Deitel demanded a table from the garçon, and sure enough the three—no matter how ill-suited their attire—blended right in. He ordered a bottle of schnapps, and within minutes Terah and Rucker were joining him in a toast.
The formality, the gilded Victorian decor, the haughty expressions, the unnecessary extravagance in design and clothing—Deitel had never noticed before how overwrought was this life and world he’d lived in until two months ago. His previous experience with the depredations of places like Africa and Arabia had simply made him grateful to return to civilized European society.
But now, after two months in Brazil and a day in Texas—it all seemed different to him. Stifling, perhaps. Oppressive and at the same time pointless. Melancholy. Holding onto the past in fear of the future. Decaying from within. There appeared to be no Freeholders in the crowd, but the couple of Frenchmen he saw seemed to stand out because of how comfortable they seemed in their own skin. Lively in comparison, he reflected.
Deitel considered this. Then he saw Rucker wipe his mouth on the back of his sleeve.
As Rucker let the schnapps warm his throat, he scanned the expansive lounge. Despite the sea of formal black worn by almost every man, the black and silver-trimmed uniform of the Waffen-SS stood out like a paint horse among palominos.
“Excuse me,” Rucker said. “Terah, watch my six. Be ready to back my play. Doctor, best you find the ship’s sickbay and scare up one of those black bags you sawbones always tote around. I conjure that Professor Renault will need some tending when we find him.”
Deitel was up and on his way out before Rucker finished the sentence. Terah grabbed Rucker’s arm.
“Fox. That is . . .” she said, stammering. “Be careful.”
“Aren’t I every time?”
She pulled him close and kissed him.
“That’s for luck. Because you almost get killed every time.”
He just wouldn’t stop making that cocky, lopsided grin of a face. She wanted to slap that off him. She wanted to kiss him longer.
Rucker sidled up to the deck-long oak bar and took the empty seat next to the SS officer who was hunched over his beer and smoking a Carolina cigarette.
“Lieutenant,” Rucker said.
Lieutenant Otto Skorzeny turned and his eyes widened for just a moment. He grinned slyly. There was a distinctly wolfish aspect to his expression.
“Captain,” he said, holding up his beer. The two toasted. “Most impressive. I expected you’d be in a diplomatic bag on the way to Berlin by now.”
“Germania. Don’t forget your Führer renamed it Germania,” Rucker said, ordering a wheat beer.
Skorzeny rolled his eyes.
“Great man, great New Order. Silly cosmetics. So what’s a Texan with nine lives doing in a place like this?” the German commando asked, his English almost without accent.
“I could ask you the same about how you got on Airstrip One, and on my crate. Remind me to send you a bill for the Trans-Atlantic ticket, by the way.”
Skorzeny laughed. Both men had their hands near their sidearms, and both men knew it.
“I expected I’d find you here,” Rucker said. “I didn’t figure that beating on an old professor was to your taste.”
Skorzeny snorted bitterly.
“That’s not soldiering,” he said. “Yes, it is necessary, but I’ll leave it to the boys who pulled wings off flies in their youth. I came up here to get away from those Gestapo falschamenn.”
Two Teutonic beauties in elegant gowns walked by the pilot and the SS man, giving the two men lingering looks and inviting giggles. Skorzeny winked at them.
“Of course, the view isn’t so bad up here,” Rucker said. “So just up the stairwell to drown your guilt in a pilsner?”
Skorzeny’s faced reddened but he didn’t raise his voice.
“I didn’t climb those three flights of stairs because I felt . . .” His voice drifted off. He took a deep breath and nodded chivalrously. “Well played again, Captain.”
Rucker returned the nod.
“I expect they’re in the valuable vault, and not the main cargo hold, where any crewman might happen upon them doing their dirty work,” he said.
Skorzeny nodded. “Excellent deduction. Only they’re not working him over in the old Gestapo way. Der Schädel has his own ‘unique’ methods.”
