Earth Fire Read online

  It was something to do, at least.

  Chapter Thirteen

  He had raced along the rocks of the sea wall built against the lake waves which could run to heights as high as sixteen feet, the air temperature cold, his breath coming in short puffs, but the air fresh, clean. He had positioned himself on the far side of the planetarium, behind the police car. And Rourke waited now, watching as the three KGB patrolmen exited the police car, one from the front passenger seat, one from the driver’s side, one from the rear passenger com­partment behind the driver’s side, only two of the men car­rying assault rifles, but all three wearing pistols in military flap holsters on their belts.

  If he had had Natalia’s silenced Walther, he reflected, but he did not.

  The three men started walking toward the end of the spit of land jutting out into the lake, across the grass that had once been green, then along the circular parking area disap­pearing behind the planetarium. No longer able to see them, they could no longer see him, and Rourke, eyeing the roadway leading from Lake Shore Drive and the airfield as well—no one was coming—pushed himself up, taking the steps from the lower rocky walkway to the planetarium level three at a time in a long strided run, the M-16 and the CAR-15 left behind with Vladov and Corporal Ravitski, the long bladed Gerber MkII in his right fist as he followed the men.

  Ravitski’s job was the most unpleasant—to take out the man who regularly urinated over the side of the sea wall. For the purpose, he had long handled wire cutters he had taken from the side of his backpack.

  Vladov was to back him up.

  Rourke kept running, the Gerber ahead of him in a fencer’s hold, his black combat booted feet soundless as he raced along the pavement of the walkway, finally reaching the far wall of the planetarium, hugging against it, able to see the three KGB men again. He was to await the cut from Ravitski.

  He saw the center of the three KGB-ers, arching his body slightly forward, one of the others laughing. The one about to urinate was one of the two armed with an AKM and the assault rifle was slung across his back. The one who had laughed was speaking animatedly, Rourke unable to follow the conversation because of the keening sound of the wind off the lake.

  Rourke waited, ready to move, the Gerber ready in his balled right fist, his left hand palming the black chrome Sting IA from its sheath behind his left hipbone inside the waistband of his faded blue Levis.

  He waited, both knives ready for their work.

  The man with the fixation to empty his kidneys took two steps forward, toward the sea wall, the other two men—the one still laughing—turning their backs as he bent forward.

  There was a scream, in Russian the man who had been about to urinate shouting, “My penis—” The body sagged forward.

  Ravitski’s long handled wire cutters had done their grisly work.

  The two men—as Vladov had anticipated and Rourke had agreed—turned back, reaching out, groping toward the sea wall to snatch at the body of their stricken comrade.

  Rourke threw his body into a dead run, across the once living grass, leaping, airborne, coming down on his feet, his knees buckling to take the force of the fall, throwing him­self forward into a dead run, the Gerber reaching out, the spear pointed tip thrusting into the back of the man to his right, severing the spinal cord he hoped.

  He left the knife there, the second man starting to turn, the pistol coming into his hand as Rourke’s left hand punched forward, the point of the little Sting IA black chrome puncturing the adam’s apple, cutting through, the man’s eyes wide open, no voice box left with which to scream.

  Vladov was up from the sea wall beyond, his fighting knife — a bastardized Bowie pattern, custom made, Rourke had surmised—hacking left to right across the throat of the man Rourke had stabbed with the big Gerber, severing the carotid artery and slicing through the voice box before there could be a scream.

  Rourke’s hands were moving—the man with the little A.G. Russell knife in his throat, Rourke’s right hand thrust­ing upward, palm outward, open, the base of his hand im­pacting the base of the man’s nose, punching the bone upward, through the ethmoid bone and into the brain, his left hand ripping the knife downward through the adam’s apple and locking against the bone beneath the hollow of the throat.

  Rourke ripped the knife free, turning as Vladov guided the other man to the ground.

  As Vladov wiped his blade clean on the man’s clothing, Rourke drew his own knife—the Gerber—clear.

  They had killed each man at least twice to be sure.

  From the converted police car, Rourke could hear a radio call.

  “It is KGB headquarters—perhaps a routine radio check—”

  “Let’s get the hell out of here—have the GRU man give the signal.”

  “It is already done, I think,” Vladov nodded, sheathing the Bowie pattern knife to his equipment belt, flipping down over the sea wall to the rocks below.

