Overkill

by Ted Bell

  “Surely you’re aware that someone is following us, Alex,” Congreve said casually.

  “Yes, I noticed that,” Hawke said. He’d never sounded more cheerful. There was a lightness to him now, one that Congreve had not seen since that terrible Christmas Day. Knowing for certain that his son was still alive, healthy, and apparently unharmed had made a world of difference in his friend’s take on life. Some of his former jauntiness had now reappeared in the determined set of his jaw.

  “Now, who in the world could that be, Alex? Following us here? Any idea? We just got here.”

  “KGB? Which would mean they’re still following my every move?”

  “Hmm. Got hold of your flight plan somehow and rang up their man in Lugano.”

  “Meaning my room phone at Badrutt’s is tapped.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Are you armed, Constable?”

  “Well armed, in fact. Heckler & Koch MP5. You?”

  “Packing heat, too,” Hawke said.

  “Please tell me it’s not that Walther PPK peashooter of yours.”

  “Kimber 1911 LAPD Swat, actually. Highly recommended by Stoke’s friend Harry Brock. CIA Miami.”

  “Good news. There’s a turning up ahead there. Top of the next hill. Let’s get there first and set up an ambush? Yes?”

  “No. Let’s lead them to the crash site and see what they do. At this point, I’d rather chat with them than kill them. See what we can learn. Who knows, maybe they work for whoever is now calling himself the Wolf.”

  “Agreed.”

  “The wreckage site is just over that rise. Speed up. We want to be there first, find high ground.”

  They turned into an off-road glacial ravine that widened out into a boulder-strewn field at the bottom. And there were the charred remains of what looked to have been of some kind of aircraft. Hawke hit the brakes and raised a small pair of high-powered binoculars to his eyes, surveying the scene below.

  “See anything interesting?” Congreve asked.

  “Yes. Yes, I certainly do, thank god.”

  “What is it, Alex?”

  “I don’t see any evidence at all of human remains. None.”

  “Let’s go down and have a closer look, shall we?”

  There was crime scene tape surrounding a roughly circular area strewn with boulders, perhaps fifty feet or more across—rotted ice, ash and blackened wreckage. Hawke parked the car behind an outcropping of rock and the two men climbed out. Then he and Ambrose quickly scrambled to higher ground.

  Hawke put his binoculars to his eyes. He did a quick but careful scan of the wreckage.

  Something seemed very odd about the crash scene to Hawke, who quickly recognized what it was. “There’s no surrounding debris field, Constable. Beyond the tape. None.”

  “Right. Whatever it was, it didn’t crash here. It landed here and exploded later.”

  “Yes. The Russians flew that chopper and Alexei somewhere first, stashed him in a predetermined location, then flew the helo back here to destroy the evidence.”

  “Bloody hell. So it’s got to be a helo, not a small airplane.”

  “Correct. Hold on—here they come,” Ambrose said, squinting in the brilliant sunshine and pulling his side arm from the holster under his left arm. Hawke swung the binoculars in the direction Congreve was pointing his weapon.

  “Yeah. There’re four of them in the car,” Hawke said, bringing the mini-binocs back to his eyes. “Get ready.”

  To their surprise, the four men inside the car didn’t follow them on the snow-rutted road into the ravine. They kept going and appeared moments later at a much higher vantage point. Hawke trained the high-powered binocs on them.

  “They’ve pulled over and parked. Four men inside. Not getting out of the car. Two in front, two in the rear. The guy in the passenger seat has his high-powers on us. You don’t think they could be CIA, do you?”

  “Protecting the crash site? Maybe. They did guarantee they’d keep it sterile until you’d had a chance to do a recon. But I’m not picking up CIA vibes here, as your pal Harry Brock might say.”

  “So what do we do?” Hawke said.

  “Do what we came here for. Comb the wreckage for physical evidence and clues to the identity of the pilots. See what happens. If they start shooting, we can be pretty sure they’re not from Langley.”

  Hawke said, “You’re right. Let’s go. Keep a weather eye on that car there, though. Here, take my binoculars.”

