Ahern, Jerry - The Quest

She had seen no sign of life at the house but it looked normal enough and that was why she had determined to stop. She’d been searching the Smoky Mountains around Mt. Eagle for several days now, trying to find “Aunt Mary” and deliver Millie Jenkins. Aunt Mary was Millie’s mother’s sister, so the last name would be different and Sarah had no idea what Carla Jenkins’s maiden name had been. It was likely, too, Aunt Mary was herself married. All Millie remembered of her aunt’s farm was that the house had been set in a valley with a huge horse pasture fenced in behind it and that Aunt Mary grew roses.

As Sarah approached the sandbag fence and stopped, leaning her left hand against one of the sandbags, she stared up at the house, seeing it now in greater detail. There were five pickup trucks parked in the yard, all lined up in some kind of order. The windows of the house were shuttered closed, with narrow slits in them. A chill ran up her spine, but not from the wind, she thought. She reached under her T-shirt and took out her husband’s .45. She’d taught herself how to lower the hammer on a loaded chamber and now, with the hammer down, she braced her thumb against it and cocked it, raising the safety, then slid the gun back under her T-shirt, having kept the gun below the level of the sandbags in case anyone in the house was watching her. The slide of the pistol felt almost slimy with her own perspiration.

She climbed up on the bottom stack of sandbags to get a better view of the farmhouse, then raised her right arm, sweeping it back and forth, calling out at the top of her lungs, “Hello! Is anybody there? I want to talk!” She stopped and listened. There was no reply. She waved the blue-and-white bandanna in her hand and shouted at the top of her voice across the sandbag fence, “Hello! I just want to talk!” The door of the farmhouse opened. A tall, black-bearded man stepped out onto the unpainted porch, some kind of rifle or shotgun in his hands—Sarah couldn’t tell which from the distance. As he walked toward the steps leading up onto the porch, Sarah stopped waving the bandanna.

The man shouted—she could hear him well—“We don’t want no strangers ‘round heah, lady. Git out a’ heah!” Sarah Rourke shook her head angrily, too angry to say anything. Then, forcing herself under control, she said, “Look, I’ve got three small children with me. I don’t want anything from you—just directions. Please!” “Git out! Them’s directions, lady.” And the man started to turn and walk away.

All the tension, all the fear, all the loneliness and frustration welled up inside her, and she fought to hold back tears. She screamed at the man, “Please! For God’s sake!” The man walked another step or two, then turned, waited, then walked back toward the end of the porch.

“There’s a gate down yonder. Send yer young’ns along ahead of y’all—and no tricks.”

She sank against the sandbags, waving her right hand and shouting, “Thank you!”

She looked back at the children and suddenly felt very tired.

“Thank you,” she muttered again, but not to the man on the porch.

Chapter 4

“There’re brigands all over here,” Rourke said, his voice low. His eyes squinted behind the sunglasses against the bright morning sunlight.

“Do you think they found your retreat, John?” young Paul Rubenstein asked, pushing his wire-framed glasses back from his nose, his face perspiring profusely.

Rourke thought a moment, then said, “No, that’s the least of my worries. Maybe an archeologist will find it a thousand years from now, but nobody’s going to find it today, tomorrow, or twenty years from now. Trouble is—” Rourke looked past Rubenstein and beyond the rocks where the bodies of the brigands they had killed lay—“I wonder if twenty years from now I’m still going to be living in it.” “What do you mean, John?”

Rourke lit one of his small cigars, thinking momentarily about the cigars he had stored at the retreat. “What I mean, Paul, is the world—you look at the sunsets, the sunrises, the way the weather has been hot one day, cold the next, the rains, the winds? And if the world stays in one piece, what happens then? Can we rebuild? There are so many questions. Not enough of them have answers and the ones that do are tough answers.” Rourke stopped talking and looked down at the Colt Python. He’d reloaded the other guns and now slipped the spent cartridges, identifying them from the primer indentations from the cylinder and replacing them with some of the loose rounds he carried. He stood up from the crouch and stretched, snatching up the CAR-15 and slinging it under his right shoulder.

“But,” Rourke continued with a sigh, “as somebody once said out of frustration and bitter experience, life goes on, hmm?” Rourke, without waiting for Paul, started walking across the flat expanse at the top of the rock cluster toward where he and the still recuperating Rubenstein had hauled the younger man’s bike that previous night. Rourke scanned the ground below. In the darkness they had manhandled the bike up into the rocks, but now, with the light, Rourke saw a path—precarious, but he judged it manageable. “You wait here,” he said, looking back over his shoulder toward Rubenstein.

Rourke picked his way across the rocks and stopped beside the bike, then looked back toward the path, and reassessed his judgment that the bike could be driven down. He glanced at the Rolex on his left wrist, then at the sun. With the gunfire ceased and the brigands not having returned to the larger force Rourke felt they were a part of, he decided it was only a matter of time before someone came—perhaps a heavily armed brigand force.

Rourke did not want that. He was too close to the retreat to waste the time, he thought, and eager to begin searching for Sarah and the children. He smiled, “eager.” From the night he had stood talking with the RCMP Inspector in Canada and the man’s wife had turned on the radio newsbroadcast, Rourke had been more than eager. When he took the first flight out to Atlanta, the bombing and missile strikes had begun. In the long night after the plane was diverted and before the crash of the jetliner in New Mexico—and in the long days and nights since—Rourke had thought of little else than finding his family.

He had resolved early on to be unwavering on one point—that somehow they had survived. And they had. As he mounted the bike and started the engine, the corners of his mouth turned down in a bitter smile. He looked out across the land from the high ground. If Sarah and the children were somewhere in the mountains of northern Georgia, they would be hard to find. Were they somewhere else in Georgia, the Carolinas, perhaps Tennessee? Every mile they traveled likely took them farther away, he realized, making the search just that much longer and more difficult.

Finding a woman and two young children, refugees in a country full of refugees—The entire midsection of the country was a radioactive desert. There was no law. What of the Russians, the brigands—God knew what that lay out there? Rourke revved the bike, squinted against the sun and, using his combat booted feet to support the machine rumbling between his legs, started it down the path.

Chapter 5

It was never good to let them see you looking dejected, KGB Maj. Vladmir Karamatsov reminded himself, throwing his shoulders back as he stepped to the door of the military aircraft and breathed the cool night air of Chicago. At the base of the short ladder leading down from the jet was his staff car, his chauffeur who was waiting on the runway tarmac beside it, snapped to attention as he saw his superior.

Karamatsov smiled as he nimbly jumped the last few steps of the ladder, then tossed his leather dispatch case in a gentle arc to his subordinate.