it and he died."
"I'm sorry, Martha," Rourke told her genuinely. "But J cant stay."
"We have twelve policemen and they work twelve-hour shifts lately—six men
on and six off. Can you fight twelve policemen to get out of town—into a
storm?" She stroked his face with her right hand. "You need a shave. I'll
bet a hot shower would be good, and a warm bed."
Her face flushed, then she added, "In the guest room, I meant."
Rourke nodded. There was no strategic reserve site for more than a hundred
miles, and Rourke knew that he needed gasoline. The slow going in the
storm had depleted his tanks. "That gas station really has gas?" he asked
her.
"You can even use my credit card, John, if you don't have any money."
Rourke looked at her, speechless. "Credit card?" The gasoline—without it
he couldn't press the search for Sarah and the children. "All right,
Martha, I'll accept your generous invitation. Thank you." His skin crawled
when he said it.
Tildie's breath came in clouds of heavy steam. On a rise overlooking Lake
Hartwell, Sarah reined the sweating animal in. Beneath her horse's hoofs
was South Carolina and on the far shore, Georgia. In the distance, to her
left, she could make out the giant outline of the dam through the swirling
snow. And below her, on the lake, was a large flat-bottomed houseboat.
Smoke drifted from a small chimney in the center of the houseboat's roof.
She looked behind her at Michael and Annie, freezing with the cold; at
Sam, John's horse before the war and now she supposed more realistically
Michael's horse. The animal was shuddering as large clouds of steam, like
those Tildie exhaled, gushed from its nostrils. "Michael, where'd you get
that knife?" "One of the children on the island—he gave it to me." Sarah
didn't know what to say. Her son had just stabbed at a man trying to hurt
him, trying to hurt his sister. "You did the right thing, using it—but be
careful with it." She couldn't quite bring herself to tell him that she
wanted to take it away from him. tfJust be careful with it. We'll talk
about it later."
"All right," he said—slightly defensively, she thought.
beneath it slick and wet and like polished ice.
When she reached the base of the rise, the houseboat was less than thirty
feet away.
There were no mooring lines, but there were trees nearby that woulddo, she
calculated. The houseboat rose and fell with the meager tide, edgingin
toward the shore and away. Sarah visually searched the hank. At one place
the houseboat's gunwales were three feet away from the edge when the
Hat-bottomed craft drifted in. Sarah skidded down, along the red clay
toward this spot, secured her rifle, then waited, wiping imaginary sweat
from her palms as she rubbed her gloved hands along her
thighs.
The houseboat was easing in. Sarah jumped, her hand reaching out for the
line of rope that formed the rail, grabbing at it. The rope, ice-coated,
slipped from her
fingers.
She twisted her body, arching her back, throwing her weight forward,
crashing her arms down across the rope, falling, heaving over the raiJ and
sprawling across the ice-coated deck.
She lay there a moment, catching her breath, her belly aching where the
butt of the Government Model Colt had slammed against it as she fell. She
rolled onto her side, giving a brave wave toward the children, still
watching her from atop the rise. But she didn't call out because of the
smoke in the houseboat chimney—there had to be
people aboard.
Sarah tried standing up, but the deck was too slippery for her and she
fell, catching herself on her hands, the butt of the AR- slamming into
the deckboards. She crawled on hands and knees toward the door leading
inside.
Sarah looked at the houseboat again. "I'm going to see. if there's anyone
aboard that houseboat—if maybe wecan find shelter with them. Michael, you
and Annie stay here. Don't come after me. If it looks like I'm in trouble
. . . then . . ." She didn't know what to tell him. Finally she said, "Use
your ownjWgment. But wait until I come for you or you see Vm in trouble.
Understood?" rtYe$, I understand," he told her. She knew he understood;
behind you—for those people." She didn't know what else to call the wild
men and women who had attacked them.
She stepped down from Tildie, her rear end suddenly cold from leaving the
built-up warmth of the saddle. She handed Michael Tildie's reins. "Hold
her. I'm going
down there to look."
Sarah settled the AR- across her back, on its sling, then thought better
of it. She took the rifle off and held it in her right hand, a fresh
thirty-round magazine in place, the chamber loaded already. Her pistol,
John's pistol, was freshly reloaded and back against her abdomen under her
clothes. It was starting to rust a great deal; she didn't know what to do
to stop it except to oil the gun.
With her gloved left hand she tugged at the blue-and-white bandanna on her
hair, pulling it down where it had slipped up from covering her left ear.
She smiled at the children. "I love you both. Michael. Take care of
Annie." She started down from the rise, toward the houseboat. It appeared
as though there were no moorings, that something like a tide was forcing
the
boat toward shore.
