“It’s not adding up, Fox.”
“What isn’t?”
“Fuel consumption for our skip over the pond.”
“You took into account all the wind variables?”
“Of course.”
“The course corrections we made at two-thirty and four A.M.?
“Naturally.”
“Weight distribution? Temperature and altitude variations?”
“Oh please. How long have I been flying?”
Rucker parked a few blocks from the edge of the university grounds. The university was founded more than six hundred years before, and the city had literally grown around it. It was one of the most urban university campuses in Europe.
“Then check your preliminary assumptions.”
“Which one?”
“Torque degradation. Crosswind streams. Weight. I don’t know. Do the math.”
It took Chuy less than a minute.
“Either the Raposa’s engines are running at ten percent less efficiency,” he said, and Rucker’s look told him that wasn’t the case, “or we were about 210 pounds heavier than the crew and cargo should have been,” Chuy concluded.
“Meh. You know Lysander and Terah. They probably threw some extra stuff in there and didn’t think it would matter,” Rucker said.
“I’m charging them for the extra fuel when we put in for reimbursement of expenses,” Chuy said.
Rucker pulled out the city map he’d picked up at the airport.
“This Renault’s an academic, so Lord knows what kind of schedule he keeps. He’s got a temporary office in the history building, and an apartment four blocks south. I’ll take the office, you take his residence,” he said to Chuy.
Rucker checked the twin Webley revolvers he wore in a shoulder rig under his leather jacket. Chuy checked his Beretta semiautomatic.
“Time to go to school,” Rucker said.
“Aye, Captain.”
Rucker went north, while Chuy went south.
The history building was, not surprisingly, one of the more historical places on campus, and the four-story building’s façade was currently undergoing restoration work. Wooden scaffolding and pulley systems for raising brick and mortar wrapped around two sides of the old stone structure. The scaffolding was almost as tall as the ancient conifers and oaks shading the building from the rising and setting sun.
Signs in Italian indicated that most of the regular offices and classrooms were temporarily being hosted in a few other buildings, but the main doors were open. Renault’s office should be on the second floor, according to what Terah had gathered, so Rucker made his way upstairs from the empty foyer.
Two men in ordinary gray suits were in the interconnected office suite where Renault’s office should have been. When they saw Rucker in the doorway, the one closest to Rucker smiled.
“Good morning, sir,” he said in accented Italian. “May I help you?”
Rucker’s Italian wasn’t half as good as his French, so he couldn’t place the accent.
“Yes, thank you. Dr. Renault?” Rucker responded in Italian.
The two men exchanged glances. Rucker noticed the slight bulge under the right side of the first one’s jacket, and a similar bulge under the left arm of the other man.
His mind and his eyes went to work: at a glance, likely semiautomatics in the popgun caliber of nine millimeter. A German favorite. The two men stood a good six inches taller and had thirty pounds on Rucker. Their ties were perfectly tied and their shoes were polished like mirrors. Pretty much the opposite of academics. More like police. Or soldiers.
“Dr. Renault is working in the offices upstairs because of the noise of the workers on the first floor,” the right-hand one said. “He is up there now. We can take you there.”
Right. Because every visitor needs two escorts.
Trap. Trappity trap trap, Rucker thought.
Might as well see this through, though, and see what they know.
“How very kind,” Rucker said. “Grazie.”
The two escorted him up the main stairwell in the foyer. Rucker noted their subtle jockeying for tactical positioning, with one working his way behind him and the other one ahead.
“Reckon there’s more than twelve feet of your boys,” Rucker said to himself in English. “They sure don’t make academics like that back home.”
Outside the door to the main office on the fourth floor, the subtle physical maneuvering continued. As Rucker raised his hand to knock on the office door, he smiled at his escorts and said, “Schlag auf holz.”
Knock on wood. In German.
Right-handed smiled and nodded before he caught himself, but it was too late.
Rucker elbowed the left-handed one in the solar plexus and stomped hard on the man’s instep. He struck out at the right-handed goon, catching him in the throat with an open-handed strike.
Neither could make a sound now.
