by Jerry Ahern
“Fucked.”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“Let’s correct that situation, Emma.”
“Do—you—do you—” Her hands were suddenly folded in her lap and she looked down at her hands, not at him. “You—but what about?”
“If I were a hero, I’d have a good answer for everything, wouldn’t I? Hoist on your own petard, as it were, hm? If I were a hero, I wouldn’t—”
She looked up at him as she told him, “Oh, yes you would, John Rourke.”
“I love you. I’ve said that to three women in my life, in the way I mean it now. To Sarah, to Natalia, but never to either of them in the way I’m saying it to you. I love you, Emma Shaw.”
“Then let’s do … My cabin or yours?”
John laughed; and, for a moment, she didn’t know what to think.
He told her, “Rather stuffy fellow that I am, right now I think I’d be perfectly willing to do it right here.”
Emma Shaw, her voice so soft that she could barely hear herself, said, “I’m yours. I always have been.”
John Rourke leaned toward her from his barstool and kissed her lips and she felt she would melt.
Chapter Thirty
It had never been like this, making love.
The touching of two bodies, hands against parts of the flesh where hands except one’s own never touched.
It was feeling, in its most literal and at once figurative sense. His fingertips caressed her breasts, his lips her nipples, his body enveloping her own, invading her, bending her to his will in a way she had never known before.
“I love you,” he whispered.
“And I love you,” she answered. “It’s funny, but I think I’ve loved you since the first moment I saw you. But you were married and—”
“I know. Be quiet and kiss me,” he told her.
She obeyed, and inwardly laughed at herself. Obeying a man! My God, how far she’d come, but was it regression or progression? He touched, she responded, but she wanted to. So, was that obedience, was that submission, or fulfillment?
There had never been fulfillment like this, so deep, so powerful, and fulfillment was merely a thought, his body so wonderfully laboring above her, making her body move in rhythm to his. The roughness of his skin, the force of him made her pulse, made her body vibrate uncontrollably. She had lost control, and she had wanted to lose control all of her life but one could not give up control; it had to be taken, then surrendered because there was no choice to do otherwise.
“You will marry me.”
“Yes.”
“Do you love me?”
“Like I’ve never loved,” she whispered, meaning it with all of her soul.
His body seemed to devour her, and his eyes consumed her when she could keep her eyes open.
Open.
Sarah Rourke opened her eyes, but Wolfgang Mann was only a dream.
Chapter Thirty-One
She had already determined that if, for some reason, he couldn’t because he was still technically—but, as he undressed her, Emma Shaw abandoned any worries. “Oh, John!”
“Be quiet,” he ordered.
She obeyed, but that was what she wanted to do. Her jacket he placed neatly over the back of the chair near the foot of her bed. “You’ll be needing this in a little while.”
She only nodded, tempted to speak so that he could tell her once again to be quiet.
His hands moved to the zipper of her skirt, zipped it down. She moved her hips. The skirt fell around her ankles. He touched her waist and she moved her feet and he picked up her skirt, setting it neatly over the chair back.
There was this silly little tie at the collar of her shirt and he undid it, didn’t remove it. His fingers moved against the buttons of her shirt and Emma Shaw thought that she would scream.
She raised her hands in front of her and he unbuttoned her cuffs and she almost died.
He slipped her shirt from her shoulders, down along her arms and held her against him, kissed her. His fingers undid the hook-and-eye clasps at the back of her bra and she bent her shoulders forward and it fell away, the straps caught in the crooks of her elbows. The synth-wool of his sweater was scratchy against her nipples and she screamed softly and John kissed her quiet again.
His hands moved along the bare curve of her back, into her panties, thumbing them down over her hips. She moved her legs and they fell.
She still wore stockings, and her panties were down around her ankles and her arms were caught up in the straps of her bra and she wanted to be his more than anything she had ever wanted in her life.
Would the damned phone ring?
Would the enemy attack?
Would she know or care?
