Final Mission: Zion - A World War 2 Thriller

by Chuck Driskell

  “May I see the papers?”

  “But it’s not even close to the noon hour.”

  “I might have till noon, but I’m not sitting here till noon. No offense.”

  Dejected, the forger removed a calfskin pouch from his inner pocket, pushing it over the sticky table. Neil opened it and, as the plates of food arrived, he scrutinized the Freeman Jennings U.S. passport, thumbing through each of the pages, satisfied with the various stamps from places such as Cuba and Portugal. He placed it on the table before studying the Austrian passport and accompanying papers. The three attached pages, detailing Neil’s new Austrian identity’s background, were on a linen paper with a watermark bearing the name of Eisenbeiss Papier. Neil held it to the light.

  The forger motioned his dripping fork to the paper. “You see, it’s the little things like that watermark that could out you. But I know these things. That’s the paper that has been used by the Austrians since thirty-four, the year of my near-fatal surgery by that unskilled Cossack doctor from Guria. I was a hair from death.”

  “Yeah…about the brand of paper.”

  “Yes…yes. You show up with standard paper or, God forbid, American paper…well…you can imagine what sort of fate might await you.”

  Neil flattened the papers on a clean area of the table and studied his name and address. His cover name was Dieter Dremel. His address was 2 Berchtoldshofweg, Innsbruck. His occupation was listed as a Logistics Expert.

  “Dieter Dremel?” Neil asked, looking up with a sour expression. “Sounds like a character in the comics.”

  “Yes, it’s rather nice, isn’t it? Especially coming from such an execrable language. And that address represents your home.” The forger added a copious amount of pepper to his runny eggs. He jammed a full egg into his mouth and continued to speak as a rivulet of yolk danced on his bottom lip. “Dieter Dremel once lived there but departed the chaos of Austria twenty years ago and moved here to the United States.”

  Neil focused on the papers again. “And how do you know that?”

  The forger slathered additional butter onto the toast, loading it so heavily that he had to crease the bread and eat quickly to keep it from running off. “Because my second cousin is in Salzburg,” he answered with his mouth full. “We’ve been working on this for some time.”

  Neil frowned. “Some time?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long?”

  The forger caught a bit of escaping butter with his thumb, sucking it before answering. “Days, weeks, what is the difference?”

  Jakey’s letter was in Neil’s pocket. Since it had been previously opened, Neil could understand how…whoever these people were…a Jewish movement…could have been planning this for weeks, but certainly not before Jakey’s death. Meghan told him Jakey had died in July, leaving the children with about two-and-a-half months of food.

  And where do you hide that many kids with three months of food? An aircraft hangar? An old factory? It’d have to be enormous. And how could they avoid detection for so long?

  “Your mind is awash in thinking, yes?” the forger asked with a mouthful of food.

  Neil reached across the table, grabbing both of the forger’s wrists, making him stop his eating. “Listen to me. Exactly how long have you been working on this? It is important.”

  “A little over two weeks.”

  Neil released him. “Who do you work for?”

  The forger glanced around before leaning forward, making a pulling expression with his greasy fork. “Tell me what you know.”

  “I know enough to know what I’m traveling to Austria to do. But I need to know more about your organization.”

  As he worked on another piece of toast, the forger grinned as he spoke. “It’s not an organization. We’re a people, a tribe. And like any good tribe that is threatened, we pool our resources for the greater good.” He peered over his spectacles, whispering again. “There are such well-known people involved with this that, if I were to tell you, it would make your Brylcreemed hair stand on end.”

  “Who?”

  “Famous people. Notable people. And skilled people, like me.”

  Another thought passed through Neil’s mind. “About this address in Austria: won’t the locals be suspicious if I just show up?”

  “Dremel was a loner. He moved from Innsbruck but retained ownership of his house and land. As far as the government knows, he has been maintaining a part-time residence in Salzburg, paying his taxes, keeping up his good standing. He is not a Jew and our friends in Innsbruck have tended the property.” The forger produced a ring of keys and slid them to Neil. “Those will get you inside the residence. It’s cozy and rustic, with a spectacular view,” he said with a conspiratorial wink.

