She fired a fourth burst, three headshots in a rough diagonal from jawline to left eyeball, a marksman with an AKM—an enlisted man—leveling his rifle at Rourke, she guessed, no time to look, to confirm that the burst the man had gotten off hadn’t killed the man she had loved since first seeing, the man she would always love.
Another three-round burst, against two men starting over some of the packing crates, hammering one man against the other. The machinery around her seemed to explode, a fusillade of automatic weapons fire making her pull back.
She changed the partially spent magazine in the rifle she held, reaching out for the fired-out M-16, the metal hot as the back of her left hand inadvertently brushed against the barrel, changing the magazine there as well.
She looked across the machine shop toward Rourke. He had taken cover near the packing crates beneath the faint thread of dynamite fuse.
Three rifles loaded and ready, Natalia rammed one of the M-16’s up over the lathes and machinery around her, firing it blindly, blowing the magazine, careful not to use the same weapon she’d used the first time lest she burn out the barrel.
She rolled left, another fresh-loaded M-16 in her hands, firing prone, toward the KGB position, kneecapping a man, dropping him, catching another man in the groin, then again in the chest—a three-round coup de grace.
She kept firing, glancing to her right—Rourke was climbing the packing crates, gunfire hammering into the wall on both sides of him, cratering the concrete with blistering pockmarks, thudding into the crates beneath his feet and legs.
She burned out the magazine in the M-16, snatching up the third rifle, firing three-round bursts again, into the KGB position, headshooting an enlisted man as he made to fire his AKM toward Rourke.
Two more of the KGB unit rushed through the blown-apart doors—one man carried what she recognized as the 7.62mm PK General Purpose Machine Gun. It fired the Type 54R cartridge, and although the same caliber as standard Soviet service weapons, and utilizing the Kalishnikov rotating bolt, the cartridge was vastly more powerful, and from the size of the field green box beneath the receiver, she realized it carried either a two-hundred- or two-hundred-fifty-round link belt.
She fired her M-16 toward the two-man machine gun crew, dropping the gunner’s assistant with a long ragged burst to the abdomen, but the machinegunner making it to cover.
“John! Machine gun!” She swapped magazines for all three rifles as she shouted to him.
He was lighting the fuse with the glowing tip of his cigar—she could see him, as if in freeze frame.
And then the machine gun opened up, the noise deafening as the reports echoed and reechoed in the confines of the abandoned machine shop, her heart stopping as the packing crates were shot out from under him and Rourke tumbled to the floor.
“Bastards!” She shrieked the word at the top of her voice, one M-16 slung under her right arm now as she stood, the other two M-16s—one in each hand—firing as she ran from cover, toward Rourke.
The machine gun was chewing into the wall behind her, chewing into the concrete flooring beneath her as she kept firing.
She heard a shout over the din of gunfire. “I’m all right!”
And then semiautomatic assault rifle fire—without looking, she knew Rourke was alive.
She kept firing, crossing the floor of the machine shop, the hammering of the PK’s almost continuous fire maddening.
One M-16 was out, and then the second. Natalia let both weapons drop on their slings, swinging forward the third assault rifle, firing with it.
She was beside Rourke now, Rourke’s CAR-15 spitting, then suddenly still.
There was a blur of motion and then the booming of his twin Detonics pistols.
“Run with me!”
She swallowed hard, moving—she would ‘run with’ him forever if he chose it.
Chapter Thirty-eight
Both Detonics pistols were empty as they reached the tunnel mouth, Rourke shoving Natalia ahead of him, then jumping after her, hitting the dirt surface of the tunnel floor hard, on knees and elbows crawling inside as the ground around him rippled with the plowing effect of the machine gun bursts.
He looked up at Natalia—she was changing sticks for all three M-16s. As he worked down the slide stop, ramming both Detonics pistols into his belt, empty, taking one of the M-16s from her, he rasped, breathless— “That fuse is lit—maybe a minute—” he sank forward, breathing hard.
“I know—run like hell,” she laughed.
He looked at her, felt himself grin. “You got it.”
And she was up, stooped over, but running, Rourke firing a burst from the M-16 through the tunnel mouth then running.
The heavy thudding of machine gun fire and the lighter reports of the AKMs was an echo behind them, now the echo diminishing.
But the Soviets would be following if they hadn’t noticed the fuse and shooting down the straight line of the tunnel, and he and Natalia would be slaughtered.
If they had noticed the fuse. . . .
He heard the gunfire, louder than it should have been, shoving Natalia down ahead of him, throwing his body over hers as bullets tore into the dirt and rock walls of the small tunnel, cut waves and ripples across the dirt of the tunnel floor.
Then he heard, feeling it almost before the actual noise reached his ears, burrowing his body even more across hers, his chest over her head, Rourke’s hands going to his ears.
The tunnel floor trembled, shook—seemed to be twisting under them.
The concussion dying, Rourke pushed himself up, dragging Natalia to her feet, shoving her ahead.
He looked back once—a wall of flames behind him.
They were safe, at least until they reached the end of the tunnel and came out through the mouth of the small cave—at least until then.
And the KGB unit behind them—unless some had run for safety through the blown-out steel doors, they would all be dead. Where the dynamite had been situated, it would have torn the machinery to bits, then propelled it in a wave of shrapnel that would have destroyed anyone in its path.
He swallowed hard—but kept running.
Chapter Thirty-nine
The Womb had been reformed now, to suit the needs of Rozhdestvenskiy’s orders—and his plans. It was no longer recognizable as NORAD Headquarters.
What had once been offices had been converted into a huge laboratory, and Rozhdestvenskiy, the conversion complete, did not this time supervise or observe from behind glass. He stood in the laboratory.
He watched the bluish glow of the almost luminescent gas that filled one of the twelve American chambers he had found.
He turned to Professor Zlovski, saying, “How long before we will know, doctor?”
“You must realize, comrade colonel—we can never know with full certainty until the actual event takes place. But the serum seems to have produced the desired effect. Yet, certain of the types of serum with which Soviet scientists experimented initially at least seemed to have the desired effect as well. It was not until the period of the experiment was concluded that we realized the serum had failed in its purpose in one aspect or another.”
“So there is no certainty?”
“According to the data you have provided, comrade, it would seem that scientists both inside and outside the NASA establishment worked with the serum and that the desired results were achieved. And I do not doubt the validity of these reports and the sincerity of the research, but you must appreciate something—” and Zlovski, gray-haired, stroked his small, gray-black spade beard, his dark eyes staring past Rozhdestvenskiy, then taking on a peculiar light as he walked away, toward the nearest of the chambers, the one that had been activated. “An example, comrade colonel. Do you smoke—cigarettes? You do, I believe?”
“Yes—I smoke cigarettes—”
“That is excellent—not for your health, certainly, but for the sake of understanding my example—and this will illustrate the scientific dilemma in which we find ourselves. Now—at the earliest stages of research to discover a link between cigarette smoking and certain diseases. You can appreciate a critical factor—time. If prolonged smoking—say for a period of twenty years—is needed to produce symptoms in some or many cases, what is a scientist to do? We have no time machines, we have no way of bending time to our will. So, the process of cigarette smoking in laboratory animals was accelerated, to approximate the effect of time. With our experiment,” and he stroked the top of the blue glowing chamber, “there was not even the possibility of acceleration. We are at the mercy of real time here—and there is no way to give positive results that will ease your mind, comrade, until the actual experiment has been performed. So, we either won’t know for five hundred years, approximately, or, on the other hand,” and his dark eyes gleamed, their corners crinkling with something Rozhdestvenskiy could only interpret as possible laughter, “we will never know.”