Return From the Inferno (21 page)

"We must arrest this man and bring him with us," the first NS officer told the second.

"But how?" the second officer replied. "We cannot fit him into either car. Not down the mountain. Not for the long ride back."

"That's exactly what the others said," the old man called across the hall to them. He was busily stirring a large pot of stew which was cooking over a smaller hearth fire. "I would have gone peacefully with them. I don't want to be an outlaw. But there was no room."

"Why didn't they shoot you then?" the first officer asked him suspiciously.

"That is the only alternative ..."

The man with the white beard shuddered for a moment.

"You can eat a hot meal first," he said, his voice barely a whisper.

Reluctantly, the two officers agreed to have a meal of stew and coffee brought on. They carefully inspected the well-stocked soup and had a lowest ranking man taste it before allowing the rest of the troop to dig in. The old man played the perfect host, refilling any wooden stew bowls that were in any danger of being emptied as well as keeping a top on each man's coffee mug. He worked so hard he didn't eat any of the meal himself. When the main meal was finished, he surprised them with several loaves of fresh, sugared bread and a jar of jam as dessert.

The supper took an hour, followed by another thirty minutes of more benign questioning of the old man. But by this time the officers had convinced themselves that he knew nothing about their missing comrades. They were also reluctant to shoot him outright. They agreed instead to place him under house arrest with a promise that another patrol would 175

return and bring him into custody.

The troop made a call back to their forward base and received orders to recon the summit and then proceed back down the mountain. On their way out, the old man approached the officers with a tray containing eight small glasses.

"Cherry brandy," he explained. "It will help against the cold."

A curt nod from the officers allowed each, man to swig his portion and the officers took theirs as well.

Then with little more than a grunt, they left the lodge, rudely leaving the door open behind them. The old man used all his strength to force it closed against the strong winds.

Then from a tiny, misted window he watched the two VBL armored cars roar to life and drive back down the lodge's entranceway.

The two armored cars circled the darkened ski area for the next 30 minutes looking for any sigh of their missing comrades.

But it proved to be a fruitless search, Eventually they found themselves coming up on the ski lodge again; this time approaching it from the south side via the carved out supply path. At the end of this path they turned onto a small ski road which would eventually lead them to the main road and back down the mountain.

It was on this ski road that they found the missing patrol.

The ice encased vehicles were right in the middle of the road, one in front of the other, almost as if they were intentionally parked there. The road was lined on both sides with two rows of pine trees, each one also surreally encased in ice. The small grove represented the only substantial number of fully grown trees at the summit of the mountain.

The search cars pulled up next to the two vehicles, and their crews slowly emerged to study the situation. It took several minutes of hacking through the ice of the first vehicle before the soldiers were able to free the turret hatch. When they did, one of the two commanders crawled into the first frozen vehicle.

The missing crew was still inside the car, all four of them at their posts.

They were long dead, of course. Their hands frozen in midair, their faces stretched and white, their eyes wide open, their mouths freeze-dried into grotesque grins. Each one had a bullet in the head.

"Ambushed . . ." he whispered, instantly knowing the ramifications of his theory.

The NS officer scrambled up out of the scout car, unfastening his side arm as he did so. But it was much too late for him and his men.

He saw the first muzzle flash come from the iced over tree directly above him, then another from the tree next to it. Suddenly the cold night air was thundering with the sound of gunfire, the loud reports echoing across the frozen mountaintop. Horrified, the NS officer realized at once that his patrol had fallen into the same trap as had the first two scout cars. Now they were also paying the ultimate price.

He watched stunned as his men were chopped to pieces by the concentrated gunfire from the trees. A fusillade of bullets ripped across his chest. In his last moment of life he thought it peculiar that they felt so terribly cold.

Another burst ripped across his neck, this one stinging hot. He immediately slumped over and felt the life ooze out of him.

