Battle Cry

by Don Pendleton

  “You’re onto that, eh? Well, you can go feck—”

  The Parabellum slug ripped into Wallace’s leg below his left knee and dropped him, with a cry of pain that echoed through the park. Bolan stepped forward and planted his right foot against the gunman’s throat.

  “You might have a limp, now. Want to try a wheelchair like your buddy Dengler?”

  “Jaysus, man! If you know him, you’ve got it all worked out!”

  Frowning, Bolan commanded, “So confirm it for me, then.”

  “The feckin’ U-boat!” Wallace answered, nearly sobbing. “Somethin’ the old Kraut dreamed up with his Jerry pals a hundred years ago.”

  “A German submarine?” Beacher demanded, clearly skeptical. “In Loch Ness?”

  “Och, it’s open to the sea,” Wallace replied. “I need a medic now.”

  “We’re not done,” Bolan told him. “What was the U-boat supposed to do? Why does Macauley want it after all this time?”

  “Some of the folk up here weren’t all that keen for England in the war, ya know? Hell, they had a wanker lined up for the Crown in London, was the next thing to a Nazi but he met some Yank and tossed it in for her.”

  “So, Axis sympathizers,” Bolan said. “Why a sub? To pick somebody up?”

  Wallace giggled hysterically, shaking his head. “It weren’t a pickup. It were a delivery. Old Heinie pricks musta known they was bound to lose the war. They start unloadin’ all the shite they stole from Jews and all, layin’ it off with friends.”

  A treasure boat.

  “Something went wrong,” Bolan surmised.

  “And how. The damn thing sunk, whoever was expectin’ it took off or died, whatever, and it gets forgotten till old Jurgen comes around.”

  “So there’s a salvage operation under way,” Bolan said.

  “Starting up tonight. The laird’s got his own baby submarine there, in the boathouse.”

  Bolan glanced at Beacher. She nodded.

  “A submarine?” she asked.

  “Hell yes,” Wallace replied. “Surprised some yokel with it, just the other night, and had to give him the deep six.”

  “That raps it up,” Bolan said.

  “So you’ll get me to the medic, then?” Wallace asked, as he tried to discreetly reach inside his jacket for a hidden gun.

  But Bolan was too fast and he shot the terrorist between his eyes.

  “Well, he no longer needs a medic,” he said to Beacher.

  ANOTHER BUFFET LUNCH. Roast beef and venison, the normal offering of vegetables and salad, with free access to the bar. Whatever shortcomings their host might have, Fergus Gibson could not fault his chef.

  They’d spent an hour burying the ghillie where no one was likely to find him without methane probes and a fair idea of where to start looking. While his soldiers worked on that, Gibson had sent his number two to scout for any obvious malingerers in Fort Augustus, though he didn’t hope for much on that end. Wallace had been getting antsy, even snippish toward the laird, and sending him away to cool off for a while had been a bit of strategy.

  Wallace was missing lunch, but Gibson and the laird were missing his sarcastic comments, which was clearly for the best. It helped the food settle, while Gibson focused on the night ahead.

  He hated the submersible. It seated three inside a metal pod with barely room enough to move once everybody was aboard. After the hatches closed and were secured, air was generated by electrolysis, while a CO² scrubber removed gas from the air and pumped it overboard. The major drawback was reliance on a bank of batteries to run the little sub’s engine, lights, breathing apparatus and everything else.

  If the batteries died at great depth, so did all hands on board.

  Gibson wasn’t claustrophobic, but he didn’t fancy suffocating at six hundred feet with two companions whom he barely knew.

  Unfortunately, their intended prize had sunk beyond the reach of scuba divers, and they couldn’t advertise the operation with a deep-sea diving rig that virtually guaranteed a tourist audience on shore. The little sub, with its mechanical arms, was their only means of retrieving whatever the U-boat had carried to Scotland more than sixty years earlier.

  And Laird Macauley had handpicked Gibson to go along for the ride.

