The New Adventures of the Eagle

by Pro Se Press

  He swiveled his masked head to look for a pathway to an exit but was stopped by Johann speaking again.

  “You underestimated the reach of the National Socialists intelligence network, Herr Eagle,” the little man said. His white robe was emblazoned with a red swastika symbol over his heart and crosses on either sleeve. He laughed a dark tone “One of our members earlier recognized you as the adventurer and operative who is known to oppose our Japanese allies.” The fellow that The Eagle had seen Saturday night leaning over to whisper into Keller’s ear smiled broadly and waved from a table in the house.

  The espionage master thought, “I guess it’s a statement of how well I’m doing that I didn’t remember him.”

  “Enough of this nonsense,” Commander Keller said standing, “I do not like all this strum and drang. We should have stopped him when Simpson said he looked familiar the other night.”

  “Come now,” Eva said appearing at the commander’s side, “ we didn’t know for sure until we did the checking today,” she said with an alluring smile. “And we would have missed his lovely performance.”

  “I’m glad you liked it,” The Eagle said. “I always wanted to be Fred Astaire.”

  “Glad I could make one fantasy come true,” she said.

  A group of brown shirted guards surrounded the costumed spy fighter and moved with him to the side of the dance floor. He offered no resistance.

  “We need to know what he is doing here,” the Commander said. “We should take him somewhere and make him talk.”

  “Oh I suspect our would-be star heart will talk constantly,” Johann said, “but with little truth in what he says.”

  “I will make him talk truth,” Keller said. “These American men are soft like the Jews who write their laws.”

  The Eagle smiled. “I’d love to see you in the ring with a little ‘soft’ Jew named Lefty Kovaks, Herr Commander. That would be a show worth seeing.”

  Keller stepped forward and smashed a fist into the espionage master’s cheek. “I will make sure you put on quiet a show for me; you will dance to my tune before you beg me for death.”

  “Not his face, Marcus,” Eva said in a petulant tone, “It would be a shame to destroy such a work of art.”

  The Commander looked at her with a sour expression, but said only, “We must have an answer for der Furher when he comes here tomorrow; along with the information from Schultz.”

  “We can make him talk only the truth,” Eva said, “And give you a show you will probably enjoy, Marcus.” Her eyes were shining with a new, almost lustful light. “What say you, Johann; up for a little invocation?”

  The Commander looked at her with an expression between disgust and curiosity. He looked over at Johann.

  “I know what you are thinking,” the little performer said.

  “Come to me, my stallion,” Eva hissed to the Eagle, “I think you will just love to see what magic the Reich can summon!” She leaned in and ran the fingers of her hand along his throat, trailing her fingernails until they drew blood.

  “We will make the future by rediscovering the past,” Eva said in an announcing voice to the room. “And you will all stand testament to the power of the pure people!” She turned to the Eagle and crooked a finger at him. “Come out here.”

  The brown shirts holding the master spy stepped away from him and stood expectantly watching him.

  The Eagle calculated his chance of breaking free and again thought that it was unlikely.

  “Whatever mumbo jumbo they intend I just have to hold out for couple of hours. I’ll resist just enough-” He suddenly realized that his pulse was racing for no apparent reason. He felt flushed and his temperature was rising.

  “She drugged me with her fingernail.” He thought; “some sort of nightshade derivative; perhaps scopolamine.” He quickly went through the symptoms he might expect; confusion, agitation, rambling speech, hallucinations, paranoid behaviors, even delusions. “And if they put a little Phenobarbital in the cocktail they figure they can disorient me enough for it to act as a truth serum. All masked with this pseudo-magic nonsense.”

  He felt the effects magnifying as the ‘Hounds’ began to chant at a signal from Eva, deep low words in an ancient Germanic tongue.

  “This will enhance the hallucinations,” the espionage master thought. “Good thing I plan ahead.” He felt in his mouth with his tongue and pushed a false cap off one of his back teeth and freed a capsule that was lodged beneath it.