Without being asked, she reached to the bottom of his sweater and pulled it up. He bent forward and she pulled it over his head, throwing it down to the deck.
Inside the waistband of his trousers, one on either side of his waist, were two pistols, worn without holsters. He took a step back, removed them, set them on the deck at the right side of the bed, then touched her again, behind her now. Emma Shaw closed her eyes, feeling his mouth as it moved along the curve of her throat, to her shoulder, his fingertips touching nipples that only a moment earlier had been pressed against the roughness of his sweater.
She turned around, eyes still closed, feeling his hands almost circumferencing her waist. He had big hands, she thought, almost laughing. His lips touched at her throat again, moved downward, touched at her left nipple, then touched at her lips and she wanted to scream again. “Tell me to be quiet, John.”
“Be quiet.”
“Yes,” she whispered. She opened her eyes, her hands (which had been limp at the ends of her arms at her thighs) starting to undo the garrison-width belt at his waist. Men hid behind these things, she reasoned, the buckles enormous, the leather thick and heavy. She started to pull it out of the trouser loops, realized she didn’t have to, started to feel for a zipper. There was none, only buttons, and she undid these starting at the top one, working her way down lower than she needed to, feeling the swelling of him with the knuckles of her fingers and actually screaming a little, very softly.
He kissed her, harder than he ever had before, and she understood more things than she had ever known in the world in that same instant …
John Rourke looked down at her face, her eyes closed. In a fraction of a second, he would enter her.
Deep inside him, he realized that what he was doing was right. For everyone.
And he did.
Chapter Thirty-Two
They were not late for the meeting, and planning ahead had nothing to do with it. Their arrival time mere chance, John Rourke walked into the conference suite, Emma Shaw at his side, on time to the second, for the second session of the meeting to start (according to the black-faced Rolex on his wrist).
They sat down, Rourke holding Emma’s chair for her.
Admiral Hayes said, “Our first order of business in this second session is Dr. Rolvaag’s summary of the crisis concerning the vent.”
Thorn Rolvaag stood up, walking toward the far wall, a remote video control clutched in both hands. Rourke could see the man’s fingers playing the device’s buttons, like the fingers of a musician over some well-loved instrument.
The size of modern video screens still amazed John Rourke. Utilizing a liquid-crystal technology, they could cover an entire wall, picture-reproduction perfect in its clarity.
The pictures began, very well-resolved underwater video of the vent beneath the Pacific which was the cause of such great concern. Volcanic lava showed, the yellow-edged redness gleaming like some forbidding view of hell itself. A scale appeared at the bottom of the screen, as a size measure. The width of the vent seemed nearly a quarter mile. Rolvaag began to speak, “There, ladies and gentlemen, is what might well be the scar from which our planet will not heal, the surface scratch which reveals the horrible illness within. Without closing this vent—and this vi
deo is quite recent, only a few hours old—I feel that our planet is doomed.” Had this been a film of some sort, all of the personnel attending the meeting aboard the Paladin would have begun to gasp, there would have been murmurs of disbelief, perhaps muted screams. There was none of that, because what Rolvaag said was nothing new, but bitterly established fact instead. “The problem is not controversial, only my projected solution to it, namely the use of nuclear weapons to reroute the vent, dissipating the force of the volcanic flow. But, whatever the remedy, without remedy this vent will relatively soon reach the easternmost edge of the Pacific plate, and strike the westernmost edge of the North American continental plate, precisely where, during the Night of the War, the shock waves from the bombing caused the cataclysmic rupturing of the San Andreas fault and other tributary fault lines, precipitating the collapse of the easternmost edge of the Pacific plate into the sea. As you may recall from history books, and as the Rourke family doubtless recalls from experience, the resultant cataclysm caused everything to the west of the San Andreas to collapse into the sea. How many millions of persons were killed, we will never know. But the cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco, and everything above them and below them and in between them ceased to exist in a matter of minutes. The resultant tidal surge swamped almost all of the Hawaiian Islands’ land mass, the coast of Alaska, etc.
