by Eddy Shah
The discussion was general; Jenny talked about her flying experiences whilst Billie reminisced about the warmth of her native Southern California. It was easy to do, as she shivered and looked out of the window at the thick snow that reflected the street lights upwards. She had come totally unprepared for the northern climes and at Adam's insistence had bought some clothes in Newark on their way to Teterborough Airport. Her new coat was now firmly wrapped round her as she waited for her meal.
'You two spend time together?' she heard Jenny say as they sipped their coffees.
'No. We're good friends,' replied Adam, knowing what she meant.
'That's wrong,' interjected Billie. 'It's, we're just good friends.'
'What are you doing travelling together?' Jenny pressed them.
'Seeing the world.'
'There's got to be easier ways than this.'
'A sense of adventure!' exclaimed Adam.
'Rubbish.' Jenny turned to Billie. 'This is the last place you want to be. You don't like the cold. You hate it. All you have to do is hire a plane out of here and go back south. You could have both gone direct to England from New York. But you wanted to come up this way. If you think this is cold, you wait till we hit Greenland. With the chill factor it's nearly minus forty. It's only minus ten here. Are you two on the run or something?'
Later, when the women let themselves into their own room, Billie sensed she was being watched.
'Something the matter?' she asked Jenny.
'You sure there's nothing between the two of you?'
'I'm sure.'
'Then why're you along with him? He's the sort who travels alone.'
'How do you know?'
'You recognise your own.'
'I just wanted to. It seemed a good idea at the time.'
'Doesn't seem enough reason. Why don't you go next door?'
Billie was taken aback by the girl's directness. 'I'm not here for that.' She hated her own prim words. Shit, she was too old for this.
'Of course I'm sure.'
'Then do you mind if I go?'
The directness shocked her. The girl was doing what she wanted to do. If it hadn't been so fucking cold 'No,' she heard herself reply. Yes. Yes. I do mind.
'Okay. I'll see you later,' said Jenny. 'Mind you, he could toss me out. You never know with some people.'
Billie heard Jenny knock on Adam's door, heard it open and close again. She waited for a while, then she undressed and climbed into bed, the coat thrown over the top to add extra warmth. Her head lay next to the wall, next to the thin wall that separated her from the two of them.
She didn't want to hear, but she held her breath and listened for any sound.
The bed creaked, and she lay even stiller, listening intently, conjuring up the pictures the sounds made in her own mind.
'Don't do anything. I'm in charge,' she heard Jenny say. It was all so terribly clear. She hated it and listened harder.
He laughed. The bastard laughed. He was enjoying it. You stupid dame, what did you expect?
'You always like being in charge?' she heard him ask.
'Always. You bastards don't have the automatic right to do it your way. Keep still,' warned Jenny. 'Don't fucking move, you bastard.'
The sounds built, the creaks got louder, her mind was absorbed with the two of them together. She turned on her back and slipped her fingers between her legs. She felt the wetness spread, down over her fingers and her thighs. She was drowning in her own juices as they soaked the sheet. The sound from next door had risen to a mechanical drumbeat, like a pneumatic drill hammering away, it was him, banging and banging away at Jenny, she could almost hear the girl's screams. Shit, shit, shit. Why did she always have to fuck herself... Why?
'You all right?' said Jenny, shaking her.
'What?' Billie came awake, wondered where she was, saw the girl looking at her with concern. She quickly sat up in the bed, the blanket wrapped round her.
'Are you all right?' repeated Jenny.
Billie nodded. Maybe she’d been dreaming. But the wetness was still there, all over her.
'You're too hot,' continued Jenny, lifting the coat Billie had placed for extra warmth on her bed. 'You don't need this. It may be cold outside, but these people know how to keep warm inside.'
'What's the time?' Billie was fanning herself with the blanket to cool the sweat that was running down her body. She'd damn well been dreaming.
'Just gone eleven.'
'You're back soon.'