Under the bar but in Terah’s line of sight, Rucker gave her the signal of where Renault was being held.
“You realize, of course, I can’t let you interfere with our work. You know too much,” Skorzeny said. “The Führer would be most displeased if we failed to recover his spear. Project Gefallener, no matter what a soldier might think of it, is too important to the future of the Third Reich. Admittedly, it is nasty business. But then war is not for the squeamish, and honor is a trait that doesn’t seem well-suited to this century.”
Rucker drained the last of his beer. “Imagine, if you will, Lieutenant, the damage someone skilled in both aviation and engineering—who’s had several hours since boarding and who may have brought with him who knows what amount of ordnance—imagine what a man like that could do to an airship like this one. A man with a score to settle against the Huns. And this, the pride of Lufthansa. More than two thousand German nationals on board. That big red and black swastika on her stabilizer,” he said, and dropped the mock smile. “Imagine that I really don’t like you people.”
Skorzeny likewise dropped the friendly pretense.
“You wouldn’t dare. I saw firsthand how your people fought in the Great War. You go out of your way not to harm noncombatants. You’re bluffing,” he said.
“I’d take no pride in it. But it wouldn’t bother me a whit. If it’s what it takes to stop that goose-stepping clown you call master from getting hold of the spear, then you’re damn right I’d burn every last man, woman, and child onboard.”
Skorzeny’s glare bore right into Rucker’s eyes. Rucker didn’t give an inch.
“You’re not bluffing,” the German concluded.
“No,” Rucker said, meeting his glare.
“We can settle this like men, not monsters,” Skorzeny said, knowing full well what Der Schädel could do once Rucker and his team were isolated from the bystanders and innocents on board.
“Are you a man of honor?” Skorzeny asked.
Rucker stayed silent.
“Of course, who would attest that he is, is most often not,” Skorzeny said. “You are holding the cards, as you would say. The one thing our cultures hold in common is the code of the duel. Would you accept my challenge?”
Rucker wasn’t expecting this one. If he pushed too far, his bluff would be called.
“Yes.”
Skorzeny smiled. It was that predator grin. “You and I are of a kind. We are out of place in this modern world. I expect we grew up with the same bedtime stories, only the details being different—heroes on horseback fighting incredible odds and slaying dragons. Maidens rescued.”
Rucker had to admit he was right. But seriously, he was sick of the “you and I are of a kind” speech—he’d heard it at least three other times. Was there a villain guidebook or something?
“Fifteen minutes, then? Forward-starboard cargo hold,” Skorzeny said.
“Agreed,” Rucker said, refusing again to be the first to blink.
Skorzeny stood, clicked his heels, and was off. When he was gone, Rucker let out a breath he’d been holding for too long. Terah moved in, and he recounted his conversation with Skorzeny.
“I’m a better liar than I thought,” he said.
“You said you were going to blow up the ship and he believed you?” she said, clearly disturbed by the thought of so many innocents slaughtered for a cause—any cause.
Rucker shook his head. “You have to understand how these people think. Even Deitel admits it: for them, individual lives are the means to the ends of the collective. He thought I was capable of such a horror, because he knows his people are capable of such a horror.”
/> “So now what?” Terah asked.
“Now? Old-fashioned showdown. Cowboys and Aryans style,” Rucker said.
Fifteen minutes later they were in the forward cargo hold. Deitel, who’d found a doctor’s kit, was prattling again.
“What is this, primary school? The fate of the world may be at stake—Hitler creating an army of monster men—and you two are settling it with a duel?” he said.
Rucker had stripped off his jacket and shirt, as had Skorzeny. They were each loosening up on opposite corners of the cargo hold.
“Would you shut up?” Rucker said.
Deitel threw up his hands in disgust.
Terah entered through the main platform door and approached Rucker.
“He was telling the truth,” she said. “They have Professor Renault locked in the cargo vault along with some creepy circus freak in a white uniform and a gas mask. There are two goons outside the door. We need to hurry this up. And here’s this.” She handed Rucker a four-ounce glass vial with a rubber stopper.
