The Red Eagles

by David Downing

  “Turn right at the end,” she said.

  “No, left.”

  “Just do it,” she said with an effort, “I’ll explain as we go.”

  He glanced at her, knew she wasn’t rambling, that there was something here he didn’t know about. He swung right onto the main road, waiting for the explanation.

  Amy tried to get her thoughts in order, to override the pain in her side. For one terrible moment she’d thought Paul was dead, had wanted to die herself, but he wasn’t, and she couldn’t, and it had to go on. Since climbing into her seat she’d thought more quickly than she could remember, and it seemed foolproof. If only she could be sure she was thinking straight.

  “You and Paul weren’t told the truth,” she said.

  “Go on.”

  “The crates were never meant to go back to the U-boat. Berlin wanted the U-boat, and you and Paul, to be unwitting decoys. You were meant to be caught, and the U-boat sunk. You see, the crates contain only enough material for two atomic bombs at most, which is almost useless to the military. We’d need dozens of bombs to turn the Allies back. So it had to look as though this uranium never reached Germany, that the eventual German bombs were made from German-produced material …”

  “But they’d never find the crates.”

  “They’ll find one identical empty crate on the beach at Ossabaw Island. Smith left it there when he picked you up.”

  “Wonderful,” he said bitterly. “And the U-boat?”

  “A telephone call to the local FBI. The U.S. Navy will sink it, and they’ll assume the rest of the crates have gone down with it. Even if it escapes, there’ll be no one looking for us.”

  He sighed. “Makes sense, as Paul would say. Just where are we going?”

  “South. Mobile, than a boat to Cuba, then a Swedish freighter to Gothenburg.”

  “We’re coming into a town,” he said, his mind whirring at what Amy had told him.

  “Huntsville. Go left at the … Farley road, I’ll tell you when.”

  The streets were empty. As they passed the station Amy could see lights but no sign of activity. The train was now half an hour late; soon someone would be picking up the telephone to find out that the lines east were dead. Then the police would be called, then a search back up the line, then …

  “Turn here,” she said. They passed an empty police car parked by a house whose lights still shone in the upstairs windows. Soon they were back in open country, a large lake to the right, a line of low hills to the left, the road pointing straight and south.

  “How far to the coast?” he asked.

  “About four hundred miles, but we didn’t plan to do it in one go. The idea was – is – to spend the daylight hours in the Talladega Forest, which is about halfway. We should be there by dawn.”

  “And by the time we leave for Cuba, the U-boat will have been sighted by your conscientious citizen.”

  “That’s right.”

  He admired her for not expressing any contrition. “How’s your side?” he asked.

  “The bleeding’s stopped, I think.”

  “Give me the map,” he said, “and try and get some sleep.”

  She passed it over and leaned back in the seat, a faint smile on her lips.

  Ten

  The road unfolded before Gerd Breitner, an endless pool of lighted asphalt slipping under the camper’s wheels. It was the first time in many weeks that he’d felt alone, the first time since that afternoon he’d spent mourning – yes, that was the word – mourning Johanna on that fence outside Beresino. And for some reason he felt strangely at peace with the world. Happy just to be alive, perhaps, but he thought it was more than that. The boy’s face, the death grin. It had ended in that moment, he realized. The war was over for him.

  He was thirty-five years old, and he’d seen a lot of men die younger. He’d loved and been loved, always had friends. He’d seen four continents. And here he was, driving down a foreign highway on a moonlit night, a lovely woman asleep beside him, two wounded comrades in the back. Who could ask for more?

  He grinned and lit another cigarette. Paul would ask for more. They were so alike in some ways, yet deep down they were so different. Yin and yang, the Buddhists called it. Paul would always look back, regretting, or at least reexamining his choices, imagining that things could have been different. It might be illusion, but it gave him his strength, that crazy refusal to bow down before what others considered inevitable. Paul didn’t believe in fate, it was as simple as that. For Paul there would always be choice, and so there could never be total satisfaction – the future would always be open, uncertain.

