The White Vixen (51 page)

Bormann chuckled. He moved over to a bookcase and selected a volume. “You know, the Führer was a great believer in the racial superiority of the Aryan. He decreed that the Aryan depicted in our official artwork be tall and broad-shouldered, blonde and vigorous.”

“Even though he himself was short, dark-haired and not exactly athletic,” Jo said with a hint of sarcasm.

Bormann roared with laughter. “You are exactly correct, my dear major,” he said finally. “Which is one reason why I never believed any of it. It was all so much
Pferdscheiss.”

Jo sensed a slight movement from Jürgen, standing seven feet away to her left at the doors. A quick glance and she saw the startled expression on his face. “But you gave it lip service,” Jo said.

“Of course! It was merely a means to an end, and the end was political power. Your politicians do the same thing. They tell the people what they want to hear in order to get elected. Mind you, I truly do believe that there is something in the German character that sets us apart. A sense of discipline that is rarely seen among other peoples. A product of our culture, our history, no doubt. Take young Jürgen, here,” he said, gesturing toward the guard. “His father came here after the war. Your mother, she was born here, was she not?”

“Yes, Herr Reichsleiter,” Jurgen said proudly. “Her parents came here from the Fatherland in 1921, after the first war.”

“And so we see a native German, for all intents and purposes, who was born Argentine,” Bormann continued. “A perfect illustration of my point. Even though he was born in this land of mongrelized peoples, Jürgen could walk the streets of Berlin or Frankfurt and pass easily for a native. You enjoyed Germany on your visit, did you not, Jürgen?”

“Immensely, Herr Reichsleiter,” the guard said, his chest expanding. Jo glanced at Bormann. She wanted the old windbag to keep talking, as she crossed her left leg over her right. She casually reached down and scratched her left shin. In her peripheral vision, she noticed Jürgen glancing at her as he caught the movement, and his Luger came back up and pointed at her. She didn’t take her eyes off Bormann as she moved her hand back to her lap. Jürgen relaxed again and the gun moved slightly away.

“So while our dear departed Führer expounded on his racial theories, I would handle the politics,” Bormann said. “That is not to say he was a wild-eyed radical. No, in fact, he was very shrewd, he had a native intelligence that many underestimated, to their eternal regret.” Bormann lectured on, replacing the book on shelf and peering at the other volumes. Jo risked a more direct glance at Jürgen. He was listening to Bormann intently, his Luger pointing away from her now, held lightly. She looked back at Bormann. He’d selected another book. “Now this one, I really recommend to you…”

Jo moved her right hand down her left leg, reached two fingers inside her sock, and found the sharp wooden point of the dart. She pulled it from the sock, hoping the feathers wouldn’t come off. They didn’t, held tightly in place by the wire she’d taken from a bra in her dresser and wound around the makeshift weapon. The three Q-tips, their cotton swabs removed on one end, provided the shaft that held the wooden needle, which she’d laboriously pried out of the headboard of her bed. The feathers from her pillow would provide just enough aerodynamic guidance.

Even if Jürgen had been looking directly at her, his eyes would not have been able to follow the movement of her hand. Still, he had seen something, and was pulling his attention away from Bormann, and something happened, but before he could react he felt a sharp pain in his throat. Crying out, he reflexively squeezed the trigger of his Luger and the gun discharged with a flat crack. The sculpted bull on the mantelpiece exploded.

Jo was moving before he pulled the trigger. She uncoiled from the chair and launched herself at the guard. She lashed out with her right foot in a knife kick, catching him on the wrist of his gun hand, smashing the delicate bones and sending the gun flying. Landing on her feet, she kept moving, spinning clockwise. Twirling on the ball of her left foot, Jo unleashed a turning side kick with all her force, catching Jürgen in the right ribcage. Her loud kiap yell almost drowned out the sound of ribs cracking and Jürgen’s own shriek of pain. The guard crashed back into the library doors, but they held, and he slumped to the floor.

