Pirate ah-3

by Ted Bell

  “Yeah, breathtaking up here, ain’t it?” Stoke said and filled his lungs with pure alpine air. He and Jet had just climbed up another steep rocky rise through the trees. He decided to stop and let her get her wind back. They were standing on an outcropping of rock overlooking something called the Obersalzburg.

  He was having the time of his life. Whole damn countryside was beautiful. Even the dirt. The ground, even up here at this elevation, was soft underfoot. Spongy, Stoke thought you’d call it. Light was filtering down through the tall trees onto a soft bed of pine needles and the air was cool and clean. He looked up. There were noisy black birds, jackdaws, riding the currents above the swaying treetops.

  Surprise, surprise. He liked Germany. It was pretty.

  What he’d seen of it on the way to Salzburg, anyway, whizzing by his window in the dark on the midnight train down from Berlin. Now, in the last couple of hours of climbing, he’d been seeing little white stone villages and green farmland spread out far below. Salzburg, where they’d spent last night, was some twenty klicks to the north. You could still see it in the clear distance. Beautiful. All around him, towering above the thick green forests, were the jagged slate-grey peaks of snow-capped ranges. He pulled his map out of his knapsack and identified them as the Untersberg and Waltzmann mountains. To the southwest, sparkling blue in the sun, was a pretty lake he’d like to see one day, the Konigsee.

  “Just smell that,” Stoke said. “Christmas.”

  “What the devil are you talking about, Stokely?”

  “Christmas trees? Am I right?”

  Jet rolled her eyes at him and walked off to stand by herself. She bent from the waist, putting her hands on her knees for support, and took deep breaths. Girl smoked way too much and she was a little out of shape. He’d have to work with her on that. Especially now that they were telling everybody in Germany that he was her personal trainer. It was a good cover story. Jet had thought of it. Told him how to act the role. One thing the girl could do was act. No, wait. He didn’t want to go there.

  In fact, Jet was one hell of an actress. And that, he had to admit, was the scariest part about this whole damn trip. Climbing mountains was easy. Figuring out whose side Jet was really on was tough. Just when you thought you had her pegged, wham. You’d see something in those eyes that didn’t seem right.

  Stoke, former SEAL and New York City cop, hadn’t done a whole lot of actual mountain climbing himself. But he had to say that after this morning’s experience he had a feeling he’d be pretty damn good at it. How hard could it be? He’d read a book, something about being up in thin air. Maybe thin up on Everest, but the air wasn’t all that thin right here in Obersalzburg, and they were plenty high up.

  “Look at that,” he said, looking up from his map to a huge snow-capped mountain rising in the distance above the treeline.

  “Look at what?” Jet said, lighting up.

  “Over there. That’s the Zugspitze, or however you say it.”

  “Zoog-spits.”

  “Right. Zugspitze is almost ten thousand feet above sea level. Tallest mountain in Germany. Right about there is where the Bavarian Mountains meet the Tyrolese Mountains. Hell, girl, let’s see a smile. We’re in Germany now. We’re almost there. It’s all downhill from here.”

  “Don’t talk about my life like that.”

  Girl was tired. Irritated. A little scared, even though she’d never admit it. Her father sounded like a pretty scary cat, all right. And now she’d crossed him, big time. Jet hadn’t wanted to leave her fancy suite at the Adlon Hotel in Berlin in the middle of the night and catch the train to Salzburg. Too bad. There was a chance they’d been made and Stoke had a lot of digging to do before he dealt with Baron von Draxis on a personal basis.

  What happened was, he’d seen the two Arnolds in the lobby of their hotel in Berlin. They had their backs to him, standing at the check-in talking to the receptionist, when he’d come back all sweaty from his evening run. He was on his way to the elevator when he spotted them. Kept his head down. Just kept walking and they hadn’t seen him. Maybe. Ah-nold and Ah-nold, he called them. The two blond goons from Valkyrie, who provided muscle for von Draxis.

  Still. Kind of odd, wasn’t it? The two of them checking into the most expensive hotel in Berlin. What was that all about?

  Stoke had a theory. He’d developed it in Vietnam in order to stay alive. Things that didn’t make sense at first always made perfect sense if you just stopped and thought about them a second. But sometimes you can’t stop, so you got to go with your instincts if you want to keep breathing.

