It was like a stage production, waiting in the wings for the cue line to enter—stage right and stage left, Vladov’s men and some of Reed’s men on stage left, Rourke and Natalia and the others below the level of the road on stage right.
Vladov had been fed the proper line.
“The trouble, Comrade Major—it is very grave. A group of Americans and renegade Russian soldiers have infil-trated the area and are preparing to attack one of the con-voys in order to gain entrance to the Womb and sabotage the efforts of our leaders.”
“This is criminal—these men—they must be stopped.”
“No, Comrade Major—they must not be stopped. Not yet—”
“Yet”—Rourke jumped up from the rocks, rolling onto the road surface, to his feet now, the Gerber ahead of him like a wand—a wand of death.
Vladov was scrambling over the roof of the patrol vehi-cle, jumping, hurtling himself at the KGB officer.
There was a plopping sound from behind Rourke— Natalia’s silenced Walther, he knew, the AKM armed man beside the KGB officer going down as he raised his assault rifle to fire.
Rourke dove the two yards distance to the man standing beside the nearest truck, Rourke’s right arm arcing forward like a fast moving pendulum, the spear-point blade of the Gerber biting into the throat of the man, Rourke twisting the blade, shoving the body away to choke to death on blood, Rourke clambering up into the truck cab—the driver was pulling a pistol, a snubby Colt revolver. In that in-stant — Rourke guessed the man had taken it off some dead American—Rourke thrust forward with the knife, hacking literally across the man’s throat, blood spurting from the sliced artery, the blood spraying across the interior front windshield, Rourke’s left hand grabbing at the man’s gun-hand, his left hand finding the revolver, the web of flesh between thumb and first finger interposing between the hammer and the frame as the hammer fell.
“Asshole—gave me a blood blister!” Rourke snarled.
He freed the Colt of his hand — a Detective Special.
There would be a blood blister.
Pocketing the little blued .38 Special, Rourke shoved the body out on the driver’s side to the road, rolling back, jumping down to the road on the passenger side, onto the back of a KGB man with an AKM. The man was a Lieuten-ant. Taking the man’s face in his left hand, as Rourke dropped back, he wrenched the head back, slashing the Gerber from left to right across the exposed throat, then ramming it into the right kidney, putting the man down.
Natalia fired the PPK/S, the slide locking back, open as the man in front of her went down to the silenced shot.
She wheeled, raking the silencer across the face of an-other man, then switching the pistol into her left hand, the right hand moving back. Rourke saw it, knew it was com-ing, the right hand arcing forward, the click-click-click sound of the Bali-Song flashing open, then her right hand punched forward, the Bali-Song puncturing the adam’s apple of the man whom a split second earlier she had hit with the pistol. He fell back, Natalia wheeling right, three men rushing her, Rourke diving toward them, snatching one man at the shoulder, bulldogging him down, imbedding the knife into the chest, twisting, withdrawing.
Natalia’s Bali-Song was opening, closing, opening, clos-ing, opening—it flashed forward, the second of the three men screaming, blood gushing from his throat where she’d opened the artery.
The third man was stepping into her, raising a pistol.
Rourke took a long step forward on his right foot, pivot-ing, his left leg snapping up and out, a double Tae Kwan Doe kick to the right side of the man’s head, the man falling away, as he did, Natalia’s knife flashing toward the man, slicing across the gunhand wrist, the pistol—a Makarov— clattering to the road surface along with the last two fingers of his hand.
Rourke stepped toward the man, his right foot snaking out, catching him at the base of the nose, breaking it, driv-ing the bone up and through and into the brain.
Rourke stopped, turned—
Vladov stood there a few yards from him—Reed was be-side him—both men’s knives glinted red with blood in the sunlight.
The fighting had stopped.
The personnel of the convoy lay dead and dying.
“No casualties,” Reed murmured. “Looks like anyway.”
“Many casualties,” Vladov corrected. “Too many, I think.”
Rourke said nothing.
Chapter Thirty-five
The trucks were rolling, Vladov and Daszrozinski each man-ning one of the M-72 combinations and two of the Soviet SF-ers riding the sidecars respectively to man the RPK LMGs. Rourke drove the first truck, his Russian good enough, he knew, Nata-lia had confirmed, that if he avoided a protracted conversation he could convince the guards they would encounter at the checkpoints outside Cheyenne Mountain that he was indeed Russian. Beside him, Natalia. She was changing into the small-est of the Soviet enlisted men’s uniforms they could find. “If I’d wanted a uniform, I could have brought my own uniform.”
“Yeah. But the Russians don’t use women for details like this—and besides, dressed like a woman you’re too recognizable to the KGB.”
“Maybe I should take my eyebrow pencil and paint on a mus-tache.”
“Do you use eyebrow pencil—”
“Not very often,” she laughed. “But a woman needs to have one just in case.”
“You shouldn’t have ridden in the front truck in the convoy.”
“I didn’t have any choice,” she laughed. “I wanted to be with you—and besides, you’re the only man here I’d undress in front of.”
“I don’t know if that’s a compliment or not,” he told her, looking at her for an instant. She had stripped away her jacket and her black jumpsuit and her boots—she looked bizarre, a silk one-piece undergarment that somewhere at the back of his mind he recalled was called a “teddy”
or some other ridiculous sounding name and black boot socks. “That’s a kinky outfit.”
“Hmm—I saw you when you were changing into your uniform—boot socks don’t go much better with jockey shorts.”
Rourke laughed. “If we get out of this—we can get the cryo-genic chambers we can steal and the serum—we can get it to the Retreat—maybe get Vladov and some of his men there and Reed and some of his men. We could accommodate more than the six of us. And you can get things ready—I can go after your uncle and Catherine and try and get them out—”
“No—”
Rourke looked at her as she pulled on her borrowed uniform pants. “Why don’t you—”
“Because you’d be killed—it’s as simple as that. There are three people I care for in the world. I’ve resigned myself to los-ing my uncle. But I wont risk losing either of the other two—
yourself, Paul. If you go, Paul will go, too—you know that. When I looked at his wound I realized he’d be at full capacity in another few days—by the time we get back—if we get—when we get back, you won’t be able to stop him. You might morally excuse punching a woman in the jaw for what you considered was her own good, but you couldn’t morally excuse doing that to Paul. No, I love my uncle—he’s the only real parent I ever had—but I won’t let you die trying to bring him back. He’s ready to die—he feels he’s lived his life. I don’t accept that, but I respect it. You’d never get him out alive. If we pull this off, if we destroy the Womb’s capabilities to survive the holocaust, if we steal the chambers, steal the cryogenic serum we need and de-stroy the rest, if any of Rozhdestvenskiy’s men survive, they won’t rest until they hunt you down or the fire consumes them. You’d never reach Chicago, you’d never get out of the city if you did. I won’t let you go—if I have to shoot your kneecaps to stop you, I won’t let you leave me.”