narrowed the distance to the tent front—she was close enough now as she stopped to read upside-down a
portion of the page of technical manual that lay on Kurinami’s lap. “He put in a hard day yesterday, I guess. You tell him I’ll come back. I guess it can keep a while longer.”
“I’ll wake him up—if it’s important, Mona.”
“No, no, Akiro—it’s fine. Just tell him I was by. Maybe he can look me up.”
And she gave Akiro Kurinami a smile and started back across the compound. Kurinami was a funny sort, she’d always felt. People talked about the Japanese as being quiet, humorless, sober people. She smiled thinking about it—the time Kurinami had put one of those rubber air-filled cushions that when compressed sounded like someone passing gas—the time Kurinami had put it in Captain Dodd’s chair when Dodd had stood up to deliver part of a briefing. And then Captain Dodd had sat down. Kurinami had been the only one with a straight face—at least for thirty seconds.
But she had heard Dodd say once, “Kurinami’s a damned good pilot. Lucky for us he wasn’t alive during World War II.”
Mona Stankiewicz had nowhere to go—but there was one place she didn’t want to go. Near the just-landed Eden Three. She was sort of engaged to one of the sleepers aboard Eden Three—and she wanted to see him very badly. But after she told John Rourke what she had to tell him and only him, her man on Eden Three probably wouldn’t want to talk with her—let alone love her.
She kept walking, heading away from the camp, passing one of the Germans—the man smiled at her and gave her the sort of salute polite military men sometimes gave civilians. She smiled back and used her one German phrase, “Guten tag.”
The man smiled again and said something that ended with “Fraulein” as he passed her.
She kept walking. Her legs tired easily, she had no
ticed—but she imagined that in a few more days, her normal stamina would start to return. Captain Dodd had exercise programs already organized for them. But she had excused herself from them as had most of the women. And for the same reason; after awakening, she had begun to menstruate, more heavily than she ever had. And some kinds of movements just weren’t pleasant at all.
She found the rock John Rourke had been sitting on when she had approached him earlier in the day, and she sat down on it herself, brushing her hair back from her face when an errant gust of wind blew it in front of her eyes.
“John Rourke.” She said his name aloud. He was a very handsome man. Tall. Muscular but not heavy—more massive than lean. He had dark hair, neatly trimmed—she wondered who cut it for him. His forehead was high, but naturally so—not from hair loss, she thought, because his hair seemed thick, healthy. There were a few strands of silver grey in the short sideburns, perhaps more noticeable because of the deep brownness of the rest of his hair. There was talk about him throughout the camp, most of the women talking about him as being good looking and did you see the way he looked at the Russian woman and the way she looked back at him and the way his wife looked at them both? But some of the women talked about—he was good looking. He had a texture in his voice that you could almost feel touch you.
But there was a warmth in his eyes when he took off his sunglasses.
But she would have thought that a man in his position would have grown a beard—she wondered why he hadn’t? It looked like he shaved every day. Even her father when she had been a little girl wouldn’t shave on his days off.
She found herself smiling. Perhaps John Rourke never had a day off.
She considered what she knew about him—from what
Dodd and Craig Lerner had told her, from what Elaine Halversen had said.
John Rourke had been a Doctor of Medicine before joining the Central Intelligence Agency—the three words chilled her. After he had left the—left it—he had taught survivalism and weapons training all over the world, even written books on the subject. He had never practiced medicine on a regular basis. But she understood from what Doctor Hixon had said that at least as far as Hixon could tell from the surgery John Rourke had performed on his son Michael Rourke, Rourke was very good—very good.
And that amazed her—that he had a son nearly as old as he was, and a daughter too.
She had heard about what Rourke had done to save his friend—it was a Jewish sounding name and she couldn’t remember it—climbing from one helicopter to another one when tlje second helicopter was already on fire and about to explode.
It was part of the reason she wanted to talk with him—to explain it to him rather than Capt. Christopher Dodd. John Rourke sounded like the sort of man that legends were built around. Christopher Dodd was a good man, a strong man—but Christopher Dodd wasn’t that sort of a man.
It would have to be John Rourke.