  The spy fighter had consulted with an old instructor of his in New York, Andrew Mayfair, a noted bio-chemist and the two had concocted what they hoped was an antidote to any truth serum or sedative that he might encounter in his mission. “A spy never knows.” He told the chemist.

  “As our inspiration and leader, the Great Adolf Hitler said, ‘A new age of magic interpretation of the world is coming, of interpretation in terms of the Will and not the intelligence.” Eva intoned.

  Then Eva began to chant a counter tone, her classically trained singing voice imparting a richness and power to the archaic words.

  The Eagle could see her ice blue eyes glowing with the inner light of fanaticism and knew any words he could have formed, any pleas he could have made would have fallen on deaf ears.

  He knew his fate was sealed, whatever it was to be, so he just stared as an apparently helpless witness to the ritual they began. He could feel the amphetamines in the ‘antidote’ driving some of the stupefying effect of the Nazi drug from his system. He had to work hard to keep the mesmeric effect of the chanting from disorientating him.

  Johann took up the same chant as Eva and the two circled the Eagle counter clockwise. As they did they dropped pellets of some sort of herb into the brazier and with each deposit a plume. First red, then green, ghostly shapes rose from the fire and were grabbed by the air currents in the room, swirling them around the prisoner as if they were things alive.

  The scent of the incense gripped hold of the Eagle, a cloying miasma that made him dizzy.

  His mind began to wander as the opposing drugs coursed through his veins and fought an internal war for his consciousness.

  The Hounds kept up their strange Gregorian like chant, increasing in volume when the howl of the storm outside increased. Soon the two competing sounds seemed to echo each other and could have vied for the chorus of the damned with the souls in Purgatory.

  Eva’s chant changed to a murmured one.

  Johann bent beneath the cart to draw out an elaborate golden medieval dagger with a swastika inscribed on it. He turned to hold it aloft to show the crowd, and they all gasped as one.

  “Blood will wash the land.” Eva said. “You will die for the glory of the Reich,” she said as she held the dagger above the transformed detective, “But only after you have told us all we want to know. And the only shame is that I don’t have time to make a mongrel traitor like you suffer longer.”

  “It is such a shame,” Johann said, “You were such a magnificent animal.” His eyes lit up and his painted on smile got wider.

  “This would all be very convincing to anyone who didn’t realize they had drugged him,” The Eagle thought, “They put on quite a show.”

  Eva announced to the room, “This magic made by our ancestors will exert its influence on this mongrel impostor and he will tell us all he knows.”

  “This would be very convincing to most,” the drugged Shannon thought. “The hallucinations are kicking in.” He tried to focus his mind to combat the swirling images that bombarded him. Even the sounds of the chanting were like an assault on his eardrums.

  The Eagle concentrated, not on what he saw but on what he knew was before him. He knew that if they did not get the answers they wanted he was going to die long before any outside help arrived; their blood lust was at a fever pitch.

  “We have proven our point with our knowledge,” Eva said directly to the drugged man. “I really don’t want to see Johann stick that nasty blade in to your so muscular flesh.” She sou
nded genuinely sorry, “We could have been wonderful together.”

  “You can’t win them all, Fibber Magee,” The Eagle said to her. Then he leaned forward, pulled her in to a quick kiss and shoved her into the giggling MC lot before she was aware of what had happened.

  Johann and Eva went tumbling to the ground as the master spy spun on his heels and made for one of the floor to ceiling windows. The drugs slowed his reactions, and his costume hampered him, but he plunged into the crowd of suddenly startled National Socialists.

  Two of the brown shirted audience rose to grab for the escaping spy, one of whom was a grinning Fritz, but the Eagle was able to swing his booted feet and smashed them down.

  The Eagle took a moment to let himself enjoy knocking the amorous Frtiz out a second time.

