looking for him. I tell myself he's looking for us. I know he is,' she automatically corrected herself. 'If John were doing this— that's my husband— well, he'd go back to the pier at night, go into the water, swim up alongside one of the boats and steal it. He'd take a knife,' she said and raised the boning knife to show Kleinschmidt as Michael handed it to her. 'And, I guess he'd use it if he had to,' she added.
'I can't let you do that, Mrs. Rourke.'
'I feel old enough these days, Harmon. Just call me Sarah,' she smiled.
Chapter 18
'Shit,' Paul Rubenstein muttered. He hunched his collar up against the wind, asking half under his breath,
'Why is it cold in St. Petersburg?' He looked around him, down at the Harley between his legs, at the Schmeisser slung under his right arm. He decided nothing in view could or would answer him. He stared down at the road, watching the troops moving along it. 'Cubans,' he muttered to himself.
Pushing his wire-framed glasses up from the bridge of his nose, Rubenstein let out the Harley's stand, dismounted, and moved into the trees to get further off the road below and to avoid the wind. He dropped to the ground, squatting there. He wished he'd started smoking again.
He could still see the road through the trees, and he watched to make certain none of the troops moving along below him made any sudden moves toward the side of the road, indicating they'd somehow detected his presence. He wished he spoke Spanish. Then perhaps if he got closer to them he could learn something.
'Everybody can't be John Rourke,' he said half-aloud, smiling. He wondered for an instant what Rourke was doing. Had he found Sarah and the children yet? If he hadn't, how long would he keep on looking?
Rubenstein studied the road, drawing casually in the dirt between his legs with the point of the Gerber MkII knife Rourke had given him for the journey. He began mentally to tick off the situation's pertinent details, to help himself to form a plan. He had been in the St. Petersburg area for nearly three days. The city itself was partially destroyed; there were internment—
concentration— camps all over. He studied the faces inside, behind the wire fences. He'd convinced himself most of the people inside were old and that most of them seemed to be Jewish like himself. It was just a feeling, he knew. Maybe they weren't Jewish; perhaps it was the armed guards and the barbed wire that made him think so— and he had seen films of the camps during World War II. That was enough. He decided some of them were Jewish at least.
He had left his bike and slipped quietly through the streets at night past the Communist Cuban patrols. The house his parents had lived in was gone. There was a house if a roof and three standing walls counted, but there had been a fire and obvious looting. They were not there. He had checked throughout the neighborhood, trying to remember which houses had belonged to friends of his parents from the few times he had visited them there. He hadn't been certain of any of it, but none of the houses in the neighborhood looked to be inhabited anymore, nor habitable.
'Gotta,' he muttered, staring away from the road, looking at the meaningless lines he'd drawn in the dirt with the long-bladed knife. There was one large camp, larger than many of the others combined. Somewhere inside, he told himself, there would be someone who knew his parents, perhaps knew what had happened to them. If they were dead, he wanted to know. For certain.
Concentration camps, he told himself, were made to keep people in, not out. The young man smiled. Perhaps after he penetrated the main camp and learned what he could, he could free some of the prisoners. Rourke would, he decided.
Chapter 19
Rourke rolled the Harley Davidson to a stop in the sand. He could appreciate more realistically how thinly spread the Russians must have been. The beach area had been fenced with barbed wire— he'd cut that. But there were no guards in sight. 'Stupid,' he muttered.
'What did you say?' Sissy asked, sitting behind him on the bike, her grip around his midsection relaxed now that they had stopped.
'I said the Russians are stupid to leave the coast unguarded like this— good thing for us, though.' Rourke decided, and without much of a valid reason, he didn't like the girl.
'Oh,' she said, noncommittally, almost inaudibly.
'Oh,' he echoed, staring down at the surf. He could see a light, blinking from offshore in the twilight. Rourke reached into the belt under his jacket where he'd temporarily stashed the Kel-Lite. He glanced up and down the beach. Then Rourke moved the switch one position forward, pushing the button, releasing it, then pushing it again. He made a series of dots and dashes and, after a moment, the light from offshore, already seeming closer, signaled back in a predetermined pattern he'd worked out with Reed by radio. He moved the switch on the flashlight back into the off position, then handed Sissy the light.
'Put that in the side pocket over there.'
'Where?'
'In the pack, Sissy— in the pack.'
'All right,' she said. 'Was that the airplane?'
'The amphibious plane, right.'
'Are you going to leave your motorcycle behind?' she asked, her voice sounding strained to him. Watching the approaching plane across the water, he decided she was probably wrestling with getting the Kel-Lite back into the Lowe pack.
'No, I'm bringing the bike. They can get close enough I can get it up a ramp and into the plane. Shouldn't get the bike too wet. I can clean off the salt water as soon as we're airborne.'
'Can't you just get another motorcycle?' she asked.
'Why should I? There's nothing wrong with this.'
'But isn't it a lot of bother— I mean, cleaning it off, hauling it aboard? Why not just—'
