Return from the Inferno

by Maloney, Mack;

  Raising the turret lids against the blowing snow, the pair of vehicle commanders emerged halfway out of the vehicles and compared map coordinates.

  “We have another ten kilometers before us,” one officer yelled over the howling wind to the other. “And that’s just to reach the bottom road.”

  “With this snow, it might take us two hours or more,” the second officer shouted back. “And we are already hours behind schedule.”

  Both men turned and for a moment studied their intended destination, the snow-enshrouded eighty-seven-hundred-foot mountain that lay some fifteen miles away. Barely visible through the storm, it looked treacherous. Foreboding. Ghostly.

  “We must press on,” the first NS officer insisted. “We must at least reach the bottom road.”

  “Agreed,” the second officer called back.

  With that, they both climbed back down into their vehicles, locking their turret lids as they did so. Then, with a puff of smoke and a roar of engine noise, the armored cars lurched forward and continued their odd journey.

  Their task was more then just a routine scouting mission. This desolate, rugged, mountainous stretch of Colorado was close to a very important boundary. For it was near here that a line began which split the American continent in two for the powers of the Second Axis.

  Per their nefarious pre-invasion agreement, everything east of these mountains belonged to the Fourth Reich forces. Everything west provided the spoils for the Asian forces. It was hardly a fifty-fifty split. More than sixty-five percent of the American landmass was under Fourth Reich control. But this was not surprising. The Fourth Reich forces had spearheaded roughly two thirds of the invasion effort, not to mention its engineering of the successful pre-invasion feint by the Horse forces and the acquisition of the nuclear-armed Fire Bats submarines.

  So the remaining third of the continent was actually a generous portion for the Asian Forces. In fact, many in the high command of the Fourth Reich considered it too generous. Though they would say so only under their breath or in the company of the most trustworthy compatriots.

  That was a battle to be fought at another time.

  The mountain before the NS troops was one of the highest sentinels of this border. And though the Asian forces had not yet reached the territories beyond the dividing boundary, they were certainly theirs for the taking.

  That the new name of the mountain was Loki did not sit well with the highly superstitious Fourth Reich soldiers. In the old Norse myths, Loki was a trickster god, and the series of brutal summer snowstorms that had been blanketing the region for the past few weeks seemed to indicate that he was in high form. Just about anything could happen if one fell under Loki’s spell. To this end, both officers, as well as their separate crews of three, were carrying a small twig of mistletoe in their uniform pocket. The famous kissing plant was also rumored to carry powers strong enough to pacify Loki’s supernatural mischief.

  The officers knew they might need it. A similar two-vehicle patrol had been dispatched to the area the previous week with orders to survey the top of the mountain as a possible site for one of the enormous Schrecklichkeit Kanones, the “frightfulness cannon.” This patrol had reached the top of the mountain, and per its orders, reported back to the Fourth Reich forward base inside the old city of Denver, some thirty miles to the southeast. Then they vanished. All attempts to contact the two armored cars were unsuccessful. An aerial re-con of the area around Loki also turned up nothing. It was as if the men and their vehicle had simply disappeared.

  The two cars of this latest patrol were sent out to look for their lost comrades.

  They knew that the missing patrol reached the summit of Loki using a rough but usable supply road that had been built years before. Their last report was made from the peak near the abandoned ski lodge which guarded the top. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary during this last radio transmission, though the reporting officer did mention that several of the troopers thought they’d heard the sounds of machinery churning away somewhere in the distance. Contact was broken soon after that and the patrol was never heard from again.

  The search patrol had no idea what awaited them atop Loki. The very least they could expect was to find the missing armored cars, their engines empty of fuel, their crews frozen to death. Or perhaps the patrol became separated and spent valuable time and fuel looking for one another. There was even a remote possibility that the lost patrol might have encountered a hostile force. Scattered bands of United American guerrillas operated in the general area, plus Free Canadian Special Forces units had been known to sneak across the border and travel undercover for days just to launch lightning raids against either Fourth Reich or Asian installations. These symbolic actions were designed to inform the Second Axis that they would always have an angry neighbor to their north.

  Then there was always the possibility that the missing soldiers had fallen prey to the mean-spirited Loki. According to his myth, the gods once punished Loki by binding him with the entrails of his own son. This did not bestow an aura of benevolence upon the god. Quite the opposite. It made him even more ruthless. His victims had been paying for the ghastly bondage ever since.

  The search patrol reached the bottom road of the mountain two and a half hours later.

  The commanders conferred again and it was decided that with barely an hour of daylight left, they should attempt to gain the summit as quickly as possible. This would mean lightening their cars as much as possible to make the trek up the mountain easier and faster. They ordered their crews to off-load any weighty, unneeded items—food packs, spare radios, half their ammunition, and any equipment that was redundant between the two vehicles.

  When this was done, they restarted their engines and began the long climb up.

  The road was potholed and dangerously narrow in some places. But thanks to the velocity of the storm which tended to deposit most of its precipitation in huge drifts parallel to the roadway, it was barely covered with snow. Still the journey up the mountain was as treacherous as it was slippery. The heavy tires of the VBL armored cars were just not made for climbing such an icy surface.

