Jerry Ahern - Survivalist 03 - The Quest

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THE SURVIVALIST #03.

THE QUEST.

by Jerry Ahern.

Chapter 1..

Sarah. Michael. Ann. Alive. God, Rourke thought as he walked briskly through the woods beyond the

gutted framework of his house, the note Sarah had written and nailed to the barn door folded

tightly in his wallet, but why do I need a wallet? Driver's license, Social Security card,

concealed weapons permit, the latter made Rourke laugh, he wanted to laugh for the first time

since the night of the war. Concealed weapons permit, he laughed again. He walked on, the Python

strapped to his right hip in the Ranger leather camouflage rig, the twin stainless Detonics in the

Alessi shoulder holsters under his leather jacket, the Colt CAR-15 slung under his right arm,

muzzle down, his thumb hooked in the carrying handle under the scope.

It was all useless, he realized, everything in his wallet, or almost everything. The hundred-

dollar bill with Ben Franklin looking enigmatic in its center, the CIA card, the credit cards, the

only things that were real there anymore was the picture of his wife, Sarah, his son, Michael, and

his daughter, Ann, and it wasn't really such a good picture of them, didn't do them justice. But

the picture and the voided Rourke family check with the note from Sarah scrawled across it were

the only real things ever since the war. Looking up at the stars, he revised his thinking: the

stars were real, the earth was still real under his feet, but for how long he didn't know. There

had been odd clouds in the night sky, the sunsets had been redder each evening, and the weather

seemed definitely to be changing. How many missiles had been launched, bombs dropped that night of

World War III, World War Last in all likelihood? And that was another real thing, he thought,

puffing on one of the cigars, the stubby, thin tobacco in the left corner of his mouth, almost

bolted between his clenched white teeth.

He stopped walking and looked up to the sky again, wondering what was up there. He'd found himself

wondering that progressively more often. When he was training to be a physician, he had been

concerned with what had made man work, not the humanity but the physiology of it. Later, in the

CIA in Covert Operations, he'd been equally concerned with making men stop working: he hadn't

become a weapons expert by mere chance or through a correspondence course. Later as a

quote/unquote Survival Expert, Rourke had been concerned again with keeping men working, the body

functioning and living, despite all odds. But he wondered, as he dragged on the cigar, whether or

not Sarah and the children were watching the stars this night, if somewhere there were sanity,

somewhere beings who had not pressed the magic and deadly red button and ordered the mass midnight

executions of legions of total strangers, men and women and children and all their dogs, cats,

frogs, and farm animals. Sometimes, Rourke realized, he almost cursed himself for being sane; it

would have been easier the other way.

And there was Paul Rubenstein, the young Jewish guy from New York City, or what had been New York

City. He'd never ridden a motor, never fired a gun, let alone in anger, and somehow Rourke counted

the younger man his best ally and, next to Sarah and the children, the only friend he had.

He looked at the dark ground, then studied the cigar butt, the tip glowing orange in his fingers,

and looked again, trying to find the nearest star.

Rourke didn't like riding the motorcycle in darkness. The Harley Low Rider handled perfectly,

everything worked well, but he wouldn't ride any bike without glasses, and all he had were the

sunglasses and light sensitive with well-above-normal night vision. Rourke could see well enough

in the dark with his sunglasses on, but felt like a fool wearing them. He glanced at his watch.

Once he'd crossed into what had been, before the night of the war, the Eastern Time Zone, he'd set

the Rolex Submariner one hour ahead. But he still felt he was on Rourke Standard Time: he had set

the watch by the sun, but now he was judging sunrise by the watch and the Rolex's luminous face

read just past six-thirty A.M. He watched the horizon and could see the reddish line there that

meant the clouds were still dust-laden. Radioactive dust? He reminded himself to check one of the

two Geiger counters, the one he carried on his bike. He'd left the other one with Paul Rubenstein.

Rourke stopped the bike. He was less than five miles from where he'd left Paul, secure up in the

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rocks, the wounds still painful but on the mend, the "Schmeisser" subgun as the younger man still

insisted on calling the MP-40, the Browning High Power, and Rourke's own Steyr-Mannlicher SSG

Special Rifle as companions. Rourke watched the horizon line, the hell with the watch he thought,

and saw the sun wink up above the glowing red clouds. The redness of the clouds worried him; he

made another mental note to check the radiation count. Suddenly, there was a knot in the pit of

his stomach: what would life be like after his quest was through, after he found Sarah, Michael,

and Ann? Would they all live in the retreat forever, like early man, but instead in a

sophisticated cave with all the conveniences? And afterward, after that, what kind of world, what

world at all perhaps, would the children grow up into?

