Crucified

by Michael Slade

  I keep the records from the gate. Instead of signing you in and sneaking you out later, I will be able to erase your very existence in the flurry of tonight's escape documents."

  "Where do you hide a tree? In a forest," said the airman.

  "Yes. And I'm the woodsman."

  "Where are we going?"

  "To hide you somewhere safe."

  "And after that?"

  His handler told him.

  A deathtrap, if ever there was one.

  CRUSADERS

  GERMANY, NOW

  Two days later

  The smell of smoke was in the autumn air, and for a second, as he gazed through binoculars at the two people having breakfast across the street from this hotel room, the Legionary had a vision of this medieval town back in the Inquisition. Nowhere had the witch hunt been as zealous as it was in Germany. Here, there were no limits on the use of torture, and denunciations spread like wildfire. "Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of a witches' coven?" In some districts of the Rhineland, no woman over forty remained alive. Inquisitors ran so short of wood that it became necessary to burn witches in groups. In this town, it was said, so many charred stakes stood in the central square that it looked like the Black Forest after a fire.

  The vision faded, but the phantom flames did not.

  The Legionary watched them lick around the image magnified by the binoculars.

  The man in the ring of fire was Wyatt Rook. The young priest recognized him from tabloid photos as the New York historian who'd stumbled on Balsdon's body. Tall, lean, and smartly dressed, Rook had been asked to investigate the fate of the Ace of Clubs. Would he be a help or a hindrance to the Legionary's crusade?

  The woman encircled by hellfire was Liz Hannah. The priest paid close attention to her. Unlike a pious female, who would pull herself in so as not to offend the religiosity of holy men, this wanton wore her hair in streaked abandon, and painted her face like a whore, and fingered a button of her blouse to toy with Rook, and dressed to show off instead of hide her shame.

  Was there any doubt?

  The Legionary of Christ shook his head.

  Beneath that godless exterior, she had a witch's tit.

  + + +

  "Why history? A good-looking bloke like you—why not the thrill of the courtroom?" Liz pressed Wyatt over a hearty breakfast the morning after they arrived in Germany.

  This town sat on foundations from the Stone Age.

  The castle at its heart dated back a thousand years. The higgledy-piggledy buildings were mostly brown stone, with small windows and red tiled roofs. The skyline boasted fairy-tale towers, steeples, and weathervanes. Down through the years, there'd been sieges and a battle with Napoleon. A sign by the door of their quaint, renovated hotel advised that Bach and Wagner had both slept there.

  "What did you say to lure me here?"

  "Many things."

  "One thing in particular as you pulled up your top."

  Liz rolled her eyes. "Men," she scolded. "It's so easy to pull your puppet strings."

  "Marionette," he corrected. "That's the proper term. A puppet is a glove-like figure manipulated by hand. A marionette is a puppet-like dummy manipulated from above by strings attached to its jointed limbs."

  Wyatt winked.

  "That's why I study history," he added.

  "To be a smarty-pants?"

  "No, to solve puzzles. Everything we say or do has a history.

  The best cops and lawyers are historians. The history of the killer and the victim leads to murder. The best doctors are historians. The history of a patient leads to illness. The best politicians are historians. The mess in Iraq dates back centuries.

  I could see it coming. The politician who didn't earn a C in history at Yale."

  '"How do you like them apples?' I think that was the come-on that lured you here."

  "Yes," said Wyatt. "So what does that mean? You chose an idiom with a history."

  Liz smirked. "Tell me."

  "In the First World War, a Stokes gun fired a trench mortar that looked like an apple on a stick. Troops called the mortar rounds toffee apples. If they took out an enemy tank, the men in the trenches would shout, 'How do you like them apples?'"

  "Now I grasp why you don't have a girlfriend, Mr. Rook.

  Dating a walking encyclopedia would drive me nuts."

  "You chose me."

  "Okay, here's a question: Supposedly, Bomber Command used the Ace of Clubs to insert a double agent into Hitler's Reich. I can see why our side kept that information from the history books. But after the Nazis lost the war, why was the German side not exposed?"