The guard was down but not out. He’d keep for a moment. She heard a roaring yell from behind her, and before she could move two brown-jacketed arms gripped her like a vise, pinning her upper arms to her side. “Fritz!
Kommen sie hier! Macht schnell
!” Bormann screamed. His strength was surprising, and he started to lift her. Jo knew she had to stay on the ground. She sucked in a deep breath and then exhaled sharply and bent forward, thrusting out her elbows to loosen his grip. She pistoned one elbow backward and then the other, connecting with Bormann’s abdomen. Did a rib crack? She heard him grunt and felt his hot breath on her neck. Sliding to the floor through his weakened arms, she pushed him backward with her shoulders, propped herself with her hands, and shot her legs overhead and backward, catching Bormann squarely in his massive chest.

There were footsteps running down the hallway now, a man shouting. Bormann staggered back to the fireplace, his shoes crunching on the shards of the bull. He steadied himself with one hand by grabbing the mantle and holding on. Jo rolled to her feet and saw Jürgen’s pistol on the floor. She dove for it, and when she rolled to her feet again, the Luger was in her hand and pointed directly at Bormann.

The Reichsleiter’s knees were buckling, and his face was a dark gray. He gasped for breath, one hand clutching the mantle, the other pounding at his chest, trying to tear open the jacket. His eyes bulged as he looked at her, then at the fallen guard, then at the photo of the soldiers. “My—heart—“ Jo fired once, twice, the rounds catching Bormann square in the chest.

“Herr Reichsleiter!” Someone was pounding on the doors from the hallway. The door handle moved and one door tried to move inward, but Jürgen was in the way. There were more steps in the hallway, more shouting in German.

Willy was pacing his bedroom when he heard the muffled sound of what had to be a gunshot, then shouting and a thudding crash. Instinctively he knew that the American was making a break for it. He went to his door, turned the knob—unlocked—and pulled the door open. The man standing guard outside was looking down the hallway toward the library, his face concerned, one hand on the holstered weapon at his hip. Willy slugged him in the stomach with everything he had, doubling the man up. Grabbing the Luger from the holster, Willy cracked the butt of the handle down on the back of the guard’s head and ran for the library.

Fritz was pounding on the door, his gun in the other hand, yelling for the Reichsleiter. “Get away from the door!” Willy shouted. Fritz turned, brought up the Luger and squeezed off a shot just as Willy fired. He felt a searing pain in his leg as he watched Fritz spin around and fall to the floor, hit in the right shoulder.

Willy’s leg burned like fire. He looked down and saw a ragged hole and rapidly spreading dark stain on his left thigh. He tried putting some weight on it, gasped from the pain, but concluded the bone wasn’t broken. Lurching against the library door, he pushed it open with difficulty.

The Reichsleiter was slumping to the floor in front of the hearth, the American crouching a few feet away with a smoking Luger aimed at Bormann, then swinging quickly to take a bead on Willy. “Don’t shoot,” Willy said, panting.

“Drop the gun,” Jo said.

“I—I am on your side,” Willy said, tossing his Luger to the floor. “The Reichsleiter…”

“He was having a heart attack. I helped it along.” Bormann’s chest heaved once, twice, then stilled. His eyes were still bulging open, mouth slack. Willy limped into the room, stepping over a white-faced Jürgen, who was clutching at his throat. Blood was seeping through his fingers, his eyes were rolling back, and then he took one rattling breath and lay motionless. A large pool of blood was underneath him.

“
Gott in Himmel
,” Willy breathed. He had never seen a man die before, not even in the Army. He looked back at Jo. The American was carefully reaching down to Bormann’s neck, her other hand pointing the Luger at the Reichsleiter’s forehead. She felt for a pulse.

“He’s dead,” she said, standing up. A glance at Jürgen told her she’d hit his carotid artery. She’d killed two men in the space of a minute or two. That would be something she’d have to deal with later. “How many more guards are there?”

“At least three,” Willy said. “Someone will come soon to investigate.”

She looked at his leg. “You’re hit,” she said. “We’ve got to get that bandaged or you’ll bleed to death.” Willy slumped into a chair, pressing down on the wound. The butler’s face appeared in the open doorway, peering around the closed door, eyes wide. “Are you Armando?” Jo asked in Spanish.

