The Empire Dreams td-113

by Warren Murphy

  What was unearthed intact was brought here, to the depot at Guise and others like it. All around the acres of grounds that comprised the storage facility were piles upon piles of unexploded military ordnance.

  The French government did try to safely detonate as many of the explosives as they could, but there were simply too many. All would be gotten to someday. In the meantime, they were stored away for that eventuality.

  It was Claude's job to watch the bombs rust. And to hope that they didn't blow up in his face. Claude made his way around the far end of the depot. Back here were huge aerial bombs-five feet tall and so thick a man's arms could stretch around the corroded casing and still not meet on the other side. They sat upright on their fins-stranded birds with clipped wings.

  Some of the ordnance had been at the depot so long that the earth was beginning to reclaim them. Mud had collected up around the bottommost shells. High weeds grew up around the stacks, partially obscuring them.

  Civray rounded a cluster of rotting pallets laden with tons of unexploded 170 mm shells. This spot always made his stomach tingle. It was here that he was at the farthest point of his nightly circuit. He always imagined that this would be the place he would be when the depot went up in flames.

  Holding his breath as he did every night, Civray quickened his pace. He stepped around the many stacks of huge shells and back out onto the road used by the demineurs' trucks. He moved swiftly away from the long 170 mm casings.

  Only after he was a few yards distant did he release his breath. He had made it.

  Claude wouldn't have to tour the yard for another two hours. Moving more briskly now, he made his way back to the main clapboard building near the barbed-wire-festooned gate of the large facility.

  When Claude had hiked the quarter mile back to the front of the yard he was surprised to find the main gates open.

  There were two large halogen lamps positioned on curving poles on either side of the gate. Insects fluttered crazily in the light.

  Claude could make out a line of trucks sitting idle along the desolate dirt road leading into the depot. This was more than just a little unusual. The demineurs never worked at night. It was dangerous enough to stumble around fields in broad daylight looking for eighty-year-old shells. To do so at night would be suicide.

  It couldn't be a delivery.

  So what was going on, then?

  Maurice St. Jean, the second man on duty that night, had been working alone in the main office when Claude left on his rounds. Now there seemed to be several figures moving in the windows of the wooden building. Something was wrong.

  Thoughts of 1951 immediately sprang up in Claude's mind.

  Heart fluttering, he hurried over to the office.

  CLAUDE FOUND several men inside. None was a demineur. St. Jean was nowhere to be seen. As one, the men inside turned to the door when Claude entered.

  "What is wrong?" he demanded anxiously. "You are Claude Civray?" one of the men asked. The speaker was old. Perhaps seventy, perhaps older. Though his words were French, they were spoken clumsily. He was clearly a foreigner.

  Claude became immediately suspicious. And haughty.

  "This is a restricted facility," he said, pulling himself up proudly. "What is the meaning of this invasion?"

  The foreigner carried a walking stick. He tapped it on the wooden floor.

  "Curious choice of words," he said, casting a glance at the others in his party.

  Some of the men laughed. The younger ones in particular. They guffawed loudly, slapping one another on their backs at the wit of the old man.

  One man pulled off his winter hat. His head was shaved bald. Tattoos covered his bare scalp. Though the others didn't remove their hats, it was apparent from what could be glimpsed of their scalps that they were adorned like the first.

  Civray had seen their kind before. Skinheads. NeoNazis. Though the young men laughed loudly and nervously, the leader of the group didn't even crack a smile.

  The old man used his cane to point at Civray. "Put him with the other one."

  The skinheads pounced. Claude found himself being grabbed by the arms, by the legs. He was half dragged, half carried out the door and into the yard.

  "Unhand me!" Civray cried, twisting in their hard grips. His pleas fell on deaf ears.

  They carried the struggling guard back several yards to an isolated spot off to the right near the side hurricane fencing.