  So be it. As the leader of the Tartan Independence Front, it was correct and proper that he prove himself before receiving a share of the spoils. Gibson refused to think about the treasure’s source—whether he might find gold ripped from the mouths of murder victims, gems that had been family heirlooms, or works of art looted from museums and from private homes.

  The movement needed money to support its struggle.

  And where better to find treasure than a legendary dragon’s lair?

  Chapter 14

  Bolan drove southward again on the A82, retracing his earlier route from Fort Augustus to Fort William, past Loch Lochy to Loch Eil again. He took his time without deliberately dogging it. He might have made the trip in half an hour, with a lead foot, but he wasn’t needed back in Fort Augustus until dusk, still five hours ahead.

  And Beacher had her own chores to complete.

  The Underwater Centre at Fort William billed itself as the world’s leading trainer of commercial divers and handlers of remotely operated submersible vehicles. Bolan had no idea if that claim was true, but the facility was certainly impressive. In addition to diving classes and various high-tech courses, it offered accommodation for visiting divers, serviced diving equipment and booked diving vacations.

  More importantly for Bolan’s needs, it rented scuba gear.

  After showing his Matt Cooper ID, Visa card and current master diver’s certification, Bolan began collecting the gear he would need. He started with a dry suit, since the average water surface temperature at Loch Ness rarely topped a chilly fifty-four degrees that time of year. Though he didn’t plan on going deep—no more than thirty feet, if all went well—hypothermia would put a fatal crimp in his plans.

  Once he’d been fitted for the suit, Bolan proceeded with the other gear he needed: mask and swim fins, an underwater flashlight, a single diving cylinder with dual regulators to allow for failure underwater, a mandatory buoyancy compensator for safety’s sake and ditchable weights to offset the last item. Bolan paid cash for three days’ rental, left his Visa number as a hedge in case the gear wasn’t returned and lugged the outfit to his Camry in the center’s parking lot.

  Diving had been a part of Bolan’s early Special Forces training, mandatory to secure a Green Beret, although it wasn’t emphasized to the degree of Navy SEAL instruction. The course he’d passed included underwater demolition, pioneered in World War II for clearing hostile beaches and refined over the years to cover “clearance” work on sunken wrecks and other obstacles, along with sabotage of surface vehicles.

  Or submarines. Why not?

  Along the way, he’d practiced fighting underwater—barehanded, with knives, and whatever else came to hand as a weapon—but Bolan doubted that he’d need that particular skill at Fort Augustus. His goal was to disable Macauley’s private submarine, and maybe sink the DeepScan in the bargain. If he managed to accomplish that, no matter what might happen next, he would have stalled the laird’s treasure hunt and kept a hoard of loot from falling into terrorist hands.

  And if he had a chance to deal with Jurgen Dengler somewhere down the road, so much the better.

  When most people thought about the Holocaust these days, they naturally focused on the death camps. Millions slaughtered in the name of “racial purity” or worked to death in service of the so-called “master race.” Largely forgotten was the fact that Adolf Hitler and his inner circle were a gang of world-class racketeers who cynically embarked on wholesale looting of occupied Europe for personal profit.

&
nbsp; Behind the cockeyed ideals of Teutonic supremacy, closet occultism and ethnic cleansing, the old-school Nazis were murderous thieves. No one could say with any certainty how much they stole between 1933 and 1945, before the “Thousand-Year Reich” collapsed in bloody chaos, but Hermann Göring’s personal collection had included some two thousand pieces of art, three hundred priceless paintings among them. Hitler’s Austrian Führermuseum was a storehouse for plunder, while other caches were known to exist at Nazi headquarters in Munich and at the Musée du Jeu de Paume in Paris.

  Bottom line: an estimated twenty percent of all art in Europe was stolen by Nazis, along with incalculable wealth stripped from individual families. Sixty-six years and counting since Hitler’s suicide, more than one hundred thousand art objects were still missing.

