by Jack Quaid
He made his way up the couple of flights of stairs, down the hall, and into a small office with a small table and a secretary with cat-eye glasses. She told Lee the general was waiting for him then waved him through. A moment later, Lee was sitting on one side of a big oak desk while General Wallace looked out his office window at a plume of smoke rising from some bombing that happened throughout the night.
“How bad is it?” Lee asked.
Wallace tore his concentration from the smoke disappearing into the gray skyline and turned back to Lee. “How bad is what?”
“The place where you’re sending me?”
Wallace gave him a long sideways glance. “How do you know I’m sending you somewhere bad?”
“In the past twelve months, you’ve sent me to German-occupied France, German-occupied Greece, and Berlin itself. May I speak freely, sir?”
“Go ahead.”
“They’re all shitholes, sir.” The sir part was added as almost an afterthought.
“I’d hate to disappoint you, Major,” Wallace said. “There’s a fair-to-middling chance that this shithole is worse than all the other shitholes you’ve been to, combined. Is that a problem?”
Lee gave that some thought. “I couldn’t imagine it would be, sir.”
“Attaboy,” Wallace said as he poured two bourbons, and when he was done, he slid one across the desk to Lee, who held it in his hand for a moment before taking a sip.
“I don’t want to pat you on the ass,” Wallace continued. “The geeks at Intel are describing this one as a suicide mission.”
“The last three were suicide missions, sir.”
“Then this should be nothing new.” Wallace finished his drink in one hit and poured himself another. “Two months ago, we lost a plane transporting an Austrian doctor somewhere over Poland. The doctor was working with the allies, and naturally, considering the downed aircraft, we assumed the good doctor was one of the casualties. As it turns out, Major, that wasn’t necessarily the case. Three days ago, we intercepted communications that the doctor not only survived the crash but was taken to a castle in Austria to complete their work.”
“What was the work?”
“That’s classified, Major.”
“You want me to go and extract the doctor?”
Wallace gave him a nod. “The doctor is being held in Austria. The German-occupied Hohenwerfen Castle, to be precise. The castle sits on the peak of a mountain and is only accessible via a cable car.”
“Doesn’t sound so tough.”
“The base of the mountain is the small town of Erlebnisburg. There are two thousand German soldiers currently occupying that town.”
“Oh,” Lee said. “That’s the suicide-mission part.”
“It’s not going to be easy,” Wallace said.
Lee finished his drink. “It never is, sir.”
Thirty-Four
Captain Jay Campbell hated top-secret missions. No matter what happened, he was guaranteed that somebody was going to end up shooting at him. He was awakened in the middle of the night and told to be fly ready by three in the morning. He was a good soldier, and come three o’clock, Campbell was in his flight suit, standing on the tarmac, waiting for his orders alongside his copilot, Bill Williams.
“Do you know anything about anything?” Campbell asked.
“Not a thing,” Williams replied.
It wasn’t uncommon for the most sensitive of sensitive missions to keep everybody in the dark until the very last minute. Twenty minutes later, they were instructed to climb aboard the aircraft and turn the engines over. They did just as they were told and waited. Always with the waiting the Air Force. Campbell and Williams used to joke around that the Air Force motto should be changed from “Aim High, Fight-Fly-Win” to “Hurry up and Wait.”
After close to forty-five minutes of warming up the engines, they finally received their orders. Fly the three hundred miles into enemy territory at thirty thousand feet, and once they reach their destination, they were to dramatically and dangerously nosedive to five hundred feet, drop their cargo and get the hell out of there. Their cargo: one American soldier with a Sten and a German officer uniform.
Campbell had been in the Air Force long enough to know that asking questions was pointless. His job was to fly to where he was told, do whatever he was told, and fly back home again. So when Campbell and Williams pulled that big, beautiful DC-3 into the night sky, he had nothing on his mind except flying.