  Claude saw Maurice immediately. When he did, he stopped fighting. The other guard had been beaten to insensibility and tied to a wooden pallet beside a pyramid stack of 75 mm shells. For whatever reason Maurice must have foolishly opened the gate for these men. Civray would never find out why.

  The skinheads didn't pause to give Claude the same treatment they had given his compatriot. They forced him down atop a neighboring pallet. They lashed him quickly and efficiently to the wood.

  Even before he was tied down, the trucks began rolling through the gates.

  There had been only the two of them assigned to guard the facility. Maurice must have told them that. With Claude out of the way, the intruders would meet no opposition.

  An army of men swarmed from the backs of the trucks. They went to work immediately, gingerly collecting rusted shell casings and hauling them off as speedily as possible into the rear of the awaiting vehicles.

  They worked for hours, carrying and loading. At one point one of the men working the truck nearest Claude dropped a case of "racket" German grenades. Claude was certain that it would go off.

  It was a miracle that it didn't. "Dummkopf!"

  The skinhead was berated for his carelessness by one of the supervisors of the operation. The grenades were carefully collected and the box was placed in the rear of the truck.

  Eventually the trucks were packed to the point where they could hold no more. Only then did they begin turning slowly around. They headed in a long, careful convoy back out the gates of the Guise facility.

  Claude couldn't see his watch, but he felt that it had to be somewhere near 3:00 a.m. The intruders had toiled for nearly four hours.

  The last truck stopped in the inverted-V-shaped clearing made by the stacks of bombs that had been left near Claude and the still-unconscious Maurice.

  The elderly man who had spoken to him in the main guard house stepped down from the passenger's side of the truck.

  Several of the skinheads came running in from a point somewhere farther up the convoy. They each carried a large red metal can. The men shouted encouragement to one another in a language Claude was now certain was German.

  Claude could hear liquid sloshing within the cans. The young men began dumping the contents of the containers in a trail from the gate up to the bombs nearest Claude.

  While the young ones worked, the old man strolled over to view Civray, trussed up like a lamb for slaughter. He tsked when he glanced at the stack of 75 mm shells.

  "Very dangerous," he confided to Civray, tapping the column of bombs with his cane. It made a dull rapping noise. The bombs sounded as solid as an anvil.

  Claude cringed, waiting for the shells to explode. They remained blessedly intact.

  "I thank you for holding these for us. They are back in the hands of their rightful owners now." One of the skinheads had come over next to the old man. He stood there patiently.

  The wind suddenly shifted, bringing the sharp scent of gasoline to Claude Civray's sensitive nose. The rest of the men hurried away, out of sight.

  In that moment Claude understood what these men had in mind for him. He shook his head dully. "No," he begged. The word was a croak.

  The old man ignored him.

  "Soak them," he said to the skinhead. He turned and walked briskly back to the truck.

  Grinning, the young man upended his container over the bodies of Claude Civray and Maurice St. Jean.

  The gasoline poured out clear in the dull lamplight. The acrid smell cut into Civray's flaring nostrils.

  As the gas soaked
into his clothes and mottled his hair, the truck carrying the old man drove calmly away. The man did not even cast a glance in Claude's direction.

  When the man had finished dousing him with gas-oline, he laughed uproariously at the two helpless Frenchmen. Dropping the can onto Claude's legs, he ran from sight.

  Maurice began to stir groggily. Claude prayed that his friend wouldn't awaken.

  The minutes dragged on. It seemed to take forever.

  After a time Claude allowed the hope that the men had reconsidered.

  As the night insects chirped in the grassland around the facility, Claude Civray heard something approaching. It was a soft whooshing noise. Like the sound of a distantly racing train or wind across an open field.

  The wall of flame slipped into sight up the dirt path. It glowed malevolently, illuminating the sides of the guardshack in weird patterns, stabbing streaks of yellowy-orange into the black French sky.

  It came slowly. Looping in from the main gate, it almost seemed as if it might pass him by. But like a dog on a scent the flames caught the path of gasoline poured in to the spot where the two guards lay.

