The Dead Alone (Empires Lost Book 3)

by Charles S. Jackson

  “But…” Levi began, glancing sharply up at Lowenstein and seeing exactly the same apprehension and fear of betrayal in his future son’s eyes “… if there is no danger, why do we need the precaution?”

  “Doesn’t this road take you back to Lifford, going the other way?” Lowenstein ventured as his stomach fell in fear, sending a sickening shudder coursing through him. “Back toward Strabane…?”

  “There’s nothin’ to worry about!” Doolan tried to reassure, forced not to turn in their direction and not making much of a job of keeping hidden his own, very different fears. “Just sit back and enjoy the bloody ride, fer Christ’s sake.”

  Keeping his hands well out of sight below the line of the front seat, Doolan carefully, and with as minimal movement as he was able, placed the walkie-talkie on the seat between him and the driver and began to slide his hand slowly inside his jacket where he kept his pistol. Southern Command had warned him that these Jews might be difficult to handle, and he was under strict instructions not to harm the old man called Lowenstein, but none of his passengers knew that, and in any case he could still use the two kids as hostages if necessary: his commanders had made it quite clear they had no interest whatsoever in what happened to the them.

  “Tueri matrem…!” Lowenstein whispered softly, doing well not to sound as terrified as he felt. His Latin was shaky and about fifty years out of practice, but he remembered his father’s home tuition well enough from when he was a child and he was certain that he’d be understood well enough, poor grammar notwithstanding.

  As Levi immediately turned and began to cover Evelyn’s body with his own for protection, Lowenstein quickly drew out the silenced Browning he’d been keeping hidden within his own clothes, disengaging the safety in one smooth movement as he raised the weapon, and jammed it into Doolan’s ear. He fired twice before anyone else could react, the shots almost inaudible because of the suppressor and the proximity to the man’s head, yet even .25ACP slugs were powerful enough at close range to punch straight through a skull and star the windshield beyond, coating the shattering glass in a modest spray of blood and fragments.

  “Do you want to die…?” Lowenstein bellowed in adrenalin-fuelled rage as he next jammed the pistol into the back of the driver’s head, struggling to maintain his balance as the man cried out in shock and fear and the Austin swerved to a sudden halt in the middle of the road.

  “Oh sweet Jesus… Mary, Mother of God…!” The young man moaned, fighting the urge to vomit over the sight of the bloodied corpse beside him as Levi cradled a screaming Evie and forced her to look away.

  “Do you want to die…?” Lowenstein shouted again, using his free hand to grab a handful of the man’s thick hair and use it as leverage, enabling him to push the muzzle of the Browning even harder against the man’s skull.

  “No…! Jesus, no…!” The driver finally managed, crying out in pain. “I’ll do whatever y’ say… please don’t kill me…!”

  “What are they trying to do? Why did they separate us?” Lowenstein snarled angrily as he leaned half over the top of the front seat and removed a large revolver from Doolan’s dead hands.

  “I don’t know much…” came the snivelling reply. “They just got me to drive. Jimmy…” His voice faltered for a moment as he spoke Doolan’s name. “…Jimmy was talkin’ to Southern Command on the radio the whole time. They were waiting for you… for you and the kids… I dunno why, but it was somethin important. They needed confirmation we had y’, and they wouldn’t stop asking Jimmy about it.”

  “What about the others? Where are the other two cars going?”

  “Up to Lifford… that’s all I know… Jimmy kept talkin’ about some great bloody plan they had goin’… how it was gonna stick it right up the Germans, and they weren’t gonna be able to do nuthin’ about it. Said something about gettin’ ‘em to start a fight with us… said we needed the Germans to start a fight, and they needed someone for bait…”

  “Yeshua ha Mashiach...!” Both Lowenstein men muttered softly in shock and surprise, almost in unison as they realised what was happening.

  “They want the Nazis to attack?” Samuel mused in bewilderment, turning to stare in horror at Levi and shaking his head slowly in denial. “They want the Nazis to attack…? Ireland wouldn’t stand a chance! What are they thinking?”

