He saw the center of the three KGB-ers, arching his body slightly forward, one of the others laughing. The one about to urinate was one of the two armed with an AKM and the assault rifle was slung across his back. The one who had laughed was speaking animatedly, Rourke unable to follow the conversation because of the keening sound of the wind off the lake.
Rourke waited, ready to move, the Gerber ready in his balled right fist, his left hand palming the black chrome Sting IA from its sheath behind his left hipbone inside the waistband of his faded blue Levis.
He waited, both knives ready for their work.
The man with the fixation to empty his kidneys took two steps forward, toward the sea wall, the other two men—the one still laughing—turning their backs as he bent forward.
There was a scream, in Russian the man who had been about to urinate shouting, “My penis—”
The body sagged forward.
Ravitski’s long handled wire cutters had done their grisly work.
The two men—as Vladov had anticipated and Rourke had agreed—turned back, reaching out, groping toward the sea wall to snatch at the body of their stricken comrade.
Rourke threw his body into a dead run, across the once living grass, leaping, airborne, coming down on his feet, his knees buckling to take the force of the fall, throwing him-self forward into a dead run, the Gerber reaching out, the spear pointed tip thrusting into the back of the man to his right, severing the spinal cord he hoped.
He left the knife there, the second man starting to turn, the pistol coming into his hand as Rourke’s left hand punched forward, the point of the little Sting IA black chrome puncturing the adam’s apple, cutting through, the man’s eyes wide open, no voice box left with which to scream.
Vladov was up from the sea wall beyond, his fighting knife — a bastardized Bowie pattern, custom made, Rourke had surmised—hacking left to right across the throat of the man Rourke had stabbed with the big Gerber, severing the carotid artery and slicing through the voice box before there could be a scream.
Rourke’s hands were moving—the man with the little A.G. Russell knife in his throat, Rourke’s right hand thrust-ing upward, palm outward, open, the base of his hand im-pacting the base of the man’s nose, punching the bone upward, through the ethmoid bone and into the brain, his left hand ripping the knife downward through the adam’s apple and locking against the bone beneath the hollow of the throat.
Rourke ripped the knife free, turning as Vladov guided the other man to the ground.
As Vladov wiped his blade clean on the man’s clothing, Rourke drew his own knife—the Gerber—clear.
They had killed each man at least twice to be sure.
From the converted police car, Rourke could hear a radio call.
“It is KGB headquarters—perhaps a routine radio check—”
“Let’s get the hell out of here—have the GRU man give the signal.”
“It is already done, I think,” Vladov nodded, sheathing the Bowie pattern knife to his equipment belt, flipping down over the sea wall to the rocks below.
Rourke followed after him. In the distance, as he im-pacted the rocks on the soles of his boots, he could hear the drone of the outboard motors, already started up.
Rourke glanced at Corporal Ravitski—the young Rus-sian SF-er’s face was white. He looked at the man’s hands— the massive wire cutters, stuck into the apex of the blade halves were something unmistakable as a human organ.
Rourke’s eyes drifted downward—at the man’s feet was the third KGB patrolman, blood oozing through lifeless fin-gers clamped over his crotch.
He would have been dead in seconds from hemorrhage, Rourke realized—but Ravitski too had taken no chances — the front of the throat was hacked open, little blood there. Perhaps the heart had already stopped pumping from shock.
A Bowie pattern bayonet for an AKM—he imagined it worked with the AKS-74 the corporal had slung across his back—lay blood smeared beside the KGB man.
Vladov took two steps and was beside the young corpo-ral. “Andreyev, you have done your duty.”
“Comrade Captain, this man was a Russian—”
“Hard tasks await us, Andreyev—hard tasks which per-haps when compared will make this task you have so effi-ciently performed seem easy.”
“Comrade Captain—I —”
Rourke, his voice a low whisper, said, “Look, boy, that you didn’t like doing this is to your credit, that you could still do it anyway is more to your credit. But it’s time to move out.”
The young Russian corporal turned to face him, staring. “Yes, Doctor—it is—”
“Time to move,” Rourke said again.
And Rourke didn’t wait, jumping down into the inflat-able as it heaved toward the rocks, his M-16 and his CAR-15 already soaked with spray.
He made a mental note to clean them as Vladov and Cor-poral Ravitski joined him in the boat.
The GRU man tugged clear his line. In the distance
Rourke could hear the sound of aircraft engines revving, from the field, he realized—but there was no sound of po-lice sirens—at least not yet.
John Rourke silently wondered how many more of hu-mankind would lose their innocence in the few days human-kind had remaining. Too many, he thought.
Chapter Fourteen
Soviet personnel were everywhere, Rourke imagined sparked by the wild chase the previous night through the Chicago expressway system and along underground Wacker Drive, and of course the murders of the three KGB patrol-men at the lake that morning. After ditching the rubber boats in what remained of Belmont Harbor and transfer-ring to a medium-sized cabin cruiser, they had gone out far-ther into the lake. There had been a tense moment—a Soviet patrol boat. But Vladov was prepared for this —or-ders from the KGB, forged, given him by General Varakov. The patrol boat had passed, but as a precautionary measure Vladov had ordered the GRU pilot to change course, dan-gerously hugging the shoreline.
It had been late afternoon by the time they had pulled ashore near Waukegan, factory complexes— abandoned now—littering the shoreline.
Working in two teams—fire and maneuver—they had worked their way through the factory complex and into the streets of Waukegan proper, continuing the two team move-ment, the process slow.
The sunset was purple, the haze almost something Rourke could taste on the air as he knocked on the rear door of the American field hospital which was in reality Resist-ance headquarters for northern Illinois and southern Wis-consin, as he had learned earlier.
The hole in the back door of Waukegan Outdoor Sports-man opened, a face peering through, back lit. “Tell Tom Maus Major Tiemerovna and I are back to see him—I’m John Rourke.”
“Wait a minute,” and the peephole in the door was closed.
Rourke waited exactly a minute, watching the sweep sec-ondhand of his Rolex, Natalia standing beside him, her eyes trained on the street as he looked at her. Vladov, Lieutenant Daszrozinski and the others were hiding down the alley.
The door opened—Tom Maus, his good-natured, slightly gravelly sounding voice low, said,
“You’ve been a busy man, Doctor Rourke—you and Major Tiemerovna have been very busy. Come in—”
“We have some friends with us. I wanted to tell you first.”
“What kind of friends?”
“Two Soviet Special Forces officers and ten enlisted men, but they’re on our side so to speak—”
Maus started to slam the door. Rourke stepped into it, pushing the door back. “Look—in a day, maybe six days at the most, nothing will be left. It’s the end of the world, Maus — for real, the end of the world.”
Rourke watched Maus’s face in the grey-purple light, dark shadows blanketing part of it, but what light there was catching in Maus’s eyes.
“You’re joking—and it’s in poor—”
“I’m not joking,” Rourke told him quietly.
“He is telling the truth,” Rourke heard Natalia whisper beside him. “I wish to God he were not