  “Won’t the neighbors think it’s strange to suddenly see me after the house has been empty for so long?”

  “Worry not—the home is quite secluded.” Again, the forger jabbed the fork at the counterfeits. “Those papers will get you to Austria. Once you’re there,” he said with a cocked caterpillar of an eyebrow, “the rest is up to you. And please hurry. You have until—”

  “September fifteenth, I know.”

  “Getting them safely out of Austria will be a major feat. That’s why you must arrive early. The southern border with Yugoslavia is heavily patrolled.”

  “I’ll get it done.” Neil shifted in his seat. “Any chance they could run out of food and water early?”

  “No.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “They will ration it to the day. This has been done at least a dozen times before. The Jewish flight from the Reich didn’t just begin, you know.”

  “And couldn’t the children be discovered in the meantime?” Neil asked.

  “Not according to your friend, Jacob.”

  “Where are they hidden?”

  “Only your contacts in Innsbruck know.”

  Neil’s mind jumped back to his cover. “What about the real Dieter Dremel? What if I run into someone who knew him?”

  The forger swallowed a mouthful of food. He sat straight, jerking the napkin from his bulging neck and wiping his hands. From inside his jacket pocket, he produced a heavy picture, backed by a thin piece of cardboard. In the photo was an unsmiling man, standing erect in front of a large building. Neil could immediately see the resemblance between himself and Dieter Dremel.

  “Do you see?” the forger asked, fingering a piece of food from between his teeth. “This is not some slipshod operation. Your cover, your home and your papers have been painstakingly thought through. Again, any failures in Innsbruck will be your own.”

  Neil stared at the forger, underwhelmed by his appearance, irritated by his peculiar method of speaking, but sufficiently impressed by the man’s diligence. He removed the envelope of money from his jacket and slid it across the table. The forger stared at it a moment, and then with a sausage finger, he slid it back.

  “Herr Dremel, I don’t want your money.”

  “But I was told to pay you.”

  “No, thank you. But you can pay for my food.” The forger’s mouth twitched upward as he leaned sideways in his booth, unbuttoning his vest to allow his massive midsection a few more inches of breathing room and sighing afterward.

  Neil studied his new papers and the photo, not hearing another word the forger said until the forger touched Neil’s hand.

  “Let’s hear your German.”

  “Why?”

  “Just talk.”

  Frowning, Neil relented because he knew he needed the practice. “Hallo, mein name ist Dieter Dremel. Ich bin Österreicher.”

  The forger’s bloodshot eyes widened before his great belly shook with building, wheezing laughter.

  “What?” Neil demanded. “What?”

  The forger scratched his cherry nose as his laughter wound down. “That accent of yours, oh my, oh my. Well, I’d suggest you’d be wise to come up with a compelling back-story,” he said, breaking into laughter again.
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  “How bad is it?”

  “I lived in Vienna—a place from here forward you shall call Wien. And that accent will stick out as badly as I would wearing my Rekel and Shtreimel at a Berlin Nazi rally,” he said, wheezing with more laughter.

  “Thank you for the papers,” Neil said, readying to leave. The forger grabbed his arm.

  “As I said, I have a cousin in Salzburg. He’s only a trepl below me in talent. If you require additional forgeries, or even counterfeit legal documents, go to him.” The forger produced a business card and pressed it in Neil’s hand. “He’s in hiding. You must first call the man on the card. He will put you in contact.”

  Neil stuffed the card into the pouch, placing everything into his inner jacket pocket. After nodding his thanks, he dropped a five-dollar bill on the table, leaving without another word.

