The Quest Read online

  She climbed up on the bottom stack of sandbags to get a better view of the farmhouse, then raised her right arm, sweeping it back and forth, calling out at the top of her lungs, “Hello! Is anybody there? I want to talk!”

  She stopped and listened. There was no reply. She waved the blue-and-white bandanna in her hand and shouted at the top of her voice across the sandbag fence, “Hello! I just want to talk!”

  The door of the farmhouse opened. A tall, black-bearded man stepped out onto the unpainted porch, some kind of rifle or shotgun in his hands—Sarah couldn’t tell which from the distance. As he walked toward the steps leading up onto the porch, Sarah stopped waving the bandanna.

  The man shouted—she could hear him well—“We don’t want no strangers ‘round heah, lady. Git out a’ heah!”

  Sarah Rourke shook her head angrily, too angry to say anything. Then, forcing herself under control, she said, “Look, I’ve got three small children with me. I don’t want anything from you—just direc­tions. Please!”

  “Git out! Them’s directions, lady.” And the man started to turn and walk away.

  All the tension, all the fear, all the loneliness and frustration welled up inside her, and she fought to hold back tears. She screamed at the man, “Please! For God’s sake!”

  The man walked another step or two, then turned, waited, then walked back toward the end of the porch.

  “There’s a gate down yonder. Send yer young’ns along ahead of y’all—and no tricks.”

  She sank against the sandbags, waving her right hand and shouting, “Thank you!”

  She looked back at the children and suddenly felt very tired.

  “Thank you,” she muttered again, but not to the man on the porch.

  Chapter 4

  “There’re brigands all over here,” Rourke said, his voice low. His eyes squinted behind the sunglasses against the bright morning sunlight.

  “Do you think they found your retreat, John?” young Paul Rubenstein asked, pushing his wire-framed glasses back from his nose, his face perspir­ing profusely.

  Rourke thought a moment, then said, “No, that’s the least of my worries. Maybe an archeologist will find it a thousand years from now, but nobody’s going to find it today, tomorrow, or twenty years from now. Trouble is—” Rourke looked past Rubenstein and beyond the rocks where the bodies of the brigands they had killed lay—“I wonder if twenty years from now I’m still going to be living in it.”

  “What do you mean, John?”

  Rourke lit one of his small cigars, thinking momentarily about the cigars he had stored at the retreat. “What I mean, Paul, is the world—you look at the sunsets, the sunrises, the way the weather has been hot one day, cold the next, the rains, the winds? And if the world stays in one piece, what happens then? Can we rebuild? There are so many questions. Not enough of them have answers and the ones that do are tough answers.”

  Rourke stopped talking and looked down at the Colt Python. He’d reloaded the other guns and now slipped the spent cartridges, identifying them from the primer indentations from the cylinder and re­placing them with some of the loose rounds he car­ried. He stood up from the crouch and stretched, snatching up the CAR-15 and slinging it under his right shoulder.

  “But,” Rourke continued with a sigh, “as somebody once said out of frustration and bitter ex­perience, life goes on, hmm?” Rourke, without waiting for Paul, started walking across the flat ex­panse at the top of the rock cluster toward where he and the still recuperating Rubenstein had hauled the younger man’s bike that previous night. Rourke scanned the ground below. In the darkness they had manhandled the bike up into the rocks, but now, with the light, Rourke saw a path—precarious, but he judged it manageable. “You wait here,” he said, looking back over his shoulder toward Rubenstein.

  Rourke picked his way across the rocks and stopped beside the bike, then looked back toward the path, and reassessed his judgment that the bike could be driven down. He glanced at the Rolex on his left wrist, then at the sun. With the gunfire ceased and the brigands not having returned to the larger force Rourke felt they were a part of, he decided it was only a matter of time before someone came—perhaps a heavily armed brigand force.

