The Quest

by Jerry Ahern

  U.S. Navy jet fighters were soaring through the bright blue sky in perfect formation, the “Star Spangled Banner” was playing loudly. There were faces, too. A black child, an Hispanic farm laborer, a businessman, an Oriental woman, a housewife. The faces of children, men, women—Americans. The flag—fifty stars on a field of blue with thirteen stripes of red and white—it waved across the faces of the children. An American Eagle soared through the sky, the signoff cutting to the Washington Monu­ment, the Lincoln Memorial, and an aerial view of the Statue of Liberty.

  “And the home of the brave,” Rourke stood up, knocking over the empty beer mug, tears welling up in his eyes in the darkness.

  He fell to his knees as the flag waved in the wind, then suddenly the tape went blank. And the great room, inside a cavern, in a granite mountain, a retreat, bomb-hardened from anything except a direct hit of a nuclear device . . . Sarah, Michael, Ann—faces, Americans. Rourke wept in the darkness. It was all gone and perhaps only they sur­vived all of it—the faces in memory.

  Chapter 11

  Sarah Rourke had kept the children riding after darkness had fallen—something she rarely did but the man at the farm hardened against brigand attack had not only known Millie Jenkins’s Aunt Mary, but also known that brigand activity in the area was so intense that any stray traveler was likely to be killed—throat slit, possessions taken—forgotten, if anyone cared to forget. She kept the illegally modified AR-15 across her saddle horn—the safety on—but her trigger finger edged along the guard, ready.

  Aunt Mary’s last name was Molliner and the men­tion of the name had struck a responsive cord in Millie. The farm was high in the mountains and far from the Interstate Highway

  that had before the night of the war teemed with commercial and private vehicles. Sarah knew these mountains, or mountains like them, she thought. She had camped several times with John, especially before the children had been born. He had liked the mountains, telling her that they were strong and peaceful—like him, she now realized, yet like the mountains, capable of erupting in storms of violence when the conditions were right. And thunder was rumbling now in the higher peaks. There was little of the moon visible, except when a gust of wind would blow the purple tinged clouds from its face for a moment. She would use those moments to slow and look back at the children, study the trail. Was she going the right way? The man at the farmhouse had drawn a crude map for her, and so far all the landmarks he had cited had been easily found—but the way was so long, she thought. Had he purposely drawn a map to take her some long and remote route, she wondered, to avoid brigand contact?

  She eased up in the saddle, her rear end hurting her. The wind gusted again, rain starting to fall light­ly. She started to turn, to say something to the children and, as she did, a gust of wind caught in a natural hedgerow to her right. She stared, thinking she’d seen some light beyond it.

  She dismounted, holding Tildie’s reins and snatch­ing at the reins of the children’s horses. The rain started to pour down in sheets as she edged toward the bushes, pushing them aside as the wind lashed the rain against her with sudden, almost unimagin­able force. Water streaming down her eyes, the hair loosened from the bandanna plastered against her forehead, the T-shirt clinging to her body like a cold, wet, second skin, she saw light beyond the bushes. “A house,” she muttered, then turned back toward

  Michael. He was wearing a rain poncho she had cut for him from sheet plastic. He was riding Sam, her husband’s black-stockinged, black-maned gray. “Michael, keep together—all of you—you in the lead behind me and the pack horse. If anything hap­pens, Michael, get Annie and Millie out of here. Try to find that farmhouse where we stopped.”

  “What’s the matter, Mom?” the six-year-old asked.

  “I think I see a house—I’m not sure—it could be Millie’s aunt’s place. I’m not sure though.”

  She brushed the hair back from her forehead, squinting her eyelids shut against the rain. Michael hadn’t let her down; he was his father’s son, and she’d learned to rely on him. He had stabbed one of the men who had attacked the farm the morning after the night of the War, Michael had saved all their lives and saved her from—she shuddered at the memory. She had drunk the contaminated water. He had cared for her until her health had returned. She looked at him now, his wavy hair plastered by the rain to his head and face with the perfect upturned nose, the strong chin, the smiling eyes. “All right, Michael?”

