The CAR-15 lay on the kitchen countertop. Be-side it an M-16, one he had taken the time to hand-pick from the stores of weapons brought from the plane. Between the two assault rifles was an olive-drab ammo box, eight hundred rounds of 5.56mm Ball.
Beside him, as Rourke lit a cigar, was Paul Rubenstein, the younger man leaning against the counter. Rourke glanced at his friend—tired, worn from loss of blood. Rourke had inspected the wound—there had been little progress, almost none—but it was healing, and with the reduced level of activity would heal completely, he felt.
“I still say—”
Rourke looked at Rubenstein again. “No. With that wound—well, you know. But even if you didn’t have the wound, I’d leave you here. Who the hell is gonna take care of Sarah and Michael and Annie for me? There’s no one else I’d trust if there were somebody else around.”
“So it’s you and Natalia against whatever the hell her uncle’s throwing you at?”
Rourke chewed down on his cigar. “Yeah—I guess that’s the way of it.”
“If you—”
“Don’t come back—I can’t tell you what to do. You’re the best friend I ever had—in some ways, I guess, maybe the only one. You do what you think is best and it’ll be the best—it sounds stupid to say it, but I have faith in you—I really do,” and Rourke looked at his friend and smiled. . . . It had taken Natalia long to change, he realized. She appeared from the bathroom wearing what John Rourke had come, subconsciously, to con-sider her battle gear—a tight-fitting black jump-suit, nearly knee-high medium-heeled boots, the double-flap holster rig on her belt with the L Frame Smiths bearing the American Eagles en-graved on the barrel flats. He could see the guns as she opened each holster in turn and checked the cylinders, then reholstered the revolvers and resecured the holster flaps.
As she walked across the Great Room, he saw that she too wore additional armament—the COP
Derringer was not to be seen, but the little four-barreled .357 Magnum would be in her purse—the massive black canvas bag she almost invariably carried. But on her belt was a Gerber Mk II, the sheath apparently specially made, black, efficient-looking, the knife’s handle material and the brass double-quillon guard betraying it as the Presenta-tion series variation—just as efficient as the more subdued-looking Gerber Rourke now wore, but prettier.
She wore a shoulder rig he had never seen be-fore—not something designed for concealment, but a field rig. Under her right armpit was a small black-handled knife, hanging upside down in a black leather sheath—he guessed a Gerber Guard-ian, the tiny boot knife similar in size to his Sting I A. Under her left armpit, balancing the rig, was what he recognized as a stainless steel Walther PPK/S, hanging upside down like the knife, pro-truding through the upside of the holster a stain-less steel-looking—it could have been some type of aluminum—silencer, perhaps six inches long and the approximate diameter of a silver dollar. She saw him looking at it— “I had the silencer specially built—aircraft aluminum but very strong. The baffles need changing after every five hundred rounds or so—there’s no slide lock, but I had the recoil spring altered so it functions perfectly with subsonic ammunition. It’s very quiet that way—almost like a whisper. But with the regular recoil spring, like I have in it now, it handles 95-grain Hollow Points and it sounds about like a belch. I tested it a lot, but never used it in the field. In case we need a relatively silent shot, this should do it.”
He saw Sarah looking at him—she stood beside Natalia.
He walked over to the two women, his right arm around Sarah, his left around Natalia. He drew both women close. There was no need to say what he felt.
Chapter Thirty
Natalia behind him, they had ridden in silence on Rourke’s machine to the hidden aircraft. Like Rourke, she had carried two assault rifles, but both of hers were M-16s. As they worked now to remove the camouflage netting from the proto-type F-111, she spoke. “What will you do, John?”
“About what your uncle has to tell us?”
“No—about Sarah and about me?”
“I don’t know.”
“You love her—and she loves you—it’s plain to see for—”
“She said the same thing about you,” Rourke said, stopping what he was doing, looking at her. “That she could tell I love you, and that you love me.”
“And what did you say to her—if I can ask?”
“I told her—well, I guess pretty much what I told you.” He chewed down hard on his cigar. “Paul is a fine man.”
He watched her eyes in the darkness—another day was coming soon, the horizon pink with it in the east, chain lightning crackling across the sky there.
“Is that what you want—for me, for him?” Na-talia asked, turning away from the plane, lighting a cigarette for herself.
“No,” Rourke sighed. “I’m just saying it.”
“This is a strange situation, John—silly, sad—all at once. If you had met me before you’d met Sarah, and then met Sarah later, I think we’d be talking about the same thing, wouldn’t we?”
Rourke looked back at the fuselage of the jet. He nodded. “Yeah.”
“I learned some things about myself tonight—when you read my uncle’s letter.”
“Look—”
“No—let me finish.”
Rourke nodded only, lighting his cigar with the battered Zippo that bore his initials—he turned it over in his hands, feeling the engraving for the ini-tials under his thumb. “So say it.”
“How much my uncle loves me—it doesn’t mat-ter that he isn’t really my uncle—he is my uncle. And Paul—I don’t know how it feels to be a Jew, but I am one—half, at least. The way he reached out and held my hand when you read that part of my uncle’s letter. And Sarah—she felt for me, about my mother and father dying. My uncle had always told me it had been an accident.”
“You never checked?”
“I never saw any reason to—I guess that I was naive.”
Rourke walked over to stand beside her, finding her left hand in the darkness, holding it tight.
“And about you—I learned a lot about you,” she whispered. “That you really love me the same way you love her. That I could be a wife, a mother—that because of what I am and what I did sometimes—that—”
Rourke held her against his chest in the dark-ness.
It was insane. General Varakov had spoken as though the world would end. The lightning tracked across the sky.
But his only thought was that he loved two women—he realized now—equally.
Chapter Thirty-one
Sarah Rourke watched the man she had just met—he was younger than she, she guessed. She fixed a drink for him—Seagram's Seven and ice—and a drink for herself. Her husband’s taste in liq-uor was as exciting and varied as his taste in women’s clothing. If someone at the Retreat didn’t like blended whiskey—and it was her favorite blended whiskey— they were out of luck.
“Good thing you’re not a Scotch drinker,” she called out to Paul Rubenstein, forcing a smile.
“Yeah—good thing,” he nodded.