  Much faster now, the strip of fire raced toward Civray.

  Bracing for the flames, Civray didn't have time to be surprised that he felt nothing at all.

  He didn't feel the fire because before the flames had reached him they had already found an opening in one of the stacks of shells.

  As the first shell detonated, the rest in the stack of 75 mm shells exploded, as well. The ground rocked as the huge pallets with their tons of ordnance blew apart in a massive eruption of fire and twisted metal.

  In less than a single heartbeat, Claude Civray was shredded into hamburger. Torn to pieces by bombs that had been dropped on his country at a time when his grandfather had been a young man.

  OUTSIDE THE DEPOT, Nils Schatz watched the initial eruption with satisfaction.

  The other trucks were gone. His was all that was left.

  The first explosions set off a chain reaction around the base. The blasts spread in violent white pockets across the length of the depot. Finally, in a concussive burst heard for miles around, the entire base exploded. In the sleepy French countryside it was as if the end of the world had come.

  Schatz's truck swayed ever so slightly on its shocks.

  Unmindful of the bombs in the rear of his own vehicle and the danger they posed, Nils Schatz watched the entire depot erupt into a single ball of glorious fiery orange.

  The brilliant light danced across his weary eyes, and for a blessed, happy instant the old Nazi was certain he could see an army of jackbooted soldiers marching from out the flames of history.

  For the first time in more than fifty years, Nils Schatz smiled. Sitting back in his seat, he tapped his cane on the dashboard.

  The truck drove off into the night.

  THE SAME DRILL was completed simultaneously and without incident at three separate deminage facilities ranged around northeast France that night.

  Of the many trucks laden with stolen ordnance, only one ran into trouble.

  In the back of a truck parked the next day at an intersection in the busiest city in the country, a single bomb was accidentally dislodged from a stack. The resulting explosion took out half of the nearest building and most of the street.

  Thirty-seven people were reported immediate casualties of the incident in Paris. Another seventy were severely wounded.

  A sign had been blown from the column beside the gate of the building that had borne the brunt of the attack. It read simply United States Embassy.

  Chapter 6

  Smith arrived at Folcroft Sanitarium just before dawn and had been working at his computer for the better part of three hours. He wanted to get as much work done as possible before leaving for Europe. There would not be much of an opportunity to get anything accomplished with his wife around twenty-four hours a day.

  Just the same, Smith planned to bring his laptop computer along on their trip.

  His wife had told him the previous night that she would call him at noon to remind him of his flight. Mrs. Smith was well aware of her husband's ability to get lost for hours at a time in his work.

  When the phone rang, he assumed it to be her. He glanced at the time display in the corner of the computer screen buried beneath the onyx surface of his high-tech desk. It was still midmorning. His wife wouldn't be calling for another three hours.

  The call was on Remo's special line.

  "Yes," Smith said, picking up the blue contact phone.

  "Morning, Smitty," Remo's voice said. "Just thought I'd check in before you left."

  "I take it by this morning's news reports that you had a busy night?" Smith asked dryly.

  He had programmed his computers to pull up any suspicious deaths that might be attributable to Remo-who was CURE's special enforcement armor to Remo's mentor, Chiun, the Reigning Master of Sinanju. The body of Linus Pagget-with its knot of compressed skull-bore the unmistakable stamp of the ancient martial art of Sinanju.

  "I told you I was antsy," Remo said.

  "That was not a CURE assignment," Smith told him.

  "It should have been."

  "Nonetheless, I would appreciate it if you checked with me before engaging in these sorts of-" Smith searched for a word that would be appropriate when describing the gruesome condition in which the Nashua police had found Pagget's body "-activities," he finished.

  "Next time. I promise. So, have you got anything else for me before you take off?"

  "Nothing pressing," Smith admitted. "You and Master Chiun may enjoy the time off while I am away."

