Ahern, Jerry - The Quest

Sarah watched the woman, watched as Mary stared through the window above the sink and into the garden and beyond. Sarah could see the purplish night far off in the distance. She heard a sniffing sound, saw Mary bend down and touch the apron to her face, then heard the water turn back on. Mary was talking, but not looking at Sarah.

“I don’t know, Sarah—where to put them peels from them potatoes. I don’t know.”

Chapter 25

Rourke watched in the shadows. It was a commando raid, he guessed, something against a Soviet installation in the city or somewhere near. He had left the bike for two of Reed’s men to guard as well as Reed’s other equipment.

Then with Reed and the other two surviving team members, Rourke had started walking through the woods and paralleled the road for about a mile, seeing no sign of traffic as they made their way toward the old drive-in theater. Rourke knew the man and woman who’d owned it years before, and now as he turned off the road and skirted behind it, avoiding the access drive, he wondered if somehow the couple had managed to make it through the holocaust.

He felt someone tapping on his shoulder and heard a whisper—Reed’s voice. “Why are we taking the long way around, Rourke?” Rourke stopped, the CAR-15 slung from his right shoulder, his fist wrapped on the pistol grip, the safety lever on and his thumb near it. “I trust the motives of the Resistance people, but there could always be a ringer in with them, working for the Soviets.” “Goddamn Russians,” Reed muttered.

Rourke looked at him, able to discern the outline of his face in the darkness, saying, his voice low, “Yeah, well, maybe goddamn Communists, but not goddamn Russians—they’re people just like we are, led by their government—doing what they’re told.” “You were sweet on that Russian broad a little, weren’t you? Chambers said she—”

Rourke jabbed the muzzle of the CAR-15 forward, hard in the darkness, a moan and a rush of air issuing from Reed’s lips as he doubled over. Bending beside him, the muzzle of the rifle alongside the hunched-over man’s face, Rourke rasped, “You keep out of my personal affairs, Reed, hear that? And not that it’s any of your business, because it damned well isn’t, if it weren’t for that ‘Russian broad’ your President would have been locked away by the Communist occupation forces by now and you and all your people would have been croaked in a neutron blast. It doesn’t matter how I feel about her, she did us all a good turn and got her own tail in a sling probably doin’ it. And I wouldn’t be here doin’ this foolishness to begin with if I weren’t trying to find my wife and kids. You grow up a little, and maybe you’re gonna realize that any normal man meets a lot of ‘broads’ like you call ‘em, a lot 6f women he can like, maybe he could love under different circumstances. But it’s only juvenile delinquents and morons who figure fidelity’s a one-way street. I figure if my wife counts me as alive, wherever she is, she’s being faithful to me—and I don’t just owe her the same, I want to give her the same. Now—” and Rourke bent low, his lips almost touching Reed’s ear, his voice rasping and hard— “you think you got all that, Reed? Or you wanna go out back there a few hundred yards into the brush and get the shit kicked out of you?” Even in the dark, Rourke could see the hard set around Reed’s eyes. “You give sermons, too, huh? Mr. Good Guy, Mr. Hero, what’s some dinky-assed nuclear war to you, huh?” Rourke let out a slow, low breath, saying half through his teeth, “You and the guys like you who stayed with the system are the ones who fucked it all up. Had to play your little games, do your little dances, keep the world spinning around and figure when it stopped it was like a roulette wheel—you win, fine, you lose, there’s always another game. Well, you look at the sunsets, you feel the temperatures against your skin, you measure the rainfall, you count the dead bodies, sucker. Some Communist gave an attack order, some guy over here gave an attack order and it’s just real great to push some goddamn anonymous button. You go out and kill a couple hundred million people some night when you can smell their sweat, smell it when they die and their bowels loosen up and their sphincters relax, and you can see the eyes go glassy. You do it that way next time, and see how well you like playin’.” Rourke turned around and started through the brush toward the main parking area of the abandoned drive-in, somehow feeling better inside and at the same time feeling worse. He’d always labeled himself either laid back or uptight—he’d never been sure which. And he wasn’t used to hearing himself let go. His jaw set, he kept walking.

Rourke edged toward the farthest end of the tall standing pine trees, their bare shadows casting long, thin lines along the ground from the reflected light of Coleman lanterns in the center of the drive-in lot. Rourke watched the assembled men—no women. He didn’t like the rendezvous; it was too open. He waited as the now-silent Reed edged up near him.

The man rasped, “After this is through, you and me.”

Rourke simply nodded. Reed, competent, tough and—Rourke thought—about as bull-headed as he, was the last thing on his mind.

Chapter 26

General Varakov sat in darkness. Other than the light from the long rectangular lamp that bathed his desk in yellow, beyond was shadow and then beyond it blackness, and far into the main hall near the skeletons of the mastodons was a ceiling light, but it shone more like a beacon than a source of illumination. The light cast shadows from the bones of the two prehistoric giants and seemed only to accentuate how they somehow did not fit in the real world of men and yet emphasized the mortality they shared with men.

Varakov wiped his hands across his eyes, and stared at the file folder. It was the KGB file on John Thomas Rourke. He scanned through it once again. Doctor of Medicine, with no particular specialty, and training toward general practice, and after the degree, internship at—Varakov didn’t recognize the name of the hospital. After there was an unaccounted-for year, and then Rourke had joined Central Intelligence as a case officer—the translation for that Varakov knew was a spy, an agent. He had moved into the Black Section—Covert Operations, and had killed several times for the agency, targets usually in Latin America. Varakov noted with interest that apparently Karamatsov and Rourke had crossed paths in Latin America once. And Rourke had bested Karamatsov.

For some reason not clear in the file, Rourke had quit Central Intelligence after an affair in Latin America, which he’d barely survived. There had been an ambush, Rourke’s people had been killed, and only Rourke’s body had not been found, and then several weeks later a man matching Rourke’s general description had been seen near the docks and after that, Rourke had apparently drifted into Miami, barely alive.

His nerve gone? Varakov doubted that, for after leaving CIA Rourke had begun to freelance, not in Intelligence, but in counter-terrorist training, survival training, weapons skills, etc. He had been spotted working with pro-American military and police units in virtually every corner of the world where the Americans needed the help most. Varakov made a mental note to see if Rourke had really left the Company, as it was called, or simply assumed a cover.

Rourke had written several books on the medical, psychological, and weapons-related aspects of survival—short and long-term. He was an expert; Varakov noted curiously that some of Rourke’s works had been pirated, translated, and were adapted as training manuals in the Soviet Union. The thought amused him; he wondered if Rourke would take such knowledge well? He doubted it. He scanned through the family background; wife works as an artist, illustrator, and writer of children’s books; two children, Michael and Ann. Varakov worked the dates—the boy would be nearing seven, the girl nearing five.