Survivalist - 17 - The Ordeal Read Free Page A

their moorings. She cocooned the heavy Icelandic shawl tighter about her, grateful for the length which brought it nearly to her knees.
    “I have been in radio contact with my colonel, Herr Chairman, Frau Rourke.”
    “And?” She couldn’t help herself; the word spilled out of her.
    The German officer—he was young, blond, blue-eyed, perfect-looking—made a great show of shooting the cuff of his uniform blouse and looking at his wristwatch. “In precisely five minutes and forty-three seconds, the Herr Colonel’s personal aircraft will touch down. The Herr Colonel has requested, Frau Rourke, that one from among this party join him aboard the J-7V to facilitate targeting recognition factors once the squadron has reached the site of the First City prior to engaging the enemy.”
    She wanted to kiss him. Instead, she said, “I’ll go.”
    The chairman of the First Chinese City merely sighed.
    If there were anything to pre-natal predestination, what would the child she carried inside her become, Sarah Rourke suddenly wondered. She smiled at the thought. Because she
    already knew. Like her son, like her daughter, this child, male or female, would be a Rourke. “Is there someplace where I can go to the bathroom before Colonel Mann lands? Pregnancy does that to you.”
    The young German officer looked taken aback.
    Sarah Rourke shrugged her shoulders and smiled.

Chapter Two
    “Your hands are crushing me,” Annie whispered up at him softly, gently.
    Paul Rubenstein realized that they were. But he held his wife anyway, slightly easing the grip his hands had on her shoulders. She was kneeling beside her brother, treating the headwound Michael had sustained at the hands of the forces of the Second Chinese City. An errant gust of wind played with her long hair. In the distance, beyond the confines of the black-hued, bare rock cave’s overhang, the sounds of battle raged on. A few feet beyond Michael lay the Russian officer, passed into something more like sleep than unconsciousness. When they had reached the cave, the Russian had murmured in well-spoken but heavily accented English, “Why did he try to save me?”
    Paul Rubenstein had had no answer for the man.
    Black smoke filled the sky to the north and west. All of it reminded him of the prophecies of Armageddon in the Christian New Testament.
    They had hidden the Specials, their New Germany-crafted high-tech weapons-equipped motorcycles, deeper within the cave. But much of what was needed for the weapons pods to be functional had been expended during the raid against the Second Chinese City which had resulted in Michael’s and the injured Russian officer’s rescue. There was an adequate supply of synth fuel, but there was nowhere to go. Enemy forces
    seemed to surround them totally.
    Otto Hammerschmidt and Han Lu Chen stood guard in the rocks above the overhang; Maria Leuden stood with her hands in front of her, one resting in the other, a look of total helplessness on her ashen face. Paul wondered absently whether she wished her doctorate were in medicine now rather than archeology.
    Paul Rubenstein looked back at his wife when she spoke. “It looks like superficial bleeding. But we don’t have any way of telling whether or not it’s anything more. Daddy always told me that you treat what you can find and try to treat what you can’t. I wish he were here,” Annie whispered.
    Paul Rubenstein took this as no reflection on his own talents or abilities, such as they were or weren’t. That John Rourke, Michael’s and Annie’s father, his best friend, would be an asset under any circumstances was a foregone conclusion. Two men in need of medical treatment only underlined the imperative.
    But John Thomas Rourke, Doctor of Medicine, survival and weapons expert, the very embodiment of the phrase “Socratic man,” wasn’t here.
    After they had begun to effect the rescue of Michael and, coincidentally, saved the Russian officer as well, Natalia had been injured