  He went right to his room and got on the phone. First he called Jet’s suite, woke her up. Told her he was booking two seats on the midnight train to Salzburg. They had to leave the hotel now. By the service elevator. She wasn’t happy. Even though it was her idea that they should check out Schatzi’s secret Bavarian hideaway.

  He was learning about Jet. She wasn’t too big on hiking or mountain climbing or staying in dumpy little guesthouses like where they’d gone after arriving in Salzburg. Didn’t like her room or her bed. Didn’t like the mattress. Didn’t like the pillow. Didn’t like breakfast. Didn’t even seem to like the Christmas trees all that much. Probably didn’t even celebrate Christmas in China, come to think of it, so he’d give her a pass on that one.

  He handed her the canteen and she tilted it back, the muscles in her throat going up and down. Thirsty girl.

  Stoke pulled his black wool sweater over his head and tied the arms around his waist. It was getting a little warm up here as the sun rose over the Alps. They had been in the mountains for about six hours now. An hour before sunup, they’d slipped out of the small gasthaus deep in the woods above Salzburg. He felt great. He’d liked his bed and his pillow. Slept like a baby under the soft eiderdown thing they used instead of blankets. He’d knocked on Jet’s door at 4:00 A.M. and again at four-thirty. Give her credit; she was standing tall at five.

  Not happy, but awake and dressed.

  He figured his only real problem was the drowned guard on Valkyrie. But to be realistic about it, it wasn’t much of a problem. Nobody had seen Stoke aboard. Guy was taking a leak and fell overboard. Happened all the time. Biggest cause of death on boats was guys pissing over the side and falling overboard. He’d read that somewhere. So. Baron von Draxis probably wasn’t really expecting his former girlfriend and a giant black guy tracking his ass all over Germany. Still, seeing the two Arnolds in the Adlon lobby bugged him sufficiently for him to bust a move.

  He’d finally reached Alex on board the USS Lincoln. Hawke was in a bad mood, too. He’d been cooped up in some briefing for about twelve hours and not happy about it. The man still wasn’t all that crazy about the idea of Stoke bringing Jet to Germany. Stoke had pointed out that she could speak German and could be a big help digging around in Schatzi’s life. Plus, Stoke told Hawke, he thought she was in love with his ass.

  Hawke said, yeah, okay, but she was also a Chinese secret police captain who had at one time considered killing him. Stoke said he didn’t want to argue. He’d keep an eye on her. And anyway, Hawke sounded like he was a little preoccupied with getting his ass the hell off the Lincoln and trying to prevent World War III.

  Few things in particular Hawke told Stoke to dig into: One, what the hell was Tempelhof? The Chinese general who had recaptured Brock had said the word “Tempelhof” like it was some big deal. Hell, it was an old airport in Berlin, everybody knew that. But Brock had no idea what the hell Tempelhof had to do with all this. Find out. Two, were the bloody Germans involved with the French—and how? Third thing. What was the von Draxis connection exactly? The baron was certainly tied to both the frogs and the Chinese. But, how?

  Stoke said he was on the case and hung up.

  “How much further?” Jet asked, handing him back the canteen. Empty. She was hot and tired and thirsty but he was having a hard time feeling sorry for her. She knew what to expect on this trip.

  She’d said there were n
o roads to the place. Inaccessible by automobile. She said you had to take a helicopter to get there. Stoke had said choppers tended to attract unwanted attention. He said they’d have to walk. They could pretend to be hikers. She agreed. Now she obviously wasn’t so sure she should have. He told her the good news. According to what he saw on the map, they had only a mile to go. He said mostly downhill but that was a stretch.

  Half an hour later, sticky with perspiration, he was standing in a sunny clearing on the side of a thickly wooded hill. At the base of the postcard mountain stood a very large Hansel and Gretel–type house. A Tyrolean château, he supposed you called it, built up against the sheer face of the rock. A narrow winding path of crushed pebbles disappeared around one side of the house and into the woods to the east. On the west side, a grassy clearing big enough to accommodate a chopper. The grass had that fresh smell and look of having been cut recently. Maybe they kept it cut. Or maybe they were expecting company. The big, black Nazi helicopter, for instance.

