He picked Annie up into this arms—she held a policeman’s nightstick in her right hand and it fell to the ground as he crushed her against him.
He looked at his son. “Thank you—”
Chapter Twenty
It was like solving a puzzle, Nehemiah Rozhdestvenskiy told himself.
“Damn this,” he murmured, blinking his eyes as he looked up from the litter of papers. “A man could go blind—” he began, not finishing it.
He stood up, lighting a cigarette.
Tired.
A puzzle. Intelligence reports from before The Night of The War, comparing these with areas that had survived the bombing, the missile strikes.
The Eden Project. If the astronaut had not been killed—died of his heart attack so shortly after the duel between the American Rourke and his prede-cessor, Vladmir Karamatsov. The astronaut might have known.
Rozhdestvenskiy inhaled on his cigarette, the intake of breath making a light whistling sound. He returned to his desk under the fluorescent tube fixture, studying the sheaves of reports, data—
The Eden Project had launched from the Ken-nedy Space Center in Florida—just before the hits on the center had destroyed it. What had remained had been searched, but further searching was im-possible after the complete destruction of peninsu-lar Florida in the massive quakes in the wake of the slippage of the artificial faultline created by the bombing.
He made himself assume that the answer was not beneath the ocean. California—but the bombing on The Night of The War had triggered the San Andreas faultline—and there was no California.
The triangle—
He walked to the wall to his left, beside his desk.
He found Bevington, Kentucky’s approximate location—the site of the factory that had been uti-lized in the manufacture of materials critical to The Eden Project. But the factory had been de-stroyed before he could find what he had sought.
“Triangle,” he said in English.
In his mind he formed one leg of a triangle be-tween Bevington, Kentucky and the crosshatched area where peninsular Florida had once been, to Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center. He looked to the west across the map.
There was only one other place—and somehow Karamatsov must have known of it, the reason why a KGB base had been established at the over-run Air Force Base in Texas. He drew the other leg of the triangle, Be-vington, Kentucky and the factory there repre-senting the triangle’s apex.
His eye drew the baseline—between the Ken-nedy Space Center and Houston, Texas.
“The Johnson Space Center,” he whispered.
After the Texas volunteer militia and U.S. II forces had retaken the base, Karamatsov and Ma-jor Tiemerovna barely escaping with their lives, Soviet freedom of action in Texas had been se-verely reduced.
“The Johnson Space Center—”
He turned to the telephone on his desk—waiting an instant. If he were wrong, there was really no other place to look and he would be dead. They would all be dead.
He lifted the receiver. “This is Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy—the Elite Corps strike force duty officer—I wish to speak with him immedi-ately—”
The cigarette had burned down between his fin-gers and yellowed his flesh.
Chapter Twenty-one
She leaned against the fuselage of the plane, the prototype F-111. One more crate remained, M-16
rifles. She looked skyward—the horizon was pink-tinged, thunder rumbling in the east, streaks of lightning across the pink line between day and night.
She could hear Paul coming back from the cam-ouflaged Ford pickup—and she turned to watch him. He moved like a man twice his age, his left arm stiff at his side. Natalia turned quickly away from him, to the crate of rifles, reaching out for it, drawing it to-ward her—it was only twenty feet or so to the truck and perhaps—
“Hey— what the hell are you doin’?”
“I’m trying to move the crate—what’s it look like, Paul?”
She felt him shove past her, felt, heard the pain it caused his arm as they made contact. His right hand was beside hers on the crate’s rope handle, wrenching the crate away from her at an awkward angle.
“I take one end, you take the other—just like we’ve been doing,” he said, not looking at her.
“I can do it—your arm—”
“Bullshit—your abdomen, probably still weak from the surgery—all I need is for you to rupture that area where John operated—now get out—”
Her left hand went against his chest as she turned to face him, shoving him back. “All I need is for you to die—get your arm bleeding again. Bullshit to you, too, Paul!”
She was screaming at him.
She stopped.
Rubenstein leaned forward, against the fuse-lage. He was laughing. Natalia, too, felt herself begin to laugh. “What do you say we just leave this crate of rifles, huh?” he smiled.
“What do you say we just carry it like the other ones—hmm? That’s a better idea.”
“Yeah—it is a good idea—and you’re a good lady,” and then he turned to face her fully, and as his right arm moved out to her, she leaned her head against his chest.
Without his strength—not the physical kind, despite her sex she was his equal in physical stam-ina and endurance, though he was better in agil-ity—life would have been sadder for her.
Chapter Twenty-two
Mary Mulliner stood beside the entrance to the bunker, the children pressed against her as she hugged them, John Rourke stood next to Sarah Rourke, beside the dented light blue pickup truck Pete Critchfield had scrounged for them—like Rourke’s own pickup, which he imagined by now Natalia and Paul had used to empty the F-l 11 and ferry the supplies to the Retreat, this too was a Ford. It was a “loan,” but both Rourke and Critchfield had known the likelihood of the truck’s being re-turned was remote to the point of nonexistence.
Rourke held his wife’s right hand in his left, his right hand holding the scoped CAR-15. The golden retriever belonging to Mary Mulliner ran between Sarah and where Mary and the children stood—it yelped.
It looked like a good dog, Rourke thought.
He let go of his wife’s hand, to glance at the black-faced Rolex Submariner he wore. It was nearly eight-thirty.
The Harley was packed, ready.
“I know,’” Sarah told him softly. “But she loves them—always acted like a grandmother to them, or an aunt. I can’t just say—”
But then Mary Mulliner’s voice, from across the yard, cut her off. “John Rourke—I don’t know if you know what you got here. These two chil-dren—and this boy of yours is more of a man than most men I’ve ever heard tell of. And your wife—she’s been pinin’ for you, John Rourke. Keep her good.”
“Yes, ma’am—I intend to,” Rourke nodded.
Then Mary Mulliner started across the yard. Michael and Annie hugged against her hips as she walked. The dog was barking maddeningly.
“Hush,” she hissed to the dog, and the golden obeyed, stretching out at her feet as she stopped a yard away from Rourke and his wife. “The dog—misses Bill, I guess,” and she started to smile, then burst into tears. Sarah folded the older woman in her arms and hugged her tightly. Rourke watched, felt his children tugging at him. Affection, he suddenly realized, had always been hard for him.