  And if Bolan had his way, not one would go to fund the Tartan Independence Front.

  WITH COOPER off in the car, Beacher walked down to Loch Ness on her own. Out through the front door of the lodge, where the black Lab was still on station as a greeter, then across the parking lot and down the curving driveway to the two-lane highway at its end. Instead of turning to the right and hiking the half mile to Fort Augustus, she crossed there, turned left and walked against oncoming traffic for three hundred yards.

  Her destination was a turnout where a narrow loop of blacktop left the highway, dipping to the loch’s shore down below. There was a stingy parking area, a gravel beach with thistles sprouting at its limits and a pair of jetties used for launching small boats on the loch. She was below road level, the traffic hissing past above her head.

  Within the next half hour or so, a car would slow, pull off the road and dip downhill to park. Until that time, she was content to find a boulder and sit atop it, watching anglers on the loch and paddling ducks closer to shore. A hen passed by with half a dozen chicks in tow, ducking their heads from time to time, a quacking convoy dining on the smaller bounty of Loch Ness.

  The call she’d made had been a gamble. Least among the risks involved had been rejection of the plan she’d hatched with Cooper. A worse scenario had been her recall from the field to face a hearing for misconduct, with potential for indictment, trial, imprisonment. If someone higher on the bureaucratic food chain had decided it should play that way, there’d be no record of her orders to proceed with Cooper in Glasgow and beyond.

  But none of that had come to pass. The answer to her call had been affirmative—which might lead Beacher to the worst scenario of all. Say sudden death, for instance.

  Staring northward and across the loch, she pictured Macauley in his big house, huddled with surviving members of the TIF contingent and his ancient Nazi colleague. She supposed that Dengler would be listed as a technical adviser if their grim adventure was a movie production. As it stood, however, he was just a monster who had lived beyond his time.

  She heard a car slowing above her, followed by a rasp of tires on gravel as it coasted down to lochside. Beacher took her time retreating from the water’s edge. The driver stepped out of his Ford and stretched a bit. She didn’t recognize him, knew that it would be an unfamiliar face behind the wheel. A hurry call like hers allowed no time for sending anyone she knew from Glasgow, much less up from London.

  Never mind.

  She showed ID and he reciprocated. Arthur Bancroft, from Britain’s National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit—NETCU—a branch of the Association of Chief Police Officers tasked with tactical advice and guidance on suppression of what the government called “single-issue domestic extremism.” That description clearly fit the TIF, but this time Bancroft was providing more than guidance, more than tactical advice.

  “I normally don’t make deliveries like this,” he said.

  “These are abnormal times,” Beacher replied.

  “Apparently. You’ve handled this equipment in the past, I take it?”

  “Not a problem,” she assured him.

  “Right, then.”

  Opening the back door on the driver’s side, Bancroft removed a gym bag, frowning as he passed it to Beacher. She pegged its weight somewhere in the vicinity of twenty pounds.

  “If there’s nothing else you need…?”

  “Just you forgetting you were ever here,” she said.

  “My specialty,” Bancroft replied. “Good luck to you.”

  She stood and watched the Ford roll out and back onto the highway, headed north toward Inverness. When it was gone, Beacher took one last look across the loch, then started back to the hotel.

  BOLAN WAS TIRED of waiting, but he needed daylight to retreat before he launched his next move against Alastair Macauley and his cronies of the TIF. Accordingly, he’d stopped with Beacher at a scenic spot most tourists overlooked: a waterfall that plunged 140 feet into the River Foyers, running a hydroelectric plan that fed Scotland’s national grid.

  Beacher ignored the scenery and asked him, “Are you sure about this, then?”

  “I’m sure,” Bolan replied.

  At the hotel, he’d shown Beacher the scuba gear, explaining how it worked, the double regulator’s fail-safe mechanism, but she hadn’t been appeased. With only three-quarters of an hour left until he went into the water, she renewed her personal objections.

