With a sloppy salute, I replied, “No problem, ma’am.”
Angie tapped her ‘off’ icon and I sat back to take a sip of coffee.
From the bathroom field came a chuckle, then a laugh. Marie said, “I can see the resemblance.” When I looked at her, she added, “Angie. Linda. They’re a lot alike.”
Grinning, she said, “I loved what Admiral Wallace told the Army colonel. ‘We go to war with the army we have, not the one we wish we had.‘ I almost burst out laughing. I’m surprised Col. Horn didn’t.”
“Yeah, she’s tough.”
Looking over the side, she asked, “Are we really done here?”
“Yup. Got your passport on you?”
Giving me a fisheye, she replied, “Of course.”
“Wanna have a late lunch in Germany?”
She grinned hugely and chirped, “Sure!” Pausing for thought, she glanced down at herself and said, “But let’s not go anywhere too fancy. Remember those wonderful little Rotwurst stands?”
“Bet we could find one. Gotta warn you, though; don’t look too hard for the old places. Some are gone and some look so different they might as well be gone.”
Marie sat and sipped a moment, then said, “Let’s find some of the wall. I know they saved some. Is there any of it left in any of the places we crossed?”
I had the screen switch from a view of the crater to a map of Germany, then had it color the old Eastern section yellow and add spots to indicate remnants of the wall. Most were in and around Berlin, a city in which we’d never moved people.
Taking control of the screen, Marie zoomed in on the Fulda region and said, “Look. There’s Point Alpha.” As the picture magnified to show what had been saved of the barrier, she yelped softly, “Is that all that’s left of it?! A little bit of fence and concrete, the watch tower, and a goddamned fake dog?!”
I sighed, “They prolly took out the land mines, too. Damn.”
Giving me a sharp glance, Marie growled, “Maybe you don’t care, but I do.”
Sipping, I said, “I just don’t see any point in caring too much. The brave new world people cleaned up the mess, put up a few memorials, and moved on. That’s what they always do.”
Panning the view, Marie said, “And now there’s nothing to show for all we did. All those people we pulled out of there.”
“Beg to differ, ma’am. Remember Emily Bruner?”
I watched her eyes as the gears turned in her head and attached the name to a five-year old blonde girl crying in the back seat of a ‘borrowed’ East German government-issue sedan.
Marie sat down and said softly, “Yeah, I remember her.”
So did I. The kid had rather stark eyes and hadn’t said much. Carla Bruner, her mother, had sat silently holding her and staring hard at the dark road ahead. It had been raining and we couldn’t use the headlights. I drove and Marie read off the odometer until we reached nineteen kilometers, then I slowed.
We’d practically crawled the last five klicks as we’d searched for a leaning tree that marked a turnoff into the woods. Luck was with us in that we encountered no other traffic.
After a time we found the tree — or thought we had — and I got out to verify. Running my hand along the downside of the trunk, I found three small nails, each an inch apart in a neat little row. All good. Any other pattern would have meant to keep moving.
Once we were into the concealment of the woods, I opened the trunk to cut and tape the wires to the rear lights, then turned on the parking lights and walked around the car. Only the front parking lights worked. I put duct tape over the top halves of the big amber lenses and we followed the logging trail deeper into the forest.
Marie had reset her watch to be on the hour. When we started moving, she pushed in the stem and listened to the watch. After a couple of seconds, she put it back on her wrist. We’d figured the meeting point would be about forty minutes up the trail. What seemed like a lot longer time passed until she said, “Forty.”
We kept going another couple of minutes and two quick flashes ahead made me stop the car. I put a hand on the .45 in my lap and thumb-checked that the safety was off on general principles. Using the cover of engine noise as I slowly got moving again, Marie eased her door open as quietly as possible and slithered out.
“Carla,” I said in a conversational tone, “You and Emily get down on the floor now, please.”
“Yah, wir…” she hissed, then, “Yah. Fertig.”
“Gut. Bleiben sie, bitte.”
I turned off the lights and we approached the area where the light had flashed at a walking pace. Several seconds later we were ordered to halt by someone to our left and slightly behind us.
Will’s voice said, “Twenty-seven.”
I replied, “Twenty-three.”
A shadow nonetheless approached the car very cautiously, stepping from tree to tree. Remaining mostly behind the nearest one, he raised a flashlight and flicked it on and off, illuminating the interior of the car for half a second.
After another second, he asked, “How many?”
I said, “Two and two,” meaning two ops and two clients.
“You’re short one.”
From behind and to his left, Marie said, “No, he isn’t. You are.”
From a tree somewhat ahead of the car on the right, Connie replied quietly, “No, he isn’t. Any surprises?”
I said, “Not a one. How about you?”
“Just one,” said Connie, “We ran into a guard. He decided to come with us.”
Carla hissingly shrieked in German, “A guard?! Here?!”
“Don’t panic. He wouldn’t be here if he wasn’t worth keeping.” Opening my car door, I asked, “And just out of curiosity, what made him worth keeping?”
Will said, “He handed me his rifle and asked to come with us.”
“If you had your gun on him at the time, that might be the expected response.”
Connie chuckled, “He seemed pretty sincere to me.”
