The End is Coming

Chapter Thirty-two

General Ishmael Varakov sat at his desk in his office without walls amid the splendors of the mu-seum. He stared at the mastodons from the dis-tance.

Two extinct creatures fighting each other in death.

He shook his head slowly.

Reports.

No trace of Natalia or of the American Rourke, or of the young Jew who had accompanied Nata-lia. As if all three had disappeared from the face of the earth.

He felt a smile cross his lips—an ironic smile, he thought.

His feet hurt, and shoeless under his desk, his toes wiggled.

Reports.

There was no trace of the American Rourke’s wife and children either. Clandestinely, Varakov had been searching for them for weeks, as further inducement to Rourke—and because it was the de-cent thing, he supposed.

Reports.

Karamatsov’s ghost, Rozhdestvenskiy, had suc-ceeded at the Johnson Space Center. Varakov’s agent inside the KGB had verified that Rozhdest-venskiy had recovered what was presumed to be the serum and twelve of the American cham-bers. The American chambers could be compared to the Soviet chambers, the Soviet chambers modi-fied if necessary. The serum, if Varakov under-stood the way of it, would be enough for thousands.

Reports.

All available army units were being mustered to a central staging area near the Texas-Louisiana border. A final battle with the surviving forces of U.S. II, but not for victory, for slaughter. But not even for that, he realized—simply to keep the army preoccupied, lest the true nature of The Womb be discovered and the horrible, final decep-tion that it constituted.

Reports.

The small band of GRU and army personnel whom he trusted were in place, waiting. They did not know the mission, nor did they know the purpose. But to activate them without his niece and without the American Rourke would have been useless.

They might wait, never activated, until the End.

He stood up, heavily, slowly.

He began to stuff his feet into his shoes, watch-ing Catherine as she slept curled up in the leather chair beside his desk. She had wanted to be with him, because dawn had been coming. But dawn had come and gone.

And they both lived, at least for another day.

He began to walk, his feet hurting him badly be-cause he had slept so little, rested so little. He walked to his figures of the mastodons, studying them as he did in the museum’s shadows. The building was nearly deserted. Some army functionaries, some KGB to keep Rozhdestvenskiy posted as to his—Varakov’s—actions.

Nothing more. Soon, nothing at all.

He looked at the battling giants, battling in death. “Marx was right about history,” he whis-pered in the darkness.