. . . Or could he?
He smashed out a window with the butt of his rifle and stuck his head outside, staring at the building’s exterior. The stone was rough, its surface cracked and uneven, which might give him the hand- and footholds he needed to make the climb. It was worth a try.
Jaeger slung his rifle over his shoulder and selected two men from the group with him, sending the others to join their comrades trying to take the staircase. The Tottensoldat had no fear of dying, so they accepted the order without concern for the consequences. He explained to the remaining two what he intended to do, just so there wasn’t any confusion, and then started upward.
It was all about the rhythm, he discovered. First find a niche to place the tip of his boot, either in a crack or on the edge of a small protuberance jutting out from the wall, then search upward for a spot where he could crimp down with his fingers to hold him steady while he lifted the other leg and searched for a foothold. Once that foothold was found, he pushed upward with his leg, taking the weight off his fingers for a moment and allowing him to search for the next handhold.
Step by step, handhold after handhold and foothold after foothold, he moved up the face of the building.
About halfway up he heard a commotion behind him. When he paused and looked down, he discovered that one of his men had fallen and, in the process, taken the other with him. Both lay on the ground, unmoving.
Jaeger shrugged and continued on. He could handle the Americans on his own.
Just beneath the lip of the roof he paused, considering. Did he move forward slowly, peering over the top and assessing the situation before sliding over the edge or did he just commit right from the start, hoping the element of surprise was in his favor?
The old Charlie would have chosen the smarter option, but that Charlie had all but ceased to exist the moment the green gas had been released into Dr. Eisenberg’s chamber of horrors. Jaeger didn’t consider the danger, just the potential outcome of the mission. Why run the risk of letting them discover he was there when he wasn’t yet in a position to do anything about it?
He chose to commit.
Jaeger reached up, gripped the edge of the roof with both hands, and then powered his body up and over the side with one deft movement.
He stood to find Burke racing across the rooftop toward a ladder that was hanging from the underside of an airship mostly concealed in the low-lying clouds overhead.
Burke’s head came up even as Jaeger reached for his rifle.
AS BURKE RACED for the ladder, he saw a dark-clad figure slip over the rooftop directly opposite him and climb to his feet.
Even from here, Burke had no trouble recognizing his former staff sergeant, and his eyes widened in surprise as he realized there was no sign of any climbing equipment; the man had just climbed the outside of the building unaided!
Charlie was going for his rifle, and Burke knew he was a sitting duck. At this range it would almost be impossible to miss. There was nothing for him to hide behind. Nowhere for him to go.
That’s when the grenade went off behind him.
Confined by the narrow passage of the stairwell, the blast seemed overly powerful, shaking the rooftop beneath his feet and sending Burke crashing to the ground. As he fell he saw Charlie, already unbalanced as he tried to get his rifle off his shoulder, stumble backward a few steps. His ankles hit the low edge of the roof and he teetered on the edge.
For a moment Burke was torn between wanting to save him and hoping he’d fall over backward.
Charlie’s luck went a little bit both ways.
As Burke watched, the big soldier shifted his weight, saving himself from toppling over the edge, but he lost his rifle in the bargain as it slipped from his grasp and plunged over the side of the roof.
When the shaking stopped, the two men stared at each other.
Then they both ran for the ladder.
Burke reached it first and began clambering upward as quickly as he could go. But Burke was exhausted; it had been a grueling mission and he’d been running on adrenaline for what felt like days. His body hurt all over and even his artificial hand, a little extra advantage he’d come to rely on when things got tight, had been damaged in the assault at the museum.
The ladder was swaying back and forth beneath his weight while rising at the same time; someone above had been watching and the airship had taken off the minute his hands had touched the ropes.
Still, that effort wasn’t enough to stop Charlie. He grasped the rungs of the ladder before they rose completely out of reach and began climbing after Burke. As one of the new breed of German supersoldiers, Charlie was no longer hindered by fatigue or fear. He could go on relentlessly, day after day, night after night, with little to no difference in his physical capabilities. He had only a minimal need for sleep—a few hours every few days—and was only truly motivated by his need to fulfill the mission.
As a result, even with the ladder swaying dangerously back and forth beneath their weight, it didn’t take him long to catch up to Burke.
Burke was all but out of weapons. He’d lost his knife some time ago; he didn’t even remember where. He’d just thrown down his Tommy gun, and his pistol was out of ammunition. All he had left were his hands and feet, and he needed the former to hold on to the ladder.
Still, that didn’t keep him from trying.
He waited until Charlie was almost directly beneath him, just inches from his leg, and then raised his knee and brought the heel of his boot down on the other man’s head as hard as he could. He didn’t wait to see the result, just brought it up and did it again.
And again.
Each blow struck solidly, and within seconds Charlie’s face was streaming with black blood from the savage tears Burke’s boots had inflicted in his flesh.
But he hung resolutely to the ladder and for all Burke’s effort it didn’t seem like he could dislodge him.
