worked, tilled the soil—nothing now. Not a living tree, or a blade of
grass that wasn’t brown or black.
His cigar was gone from his teeth and he checked the ashtray, realizing
he’d extinguished it. Rourke shook his head, silent—tired. . . .
Reed started to stub out his cigarette, but didn’t. Cigarettes were
getting harder to find. He kept smoking it, then looked up across the
littered table from his cup of coffee. “What, Corporal?”
“Captain, your pal, Dr. Rourke—he’s gonna have trouble, sir.”
“He had trouble—remember? Hell of a lot of good we were to stop it.” He
looked back at the cigarette and noticed that the skin of his first and
second fingers was stained dark orange. Reed wondered what the stuff in
the cigarettes did to his lungs. He shrugged and took another drag; then
through a mouthful of smoke, he said, “What kind of trouble? He’s got a
radio. We can contact him.”
“A storm system—it just moved in, like it was out of nowhere, sir.”
“He’s a fine pilot. He’ll fly over it,” Reed answered, dismissing the
problem.
“But, Captain?”
Reed looked up at the red-haired young woman again. “What, Corporal?”
“You don’t understand, sir,” she insisted. “See. It’s a massive winter
storm system—it was just there. You
know the weather’s been crazy—”
“Winter storm system? Have you weather people ever figured out you can
learn a hell of a lot by just looking out the damn window?” Reed checked
his wrist watch, thinking of Rourke for an instant and envying Rourke the
Rolex he habitually wore. “An hour ago it was in the sixties—snowstorm?”
“Sir . . . please,” the red-haired woman said.
“Yeah.” He nodded, tired from going more than a day without sleep.
Standing slowly, he stubbed out the cigarette and looked around the
place—some officer’s club, he thought. One lousy window. He walked across
the room, lurching a little because of sitting so long in one chair,
tired. He staggered against the back of a chair. A Marine lieutenant
started to his feet, saw Reed, then looked noncommittal. Reed shrugged it
off, reaching the window. “I need a good couple hours sleep, Corporal.”
“Yes, sir.” The red-haired woman nodded.
Reed pulled back the heavy curtain. Staring outside, he whispered, “Holy
shit!” He judged the depth, at least four inches of snow; a heavy wind was
blowing what had fallen back into the air. Drifts were mounting against
the tires of a jeep outside by the walkway.
“Yes, sir. That’s it, sir,” the red-haired woman echoed.
Reed looked at her. “It’s impossible! It was like spring a few—”
He looked back out the window. It was no longer like spring.
The sleet was coming in torrents now. Sarah huddled beside the children
under the overhang of rocks, a pine bracken to her right, as she stared
down into the valley. The pines made a natural windbreak for herself,
Michael, Annie, and the horses.
Across her lap, resting on her blue-jeaned thighs instead of the
children’s heads, was the AR-—the one modified to fire fully
automatically when she put the selector at the right setting, the one
almost used to kill her the morning after the Night of the War, the one
she’d taken from the dead Brigand and used to shoot out the glass window
in the basement of her house in order to set off the confined natural gas
there after the gas lines had begun filling the house following the
bombing—to blow up her own home and the men inside it who had tried to
rob, to kill, to rape.
Priorities were odd, she thought, as she raised her left hand from Annie’s
chest where it had rested and tugged the blue-and-white bandanna from her
own hair. Before the Night of the War—rape, it would have been a top
priority. But now losing things had somehow become unconsciously more
important as she considered life.
Rape would be a horror—but it could be overcome. Death—it might well be
more than expected. But to be robbed, deprived of food or horses or
weapons with which to fight—this was worse than death, and rape of the
spirit more foul than any rape of the body.
She looked to her right. Michael was sleeping, his body swathed—like
Annie’s—in blankets against the bizarre and sudden cold. Michael would be
turning eight soon, and already he had murdered a man—a Brigand who had
tried to rape her. \
She studied his face. It was John’s face, but younger, though appearing no
less troubled. She could see the faint tracing of lines which in adulthood
would duplicate the lines in the face of his father. She could see the set
of his chin. She thought of his father’s face, the quiet, the
resoluteness, the firmness. She found herself missing that—the steadiness
with which John Rourke’s infrequent life at home had provided her.
She watched the valley, the impromptu-appearing Brigand encampment there,
pickup trucks sheltered with tarps, and motorcycles, these, too,
covered—covered better than her children.
The sleet had begun to stream down from thegray-blue skies more than two
hours earlier. Sarah had quickly led the horses—the children mounted on
her husband’s horse, Sam—up and away from the low valley now below her.
For she had seen the Brigands already, heard their vehicles, their
laughter and shouts, felt the fear they always made her feel. She had
tethered Sam and Tildie, then wrapped the children in their blankets and
in hersas well. Now she sat, huddled in an incongruously feminine woolen
jacket, on two saddle blankets spread over the bare rock. She was freezing
with the cold.
She looked away from the Brigand camp below. There were perhaps a dozen of
them, a small force by comparison to some she had seen, almost
encountered. She looked instead at the faces of Michael and Annie, trying
to remember the last time she had seen either child really play. Not on
the offshore island where they had hidden from the Soviet troops in
Savannah. But at the Mulliner farm. The children had played there. Mary
Mulliner had …
Sarah looked down at herself, the rifle across her blue-jeaned thighs. She
had worn a dress at the Mulliner farm much of the time, slept in a warm
bed at night, worn a nightgown. The children—they had run with the dog
Mary kept, forgetting the times they’d run from wild dogs.
There was Mary’s son; he fought with the Resistance against the Soviet
Army. And the Resistance would have ways of reaching Army Intelligence. If
John had gone to Texas near the Louisiana border, as the intelligence man
in Savannah had told her, then Mary’s son would have a way of contacting
John, of letting him know. . . .
She hugged her knees close to her chin, watching the faces of her
children; there was little happines in them. But there would be happiness
again.
Suddenly, desperately, she wanted to be rid oi her rifle, rid of her war
of nerves with every strange sound in the night, rid of the worry.
Her eyes closed, she imagined herself, in her borrowed dress, living at
the Mulliner farm, living like a person again.
She opened her eyes, gazing down at the valley. The Brigands—they would
rob, kill, rape her if they guessed her presence. But they would leave
eventually. If she
turned north, despite the storm, she could reach Mt, Eagle, Tennessee in a
matter of days. Texas was farther away than that—farther away. Sarah
Rourke closed her eyes again, trying to forget
the Brigands and see the faces of her children, playing.
But instead, in her mind all she could see was the face of
her husband, John Thomas Rourke.
“These are all the reports, Catherine; there is nothing fresh from the
radio room?”
“There is nothing fresh from the communications center, Comrade General,”
the young woman answered him.
Varakov looked up from the sheaves of open file folders littering his
desk, into Catherine’s young eyes. “I love the way, girl, that you correct
me—communications center it is, then.” He slammed his fist—heavily and
slowly—down on the last of the file folders he’d opened, then stared at
the desk. Nothing concretely showed that Natalia, his niece, was safe.
“Comrade General?”
Ishmael Varakov looked up at the young secretary again. “Yes, I worry over
Major Tiemerovna. I would worry over you, too, I think because I tend to
feel like everyone’s father. When one reaches my age, girl, he feels that
way. You may, too, someday. Now leave me. You have,”—he looked at the
watch on his tree limb-sized wrist—”you have gone with little sleep for
three days, I think. Each time that I call you, you are here— and that is
impossible if you go off duty to sleep. You will
be of no use as my secretary in the hospital. You are off duty for
twenty-four hours. Go and sleep, Catherine.” Varakov felt mildly proud of
himself for remembering her name.