  Gerd had no regrets. Sadnesses, yes, but the good had gone with the bad. Johanna and little Paul were dead, and so were those Russians in the little village outside Vitebsk. It was funny how the two always went together in his mind, as if the one had been a punishment for the other. Perhaps it had. They’d gone mad that day with blood lust – three years ago now, though sometimes it seemed like a century, sometimes like yesterday. The war had done away with coherent time, broken it up and thrown it together. It was all part of the same madness.

  He remembered the conversation with the Arab in that room in Tobruk. A sufi, that’s what the man had said he was, some kind of holy man. They’d talked for hours in broken English, but all he could remember was the one proverb: People fall in love with each other because of what time has made of them both; tribes fall in madness with a moment, because of what time has made of them. He and Johanna. Germany and the twentieth century.

  Gerd thought about what the woman had told him. They should have expected the deception, or something like it. It made perfect sense, provided you didn’t mind sacrificing a U-boat full of boys and a couple of soldiers. And who would? The Russians, the British, all of them would have accepted the same logic without batting an eye. If you were prepared to kill thirty million people, what difference did a few more make?

  The camper rolled on, climbing and descending ridge after ridge, swooping across fast-running streams that glittered in the moonlight, tunneling through pine forests, rumbling through one-street towns where no lights shone. It was in one of these that the front tire went flat, jerking Gerd from his reverie and slewing the vehicle across the street.

  Amy woke with a start and gingerly climbed down from the cab. Gerd was already unbolting the spare tire from the chassis, letting out a long and imaginative string of German profanities. She looked up and down the street, lit only by the now-sinking moon, which threw shadows across the silver-gray surface. No lights had gone on in the houses.

  “How long?” she asked.

  “About twenty minutes.”

  As he answered they both heard footsteps, way down the street but coming in their direction. Two people, she thought. He put a finger to his lips and gestured her back into the camper, but before she had moved more than a few paces, the footsteps stopped. They heard a door close, distant voices, saw a faint glow that indicated a light had been turned on.

  “Is there any way I can help speed it up?” she asked.

  “No.”

  She leaned against the hood, listening for any further activity while he finished taking off the punctured tire. The glow down the street seemed to be brightening as the moon shadows lengthened, then suddenly it blazed and a door slammed and there was laughter. More doors, car doors this time, and then two headlights were shining straight at them, illuminating the whole street. The car, a convertible, rolled toward them and stopped alongside the camper, its headlights now pointing away, down the street.

  “Trouble, folks?” the man sitting next to the driver asked.

  “Just a flat,” Gerd replied.

  “You folks from up North?”

  “Yep. Just tourin’. Saved up our coupons a year for this trip.”

  At that moment a flashlight beam stabbed out of the convertible’s rear seat, flooding Gerd and the camper cab with light.

  “Turn that off, Jesse,” the man said. “Sorry …�
�� he started to say, but the driver was whispering something to him, and suddenly he was out of the car, a rifle in his hand, the glint of a badge on his shirt.

  “Put your hands in the air, mister,” he told Gerd. “And you, too, ma’am.”

  The one called Jesse and the driver were both out of the car now, and they both had rifles too. “Cover them, Jake,” the man with the badge said, reaching into the cab and unslinging the tommy gun from its place on the back of the driver’s seat.

  “Duane, the woman’s bleeding,” Jake said, excitement in his voice.

  “Make sure you don’t get any on you,” the sheriff said, moving around to the camper’s rear. They heard him open the doors. “There’s a dead man in here. No, he’s breathing. Sonovabitch.”

  Amy and Gerd exchanged glances. Where was the other man?

  The sheriff came back. “Jesse, bring that guy in the back down to the jail. Be careful with him.” Jesse giggled, and went to do it. “Okay, you two,” the sheriff said, “walk.”

