'Sir . . . please,' the red-haired woman said.
'Yeah.' He nodded, tired from going more than a day without sleep.
Standing slowly, he stubbed out the cigarette and looked around the place—some officer's club, he thought. One lousy window. He walked across the room, lurching a little because of sitting so long in one chair, tired. He staggered against the back of a chair. A Marine lieutenant started to his feet, saw Reed, then looked noncommittal. Reed shrugged it off, reaching the window. 'I need a good couple hours sleep, Corporal.'
'Yes, sir.' The red-haired woman nodded.
Reed pulled back the heavy curtain. Staring outside, he whispered, 'Holy shit!' He judged the depth, at least four inches of snow; a heavy wind was blowing what had fallen back into the air. Drifts were mounting against the tires of a jeep outside by the walkway.
'Yes, sir. That's it, sir,' the red-haired woman echoed.
Reed looked at her. 'It's impossible! It was like spring a few—'
He looked back out the window. It was no longer like spring.
The sleet was coming in torrents now. Sarah huddled beside the children under the overhang of rocks, a pine bracken to her right, as she stared down into the valley. The pines made a natural windbreak for herself, Michael, Annie, and the horses.
Across her lap, resting on her blue-jeaned thighs instead of the children's heads, was the AR-—the one modified to fire fully automatically when she put the selector at the right setting, the one almost used to kill her the morning after the Night of the War, the one she'd taken from the dead Brigand and used to shoot out the glass window in the basement of her house in order to set off the confined natural gas there after the gas lines had begun filling the house following the bombing—to blow up her own home and the men inside it who had tried to rob, to kill, to rape.
Priorities were odd, she thought, as she raised her left hand from Annie's chest where it had rested and tugged the blue-and-white bandanna from her own hair. Before the Night of the War—rape, it would have been a top priority. But now losing things had somehow become unconsciously more important as she considered life.
Rape would be a horror—but it could be overcome. Death—it might well be more than expected. But to be robbed, deprived of food or horses or weapons with which to fight—this was worse than death, and rape of the spirit more foul than any rape of the body.
She looked to her right. Michael was sleeping, his body swathed—like Annie's—in blankets against the bizarre and sudden cold. Michael would be turning eight soon, and already he had murdered a man—a Brigand who had tried to rape her. par She studied his face. It was John's face, but younger, though appearing no less troubled. She could see the faint tracing of lines which in adulthood would duplicate the lines in the face of his father. She could see the set of his chin. She thought of his father's face, the quiet, the resoluteness, the firmness. She found herself missing that—the steadiness with which John Rourke's infrequent life at home had provided her.
She watched the valley, the impromptu-appearing Brigand encampment there, pickup trucks sheltered with tarps, and motorcycles, these, too, covered—covered better than her children.
The sleet had begun to stream down from thegray-blue skies more than two hours earlier. Sarah had quickly led the horses—the children mounted on her husband's horse, Sam—up and away from the low valley now below her.
For she had seen the Brigands already, heard their vehicles, their laughter and shouts, felt the fear they always made her feel. She had tethered Sam and Tildie, then wrapped the children in their blankets and in hersas well. Now she sat, huddled in an incongruously feminine woolen jacket, on two saddle blankets spread over the bare rock. She was freezing with the cold.
She looked away from the Brigand camp below. There were perhaps a dozen of them, a small force by comparison to some she had seen, almost encountered. She looked instead at the faces of Michael and Annie, trying to remember the last time she had seen either child really play. Not on the offshore island where they had hidden from the Soviet troops in Savannah. But at the Mulliner farm. The children had played there. Mary Mulliner had ...
Sarah looked down at herself, the rifle across her blue-jeaned thighs. She had worn a dress at the Mulliner farm much of the time, slept in a warm bed at night, worn a nightgown. The children—they had run with the dog Mary kept, forgetting the times they'd run from wild dogs.
There was Mary's son; he fought with the Resistance against the Soviet Army. And the Resistance would have ways of reaching Army Intelligence. If John had gone to Texas near the Louisiana border, as the intelligence man in Savannah had told her, then Mary's son would have a way of contacting John, of letting him know. . . .
She hugged her knees close to her chin, watching the faces of her children; there was little happines in them. But there would be happiness again.
Suddenly, desperately, she wanted to be rid oi her rifle, rid of her war of nerves with every strange sound in the night, rid of the worry.
Her eyes closed, she imagined herself, in her borrowed dress, living at the Mulliner farm, living like a person again.
She opened her eyes, gazing down at the valley. The Brigands—they would rob, kill, rape her if they guessed her presence. But they would leave eventually. If she
turned north, despite the storm, she could reach Mt, Eagle, Tennessee in a matter of days. Texas was farther away than that—farther away. Sarah Rourke closed her eyes again, trying to forget the Brigands and see the faces of her children, playing.
But instead, in her mind all she could see was the face of her husband, John Thomas Rourke.
'These are all the reports, Catherine; there is nothing fresh from the radio room?'
'There is nothing fresh from the communications center, Comrade General,'
the young woman answered him.
Varakov looked up from the sheaves of open file folders littering his desk, into Catherine's young eyes. 'I love the way, girl, that you correct me—communications center it is, then.' He slammed his fist—heavily and
