“Shit!”
He tucked down, the ground on both sides of the truck erupting as another of the machines made a pass, the sound of bullets ricocheting off the metal of the truck body. Screams — not all of the patients had been successfully evac-uated from the building and those that were, were still pinned down in the trucks, some at the far end of the road, others still in front of the school.
The sound of a missile firing—Reed looked up. The con-trail, then one of the two and a half ton trucks at the far edge of the driveway seemed to bounce upward for an in-stant, then was consumed in a ball of flame. Men, women, their clothes and hair afire, fell from the back of the truck.
“Bastards!” Reed screamed at the machines as they fin-ished the pass. They were coming back.
For some reason he turned around—he had never be-lieved in a sixth sense beyond the uneasy feeling one sometimes got in combat. But Colonel Rubenstein had left the school building. The man stood there. He screamed, “My wife is dead!” His hands tore at the collar of his shirt, rip-ping it. Suddenly, Reed was conscious of Rubenstein being a Jew and Reed seemed to remember that the rending of some article of clothing was a tradition for the death of a loved one.
Reed started to shout, “I’m sorry.” But then the school steps vaporized in a ball of flame and Colonel Rubenstein was gone.
Reed stabbed the M-16 skyward, firing it out uselessly, screaming the word again and again,
“Bastards!”
He pushed himself to his feet, out of magazines for the M-16, running toward the nearest of the trucks which could still move, shouting toward the cab, “Driver—get us out of here!”
As he started to climb aboard, hanging on to the stakes that surrounded the truck bed, he realized the truck’s engine was not running. “Driver!”
His .45 in his fist, Reed jumped to the ground. Screams of the wounded and dying were drowned out by the rattle of machinegun fire, the long staccato pulse that sounded like a solitary drone of some huge wasp as it beat its wings. The truck beside him was hit, Reed throwing himself to the dirt and gravel of the driveway, a shower of the material of the driveway raining down on him.
Flames engulfed the truck beside him—screams, bodies on fire hurtling themselves from the vehicle.
A missile impacted the front of the school, flames now belching from the roof as he pulled himself to his feet. He climbed up into the truck cab—the windshield was pep-pered with spiderwebbed bullet holes—the driver’s eyes were wide open in death, the front of the fatigue blouse dark and wet with blood.
Reed shoved the body through the driver’s side door, “God bless you, son,” he murmured, starting the deuce and a half. “Hang on back there,” Reed shouted behind him. “Hang on!” The sick, the wounded—he didn’t want to add them to the ranks of the dead.
He pumped the clutch, stomping the gas pedal, letting the truck start rolling forward, the gunships coming through for another pass. One of the helicopters was coming right at him as he upshifted, cranking the wheel hard left and out of the driveway. Reed ducked, machinegun fire blowing out the window—he was losing control of the truck—losing it. As he moved on the seat, he could feel the shards of glass falling, hear the tinkle of glass as it fell from his clothes, breaking, feel the crunch of it under and around him. He fought the wheel, trying to get control. A tree—he cut the wheel hard right. He felt it as he threw himself down, the lurch, the tremor of the truck cab around him, the shudder-ing of his own body as he slammed forward and rolled from the seat, his right elbow hitting the driveshaft hump, his head striking the dashboard.
With his left hand he felt for the door handle, twisting at it, his right hand clutching for the cocked and locked .45 which was back in his holster. He found it, half falling from the truck cab to the ground, steam rising in a whistling column from where the nose of the deuce and a half had struck the tree.
Reed staggered, falling to his knees, still clutching the .45.
He looked skyward—the Soviet marked gunships were breaking off, disengaging.
Reed looked around him now—the school was awash with flames, all but two of the trucks burning or otherwise disabled.
Bodies lay everywhere about the driveway, moans of the dying filling the air as the beating of the helicopter rotor blades died on the air slowly.
Reed got to his feet. His left hand was bleeding, he real-ized, and his head ached badly.
He staggered toward the rear of the truck, ripping back the tarpaulin cover there.
“Jesus.” He turned away, feeling the thing in the pit of his stomach, gagging as the vomit rose in him, falling to his knees as it poured from his mouth onto the ground.
The twenty or so people in the back of the truck were all dead.
He set down his pistol just to the side of the puddle of vomit, his left elbow aching as he moved the arm, both hands finding the lapel of his fatigue blouse. For Colonel Rubenstein, for Mrs. Rubenstein—for all the dead. It was hard to tear the fabric, but on the third try, it ripped.
Chapter Seven
Natalia Anastasia Tiemerovna, Major, Committee for State Security of The Soviet, felt the warmth and strength of her uncle’s arms around her, a warmth and strength she had felt and loved since she was a little child, something she would never know again. She tasted the salt of her own tears mingled with the salt of General Ishmael Varakov’s tears as her head rested against his chest. “All—all of it—in the letter to John Rourke—about my real parents—my real mother—it—it only made me love you more, Uncle Ish-mael—it only—”
“I told all of those things in the letter because I thought perhaps, child, that I might never see you again, and you had the right to know these things. How goes it with the American Rourke?”
She still let her uncle hold her, there in the quiet darkness of the mummy room. “He has found his wife and children, Uncle—”
“What of you, child?”
She closed her eyes so tight she could see red and green floaters in them.
“What of you, child?”
“She knows — his wife knows that I love him. And that he loves me—he actually loves me.”
“A man does not have two wives—at least not a man like this Dr. John Rourke.”
“We—we—”
“Perhaps he thinks of the Jew, Rubenstein, of him for you should the Eden Project not return—”
She kept her eyes closed. “I love Paul—but like he were my brother, Uncle—like that only. I would rather go on lov-ing John Rourke and have him never touch me than to lie that I could love someone else.”
“She is older than you?”
“She is thirty-two, perhaps thirty-three, I think, there is only four or five years of difference between us —”
“Then you will both outlive him if you somehow survive this holocaust.”
“I would not want—”
“To live if this Rourke man were dead?”
“Yes—I would not.”
“You are skilled in many ways, child—”
She closed her eyes still tighter, like she had when Karamatsov had beaten her before Rourke had killed him. “I could never—it would—it would be—”
“I know that you could never,” and she felt his body shud-der as he laughed. “The efficient KGB killing machine— you were called that once and I never told you. A killing machine in skirts and silk stockings—a member of the Pol-itburo spoke of you that way when you and Karamatsov worked together in Latin America before The Night of The War. But I knew that what the Politburo member said was wrong. Your heart—it has always been the heart of your real mother—did I tell you in the letter that her name was Natalia as well?”
“Yes—yes, Uncle,” she whispered. “You told me that—”
“An old man forgets, child. But there are some things— some things that an old man can never—” He ceased to speak.
“Forget,” she whispered for him.
“There are some things, and perhaps for you John Rourke is such a thing—would that she had so worshiped
