The Dead Alone (Empires Lost Book 3)

by Charles S. Jackson

  The first panzer, having ceased firing on the two escaping volunteers, instead turned its main gun toward the source of the shell that had destroyed its colleague. A thousand yards away across the open fields, a huge cloud of dust and smoke was also rising into the air above Derriaghy Road, and it didn’t take much of a guess for the tank’s commander to recognise that some type of recoilless weapon had fired upon their position. Its 75mm cannon barked in return, the high-explosive shell sizzling away overhead but going long and exploding in the middle of a field well beyond the raised line of the distant road.

  Another faint cloud of smoke burst forth at that moment and a second recoilless round hurtled in trailing a ball of sizzling pink tracer. A near miss, it scudded off the curved side of the panzer’s sloped turret and exploded amid a squad of infantry that had deployed behind the tank, intending to advance on Glynn’s position. Three were killed instantly and the rest were severely injured, their screams rising to join the surrounding cacophony of explosions and gunfire. A mortar shell also detonated within the perimeter of the barracks a few seconds later, doing no damage but making it quite clear that the distant gunner at least had some back-up.

  Unable to pick out a clear target through the surrounding haze of smoke and dust and feeling quite vulnerable in the middle of that exposed intersection, the P-3E’s commander quickly decided to withdraw back to within the barracks’ walls until a heavier force could be mustered. He popped smoke from the triple launchers mounted on either side of the tank’s turret and immediately backed away as hissing grey clouds quickly obscured the entire scene.

  Needing no further urging, Glynn rose instantly to his feet and bolted, grabbing his colleague by the collar and dragging him along for the ride as they continued to head north, directly away from the immediate danger. Smallarms fire whizzed past here and there as soldiers fired randomly in their direction through the walls of smoke, but none came particularly close, and both men knew they’d never get a better chance.

  They were met by an old Austin Twelve before they’d run another hundred yards, the speeding sedan sliding to a halt on the grass verge close to their position. Glynn was stunned as his eyes took in the extremely unexpected sight of Jamie Riordan sitting behind the wheel.

  “Fer Christ’s sake, get in, y’ mad bastards!” He called tensely, using his right hand to reach back and throw open the rear-hinged passenger door behind him. “We’ve only got a minute or two before those fookers regroup and come at us with everythin’ they’ve got!”

  Both men dived into the rear of the vehicle without hesitation, and Riordan immediately executed a tight U-turn that took up the entirety of the road width and quite a bit of the verge on either side. They powered away again heading north as mortar shells continued to fall around the intersection behind, the shells a combination of high explosive and smoke intended to obscure their escape and deter any would be pursuer.

  “What the fook are you doin’ here, Jamie?” Glynn demanded hoarsely the moment he’d caught sufficient breath to speak again. “You’re squad’s supposed to be hittin’ St Mary’s College… with those recoilless-fookin’-rifles!”

  “I’m sorry, Tomás, I truly am…” Riordan answered after a short pause, staring directly at the road ahead and reluctant to answer the question he’d known would come. “None of it’s gone ahead. None o’ me boys have deployed…”

  “You’ve not hit St Mary’s…?” Glynn asked in confusion as his feelings of terror began to mutate into a smouldering rage.

  “None of ‘em, man.” He snarled back over his shoulder, angry at the situation rather than anyone else in the vehicle. “Not St Marys, not at Dundalk, not at Armagh… no one…!”

  “You loyalist bastards have shopped us…!” Glynn screamed in fury, drawing a knife from his belt and holding it to the back of Riordan’s neck. “Give me one fookin’ reason why I shouldn’t shove this into the back o’ yer bloody skull right now…!”

  “Apart from crashin’ the fookin’ car and killin’ all of us…?” Riordan shot back, disgust in his tone now.

  “Fuck the bloody car… you bastards sold us out…!”

  “Not us…!” Riordan screamed in return, his own rage erupting with such force that the vehicle swerved slightly under his shaking hands. “Not us, this time…” A humourless sneer spread across his face. “You were sold out alright, but not by us…!” The words came in a torrent now as they rounded a tight bend to the right and then turned back to the north.