A little shy of six hours later, they crossed into Austrian airspace, and when they were fifteen minutes from their target, Campbell unclipped his belt and made the half walk, half stumble down the middle of the fuselage until he was face-to-face with their human cargo. Since they had taken to the air, they hadn’t heard a peep out of him. A couple of times, Campbell had thrown a look back over his shoulder, and each and every time, it looked as if the soldier hadn’t budged a muscle.
When he reached the soldier, Campbell was surprised by how young the man was, but then again, they were a few years into the war, and all guys he saw coming through were young.
“We’re going to drop down to five hundred feet!” Campbell yelled.
Lee nodded and give the pilot the thumbs-up.
Campbell was about to step off when he turned back. “You’re out of your mind!”
He didn’t know what reaction to expect from the young soldier, but what he got back was stone-cold seriousness. He isn’t out of his mind, Campbell thought. This crazy bastard knows exactly what he’s doing, and he takes his craziness seriously.
The DC-3 dropped dramatically out of the sky at three hundred miles an hour and cut through the dark skies and clouds as Campbell watched the altimeter spin around and around and around.
Thirty thousand feet.
Twenty-nine thousand feet.
Twenty-eight thousand feet.
They dropped one thousand feet every couple of seconds, and Campbell’s balls felt like they were hiding somewhere up near his throat. The fact that nearly every single thing on the aircraft rattled and shook didn’t make him feel much better about things, either.
That aerial insanity went on for what felt like forever, but as soon as the altimeter spun past two thousand feet, Campbell and Williams both pulled back hard on the wheel, just like they had planned, and began the nightmare of straightening the DC-3 back up. If his math was correct—and he hoped to hell that it was—by the time the aircraft leveled out, they would be right on target and traveling at a height of five hundred feet.
The ground came up hard and fast, and just as Campbell thought it was going to be all over red rover, the DC-3 leveled out, cruising so low that it looked like it might cut the tops off the trees beneath it. Campbell leaned out of the cockpit and gave the soldier the thumbs-up.
He was all good to go. The soldier took a couple of steps to the open door and looked out at the darkness below. He took a breath, closed his eyes, and took the plunge.
Thirty-Five
This is one hell of a job, Lee thought as he dropped through the night sky. His chute opened hard and fast, jerking his back, but before the pain could settle in, his feet were on the ground. That was all he cared about. The pain didn’t bother him. He pushed it aside and powered on. He could have parachuted into a tree at fifty miles an hour, so a sore back was the least of his problems. He gathered up the parachute and buried it under the snow as quickly as he could, then he drew his silenced Luger and made a beeline for Werfen Road. Then he waited.
Only one road led into the small town of Erlebnisburg. Above Erlebnisburg was the Hohenwerfen Castle, and in that bad boy was the doctor he had to extract.
Lee knew he couldn’t just walk into Erlebnisburg with nothing but his German uniform and a nod to the guard as he passed by. He would need wheels, and the one road that led into Erlebinisburg was the best place to find them.
He crouched beside the road, not far from where it bent around a mountain, and waited. Three cars and one truck passed, but
he let them pass. He was waiting for a specific vehicle, and after twenty-five minutes of waiting in the cold, Lee heard the engine of a motorcycle. He took a knee in the snow, raised the silenced Luger, and waited.
The sound of the engine grew louder and louder, and just as the motorcycle and sidecar took the corner, Lee wrapped his finger around the trigger and squeezed.
Two shots popped out of the end of the pistol and hit the rider square in the chest. He slumped over the handlebars, then the motorcycle veered off the road and crashed into a mound of snow.
Lee wasn’t in a rush as he made his way to the motorcycle. It had flipped over on itself. The rider was dead, and the poor bastard who’d been riding shotgun was trying to crawl away. He begged and pleaded in German. Lee spoke German, but he didn’t give a shit about that Nazi’s pleas for forgiveness. He raised the silenced Luger, wrapped his finger around the trigger, and squeezed.