  “None of that matters, Samuel…” Levi pointed out, bringing Lowenstein suddenly back to the present. “What matters right now is that they’ve betrayed their own, and that they’re sending our friends into a trap!”

  The two men stared at each other for a long time, both recognising that their troubles were not yet over; that there was more work to be done, and that there’d be time enough later to be unhappy about that, should they survive. With a silent, almost imperceptible nod, the decision was made.

  “What’s your name, son…?” Lowenstein demanded, his tone softer now as he released a little pressure from behind the driver’s head.

  “Patrick…” the young man answered shakily, the streaks of tears on his cheeks as he closed his eyes and prayed for his life. “Patrick Monaghan…”

  “I s’pose everyone calls you ‘Paddy’, right…?”

  “Yeah… yeah, they do…” The faintest glimmer of hope flared in his mind now as he finally noted the softening tone behind him.

  “Well, Paddy Monaghan…” Samuel Lowenstein began, almost managing a grin. “How’d you like to live to see your mum tonight?”

  “I’d be real happy with that, sir,” Paddy answered immediately, sounding about as genuine as it was possible for a man to sound.

  “Well, you’re in luck, Paddy… ‘cause all you have to do for that is to do everything I say… You happy with that…?”

  “Yes, sir… anything you say, sir…”

  “Good man,” Lowenstein nodded with exaggerated approval. “Now… the first thing we’re gonna do is get Mister Doolan here out of the car… and after that, you’re gonna drive us straight back up that road to Lifford to catch up with our friends…!”

  Germanische-SS local command HQ

  Strabane, County Tyrone

  Reich-Protektorat Nordirland

  It had taken Schmidt’s troop the better part of half an hour at a very uncomfortable speed to cover the distance between Derry and Strabane, only to find that as Stahl and Bauer had feared, it had indeed been a pointless exercise. With the majority of the garrison already despatched to assist with attacks elsewhere, it had been no great feat to overpower and kill everyone left inside the main office and free the prisoners – something that both Germanische-SS officers immediately realised had probably been the objective right from the beginning.

  Feeling unusually impotent, with no immediate target for their righteous rage, both men stood stiffly by the radio microphone by the main counter, doing their best to ignore the world around them as a squad of Schmidt’s men worked to clear the bloody bodies away and move them out of sight. Stahl particularly was incensed that anyone had dared to mount such a brazen attack on a German military installation, and he was continually on the radio, checking time and time again with scouts both on the ground and in the air, desperate to find some trace of their missing prisoners.

  “Pieter, they will report if the find anything…” Bauer attempted to placate, also furious but able to force himself to display a little more pragmatism. “…All you’re doing at the moment is tying up the airwaves and getting in the way of them doing their jobs…”

  “The gall of it…!” Stahl raged, barely listening as he stood there with teeth clenched and fists balled at his sides. “The complete and unmitigated gall…! How dare they? How dare those filthy, stinking untermenschen defile this place with their presence?”

  Standing some distance away at the far end of the counter, Schmidt managed to stifle a snort of derision as he was suddenly struck by a dark irony regarding the situation that was completely lost – natürlich – on either of the two fanatics in the room with him: that in all this sel
f-righteous, arrogant rage about what their enemies had done, there was not one single moment during which either of that pair of poster-boys of the Aryan ideal had shown a single ounce of concern or regret over the lives lost in that headquarters… the lives of fellow soldiers… fellow Germans.

  Schmidt wasn’t even close to being a fanatical Nazi, but neither was he about to stand by and see his fellow men murdered in cold blood by cowards too frightened to face them in fair combat. To hell with the ‘shame’ of it, or any of that kind of rubbish… in the Sturmbannführer’s mind it was crystal clear: whoever did this to his countrymen at arms should pay for it, and pay dearly.

  “Hey… hey there, blondie…are y’ there, pretty-boy…?” Spoken in Irish-accented English, the words that suddenly burst forth from the radio speaker immediately caught everyone’s attention. Both Bauer and Stahl spoke the language fluently, and although Schmidt could only manage a smattering of simple phrases, he too recognised it for what it was clearly enough. “Come on, y’ great, blond gobshite… We know you’re there… if you wanna catch the bastards who did this to y’, answer the feckin’ radio…!”