  "What are you willing to bet me for the answer?"

  "You are a wicked man."

  "Strip poker was your idea."

  "I'll bet my shoe."

  "I'm not a foot fetishist."

  "Let's put the shoe on the other foot, then. If you can't think up a valid answer to my question, you'll take me out to dinner dressed in drag."

  "What!"

  "You heard me, smarty-pants. Let's up the ante. Losing this hand will put you in touch with your feminine side."

  "No wonder we got expelled from Eden."

  "I'll even do your makeup."

  "I have a reputation to maintain," said Wyatt.

  "I'm not afraid to take my clothes off in public, but you're afraid to put them on?"

  "My fear is that you'll snap a picture and put it on the Internet."

  "Then you'd better not lose."

  "I don't suppose you'd settle for my pants instead?"

  "Nice try."

  "Some like it hot, huh?"

  "That's what my mother and her second-wave feminists don't grasp. This is what they spawned."

  "I like the second wave. Puzzle out the internal consistency, then you know how to win at their game."

  "I much prefer wild card poker."

  "So I see."

  "Playing with smart men who won't tie me down."

  "Touche."

  "Well? Are you chicken?"

  Liz was playing him like a fish. Not for nothing was she employed as a researcher for a TV network. In playing out the line, she let him run free, peppering her conversation with Americanisms picked up from lots of movies and life in a global village. To deliver the punch lines, she'd assume an American accent. To jerk on the line, she'd drop in something homegrown like "bloke," to let him know she knew exactly who she was. And while she was teasing him verbally, she used body language to keep him on her hook.

  Sex it up.

  That was her third-wave game.

  "In for a penny, in for a pound," he said, throwing back his best rendition of a British accent.

  Liz dug in her bag and withdrew a tube of lipstick. She set it up in a phallic manner between them on the table.

  "You got a purty mouth," she drawled, as if the line was strummed on a dueling banjo.

  "Trying to psych me out?"

  "Go on, sport. Play the ace of clubs."

  "Say I'm a strategist with Bomber Command. Churchill orders me to insert a secret agent into Germany in such a way that those plotting to overthrow Hitler can find him. Why use a bomber? Because I can choose where to insert him. Why use the Ace of Clubs? Because my secret agent is among its crewmen. If an RAF officer bails out where we know the Ace went down, he'll almost certainly end up a POW in Stalag Luft III."

  "My granddad was the only officer aboard. The rest of the airmen were sergeants."

  "If I'm a strategist with Bomber Command, I can create any cover story I want. That's how secret agents stay secret. I issue him a false ID and an officer's uniform to wear under his own.

  Once the traitors sneak him out of Stalag Luft III, they give him a German identity. The fake ID from me is shed like a snake's skin and can't be traced by Nazi spies in Britain to a real person."

  "How was he sprung from the camp?"

  "Say I'm a strategist with the Judas traitors. Those opposing Hitler were in the German military.
With almost ten thousand POWs from Bomber Command alone, how difficult would it be for a well-placed mole to lose track of a prisoner?

  Burn a piece of paper and— poof! —he's gone. He could vanish during a purge, when prisoners were being moved from one camp to another. Or he could vanish as a ghost, a POW who fakes an escape and hides in the camp, then escapes for real when the guards are off hunting for him."

  "Is that your theory?"

  Wyatt shook his head. "My bet is they used the Great Escape. Shortly after the Ace went down, seventy-six POWs broke out of Stalag Luft III. Hitler was enraged and ordered all be shot. The head of the Luftwaffe thought that would be a mistake. It would look like murder, and there could be reprisals against German POWs. Hitler compromised, and fifty were shot. All but three of the escapees were caught. And the man who decided who should live and who should die was Artur Nebe.

  "Nebe put each man's name and personal details on an index card. He shuffled through them and said, 'This one is very young. He can stay alive.' Or, 'This man has no children.

  He'll be one of them.' Those culled for death were shot in small groups in the woods along the roads back to the camp.