  "You know I'd prefer to keep busy. C'mon, Smitty, there must be something."

  Smith was surprised at Remo's eagerness to work.

  It was not long before that he had been pushing for a vacation.

  "Remo, if I had an assignment, I would use you. There is simply nothing large enough to warrant putting you into the field at the present time."

  "I'm not a tractor, Smitty." His tone bordered on disgust.

  Smith raised a thin eyebrow. "Is there something more to this than a simple desire to keep busy?"

  Remo sighed. "You should be a shrink," he said glumly.

  "I actually do hold a doctorate in clinical psychology," Smith noted.

  "Yeah, right," Remo said absently. "It's just that there's always something more to do. One more creep determined to wreck the world for everybody else. Pagget left that nun barely breathing."

  "She died this morning," Smith said tightly.

  "I heard," Remo replied. His voice was laced with bitterness. "A fat lot of good I did her. I'm great at retribution, Smitty. What I stink at is getting there in the nick of time."

  "Perhaps I am not the best person with whom to discuss this," Smith said, clearly uncomfortable. "Have you spoken to Chiun?"

  "He thinks it's the same old story. Every year I get the blahs about the business. But it really isn't the same this time. I can't explain it. It's as if I know there's a lot of stuff that needs to be done, but I finally realize that I can't do it all. I mean really realize it." Remo exhaled loudly. "I don't know. Maybe it's time I finally packed it in."

  Smith had only been half listening while Remo spoke. Like Chiun, the CURE director had grown used to Remo's frequent bouts of melancholia. But when he raised the desire to abandon the dangerous life he was in, Smith took notice.

  The CURE director frowned. "Remo, someone told you something a long time ago. He used to say the same thing to me. 'One man can make a difference.'"

  He heard a pensive intake of breath on the other end of the line as Remo considered the words.

  "I don't think I believe that anymore," Remo said after a long, thoughtful pause.

  Smith pressed ahead. "It was true enough for him. Conrad MacCleary believed that his entire life. That was why he recruited you. He knew that you could make a difference."

  "MacCleary died more than twenty years ago," Remo countered. "He nev
er lived in this America. He never saw anything as bad as what's going on out there today."

  Smith paused. How could he tell Remo of the shared horrors Smith and MacCleary had witnessed as members of the OSS during World War II? It was a time when darkness threatened to engulf the entire planet. Subsequent generations had never known such a struggle. It was already history before Remo was even born.

  In the end Smith decided not to even try.

  "I will try to find something for you," the CURE director promised.

  "Thanks, Smitty," Remo said. The news appeared to do nothing to lift his spirits.

  Smith hung up the phone, turning his attention back to his computer.

  While he had been talking to Remo, a news story had come in from one of the wire services. Smith had failed to notice the interruption on his computer screen. The electronically reproduced story had waited patiently for his perusal.

  Smith's lemony features grew more pinched as he read the details, sparse for now.

  There had been several large explosions in the north of France during the night. All at deminage depots. The French government was attributing the nocturnal blasts to recent procedural changes in the storage of old war supplies. Unwise changes, it had turned out.

  The interior minister, speaking on behalf of the president, had assured the public that in the future there would be no more such alterations in the handling of the dangerous items warehoused on the bases. In the meantime the military and police were conducting house-to-house searches in the towns around the blast sites. They stressed that they had no desire to alarm the public, but they admitted that there was a possibility that some of the unexploded mustard-gas shells that had been stored on the bases could have been corrupted in the blasts. The gas would have been released during the explosions. They wanted to be certain that everyone in the surrounding communities was all right.

  Something about the report struck Smith as false. Of course the mustard-gas shells would have gone off along with everything else. Why would the French army be involved for so simple a matter as this? Surely the gas would have dissipated long before it reached a populated area.

  Smith dumped the story from the screen and began typing swiftly at his special capacitor keyboard. In a moment he had accessed the private lines within the Paris headquarters of the Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure, or DGSE.