Rourke could see himself, someday saying to his son, "Michael, I leave you vast nuclear

wastelands, in which nothing will grow for two centuries, irradiated water you cannot drink,

poisoned air you cannot breath, the last surviving Encyclopedia because there is no one left to

write another and a superlative command of the language, but no one to talk to. Here's a vintage

motorcycle, but there is no gasoline; Here's your choice of the finest pistols ever made, but all

the ammunition is gone now. And the birds and the bees I told you about are now totally extinct,

and if you do find a human female who hasn't grown up to be a murderess or just gone insane, you

can have children with her to perpetuate the race, but it's likely they'll be hideously deformed."

Rourke shook his head and watched the sunrise. He never knew when it would be the last time

anymore. The sun rose because the earth rotated, but when would that stop? He thought of the

finishing line for the lecture to his son on the attaining of his manhood: "Have a good time ..."

Rourke stopped the bike again, the grayness in the East pink-tinged with the color of the horizon,

the fog smelling foul and rolling in waves across the ground. He heard shots just ahead, killed

the motor on the Harley and swung the CAR-15 from the muzzle down carry across his back into his

right hand, the fingers of his fist wrapped around the pistol grip, his left hand automatically

coming back and sweeping the bolt open and letting it fly forward, his thumb fingering the semi-

automatic's selector into the safe position. The ground dropped off perhaps fifty yards ahead of

him. Beyond that was a long grade, then a clearing of flatland, then a high mound of rocks. Rourke

edged forward from the Harley, the gunfire growing clearer with each step, sporadic, not like a

pitched battle, but rather like ... He stopped and flattened himself on the lip of the grade. Paul

Rubenstein was in the high rocks beyond the clearing where Rourke had left him early that previous

night. Below Paul were perhaps a dozen figures, most of them men, but one or two possibly women,

(it was hard to tell sometimes, Rourke reflected). The figures, clearly brigands, heavily armed,

dirty-looking, and out for blood, were slowly advancing up the rocks, firing to keep Rubenstein

pinned down until they could close in. Rourke's face creased into a smile. "Here it goes again,"

he whispered.

Chapter 2.

Rourke moved the Harley back into a stand of trees, then circled wide around the lip of the

grade, noticing five pick up trucks of varying vintage parked perhaps two hundred yards farther

back in a small clearing, the brigands' transportation, he decided. Rourke had already assessed

the situation. If he started shooting, there would be a protracted gun battle, lasting hours,

perhaps it could last days, especially if there were more of the brigands nearby to hear the

change in the pattern of the shots and come running to reinforce their friends.

Rourke was now at the far end of the grade, looking down onto the flat expanse leading toward the

high rocks. He could see Paul Rubenstein, body tucked down, the Steyr-Mannlicher SSG Special Rifle

with the 3 x 9 scope at his shoulder. There would be a series of shots from the brigands to pin

Paul down, then the brigands would advance, and Paul would edge up and fire the green synthetic

stocked rifle, then duck down as the brigands shot again. If the brigands had divided themselves

into fire-and-maneuver elements, Rourke realized, they could have swept over Paul easily, but

fortunately their tactics weren't that good.

Rourke slung the CAR-15 across his back diagonally, muzzle down, and edged over the lip of the

grade, hugging the pine trees and low rocks along the side and moving diagonally along the left

flank of the attacking brigands. The closest of them, a big man, heavyset, armed with some type of

automatic rifle Rourke couldn't immediately identify at the distance, was perhaps fifty yards

away, edging along a wall of low rocks running in a zigzag pattern toward the far side of

Rubenstein's position. Rourke inched along, flanking the man, but cutting the distance too, timing

spurts of his own movements to the covering noise of the brigands' shots. With his left hand,

Rourke palmed out the A.G. Russell black chrome Sting IA; the tiny double-edged knife shifted then

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into his right hand. There was another long round of firing and Rourke made his move, coming up

behind the heavy brigand in a rush, diving toward him, tackling the man and bringing him down hard

onto the rocks, the squishing sound of the man's head slamming into a rock, Rourke's right fist

ramming forward into the throat rather than the man's trunk because of the shortness of the knife

blade. Rourke gave the knife a hard twist and ripped it out, flattening himself over the body,

listening for a change in the pattern of shooting. Looking up over the low wall of rocks, he saw

that nothing had changed. He picked his next target, a tall, lanky man with shoulder-length blond

hair and a scraggly beard. Wiping the knife blade clean of blood on the first dead man's trousers,

Rourke inched forward over the low rock wall and toward the tall blond man.

