by James Lepore
“What did you tell him?”
“To wait for word from us.”
“You better go back and tell him to deliver it now, to be served à la carte at tonight’s dinner.”
“What? Why?”
“A message came through from the Three Kings in Prague. Our boys are being dropped tonight in a field near the abbey.”
“Dropped? Where are they?”
“Somewhere north on the Niesse River. One of Moravec’s men found them. He made contact today, asked for a plane to pick them up and take them to Metten.”
“Do you have the coordinates?”
“Yes, a field about two miles east of the abbey. They’ll be dropping them tonight at ten or so. They have taken on some help, two men, two small men to be precise, plus Moravec’s man.”
“What were they doing up north.”
“I wasn’t told.”
“Do they know we’ll be meeting them?”
“Yes.”
“It’s settled,” Fleming said without hesitation, “the good padre must deliver the rat poison this afternoon. I’m sure they can use another sack of flour at the abbey. Billie, can you ride over to tell him? I’ve shown my face enough in Deggendorf. I’ll stay and help get ready.”
“Yes,” Billie said. “Of course. It will be a pleasure.”
“Rat poison,” Dowling said. “Appropriate. Will it kill them?”
“We told the chemist we needed to kill a dozen big rats,” Billie answered. “He said what he gave us would do the trick. It’s arsenic, basically, in a white powder. It causes massive internal hemorrhaging. They may not die immediately, but they will be on their backs very quickly, in agony.”
“Let’s kill them all,” said Hans Kaufman. “I can operate the radio.”
44.
Over The Niesse River Valley
October 9, 1938, 8:15 p.m.
“Why can’t we land in Metten?” Trygg Korumak asked.
“The pilot does not know the terrain,” Vaclav replied. “It will be dark. This plane needs a lot of runway. We have to jump.”
“How high are we?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Ten feet or ten thousand feet, I’m in the air, it doesn’t matter.”
“We’re at fifty-one hundred feet,” Vaclav replied, after glancing at the altimeter.
Korumak and Vaclav were in the stripped down Avia 158’s cockpit. Vaclav, in the co-pilot’s seat, had to twist around and look down at Korumak, who was sitting on the floor just behind him over the hinged sheet metal door that they would be jumping out of in two hours. The plane had no actual jump door as the pilot and co-pilot would jump from the cockpit doors if and when they had to eject. A mechanic had hurriedly jerry-rigged this door in the floor that afternoon. Vaclav and Korumak were shouting at each other over the roar of the plane’s twin engines. In the fuselage, sitting hands to knees, were the rest of the fellowship of six, as Tolkien had dubbed them. The pilot, grinning happily, was the same boy who had dropped Vaclav the night before. “My king,” he had said, as he greeted his countryman in the potato field he had landed in almost precisely on time at eight o’clock.
“We will jump together,” Vaclav said. “Just hug me tight and hold on. Think of me as a beautiful woman that you are madly in love with. When we hit the ground, it will be orgasmic.”
* * *
In the rear, there was no banter. Professor Tolkien and Professor Shroeder, their chutes strapped to their backs, sat next to each other, leaning against the hull. Directly across sat Gylfi and Dagna, their faces pasty white. They were afraid of heights and afraid of jumping, and the loud, bumpy ride did not help.
“Are you alright, Franz?” Tolkien asked.
“It’s almost done,” the German professor replied.
“The flight? No, we just took off.”
“Not the flight. Our journey.”
“The ritual?”
“Yes. I am being drawn like a magnet.”
“Tell me about it.”
“It’s simple. I pile kindling around the base of the Devil’s Oak. I light the kindling. I kneel at the black stone alter. I recite the Vedo until the tree is fully in flames. I throw the parchment and the amulet into the flames.”
“You will need help,” said Tolkien.
“I took the amulet and the parchment from Father Adelbert’s dead body. I unleashed this evil. I must destroy it.”
“Yes, but Professor, you say the tree is a hundred feet tall, the trunk ten feet in diameter. It will not burn. You will need fuel, not just kindling.”
“Petrol, perhaps,” said Shroeder.
“How will we get it?”
“Not petrol, lamp oil,” Shroeder replied. “The monks use it at the abbey.”
“You mean when you were a student?”
“Yes.”
“But that was sixty years ago.”
“The monks throw nothing away.”
“How will we get it?”
“I don’t know. But we will.”
“Do you know where the tunnel entrance is?”
“Yes, I will find it.”
“I will go down with you.”
“Where do the monks keep the lamp oil?” asked Dagna.
“You have been listening,” said Shroeder.
Dagna nodded, as did Gylfi.
“In a large store room next to the kitchen,” Shroeder replied. “There is a large drum and tins for pouring.”
“We’ll get the oil,” said Dagna.
“And we’ll go with you into the canyon,” said Gylfi.
“God be with us,” said Tolkien.
45.
Metten Abbey
October 8, 1938, 8:15 p.m.
“Are they dead?” Fleming asked.
“Yes,” Rex Dowling replied.
