by Jerry Ahern
“Agreed,” Sarah shouted back.
“Come on then,” Mary Beth said, smiling for the first time. “I’ll give you a hand and watch the kids. Some of the girls here can help you with Harmon, gettin’ him up to the cave. Then I guess we can all give you a hand with the boat. Come on.” She started toward Michael and Annie, Michael’s arm going around his sister’s shoulders, his feet moving back across the sand. Mary Beth looked at Michael and Annie. “Suit yourself, boy. Just follow everybody else then.”
“See,” Harmon Kleinschmidt whispered. “It’s gonna be fine.”
Sarah just looked at him. He was the only fully grown man on the island and couldn’t take more than two steps without someone holding him up. She shook her head, shivering a little, not thinking it was going to be fine at all.
Chapter 33
John Rourke waited in the shadows by the corner of the building, watching. Chambers had called the emergency meeting, not announcing Rourke’s arrival but did reveal the presence of Sissy Wiznewski. Chambers had announced to his advisers that disaster in Florida was imminent; he told them everything that had nothing to do with Rourke’s plan to flush the traitor. Prior to the meeting, Chambers had selected eleven men, Rourke making the twelfth. The eleven had been chosen from Army Intelligence, men Chambers knew Reed personally trusted.
The meeting finally broke up. Rourke waited. On mere chance, he had selected to follow Randall Soames, commander of the Texas Volunteer Militia. Each of the other men would also follow one of the advisers. If someone left the compound, it would be almost a dead giveaway that this person were the traitor, Rourke had determined.
As he studied the compound, looking for some sign of Soames, Rourke wished it were merely as simple as finding the traitor. But once the traitor was recognized, it would be necessary to follow him to his contact, his radio, whatever means he used to notify the Soviets. And through that chain Rourke could contact Varakov. Already time was running out and there was little hope of an evacuation, however limited.
Rourke turned up the collar of his coat, the wind cold on his neck. He’d left the pistol belt with the Python and the CAR-15 with his bike. As he closed the leather jacket he checked the twin Detonics .45s in the double Alessi rig under the coat— they were secure, with spare magazines for the pistols on his trouser belt in friction retention speed pouches.
Cold still, Rourke hunkered back into the niche in the wall beside which he stood, then stopped. Randall Soames, dressed in a pair of Levis, a black Stetson and a western-style plaid shirt, was walking across the compound toward the gates. It was almost too easy, Rourke thought. As soon as Soames disappeared through the gates, Rourke took off at a dead run after him, reaching the gates, nodding to the guard there and looking down the road. Soames was walking. Rourke turned to the guard. Both the Intelligence people and the MPs were under Reed. “Did he say where he was going, Corporal?”
“No, sir— just for a walk, I guess. He does that a lot, but so do some of the others.”
“How long is he usually gone?”
“You’re Mr. Rourke, aren’t you?”
“That’s right, son,” Rourke told him.
“Maybe half an hour. But if he were going anyplace on foot, the only place he could make in that amount of time and get back would be the town. It’s abandoned now, and there wouldn’t be time for him to do anything except turn around and walk right back.”
“He always walks that way?” Rourke said, pointing down the road.
“Leastways every time I’ve seen him, sir.”
“Thanks, Corporal.” Rourke smiled, starting down the road after Soames, hugging the compound wall until the man disappeared over the rise. Then he started running as fast as he could, getting to the rise and dropping down beside the road.
Randall Soames wasn’t walking quickly, wasn’t turning around— nothing suspicious. Rourke waited. Maybe all Soames was doing was going for a walk— for a man his age he looked reasonably fit, and riding a desk all day could make any man antsy. He watched Soames pass over the next rise— there wasn’t even a weapon visible. Rourke couldn’t see anyone going out these days unarmed unless he were a complete fool.