The target was twenty-five yards ahead, and as with the first brigand, Rourke waited for another

long shot string, then made a headlong dash, leaping over a clump of low rocks, sidestepping a

half-rotted pine tree trunk and diving into the man's body just below the waist, throttling him to

the ground. Rourke's right hand whipped forward with the knife, his left hand grabbed on to a

handful of the greasy hair and jerked the head back to expose the neck, then the knife made a left

to right swipe across the unguarded throat. As Rourke drew the knife away, he let the head sag to

the rocks. Wiping the blade clean on the blond man's clothes, Rourke spotted his next target,

wondering how many of them he could take out before they'd be missed, before someone would turn

around, see him, then start the real shooting.

He edged toward a black man, smallish in build, but the bare arms rippling with muscles. A .45

automatic was in the man's left hand. The distance was twenty-five, perhaps thirty yards, the

precise range hard to tell because of the man's position in the rocks. Rourke closed to ten yards,

waited for another volley of shots from the brigands, then moved forward. He dove toward the man,

but the man turned, sidestepping and missing Rourke's knife blade, but Rourke's left arm was

solidly hooked on the man's left shoulder and neck and he brought him down. As the man started to

shout, Rourke lunged upward from his knees with the Sting IA, the spear point biting deep into the

Adam's apple. The man fell back, his mouth half opened, but the scream not coming. The body

tumbled backward along the rocks.

Rourke got to his knees, turning, and saw one of the brigands looking his way, starting to shout.

Rourke's right hand dropped the knife, flashing toward the Detonics pistol under his left armpit,

the tiny stainless steel .45 in his fist, the hammer swiping back to full stand. The first finger

of Rourke's right hand edged against the trigger until it gave, the pistol rocking in his hand,

the brigand sounding the alarm now falling back, the center of his forehead split wide because of

the angle of the 185-grain jacketed hollow point slug when it impacted.

Rourke snatched up his knife, wiped it clean, and holstered it, then pulled the second Detonics

from under his right arm.

With one of the .45s in each fist, Rourke started up the sloping rocks, the brigands turning

toward him now, directing their fire away from Rubenstein. Rourke fired the gun in the left hand,

then the one in the right, then the left again. As the enemy fire started finding him, he dove

into the rocks, hearing the chattering of Rubenstein's 9mm subgun coming from the top of the

rocks. Jamming both of the emptied .45s into his belt, Rourke swung the CAR-15 from his back, his

thumb flicking off the safety, his trigger finger snapping off three-round, semi-automatic bursts

from the Colt's thirty-round magazine. The brigands were falling back. Rourke got to his feet and

moved out toward them. From the corner of his left eye he saw Rubenstein, moving awkwardly because

of the earlier wounds, starting down from the rocks, the subgun in his right hand, the 9mm

Browning High Power in his left, both guns spitting fire. Three brigands were still moving along

down toward the base of the rocks and past the clearing, heading for the trees. "The pickups,"

Rourke rasped under his breath. He raised the CAR-15 and fired, then fired again, but the magazine

was shot empty and there were still two men running.

Rourke let the CAR-15 swing out of the way under his arm. He snatched the Mag-Na-Ported six-inch

Python from his hip, lining the dull metallic finish of the Metalifed gun's front sight into the

outlined notch of the Omega rear sight blade, his fists wrapped around the massive Pachmayr grips,

the double action pull coming off, a single 158-grain semi-jacketed soft point belching fire at

the muzzle. The nearer of the two men was going down and rolling forward, hands outstretched.

Rourke sighted again, fired and missed, then thumb cocked the Python, the last brigand was perhaps

seventy-five yards downrange, and Rourke fired, the muzzle climb of the .357 almost negligible,

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but blocking his view for an instant. As the gun came down out of recoil, he saw the last brigand

staggering, both hands clamped to the small of his back, then the legs buckled and the man went

down. Rourke turned, swinging the muzzle of the Python around, but eased it down.

Paul Rubenstein was beside him. The younger man, his face streaming sweat, panted, "You shot him

in the back." Rourke let the revolver hang limp at his right side along his thigh and said, "Only

because that was the guy's best looking side."

Chapter 3.

Sarah Rourke dismounted, held loosely one of Tildie's reins as she stood beside the lathered

animal, and stared out at the sandbag fence and the farmhouse beyond.

rayd

She looked over her shoulder, "Michael, Annie, you, too, Millie, stay here and keep mounted. I'm

going to see if there's anyone at that farmhouse." Then looking at ten-year-old Millie Jenkins,

she added, "Millie, I want to see if anyone knows your aunt and where I can find her farm."