  “Okay,” he said.

  She wondered when this were ever through, could Michael go back to being a little boy again? She didn’t think so: he had been a man too long now. Because of the rain, Sarah Rourke couldn’t tell if there were tears welling up in her eyes.

  She turned, handing back the reins of his horse to Michael, handing Millie the reins of the horse she rode with Annie, Annie half-asleep against the older girl’s back despite the rain and rough country. Sarah hauled herself wearily into the wet saddle, bending across and shaking Annie, then snatching the little girl into her arms across the saddle horn, displacing the AR-15. She handed the rifle to Michael. “The safety’s on; don’t touch it, Michael!” Managing the reins of Tildie and the Jenkins’s horse used as a pack animal, her daughter Annie in her arms, Sarah started forward around the hedgerow and toward the light.

  A broad, open field lay beyond, rocky and with high grass, the wind whipping the sodden grass against her legs and the horses, the rain so heavy now Sarah could barely see beyond the horse she rode. But the light was still there—that she could still make out. The wind was blowing harder now, driv­ing the rain against her. She glanced behind her again and again to make certain none of the children had fallen behind. She felt her horse stumbling, the animal starting to go down. She slid from the wet saddle, Annie clutched against her breast. The ground was hard despite the rain, the grass lashing at her face as she forced herself to her knees. She glanced back to Michael and shouted, “No, I’m all right! Stay mounted and keep an eye on Millie!”

  Sarah Rourke, her body wet and aching, her arms stiff from holding her daughter against her, pushed herself to her feet and caught up the reins of her own horse and the pack horse, then stared at the yellow light beyond the end of the field. She started walking toward it, the rain hammering against her, obscuring her vision. She would turn her face away from it, then glance back toward it at an angle so she could see for a few seconds before the rain blurred her vi­sion again. She could tell now that the yellow light was from a farmhouse window.

  She stumbled to one knee, pushed herself up, and walked on, holding the sleeping Annie in her arms, the reins to the two horses tight in her left fist, the animals balking. She was tired—a mother, a mother to the children of her body, a mother now to the or­phaned Millie Jenkins since her parents had been killed. Sarah Rourke laughed, swallowing too much of the rain, choking for an instant. She was a mother even to the horses. She could hear herself as if the voice belonged to someone else, cajoling the animals, telling them to be good, to walk just a little farther in the darkness and rain. Sarah Rourke, mother and adventurer, she thought. She laughed.

  The farmhouse loomed ahead of her in a massive shadow, the yellow light brighter and clearly visible from a side window.

  She stumbled once again, this time banging her elbows hard on the ground as she fought to keep her weight from crushing her four-year-old daughter. She got to her knees, leaned back on her heels, then one leg at a time, stood, then started forward, glanc­ing behind her to the children, talking low and soft to the animals. The rain washed over her body and her body racked with chills.

  The house was twenty yards ahead, she judged, and she quickened her pace. She saw the window clearly, a small porch and side door near it. She stopped at the base of the low steps, forced one leg, then the other, then again and again, and she was standing, swaying on the porch.

  She kicked at the door and the door opened. A young man with a shotgun in his hands stood framed in the blinding yellow light from the kitch
en beyond, a woman in a house dress standing behind him.

  Sarah Rourke gasped, “Aunt Mary, I brought you Millie Jenkins.”

  There was heat from the kitchen, and the warm dry air made her start to feel faint.

  She heard a woman’s voice shout, “Get out of my way! Her baby!”

  Sarah started to fall forward, felt a man’s rough hands catch at her and Annie swept from her arms as she sank to her knees.

  Chapter 12

  Rourke sat at the kitchen counter, staring into the empty great room, sipping at his own strong black coffee. He had arisen early, Rourke time of eleven A.M. He had cleaned the guns, including Ruben-stein’s High Power and MP-40, then performed the necessary maintenance on the liberated Harley Low Rider, and checked his own machine.