  They walked, a hundreds yards or so, down to where they’d first seen the glow of light. “Blount County Sheriff’s Office, Locust Forks” it said above the door. The man called Jake opened the door, took off the “Gone Fishing” sign, and preceded them in. The sheriff brought up the rear and, still holding his gun on them, took two pairs of handcuffs from his desk drawer. He threw them to Jake.

  “Behind the back,” he said, watching while the cuffs were snapped on. He lit a cigarette and sat down behind his desk. “So what have we got here?” he asked dryly. “Bonnie and Clyde?”

  Amy examined the two men; it was the first chance she’d had to see their faces. The sheriff was a man in his forties, thickset with a round head and cropped blond hair. Jake was his opposite, wiry and dark with a lugubrious face.

  “What’s your name, lady?” the sheriff asked her.

  “Bonnie,” she said.

  He didn’t smile. “Bonnie,” he repeated softly. “Yeah.”

  The one called Jesse dragged Kuznetsky across the threshold and let him down, with surprising gentleness, on the wooden floor. “Duane, there’s two more machine guns in the back and some big crates with weird markings on them.”

  “Is there now? Take him through to the cells and then go get the guns.”

  Jesse turned to obey like an obedient dog. His face, Amy noticed, was too young for his body, much too young. There was something wrong with him.

  “Maybe I’d better look at those crates,” the sheriff mused. “Watch ’em, Jake.”

  “I wouldn’t open them,” Amy said as he headed for the door.

  He turned. “And why’s that, lady?”

  “It’s dangerous stuff.”

  “What is?”

  “It’s … a new type of explosive.”

  He walked back to his desk. “From where?”

  “Paradise,” Gerd said.

  “Shut up, Clyde.” He looked at them both, then ground out his cigarette in the brass ashtray and picked up the telephone. “C’mon, c’mon,” he muttered. “Mary Beth,” he said at last, “yeah I know what time it is. Business. Get me the state police in Huntsville.”

  He waited, staring at Amy. She stared back.

  The operator was talking. “It’s dead? Then try Birmingham,” he said. Cradling the receiver in his shoulder, he lit another cigarette. “It’s ringing,” he told Jake. “What the … there’s no lines out? Hey, Mary Beth, what’s going on?”

  He put the phone down, walked across to Amy. “There’s someone out there messin’ with us, Bonnie. Ain’t there?”

  She looked at the floor.

  He grabbed the front of her blouse and yanked her to her feet in one violent jerk. She felt a moment of nerve-tearing pain, then the warm wetness of blood flowing out of the reopened wound.

  “How many?” he was asking.

  Gerd leaped to his feet, but Jake prodded him hard in the stomach with a rifle barrel and sent him sprawling back across the bench.

  “Two,” she said.

  “You lying bitch,” he said, shoving her back onto the bench. “Jake, take him into the cells and stay with him. Jesse, take her upstairs.”

  “She’s bleeding, Jake.”

  “So what?”

  “Shall I clean her up?”

  “You behave yourself. Just make sure she doesn’t go anywhere.”

  “Where’ll you be, Duane?” Jake asked.

  “Right here, with a rifle pointed at the door. It’ll be light in a couple of hours, and then we’ll go out and get whoever it is.”

  Paul dropped from the telephone pole the last few feet to the grass, then sat on his haunches for a few moments, a shadow among shadows, trying to ignore the splitting pain in the back of his head. On the other side of the road the breeze rustled the pines, but the night was empty of any other sound.

  He’d had two pieces of luck: return to consciousness and the wirecutters still being in his pocket. And perhaps the location too. Locust Forks – population 896, according to the town sign – was only about half a mile from end to end and considerably less wide than it was long. He’d found no road entering the town from the east, and the hill he was now skirting seemed to rule out access from the west. But he had to make sure.

  He clambered down a bank, waded across a stagnant ditch and up the other side, walking into a barbed-wire fence at the top. He cut himself a hole to get through and removed a four-foot length just in case.