She hurried as best she could, slipping several times where the iced-over
gravel was still loose, the red clay
She stopped beside the closed door and reaching around behind her, got the
AR- and worked the selector to full auto. Reaching up to it, she tried
the door handle. It opened under her hand, swinging outside to her left.
Not entering, she looked inside. A man and a woman lay on the bed at the
far corner of the large room, the sheets around them stained; the smell
assailed her nose. They were locked in each other's arms, their bodies
blue-veined and dead.
"They killed themselves," she murmured, resting her head against the
doorjamb.
Sarah Rourke wept for them—and for herself.
Settling his glasses back on the bridge of his nose, Paul Rubenstein
pulled down the bandanna covering his face as he slowed the Harley, the
snow under it slushy and wet. He looked up, and for a brief instant could
see a patch of blue beyond the fast scudding gray clouds.
"It is breaking up," Natalia said from behind him.
'"Bout time." He smiled. He suddenly had the realization of the air
temperature on his face. rtMust be twenty degrees warmer than it was when
we broke camp," he told her, looking over his right shoulder at her.
"We should be getting into my territory soon, Paul— there may not be
time," she began.
"I know; give John your love, right?"
He felt the Russian woman punch him in the back. "Yes." He heard her
laugh. "And this is for you." And he felt her hands roughly twisting his
head around, her face bumped his glasses as she kissed him full on the
lips. "I won't ask you to give that to John—that was for you." She smiled.
"Look, you don't have to—"
"To go back to my people? John and I went over that. I have to. I'm a
Russian—no matter how good my English
is, no matter how much I can sound or look like an American. I'm a
Russian. What I feel for John, what I feel for you as my friend—that will
never change. But being what I am won't change either."
"You know you're fighting on the wrong side," Rubenstein told her,
suddenly feeling himself not smiling.
"If I said the same thing to you, would you believe me? I don't mean
believe that I believed it, but believe it inside yourself?"
"No," Rubenstein said flatly.
'Then the same answer ior you, Paul. No. My people have done a great deal
of harm, but so have yours. With good men like my uncle, perhaps I can do
something—* to-"
"Make the world safe for Communism?" He laughed.
She laughed, too, saying through her laughter, "You're not the same
barefoot boy from the Big Apple that I met long ago, Paul."
He was deadly serious when he said to her, "And you're not the same person
you pretended to be then. I'll tell you what your problem is. You grew up
believing in one set of ideals and you've been realizing what you believed
in all that time was wrong. Karamatsov was the Communist, the embodiment
of—"
"I won't listen anymore, Paul." She smiled,*touching her fingers to his
lips.
"All right." He smiled, kissing her forehead as she leaned against his
chest for a moment. "Just think what a team you and John would make," he
told her then.
She looked up at him, her eyes wet. "Fighting? Always fighting? Brigands
or some other enemies?"
"That's not what I meant. You can find other ways to
be invincible together." He laughed because he'd sounded so serious, so
philosophical.
"He—he can't. And I can't."
"What if he never finds Sarah?"
"He will," she told him flatly.
Paul said again, "What if he never finds Sarah? Would you marry him?"
"That's none of your business, Paul," she said, then smiled.
"I know it isn't—but would you?"
"Yes," she said softly, then started to fumble in her bag. She took out a
cigarette and a lighter, then plunged the tip of the cigarette into the
flame with what looked to Rubenstein like a vengeance.
"Stay where you are. Raise your hands and you will not be harmed!"
Rubenstein looked ahead of them—a half-dozen Russian soldiers, greatcoats
stained with snow, and at their head a man he guessed was an officer. "You
are under arrest. Lay down your arms!"
She said it in English—he guessed so he could understand. "I am Major
Natalia Tiemerovna,"—Rubenstein thought he detected her voice catch for an
instant before she added, "of the Committee for State Security of the
Soviet."
Ill
Varakov pushed the button for his window to roll down—it was warm now, so
much warmer than it had been.
He glanced at his driver; this driver was not as good a man as Leon had
been. Varakov exhaled hard, waiting as the Soviet fighter homber taxied
across the field.
He decided to get out. "You will wait for me here." He opened the door. "I
can get out myself."
"Yes, Comrade General," the driver answered, turning around.
Varakov smiled. There was no reason to act gruffly toward the young man
simply because he was not Leon. "You may smoke if you wish, Corporal,"
Varakov added, stepping outside, then slamming the door.
Varakov snorted, stretched, and started walking toward the slowing-down
taxiing aircraft.
Was there a doomsday project that the United States had launched? Was an
end finally coming? he asked himself.
He had avoided philosophy—meticulously. Philosophy and generalship were
not compatible; they never had been.