  The first floor was white stucco with big red-shuttered windows. The top three floors were dark and wood-sided with balconies railed with white flower boxes on all four sides. Red geraniums filled the boxes on every floor. Stones had been laid on the wide overhanging roof. Hold the wooden shingles down in the high winds, Stoke guessed.

  “Is that it?” he asked Jet.

  “That’s it,” she said, holding on to his forearm while she bent and massaged her sore ankle.

  It certainly didn’t look like a billionaire’s mountain getaway to him. Looked like something Snow White might have lived in after she got married and had a bunch of rugrats. It looked like a fairy-tale house. But maybe that was the whole idea.

  “I thought you said he had a big schloss,” Stoke said, trying not to laugh.

  “I’ve tried to explain this. The castle is hidden inside the mountain behind the house,” Jet said. “This charming little guesthouse is just there for appearances. It’s a false front hiding the secret entrance.”

  “Pretty damn realistic, though,” Stoke said. “Now, I get it. Zum Wilden Hund. Did I say that right?”

  “No.”

  She pronounced it correctly but Stoke was damned if he could tell much difference from the way he said it and the way she said it. German was such a weird-ass language anyway. No matter what you said in German it sounded like you were going to rip someone’s throat out. Ich liebe dich. Translation: I love you. Sounds like: I’d like to eat your nuts for supper.

  “Let’s go say hello to Frau Wienerwald,” Stoke said. This was the woman who ran the baron’s phony gasthaus and from what he could gather from Jet, she was the kind of innkeeper who ate any small children who got lost in the woods.

  “Winterwald,” Jet said. “Trust me, she won’t think it’s funny if you get it wrong. She’s the official gatekeeper to Schatzi-World.”

  “This whole damn country feels like Disneyland,” Stoke said.

  “It isn’t,” Jet said.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  The Indian Ocean

  HAWKE HAD HAD HIS FIGHTER PILOT’S BREAKFAST—TWO ASPIRIN, a cup of coffee, and a puke—and headed for his airplane. Engines spooling up. Green jackets, purple jackets, yellow jackets, the color-coded crewmen ranging over the broad flight deck. The swarm of F/A18 Super Hornets, just arrived from the Nimitz, loaded and lethal, still, looking prematurely antiquated by the presence of the sleek, sculpted, single-seat F-35 in their hive.

  And, too, there were the young aviators gawking lovingly at his plane. Kids who never ever wanted to do a damn thing in this world but fly airplanes. See if they had the stuff, ace.

  Turn inside the other guy, turn your damn plane inside out if you had to, pulling nine or ten g’s and close as billy-be-damned to a suicidal red-out, all the blood rushing from your brain to your extremities. Get on some faceless boy’s six, unleash a Sidewinder and blow his punk ass out of the sky.

  Yeah. Rain death and destruction down on invisible strangers and then fly home to a warm bunk on a big boat with a few thousand other guys. Get drunk and fight with your fists and sleep it off in the brig. Shed friends, shed wives, shed family. Even shed a few tears maybe when it was all over, when even the great shooting match in the sky was finally over.

  All for what, hotshot? Hawke thought.

  Honor? Danger? Death? Glory?

  Who the hell knew?

  It was a stupid question, anyway, Hawke told himself as he reached forward to adjust his suddenly squawking radio. Because the only pilots who would ever really know the one, true answer were dead.

  “That really you down there, Hawkeye?” Alex heard a familiar voice say in his headset.

  “Roger, sir, it’s me all right,” Hawke replied, tightening his harness. Girding my loins, he thought, and smiled.

  “Well, I’ll be damned, it shore as hell is him! Look at this, boys, Captain Hawke’s flying himself a real bona-fide airplane this time!”

  It was the Lincoln’s new air boss. A crusty old bird named Joe Daly. Lately arrived from the Kennedy, where the American jocks called him the Iron Duke. Hawke recognized Daly’s droll twang from his own brief sojourn aboard the American carrier Big John. Alex had caused a bit of consternation on board when he’d landed his little seaplane on the carrier three years ago. This was at a critical moment during what he’d come to call his personal Cuban crisis. Irritation was more like it. For some reason, he and the Iron Duke just hadn’t clicked. Checking his fuel, he heard a crackle in his phones and the Duke was back.

