Return From the Inferno (16 page)

"Don't worry," he heard her voice waft over his shoulder as she continued her light massage. "You're safe. I would never harm someone who was so close a friend to the late, great Hawk Hunter."

Her unseen reassurance did little to melt "Yaz" back to reality. He knew for a fact that it was a deceitful boast. Elizabeth Sandlake had been the one responsible for sending the person closest to Hawk Hunter-his girlfriend Dominique-off to her death. "Yaz" couldn't imagine why he'd be spared.

"It's because you are a man," came the answer to his unspoken dilemma. "You are the last man on this ship who can come anywhere near satisfying both of us."

That was when "Yaz" opened his eyes for real and found the beautiful face of Juanita Juaraez, Elizabeth's "companion," smiling sleepily at him.

"You are lucky," Elizabeth's voice told him as Juanita's hand joined hers.

"For years, men have enslaved women. To feed them. To clothe them. To bear their heirs. To be their whores."

"Yaz's" eyes went wide as both women made a concerted effort to get him revved up again.

"But as of last night, you are now our whore."

It was almost thirty minutes later when the red phone on the table next to the huge water bed began buzzing.

"Yaz" was grateful for the break in the action. With his stamina just about peaking, he needed a few moments to catch his breath and coax some feeling back into his jaw.

Answering the phone with a cold, angry response, Elizabeth's attractive if deadly features drooped as she received the bad news from the unfortunate sort on the other end of the line. She hung up the phone while the caller was in midsentence, then slumped back to the water bed.

"Those heathens!" she cursed. "They've sunk one of the Fire Bats. . ."

"Oh no . . ." Juanita moaned. "How? When?"

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Elizabeth ignored her questions. "They've obviously found out about my coronation." she said in a voice so low, that "Yaz," situated at the foot of the bed, barely heard her. "They want to spoil what is rightly mine."

Both women were totally ignoring "Yaz" by now. "Will we still go through with the ceremony?" Juanita asked.

"Yes! Of course!" Elizabeth bellowed. "We must go through with it. Now more than ever!"

132

General Dave Jones reached into the bucket of grimy water and splashed a few drops onto his dry, sunburned face.

It was closing in on noontime and this meant that his chiseling station, mercifully hidden in the shadows for most of the morning, would soon lose its shade and be subjected to the intense summer heat.

Jones gave his tired neck a crack and then picked up his tools and began chipping away at the massive block of stone in front of him. This was Piece 34-A Center, half of the buckle which centered on the uniform belt surrounding the massive stone impression of Hitler. He would have to chip away nearly half the two-ton block by sundown that day or face punishment. It was a daunting task made even more difficult by the fact that he no longer had an assistant.

After Frost had "died," the prison camp administrators failed to assign him a new helper.

So now, besides the lonely fact that he was the only one left on the inside who knew that something was going on the outside, his work load had doubled.

He chipped away for several minutes, working quickly as the last of the cooling shadows slipped away. Then, somewhere off in the distance, he heard a deep-throated whistle, like one from a steam pipe organ. Instinctively, many of the ragged men around him perked up. They had all learned that the sound of the strange whistle usually presaged the serving of their single daily meal.

Sure enough, a minute later the doors to the prison yard swung 133

open and the mess truck rolled in followed by two jeeps filled with the hooded Death Skull soldiers.

The mess truck came to a slow stop in the center of the yard, and a line of hungry prisoners quickly formed. The meal was the same as always: a weak-tasting, foul smelling soup which only on the best of days featured a few raw vegetables swimming hi it, plus a piece of stale black bread. Each man ladled out his own, one scoop per man, as the faceless, heavily armed Death Skulls stood by, whispering to each other through then-black hoods. Once he'd drawn his meal, each prisoner was given five minutes to consume it before returning to work.

Jones wearily picked up his rusting meal can and made his way to the end of the food line. It was obvious that as the work progressed on the gigantic statue, the number of prisoners still available was dwindling. Deaths, real and otherwise, were gradually taking then* toll on the officers' prison population.

