A searing pain in his left leg and he stumbled forward, falling hard against the rocks, firing the pistol as soon as he raised it, another of the KGB men going down.
“Hang on, Tommy!”
The voice almost made him laugh. The boom of a .357 Magnum, again and again and again, the thunder of a shotgun, then again.
He looked to his left.
It was Marty, the Python in his fist, another man be-side him holding a riot shotgun.
Marty dropped to his knees beside him. “You okay, Tommy?”
“Am I okay? You crazy. My left arm’s almost shot off and somebody shot my left leg out from under me, but I’ll make it. Get me up. We’re headin’ for Soldiers Field. How many of us left?”
“Maybe fifty, scattered all over the shoreline for about a city block. Seven of the Russian patrol boats are left.”
“The hell with ‘em—let’s move—get me up,” and Marty hauled Maus’s right arm across his shoulders, Maus getting to his feet, wincing from the pain in his left leg. But he could hobble.
“All those times I told ya, without me you’d be flat on your face—took this to make you see it seriously,” Marty laughed.
“All right. So walk already. In my next life I’ll treat you better.” Moving made him scream inside himself, but he forced the pain from his mind as much as he could. There were Americans who needed to be freed before they died.
They reached the height of the spit of land near the airfield, Marty discharging the Python twice more, downing one of the KGB men.
The man with the shotgun on Maus’s left picked up the AKM and handed Maus the shotgun.
“Can you hold it with your left hand enough to use it like a cane—it’s outa ammo anyway.”
Maus took it, his left arm barely able to move, but he closed the fingers of his left fist around it, supporting his left leg now rather than just dragging it.
“I can walk,” Maus snarled, Marty letting free of his right arm, reloading the Python.
“So you can walk—how about shoot?”
“Put a fresh magazine in for me and we’ll see, huh?”
Marty took the Colt from Maus’s right hand, dumped the spent magazine—the slide locked open already— and took the magazine from the single carrier on Maus’s belt. He rammed it home, letting the slide run forward, upping the safety, handing the Colt back to Maus.
“So let’s kill some KGB guys and free those Ameri-cans and if there’s time before the sky catches on fire I’ll let you buy me a beer,” Marty laughed.
“Sounds okay to me—but you can buy—I bought the last time.”
Together they walked ahead. And somehow, the fighting around them sporadic, more of the Resistance forming around them, he felt they’d make it.
Chapter Fifty-four
Lieutenant Feltcher peered through the binoculars. Be-low him the Western Soviet Army, far in the distance the Eastern Army. No one bothered with his aircraft and he or-dered the pilot to veer off, replacing the binoculars in their case and picking up the microphone. It was all in a nonsense code he had worked out, something the KGB would not de-cipher quickly. “This is organ grinder, calling taffy pull, over.”
The voice came back immediately. “Taffy pull to organ grinder—reading you. Go ahead. Over.”
“Affirm right testicle and left—your nearest moving. Farthest coming up with a birthday party—getting my drift? Over.”
“Affirmative, organ grinder—come home for a snack. Taffy pull out.”
“Organ grinder out.”
Taffy pull was the TVM—Texas Volunteer Militia. Sur-prise Party meant unexpected forces behind the Eastern So-viet Army—Resistance as best Feltcher could make out, perhaps from states all over the southeast and middle west. He had no way to tell. But there were at least a thousand vehicles coming up behind the Eastern Soviet Army.
The reference to testicles had meant the Armies them-selves—the right one the Army of the West, the left the Army of the East. U.S. II forces were in the distance as he stared back across the terrain. A certain sadness over-whelmed him. The Resistance Army about to assault the rear of the Soviet Army of the East had crossed through the no-man’s land of the Mississippi, intentionally exposing themselves to radiation, sealing their death.
But they came anyway. Soon, the Soviet Armies wouldn’t know what hit them.
“Make this thing fly faster, huh. I don’t wanna miss Armageddon by five minutes.”
The snack—it meant the attack was about to begin.
Chapter Fifty-five
Vladov and his men had moved ahead, to confront the en-emy at the end of the corridor which led to the cryogenics lab, Natalia standing beside Rourke, watching with him as Vla-dov moved on. Behind them, at the far end of the corridor, Rourke knew there would be a cordon of KGB
Elite Corps— to block any possible retreat.
But it was quiet for a moment, Natalia saying, “Have I brought all of this upon you, John?”
Rourke folded her into his arms, drawing her head to his chest. “No, no more than I brought it on you. If you’d never met me, Karamatsov would probably still be alive and he’d be running the show here and you’d have a place in the Womb.”
“I wouldn’t have wanted that,” she interrupted, her voice low, muffled sounding against him.
“I know that—neither would I.”
“If—if Captain Vladov-what if—”
“If the Eden Project never returns and we survive some-how?”
“Yes,” she answered softly.
“You’ll never want,” Rourke told her.
She looked up at him, Rourke touching the tips of his fin-gers to her chin, looking into her eyes, their incredible blue-ness. When Vladov and his men had first moved out, she had changed into her own clothes—her battle gear, a black jump-suit. Rourke too had changed out of the borrowed Soviet uniform, to his faded Levis, his combat boots, a light blue chambray shut, his battered brown leather bomber jacket covering the twin Detonics stainless pistols.
“I’ll always love you,” he told her, pulling her closer against him, kissing her, his mouth crushing against hers.
“We might be better off—all of us—if I died here,” she said.
Rourke pushed her away, his fingers clamped tight to her upper arms. “Don’t you say that, don’t ever say that. Life isn’t something you can throw away—not a life like yours. Don’t ever think that. Because if you die here, I’d fight here until the last one of them was dead or I was dead. And then all of this would be for nothing.”
There were tears in her eyes. “But you already have a wife, and you are not the kind of man to—”
“No—I’m not,” Rourke told her. “You’ve trusted me. And I’ve trusted you. You have to trust me in this,” Rourke almost whispered.
“I read the fairy tale about sleeping beauty when I was a girl—my uncle would bring things to me from all over the world. It was a beautiful book—I think it was printed in America. He taught me English because he said I must know the way my potential enemy would think and could not un-less I understood his language. But—with the cryogenic sleep—will you,” and she smiled, turning her face away, her lips touching at his right hand.
Rourke drew her to him. “Awaken you with a kiss?” And he held her very close, his lips touching her hair.
He knew what he would do. Because if the Eden Project did not return, and he eradicated the Womb, six people would remain alive on earth. Perhaps others would survive through the generations. But what five centuries