With the man in front grasping at his throat with both hands, his midsection was wide open. Rucker kneed him in the groin, grabbed his ears, and brought the man’s face down into his other knee.
The one behind him was still hunched over but tried to take a swing. Rucker caught his wrist, twisted it around, and snapped his foot out, connecting the toe of his ankle boot to the man’s temple.
Rucker pulled out each man’s pistol—Walthers—and checked their loads. One in each hand, he kicked open the door and charged in, prepared to take on whomever was laying this trap. Prepared, he thought, for anything.
He wasn’t prepared, however, for the half-dozen pistols and submachine guns pointed at him by German thugs in plainclothes. A seventh man with a long scar on his cheek and screen actor good looks sat behind a desk still drinking his coffee as if nothing were out of the ordinary.
“Guten tag,” Scarface said.
There was only one rational course of action.
“Drop ’em or you all die,” Rucker said.
The man with the coffee couldn’t help but nod approvingly.
“Ah, Herr Rucker. I would have expected no less. Please, there’s no need for all this gunplay now. Put down the pistols and join me for, as you Texans say, a ‘cuppa java,’ ” Skorzeny said, sweeping his arm out to the chair across the desk.
Rucker saw they had him dead to rights, and this was one German who wasn’t going to react to bluster.
One of the Germans approached Rucker and took his appropriated Walthers. Another, approaching from behind, started to frisk him. Rucker elbowed the man square in the face. The agent fell back, blood pouring from his nose. Fingers tightened on triggers.
“Don’t . . . touch . . . me,” Rucker said through gritted teeth.
Slowly, deliberately, Rucker pulled his twin Webley revolvers from the shoulder holster rig under his leather jacket. He spun them around, butt first.
With a nod, Skorzeny signaled for his men to stand down.
Rucker set the pistols on the desk in front of Skorzeny.
Skorzeny’s men lowered their weapons. Rucker took a seat across from the commanding German. Despite the man’s good looks, there was an edge on him as sharp as a Bowie knife and a look in his eyes Rucker had only seen in jungle cats. The German had a boxer’s nose and the kind of thick fingers a man only gets from a life of hard labor. He recalled that his old friend, Captain Blackadder, had a particularly crude and particularly British expression for a man like this: a “hard cunt.”
“You probably do not know me as well as I know you, Captain Rucker. I am Lieutenant Otto Skorzeny, at your service,” the man said as a he poured a second cup of coffee and set it in front of Rucker. “Cigarette?”
Rucker took the coffee. “Much obliged Lieutenant Skorzeny. But no, I don’t smoke.” He took a sip. Not bad.
“Our files on you are quite extensive, though I must admit that your crashing the party at Hamilton House was the first chance I had to see you at work,” Skorzeny said. “Impressive.”
Hamilton House? Then that meant . . .
> “Let me guess, Lieutenant—you weigh about 210 pounds?”
Skorzeny inclined his head.
There it was. Chuy’s anomaly. Skorzeny had hitched a ride in the Raposa’s cargo compartment.
Skorzeny opened a file.
“You have quite the history. Sean Fox Rucker. Son of a West Texas rancher. Started flying at age fourteen. Lied about your age and joined the Freehold Volunteers, 315th Fighting Fireflies as a pilot before your seventeenth birthday. Twenty-nine air combat victories. Shot down three times. Captured three times. Escaped three times. There was that whole incident with Baron Manfried von Richtofen,” Skorzeny said. He looked up from the file. “You know, I’m sure Herr Richtofen would like to have words with you about that.”
“Manfried is a good man,” Rucker said, “and we have spoken since the war. Last I heard he’d emigrated to Switzerland, so I doubt he’s still all concerned about protecting the honor of the Fatherland.”
“Ja. The baron, war hero or not, has not been a supporter of the New Order.”
“Most soldiers aren’t, if I hear right,” Rucker said quite dismissively.
Every one of the half-dozen muscle men in the room shifted into more threatening postures. Even Skorzeny’s superior grin fell a little. He returned to the file.
