by Ahern, Jerry
Then they went in, Tim Shaw and his son right behind the three men who were the first inside, all of them not only vigilant for lurking enemy personnel but careful of their footing in the overturned vehicle, the slippery foam clinging to everything.
There were crates of explosives visible in the flashlights of the TAC Team men, the crates wired in series and ready to be exploded. There was a detonator rigged, but the detonator was covered with foam, as were the battery terminal leads.
“You made a lucky guess with the fire extinguishers, Eddie,” Shaw announced. “Good tactics. Glad I hired you. If they’d blown this shit, we woulda been sittin’ on the biggest fragmentation grenade in history.” And Tim Shaw walked out, back onto the street knowing he was no longer needed. And, he was tired.
His shoes were covered with white foam, his raincoat and his trouser legs were mud-stained and he was wet and cold. Then he started whistling as he walked away from the overturned armored truck and toward the police lines.
A woman reporter from a video news crew which had evidently slipped through the lines accosted him as soon as he neared them. Instantly, she started firing questions. “Who were these men, Inspector Shaw?”
Tim Shaw stopped whistling, cutting the melody in midphrase. “We have reason to believe they were terrorist saboteurs. There was some evidence of explosives inside the vehicle, but we have no definite data at this point on if or how those explosives were to be used. There’ll be statements released as soon as possible outlining the progress of the investigation. So I’m afraid you’ll have to wait and see.”
“What will happen to these men?”
“It’s too early to say. The wounded will, of course, be given the best possible medical attention. Beyond that, the situation is still very fluid. A number of charges will probably result.”
“Were there any police casualties?”
“Very few, and no fatalities which I’m aware of, thank God.”
Almost as an afterthought, the reporter asked him,
“What were you whistling, Inspector Shaw?”
Tim Shaw grinned. “Gilbert & Sullivan, from The Pirates of Penzance—you know, ‘a policeman’s lot is not a happy one.’”
Thirty-Eight
This meant openly invading the community, of course, but there was no other option left but to blast their way inside. Using every sensing device available to them aboard the Nazi V-stol, no other chink in the walls of the mountain was discernible. It was clear that the occupants of the mountain redoubt were either capable of utilizing a technology those living beyond its walls could not suspect or else they simply never went outside.
Where the main entrance to the onetime War Retreat had been, there were now thousands of tons of rock. The age of the rock slide was impossible to ascertain. Rourke supposed there might be still another alternative, that the occupants were trapped inside. But, that hardly seemed possible. And the gas could not have been natural.
And, with the presence of the lethal halucinogenic gas, he and Paul and their unlikely temporary allies would not have been able to risk moving about inside the mountain without chemical warfare gear, which
would have made their presence rather obvious anyway.
“What if these people are perfectly peaceful, John? This is wrong.”
John Rourke turned away from the laying of the explosives, put his hand to Paul Rubenstein’s shoulder and started walking off with him, leaving the party of men planting the charges and moving toward the V-stol. “That fact hasn’t escaped me. If we don’t cooperate long enough to get the remains Zimmer wants, we have no real bargaining chip at all for the return of Sarah. After all, what if Michael’s identity is discovered? There won’t be any shooting unless it’s in self-defense, and that wouldn’t be morally justified either, I know. This may very well be wrong.”
“You know I’m with you, regardless.”
John Rourke nodded, wishing his own trepidations were as easily set aside. He was uncertain as to his rectitude, a feeling which troubled him greatly. He said nothing more of it, however, because Hauptsturmfuhrer Gunther Spitz was coming straight toward them from the V-stol.
“So, Herr Doctor! How goes it?”
“It goes well.”
“The explosives?”
“Nearly in place.”
“Good,” Gunther Spitz said, walking on then. Paul, his voice little over a whisper, said, “He’s being too friendly.” “Agreed.” “What if—”
“It isn’t all that it appears?” John Rourke interjected, preempting his friend. “That thought has crossed my mind. What if, for example, they merely gave us a convincing-sounding lie, hmm? But, there’s no way to know short of blasting our way in through the side of the mountain, is there?”
“So,” Paul observed, “either way—”
“The expression I think you’re searching for,” John Rourke noted, “is we’re either damned if we do or damned if we don’t, but in any event, damned.”
Paul Rubenstein beside him, John Rourke started back toward the base of the mountain, where the laying of the explosives, indeed, was nearly complete.
Thirty-Nine
The noise came from below her.
Emma Shaw crouched in the mouth of the cave and stared downward into the night, toward the river in the gorge below.
And she realized the noise was the whinnying of a horse.
There was a small fire glowing below, very small, as though built by someone exceedingly careful not to be observed.
Emma Shaw debated what she should do. To stay here in the cave was definitely the most prudent course of action, at least when viewed simplistically. Stay in the cave and whoever was down in the base of the gorge would move on.
Yet, two factors mitigated against her deciding to do just that. First, what if the fire were from the Land Pirates and they decided to stay put for a while? She couldn’t remain hidden in this cave for more than a few days without running out of food. And the cold would eventually get her, because the solar batteries in her
sleeping bag would be discharged and could not be recharged in the darkness of the cave. And building a fire would generate smoke which would draw attention to her position.
