slowed his pace, his feet hurting, walking up to her. 'Natalia Tiemerovna, can you still love your uncle?'
He stopped, six feet or so behind her. The girl turned, her hands coming from the pockets of her fur coat, her arms reaching out as she ran the few steps toward him. She put her arms around his neck. He could no longer see her face. He looked beyond it at the waves, feeling her body against his massive chest and stomach, hearing her sobs below the keening of the wind.
'Can you still love your uncle?' he asked again, his voice low, his lips close to her right ear.
'Yes,' she murmured.
Varakov smiled. He didn't ask the other question that hung between them. And he knew the answer concerning Rourke, and he feared it.
Chapter 17
Sarah Rourke swung down from Tildie's saddle, her hands sliding across the animal's neck. She started to wipe the lather down along her thighs, but remembered she was still wearing the skirt. She reached up to the blue jeans tied to the saddle thongs and wiped the sweat from her hands. Then she took her pants and reached into the saddlebag for her gun, leading Tildie toward the farmhouse.
She looked from side to side, double-checking as she had since coming in sight of the farmhouse that there were no signs of Soviet troops or Brigands. She stopped at the door, knocking. 'Michael, it's momma,' she said loudly.
The door opened and she stepped inside, tugging at the reins of the mare behind her, bending and kissing Michael. 'Did anything happen?'
'No, nothing. Did you find the boat, Momma?'
She kissed the boy again. 'I did, but—'
'Mrs. Rourke, you found the boat?'
She turned around. It was odd not to hear herself addressed as someone's mother. She stared across the room. Harmon Kleinschmidt was sitting up on the cot, his back propped against the wall. 'You shouldn't be sitting up, Harmon— not with those wounds,' she told him.
'But you found it?'
She looked at Kleinschmidt a moment, turned toward Michael and handed him Tildie's reins, saying,
'Michael, rub her down and feed her. I'll need her again soon.'
The boy moved off and Sarah Rourke turned again toward Kleinschmidt. Annie was asleep on some blankets on the floor, and Sarah, as she walked across the room, stooped down, kissing the girl's forehead, tucking the blankets up around her. Sarah was still cold from the ride outside in the wind.
'I found your boat, Mr. Kleinschmidt. I saw a lot of boats.'
'Did you see the Stargazer II? I used to work on it.'
'As a matter of fact I did,' she told the younger man. 'I need a boat that size. Why can't we ask the man who owns it, if you used to work on it?'
She stepped beside the cot, automatically checking the bandages. They didn't need changing yet, she determined.
'I can't risk it for him. They might be watching him anyway, looking for me.'
Sarah nodded, saying nothing.
'But you saw the Ave Maria— you saw it?'
'You can't operate the boat, Harmon,' she told him, looking at him evenly. 'And even with the children helping me, I can't operate something that big either. I need a smaller boat, like the Stargazer II. I need a place we can leave the horses, then I need a way of getting us to the boat, though. Can you help me there?'
'Yeah, but I just don't see why you don't want the Ave Maria. Why?'
Sarah stood up, walking behind a blanket suspended from a rope she'd run across the opposite corner of the house. She hadn't felt like undressing with Harmon Kleinschmidt being able to wake up at any moment and watch her. Behind the blanket, she dug down into one of the duffel bags. There was a pair of pink shorts she remembered that had gotten caught up with her blue jeans when she'd packed hurriedly that first time they'd left the farmhouse in northeast Georgia, right after the bombing. She'd been tempted to throw the shorts away, but kept them in case the weather became hot. She studied the shorts a moment. 'Swimsuit,' she muttered to herself. Then, starting to undress behind the screening blanket,
she said to Kleinschmidt, 'What was it you were saying, Harmon?'
'Why not the Ave Maria? She's a good ship.'
'She's too much of a ship,' Sarah said back to him, stripping off the T-shirt, then the bra, then putting them on top of her skirt and her underpants. She pulled on the shorts, then the T-shirt again. 'I can't handle it, so if the Russians were after us, I couldn't outrun them,' she said finally.
'All right— but you could get the horses on her.'
'But I'm not taking the Ave Maria, Harmon. That's final.' She stepped into her track shoes, bending to tie them, saying, 'Michael—-carefully— get me that boning knife from the other duffel bag.' She let her hair down as she stepped from behind the blanket. The hell with not washing it, she thought— it'd be wet soon enough.
'Momma, why are you wearing shorts? It's cold outside. You wouldn't—'
She cut the boy off. 'I don't feel like going for a swim in my blue jeans, Michael.'
'A swim, Mrs. Rourke?' Harmon Kleinschmidt asked.
'I asked myself, Harmon, what would my husband do in a situation like this. Well, my husband is very good at things like this— always was. I guess it isn't a secret anymore that he was in the C.I.A., he was a survival expert, and a doctor too. He's alive somewhere. That's what the children and I are doing—