“After the war you studied mechanical engineering at the University of Austin. You dropped out and for the next several years, flew charters in just about every backwater corner of the world. In 1925 you and your fellow Firefly veteran, the Latin Negro Jesus D’Anconia Lago of Sao Paolo, founded Far Ranger Air, where you now serve as a pilot and trade facilitator. All of which, of course, is a cover for your true work as a spy for the Freehold government in Austin.”
Rucker laughed loudly.
“Oh, good Lord, your people actually believe that?”
“It is the truth, nicht wahr?”
Rucker shook his head.
“Not everything that people in other nations do is about military conquest and government spying, just because that’s how it is where you’re from,” Rucker said.
The look on Skorzeny’s face reminded him of Blackadder’s Axiom Number 13: “One can always reason with a German. One can always reason with a barnyard animal, too, for all the good it does.”
Skorzeny lit another cigarette and put his feet on the desk in front of him. Rucker waved the smoke off and coughed to the side as a cover for checking the room, the position of the guards, and the proximity of the exits.
The door was not an option. Four of the guards, while large and muscled, were young and their faces unmarred. The one to his right with the machine pistol, though—from the scars and missing teeth, he’d been in his share of brawls. Mark him as the most immediate threat, Rucker thought, but the man would be cautious about shooting at him if Skorzeny was in the line of fire. The sixth man, by the window, presuming the others had Rucker covered, had reholstered his pistol. His wide eyes told the story—a true shavetail. Skorzeny, Rucker figured, had his sidearm either under his jacket or inside the desk drawer. Within easy reach, certainly. Rucker’s pistols sat on the desk between the two.
He did the math.
“The point, Herr Rucker,” Skorzeny said, “is that we know all about you and your friends. We know you are after Dr. Renault and the spear. We have him. We’ll soon have your friends, and we’ll soon have the Spear of Destiny. Your efforts to interfere with the Reich are now kaput, and you should prepare yourself for an extended stay in Germany.”
“Oh goody, German hospitality,” Rucker said. “Stale sausages in the morning and rough rogering at night.”
Skorzeny leaned forward. “The only question before you is, do you plan to come with us peacefully or do you plan to make it difficult?”
Rucker didn’t miss a beat.
“Oh don’t be so stupid. Of course I plan to make it difficult,” he said, shooting up from his seat and with a kick sending the chair into the stomach of the guard posted behind him. He grabbed his pistols and, with them in his hands, lifted the front of the desk and flipped it over, toppling Skorzeny backward.
Rucker rolled over the desk, spinning 180 degrees, and landed on his feet. He zeroed in on the hard one with the machine pistol, and though his shot went wide, Fortune was with him. The bullet hit the man’s weak-side shoulder and sent him spinning left, his finger pulling the trigger of his MP-40 in reaction to the pain. The four guards to his left scrambled for cover from his accidental fire as the man went down in pain from the muzzle energy imparted from a .45 caliber round. In this case it was 480 foot-pounds of energy, as Rucker used his own hand-loaded .45 ACP rounds, which carried a stronger punch than factory rounds.
Skorzeny and the guard who’d taken the chair in the stomach were just recovering. Rucker spun to his right and sprinted toward the nearest window, firing a shot to break the glass. He holstered his revolvers just before he reached the ledge and dove out.
Suicidal idiot, Skorzeny thought for just a second. But no. If he wanted to die, he would have stood his ground and fought to the end.
Skorzeny and his men rushed to the window.
Rucker had grabbed one of the ropes used to haul mortar and bricks up the scaffolding and was swinging out toward one of the conifers. He let go—still a good forty feet off the ground—and fell through the branches, letting them break his fall all the way to the ground.
Not graceful, Skorzeny thought, but effective.
Oh, very graceful, Rucker thought, coincidentally, feeling the small explosions of pain in his ribs and along his arms with every impact on every branch until the final impact on the ground. He made a point to remind himself later: just because Daniel Boone had jumped off a cliff, broken his fall by crashing through the branches of a large tree, and walked away uninjured, it didn’t mean he could.
