Emerald Death (6 page)

Hannigan pushed the thought away.  She was easy on the eyes all right, but he had no time for romance.  And right now, he was not so much worried about whether she liked him, as he was that she was going to get him killed.

                                    *****

Sturmscharfuhrer Hans Wessel hurried his men from the trucks that had carried them back to the airfield where the Valkyrie was moored.  The huge zeppelin dominated the airfield.  The big cigar-shaped hull towered above every other aircraft or structure in sight, and the bright African sun gleamed off the silvery-looking hull of the German airship, making it look like the vengeful spirits that were her namesake.

Valkyrie - LZ 131 - was the pinnacle of German engineering.  Powered by four 1,200 horsepower Daimler-Benz diesel engines, she was capable of a ponderous but steady 135 kilometers per hour, and her pressurized hull could take her high above the weather, where the air was too thin for modern airplanes to fly. Three hundred meters long, she was larger even than the mighty Graf Zeppelin II, but her lightweight skin of cotton, doped with iron oxide and a substance impregnated with aluminum powder concealed far more than just 250,000 cubic meters of hydrogen gas in twenty individual cells.  The Valkyrie carried an entire squadron of Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighter planes, which could be launched or landed from the long suspended runway concealed inside the cavernous hull.

Unlike other military dirigibles, which could only carry parasite fighters for their own protection, the Valkyrie was the first true aerial aircraft carrier; an airbase in the sky.  Fighters could be transported anywhere in the world, flown high above the range of attack planes and anti-aircraft guns, and launched directly on the target, with plenty of fuel and ammunition to ensure victory.  With a fleet of airships like her, the Reich would rule the skies, and thence the world.

He wished that his men could spend more time aboard the magnificent ship but Doctor Ragnarok would have none of it.  He was totally focused on retrieving the so-called Emerald of Eternity.

He scowled at the thought of his immediate superior.  Doctor Ragnarok was a strange one.  He wore a steel mask over his head to conceal his true face from everyone.  Yet, he had emerged seemingly from nowhere to earn Der Fuhrer’s full confidence in matters of the occult.

Rumors had begun circulating among the crew of the Valkyrie; rumors that had spread to his own special team of Waffen troopers that attributed the disfigurement to a ritual had gone wrong - a demon he had summoned had melted his face. 

Demons
.  Wessel scoffed at the thought.  There was no such thing.  No demons, no magic power, no Emerald of Eternity.

If the good doctor’s face had actually been melted, it was from some sort of fire, no doubt by some of the strange electronic devices that the man surrounded himself with. Wessel shook his head.

He was an atheist in the truest sense.  A pragmatist that believed in nothing he could not see, touch or quantify in some way.  He believed only in the one entity that had never disappointed him: himself.  Those poor deluded fools who chose to believe in gods, fairies or whatever else, interested him not in the slightest.

Then again, science certainly held its share of strange phenomena.  What if the so-called Emerald of Eternity was not a mystic treasure, but simply a physical object with remarkable properties?  The debate was irrelevant; he had his orders.  Follow the instructions of Doctor Ragnarok, and find the emerald.

Degiorno's escape bothered him more than he cared to admit.  The Italian had found allies - mercenaries perhaps - who had proven unusually effective against his men.  There was a shrouded corpse in the back of one truck to prove it.  The matter was proving to be more than just an annoyance.

As the trucks pulled to a stop, he was surprised to see Ragnarok himself on the ground striding towards him.  The sunlight gleamed off the metallic mask, flashing intensely bright.

“Where is the Italian?” Ragnarok demanded as Wessel stepped from the truck.  The doctor’s voice was as cold and metallic as his visage.

“He escaped,” Wessel replied curtly, aggravated with himself for giving his after action report on the tarmac of the airfield.

“How?” Ragnarok asked, his tone conveying his shock.  “I thought your men were the best at this?”

“He had help,” Wessel snapped.  “And I believe that our earlier concerns have proven justified.  We need to get airborne if you want to reach the prize before the Italian.”

“What have you done?” Ragnarok demanded.

“The Italian has a copy of the map.”

