Rick said exactly what was on his mind. “I sure didn’t expect to see you here.”
I hadn’t expected to run into him, either, and I told him so.
“So, what brings you up to Cambridge so early?” Rick asked. His face told me that he already knew the answer to that one.
So I didn’t disappoint him. I gave him what’s known in the trade as a Roguish no-shitter. Which is to say, I told him that I had to get back to my men; that the Krauts had made me persona non grata; and that there was some pretty important unfinished business I had to attend to in the next few days—business that entailed national security considerations. I didn’t embellish, but I didn’t play coy, either. After all, I was asking a man I hardly knew to put his job on the line for me.
“I gotta talk to Bob,” Rick said. “He’s the senior man on the flight deck.”
“Bob’s heard enough,” a voice came from behind me. The other pilot stepped out from behind the DC-10’s front landing gear. “So far as I’m concerned, we don’t want to know anything.”
Fuck me. Doom on Dickie.
Then he surprised me: “So, just climb aboard, hunker down somewhere aft, and don’t get off until you hear from one of us. I don’t want to have to explain this little infil to anybody.”
I looked at the two FedEx pilots and shook my head. “I don’t know what to say, except ‘thanks.’”
“Hey, you ever come to Memphis, dinner’s on you, bub,” Rick said.
“Screw the dinner, I’m sticking him with the bar tab,” Bob said, a big smile in his dark eyes. He indicated the plane’s forward stair unit. “C’mon, go climb aboard and make yourself to home.” He checked his watch and jerked his thumb in Bob’s direction. “We’re allegedly wheels up in seventeen minutes, and this asshole hasn’t checked jackshit yet.”
0715. You’d probably like it better if Herr Murphy wreaked all sorts of havoc with the flight back to Krautland and caused me no end of problems. I know the editor would. But since we’re dealing in the real world here, folks, not Hollywood bullshit, lemme tell you that the trip was smooth, and nobody paid the slightest fucking bit of attention to me at Rhine Main. I waited until the plane was unloaded, Rick wandered aft and gave me an upturned thumb. I picked up my stuff and walked down the roll-away stairs, crossed the tarmac to the American air base, waved my military ID in the general direction of the German rent-a-cop at the gate, and walked out into the bright Teutonic sunlight free as the North Joyzey boyd. Now all I had to do was find a pay phone, chase my men down, and go hunting.
At which point I slapped my forehead hard enough to make myself wince, to-the-rear-marched and huptwo, hup-two’d to the low, red brick building that housed the Intelligence staff. I was delighted to see that First Sergeant M. Walsh was womaning the desk.
She looked up at me and smiled. “Captain Marcinko. Nice to see you again.”
“Ditto that, First Sergeant,” I said. “I need to borrow your phone for a while. May I?”
She hefted the receiver atop the divider. “Dial nine for an outside line, then the local area code.”
Boomerang answered on the second ring. “Yo, Boss Dude.”
“Howdja know it was me?”
“’Cause almost nobody else has the number. Hold on a sec.” I heard rustling, and a muffled, “Belay, assholes, I’m talkin’ to the skipper,” and then he came back on-line. “Sorry, Boss Dude.”
“Where are you?”
“We’re not secure, Skipper, so I’d rather not say,” he said abruptly.
I might have been taken aback by his tone. But I wasn’t. After all, he was right. I tend to forget things like that when I’m in my War Mode. “Gotcha. How’re the men?”
“We’re okay. Waiting for you.”
He was real preoccupied. “Great—then come and get me.”
“I’ll send someone.”
Whatever. Geezus, he didn’t sound like himself. “Boomerang—is there anything you want to tell me?”
“No.” There was more silence as he cupped his hand over the phone. Then: “Where’s the pickup?”
I’d given that some serious thought. I needed someplace close by, but I certainly didn’t want anybody showing up at the front gate of Rhine Main. Too much opportunity for Mister Murphy. I caught First Sergeant M. Walsh looking at me, and realized whatever I did, I’d better do it fast. “Remember where we met that lieutenant colonel just after we arrived? Lieutenant Colonel Smith?”
I could almost hear the gears grinding away in his surfer’s brain. Then: “Gotcha, Boss Dude.”
“Good. Pick me up there. Half an hour.”
“Negatory, Boss Dude. No can do.”