  “Stop him!” Johann called, “He must me made an example!”

  Commander Keller was on his feet directly in The Eagle’ path and drew a pistol.

  “Hold it right there, swine!”

  . The crowd burst into thunderous applause.

  Guards swarmed forward and grabbed hold of the almost-escapee. They pulled the hooves of his arms and the horse mask off his head.

  “No more of these games,” the Commander said, “I will put a bullet into you kneecap and then you will tell me what I want to know or I will continue to hurt you until you beg for the release of death.”

  “I want to see him in pain!” Eva screamed.

  “Now, now,” The Eagle said thinking of his girl Joan Kirke, “Just ‘cause I like women that are actually attractive, instead of chubby soulless ice cold racist nut jobs?”

  The blonde woman became infuriated and charged in to attack the espionage master. In doing so she blocked Keller’s shot- as the Eagle had hoped, and he snapped a front kick into her that catapulted the woman into the Commander.

  At the same moment he dropped forward and flipped the two guards over him to the floor. He was about to lash out at another with a sidekick when a roaring sound filled the night air and the room seemed to rumble.

  Everyone froze, and all attention turned toward the North facing windows.

  The howl of the wind increased, and all at once the glass of the windows exploded inward as the wind of hurricane force smashed into the north shore.

  Chapter Eight

  Gotterdammerung

  The glass from the shattered window had not hit the floor by the time the lights flickered out and the torrent of the storm exploded through the portal. It seemed like the whole of Long Island Sound had been lifted into the air and tossed through the opening.

  The huge volume of water was driven by hurricane force winds. The droplets stung the eyes and skin of the guests near the French doors like slivers of jagged steel. The glass driven by the wind was like flichets that peppered those guests and soon the chorus of screams joined the cacophony of the storm.

  The sky was as black as night, even though it was the middle of the afternoon, so the ballroom was plunged into pitch darkness.

  The espionage master used the momentary distraction the chaos brought to shake free of the hands holding him and kicked out behind him, his right foot smashing into Johann’s chest with a snapping sound.

  “Stop the swine!” Eva yelled, but her voice was barely heard in the roar of the storm as it blasted into the room.

  Chairs and plates flew as if fired from cannons. Debris, sand, and tons of water from outside were churned into the room so that the frantic cries of horrors from the crowd, were drowned out as they were flung to the ground.

  The Eagle raced forward into the knot of screaming chorus girls and barreled directly through the blasting storm.

  Keller somehow held his feet, and with single-minded determination tried to fire at the spy fighter’s back, but his shots went wild.

  The Eagle had no idea beyond escape, no thought to what would become of him when he got outside. He knew Lefty would be out there somewhere, and he had a fleeting moment of worrying about his friend, but blocked the thought as useless.

  “I have to try to get to Schultz in the storage hut in all this; I might be able to get him out.”

  The other windows burst into pieces as the storm gusted and the screams increased in intensity with them. The air pressure ‘pulled’ the South facing windows in with a new shower of razor sharp glass.

  The water was sloshing across the floor of the ballroom and made moving forward like navigating a shallow rapid that was clogged with bodies and debris.

  A bullet whizzed past the Eagle’ ear, but he didn’t stop his headlong charge. A table slammed into his right leg and he stumbled but regained his footing.

  The storm winds in the ballroom were like a dozen hand grenades, the shrapnel of the building and the detritus of the surrounding land slicing into people with no discrimination.

  A shard of glass tore along The Eagle’ left side and he winced in pain, a fact that he suppressed. He ignored the slash but wheeled to turn his face from the blasting force of the wind. He drove forward and through the shattered frame of the door and out into the storm.

  The fury of the storm pummeled the espionage master and suddenly he was not sure what he could do or where he could go in the mad winds. He tried to find a shelter against the onslaught, but there was nothing upright, the furious winds bending the trees, snapping some of them and ripping clumps of sea grass and scrub brush into projectiles.