Rourke ran ahead to the next rise, barely catching sight of Soames as he finally looked behind him, then pushed his way into a stand of trees. Rourke watched, waiting, thinking that a radio might be concealed in the trees there. But as Rourke started to push himself up, to move over the rise toward the trees, Soames reappeared, pushing a small motorcycle. A smile crossed Rourke’s lips, then the corners of his mouth turned down. It was a small Honda, the kind that had been made years earlier and designed for compactness— the handlebars folded down for easy storage. He remembered reading about the small cycle. Top speed was about thirty-five miles per hour he recalled.
Soames looked from side to side along the road, then mounted the cycle, starting it and continuing down the road toward the abandoned town.
Rourke realized now how Soames made his walk so quickly and made it appear he had no time to do anything if he did walk down to the town. It had to be risky keeping the cycle stowed there, Rourke thought. But being a spy was not exactly safe either, he knew.
There was nothing to do now but run. Rourke pushed himself to his feet and took off along the rise, wishing he’d somehow had the foresight to stash his own motorcycle nearby, or that he could risk a radio call-in and get transportation. But he had no idea what frequency Soames’s Soviet contact might be on, and had eschewed the use of a radio. So he ran, stripping the leather jacket from his back and holding it bunched in his left fist.
He had to gamble that Soames would be headed for the town and stay on or near the road. The small bike Soames rode wouldn’t handle the terrain off the road— or at least Rourke hoped it wouldn’t. The road, he remembered from the map he had studied earlier, zig-zagged following the terrain, and Rourke ran cross-country now to intercept the road.
He skidded down a low embankment, rolling behind some scrub brush, low against the ground, the road below him as Soames moved along it on the small bike. As Soames passed, Rourke pushed himself up, running across the road and through the grassy field beyond, to intercept the road again just before it turned into the town. His face and neck streaming sweat, his arms back and out like a distance runner going for the tape, Rourke ran on, not daring to lose sight of Randall Soames.
Rourke stopped again, diving half into a ditch along the roadside as Soames rounded a curve.
The commander of the Texas paramilitary forces stopped the bike, looking behind him, then from side to side. Rourke, peering through the tall grass, could see a smile crossing Soames’s face. The bike started up again, down the road and into the town.
Rourke pushed himself up, jumping the ditch into the road, then crossing it and running parallel to it, hoping he was in the rider’s blind spot should Soames look back. Rourke reached the building at the nearest edge of the abandoned town.
The town-limits sign was down, but he estimated from the buildings and the streets, that it had been a town of three or four thousand before the Night of the War.
He peered around the corner of the abandoned fire station behind which he stood, watching as Soames turned the motorcycle down the street at the farthest edge of the town.
Rourke began again to run, his lungs aching from it. Too many cigars, he thought.
He passed the first block, running across the intersecting street; he then passed broken store windows, a mailbox knocked over apparently by a car in haste to evacuate the city, a fire hydrant with the caps off and a few drops of water still dribbling from it. He reached the next intersection, glanced down it to make certain Soames wasn’t suckering him, hadn’t doubled back. Then he ran down the next block.
There was a broad expanse of burnt-out lawn, a Baptist church at the far end, the church untouched. Rourke stopped a moment, catching his breath, staring at the church. “Why wasn’t it vandalized?” he asked himself aloud, then shook his head and began to
run again, reaching the end of the block.
There was one more block to go before the street down which Soames had turned. Rourke, his arms out at his side again, ran it dead out, half collapsing against the side of the corner building— a real estate development firm— then peering around the corner.
Rourke’s heart sank a moment. Soames was nowhere in sight, but at the end of the street, approximately two blocks down, was an uncharacteristically elaborate athletic field and stadium.
Rourke stared at it. The stadium looked to have cost more than all the other buildings in the town combined.
Rourke reached up under his left armpit, snatching one of the twin Detonics pistols from the Alessi shoulder holsters. He thumbed back the hammer, pushing up the frame-mounted thumb safety. Bending into his stride, he began to run again, hugging the side of the buildings he passed, getting across the alley, then to the next street and into the next block. He slowed, the athletic field less than two hundred yards away; and beyond the cinder track, with some of the painted white lines in the field still visible, was the stadium.