Will flicked his flashlight on to his left and showed me a guy in uniform sitting on the ground at the base of a tree. His hands were tied on the other side of the tree. Beyond him I saw the vague outline of another car.
The guy started to speak just as the light went off. In a shaky, teen-aged voice, he said, “Ah… hallo? I wish only to go with you to the west. Please. I am but eighteen and I do not wish to die. Please?”
Connie said, “Like I said; he sounds sincere. He says his name is Wilhelm and he learned English from his mother.”
“She must be a good teacher.”
The guy at the tree said, “She was. My mother died. Uh… may I speak more?”
Walking over to him, I hunkered a few feet away and said, “Sure. Quietly. What’s on your mind?”
He studied me with more than a little fear and glanced at the others, then said, “I was to be in my… I don’t know the English word… where Army men live together… by midnight.”
“Barracks.”
“Barracks? I don’t know that word.”
“That’s where Army men live. Is that all you wanted to say?”
“I… I thought it to be important.”
Standing, I said, “You’re right. It is.”
Looking at the others now standing near us, I asked, “Well? Take him or not? Last call for votes.”
There was silence for a moment, then Will and Connie spoke almost at the same time. Will deferred to Connie and she said, “Take him. If he’s real, great. If he does anything stupid, he’s dead.”
Will said, “Same here.”
Carla and Emily stood staring sullenly at the kid, likely due to his uniform more than anything else.
In German I said, “Not all who serve are volunteers, Carla.”
She looked at me and said flatly, “Yes, I know. But it is hard for me to wish him well.”
“That’s the uniform talking.” Looking at Will, I said, “And speaking of that, let’s find him something else to wear that won’t att
ract attention.”
Will untied the guy. Rooting through my luggage turned up some pants that would fit him. Will contributed a shirt and a pair of socks. Using the last can of medium-brown spray paint that had changed the look of the car, I lightly sprayed the guy’s uniform overcoat and cautioned him to stay away from open flames for a while.
After we took a few minutes to eat, drink, and relieve ourselves, we got into both cars and followed the winding logging road to the next town. I was thankful not to have Wilhelm in my car; paint fumes always set off my allergies.
We weren’t trying to get closer to the border. We were going to a small airfield east of the village. We parked the cars in the woods and headed down the hill toward the airfield’s perimeter fences. A guard truck circled the airfield inside the fence at nine-thirty. As soon as it passed, we began cutting barbed wire to get to the fence.
At ten thirty-five, an old Douglas A-20 with Russian markings landed and five guys got out of it. One stayed with the plane as the others headed for the office. A sedan left the field about the same time the guard truck began another round of the fence line.
We’d cut the barbed wire, but attached the ends to tree limbs that held it more or less where it had been. As soon as the truck went by, Will and I cut a panel of the eight-foot chain link fence between its support posts. At a height of about six feet, we simply tossed the curtain of loose fencing over itself twice and signaled up the hill with the flash light.
Will and I each grabbed a tree limb and hauled the barbed wire out of the way as the two cars rolled down the hill toward us. Connie drove one and Marie drove the other. Wilhelm held the door of Connie’s car open for Will and Carla held the door of Marie’s car open for me.
Will and I hopped in as the cars rolled by and the ladies started the engines as we reached the fence. We dashed across the airfield to the Douglas and slid to a halt between it and a hangar.
The guy by the plane raised his hands and rapidly whispered, “Boston! Boston!”
Will said, “Okay. Good,” and followed the guy toward the hangar.
They tilted a big drum slightly and put something under it, then Will tied the man’s hands around a light pole and gagged him. As Marie and Connie got everybody stashed aboard and Will moved the chocks, I ran a quick flight check, then fired up the engines.
We started moving and I turned the plane toward the runway as Marie slid into the copilot’s seat and strapped in.
She said, “Everybody’s in. Somehow. This thing looked a lot bigger before we all crammed into it.”
“It was made for three guys and a ton of bombs. They’re heavy, but they don’t take up much space.”
Glancing at the dash, she asked, “Are we good?”
Taxiing to the runway, I replied, “Oh, yeah. We’re fine. Hear those engines? They took care of it.”
“Jeez. This crate must be thirty years old, Ed.”
“Prob’ly every day of that, ma’am. They were part of the Lend-Lease deal in the early forties.”
She grinned. “So we’re really just repossessing it, right?”
“You got it.”
Takeoff was a breeze. The wind was right, the truck was at the far end of the field, and we lifted sooner than I’d expected. Flying high enough to avoid ground obstacles and low enough to avoid most radar, we headed for the border. Marie keyed the radio and said, “UFO Boston” every few seconds until someone answered, “Road crew, Boston. Road crew, Boston.”
Marie answered, “Boston, Road crew. Boston, Road crew,” and held the radio’s mic in her lap as she said, “All set.”
A few rounds peppered the plane as we flew over the border, but the shooting quickly stopped and nobody was hit.
On the western side I found the right bit of road blocked off by six jeeps and a deuce and a half truck. Road flares helped outline the road for us and vehicle lights made up the difference. I managed to set the plane down gently enough and shut down the engines.