Sarah turned back and faced the farmhouse, then drying her sweating palms on the sides of her blue-

jeaned thighs, she started walking toward the sandbag fence, leading Tildie behind her. The mare

whinnied once, snorted, and followed her on the loose rein. Sarah had left tied to Tildie's saddle

the modified AR-15 she'd taken from one of the brigands that first morning after the war. All she

had was her husband's Colt .45 automatic inside the waistband of her trousers, the butt concealed

under her ripped blue T-shirt. She was perspiring despite the fact that it was cool in the

Tennessee Mountains. She stripped the blue-and-white bandanna from her hair and shook her dark

hair loose as the wind whipped up from beyond the farmhouse.

She had seen no sign of life at the house but it looked normal enough and that was why she had

determined to stop. She'd been searching the Smoky Mountains around Mt. Eagle for several days

now, trying to find "Aunt Mary" and deliver Millie Jenkins. Aunt Mary was Millie's mother's

sister, so the last name would be different and Sarah had no idea what Carla Jenkins's maiden name

had been. It was likely, too, Aunt Mary was herself married. All Millie remembered of her aunt's

farm was that the house had been set in a valley with a huge horse pasture fenced in behind it and

that Aunt Mary grew roses.

As Sarah approached the sandbag fence and stopped, leaning her left hand against one of the

sandbags, she stared up at the house, seeing it now in greater detail. There were five pickup

trucks parked in the yard, all lined up in some kind of order. The windows of the house were

shuttered closed, with narrow slits in them. A chill ran up her spine, but not from the wind, she

thought. She reached under her T-shirt and took out her husband's .45. She'd taught herself how to

lower the hammer on a loaded chamber and now, with the hammer down, she braced her thumb against

it and cocked it, raising the safety, then slid the gun back under her T-shirt, having kept the

gun below the level of the sandbags in case anyone in the house was watching her. The slide of the

pistol felt almost slimy with her own perspiration.

She climbed up on the bottom stack of sandbags to get a better view of the farmhouse, then raised

her right arm, sweeping it back and forth, calling out at the top of her lungs, "Hello! Is anybody

there? I want to talk!"

She stopped and listened. There was no reply. She waved the blue-and-white bandanna in her hand

and shouted at the top of her voice across the sandbag fence, "Hello! I just want to talk!"

The door of the farmhouse opened. A tall, black-bearded man stepped out onto the unpainted porch,

some kind of rifle or shotgun in his hands, Sarah couldn't tell which from the distance. As he

walked toward the steps leading up onto the porch, Sarah stopped waving the bandanna.

The man shouted, she could hear him well, "We don't want no strangers 'round heah, lady. Git out

a' heah!"

Sarah Rourke shook her head angrily, too angry to say anything. Then, forcing herself under

control, she said, "Look, I've got three small children with me. I don't want anything from you,

just directions. Please!"

"Git out! Them's directions, lady." And the man started to turn and walk away.

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All the tension, all the fear, all the loneliness and frustration welled up inside her, and she

fought to hold back tears. She screamed at the man, "Please! For God's sake!"

The man walked another step or two, then turned, waited, then walked back toward the end of the

porch.

"There's a gate down yonder. Send yer young'ns along ahead of y'all, and no tricks."

She sank against the sandbags, waving her right hand and shouting, "Thank you!"

She looked back at the children and suddenly felt very tired.

"Thank you," she muttered again, but not to the man on the porch.

Chapter 4.

"There're brigands all over here," Rourke said, his voice low. His eyes squinted behind the

sunglasses against the bright morning sunlight.

"Do you think they found your retreat, John?" young Paul Rubenstein asked, pushing his wire-framed

glasses back from his nose, his face perspiring profusely.

Rourke thought a moment, then said, "No, that's the least of my worries. Maybe an archeologist

will find it a thousand years from now, but nobody's going to find it today, tomorrow, or twenty

years from now. Trouble is, " Rourke looked past Rubenstein and beyond the rocks where the bodies

of the brigands they had killed lay, "I wonder if twenty years from now I'm still going to be

living in it."

"What do you mean, John?"

Rourke lit one of his small cigars,thinking momentarily about the cigars he had stored at the

retreat. "What I mean, Paul, is the world, you look at the sunsets, the sunrises, the way the

weather has been hot one day, cold the next, the rains, the winds? And if the world stays in one

piece, what happens then? Can we rebuild? There are so many questions. Not enough of them have

answers and the ones that do are tough answers."

Rourke stopped talking and looked down at the Colt Python. He'd reloaded the other guns and now

slipped the spent cartridges, identifying them from the primer indentations from the cylinder and

replacing them with some of the loose rounds he carried. He stood up from the crouch and

stretched, snatching up the CAR-15 and slinging it under his right shoulder.

