Final Mission: Zion - A World War 2 Thriller

by Chuck Driskell

  Neil’s voice cracked when he said it.

  “I’m a professional killer.”

  The short sentence Neil had never before uttered was now out, lingering, floating around the couple like a phantasm.

  Gabi, to her credit, took the news well. She tilted her head, eyeing him quizzically.

  “Before my wife’s death, Gabi, my job was to kill men who were enemies of the United States. It didn’t start that way, but that’s what it evolved to. It doesn’t sadden me. I vetted each target beforehand and, even though I roundly despise the bastards I worked for, I still support many of their beliefs. The earth is a cleaner, safer place minus the men I’ve put into its soil.”

  “I like it when you speak the truth.”

  “That’s it? No questions?”

  “What else is there to say?”

  She gave his hand a final squeeze before she stood and crossed the room, entering the bedroom and closing the door behind her. Neil heard the water running in the tub. Thirty minutes went by, dragging on longer than the sum total of his entire journey. He watched the fire lose its flame, smoldering in a lump of orange coals. Before, when the girls had been in the bedroom, he had been in the mission, inventorying his thoughts like the professional he was, preparing for his next set of tasks. But now, over that unending half-hour while she was in the bedroom and bath, all Neil could think of was this young German woman who had left her family for him, and the fact that she claimed to love him. Just when he thought he might have to go outside for some air, the bedroom door opened halfway.

  He sat still, not breathing. The door was ajar; the room behind it dark. Everything remained silent and still for a full minute. Schatze lay curled in a ball, sleeping. Neil looked at the bedroom door again. He stood, slowly crossing the main room, standing just outside the bedroom. Inside, the quilt and sheet rustled.

  “I drew another bath for you.”

  Neil’s throat was nearly swollen shut and, after a strained swallow, he entered the diminutive bathroom and pushed the door shut behind him. He brushed his teeth before entering the tub, dunking himself before using soap to clean his hair, his ears and every square inch of his body. Neil realized his night clothes were in the bedroom so, after toweling dry, he cracked the door and asked Gabi to hand them to him.

  “You don’t need your clothes,” she said. “Come to bed.”

  Neil’s breathing was coming in large gasps which he did his best to silence. He slid under the covers and pulled the quilt to his neck. Gabi immediately rolled to him and he could tell by the touch of her skin that she, too, wore nothing. The smell of the same soap he had just used danced on her skin. She pressed her lips to his, a small peck growing into a passionate kiss. Gabi’s leg probed both of his, silky smooth and sliding up and down, petting him with her foot. Her hand moved from his neck, down the muscles of his chest, over his stomach and below his navel. She locked her leg over his body, moving astride him, allowing the quilt to roll backward.

  There was scant light in the room, but enough that Neil could see her staring down at him. She placed her hands on his chest and moved slowly, sliding forward and backward. The sensation was almost unbearable. She made soft sounds before taking Neil’s hands and moving them to her thighs. Despite the absence of light, Neil could see her smile.

  They rolled over, never losing contact with one another. Neil kissed her. She dragged her mouth to his neck, licking him up and down before again locking her mouth on his as she increased her movements under him. As the physicality of their intimate actions increased, Neil could feel his ribs throbbing, and the pain somehow added to his excitement. When he neared his zenith, Gabi moaned softly and increased her grip on him, pulling him closer as they both released in a hail of gasps before collapsing onto the damp sheets.

  Gabi kissed him lightly on his chest before he rolled off of her. She nestled into the crook of his arm and whispered one last phrase for the evening.

  “No matter what you’ve done, I still love you. Ich liebe dich.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  EARLIER THAT FRIDAY, Thomas Lundren had been in the Austrian town of Wörgl. It was the type of place he might have wanted to live in his youth. There were abounding outdoor activities and, because of that, everyone seemed so cheerful. The shopkeepers and locals, easy to mark due to their deeply bronzed skin, greeted Thomas everywhere he went. Without prompting, they offered advice on activities he might enjoy on the slopes or the surrounding lakes. The local economy was tourism, and the residents obviously knew it. In a matter of weeks, Wörgl would be teeming with skiers and tourists, using it as their home base for skiing on the nearby ski runs, the most famous being Kitzbühel.