Burke wasn’t ready to give up, though.
He raised his leg and brought it powering downward . . . only to miss his target as Charlie slipped deftly around to the other side of the ladder.
The missed strike nearly caused Burke to lose his grip, and as his concentration faltered for a second Charlie made his move.
As Burke began to pull his leg back up after his strike, Charlie reached out, caught it in his iron grasp, and yanked downward.
Burke gasped in surprise as his hands were torn from the rungs.
He fell.
As he shot past a blood-smeared but grinning Charlie, arms and legs flailing, he felt something brush his fingers.
PleaseGodplease!
He snatched at whatever it was.
Burke felt it burn through his fingers for a moment and then a horrible tearing pain shot through his shoulder as his body came to a sudden, jarring stop.
He hung from the second-to-last rung on the ladder, his body twisting in the wind a hundred feet above the Thames.
It was all he could do to hang on.
A dozen or so feet above him, Charlie drew a pistol from the belt at his waist and looked down.
And so it ends, Burke thought, fully expecting the other man to shoot him where he hung.
But apparently his former sergeant had other ideas. Rather than wasting a bullet on Burke, he climbed a few rungs higher, wrapped an arm around the rope ladder, and then began firing at the aft section of the airship, no doubt hoping to bring it down.
DRUMMOND DISCOVERED THAT the airship was the HMS Dover, a British observation vessel that had been stationed at York prior to the fall of London. By the time Drummond was pulled into the cargo bay, the Queen had already been hustled off to the safety of an interior cabin and the other Americans, especially Freeman, were hustled off to sick bay. That left only Drummond and a few British airmen in the cargo area to wait for Burke.
“Serge
ant!”
Drummond turned at the urgent tone in the airman’s voice and hurried over to where he stood by the winch controls. Without a word the other man pointed down through the hatch at the ladder the sergeant had just ascended.
Looking down, Drummond saw the problem.
Burke was hanging off the end of the ladder, barely holding on with one hand, while a German soldier stood several rungs above him, firing at the rear of the airship!
“If he hits the rudder controls, or God help us the aether converter, we’re going to be sitting ducks for whatever German aircraft we run into between here and France,” the airman said. “If we don’t blow up first!”
They’d come too far, lost too much, to fail at this point—so close to success. Drummond brought up his rifle, intending to shoot the bastard off the ladder, but couldn’t manage to line up the shot without fear of hitting Burke. Jones might have been able to pull it off, but they’d lost him to the grenade back on the Reliant, and no one else in the squad was as talented with a rifle as he’d been.
The dull crack of another gunshot reached his ears and this time Drummond thought he heard an answering spang as the bullet struck something along the hull of the airship.
“Do something!” the airman urged.
Drummond glanced down, saw the dark waters of the Thames some hundred feet below them as they slowly climbed. Burke had regained the ladder and was climbing upward toward the German soldier, even as the other man lifted his weapon to fire again.
The airman was right, something had to be done.
The Yank was a good man; Drummond had enjoyed serving with him. He was the kind of commander who could inspire men to selfless acts, the kind that drove them forward against all odds and somehow managed to come out on top time and time again. He’d done the impossible, locating the Queen not once but twice in this shattered wasteland of a city, had managed to fight his way out of a half-dozen confrontations and deliver her as he’d promised to the safety of her countrymen. Even now he was still fighting, refusing to go down until he’d done everything that he could.
He was a good man; he didn’t deserve to go out like this.
But then Burke’s own words from the barricade earlier came back to him. “Your Queen needs you.”
Drummond couldn’t escape the truth of those words now any more than he could earlier.
Burke was right; this had all been to rescue the Queen and to fail in that endeavor now would make all their sacrifices useless.
That decided it.
The ladder was attached to a winch that was normally used to haul cargo up into the airship’s bay. It came with a quick release lever—there for use if the cargo got away from the cargo master and threatened to damage the ship in the midst of a delivery. The lever was easily identified by its bright red handle.
Steeling himself against the consequences of what he was about to do, Drummond stepped over and without hesitation pulled the lever.
A sudden whine filled the bay as the line holding the ladder ran itself back through the machine and then zipped away through the opening.
Drummond caught a glimpse of the ladder, and the two men it carried, falling away from the airship toward the water below before turning away, his heart heavy in his chest.
Chapter Forty-two
MID Headquarters
France
COLONEL NICHOLS WAS seated behind his desk, trying to make heads or tails of the latest German intelligence intercepts, when the door to his office was thrown open and a woman, with long auburn hair and dressed in a men’s styled white shirt and pants, stalked into the room, flanked on either side by a pair of British army officers wearing the emblem of the Queen’s guard.
It didn’t take much intelligence on Nichols’s part to recognize that he was in the presence of Her Royal Majesty, Queen Veronica.
Behind her was the Black Watch sergeant he’d sent along with Burke—Drummond he thought the man’s name was—and Professor Graves.