Also, the idea of a horse appealed to her considerably. With a horse, she could make it down river no faster but considerably more safely.
If she waited until morning, her options might well be fewer. She might, indeed, find that she was trapped, or that the possibility of stealing the horse had eluded her. Yet trying to navigate the side of the gorge at night might precipitate danger of another sort, either a fatal fall or a broken limb, which would—just as surely as it had so often for the old pioneering mountain men of the early part of the nineteenth century—insure her eventual death.
Emma Shaw lit a cigarette and tried to weigh her possibilities…
The V-stol was airborne and John Rourke had made a decision.
There was no sense in attempting to hide his conclusions from the Nazis who made up the rest of his and Paul’s party, because the Nazis themselves would play an intrinsic part in what would happen if John Rourke’s idea proved correct.
Rourke ordered that the V-stol land some twenty-five miles away from the mountain, then called a meeting, both the pilot and copilot present for it as well.
Outside, there was nothing but darkness, the moon—it should have been three-quarters fulltotally obscured by heavy cloud cover. Their aircraft, the window curtains drawn down and all running lights off, would only be visible for its heat signature.
Hauptsturmfuhrer Spitz lit one of his cigarettes from the case which had the built-in lighter, leaning back as he said, “So? Why are we not activating the explosives, Herr Doctor General?”
Rourke ignored Spitz’s use of the contrived-sounding title. “The explosives are in place and all we have to do is detonate. If our mysterious inhabitants of the mountain do have sensing equipment, they’ll know it, be prepared for us to blast our way inside, or at least attempt t
o do so. There are two possibilities, of course: either that the explosives will do the job and get us in or merely cause some damage and we’ll be unable to enter. I’ve been giving the present situation a great deal of thought,” Rourke said, not about to mention that he and Paul had also considered that the very intent of their mission might be a ruse. “In order for that synth-concrete-style cap to have been put in place over the exhaust system for the lethal halucinogenic gas we discovered, someone had to get on top of the mountain to construct it, right?”
Gunther Spitz leaned forward in his seat, flicking ashes from his cigarette into the palm of his hand rather than looking away to use the ashtray. “I am intrigued, Herr Doctor.”
Rourke smiled thinly. “I thought that you might be. The American short story writer and poet, Edgar Allan Poe, was of course best known for his tales of horror. But he also pioneered the detective story, predating Conan-Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes with his own character, Dupin.”
“‘The Purloined Letter,’” Paul almost whispered. “The object which is in contention is in plain sight.”
“In a manner of speaking,” Rourke said, nodding to his friend.
“Letters? What do such things—”
Rourke looked at Spitz. “What if your people have been so intent on finding an entryway to the mountain redoubt that they have ignored the obvious, hmm? What if, instead of an entryway into the mountain itself, there are access tunnels coming into the mountain from underneath? The material like synth-concrete which was used to construct the cap over the gas outlet piping could just as easily be utilized to build tunnel walls. What if your aerial observations were so committed to looking for the subtle that the obvious was ignored?”
“Passageways,” Spitz said.
John Rourke glanced at Wolfgang Mann. Mann seemed attentive, but there was a look in his eyes that seemed inexplicable. And suddenly, John Rourke realized that not only had the Nazis ignored the obvious in their search for the subtle, but so had he. And a chill, more properly called an involuntary paroxysm, ran along John Thomas Rourke’s spine and made the hairs on the back of his neck feel to him as if, indeed, they were standing on end.
Rourke exhaled.
Paul said, “Then we should go airborne and utilize the colder evening temperatures to assist us in looking for heat signatures from tunnel openings which might be hundreds of yards, maybe even miles away from the base of the mountain.”
Rourke looked at the pilot, then the copilot.
“Gentlemen, you’ve worked a long day. Can we do a few hours of high altitude observation before calling it a night?”
The pilot answered for both men. “Yes, Herr Doctor!”
John Rourke stood up, adjusting the positioning of his Scoremasters in his belt. “Good. We’ll all help however we can, of course. I can spell either one of you on the V-stol’s controls—for level flight only, however, since I’ve never checked out on one of these. While the inhabitants of the mountain, if they are aware of our presence, await our doing something with the explosives we’ve set, we’ll look for another way inside.”
Spitz smiled. “You are, indeed, Herr Doctor, magnificent!”
John Rourke said nothing.
Forty
Her father had always told her she was reckless, and she could almost hear Tim Shaw’s voice in her ear telling her, “Watch out you don’t break your damn fool neck, kid—excuse my language.” And the thought of her father just then brought a smile to Emma Shaw’s hps as she angled her way into a little defile, wedged herself there for a moment and rested. The little campfire was closer now, but it didn’t seem much larger. Whoever had set it wasn’t building it up for the night, perhaps was letting it go out.
The fire was her beacon and, just in case the fire was about to extinguish itself, Emma Shaw started moving downward again, trying to quicken her pace as much as she dared.
