Anno Frankenstein

by Jonathan Green

  With a loud crash the back end of the tank made contact with the dirt road again, throwing up a great spew of mud behind it as the tracks regained their grip and the Seigfried shot forward.

  The tank swerved sharply, but this time it was all down to Jinx. The tracks rattled and bounced as the vehicle left the road. The nervous doctor gave a whimper of fear and clung to the access panel beside him. Quicksilver, meanwhile, had braced himself between the roof of the cabin and the floor, his face set in a grimace.

  And then Jinx swerved again, changing gear as she did so and putting her foot down once more, sending the tank careening across the dirt track. She churned up the turf on the other side as she spun it round once again.

  She was driving like a maniac, but Cookie never once doubted her decisions or her ability to keep control of the wildly zigzagging machine. Jinx knew exactly what she was doing, Cookie was sure of it. The crazed course was their best chance of avoiding the bomber birds.

  “Dam!” Jinx suddenly shouted.

  Cookie scrambled across the cabin to the driver’s position in an instant. “What is it? What’s the matter?”

  “No, it’s the dam. Dead ahead.”

  Cookie peered out of the slit in front of the driver’s seat.

  And there it was, around a bend to the right in the road ahead of them – the Darmstadt Dam. To their left the ground rose up towards the foothills through which this stretch of the Rhine tumbled over the mossy boulders of a limestone gorge. To the right, the land dropped away towards the forested depths of a steep-sided valley below. And here, where the river’s current was at its most ferocious, the dam had been built.

  It was a great black stone wall, two hundred yards long and almost a thousand feet high. Beyond it, a forest of steel pylons followed the rugged peaks of the hills, heading east. The unstable electrical energy generated by the dam’s furious turbines supplied power to the corpse factory that lay another sixteen miles away, hidden among the wooded hills north of the industrialised town itself. The road crossed the top of the dam. To the right, beyond a low wall, lay the giddyingly deep gorge; to the left, behind a higher wall and the block of buildings that contained much of the dam’s inner workings, the man-made lake behind the dam.

  “We’re almost there!” Cookie gasped, hardly able to believe that they had progressed so far with their mission.

  The other girls allowed themselves a stifled whoop of joy, the thrill of the chase and the rush of adrenalin inside each of them setting nerve endings on fire.

  “They won’t dare bomb the dam, will they?” Dina said, suddenly breathless with excitement.

  “Not a chance,” Cookie said, with relish. “If they take out the dam they will have as good as completed our mission for us.”

  Dina looked at the squad’s leader, grinning from ear to ear, a flicker like the spark of a burning fuse in her eyes. “Although that is something I’d like to see,” she added, murmuring with almost festishistic delight.

  “Me too,” Cookie said with a smile.

  “The Nazis may be many things,” Quicksilver threw in, “but they’re not stupid.”

  Cookie’s face fell. “More’s the pity.”

  “Bugger!” came the curse from the driver’s seat.

  “What is it?” Hercules asked, coming to the front of the cabin as Jinx directed the tank back onto the road, heading for the dam.

  “Stalkers,” Jinx muttered, eyes narrowing as she changed gear again, the tank’s grumbling engine growling like a caged beast in response.

  “Stalkers?” Hercules said, clearly unfamiliar with the term.

  “Landsknechts,” Cookie explained, her face slack with shock. “Which means we’re all as good as dead already.”

  HERCULES PEERED THROUGH the viewing slit in the hull of the tank. There were three of them; a full squadron. They were lined up next to each other on the other side of the dam, their armoured might blocking the way ahead.

  There would be no sneaking past them, or charging past for that matter. The only way for the Seigfried and its passengers to get any further was to go right through the middle of them.

  “What are Landsknechts?” Doctor Jekyll asked from the rear of the cabin, his voice a high-pitched waver.

  “Take a look for yourself,” Hercules said, nodding towards the letter-box shaped slit.

