sure they were dead.
She dropped to her knees beside him, setting the AR-15 onto the ground and
raising his head with her left hand. "Ron—it's all right. I'll get you out of
this," she said.
Eyes opened and staring past her, she could hear him whisper, "I'm not
gonna—gonna make it, Mrs. Rourke. Take care of Carla and Millie—get 'em to Mount
Eagle. God bless you—'cause them killers is gonna be back here sure as I'm—" and
his eyes kept staring but there was a rattling sound in his throat and his
breath suddenly smelled bad to her. She took her hand from his face, got to her
feet and stepped a pace back. She stared at him a moment. "You're dead—Mr.
Jenkins," she said hoarsely. "You're dead."
Chapter Eight
There was gunfire by the border crossing, Rourke decided as he turned his
motorcycle into the side street and pulled up alongside the curb.
"What's all that shooting?" Rubenstein queried.
"Either some of them—Mexicans—are trying to get across the border into
here—which would be damned foolish just now—or a pile of Americans are trying to
get across into Mexico—which would be just the reverse of the usual situation,
wouldn't it. White Anglo-Saxon Protestant wetbacks."
"Jess—you were right about this place. Everything," and Rubenstein turned
around in his seat and stared at the buildings lining both sides of the street,
"looks like it's been looted fifty times."
"Somethin' to do, I guess," Rourke commented, staring behind them, as if somehow
he could watch the gunfight around the corner and beyond. Then, turning and
looking up the street ahead of them, Rourke whispered, "Quiet a minute."
The sound was a rumbling, growing louder by the second, it seemed. "What is it?"
Rubenstein asked, staring into the empty street.
"Shh!" Rourke whispered. He was silent for another moment, then slowly, glancing
behind him, said to Rubenstein, "Sounds like a riot maybe—some kind of a mob
heading toward us. Let's get out of here." Rourke started turning his bike,
Rubenstein behind him. Glancing up the street, Rourke watched as the mob turned
into it—men, women, even some children, hands and arms flailing in the air, some
carrying clubs, guns discharging into the air space and empty buildings around
them.
"They—nuts?" Rubenstein stammered, his voice and look filled with astonishment.
"Maybe desperate's a better word—like I said, it's somethin' to do—isn't it?"
Rourke wheeled his bike and gunned the engine back down the street, slowing at
the corner, balancing the bike as he scanned the street in both directions,
Rubenstein beside him again.
"Can't go back the way we came—look," and Rourke pointed in the direction
leading out of the city. "Either another mob or part of the same one," he
commented.
"But there's a gunfight down the other way by the border."
"Maybe they won't notice us," Rourke said— smiling, then started the Harley
under him into the street, Rubenstein beside him on his left. Rourke cruised
slowly over the pavement, guiding his bike around stray bricks and rocks and
broken glass, cutting all the way left to avoid a pool of stagnant water
swamping the right gutter and overflowing into the street. Rourke and Rubenstein
rounded the corner, Rourke pulling to a halt in the middle of the street. He
glanced behind him—the sound of the mob was barely audible now over the sound of
the gunfire ahead, but already Rourke could see the first phalanxes of the mob
behind him coming into the street which they'd just left. Ahead was the main
border crossing into Juarez—and from across the river Rourke could hear gunfire
as well, see the smoke of buildings afire there.
"Is this what's left of the world—my God!" Rubenstein exclaimed.
"It may sound like some kind of put-on," Rourke said slowly, "but I expected
worse. And don't worry who you shoot at—they'll all be shooting at us—kind of
like a diversion for them. Let's ride," and Rourke gunned his motorcycle,
curled around the pistol grip of the CAR-15 slung under his shoulder.
Chapter Nine
Rubenstein jerked back the bolt on the Schmeisser 9mm submachine gun, checked
the safety and gunned his motorcycle ahead, John Rourke's tall lean frame bent
over the big Harley Davidson already several yards ahead of him. With the back
of his hand, Rubenstein pushed his wire-rimmed glasses up off the bridge of his
nose, bending low over his handlebars, his sparse black hair whipping across his
smooth sunburnt forehead. He repeated to himself what Rourke had told him—"Don't
fire that thing like it's a garden hose, practice trigger control." Rubenstein
had asked what the spare magazines were for. Rourke had simply told him to sit
on his motorcycle, hold the handlebars with one hand and the MP-40 subgun with
the other. Then Rourke had reached over and pulled out the magazine. He'd stuck
it in the saddlebag on the right side of the bike and said, "Okay—without taking
that hand off the handlebar and without dropping the gun, reload."
Rubenstein had tried for a few moments, then looked at Rourke in exasperation.
"That's why," Rourke had said, "you need more than one gun, and that's why with
all your guns you only fire at something, not just to make noise. And with a
full-auto weapon like that you confine yourself to three-shot bursts."