Something inside Rourke told him Soames was there. The wind was blowing cold again. He pulled the waist-length brown leather jacket back on. Then, at a slow trot, started across the athletic field, snatching the second Detonics from under his right arm into his left hand, thumbing back the hammer and crooking his thumb around to push up the safety.
Rourke stopped beside the stadium entrance, examining the dust on the concrete surface, a smile crossing his lips. Faintly, he could detect a tire tread in the blown sand.
Rourke started through the entranceway, and as he reached the end of the long tunnel, he scanned the bowl of the stadium itself, squinting against the sunlight despite the dark glasses he wore. A smile crossed his lips again. Apparently the games held at the stadium had once been broadcast over local radio. There was a low-gain antenna beside the booth on the far, topside of the arena, the sort of antenna that could be used to transmit to a more powerful receiver-sender fifty miles or so away.
There was no sign of Soames or his bike.
Rourke walked up the low, broad concrete steps into the grandstand, then started along the circumference of the stadium toward the booth and the antenna.
One Detonics .45 in each hand, Rourke moved slowly ahead, looking from side to side. He no longer cared if Soames detected his presence— because there was nowhere the spy could go. Soames could smash his radio, but that was unlikely. Rather than going cold, out of contact with his Soviet masters, he’d likely try to make a fight of it. Perhaps Soames had weapons stashed somewhere in the stadium; perhaps there had been a weapon concealed on his body— a holster that carried a snubby revolver or medium frame auto in the top of his cowboy boot. It didn’t matter, Rourke thought.
Rourke stopped halfway around the stadium, beside the broadcast booth. The antenna was corroded, weather-stained, but a new-looking, almost shiny coax cable ran from it, through what seemed to be a freshly drilled hole in the concrete below the grandstand.
Rourke turned around, his eyes searching for the nearest steps down into the stadium complex beneath the stands. He found them, then started walking toward them. He stopped at the head of the steps, looking at the twin pistols in his hands, holding them as if weighing them.
Both pistols in front of him, elbows tucked close at his sides— he thought if he could see himself he’d be reminiscent of a cowboy in a silent picture— he started down the steps, into the darkness of the shadow there.
Rourke stopped halfway down the steps. With the back of his right hand he pushed the sunglasses up off the bridge of his nose and into his hair. He started walking again.
Rourke stopped, his left foot on the last step, his right foot on the concrete walkway of the tunnel. He held his breath, listening. Voices. He heard two voices, the words unintelligible but distinct enough that Rourke could tell they were in English. They were coming from the farthest end of the tunnel.
Rourke began walking, hugging his body against the rough concrete wall, the pistol in his right hand held high, the one in his left held flat along his left thigh.
He could hear the voices more clearly. He stopped, seeing the darker blackness of the new coax cable leading down from above, then snaking ahead into the shadow along the tunnel and toward its end. Rourke shifted the Detonics in his right hand into his belt, taking the sunglasses off his head, putting them in their case under his coat. His right fist clenched around the pistol again and he moved slowly, cautiously ahead.
The voices were clear enough now to be understood, at least in part. One of them belonged to Soames: “I don’t care, Veskovitch. Why worry? All that damned earthquake is going to do is kill more Americans and kill a bunch of them danged Cubans. I don’t think your folks give a shit about them anyway.”
“You were wise to come,” the other voice— Veskovitch, Rourke assumed— began. “But you are wrong. We must contact headquarters. This is an important development. There may be valued Soviet personnel working in Florida at this very moment. They at least must be gotten out. It is not your responsibility, nor is it mine, to determine who should live and die. You speak of a disaster which could take millions of lives. Do you wish this on your conscience?”
Rourke, standing in the darkness along the wall, smiled. The Soviet agent, probably KGB, was sounding almost humanitarian. Soames sounded like a bloodthirsty animal. Rourke moved ahead, more slowly now, cautiously, not being able to see more than six feet ahead into the shadows.
