She turned her face, her hair caught in the slip-stream of the air around her and the Harley that throbbed between her legs. She looked at Rubenstein as she brushed hair back from her eyes. She felt stupid, shouting it to him. “I’m happy, Paul!”
They were starting into a curve as they passed beneath an outstretching roadside oak to their right, the angle of the road dropping steeply left, an abandoned roadside store on the left perhaps forty yards ahead. In the gravel parking lot be-tween the store and the road were more than a dozen men on motorcycles or standing beside them. Heavily armed, the men were Brigands. She swung her M-16 forward on its sling. She slowed her bike. She looked at Paul Rubenstein—his German MP-40 submachine gun was in his right fist. She felt a tear at the inside corner of her right eye. Natalia Anastasia Tiemerovna, major, Committee for State Security of the Soviet, told herself the tear in her eye was only from the wind. It had been foolish—dangerous—to feel happy.
Chapter Three
He laughed when he thought of it— “trigger con-trol.” It had been his slogan, his watchword, so long—but so little time—ago. Paul Rubenstein pumped the Schmeisser’s trigger, a neat three-round burst across the forty yards or so separating him and Natalia from the dozen Brigands, pumped the burst toward the nearest of the two Brigands raising assault rifles toward them. And the Brigand—a tall, beefy man wearing a sleeve-less blue denim jacket—doubled up jacknife fash-ion, falling forward. A sharper, louder crack, hot brass pelting at his left cheek—Natalia’s M-16, a long burst, the sec-ond rifleman going down, his legs cut from under him, gunfire raining toward them now as others of the Brigand band opened fire, motorcycles start-ing out of the gravel parking lot, skidding into the loop of highway that flanked the lot on two sides.
“Back the other way!” Natalia was screaming. Rubenstein fired another burst, then another and another, the comparatively mild recoil shocking his body, bringing a wash of cold sweat to him, his arms aching like a bad tooth. He started cutting the Harley into a steep arc, firing another burst, downing still another of the Brigand bikers, the Brigand’s machine—a Japanese bike dripping chrome and gleaming like something just off a showroom floor—skidding across the highway. The Brigand was screaming, dragged behind it, the bike’s engine roaring, sparks showering up from the road surface, then a scream more hid-eous than anything Paul Rubenstein had ever heard— a shriek. The Brigand’s left leg, as the ma-chine whiplashed against a rock of massive pro-portions, the rock a barrier between the corner of the gravel lot and the loop of highway—the left leg was torn away, the bike exploding as it struck the boulder-sized rock, a spray of flaming gasoline belching laterally across the loop of highway then rising, the amputated leg of the Brigand like a flaming log, the Brigand himself screaming again as flames engulfed his thrashing body.
Rubenstein fired out the Schmeisser’s magazine through the sheet of flame, a Brigand biker crash-ing through it, bouncing to the highway, clothes and hair and face on fire. Rubenstein let the Schmeisser drop to his side on its sling, snatching the battered Browning High Power from the web tanker style shoulder rig under his field jacket, jacking back the hammer with his thumb. He fired once—the Brigand biker, a human torch, dropped, the burning arms and hands slapping up toward the face, the face like the burning head of a match. What had been a man fell. Rubenstein gunned the Harley, Natalia twenty yards back along the road by now, her machine stopped, the M-16 held in both her hands as she twisted in the bike seat, spraying death behind them. He shouted to her over the crackle of flames and gunfire— “Run for it!”
He shot his machine past her, hearing her ma-chine rev on the whistle of the slipstream. Paul Rubenstein looked behind him—Natalia was coming, riding low over her Harley, Brigand bikers—at least six of them—starting out of the loop of highway and following.
Chapter Four
The M-16’s thirty-round magazine spent, she let the rifle fall on its sling, dismissing it as she leaned her weight forward over the Harley, tucking her body down against the gunfire of the pursuing Brigands. Paul Rubenstein was ahead of her, his machine weaving—perhaps to avoid Brigand gunfire, per-haps the pain in his arm making him weak. She didn’t know.
Natalia kept riding.
There was a roar behind her and she looked back.
One of the Brigand bikers—he was breaking away from the rest, a three-wheeled trike, the roar of its engine loud. She stared at the machine. From what she could tell it was no real bike at all—something customized, hand built, chrome pipes gleaming every-where, a chrome-plated auto-mobile-sized engine between the single front wheel and the rear wheels, just behind the driver’s seat. There was a rippling, exploding sound, the bike up on its rear wheels for an instant, then rocketing toward her, a cloud of exhaust fumes rising in its wake.
The face of the man driving it—lips wide back from the bared teeth, snarling, one eye gone, the right one. In the left hand she saw a shotgun, the barrels short, no buttstock at all, as far as she could see. The double side-by-side barrels were raising to-ward her as the three-wheeled machine gained on her. Natalia reached her right hand to the Safariland flap holster at her right hip, her fingers curling around the smooth, memory-grooved Goncalo Alves stocks, the L-Frame Smith & Wesson in her fist as she wrenched it from the leather.
She punched the Metalife Custom .357 Mag-num out, toward the man with the shotgun com-ing at her on the trike. If he fired first—she would be dead or worse, she knew. She double-actioned the slab-side barreled revolver, the wheelgun bucking in her right hand, the face of the Brigand biker seeming to erupt at the bridge of the nose and between the eyes. The shotgun discharged, both barrels, Natalia turning her face away, hear-ing a roar then a roar louder than the shotgun blasts had been, feeling heat sear at her right hand. She turned to fire again—but the trike, the biker, a massive oak tree growing close out of the side of the road—the bizarre machine had climbed it, hung from it now as flames rained down in chunks of burning flesh and debris and the trike and the biker who had ridden it were gone. She holstered the L-Frame, one of two given her by the de facto President of U.S. II, Samuel Chambers—in her mind’s eye she could see the American Eagles engraved on the right barrel flats, remember the look in Rourke’s eyes as Chambers had awarded her the guns, his token of thanks—
She was Russian, fighting Americans, fighting Russians, too, by hiding from them—at war with her own KGB—at war with her own heart.
Natalia screamed into the wind—
The Brigand bikers had given up their pursuit.
Chapter Five
Rourke slowed the jet-black Harley Low Rider. He eased the bike into a stop, letting down the stand, dismounting, sliding the CAR-15 forward on its sling.
He stood beside the Harley, listening. He could hear faint clicking sounds as the Harley’s engine cooled, but, above these, he heard the sounds that had precipitated the Night of The War—the sounds of advancing Soviet tanks.
The CAR-15’s pistol grip clenched tight in his right fist, he walked ahead, leaving the Harley by the side of the road—a dirt track leading from one main highway to another through farms and woods. He entered the woods now, moving slowly, pushing aside overhanging branches, not break-ing them, ducking the larger ones, squinting against the cool sunlight through his dark-lensed aviator-style sunglasses. He moved the short, dark tobacco cigar with his tongue from the right side of his mouth across his teeth to the left, clenching it there, still unlit.