Rubenstein had mimicked Rourke then: "I know—practice trigger control—right?"
And now, as Rubenstein rounded a curve in the street, watching the armed men
huddled along the supports for the bridge leading into Mexico and the other
armed men across the wide square in building doorways and smashed-out windows,
he repeated to himself, "Trigger control… trigger control."
The speedometer on his bike was only hovering around thirty or thirty-five, he
noticed, but as he caught sight of the street beneath him, the pavement seeming
to race past, it seemed as though he were doing a hundred or better. Rourke was
already firing his CAR-15. It looked to Rubenstein like a long-barreled space
gun with the scope mounted on the carrying handle and the stock retracted—like a
ray gun in a movie about outer space.
As Rubenstein reached the middle of the square, gunfire started raining down
toward him and he leveled the Schmeisser at the closest group of shooters and
fired back, repeating aloud at the top of his voice so he could hear himself
over the noise of the shots, "Trigger control… trigger control… trigger—"
Chapter Ten
Rourke worked the CAR-15's trigger steadily, aiming rather than at single
targets at groups of targets, figuring to up his chances of making each shot
count. As best he could make out as he sped along the gauntlet of armed men on
each side of him, the ones by the bridge—there was a large hole in the middle of
it—were Mexican, firing at Texans on the street side and also caught in a
crossfire between the Texans and some other group at the far end of the bridge
on the Juarez side. A man from the Mexican group started running into the street
toward Rourke, what Rourke
identified as a vintage Thompson SMG in his hands,
spitting fire. Rourke swerved his bike, a burst of the heavy .45 ACP slugs from
the tommy gun chewing into the pavement beside him. Fighting to control the bike
and still keep shooting, Rourke swerved back right, his bike now less than a
dozen feet from the man with the Thompson.
As the man turned to fire another burst, Rourke pumped two rounds from the
semiautomatic Colt CAR-15 that he held like a pistol in his fist. Both Rourke's
shots slammed hard into the tommy-gun-armed man's chest, hammering him back onto
the pavement. Rourke's bike skidded as the subgunner fell uncharacteristically
forward, the body vaulting toward the front wheel of Rourke's bike. The bike
slipped and Rourke rolled away. Flat on the street, Rourke hauled himself up to
his knees and holding the CAR-15 at waist level, fired rapid, two-round
semiautomatic bursts into the closest of the armed men. At the corner of his
eye, Rourke could see Rubenstein, hear him shouting, "I'm coming, John!"
Rourke hauled himself to his feet. Firing the CAR-15 one-handed again like a
long-barreled pistol, Rourke ran toward his bike. Two men with riot shotguns
were opening up on him, running for him, Rourke guessed in order to steal the
bike and his weapons. Dropping to one knee, he swapped the CAR-15 into his left
hand, firing it empty at the two attackers, and snatching the Python from the
leather on his right hip, he fired it as well.
Backstepping, holstering the Python and making a rapid magazine change on the
CAR-15, Rourke hauled his bike up, kicked it started and let the CAR-15 hang at
his side on its black web sling as he started the bike back into the middle of
the street.
Already, more than a half-dozen men from the building side of the street were
running toward him, assault rifles and pistols blazing in their hands. Swerving
to avoid the fusillade of gunfire, Rourke cut back along the street, catching
sight of Rubenstein coming up fast behind him. Rourke gunned his bike and
jumped the curb, heading down along the sidewalk, the Mexicans there on the
bridge side parting in waves before him as he bent low over his bike, firing the
CAR-15. Behind him, Rourke could hear the steady, light three-round bursts of
Rubenstein's German MP-40 9mm, hear Rubenstein's counterfeit Rebel
yell—"Ya-hoo!"
Rourke fired the CAR-15 empty as he reached the end of the sidewalk, jumped the
bike down the curb and into the street. Glancing over his shoulder, he could see
Rubenstein close behind him, the "Schmeisser" shot empty, the Browning High
Power firing from his hand as he jumped the sidewalk and into the street, Rourke
heard the rebel yell again as the noise of the gunfire died in the background
behind him. Under his breath, bending low over his bike, Rourke muttered, "That
kid's really gettin' into it."
Chapter Eleven
Major Vladmir Karamatsov glanced to Captain Natalia Tiemerovna at his side in
the gathering darkness. He could just make out the outline of her profile, the
skin of her face smudged with black camouflage stick, a black silk bandanna tied
over her hair, her hands fitted with tight black leather fingerless gloves, a
close-fitting black jumpsuit covering the rest of her lithe body. He noticed her
hands again—she held an assault rifle the way most women held a baby, he noted.
A smile crossed his thin lips, his black camouflage-painted cheeks creasing at
the corners of his mouth into heavy lines.