The Englishman and the American, their faces blackened with soot scraped from the interior walls of the mill’s crumbling fireplace, were standing over the bodies of four Waffen-SS troops lying on the ground along the five-foot-high stone wall that stretched out on either side of Metten Abbey’s filigreed wrought iron front gate. A fire blazed in a two-hundred-liter steel drum a few feet away. Tin mess kits littered the ground near the drum.
The small party of four men and Billie had waited until nightfall to make the two-mile hike through the forest to the abbey. It had been very slow going as they were constantly stopping to listen for the German patrol. When they got near the front gate, Fleming and Dowling, the group’s de facto, unspoken co-leaders, had told the Kaufmans and Billie to stay in the darkness of the tree line while they approached.
Now Fleming put two fingers to his mouth and let out a short, shrill whistle. He counted to ten and did it again. He and Dowling watched as Hans, Jonas and Billie, all in rough gear, their faces blackened as well, all carrying machine guns, approached them at a crouching run.
“They’re dead,” he said when they reached the wall. “Take their weapons and ammo, scatter them. Hans, Jonas, drag the bodies into the woods.”
“What now?” Billie whispered.
“The machine gun,” said Fleming.
“He should be dead too,” said Dowling.
“One can only hope,” said Fleming, smiling. “Nevertheless, we’ll go around back.”
As Hans and Jonas were returning from dumping the bodies, the sound of the abbey’s front door swinging open could be distinctly heard. Dowling got down on all fours and crawled to the corner where the foot of the gate joined the wall.
“It’s a priest,” the American said, “and a soldier with a gun at his head.”
Fleming crawled over to have a look at the scene perhaps thirty yards away. “Christ,” he said. “It’s Father Wilfrid.”
&nb
sp; “Unteroffizier, sind sie da?!” the soldier at the door shouted.
“Ja, Stabsunteroffizier, komm,” Fleming replied.
“Frederick?”
“Ja, komm. Wir sind erbrochenes.”
“He’s not coming,” said Dowling. “It must be your accent. No unteroffizier sounds like an English toff. You don’t sound sick either.”
Before Fleming could answer, a shot rang out, the sergeant’s head exploded and he crumpled to the ground. Father Wilfrid stood frozen in place. This tableau, Fleming and Dowling, still crouching, hidden behind the wall, could plainly see in the light spilling out through the abbey’s wide open front door.
“Who in hell?” Fleming asked and then he had to duck and pull back as machine gun fire from the abbey began peppering the wall to his left, where, come to think of it, he said to himself, the shot that had felled the German sergeant had come from. He looked that way and saw Hans and Jonas crouching behind the wall, their heads together. Billie was crouching next to them. Fleming caught her eye and waved her over. Covered by the wall, she ran to his position. The machine gun fire had stopped but now began again, this time strafing along the top of the wall as if the gunner could see or sense Billie running behind it. Fleming ducked low and took a look through the gate up at the tower, where he could see the muzzle flashes of the machine gun in a turret window on the second floor. Father Wilfrid was kneeling over the German sergeant.
A movement to Fleming’s left caught his eye. Looking that way he saw Jonas leap over the wall and run full out to a tree about twenty yards away on the lawn that bordered the courtyard. When he got there, he crouched and raised his right arm. At this signal Hans stood and began firing his machine gun up at the turret window. Under this covering fire, Jonas stepped out and flung a hand grenade up at the turret. It hit the wall beneath the window and blasted away a ragged chunk of it. Hans was still firing non-stop. Jonas pulled another grenade off of his shoulder clip and flung it, this time directly into the turret window, where it exploded, sending rock and glass and the German gunner’s body flying through the air.
“He must not have been hungry,” said Fleming.
“Look,” Dowling said. “The priest.”
They peered through the clearing smoke and saw Father Wilfrid staggering toward them, a huge bloody gash where his face should have been. He took one last step, reached his hand out, and slumped to the ground.
“Hans,” Fleming said. “Cut the telephone lines.”
46.
The Bavarian Forest
October 8, 1938, 8:30 p.m.
“We’re here,” said Dowling.
The group was huddled in a grove of tall fir trees about a mile east of the abbey. Dowling’s flashlight shone on a map he had unfolded and placed on the needle-covered forest floor.
“We have ninety minutes,” said Fleming.
“Will we make it?” Billie said.
Dowling ran the end of the narrow beam of the flashlight along the course they would take to get to the landing field, which he had marked in red before leaving the mill. “It’s four-plus miles,” he said. “It’ll be close.”
Knowing that the firefight would surely draw the German patrol back to the monastery, Fleming and Dowling had decided that the best thing to do was to head posthaste to the landing field. They knew that when the patrol arrived at the abbey, the lives of all of the monks would be in grave danger. The machine gunner dead from a grenade attack, the rest of the troops either dead or deadly sick. Whoever was in charge would have to improvise. Hopefully the first thing he did was to get rid of the leftover poisoned food and spirit away the cook whose work it was. The cook and Father Schneider were dead men if they were discovered, but there was no help for that now. Fleming and the American had agreed that the less they knew at the abbey, the better, especially when it came to their numbers and the direction they were heading.
