Return From the Inferno (7 page)

The First Governor cleared his throat and began again. "What I have to tell you-or rather to ask of you-should be spread far and wide. To your soldiers.

To your own staff officers. To the people here under our guard. To any refugees who might stumble into our territory. It is a message that should be blanketed throughout our domain. Carried to its farthest reaches. My quest will become your quest."

The First Governor paused for a moment and studied the 55

ninety-two officers. Then he smiled broadly once again. "To begin, gentlemen,"

he said, "we must find 'a man of water.'"

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He was lying flat out in an open field, the remains of his tattered parachute wrapped around him, no less than sixteen assorted machine guns pointed at his head. He'd landed there after punching out of his fuel empty F-105 which he had run bone-dry chasing what he thought was the airplane that had iced the jumbo and his comrade, Bone.

"Don't shoot. . ." he said once again, staring up at the gun barrels. "I have heroin. Pure gold scag. I have crack. Good stuff. I can even get you some myx.

The real stuff. Not the fake stuff. Ill give it all to you. Just don't shoot."

It was Itchy's fortune that the sixteen soldiers hovering over him had no interest in these drugs. He'd mistaken them for a band of outlaws, but it was an understandable error. They were dressed like bandits: each was wearing a black nondescript uniform. Their weapons-M-16s and AK-47s mostly-were of the type favored by many outlaw gangs roving the northern tier of the American continent. Even their general appearance-long hair and days-old beards-fit the bill.

But the sixteen men were not outlaws. Quite the opposite. They were members of the elite Football City Special Forces, specifically the Ranger Corps. They'd seen Itchy eject from his Thud and had him surrounded before he even touched the ground.

"This is a complication," one of the Rangers said now, as 57

Itchy squirmed on the damp ground. "What are we going to do with him?"

"He's already seen us," came the reply. "So we'll have to take him with us."

Itchy wasn't sure what the men were talking about, but it didn't really matter. All that was important to him at that point was that the men apparently weren't going to kill him outright.

"Okay, 'sleep him,'" one of the soldiers said.

"How long?"

"Give him three hours, for now."

With that, one of the men knelt beside Itchy and injected him in the right arm. Itchy blacked out two seconds later.

The next eighteen hours were ones of total confusion for Itchy.

He would wake up every three hours or so only to be injected back into unconsciousness again. In the few brief moments that he was awake, he saw things that made little sense, either separately or collectively.

In his first awakening, he found himself being trundled along in the back of a truck with the same sixteen grimfaced men. It was just sunset and the destination was unknown. He noticed before he went under that, besides the rifles the men carried, they were also equipped with several laser devices, the purpose of which he did not know.

When he came to the second time, it was the dead of night and the truck had stopped. In the minute before the soldiers injected him again, he managed a peek out of the back of the vehicle and saw that it was parked in an old highway rest area. One that looked out over a well-lit city about six miles away.

Waking up a third time, he found that the men had deployed their laser devices and were working over them feverishly. In the background he could hear tremendous explosions, the chattering of AA guns and the peel of air raid sirens. Still groggy, he leaned further out of the back of the truck to see that the city was now in flames and under heavy air attack.

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In the thirty seconds he had before the soldiers realized he was conscious and stuck him again, he was able to determine that the men were using laser sighting devices-probably PAVE/PENNY-to target smart bombs falling on the city with ear-splitting regularity.

His fourth conscious period came close to dawn. The truck was just moving out from its targeting perch and heading back down the abandoned highway.

The soldiers quickly injected him again and when he lay back down he could see the sky through the flap in the back of the truck. It was filled with smoke, but there were brilliant patches of light blue and red, the prelude to a clear warm summer's day.

Just as he was going under for the fifth time, Itchy thought he saw a very strange sight. It looked like hundreds of Ws written in contrails across the sky.

But later on, he assumed that it was just a dream.

It was midmorning when Itchy woke up for the sixth time.

He was back in the same field where the men had taken him prisoner. They were off the truck. It was nowhere to be seen. Instead a large CH-47 Chinook was on hand. The soldiers were loading their gear into it as another dozen or so new troops maintained a tight defensive ring around the LZ.

Itchy was kept awake while an intense discussion about his fate carried on between the man who appeared to be the leader of the sixteen soldiers and the pilots of the big troop helicopter. Through stuffed ears, Itchy was able to hear the gist of the debate, which was that the Chinook was overloaded and underfueled and even one more person on board could make the difference weightwise as to how successful the flight would be.

It was very apparent that no one involved wanted to spend much time on the question. This made Itchy itchy. If he was simply excess weight to them, then a bullet to his brain would quickly solve the problem. Yet that option never really came up.

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One of the pilots blew a whistle and immediately the troops began climbing aboard the helicopter. The man in charge of the sixteen soldiers walked over to Itchy and untied his hands and feet. Then he tossed the rope at Itchy's head.

"As long as you live," the man told him, "you'll never have a day as lucky as this one."

With that, he climbed aboard the chopper, closing the door behind him. Then in a great burst of power and engine wash, the Chinook took off, and went straight up until it was out of sight.

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Chapter Eleven

The two Fourth Reich soldiers who manned Outpost #6406 began the day with a meal of powdered eggs and stale coffee-and no drugs.

The Wabash River was running particularly rough this morning, too rough for the men to take their usual morning bath. Instead they gathered some of the brisk water in cans and took turns dumping them over each other's head, the

"in the field" equivalent of taking a cold shower.

The outpost-a thirty-five-foot high tower which sat on a slight bend in the Wabash-was equipped with state-of-the-art video equipment, infrared sights, NightScope devices and even thermo-detection gear. Its weaponry included two

.50-caliber heavy machine guns, a small rocket launcher, an SA-7 portable SAM

system and a small arsenal of light weapons. The outpost had spy drone launch capability and three ways of instant communication back to the main NS HQ in Bundeswehr Four.