Hey—fuck no can do, which is what I told Boomerang in RBL.83 I was impatient. I had white heat burning inside me. I wanted revenge, and I wanted it NOW.
“Fuck you back, Boss Dude,” he exploded. “I’ve got some fucking complicated tactical considerations to deal with right now. We’ll come and get you in three and a half hours—eleven twenty-five.”
I didn’t like what I was hearing and decided that when I rendezvoused with the team, Boomerang was going to get a genuine Rogue Attitude Adjustment. “It’s your fucking call, Boomerang. You’re the one who’s got to do the fucking traveling.” Oh, I wasn’t happy about this at all. “Who you going to send?”
“You’ll know when you see him.”
The phone went dead in my hand. WTF? This was not the man I knew and trusted.
It took me a few minutes to cool down, but when I finally did, I realized that three hours wasn’t going to mean much in the long-term scheme of things. Besides, there are a lot of tactical rules to follow when you are operating in a hostile environment, and so far as I was concerned, that’s exactly what I was doing.
And so, I used the same anonymous, fürshtunken diesel minibus I’d ridden on our first day in Germany, and chugged sluggishly through Florsheim, and Weil-bach, and Biebach, and Erbenheim, and Wiesbaden, and crossed the Rhine at Schierstein, and finally said auf Wiedersehen to the driver on Rhein StraBe, just south of the Hilton Hotel and north of the Rhinehalle concert hall.
From there, I caught a tram and rode to the Hauptbanhof, jumped off, and worked my way down Binger StraBe to Münster Platz, crossed against the light and wandered down Schiller StraBe. There, I paused to admire St. Emmeren’s church, which was just down the hill.
Now, you know as well as I that I wasn’t sightseeing. What I was doing was performing what’s known in the trade as an SDR, or Surveillance Detection Route. SDRs are long, meandering walks, during which you perform certain elements of trade-craft, secrets that I’m not about to give away right now, which allow you to tell whether or not you are being followed.
And so, for the next fifty-five minutes, I played tourist. I window-shopped. I browsed the book stores. I meandered through the Höfchen Markt with its cheek-by-jowl farmers’ market stalls set up in the big Dom square. And then, confident that no one was sniffing my spoor, I backtracked around the cathedral, worked my way up GrebenstraBe, and up to the small platz onto which the Alt Deutsche Weinstube faced.
The minisquare was bright with brilliant sunlight and bustling with people, but I didn’t see anybody I recognized. I checked the “big watch, tiny pecker” tick-tock on my wrist. Eleven-hundred eighteen. I was seven minutes early. And so I retreated to the Irish pub just up the narrow street from the Weinstube, ordered a Murphy’s stout, found a stool outside in the sun, and sipped away.
I wasn’t even halfway through my pint when a long, familiar-looking slate gray Beemer 7000 with darksmoked windows nosed into the square. The driver’s window eased down. Wolf, der skinhead who had been Fred’s driver, raised his Oakley shooting glasses and, squinting, scanned the square until he saw me.
“Kommen Sie hier, Herr Dickie,” he mouthed, beckoning me toward the big car. Wolf disappeared behind the sunglasses as his window slid upward with a whir.
Alert to anything untoward, I set the Murphy’s down and jogged to the Beem
er. I heard the electronic locks release, quickly opened the rear door, slipped inside, and slammed the door.
Brigadegeneral Fred Kohler, his muscular arms crossed, looked over at me. “Willkommen auf Deutsch-land, Richard,” he said, a bemused expression on his Kraut face reacting to my highly visible double-take.
17
“WTF, FRED?”
“It is kompliziert—” He struggled for the English. “Complicated, Richard.”
“Fuck complicated. I thought you were dead, you Kraut asshole.” I was so relieved I didn’t know whether to hug the motherfucker or smack him into next week.
He shook his head as the big Beemer K-turned and threaded through traffic toward the river. “Yes—and so does Lothar Beck. The son of a bitch.”
“But the Pave Low—” I was so fucking confused I was shaking.
“A nasty accident, believe me. I lost an eight-man crew, and six of my shooters.” Fred’s expression was cold as steel. “They got to somebody at KSK. There was Semtex put aboard. It was a bomb.”
“Holy shit.”
“Und zooo,” Fred continued, “I thought it was best that they think they have killed me.”