  "It turned out that Nebe was among the traitors plotting against Hitler. When the assassination failed, he and five thousand others were arrested. Though tortured for two months, he betrayed no one. He and the other leaders of the conspiracy were hanged by piano-wire nooses strung from meat hooks.

  The slow strangulations were filmed for Hitler to view later."

  "So you think Nebe let the Judas agent slip away?"

  Wyatt shrugged. "I'm saying there are many ways the agent could disappear. And if Judas and those advancing his plot got caught up in the executions . . ."

  "That would explain why the German side wasn't exposed after the war. Judas and his ilk were dead."

  Wyatt cocked his finger at Liz. "I win," he said. " You guessed the answer, so it must be logical."

  The tube of lipstick returned to her bag.

  "The next time we bet," Wyatt said, "let's go back to wager-ing for your clothes."

  "Want to up the ante again?" Liz asked.

  "How?"

  "Let's go for broke."

  She pretended to push her entire stash of poker chips to the center of the table.

  "Since you seem to work to incentive," she said, "I'll make you an all-or-nothing deal. If you can solve the puzzle of where my granddad is now, I'll fuck the socks off you, Mr. Rook."

  Well, there you have it.

  The thinking man's conundrum.

  A choice between divergent views of the world.

  On the one hand, there was original sin. Adam and Eve, the apple and the snake, in the Garden of Eden. Here was a modern Eve, tempting him with her apples, while he, thanks to concupiscence, was teetering on the brink. He knew he should wag his finger at her, refuse to be made a sex object (her mother would like that), and demand that their clergy get together to work out sinless Marquis of Queensberry rules before any rumpy-pumpy.

  The high road.

  On the other hand, there was human evolution. My, how Darwin had tossed a monkey wrench into righteousness. Ninety-nine percent of his genes were the same as those of a chimp.

  Most of his body language came from the R-complex—the old reptile brain—at the top of his spinal cord. Like a snake flicking its tongue. This sexy stuff originated in the limbic system—the irrational mammalian brain—lurking at the center of his noggin.

  Home of the four Fs: feeding, fighting, fleeing, and fucking. And the game-playing? That came from his cerebral cortex—the rational brain—the new kid on the block. All that was happening here was survival of the species, and what if he took the high road and then got hit by a bus?

  He'd never get to taste the apple.

  Tsk-tsk...

  "Fuck the socks off me, huh?" he said.

  "Don't tell me you know the origin of that idiom, too?"

  "I believe the expression is ' knock the socks off you.'

  It dates back to fisticuff days in the nineteenth century. That's boxing hyperbole for a knockdown fistfight so savage that the loser got knocked out of his socks as well as his shoes.

  "But, hey, let's not quibble. I much prefer a carrot to a stick."

  Wyatt held out his hand.

  "You're on, Ms. Hannah," he said.

  + + +

  The hotel room across the street was the Art Historian's.

  Growing weaker by the day, he was on a crusade as important as any undertaken by Christian knights to the Holy Land. If he didn't find his Holy Grail soon, leukemia would end his life. So while the Legionary spied on Liz and Wyatt, the dying man sat in the shadow of the priest, listening to Balsdon's screams and reading the sergeant's archive.

  "Jesus Christ!" the German exclaimed, tearing the headphones off his ears when he could no longer take the confession his agent had extracted with the Judas chair.

  The Legionary turned.

  "Don't swear," he said, glowering at the cringing man.

  "I can't hear what he's saying through the shrieks. Why's there an echo in the recording?"

  "I held the recorder at the end of a tube from an oxygen mask on his face."

  "Did he reveal anything new?"

  "No, just what's in his archive. He repeated the name of the Judas agent several times."

  "That's merely his suspicion. These papers contain no proof. Nor does the archive"—the Art Historian flicked a dis-missive hand at the other papers stolen by the Legionary—"of the crewman he suspected of betraying the Ace of Clubs"

  "Let's pray there's a clue in the bomber itself," said the young priest.

  "And use this fellow Rook."

  "Do you know him?"

