Crucified (26 page)

Sturmer heard the computer purr as it performed.

"Here's something to chew on," the captain growled at whatever he saw through the periscope. "Tube two . . ."

A measured pause .. .

"Fire!"

Again, the
Black Devil
bucked from loss of weight. Down below, the chief engineer reacted, flooding the ballast tanks the moment the eel ejected to make sure the sudden buoyancy didn't force the boat to surface and turn it into a sitting duck.

"Crash dive!" the Old Man ordered.

The eel had an impact—not a magnetic influence—fuse. To detonate, the firing pin and whiskers required at least a glancing blow. But even if the torpedo scored a hit and took out one destroyer, there was no defense against the other sub killer, except to dive as fast as could be down, down, down to the depths of the sea.

"Into the cellar," the skipper said as the periscope retracted.

Rung by rung, they scrambled down from the conning tower, one man's boots chasing the other's grasp on the ladder.

A jarring percussion rocked the boat.

"A hit!" the men below rejoiced in unison.

But the triumph was short lived.

The
Black Devil
was in a steep plunge. The bilge water rushed forward beneath the floor plates. The sausages dangling overhead swung like pendulums. "All hands forward!" the Old Man ordered those standing by, and they charged toward the bow to add body weight.

"Depth charges coming," warned the radioman.

The hydrophones were picking up sonar pings. The noise was like a hammer hitting a tuning fork. The ship stalking them was pulsing out high frequencies and catching anything that bounced back from submerged objects like this submarine.

Ping . . .

Ping . . .

Ping . . .

Blechkoller
was the term. "Tin-can neurosis." The numbing dread that seized submariners under depth-charge attack.

Ping ...

Ping . . .

Booooom!

Sound is five times louder in water than it is in the air.

The force of the first charge slammed the sub like a sledgehammer. The boat vibrated violently from bow to stern. Crewmen not holding on to something were knocked off their feet.

The first casualty of the shock wave was the Old Man. A metal surface caught the skipper under his chin, jerking back his head so sharply that his neck snapped.

Booooom!

The second blast snuffed the lights.

Every sound was amplified in this dark kettledrum. Their sole protection from the sea was a sheet of steel, and the thud-thuds knocking them about were testing its stress resistance. Crockery smashed to pieces, and the floor plates jumped and clattered. Light bulbs popped from their sockets, and instruments shattered. Wood splintered while food cans flew like caged canaries. How much more jolting could the
Black Devil
take before it split at the seams?

Before one of the hull welds cracked and the green sea poured in?

With the skipper dead, Sturmer took command. Surrender the sub in the Firth of Forth and he could finish delivering the Judas package.

The destroyer was racing up and down under full steam, a poacher fishing with bombs.

The tension was nerve-shredding.

Sturmer held his breath.

White cones from flashlights cast circles on the dark. Oil-smeared faces twitched in the pools of light. One seaman chewed his lip. Another scrunched his eyes. Two, like turtles, hunched their heads down between their shoulders.

Emergency lights came on and bathed the sub in electric blue. Drops of perspiration splashed into the bilge. The crew feared the next depth charge would nail the lid down forever.

Every sailor's deepest fear is the cruel sea. Water strangles slowly in a drowning submarine. A trip to the bottom takes time.

Will the water pressure compress the sub to a lump? Do corpses rot in the lower depths, or do fish gnaw flesh from the bones?

A drum roll of explosions boomed on all sides. A double whammy beneath their feet punched the sub in the gut.

"Leakage!" someone yelled.

Jets of water spurted, drenching the sailors and filling the sub with dense blue clouds.

"Blow the ballast tanks," Sturmer commanded. "All hands prepare to surface."

Down here, men were wholly dependent on equipment.

Batteries, in any sub, posed two perils: damaged cells could cause the loss of underwater power, and battery casings cracked by depth-charge jolts could spill their electrolytes into the bilge. Electrolysis of the sodium chloride in the brine would then produce—

"Gas!"

There was no mistaking this pepper-and-pineapple smell.

Chlorine gas—the chemical weapon used in the Second Battle of Ypres during the First World War—billowed up through the floor plates from the storage trough below. As the
Black Devil
struggled to claw toward the surface, the greenish-yellow poisonous haze overpowered the crew.

The metallic taste of the gas stung Stunner's throat and lungs. One by one, the men around him crumpled to their knees, suffocating in agony. Their rudimentary oxygen masks were of little use to those stumbling to strap them on, for just then, a depth charge exploded beside the sub, hurling the men still standing against metal edges.

Every bone in Stunner's face smashed to splinters.

The sub broke the surface.

But no one escaped.

By the time the Royal Navy pried open the hatches, fourteen corpses manned the sub.

The date was July 19, 1944.

Two days after Rommel was wounded by the Spitfire attack in France, and one day before the July Plot bombers would fail to assassinate Hitler.

      
GERMANY, NOW

The next day

From the window of a tower, Wyatt looks down at a bonfire blazing on an island in a pond. Through the flames, he glimpses Joan of Arc, lashed to a stake, cross in hand, as she's burned alive.

Masked by hoods, Catholic Inquisitors ring the heretic. Only when she screams his name does Wyatt identify the doomed witch as Liz Hannah. The upside-down crucifix she holds comes from the beam above the Judas chair in Balsdon's cottage.

Recoiling in horror, Wyatt sees iron bars on the window.

"Wyatt!

"Wyatt!

"Wyyyatt!"

Vertigo assaults him as he whirls about in this cell high up in the turret of a castle. He rushes to the only door in the circular wall, gives it a frantic rattle, and learns he's imprisoned in a locked room. Dropping to his knees, he peers through the Judas window in the door. His jailors are playing chess. Detective Inspector Ramsey, who suspects Wyatt of killing Mick Balsdon, and Detective Inspector Stritzel, who has him in the frame for the murder of Lenny Jones, make the same move.

