Return From the Inferno (11 page)

At exactly 7 AM, hundreds of air raid sirens began to blare across the city.

This was a signal. The airplane carrying the First Governor of Bundeswehr Four was now just five minutes from landing. It was time to sort out the traffic jam and rev up the false moxie of the very captive audience.

Four minutes and fifty-eight seconds later, the enormous C-5 carrying the First Governor and his entire entourage touched down at the end of Fuhrerstadt Airport's longest runway.

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Screeching overhead was its ten-plane protection squadron, an elite unit made up of Tornadoes. They plowed a way through the spiral of Fuhrerstadfs own circling jets, broke into pairs and came in for quick landings nearly on the tail of the big C-5.

The C-5 had slowed to the end of the runway by this time and had turned onto a taxiway which would bring it to the main terminal building. This taxiway was lined with 122-mm mobile artillery pieces, their long barrels cocked at 45-degree angles. Each gun fired off a single dummy round-long on noise and smoke but little else-just as soon as the tail of the Galaxy transport rolled by its position. This was an exercise performed with extreme precision and care. Woe to the gun commander whose crew shot too soon and impacted its jowerbag onto the tail of the dignitary's airplane.

The huge jet transport made it through the gauntlet unscathed and turned toward the main terminal. There was no one there waiting for it. The governor of the Bundeswehr Four would be insulted by a simple airport greeting ceremony. Rather the big plane screeched to a halt about 200 feet from the terminal. Its crew quickly shut down its four massive engines.

Exactly one minute later, the front of the airplane lifted up like a gigantic mouth. Out of the maw came two VBL scout cars, a Bradley APC, a Hummer crammed with radio equipment, and a converted troop van which now served as an emergency ambulance. It came complete with an operating table and a six-man squad of the Fourth Reich's top surgeons.

Behind this vehicle came a long, pearl white, super-stretch Mercedes limousine. The front of this thirty-five-foot, sixteen-wheeled car was heavily reinforced, as were its many door panels and underbody. To the rear of the vehicle was a raised platform which featured a removable crystal clear bubble top. Underneath this bulletproof canopy were three chairs.

The one in the middle, slightly higher than the other two, was occupied by the resplendently dressed First Governor. In the seat to his left sat the young girl named Bridgett, the

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former slave whose talents at artwork so enamored the Nazi high commander.

In the seat to the First Governor's right, wearing a tall white miter on his head and dressed in colorful satin vestments that rivaled those of Vatican's past, sat a very bewildered Mike Fitzgerald.

Exactly two minutes later, the small motorcade was roaring down the main boulevard toward the heart of Fuhrerstadt.

The thousands of slave laborers waved their small flags with less than controlled abandon as the visiting high officer's limo shot by. Many of the intersections were crowded with various NS ceremonial outfits, regimental bands, honor guards and such. These units would snap to action as quickly as the small parade of vehicles approached.

Those that could, caught a brief glimpse of the be-medaled and beaming visiting Governor, the young girl in the frilly white dress on his left who was waving somewhat stiffly, and the man in the religious robes, who was simply staring out at them, his face a bucket of confusion.

The motorcade passed the halfway mark and turned onto the main street which would bring it directly into downtown Fuhrerstadt. There, waiting at the main headquarters of the occupying German forces, was the Amerikafuhrer himself, the hermit Supreme Commander of Fourth Reich America. The plan called for him to greet the First Governor at the top step of the gigantic Reichstag, and then usher him and his entourage into the main dining hall for a four-hour, twelve-course state brunch.

But very soon, that plan would go awry.

The motorcade was about a half mile away from the Reichstag when the First Governor leapt to his feet and commanded the limo driver to stop the car. The man unquestioningly obeyed, screeching the vehicle to a halt so sharp, he was nearly ejected out the front window.

As the security people in the first two vehicles turned around in horror, they saw the First Governor's limo take a

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very unscheduled right turn off the main street and toward the largely abandoned west side of the city.

