by P. W. Child
Yet, she had never conclusively cheated on him. They were almost inseparable, Greta and her Heinz, most of the time. Whenever she had to spend time on business trips she usually asked him along without reservation and most of the time he complied with his darling spouse’s wishes. With her progressing age she seemed to have become more restless in her personal pursuits and quite recently she had Heinz worried with her insistences on keeping her latest ventures more…to herself. It sparked a small amount of jealousy in Heinz which he hid successfully under his stern appearance, through which his little self-doubt would ever elude his control.
Now he listened for anything that would point to infidelity. Words and phrases like ‘soon’, ‘where do we meet?’, ‘away’, ‘I miss you too’ swam through his conjured precognition, but his hearing pleasantly disappointed his expectations. Not one of those horrid things was said while she spoke, although she had begun to have her conversations a bit more under her breath than before. Heinz hated secrets. As a military man he knew secrets could be deadly, and so they were in relationships too. He stood nearer to the door to find out what she was discussing, but what he heard perplexed him.
“And when can we do the test?” she asked, standing as close to the open window of the hotel room as she could. Her index finger was tapping lightly against her chin as she spoke, a gesture Heinz had learned through the years, meant that Greta was dead serious – even obsessed.
“I can’t. I have to be at the agency on Tuesday, but I’ll see if I can make the trip while I am in the city,” she said softly, her big dark eyes staring ahead of her. Heinz perked up and sharpened his hearing for what was to come, but he would not get any more information from the call.
“I…I have to go, if you don’t mind,” she said suddenly, anxious to end the call, “I have another call coming through. Thank you. I’ll talk to you soon, alright? Goodbye. Bye.”
She pressed the button with uncharacteristically shaking hands. Her husband could not determine the reason for her haste, or her tremors, for that matter. From behind the slit of the bathroom door, which was slightly ajar, he watched her behavior. It bordered very mildly on panic and it frightened him. He had never seen her like this – off kilter, even so slightly.
“Yes,” she feigned her firmness for the next caller. He watched her face change into the mask she wore most of the time and it fascinated him how even her hands had no stopped shaking. Suddenly, at the change of topic and person on the phone, Greta went from a frail, anxious woman with rushed words to the smart, independent leader she was known as – but then…
“That is an inconvenience, Markus. I don’t tolerate unnecessary obstacles, as you know,” she snapped at someone on the other side of the line.
Heinz-Karl watched in unprecedented horror how his wife disappeared under the skin of the new face she pulled. Already caught off-guard by her aberrant fragility a few minutes before where she had been positively groveling, he was now taken aback a hundred fold more by the new side of Greta he had never seen before. Not in over two decades had he ever seen her eyes fall to shadow, her lips pursed in frustration and her elegant fingers turn to clutching talons around the phone as she sneered through her clenched teeth, “Get to him before he leaves Germany. And get the camera, Markus, or else you will be the one with the dogs at your heel.”
Heinz caught his breath. What was she talking about? More yet, who was she talking about and why did this person vex Greta so? He stood frozen in amazement as she flung her phone on the bed.
“Ready, love?” she called to him in her usual way, completely docile in tone.
“Uh, ja!” he jumped on his side of the door and put on his usual charade as well, prancing out in his evening wear with his well-known proud strut and impeccably combed hair.
They left the hotel room to leave for the fundraiser downstairs they were invited to attend. As Heinz clicked the door shut, he wondered as to the identity of the man Greta was after. And then he wondered what was on the man’s camera.
Cha pter 9 – Mueller’s Siege
The crisp air breathed a sigh of foreboding across the pointy tops of the tall grass and caused a sinister rustling amongst the branches of the surrounding trees. It hissed like an approaching serpent, bending the grassy shafts under the continuous gusts to form coppery yellow waves on an ocean of mountainous landscape. The hills and valleys rose and dipped like stormy waves while the wind rippled over the weeds, but other than this there was virtually no movement at all in the woodland country near Nohra. Herr Mueller and his sons sat down for dinner. It had been days since they chased off the intruders on his land, men who hunted another unarmed man shamelessly on his ground – a dishonorable act in his point of view. And Herr Mueller was a man of honor.
He did not use his land for farming, as it was purchased for by his grandfather in the mid-1900’s and as his father had raised him – no, Herr Mueller was an engineer of note, although he had never walked the halls of any institution or university for it. He possessed the natural skills for forging, constructing and planning extensive layouts of machinery and factories in general. This is where he found his purpose as a young man, close to his childhood home no less. It was convenient and Mueller knew he could utilize his land to give him the necessary privacy needed to pursue his hobbies of building, crafting and testing whatever amusing contraptions he would come up with.
In truth the man’s wheels never stopped turning, his head always swarmed with interesting theories and great ideas that he had just not had the time to test. His late teenage years and his twenties were spent working for the Nazis in the local factory where they produced mainly artillery, mines and grenades. Later they even assembled Panzers and other vehicles of war in the vast concrete basement of the factory, but the location of the structure was never plotted on any course, and never mentioned in any documentation. Herr Mueller soon made an impression as a designer of alternative weapons and furnace interiors which optimized the use of heating materials to produce more heat with less fuel.