“We need to push on,” said Fleming. “Single file, as quietly as possible. I don’t think the patrol will set out for us. There are only eight of them and they don’t know where to begin to look. But we can’t be sure, so it’s quiet, deliberate speed.”
“Surely they’ll do something,” said Billie.
“They’ll radio for help,” said Dowling, but as far as I know the nearest army base is outside Stuttgart, that’s about two hundred miles. My estimate is that we have about four hours to collect your father and his party, bring them to the magic canyon and get us all to safety.”
“What’s the plan for that?” Billie asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Neither do I,” said Fleming, “but it’s early, we’ll figure something out.”
47.
Above The Bavarian Forest
October 9, 1938, 10:15 p.m.
The field was much bigger than either Vaclav or the pilot thought it would be from looking at the map. Marked out, as requested, by bonfires at either end, it was perhaps a quarter mile in length and looked as if someone had tried to grow crops in it at one time. The light from the half moon was so good that the bonfires were not really needed. But that chance could not be taken. In the pilot’s experience, clouds flew around the night sky on schedules only they knew for sure.
On their first descent they had seen a much smaller cleared area and the outline of a dilapidated farmhouse. The pilot now descended again and circled the field. He was, Vaclav knew, ready to drop his human cargo.
“All ready, my king?” the pilot said to Vaclav.
“Yes.”
“I will come in from the east, the wind will blow you back a bit.”
“Fine.”
“By the way, I can land here.”
“You can? Then land for God’s sake. Do the dwarfs and the two professors a favor.”
“I can’t now, fuel.” The young flier pointed to the fuel gauge on the instrument panel. It read empty. “I think it’s wrong, but you’re safer to jump.”
“Fuck.”
“It’s this plane. It’s a prototype, one of a kind. Rejected by the air force for many reasons.”
“Leaky fuel tanks among them.”
“I hope not. I have a hot date tonight. Hate to let her down.”
“If you make it back to Prague, can you come back to pick us up?”
“Of course. What time?”
“What about your date?”
“War is hell.”
“Say o-one hundred.”
“Fine.”
“I don’t know about the bonfires.”
“I’ll find it.”
Vaclav nodded. Where did these kids come from? God knows we’ll need them when the Germans invade.
* * *
The pilot banked and leveled off at a thousand feet, heading due east. The forest below, dense and black, whizzed by for a few seconds and then, about a quarter mile from the edge of the field, he raised his thumb to Vaclav. The English professor was sitting on the edge of the jump door. Vaclav nodded to him and raised his thumb and the professor jumped. In a line facing Vaclav the others waited their turn. The German professor was next. His long white hair blew wildly in the wind from the open door. He crouched and sat for a second on the door’s rim, then slipped away into the night.
The pilot turned to check his instruments. The fuel gauge still read empty. He was certain that he had not miscalculated his flight time or rate of consumption. Fairly certain. A moment later he heard Vaclav say, “hold on tight, we’re off.” The pilot kept his heading but began to climb, happily, into the cloud cover that was beginning to amass. He would have to cross the rest of Germany and then the German-occupied Sudetenland before he could breathe easily. Before entering the clouds, he banked slightly to the left, turned and looked down, and saw a line of five parachutes in perfect formation drifting down toward the field.
48.
The Bavarian Forest
October 9, 1938, Midnight
A checkerboard pattern of clouds drifted by above the heads of the six people sitting near Metten Abbey’s orchard wall. The moonlight that broke through at eerily regular intervals cast its silver light on their faces at the same intervals—the grim, tired faces of one woman and five men. The ground floor lights in the abbey were on, but they neither saw nor heard any movement. Guided by Trygg Korumak, who seemed to know the area intimately, they had made their way from the drop area through a deep pine forest, made deeper by the failure of any moonlight to penetrate the dense canopy that loomed overhead, as if, they all felt, they were hiking through a living, breathing tunnel.
The other five members of the fellowship, as Professor Tolkien had come to describe it to himself, were off on missions: the Kaufman brothers to scout the Roman wall, and the three dwarfs to steal lamp oil from the abbey.
What else but a fellowship? Tolkien said to himself. A fellowship whose oath had been sworn not with words, but with deeds: the escape from Carinhall, the slaying of the German soldiers hunting them, the leap from an airplane into the abyss of the night, the trek through forest, after the firefight at the abbey, by virtual strangers to collect other virtual strangers in a godforsaken farm field. Who needs to swear an oath after doing such things?
The English professor was sitting off to the side, perhaps twenty feet from the others. He did not expect to survive the night, which was too bad. He had been feeling low of late for reasons he could not fathom, unable to write, at odds with his publisher, tired of lecturing to teenage boys who were passionate about all the wrong things, detached from life. Now all was clear, especially the confusion that had been dogging him about the novel he was writing. Good-evil, honor-desecration, base-noble—if he lived he would write about these things, with no fear or reservation, no self-doubt. Not after what he had seen in the last two days.