Jenny laughed. 'He wanted to talk about flying. I offered him my body and he just wanted to talk about flying. Funny bloke. Nice, but weird. You all right now?'
Billie smiled. 'I'm fine.’ She wondered again if it had been a dream or if they had fucked each other. ‘Come on, you'd better get to bed if you're going to take us to England tomorrow. You need your beauty sleep.'
'What for? It's bloody wasted here, isn't it?'
Ch. 56
Olympic Stadium
Charlottenburg
Berlin
Germany.
The riot had started from nothing; nobody had expected any trouble.
It had been a march for the jobless, organised by the socialist opposition parties. The police, notified about the demonstration, sent fifteen uniformed men and two vans to marshal the crowd. It was to be a small rally, starting at the Olympic Stadium and ending outside the rebuilt Reichstag building at the Platz de Republik in the Tiergarten. There was to be an estimated crowd of one thousand.
The organisers, loudhailers in hand, were corralling the crowd into marching formation when the first crowd of skinheads appeared. There were some forty of them, moving in from all directions, in groups of no more than three or four.
The police, still clustered by their vans, weren't watching out for trouble. Some of them sat on the grass, smoked cigarettes and watched the organisers' bumbling attempts to set the rally in progress. The buses and coaches which had brought the marchers were parked opposite the entrance in a long line down the road. Behind the police stood the vast, ninety thousand seater, Olympic Stadium. Built in 1934 for the infamous 1936 Hitler Olympics, when the black hero of America, Jesse Owens, smashed the formidable sprint opposition of Germany, the Stadium had withstood the Allied bombings during the War and became a symbol of a new Germany when Berlin was split in half by the Wall.
The skinheads and punk rockers, sensing easy meat, mixed with the crowd, their red communist-starred sweatshirts hidden under their coats. There were five pack leaders, whose responsibility was to incite violence from those who were always prepared to join in. The others, the storm troopers or Stermabeitalung, would spread through the crowds, wielding clubs, baseball bats and sometimes knives. It was to be an ugly demonstration; damage limitation was not on the agenda. Do what you want, boys, but make sure the television cameras get great pictures.
When the leader, a young man in his early twenties, saw that his Stermabeitalung were in place, he walked towards the steps that lead up to the grand entrance. He stood there, red shirted, on the steps, his coat wrapped around his waist. He would need it when he made his escape.
'Workers unite,' he shouted through the loudhailer he had hidden under his coat. 'Communists, friends of the people, unite with us to drive out those who are profiting from your hard toil, those who steal the food from your tables and live off the sweat of ordinary people. Workers unite. Don't let these people, these pawns of the capitalists....'
As he shrieked through his loudspeaker, the Stermabeitalung started to stream through the crowd, their red shirts now on view, hitting out at all who stood before them.
The police were slow to realise that there was trouble, but now they moved into the crowd, attempting to find the troublemakers. But the crush of those fleeing was too much and the officers were swamped.
On the steps of the Stadium someone had erected a red hammer and sickle flag and was waving it towards the crowd and the few media people present.
A woman wi
th a child fell and the child was trampled in the rush and killed. A few feet away, a baseball bat crushed a school-teacher's head, smashed his skull into a pulpy mess. It was carnage.
Two policemen, near the coach line, saw the waving flag and decided to try to arrest the two men on the steps. But as they approached, the men broke and ran into the stadium, vaulting the entrance turnstiles as they did.
A pack leader saw the police in hot pursuit, he called six Stermabeitalung to him and led them into the stadium. The two policemen hadn't expected to be followed; they were concentrating on their efforts to find the men who were now hiding in the covered area amongst the seats that were tilted upright in their stored position.
The pack leader grabbed the first policeman from behind and wrestled him to the ground, knocking his revolver from his grip.
The second policeman managed to get a shot off in panic, but before he could take aim, one of the skinheads smashed his shoulder with a baseball bat and knocked him down the aisle steps. Before he could rise to defend himself, four of them were on him with their clubs, battering his life from his body. He was dead within ten seconds. A coroner would later record that his body was hit over sixty times. Only his card allowed him to be identified.