  Unable to contain his curiosity, Jekyll clambered across the rocking cabin to the crowded driver’s position, having to bend down to see out of the viewing port. His croaking gasp, trailing off into silence, said it all.

  The Landsknechts were walking machines, twenty feet tall, great armoured behemoths weighed down by their weapons. With their backward-jointed legs, they looked not unlike squat wading birds. The cab supported on top of the waist bearing, however, looked like a miniature tank, with its cannon sponsons and rotating turret gun. The ammunition hoppers mounted behind the cabs made them look hunchbacked.

  Smoke came in gusts from the smokestacks in the top of the machines. One was rocking from side to side as it stamped its feet, like a horse impatient to gallop into the fray.

  The tank began to slow.

  “What do you want me to do?” Jinx asked, glancing at Cookie as the Seigfried approached the near side of the dam.

  “Don’t slow down,” she threw back. “Keep going.”

  “Right you are,” Jinx replied, a sinister smile spreading across her lips as she changed up a gear and put her foot to floor once more.

  There was a dull boom from somewhere off to their right that echoed from the thick walls of the dam and away into the valley below. The resultant shockwave caught the tank and slammed it into the side of the low wall skirting the dam-road.

  The Seigfried kept powering forward, gouging a groove in the stonework of the wall before Jinx was able to bring it back under control.

  Jinx and Cookie looked at each other in surprise.

  “You know how you said the Nazis wouldn’t be so stupid as to bomb their own dam?” Hercules said, a wry smile curling the corner of his mouth.

  Cookie nodded.

  “On what were you basing that supposition, exactly?”

  “STOP THOSE BIRDS!” Lance Corporal Riker screamed into the radio microphone in his hand. “By Thunor, somebody call those birds off before one of them blows a hole in the dam!”

  “At once, Lance Corporal,” a voice distorted by static crackled back through Riker’s headset.

  Commander Riker looked through the eyepiece of the periscope of the Wotan, the command vehicle, positioned between the Donner, with its thunder hammer cannon, and the Blitzen, with its flame-thrower attachment.

  He angled the scope so that he caught the swooping cyber-eagles in his sights. There were four altogether and each of them had dropped one of the two spherical bombs they carried in their adapted steel claw-clamps.

  He watched them anxiously as they came in low over the dam, as if preparing for another strafing bombing run. But then he relaxed as the avians peeled away, the lead raptor diving over the side of the dam as its electrode-plugged brain received the signal to cease-fire, the rest of the flock swooping after it and over the wooded valley below.

  “Take aim and prepare to take out that tank on my command,” Riker shouted into his handset, turning his attention away from the errant cyber-eagles and back to the approaching Jotun-class tank.

  But something was wrong; either the last eagle hadn’t received the stop signal for some reason, or its bomb harness was faulty. But whatever the problem was, as the bird swooped low over the dam, the second bomb it was carrying rattled loose of its claw-frame as the raptor turned and plunged over the edge of the dam after its fellows.

  The bomb didn’t have far to fall before it hit the road in front of the tank. Its detonation didn’t seem loud but it hurt Riker’s ears, blotting out all other sound.

  Smoke and flame washed across the dam towards them and Riker felt the force of it through the trembling Landsknecht.

  As the smoke drifted
away on the breeze, Riker caught his first glimpse of the crater the explosion had excavated in the top of the dam. Six feet deep and three times that across, if it had exploded halfway down the dam, right now they would be plummeting into the river valley below – tank, stalkers and all – as the force of the Rhine tore the structure apart, carrying chunks of stonework as large as houses away in its white-water wrath.

  They were safe, if only just, but the same couldn’t be said for the traitorous tank. It was going too fast, its driver unable to bring it to a halt in time as it was consumed by the roiling ball of smoke and flame.

  The armoured behemoth plunged nose first into the smoking pit. Tracks ground uselessly against the crumbling sides of the crater, the barrel of its main gun wedged in the bottom of the hole, leaving the Seigfried angled at close on forty-five degrees.

  The spies wouldn’t be going anywhere in a hurry now.

