The third man was stepping into her, raising a pistol.
Rourke took a long step forward on his right foot, pivot-ing, his left leg snapping up and out, a double Tae Kwan Doe kick to the right side of the man’s head, the man falling away, as he did, Natalia’s knife flashing toward the man, slicing across the gunhand wrist, the pistol—a Makarov— clattering to the road surface along with the last two fingers of his hand.
Rourke stepped toward the man, his right foot snaking out, catching him at the base of the nose, breaking it, driv-ing the bone up and through and into the brain.
Rourke stopped, turned—
Vladov stood there a few yards from him—Reed was be-side him—both men’s knives glinted red with blood in the sunlight.
The fighting had stopped.
The personnel of the convoy lay dead and dying.
“No casualties,” Reed murmured. “Looks like anyway.”
“Many casualties,” Vladov corrected. “Too many, I think.”
Rourke said nothing.
Chapter Thirty-five
The trucks were rolling, Vladov and Daszrozinski each man-ning one of the M-72 combinations and two of the Soviet SF-ers riding the sidecars respectively to man the RPK LMGs. Rourke drove the first truck, his Russian good enough, he knew, Nata-lia had confirmed, that if he avoided a protracted conversation he could convince the guards they would encounter at the checkpoints outside Cheyenne Mountain that he was indeed Russian. Beside him, Natalia. She was changing into the small-est of the Soviet enlisted men’s uniforms they could find. “If I’d wanted a uniform, I could have brought my own uniform.”
“Yeah. But the Russians don’t use women for details like this—and besides, dressed like a woman you’re too recognizable to the KGB.”
“Maybe I should take my eyebrow pencil and paint on a mus-tache.”
“Do you use eyebrow pencil—”
“Not very often,” she laughed. “But a woman needs to have one just in case.”
“You shouldn’t have ridden in the front truck in the convoy.”
“I didn’t have any choice,” she laughed. “I wanted to be with you—and besides, you’re the only man here I’d undress in front of.”
“I don’t know if that’s a compliment or not,” he told her, looking at her for an instant. She had stripped away her jacket and her black jumpsuit and her boots—she looked bizarre, a silk one-piece undergarment that somewhere at the back of his mind he recalled was called a “teddy”
or some other ridiculous sounding name and black boot socks. “That’s a kinky outfit.”
“Hmm—I saw you when you were changing into your uniform—boot socks don’t go much better with jockey shorts.”
Rourke laughed. “If we get out of this—we can get the cryo-genic chambers we can steal and the serum—we can get it to the Retreat—maybe get Vladov and some of his men there and Reed and some of his men. We could accommodate more than the six of us. And you can get things ready—I can go after your uncle and Catherine and try and get them out—”
“No—”
Rourke looked at her as she pulled on her borrowed uniform pants. “Why don’t you—”
“Because you’d be killed—it’s as simple as that. There are three people I care for in the world. I’ve resigned myself to los-ing my uncle. But I wont risk losing either of the other two—
yourself, Paul. If you go, Paul will go, too—you know that. When I looked at his wound I realized he’d be at full capacity in another few days—by the time we get back—if we get—when we get back, you won’t be able to stop him. You might morally excuse punching a woman in the jaw for what you considered was her own good, but you couldn’t morally excuse doing that to Paul. No, I love my uncle—he’s the only real parent I ever had—but I won’t let you die trying to bring him back. He’s ready to die—he feels he’s lived his life. I don’t accept that, but I respect it. You’d never get him out alive. If we pull this off, if we destroy the Womb’s capabilities to survive the holocaust, if we steal the chambers, steal the cryogenic serum we need and de-stroy the rest, if any of Rozhdestvenskiy’s men survive, they won’t rest until they hunt you down or the fire consumes them. You’d never reach Chicago, you’d never get out of the city if you did. I won’t let you go—if I have to shoot your kneecaps to stop you, I won’t let you leave me.”
Rourke didn’t know what to say to her.
Chapter Thirty-six
The concrete barricades were just ahead.
Vladov had read the orders, then given them to Natalia— the trucks carried plastique, C-4
explosives. Rourke watched Vladov through the windshield, aboard the right flanking M-72
motorcycle combination.
In the second truck, Lieutenant Daszrozinski was wear-ing the uniform of the dead KGB major. In the third truck, Corporal Ravitski wore the uniform of the slain lieutenant of the KGB. The Americans were hidden in the trucks, be-hind the cases of C-4—not a convenient place to be in the event of a gunfight, Rourke thought. C-4 was quite stable as an explosive, but there was always the chance—
Natalia beside him, in male drag, the uniform of a corpo-ral, said, “What do you think?”
“About what?”
“Will we make it inside, I mean?”
Rourke shrugged. “Tell you one thing, keep your mouth shut beyond a yes or no, you’ve got girl all over your voice. And watch your eyes — squint or something. They see those they’ll figure something’s wrong.”
“Why don’t I just hide in the back of the truck,” she said sarcastically. “These clothes are uncomfortable anyway.”
“Because if there is a fight, you’re better than anybody else.”
“Except you, maybe.”
“Maybe,” said Rourke glanced at her and laughed. “My ego will be bruised.”
“Your ego is too big to bruise,” she laughed.
“Touche,” he nodded.
There was another convoy in front of them and Rourke slowed the truck, then stopped, the two M-72 motorcycle combinations stopping as well. Already, in the sideview mirrors, he could see Daszrozinski and Ravitski climbing out—to do the impatient officer routine while the convoy was forced to wait. Rourke felt Natalia’s left hand against his right thigh, groping for his hand—her palm sweated.
“That’s another thing that’ll blow your disguise,” he mur-mured. “Holding my hand.” And she started to take her hand away, but Rourke held it tight. “But I’ll tell you when it gets dangerous and you have to stop.”
Chapter Thirty-seven
“We’ve gotta assume that Lieutenant Feltcher never made it through to contact the TVM, so we’re in this thing against the KGB and the Army units under their control all alone.”
Sam Chambers studied the faces of his officers and his senior non-coms. He looked away from them, up into the barn rafters for a moment, trying to search for the right words. He turned his face back to his men. “I—I don’t know what to say. I was never a politician—I was a scientist basically—I guess that was all I ever wanted to be. As your president, I should be able to say something consoling, something inspirational to you at this time. The Russians are closing in from both flanks, we have enough aircraft to evacuate some key personnel, but there isn’t any point to it. A dawn today, I considered the fact that God had given us another day of life. By dawn tomorrow or the next day or within a few days after that, the world will be ending. As a scientist, I had no means at my disposal to confirm or deny any of the hypotheses formed for post-war scenarios. But the Supreme Soviet Commander,