“Impossible!”  Ragnarok raged.  “I hold the only copy.”

Wessel moved past Ragnarok, eager to take refuge in the zeppelin.  “You should have investigated the Italian more thoroughly.  I discovered that he is known to have a perfect photographic memory.  He no doubt had duplicated the map within hours after we showed it to him.  My spies revealed that he has been trying to recruit men for a journey deep within the jungle.  I believe he was going to make a try for the emerald,”

“Stop!” Ragnarok’s voiced crashed out behind him.

Wessel froze.  It took him a moment to realize he could not move.  There was a strange humming all around him; he could hear it and feel it.  Mein Gott, he thought, failing the first test of his unbelief by taking refuge in thoughts of the Divine. How is this possible?

“Let me go,” Wessel managed to get out between clenched teeth.

“You are sure they are going to go after the emerald?” Ragnarok’s voice had taken in the sibilant quality of a snake.  Wessel felt his head swivel seemingly of its own volition to look the masked man directly in the eyes.

“Yes!” he hissed, the pain wracking his body almost overwhelming. Then it ceased, gone as immediately as it had come.  Wessel felt his muscular control of his body return and the humming vibration was gone.

“What did you do to me?” Wessel croaked, fear filling his body and mind.

“I command your obedience.”  Ragnarok said imperiously.  “You were insolent.  Gather your men and make arrangements for us to depart immediately.”

“Sieg Heil!” Wessel replied, raising his arm in the traditional Nazi salute.  He staggered off, frightened of what had happened, afraid of what Ragnarok was capable of.  Wessel waved at his men and they ran for the zeppelin. They had seen Ragnarok’s power at work. 

…Now it wasn’t rumor, it was fact!

Chapter Seven

He looked over at Captain Morgan.
“We have to reach the Mission ahead of Bridget and the others,” Niles McKenzie said, wiping the sweat from his brow.

 
“Now Padre, if they’s a flyin’ that plane, there certainly ain’t no way for us to get there before them.”  Morgan reminded him. 

“At best we might end up a day behind them, depending on if there are people waiting to transfer cargo from this boat to the one above the falls.”

“They have no idea what they are getting themselves into, of the danger they will be in,” McKenzie muttered almost as if he hadn’t heard Morgan.  There was a good chance he hadn’t.  More and more of late, he was having trouble focusing his thoughts.  He sometimes wondered if he hadn’t been too long in the jungle.

Right now, he had to think about Bridget, about protecting her from the secrets that lay deep in the jungle.  He had to prevent her from traveling into Prester John’s territory.

The actual location of the legendary Priest King’s hidden demesne was but one of many secrets with which he was burdened.  For centuries - really since its inception - rumors of the fabled lost Christian Kingdom of Prester John had trickled out of Africa.  Rome had long known of his existence, but they conveniently chose to look the other way.  Prester John left the Church alone, and they had learned the hard way to leave him alone.  McKenzie knew that on several occasions the Holy Roman Order had sent assassins after the immortal Priest King.  None of them returned in one piece.  The last had been left dismembered in the Pope’s own bed while the Pope slept unaware.  The message had been received.  ‘Leave me alone or war will be waged!’

Even the mighty Vatican knew when to back off; the cost of an open holy war with the Priest King of legend would have been incalculable. Instead, they had adopted a policy of denial and isolation, which was certainly amenable to Prester John.  The College of Cardinals had reluctantly settled for satisfying their unquenchable penchant for meddling by assigning spies to watch from afar - spies like Niles McKenzie.  Yet McKenzie did not report everything he learned to his masters.

In his fortress in the lost city of Simbalwe, hidden deep in the reaches of the Congo jungle, the legendary of the Priest King concealed one of the deadliest artifacts known to man: The Emerald of Eternity.  He guarded it savagely, as a hyena fights for carrion; it was more important to him than any of his treasures, perhaps more valuable than any other treasure in the world, for the emerald was the key to his immortality.  He would kill to keep it - kill at the first hint of a threat to his sole possession.  And now Degiorno was poised to take Bridget into the lion’s den.  If Hannigan and the others insisted on going after it, he would intervene, go himself rather than put Bridget in that kind of danger.

