The Quest

Chapter 10

John Thomas Rourke sat up, staring at the videotape on the television set. He realized immediately what had happened. The great room was dark; he’d fallen asleep watching the movie. And when he had recorded it, he’d left the tape running too long.

U.S. Navy jet fighters were soaring through the bright blue sky in perfect formation, the “Star Spangled Banner” was playing loudly. There were faces, too. A black child, an Hispanic farm laborer, a businessman, an Oriental woman, a housewife. The faces of children, men, women—Americans. The flag—fifty stars on a field of blue with thirteen stripes of red and white—it waved across the faces of the children. An American Eagle soared through the sky, the signoff cutting to the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, and an aerial view of the Statue of Liberty.

“And the home of the brave,” Rourke stood up, knocking over the empty beer mug, tears welling up in his eyes in the darkness.

He fell to his knees as the flag waved in the wind, then suddenly the tape went blank. And the great room, inside a cavern, in a granite mountain, a retreat, bomb-hardened from anything except a direct hit of a nuclear device . . . Sarah, Michael, Ann—faces, Americans. Rourke wept in the darkness. It was all gone and perhaps only they survived all of it—the faces in memory.