"But," Rourke continued with a sigh, "as somebody once said out of frustration and bitter

experience, life goes on, hmm?" Rourke, without waiting for Paul, started walking across the flat

expanse at the top of the rock cluster toward where he and the still recuperating Rubenstein had

hauled the younger man's bike that previous night. Rourke scanned the ground below. In the

darkness they had manhandled the bike up into the rocks, but now, with the light, Rourke saw a

path, precarious, but he judged it manageable. "You wait here," he said, looking back over his

shoulder toward Rubenstein.

Rourke picked his way across the rocks and stopped beside the bike, then looked back toward the

path, and reassessed his judgment that the bike could be driven down. He glanced at the Rolex on

his left wrist, then at the sun. With the gunfire ceased and the brigands not having returned to

the larger force Rourke felt they were a part of, he decided it was only a matter of time before

someone came, perhaps a heavily armed brigand force.

Rourke did not want that. He was too close to the retreat to waste the time, he thought, and eager

to begin searching for Sarah and the children. He smiled, "eager." From the night he had stood

talking with the RCMP Inspector in Canada and the man's wife had turned on the radio

newsbroadcast, Rourke had been more than eager. When he took the first flight out to Atlanta, the

bombing and missile strikes had begun. In the long night after the plane was diverted and before

the crash of the jetliner in New Mexico, and in the long days and nights since, Rourke had thought

of little else than finding his family.

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He had resolved early on to be unwavering on one point, that somehow they had survived. And they

had. As he mounted the bike and started the engine, the corners of his mouth turned down in a

bitter smile. He looked out across the land from the high ground. If Sarah and the children were

somewhere in the mountains of northern Georgia, they would be hard to find. Were they somewhere

else in Georgia, the Carolinas, perhaps Tennessee? Every mile they traveled likely took them

farther away, he realized, making the search just that much longer and more difficult.

Finding a woman and two young children, refugees in a country full of refugees, The entire

midsection of the country was a radioactive desert. There was no law. What of the Russians, the

brigands, God knew what that lay out there? Rourke revved the bike, squinted against the sun and,

using his combat booted feet to support the machine rumbling between his legs, started it down the

path.

Chapter 5.

It was never good to let them see you looking dejected, KGB Maj. Vladmir Karamatsov reminded

himself, throwing his shoulders back as he stepped to the door of the military aircraft and

breathed the cool night air of Chicago. At the base of the short ladder leading down from the jet

was his staff car, his chauffeur who was waiting on the runway tarmac beside it, snapped to

attention as he saw his superior.

Karamatsov smiled as he nimbly jumped the last few steps of the ladder, then tossed his leather

dispatch case in a gentle arc to his subordinate.

The driver caught the case, saluted, and said, "Good evening, Comrade Major."

"Good evening, Piotr," Karamatsov responded without looking at the man. He stared at the runway

lights at the far end of the field instead. More military transports were arriving. He reflected

that they would be needed. After the loss of the new American President, Samuel Chambers, and the

dangerous and embarrassing episode with John Rourke and his own wife, Natalia, Karamatsov had

revised his earlier impressions of American pacification following the war that his country had

nominally won. A nation of armed citizens, a nation of individualists, it would be hard to quell

their resistance. He had learned that.

Rather than bombing the cities, Karamatsov thought, smiling almost bitterly, they should have

bombed the countryside. Bombing the countryside would have been easier in the final analysis,

since the people of the cities would have been easier to subjugate. He had seen no point in

bombing New York out of existence, for example. The wealth of the city was eternally lost now, and

the weaponless, fear-ridden people of the American giant would have been easier to subjugate than

the heavily armed and fiercely independent Westerners and Southerners.

He noticed himself shrugging his shoulders as Piotr, his driver, said, "Comrade Major, there is

something?"

"No, Piotr," Karamatsov said and turned, his dark eyes gleaming. "I was just considering the

efficiency with which our leaders are introducing additional troops to aid in the pacification of

the United States. We are fortunate indeed to be possessed of such men of courage and foresight.

Is this not so, Piotr?"

"Yes, Comrade Major," the young man said. A smile forced on his face, Karamatsov thought.

The KGB major and the Army corporal eyed each other a moment, Karamatsov still thinking in

English, saying in his mind, "The boy doesn't believe that bullshit any more than I do." He

laughed, then walked toward his open car door, and stepped inside the Cadillac. He liked American

cars: they ran, which was more, he thought, than could be said of their Soviet counterparts.