Ten minutes later, he was cruising along Werfen Road on his newly acquired motorcycle with a corpse riding shotgun in the sidecar. He heard the sounds of Erlebinisburg on the air before the lights of the town emerged out of the darkness, and as he approached, he saw that even though it was the middle of the night, the town was still alive with soldiers partying it up, with jugs of ale in their hands, pretty Austrian girls under their arms, and a carefree knowledge in their eyes that the war was far, far away from where they stood at that very moment. Despite the fun and games, Lee still had to pass a checkpoint with a boom gate and a couple of armed guards.
He slowed the motorcycle and brought it to a stop at the checkpoint.
“Papers?” one of the guards asked.
Lee dug his hand into his pocket and pulled out a set of papers he’d stolen from the dead biker and handed it over to the guard.
The guard gave it a brief looking over before motioning to the dead soldier in the sidecar. “What happened to him?”
Lee paused and looked at the dead soldier. “Can’t drink.”
The guard shrugged. Drunken, passed-out soldiers were a common occurrence in Erlebnisburg. He handed the papers back to Lee and waved them through.
Lee slipped the bike into gear and cruised through the town at a speed that wasn’t too fast or too slow. It was just perfect for blending into the busy streets of Erlebnisburg. Looming over the town was the great big Hohenwerfen Castle, ancient, majestic, and bold. The word castle didn’t do it justice. It was more like three castles rolled into one, and if it weren’t for the giant swastika flags blowing in the wind, it could easily be mistaken for Dracula’s abode.
Lee brought the motorcycle to a stop in a small alley behind a barn and shut the engine down. He looked behind himself, looked in front of himself, and looked behind himself again—the coast was clear. He climbed off the motorcycle and dragged the body out of the sidecar. When he was absolutely, positively certain that nobody was watching him dump a dead body in a barn, he dumped that dead body in the barn.
There was only one way up to Castle Hohenwerfen—by cable car. So when Lee parked the motorbike, he had to wait between the giant wheels and cogs that made the whole machine run while the car to come back down from the castle.
And he wasn’t alone. Lee had a fellow traveler, and it was about the worst fellow traveler he could’ve had, given his current situation. The man standing next to him went by the name Arthur Frank, and he was about as German as a person could get with his blond hair, blue eyes, and clear white skin, but it wasn’t those features that bothered Lee. It was the Gestapo uniform.
When the cable car arrived, the doors opened, Lee stepped inside, and right there behind him Arthur Frank followed. The operator in the control box closed the doors again, and the cable car began its slow ascent up the mountain. All the while, Frank kept his eyes on Lee. The American gave him a slight and polite smile that said both “hello” and “leave me the hell alone” at the same exact time.
Frank didn’t get the message. “Cold, isn’t it?”
Lee gave an agreeing nod but offered little else. His German was good, so that wasn’t the problem. Lee just thought that getting all chatty probably wasn’t going to be in his best interest.
“Answer me, Private,” Frank said.
Lee’s eyes snapped to the SS and potential nightmare of a situation that was brewing.
“Very cold,” he said.
“Have you been in Austria long?”
“No, sir.”
“Where did you come from?”
“France, sir.”
Frank said diddly-squat. He just sized Lee up for a couple of moments before a smile broke out across his face. “Ahh, France, we’re going to do wonderful things with that country. Did you see the Tower? Oh, what a sight. And those museums? Did you get a chance to see those museums?”
Lee shook his head.
“I would never say it back in Berlin,” Frank said as if they were conspiring, “but my gosh, what a collection, ay?”
Again, Lee just nodded. Things were starting to get a little suspicious.
“What was your post in Paris?
Lee didn’t budge. Not a single muscle. Then eventually, after an awfully long pause, he said, “I was 155th Mountain Division.”
“Does Schricker still have that bulldog that he takes around everywhere?”
At that point that, Lee really did start to think he was on a suicide mission. By the time Lee did speak, the air was so thick that he could almost see it. The smile had faded from Frank’s face, and he was no longer interested in idle chitchat.
“The dog died about a year ago,” Lee eventually said.