  For the next three hours, he walked the streets of Manhattan, stretching his legs, strolling all the way to the north end of Central Park, speaking German to himself and wondering how on earth he was going to accomplish this mission without getting found out.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE RMS QUEEN MARY STEAMED THROUGH THE MOUTH OF NEW YORK HARBOR, signaling with her great steam horns to the well-wishers waving their handkerchiefs from the railing on Ellis Island. It was mid-afternoon. Neil was in his modest cabin room, wearing only his wrinkled suit pants and his undershirt. He finished unpacking his bags and laid his suit coat on the bed, pulling the lone chair next to the single mattress. He sat and removed the pouch of identities from the jacket pocket of his suit coat. Neil worked his finger through a tri-fold crease on the other side of the jacket, revealing a hidden pocket from which he extracted a thin smoking tin. After spreading one of his clean undershirts on the bed, he opened the tin and removed a felt bag, carefully pouring out its contents over the undershirt.

  Before him, sparkling like tiny flecks of molten sun, was the sum total of what remained of his personal fortune. Seventy-nine diamonds of assorted size, all of the highest cut and clarity. It would have been far too great an undertaking to try to move nearly two million dollars in cash, even if he were to use hundred-dollar bills. Such a large amount would have been bulky and hard to secure, and would have no doubt raised someone’s suspicion.

  The diamonds, however, fit neatly in his pocket and their worth was essentially universal. General Logistics had sold quickly—Neil knew it would. And after Musselwhite convinced Remington to take the entire estate, Neil arranged for the diamond exchange through Meghan Herman, at the same time she informed him of the New York forger.

  The old man who’d exchanged the diamonds for Neil had been located in a dim little shop just outside of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Neil had immediately wondered how the shop ever attracted a single customer. The front window was so dirty it had become opaque, and had he not been given explicit instructions on where to go, Neil would have never found the place. Two women, both in their fifties, had ushered Neil in, keeping their heads bowed but stealing occasional glances at him. After having Neil sit, they both began to deafeningly yell the word “papa” in the direction of the rear of the store. Neil heard what sounded like a mattress creaking, followed by what must have been assorted curses in a language he didn’t understand. And then the old jeweler appeared, wearing an undershirt and silk pajama pants while both of his bony hands scratched his stomach and exposed ribs. He was small and wiry, with parched lips that he licked incessantly.

  “My daughters,” the old man said as he poured a cup of tarry coffee from a silver pot.

  “We’ve met,” Neil answered, watching as the two peculiar women giggled like teenagers.

  After the man’s painstakingly slow cup of coffee, and very little small talk, he and his two daughters counted the bills from the many stacks of cash. The man whispered a figure to both girls; they both nodded their agreement. Then, from a locked safe, the old man removed three pouches of glittering diamonds, keeping them segregated into piles, probably based on size and value.

  The jeweler had poured another cup of coffee, nibbling a hard biscuit as he worked arithmetic on a brown paper sack. He drew two hard lines underneath the total and, with a slight cackle, he shaved fifteen percent off of the diamond exchange for his trouble, marking it in large numbers. Neil looked at the list of diamonds, marked by their weight, their cut, and their clarity. He nodded his approval of their value, taking the old man’s word for it. And how would he have known if he was being taken advantage of? He wouldn’t, and had simply decided to trust Meghan’s advice.

  Next, he asked the jeweler about exchanging the diamonds for cash in Europe and was told the best rate of exchange would be enjoyed in Belgium. The jeweler told Neil to expect another haircut, probably at least fifteen percent and perhaps twenty. But Belgium wouldn’t work for Neil; he needed reichsmarks. He asked about Germany or Austria.

  “If you must go there, exchange the diamonds in Austria,” the old man answered, waving his hand as if he didn’t approve. “The Austrians: such rough, boorish people. Neither they, nor their banal cousins to the north, know the true worth of these precious stones. Expect to be offered half of what you might get in Brussels.”

  “Any Austrian cities you might recommend for the best value?” Neil asked.

  “Salzburg. At the very least, they somewhat understand the fruits of the earth there. You’d be best advised to find a Jew, if there are any left who dare show their face.”

  Another blast from the ship’s horns broke Neil’s reverie. He stared at the cluster of diamonds scattered about on his undershirt. With his index finger, he traced a line through them, watching as they absorbed and refracted light, thinking of all of the things that needed to occur if he had any hope of pulling this off.