He stopped, holding his breath, cursing mentally, then reached down and rubbed his right shin. There had to be a ramp down into the tunnel. He had just bumped his shin against Soames’s motorcycle. Rourke shoved the Detonics from his right hand into his trouser band, then using the Safariland stainless handcuff key from his key ring, he found the valve stem on the rear tire and deflated it. He didn’t want Soames using the bike for a getaway.
Pocketing the key ring, Rourke snatched the Detonics from his belt again. A pistol in each hand once more, he sidestepped the bike, then pressed against the concrete tunnel wall and moved ahead again.
The voices were louder now. “Well, go on then and call Varakov or whoever gets it— but let ‘em know I brought it to you.”
“You are still worried General Varakov will come for you, perhaps sometime in the middle of the night, and kill you for molesting a child. He did not like you. You were afraid of him and he knew that.”
“Shut up,” Soames snapped.
Rourke took two steps ahead, into the small cone of yellow light from the niche in the tunnel wall just ahead, then turned, both guns leveled, looking into the tiny room.
“I’ll go along with that, Soames— but you two shut up,” Rourke whispered, the safety catches down on both pistols as he aimed one at Soames and one at Veskovitch.
“Who—“
“Move and I kill you,” Rourke interrupted.
Soames started for the radio, a move Rourke hadn’t anticipated from the paramilitary commander. Rourke fired the Detonics in his right hand, the slug tearing into Soames’s left side, kicking the man back against the far wall.
But Veskovitch was coming toward him, a pistol in his right hand, the gun firing.
Rourke fired the Detonics in his left hand, but Veskovitch was already on him, the 185-grain .45 ACP slug tearing into Veskovitch’s left leg. There was a loud cry of pain and anguish. The pistol in Veskovitch’s right hand discharged and Rourke could feel heat against his own left hand, glancing down to it, as he smacked the .45 in his right down across the KGB man’s neck. There was no wound in the hand, but the bullet had passed close, Rourke realized, perhaps just barely grazing his skin.
The Russian’s left fist was circling upward and Rourke’s right forearm blocked it. The Russian was screaming, “The radio, Soames— smash it!”
His left knee smashing up into the Russian’s gunhand, Rourke looked over the KGB man’s back. He could see Soames staggering away from the far wall, a
pistol in his right hand aimed at the radio.
Rourke tried bringing his right hand into position to shoot, but the Russian grappling with him shoved against him and the .45 discharged into the concrete over their heads, the slug ricocheting maddeningly off the concrete walls. Rourke backhanded the Detonics in his left hand across the KGB man’s face, knocking him away.
Then Rourke brought down the Detonics pistol in his right hand, raising the left one into position as well, both pistols discharging simultaneously, both slugs driving into Soames’s center of mass. The Texas commander fell back, the Detective Special .38 in his right hand discharging into the floor at his feet.
The echo of the gunshots still reverberating in the tiny room, almost deafeningly, Rourke wheeled right. The KGB man was raising his pistol to fire.
No time to swing his guns on line, Rourke hurtled himself sideways toward the Russian. Both Rourke’s pistols clattered to the floor as his left hand reached for the KGB man’s gunhand, his right hand going for the throat.
The agent’s pistol discharged and for the first time, his ears ringing with the sound, Rourke noticed it— a Detonics .45, like his own, but blued. Rourke’s left hand on the KGB man’s wrist, he slammed the gunhand down, the pistol firing again.
Rourke moved his hand from the Russian’s throat and smashed his right fist across the man’s jaw.
The Russian’s head snapped back and Rourke moved up on his haunches, straddling the KGB man’s body. He studied the eyes— the lids were closed, not fluttering. Rourke, prying the man’s fingers from the blue Detonics .45 then, bent low, trying to feel for breath. Rourke touched his fingers to the Russian’s neck, then to the man’s wrist. He raised the head slightly. However he’d hit the man, the neck had snapped and the Russian was dead. He hadn’t wanted that.
Rourke thumbed up the safety on the blue Detonics and rammed the pistol into his belt, intending to keep it. He found his own pistols, then walked the few steps to Soames. Despite three hits from Rourke’s .45s, the paramilitary leader was still breathing.