After the Second World War was ended by a sudden collapse in the Nazi regime and its affiliate secret organizations, most of the high ranking officers who commanded the secret factory disappeared to escape prosecution. Electing to return later to the place only they knew of, they evaded the Allied Forces’ intelligence agencies successfully to hide their treasures, their knowledge and blue prints in the former factory that was now no more than some pallid decrepit ruin somewhere in the middle of nowhere. It was rumored that even some very valuable artifacts of questionable origin were stashed there too and Mueller figured it was this very hoard the Captain and his dogs were after. He had no time to effectively get to the bottom of it all from the stranger he and his sons had rescued from the hit team, because the man direly needed proper professional medical help and they could not waste any time before getting him to the hospital in Weimar.
Through the years, with the speculation of friends, the opinions of conspiracy theorists he had met at family gatherings in the 60’s and 70’s, and some rumors drifting through the mazes of local word of mouth, he had learned of the theory that the Prague Palace treasures had been moved to the very factory where he used to work at. With the mass red tape and post-War bureaucratic nightmares Germany had to deal with in the 1950’s, the borders of the land Herr Mueller had inherited from his father became a matter of speculation too.
It was not clear if the factory was in fact on his smallholding or just on the other side of the border with the next farm, which coincidentally belonged to one of the Nazi’s affiliates, the Black Sun Order. He never bothered to clarify this until now, since the factory and the land it was built upon had never been disputed until the new threat of mercenaries arose seemingly from nowhere. He hardly thought he would run into them on his land, let alone under the circumstances that he found Sam Cleave.
In the low light of the dining room the four men sat around the table. Among them it was silent for a change, because they all knew, without sp
eaking a word of it, that something was coming. Herr Mueller had trained his sons as best he could to shoot well and accurate since their boyhood but their level of expertise had only been tested by rabbit battues and the odd hunt for venison every now and then. They were hardly prepared for a run-in with professional hit men, deadly hunters who had years of training and solid body counts under their belts. It worried the old German engineer, but he dared not show any cracks in his tough foundations.
“Eat up, brothers,” the youngest cheered in his usual forward manner, “tonight we dine in hell.”
The young men who usually enjoyed a good movie line as much as the next gamer or graphic novel fan, did not respond this time. Normally there would be a resounding answer coming, but they just exchanged glances tonight.
“What?” he said with fork and knife pointed up in gesture, unperturbed by the lurking danger outside.
“Not funny. Not tonight,” his older brother said plainly and tore a chunk of pork from the bone. The youngest knew what the general consensus was, he just did not care.
“Listen, we can take them. This is our ground. They are intruders. Vati, why don’t you call the neighboring farmers to help us? Or the police?” he asked. His voice was the only one in the room amongst the clink of glass and the scraping of silver on porcelain.
“They don’t believe that we are in danger,” Herr Mueller explained quietly to his son. “These hunters, these merciless bastards who can attack one wounded man like a pack of wolves without honor – full of cowardice…they…” he hesitated, “…they don’t exist unless you see them with your own eyes.”
His sons stopped chewing at the sinister picture he painted of the men lying in wait outside on their very land, passed looks among them, and resumed their feasting. The mouthy young man looked at his father and answered boldly, “But they are not ghosts, Vati. They are ordinary mortal humans, not ghosts!” Herr Muller slammed on the table and silenced his son’s exclamations. With a warning leer he moved his face closer to his son’s and whispered loudly, “That is not what I meant. Don’t be an idiot, insinuating I believe superstitious nonsense, my boy. I meant that these men are here in secret and have shown themselves to no-one, because they are not supposed to be here. Our neighbors do not believe that there is a threat, because these men ‘don’t exist’, do you understand? And since they are right outside…” his voice became more furious behind the shiver of his full beard and lips crumbed with food, “…I suggest you keep your fucking voice down!”
Herr Mueller’s son recoiled at the urgency of his father’s raging imploring, but their eyes stayed locked with one another’s and he could see the fear peeking out from deep within the old man’s flaring blue gaze. That was enough to shut him up. If his fearless father held this shard of apprehension inside, then it was official – they were in deep shit without a shovel.
Feeling the fool, he looked at both of his brothers, their eyes glinting with a similar apprehension while they ate silently.
As expected a clanking sound came from further away outside their home yard fence. It resembled the sound of a gong without the resonance, a blunt iron clang. Herr Mueller straightened himself, listening. He knew what made that sound. The perimeter around his home was cleverly fenced by thin wiring to which he had fixed iron lids from old oil containers in his father’s shed. They were very hard to perceive, especially in darkness, because the engineer employed some cunning in his camouflage techniques and colored them with shades of the encompassing grassland to blend them into the terrain.
Now one of those had been triggered.
It gave him a good idea of how far the radius of their stalkers reached and how far the closest creeper was to the house. But what Herr Mueller did not count on was the cunning of his opponent, the Captain who led the deadly team. He was himself an old acquaintance of trickery and construction and he skillfully devised a plan reminiscent of the oldest trick in warfare – misdirection.