  In the end, the cold, cautious climb would take nearly three hours.

  The storm had subsided somewhat when the two cars reached the top of Loki.

  The place looked like something out of a fantasy book. Everything at the summit—the old ski lodge, the rusting remains of the ski lift machinery, the rows of power poles, the strings of snow fences—was encased in a thick covering of ice. The roadway itself, now leveled out and straight at the summit, was actually underneath a long ribbon of ice. This forced both car commanders to stop, and order two crewmen to get out and let air out of their patrol car’s rear tires, a somewhat desperate attempt to get more traction from the power wheels.

  After much skidding and sliding, the armored cars reached the entranceway to the lodge and turned up toward the huge, dilapidated building.

  They were amazed to see a light burning inside.

  Deploying about fifty feet from the entrance, the commanders left one man apiece with the patrol cars, and then ventured up to the front door of the place. They hardly had the propensity to knock. Instead they violently kicked down the large oak door.

  They found themselves stumbling into a main hallway which was set up as a workshop. Carved wooden figures—toys, statues, puppets—were hanging everywhere. Two large logs were burning away in a fireplace at the end of the hall. The smell of sawdust and burnt wood was in the air.

  And sitting before a work table not too far from the roaring fire was a man.

  He looked elderly, and was portly, balding, and sporting a great white beard. He was dressed all in red, except for black boots and a short, green work apron. A long cornpipe was stuck between his teeth, a thin wisp of smoke escaping from its bowl.

  The man barely looked up as the soldiers burst in.

  “More visitors?” he chuckled, his substantial belly jiggling as he did so.

  “W
hat nonsense is this?!” one of the NS officers demanded. “Who are you and what are you doing up here?”

  “I live here,” the old man replied innocently, getting up from his workbench and carefully approaching the heavily armed troops. “I’ve lived up here for years.”

  “Do you realize that you are in violation of the rules as set down by the military commander of this territory?” the officer asked harshly. “Do you realize we could shoot you right now?”

  “That’s what the other soldiers told me,” the old man replied evenly.

  “You saw the others?” the first officer asked, taking two belligerent steps toward the man. “When?”

  “A week ago,” the man replied, his voice soft and cheery despite the circumstances. “I fed them. They stayed with me for hours. We got along wonderfully.”

  “Where are they now, old man?” the second officer demanded.

  The man in red just shrugged. “They left,” he said. “They told me they had to return to their base. But they promised to come back. I thought you were them at first.”

  The two officers were infuriated that the man would talk to them with so little respect. For the next five minutes they barraged him with questions pertaining to the missing patrol, sometimes screaming at him from less than a foot away. But through it all, the man in red never lost his composure. He simply repeated over and over that the patrol had come to the lodge, had questioned him, had taken a meal with him and then left on apparently friendly terms.

  At the end of the badgering session, the officers could only glare at the man and then at each other. Neither knew what to do.

  “Please, gentlemen,” the man told them. “Come in and sit down. I have stew. I have hot coffee. Surely you can abide my hospitality.”

  “Shut up!” the first officer bellowed at the man. “We don’t need your hospitality. We will take what we want without it.”

  With a single movement of his hand, he ordered his troopers into the area near the fire where they could get warm. The second officer returned to the front door and called for the two soldiers watching the cars to come inside. Soon all eight soldiers were gathered near the fireplace, warming their cold and tired bones.

  “We must arrest this man and bring him with us,” the first NS officer told the second.

  “But how?” the second officer replied. “We cannot fit him into either car. Not down the mountain. Not for the long ride back.”

  “That’s exactly what the others said,” the old man called across the hall to them. He was busily stirring a large pot of stew which was cooking over a smaller hearth fire. “I would have gone peacefully with them. I don’t want to be an outlaw. But there was no room.”

  “Why didn’t they shoot you then?” the first officer asked him suspiciously. “That is the only alternative …”

  The man with the white beard shuddered for a moment.

  “You can eat a hot meal first,” he said, his voice barely a whisper.

  Reluctantly, the two officers agreed to have a meal of stew and coffee brought on. They carefully inspected the well-stocked soup and had a lowest ranking man taste it before allowing the rest of the troop to dig in. The old man played the perfect host, refilling any wooden stew bowls that were in any danger of being emptied as well as keeping a top on each man’s coffee mug. He worked so hard he didn’t eat any of the meal himself. When the main meal was finished, he surprised them with several loaves of fresh, sugared bread and a jar of jam as dessert.

  The supper took an hour, followed by another thirty minutes of more benign questioning of the old man. But by this time the officers had convinced themselves that he knew nothing about their missing comrades. They were also reluctant to shoot him outright. They agreed instead to place him under house arrest with a promise that another patrol would return and bring him into custody.

  The troop made a call back to their forward base and received orders to recon the summit and then proceed back down the mountain. On their way out, the old man approached the officers with a tray containing eight small glasses.

  “Cherry brandy,” he explained. “It will help against the cold.”