Surprised by the interruption, Nichols rose to his feet and found himself pinned beneath the angry glare of the Queen’s deep green eyes.
“Colonel Nichols?” she asked, in a tone that Nichols hadn’t heard since his childhood days, and then usually only after he’d stolen a piece of his mother’s pie from the kitchen counter. To his amusement, he felt just as guilty now as he’d felt then and he didn’t even know what he’d done.
Nichols was never one to let his emotions get the best of him, however. He returned her gaze without rancor and bowed, deeply, at the waist.
“Your Majesty,” he said.
“Don’t give me any of that crap, Colonel. I’m not in the mood.”
Nichols spent his days dealing with everyone from the American president to the senior brass of all the Allied forces. He knew how to move with the tide when the situation demanded it.
“As you wish, ma’am.”
She glared at him over the ma’am remark, but let it go. “Tell me what’s being done,” she said.
Somehow he knew she wasn’t asking about their response to Richthofen’s latest advance along the front or China’s recent declaration of war against the Allies. No, it was something else, otherwise Drummond and Graves wouldn’t be here.
Drummond and Graves . . .
Ah, I see.
Still, he’d wait for her to say it. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but you have me at a loss.”
She kept him pinned with her gaze.
“What’s being done to rescue Major Burke?”
Nichols let the question hang in the air for a moment. Over the Queen’s shoulder he caught the disappointment that washed over Graves’s face; he, at least, knew the answer before it needed to be said.
Then, calmly, Nichols put the papers he was holding down on his desk and said, “Major Burke is dead, Your Majesty.”
“We don’t know that.”
Her response was said as calmly as his own, but Nichols could hear the emotion underneath it. He chose his next words carefully.
“Major Burke perished when Sergeant Drummond released the rope ladder from beneath the HMS Dover, Your Majesty.” He glanced over the Queen’s shoulder, caught the now-angry glare of the Black Watch sergeant and held it. “And for the record, Sergeant, it was the right call. Not easy, I’m sure, but the right call nonetheless.”
Drummond nodded, one professional to another. His eyes betrayed his pain, however.
“I don’t believe that,” the Queen replied.
Nichols focused on her once more. “That it was the right call?”
“No. That Burke is dead.”
Nichols nodded, acknowledging her point. “I’m sorry for that, but there isn’t anything I can do at this point.”
“You can send someone after him.”
Nichols’s tone turned to that of a schoolteacher dealing with a recalcitrant child. “Your Majesty, in the last twenty-four hours Richthofen has moved three divisions of armor and four of infantry to the center of the front line and has been charging forward ever since. We’ve been pushed back nearly five kilometers already and expect to lose twice that, and possibly more, before we can stop him. If we can stop him.
“At the same time, China has declared war on Japan, your sovereign ally, need I remind you, and is rumored to be about to do the same to the United States, a move that is sure to pull troops from the front in anticipation of an attack on the Pacific Coast of the Americas, further weakening our position here. With all that going on, I do not have time or resources to spend on a search for a man that, by all logical reason, is already dead, no matter how much I liked him.”
He didn’t mention the fact that she, of all people, should have known that was going to be his answer before she’d even walked in the door. Then again, he didn’t have to. He could see it in her eyes, eyes that no longer shone with anger but
were filled with such an aching sense of loss that Nichols literally took a step back. He had no idea what had happened between Burke and Queen Veronica, but whatever it was, the loss of the man had struck her to the bone.
She stared at him, not saying anything for what seemed the longest moment, and then nodded, once.
“You are right, of course, Colonel,” she said at last, her voice steady and calm and yet somehow full of heartbreak and despair at the same time. “I am sorry for barging in so rudely. I hope you will forgive me.”
Nichols tried a gentle smile. “There is nothing to forgive, Your Majesty. I miss him, too. He was an extraordinary soldier.”
“He was far more than just a soldier, sir,” she said, but this time there was no anger, just weariness.
Nichols nodded, accepting the rebuke without comment. It was the least he could do.
“Good day, Colonel,” the Queen said, then turned and swept out of his office as abruptly as she’d entered it.
Her visit had forced Nichols to face something that he hadn’t yet wanted to face, however, and the day now seemed darker and more dreary because of it.
He sat back down. Opening the bottom drawer of his desk, he pulled out a bottle of scotch and poured a generous portion into a tumbler on his desk. He carefully recapped the bottle and put it away in the drawer; as much as he wanted to, now was not the time to get rip-roaring drunk.
Raising the glass, he said softly, “Here’s to you, Burke. I hope you’re still giving ’em hell, wherever you are.”
Chapter Forty-three
Top Secret Location
Germany
AT THAT VERY moment, the man that Nichols was toasting was being led from the dark depths of a train car into the cold night air. He suspected he was in Germany somewhere, but he couldn’t be certain. All he knew for sure was that he was alive and in the hands of the enemy.
On Her Majesty's Behalf Page 28