The Dead Alone (Empires Lost Book 3)

by Charles S. Jackson

  His gaze moved continuously as he approached, casting this way and that and taking in every detail of the deck around the guards and constantly returning to keep a weathered eye on both men, preparing himself for the moment he knew they would finally become aware of and undoubtedly challenge his presence. He was just a few yards away, rounding the corner of the main hatch, when the nearer of the two men finally picked up the soft ring of his boots on the deck above the distant rumble of battle and turned toward him with suspicion all over his face.

  “You…! You there…! Stand back…! No one is permitted to approach…!”

  Those barked words in cold, clipped Japanese were barely simple enough to be intelligible with the very simple and basic knowledge Reuters had so far learned of the language, but the tone behind them was clear enough, as was the intent of the muzzle of the man’s stubby little submachine gun as it swung quickly in his direction.

  “Case…” he ventured slowly in very simple English, hoping – perhaps optimistically – that one of the privates at least might have a smattering of that tongue in their childhood education. “My case – I left it. Come back to get it…”

  “You not allowed here!” The first guard continued, not comprehending the gist of his words and now somewhat nervous upon the realisation that this newcomer was clearly a high-ranking German officer, albeit one who clearly shouldn’t have been there without some kind of official escort. “Go now! Go back now…!”

  Reuters had continued to approach, now within just two or three yards of both men, and seemed to stumble as he took another step forward, apparently catching his foot on a raised part of the deck and falling heavily to his knees against the raised frame surrounding the open loading hatch, the case under his left arm sliding haphazardly across the damp, somewhat slippery deck and coming to rest at the guard’s feet.

  “Come on, old one…” the guard grumped softly, realising now that this officer clearly spoke little or no Japanese and he could therefore get away with some otherwise insubordinate familiarity. “Bit slippery up here for a grandfather… let me give you a hand…”

  As he stepped forward, extending an arm toward Reuters and at the same time sliding his weapon around to his back, suspended from a sling about his neck, the second guard also moved to assist by collecting the discarded case his colleague had bypassed. As he collected the satchel, a faint flicker of concern flared in his mind – far too late – that there was something unusual about the fact that it felt completely empty.

  Reuters was already drawing his right hand from the pocket of his jacket as the guard gently took hold of his left arm and began to lift him upward. With vision obscured by his own body, he saw nothing of the small, silenced pistol that came with it, and the last thing his mind registered was the strange, hushed ‘popping’ sound as it discharged twice into his lower abdomen.

  The silencer’s muzzle had been pressed tight against the man’s uniform, and angled sharply as it was, it fired two .32-calibre slugs straight up into the man’s chest, passing underneath his ribcage and doing untold damage to his vital organs. One found his heart, killing him instantly and quite silently, and there was therefore no warning whatsoever for the second guard as his colleague suddenly and quite unexpectedly toppled over the side of the open hatch and disappeared.

  It mattered little. Even as the first man fell away, Reuters had already raised the Walther PPK in his right hand and fired two more slugs into the second guard’s chest at a range of just four feet. With such a target impossible to miss at such close range, he too died instantly and crumpled to the deck, the only real sound being the clatter of his weapon as it landed beside him.

  “Scheisse…!” Reuters rasped, breathing heavily as he regained his feet as quickly as he was able and limped across to the fallen man. He’d struck his left knee quite sharply during his feigned stumble and twisted it badly in the process, leaving himself in constant pain, with barbs of outright agony ripping through that leg with every step he took. It was poor luck, but there was no time to dwell on such things as he dragged a water canteen from the guard’s belt and used every ounce of his remaining strength to drag the body across to the hatchway and let it also tumble over the edge, a soft, muffled splash below reaching his ears a few seconds later.

  Mama…! Mama…! No, mama… noooo…!

  “Christ, not now…!” He hissed sharply, banging an angry fist against the deck as he rested there for a moment, fighting to regain control of his senses. “Not now, damn you…!”

  He paused for a moment to recover from the sudden attack, taking the opportunity to uncork the water bottle he’d taken and pour its contents all over the deck before him, washing away the relatively small pools of dark red blood that had collect there where the men had fallen. With the steel surface already damp from the overnight rain, it was no great effort to dilute the crimson stain to the point that it was almost invisible, lost amid the general greasiness of the deck and the faint, rainbow-like patches of oil and diesel that already lay about.

  It’s not often I’d award an Iron Cross for slovenliness, but I may make an exception in this case… He mused silently, giving thanks that the ship’s captain had made no great effort to have his crew keep the ship clean over the last few weeks.