“This disaster which awaits us, if it cannot be prevented, would make all of what has gone before pale by comparison. As you no doubt know, but I must emphasize again, what could very well happen is the linking of all the ‘jewels’ in the ‘ring of fire’ which surrounds the Pacific basin. In other words, the vent would slam against the North American plate and split. In itself, that might seem desirable, because its energy would be dissipated. However, that energy would follow along the path of least resistance, as energy does unless forced to do otherwise. It would follow the plate boundary, activating volcanic activity to the north and to the south, gathering momentum and energy as it moved, fed by the volcanic areas which it touched.
“Soon, ladies and gentlemen, very soon, the vent would effectively encircle the entire Pacific Basin. Once the encirclement was complete, the eruptive force would be of such strength that an event unlike any other perhaps in the history of the solar system would occur. The eruptive force would blow out the Pacific basin. Then, one of two events would occur, and there is no way to tell which—either the entire planet would implode or the planet would be launched out of orbit. I lean toward the second theory. As a scientist, I find it ironic that if we cannot prevent the vent from reaching the North American plate, I’ll never know which theory was correct. In the instant that the ring of fire is completed, the explosion of the Pacific basin will begin. Any life surviving the rain of volcanic ash, the darkness which will by then have consumed the planet, will be instantly destroyed. So, neither I nor any of my colleagues will ever know whether the planet will cease to exist as anything but gigantic pieces of rocky debris in an orbit once held by a planet or become a dead nomad, ejected from the solar system into space. Or, the planet might be caught in the gravitational field of the sun and drawn into it.”
James Darkwood, the nature of the remark somewhat flippant sounding, but the tone of his voice conveying deadly seriousness, asked, “Is there any more to your good news, Dr. Rolvaag?”
Thorn Rolvaag summarized. “If we cannot stop the spread of the vent, it means the end of all life on this planet forever.”
John Rourke lit a cigar, not asking if the smoke would bother anyone. The problem of secondhand smoke seemed somewhat less than significant at the moment. “Dr. Rolvaag,” Rourke began. “Your proposal is to utilize nuclear warheads as strategically placed charges with which we’ll divert the vent, dissipate its energy.”
“Yes, Dr. Rourke, along the lines of the theory you proposed shortly after the eruption of Kilauea. We can create a system of canals or channels, as it were, thus dissipating the force of lateral movement within the vent, blowing off energy into these canals, harmlessly essentially, in the hope that the vent will lose sufficient force and stop of its own accord. That is, as far as I can see, our only hope. Other scientists agree that ideally we should discover some means of relieving the volcanic pressure. It’s my methodolgy which scares them. And, in truth, I can’t say that I blame them.”
“Why does it scare them, as you say, Doctor?” Admiral Hayes asked.
“For the simple reason that nuclear detonations are what probably brought about this crisis in the first place. The earth is looked at by most of us as a giant object that we can abuse however we like. And, I’m not talking about the echo system, here.
“Let’s take an example that everyone should readily see,” Rolvaag went on, caught up, it seemed, in the analogy he was about to make. “In the Lydveldid Island of my ancestors, policemen commonly carried swords, as a badge of office. But my ancestor, Bjorn Rolvaag, preferred a staff. His staff—my family still possesses it, passed on through the intervening generations—was made for him by a retired scientist—”
“Old Jon the swordmaker,” Michael supplied.
Thorn Rolvaag smiled, nodded. “Yes. The same man who made the knife you carry, as I understand.”
Michael nodded, adding, “Like your forefather, Old Jon was a fine man, Doctor.”