“Right.” To Skorzeny, he said, “Lieutenant, mind if I tape my hands? You know as well as I do hitting a man with a closed fist is a bad idea, and I can’t fly too good with broken knuckles.”
Skorzeny was squatting low, his weight on his right leg, which was beneath him, and his other leg straight, foot pointing skyward and heel on the ground. He moved his arms in a circular motion, the blades of his hands rigid and ready to strike or block. Using only his right leg, he stood, his left leg still outstretched. Finally, he nodded his assent, and repeated the exercise, this time using his left leg. He set into a deep fighting stance and swept his rear leg up in front of him in a kick that followed the shape of a crescent.
“Be my guest. I find they interfere with my ability to perform tiger strikes and panther fists,” Skorzeny said. He was supremely confident in how this would go.
Rucker turned his back and opened the doctor’s kit, using the medical tape to secure his knuckles and wrists.
“Did you hear that?” Deitel said. “Panther fists? Skorzeny’s some kind of master of celestial fighting and an überkommando. Fox is a dead man unless he has some sort of comic strip superpower he hasn’t told us about.”
Terah tilted her head. “Well, he did box a little for those couple of years he went to the University of Austin. He tried fencing for a semester, he told me. Oh, and he’s a good tennis player.”
“I’m a great tennis player,” Rucker corrected.
“That involves hitting things,” Terah said, a knowing look in her eye.
“You’re both insane,” Deitel said. “No, wait. That can’t be. Clearly it is I who have gone insane. None of this can be really happening. That’s the only logical answer.”
Terah put a finger up to Deitel’s lips. “Hush. They’re starting.”
Skorzeny and Rucker squared off. Skorzeny looked like he was carved from a piece of wood—all muscle and gristle, with more scars on his torso and arms to go with the one on his face. Rucker, meanwhile, had his share of scars, and while he lacked the German’s bulk or height, he had a looser, rangier muscle build that allowed him greater flexibility and speed.
It all came down to this, Rucker thought. The future of the free world—of life on earth itself, possibly—came down to which man could beat the other down.
They circled one another, Skorzeny sliding in and out of aggressive, beautiful fighting stances—deep like a tiger, flowing like a snake, balanced like a crane. Rucker kept his hands up like a boxer, but with his left held out farther in the bare-knuckle style of old.
Skorzeny made the first move—a feint with his left leg, his open hands moving in like spinning blades, moving in for a strike at Rucker’s throat. Deitel was biting his own fist. Terah seemed unnaturally relaxed. Rucker dodged right and jabbed with his left, barely tapping the German in the mouth and nose and grabbing at the man’s face. Rucker’s left side was unprotected. Skorzeny struck him with an open palm to the chin. Rucker didn’t lose his footing, but his head spun.
Skorzeny was smiling. He wasn’t fazed by anything.
Fine, Rucker thought. The hard way.
Rucker charged into Skorzeny before the bigger man knew what was happening. He snaked his left arm under Skorzeny’s right and brought his hand over the right side of the German’s face. Grappling is the shorter fighter’s best strategy, and Rucker was employing the strategy well. Only he seemed intent on holding Skorzeny’s arms pinned and his own left hand over Skorzeny’s mouth, as if trying to gag him.
After a few seconds Skorzeny collapsed in a heap.
“What?” Deitel asked.
Terah snapped on rubber gloves and helped Rucker remove the wrapping from his left hand. She didn’t want the ether soaking his wraps getting on her hands.
“What?” Deitel repeated.
Deitel examined Skorzeny, who was flat on his back. There wasn’t even a bruise.
“What?” Deitel said.
Rucker grinned that infuriating grin.
“Diethyl ether,” Terah said.
“What?” Deitel said once more.
“What do you think this is, some sort of dime pulp fiction western with a duel at high noon?” Rucker said. “Old advice from Grandpa—never hit a man when you can outthink him. Besides, he would have taken my head off. So I gave him a dose of ether.”
