It had been late afternoon by the time they had pulled ashore near Waukegan, factory complexes—abandoned now—littering the shoreline.
Working in two teams—fire and maneuver—they had worked their way through the factory complex and into the streets of Waukegan proper, continuing the two team move-ment, the process slow.
The sunset was purple, the haze almost something Rourke could taste on the air as he knocked on the rear door of the American field hospital which was in reality Resist-ance headquarters for northern Illinois and southern Wis-consin, as he had learned earlier.
The hole in the back door of Waukegan Outdoor Sports-man opened, a face peering through, back lit. “Tell Tom Maus Major Tiemerovna and I are back to see him—I’m John Rourke.”
“Wait a minute,” and the peephole in the door was closed.
Rourke waited exactly a minute, watching the sweep sec-ondhand of his Rolex, Natalia standing beside him, her eyes trained on the street as he looked at her. Vladov, Lieutenant Daszrozinski and the others were hiding down the alley.
The door opened—Tom Maus, his good-natured, slightly gravelly sounding voice low, said,
“You’ve been a busy man, Doctor Rourke—you and Major Tiemerovna have been very busy. Come in—”
“We have some friends with us. I wanted to tell you first.”
“What kind of friends?”
“Two Soviet Special Forces officers and ten enlisted men, but they’re on our side so to speak—”
Maus started to slam the door. Rourke stepped into it, pushing the door back. “Look—in a day, maybe six days at the most, nothing will be left. It’s the end of the world, Maus — for real, the end of the world.”
Rourke watched Maus’s face in the grey-purple light, dark shadows blanketing part of it, but what light there was catching in Maus’s eyes.
“You’re joking—and it’s in poor—”
“I’m not joking,” Rourke told him quietly.
“He is telling the truth,” Rourke heard Natalia whisper beside him. “I wish to God he were not
—”
Rourke looked at her and smiled.
“What the heck is going on here?” Maus asked
“One last mission, to maybe save some of humanity. And we need your help.”
Rourke watched Maus’s face. The darkness was growing. Maus nodded, then. “All right, inside with you both —”
“Our twelve friends?”
“God knows why,” Maus murmured, shaking his head. “This is stupid—but yeah — but don’t mind it if some of my people keep their guns drawn—”
It was Natalia’s voice. “Don’t mind if some of my people keep their guns drawn, too.”
Rourke made a single, long, low whistle, and as he started through the doorway after Natalia, he could faintly hear the shuffling sounds of twelve pairs of combat boots hitting pavement in a dead run.
Chapter Fifteen
Emily, the Polish American Resistance captain they had first met when landing in Illinois, sat at the far edge of the room, her ungainly six-inch barreled revolver on the table beside her. Vladov sat a few feet from her, perched on the edge of a heavy worktable. Emily’s eyes constantly flickered toward him. A young man, very young looking, thin, a pleasant grin on his face, sat at the radio set, tuning the fre-quency. Maus had identified him—the young man working the radio—as his top field operative against the Russians despite the man’s youth. A six-inch blue Colt Python was on the radio table beside him as he worked. And as he worked, he spoke. “We almost never use this radio—can’t afford to. If the Russians picked up a transmission from around here, well, they’d know where to look.”
“This is important, Mr. Stanonik,” Natalia told him.
“Marty—everybody calls me Marty, Major—”
“I am Natalia.”
“Natalia—right. Russian or not, you’re awful pretty to be a major. Take Tommy there,” and he jerked his thumb toward Maus. “Before The Night of The War he was in the Reserves— he’s a major. And I’d sure as hell rather look at you, ma’am, than look at Tommy there.”
“If this were still a gunshop and you still worked for me—”
“I know,” Stanonik laughed. “You’d fire me—here—I’ve got it, I think,” and he flicked a switch on the radio set in the store-room near Maus’s office. “This is Shooter calling Eagle Two—come in. Shooter calling Eagle Two—” There was no answer, only static over the speaker. This is Shooter calling Eagle Two—do you read me—acknowledge. Over.”
Static—then, “Eagle Two—code sequence verify. Over.”
Marty Stanonik looked at his watch, then began flipping through a Rolodex file beside him—Rourke noticed it because it had been painted and was no longer black with a metallic framework. It was painted gold. “A gold Rolodex,” Rourke said under his breath, shrugging it off. Stanonik was apparently reading off a series of cards in the file, “Series twenty zero eight—Tango—reading now. Bob, Jack, Willie, Mary Jane, Harold. Awaiting verification.”
Rourke smiled to himself—the code was ingenious and sim-ple. And the oddly painted gold Rolodex was its key. Series twenty zero eight translated to the time—eight twenty. Tango was the standard phonetic alphabet correspondent to the letter T—T was the twentieth letter in the alphabet and the first names Stanonik had read over the radio were from the T section of the gold Rolodex, apparently arranged randomly and read in a cer-tain pre-arranged order.
The radio crackled with static. “Shooter, this is Eagle Two— verifying. Series twenty zero eight plus twenty-seven—” Twenty-seven would mean plus one since there were only twenty-six letters in the alphabet. “Uniform—repeat. Uniform. Mabel, Alice, Fred, Pablo, Maurice, Joe. Awaiting verification.”
Stanonik flipped through the Rolodex—into the U section. Then he looked to his microphone.
“Got a man here to talk with Eagle Two Leader—gotta make it quick. Shooter Over.”
“Eagle Two is real busy, Shooter—give it to me—”
“Tell him it’s John Rourke, Marty—and tell him to tell Presi-dent Chambers I have confirmation of a worst case post holo-caust scenario—six day countdown.”
“A what?” Stanonik looked over his shoulder at Rourke.
Rourke started to speak, but Maus said it, “The man here tells me the world is going to end, Marty.”
“Ohh, shit—”
Rourke thought the remark summed it up rather succinctly.
Chapter Sixteen
The radio was designed to automatically change frequen-cies and despite the fact that Soviet monitoring equipment existed which could still pick up such a set-up easily enough, it was a far better arrangement than a single frequency sys-tem.
“I cannot summon a large force, Dr. Rourke. But Varakov is right. I of course knew the post holocaust scenario possibilities and I was never certain the Eden Project got away in time before Kennedy Space Center was destroyed. I don’t doubt that he has the data to support the scenario. I can send you a dozen volunteers. No others to be spared. KGB forces and Army units under KGB command have our backs to the wall here—boxing us in. Our only chance is volunteers from Texas. Reed here is telling me I’m stupid to be saying this en clare , but what’s the difference now. We’re going to fight. I should have known a set-up for a slaughter like this wasn’t General Varakov’s doing. They’ve been making strafing runs on hospitals, bombing civilian en-campments—the whole thing. The largest troop commit-ment they’ve made since invading the continent. I’ve got a volunteer, your old friend Colonel Reed. Where do I send him and the man he’ll take with him?”
Chambers’ radio procedure left a great deal to be desired, Rourke thought. “I saw Reed with a western novel once. I recall reading the author was particularly interested in a cer-tain location. For four reasons. See if he understands — Rourke over.”