The End is Coming

Chapter Thirty

Natalia behind him, they had ridden in silence on Rourke’s machine to the hidden aircraft. Like Rourke, she had carried two assault rifles, but both of hers were M-16s. As they worked now to remove the camouflage netting from the proto-type F-111, she spoke. “What will you do, John?”

“About what your uncle has to tell us?”

“No—about Sarah and about me?”

“I don’t know.”

“You love her—and she loves you—it’s plain to see for—”

“She said the same thing about you,” Rourke said, stopping what he was doing, looking at her. “That she could tell I love you, and that you love me.”

“And what did you say to her—if I can ask?”

“I told her—well, I guess pretty much what I told you.” He chewed down hard on his cigar. “Paul is a fine man.”

He watched her eyes in the darkness—another day was coming soon, the horizon pink with it in the east, chain lightning crackling across the sky there.

“Is that what you want—for me, for him?” Na-talia asked, turning away from the plane, lighting a cigarette for herself.

“No,” Rourke sighed. “I’m just saying it.”

“This is a strange situation, John—silly, sad—all at once. If you had met me before you’d met Sarah, and then met Sarah later, I think we’d be talking about the same thing, wouldn’t we?”

Rourke looked back at the fuselage of the jet. He nodded. “Yeah.”

“I learned some things about myself tonight—when you read my uncle’s letter.”

“Look—”

“No—let me finish.”

Rourke nodded only, lighting his cigar with the battered Zippo that bore his initials—he turned it over in his hands, feeling the engraving for the ini-tials under his thumb. “So say it.”

“How much my uncle loves me—it doesn’t mat-ter that he isn’t really my uncle—he is my uncle. And Paul—I don’t know how it feels to be a Jew, but I am one—half, at least. The way he reached out and held my hand when you read that part of my uncle’s letter. And Sarah—she felt for me, about my mother and father dying. My uncle had always told me it had been an accident.”

“You never checked?”

“I never saw any reason to—I guess that I was naive.”

Rourke walked over to stand beside her, finding her left hand in the darkness, holding it tight.

“And about you—I learned a lot about you,” she whispered. “That you really love me the same way you love her. That I could be a wife, a mother—that because of what I am and what I did sometimes—that—”

Rourke held her against his chest in the dark-ness.

It was insane. General Varakov had spoken as though the world would end. The lightning tracked across the sky.

But his only thought was that he loved two women—he realized now—equally.