“They—”
“Beck. It is Beck.”
“But how—”
“You perhaps have noticed how I have isolated the unit,” Fred said.
I nodded my head in the affirmative.
“It is not the way I prefer to do business, but given the current mission, it is necessary. Recently,” he continued, “it has been raised to me the possibility of internal infiltration.”
“Moles.”
“Ja, moles—or perhaps even worse. Verrätern—traitors. So, also, I have been changing my flight patterns for a little while now. A long flight is scheduled, und it is at the last minute changed to a short one. Or I switch choppers. Or I go by car. That is what happened here. We have a long-scheduled training exercise in Hanover. A counterterroristin scenario at a bank. On the pad, I change my mind. Instead of the Pave Low, I decide to use the NOTAR we flew, you and I, when we go to BeckIndustrie. But it is not fueled. Und so, the Pave Low goes ahead without me. But I am still on the manifest, ja? And over the Nutscheiderwald”—his hands flung violently upward—“explodes. Goes down. Boom-boom—und alles kaput.”
Fred shrugged, his palms upturned. “Und zooo, I construct this current . . . Scharade, ja?”
“What about Berlin?”
Fred’s face took on an ugly expression. “I let Berlin think what it wants to think,” he spat. “I do not know who my friends are anymore in Berlin.”
“And the unit?”
It was as if a black cloud suddenly washed across his face. “My men, too. They think I am gone. Except for the three who are with me on the NOTAR. Wolf here, Max the pilot, and Werner, my copilot.”
He looked at me like a man who’d just lost everything. Which, in fact, he had. “It was from within my own unit, Richard. My own unit!”
There was nothing I could say to him. The thought was inconceivable to me. My whole career has been built upon one unassailable foundation: my loyalty to my men, and their loyalty to me, is absolute. Complete. Pure. Unqualified. Unconditional. Categorical. The thought that one of them would ever betray me was foreign to everything I was, am, or will be.
Fred is cut from the same bolt as I. And so I cannot fathom the psychological depth to which he’d been suddenly dropped. I looked over at him. He had aged in the day and a half since I’d seen him. The lines on his face were deeper. His eyes had sunk into his skull. There appeared to be more gray in his hair.
He crossed his big arms and stared straight ahead. “I am at how do you say, vit’s end, Richard. We set the NOTAR down and hide it. I send Wolf for the car—it takes him half a day but he comes back with it. And while I wait, I have my Max telephone your Boomerang. He is carrying the phone I gave him, so we know how to reach him, but I do not want to talk myself because no one can tell me that Beck and his people have not compromised my communications.”
Good point. It also explained why Boomerang had been so close-mouthed on the phone.
Fred uncrossed, then recrossed his arms. “Und zoo, we finally rendezvous late last night—and we wait for your call.”
“And now?”
He looked evenly at me. “Und now, I am with you für die Daur des Krieges—until this war is over. You said to me before you left to London, you were going to go hunting. Zooo, Wolf, and Max, and Werner and I—we are with you. When it is over, then I will think about picking up the pieces.”
He turned away, his eyes straight ahead as Wolf eased the car through the heavy Mainz traffic, north onto the crowded two-lane highway that ran along the Rhine. Just northwest of the city, we sailed up onto the 61 Autobahn and cruised at two hundred–plus kliks per hour past Koblenz, turned south onto the 48 at the big Metternich Interchange, and then ran southwest, roughly paralleling the twists and turns of the Mosel River. Wolf exited at a sign that read KAISERSESCH.
From there, he took a hard right onto a wide, two-lane highway followed immediately by a second hard right onto a wide two-lane highway, which after about two kilometers crossed back under the Autobahn, heading south. After about a klik and a half, Wolf steered right again, onto an unmarked narrow country blacktop lane that wove through hilly pastureland and freshly ploughed fields.
We drove for perhaps a quarter hour in silence. I spent my time watching Fred as he sat in the rear right-hand corner of the Beemer, staring at nothing. I am accustomed to operating UNODIR. Fred is not. He is one of those alles in Ordnung kind of guys. And so I understood all too well that every molecule of his being was out of sorts because his entire existence had just been turned upside down.
I told him about my conversation with the Chairman. Fred nodded his head. “That is good,” he said. “And perhaps you will check with him—I still have a secure phone—as to what he has been able to do.”