He managed to gasp out one last word: "Loki. . ." Then he fell forward, cracking his head on the vehicle turret and opening a wide bloody wound.

It didn't matter-he was already dead.

The shooting stopped less than a minute later. Then one by one, men in black uniforms jumped down from the trees, crunching the ice encrusted snow below.

"We've got them all," one man said to the commander of 177

the ambush team. "Just like last time."

Captain "Crunch" took the empty magazine from his M-16 and replaced it with another full one.

"Yeah, but there will be more," he said, surveying the top of the mountain which was now eerily silent. "We can be damn sure of that..."

Fuhrerstadt

The heavily armed NS sergeant quietly slipped inside the ornate bedroom and slowly closed the huge steel doors behind him.

At the far end of the room, sitting in a shaft of sunlight, was the young girl in the white frilly dress. In front of her was a large easel and canvas. A tray containing dozens of oil paints and brushes was at her side as was a small official photograph of the assassinated First Governor of Bundeswehr Four.

The NS man approached her slowly, bearing a small jar of paint thinner in hand.

"You requested this, Miss?" he asked her in heavily accented English.

She looked up at him for the first time, her eyes sad and teary, her young face seeming drawn and pale.

"Thank you," she replied softly, taking the jar from him and immediately dipping several of her brushes into it. Td run out."

The NS man shifted uneasily. His guard unit had been assigned to watch over the young girl right after the assassination of the First Governor. Unlike the priest who was imprisoned for complicity in the shooting of the high Fourth Reich official, the young girl had become a protected ward of the American Nazi government. On orders from the Amerikafuhrer himself, she'd been installed in one of the most luxurious top-floor suites inside the rambling Reichstag. She was

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watched over by no less than ten NS troopers at all times, plus a gaggle of nannies, including a nurse and a palmreader. She also had her own chef, her own butler, her own dresser and even a squad of "house mistresses" who bathed and oiled her every day.

Yet it was clear that the young girl was not doing too well psychologically.

Witnessing the assassination of the strange man who had quite literally saved her from a life of slavery and degradation had taken a quick and brutal toll.

She barely spoke to anyone, and many of her meals went untouched. She never left her quarters, and refused most visitors, perhaps knowing that they were sent by the Amerikafuhrer's staff people in an effort to lift her spirits.

In fact, since the shooting, she had done little else but paint and stare out the window of her suite, as if these two things alone would somehow restore her to the normal life that she should be leading as a mere sixteen-year-old.

The NS man could not help but glance at her most recent work. One quarter of her canvas was covered with dark blue, indicating a night scene was evolving.

In mid center, the rudimentary lines of a snow-covered mountain were taking shape and light sketching of buildings were emerging from the background. But all in all, even the luggish NS man knew the painting was still in its very beginning stages.

"I keep having this dream," the young girl suddenly confessed as she added another dark blue wash to the canvas. "I don't know what it is, or where it is. But I thought it was best to paint it."

"That seems like a good idea," the NS man replied nervously. "It looks fine so far."

The young girl began to say something else, but quickly stopped herself. She sighed instead, her shoulders slumping appreciably. Then she brushed back her long brown hair with one unintentionally suggestive movement.

The NS man was really tense now. This was not a comfortable situation for him.

He'd participated in many raping

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sprees during the blitzkrieg of America, claiming girls such as her among his victims. Now to be head of the unit protecting such a delectable item was ironic, to say the least.

"Will there be anything else, Miss?" he finally managed to blurt out.

She simply stared at her painting for a moment, working some of the dark paint to form one of many trees on the side of the mountain form.

Then she turned and looked back at him.

"Is it true the priest escaped?" she asked him point-blank.

The NS man could only nod. "Yes, Miss, I'm afraid he did," he replied. "He and two other dangerous criminals."

"Do you think he'll ever come back here?" she asked, demurely dipping her brush into a small puddle of white paint.

"I would doubt that, Miss," the sergeant answered confidently. "If he did, he would be captured and shot immediately."