He pulled himself off the ground, almost threw up, and then saw Skorzeny and his goons still in the fourth floor window. With great pain he pulled himself up and limped off across the campus park to the side streets.
Skorzeny’s men couldn’t get out the door fast enough.
Skorzeny watched Rucker until he disappeared around the corner. Helmut was still on the floor, stoically applying pressure to his gunshot wound. He would need medical attention.
“Well played, Captain,” Skorzeny said in English.
As Rucker ran though the streets of Rome, he did the math. Five well-trained plainclothes killers right on his tail. Dr. Renault was in the German Embassy. Likely the trap was closing on Terah and Deitel. They probably already had Chuy.
He passed a street cart vendor making his way up the avenue toward a tourist section, and as he sprinted past he grabbed a city map while dropping a copper coin.
As with air combat, Rucker needed altitude. Altitude and speed were life for a pilot. Sprinting through a back alley with the sounds of the pursuers on his six o’clock echoing off the sidewalks and cobblestones, he scanned the horizon. Come in out of the sun, he thought. He vaulted atop a refuse bin and leapt to the railing of the second-story fire escape. He didn’t have time to think about how he’d just smashed his finger or the bruising his knee took. Up and over the railing and up the fire escape as the first bullets struck all around him.
He reached the ceramic tiled roof on the fifth story and spun around, taking in his route and a quick glance at the map. He saw the top of the fire escape shaking as the Germans started climbing.
“Fine. I’ll race you,” he said to himself.
Rome’s inner city streets had an advantage—they were designed when most of the traffic was by foot or cart, placing the buildings closer together than in modern cities. He leapt across the chasm between two buildings and made his way across the rooftops, swinging down onto a balcony and running through an apartment and out to a second story lanai. He vaulted over the railing, landed in the back of a cart being pulled by a donkey, then scrambled to the ground. Behind him he could hear the Germans struggling to keep up. One was way ahead of the others.
Fine, deal with the jackrabbit first.
Turning into an alley, he came to a halt and pressed himself against the wall. As the German rounded the corner at a dead run, Rucker threw a forearm that caught the man in the neck. His legs whipped out from under him and the back of his head hit the stone street with a sickening thud.
One down. Four left.
Why am I running anyway? he thought. They had his friends and they were after the Spear. They should be running from him. At the least, he should be following them.
Rucker took off at a sprint right back the way he’d come, passing between two Germans so caught off guard it took them precious seconds to realize what they’d seen. As he rounded another corner into an alley, bullets pinged off the wall next to him.
The tailing two Germans, following the sound of the gunshots, found the alley just as Rucker was out the other end, which opened up on a wine barrel manufacturer’s loading dock.
The nice thing about a .45 caliber, as opposed to the 9mm, was that it brought to bear a hell of a lot more foot-pounds of energy on impact. A shot from a Lugar or Walther, with its mere 350 foot-pounds of energy, would have just penetrated the wood of the chock that kept the line of wine barrels from rolling. A shot from one of the Webley .45 pistols, however, sent the chock spinning away, freeing four of the barrels to fall from the second story into the alley below, where one of the four Germans had just come to a halt trying to determine which way Rucker had gone.
A fifty-nine-gallon oak barrel weighs about 120 pounds when empty and six hundred pounds when full. These barrels were empty, so the German only suffered multiple broken bones and a massive concussion instead of a terminal case of flatness.
Two down, three to go.
Do the math—greenhorn or experienced, these were SD men. Getting either of those fanatics to talk would be damn near impossible. He needed one to lead him back to their rendezvous point. To do that, they’d need to think, think, think—
Got it!
The gunfire just seconds before sent Roman citizens scrambling in every direction, which separated the last three Germans. Good, Rucker thought, watching them in the middle of the street from the second story balcony of a building adjacent to the barrel maker. He whistled to get their attention, gave them a single-digit salute, took off across the balcony and leapt down to the street. He was a good fifty feet ahead of the lead German and a hundred feet ahead of the other two.
Death's Head Legion: The Spear of Destiny: Part Two of Three Page 2