  Rourke did not want that. He was too close to the retreat to waste the time, he thought, and eager to begin searching for Sarah and the children. He smiled, “eager.” From the night he had stood talk­ing with the RCMP Inspector in Canada and the man’s wife had turned on the radio newsbroadcast, Rourke had been more than eager. When he took the first flight out to Atlanta, the bombing and missile strikes had begun. In the long night after the plane was diverted and before the crash of the jetliner in New Mexico—and in the long days and nights since—Rourke had thought of little else than finding his family.

  He had resolved early on to be unwavering on one point—that somehow they had survived. And they had. As he mounted the bike and started the engine, the corners of his mouth turned down in a bitter smile. He looked out across the land from the high ground. If Sarah and the children were somewhere in the mountains of northern Georgia, they would be hard to find. Were they somewhere else in Georgia, the Carolinas, perhaps Tennessee? Every mile they traveled likely took them farther away, he realized, making the search just that much longer and more difficult.

  Finding a woman and two young children, refugees in a country full of refugees—The entire midsection of the country was a radioactive desert. There was no law. What of the Russians, the brigands—God knew what that lay out there? Rourke revved the bike, squinted against the sun and, using his combat booted feet to support the machine rumbling between his legs, started it down the path.

  Chapter 5

  It was never good to let them see you looking dejected, KGB Maj. Vladmir Karamatsov reminded himself, throwing his shoulders back as he stepped to the door of the military aircraft and breathed the cool night air of Chicago. At the base of the short ladder leading down from the jet was his staff car, his chauffeur who was waiting on the runway tarmac beside it, snapped to attention as he saw his superior.

  Karamatsov smiled as he nimbly jumped the last few steps of the ladder, then tossed his leather dispatch case in a gentle arc to his subordinate.

  The driver caught the case, saluted, and said, “Good evening, Comrade Major.”

  “Good evening, Piotr,” Karamatsov responded without looking at the man. He stared at the runway lights at the far end of the field instead. More military transports were arriving. He reflected that they would be needed. After the loss of the new American President, Samuel Chambers, and the dangerous and embarrassing episode with John Rourke and his own wife, Natalia, Karamatsov had revised his earlier impressions of American pacifica­tion following the war that his country had nomin­ally won. A nation of armed citizens, a nation of individualists—it would be hard to quell their resistance. He had learned that.

  Rather than bombing the cities, Karamatsov thought, smiling almost bitterly, they should have bombed the countryside. Bombing the countryside would have been easier in the final analysis, since the people of the cities would have been easier to sub­jugate. He had seen no point in bombing New York out of existence, for example. The wealth of the city was eternally lost now, and the weaponless, fear-ridden people of the American giant would have been easier to subjugate than the heavily armed and fiercely independent Westerners and Southerners.

  He noticed himself shrugging his shoulders as Piotr, his driver, said, “Comrade Major, there is something?”

  “No, Piotr,” Karamatsov said and turned, his dark eyes gleaming. “I was just considering the effi­ciency with which our leaders are introducing addi­tional troops to aid in the pacification of the United States. We are fortunate indeed to be possessed of such men of courage and foresight. Is this not so, Piotr?”

  “Yes, Comrade Major,” the young man said. A smile forced on his face, Karamatsov thought.

  The KGB major and the Army corporal eyed each other a moment, Karamatsov sti
ll thinking in English, saying in his mind, “The boy doesn’t believe that bullshit any more than I do.” He laughed, then walked toward his open car door, and stepped inside the Cadillac. He liked American cars: they ran, which was more, he thought, than could be said of their Soviet counterparts.

  Undoing the holsterless belt on his greatcoat, then undoing the double row of buttons, he slumped back in the seat, taking the proffered dispatch case from Piotr. “To the house, Piotr.” He removed his hat, setting it on the seat beside him on top of the dispatch case, and closed his eyes, waiting for the motion of the car to start as soon as his luggage was removed from the plane and placed in the trunk of the car.

  He opened his eyes and sat up, startled. The car was slowing down, and he sat forward in the rear seat to look over the front seat through the tinted glass of the windshield. He could see the house. Large, white-painted brick with a low porch and three steps leading from it toward a walk that jutted out to a cemented driveway slicing between dead grass patches that once had been verdant lawns, he imagined.