  Hawke picked his way carefully through the rocky cover. Congreve quickly followed right behind him. Both of them were exposed periodically, but there was no gunfire from the car, at least not yet.

  “Bloody hell. Look, let’s divide the scene in half. You take from here to the fuselage, I’ll take the rest of it. That’s got to be what’s left of the cockpit right there. You take that locale, oh great master of forensic science.”

  “Alex, please. This is not funny. Let’s get this over with before we start to take fire.”

  “They’re not getting out. They’re still sitting up there in the car. They get out or I see a rifle, we make for that nest of boulders over there, right?”

  Congreve didn’t answer. He was down on his knees, turning a blackened object over and over in his hands. “Look here, Alex. See this? This is—it’s a piece of the chopper’s fuselage . . . blackened, but with visible paint remaining.”

  Hawke stared at it. The visible paint was red. With a partial white marking that could well be the lower half of the number four.

  A sharp retort cracked the air wide open. High-powered rifle, Hawke knew instantly.

  “Damn it to hell!” Congreve shouted, his left hand clutching his shoulder.

  Congreve, hit, was spun all the way round, a bright red blossom of blood on his right shoulder.

  “Ambrose!” Hawke cried, firing his weapon up at the two men as he raced back toward his friend.

  There was a lot of blood—too much blood.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Zurich

  Mr. Joseph Stalingrad of Los Angeles, California, stepped out of an enormous elevator and into the strange and exciting new world of Professor Gerhardt Steinhauser and his Magic Mountain.

  Alias the Sorcerer.

  Joe found himself inside a mammoth cave carved out of rock. He now understood the true meaning of the word cavernous. Holy shit. Joe’d been meaning to drive the Vette over to Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, but hadn’t made it. But he’d seen the postcard and those caverns had nothing on this joint.

  And this was only the ground floor!

  The interior dimensions of the damn thing were nearly those of a United Airlines hangar out at LAX! There was a funny smell too, one that he didn’t recognize at first and then he did. The whole place smelled of engine oil and grease and heavy machinery. He moved deeper into the interior.

  That’s when he first saw the squadron of fighter jets. Four perfectly aligned rows of them in the hangar. F/A-18s too, pretty hot-shit aircraft. Silver fuselages with a mountan peak emblem on the tails, and the words White Death near the nose. They were in tiptop condition, looked just like they did sitting out on the deck of an aircraft carrier, waiting in line for the catapult shot. He walked over to the nearest one and—

  “Can we help you?” a voice in the darkness said.

  Four beefy characters in black uniforms materialized out of the gloom, carrying serious assault weapons. “Can we help you?” one repeated, and Joe, who was no slouch at recognizing sarcasm if not irony when he heard it, didn’t hear any. He’s just being polite, Joe found himself thinking. He’s Swiss, for crissakes.

  “Yeah, I guess so.” Joe said. “I think I pushed the wrong button or the wrong elevator. Something.”

  “Which button did you mean to push, sir?”

  “Um, let’s see. Residence? Yeah. That was the one.”

  “Yes, well, this isn’t the residence. Nobody’s allowed on this level unless they’ve been cleared by the air boss
. Who hasn’t cleared you.”

  “No, no, I understand. Just a simple mistake. I have an appointment and—”

  “An appointment? Really?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Just who are you looking for, sir?”

  “I’m here to see Professor Steinhauser.”

  “He’s not receiving visitors at the moment. Perhaps you could stop by again? Say, next year, or the one following?”

  “Look here, pal, I got—”

  “Are you expected?”

  “I sure as hell hope so. I just took a long ride across a frozen lake in a submarine to get here.” Joe looked around. “Say, is this a natural cave? Hand-of-God kind of thing?”

  “God had nothing to do with the inside of this mountain, Mr. Stalingrad. As you will soon hear from the professor, everything you will see during your visit is the work of Hitler’s best Nazi engineers. Hitler had the entire complex, all twelve levels, built in total secrecy.”

  “He actually lived in here? I’ve never heard of him living in Switzerland.”