Both castle their rooks . . .

Wyatt jerked awake to find himself in bed. The clock on the nightstand said it was 4:13.

Tick-tock . . .

He tried to go back to sleep, but sleep eluded him. So Wyatt rolled onto his back, locked his fingers behind his neck, and plumbed the anxiety that had stalked him out of dreamland.

Whoever had skewered Balsdon on the Judas chair wasn't hunting for decades-old atomic secrets. The killer had to be after the biblical relics rumored to be in the missing Judas package.

The only clue to the location of the relics hid in the recollections of the crewmen of the
Ace of Clubs.
Had Balsdon believed Trent Jones was the agent? Having extracted that from the old man by torture and reading his pilfered archive, had the killer flown to Germany to steal Trent Jones's papers from his grandson, Lenny?

But if Jones wasn't the Judas agent—and Wyatt had proved he wasn't by solving the locked-turret puzzle—then the killer had yet to find what he was looking for. That meant he was
still
on the hunt. Would he go after Sweaty and Liz next?

Tick-tock . . .

Unless the religious signature left at the Balsdon murder was a red herring to blindside the police, the killer exhibited symptoms of paranoid psychosis fueled by Catholicism.

The crucifix and the Inquisition instrument found in the cottage indicated that the killer was a religious nut.

There's
nothing
more dangerous, Wyatt thought as he threw back the covers, sat up in bed, and glanced at the clock.

Tick-tock . . .

Better safe than sorry.

Though it was ultra early, Wyatt phoned Liz's London flat.

Her machine answered.

"Hi. It's Wyatt. Call me on my cell."

He left his number.

For a moment, Wyatt pondered going to the German federal police with his concern about Sweaty's and Liz's safety.

He could ask them to contact the British police. But both forces viewed
him
as their prime suspect. Before the cops turned their attention to phantom killers, would they not wish to eliminate the only person who had appeared mysteriously at
both
murder scenes? Particularly if that suspect tried to elbow into the investigations like Raskolnikov did in
Crime and Punishment?

You bet your booty they would, Wyatt concluded.

He decided that the German half of the Judas puzzle was best left to Rutger, who'd now returned to Berlin. There was nothing to keep Wyatt here, so he packed his bags, checked out of the hotel, drove to the airport, turned in the car, and caught the first available flight to London. From Gatwick, he hopped a train to the Achilles heel.

Tick-tock . . .

+ + + 

Trundling along in this train carriage brought Alfred Hitchcock to Wyatt's mind. Hitch made a number of train movies:
The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, Strangers on a Train, North by
Northwest.
And in explaining the "MacGuffin"—the generic, non-specific engine that sets a film in motion—Hitch had two men traveling on a train from London to Scotland. On the lug-gage rack above their heads jiggled an oddly shaped package.

"What's in the package?" asked one of the men.

"That's a MacGuffin," replied his companion.

"What's a MacGuffin?"

"It's a device for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands."

"But there aren't any lions in the Scottish Highlands!"

"Well, then, I guess that's no MacGuffin."

For Hitchcock, the MacGuffin could be anything from a strip of microfilm (
North by Northwest)
to a coded message in a piece of music
(The Lady Vanishes).
All that mattered was that it seemed to be of vital importance to the characters in the film.

Well, that's what Wyatt had here. A MacGuffin that was valuable enough to someone that he was willing to slaughter Balsdon and Lenny Jones to get it.

Of course, Wyatt had no inkling what the MacGuffin was.

But he sensed he was closing in on the secret by concluding that Judas was Erwin Rommel. Rommel's battles in North Africa, Wyatt knew, took him to the border of the Holy Land, where he might have chanced across some biblical relics.

Tick-tock . . .

As the train slinked southeast toward the Achilles heel of England, Wyatt passed the time by leafing through Rutger's files on U-boats sent to Britain between the night the
Ace
was shot down and the day the July Plot to assassinate Hitler failed.

Each file included a group photograph of the crew snapped before the sea wolves went hunting.

For a man whose life centered on books, Wyatt wondered why he never had a bookmark at hand. As always, he had to dig out his business cards and slot them into places that he would revisit later. As he looked over the men in each picture—their young faces frozen in time—he wondered which one was Ack-Ack DuBoulay.

+ + + 

Wyatt checked his bags at the station and walked into town. He was here to accomplish several tasks. The relatives of the Ace's crew had kept in touch, and two of them—the son of the flight engineer, Hugh "Ox" Oxley, and the daughter of the bomb-aimer, Russ "Nelson" Trafalgar—were married to each other and lived by the sea. Wyatt figured they'd have phone numbers for Liz's mother and grandmother, and he could call them to see if she was with them. He'd also be able to get a look at any archives kept by Ox and Nelson during the war. And he could borrow a photo of Ack-Ack DuBoulay to compare with the faces of the sea wolves in the U-boat files.

Tick-tock . . .

The Achilles heel of England was the weak spot where the invaders stormed in. Six centuries before the Romans landed, Celts from northern Europe had opened the gateway to pre-Christian Britain. Julius Caesar came, saw, and didn't conquer in 55 B.C. But the legions returned to stay a decade later, and refused to leave for four hundred years. When the Romans withdrew to defend Rome against pillaging heathens, the Angles and the Saxons—and later the Vikings and the Normans—sought out gaps in the coastline as their entry points. Each group of invaders threw up fortifications to bulwark themselves from the next, and today the shores bristle with forts, castles, moats, cannons, draw-bridges, and portcullises resembling fangs about to chomp. In 1940, the bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover were chewed by Nazi planes attacking during the Battle of Britain. Now, foreign conquerors came in by ferries and Chunnel trains, then fanned out to overrun England's teashops.