Undoing the holsterless belt on his greatcoat, then undoing the double row of buttons, he slumped

back in the seat, taking the proffered dispatch case from Piotr. "To the house, Piotr." He removed

his hat, setting it on the seat beside him on top of the dispatch case, and closed his eyes,

waiting for the motion of the car to start as soon as his luggage was removed from the plane and

placed in the trunk of the car.

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He opened his eyes and sat up, startled. The car was slowing down, and he sat forward in the rear

seat to look over the front seat through the tinted glass of the windshield. He could see the

house. Large, white-painted brick with a low porch and three steps leading from it toward a walk

that jutted out to a cemented driveway slicing between dead grass patches that once had been

verdant lawns, he imagined.

The square footage of the house was over three thousand, larger by far than anything he and

Natalia had ever lived in. At one time, the suburb of Chicago, where the house was situated, had

been for the very rich. Now they were dead or had fled. All houses within the six-block area had

been taken over as an officer's compound or for important civilian officials, falling into both

categories, really.

Karamatsov thought he had gotten one of the best of the houses.

As the Cadillac Fleetwood turned up the driveway, Karamatsov leaned back, minutely inspecting the

insignia on his hat, but really wondering what it would be like with Natalia. It would be the

first private time they had had since the events leading to Chambers's and Rourke's escape from

the complex in the taken-over air base in Texas. He had covered for her, partially he realized

because she knew enough about him to damn him and partially, The car stopped and Karamatsov put on

his hat, waiting for his chauffeur to open his door. Had Rourke lied, he asked himself? Had Rourke

and Natalia been lovers?

"What sir?" Piotr asked.

Karamatsov half turned to face the younger man as he stood beside the door. Karamatsov stopped,

frozen almost half-bent as he stepped from the back seat of the car. "Nothing, Piotr, nothing."

Karamatsov stepped out of the car, his great coat unbuttoned, his belt over his arm beside the

dispatch case. "I will need you at six A.M. Have a pleasant evening."

"You too, Comrade Major, a pleasant evening."

Looking up at the lighted windows in the house, thinking about the woman inside, anger suddenly

boiled within him. Karamatsov muttered, "Yes. Thank you, Piotr." Turning on his heel, he added,

"The bags, place them just inside the doorway and you may leave."

"Yes, Comrade Major."

Karamatsov stood at the base of the steps, watching Piotr pass him to go up to the door, ring the

bell and wait, a flight bag, a large briefcase and a suit bag in his arms.

The door opened. Karamatsov could not see her, only hear the voices.

Piotr said, "Good evening, Comrade."

"Good evening, Piotr," the soft contralto responded.

Karamatsov balled his right fist. He imagined her with closed eyes. She liked white, and she was

probably wearing a white robe over a white negligee. She would be impeccably beautiful as she was

always, the bright dark-blue eyes, the almost black hair, the ivory white of the skin that lost

any suntan almost immediately to return to the almost religious alabaster radiance. She would be

smiling at Piotr; she always smiled at people. That was part of why she was the best agent he knew

in KGB: she was coldly efficient and deadly, but there was a warmth and humanness in her when

business was not the order of the day. Even her enemies had always found it hard to hate her.

He walked up the steps and stopped at the small porch, looking over Piotr as he set down the

baggage and staring at Natalia, his wife.

"Good evening, Natalia," he murmured.

"Good evening, Vladmir," she answered, her eyes downcast.

She was wearing white, something with lace that she had not acquired in the Soviet Union,

something beautiful. She looked the model wife, elegant, lovely, almost shy and demure. She

remained unmoving as Piotr came to attention between them.

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"Good night, Piotr," Karamatsov said.

Piotr looked awkward. It had suddenly become common knowledge that Karamatsov and Natalia were

married, a fact Karamatsov had concealed for years, and the looks of awkwardness in the eyes of

those who knew them, however casually, were something he was becoming accustomed to.

Natalia said nothing. Piotr moved between them and stepped out, saluting as Karamatsov waved him

away. The door closed behind Karamatsov's hand as he leaned against it. Natalia was still staring

at the floor; he could not see her eyes.

"You are radiant tonight. You are radiant every night, but you know that," he whispered hoarsely.

Stepping away from the door, he stripped the black leather gloves from his hands and set them

along with his hat and dispatch case on the small leather-covered table by the door. He slipped

off the greatcoat and draped it across a French provincial chair beside the table.

"A drink, please?" he asked.

She said nothing, but moved away. Because of the flowing quality of the lace-trimmed floor length

robe she wore, it seemed she floated to the kitchen rather than walked, he thought.