He worked his way down the queue, finally scooping out a ladle of the bad stew and grabbing a piece of black bread. His usual procedure, acted out like a ritual when Frost was still around, was to head back to this station and eat in the last remaining bits of shade. But now, on this day, something attracted his attention to the far side of the prison yard.

A small group of inmates had gathered there and were in fact sitting and eating then* meals together. This sudden show of solidarity mystified Jones.

It was rare to see three or more prisoners sitting together in the work yard.

To see as many as two dozen to one place was highly unusual.

He drifted over toward the group, dipping his bread into his soup and eating it as he walked. It wasn't until he was about fifty feet away that he realized the prisoners hadn't just spontaneously sat down to the rough semicircle.

Rather they were listening to another prisoner, one who was sitting to the middle of the group.

The prisoner was Thorgils, keeper of the dogs and the dispenser of the somnambulistic doses of myx.

Jones instinctively slowed his stride, trying his best to catch wind of what the strange man was saying without having to join the group itself.

What he finally heard startled him.

"We will rise from here," Thorgils was saying, through bites of his 134

own meal. "We will all ascend. Into the sky. We will be saved from this life.

We will die and then be reborn. It's just a matter of time."

Suddenly Jones wasn't hungry anymore. There was an eerie feel-tog in the air as Thorgils's squeaky, broken English wafted over the crowd and bounced off the nearby walls.

"We will rise," he was saying again. "We will all be out of here soon."

Jones couldn't believe it. The man was preaching blasphemy as far as the prison authorities were concerned. Yet there were two hooded Death Skull soldiers standing nearby, if not directly listening to Thorgils's rambling.

They probably didn't speak English, yet they were at the very least letting him continue.

"And once we arise," Thorgils went on, "I will be your King."

Jones now began working his way away from the gathering. Thorgils was obviously dipping heavily into his bag of myx and the last thing Jones wanted was to get caught along with that group once the Skulls realized what the fallen Norse leader was babbling about.

He returned to his station and cleaned out his soup can, watching as the Skulls finally began moving through the courtyard ordering prisoners back to work after the short five-minute break. He went back to chiseling the huge belt buckle, but the bizarre little scene began to gnaw at him. It was just a matter of time before someone to the prison administration realized what was going on with the unstable Thorgils and his stash of myx. When they did, they were likely to execute the Norsemen on the spot. This would be a lucky turn of events, as far as Jones was concerned. The alternative would be if the Skulls decided to take Thorgils to their headquarters and interrogate him first before putting nun to death.

And if that happened, Jones knew that he'd be in serious trouble. As the man who had given them the ODs of myx, Thorgils knew many secrets about him.

Jones felt the heat of the sun finally touch his forehead and bare chest. The last of the shadows were gone. He could now look forward to being baked by the brutal sun for the next five hours.

Sweat and grime returning with full intensity, he quickened the pace of his chiseling. At the same time, he tried to formulate a plan about what to do with Thorgils.

135

The Reichstag, five miles away

Mike Fitzgerald walked across his vast bedchamber and turned the air conditioner down to low power.

"The last thing I need now is to catch a chill," he thought aloud, walking back across the room and collapsing back onto his enormous satin pillow packed feather bed.

His head was aching, his stomach was grumbling, and he had developed a slight shaking of the hands. He wasn't surprised that he was in such a condition. To say that he had lived the last two weeks in a state of high anxiety was a gross understatement.

Sure, he'd been immersed in forced extravagance inside the Reichstag's special guests' suite-eating the finest food, drinking the finest wines, wearing the finest silk clerical garb. But despite his opulent surroundings, he had endured nothing but a bad case of nerves in that time.

One big question had been answered: It was obvious to him now that all of the healing and raising from the dead stuff was actually part of some incredibly elaborate scheme concocted by the United Americans. The encounter with Frost had proven this point.