  That last sentence galvanised Bauer to action, and he leaped forward to snatch the microphone from the desk just scant seconds before Stahl was able to react and reach for it also.

  “Who is this?” He demanded with cold calm, completely ignoring the filthy glare he received from his partner in that moment. “Identify yourself immediately.”

  “It’s no feckin’ matter who I am, arsehole,” the voice responded quickly in a condescending tone laced with sarcasm, “but if you want to catch the buggers, you’d best get yourself down to the river: they’re drivin’ into Lifford up the Castlefin Road right now…”

  “I repeat… Identify yourself…!” Bauer demanded again with greater force, but this time he was met with only static.

  “They’re playing with us now, Franz!” Stahl snapped, ready to immediately launch into another self-indulgent tirade.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Pieter…” Bauer shot back, dismissing the idea in an instant. “Why would they bother? And yet, why also would they – on the face of it – betray their own people?

  “Some kind of ‘territorial’ dispute between the Catholics and Protestants, Mein Herr…?” Schmidt suggested, speaking up for the first time. His knowledge of the politics of Northern Ireland was limited at best, but anyone with half a brain and even a basic knowledge of foreign affairs knew at least that much: that there had been ongoing friction between those two religious factions for many years.

  “More probable,” Bauer conceded with a nod of acknowledgement in the man’s direction. “Still very likely to be some kind of trap also, but perhaps worth investigating all the same. One small problem, however,” he added with a tilt of his head. “The Castlefin Road is on the other side of the river which, technically-speaking at least, places it completely out of our reach…”

  “You’d let these schwein stand on the other bank and thumb their noses at us?” Stahl snarled in disgust, unable to believe what he was hearing. “You’ve seen our latest intelligence reports on the disposition of the Irish Defence Forces… the battalion aboard the Schlageter alone would be enough to take the whole pathetic little country! If there’s any truth to what we’ve just heard, we must act on it immediately!”

  “I doubt anything would be quite that simple, Pieter, and I suggest you calm yourself before you say or do something you may come to regret,” Bauer replied, handing his friend and partner a gentle but none-too-subtle warning that he was going too far. The standartenführer hadn’t missed the implicit suggestion Stahl had included in his words: the implication that Bauer lacked the courage to take appropriate action if required. Friends they might well be, but he was the man’s commanding officer nevertheless and his own voluminous pride was far too great for Franz Bauer to allow a slight of that nature to stand unchallenged.

  “There might be something we could do, Meine Herren,” Schmidt suggested gingerly, picking up the awkward vibe between the two men as each glared sharply at the other in momentary silence, neither willing to back down.

  “And that might be, sturmbannführer?” Bauer hissed softly, both men’s glares suddenly turning in his direction and making the major sorry as hell that he’d opened his mouth.

  “Well… per-perhaps you’re forgetting that we also have some aerial assets in play?” Schmidt continued falteringly, trying to ignore the death stare from Stahl that continued to bore into his soul. “We have several squads of fliegertruppen in the air above us right now, and any one of them could be observing the road in question from our side of the river within minutes.”

  “You have my attention, Schmidt,” Bauer declared after a moment’s pause that seemed like an eon to the nervous major, the man’s widening smile helping to finally defuse the situation somewhat. “I suggest we do exactly that, and in the meantime, we should mount up and indeed deploy your ground forces to the river bank so we may indeed be ready for any eventuality. Does that sound acceptable, Pieter?”

  Stahl’s thoughts churned as he sought desperately for any reason to declare a dislike for the idea but was eventually found wanting and ultimately forced to concede to common sense.

  “Yes…” Stahl replied with a long, exaggerated sigh. “Yes, that will do for the moment.”

  “Then let’s be away, Herr Sturmbannführer: we can make the necessary calls from your command vehicle.”

  “At once, Mein Herr…!” Schmidt barked in return, snapping to attention and relieved to be getting out of that place and back into his familiar surroundings.