She gave a slight, sad shrug. "But then he would just raise himself from the dead," she said, her voice an offhand whisper. "Wouldn't he?"

Now the NS man stiffened completely.

"I really don't know," he finally replied.

He was a ghost.

He felt like the sun's rays could go right through him. He felt like he cast no shadow. If he were to look in a mirror, he wondered if he'd see any reflection.

Probably not.

He'd accomplished what every great military commander had sought to do at least once in their careers: he'd become invisible. He'd gone on the offensive against overwhelming odds on many fronts, day or night, for nearly a year and had won every engagement simply because he'd mastered this science of transparency. It really wasn't that difficult-and this was not surprising. All great things were essentially simple. So too the secret to being invisible. It actually turned on one simple rule: make sure the enemy is not looking for you.

And how best to do that?

Make them think that you are dead.

But there were definitely drawbacks to being invisible. Much had to be given up. Much had to be surrendered. All of it with little chance of being recovered. He didn't look any different. There was the sturdy, slender frame.

The powerful shoulders. The lightning quick hands. The steel blue eyes. The handsome face. The hair too long.

Yet he was different. And he knew why. The problem with being a spirit was that you were always in danger of being empty-inside as well as out. You tried to feel it, but sometimes there was nothing deep anymore. As a phantom, nothing real remained of his life. No home. No roots. No friends. No loves. No real future. If anything, he become just a name now. Someone spoken about between breaths, or between beers, if at all.

Yes, the sentence he'd given himself was the worst kind of self-inflicted wound. The Native Americans knew it best.

How does a man feel when he's lost his soul?

He feels like a ghost.

The mountain looked out over miles of rolling flatlands of what was once upstate New York.

This territory was all but deserted now. No civilian in his right mind would live in such an absolutely lawless region when Free Canada, with its liberty, its laws, its high regard for human life, was barely a hundred miles to the north. It was much simpler to just walk across the border and leave all the fear and oppression behind.

Yet it was here that The Wingman had chosen to stay. Why? It had fit his needs. He'd found jet fuel here. He'd hidden stores of ammunition here.

Trusted allies were stationed nearby. It was an unlikely hiding place, yet a good location from which to project the beginnings of the intricately far-reaching plan he conjured up over the last dozen months.

It was also a good place to think.

He'd lost count of the number of times he'd flown down near Football City, keeping the jump jet low and evading the Fourth Reich's rinky-dink radar nets, landing and hiding whenever he got too close and resuming his mission on foot.

It was on his last mission to the Fourth Reich capital, when under the new disguise as a Death Skull, he'd got wind that his three friends, General Jones, Major Frost and Mike Fitzgerald were still alive, but due to be executed.

His rescue of the trio resulted-and it too fit neatly into his plan. If the situation hadn't been so desperate, he might have enjoyed the astonishment of his friends longer when they first saw him. It was so obvious that all three had believed he was dead. After all that was the impression he'd been working hard to preserve for nearly the past year.

As it turned out though, their reunion was painfully brief and utterly silent.

He'd arranged for three separate helicopters piloted by Free Canadian volunteers and expertly disguised as Fourth Reich aircraft to swoop down and immediately take each of his friends away to three very different locations.

Each one thus began their own very secret yet very crucial mission as explained to them by the crew members of their individual rescue choppers.

Meanwhile, he had stayed on the ground. Hidden hi his Death Skull robes, he was able to gather more information on the UA officer compound within the prison before returning to the Harrier which he'd hidden on the east side of the Mississippi.

Oddly enough, if everything went well, he would not see Jones or Frost or Fitzie until the last stage of his grand plan. He'd mused more than once about what this longer reunion would be like. His three friends bugging him for details on how he was able to pull off the daring rescue. Meanwhile he held off divulging any more information until he'd secured promises of the many rounds of drinks due him in return for saving their necks.