Survivalist - 17 - The Ordeal Read Free Page B

somehow and John Rourke had delegated her Special to Han Lu Chen, taking Natalia aboard his own. They had been forced to escape via a different route. And nothing had been seen of them since. Natalia had been hospitalized prior to going on the rescue mission, declared herself well, seemed her old self—or had she? Paul Rubenstein wondered.
    The radios in their helmets worked perfectly and, logic dictated, so did those in the identical helmets worn by John and Natalia when they were last seen. Yet John and Natalia couldn’t be raised, meaning something was very wrong or they were out of range.
    Already, Paul Rubenstein planned to combat the second possibility.
    But what disturbed him—more even than their current
    plight in the middle of what seemed like full-blown warfare between Soviet Air Cavalry and the hard-line Communist surface armies of the Second Chinese City—were the remarks of Han Lu Chen concerning Natalia. That she had seemed * totally unaware of what was happening, could only murmur John’s name, that something seemed so terribly wrong about her.
    And as all of them had fled into the mountains to escape the battle, Annie had said to him through her helmet radio, “I can feel something—it’s Natalia, Paul.”
    Paul Rubenstein dropped to his knees beside his wife. Her hands had begun gently to dress Michael’s headwound. “What did you mean about Natalia?”
    “Before?”
    “Is there something now?”
    “She’s very sick. I can feel her thoughts inside of me and they’re meaningless. The only thing I do … understand … the only thing I do feel strongly enough to understand besides that is sadness, that she’s so filled with sadness. It’s like she’s inside some deep pit and she can’t quite see the top, knowing that there’s something still outside beyond it. She’s afraid.”
    He stared into his wife’s eyes. She wasn’t looking at him, wasn’t looking at anything.
    It was a different sort of vision.
    And, though she’d always had it since adulthood, perhaps before, a chill ran along his spine. Such an ability—or curse— frightened him. And he knew it frightened Annie. “Where is she, Annie?”
    Annie’s eyes didn’t flicker, although she blinked. “Cold. Very cold. I can feel Daddy’s thoughts near to her, but it’s like a bad radio transmission. I can just tell that he’s there. What’s in her is so strong, it’s like—” And Annie bent her head forward, her face going down into her hands as she began to weep.
    The voice made him jump slightly and he began reaching for the battered Browning High Power in the tanker holster
    beneath the open front of his arctic parka.
    “This woman—your wife—she sees through the mind?”
    Paul folded Annie against him, turned and looked at the Russian officer. The man was sitting up, his head lolled forward, both hands to it as though he were in pain or very tired, what Paul could see of the face nearly as pale as death.
    “Yes. She does,” Paul Rubenstein answered.
    “Can she see the future, too, then?”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “I have no such abilities, sir. But for us, here, no special talents are needed. We are all dead. We breathe and move about and hope. But, in the end, we are all dead certainly.”
    Paul Rubenstein didn’t say anything to him after that.
    He just held Annie close to him.
    The Russian was, most probably, correct.

Chapter Three
    Natalia’s eyes, the incredible blueness of them—but they only stared emptily, as though looking through him, not seeing him.
    John Rourke held Natalia’s nearly naked body close against him and had for some time, but still she trembled. It was not the hypothermia his physician’s instincts had first feared, the result of the Special crashing over the edge of the precipice into the icy, raging waters from which he had pulled her. It was something inside her that made her shake, something inside her that was keeping the warmth from his body from warming her.
    It was