  “Riker to all Landsknechts!” the commander spoke into the handset once again. “Take aim and, on my mark, hit that tank with everything you’ve got.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Beast Within

  THE WOTAN TREMBLED, with a reverberating clang, as something heavy landed on top of it. The whole machine shook, Riker dropping his precious handset in the process. He cursed loudly, as did the three crewmen locked inside the Landsknecht with him.

  Riker grabbed the handles of the periscope and twisted it around, pushing his face up against the rubber-rimmed eyepiece again. Whatever it was that was on top of the Landsknecht, it was so close as to be blocking his view entirely. All he could see was indistinct darkness.

  Suddenly the tube of the periscope twisted in his grasp, tugging him round and making him lose his footing. He slipped and the periscope twisted again, anti-clockwise this time, one of the handles catching him in the face as he struggled to keep his balance. The assault was accompanied by what sounded like a bullish snorting from beyond the carapace of the stalk-tank.

  Blood pouring from his nose, on his hands and knees on the grilled floor of his elevated command position, the Lance Corporal found himself level with the pilot’s reinforced view port.

  The stricken Siegfried remained where it was, upended in the blasted crater, forgotten about in the heat of the moment. The crews of the other two Landsknechts were still faithfully waiting for his command to fire.

  His eyes fell upon the microphone, lying on the plates in front of him. Grabbing it, his words distorted by the injury to his nose, he gave the order: “Open fire!”

  The air was suddenly filled with the clatter of the Wotan’s paired Gatling guns running up to speed.

  To the left of the command vehicle, the Blitzen’s flame-thrower ignited. To the right, the gunner on board the Donner calculated firing solutions and cranked the thunder hammer cannon into position.

  The Wotan rocked again. This time the pilot was forced to compensate, the stalker taking a stumbling step forward to avoid being toppled altogether. But whatever it was that had caused the heavy machine to stumble was ready and waiting.

  Just when all of the bipedal walker’s weight was over its right foot, the unseen assailant struck again. It hit the sturdy leg side on, turning the machine’s great weight against it. The Wotan began to topple, slowly at first, and yet as unstoppable as a falling tree, colliding with the Donner to its right.

  Its momentum was not enough to send the braced heavy weapons stalker toppling as well, but it was enough to knock its carefully-targeted cannon off target.

  The thunder hammer fired, a split second before the Blitzen’s flame-thrower sent a wave of burning naphtha washing towards the immobile Jotun-class tank.

  TRAPPED INSIDE THE upended tank, Hercules Quicksilver and the others on board instinctively ducked on hearing the cataclysmic boom of the cannon, while Jekyll just screamed, overwhelmed by fear.

  They heard the whine of the heavy projectile as it spun through the air, passing over the tank.

  “How could they miss at that range?” Dina muttered incredulously.

  There was a second distant boom of an explosion, this time somewhere above them.

  “They hit something,” Hercules added, glancing anxiously at the roof of the cabin.

  A moment later they heard the crackle of flames as the flame-thrower vomited blazing naphtha over the hull of the tank.

  “Is it me, or is it getting hot in here?” Hercules asked, rubbing a finger inside the collar of his shirt.

  Abruptly the flames died.

  “If I might make a suggestion,” Hercules said, his voice loud in the eerie silence that had suddenly descended, “I think we should get out of here, and fast. We might not get a better chance than this one.”

  “EVERYBODY OUT!” COOKIE commanded.

  Throwing open the hatch, taking in what was going on around them with only the most cursory glance, she led the way for the rest of them, leaping down from the top of the tilted turret onto the fractured tarmac surface of the road.

  Their closest cover was the wall of the dam. Running to the wall, she stopped and looked again at the Landsknechts. The middle one had fallen against the machine to its right, effectively wedging it against the dam. The one to its left, however, was clanking towards them with bird-like steps, the blackened nozzle of its flame-thrower tracking them.

  The flicker of a moving shadow on the other side of the dam, something moving behind the stalkers, distracted her. There was something else there with the Landsknechts. It looked like an impossibly large man.

