by Jerry Ahern
Rourke was on his feet, his left hand grasping the woman's shoulders, dragging her toward the Harley as he fired out the .45 with his right hand.
"Hang on— come on!" Rourke snapped, righting the bike. He silently prayed he hadn't damaged it as he gunned the engine, balancing the machine between his legs and starting off toward the river bank.
Rourke glanced behind him. One of the pickup trucks hit the road edge too fast, sailing off into midair. As he turned away he could hear the explosion at impact sound. The girl behind him screamed. Ahead, perhaps five hundred yards along the river bank, Rourke saw their chance. There were still three bikers behind him as he shot a glance back. Two pickups, guns blazing from the truck beds, were slowly taking the grade down from the road.
Rourke throttled out the bike, already gauging the distance from the river bank to the auto ferry moored there. Perhaps a dozen feet. He tried judging the length of the ferry, the length of the run along the river bank. With two hundred yards to go, Rourke swung the CAR-15 out of his way then rasped to the girl,
"Whatever happens, hold on, then let go when I shout— just do it!" At one hundred yards Rourke swung the Harley left to the farthest extreme of the river bank. He judged the distance between the bank and the auto ferry as greater now— perhaps eighteen feet. One heavy rope was tied to a stout pine some five or six feet back from the near edge of the river bank. Fifty yards. Rourke worked out a scenario in his mind to explain the presence of the auto ferry. Brigands perhaps, perhaps someone else. Whoever had last used the ferry had taken it downriver and, possibly with an eye to future use, secured it along the river bank.
Twenty-five yards now and Rourke dropped his speed as he widened his arc and edged away from the water. Eighteen feet, he decided— the jump would be eighteen feet from the river bank to the auto ferry, more dangerous because it was so short and the power and acceleration he'd need to make it might carry him too far. The ferry's length was about thirty feet from end to end. Ten feet remaining before the jump and Rourke shouted to the girl behind him, "Hold on—
tight!"
His jaw set, Rourke wheeled the bike, aiming it straight for the river bank, the Harley bumping and jostling over the rough ground. Rourke's hands gripped the handlebars like a pair of vices, his eyes already focused on the auto ferry deck. He revved the Harley Davidson, pulling up on the front end by the handlebars, and the bike jumped out over the water, the rear end dropping. The front end was too high, Rourke thought. Then the rear wheel crashed onto the deck. Throwing his weight forward to get steering control from the front wheel, Rourke roared to the girl, "Jump clear— jump— now!"
Rourke braked the Harley hard, the bike skidding. And above the screeching sound and the exhaust noises there was still the gunfire. The bike slipped, still sliding and Rourke with it toward the far end of the deck. The wooden planks were rough against Rourke's hands and legs, tearing at him. He twisted the machine, hauling at it, trying to slow it. The bike finally stopped and Rourke with it. He looked up, his hands bleeding, his arms aching. The Harley was less than six inches from the edge of the auto ferry's deck.
Rourke clambered to his feet, snatching at the CAR-15, dumping the empty thirty-round magazine, ramming a fresh one home. He worked the bolt and ran back across the ferry, the gun already spitting fire in his hands.
Rourke reached the rope securing the ferry to the river bank, shouting to the injured girl,
"Secure my bike if you can!" The A.G. Russell black chrome Sting IA was in his left hand, the double-edged blade hacking at the rope.
Already, the remaining brigand cyclists were roaring up along the river bank. Rourke hacked again with the knife blade, the rope fraying and snapping as the current tugged at the auto ferry. The flat-decked river boat pulled away from the bank now and into the current. Rourke telescoped out the stock on the CAR-15, ripping the scope covers away. He sighted on the nearest Brigand biker, firing the CAR-15 almost as soon as the cross hairs settled. "One," he snarled, the first biker going down.
Rourke swung the muzzle along the river bank.
"Two," he whispered as he fired again, the second biker sprawling back off his machine, the motorcycle spinning itself out into the water. Rourke swung the muzzle of the CAR-15. There were two pickup trucks driving along the river bank. Rourke sighted on the driver of the first truck. "Tough shot," he muttered, then drew his trigger finger back, the rifle cracking but not really moving. Another reason he liked the .223, he thought, was that he could ride out recoil when he wanted to, since with the straight-line stock of the CAR-15 recoil was almost non-existent.
Rourke followed the pickup truck cab through the three-power scope as the driver pawed at the wheel with one arm. Rourke fired again. Through the scope he was able to see the bright red flower of blood on the side of the neck, matching the one already on the driver's right arm. The driver's head snapped back, and the truck cut left, slamming into the river bank, then bouncing toward the water. Already, the Brigand men and women in the truck bed were jumping clear. "No," Rourke rasped under his breath, swinging the scope onto the escaping Brigands. He fired once, twice, three times, then a two-round burst, catching some of them in mid-air as they flipped from the back of the truck. He hit some of them as they ran off after jumping to the ground.
Rourke raised the muzzle of the rifle, the rest of the surviving Brigands fleeing from the river bank. The rifle had done for Rourke what he'd wanted it to do— he had no desire for a running gun battle between the ferry and the river bank.