The jeeps rushed toward us and men gathered up the road flares, which had been sitting on buckets of dirt. The men turned the flares upside down and crammed them into the dirt, then moved up the line until all the buckets reached the truck.
We were hustled out of the plane and into the jeeps and driven to a house in the woods about fifteen minutes away. After a quick debriefing, Will and I were issued one room and Connie and Marie were issued another. I don’t know what arrangements were made for the others. An Army sergeant knocked on the door at six the next morning. Our clients were already gone. We were fed and debriefed a bit more, then allowed to leave around ten.
Waving a hand in front of my face, Marie said sharply, “Hey! Yeah, you! You were somewhere else.”
Letting my reveries fade, I replied, “I was remembering that night. Our airplane ride.”
“So was I. That’s probably why I didn’t notice you were off in space right away.”
“Fun times, huh?”
She grinned. “Yeah, they were. What was it you were going to say about Emily?”
With a shrug, I replied, “Let’s find her,” and put the question to my core. An answer popped up quickly and I put it on a screen that showed us a mid-forties blonde woman in a business outfit. She worked for a bank in Heilbronn.
“My God,” muttered Marie, “That’s her? She looks older than me. What about her mother?”
“This says her mom died four years ago. Hang on one.”
Fishing up more details, I found Wilhelm in Darmstadt; he’d become an auto mechanic and opened his own shop.
Marie chuckled, “Well, I guess he was ‘sincere’ about coming to the west after all.”
Next I tried to find the plane. It had been stored for half a year or so, then returned to the Russians. For some reason, that really disappointed me.
I said, “We shoulda kept it. They never paid off the war loans.”
Studying the plane, Marie nodded and chuckled, “Yeah.”
After a moment, she sighed and sat down, then sipped her coffee and made a face. “It’s old and it’s cold.”
“That happens when you don’t drink it fast enough.”
“Don’t ‘advise’ me, damn it. Take me to fresh coffee.”
I chuckled, “Oh, yes, ma’am. Right away, ma’am,” and put the flitter in motion toward Europe.
Chapter Nineteen
Marie picked Wiesbaden as a place that would — as she put it — ‘be a good mix of German and American’. Galatea reached us before we reached Germany and I had our flitter blend with Tea. It happened so smoothly we didn’t even have to adjust our seats. The flitter we’d used above Iran was simply converted to field energy and absorbed by Tea.
Glancing around somewhat wide-eyed, Marie said, “That was slick. I couldn’t tell when one flitter ended and Galatea began.”
“That just means she did it right.”
Running her hand over the console as if touching it for the first time, Marie asked, “You’re telling me I could have one of these?”
“The use of it, yes. It would belong to 3rd World.”
As if some great decision had been reached, she nodded and said firmly, “Okay, then. I’m definitely in.”
“There was still a question about it?”
Looking at me, she replied, “Yes.”
Huh. Wouldn’t have thought so. Oh, well. We began descending toward the east side of Wiesbaden and Marie became very intent as she peered ahead of us. Tense about our rate of descent? No.
She abruptly pointed down and to our right a bit and said, “Over there. There used to be a place near the train station.”
But when we reached the area, she couldn’t find whatever she’d been looking for. After a long look around, she pointed west and said, “That way. There’ll be something between here and town.”
Her tone showed disappointment. No surprise; I’d felt the same way when my familiar landmarks hadn’t survived the decades.
“Here’s one,” she said, again pointing, “At le
ast these places are still on every other corner.”
We landed around the corner from the cafe. Stepping out of Tea’s stealth field made us seemingly appear out of nowhere, but there was nobody around to see us do it. The cafe occupied the corner of a building that had a stone above the middle doorway. Old-style script numbers carved into the stone read ‘1803’.
Marie looked up and smiled. “In America, that would be the address, not the year it was built.”
Inside the cafe we found heavy wooden furniture, but the sense of age didn’t match the rest of the place. Marie glanced around and chose a table. The older woman who came to take our order saw her briefly caress the back of a chair and told us the furniture had been made in 1924. That figured; a lot of it had probably become firewood in the hardest years after World War 1.
As the woman left with our orders, I asked, “Do you think it’s still here, ma’am?”
Marie gave me a mystified look and, “Do I think what’s still here?”
“Whatever you’d have left. And wherever you’d have left it.”
Meeting my gaze for a moment, Marie sat back in her chair and said, “The first place was the drop.”
“Always have a backup plan.”
“That doesn’t automatically mean this is it.”
I chuckled, “Of course not, milady. Who used to sit here with you?” Nodding toward the chair on her right, I added, “In that particular chair?”
Marie’s gaze hardened briefly, then she glanced at the chair and sighed, “Conrad Hecht. He was… a friend. I met him almost six months after Mike died. He wasn’t in the trade.”
Looking at me, she asked dryly, “Aren’t you going to ask if I was sure about that?”
Shaking my head, I said, “No. If you didn’t check him out, someone else did. So he was your excuse for coming here. You just incorporated a little business with pleasure.”
For a time, she just looked at me, then said, “You make it sound so cold. But yes, that’s essentially how it was.”
3rd World Products, Book 17 Page 21