  He had showered and changed. Next he had got­ten out the Lowe Alpine Systems Loco pack, the kind used by search and rescue teams—to Rourke’s thinking the perfect all-around pack with an integral frame. He had put off loading it, being hungry. He stared at the waterfall and the pool, wondering what Sarah and the children would say when they first saw the retreat—if they ever would see it. He scratched the last thought; he would find them and bring them back—bring them home. They would see it. He imagined the children playing in the shallow pool beneath the falls.

  He poured another cup of coffee, working with pencil and paper to list what he would bring. He would leave soon to scout the area for Soviet and brigand activity and pick up the trail of Sarah and the children. He noted down items on the list: both of the Detonics pistols, the small Musette bag with spare magazines and ammo, the Bushnell 8 x 30 armored binoculars, the big, handmade Chris Miller Bowie knife. He stopped and looked up. Rubenstein entered the great room from the side bedroom where he’d been sleeping.

  “Hello, Paul, you trying for an endurance record?” Rourke glanced at his Rolex. Rubenstein had retired fourteen hours earlier.

  “The first time I figured somebody wasn’t going to shoot me in the middle of the night or something. Sorry.”

  “No need to be. Have some coffee.” Rourke answered. Rubenstein ascended the three stone steps into the kitchen. “There’s orange juice in the refrigerator. Just look around and fix yourself some breakfast.”

  “Orange juice?” Rubenstein asked, his eyes wide behind his glasses.

  “Yeah—frozen from concentrate.” Rourke thought of something else to add to the list: one of the Harry Owens barrel inserts for the Detonics so he could fire .22 rimfires if he potted a rabbit or something.

  “John?” Rubenstein began.

  “I don’t know when I’m leaving—soon, though, but I won’t be out long this first trip, so you just take it easy.”

  “My parents—I want to go down to St. Petersburg, see if there still is a St. Petersburg, see if they’re alive.”

  “I know,” Rourke said, then smiled at the younger man standing across the counter from where Rourke sat. “I’ll miss you, Paul. I’ll always count you my best friend—”

  “Listen, if, ahh—” Rubenstein stammered.

  “Take whatever you need to get there and stay alive. I’ve got plenty and I can get more.”

  “No, I didn’t—I mean, if they’re dead, would you—”

  “My home—” Rourke gestured to the cavern walls and ceiling—“is your home—mi casa es su casa, amigo. Yeah, I’d like it if .things work out that way. And for your sake I hope they don’t, but I’d like it if you came back. I could use your help find­ing Sarah and the children; the kids could use an uncle.”

  “John, I—”

  “Don’t. You can’t leave for a while, remember, I’m a doctor? You need about a week of rest before those wounds will be healed enough for you to travel hard. I want to teach you a few things before you go anyway: couple of tricks that might help you stay alive. Give you a few things—a good knife, some maps, a good compass, show you how to use it—show you how to take care of your bike. You know some of that already anyway.”

  “John, do you think you’re going to find them—Sarah and the children, I mean?” Rubenstein asked, sipping a mug of coffee.

  “Yeah, I’ve thought about it. And, yeah, I’ll find them, no matter what. See—” and Rourke stood up, poured himself another cup of coffee, then leaned against the counter, staring past Rubenstein toward the great room—“see, we never had much time to talk, you and I. I think Natalia always wondered about that, what makes me tick? I decided years ago, back in Latin America that time I had to stay alive on my own after the CIA team I was with got ambushed and I was wounded. The thing that makes one person stay alive no matter what and another person buy it—there’s some luck to it, sure. The toughest man or woman on earth can be at ground zero of a nuclear blast and he’s going to die. But under general conditions, what makes one person survive and another lose is—well, there’re a lot of names for it. Some people call it meanness, some call it tenaciousness—whatever. But it’s will—you will yourself not to die, not to give up. Nobody out there’s going to kill me,” Rourke said, gesturing toward the steel doors leading into the entrance hall and the outside world beyond. “Nobody out there’s going to kill me or stop me—unless I let them do it. Sure, somebody could be up in the rocks and blow the back of my head open with a sniper rifle, and you can’t control that—but in a situation, a con­flict—” Rourke struggled for the right words—“it’s not that I’m any better or tougher or smarter. I just won’t quit. You know what I mean, Paul? It’s hard to explain, really.”

