Survivalist - 19 - Final Rain

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Book: Read Survivalist - 19 - Final Rain for Free Online
Authors: Jerry Ahern
their own sides became more serious, irreparable. It was one of these men who pushed the button you damn, Sarah.”
    And she laughed.
    “Why do you-“
    She looked at him across the lip of her coffee cup. “Before the Night of the War, the majority of the planet’s population was comprised of women and children, Colonel; not men. I always wondered why a minority decided the fate of the majority.”
    He just looked at her, looked away for an instant, smiled defensively as he looked back. “That is merely the natural order of things, Sarah.”
    She looked at him, feeling a smile of her own starting. “Yes, but isn’t a natural hierarchy of things, especially people, simply because of the way they were born, isn’t that the Nazi part of your education coming out?”
    He looked grounded, true hurt in his eyes. He had fought to make New Germany in Argentina a free nation, fought, risked everything, to depose the Nazi Party and the dictator at its head. He was a liberator.
    “What I mean, Colonel,” Sarah Rourke began again, “is that who says there’s a natural order to things like that? Just because a man could move a bigger rock? Or because of the biological necessity of women nurturing children? I mean, look at it in simpler terms. Those few men. Let’s say they weren’t all men, that some of them were women, those ones who wanted war. Whoever pushed the button, and whatever group he represented, who gave that person—notice, I didn’t say man—but who gave that person the right to play God?” “No one, Frau Rourke.”
    “Wolfgang—” Sarah Rourke set down her coffee cup, held both his hands in hers. “That same mentality is at work today, this instant. People who are willing to risk total annihilation just to have it their way. That’s why Akiro is injured. That’s why John and Paul are off looking for Annie and Natalia and your Captain Hammerschmidt. That’s why Michael and Maria Leuden and Bjorn Rolvaag and your volunteers are in Iceland, trying to forestall something terrible happening with the people of the Hekla Community. Because some people play God. And no one has that right.”
    As she looked away from his eyes and across the expanse of the Retreat, she didn’t say, “Not even John Rourke,” but she thought it… .
    Paul Rubenstein’s hands shook as he held the Schmiesser. His hands shook because he was cold and one of the principal reasons he was cold was because his coat was open. His parka was partially open in order to protect the submachinegun’s action from the freezing rain. Under a rain poncho, which had become stiff as board, he kept an M-16. But he wanted the Schemisser just as ready to fire, warmed by body heat and dry, as the Browning High Power he wore in the tanker holster on his chest. The M-16 was one of more M-16s that he could remember well enough to count which had passed through his hands since the Night of the War. But the Schmiesser, or German MP-40 as he knew it was more correctly called, had been with him since that first battle.
    He could still remember … “Here, use this for now.” John reached into the pile of weapons assembled there on
    the ground near the jetliner crash site, weapons taken from the dead Brigands. John killed eleven men and one woman while fighting to save the passengers, outlaw bikers all of them, bent on lawlessness and death. “This is a 9mm. One of the best there is.” And John gestured toward what Paul Rubenstein was about to learn was a German MP-40 submachinegun, there on the ground beside him, “There should still be plenty of 9mm stuff available.” John ruminated softly about the compatibility between the two guns … It was Greek to Paul Rubenstein then, even more intelligible than Greek because at least he knew how and what to order in a Greek restaurant if he needed to. But despite the fact his father had been a career Air Force officer, he’d never had any experience with firearms of any kind. It had simply never come up.

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