When the security chief radioed back to the limo to ask why it had veered off course, the First Governor himself took the call.

"This is where my work will begin," he told the security man calmly. "Perhaps you should all follow and learn something."

By the time the scout cars, the APC, and the ambulance turned off the main street, the First Governor's limo was roaring through the deserted streets.

Its driver following directions personally called out by the top man via the car's radiophone. Two security helicopters had now joined the pursuit, alerted that something might be terribly wrong in the motorcade.

The choppers reached the limo's position roughly the same time the ground units did. They found the car had pulled over a dirty smoking truck, the First Governor apparently intent on questioning the driver.

Upon arriving, the security forces bounded from their vehicles and set up a hasty protective ring around their charge. They were horrified to see that the truck the First Governor had stopped was actually a morgue wagon, carrying the nightly fatalities from Dragon's Mouth prison to the mass grave on the other side of town. Even more amazing, the First Governor himself was out of his protective limo and was engaged in an animated conversation with the lowly vulture driving the sputtering hearse.

"How many of them are dead?" the First Governor asked the driver.

"All of them, I think," the totally stupefied man replied.

"Lay them out," the First Governor ordered the man. "Lay them right out on this street for all to see."

The confused, yet savvy, security men didn't have to be told to help. They practically knocked aside the driver and his goon assistant in their rush to take the two dozen bodies off the truck. Each corpse was wrapped in a dirty white sheet and sealed inside a reusable fiberboard box. These coffins had been recycled so often, however, that their lids barely stayed on.

Once the dead were arrayed in a long straight line down the middle of the road, the First Governor addressed the fifty or so people, security men and NS

street troops from the parade route, in a loud, ringing voice.

"We are water," he declared definitively. "We come from the water, which in turn, comes from the stars. Just as water gives us life at birth, it can too give us life after death."

The security troops tried to remain looking grim, but it was hard to do when the First Governor's actions seemed so baffling. The six doctors who'd followed the scene in the rolling operating room had drawn out their own diagnosis of the First Governor's peculiar behavior days before. It was so apparent. He was displaying every single known symptom of acute myx poisoning, from giddy irrationality to tenth-degree megalomania.

"I have proof that this is true," the First Governor went on. "I have talked to people who have seen it, and now I believe. I want to prove it to you, so you will believe too."

He took the young girl in the white dress by the hand and together they walked down the row of shabby, corroding coffins. They stopped about two thirds of the way down the line. The girl, edged on by the First Governor's whispered instructions, pointed to a particular box.

"Open it!" the First Governor commanded. The truck driver and his assistant, at last realizing just who was giving the orders, jumped forward and began prying the nails out of the coffin lid. While they did this, the First Governor raised his hand and motioned back to the limo.

"Father!" he called to Fitzgerald. "Come forth and show us your secret of salvation!"

Mike Fitzgerald was just about frozen to the spot.

He'd been through many strange incidents in the past five years. Many strange incidents in his life, but this? This "Man of the Water" stuff? A messiah?

Him?

He climbed out of the limousine, past the edgy security guards, and down the line of coffins. The two oily workmen

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had pried off the coffin lid by this time. As soon as Fitz reached the open box, the First Governor turned back to the crowd and resumed his pontificating.

'This, my friends, is a true 'man of water,'" he told them, his hand resting on Fitz's shoulder. "Watch him. And believe . . ."

The First Governor turned to Fitz and smiled.

"Raise him," he said softly.

Fitz was almost paralyzed.

"Raise him," the First Governor repeated, pointing down at the sheet draped corpse. "Raise him, so they too will believe in you as I do."

Fitz had no choice. He knelt down and said a quick stall-big prayer. He knew his masquerade would soon be over.

He pretended to finish with a whispered "Amen," Then he did a slow-motion sign of the cross.

"Prepare to believe!" the First Governor bellowed.

All eyes burning through him, Fitz reached into the box and placed his hand on the man's forehead.

