The Quest

Chapter 16

“Comrade General!”

Varakov opened his eyes. He heard gunfire, the hum of the engine was louder than it should have been. He looked out the window, startled. The area he recognized from his initial tour of the city was the portion of the city that had been all but destroyed in racial riots many years back in the 1960s. And now there was gunfire all around him.

“What is it?” he asked, but he already knew: the freedom fighters, the people who had survived by being far enough away from the neutron bombs, the people who lived in basements and hidden bomb shelters, who carried guns, killed Russian soldiers, and threw crude gasoline bombs at Soviet vehicles; they called them—the nerve—Molotov cocktails.

No sooner had the thought left his mind than it returned, the shattering of a glass bottle in the street beside them and the roar of an explosion, a fireball, the car swerving to the side.

“Get out of here now, Leon, and you get two weeks leave in Moscow and a letter to a brothel a woman I know keeps.” He smiled. Leon was the best driver to be had and would get him out of there anyway—if it could be done. Varakov drew the pistol from his greatcoat pocket where he’d left it, pushed the button for his window to roll down, then fired into the street. He saw figures running, their shadows made larger than life by the flickering of the flames, a Soviet truck overturned and burning.

He almost lost the gun outside the window as Leon, his driver, wheeled the Lincoln around a corner and onto a highway feeder ramp. “We are going in the wrong direction, Comrade General Varakov.” “It does not matter, Leon,” he rasped across the seat back separating them.

“Get down!” the driver shouted and Varakov knew better than not to obey. Rocks and bricks pelted at them from a walking bridge over the expressway, the windshield shattering and the car careening toward a guard rail. Varakov dropped to the floor, felt the bounce and lurch, the jerkiness of the car’s movements, then the shudder as the car stopped.

With the pistol in his hands, he rose from his knees and pried open the door on the driver’s side. He could hear sirens in the distance. They were Russian, he knew. He saw a figure fleeing across the walking bridge, raised his pistol and lowered it without firing. Then Varakov looked down to Leon. The boy’s face was halfway through the windshield and one of the eyes was bulged out. It seemed that the head had almost exploded.

He closed his eyes and asked himself out loud, “If all those fools so believe in you, God—why this?” He realized as he walked from the car toward the advancing military police vehicles the mere fact the clouds had not parted and no voice had rumbled like thunder and answered him proved nothing—at least he secretly hoped that.