  “We were ready!” He continued, shame in his voice now too as the explanation came bursting forth. “Our boys were armed and ready, but they told us… ordered us not to proceed… not to engage…”

  “‘They’…?” Glynn repeated, a hollow sound to his words now as the other volunteer, Allan, sobbed quietly in the seat beside him. “Who are ‘they’? Who gave the order?”

  “Southern Command…” Riordan breathed softly, tears in his own eyes, and he was surprised to discover how much letting Glynn and the other republicans down felt like a betrayal. “It was your own Southern Command, Tomás… your own boys…”

  “No…” Glynn breathed softly, sagging back into the seat beside his sobbing colleague as the knife fell from his grasp and clattered to the floor. It was too much to accept… too terrible to believe… and yet somehow the disgust and self-loathing in Riordan’s voice told him it was the truth nevertheless.

  “They told us to keep out of it, Tomás, but I couldn’t just leave all you boys to take the fall like that. We were enemies once, but we’re on the same side now… I just couldn’t do it…!”

  “Why, Jamie…?” Glynn croaked hoarsely. “Why…?”

  “I don’t know, man…” Riordan moaned in return, struggling to see the road ahead through his own tears. “They told us nothin’… all we knew was that we weren’t to help… we were ordered to let you all hang…!”

  “Christ Almighty,” Tomás Glynn whispered, his face a mask of horror as he stared out at the passing fields through the side window. “…They’ll tear us apart…!”

  Strabane, County Tyrone

  Reich-Protektorat Nordirland

  The drive along Railway Street had been excruciatingly slow for all concerned as Seán Michaels held the 3-tonne Opel at a sedate pace, intended to maintain the pretence of legitimacy. They passed several patrolling squads of men on foot, all of them alert and well aware of the attacks occurring in other parts of the country. There appeared to be nothing unusual or suspicious about two fellow soldiers making a delivery however, and those who even bothered to notice barely gave a wave or nod of recognition before returning their full attention the goings on of the population at large around them.

  Their ability to remain inconspicuous waned quickly however as the Opel left the town behind and continued west on the Lifford Road, heading toward the bridge across the River Foyle and the Irish Republic beyond. The stone arches of the Lifford Bridge spanned the river at the westernmost point of a small spit of land formed by the confluence of the Foyle with the lesser Mourne River, just a few dozen yards south. The last two hundred yards of the road running up to the bridge were nothing more than grassed, open fields that had been intentionally left clear to aid surveillance as it approached a fortified checkpoint on the German side of the river.

  The eastern entrance to the bridge was entirely enclosed by cyclone fencing and barbed wire on both sides and overhead, the metal-framed structure forming a long ‘tunnel’ leading back from the river, into which any traveller or vehicle intending to pass over to the other side would be forced to travel. A pair of broad and low-set concrete pillboxes straddled the road, standing back perhaps fifty yards from the river bank, with firing slits covering a full 360-degree field of view.

  Into the broad, flat roof of each was set a small, green-painted turret armed with .50-inch Vickers and 7.92mm Besa machine guns, cannibalised from surrendered British Mark VI tanks following the 1940 capitulation – tanks that would otherwise have been scrapped as u
seless and completely obsolete. With more than 1,500 of that model built, the turrets had been put to good use as static defences at border crossings, checkpoints and at a variety of higher-value installations, and would continue to serve at least until supplies of non-standard ammunition for the Vickers heavy machine gun were finally exhausted.

  The Opel turned south however, no one relishing the idea of taking on well-fortified positions on high-alert, and instead continued south across the Mourne River, turning onto Urney Road as it followed the eastern bank of the Finn heading upstream. Sitting in the rear of the vehicle with Kransky, Lowenstein and the others were Levi Lowenstein and Evelyn Graham, a red-haired, freckle-faced girl of similar age who’d been a childhood friend of Levi’s and had been taken in by his family following the death of her parents during the Siege of London at the end of 1940.