  The moon had almost set now, turning orange and bathing the buildings to his right in a ghostly luminescence. He trotted across the field, slipped, and fell headlong, catching the barbed wire against his thigh and burying his face in something that smelled like rotting cabbage. He lay there for a moment, silently laughing at himself. “Two eagles” Schellenberg had called them, and here was one of them tripping over vegetables in the dark.

  He moved on, crossing two more fields and cutting his way through two more fences before he reached his starting point at the town’s northern end. Just the one road, then. And they’d be doing no talking on the telephone. But there wasn’t that much of the night left, there were at least three of them, and they had the guns.

  He squatted down and cut the barbs off the last foot of each end of the wire, then twisted those ends into loops. It wasn’t very flexible, but it would have to do. He began edging his way down the street, keeping to the darker shadows of the western sidewalk.

  Jesse laid Amy out on the sheriff’s bed and disappeared. She heard running water through the adjoining door; presumably it was the sheriff’s kitchen. It was extremely hot, or had the wound made her feverish? She could feel the sweat pouring down her face.

  He came back with a bowl of hot water and what looked like a piece of bed sheeting, gently opened up her blouse, and carefully wiped away the blood from around the bullet gash. Then he just sat there, the bloodied sheet in his hand, staring at the space of bare flesh between her belt and her brassiere.

  “Thank you,” she said, trying to lift herself up, trying not to let fear creep into her voice.

  He helped her forward, and for a second she thought she’d misjudged him, but his hands wrestled with the hook on her brassiere. Successful, he pushed her back down, and like a little boy peeking under a stone, he eased the cups off her breasts with the palms of his hands. Looking into his eyes, she found an innocent evil that terrified her far more than any sign of lust.

  He didn’t touch her for a long time, just stared as if transfixed by her naked breasts, the droplets of sweat rolling down between them. Then he reached out a hand and stroked a nipple with the edge of a thumb. Not once did he look at her face. Leaning forward, he put his mouth around the other nipple, sucking gently, his eyes closed.

  She squirmed violently, felt the blood flow again.

  He let go, looking horrified, and held the sheeting to staunch the renewed flow and made a clucking sound in his throat.

  Paul stood on the side of the street opposite the jail, examining the lighted sheriff
’s office. The lights seemed to be on in every room, up and down, but in ten minutes he’d seen only one hint of movement, someone upstairs carrying a bowl. It didn’t look very inviting. Someone must have picked up the phone and put two and two together. They were waiting for him.

  He crossed the street in a wide semicircle, avoiding the patch of light thrown from the windows and open door, and worked his way around to the back of the building. The lights were on there, too, throwing the shadows of the window bars across the remains of an old tractor. The back door was locked.

  He made his way back down the side, but stopped when he heard Gerd whistling the first notes of “Lili Marlene,” which seemed to come from a point only feet away through the clapboard wall. The whistling was swiftly followed by a grunted “Shut up” and the sound of footsteps.

  “Keep the bastard quiet, Jake,” another voice said, this time from the right, toward the street.

  Which meant the third guy was probably upstairs, and probably with Amy. Stupid, Paul thought. They shouldn’t have separated themselves. He looked up, then remembered the rain barrel and pipe at the rear.

  Amy had never felt so much like screaming. If he’d said anything, just one word, it might have been bearable, but the silence, the look of schoolboy curiosity on the middle-aged face, even his concern over her wound …

  He unbuckled her belt, breathing with little gasps, a small trace of spittle forming at the corner of his mouth.

  “If you take off the handcuffs, I could help,” she said, fighting to keep her voice steady.

  He didn’t even seem to hear. She felt him tugging at her skirt, pulling it below her knees, felt a drop of moisture fall on her bare thigh. He was dribbling uncontrollably, a glistening of tears in his eyes.

  She closed hers, heard an inhuman gurgle, and almost fainted. But suddenly the hands disappeared, his head jerked back violently, blood spurting as Paul wrenched the barbed wire tight across his throat. It seemed to go on silently forever, then he let the body down onto the bed and lifted her up, and she sobbed into his shoulder. “Paul, Paul …”