Death's Head Legion (2 page)

“Is there any reason you and Herr Rucker must always bicker?” Deitel asked her quietly.

She shrugged. “How is that your concern?”

Deitel, ignoring the question she answered his with, said, “I wonder if it's because you fear what you might say if you stopped pretending to fight.”

Terah started to respond, but stopped herself. She didn't know what to say to that. And Deitel knew it.

Rucker interrupted.

“If you find Renault, get him out of there. Take a taxi. We'll plan to meet up—where, Chuy?” Rucker said.

“The Coliseum?” Chuy supplied.

“The Colis . . . really, Chuy? Really? That's like rendezvousing at the Alamo in San Antonio or the Eiffel . . . you know what? Fine, never mind—the Coliseum at eleven
A.M.
And good luck.”

“And if we see any Germans?” Terah asked. She glanced at Deitel. “Any
other
Germans?”

Rucker pulled out into traffic and shouted over his shoulder, “Don't let them see you.”

The drive to the university took another twenty minutes. The whole time, Chuy was engrossed in his calculations again.

“It's not adding up, Fox.”

“What isn't?”

“Fuel consumption for our skip over the pond.”

“You took into account all the wind variables?”

“Of course.”

“The course corrections we made at two-thirty and four
A.M.
?

“Naturally.”

“Weight distribution? Temperature and altitude variations?”

“Oh please. How long have I been flying?”

Rucker parked a few blocks from the edge of the university grounds. The university was founded more than six hundred years before, and the city had literally grown around it. It was one of the most urban university campuses in Europe.

“Then check your preliminary assumptions.”

“Which one?”

“Torque degradation. Crosswind streams. Weight. I don't know. Do the math.”

It took Chuy less than a minute.

“Either the
Raposa
's engines are running at ten percent less efficiency,” he said, and Rucker's look told him that wasn't the case, “or we were about 210 pounds heavier than the crew and cargo should have been,” Chuy concluded.

“Meh. You know Lysander and Terah. They probably threw some extra stuff in there and didn't think it would matter,” Rucker said.

“I'm charging them for the extra fuel when we put in for reimbursement of expenses,” Chuy said.

Rucker pulled out the city map he'd picked up at the airport.

“This Renault's an academic, so Lord knows what kind of schedule he keeps. He's got a temporary office in the history building, and an apartment four blocks south. I'll take the office, you take his residence,” he said to Chuy.

Rucker checked the twin Webley revolvers he wore in a shoulder rig under his leather jacket. Chuy checked his Beretta semiautomatic.

“Time to go to school,” Rucker said.

“Aye, Captain.”

Rucker went north, while Chuy went south.

T
he history building was, not surprisingly, one of the more historical places on campus, and the four-story building's façade was currently undergoing restoration work. Wooden scaffolding and pulley systems for raising brick and mortar wrapped around two sides of the old stone structure. The scaffolding was almost as tall as the ancient conifers and oaks shading the building from the rising and setting sun.

Signs in Italian indicated that most of the regular offices and classrooms were temporarily being hosted in a few other buildings, but the main doors were open. Renault's office should be on the second floor, according to what Terah had gathered, so Rucker made his way upstairs from the empty foyer.

Two men in ordinary gray suits were in the interconnected office suite where Renault's office should have been. When they saw Rucker in the doorway, the one closest to Rucker smiled.

“Good morning, sir,” he said in accented Italian. “May I help you?”

Rucker's Italian wasn't half as good as his French, so he couldn't place the accent.

“Yes, thank you. Dr. Renault?” Rucker responded in Italian.

The two men exchanged glances. Rucker noticed the slight bulge under the right side of the first one's jacket, and a similar bulge under the left arm of the other man.

His mind and his eyes went to work: at a glance, likely semiautomatics in the popgun caliber of nine millimeter. A German favorite. The two men stood a good six inches taller and had thirty pounds on Rucker. Their ties were perfectly tied and their shoes were polished like mirrors. Pretty much the opposite of academics. More like police. Or soldiers.

