Survivalist - 18 - The Struggle by Jerry Ahern Page A

made them seem one.
    It should have been warm here, but the outside cabin temperature at the comparatively low altitude at which they flew was below freezing. Wind-tossed whitecaps formed the only relief from the gray monotony surrounding them, the only possible means of sensual orientation for up and down. In the interests of not attracting Soviet attention, Rourke elected not to send out constant signals which might be picked up by Mid-Wake vessels because they might also be picked up by the Russians. But such radio silence caution didn’t preclude listening.
    The cacophony of natural radio emissions coming through the headsets they both wore was maddening,
    Paul Rubenstein saying over the whir of the rotor blades, “I’m getting a headache listening to this stuff. And to think all of this is natural radio emission. Wild.”
    Paul had been starting fragmentary conversations ever since he’d come out of his sleep period, John Rourke not yet taking his. He’d taught Paul in the first few hours how to hold the machine on course at altitude, which was enough to allow Rourke to catch a few hours’ rest He did not look forward to rest, because it was inactivity and there was too much to do. Paul spoke out of nervousness over the fate of his wife, Rourke’s daughter, Rourke knew. And he tried to keep the conversations going because he, too, was frightened that Annie, and Natalia and Otto Hammerschmidt as well, might be lost.
    “That explosive device we have. You sure they’ll pick it up?”
    “If we detonate it directly over Mid-Wake,” Rourke nodded, “they’ll pick it up. Might even send a submarine up to investigate. They’d better or we’re out of luck. Once we’re over the Bonin Trench, I’ll tack us almost due south toward the Marianas. That way, we can set her down and do any last-minute checks before we strike out for the open sea between Midway and Wake Islands. Be good to stretch our legs, too.”
    “You’re counting on the Americans at Mid-Wake having picked up that transponder signal, aren’t you?” Paul Rubenstein said suddenly.
    “I have to. Otherwise, Annie and Natalie and Otto are—”
    “Yeah,” the younger man said, looking away to starboard. “They’re dead. Shit. I mean—”
    “Why were you and Annie and all the rest of us born into this?”
    “Yeah. This weather—I mean—and the Soviets trying to get the Chinese missiles, all of this—I mean, isn’t the world fucked up enough? It should be spring. It’s winter. This should be the tropics. It looks like the Arctic down there. What if we so screwed up the world that it’s never going to go back to normal?”
    “‘Normal’ is a very subjective term,” John Rourke observed. “What was normal during the last decades of the twentieth century isn’t necessarily always normal., The Earth hasendured a significant number of climatic variations more bizarre than this, probably.” If Paul retreated from the reality of the single option theory— that Annie and the others were dead if they had not been taken in by one of the submarines of Mid-Wake— John Rourke realized that so did he. If Paul chattered, he found some intellectual triviality and played with it.
    “If she’s dead, John—if she’s—if she is, I’d never marry again. And, so help me God, I’ll find every one of Antonovitch’s troops and kill them—hunt down the last damn one and choke the life out of him.”
    “What happened to ‘Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord’?”
    “What happened to justice, John?” John Rourke had no answer for that…
    The snow was still falling. Akiro Kurinami had built a fire to keep from freezing, but built it beneath a rocky overhang, keeping the fire as low and smokeless as possible. Periodically, Soviet helicopters still moved through the gray skies overhead.
    As best he could judge, if he could begin to press on within the next hour or so, he would reach Doctor Rourke’s Retreat sometime between dusk and dawn. Once