McKenzie thought about that and almost laughed.  How much danger did he put her in daily by keeping her here in Africa?  Really, what was he doing here at all?  Trying to atone for some imagined sins against God or man?  God forgave - if he believed anything, he had to believe that - and man simply did not care.  So whom did he need forgiveness from?  His ghosts?

He felt moisture on his cheeks that wasn’t sweat.  It took him a moment to realize what it was and where it had come from.  Tears.  Tears of revelation?  Tears of penance?  Tears shed for all those he had not been able to help over the years?

You can never run from your ghosts.  They always find you.  Maybe it was time to leave, time to go back to the States and resume a real life.

McKenzie wiped his face, careful not to let Morgan see what he was doing.  He could not afford to show weakness, not now, not in front of the riverboat captain.  As circumspect as he knew Morgan to be, rumors had a way of spreading, and he could not afford to be thought of as anything but Father McKenzie, the warrior priest.  If it were even whispered that his resolve was flagging, the Mission would become a prime target for the various bands of pirates that operated along the Congo River.

He pulled himself together, straightening his back.  He had to focus, focus on catching up with Bridget and the others.  He had to reach them before it was too late.

            *****

Sturmscharfuhrer Hans Wessel peered through one of the sealed portals in the smooth hull of the Valkyrie, searching for some sign of the small floatplane that had slipped into the air ahead of him.  From this lofty vantage, he commanded a view of hundreds of square kilometers, but the green expanse played tricks on the eye.  The jungle hides its secrets well, he thought mordantly.

A thunderous roar shuddered through the zeppelin as two of the Messerschmitt fighter planes blasted down the internal runway and out into the sky.  Wessel couldn’t help but smile as the fighters came back across the bow in a display of aerial acrobatics.  The pilots of the famed Kondor Legion - the Sky Masters - had cut their teeth on the exploits of Richtofen and the Bloody Circus.   They were Germany’s new best of the best, and couldn’t resist a little showing off.  They were champing at the bit to prove their steel on the field of combat.

…Too bad that their first mission, hunting a lone unarmed float plane, wouldn’t provide much sport.

                                    *****

Mike Hannigan squinted at the dots that appeared on the horizon behind them.  He had spotted the zeppelin early on, rising lazily like a second moon from the verdant horizon.  He wasn’t too concerned about that; there was no way the ponderous gasbag would be able to catch them.  It was the smaller shapes that had him worried.  They were zigzagging across the sky, and growing larger with each passing second.  It didn’t take a gemstone with magic powers to divine their intentions.  As the dots grew bigger, he recognized them for what they were: fighter planes.  Things were about to get very hairy.

The planes were still barely larger than buzzing flies in the distance when they swung into line and began driving straight toward the floatplane.  

Hannigan spied a flickering light emanating from the pursuing aircraft, yet it wasn’t until he saw white streaks zipping through the sky that he realized what was happening: the Nazi fighter planes had opened fire!

Hannigan drew his Colt as he tried even harder to make himself a part of the Duck’s fuselage.  Tracer rounds burned past him; close, too close.  Something sparked off a wingtip, a scratch only, but nonetheless, a hit. 

Bridget reacted like someone stung by a wasp; sending the floatplane in what felt like a panic climb higher into the sky.  Hannigan’s stomach dropped and he involuntary clutched at the smooth exterior of the plane for a moment.  The fighters however, easily mimicked the maneuver, and continued to close the gap.

Hannigan, feeling a little like David with his sling, leveled the Colt towards the approaching warplane and thumbed down the safety.  Locking his elbow, he took careful aim and pulled the trigger again and again.  The closest plane suddenly swerved away and Hannigan swore he saw glass on the cockpit shatter. 

Then he saw nothing but sky as Bridget threw the Duck into a gut-wrenching loop and barrel roll trying to evade the gunfire from the second fighter.  Hannigan tried to aim at the Messerschmitt, but Bridget’s acrobatics had put the fuselage of the Duck between him and it.  So he did the one thing he could: he held on for dear life!