“Dr. Renault is working in the offices upstairs because of the noise of the workers on the first floor,” the right-hand one said. “He is up there now. We can take you there.”

Right. Because every visitor needs two escorts.

Trap. Trappity trap trap, Rucker thought.

Might as well see this through, though, and see what they know.

“How very kind,” Rucker said.
“Grazie.”

The two escorted him up the main stairwell in the foyer. Rucker noted their subtle jockeying for tactical positioning, with one working his way behind him and the other one ahead.

“Reckon there's more than twelve feet of your boys,” Rucker said to himself in English. “They sure don't make academics like that back home.”

Outside the door to the main office on the fourth floor, the subtle physical maneuvering continued. As Rucker raised his hand to knock on the office door, he smiled at his escorts and said, “
Schlag auf holz.”

Knock on wood. In German.

Right-handed smiled and nodded before he caught himself, but it was too late.

Rucker elbowed the left-handed one in the solar plexus and stomped hard on the man's instep. He struck out at the right-handed goon, catching him in the throat with an open-handed strike.

Neither could make a sound now.

With the man in front grasping at his throat with both hands, his midsection was wide open. Rucker kneed him in the groin, grabbed his ears, and brought the man's face down into his other knee.

The one behind him was still hunched over but tried to take a swing. Rucker caught his wrist, twisted it around, and snapped his foot out, connecting the toe of his ankle boot to the man's temple.

Rucker pulled out each man's pistol—Walthers—and checked their loads. One in each hand, he kicked open the door and charged in, prepared to take on whomever was laying this trap. Prepared, he thought, for anything.

He wasn't prepared, however, for the half-dozen pistols and submachine guns pointed at him by German thugs in plainclothes. A seventh man with a long scar on his cheek and screen actor good looks sat behind a desk still drinking his coffee as if nothing were out of the ordinary.

“Guten tag,”
Scarface said.

There was only one rational course of action.

“Drop 'em or you all die,” Rucker said.

The man with the coffee couldn't help but nod approvingly.

“Ah, Herr Rucker. I would have expected no less. Please, there's no need for all this gunplay now. Put down the pistols and join me for, as you Texans say, a ‘cuppa java,' ” Skorzeny said, sweeping his arm out to the chair across the desk.

Rucker saw they had him dead to rights, and this was one German who wasn't going to react to bluster.

One of the Germans approached Rucker and took his appropriated Walthers. Another, approaching from behind, started to frisk him. Rucker elbowed the man square in the face. The agent fell back, blood pouring from his nose. Fingers tightened on triggers.

“Don't . . . touch . . . me,” Rucker said through gritted teeth.

Slowly, deliberately, Rucker pulled his twin Webley revolvers from the shoulder holster rig under his leather jacket. He spun them around, butt first.

With a nod, Skorzeny signaled for his men to stand down.

Rucker set the pistols on the desk in front of Skorzeny.

Skorzeny's men lowered their weapons. Rucker took a seat across from the commanding German. Despite the man's good looks, there was an edge on him as sharp as a Bowie knife and a look in his eyes Rucker had only seen in jungle cats. The German had a boxer's nose and the kind of thick fingers a man only gets from a life of hard labor. He recalled that his old friend, Captain Blackadder, had a particularly crude and particularly British expression for a man like this: a “hard cunt.”

“You probably do not know me as well as I know you, Captain Rucker. I am Lieutenant Otto Skorzeny, at your service,” the man said as a he poured a second cup of coffee and set it in front of Rucker. “Cigarette?”

Rucker took the coffee. “Much obliged Lieutenant Skorzeny. But no, I don't smoke.” He took a sip. Not bad.

“Our files on you are quite extensive, though I must admit that your crashing the party at Hamilton House was the first chance I had to see you at work,” Skorzeny said. “Impressive.”

Hamilton House? Then that meant . . .

“Let me guess, Lieutenant—you weigh about 210 pounds?”

Skorzeny inclined his head.

There it was. Chuy's anomaly. Skorzeny had hitched a ride in the
Raposa
's cargo compartment.