  The square footage of the house was over three thousand, larger by far than anything he and Natalia had ever lived in. At one time, the suburb of Chicago, where the house was situated, had been for the very rich. Now they were dead or had fled. All houses within the six-block area had been taken over as an officer’s compound or for important civilian officials, falling into both categories, really.

  Karamatsov thought he had gotten one of the best of the houses.

  As the Cadillac Fleetwood turned up the driveway, Karamatsov leaned back, minutely inspecting the in­signia on his hat, but really wondering what it would be like with Natalia. It would be the first private time they had had since the events leading to Chambers’s and Rourke’s escape from the complex in the taken-over air base in Texas. He had covered for her, partially he realized because she knew enough about him to damn him and partially—

  The car stopped and Karamatsov put on his hat, waiting for his chauffeur to open his door. Had Rourke lied, he asked himself? Had Rourke and Natalia been lovers?

  “What sir?” Piotr asked.

  Karamatsov half turned to face the younger man as he stood beside the door. Karamatsov stopped, frozen almost half-bent as he stepped from the back seat of the car. “Nothing, Piotr, nothing.” Karamatsov stepped out of the car, his great coat unbuttoned, his belt over his arm beside the dispatch case. “I will need you at six A.M. Have a pleasant evening.”

  “You too, Comrade Major, a pleasant evening.”

  Looking up at the lighted windows in the house, thinking about the woman inside, anger suddenly boiled within him. Karamatsov muttered, “Yes. Thank you, Piotr.” Turning on his heel, he added, “The bags—place them just inside the doorway and you may leave.”

  “Yes, Comrade Major.”

  Karamatsov stood at the base of the steps, watching Piotr pass him to go up to the door, ring the bell and wait—a flight bag, a large briefcase and a suit bag in his arms.

  The door opened. Karamatsov could not see her, only hear the voices.

  Piotr said, “Good evening, Comrade.”

  “Good evening, Piotr,” the soft contralto responded.

  Karamatsov balled his right fist. He imagined her with closed eyes. She liked white, and she was prob­ably wearing a white robe over a white negligee. She would be impeccably beautiful as she was always—the bright dark-blue eyes, the almost black hair, the ivory white of the skin that lost any suntan almost immediately to return to the almost religious alabaster radiance. She would be smiling at Piotr; she always smiled at people. That was part of why she was the best agent he knew in KGB: she was coldly efficient and deadly, but there was a warmth and humanness in her when business was not the order of the day. Even her enemies had always found it hard to hate her.

  He walked up the steps and stopped at the small porch, looking over Piotr as he set down the baggage and staring at Natalia, his wife.

  “Good evening, Natalia,” he murmured.

  “Good evening, Vladmir,” she answered, her eyes downcast.

  She was wearing white, something with lace that she had not acquired in the Soviet Union, something beautiful. She looked the model wife—elegant, love­ly, almost shy and demure. She remained unmoving as Piotr came to attention between them.

  “Good night, Piotr,” Karamatsov said.

  Piotr looked awkward. It had suddenly become common knowledge that Karamatsov and Natalia were married, a fact Karamatsov had concealed for years, and the looks of awkwardness in the eyes of those who knew them, however casually, were something he was becoming accustomed to.

  Natalia said nothing. Piotr moved between them and stepped out, saluting as Karamatsov waved him away. The door closed behind Karamatsov’s hand as he leaned against it. Natalia was still staring at the floor; he could not see her eyes.

  “You are radiant tonight. You are radiant every night, but you know that,” he whispered hoarsely. Stepping away from the door, he stripped the black leather gloves from his hands and set them along with his hat and dispatch case on the small leather-covered table by the door. He slipped off the great­coat and draped it across a French provincial chair beside the table.

  “A drink, please?” he asked.

  She said nothing, but moved away. Because of the flowing quality of the lace-trimmed floor length robe she wore, it seemed she floated to the kitchen rather than walked, he thought.

  He unbuttoned his uniform tunic and removed it, dropping it on the side of a sofa as he stepped down three steps into the living room. He undid the top buttons of his white shirt, automatically checking the tiny S & W Model 36 holstered inside his trouser band on his left hip.

