Ahern, Jerry - The Savage Horde

"Yes, it is stupid—you know why?"

"No—tell me why," she told him.

"You know why."

"No—no, I don't. What is it? Just because you're a man when I need you, you figure you can't be a little boy anymore. Well—you are a little boy. You'll be a man soon enough—don't rush it anymore than you already have."

"That's not what I mean," he answered, looking up at her.

She folded her arms around him, drawing his head against her right breast. She heard the other children playing, the singing stopped, the children running off excess energy, chasing each other around the fenced-in corral.

She held her son very close—the little boy in him had died somewhere and she started to cry as she held him more tightly against her body.

Chapter 50

Nehemiah Rozhdestvenskiy ordered the driver of the electric car to stop, then stepped out.

Its vastness amazed him.

The Womb.

Everywhere, men moved machinery and equipment, weapons, ammunition, food stores.

At the far end of the long, high-vaulted rock chamber he witnessed the coffm-shaped crates being transported one at a time because of their fragility on yellow, Hyster forklifts. There would be eventually two thousand of these, if time permitted. The first one hundred were already being unpacked, connected to monitoring equipment, being tested for functional reliability.

What they carried meant everything.

The rumble of electric generators being transferred on propane fueled trucks made an echoing sound.

"Comrade colonel—"

He looked at his driver.

"The future—it is here," he told the man. He told the polished stone of the walls—he told himself.

The Womb—he smiled as he thought of it. The most important strategic intelligence operation in the history of mankind—and at least for once, the code name was apt.

The Womb.

"Yes—drive on." He sat down, closing his eyes as the electric car took him ahead.

Chapter 51

Rourke sat with the ship's armorer, the man reassembling an M-after having saturated it in a bath of Break Free CLP. Rourke had done the same with his own and Rubenstein's guns, getting to the salt water in time to prevent damage. He assembled Rubenstein's Browning High Power now, the finish a little the worse for wear but the gun wholly serviceable and no new evidence of rust or pitting.

The armorer had aided Rourke in the detailed reassembly of the German MPsubmachinegun—the older the weapon, somehow, Rourke had always noted, the greater the complexity of parts, The six-inch tubed Metalifed and Mag-Na-Ported Colt Python . lay on the table before him, as did both Detonics stainless .s, the CAR-and Rubenstein's MP-Schmeisser there as well—oiled, loaded except for the chamber (the revolver's cylinder was empty) and ready. A mink oil compound had been used on his boots and other leather gear, again preventing moisture damage.

The last item—the Russell Sting IA. Carefully, to avoid destroying the black chrome coating of the steel, he touched up the edge on the fine side of a whetstone, using the Break-Free as the lubricating agent here as well—he always preferred oil to water when the former was available.

He leaned back, breathing a long sigh, watching with one level of his consciousness as the armorer reassembled the trigger group of an M-, and with the other level of his consciousness trying to think. The man Cole—there was something more to him than the swaggering, perhaps cowardly, certainly self-serving too-rapidly-promoted military officer he purported to be. He tried remembering the words of the dying man—that Cole was not who he seemed to be.

It was a cliche, he realized, but dying men rarely did lie. Other than a last laugh on the world, what was there to gain from it?

The original orders Rourke had seen. They had clearly indicated to him that Cole did indeed carry presidential orders—but orders for whom?

More and more, things seemed to point to Cole being someone other than Cole.

Rourke leaned forward in the chair, beginning to load -grain Military Ball . ACP into the Detonics magazines. At the Retreat, he had large amounts of -grain Jacketed Hollow Points stored.

"At the Retreat," he murmured to himself.

Where he wanted to bring Sarah, Michael, Annie—Natalia, too? And Paul Rubenstein.

He smiled as he whacked the spine of a fresh loaded magazine against the palm of his hand to seat the rounds, then began to load another magazine.

He had been a man who had habitually done things alone. He had a wife, two children. He now had a woman who loved him, whom he loved. And he had a friend so close as to be a brother.

Rubenstein—the wound in his head had not proven serious, nor had any signs of concussion been evinced during Doctor Milton's twenty-four hours of observation.

In a few hours, the submarine would surface, he and Paul and the enigmatic Cole and others would start cross country to Filmore Air Force Base, to find the warheads.

That there would be further fighting with the wildmen—whoever they were—was obvious to him. Natalia had been grievously wounded, near death. Paul had been wounded in the last battle.

He had escaped it all—so far. There was no time for him

to be injured. The skies became progressively redder, the weather progressively more bizarre. The thunder which rumbled in the skies was so much a part of day-to-day existence that he barely noticed it, primarily noting it at all by its occasional absence.

He tried to remember—had it thundered during the time on land. But then it only seemed to thunder during the daylight hours. There were books at the Retreat—if he could find Sarah and the children, perhaps there could be time to study his books, to learn what was happening, to prepare somehow.

Time—he glanced at the Rolex. Time had become a way of keeping score only.

Chapter 52

Two reports troubled him. He stuffed his feet awkwardly into his shoes, standing as he pushed away from his desk. Both reports were related, really.

General Ishmael Varakov—he read the sign on the front of his desk in his office without walls in what had been the Natural History Museum in Chicago. "Supreme Commander, Soviet North American Army of Occupation."

"Supreme commander," he muttered. If he were as "supreme" as the sign indicated, the two reports would not have concerned him as greatly.

He started to walk across the great hall and toward the nearer of the two staircases which led to the small mezzanine, so he could better overlook the main hail.

The first report concerned additional data on the American Eden Project and the related post-holocaust scenario which had necessitated the creation of the Eden Project from the very beginning. Had he been a man given to profanity, he realized he would have used it. Where was Natalia? He had sent her with the Jew, Paul Rubenstein, to get the American Rourke, to give him the note.

He started up the stairs toward the mezzanine, his feet hurting. He scratched his belly once under his unbuttoned uniform tunic. Natalia and the young Jew had been dropped by plane near "The Retreat," the place the American Rourke had.

Perhaps Rourke would not come. The obsession—a laudable one as obsessions went—with finding his wife and children. But, surely he thought, a man such as Rourke

could not ignore the letter.

Perhaps—it was a possibility—the ghost-like Rourke, the man neither brigand killers nor Soviet Armies had been able to capture or murder, was somehow dead.

What would Natalia do?

She would return—as Rourke would have done—to learn the rest of the information, what she could do. The young American Jew—he would come with her.

As Varakov stopped at the mezzanine railing, slightly out of breath, weary, he wondered if perhaps all of them had been killed. Rourke, Rubenstein, his niece Natalia.