“I’ll ask a favor,” Rourke murmured in the darkness, pushing aside a low hanging branch, holding it for Marty and Tom Maus and then continuing on. “Don’t make a direct assault on Soviet Headquarters at the museum. Let Varakov die his own way.”
“Agreed,” Maus answered. “That’s the funny thing—the way Major Tiemerovna spoke about her uncle, before and in the truck just now, and what he’s done now to fight the KGB—General Varakov sounds like a good man.”
“He is.”
Marty said it, “Kind of stupid, isn’t it—I mean, if you assume we’re good men, too. Why were we fighting each other all these years?”
Rourke had no answer for him.
Chapter Nineteen
Sarah Rourke, barefoot, wearing a pair of the blue jeans her husband had stocked for her and one of her husband’s shirts, listened to the sounds of her children over the muted sound of the waterfall to the rear of the Great Room. The children were playing poker with Paul Rubenstein and laughing because they were beating him at it, consistently.
He owed Michael thirteen trillion dollars, Michael had run to tell her.
Michael was a boy again. At least for now.
And Annie—there was a sparkle in her eyes and she gig-gled when Paul would tell her a joke. She had even blushed when Paul had told her she was a pretty little girl.
Sarah sipped at her drink, a book open on her lap—she hadn’t begun to read it past the first line.
She had listened to music earlier—her husband’s library housed records and cassettes ranging from The Beatles to Rachmaninoff, from original recordings of Enrico Caruso to Charles Aznavour.
The children had watched a movie on the videocassette recorder—she had been surprised that their interest had sus-tained in the original version of Lost Horizon starring Ronald Coleman. Perhaps it was the novelty of even seeing a television—the last program they had seen was the red haired Atlanta newsman warning of the impending Soviet attack.
They had played.
They had eaten the dinner she had prepared, not using the microwave, but slowly, lovingly prepared on the con-ventional electric stove. She had baked bread. She had made an apple pie using some of the dehydrated apples she had found in one of the freezers.
She felt human again.
Behind a series of vault doors in a cave inside a mountain in the middle of World War III, perhaps Soviet soldiers or brigands prowling nearby.
But she felt human again.
It was a feeling she did not want to lose.
But she could not concentrate. She worried that John Rourke still lived somewhere out there. That he would be able to come back to her.
And despite the fact the beautiful Russian woman was her rival, she worried—and she found herself smiling at the thought — for Natalia Tiemerovna.
“I’m crazy,” she murmured, listening to her children laugh.
Chapter Twenty
The GRU aircraft—a Beechcraft Super King Air—had made its pass over the field, Vladov radioing to the aircraft, getting the proper recognition signal. There had been a schedule of appointed rendezvous times, five in all and this was the fourth.
The Polish American woman, Emily, who was a self-pro-claimed hater of the Russians, had laughed as she had bro-ken out the flares. She had said, “If I’d ever figured I’d be lighting a field so a bunch of Commies usin’ a stolen Ameri-can airplane could land safely I’d have had myself commit-ted to the funny farm.” But with Lieutenant Daszrozinski and several of his men helping her, she had done just that.
In the brush at the far edge of the field now, Rourke, Na-talia, Vladov, Maus and Marty Stanonik waited, their as-sault rifles ready, the rest of Vladov’s men sprinkled around the field with Daszrozinski and Emily at the far end.
“That GRU man is a good pilot,” Rourke commented, watching as the Beechcraft touched down, bouncing across the field, slowing, slowing still more, then turning into a take-off position. “Makes me feel like a drug dealer waiting for a marijuana drop,” he laughed, pushing himself to his feet, staying in a low crouch, running, the CAR-15 across his back, the M-16 in his hands, Natalia, Maus, Stanonik and Vladov in a wedge around him.
It was two hundred yards as he reckoned it—a healthy run with a heavy pack, several handguns and knives and two assault rifles. But he didn’t slow or stop until he reached the aircraft, hearing Vladov on the small radio giving the code phrase, “Red, white and blue—red, white and blue—”
The irony didn’t escape him.
The door in the fuselage opened, a tall, thin man appear-ing in the shadow and moonlight.
He looked down. “You are the American doctor?”
“I’m Rourke.”
The man extended his right hand, hesitantly. Rourke shifted his assault rifle, holding it by the front handguard in his left hand, taking the GRU man’s hand. “We had an ex-pression here in America—I don’t know if you ever heard it. Politics makes strange bedfellows. Anyway—I’m glad you made it.”
The GRU man nodded.
Rourke felt Natalia’s presence beside him. “I know you — you are Captain Gorki.”
“Yes, Comrade Major—I met you once in Moscow—you remember faces well. I am Major Gorki now.”
“It is good to see you, Comrade.”
Rourke shrugged his shoulders.
Maus and Marty Stanonik, M-16s in their hands, were coming from the nose of the plane, dipping under the star-board wing. “You’d better get airborne and get the hell out of here,” Maus announced.
“I was planning on it,” Rourke nodded.
At the edge of his peripheral vision he saw Vladov and Daszrozinski, Daszrozinski leading the Soviet SF-ers to-ward the fuselage. Rourke stepped away to give them room.
The GRU pilot had hopped down, standing beside Maus now. “There are two of us — myself and a Sergeant Druszik. We will accompany you, Comrade Major Tiemerovna, and be ready to fly you out should that be possible.”
Rourke watched as Natalia nodded. “We’ve got a slight change in plans,” Rourke said, then. “I couldn’t inform U.S. II of the exact rendezvous point we’d been given—the possibility of the KGB listening in. But I’ll give you a new rendezvous spot—easy enough to get to.”
“I have charts aboard the aircraft, Dr. Rourke. If you’ll follow me, while the gear is being secured.”
Rourke nodded. He turned to Tom Maus. “Tom, good luck to you. I hope you can do what you plan.”
Maus laughed, saying, “All I can do is try—don’t have much to lose, do I?”
Rourke shrugged. He extended his hand to Marty Stanonik. “Pleasure to meet you, Marty. I wish you the same—good luck.”
The young man nodded. “Yeah, knowin’ Tommy here, we’ll need it,” and Maus laughed.
Emily was there as well. “Ma’am, without your help we wouldn’t have made it this far. Thank you.”
She said nothing, only nodded.
Natalia stepped forward, leaned toward Maus, kissing him on the cheek, then did the same to Marty. “Thank you both,” she said softly. She turned to Emily. “And thank you, thank you very much, Mrs. Bronkiewicz.”
The woman who hated the Russians, her voice barely au-dible, told Natalia, “God bless all of you,” then turned and walked away.
Chapter Twenty-one
The Four Corners were not a precise location place wise, but geographically quite precise. There was a marker nearby Rourke knew —he hadn’t bothered to read it, having read it years before.