  Rourke followed after him. In the distance, as he im­pacted the rocks on the soles of his boots, he could hear the drone of the outboard motors, already started up.

  Rourke glanced at Corporal Ravitski—the young Rus­sian SF-er’s face was white. He looked at the man’s hands— the massive wire cutters, stuck into the apex of the blade halves were something unmistakable as a human organ.

  Rourke’s eyes drifted downward—at the man’s feet was the third KGB patrolman, blood oozing through lifeless fin­gers clamped over his crotch.

  He would have been dead in seconds from hemorrhage, Rourke realized—but Ravitski too had taken no chances — the front of the throat was hacked open, little blood there. Perhaps the heart had already stopped pumping from shock.

  A Bowie pattern bayonet for an AKM—he imagined it worked with the AKS-74 the corporal had slung across his back—lay blood smeared beside the KGB man.

  Vladov took two steps and was beside the young corpo­ral. “Andreyev, you have done your duty.”

  “Comrade Captain, this man was a Russian—”

  “Hard tasks await us, Andreyev—hard tasks which per­haps when compared will make this task you have so effi­ciently performed seem easy.”

  “Comrade Captain—I —”

  Rourke, his voice a low whisper, said, “Look, boy, that you didn’t like doing this is to your credit, that you could still do it anyway is more to your credit. But it’s time to move out.”

  The young Russian corporal turned to face him, staring. “Yes, Doctor—it is—”

  “Time to move,” Rourke said again.

  And Rourke didn’t wait, jumping down into the inflat­able as it heaved toward the rocks, his M-16 and his CAR-15 already soaked with spray.

  He made a mental note to clean them as Vladov and Cor­poral Ravitski joined him in the boat.

  The GRU man tugged clear his line. In the distance

  Rourke could hear the sound of aircraft engines revving, from the field, he realized—but there was no sound of po­lice sirens—at least not yet.

  John Rourke silently wondered how many more of hu­mankind would lose their innocence in the few days human­kind had remaining. Too many, he thought.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Soviet personnel were everywhere, Rourke imagined sparked by the wild chase the previous night through the Chicago expressway system and along underground Wacker Drive, and of course the murders of the three KGB patrol­men at the lake that morning. After ditching the rubber boats in what remained of Belmont Harbor and transfer­ring to a medium-sized cabin cruiser, they had gone out far­ther into the lake. There had been a tense moment—a Soviet patrol boat. But Vladov was prepared for this —or­ders from the KGB, forged, given him by General Varakov. The patrol boat had passed, but as a precautionary measure Vladov had ordered the GRU pilot to change course, dan­gerously hugging the shoreline.

  It had been late afternoon by the time they had pulled ashore near Waukegan, factory complexes—abandoned now—littering the shoreline.

  Working in two teams—fire an
d maneuver—they had worked their way through the factory complex and into the streets of Waukegan proper, continuing the two team move­ment, the process slow.

  The sunset was purple, the haze almost something Rourke could taste on the air as he knocked on the rear door of the American field hospital which was in reality Resist­ance headquarters for northern Illinois and southern Wis­consin, as he had learned earlier.

  The hole in the back door of Waukegan Outdoor Sports­man opened, a face peering through, back lit. “Tell Tom Maus Major Tiemerovna and I are back to see him—I’m John Rourke.”

  “Wait a minute,” and the peephole in the door was closed.

  Rourke waited exactly a minute, watching the sweep sec­ondhand of his Rolex, Natalia standing beside him, her eyes trained on the street as he looked at her. Vladov, Lieutenant Daszrozinski and the others were hiding down the alley.

  The door opened—Tom Maus, his good-natured, slightly gravelly sounding voice low, said, “You’ve been a busy man, Doctor Rourke—you and Major Tiemerovna have been very busy. Come in—”

  “We have some friends with us. I wanted to tell you first.”

  “What kind of friends?”

  “Two Soviet Special Forces officers and ten enlisted men, but they’re on our side so to speak—”

  Maus started to slam the door. Rourke stepped into it, pushing the door back. “Look—in a day, maybe six days at the most, nothing will be left. It’s the end of the world, Maus — for real, the end of the world.”

  Rourke watched Maus’s face in the grey-purple light, dark shadows blanketing part of it, but what light there was catching in Maus’s eyes.