But why formulate such an ambitiously far-out ruse? This answer too came easily to Fitz. He was savvy enough to know that the whole scenario of providing him with a messianic image had obviously been constructed to get him here. Inside the supreme headquarters of the fascist occupying forces, he was close to the seat of Nazi power, close to the shadowy Amerikafuhrer himself.

But what exactly was the next part for him to play? And who would tell him?

And when? These questions were not so easily answered. But as a good officer and professional soldier, Fitz knew it was his duty to continue to go along with the charade and await further instructions.

Still it was this not knowing that had kept his psyche frayed for the past fourteen days.

About half that time, he'd spent at the side of the First Governor at a myriad of public displays. Sitting on the man's right, just as the fifteen-year-old girl prodigy was sitting on his left, it outwardly appeared that the First Governor immensely enjoyed soaking up the apparently never ending adulation heaped on him by the scores of occupying Fourth Reich soldiers.

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Yet despite appearances, Fitz knew better. It was obvious to him that the First Governor was becoming more unbalanced as the days went by. They had appeared at more than two dozen official functions in the past fourteen days-state dinners, parades and nearly daily political rallies. But for the most part, the First Governor had simply sat and smiled. He quickly lost interest during the elaborate proceedings staged in his honor and spent most of the time staring off into space, trying to think the Big Thoughts.

On those occasions that he did speak, it was to ask Fitz about the moral implications of even his tiniest acts. By bathing every day, wasn't he wasting water needed by others? Wasn't it immoral to eat an egg because it meant taking an offspring away from its chicken mother? Was it not in opposition to Nature for men to fly in airplanes? After all, had he been meant to fly, man would have sprouted wings.

Fitz had learned quickly under fire to nod his head to each question and then give the First Governor a distinctly vague answer, which the Fourth Reich officer always seemed to enjoy interpreting. It was clear that he had come to regard Fitz not only as his personal resurrector, but also as his spiritual conscience, a bizarre concept for a man once known for his systematic brutality.

Through it all, Fitz silently prayed that they would not come upon a legitimately injured or dead person - an accident victim or a sudden heart attack, someone not in on the plan-which the First Governor would want him to cure.

It hadn't happened yet. But just how long could the balancing act goon?

A knock at the door brought a message from the First Governor's aide-de-camp.

Fitz was to suit up in his best priestly garments and be escorted to the front door of the Reichstag. He was to ride in yet another parade, this one to celebrate the halfway point being reached in the construction of the Amerikafuhrer's one hundred fifty-foot wedding present statue of Adolph Hitler.

Once again, Fitz, the young girl, and the First Governor himself would be the guests of honor.

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It took only a half hour for the thousands of slave workers to file out of their factories and line up along the main parade route.

Many of the workers knew their assigned spots by heart. It had become a habit of their drudgery, this never ending cycle of orchestrated praise for those who kept them in chains. Walking to a particular place on a particular curb on the main avenue in slow, measured, sullen steps, they would stand silent and still until it was time to mechanically wave their small Nazi flags at the passing dignitaries. Then it would be the march back to the hellish factories again until it was time for the next parade.

Not everyone in the crowd were slave laborers. Hundreds of special riot-trained NS also lined the parade route, and a small army of undercover police always roamed the crowd. There was also a scattering of sputniks.

Though mostly ill fed and ill clothed, the parade police would always yank one or two of these yet to be arrested people out of the crowd and place them in front of everyone at the curbside. This was by orders of the parade marshals who thought it wise that the parade honorees see more than just drab faces of the city's slave work force.

And this is what happened to the man named Itchy.

It had taken him nearly three weeks to walk to this place, the very heart of America's Nazi Empire. He'd arrived a changed man. Accustomed to being either stuffed inside a fighter jet killing innocents on behalf of his air pirate squadron or getting all drugged up and sexually assaulting young girls, Itchy's frightful encounter with