  “We can rent a boat,” she said. “Go past and wreck his little navy from the surface.”

  “Not with the equipment that we have,” Bolan said. “My rifle and grenades might do some damage to the DeepScan, but I likely couldn’t sink it. And there’d be no way of knowing if we even hit the sub, inside the boathouse.”

  “Can’t you get some rockets, then?” she challenged him. “Something to do the job without you swimming underwater, in the dark, around Loch Ness?”

  “You got the limpet mines,” Bolan reminded her. He’d checked and armed them at the lodge. “And I have a light.”

  Which would be used discreetly, to avoid alerting any watchers on the shore.

  “I just don’t like this,” Beacher said.

  He smiled. “Look, if the monster’s got you worried—”

  “No, dammit! Macauley has me worried. And his playmates. If they’re on the verge of bringing up this treasure, don’t you think they’ll be on guard?”

  “I doubt that they’ll consider anyone approaching from the loch, submerged,” Bolan replied. “And if they do…”

  He’d double bagged the Spectre SMG in plastic, sealed with duct tape. With its loaded magazine and sound suppressor attached, it added nine pounds to his total weight, which Bolan counted as a benefit for traveling submerged. He still had thirty feet selected as his ideal depth and planned to let the east shore of the loch guide him as he swam southward, from the outlet of the River Foyers to Macauley’s dock and boathouse, something like a quarter mile below.

  Easy enough. Unless an unexpected current sucked him out into the loch and took him deeper than his gear and lungs could handle. Or unless Macauley’s lookouts saw him coming and decided they could risk a fusillade of shots to sink him.

  And if he was eaten by a monster, who would ever know?

  “What’s funny?” Beacher asked him.

  Hardly conscious that he had been smiling, Bolan answered, “Nothing. I enjoy the peace and quiet here, is all.”

  “So let’s stay here,” she said. “Forget about this frogman scheme and find another way to stop Macauley.”

  “Taking out the DeepScan and the sub won’t stop Macauley,” Bolan said. “It’s just a means to slow him. I’ll stop him afterward.”

  “You mean we will,” she said.

  “If you’re still with me,” Bolan countered.

  “Jesus, you’re a stubborn bugger,” Beacher said. “All right, let’s go and drop you in the loch, shall we? It’s almost time.”

  THE CHAPEL WAS a small but solemn place, devoted t
o the Church of Scotland. Alastair Macauley’s great-grandfather had constructed it in 1865, three-quarters of a century before the British Parliament in London recognized the Church of Scotland’s full independence from the Church of England.

  One more bloody insult: John Bull telling Scots how they should worship, even as he stole their land and livelihood, defiled their daughters under Jus primae noctis, and hanged their sons for treason if they dared resist.

  It pained him that the Brits would never truly suffer for their crimes, but with the newfound wealth that waited for him in the loch, Macauley could finance a grim war of attrition that would make them pay in blood, until they squealed for mercy.

  “And you’re sure about the contents of the submarine?” he asked.

  “Ja, ja. Unless your dragon of the lake has stolen it,” Dengler replied. “Twelve hundred kilograms of gold, five hundred kilograms of cut diamonds, plus assorted other gems.”

  The gold alone, at that morning’s price in London, exceeded thirty-five-and-a-half million pounds. The cache of diamonds, while smaller and subject to flexible pricing, was vastly more valuable—somewhere in the neighborhood of four billion pounds.

  A king’s ransom, and then some.

  King Alastair the First?

  Macauley had no such royal aspirations, but he would gladly accept nomination as his homeland’s first prime minister. And if Macauley’s people deemed that he should rule for life, how could he refuse them? He would be benevolent, of course. Attentive to the needs of every Scot and zealous in defending Scotland’s reputation. And if the Brits wanted oil and natural gas to keep flowing from the drilling rigs in Scottish waters, they could damned well raise the ante.

  With a nice percentage for the laird.

  Why shouldn’t a patriot benefit from his sacrifice for the good of his nation?