  "No, but I just finished reading his books. He's a digger, and he's got an inquiring mind. In his search for Hitler's Judas, he might stumble across our Holy Grail."

  "Who was Hitler's Judas?" the Legionary asked.

  "I'll give you three clues, and you can puzzle it out. Play detective on the Internet.

  "Clue one: Cyrenaica.

  "Clue two: Blue Max.

  "Clue three: Wiistenfuchs."

  GRAVEDIGGERS

  War of the Worlds.

  Alien.

  The Thing.

  Standing on the rim of the pit above the Ace of Clubs, Wyatt felt as if he had wandered onto the set of one of those science fiction films in which a crashed UFO has cratered the ground.

  He hoped aliens would emerge from the wreckage.

  Nope.

  What impressed him first was the size of the unearthed bomber. Its wingspan was a hundred feet, its length seventy feet, and its height twenty feet or more. He'd once seen a photo of squadron crews fronting a similar plane. Wingtip to wingtip, it took more than thirty men to span a Halifax.

  Surprisingly, the aircraft was still intact. The Ace had belly-landed in a valley, skidding along this hollow flanked by trees.

  The force of the crash had destabilized one slope, causing a landslide to crumble down and bury the plane. With bombs dropping night and day, churned-up dirt was the rule, not the exception. If a plane falls in a forest and there's no one around to see it, does that imprint a memory?

  Evidently not.

  So here the Ace had languished for sixty-odd years, camouflaged by the neglect of East Germany, a Communist country virtually frozen in time at the end of Hitler's war.

  Only the fall of the Berlin Wall had lured development east, and now autobahns were reunifying its medieval cities with the west.

  Highways like this one.

  With the biggest pothole in the world.

  "This reminds me of Gulliver's Travels," said Sgt. Earl Swetman. With the recent death of Mick Balsdon on the Judas chair, Sweaty—that's how he'd introduced himself at the hotel—was the sole survivor of the Ace's crew. Once a redhead with a freckled face, he now sported white hair and liver spots.

  With a little imagination, this could have been Lilliput.
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  The gigantic plane did resemble a staked-down man—his head the cockpit, his crucified arms the wings, his belly button the mid-upper turret, his feet the double-finned tail. An anthill of little people swarmed around the castaway. By squinting his eyes, Wyatt could turn the salvage scene into Gulliver lashed to the beach in Jonathan Swift's novel.

  "I don't like that," said Sweaty.

  "What?" Wyatt asked.

  "The rear turret. The guns point back."

  "Shouldn't they?"

  "Not for bailing out. The quickest way for Ack-Ack to escape would have been to swivel his turret to point like that, open the doors behind his seat to grab his chute from just inside the fuselage of the plane, then rotate the turret to one side. With the guns pointing left or right, he could backflip out the opening and drop from the other side."

  "So if Ack-Ack did that, the guns should still be pointing sideways?"

  "Yeah, not to the rear. The way they're pointing means the turret doors open into the plane."

  "Could he escape that way?" asked Liz.

  "Sure. But he didn't. Before I bailed, I glanced along the fuselage tunnel. I saw the mid-upper gunner descend from his turret. I didn't see the rear gunner crawl forward."

  "He didn't get out?" said Wyatt.

  "That's my fear."

  Under a sodden gray sky threatening rain, these four who had met up in Germany circled the unearthed plane. The trek was slow, as Sweaty struggled with a gimpy leg. "I hurt it when I landed after bailing out," he explained. "By the time you reach my age, your chickens come home to roost. I'm booked for a hip replacement once I return to the States. But I couldn't miss this. I owe these guys. And I've got to know why we went down that night."

  Like Sweaty, their fourth member—about thirty, well dressed and obsessively groomed—was also from the States.

  He'd told the others at the meet-and-greet this morning at the hotel that he was Lenny Jones, Trent Jones's grandson.

  Trent Jones had been the mid-upper gunner.

  "Liz Hannah," Liz had said, offering her hand. "Granddaughter of Fletch Hannah, the Ace of Clubs' pilot."