  But sporting was not Thomas’ reason for being here.

  Once again, a map was spread out before him, this one of the three states of western Austria. Thomas was currently facing due north, at a café with an elevated outdoor patio. He had sent his detail forward to investigate several suppositions that needed to be looked into, even though he felt they would probably bear no fruit.

  Sometimes Thomas simply needed to be alone with his thoughts.

  The accommodating waiter had given Thomas five glasses of water. Four held the map down in the cool afternoon breeze. One was cupped in his hand as he leaned over the map, staring at the pass that the airplane was to have flown through. The first town south of the pass, on mostly level ground, was Wörgl, and that’s why Thomas had chosen to come here. While he doubted Kruger’s killer had immediately descended into Wörgl, Thomas felt it important to stop and view the physical surroundings as well as the map.

  Thomas still believed Kruger and the other man had flown directly from England, where, years before, Kruger was said to have defected to. They likely stopped in Velden with the intention of refueling. Antonio, the airfield worker, said they didn’t take any fuel and Thomas believed him. While they were there, something went wrong and Kruger was shot, right at the spot he was found. Due to the spattering of blood, the man had not been shot in the airplane and then dumped.

  There were traces of one other blood type, a short distance away. Thomas assigned that blood to the “pilot,” the one he’d seen struggling with the airplane. Since Wilhelm Kruger had been a pilot in the Great War, it was quite reasonable to assume he had been the one flying on that night, before his death. So then, after the killing, the shooter would have been forced to fly to get away—especially if he was too injured to run. Yes, that makes sense, Thomas thought. The man was either a novice pilot or very unfamiliar with that aircraft. All of these hypotheses Thomas could live with.

  But what he kept coming back to was the story from the veterinarian. Why would he make such a thing up? And, if the vet had been so drunk he’d hallucinated a plane crash—something Thomas struggled to believe—why would he immediately change his tune when he heard the contrasting tale from the Heinz boy?

  The veterinarian was vermin, without a doubt. Thomas wouldn’t trust the man to scrawl his own name, much less take care of one of his animals. But there seemed to be some truth to his story, especially the way he had first relayed it down in that lower field. And then, after they had searched the Heinz home and barn, the man had abruptly changed his story and seemed eager to leave. But why? In all Thomas’ years of investigation, never before had he seen a witness so quickly flip, and then be so sure about it.

  Leaning back and stretching in the sun, Thomas felt the sea change in his leanings.

  It had taken his crossing the political border into Austria to feel more strongly that the airplane had actually come to a rest somewhere north of the Alps, in Germany. There was certainly a chance the airplane had had enough fuel to make it to Austria. There was a chance the pilot had stopped and refueled somewhere else. There were always chances.

  But that didn’t coincide with Thomas’ research on the range of the Hornet Moth on a single tank of fuel. The fuel would have run out north of the pass, very close to where the veterinarian said the plane crashed.
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br />   Many years ago, when all else failed, Thomas learned to trust his gut instinct. And right now it was telling him that he had gone too far south. Somehow the crooked veterinarian, and maybe even the Heinz boy at the farm, held the key to what really happened.

  Thomas stayed at the café another hour, eating a light pastry before retiring to the hotel for the night. The other officers arrived at sundown, empty-handed as Thomas thought they might be. His men went out for a night on the town. But Thomas stayed in his chamber, reading, although he couldn’t have recounted a word of what he read. His mind was still in Hausham, occupied with the unsavory veterinarian and his strange story.

  After five hours of fitful sleep, Thomas sat straight up at three in the morning on Saturday. Following a brief coughing spell, he wore his nightshirt to the end of the hallway in the small inn, enjoying a hot bath and a shave at the same time. After cleaning his teeth, Thomas accepted a hot mug of tea from the elderly man in the office. He left a sealed note for his chief man, instructing him and the officers to split up and question the citizenry in the valley toward Zell am See, and in the other direction towards Innsbruck.