He had lived a full life—full because of his achievements, because of the
friendships he had made, because of the daughter he had raised—not his
daughter, but his brother's daughter, Natalia.
He had done that well, he thought. The thing with Karamatsov behind her,
she would grow away from it. She would meet another man. Or had she met
him already, the American Rourke?
He shook his head.
He worried over Natalia, and the people like her, the new Russia he had
fought all his life to make survive, to make triumphant. "Doomsday," he
murmured, thinking once again about the Eden Project.
The plane stopped, the passengers' doorway opening immediately. Uniformed
Soviet soldiers rolled a ramp toward it; and already framed in the
doorway, civilian clothes as rumpled as though he had slept in them, his
blond hair tousled in the breeze, stood Rozhdestvenskiy.
Varakov walked the few extra yards toward+he foot of the steps.
Rozhdestvenskiy was already halfway down them.
"Did you learn anything, Colonel?"
The younger man stopped. "I learned it all, Comrade General—all of it."
Then he turned away for an instant, to shout up into the plane. "Those six
cartons of documents—the seals are to remain untouched, unbroken. They
are to be delivered to my car—immediately."
Varakov glanced down the airfield. There was a black American Cadillac
waiting, and Varakov assumed it was Rozhdestvenskiy's car. As the younger
officer reached the base of the steps, Varakov extended his right hand—
not in greeting, but to Rozhdestvenskiy's left forearm, to hold him there
a moment. "Is there a doomsday device?
What is it?"
"Not a device, Comrade General," Rozhdestvenskiy said, not smiling. "And I
cannot tell you any more; those are the orders of the Politburo." Then
Rozhdestvenskiy added, "I am sorry, sir."
He shrugged off the hand and walked away.
Varakov watched as the first of the red-sealed packing crates was carried
down and past him.
The old man's feet hurt.
Glancing at his Rolex, Rourke wiped the steam of the shower away from the
crystal.
It was nearly noon, the woman having let him oversleep—or perhaps just
the fact of sleeping in a bed in a normal-seeming home had done it to him.
During the night he had dreamed—about Sarah, about Michael and Annie . . .
and about Natalia.
He could not remember the dreams, and he was grateful for that. Dreams
were something that could not be controlled, an alien environment that
merely happened out of the subconscious. Desires, fears—all of them things
he could not manipulate to his own choosing. They had always annoyed
him—and if anything did, slightly frightened him.
He turned the water straight cold, the hairs on his chest grayer, he
noticed, his body leaner. He shut off the water, opening the shower
curtain, snatching the towel, and beginning to dry himself before stepping
out into the neat and very feminine-looking bathroom. He glanced once
between the shower curtain and the plastic liner; on the lip of the tub
was one of his stainless-steel Detonics .s, none the
worse for wear
apparently.
He noted the bruise on his shoulder in the partially steamed-over mirror,
the bruise from his fall from the plane to the road surface. He flexed
that arm to work out the stiffness. It would heal, he diagnosed. He
smiled—no doctor worth his salt trusted self-diagnosis, but under the
circumstances . . .
Martha Bogen was making him breakfast, despite the hour, so meanwhile
Rourke took the Harley from the garage where it had been locked overnight,
and following her directions, headed toward the nearest gas station.
He turned the machine now, his hair blowing in the warm breeze coming down
the mountain slope, his blue shirt sleeves rolled up, both of the Detonics
.s stuffed inside the waistband of his trousers under the shirt. He
could see the gas station ahead. There was one car at the self-service
island so Rourke turned to the full-service island, shutting down.
He let out the kickstand and dismounted. A smiling attendant in a blue
workshirt with the name, "AI," stitched over the heart came from inside
the service bays; there was a car inside getting an oil change.
'Till 'er up?"
"Yeah. I've got an auxiliary tank—fill that, too," Rourke rasped.
"Check your oil?"
"Yeah. Check my oil." Rourke nodded. He looked at his bike. Miraculously,
after the air crash, then the skid on the icy mountain roads, there were
no visible scratches, no visible damage.
"Y'all related to someone round here?" The attendant smiled.
Rourke shrugged mentally. "Yeah. My sister's Martha Bogen. My name's Abe."
v
"Well . . . hey, Abe." The attendant smiled. "I'm happy for Martha. It
woulda been sad."
Rourke started to ask why, then nodded. "Yeah—sure would," he agreed.
"Nice lookin' machine y'all got here," Al said.
"Thanks." Rourke nodded. "Nice looking town. Cold as a witch's—Real cold
outside. You got funny weather."
"Yeah. Just a little pocket here, I guess. We was always fixin' to get
together with them fellers at the National Weather Service and maybe find