When Eagles Burn (Maddox Book #1)

by Jack Hayes

  He glanced up as Maddox approached and hurriedly primed the weapon.

  “No,” Maddox said, pulling the pistol from his hand and throwing it aside into the woods. “We won’t be having any of that.”

  The German half-snorted a chuckle.

  “I thought I might have time to get at least two rounds into you before you got close to the plane,” he said. “The third would be for me if I couldn’t get free.”

  Maddox surveyed the major’s injuries.

  “I’m afraid, I don’t think you’ll be going anywhere,” he said. “Even if I could free you, you’d bleed out before I got you anywhere near a medic.”

  Nieder released a guttural sigh.

  “I can pay you to try,” he said.

  “A bribe?” Maddox replied. “You really think that’ll work?”

  Nieder brought his hands to the strut poking through his chest. A snarl of pain flickered across his face.

  “No,” he replied. “No, I suppose I don’t. I offer you the diamonds and you’ll act with wounded pride. I try to play on your humanity and you’ll ask where my sympathy was when I killed people in my career as a Nazi officer. I guess, when you reach a certain point in the game, there are just some times when there is no winning move.”

  “Indeed,” Maddox said.

  “So, perhaps we can make this work another way,” Nieder said.

  One hand left the metal pole through his ribs and fished across the seat from a small pouch. He held it out for Maddox.

  “Here,” he said. “The blue diamonds.”

  Maddox checked the contents. Ten tiny, rough gems. Even encrusted in the rocks they’d been mined from, he could see their beauty.

  “With their size, they could be split easily; perhaps enough for twenty of the Helix devices,” Nieder said. “Imagine that: twenty precision strikes by the Nazis on your nation. If we’d have picked the right targets, we could perhaps have turned the war in our favour.”

  “What did you mean when you said ‘we can make this work another way’?” Maddox said, slipping the purse into his pocket.

  Nieder smiled despite his obvious injuries.

  With the sun hanging lower than the tops of the cedars, the only light strained down through the opening caused by the Storch as it had crashed through the canopy. The shafts of left the back of the passenger seat shrouded in shadow.

  With effort, Nieder shuffled across a leather satchel. Maddox reached an arm across to help the German pass it out, then opened it and raised an eyebrow. It was half full of rough diamonds in various shades of whites.

  “They were useless for the rocket program,” Nieder wheezed. “But there was no sense in letting them go to waste.”

  “They would have made a nice nest egg for you after the war,” Maddox agreed.

  “They won’t help me where I’m going,” Nieder replied. “However, they might be enough to ensure me one last request. Even a man facing a firing squad gets that.”

  Maddox closed the bag and stared into Nieder’s eyes. They burned with an intensity that he’d only ever seen before in a manic or those in the last vivid gasps of death.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Put me out of my misery,” Nieder replied. “If I don’t die now, I’ll limp on for a few more hours, only to be mauled by wolves or bears. Kill me. Kill me now and leave with a clear conscience.”

  Maddox looked at the man responsible for so much suffering to so many: a torturer, a murderer, a sadist.

  “I’ll grant your request,” he replied. “In my fashion.”

  He pulled the pin from his hand grenade and tossed it into the foot well of the cabin.

  Nieder yelled as he tried to lean down and throw it out. He was prevented by the strut pinning him to the seat.

  As Maddox walked away through the forest, the Storch exploded in a giant fireball.

  “Hmm,” he said. “So that’s where the fuel tank was.”

  CHAPTER 51

  In the office of Brigadier Carter, the bloated slug tossed the file onto his desk and rubbed his forehead with irritation.

  “And I’m supposed to believe this?” he sneered. “I wouldn’t be surprised if this report was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for fiction once the war is over.”

  Maddox ignored him and said nothing.

  He sat in the overlarge leather chair and simply let the Brigadier rant. There was a slender scratch in the material and he ran his fingernail along it. As he moved his hand, the cuff of his shirt moved subtly up his wrist, revealing the half-inch of a scar; an angry pink set against the paleness of his skin.

  It was a natural tattoo to the nemesis that lingered within his blood.

  To a lay observer, it and the myriad of others criss-crossing his chest, back and legs, would look like the badly healed scars of an attempt at suicide by knife – or perhaps the remnants of a flogging.

  They were not.

  Maddox knew well that the deadly griddle pattern extended over a third of his body.

  He knew it because he came face to face with it every time he stood in front of a mirror naked.