He pulled his shirt and leather jacket back on, securing his shoulder holsters. “Don’t just stand there gaping at me, Doc. Use some of that baling line to tie Skorzeny up real tight, then gag him and put him on that dolly. We have to lock him away with the rest once we get the professor. Let’s move.”
Deitel watched Rucker checking the loads in his pistols, as Terah took Skorzeny’s pistol and extra magazines.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Section 712, deep underground
Wewelsburg Castle
Greater German Reich
Even before the events of the Great War had opened a doorway to a darker dimension, most people of the modern world knew of the existence of magic. The hard sciences tried to explain it away as relative forces and perhaps technologies that man had not yet understood. The religions of the world explained it away as proof of their faith in the supernatural. The alchemists and necromancers—the genuine ones admittedly few and far between, compared to the illusionists and charlatans—simply practiced their arts as they pleased or as they could; in tribal secret out of fear, or, more rarely, in public with hopes of profit and fame.
The world also knew that many of the monsters of ancient lore and modern folktale were true—or at least had a basis in reality. The chupacabras of the Chihuahua Outback, the Tree Folk of Laos, the small folk of Ireland, the Yetis of the Himalayas—all creatures as real yet also as frightening or wonderful as their legends. Since the days of Gilgamesh there were stories of the dead rising to feast on the living. The world knew that Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel of a man-made man was really no novel at all. It knew flesh-eating ghuls once roamed the sand seas of Arabia in years gone by, as did the blood-drinkers of Eastern Europe of the Gothic age. People knew there were seas no sailor—no modern ship of war—dared sail or even speak of.
All real, but all—mostly all—out of sight.
But with the war, everything changed. What had stayed mainly in the shadows came forward. Magic and monsters had always been at the edge of man’s perception, just out of sight, but enough in mind to make him wary of the dark. The scale of death and destruction in the war tore open a rift in what the theorists called another dimension, and what the necromancers called this plane of existence. The religionists called it what they always had: Hell. It was as if a new charge of dark energy had flowed into the world—igniting latent magical powers and reviving things long thought—and long hoped—extinct. Far worse, these dark energies flowing in from the Otherness, combined with the poisons and the pure hatred of the war, twisted and created new horrors. The Otherness – that anti-life force – had at its core a desire to destroy all that wa
s in the world of man.
The Nazis, of course, saw this not as a problem, but as an opportunity. Chief among those who saw this rift in the world as a potential weapon was Dr. Übel, the brilliant transgenicist turned architect of the Black Sun’s secret superweapons programs.
The young gorillion they called Jurg—a transgenic creature born of the genetic materials of both gorilla and lion—made hand motions that said, The answer is seventy-two. Please, I want a banana now, Father.
Dr. Übel clapped his hands together giddily and laughed in delight.
“Vunderbar! It’s absolutely wonderful!” he said. Then he signed, Here is your banana, Jurg.
Dr. Übel’s assistant, Otto—Jurg called him the Thin Man—was likewise impressed.
“Amazing, Doctor. And his math skills—he easily has attained the basic mathematics achievement level of a nine-year-old German student, or a thirteen-year-old American student,” Otto said. “And his vocabulary grows daily.”
“Ja, Otto, it’s astounding. Our best work yet. With our transgenic modifications, Jurg has internalized a vocabulary of over twelve hundred words with just six month’s instruction.”
Übel scratched the maned neck of the three-year-old adolescent simian-feline mutant. Jurg smiled a closed-lip, happy smile at her “father.”
“Of course,” Dr. Übel continued, “he still has trouble with abstracts and higher concepts. Watch.”
The doctor signed to the gorillion, When you reach maturity I am going to surgically replace your limbs with clockwork mechanisms, Jurg.
Jurg simply smiled.
The doctor sighed. “You see? He’s not even curious as to what I mean. Poor, incurious Jurg.”
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