Uncertain the young soldier in front of him was on the level, Frank simply stared at him until the cable car reached Castle Hohenwerfen and the doors opened.
Lee was starting to weigh up his options. He could kill the son of a bitch, just take out his silenced Luger and put two rounds in Frank’s chest. If he did that, he would certainly have to put two more in the chest of the cable car operator who was watching the pair of them and wondering why the hell they weren’t climbing out of the cable car. Then he would have to hide the bodies. Where? Who the hell knew? His best chance was to toss them both down the steep cliff face and hope the bodies didn’t kill anyone in the village below when they hit the ground. That would certainly raise the alarms. As for any other options… well, that seemed to be pretty much the only one.
Just when Lee was thinking that option was going to be his plan of attack, Frank slapped a friendly hand on Lee’s back. “Next time you’re in Paris, you must see those museums.”
“Yes, sir,” Lee said, loosening his grip on the Luger in his pocket.
Thirty-Six
It was only Private Holder’s third week in the army. He had been in the Hitler Youth, gone to basic training, passed in the bottom half of his class, and been assigned to Erlebnisburg. He was keen to get into the fight, get some kills under his belt, like all the heroes they’d told him and his fellow cadets about, but all he had done was run patrols on guard duty. He didn’t even work the checkpoint. He’d spent the night checking for unlocked back doors and anything out of the ordinary, just like he had every single night since arriving in Erlebnisburg, and not once had he found anything.
He was walking down a small alley with barns on either side. There were no horses in Erlebnisburg anymore, but there were still barns—and one of those barn doors was slightly ajar. He could have sworn the door had been firmly closed when he passed it not two hours ago.
Gripping his Sten, he held the gun just like he’d been trained to do and very carefully opened the door. Inside was a German soldier covered in blood.
Holder raised the alarm.
Thirty-Seven
Seconds before Holder got on his radio and broke the news that there was a killer on the loose, Lee and Frank were politely walking side by side through the halls of Castle Hohenwerfen. They reached a crossroads, exchanged a nod, and broke off in their different directions. Neither of them had made it more than a couple of ste
ps before the speakers fixed to the walls of the ancient castle blasted the repetitive whoop-whoop-whoop!
Frank’s gaze snapped back over his shoulder to Lee. He knew the private had done something—he known for sure that something was rotten in the State of Denmark—but before he could do anything, Lee palmed his silenced Luger, fired two rounds into Frank’s chest and a third in his head. Needless to say, Frank hit the deck and Lee looked over his shoulder to see if anyone had seen him. There was no one in the narrow hall, and on the surface of it, the murder went unnoticed.
Lee swung open the nearest door—the room was full of supplies. Lee dragged the body inside, stepped out, and figured the timeline to complete his mission had just significantly decreased.
Before stepping onto that DC-3 back at the tarmac, Lee had spent every waking moment reading over the maps for both Erlebnisburg and Castle Hohenwerfen. He had a great memory for those kinds of things, and even though all was going to hell with alarms sounding and so forth, Lee knew exactly where he was going and where to find the doctor. According to the intelligence, the doctor was the only prisoner being held at Castle Hohenwerfen. All he needed to do was get to Castle Hohenwerfen’s cellblock, grab the doctor, get the hell out of the castle, get past the two thousand troops stationed in Erlebnisburg, then find a way out of Austria. It wasn’t the worst mission he’d been on… not yet.
The single guard on duty in the cellblock didn’t look too bright. Lee took him out with one monster of a left hook, and he was out cold by the time he hit the stone castle floor.
Lee pulled the keys off his belt and worked his way down the rows of recently fitted cells. Each cell he passed was empty… all except one. In the second-to-last cell, he found a redheaded woman. Lee figured her for late twenties or early thirties, and she wore trousers, a vest, and a beret. For a brief moment, Lee let his mind slip from the mission and allowed himself to think she looked like a movie star. She had that kind of look about her. Lee took one look at her, knew it wasn’t the doctor, and muttered some profanity under his breath.