  “You’re joking—and it’s in poor—”

  “I’m not joking,” Rourke told him quietly.

  “He is telling the truth,” Rourke heard Natalia whisper beside him. “I wish to God he were not —”

  Rourke looked at her and smiled.

  “What the heck is going on here?” Maus asked

  “One last mission, to maybe save some of humanity. And we need your help.”

  Rourke watched Maus’s face. The darkness was growing. Maus nodded, then. “All right, inside with you both —”

  “Our twelve friends?”

  “God knows why,” Maus murmured, shaking his head. “This is stupid—but yeah — but don’t mind it if some of my people keep their guns drawn—”

  It was Natalia’s voice. “Don’t mind if some of my people keep their guns drawn, too.”

  Rourke made a single, long, low whistle, and as he started through the doorway after Natalia, he could faintly hear the shuffling sounds of twelve pairs of combat boots hitting pavement in a dead run.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Emily, the Polish American Resistance captain they had first met when landing in Illinois, sat at the far edge of the room, her ungainly six-inch barreled revolver on the table beside her. Vladov sat a few feet from her, perched on the edge of a heavy worktable. Emily’s eyes constantly flickered toward him. A young man, very young looking, thin, a pleasant grin on his face, sat at the radio set, tuning the fre­quency. Maus had identified him—the young man working the radio—as his top field operative against the Russians despite the man’s youth. A six-inch blue Colt Python was on the radio table beside him as he worked. And as he worked, he spoke. “We almost never use this radio—can’t afford to. If the Russians picked up a transmission from around here, well, they’d know where to look.”

  “This is important, Mr. Stanonik,” Natalia told him.

  “Marty—everybody calls me Marty, Major—”

  “I am Natalia.”

  “Natalia—right. Russian or not, you’re awful pretty to be a major. Take Tommy there,” and he jerked his thumb toward Maus. “Before The Night of The War he was in the Reserves— he’s a major. And I’d sure as hell rather look at you, ma’am, than look at Tommy there.”

  “If this were still a gunshop and you still worked for me—”

  “I know,” Stanonik laughed. “You’d fire me—here—I’ve got it, I think,” and he flicked a switch on the radio set in the store­room near Maus’s office. “This is Shooter calling Eagle Two—come in. Shooter calling Eagle Two—” There was no answer, only static over the speaker. This is Shooter calling Eagle Two—do you read me—acknowledge. Over.”

  Static—then, “Eagle Two—code sequence verify. Over.”

  Marty Stanonik looked at his watch, then began flipping through a Rolodex file beside him—Rourke noticed it because it had been painted and was no longer black with a metallic framework. It was painted gold. “A gold Rolodex,” Rourke said under his breath, shrugging it off. Stanonik was apparently reading off a series of cards in the file, “Series twenty zero eight—Tango—reading now. Bob, Jack, Willie, Mary Jane, Harold. Awaiting verification.”

  Rourke smiled to himself—the code was ingenious and sim­ple. And the oddly painted gold Rolodex was its key. Series twenty zero eight translated to the time—eight twenty. Tango was the standard phonetic alphabet correspondent to the letter T—T was the twentieth letter in the alphabet and the first names Stanonik had read over the radio were from the T section of the gold Rolodex, apparently arranged randomly and read in a cer­tain pre-arranged order.

  The radio crackled with static. “Shooter, this is Eagle Two— verifying. Series twenty zero eight plus twenty-seven—” Twenty-seven would mean plus one since there were only twenty-six letters in the alphabet. “Uniform—repeat. Uniform. Mabel, Alice, Fred, Pablo, Maurice, Joe. Awaiting verification.”

  Stanonik flipped through the Rolodex—into the U section. Then he looked to his microphone. “Got a man here to talk with Eagle Two Leader—gotta make it quick. Shooter Over.”

  “Eagle Two is real busy, Shooter—give it to me—”

  “Tell him it’s John Rourke, Marty—and tell him to tell Presi­dent Chambers I have confirmation of a worst case post holo­caust scenario—six day countdown.”

  “A what?” Stanonik looked over his shoulder at Rourke.

  Rourke started to speak, but Maus said it, “The man here tells me the world is going to end, Marty.”

