Ahern, Jerry - The Quest

“The ever dutiful wife,” he remarked as she passed him and bent over a low coffee table to set down the bottle and glass. “You aren’t drinking?” “I don’t feel like it, Vladmir,” she said quietly.

His hands held her shoulders and he snapped her around to him. Her dark hair fell across her forehead as her head bent back, tossing the hair from her face showing her slender white neck. His right hand moved to her throat and tightened around it.

“You’re hurting me.”

Karamatsov laughed. “You are a martial arts expert; why don’t you stop me?” he asked, then let go of her neck, bent down and poured a glass of vodka for himself and downed half the tumbler. He looked at her. “I want you to have a drink.” He knotted the fingers of his right hand in the hair at the nape of her neck and bent her head back, arching her back. Her mouth contorted downward. Karamatsov raised the glass to her mouth, forced its rim between her lips, and poured the vodka from the glass, some of the liquid dribbling down the sides of her mouth. He let go of her hair as she started to cough, choking on the vodka.

Her head bent low over her knees, one hand held her hair from her face as she sat perched on the edge of the sofa.

He bent down, staring at her. “Did you drink with Rourke, Natalia? Do you like American whiskey better than Russian vodka?” He half stood, poured another glass of the vodka for himself, studied the clear liquid for an instant. He suddenly raked the back of his right hand downward, his knuckles connecting against the miraculously perfect right cheek of the seated woman in front of him. The force of his hand knocked her from the edge of the couch onto the floor.

“I did not cheat on you with Rourke. He wouldn’t,” she said, staring up at Karamatsov from the floor.

Karamatsov dropped to his knees, spilling half the vodka from his glass, wetting the front of his shirt and pants. His face inches from hers, he rasped, “But you wanted to!” His right fist lashed out, and her left cheekbone suddenly lost its perfection as well.

Chapter 6

Varakov stared at the skeletons of the mastodons in the main hall. In the weeks since Soviet Military Headquarters for North America had been set up in the former lake-front museum, General Varakov had grown exceedingly fond of watching the two extinct giants. And sometimes when he looked at them, he thought, an amused smile crossing his florid thick lips, instead of mastodons he saw the skeletons of a bear and an eagle locked in mortal combat eons after their disappearance from the earth. He looked up through the windows over the far door. There was darkness.

Gen. Ishmael Varakov had always liked the dark; it was peaceful, yet full of things to come.

“Comrade General?”

Varakov turned from the railing overlooking the main gallery and smiled at his young woman secretary. “They are here?” “Yes, Comrade General.”

He shrugged, looked at his unbuttoned uniform tunic, then left it unbuttoned, reminding himself he was the commanding general and there was no one for thousands of miles who had the power to tell him to button it. “Go tell them I’ll be there.” He turned to look back at the mastodons once more. If nothing else positive had come out of the war, he thought, it was seeing this place. When he had served as an advisor once in Egypt, he had never seen such treasures of the past as were there. He had never appreciated the beauty and complexity—yet at once simplicity— of the evolution of nature as he had from what he had seen here. He wandered the halls incessantly. He had at last found a home he liked, he thought, smiling. Then out loud he added, “Here among the rest of the anomalies of antiquity.” He smacked his lips, turned from the railing, and started toward the low, winding steps leading to the main floor and the meeting.

He shuffled on his sore feet past a bronze of a stone age man, another of a Malaysian woman, and another of a bushman armed with a blowgun. He turned right toward his wall-less office just off the main hall. An office without walls was the best kind, he thought with a smile. They were all there, the ranking general and field-grade officers of his command, sitting in a neat semicircle facing his empty desk. He stopped and watched them, shook his head, and stared at his feet, then smiling, walked ahead, rumbling, “There is no need to disturb yourselves, gentlemen. Please remain seated.” He crossed past the semicircle of men on the edges of their seats, rounded the corner of his desk and plopped into his chair. He leaned forward across the leather desk top, then pushed off his shoes, his white stockinged toes splaying against the carpet under them.

“We all are aware,” he began, looking at no one in particular, “that the complete military occupation of the United States is impossible at this point in time. Those fragmented units of American, British, and West German troops and others are still making life in Europe miserable for our forces. China is holding its borders and we are holding ours—a land war with China, gentlemen, would be madness. I am convinced we would never have occupied this land if it weren’t for the fact that we need the industrial output possible from the still-standing factories— weapons, small arms, tanks, food, chemicals. And this—” and he hammered his fist on the desk top— “is our primary mission in the United States. I emphasize this because many reports have come to me that it seems instead we are bent on the total pacification of America. That is not within the realm of possibility at this point in time—regardless of official line, it is not!” He leaned back and stared past the men. “I have decided to take personal charge of the fine details of the plan for civilian pacification. It is a limited plan to achieve limited and realistic goals, Comrades. Since the restarting of vital industries and their protection from sabotage is our most important goal, we shall act accordingly. I shall borrow something from the psychology and experience of the very people we are attempting to control—and I emphasize control. Control! I have signed an order establishing what can best be called forts, military outposts designed to be as largely self-sufficient as possible, like the American frontier outposts we have all seen in the American Indian capitalist exploitation films. We—” he leaned forward, raising his first finger on each hand, staring briefly into the eyes of each of the men in the semi circle before him—“we will be the cavalry! Our functions will be simple—to prevent the rise of organized resistance and protect the civilian population as well. Notice that: protect the civilian population. There are bands of blood thirsty brigands prowling this land, killing and looting. We must prove to the surviving American civilian population that we are not out to facilitate their extermination; we must protect them from these brigands, and at the same time we must realize that some of these brigand forces could become the kernel around which massive armed resistance can grow. As a formal resistance movement develops—and much of my intelligence information indicates this may already be happening—we must be so actively engaged in protecting the American people from these criminal brigand elements that we can lump together these resistance fighters with the lawless brigand elements and combat them all. We must not let resistance become a popular movement as it did in Afghanistan, or years earlier as it did for the Nazis—” he almost spat out the word— “as they fought the French.” For the first time one of his subordinate officers, General Novadkhastovski, spoke.

“Comrade General,” he began, then his face softened into a smile as he glanced around the room. “Ishmael. We are to protect these people?” “That is right, Illya, we will never, not within our lifetimes at least—” he stared past his old wartime friend to the bony mastodons in the main hall near the fountain beyond— “but if we can make them see that their safety,” he stopped, realizing he had skipped an entire portion of his idea (he was getting old, he sighed) then backtracked—“we will never get them to like us, to willingly accept our rule, but if we can at least make them rely on us for their safety we will have won the most major of psychological battles. And, as long as the brigands are roaming free, we too must worry about their harassment. These gangs of ruffians are heavily armed and kill without mercy. They are animals.” “It is wise, I think. You are right, Ishmael.”