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CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
John Rourke had stripped away her wet clothes, except for her underwear, wrapped her in the disposable insulated blanket he carried in the musette bag. But he could not risk a fire by which to warm her. The radio in his helmet and hers either no longer worked or Annie, Paul and the others were too far out of range to pick up.
His handguns were reloaded, and he would, one at a time, disassemble and clean them, the revolver more challenging in the field like this, but not impossible.
The ammunition he would have to bank on still functioning. But that was the advantage of a knife. It never ran out, and the Grain knife he had wiped down immediately, then left out of the sheath until the sheath began to dry. He shivered with the cold.
The Special was lost. The sounds of full-scale war still echoed from the Second City miles away, the smoke dense in the distance where the Second City was, Soviet gunships making passes everywhere in the sky above.
They were hidden in a niche of rock, invisible
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from the air as best he could discern.
He stripped away his wet clothes and huddled into the blanket with Natalia, her body trembling with cold as he held her to warm her.
They were miles inside hostile territory and, at least here, in the middle of rail-scale war, without transportation, without communications, Natalia gravely ill in a state, it appeared, of total mental collapse.
For now, until cover of darkness, there was nothing to do but wait and warm her.
The tears had stopped, but the surrealistically blue eyes only stared vacantly away.
And she kept on repeating his name, her voice hoarse with it now, “John —.”