  Both has since been on the run after the SS had started rounding up Jewish families right across the British Isles and sending them on to forced-labour camps near Birmingham and Wolverhampton… ‘labour’ camps that thanks to the persistent spread of some quite horrific rumours were now generally well-known to in fact be places of genocide and mass extermination.

  “I hope to Christ we’re not gonna try crossing at Clady again,” Kransky growled sourly, peeking out through a gap in the truck’s canvas cover and taking note of the passing road signs. “I’m guessin’ we all remember what a screw-up that was?”

  “Keep yer shirt on, Richard,” Kelly admonished with a grin from the seat opposite. “We’ve worked too hard gettin’ you out for us to be doin’ anything stupid now. There’s a point down the road a ways where it’s only a few dozen yards to the river. Some of our boys have been there most of the night, cutting through the barbed wire on the bank to allow some small boats through. Southern Command will have a couple of cars waiting on the other side when we come across. Quick and clean and off into that lovely Irish countryside before the buggers have even worked out what’s happened.”

  “Do you have a family, back… where you come from?” Levi asked Lowenstein as they sat together with Evie, just down from Kelly. “A family of your own, I mean…” he added quickly, the qualification making it clear he still wanted the girl next to him to know nothing of the future son she might now never have.

  “And you said you didn’t want to know…” Lowenstein observed wryly in return, drawing a faint grin from the boy.

  “I have an avid curiosity,” he replied finally with a shrug. “It’s a failing of mine, I suppose…” He shrugged again as his own smile momentarily turned almost mischievous. “Indulge an ‘old man’ just this once…”

  “No… no family…” Lowenstein answered the original question with an even broader smile as he caught the glint in the boy’s eye. “A lifetime spent ‘married’ to study and research is all I have to show for the life I left behind, and now the guilt of this legacy too that I’ve left for the world…”

  “The kid knows…?” Kransky interjected at that point, surprise in his expression. “Geez, I spend a week in ‘Sing-Sing’, and now I gotta play ‘What did I miss?’ with you guys…?”

  “I know some of the story behind Samuel’s origins, Mr. Kransky, hard as they are to believe,” Levi explained quickly, eager to head off any potentially dangerous conversations in Evie’s presence. “Some family histories probably don’t need to be discussed right now,” he continued, a pointed expression on his face as he flicked a glance in the girl’s direction, “but I was interested to know a little more about him…” The pointed expression remained, and like Lowenstein earlier, Kransky was now surprised and caught unawares by the boy’s depth and intensity. “Surely you can understand that, under the circumstances?”

  “Yeah… yeah, I guess I can…” The American replied eventually, accepting grudgingly but someone still uneasy about the idea of Levi knowing the truth despite not being able to think of a single reason why it would be a problem.

  “And so, Samuel,” Levi began again, turning his attention back to Lowenstein, “tell me why the Nazis have done this to you… done this to you and, by definition, to the entire world also as a result…?”

  There was a long, silent and very pregnant pause as Lowenstein stared at his own feet and considered how best to answer such a question, the delay in response centring more around his own shame over recognition that it was his work that had allowed the development of the devices that could now ultimately result in the extermination of Judaism throughout all of Europe.

  “The simple answer…?” He began bitterly, unable to lift his eyes from the floor, the rumbling of the truck along the road and the muted roar of its engine the only sounds save for that of his own voice. “The simple answer is that Nazi Germany lost a world war… a world war that lasted six long, terrible years and cost the lives of over fifty million human beings… more, if you include the six million Jews exterminated in concentration camps across Europe.

  “The Nazis lost, and the most powerful nation on Earth was shattered and torn apart and never allowed to forget the horror that Adolf Hitler and the rest of them had visited on the rest of the world. “He gave a humourless snort of soft derision over those words. “Never allowed to forget…” he repeated “…and some remembered for very different reasons.”