The other policeman struggled uselessly. Then he saw one of the men pull out a machete from his deep lined overcoat pocket. He was grabbed by the shoulders and forced to his knees. He screamed, fought back, but it was futile. Their grip was too strong.
The Stermabeitalung with the machete sliced the top of his skull off. The blood gushed out and he was thrown to the ground. The man with the machete continued to hack at the body right down to the bone and intestines.
They threw the red communist flag over the policeman, draped it over his cut and bleeding body, then they left the stadium by a side entrance.
The riot had now spread. More police were called, and the troublemakers of Berlin, always looking for new violence, joined in the fray. It was to last for nine hours, spreading from the Olympic Stadium into the streets, houses and offices of Charlottenburg, to shops which were looted and their windows smashed, to fires started with petrol bombs, to cars burnt to bare metal twisted shells, before the riot police, with their armoured vehicles and water canons, brought the whole thing under control.
Fourteen people were killed in the demonstration for the unemployed.
Three of them were policemen.
There were over six hundred arrests, most of them youths who had joined in the riots but were not Stermabeitalung.
The white Mercedes bus that had waited at the end of the line for the red shirted storm troopers left an hour after the attacks started. The young man with the curly hair and the scar on his left cheek was nowhere to be seen.
By the time the riot was brought under control, the white bus was already back in Dresden.
Ch. 57
11000 feet
North Atlantic Airspace.
She let him fly.
Adam's natural ability impressed Jenny. He instinctively held the aircraft on course without being intimidated by its power or his lack of experience. He was a natural in a world where most pilots are made, not born.
After Goose Bay, where she had controlled the plane as it climbed through thick ice laden cloud to eleven thousand feet, they had flown direct to Narssarssuaq on the southern tip of Greenland. Once clear of the cloud, she had handed the controls over to him and taught him how to use the power and propeller pitch levers, how to bank the plane sharply, how to descend and climb with power and nose attitude. She enjoyed it. It took away the normal drudgery of long flights with little radio contact and constant headings.
Billie, having now accepted Jenny as someone who could be trusted, settled herself down in the rear, albeit cramped, and spent most of the flight asleep. The dream about Adam had distressed her, and she had spent most of the night awake thinking about him, about her own life and where she was going. Wherever she turned, there were few answers to her frustration. Her life had simply come to a full stop.
Narssarssuaq, a small settlement of scientists and Eskimos, is a seven thousand foot runway cut out of the glacier. It is approached along a forty mile long fjord and the approach instructions are that the pilot should turn left at the entrance by the sunken freighter that sticks up in the fjord, or else run out of airspace and crash into the sheer mountains that rise to seven thousand feet at the end.
Jenny let Adam descend from altitude into the fjord, down to two hundred feet above the frozen water. He enjoyed that most of all; the plane seemed like a toy, suspended between the high rising mountains on each side in the vast frozen landscape.
They found the sunken ship with its bow pointing upwards and he turned left towards the runway four miles down the fjord.
'Can I land it?' he asked.
'All yours,' she replied, but she kept her hands near the controls. He was good, but not that good.
The landing was bumpy and they skipped over a small iceberg at the end of the runway where it sloped down to meet the fjord. That annoyed Adam for he was a perfectionist and Jenny smiled. It was time he came down to earth with a bump, she thought. Literally.
'Any landing you walk away from is a good one,' she exclaimed as they taxied in to the small terminal. His grunt of annoyance made her chuckle even more.
Billie stretched her legs while Jenny refueled and Adam bought some food for the next leg in the cafeteria at the rear of the terminal.
Nobody asked to see their passports and they were airborne half an hour later, on their way to Keflavik on the eastern side of Iceland, where they landed seven hours later.
It was a quick turnaround; the last leg to Manchester, nearly five hours flying time, would be exhausting.