  Thomas wrote that he was going back to Hausham, and that he had additional questions for Hörst Baldinger, the veterinarian.

  The old truck puttered north, up the steep incline toward the pass at Kufstein. Inside was Thomas Lundren, his face bright, as his instinct told him that a break in the case was very near.

  ~~~

  At seven in the morning, the parking lot of the main police station in Nürnberg buzzed with activity. While the black Mercedes patrol cars came and went, Preston Lord watched as a gaggle of officers yelled at one another, dividing into what looked like two sides with clearly differing opinions. They all wore the same police uniforms and, after two full minutes of arguing and a few vulgar gestures, both sides went their separate ways. Who knew what the argument was about? Who cared? Lord sat in the constable’s old DKW rattletrap, not deliberately hiding, but sitting low in the seat to avoid any unwanted questioning. Before Constable Sauer had gone inside, he placed an official-looking paper on the dashboard, covered in stamps and signatures, adorned several times by the far overused National Socialist swastika.

  And while Lord had seen the swastika in newsreels and photos, he was staggered by the frequency of the Nazi symbol across the Germanic land, especially in a large city like Nürnberg. On light poles, hanging from buildings, in car windows, on children’s arm bands, hanging in front of schools and businesses: the icon was everywhere he turned. Sitting in the liquor-pervaded cabin of Sauer’s car, Lord looked around, counting one…two…three…four…five Nazi symbols. All of them clearly visible, and this was only in an isolated parking lot, sandwiched between two taller buildings.

  Twenty minutes had passed since the constable went inside. Since their meeting at the café, Sauer had told Lord all about the discovery of the body at the airstrip. The body was discovered at Velden, the very same airstrip that the Danish partner of Wilhelm Kruger said he would use to stop and refuel. After working through a loose timeline, Lord was almost certain that the body was found the morning after Kruger left England. It was too fantastic to have been a coincidence and the reasoning was simple: Reuter had needed to come to Germany, covertly. He’d found his man, hitched a ride with him, and killed him once he was inside the Reich.

  Unless, by chance, the body was actually Neil Reuter’s.

  “No,” Lord spoke to the empty car, a rueful grin on his face. “I’m lucky, but not that lucky.”

  But why would Reuter have left Wilhelm Kruger’s carcass lying out in the open like that? And who’d flown Kruger’s airplane? Reuter didn’t know how to fly—at least Lord didn’t think so. None of it made sense. He shook his head and dug underneath the seat, finding Sauer’s flask and swigging from it. Kentucky bourbon of piss-poor quality, Lord thought, taking a second swig. The truth was: Lord had no way of knowing how that shooting had gone down. If Reuter was the killer—and that was highly likely—any number of things could have happened to necessitate a hasty getaway.

  Lord recalled the cuckolded Danish husband, Henry Janzen, mentioning that Kruger may have tried to rob Neil. That had to have been it. The pilot landed in Velden to refuel, then tried to rob his passenger, having no idea who he really was.

  Bang-Bang!

  A dead body on the runway.

  Dumb move, Willi Kruger.

  The other troubling aspect was the airplane. The constable had told Lord that the old policeman had shot at it as it sped down the runway and flew away. On the drive to Nürnberg, Lord scoured Reuter’s file for any information regarding flight training. There was none. Perhaps he had learned on his own—entirely possible. But, if that were the case, why use Kruger to get into Germany? Why not fly himself? It didn’t make sense at all.

  Another swig.

  Just as Lord had nestled deep into the worn seat, he saw the lumbering, pear-shaped constable crossing the parking lot, triumph all over his face. The man better never take up poker, Lord mused, already hating him. Sauer jerked the door open, plopping onto the seat with a whoosh as his hand automatically reached underneath for the flask. Lord watched his face darken a fraction as he had to move his hand to the right of where it was supposed to be. He removed the flask and shot his evil eye at the American as he took a swig.

  “Well?”