Karamatsov upped the safety catch on the blued-black Smith & Wesson Model 59 in
his right hand. Like all the people in his special KGB liquidation squad, he
carried strictly American or Western European-made firearms. In the event that
they encountered a substantial American force, regular or irregular, there was
nothing to identify himself or any of his handpicked, personally trained team as
Soviet—their English was perfect midwestern, all of them trained, as was
Karamatsov himself, at the KGB's top-secret "Chicago" espionage school. They had
read American books and newspapers, watched videotapes of American television,
worn American-made clothes, trained on American-made firearms. American food,
American slang—everything so American that they soon thought, talked and acted
like Americans who had lived in America all their lives—with the one exception
being their often-tested allegiance to the KGB.
Like most of the top clandestine operatives in the KGB, Karamatsov—like the girl
beside him in the darkness—had gone to the Chicago school in his mid-teens. He
had grown up playing basketball and betting on the World Series. For years,
Karamatsov's one outside interest besides chess had been American football. He
had arranged to attend three Super Bowls and had sat in the crowd happily
munching hot dogs; drinking beer and shouting and cheering no less earnestly
than everyone around him. He had been Arnold Warshawski of South Bend, Indiana,
or Craig Bates of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, or someone else. Karamatsov was a past
master at dying his hair, creating life-mask wrinkles or built-up noses.
Sometimes he would stroke his cheek expecting to find a full beard and remember
suddenly that that had been yesterday—instead of forty-three with a red beard
and broken nose he was twenty-eight with blond hair, a small mustache and a nose
that looked as though it had been the model for a Roman or Greek statue.
And very frequently over the years he had worked with the magnificent
Natalia—sometimes they had posed as husband and wife, sometimes as brother and
sister, sometimes as father and daughter. He liked her best as she looked now,
the black hair just past the shoulders, her own strikingly dark blue eyes rather
than contacts which had made them appear brown or green, her own slightly
upturned nose—the figure that he had warmed himself beside so many nights. She
was technically his second-in-command, his right hand. Her heart was too soft,
sometimes, he reflected; but it had never interfered with her work.
He stared into the darkness, trying to make out the shapes of the others of his
team who were there— Nicolai, Yuri, Boris, Constantine… he could not see them
and Karamatsov smiled because of this.
His head itched under the black watch cap he wore. He scratched the itch,
checked the Rolex watch on his wrist and felt again in the darkness the safety
catch on the fifteen-shot 9mm pistol he held, checked the position of the tiny
blue Chiefs Special .38 in the small of his back, checked the 9mm MAC-10 slung
from his shoulder.
He watched the face of the Rolex, and as the hand swept into position, he raised
up from his low crouch and started into a dead run, Natalia—as she always was,
he thought comfortably—beside him, ready to die for him. The ranch house was
just beyond the end of the bracken and as he reached the clearing, he could see
the others of the team breaking from the shadows as well.
There was gunfire coming from the house, slow as though from a bolt action
rifle. A shotgun went off in the darkness—none of his men carried a shotgun and
he cursed. He kept on running, the pistol raised in his hand, 9mm
slugs—115-grain jacketed hollow points—spinning from its muzzle toward the plate
glass front of the building. He could hear glass shattering. There was a
faster-working rifle now firing into his team in the darkness, and he tried to
make out the sound. As he turned to bear his pistol down onto the suspected
target, he turned to his left and saw Natalia, down on one knee, the H-K assault
rifle to her shoulder, firing steady three-shot bursts, the window that had been
Karamatsov's projected target shattering and even in the near total darkness the
ill-defined shape of a body falling forward through the glass and into the bed
of white flowers just outside.
Karamatsov started running again, first to reach the front door, kicking at the
lock, which held, then stepping back and blasting at it with the MAC-11 on full
auto. Natalia was beside him, her left foot smashing toward the lock, kicking
the shot-through mechanism away, swinging the door inward. Karamatsov rolled
through.
The house was in near total darkness. He fired the MAC-11 at a flash of
brightness, his gun going empty on him. Rather than swapping magazines, he
reached for the Model 59 pistol—he gauged there were at least eight rounds left
in it.
There was another flash in the darkness and he fired twice, hearing a moaning
sound then a heavy thud as there was another gunshot, the fireburst of the
muzzle going off in the direction of the ceiling.
He stood in a crouch, his fists wrapped around the pistol butt, the first finger
of his right hand poised against the revolverlike trigger of the auto-loading
pistol.
He could hear the rustle of Natalia's clothes as she moved through the darkness.
"There is no electric power here, Vladmir."
"Lights—and on guard," Karamatsov shouted. There was a clicking sound, followed
immediately by a second similar sound and suddenly the room was bathed in light.
He glanced obliquely at the powerful lanterns now in the middle of the floor,
staying out of the circle of light to guard against still another defender being
alive somewhere in the house.
"I don't think Chambers is here—President Chambers," Natalia added as an