They took off in the dark. Adam climbed out of Icelandic airspace and steered westwards towards Scotland, intending to cross the coast at Stornoway. Jenny dozed off and he switched on the auto pilot. He had promised her that if anything happened out of the ordinary, any unnecessary flicker on a dial, he would wake her. Billie was fast asleep; it had been a long and boring trip for someone crammed in the back. He had offered her the front seat for the last leg, but she turned it down. He sensed it was because she could see he enjoyed the flying and there was little she could do. She was a fine person and he knew they related to each other, shared the same sense of humour. But she might still be a hindrance when it came to the rough stuff.
He was pleased nobody had asked for his passport.
He started to work out the next stage. It was time to clear his mind.
Nordhausen and Albert Goodenache were coming into view over the horizon.
Ch. 58
Jardin des Tuileries
Rue de Rivoli
Paris.
The Jardin des Tuileries is Paris' garden; sixty four acres housing a glorious Orangerie, exotic blooms and a mini Arc de Triomphe which was built to celebrate Napoleon's many triumphs. There is also a fairground that houses what must be some of the worst rides in Europe. Modern, brash and cheap. It is an annual event, running from December into January. For all its shoddiness, people flock there, day and night, to spend their francs being whisked around on ghost trains and dodgem cars.
Helmut Kragan left Dresden immediately after the Council meeting and flew to Paris. He booked in to the InterContinental Hotel, only a few minutes' walk from the fairground. The desk clerk saw nothing unusual about Kragan; he was just another businessman in a dark suit with a Liberty's all wool overcoat draped over his shoulders.
The same desk clerk was on duty when Kragan left the hotel two hours later, at nine in the evening. He recognised him and acknowledged Kragan's wave. The German wore his coat buttoned up against the cold of the night.
Kragan turned right outside the hotel entrance and walked towards the Rue de Rivoli. Once he had turned the corner, he took the coat off and slipped it over his arm.
This was no businessman. He wore motorcyclist's leathers underneath, black and shiny, with ca
lf length boots to match. He crossed the Rue de Rivoli and entered the fairground.
It was lively as usual, the mish mash of pop music blaring through loudspeakers as he walked among the crowd, mostly young people on the lookout for instant fun and excitement. Kragan fitted in, a motorbike boy out for the night. Here and there a fight broke out, girls screeched as someone goosed them, lovers clung together and ignored all that went on around them, pickpockets worked their art furiously and everyone set out to enjoy themselves.
He stayed in the shadows as he passed the House of Mirrors, slid past the Dodgem Cars and approached the Dancing Fly. It was in motion, a carousel of two seater chairs that spun unbelievably fast whilst it bobbed up and down on its rollers. The girls screamed; some gritted their teeth, others stayed cool as if nothing worried them. Kragan grinned. He never understood the fools who paid to frighten themselves to death.
He saw the curly haired man with the red scar on his left cheek talking to two short skirted, high-heeled girls no more than fifteen years old. The over-mascara'd make up and glossy lips couldn't camouflage their age. Young and slim, dressed in blue jeans and denim jacket, the man worked the Dancing Fly. His position in life, although not a great revenue earner, was obviously supplemented by an endless supply of young girls who found his lifestyle exciting.
Kragan retraced his steps and left the crowds to walk behind the House of Mirrors. When he was sue he hadn't been spotted, he moved in the darkness back towards the Dancing Fly. The sounds from the rides and the carnival continued, nothing seemed out of place. He felt the gun in his shoulder holster.
The girls were still there, standing where he had seen them earlier. There was no sign of the curly haired man. The alarm bells started ringing in his mind. Kragan moved his hand over the butt of his revolver and loosened it in its holster.
'This is a Colt hand-gun, with real lead bullets,' he heard the voice say from behind him. 'It's not a fairground toy. It will kill you when I pull the trigger.'
Kragan felt the hardness of the muzzle in his back, just behind the heart.