Red Rabbit - Tom Clancy [255]
The first fire truck arrived less than five minutes after the pull alarm had sounded. Hardly needing to be told—the fire was visible from outside, since the room's windows had shattered from the heat of the renewed blaze—they forced their way past the escaping hotel guests. Within a minute after arriving, the first seventy-millimeter hose was spraying water into the room. It took less than five minutes to knock the fire down, and through the smoke and horrid smell, the firemen forced their way inside to find what they feared—a family of three, dead in their beds.
The fire lieutenant in command of the first responders cradled the dead child in his arms and ran down and out onto the street, but he could see it was a waste. The child had roasted like a piece of meat in an oven. Hosing her body down only exposed the ghastly effect a fire has on a human body, and there was nothing for him to do but say a prayer for her. The lieutenant was the brother of a priest and a devout Catholic in this Marxist country, and he prayed to his God for mercy for the little girl's soul, not knowing that the very same thing had happened over four thousand miles away and ten days earlier.
* * *
THE RABBITS WERE out of the city in a matter of minutes. Hudson drove carefully, within the posted speed limits, lest there be a cop around, though there was virtually no traffic in evidence, merely the occasional truck, commercial ones with canvas sides, carrying who knew what to who knew where. Ryan was in the right-front seat, half turned to look in the back. Irina Zaitzev was a mask of tipsy confusion, not comprehending enough to be frightened. The child was asleep, as children invariably were at this time of night. The father was trying to be stoic, but the edge of fear was visible on his face, even in the darkness. Ryan tried to put himself in his place, but found it impossible to do so. To betray one's country was too great a leap of imagination for him. He knew there were those who stabbed America in the back, mainly for money, but he didn't pretend to understand their motivation. Sure, back in the '30s and '40s there had been those for whom communism looked like the leading wave of human history, but those thoughts were all as dead as V. I. Lenin was today. Communism was a dying idea, except in the minds of those who needed it to be the source of their personal power…And perhaps some still believed in it because they'd never been exposed to anything else, or because the idea had been too firmly planted in their distant youth, as a minister or priest believed in God. But the words of Lenin's Collected Works were not Holy Writ to Ryan and never would be. As a new college graduate, he'd sworn his oath to the Constitution of the United States and promised to "bear true faith and allegiance to the same" as a second lieutenant of the United States Marine Corps, and that was that.
"How long, Andy?"
"A little over an hour to Csurgo. Traffic ought not to be a problem," Hudson answered.
And it wasn't. In minutes, they were outside the boundaries of Hungary's capital, and then the lights of houses and businesses just stopped as though someone had flipped the master switch for electricity to the region. The road was two-lane blacktop, and none too wide at that. Telephone poles, no guardrails. And this is a major commercial highway? Ryan wondered. They might as well have been driving across central Nevada. Perhaps one or two lights every kilometer, farmhouses where people liked to have one on to help find their way to the bathroom. Even the road signs looked decrepit and not very helpful—not the mint-green highway signs of home or the friendly blue ones of England. It didn't help that the words on them were in Martian. Otherwise they were the European