  They were all riveted at that point, Kelly, Kransky and the rest all mesmerised by the intensity of what he was saying. Even Evie and Brendan, neither of whom had any clue as to his true origins or the story behind them, still watched in reverential silence. Neither completely understood as yet what Lowenstein was talking about, but they instinctively understood that it was incredibly significant all the same.

  “In my world they’re called ‘Neo-Nazis’,” he continued after a short breath. “It was probably always there, hiding, festering and biding its time as Europe recovered after the Second World War.” He shrugged, still staring at his feet. “I wasn’t born until ‘Fifty-Nine, so I don’t really remember much before the Mid-Sixties, but I know that Neo-Nazism was well established throughout the continent by the Seventies and Eighties and, I’m ashamed to say, throughout Britain as well.

  “Most of them were just uneducated, racist crackpots who – much like Hitler and the Nazis of the 1920s – just wanted someone else to blame for their own failings. Many were far too young to have even been born during the war, let alone remember it.” He shrugged again in silent concession. “Not all of them, though… not all…” He glanced quickly up at the others for the first time, almost causing them all to flinch in surprise as he met each gaze with a sad, hollow stare.

  “You’ve all heard of the Nazis’ ‘Board of Directors’, yes?” He demanded sharply, knowing the answer already as each nodded silently in turn. “Of course you have… everyone has.” He released a soft chuckle then that was completely devoid of any mirth. “Well, they’re all from the same place as me… the future…”

  “What…?” Brendan began, unable to remain quiet over such a statement, but he was quickly silenced again as Kelly laid a gentle but firm hand on his arm and cut off anything else he might’ve said with a stern glare.

  “They were all old enough in most cases to perhaps remember the last years or the war, or at least the terrible privation and despair throughout Germany that directly followed the surrender in 1945. They were all filthy rich, of course,” he added with a sneer. “None of what happened could have been possible without access to millions. All of them businessmen… scientists… leaders of industry… and all committed Nazis…” he continued, his mouth twisting into another sneer. “Maybe for some it was a reaction to what they’d experienced as children.”

  “You’re saying this was revenge…?” Kransky questioned at that moment, intrigued. “Revenge against the whole God-damned world on a grand scale, just because they had it tough as kids…?”

  “I suspect that perhaps there was more to it than that,” Lowenstein countered with a thin smile. “Joachim…” he paused again for a moment, a fleeting flash of guilt flic
kering across his face as he recalled memories of a Nazi scientist who’d been the only man who’d shown him any kindness during his years of captivity... a man he’d shot to death without a moment’s thought during his escape from that same captivity in September of 1940. “Joachim, their head technician, knew one or two of them and he told me something of what they’d suffered in their childhoods. Maybe they all suffered,” he added, then waved a dismissive hand. “I don’t really give a shit about their motives or what they went through: they were monsters then, they’re monsters now, and I’m not sorry one of them was killed the same night I escaped. I just wish I’d been there to see the bastard burn!”

  The truck began to slow at that moment, causing Lowenstein to halt his story as he glanced sharply around in apprehension.

  “It’s all right,” Kelly assured quickly as he lifted one flap of the tarpaulin covering the vehicle’s roof and sides and peered out. “We’re at the farmhouse: time to walk from here.”

  The Opel pulled off into a driveway a few dozen metres south of the Prospect Road intersection and trundled slowly and awkwardly around to the rear of a small farm house, where the open doors of a far larger barn awaited. The moment the vehicle was under cover, Kelly and Brendan jumped down from the rear and quickly closed the main doors, leaving them all in a musty semi-darkness that reeked of damp hay and more than a hint of manure. One by one they too climbed down from the cargo bed and gathered near the closed doors, most of them with concern showing on their faces.

  “The crossing point is about two hundred and fifty yards down the road, but our transport on the other side hasn’t arrived yet,” Seán McCaughey advised as he climbed down from the cab to greet the others, a large, green-painted walkie-talkie clenched in one fist. “There’s nowhere to hide a bloody great lorry down there, so we’re to wait until we get the all clear to come down on foot. There’ll be a boat waitin’ to get us across.”