  “Find a Jew in Salzburg,” Neil said aloud, chuckling at the situation’s absurdity before he carefully replaced the diamonds and stuffed the tin back into the hidden coat pocket. He rubbed his face, dreading the hundreds of lonely hours he was going to endure on this ocean liner.

  His mind moved across the Atlantic to London, where his mission would really begin. From London, there were no contacts and no plan. It would be Neil Reuter, and Neil Reuter alone. He closed his eyes, remembering the days during the war, when one of the men laying cover-fire for him first dubbed him the Pale Horse. The man, like Neil, had American Indian blood—a Cherokee. He claimed when Neil ran back through the flying lead of the front line, his feet never once touched the ground. That next morning, as they’d boiled wild onions with the scant meat of a pigeon, the Cherokee had bestowed him with the sobriquet, telling Neil about Cherokees who’d performed similarly under duress.

  “Pale Horse,” Neil said aloud, glancing at his tired reflection in a mirror. “Let’s hope you can conjure him again.” He touched the stitches on his forehead, that drunken day seeming months ago. He removed them in only a few seconds using a pair of cuticle scissors.

  Neil lit a cigarette and spun the round porthole window open on the vertical hinge, flooding the cabin with moist, salty air. Leaning against the cabin’s outer wall, he stared at the flat nothingness of the Atlantic, feeling the slight vibrations as the great ship effortlessly sliced through the waves off the coast of Long Island. A solitary cloud obscured the afternoon sun, diffusing it to a lemon corona. The sound of seagulls, unknowingly committed to following the ship across the Atlantic, occasionally squawked from aft, probably circling a child who was rewarding them with thrown pieces of bread. The child made Neil think of his unborn son, and of Emilee.

  She would have liked to have been with me, he thought. By this time their son would have been one-and-a-half years old. Maybe he’d be playing, or perhaps taking an afternoon nap. Emilee would walk up behind Neil and rest her head on his shoulder, like she always did when feeling pensive. Sometimes they would go to bed during the day, especially on holidays or weekends. But it wasn’t typically sexual; Emilee preferred that during the nighttime, unless they were out on the yacht. The daytime bed sessions
at Hillside were about conversation, and opening up. Emilee would sometimes share Neil’s cigarette, nodding as she dragged on it, listening to his limited tales from the Great War, rubbing his dark hair as she soothed him while he opened up a Pandora’s box of tragic, horrid memories.

  Neil remembered the time she told him that she had feelings, premonitions, that they were doomed to a short life with each other. But Em always felt it was he, and not she, who would die early. She would scold him about working too hard, recounting for him her father’s death by that old printing press, his hand clutching his chest as he collapsed and died in front of his two employees. Neil would comfort her, talking about his own good health and pronouncing himself strong as a bull. And then Em would feel better, and the subject would be tabled until the next session, when it would come up again.

  It would have been worse, far worse, had she known about his true occupation.

  Neil always felt Emilee suspected he did something more than just run General Logistics. She’d never said anything, but when he would return from a business trip with no gifts and scant details about what had transpired, he would see the knowing look of anxiety in her eyes. And in the end, Emilee’s premonition was correct – only it was she, not Neil, who would be ripped from the earth far too early.

  Determined not to begin another period of melancholia, Neil pitched the cigarette out the porthole and glanced around the cabin. All this sitting around was going to be hell. He needed a drink. Desperately.

  No…yes…no, dammit.

  Just as he was considering a room service call to the steward, a loud, merciful knock came through the shiny teak door. Neil didn’t expect any sort of trouble on this voyage, but he also didn’t anticipate any visitors. He glanced at his bag containing his Colt, thought better of it, and opened the door.

  “Message for Mister Jennings,” the short steward said. The man handed him a buff envelope, bowed politely, and hustled off into the labyrinth of corridors. A strong, masculine script addressed the note to Freeman Jennings. Neil frowned, knowing the passage had been purchased in this name, and also knowing that he had told no one, other than Meghan and the forger, of the alias. He found a letter opener in the room’s desk and sliced the envelope open…