  “Ohh, shit—”

  Rourke thought the remark summed it up rather succinctly.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The radio was designed to automatically change frequen­cies and despite the fact that Soviet monitoring equipment existed which could still pick up such a set-up easily enough, it was a far better arrangement than a single frequency sys­tem.

  “I cannot summon a large force, Dr. Rourke. But Varakov is right. I of course knew the post holocaust scenario possibilities and I was never certain the Eden Project got away in time before Kennedy Space Center was destroyed. I don’t doubt that he has the data to support the scenario. I can send you a dozen volunteers. No others to be spared. KGB forces and Army units under KGB command have our backs to the wall here—boxing us in. Our only chance is volunteers from Texas. Reed here is telling me I’m stupid to be saying this en clare, but what’s the difference now. We’re going to fight. I should have known a set-up for a slaughter like this wasn’t General Varakov’s doing. They’ve been making strafing runs on hospitals, bombing civilian en­campments—the whole thing. The largest troop commit­ment they’ve made since invading the continent. I’ve got a volunteer, your old friend Colonel Reed. Where do I send him and the man he’ll take with him?”

  Chambers’ radio procedure left a great deal to be desired, Rourke thought. “I saw Reed with a western novel once. I recall reading the author was particularly interested in a cer­tain location. For four reasons. See if he understands — Rourke over.”

  It was Reed’s voice, half laughing. “Rourke—I’d love to meet you there—love it.”

  Rourke nodded unnecessarily to the voice so far away, then said, “As quick as you can and bring whatever you can carry. Rourke over.”

  “Reed—over.”

  Rourke handed the table microphone to Marty Stanonik whom he stood beside.


  He walked away from the radio set as Marty closed the transmission.

  “I do not understand,” Natalia began, looking puzzled.

  “The most famous western writer in history. I’ve got a lot of his books at the Retreat—you should read them. His name is French for love. The Four Corners—where Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico’s state boundaries all meet. I read about his interest in the area some years back. Reed— I figured he’d know, too. Lucky for me he did. And lucky for me you didn’t—”

  “Why?”

  “A Russian wasn’t supposed to be able to understand it,” and he winked at her.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Reed stood in the darkness on the steps of the church, looking out across the wooded area beyond the parking lot. “The men are ready, sir,” Sergeant Dressler’s voice came from behind him.

  “Very good, Sergeant,” and he turned and started through the open doorway, Dressier stepping aside to let him pass.

  Military courtesy sometimes amused Reed, sometimes affronted him. Sergeant Dressier had seen active duty dur­ing the closing days of World War II as a tanker, served the country during the Korean conflict, been retired during the Viet Nam conflict and now — in his sixties — was once again in uniform. That a man of Dressler’s age and experience should step aside for him — Reed — seemed somehow wrong.

  But it was too late to change any of that, Reed thought, walking up the aisle toward the front of the church. “Ten-hut!” Dressier snapped.

  Reed shook his head, “As you were—take your seats, gentlemen.” Ten other men sat in the first pews on each side of the aisle. Reed stepped up the three low steps leading to the pulpit, just short of entering it. Reed stood beside it in­stead, feeling odd wearing a pistol on his hip. “All of you were told before volunteering that this was likely a suicide mission. Rourke couldn’t get too specific on the radio—but I’ve talked with him often enough. Apparently the Russians have some move afoot to destroy what was called the Eden Project. Our earth—well, we told you that, too. In six days at the most, perhaps at dawn tomorrow, the sky will catch fire, the atmosphere will all but completely burn away and the earth itself will burn. We’ll all die then anyway. But ap­parently the Russians have some system for surviving it somewhere. My guess is the old Norad headquarters at Cheyenne Mountain but we won’t know that until we ren­dezvous with Rourke and his force. It’s our job to knock out the Russian base, so they can’t survive the holocaust. Otherwise, when the 138 people of the Eden Project return to earth, the KGB’ll be waiting for them, to shoot down the space shuttles before they land. And the Russians will have won it all, Communism will have the ultimate triumph. We owe it to the future, if there is one, and to every man and woman alive today or whoever lived, whoever sacrificed life or security or pleasure to defend the ideal of freedom—we owe it to all of them not to let Communism win, not to let the KGB be the masters of earth. And dying fighting for that is a hell of a lot better—” and he felt sorry for the word, remembering suddenly he stood in a church—”a lot better than being incinerated when the end comes. Are there any questions?”