The End is Coming

Chapter Thirty-five

The base to which Emily Bronkiewicz had re-ferred was at first look a cave dug out of a slop-ing hillside, Rourke and Natalia in the middle of the Resistance group, walking stooped over through the cave by flashlight beam, a brighter light ahead, noise as well.

The tunnel abruptly stopped, Rourke sud-denly realizing he could stand to his full height, Natalia rubbing the small of her back with her hands as she did likewise.

The tunnel had ended in a building, a struc-ture largely concrete with heavily shuttered high windows—or at least Rourke assumed them to be windows—and double steel doors at the far end. The building seemed nearly a perfect square, drill presses—dust covered—and lathes and other machinery in evidence, as though pushed aside into corners of the building, the floor oil-stained in spots, large patches of it, gummy-looking as Rourke and Natalia fol-lowed Emily Bronkiewicz across the floor, diag-onally toward a cubicle-style office at the height of a dozen or so stairs that overlooked the main floor. Rourke surmised that it had once been a plant manager’s office, the place apparently at one time a machine shop. Its exact nature was hard to determine.

Others of the Resistance broke off before reaching the stairs, Rourke and Natalia continu-ing to follow Emily Bronkiewicz.

She started up the steps, Natalia immediately behind her, Rourke following Natalia, Dum-browski and two other men behind Rourke.

Emily paused at the office door, turning the knob, opening the door inward. Natalia followed her inside, Rourke after Na-talia, only Dumbrowski coming inside after Rourke. Emily perched herself on the front edge of the gray metal desk at the rear of the office. Natalia remained standing.

Rourke shrugged, sitting down in the metal in-terview chair and pushing it away from the side of the desk, turning out to face Emily Bronkiewicz. “So—where’s the radio?” Rourke asked her.

“I’m a Pole, Dr. Rourke—if that’s your real name.”

“It’s really Rourovitch and I’m a spy.”

Emily looked at him, but didn’t smile. “I hate the Russians. I hated them before The Night of The War, for what they did in Poland. My oldest son—he was thirteen. He got killed fighting the Russians. My husband just died. Doing the same thing. My daughter’s in such a way that she won’t even talk. She’s seventeen—a Soviet sol-dier. He was drunk, he raped her. She caught something from him—some kind of disease. But we don’t even have penicillin to fight it. My mother and father lived in Chicago—they died during the neutron bombing on The Night of The War. My husband’s brother was arrested and hauled away to a forced labor camp or something—”

“A factory,” Natalia interrupted. And Emily Bronkiewicz looked at her. “It would have been a factory. There are no forced labor camps here—but the laborers at the factories are not al-lowed to leave—so it is like a camp. They are fed well—it was my uncle who insisted that they work in eight-hour shifts only and be treated de-cently.”

“Is that your excuse?” the woman asked.

“It is not an excuse—it is merely the truth.”

“They made him a slave—that’s simple enough to understand. He has to work for them, can’t come back. I don’t know where he is, even if he’s still alive at all.”

“What are you trying to say?” Rourke asked the woman.

“Out there on the airfield—well, you could have killed a lot of us. Here—no such luck for you. I’ve got all my people outside. If I don’t step outside with you two following me, you’ll never get out of here alive. First gunshot they hear, they’ll be ready, and if I don’t come out, they’ll come in and kill you. Shoot the walls out of the office here to kill you both. But kill you—kill you anyway. Me—I don’t matter much no more any way.”

Morris Dumbrowski swept the muzzle of his Mini-14 up, fast, Rourke starting to move, Na-talia’s right hand flashing across her body, the silenced stainless Walther in her right fist. Rourke shifted direction, going for Emily Bronkiewicz, his right hand bunched into a fist, flashing out toward her jaw as he came out of the chair.

He heard something that sounded like a loud belch, the mechanical noise of a slide moving out of battery, back into battery, the clatter of metal against wood. Rourke’s fist found Emily Bronkiewicz’s jaw, a light tap to throw her off balance, his left hand reaching out across her body and smothering her right as she made to draw her long-barreled revolver.

As Emily slumped back, Rourke’s hand moved up to cover her mouth, Dumbrowski starting to say something, but Rourke heard Na-talia cut him off, “Shh.”

Rourke had the Bronkiewicz woman, sup-porting her from falling off the desk, her re-volver out of the leather in his left fist, pointed at the woman.

She moaned, Rourke watching as her eyelids fluttered.

He could hear Natalia talking, her voice a whisper. “I could have just as easily killed you, Mr. Dumbrowski—but I only shot you in the right forearm—that’ll heal.”

“You’ll never—”

“Shh—”

The door from the head of the steps outside the office started opening, Natalia sidestepping, Rourke leaning Emily Bronkiewicz back roughly across the desk, beside the door in two strides, the first man coming through the door-way. Rourke hammered down with the barrel of the ungainly sized M&P

revolver, his wrist tak-ing the impact as ordnance steel impacted bone, the man slumping forward. Rourke let him fall, starting for the second man, his shotgun starting to swing on target, his mouth opening to shout, Rourke reaching for him.

There was a flash of something, something gleaming, catching light as it moved, the man’s mouth open but not making noise as the man’s eyes shifted right, fast. Rourke stepped into the man, shoving the riot shotgun’s muzzle hard to the man’s right, Rourke’s right fist hammering out, tipping against the base of the man’s jaw, the head snapping back.