  A curt nod from the officers allowed each man to swig his portion and the officers took theirs as well.

  Then with little more than a grunt, they left the lodge, rudely leaving the door open behind them. The old man used all his strength to force it closed against the strong winds.

  Then from a tiny, misted window he watched the two VBL armored cars roar to life and drive back down the lodge’s entranceway.

  The two armored cars circled the darkened ski area for the next 30 minutes looking for any sign of their missing comrades.

  But it proved to be a fruitless search, Eventually they found themselves coming up on the ski lodge again; this time approaching it from the south side via the carved out supply path. At the end of this path they turned onto a small ski road which would eventually lead them to the main road and back down the mountain.

  It was on this ski road that they found the missing patrol.

  The ice encased vehicles were right in the middle of the road, one in front of the other, almost as if they were intentionally parked there. The road was lined on both sides with two rows of pine trees, each one also surreally encased in ice. The small grove represented the only substantial number of fully grown trees at the summit of the mountain.

  The search cars pulled up next to the two vehicles, and their crews slowly emerged to study the situation. It took several minutes of hacking through the ice of the first vehicle before the soldiers were able to free the turret hatch. When they did, one of the two commanders crawled into the first frozen vehicle.

  The missing crew was still inside the car, all four of them at their posts. They were long dead, of course. Their hands frozen in midair, their faces stretched and white, their eyes wide open, their mouths freeze-dried into grotesque grins. Each one had a bullet in the head.

  “Ambushed …” he whispered, instantly knowing the ramifications of his theory.

  The NS officer scrambled up out of the scout car, unfastening his side arm as he did so. But it was much too late for him and his men.

  He saw the first muzzle flash come from the iced over tree directly above him, then another from the tree next to it. Suddenly the cold night air was thundering with the sound of gunfire, the loud reports echoing across the frozen mountain-top. Horrified, the NS officer realized at once that his patrol had fallen into the same trap as had the first two scout cars. Now they were also paying the ultimate price.

  He watched stunned as his men were chopped to pieces by the concentrated gunfire from the trees. A fusillade of bullets ripped across his chest. In his last moment of life he thought it peculiar that they felt so terribly cold.

  Another burst ripped across his neck, this one stinging hot. He immediately slumped over and felt the life ooze out of him.

  He managed to gasp out one last word: “Loki …” Then he fell forward, cracking his head on the vehicle turret and opening a wide bloody wound.

  It didn’t matter—he was already dead.

  The shooting stopped less than a minute later. Then one by one, men in black uniforms jumped down from the trees, crunching the ice encrusted snow below.

  “We’ve got them all,” one man said to the commander of the ambush team. “Just like last time.”

  Captain “Crunch” took the empty magazine from his M-16 and replaced it with another full one.

  “Yeah, but there will be more,” he said, surveying the top of the mountain which was now eerily silent. “We can be damn sure of that …”

  Fuhrerstadt

  The heavily armed NS sergeant quietly slipped inside the ornate bedroom and slowly closed the huge steel doors behind him.

  At the far end of the room, sitting in a shaft of sunlight, was the young girl in the white frilly dress. In front of her was a large easel and canvas. A tray containing dozens of oil paints and brushes was at her side as was a small of
ficial photograph of the assassinated First Governor of Bundeswehr Four.

  The NS man approached her slowly, bearing a small jar of paint thinner in hand.

  “You requested this, Miss?” he asked her in heavily accented English.

  She looked up at him for the first time, her eyes sad and teary, her young face seeming drawn and pale.

  “Thank you,” she replied softly, taking the jar from him and immediately dipping several of her brushes into it. “I’d run out.”

  The NS man shifted uneasily. His guard unit had been assigned to watch over the young girl right after the assassination of the First Governor. Unlike the priest who was imprisoned for complicity in the shooting of the high Fourth Reich official, the young girl had become a protected ward of the American Nazi government. On orders from the Amerikafuhrer himself, she’d been installed in one of the most luxurious top-floor suites inside the rambling Reichstag. She was watched over by no less than ten NS troopers at all times, plus a gaggle of nannies, including a nurse and a palmreader. She also had her own chef, her own butler, her own dresser and even a squad of “house mistresses” who bathed and oiled her every day.

  Yet it was clear that the young girl was not doing too well psychologically. Witnessing the assassination of the strange man who had quite literally saved her from a life of slavery and degradation had taken a quick and brutal toll. She barely spoke to anyone, and many of her meals went untouched. She never left her quarters, and refused most visitors, perhaps knowing that they were sent by the Amerikafuhrer’s staff people in an effort to lift her spirits.

  In fact, since the shooting, she had done little else but paint and stare out the window of her suite, as if these two things alone would somehow restore her to the normal life that she should be leading as a mere sixteen-year-old.

  The NS man could not help but glance at her most recent work. One quarter of her canvas was covered with dark blue, indicating a night scene was evolving. In mid center, the rudimentary lines of a snow-covered mountain were taking shape and light sketchings of buildings were emerging from the background. But all in all, even the luggish NS man knew the painting was still in its very beginning stages.