They had played.
They had eaten the dinner she had prepared, not using the microwave, but slowly, lovingly prepared on the con-ventional electric stove. She had baked bread. She had made an apple pie using some of the dehydrated apples she had found in one of the freezers.
She felt human again.
Behind a series of vault doors in a cave inside a mountain in the middle of World War III, perhaps Soviet soldiers or brigands prowling nearby.
But she felt human again.
It was a feeling she did not want to lose.
But she could not concentrate. She worried that John Rourke still lived somewhere out there. That he would be able to come back to her.
And despite the fact the beautiful Russian woman was her rival, she worried—and she found herself smiling at the thought — for Natalia Tiemerovna.
“I’m crazy,” she murmured, listening to her children laugh.
Chapter Twenty
The GRU aircraft—a Beechcraft Super King Air—had made its pass over the field, Vladov radioing to the aircraft, getting the proper recognition signal. There had been a schedule of appointed rendezvous times, five in all and this was the fourth.
The Polish American woman, Emily, who was a self-pro-claimed hater of the Russians, had laughed as she had bro-ken out the flares. She had said, “If I’d ever figured I’d be lighting a field so a bunch of Commies usin’ a stolen Ameri-can airplane could land safely I’d have had myself commit-ted to the funny farm.” But with Lieutenant Daszrozinski and several of his men helping her, she had done just that.
In the brush at the far edge of the field now, Rourke, Na-talia, Vladov, Maus and Marty Stanonik waited, their as-sault rifles ready, the rest of Vladov’s men sprinkled around the field with Daszrozinski and Emily at the far end.
“That GRU man is a good pilot,” Rourke commented, watching as the Beechcraft touched down, bouncing across the field, slowing, slowing still more, then turning into a take-off position. “Makes me feel like a drug dealer waiting for a marijuana drop,” he laughed, pushing himself to his feet, staying in a low crouch, running, the CAR-15 across his back, the M-16 in his hands, Natalia, Maus, Stanonik and Vladov in a wedge around him.
It was two hundred yards as he reckoned it—a healthy run with a heavy pack, several handguns and knives and two assault rifles. But he didn’t slow or stop until he reached the aircraft, hearing Vladov on the small radio giving the code phrase, “Red, white and blue—red, white and blue—”
The irony didn’t escape him.
The door in the fuselage opened, a tall, thin man appear-ing in the shadow and moonlight.
He looked down. “You are the American doctor?”
“I’m Rourke.”
The man extended his right hand, hesitantly. Rourke shifted his assault rifle, holding it by the front handguard in his left hand, taking the GRU man’s hand. “We had an ex-pression here in America—I don’t know if you ever heard it. Politics makes strange bedfellows. Anyway—I’m glad you made it.”
The GRU man nodded.
Rourke felt Natalia’s presence beside him. “I know you — you are Captain Gorki.”
“Yes, Comrade Major—I met you once in Moscow—you remember faces well. I am Major Gorki now.”
“It is good to see you, Comrade.”
Rourke shrugged his shoulders.
Maus and Marty Stanonik, M-16s in their hands, were coming from the nose of the plane, dipping under the star-board wing. “You’d better get airborne and get the hell out of here,” Maus announced.
“I was planning on it,” Rourke nodded.
At the edge of his peripheral vision he saw Vladov and Daszrozinski, Daszrozinski leading the Soviet SF-ers to-ward the fuselage. Rourke stepped away to give them room.
The GRU pilot had hopped down, standing beside Maus now. “There are two of us — myself and a Sergeant Druszik. We will accompany you, Comrade Major Tiemerovna, and be ready to fly you out should that be possible.”
Rourke watched as Natalia nodded. “We’ve got a slight change in plans,” Rourke said, then. “I couldn’t inform U.S. II of the exact rendezvous point we’d been given—the possibility of the KGB listening in. But I’ll give you a new rendezvous spot—easy enough to get to.”
“I have charts aboard the aircraft, Dr. Rourke. If you’ll follow me, while the gear is being secured.”
Rourke nodded. He turned to Tom Maus. “Tom, good luck to you. I hope you can do what you plan.”
Maus laughed, saying, “All I can do is try—don’t have much to lose, do I?”
Rourke shrugged. He extended his hand to Marty Stanonik. “Pleasure to meet you, Marty. I wish you the same—good luck.”
The young man nodded. “Yeah, knowin’ Tommy here, we’ll need it,” and Maus laughed.
Emily was there as well. “Ma’am, without your help we wouldn’t have made it this far. Thank you.”
She said nothing, only nodded.
Natalia stepped forward, leaned toward Maus, kissing him on the cheek, then did the same to Marty. “Thank you both,” she said softly. She turned to Emily. “And thank you, thank you very much, Mrs. Bronkiewicz.”
The woman who hated the Russians, her voice barely au-dible, told Natalia, “God bless all of you,” then turned and walked away.
Chapter Twenty-one
The Four Corners were not a precise location place wise, but geographically quite precise. There was a marker nearby Rourke knew —he hadn’t bothered to read it, having read it years before.
He sat in the shelter of high rocks, overlooking the only logical landing site for an aircraft of sufficient
“The Comrade Major, she loves her uncle a great deal, I think,” Vladov whispered.
Rourke nodded slowly, so some sudden movement would not awaken her.
“And she loves you, too, I think, also a great deal. It is written in her eyes. Women—even if a woman is a major in the KGB—they write their emotions across their eyes. For you, that is what is written there.”
“I know,” Rourke answered, trying nottural microbes, which had been all but ignored by commercial enterprises. The unexpected advent of recombinant-DNA techniques from Rourke.
“What are they like?”
Rourke knew where the Soviet captain was looking—to his two sentries on the far side of the grassy plain which the rocks overlooked. “They’re like you, like me, very much like us both, I’d imagine. So far as I know, only one of the men is a man I know personally.”
“The Colonel Reed of whom you speak?”
“Yes, Colonel Reed.”
“What is he like? I have heard of him before. The chief intelligence officer for United States II.”
Rourke felt himself smile. “He is that. Strange guy—fluc-tuate from an occasionally bizarre sense of humor to a guy who wouldn’t laugh if his life depended on it. He’s a career man so to speak. Any Intelligence on active duty for a long time, then in the Reserves, then called up to active duty when all of this started—before the War.”
“He hates Russians then.” It was a statement Vladov made, not a question, shifting his position, moving the 5.45mm AKS-74 onto his lap from the ground beside him.
“Yeah, he hates Russians with a real passion.”
“It is something very strange,” Vladov said. “But before The Night of The War, I hated Americans very much.