  “Last time I saw you, Hawkeye, you were flying that little toy airplane of yours. Built it yourself out of tinfoil and rubber bands. Took you four or five passes to get that dang Tinkertoy down on my deck. What’d you call that thing?”

  “Kittyhawke, sir. Finest airplane in the sky.”

  “You’re bleeping nuts, boy. Get your ass off my deck.”

  Hawke laughed. He followed the taxi director’s hand signals and moved the plane the last few feet into the catapult shuttle of cat number 1. Flaps and slats to takeoff, he merely sat and watched. A green-jacketed crewman instantly knelt on the deck and attached the towbar connecting his nose gear to the shuttle in the slot. Get ready for the cat-shot.

  “It was actually only two passes, as I recall, sir,” Hawke said, craning his head around for one last look at the Lincoln. “Third time’s the charm. I see you got yourself a new boat.”

  “Yeah, well, the cream rises to the top in this man’s navy, Hawkeye. You sure you know how to fly that damn thing?”

  “We’ll find out soon enough, I guess.” Hawke noticed that the hand on the control stick was shaking a bit. Adrenaline. Had to be. C’mon, boys, hook me up. He wasn’t scared of the monster, he told himself. He was just excited about what a carrier launch would be like in this thing. Right. He was just shaking a little because he was ready to light the candle.

  C’mon, Momma, now light the candle ’cause you know your poppa is too hot to handle…

  “Okay, Hawkeye, you are number two for launch,” the Iron Duke said in his phones. “You, uh, you might want to let that Super Hornet there in front of you get airborne before you push any unfamiliar buttons. Sound good to you?”

  “Aye, aye, sir, sounds good to me,” Hawke said, grinning from ear to ear. Single seat. Single engine. Supersonic.

  Nowhere to go but up.

  But there was a problem with the aircraft in front of him. Hawke forced himself to sit tight in his cockpit and wait for the tugs to pull the disabled fighter off the cat and put him in its place. The process seemed to take from here to eternity.

  “Hawkeye, you are number one to go,” the Iron Duke said after a few long minutes.

  “Roger. Number one to go. Onward and upward, sir.”

  The jet blast deflector rose up from the deck behind him.

  His hand went to the throttles. Oil pressure and hydraulics okay. He waggled the stick and checked the movement of the horizontal stabilizers. He could see the “shooter,” the catapu
lt officer down in the little domed control pod that protruded just above the deck. He was getting the cat ready. Clouds of white steam were rising from the slot beneath Hawke’s airplane.

  The shooter was monitoring the pressure building up in the cat cylinders. The combined pent-up force of the steam behind the catapult shuttle and the enormous thrust of his Rolls-Royce–built engine was about to hurl him into the sky. It was definitely time to fly.

  Hawke wound it up, gave the salute, and waited for the launch.

  One heartbeat, two heartbeats later, he felt the thunk as the shooter eased the shuttle into position with the hydraulic piston. He shoved the throttle forward and the big engine came up nicely: rpm, exhaust gas temp, fuel flow. Looks good. The cat fired. The big plane shuddered like some living thing and started to go.

  Then…nothing.

  He was moving down the deck all right, but there was no acceleration. Christ! He pulled the power and stood on the brakes. Somehow, he had to shut it down. Where the hell was that bloody computer when he really needed it? It was supposed to anticipate his every need. Surely it must have seen this nightmare coming!

  Two seconds later, his heart pounding, he found himself teetering over the leading edge of the flight deck. The air boss was saying something very calm and soothing in his earphones but the big fighter was rocking right on the edge with every deep rolling wave, every sickening movement of the ship. He reached over to blow the canopy. He had to get the hell out, now, while he was still alive. Too late to eject? Maybe not, if—

  “Stay in the cockpit, Hawkeye,” the air boss said, as if reading his thoughts. “We are going to hitch you to a tug—we, uh—”

  “Uh, roger. She’s rocking and rolling pretty badly out here. You might want to…”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know…shit…I’ve got several crew trying to hold your tail down now, sir. We need to, uh, need to change your aircraft’s center of gravity until we’ve got you safely hooked up to the tug.”

  “Well, that’s a real good idea but—”