“Thank you, sir.” Rolvaag cleared his throat, then went on. “That staff was designed to be used for every conceivable function for which a staff might be needed—as a weapon, a climbing assist, whatever. The staff looks as perfect today as it did in Bjorn Rolvaag’s day. Because it was cared for properly and only used, not abused. If this mighty ship, the Paladin, had existed in Bjorn Rolvaag’s day, and he had set about beating at its hull with the staff, he would doubtless have done some minor damage to the hull of the Paladin, but in the process would have mutilated his staff. Rather than using the geology of the planet, we have abused it. And, perhaps, beyond any hope of repair. Any object, if it is constantly abused, will eventually deteriorate. Nothing, except perhaps our own concept of the Divine and for those of us lucky enough, love, lasts forever. This may be the end of the species, which must come someday to be sure. But I feel that the impact, the repeated battering, of the multimegaton thermonuclear devices used over six centuries ago is bringing about this termination prematurely.
“The evidence is overwhelming,” Rolvaag said, his voice obvious in its passion, “that the destruction of what was the West Coast of the United States was brought about by the impacts of the bombs and missiles. The fault line created within the Gulf of Mexico and extending outward into what was called the Bermuda Triangle, the fault which shortly after the Night of the War precipitated the cataclysmic earthquake which collapsed peninsular Florida, destroying it utterly—this was clearly precipitated by the pounding of the nuclear weapons against the Earth’s mantle.
“You’ll notice, if you study the history of the thing, that Florida’s collapse occurred several weeks after the Night of the War. Archives from the Chinese Second City indicate that there were cataclysmic earthquakes over the period of time immediately following the Night of the War, and even in the five centuries between the Great Conflagration and the return of the Eden Project, earth tremors nearly destroyed the Second City, the civilization at New Germany in South America, etc. Lydveldid Island was, itself, nearly destroyed, the Hekla community devoured only to later be rebuilt, this latter by volcanism on an unprecedented scale. This is all a pattern which has been developing for centuries, thanks to the folly of mankind.”
John Rourke interrupted. “The folly of mankind in the days following World War II isn’t in dispute, Doctor. And, it wasn’t confined to the proliferation of nuclear weapons. What was lacking was the resoluteness to risk all for what was right. On the global level, this translated into the superpowers feinting at one another, playing a game of death. One night, the game got out of hand. The Night of the War was the result. It was essentially inevitable, given the nature of mankind, not that there’d be
warfare but that something would go wrong resulting in catastrophe. And, by that, I don’t mean that we, as a species, are evil or stupid. Far from it. Philosophy may seem out of place here, but I tend to think that there’s never been a better time for it.
“Man desires peace, basically, to be left alone to live out his days in the bosom of his family and friends, as it were—normal man. But there have always been those for whom the pursuit and capture of power was the reason for living. For some of those others, the pursuit, however vigorous, was, if not to the benefit of mankind, not overwhelmingly to its detriment. Many of these men achieved what we call greatness. A far smaller percentage achieved infamy. Life was always precious, but to an increasingly great number of people in the twentieth century, especially those living beneath the umbrella of Western civilization as it was so euphemistically called, the desire for continued existence overwhelmed all other motives. If there was a chance to survive while hiding from what was wrong, take it. We took that chance, as a species.
“In the closing decades of the twentieth century, ladies and gentlemen, there was a virtual litany of abominations. From the close of World War II onward, evidence strongly suggested that the United States abandoned some of its POWs and MIAs because of political expediency. This was unconscionable. Totalitarian regimes flourished, making the lives of all whom they controlled hell on earth. And we, as Americans, or British or any of the other major Western powers, let those regimes essentially do what they wanted so long as we were not affected. The torturing of political prisoners by foreign powers, the erosion of order in public education giving rise to heightened juvenile delinquency, the proliferation of dangerous drugs under the umbrellas of legal loopholes and uncaring citizens, the sweeping horror and incalculable cost in human suffering brought about by pernicious disease, such as AIDS. Racism, sexism, things that by rights should have died of their own weight, or been brought to book by the righteous, were allowed to spread, to continue, to entrench themselves in society because society was too apathetic.