  And the marks were getting bigger with every passing week.

  He closed his eyes for a second.

  “Well?” Carter said, bringing his attention back to the room.

  “Well?” Maddox replied.

  “What happened to the diamonds?” the Brigadier huffed. “And I’m not talking about this nonsense that the plane exploded on contact with the ground and was too hot to get near.”

  Maddox exhaled slowly.

  “You have my report, sir,” he replied.

  Carter stood behind his desk and banged his knuckles on the heavy wooden veneer like a gorilla stomping on the ground. A glass ashtray clanked as it bounced from the force of the blow.

  “Perhaps I should send a second team up there to recover them,” he bellowed. “Then we’d get to the truth of the matter.”

  Maddox pulled the cuff of his jacket down to cover his scar.

  “You could, sir,” Maddox replied. “Unfortunately, I doubt they’d find what you hope them to.”

  “No?”

  “No,” Maddox said. “I’m not a man of science but my limited understanding of diamonds is that, unlike water, which has a solid phase – ice – and then a liquid and finally a gas as it’s heated, that diamonds respond quite differently to high temperatures.”

  “Do they really?” Carter huffed.

  “Yes, sir,” Maddox said calmly. “I believe the technical term is ‘sublimation’. There is no such thing as liquid diamond. When heated, like coal, they simply go straight from a solid to smoke. If the diamonds burned, there would be nothing there for your second team to discover in amongst the ashes of the charred Storch.”

  “And what if the diamonds didn’t burn?”

  “It was a very violent fire, sir,” Maddox replied. “I’m quite sure they would have.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Carter said, peering down his nose.

  “Quite frankly, Brigadier,” Maddox replied, standing. “I don’t really give a damn what you meant.”

  The captain walked to the door.

  “Get back here,” Carter shouted. “I haven’t finished with you.”

  Maddox opened the door and whispered.

  “I hesitate to repeat myself,” he said. “But once again: I don’t care. You sent me to north Finland with an inappropriate team and planted a mole among us. You intended me either to fail or incriminate myself somehow or, most probably, to die. None of those things happened. Now that I’m back, if I were you, I would remember that both my men and I take a very dim view of that.”

  “Get back here and answer my questions,” Carter said menacingly. “You’ll stay until I’m satisfied I’ve got to the bottom of what happened.

  “No, thank you, sir,” Maddox said. “Oh – you can put all of that in your report too, if you like.”

  He flashed the brigadier a smile and closed the door behind himself.
r />   As he walked away he heard a small crash and the sound of shattering glass. Carter had thrown the ashtray at the wall. There would be fallout from his insubordination – but almost certainly it would come from Carter and not the higher ups in the SOE. The Brigadier wouldn’t want a light shone on his actions. And, if he tried to make a fuss about the diamonds, he had no proof that Maddox’s account wasn’t exactly what had transpired.

  Maddox took a few turns along the corridors and headed up a flight of steps to the dormitory section of the building. It was here squads sent out on missions were housed for a brief period prior to their departure and immediately upon return. Ostensibly, it was so that everyone could attend briefings on time. In reality, as with most practices in the division, the real reason was security.

  Carter’s only hope of proving Maddox hadn’t taken the diamonds would be to get a confession from one of the men on the mission.

  That would be difficult.

  He went into his room. The familiar smell of tobacco and whisky hit him, even though the window was open.

  Fallon, Patterson and Marlowe – his regular crew – were all there, waiting for his return. Sledge had already been reassigned for other missions.

  “All good?” Fallon asked as Maddox stepped inside.

  “All good,” Maddox said. “Carter’s nose was bent out of shape about the missing diamonds but that was about it.”

  Fallon sat on the windowsill blowing smoke rings out into the night. Windows inside the building were normally sealed shut. The men must have jimmied this one while Maddox was in his briefing.

  “He suspects?” Patterson asked.

  “Of course he does,” Maddox replied. “But he can’t prove. Frankly, it was the crooked bastard’s only real concern.”

  “That and the fact that his real motives for the mission might have been uncovered,” Marlowe said, pouring Maddox a tumbler of whisky and passing it across.

  “Same difference,” Maddox chuckled. “There was no real reason for him not to send the Norwegians other than he wanted direct control of the proceeds when they came back. Had another group gone, the blue diamonds would have been received by the bosses of that team. They wouldn’t have been able to mysteriously disappear from the SOE’s stores, the same way that counterfeit currency did.”