  “No. But it was his plan throughout the war. After conquering Europe and the successful invasion of Switzerland, der Führer would rule his glorious new Nazi empire from right here at the top of the world. Zurich was to be the new capital of the New Europe, and this was to be the ruler’s palace. When Berlin fell, Hitler and Albert Speer were working on a Nazi aerodrome here in Zurich, one twice the size of Tempelhof in Berlin.”

  “What the hell is that noise?” Joe asked. Suddenly, hearing a deep rumble from somewhere far back in the cavern, he looked up. Something really enormous was on the roll. You could almost feel it moving forward toward them through the darkness. The vibration beneath his boots told him it was on the rail tracks laid in the stone floor, tracks that stretched away into the blackness of a large tunnel.

  “Seriously? What the hell is it?” he asked the guard, upon seeing the approach of a hulking silhouette.

  “We’re moving some of our heavy artillery around,” the lead guard said. “Keeps the wheels greased, you know.”

  “Of course,” Joe said, enchanted with the whole layout and the nazified over-the-topness of absolutely everything inside this mountain. He could hardly wait to see the other levels.

  Seeing the gaping maw of the huge black muzzle emerge first, Joe held his breath. It simply wasn’t possible, but there it was. A massive German cannon, the most famous one, called the 88, was now rolling down the tracks straight toward them. He’d seen only one like it before, and that was in the movie The Guns of Navarone. Anthony Quinn had really rocked that role, his opinion.

  “Are you guys serious?” Joe said. “What’s an eighty-eight doing up here at fifteen thousand feet?”

  “Part of our home defensive systems,” the lead guy said. “A small part, yes, but an effective one if it’s ever needed to dissuade an attacker. Hasn’t been fired in anger since Hitler made a brief foray into Switzerland in World War II. Operation Tannenbaum, it was called.”

  “A deterrent, you’re saying,” Joe said, admiring the big gun.

  Suddenly a giant section of the rough-hewn rock wall began to slide silently to the left. It was, Joe now saw, the rock-clad hangar door, now open to the freezing air of the cold and starry night.

  “Over here, sir,” the lead guy said.

  “Sure, what’s up?”

  “I think there’s enough moonlight for you to see those two high mountains standing side by side over there to the north. See the crotch between them? Well, that’s the pass an enemy tank division would have to take to get anywhere near us here at White Death. Any commander foolish enough to try and get a division up this mountain and through that pass? The second he started taking fire from Big Bess here, he would very quickly realize he’d made a seriously bad decision.”

  “But I was told that nobody knows this complex is even here. Europe’s best-kept secret kind of thing.”

  “Well, there are rumors of our existence. Always have been.”

  “I should introduce myself. I’m Joe Stalingrad. I live in L.A., by the way. Movie business when I’m not doing this kind of thing. Couple of pictures under my belt. You ever see a flick called The Good, Bad, and the Naked?”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell. Sorry.”

  “No biggie. Just sayin’.”

  There was a bit of eye rolling and then the guy said, “Welcome to to our world, Mr. Stalingrad. Please follow me. Professor Steinhauser has a high-speed private residential elevator right over there by that fire extinguisher. Express to the top level.”

  “Thanks, guys. Catch you later,” Joe said. They were still staring at him, wondering what business a Joe Stalin look-alike actor could possibly have with the most powerful man in Europe.

  A statuesque brunette in a tailored emerald-green suit was waiting outside when the elevator doors parted. As she walked toward him, he thought she was perhaps the most voluptuous woman he’d ever seen. And that face! Except for the auburn hair, she was living, breathing Diana, Princess of Wales!

  “Mr. Stalingrad.” She smiled. “I’m Emma Peek. So lovely to meet you!”

  Her accent was a very posh, Mayfair, London, Joe thought. “We’re ever so delighted to have you with us,” she said. “Please give me your bag. I’ll have your belongings unpacked and placed in your room. You’re in the Blue Room in our guesthouse. It’s a separate structure, just a short rail trip away.”

  “Wait, there’s a railway inside this mountain?”

  “Well, not exactly a railway. More of a tram. A system of trams serving all twelve levels.”

  “Twelve levels? You gotta be effing kidding me.”