“Si, señora,” the man said, his voice shaking as he took in the bodies on the floor. His eyes lingered on Bormann.

“Get a first-aid kit,” Jo ordered. “If any more guards come to the house, tell them nothing’s wrong. Hurry!” The frightened butler disappeared down the hallway, shouting for one of the maids.

“The guards will come here eventually,” Willy gasped, as Jo looked at the wound.

“I know, but that’ll buy us some time,” she said. “Do you have a knife?”

Willy shook his head. Sweat was beading on his forehead. The pain, surprisingly, had quieted down into a dull, persistent throb. “On the bookshelf, over there,” he said, gesturing with his head.

A ceremonial SS dagger sat inside a case on one of the shelves. Jo pried the case open, unsheathed the weapon and used it to cut away part of Willy’s trouser leg, exposing the wound. She probed the underside of his thigh. “It didn’t go through,” she said. “The bullet’s still inside.”

Willy nodded. Footsteps clattering in the hallway brought Jo’s weapon up, startling a middle-aged maid as she appeared in the doorway holding a white metal box with a red cross on the lid. “Thank you, señora,” Jo said, putting the Luger aside as she gestured for the maid to come in.

Jo quickly field-dressed the wound as best as she could. “That’ll keep for a while,” she said, “but we have to get you to a hospital.”

Willy shook his head. “Too risky,” he said. He had felt himself going into shock, but Jo’s treatment settled him down. “Bormann has men everywhere. We—we have to get out, somehow.”

“I overheard him talking to someone on the phone, someone named Dieter,” she said. “Would that be your father?”

“Probably. What did Bormann say?”

“I only heard the end of it. ‘Code red, zero-two-hundred.’ He said he’d explain it to Dieter when he arrived.”

Willy’s eyes widened. “My father is on the way here, then,” he said, “to monitor the attack. Bormann must have moved up the launch time.”

“Moved it up?”

The Argentine nodded as he struggled to stand. “It was to launch tomorrow night at ten p.m. If he said ‘zero-two-hundred’, that must mean he has moved it up to 0200 hours tomorrow morning.”

“That explains why he wanted to send me to Buenos Aires a day early,” she said. “What about the ‘code red’?”

Willy tried putting weight on the wounded leg. It held, but the pain pounded against him. He had to hold onto the back of the chair. “An alternate launch plan,” he said. “They will move the weapon to a secondary base and the plane will take off from there. Just one aircraft. The rest of the strike force will launch from the original base, as a decoy.”

Jo looked at the clock on the wall. Nearly nine-thirty, less than seventeen hours before the attack. Somehow she had to get the information to CIA or SIS. She rapidly ran through the few contact procedures she’d been given in the event she’d have to leave Buenos Aires. Jo reached for the telephone but when she dialed O, she got another dial tone. “Only Bormann can make long distance calls from here,” Willy said. “He has a code number that has to be dialed first.”

“Is there a British consulate in Bariloche? An American consulate?”

Willy shook his head. “We can take a car across the border to Chile,” he said. “You can contact your people from there.”

“How far to the border from here?”

“At least an hour by car, I think, probably closer to two.”

This time it was Jo who shook her head. “They’ll get us before we can cross. Is your jet still here?”

“Yes, it is. We can order the pilot to take us anywhere.”

“Too risky,” she said. “He could fly us right into a trap, or right into the ground.”

“What, then? I’m certainly no pilot,” Willy said.

“I am,” Jo said. “Let’s go.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Rio Negro province, Argentina

Monday, April 26th, 1982

Jo Ann stepped out of the library, sweeping the hallway with the Luger. At the far end a man was walking quickly in her direction. She recognized him as the guard who’d been patrolling the grounds outside her window. “Stop there or I’ll shoot,” she said. The guard, caught by surprise, stopped in mid-stride and held up his hands. “Baumann, tie him up. Use his belt, and make sure to take his gun.” Willy hobbled down the hallway and quickly subdued the grim-faced man, pinning his wrists behind him with his narrow belt. He took the man’s Luger and put it in a pocket of his own jacket.