Mona Stankiewicz heard movement behind her—maybe it was … “Ohh—it’s you. Where—where?” It was a gun and she knew she should be hearing something because it had just been fired, but she didn’t hear it. It was because her attention was focused on the burning in her chest. And then her head felt as if it were going to explode.
Chapter Seven
John Rourke opened his eyes. It sounded … like a woman screaming? He threw his bare feet over the side of the cot.
It wouldn’t be a dream—he didn’t dream anymore. A woman …
“Doctor Rourke! John!” The tent flap flew open. It was Kurinami. “A woman screamed. I—” ‘
“Yeah.” Rourke licked his lips—they were dry. “I’m right behind you.”
Rourke pushed himself up, grabbing up the double Alessi rig, ripping first one, then the second of the twin stainless Detonics .45s from it, barefoot now, running through the tent opening, stuffing one pistol in each hip pocket of his faded Levi’s, running.
He squinted against the fading light—he had left his sunglasses in the tent. But he could see Kurinami ahead of him running. Kurinami stopped, six feet or so from the body of a woman.
Rourke kept running. The wind played at the hair on the head of the prostrate body—the hair was red, more red than auburn.
It was Mona Stankiewicz.
Rourke passed Kurinami, skidding to his knees on the caked mud and gravel and sand, slowly raising the woman’s head in his hands. Two bullet wounds—one in the
center of the chest, another perhaps an inch from the heart.
The woman’s eyelids fluttered as Rourke held her head across his thighs, his hands cradling her there. “Don’t try to talk.”
The eyelids opened. The eyes were very beautiful. They held neither fear nor pain. Peace, he would have almost said. And then Mona Stankiewicz’s lips moved and Rourke bent his head to her mouth to hear her words. Kurinami knelt beside him now. “So-Soviet—Soviet agent—did this… .” The eyelids didn’t close. The pulse Rourke had purchased a finger against in her neck stopped.
“The Soviet agent,” Kurinami murmured. Rourke looked up—others were around them—Dodd, Lerner, Elaine Halverson, Sarah.
Dodd spoke—his voice was very soft, very low. “That flashy i looking automatic pistol Major Tiemerovna carries in that shoulder holster—isn’t it fitted—”
“With a silencer,” Rourke finished for him. The Stankiewicz woman had been shot twice—but the only sound had been her scream. Rourke looked back to Dodd, at the man’s eyes. “If Natalia had done it, she would have been neater about it.”
John Rourke closed the Stankiewicz woman’s eyes.
They were a very light shade of brown with what seemed like green flecks in them.
Chapter Eight
Examining the dead was never pleasant—especially when the dead person was someone you had known in life, John Thomas Rourke reflected. He had observed at the autopsy performed by Doctor Hixon of Eden One and Doctor Munchen, the physician attached to the military command of Wolfgang Mann. Rourke had urged Munchen’s presence on the assumption that a military doctor’s knowledge of gunshot wounds might be useful. >
But as Hixon had opened the body, Rourke peering past him, it was all too obvious. She had been shot at close range by an indifferent marksman. The bullets extracted from her were clearly of 9mm diameter and little deformed. Rourke judged them as being fired from a .380. Whoever had killed her had thought to pick up empty brass from the ground nearby.
Natalia carried a .380 stainless Walther PPK/S in her shoulder holster. And as Dodd had observed at the murder scene, it was fitted with a suppressor.
Dodd, observing at the autopsy, said slowly, “What more do you want, Dr. Rourke? Mona Stankiewicz named a Russian agent as her murderer. She was shot with what you call a .380—”
“9mm Browning Short,” Rourke whispered.
“And the pistol was evidently fitted with a silencer since nobody heard a shot. Major Tiemerovna is a Russian
agent—”
“Was!” Rourke snapped, his voice low.
“Fine—was. But she might easily be identified as a Russian agent by a dying woman who might not have been able to recall her name. Major Tiemerovna carries a pistol with a silencer in that shoulder holster of hers. What kind of pistol is it—the caliber?”
“.380, 9mm Browning Short—one and the same.”
“And the gun that was used to kill Mona Stankiewicz is one and the same with the gun owned by Major Tiemerovna.”