She heard the sound of a horse again, the clicking of hooves on rock and soft whinnying in the night. As Emma Shaw worked her way downward, picking her way with great care because the rocks were sharp and unevenly spaced, she felt warmer. And, it was more than her own exertion. Her father had always kidded
that girls never sweated, only glistened. She’d kept the joke going with him over the years. Now, she was “glistening” quite heavily. She kept moving.
In addition to the sight of the fire, there were now two other sensual keys, both its smell—good, actually— and its crackle, almost friendly in the night. Soon, there was still another smell, one which was unmistakable. It was the smell of freshly made coffee.
Soon, Emma was able to discern shapes just at the boundary of the firelight, one of them very large, the horse. The other seemed to be a man. This latter moved about, as if tending to chores in some regular pattern. The smell of the coffee was stronger.
A small stone dislodged under her left foot, then started a cascade of stones down into the gorge and Emma Shaw froze, realizing that she might have alerted whoever it was beside the fire. And she was relatively certain that it was only one person. But the person’s movement pattern seemed uninterrupted.
She waited, crouching there uncomfortably amid the rocks, her eyes focused intently on the fire. The man shape seemed to settle in, back toward her, she realized, because the figure’s outline was silhouetted by the flame. She could make out no detail, only blackness.
By the face of her wristwatch, she ticked off the minutes, seven going by before she felt that it might be safe to move again. Then, move she did, but more slowly and cautiously now, feeling each step out lest she cause more sounds in the night. She reasoned that perhaps the rolling of the river—there were small rapids all along its length in either direction as far as she had been able to see before dark—had obscured the noise, thus leaving whoever it was beside the fire
unalerted to her presence. Emma Shaw hoped.
At last, she was nearly to the bottom of the gorge, her improvised backpack made from the parachute pack weighing heavily on her, her right hand sweating inside the insulated glove. In her right hand, which was balled into a fist, was the .45 automatic.
She started to ease her way down to the comparatively level surface of the river bank.
There was a series of four clicks and a man’s voice from behind her saying, “Stop where you are.”
Emma Shaw came close to pissing in her panties.
Forty-one
Emma Shaw’s mind raced. He used English, not one of the bastardized dialects of the Land Pirates. The way the words were said, there was a definite sign of education, again totally atypical of the Land Pirates. And, a Land Pirate would have shot first, because in the darkness and with her helmet on, she would most likely be mistaken for a man.
Emma Shaw decided to risk it, spinning around to her right, her thumb sweeping down the .45’s safety. She was nearly fully turned around when something hard struck her on the shoulder near the right side of her neck and her arm went suddenly numb and she started to go down.
Her gun fell from her fingers, but she launched her weight against the legs of the man who had just struck her and they both fell onto the snow-splotched rocks. She head butted the man, and as her helmet made contact, she heard him exclaim in a kind of low growl, “Damnit!”
Then something was grabbing hold of her helmet,
snapping her head back and dragging her up to her knees simultaneously, her helmet pulling free of her head, her hair falling out from beneath it, a fist—it seemed huge—coming toward her face.
And it stopped.
“A girl!”
Emma Shaw seized the opportunity, crossing toward his jaw with her bunched up left fist, his head tilting away in order to dodge the blow, her fist missing the underside of his jaw, catching him at the flat of the bone just forward of the ear.
He was better at this, she realized in one fleeting instant as his left arced up toward her and darkness swept over her after an incredible flash of light.
“But time is of the essence, is it
not?”
Rourke didn’t look at Spitz, still watching the instrument array. But he answered him. “Your Fuhrer’s remains have been inside the mountain, according to Dr. Zimmer, since immediately following the conclusion of World War II. That was in the middle of the fourth decade of the Twentieth Century. I shouldn’t think a few hours will make much difference after almost seven centuries, would you?”
Spitz seemed to sigh. “I suppose not, Herr Doctor.”
“Why don’t you get some rest; we’ll all need it, whether we blast our way in or we find a tunnel—”
John Rourke didn’t finish what he had been about to say. As the pilot tacked tangentially outward to the two mile mark, John Rourke’s eyes detected a heat signature on the thermal scan …
John Rourke sat at the V-stol’s copilot controls, his eyes scanning the instrument readings for any sign of a heat signature. This was their fourth sweep, and even John Rourke was beginning to despair of finding the theoretical tunnel openings. The craft was fifteen miles out from the mountain’s center.
One of the Nazi enlisted personnel brought him a cup of coffee and Rourke nodded his thanks, then sniffed at the coffee before sipping at it. It smelled like nothing but coffee.
“Take it out another two miles only.” Rourke told the pilot.
From behind him, he heard Spitz’s voice. “I am beginning to think, Herr Doctor, that your idea, however clever, is mistaken.”
“Perhaps,” Rourke said, sipping again at his coffee. “Perhaps not. Time will tell, as the saying goes.”
Emma Shaw opened her eyes but did not move. Her head was resting on something and she was stuffed inside a thermal sleeping bag identical to her own, but it didn’t quite smell right. There was nothing bad about the smell, but it was different, a hint of tobacco about it.
As she turned her head to the right—her jaw hurt a httle—she saw the figure of the man whom she’d fought. She still couldn’t see his face. “Sorry I decked you, Commander Shaw,” he said.