  Sauer lowered the flask and let out a rancid, yet satisfied breath. “It’s a very quiet operation that no one is supposed to know about. But the desk man knows me. We went out back for a cigar.” Sauer’s face took on an uncharacteristic apprehensive look. “It ended up costing me a twenty to get him to talk.”

  Lord knew full well Sauer probably only paid five reichsmarks. “Fine,” he grumbled, throwing a wad of the strange-looking fives on the seat. “What did he tell you?”

  “The man I told you about, Lundren, once a high-ranking policeman, was named special investigator just for this case. He supposedly has a solid reputation, but he’s had difficulties finding anything meaningful about the murder. That said, something happened recently. He’s not here because he got called to the south part of Bavaria. Something urgent.”

  “They say why?”

  Sauer took another nip and shrugged. “Said there was a witness.”

  “Have they identified the body?”

  “Nope.”

  Lord held his hand out for the flask. The constable reluctantly handed it over. After a long pull, Lord said, “I find it hard to believe they weren’t able to figure out Kruger’s identity.” He gnawed on a fingernail. “Hell, maybe the dead man is Reuter.”

  “Didn’t you say your American had different-colored eyes?”

  “Green and blue.”

  “Well, the dead body down at the morgue has bad teeth and brown eyes. They don’t have his name yet, but his description is in the report. He’s also got an uncircumcised prick.”

  Lord eyed Sauer for a moment. He dug into Reuter’s file, pulling out the medical information. There it was, circumcised. He shook his head, constantly surprised by the directions his job sometimes took him. Lord poked the page. “The cadaver’s not Reuter. I knew it wouldn’t be. Reuter killed that guy, I’d bet anything.”

  Sauer twisted his girth to face Lord. “We should find Lundren. He may just lead you to your man. And I wouldn’t mind settling a score with that old bastard.”

  “Did you say the south of Bavaria?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s there?”

  “Resorts and baths mainly, at the base of the mountains.”

  Lord spit out a piece of a fingernail. “The videos I’ve seen in the news about Adolf Hitler, where he hosts world leaders. It’s in the mountains, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, near Berchtesgaden.”

  “And where is that?” Lord knew all this, but he was bringing his patsy along, letting him think he was the intelligent one.

  “In the south of Bavaria.”

  “Can you find out w
here this special investigator was called to?”

  “Thomas Lundren.”

  “Yeah, Lundren.”

  “Maybe.” Sauer paused, cutting his eyes. “I’ll need more money.”

  Preston Lord reached inside his overcoat and peeled off 100 reichsmarks in twenties, dropping them on the wine-colored seat. As Sauer was exiting the car again, Lord pulled him back in by the tail of his threadbare barn coat.

  “Whatever you do, don’t raise suspicion about why you want to know this.”

  Sauer grinned, his face sinking back into his multiple chins as he bared his stained teeth. “It’s not a problem. I made it clear that I hate the old fart. My buddy thinks this is all personal.”

  After Sauer had left, Lord pinched his bottom lip as his mind raced. He knew his theories were racing off in a reckless direction, but they made sense. While there was a chance he might be off target, he would bet a quarter of his trust fund that Neil Reuter was planning to kill Adolf Hitler at his retreat in southern Bavaria. The same retreat that was always on the news, as the fanatical German hosted whomever the world leader of the week might be.

  And Neil Reuter would kill him there, in his home, because Reuter had just that kind of style—and so did Preston Lord.

  Which enabled him to think like Neil.

  Or, so he thought.

  ~~~

  Thomas parked between the Hausham Catholic Church and the ramshackle, two-story building with a hand-painted sign displaying Baldinger Veterinary & Husbandry. It was nearly noon, a sunny Altweibersommer day—the German equivalent to Indian summer. The warm breeze carried the pleasant smells of hay and hops. He stretched, allowing the sun’s radiation to reenergize him. While he was quite comfortable with waking early, especially at his advanced age, a fitful, coughing night of sleep had taken its toll on him. Perhaps after speaking with the veterinarian, he could find a fortified lunch somewhere in town. It seemed ages since he’d had a good meal, and on this warm day he was craving overcooked vegetables and a pork dish, with good bread, just like his Greta had once prepared every Sunday.