“Done and done.”
“Once we know,” Fred said, his voice rock hard, “then we can finish things.” He steadied himself as a hard left took us onto a narrow, gravel road barely wide enough for the big BMW. Wolf steered gingerly; the car’d been designed for urban speed, not rural maneuverability. On a ridge to my right, I saw a small enclave of houses and barns. I nudged Fred. “What’s that?”
“The village of Pillig,” he said. “We are close.”
The topography was changing. It became hilly, rougher. The fields slowly gave way to rough, untilled countryside, above which we began to see the sorts of craggy escarpments similar to those ringing both sides of the Rhine and Mosel Valleys. After about six minutes, Wolf turned right onto an unpaved track, drove another hundred feet, and stopped.
Dead ahead, in a small clearing, our RV, its roof camouflaged with evergreen boughs, had been pulled up close to the trees. Behind it was the Mercedes. It, too, was covered with branches, so as to conceal it.
Gator Shepard, Max the pilot, and the Rodent were sitting under the RV’s retractable awning. They’d brought out the portable picnic table and were scrubbing, swabbing, and lubing our field-stripped MP5s in an efficient assembly line. At the far end of the table, Baby Huey and Nod were working on pistols. Duck Foot perched on the rear bumper of the Mercedes, loading magazines.
Boomerang emerged from the RV, a taciturn look on his narrow face and a small block of what looked like C-4 plastic in his left hand. He put the explosive down on the edge of the picnic table and came toward me, trying to read my body language. “Welcome home, Boss Dude,” he said somewhat tentatively. “I guess I—” He stopped and flailed in my general direction, at a loss for words.
I gave him nothing. Instead, I did a pretty passable imitation of Everett Emerson Barrett’s compound complex use of the F-word in polysyllabic combination. Then I bounded over to the wide-eyed cock-breath sonofabitch and hugged the hell out of him to let him know how I really felt about him.
He shrugged it off, giggled that silly laugh of his, and grinned at me.
“If that’s the way you feel, Skipper, let the real fun begin soon.”
I clapped him around the shoulder. “I thought you’d never ask, asshole.”
1500. Boomerang’s sit-rep was succinct. At about the same time I’d been sitting on the tarmac at Rhine Main, Lothar Beck and three chase cars had come barreling out of the BeckIndustrie headquarters and headed straight for the castle. Nod and Rodent had followed ’em to the castle on the motorcycles. They’d remained on scene until Boomerang could move the rest of the guys into position, something that had been complicated by Fred’s predicament. Indeed, they’d had to leave Nod and Rodent on their own overnight.
But now things seemed to be more or less shipshape. Beck was bottled up in his castle, which was crawling with armed guards. They’d maintained a constant surveillance on the place—and no one had gone in or out. Indeed, Half Pint and Werner, the copilot, were out on surveillance for the next hour and a half. Then they’d been relieved by Baby Huey and Wolf.
“Where’s Franz?” I asked. Franz was nowhere to be seen, although Nod swore that the former GSG-9 shooter had been riding shotgun in Beck’s armored limo.
I nodded. That put them both under the same roof. So, all we had to do, was go play some hide-and-seek with ’em, which we’d do tonight.
1515. I wanted to see the target firsthand. I packed one of our waterproof rucksacks with the necessities for an afternoon in the woods: field glasses, our pint-sized radiation detector, and a suppressed weapon. Duck Foot volunteered to play guide. We were, according to the map, just about two kliks from Schloss Barbarossa, Lothar’s castle, which was located above a winding tributary of the Mosel River. That’s not so far, you say—just over a mile. You’re right. But what a mile it would be. It took Duck Foot and me just over an hour to cover the distance.
The castle grounds, some eighty acres, abutted what had to be several thousand acres of national forest, with the myriad hiking trails and touchy-feely nature walks so beloved of lederhosen-wearing Krauts. And lemme tell you: Germans don’t make things easy for themselves. We’re not talking Disneyland-style gently sloping paths, graded for amateur hikers. We trudged through thick evergreen forest, our feet crunching on the dried needles and the occasional branch. The terrain was tough: one ridge after another, each no more than three hundred feet high. But climbing one after another while moving along the rough terrain at a fast pace becomes tiring.
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