Skorzeny opened a file.

“You have quite the history. Sean Fox Rucker. Son of a West Texas rancher. Started flying at age fourteen. Lied about your age and joined the Freehold Volunteers, 315th Fighting Fireflies as a pilot before your seventeenth birthday. Twenty-nine air combat victories. Shot down three times. Captured three times. Escaped three times. There was that whole incident with Baron Manfried von Richtofen,” Skorzeny said. He looked up from the file. “You know, I'm sure Herr Richtofen would like to have words with you about that.”

“Manfried is a good man,” Rucker said, “and we have spoken since the war. Last I heard he'd emigrated to Switzerland, so I doubt he's still all concerned about protecting the honor of the Fatherland.”

“
Ja
. The baron, war hero or not, has not been a supporter of the New Order.”

“Most
soldiers
aren't, if I hear right,” Rucker said quite dismissively.

Every one of the half-dozen muscle men in the room shifted into more threatening postures. Even Skorzeny's superior grin fell a little. He returned to the file.

“After the war you studied mechanical engineering at the University of Austin. You dropped out and for the next several years, flew charters in just about every backwater corner of the world. In 1925 you and your fellow Firefly veteran, the Latin Negro Jesus D'Anconia Lago of Sao Paolo, founded Far Ranger Air, where you now serve as a pilot and trade facilitator. All of which, of course, is a cover for your true work as a spy for the Freehold government in Austin.”

Rucker laughed loudly.

“Oh, good Lord, your people actually believe that?”

“It is the truth,
nicht wahr
?”

Rucker shook his head.

“Not everything that people in other nations do is about military conquest and government spying, just because that's how it is where you're from,” Rucker said.

The look on Skorzeny's face reminded him of Blackadder's Axiom Number 13: “One can always reason with a German. One can always reason with a barnyard animal, too, for all the good it does.”

Skorzeny lit another cigarette and put his feet on the desk in front of him. Rucker waved the smoke off and coughed to the side as a cover for checking the room, the position of the guards, and the proximity of the exits.

The door was not an option. Four of the guards, while large and muscled, were young and their faces unmarred. The one to his right with the machine pistol, though—from the scars and missing teeth, he'd been in his share of brawls. Mark him as the most immediate threat, Rucker thought, but the man would be cautious about shooting at him if Skorzeny was in the line of fire. The sixth man, by the window, presuming the others had Rucker covered, had reholstered his pistol. His wide eyes told the story—a true shavetail. Skorzeny, Rucker figured, had his sidearm either under his jacket or inside the desk drawer. Within easy reach, certainly. Rucker's pistols sat on the desk between the two.

He did the math.

“The point, Herr Rucker,” Skorzeny said, “is that we know all about you and your friends. We know you are after Dr. Renault and the spear. We have him. We'll soon have your friends, and we'll soon have the Spear of Destiny. Your efforts to interfere with the Reich are now kaput, and you should prepare yourself for an extended stay in Germany.”

“Oh goody, German hospitality,” Rucker said. “Stale sausages in the morning and rough rogering at night.”

Skorzeny leaned forward. “The only question before you is, do you plan to come with us peacefully or do you plan to make it difficult?”

Rucker didn't miss a beat.

“Oh don't be so stupid. Of course I plan to make it difficult,” he said, shooting up from his seat and with a kick sending the chair into the stomach of the guard posted behind him. He grabbed his pistols and, with them in his hands, lifted the front of the desk and flipped it over, toppling Skorzeny backward.

Rucker rolled over the desk, spinning 180 degrees, and landed on his feet. He zeroed in on the hard one with the machine pistol, and though his shot went wide, Fortune was with him. The bullet hit the man's weak-side shoulder and sent him spinning left, his finger pulling the trigger of his MP-40 in reaction to the pain. The four guards to his left scrambled for cover from his accidental fire as the man went down in pain from the muzzle energy imparted from a .45 caliber round. In this case it was 480 foot-pounds of energy, as Rucker used his own hand-loaded .45 ACP rounds, which carried a stronger punch than factory rounds.