KGB, all the support personnel, the thousands of American small arms stored there, the millions of rounds of ammunition. All of that— well, if mankind survives somehow after the ionization ef-fect begins and ends, well — history will probably show that this—” and he gestured again to the even dozen Soviet Spe-cial Forces troops and then to Natalia and himself— “this assault force just took advantage of those poor misguided KGB people.”
Natalia Anastasia Tiemerovna began to laugh, hysteri-cally, doubling forward with it, holding the M-16s back on their slings, falling to her knees. And suddenly, Captain Vladov, whom Varakov himself had labeled the best sol- dier in the Soviet Union, began to laugh, Lieutenant Daszrozinski joining him, the sergeants each man had, the enlisted personnel laughing, too.
Catherine, Varakov’s secretary with the too-long uniform skirt, smiled. Varakov, his face seaming, began to laugh, a laugh that sounded like a child’s dream of Santa Claus as it rolled sonorously from his massive body.
John Rourke began to check one, then the other of the twin stainless Detonics Combat Master
.45s he wore—it was the first time in his life, he smiled, that he had ever been funny. And in view of what lay before them, he thought, most likely the last time as well.
Chapter Four
Dawn came—the world had not perished by fire as it would, perhaps the next sunrise, or the next. It was an in-definite sentence of death — sometime, some sunrise within the next seven days at best, because of the electrically charged particles which had been thrust into the atmo-sphere during the bombings and missile strikes of The Night of The War, the total ionization of the atmosphere would take place. The atmosphere would catch fire, the fire spreading as the electrically charged particles were acted upon by the sun. It would be the last sunrise for humanity. As the earth rotated and the sun eventually rose throughout the twenty-four hours, there would be twenty-four hours of death, the sky itself aflame, the surface of the earth de-stroyed, the atmosphere all but completely burned away, much of the ozone layer destroyed. Humanity and all the lower life forms would be obliterated—forever.
And General Varakov had held out one chance—that in a hermetically sealed shelter such as Rourke’s own survival Retreat in the mountains of northeast Georgia not far from the town of Helen, his wife Sarah, his son Michael and his daughter Annie could survive, and that he—Rourke—could survive as well, and so could Natalia and Paul Ruben-stein and any others the Retreat could accommodate. All through the use of the cryogenic chambers originally devel-oped for deep space travel, in use with the six craft of the Space Shuttle Fleet somewhere on an elliptical voyage to the end of the solar system and back. The cryogenic sleep chambers, coupled with the almost mystical serum which allowed the human brain to be awakened from the life sustaining, unaging sleep, could allow Rourke’s family to sur-vive the scorching of the earth and the sky, to survive the centuries while the lower plant forms gradually rebuilt the atmosphere to a level comparable to the highest altitude mountain atmospheres—but liveable. The chambers and the serum without which the chambers would be a perpetual living death from which there could be no awakening would allow his family to awaken five centuries in the future to a world, once again and however marginally, habitable. And to awaken to the hoped for return of the Eden Project survi-vors, an international corps of deep space astronaut train-ees recruited because of their skills and their physical perfection from all the western aligned nations. To return with their microfilm libraries of the accumulated knowl-edge of mankind, their cryogenically frozen embryonic life forms—domestic animals, livestock, even birds to sing again in the air if indeed there were air.
An Ark.
But Colonel Nehemiah Rozhdestvenskiy, successor to Vladmir Karamatsov, the husband of Major Natalia Tiemerovna whom John Rourke had killed in a standup gunfight engineered by Natalia’s uncle General Varakov, had assembled the one thousand finest of his Elite KGB Corps. With one thousand handpicked perfect Soviet fe-male specimens, with the secret of life sustaining cryogenic sleep stolen with the American cryogenic serum, they would survive the global holocaust to use particle beam weapons already installed at what once had been NORAD
Head-quarters at Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, they would sur-vive in what Rozhdestvenskiy had dubbed “The Womb” to destroy the returning Eden Project before the last survivors of the world democracies could land, could reclaim the purged earth.
It was this that was his mission, John Rourke realized, sitting in the semi-darkness at the height of the mezzanine steps, but in shadow from the first floor of the museum itself. He could see the two figures of mastodons fighting. Natalia had told him how her uncle watched these without cease. He understood the reason—and like the mastodons, he was now prepared to fight unto extinction because the circumstances of his own life had issued him no choice. It was his mission, above the saving of his wife and children, beyond saving Natalia and Paul and even himself for a world five centuries from now—it was his mission to pre-vent the KGB Elite Corps from utilizing the cryogenic se-rum, destroy the particle beam weapons, prevent the ultimate Soviet domination of the entire earth, the ultimate victory for evil.
It was an involuntary nerve response, a paroxysm, the shiver which ran along his spine—as a doctor he could think of a multiplicity of medical related reasons for it. But the truest reason was within himself and what he had to do.
Chapter Five
Sarah Rourke, wearing a borrowed sweater—Natalia’s things fit her almost perfectly—and her own blue denim skirt, the only skirt she owned, sat on one of the high rocks not far from the Retreat entrance, her pistol in its holster on the ground beside her. On the next rock, Paul Rubenstein sat, an M-16 across his lap, some kind of submachinegun slung diagonally across his back, a pistol—she recognized it as a Browning High Power—in a shoulder holster that posi-tioned the pistol half across the left side of his chest.
“Are you sure you’re well enough—”
“It was only my left arm, Mrs. Rourke—I shoot with my right—”
“I didn’t mean that -and it’s Sarah—”
“Sarah,” he nodded, pushing his wire-rimmed glasses up off the bridge of his nose with his right index finger. “Any-way, the fresh air’s good for me.”
“Do you think the children—”
“I left a note on the pillow next to Michael—he can read it, know we’re just outside—I just—”
And he looked at her. “Why’d you come out here? John tell you to keep an eye on me with my arm?”
She shook her head—it was such a good feeling to have clean hair, to wash it with seemingly limitless hot water. She suddenly wondered—shivering —what it would be like when all the supplies stored in the shelves and cabinets of her husband’s Retreat were depleted. She had looked through the library—there were books which showed how to weave cloth, books which showed how to make soap from animal fat. Would they someday wear rags? Live by the light of homemade candles because the supply of light bulbs and fluorescent tubes had been depleted—she laughed at the irony. Limitless electricity from the hydro-electric generators her husband had installed—but electric-ity was useless without lights. She laughed —out loud—
“I’m sorry—”
“What is it?” Paul Rubenstein asked her.
“Nothing—I was just thinking—how stupid I’ll feel someday running around in rags or animals skins cooking wild rabbit by candlelight on a microwave oven.”
Paul Rubenstein started to laugh and she laughed with him. It was nice to have something to look forward to, after all, Sarah Rourke thought.
Chapter Six
He had taken an M-16 from a soldier killed in the first pass the helicopters had made across the school grounds. As the machines banked, their guns opening up again, plowing waves in the dirt on both sides of the disabled, al-ready burning truck behind which he had taken cover, Reed leveled the assault rifle toward the bubble dome of the near-est of the machines—they were American Bell 209 Huey Cobras, taken over by the Russians, a red Soviet star embla-zoned over the American markings. Reed squeezed the trig-ger, firing, emptying the M-16’s magazine, the helicopter’s 7.62mm multi-barrel Minigun still firing, the helicopter un-swerving, unaffected.