  “Quickly!” she shouted as Missy, followed immediately after by Dina, Cat and Trixie, clambered out of the top of the tank and ran to join her at the wall. Jinx was the last one out of the Seigfried, looking disgruntled.

  Cookie leaned over the top of the wall, the curved structure of the dam sloping sharply down to the churning waters of the river below. Immediately on the other side of the wall there was a ledge at the same level as the road, a few feet in width. It protruded from the side of the dam above the precipitous drop. Gracefully swinging first one leg, then the other, over the wall, she lowered herself onto the ledge.

  “Where’s Quicksilver?” she hissed, peering over the top of the wall as the rest of her team joined her on the ledge.

  And then she saw him getting out of the tank, having let all the women out before him.

  “He’s such a gentleman!” she heard Cat whisper. She caught the glint of desire in the burglar’s wide eyes; the kind of look that she usually reserved for large cut diamonds or priceless antique crowns.

  And she had to agree, he was.

  The stalker was closing the distance to the tank with every clanking step. Cookie could hear the hiss of the flame-thrower’s flickering blue pilot-light now.

  “Hurry up!” she shouted.

  A fleeting shadow caught her attention again and she shot a glance at the sky.

  Now she knew what it was the shell had hit.

  At that moment, the stricken cyber-eagle lost the battle to stay airborne and dropped like a stone, its one remaining bomb still clutched in its steel-trap claws.

  “Get out of there!” Cookie screamed.

  HERCULES REACTED IMMEDIATELY, twisting to look at her and then following her appalled gaze to the plummeting bomb-bird above.

  There wasn’t time to even swear. Half-jumping and half-falling from the tank – only dimly aware Jekyll’s sweat-slicked hand slipping from his – Hercules dived at the wall as the eagle hit.

  The great bird – its wingspan some fifteen feet from wingtip to wingtip – landed directly on top of the stricken tank, accompanied by the crash of buckling exo-skeletal mechanisms and the snap of breaking feathers and bones.

  Hercules had already picked himself up and was running for the edge of the dam when the eagle’s payload exploded.

  The force of the explosion lifted him off his feet and slammed him into the low wall. As he half-fell over the other side, the girls of the Monstrous Regiment – as Hercules liked to think of them – grabbed h
im and pulled him to safety on the thin ledge beside them.

  A roiling cloud of oily flames and greasy smoke rolled over them and was carried away on the cold autumnal breeze, the echoes of the explosion rippling across the wooded valley below.

  Crouched on the ledge behind the wall, Hercules closed his eyes and put his head in his hands. He felt like weeping. Their mission had always been fraught with danger, but to have got this far, to have had Jekyll’s hand in his, ready to pull him from the trapped tank, and now…

  There seemed little point in going on now, even if he did have the Monstrous Regiment at his side. He had thought he had failed in his mission from the moment he landed in Hessen, but somehow Jekyll had survived, the cryo-pod perhaps sheltering his fall. And now he felt a thousand times worse. To have had his hopes raised, to have got this far, even having been captured by the Nazis once already, only to have them dashed like this. This was one disaster that Henry Jekyll wouldn’t be walking away from, unscathed or otherwise.

  But, Hercules thought, jerking himself out of his self-pitying stupor, if he could survive an airship crash…

  The roar of rage that reverberated from the walls of the dam – surely amplified by the acoustics of the river gorge, for how else could it be so loud? – made him start. Had it really come from the wreckage of the tank?

  Hercules joined Cookie in cautiously peering back over the top of the wall, the cold wind whipping about them. Thick black smoke was still pouring from the crumpled carcass of the tank and drifting across the dam, concealing the Landsknechts from sight.

  With a screech of tearing steel, a huge fist punched its way clear of the twisted hole in the top of the tank.

  The powerful fingers of a huge hand grasped the lip of the hatch and pulled. With a colossal noise, the whole turret section came free of the rest of the wrecked tank slid, with a crash, onto the road.