  Joe felt like a kid who’d stumbled onto the ultimate Disney World ride. Space Mountain had nothing on the Sorcerer’s little mountain getaway.

  “Question. Does my room have a view?”

  She laughed. “It would if it had a window.”

  “I’ll take that as a no. Are there any windows at all up here in outer space?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes,” she said, leading him to a mammoth pair of carved oaken doors inlaid with ivory. “Please step this way, Mr. Stalingrad. This is Professor Steinhauser’s private office. And yes, it has a large, lovely window out onto the world. Make yourself comfortable in that green leather chair over by the fire. He won’t be long—just finishing up a call to London.”

  “I’m fine, no hurry.”

  “Would you like a drink? Brandy, perhaps? Schnapps?”

  “I love schnapps. I even like the way the word sounds . . . schnaaaaaaps!”

  “I beg your pardon, Mr. Stalingrad?” Emma Peek said. “Are you ill?”

  “Uh, no. Not ill, Miss Peek. I think I’m in love.”

  Chapter Thirty

  A few minutes later, Joe was sitting alone with his coffee in a high-ceilinged office with lamps burning low on various tables. Faded Persian rugs of rose and pink covered the polished hardwood floors, and the walls were studded with Old Masters. Floor-to-ceiling bookcases bulged with leather-bound collections of authors from Goethe to Voltaire to Dickens to Hemingway and Twain.

  An enormous carved partner’s desk stood beneath the giant window, through which moonlight poured in. Now, this was an office a man could be proud of. Larry Krynsky, Wells Fargo on La Cienega? Eat your fuckin’ heart out, Larry. You lousy scumbag.

  Suddenly feeling just a smidge antsy, he got up from his comfy chair and walked around a bit, sipping his drink. Intensely curious about what made the Sorcerer tick, he went over to the source of the pale blue glow that filled the whole room. A soaring window reached from the floor clear up to a twenty-foot ceiling, lead-paned and crystal clear.

  The view of countless snow-covered mountaintops, a pale blue in the brilliant moonlight, was staggeringly beautiful.

  He was wondering if that massive window was such a good idea, especially for someone trying to remain invisible to the world. That was, until he saw the massive sliding steel doors built into the rock to either s
ide. Studying them more closely, he saw that their exterior surfaces were sheathed in hyperrealistic fake rock. Doors that would instantly slam shut and seal tight at the press of a button hidden somewhere.

  Trying unsuccessfully not to be a total nosey parker, he surveyed the rest of the surreally beautiful office.

  He checked out the desk first, mahogany with carvings of Alpine and forest scenes on the drawers and dark green leather covering the top. There were papers casually lying about but he chose not to look. None of his business. But a recessed LED light high up in the ceiling illuminated a shiny desktop object that definitely caught his eye.

  He bent and looked closer. It was a mounted piece of sculpture about a foot high, carved out of a solid block of highly polished steel.

  It was a Nazi swastika.

  He picked it up, feeling its hefty weight. What the hey? He’s a Nazi, this Steinhauser guy? A Nazi Jew hater who—

  “Good evening, Mr. Stalingrad,” a voice behind him boomed. “So good of you to come.”

  It was the Sorcerer, he knew, no question. His big voice had an otherworldly quality that sent chills straight up Joe’s spine.

  Mr. Joseph Stalingrad whirled around, holding the swastika sculpture in a death grip as if he been caught snooping. Which was only fair. Since he had been snooping.

  “I am so sorry,” Joe said, hastily putting the artifact back on the desk where it belonged, and feeling ridiculously guilty, he added, “Beautiful piece of art, Professor, beautiful,” and then he felt really dumb. A Jew calling a swastika paperweight beautiful? Really, Joe?

  The Sorcerer smiled and said, “Not really beautiful perhaps, Mr. Staligrad, but surely a powerful and iconic reminder of the evil that dwells in the hearts of men. That’s why it’s there. Keeps me honest.”

  “I can’t help but ask who the man was who built this . . . uh, this mountain fortress. German, I imagine, based on the big black eighty-eight cannon that welcomed me.”

  “Not to mention that controversial paperweight I caught you admiring?”