Survivalist - 15 - Overlord by Jerry Ahern Read Free Book Online Page B

in it spare magazines for the M-16 and a few spares for the Beretta and the Scoremaster. An identical musette bag—her father called them Swedish Army Engineers Bags —was slung from left shoulder to right hip, identically loaded. The weight was all she could carry, but she told herself it kept her thin.
    She suddenly thought of her mother. For Sarah Rourke to have shown up for battle dressed as she was, meant that blue jeans no longer fit. Annie wondered if she would soon have a little brother or little sister. And she wondered how her mother felt about the whole thing, because her mother never really talked about it and Annie felt she shouldn’t ask. She decided, on the spot as she turned and started back across the porch in the direction from which she had come, that when she next saw her husband Paul, she would ask him if he felt she should try to talk with her mother about the pregnancy or just wait to be invited to talk about it. Paul was sensitive to this sort of thing, and gave her good counsel. He always gave good counsel. And he was cute. Sometimes she missed the glasses he used to need to wear. Once she had even asked him to put them on for her because she knew he always carried them with him just in case somehow the regenerative effect of the cryogenic sleep instandy wore off and he found himself needing the glasses again to see.
    He had put them on and she had laughed and he had taken them off and she had made a big thing out of begging him to put them on again. And then she had laughed again and he hadn’t taken them off but instead just laughed with her and at her and at himself and they had made love. She thought about this. It was the last time they had made love before they had left Iceland to search for her father, just
    before Karamatsov had tried to use his madness-inducing poison gas to launch a revolution against his government at the Soviet Underground City.
    Annie Rourke Rubenstein thought of her mother again, of her mother being pregnant. Annie wanted Paul’s baby but they had agreed, not until the world was rid of Karamatsov and it would be safe to have a child, to bring a new life into the world. If anything had made their resolve more, more — she tried to think of a word —more resolved, she almost verbalized. If anything, it had been the death of pretty Madison and the baby.
    She shifted the M-16, carrying it at the pistol grip in her right fist.
    She thought she heard a sound from the greenway at the center of the community, just beyond the last step. She didn’t change her pattern of movement. To do so, if an enemy were present, would be to invite a shot. She kept walking, forcing herself not to increase her pace as she crossed the expanse along the height of the steps, perfectly in the open, an easy shot for even an indifferent marksman.
    The German sergeant, Ludwig Peiffel, had heard the sound too, and with his eyes he telegraphed it to her.
    If it were Russians out there —and some of their commando units were good at infiltration, very good —it might somewhat disarm them to think that Lydveldid Island was guarded by women, that the situation were so desperate that just defenseless women —and she smiled despite the danger she knew she was exposed to as she walked on, in the open. She had never felt herself to be particularly undangerous because of her sex, or that sex automatically made someone more or less of a danger. Maybe, if it were Russians who had caused the all but undetectable noise, they would learn about dangerous women this night. She was nearly to the edge of the open space, nearly to where she could duck beneath the comparative shelter of the porch railing.
    Sergeant Peiffel cleared his throat and she didn’t move her
    head but let her eyes follow his out toward the greenway. Had it been movement?
    There was still no gunfire from the rim of the volcano.
    “Ludwig—awful quiet, isn’t it?” she said in a not overly loud stagey voice.
    “Yes, Frau Rubenstein,