He turned and stared at the girl with the reddish-brown hair. She was pale, he thought. Then he started toward her in long, loping strides, breaking into a run, the CAR-15 swinging to his side as he tried to catch her before she collapsed over the side of the ferry and into the current. Rourke got both hands under her armpits and pulled her against him. But she was already unconscious and— he confirmed it now— the left arm was still streaming blood. He moved his right hand across her back, finding a bullet wound there as well. The sticky feeling of blood was something he couldn't mistake.
Chapter 3
"I was the only one who knew how to ride a motorcycle, so I guess I was elected. I'd always talked about equality of the sexes— so here was my big chance. When your parents give you a first name like
'Sissy' you can't just sit around and be one."
Rourke looked at the girl, his eyes smiling. "So 'Sissy' had to prove she wasn't a sissy. And you could've gotten yourself killed. Or worse— and I mean that literally."
The girl winced a little as Rourke checked the security of the bandage on her left shoulder where a bullet had grazed her. "Lucky for me," she began, sucking in her breath hard as Rourke took the blanket back from her and probed at the wound along the left side of her rib cage.
"Lucky you're a doctor."
"Lucky that bullet didn't break a couple of your ribs. It hit you at just the right angle and skated along between the second and third rib and lodged there. In a few days you'll feel fine. Time for that old joke about the guy who's injured, both hands damaged. Says to the doctor, 'You mean after the bandages come off, I'll be able to play the violin?' The doctor nods and the guy says, 'Wow— I could never play the violin before!' But you'll be fine— whatever you do," Rourke added.
"After I passed out, did I— ahh—" the girl stammered.
"What? That ahh of yours covers a wide range of possibilities. But no— all you did was stay passed out. I took the auto ferry downstream— I make it about twenty-five miles or so—
and that's where I removed the bullet along your ribs. Then I decided it was safe to stop awhile. So here we are." Rourke gestured with his hands to the riverside clearing, a semicircle of bright green pines and a few naturally growing cedars at the far side. Beyond the trees were foothills.
"I didn't say anything then?" the girl asked again.
Rourke dropped to one knee beside her, studying her face. There was relief there, and pain too— but something else, uncertainty
and fear.
"What shouldn't you have said?" Rourke asked, his voice low, the words slow.
"No— it's just—"
"I'm not going to suppose those Brigands were chasing you for any other reason besides the fact that you were alone and unarmed— and they like women that way especially. But why were you the only one who could ride a bike— what did you get elected to do?" Rourke asked.
"Just— some friends of mine. We were— up in the mountains ever since the War and we had to get—
ahh—" and the girl stopped.
"Next time you say ahh, let me know in advance and I can get a tongue depressor out of the first-aid kit and check your tonsils," Rourke told her.
"I'm sorry," she smiled. "It's just that— ahh—" And she laughed, tears coming into the corners of her eyes a second later as she reached for her left rib cage.
"I forgot to mention you shouldn't laugh," Rourke said slowly.
"I just promised—"
"Here." Rourke fished into his hip pocket and took out his wallet, opened the plastic bag sealing it, and searched inside. In a moment he passed her a plastic coated identity card with his photo on it.
"C.I.A.?"
"Retired. I don't even think there is a C.I.A. any more. I guess what I'm trying to get across is you can trust me— if you need to."
Rourke took one of his small, dark tobacco cigars and lit it in the blue-yellow flame of his Zippo. "Well?" he asked her.
"I'm Sissy Wiznewski— Doctor Wiznewski, really. I'm a kind of geologist," she began.
"What kind of geologist?"
"Seismology. We— Dr. Jarvis, Dr. Tanagura, Peter Krebbs, and I— we were manning a survey station up in the mountains."
"I don't follow you," Rourke said matter-of-factly.
"Well, I don't know if you know it," she began again, "but there are—"
"Fault lines around here," Rourke interrupted. "But the strength of any shocks in the area has been minor so far."
"Right— that's true. That's why we were here. We were recording plate tectonics to compare with plate movement in California and along the West Coast. You may have read or seen something on television about how scientists are trying to figure ways of defusing earthquakes before stress between plates gets so severe that one plate slips and there's a major earthquake."
"So," Rourke said thoughtfully, studying the girl's face— she had green eyes. "So you were studying plate movement here to get a handle on what— other than geologic age— has contributed to stability and to learn what you could engineer into this defusing process."
"Yeah," she interrupted him. "Exactly. So we could learn what we might be able to do to stabilize plate movement on the West Coast. If we investigated the end result of a quiescent fault system then we might learn what sort of things we could do to relieve plate tensions on the West Coast."
"Was it working?" Rourke asked her.
"Yes— I think so. I mean, all the preliminary data we were accumulating seemed to indicate our research was going along the right direction and everything. But it was really too early to tell, then there was the—" The girl stopped, turning her face away to stare at the ground.
"What? Were you sort of like Noah's dove— they sent you out to see if there were still a world left?"