He unbuttoned his uniform tunic and removed it, dropping it on the side of a sofa as he stepped

down three steps into the living room. He undid the top buttons of his white shirt, automatically

checking the tiny S & W Model 36 holstered inside his trouser band on his left hip.

He turned, seeing Natalia re-enter from the kitchen with a tray containing a bottle of vodka and a

glass.

"The ever dutiful wife," he remarked as she passed him and bent over a low coffee table to set

down the bottle and glass. "You aren't drinking?"

"I don't feel like it, Vladmir," she said quietly.

His hands held her shoulders and he snapped her around to him. Her dark hair fell across her

forehead as her head bent back, tossing the hair from her face showing her slender white neck. His

right hand moved to her throat and tightened around it.

"You're hurting me."

Karamatsov laughed. "You are a martial arts expert; why don't you stop me?" he asked, then let go

of her neck, bent down and poured a glass of vodka for himself and downed half the tumbler. He

looked at her. "I want you to have a drink." He knotted the fingers of his right hand in the hair

at the nape of her neck and bent her head back, arching her back. Her mouth contorted downward.

Karamatsov raised the glass to her mouth, forced its rim between her lips, and poured the vodka

from the glass, some of the liquid dribbling down the sides of her mouth. He let go of her hair as

she started to cough, choking on the vodka.

Her head bent low over her knees, one hand held her hair from her face as she sat perched on the

edge of the sofa.

He bent down, staring at her. "Did you drink with Rourke, Natalia? Do you like American whiskey

better than Russian vodka?"

He half stood, poured another glass of the vodka for himself, studied the clear liquid for an

instant. He suddenly raked the back of his right hand downward, his knuckles connecting against

the miraculously perfect right cheek of the seated woman in front of him. The force of his hand

knocked her from the edge of the couch onto the floor.

"I did not cheat on you with Rourke. He wouldn't," she said, staring up at Karamatsov from the

floor.

Karamatsov dropped to his knees, spilling half the vodka from his glass, wetting the front of his

shirt and pants. His face inches from hers, he rasped, "But you wanted to!"

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His right fist lashed out, and her left cheekbone suddenly lost its perfection as well.

Chapter 6.

Varakov stared at the skeletons of the mastodons in the main hall. In the weeks since Soviet

Military Headquarters for North America had been set up in the former lake-front museum, General

Varakov had grown exceedingly fond of watching the two extinct giants. And sometimes when he

looked at them, he thought, an amused smile crossing his florid thick lips, instead of mastodons

he saw the skeletons of a bear and an eagle locked in mortal combat eons after their disappearance

from the earth. He looked up through the windows over the far door. There was darkness.

Gen. Ishmael Varakov had always liked the dark; it was peaceful, yet full of things to come.

"Comrade General?"

Varakov turned from the railing overlooking the main gallery and smiled at his young woman

secretary. "They are here?"

"Yes, Comrade General."

He shrugged, looked at his unbuttoned uniform tunic, then left it unbuttoned, reminding himself he

was the commanding general and there was no one for thousands of miles who had the power to tell

him to button it. "Go tell them I'll be there." He turned to look back at the mastodons once more.

If nothing else positive had come out of the war, he thought, it was seeing this place. When he

had served as an advisor once in Egypt, he had never seen such treasures of the past as were

there. He had never appreciated the beauty and complexity, yet at once simplicity, of the

evolution of nature as he had from what he had seen here. He wandered the halls incessantly. He

had at last found a home he liked, he thought, smiling. Then out loud he added, "Here among the

rest of the anomalies of antiquity." He smacked his lips, turned from the railing, and started

toward the low, winding steps leading to the main floor and the meeting.

He shuffled on his sore feet past a bronze of a stone age man, another of a Malaysian woman, and

another of a bushman armed with a blowgun. He turned right toward his wall-less office just off

the main hall. An office without walls was the best kind, he thought with a smile. They were all

there, the ranking general and field-grade officers of his command, sitting in a neat semicircle

facing his empty desk. He stopped and watched them, shook his head, and stared at his feet, then

smiling, walked ahead, rumbling, "There is no need to disturb yourselves, gentlemen. Please remain

seated."

He crossed past the semicircle of men on the edges of their seats, rounded the corner of his desk

and plopped into his chair. He leaned forward across the leather desk top, then pushed off his

shoes, his white stockinged toes splaying against the carpet under them.