Rourke started to catch the body as it sagged, glancing once at Natalia, the stainless silenced PPK/S

shifted into her left hand. He looked at the door—the man’s right arm was pinned there by the Bali-Song, the handle slabs open and spread, the Wee-Hawk pattern blade penetrated through the leather of the man’s jacket and at least a half-inch into the soft wood of the door. Rourke wrenched the knife free, dragging the body through the doorway, then easing the door closed. He stood beside the doorway, “You throw a good knife, Natalia,” Rourke told her, looking up from the knife, closing it, locking the handle slabs together, then tossing the Bali-Song to her. She caught it in her right fist, making it disap-pear into a pocket of her black jumpsuit. “Pa-cific Cutlery made a good knife—all I did was practice a lot,” and she smiled.

“You two Commies quit congratulatin’ your-selves—you ain’t never gettin’ outa here alive.”

It was Dumbrowski, and Rourke looked at the man.

Rourke picked up the man’s Mini-14 from the floor. He examined the gun—stainless steel, fac-tory folding stock, factory twenty-round maga-zine in place.

Rourke turned the gun around and handed it to Dumbrowski.

“If we’re here to do you harm, why haven’t we killed any of you? Natalia’s shot could have put out your lights, Natalia’s knife could have killed the man at the doorway. How come? Enemy agents and we don’t like to kill? That make sense to you? Now where’s the goddamned radio, Dumbrowski—call U.S. II and we can quit this idiocy.”

It was Emily Bronkiewicz’s voice—Rourke hearing it from behind him.

“We don’t have no radio here—”

There was gunfire suddenly—heavy caliber assault rifle fire.

“Those are Kalishnikovs,” Natalia almost hissed, turning away from Dumbrowski. “Some of my people—perhaps the plane was spotted.”

“Fuckin’ Commie trick,” Dumbrowski shouted.

Rourke punched Dumbrowski in the mouth, hammering him down into the interview chair. Rourke looked at Emily Bronkiewicz. “What you said makes sense,” she nodded. “We can talk later—let’s get the hell out of here.”

Natalia had made the Walther return to its shoulder rig, both revolvers in her hands, the M-16s hanging from her sides. “I can’t kill my own—”

There was a roaring sound then, cutting off her words, Rourke beside the windows of the of-fice, then dropping away, shouting, “Hit the floor!”

The doors had been blown through, the floor of the office shuddering with the concussion. Rourke rolled, was up, his M-16 coming into his hands. Natalia, beside the desk, was helping Emily Bronkiewicz to stand—a shower of glass covered the desk—and the Bronkiewicz wom-an’s left arm was slashed.

“Stop the bleeding,” Rourke rasped, opening the door.

He recognized the uniforms, but more impor-tant, the technique—men poured through the blasted open doorways now, green shoulder boards on their brown uniforms—KGB. AKM flashed fire in their hands, the Resistance on the ground level of the machine shop holding them for the moment near the blown-out doors.

“Let’s get out of here—down the steps—fast,” Rourke ordered, jumping through the doorway. Dumbrowski was behind him, half dragging the semiconscious man Rourke had decked in the doorway. Rourke looked back—Natalia and Emiliy Bronkiewicz, Emily’s arm bandaged with a shirt-sleeve, helping the man Rourke had cold-cocked with the barrel of the revolver, the re-volver back in Emily’s right fist, Natalia’s one revolver holstered, but her left hand still holding one as she shouldered half the weight of the man.

Rourke rammed the muzzle of his M-16 for-ward, throwing the assault rifle to his shoulder, firing down from the top of the steps toward the KGB invaders.

As he started down the steps, gunfire began pouring toward him, the sounds of what glass hadn’t been blown out of the office walls in the explosion now shattering as stray rounds im-pacted it. Rourke fired into the KGB invaders again, their knot beside the blown-open steel doors thinning as they drew back.

An officer—Rourke saw the man as he looked up. Rourke heard his shout—in Russian, which Rourke understood. “It is Major Tiemerovna—she is ordered to be killed!”

“Down,” Rourke shouted back to Natalia. “Down, Natalia!”

Rourke made to fire the M-16—a three-or four-round burst and the rifle was emptied. The Soviet officer was leading a group of a half-dozen men—they had broken through the Resistance fighters, were charging the staircase, the officer holding a pistol, the six men with him AKMs. Rourke let the M-16 fall to his side on its sling as he took the stairs down two at a time, both Detonics pistols coming into his hands, his thumbs jacking back the hammers. He discharged both pistols toward the center of mass of the charging KGB officer—once, then once more, the man’s body falling back.

Four AKs were turning on him, Rourke taking a half-step back, his pistols raised. There was a burst of assault rifle fire, then an-other and another, from the stairs above him. Three of the Soviet soldiers went down, Rourke firing his pistols, emptying them toward the remaining three men, more assault rifle bursts—one an M-16 on full auto, the other only a semiauto—coming from behind him.

The last three men were down.

Rourke rammed both pistols into his belt, grabbing the Colt Mk IV already there, jacking back the slide. He looked up the steps—Natalia, and beside her Dumbrowski—and Emily Bronkiewicz was staring at her.

Natalia’s face was ashen—Rourke read it in her eyes. She had killed her own. As he turned away, raising the Colt, firing twice into the dissipating knot of KGB troops, he heard Emily Bronkiewicz shouting from the top of the stairs. “These two are on our side—make a run for the tunnel—quick!”

Rourke emptied the Metalifed Government Model .45, covering Emily, Dumbrowski, and the two other men—they moved well enough now—as they descended the stairs.

It was almost like moving someone in a trance as, his M-16 reloaded—he half dragged Natalia toward the tunnel.

Behind them was another explosion and more gunfire.

“Hurry!” Rourke rasped.