“When I was a boy, all was in tur-moil. Russia had suffered defeat at the hands of the Japa-nese and the old Czar and his family liked more to play tennis and to have parties than to care for the people. Lenin was always on the lips of the people—he is here, he is there. There was much hunger. And then of course the First World War, which was to be the war to end all wars, but so many of our soldiers never returned and then the era of Kerenski, and that failed, and then Lenin finally took charge and there was fighting everywhere. I was only very young after all that and I remember the horrors still as though I had seen them myself because still my family spoke of them, still whispered of them when there was darkness. And the Sec-ond World War—in which I fought—Stalin was a fool to ever trust the Nazis. And then they turned on us and tried to destroy us and later we destroyed them. All this—you would think, Catherine, that with all the millions who died in the First War, the many who died during the Revolution, the millions who died during the Second War—you would think that we would have learned something, Catherine, something to tell young people like you that would magi-cally make you understand how stupid and useless it all was. But did we?”
He stopped walking, looking into her eyes. “You are a pretty young girl. I do not still understand why you would so favor an old man by loving him. But I am glad that you do. Sit and tell me about your childhood.”
He sat near the feet of the mastodons, Catherine sitting beside, but more perched on the edge of the vinyl covered bench than actually sitting. “I did nothing interesting, Com-rade General—it is a very boring story—there is nothing in-teresting about me— “
“How wrong you are,” and he held her hand.
Chapter Seventy-two
He had landed the aircraft on a stretch of straight high-way, then taxied it off the road and into a field before it had been able to go no further.
Natalia had gone on ahead, to the original take-off site they had used with the prototype fighter. Rourke’s Harley was hidden there.
And Rourke had worked while she had been gone, get-ting the eighteen smaller crates offloaded from the plane, getting the six coffin-shaped crates which contained the cry-ogenic chambers nearer to the hatch.
He had field stripped his rifles one at a time, cleaning them. He had cleaned the Government Model, the little Lawman, the six-inch Python. He had touched up the edges of his knives. He had done everything to avoid thinking.
It was already the new day beyond the ocean—and soon—He somehow knew that it was the last day.
A plan had already formed, a plan to solve the unsolve-able.
But it meant putting himself in the position of God—and it was an uncomfortable thought.
He loved Sarah. He loved Natalia. He loved them equally—at least he told himself that—and he loved them differently.
It was the only way to solve it.
He closed his eyes. There was no need, no desire to sleep. If all went well and they were able to utilize the cryogenics equipment and the last precious bottle of the serum, he would sleep for nearly five centuries. If it did not, he would die. In either event sleep now was unimportant.
In the distance now, he heard the sound of the trucks, the familiar sound of his own camouflaged Ford pickup truck. The less familiar sounds of the truck he had borrowed from Pete Critchfield, the Resistance leader; Rourke would never return it.
He wondered if Natalia had told Paul and Sarah and the children what would happen at the next dawn. Had she told Paul the story Reed had recounted of the death of Paul’s parents?
He somehow doubted that she had. It was, after all, his responsibility.
One could escape one’s enemies, but never the ultimate enemy of being the one who was responsible.
He closed his eyes again. There was no need to see the trucks as they approached. And he wondered how he would begin it. Would he look at Michael and Annie and tell them, “Your lives are forever to be changed—forever.”
Chapter Seventy-three
He didn’t know why the KGB was evacuating the city. There were still regular army troops, but they fought every-where throughout the city with the people he and the others of the Resistance had freed from the detention camps.
That death was inevitable did not escape him, but not from his wounds at least. He rested in the back of the van they had taken from the Russians, a police van. Through the open doors, he could see Marty approaching, carrying something.
He didn’t try to sit up. He watched instead.
Marty stopped at the open rear doors. “Hey, Tommy—how you feeling?”
“I’ve felt better—what have you got there?”
“Remember I promised you a beer? Well, this one closet near where the locker rooms were—guess one of the KGB prison guards liked beer. Had a cooler-full. I got us each one.”
Marty stepped up into the van, twisting the cap off one of the bottles and handing it to Maus.
“You heard something, didn’t you?”
“Well, you know how people talk—word is the KGB pulled out because some top secret project went belly up— and —” But he stopped talking.
“And what?”
“Nothin’ important—”
“What?”
Marty opened his beer, clinked the bottle against Maus’s bottle and then took a long pull. He smacked his lips. “Nice and cold.”
“What?”
“They had a radio here—one of those jobbies that pulls in stations from all over the place.”
Marty drank some more of the beer. “Got a ham operator out of Greenland—said all of Europe was off the air—lots of static, then a moment of clear transmission—one of the guys he had talked to—he said the—” Marty took another pull on the beer. “Trouble with beer—once you drink it, the bottle’s empty.” And he looked at Maus. “The ham operator said the guy told him the sky was on fire and—it didn’t make much sense.”
Maus raised his bottle of beer, clinked the glass against Marty’s. “Here’s lookin’ at ya, Marty.”
Marty began to laugh. “I betchya I can scrounge up a couple more beers if I try hard. Our work’s done tonight.”
“Yeah, that’s a good idea. You know, I had this terrific idea for increasing sales, ya know—was just gonna imple-ment it before The Night of The War.”
“What kinda idea?”
“It’ll take a while to explain it—”
Marty laughed, and Maus laughed then, too. Marty said, “I got all night, Tommy.”
Chapter Seventy-four
President Samuel Chambers stood on the rise of ground looking out. He could see much by the fires that still burned. Beside him stood Lieutenant Feltcher. At the base of the rise stood the TVM Commander.
The Soviet Armies had been defeated, routed.
Feltcher said, “We won, Mr. President.”
“My radio man has been getting these weird signals all night. Ham operators—like that.”
“What do you mean, sir?”
He looked at Feltcher.
He didn’t have the heart to tell him. Instead, he said, “Maybe what transpired will bring about peace someday. Maybe somebody somewhere will look back and know what happened—maybe.”
“You mean, Mr. President, maybe we whipped them so bad we’ll really beat them, drive ‘em back to the Soviet Union—have America back?”
“By tomorrow morning, I’m confident of it, Lieutenant, all our troubles will be over.”
“Is it some new weapon, sir?”
He looked at Feltcher in the firelight, then just shook his head as he lit a cigarette—he had several packs to still smoke that night—there was no sense wasting the last of his cigarettes.
“No—not a new weapon, Lieutenant. I think we’ll shortly see the old weapons did quite enough—quite enough.” He inhaled the smoke deep into his lungs and said nothing else for a moment.