"We all are aware," he began, looking at no one in particular, "that the complete military

occupation of the United States is impossible at this point in time. Those fragmented units of

American, British, and West German troops and others are still making life in Europe miserable for

our forces. China is holding its borders and we are holding ours, a land war with China,

gentlemen, would be madness. I am convinced we would never have occupied this land if it weren't

for the fact that we need the industrial output possible from the still-standing factories,

weapons, small arms, tanks, food, chemicals. And this, " and he hammered his fist on the desk top,

"is our primary mission in the United States. I emphasize this because many reports have come to

me that it seems instead we are bent on the total pacification of America. That is not within the

realm of possibility at this point in time, regardless of official line, it is not!"

He leaned back and stared past the men. "I have decided to take personal charge of the fine

details of the plan for civilian pacification. It is a limited plan to achieve limited and

realistic goals, Comrades. Since the restarting of vital industries and their protection from

sabotage is our most important goal, we shall act accordingly. I shall borrow something from the

psychology and experience of the very people we are attempting to control, and I emphasize

control. Control! I have signed an order establishing what can best be called forts, military

outposts designed to be as largely self-sufficient as possible, like the American frontier

outposts we have all seen in the American Indian capitalist exploitation films. We, " he leaned

forward, raising his first finger on each hand, staring briefly into the eyes of each of the men

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in the semi circle before him, "we will be the cavalry! Our functions will be simple, to prevent

the rise of organized resistance and protect the civilian population as well. Notice that: protect

the civilian population. There are bands of blood thirsty brigands prowling this land, killing and

looting. We must prove to the surviving American civilian population that we are not out to

facilitate their extermination; we must protect them from these brigands, and at the same time we

must realize that some of these brigand forces could become the kernel around which massive armed

resistance can grow. As a formal resistance movement develops, and much of my intelligence

information indicates this may already be happening, we must be so actively engaged in protecting

the American people from these criminal brigand elements that we can lump together these

resistance fighters with the lawless brigand elements and combat them all. We must not let

resistance become a popular movement as it did in Afghanistan, or years earlier as it did for the

Nazis, " he almost spat out the word, "as they fought the French."

For the first time one of his subordinate officers, General Novadkhastovski, spoke.

"Comrade General," he began, then his face softened into a smile as he glanced around the room.

"Ishmael. We are to protect these people?"

"That is right, Illya, we will never, not within our lifetimes at least, " he stared past his old

wartime friend to the bony mastodons in the main hall near the fountain beyond, "but if we can

make them see that their safety," he stopped, realizing he had skipped an entire portion of his

idea (he was getting old, he sighed) then backtracked, "we will never get them to like us, to

willingly accept our rule, but if we can at least make them rely on us for their safety we will

have won the most major of psychological battles. And, as long as the brigands are roaming free,

we too must worry about their harassment. These gangs of ruffians are heavily armed and kill

without mercy. They are animals."

"It is wise, I think. You are right, Ishmael."

Varakov nodded to his old friend. Such a thing for the man to say was worth more than an official

commendation; he valued the man's mind.

"Thank you, old friend," Varakov said. "The first of these forts will be established in

northeastern Georgia." There were smiles because of the similarities in Soviet Georgia and

American Georgia, but in the name only. "It will be charged with patrolling northeastern Georgia

and the Carolinas and extending to the Atlantic Coast." And then Varakov laughed. "We have given

Florida with its sinkholes, forest fires, diminished water table and rising coastline, etc., to

the Cubanos. And as our loyal allies we wish them well!"

There was a broad round of laughter, even Varakov's usually reserved secretary smiling, almost

blushing as she sat on the small chair by the side of his desk taking notes on the meeting. As the

laughter subsided, Varakov cleared his throat, then began again. "This fort will be located in

what I understand is one of the oldest universities in the United States. I would encourage that

this structure remain as unaltered as possible. If we appear to show respect for what the American

people themselves respect, perhaps we too can gain some of this respect, if not affection." Then

Varakov looked at his secretary, saying, "Call in Colonel Korcinski. We need him now."

The young woman got up, smoothing down what Varakov thought was an overly long uniform skirt, then

walked across the open-walled office and out to the main hall. She returned in a moment, following

discreetly behind Col. Vassily Korcinski. The Colonel was middle-aged, white-haired, handsome to

the point of effeminacy, Varakov thought. He leafed through Korcinski's service record file,

airborne qualified, wounded twice in combat, married with two teenage sons in Moscow. They were

still alive and had survived the American attack, the file noted. Varakov wanted no man in a

position of authority with a personal vendetta.

Korcinski stood at attention before the desk, and Varakov nodded to him, saying to the assembled

staff officers, "Gentlemen, the Commander of our first outpost!"

Chapter 7.

Natalia reeled under her husband's blow to her left cheek. His knuckles were bloodied. She stared

up at him. She started to her feet, saw his hand coming for her again, and tried to raise her hand

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