  Pilot Felix Böhm was a twenty-six-year-old veteran with experience flying a number of different helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft within the small but growing air arm of the Waffen-SS. A man of medium height and broad, welcoming features, he carried himself with a solid, stocky build and a level of general fitness he’d developed as a teenager, working in one of his father’s many foundries and steel mills. A man with no fear of good, honest hard work, his hands and arms still carried the scrapes and scars he’d earned working in the glow of molten metal, and he wore every single one with pride.

  Böhm was one of the Albert Schlageter’s leading pilots and was also a member of a small and quite exclusive – if unofficial – club known as the ‘Kaffeeklatsch’. Its members, of which Schmidt and Milo Wisch were two, had been good friends now for several years and regularly met, when recreation time permitted, to share coffee, tall stories and animated (and often quite argumentative) games of skat.

  At that particular moment, Böhm and his co-pilot, Brandt, were flying in a holding pattern just a few miles east of town as they awaited further orders either from the Schlageter, or from the troop commander on the ground in Strabane itself. Behind him in the main cargo hold of his aircraft, twenty-five fully armed and equipped SS fliegertruppen sat on the fold-down canvas seats along the sides of the aircraft, waiting calmly for their orders to deploy.

  The Focke-Achgelis MH-16E utility helicopter was large by any standard. Almost fifty feet long and weighing more than eleven tons at full load, its fore-and-aft twin main rotors were powered by a pair of powerful BMW radial engines mounted in pod-like nacelles beneath the rear rotor hub. The Schlageter carried a dozen of the huge machines, enough to carry deploy all four companies of air-mobile troops normally aboard. It carried with it the universally-adopted nickname of Mixgerät (or ‘Mixer’) in recognition of the vague similarity of its twin rotors to that household kitchen tool.

  Taking a look out through his portside window, Böhm caught a momentary glimpse of their escorting gunship. It was standard doctrine for fliegertruppen to be protected by attack helicopters over enemy territory, and it had become quite clear that morning that Northern Ireland at the moment could most certainly be classified as exactly that. The grey-painted SH-6E Seedrache banked away sharply as he watched, its narrow, slender fuselage and insect-like appearance making it look as lethal as it indeed truly was,
with its nose-mounted cannon and stub wings loaded with rocket pods.

  “Blue-Two, this is Green-Leader… come in please, Blue-Two… over…”

  “This is Blue-Two reading you loud and clear, Green-Leader,” Böhm responded immediately, recognising Schmidt’s voice and happy to be finally – hopefully – receiving some orders. “Awaiting instructions, Green-Leader, over…”

  “Acknowledged, Blue-Two, what is your position please, over…?”

  “Currently holding position approximately two thousand metres east of Strabane, Green-Leader, with escort in tow, over…”

  “Understood, Blue-Two… instructions are come about to heading two-seven-zero and make for River Finn at best possible… Report received of Strabane escapees moving north on west side of the river: Lifford - Castlefin Road. Ground forces are enroute… Aerial confirmation required…”

  Böhm and his co-pilot threw each other a severe glance upon hearing that last transmission. Both were well aware that the road they’d been ordered to observe was on the other side of the border, and neither was sure what, if anything, they could possibly do if they did manage to confirm the presence of the escapees. Any action on the western side of the Finn would potentially constitute an act of war against a neutral nation, and neither pilot wanted anything to do with that if they could avoid it.

  “Green-Leader, please reconfirm you are requesting we recon the opposite side of the river,” Böhm called through, wanting to make sure everyone was crystal clear about what they were doing.

  “Blue-Two, I repeat: you are to seek out unidentified northbound vehicles on the Lifford to Castlefin Road suspected of carrying prisoners escaped from the SS holding facility here at Strabane. Your mission is to observe and report only and to remain within German airspace at all times: at no stage are you to enter Irish airspace or engage unless specifically instructed. Please acknowledge, Blue-Two… over…”

  “Instructions received and understood, Green-Leader,” Böhm responded in an instant, already taking the aircraft into a wide, banking turn to starboard and heading for the river. “Turning in now… estimated time to target less than sixty seconds… Blue-Two out…”