Suddenly, the corpse moved.

It startled Fitz so he nearly fell over. The gasp from the crowd sounded like the crack of a gunshot.

"Believe!" the First Governor cried out. "Believe your eyes!"

Fitz was shaking visibly as he tapped the side of the figure's head. The body stirred again.

"No ... it can't be," someone moaned in the crowd.

"Is this happening?" another whispered in a trembling, reverent voice.

Somewhere deep inside him, Fitz found the countenance to reach down and lift the sheet from the man's face.

"Oh, my God," he said as he stared down at the body.

The man's eyes blinked once and then popped open.

"Fitz? Is that you?"

Fitz couldn't speak.

It was Frost.

That was why he knew it had to be a setup. He knew it must be part of some grand plan, a plan hatched to regain control of the country or something equally heroic. It was

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the only explanation. The trouble was that only one man could have arranged it all. And he was supposed to be dead.

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Lieutenant Donn Kurjan-code name "Lazarus"-checked his watch.

It was 1700 hours-5 PM. He slowly lifted a small set of binoculars to his eyes and scanned the road beyond the graveyard. Besides a pack of wild dogs and some crows, he saw nothing.

"What's gone wrong?" he whispered to himself. "Someone screwed up . . ."

Kurjan shifted uneasily in his heavy, branch draped uniform and continued to scan the long dusty road leading to the cemetery. In all the missions he'd been asked to perform in his three years in the Football City Special Forces, this one had to be the worst.

He was invisible. Of that he was certain. He was in a shallow trench selected carefully on the side of a small hill which looked out over the entrance to the graveyard. On top of him was a carefully constructed shield of dirt, branches, leaves, and grass, that he built himself following the rigorous standard as set out by a decades-old SAS manual.

This roof was indistinguishable from the topography around him. Indeed, more than once during this four-day, one-man mission, Death Skull guards had ventured very close to his hiding spot. One squad even took their lunch no more than ten feet away from him. Newly fluent in German, he had 97

little choice but eavesdrop on the Nazi soldiers' conversation which consisted almost entirely of past atrocities they'd committed as well as ones they were planning in the future.

He could have easily killed all seven of them. His M-16-1EG was not only silencer equipped, it also had laser designated sighting. But to have done so would have given away his position, and therefore terminate what had been, up to this time, a bold yet highly successful covert field operation.

Kurjan's mission was to raise people from the dead. Literally. As point man for the appropriately titled "Operation Lazarus," it was his job to station himself close to the Mass Grave #1. Once night had fallen, he would sneak down into the gravesites looking for the United American officers who had chosen to

"die" that day via the controlled overdose of myx. Once found-and much talent lay in the finding Kurjan would revive the escapee and spirit him away to a safe location, where he would be met by members of the local underground.

These former militiamen would then escort the liberated man through a modern version of the Underground Railroad, a journey which culminated in the escapee reaching United Americans forces either in Free Canada or on the secluded islands in the Caribbean.

In the twenty days off and on that he'd been working the mission, Kurjan had succeeded in getting twelve officers out of their graves and into the escape system. Even the fruitless trips into the hellish pit proved educational. They served to hone his odd but useful skill of quickly determining who was dead and who was myxed by jimmying the coffin lid, reaching inside, finding the candidate's nose through the death shroud and squeezing it. This temporary interruption of the already drastically slowed-down breathing process always proved just enough to wake the person out of their myx-induced stupor.

In other words, if the person didn't cough, he was dead.

Despite the perilous aspects of the mission-patience was the number one talent-he had managed to rescue that even dozen of officers without any problems at all.

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Now, it appeared as if something had gone wrong with Escapee Number Thirteen.

He checked his watch again, the movement being painful as his shoulder muscles tended to cramp up after seven hours of studied nonmovement. 1710 hours. The stiff wagon supposedly carrying the "dead" officer was way overdue.

"Maybe thirteen is my unlucky number," he muttered.