  “I know—I’ve seen that in you,” Rubenstein said. “Yeah, you want to teach me that?”

  “I couldn’t if I wanted to—and I don’t need to.

  You just need to sharpen a few more of the skills that’ll let you stay alive. You’ve got will enough already. I don’t worry about you out there anymore than I worry about myself. You’re a good man. I haven’t said that to very many people,” Rourke con­cluded, then stared back at his list, sipping his cof­fee, aware of the sounds of Rubenstein making himself breakfast, aware of the sounds of the water from the falls, then the water crashing down into the pool.

  He wrote something on the list—the one item that made his skin crawl because it represented something he couldn’t combat head-to-head: “Geiger counter.” He swallowed his coffee and almost burned his mouth.

  Chapter 13

  Varakov stared out from the balcony again, at the skeletons of the mastodons. Karamatsov said he had slipped when Varakov asked him earlier that morn­ing about the bruises on the right side of his face. And Natalia, Karamatsov had said, was feeling ill and might not be in for several days. Varakov had dispatched Vladmir Karamatsov to the southeast, to aid Colonel Korcinski in setting up the new military district. There was a tough Resistance movement forming in the area, intelligence reports indicated.

  Ever since the business in Texas, Varakov had realized that Natalia had betrayed Karamatsov somehow, and that Karamatsov was not quite right in the head anymore, perhaps because of it. The aftermath of the debacle and the loss of Samuel Chambers had shown a ruthlessness in Karamatsov that Varakov had always suspected, but never imag­ined in its scope. He had executed several of his own men for allowing the escape; he had used his forces to kill every suspected member of the Texas militia—a bloodbath Varakov had not seen the likes of since the purges of the thirties under Stalin.

  A soldier’s stock in trade was bloodletting, but there was a difference between warfare and murder. Karamatsov was a murderer, pure and simple, Varakov thought. And the thought made him wonder all the more about Natalia. Had something happened?

  Varakov leaned over the railing, calling out to his secretary below, “Cancel my appointments for this afternoon. Call up my car and driver. I have business to attend to. If something must be signed and you think it should be signed, then forge my name. Hurry.”

  He trusted the girl; that was part of being a human being, he had always thought, trusting those who deserved trust and distrusting those who would stab you in t
he back and smile over your still warm body. He distrusted Karamatsov for exactly that reason, and he found his palms sweating as he started down the low, broad steps from the mezzanine overlooking the main gallery. He was worried about Natalia, the beautiful Natalia, the superlative agent, the tough fighter, the gentle girl—his dead brother’s only daughter.

  Chapter 14

  Sarah Rourke sat up in bed, startled, then a smile crossed her lips as the strong sunlight bathed her face in its warmth. She remembered the previous night. After her collapse on the kitchen floor, she had revived, finding that Mary Mulliner had fed, bathed, and bedded not only her niece Millie, but Michael and Annie as well. Mary Mulliner had offered Sarah a home for as long as she had wanted it. Sarah smiled, throwing back the sheet, and stared at her feet. She wiggled her toes and stood up, and the bor­rowed yellow nightgown fell to the floor past her ankles. Slippers were beside the bed, but she didn’t remember them from the previous night. She stepped into them, walked across the small bedroom of the country farmhouse to the full length mirror on the inside of the door. She looked at herself. She had showered and washed her hair before going to bed. She ran her hands through her hair now, letting it fall to her shoulders. She turned around, staring at her unfamiliar image. She had not worn anything besides jeans in—she couldn’t remember how long and was too happy to try.

  There was a long robe across the bottom of the bed, yellow like the nightgown, and she put it on, belted it around her waist. She realized for the first time that she had lost weight these many weeks since the night of the war. She walked to the door, opened it, and stepped into a hallway. A staircase was at the end—she remembered that—and she started toward it, then stopped as she passed a half-open doorway. Michael and Annie were sleeping in a huge double bed, sunlight streaming across it. Annie was not sucking her thumb, for a change, and Michael peaceful and smiling, rolled over, stretched and hunched down against his pillow.