The men in the house eyed one another, knowing exactly which one to do what. Briskly they deployed, each shooting off into different parts of the house. Loading their rifles in solitude each, they waited. There was not a sound outside their windows, apart from the whisper of the tree tops and the occasional hooting of an owl. Inside the house it became as dead silent as it was in the dead of night when they slept, with only the antique Gustav Becker mantle clock persistently ticking away each second of anticipation. Had it not been for the situation they may have found the calm atmosphere quite soothing.
Suddenly there was a knock at the front door. Herr Mueller and his sons frowned, shifting uncomfortably at the odd development. It was a civilized, gentle knock, not too loud, but clear. Then a woman’s voice from the other side of the door. “Hello? Is anyone home? I need some help please.”
One of Herr Mueller’s sons crept from the dark corridor to join him at the fireplace where he was crouching behind an armchair. The old man could see his other sons peeking from the spare room opposite the living room, their perplexed faces only slightly illuminated by the orange light of the dining room lamp and the fire in the hearth. He motioned for them to remain quiet. Women were far from weak and innocent in Herr Mueller’s opinion, something he learned quickly during the war. They were often the best assassins because of the assumptions held about them, or spies, as spies they employed that innate guile they possessed over the misogynistic opinions men had about them.
The knock was louder and more urgent the second time round, yet her voice maintained its soft and helpless tone.
“Please, anyone! I cannot get back to my car. My tire blew out and I…I am stranded here because…’cause…” she whispered against the door, “…there are men patrolling or something and they won’t let me get back to my car.”
The Mueller sons exchanged glances again and then stared at their father for a decision, but he looked as dumbstruck as they were. He simply shook his head and shrugged, mouthing ‘what shall we do?’ But his sons shook their heads in the mute atmosphere of the house. They did not know if they could trust the woman. Like their father they had no illusions about stereotypes and knew that she could be one of them.
“What is she is not one of them, Vati?” the youngest son asked, hardly making a sound as he spoke.
“That is the predicament we find ourselves in,” Herr Mueller answered. “How can we turn away a lady in trouble? It is not how we do things.”
“Unless she is a lady with a gun,” the other brother commented nonchalantly while he looked at the drawn curtains. He contemplated stealing a look at the caller to see if she was genuine and his father nodded in agreement, gesturing for him to go ahead.
“Be careful,” Herr Mueller whispered.
The woman knocked again, her beats more solemn and lost now. Her sobs provoked their sympathy, but their lives were at stake if they opened that front door. On the other side of the door they could hear her sitting down on the step, crying softly so that the men in the field would not discover her. Obviously she thought nobody was home and knew that she was trapped on the porch of an empty house in a barren wilderness where bad men barricaded her way with no help in sight.
At the window Mueller’s eldest carefully pulled aside the far side of the curtain, barely perceptible with his skill. She was as timid as she sounded – her blond hair was unkempt in the cold wind, but she looked by no means less groomed. Guessing her at about thirty years of age, he saw that she was wearing new jeans and leather boots with a leather jacket and scarf, clutching her bag under her arm. She looked around frenziedly, wondering what was in the pitch dark just outside the reach of the farm house porch lights. The only other light was the bright pole mounted trooper Mueller kept above the lock-up shed where he parked his vehicles. On the step the woman tried her cell phone, but it kept beeping to announce the lack of signal there while she had no idea she was being watched.
Mueller’s son checked the area where the darkness consumed the spreading beam of the front yard. The others wa
ited with bated breath to see what the verdict was. He looked at his brothers and with a relieved expression he gave them a thumbs-up to open the door. As they rose to their feet and converged in the lobby the rain started pouring down outside, blown in sheets by the wind. The woman jumped up as the water started drenching her hair as Herr Mueller flung open the door and shouted for her to enter quickly.
“Oh thank god!” she cried, cowering in under the big old man’s arms to get into the shelter of the house. Her big blue eyes ran over the occupants in the immediate area and they stared back at the pretty woman with no small amount of attraction.
Herr Mueller closed the door and asked her what her name was. The small blond smiled shyly and checked her phone again, but it looked slightly different from the one she had been struggling with outside. She pressed the green button and exclaimed “Vier Männer!”
A split second later the window where the eldest Mueller son stood shattered, splattering his blood all over the drapes and lace curtains. Herr Mueller knew instantly that they had been betrayed and now the enemy knew their numbers. Without inhibition he landed a devastating left jab on the small woman’s jaw, dislocating it on impact. She fell limply against the mantle, the blood oozing from her nose and mouth. He shouted for his sons to drop to the floor for the ensuing firefight about to rip their home apart. But nothing happened. Instead they heard the kitchen window breaking. Herr Mueller cocked his gun and stole towards the kitchen, his two other sons in tail. The thunder showers outside clouded the all-important noises Herr Mueller needed to determine the position of his enemies and made it very difficult for him to hear from what direction they progressed.