"No," she answered, her voice so soft Rourke could barely hear it. He guessed the girl was about twenty-seven or twenty-eight. And Rourke also guessed there was something that was frightening her, more terribly than the pursuit of the Brigands or even the War itself.
"You discovered something, something that couldn't wait any longer," he surmised.
"Yes— we did. It was really an accident, but we're certain about the findings, at least as certain as we can be without field investigation on the spot. I don't know if that's possible. We figured somebody had to tell the Army, or even if the Russians had won the War, tell them. Somebody had to do something. And there isn't time to wait."
"Tell them what?" Rourke asked her, studying the glowing reddish tip of his cigar.
"Who won the War?" The girl looked at him, her eyes wide.
"We all lost— the Soviets have some troops over here, but... You're a scientist, you should see that better than I do. If it's summer now— then why are we wearing heavy clothes, why has the temperature been dipping to the freezing mark at night? What did you find?"
"Tell me one thing first— was the West Coast bombed heavily."
"You have people there?"
"Yes, but— from a scientific standpoint, I need to know. Do you know?"
"Apparently the fault line ruptured under the impact of the explosions there— the old fears about California slipping off into the sea. Well," Rourke sighed, "it happened— there is no West Coast anymore. None— it's gone."
The girl made the sign of the cross, staring down at the ground, heavy sobbing her only response to his words.
Rourke stood up, walking toward the river bank, studying the water, the tip of his cigar, the toes of his black combat boots. He heard her voice behind him, the words difficult to understand through the sounds of her tears. "Did they bomb Florida?" But the girl didn't wait for him to answer as he turned to face her. He watched as she stared straight ahead into the trees.
"Well— then we're right. The night of the bombing."
"The Night of the War?" Rourke almost whispered. "The bombing did something that shouldn't have been possible, but it created an artificial fault line— I guess you'd call it that. The instruments we had implanted all up and down the coast went insane when the bombs dropped that night. But they were built to withstand massive shock and most of them held up. We then found a fault line that wasn't there before the War, gradually growing. It could be days from now, just a few, but it could also be hours. There's going to be an earthquake, one of the most massive ever recorded. There could be thousands of people killed. Maybe millions. I don't know how many people there are down there since the War began. But soon—" The girl sobbed heavily. Rourke took a few steps nearer to her, then dropped to one knee beside her. "Soon, there's going to be an earthquake along that new fault line, and it will separate the Florida peninsula from the rest of the continent and the peninsula will crash down into the sea. There should be tidal waves all along the coast, into the Gulf too. But the whole Florida Peninsula will disappear from the face of the earth."
The girl looked up at him, turning around awkwardly because of her wounds. Rourke saw something pleading in her eyes and he folded her into his arms, letting her cry against his chest.
"So many, so many people— Jesus," the girl cried.
Rourke looked down into the girl's hair, then over his shoulder toward the ferry boat. The motorcycle on the deck was almost completely out of gasoline after the high-speed chase. "Paul," Rourke whispered.
"My God..."
Rourke let the girl cry for a while— the tension of everything that had happened to her demanded it, he realized. He guessed she'd been close to some of the people who had died in the San Andreas quake that had wiped out California. And now she saw it happening all over again. She said nothing else yet, but Rourke realized now why she had been sent by the others of her team. The knowledge of the impending disaster had forced them to do something. Rourke wondered silently if Cuba or perhaps the Russians could be somehow alerted to help in the evacuation. Certainly the government of United States II should be told. All three had a stake in the population of Florida. Rourke wondered how many men, women, and children had survived the Night of the War, the reported Communist Cuban occupation.
There was his own search for Sarah and the children to consider. But perhaps they would be near the coast where the tidal waves provide a built-in warning as the tides begin rising. There would at least be a chance for them, Rourke thought. But his friend Paul Rubenstein was likely in Florida by now. There would be no chance for him. Rourke thought about the young man. Before the Night of the War, neither had known the other existed. And in the space of a few hours after the crash
of the diverted jetliner they had all ridden, Rourke and Paul Rubenstein—
ultimately the only two survivors from the passengers and crew— had begun the friendship that had carried them across two-thirds of the United States. Rourke suddenly realized he had no idea why the New York City-based editor with a trade magazine had been in Canada to begin with and headed toward Atlanta. Rourke shook his head, a smile crossing his lips.
Rourke thought about himself a moment. He had made few friends in his life, had always had few relatives. "Friends," he whispered under his breath. Sarah, his wife, had always been his friend— perhaps that was why they had argued so much before the War, wasting hours they hadn't bothered to tally. Natalia— his most curious friend, he thought. He remembered their meeting in Texas that had led to Rourke's having a final showdown with her KGB husband, killing him. Rourke realized she probably hated him now. The one friend was Paul Rubenstein.
"I'll help you," Rourke whispered to the girl, her head against his chest and her sobbing subsiding now.
"We can take the ferry boat downriver. I think I can find a contact in Army Intelligence in Savannah. We can do something to try to get some of the people out before it happens. I don't really know how much we can do, how many people can be evacuated— however it's done. But you and your colleagues were right," he told her. "Something has to be done. And I guess now it's up to both of us."