  “And the art that was captured,” Marlowe sniggered. “It’s amazing Carter has got away with so much petty theft for so long and no one has taken notice.”

  “He’s got to pay for his big country estate somehow,” Fallon said, blowing more smoke rings out of the window.

  “And the wife twenty years his junior,” Patterson laughed. “So, how much is our haul worth?”

  Maddox was an East End boy, born and bred. He knew who to pass the gems onto and get a fair price.

  “Once they’re cut and polished?” Maddox replied. “We get a diminished cut, as you know. Everyone involved in the chain has to get their slice.”

  “But what will come to us?” Patterson asked.

  “I estimate about £300,000,” Maddox said. “In total. And that will be split eight ways.”

  A sigh from Fallon and Marlowe.

  “Really?” Marlowe said. “Eight ways?”

  Maddox gave him a look.

  “You know my rules,” he said coldly.

  Where the team member was still alive, they were given an equal share of the money – on the condition that it was stored safely until after the war.

  Where the team member was dead, the money was passed on to a lawyer, to be given to the immediate family of the man, via a charity Maddox had was set up to, ostensibly, provide solace for grieving widows and orphans.

  The families would never know its true origins.

  That included the family of Conley.

  Maddox insisted on it.

  If you fought alongside him, you were part of his team.

  No exceptions.

  “Eight ways, it is,” Patterson agreed.

  Marlowe and Fallon nodded slowly in unison.

  “Just one thing,” Patterson asked. “How did you know it was Conley who was the mole?”

  Maddox inhaled strongly through his nose and held it for a few seconds.

  “He didn’t stack up,” he replied. “He was supposed to be fresh to us out of training. He was supposed to be raw – but had been made a sergeant already. During our fire-side chat, he opened up that he’d been on several missions in South East Asia. The callowness of youth; he couldn’t keep his story straight.”

  A searing spasm flashed along the length of Maddox’s arm.

  He yelped.

  The fingers of his left hand locked like a bear’s claw, their tips twitching with every agonising flicker as it burned through his nerves.

  Maddox’s jaw clenched.

  His vision began to blur.

  He leaned against the wall to steady himself. Patterson leapt forward and gripped his shoulders in support.

  “It’s getting worse, isn’t it?” his friend said.

  The pain subsided and Maddox gasped for breath. Fallon and Marlowe looked on with concerned faces. It was not the first time they’d seen their commander ravaged by an attack.

  Maddox’s muscles released, gradually returning to their natural state. He stood upright, blinking as the pain dulled.

  “Is there nothing we can do?” Fallon asked. “Medicine has leapt on because of the war.”

  Maddox rubbed his forearm to bring circulation back.

  “I’ve been through the usual treatments,” he replied. “Went up and down Harley Street, as you know. One doctor used antimony. That calmed it briefly – then it flared back. Another tried a historic remedy made from Myrrh.”

  “Very biblical,” Marlowe said. “It didn’t take?”

  Maddox shook his head.

  “There’s got to be someone,” Patterson said.

  “There’s a possibility,” Maddox sighed. “There is one doctor who may have a treatment.”

  “Then let’s seek him out,” Patterson replied. “I can drive you there. We can arrange an appointment right away. It’s not like paying for it is going to be a problem.”

  “It’s an excellent plan,” Maddox said. “It has just one small flaw.”

  “What?” Fallon asked.

  Maddox looked at his friends. In unison, they said:

  “He’s German.”

  All four men went silent, introspectively focusing on the difficulty of the task in front of them.

  “Well,” Patterson said, after a long pause. “I think I speak for everyone present when I say that each of us owes our lives to you, in some cases more than once.”

  “Agreed,” Marlowe said. “We find out where he is and we formulate a strategy.”

  “And damn the consequences?” Maddox replied. “No. That’s one thing I’m not prepared to do.”

  “I don’t think you have a choice,” Patterson said. “We’re going to work on this and we can include you in the operational planning or you can choose to opt out. Either way – you’ll be coming with us and we’ll just factor in your compliance or take you into account as a complicating factor.”

  Maddox smirked.

  They were good men.

  He said nothing for a few seconds while he considered his words.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Thank God I met three such strong friends.”

  He refilled his tumbler with drink.

  “To our mutual good fortune,” he said.

  They clanked their glasses together.

  “And you making it through this sodding war alive,” Patterson added.