  He turned, seeing Natalia re-enter from the kitchen with a tray containing a bottle of vodka and a glass.

  “The ever dutiful wife,” he remarked as she passed him and bent over a low coffee table to set down the bottle and glass. “You aren’t drinking?”

  “I don’t feel like it, Vladmir,” she said quietly.

  His hands held her shoulders and he snapped her around to him. Her dark hair fell across her forehead as her head bent back, tossing the hair from her face showing her slender white neck. His right hand moved to her throat and tightened around it.

  “You’re hurting me.”

  Karamatsov laughed. “You are a martial arts ex­pert; why don’t you stop me?” he asked, then let go of her neck, bent down and poured a glass of vodka for himself and downed half the tumbler. He looked at her. “I want you to have a drink.” He knotted the fingers of his right hand in the hair at the nape of her neck and bent her head back, arching her back. Her mouth contorted downward. Karamatsov raised the glass to her mouth, forced its rim between her lips, and poured the vodka from the glass, some of the liquid dribbling down the sides of her mouth. He let go of her hair as she started to cough, choking on the vodka.

  Her head bent low over her knees, one hand held her hair from her face as she sat perched on the edge of the sofa.

  He bent down, staring at her. “Did you drink with Rourke, Natalia? Do you like American whiskey better than Russian vodka?”

  He half stood, poured another glass of the vodka for himself, studied the clear liquid for an instant. He suddenly raked the back of his right hand downward, his knuckles connecting against the miraculously perfect right cheek of the seated woman in front of him. The force of his hand knocked her from the edge of the couch onto the floor.

  “I did not cheat on you with Rourke. He wouldn’t,” she said, staring up at Karamatsov from the floor.

  Karamatsov dropped to his knees, spilling half the vodka from his glass, wetting the front of his shirt and pants. His face inches from hers, he rasped, “But you wanted to!”

  His right fist lashed out, and her left cheekbone suddenly lost its perfection as well.

  Chapter 6

  Varakov stared at the skeletons of the mastodons in the main hall. In the weeks since Soviet Military Headquarters for North America had b
een set up in the former lake-front museum, General Varakov had grown exceedingly fond of watching the two extinct giants. And sometimes when he looked at them, he thought, an amused smile crossing his florid thick lips, instead of mastodons he saw the skeletons of a bear and an eagle locked in mortal combat eons after their disappearance from the earth. He looked up through the windows over the far door. There was darkness.

  Gen. Ishmael Varakov had always liked the dark; it was peaceful, yet full of things to come.

  “Comrade General?”

  Varakov turned from the railing overlooking the main gallery and smiled at his young woman secretary. “They are here?”

  “Yes, Comrade General.”

  He shrugged, looked at his unbuttoned uniform tunic, then left it unbuttoned, reminding himself he was the commanding general and there was no one for thousands of miles who had the power to tell him to button it. “Go tell them I’ll be there.” He turned to look back at the mastodons once more. If nothing else positive had come out of the war, he thought, it was seeing this place. When he had served as an ad­visor once in Egypt, he had never seen such treasures of the past as were there. He had never appreciated the beauty and complexity—yet at once simplicity— of the evolution of nature as he had from what he had seen here. He wandered the halls incessantly. He had at last found a home he liked, he thought, smil­ing. Then out loud he added, “Here among the rest of the anomalies of antiquity.” He smacked his lips, turned from the railing, and started toward the low, winding steps leading to the main floor and the meeting.

  He shuffled on his sore feet past a bronze of a stone age man, another of a Malaysian woman, and another of a bushman armed with a blowgun. He turned right toward his wall-less office just off the main hall. An office without walls was the best kind, he thought with a smile. They were all there, the ranking general and field-grade officers of his com­mand, sitting in a neat semicircle facing his empty desk. He stopped and watched them, shook his head, and stared at his feet, then smiling, walked ahead, rumbling, “There is no need to disturb yourselves, gentlemen. Please remain seated.”