The job was simply to keep an eye on things. A half mile to the south there was a large tract of farmland which was worked by two hundred slave laborers.

Directly to their east was a small truck repair facility, also worked by slave labor. Next door to that was a small jail which held people marked for execution. Outpost #6406 provided surveillance and early warning threat detection for all three of these facilities. By keeping constant tabs on the many slave laborers in the area, they helped cut down the escape rate, which was fairly small to begin with.

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They were also charged with looking for any refugees who might be inside the Bundeswehr Four military district illegally. Such a crime usually meant execution. From their vantage point, they were able to watch several roads leading down from the north, roads that the sputniks were likely to travel.

This was the most active part of their mission. They averaged spotting six refugees a week, many of whom were simply tracked down and locked up in the jail next to the truck repair facility to await their turn before a firing squad or years of backbreaking labor in the fields.

Directly to the north of the station, a mile and a quarter up the Wabash, was the small rusting bridge. This too was supposed to be under the watchful eyes of Outpost #6406, but neither man had turned his scope in that direction for days, not since the strange incident in the river with the priest and the two drowning people.

Their lives began to change the moment the Mercedes staff car pulled up in front of the outpost tower. The two soldiers were horrified. They recognized the car right away as belonging to Colonel Lisz, their overall commander. His sudden appearance could only mean a surprise inspection, something Lisz was not known for in the past.

The two soldiers barely had enough time to fasten up their uniforms before Lisz and an entourage of six bodyguards rode the small elevator up to the watchtower and walked in.

There was a barrage of heel clicking and crisp salutes, with Lisz making the two soldiers stand at attention for about ten seconds longer than was needed.

"I am here at the personal request of the First Governor himself," Lisz began, his usually booming, Teutonic voice appreciably subdued and hesitant. "He has asked me-as well as every officer on his staff-to visit every outpost under their command. To talk to soldiers, such as yourselves, about a subject which has become very, very important to him."

The two soldiers looked at each other with twin expressions of puzzlement.

What the hell was Lisz talking about?

"It has come to the First Governor's attention," Lisz began again. "That there may be a man within our territory who: perhaps unknowingly, has displayed certain . . . powers."

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"What kind of 'powers,' Colonel?" one of the outpost soldiers asked.

Lisz was growing more uncomfortable by the second.

"Let us just say, 'unusual powers,'" he replied, the tone of his voice sounding embarrassed at such a silly notion. "Things that are out of the ordinary . .."

The two border guards now eyed each other with considerable consternation.

"Well? Should I assume you've witnessed nothing of the sort?" Lisz asked them.

"I've reviewed your reports for the past month and saw nothing in them that would indicate ..."

Both soldiers were trembling slightly by this time. Both were eyeing Lisz's particularly fierce looking bodyguards.

Finally one soldier bucked up and cleared his throat.

"Herr Colonel," he said, stuttering. "May we speak to you alone?"

Colonel Franz Hantz was the chief medical officer for Bundeswehr Four.

His typical day would begin by making the rounds at the main infirmary which was located on the edge of the Aerodrome. This large, well-equipped facility was for the care of Fourth Reich personnel exclusively. It boasted a large staff, state-of-the-art medical technology and the latest in procedures and diagnostic care. Hantz would usually spend three hours at the hospital, reviewing the most important cases, even assisting in critical operations. It was, in many ways, the castle of his kingdom.

A second hospital-smaller, poorly staffed and poorly maintained-was located on the far edge of town, near the all but abandoned railroad station. It was used for little more than a storage facility for ailing civilians and the occasional sickly sputnik. The patients there received the bare minimum of care-food, water and antiseptics-and little else. Few operations were performed and when they were, the surgeons were usually undertrained medics or even unqualified nurses.

The second-class hospital had an even darker side however. Since its opening, there had been dark rumors that Dachau

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type human experiments were performed there, under the tacit agreement of the Bundeswehr Four leadership. Though meticulous records were kept on all patients entering the facility, there was virtually no accounting for what happened to them once they were admitted.

So it was an extremely rare occasion when Colonel Hantz, the physician, would visit the place. And never in the past had he stooped so low as to actually walk through the patient wards.

But things had changed drastically inside Bummer Four. And so on this morning, Colonel Hantz was indeed walking the floors, speaking with the sick, the injured, the dying, a demeaning task that could only be forced upon him by the First Governor.

Most of the four hundred or so second-class patients were ailing from lack of care of routine maladies-ulcers, appendicitis, swollen tonsils, cataracts.

Some had sustained injuries in typical household or roadway accidents. Others were simply wasting away from incurable diseases.

But there was a small psychiatric ward, and it was here on his last stop of the hurried, distasteful tour, that Doctor Hantz met the sputnik from Gary, Indiana.

The man's story, according to the ward nurse, was typical in many respects. He claimed to be from the large industrial city to the north and that he'd witnessed a horrifying artillery attack several weeks before. A routine check by Hantz with Bundeswehr Four's military intelligence section confirmed that a section of Gary had been the target of a "fright" shelling earlier in the month. The man then made his way south, stumbling inside the Bundeswehr Four military district and making his way up to the crosspoint of Wabash River.

That was when a strange thing happened.

"I had to ford the river," the man told Hantz from his bed. "I was certain that troops were chasing me and I had to get away, or drown trying. I was injured though, and weak from my long walk. So I cried for help, near the place where the drawbridge is located.

"A man came out of the bridge tender's hut and lowered the bridge. He was a priest. He carried me across and

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brought me to his quarters. He gave me wine and a blanket-a blanket which he had dipped into the waters of the river.