  The campground below was worse. The Sound heaved itself out of the seabed in a twenty-five foot wall of water that swept cross the parade grounds pushing the buildings ahead of it and smashing them to kindling.

  The Nazis were so much debris themselves, washed helplessly across the grounds in the roiling surf. The water climbed the knoll that the mansion stood on, but it only came to the middle of the Eagle’s thighs. It was a rushing tide and he fought to keep from being thrown to all-fours.

  Nazi partygoers were trying to come out of the shattered windowless ballroom, looking desperately for some shelter against the pummeling wind and rain, but there was no relief from the maelstrom.

  The Eagle spun again to look toward the house for some sort of place to hide from the driving wind. Any thought of saving anyone was fast fading in the reality of mere survival in the elemental fury of the storm.

  He saw Eva coming out of the shattered French doors. Her face was a mad mask of twisted hate. The splattering storm had plastered her long hair to her head and her blue eyes were wide with madness and hate as she stepped into the full fury and screamed at him.

  “I will kill you, you filthy mongrel swine!!” She raised her pistol to fire it at the master spy, but a change in wind direction drove water into her eyes and she was forced to turn her head.

  The Eagle used the chance to run up at her and drive a fist against her temple with more force than he intended.

  The evil Valkyrie dropped into the roiling waters and was swept away before he could grab her. The espionage master tried to race after her in a vain attempt to get her out of the waters as a new rush swept The Eagle off balance. He fell into the roiling surf with an involuntary cry and was swept down the hill into the angry dark.

  The next minutes were a nightmare of confused images and impressions; objects rolling out of the dark and swirling waters and disappearing quickly into the black of the ‘afternoon-as-night’ as if in a hallucination.

  It didn’t help that the espionage master was fighting the effects of the drugs in his system, so that his senses were distorted to begin with. He fought for some sort of control, but the boiling surf was master, and so he changed tactics and tried to use the force of it to steer within the mad currents.

  He was able to body surf toward a twisted pine tree and latched onto a sturdy limb with a crooked arm. The force of the water almost yanked him free, but he was able to hold on with the crooked arm and maneuver so that the surf pushed his body up into the tree.

  He climbed as high as he could into the branches of the tree, wrapping his long legs around the
trunk. He pulled off the top of his costume and used it to tie himself to the trunk of the tree. The winds were like a ghostly hand trying to rip him from his perch, but he held on with the full force of his will as the camp was devastated around him.

  Debris and people swept past him for what seemed like an eternity. Several times people were driven past the tree, but they were too far away or too panicked for him to reach out to them from his precarious perch.

  After a time he spotted a red head bobbing through the surf and, by stretching out a leg was able to snag part of the clothing of the person it belonged to. He got a grip on a long dress and pulled one of the show girls to the tree trunk.

  She was almost unconscious and he took off his improvised rope and tied her to the tree in his place.

  “Help!” A voice from the roiling surf caught his attention over the howl of the wind.

  The Eagle strained his eyes against the cutting raindrops and was able to see a figure holding onto a seat cushion who was trying to swim toward the tree.

  The espionage master at once ventured down the branches and actually lowered himself into the water while holding onto a low bough. He held out a hand and the man swimming toward him clamped onto it.

  The spy fighter pulled the swimmer to the tree by main strength and the two of them climbed back up the branches. The other man was able to get up to a higher branch and reached back to help the Eagle.

  When the spymaster was secure on a new perch he looked over to see the face of the man he had saved and the two of them received a shock; it was the pug face of the amorous Fritz.

  “Danke,” the Nazi said, suddenly a brother in misery. The Eagle nodded.

  They saw no more heads bobbing in the water; though many vague shapes in the deepening black might have been any number of people, none showed signs of life.

  Together the three castaways endured an evening and night in hell as the roaring wind screamed in anger around them, and the cries of the dying blended with the hiss of the surf and whistling of the winds.