  Glancing down at his own hands, he was suddenly shocked by the sight of blood on them also, and in turn he also washed each with the remaining water from the canteen, rubbing them furiously together until he was satisfied they were sufficiently clean.

  “Who indeed might’ve thought those old men should have so much blood in them…?

  He knew immediately where that remembered phrase had come from: something Albert Schiller had said in a car, many weeks before, as they’d travelled back to the airport from Buchenwald concentration camp, having just witnessed the torture and execution of the man who’d been behind the entire plot to supply the Japanese with atomic weapons in the first place.

  A paraphrasing of a line from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, he’d been horrified by the terrible, hollow tone with which his aide had uttered those words, and he’d been left at the time with the uncanny feeling that the words hadn’t been uttered without purpose: that there’d been some real incident Schiller had been referring to that the Reichsmarschall had so far been too unnerved to enquire about in the weeks since.

  He recalled those words now well enough though, wringing at his own hands as he desperately worked to remove the murderous remnants from his own skin, and in that moment he felt perhaps a faint pang of empathy for his long-time friend and confidant, hidden as it mostly was by his own current fear regarding the desperate action he was now taking.

  Another moment and he was up again, stuffing the Walther back within his jacket and limping as quickly as he could around to the other side of the huge, open hatch where a set of steps led down into the hold itself. There was little time to lose and even less time spare for him to think about such sophistries, and as he threw one last glance down toward the stern and noted that the third guard had not moved, Reuters very uncharacteristically whispered a silent prayer and ventured into the gloom of the hold below.

  Corner Welser- and Fuggerstrasse

  Schönberg, Berlin

  Maria Ritter had returned home well after midnight, having drunk far too much that evening with friends at a particularly successful dinner party nearby. Taking care not to wake either her children or her mother, she’s staggered waywardly upstairs, more than a little drunk, and had barely been able to undress herself before falling into a deep, alcohol-assisted sleep filled with strange, surreal dreams.

  “Mama…! Mama…! No, mama… noooo…!”

  Her eyes had flickered open instantly upon hearing the cry, maternal instincts completely overriding her left-over drunkenness as she shot bolt upright in bed, searching the darkness for a sign that the scream she’d heard had indeed been real and not some remnant of a sleep-addled dream. Instinctively, her right hand slipped beneath her pillow and found the reassurin
g butt of her father’s old Browning pistol; the one Carl had taught her to shoot just weeks before.

  “Mama…! Mama…!”

  This time there was no denying the reality of the cries, and she leaped from her bed, pausing only long enough to throw a thick, woollen robe over her naked body before bursting out of her bedroom and charging down the hallway toward where the children slept. Her mother’s face appeared at her own bedroom door, Maria raising a steady hand to indicate she had things well under control as she swept past, adrenaline forcing any after effects of the previous night’s drunkenness from her system.

  Little Kurt, her youngest of just three years, was kneeling in his cot, tiny fingers clenched desperately about the wooden bars of its side walls and screaming terribly, tears streaming down his cheeks. Always the perfect, protective sibling, seven-year-old Anton was already at the cot as she entered the room, reaching for his baby brother and lifting him carefully out. A tall and remarkably strong boy for his age, Anton was already quite able to carry Kurt without any danger, and he did that now, turning with a frightened and tearful expression on his face as his mother arrived.

  “He’s having his bad dream, mama…” Anton explained hurriedly, worried for his brother and seeming about to burst into sobs of his own as if the situation was somehow his fault. “He keeps crying and he won’t stop…”

  “It’s all right, my darling,” she reassured, reaching out and gently taking Kurt from him. “It will be all right… just a bad dream, like you said. Come and lay down now, and I’ll sit with you…” she added, cradling the little one tightly to her chest as she led his older brother back to his own bed and pulled the covers over him as he lay down.

  “There-there, my little one…” she soothed softly, rocking him from side to side as she slid carefully into a comfortable old armchair positioned between both beds… one she’d used on many a night to feed Kurt his bottle when he’d been younger. “It’s all right now… mama’s here… mama’s here…”

  Narrowing her bleary eyes, she squinted carefully at the small clock hanging on the wall by the door and realised it was not long after five that morning, stifling an inward groan of tired frustration as her initial burst of adrenaline began to recede and she started to feel the first sighs of a splintering, alcohol-induced headache.

  “Mein Gott, no more… no more wine after midnight…!” She muttered to herself, stroking Kurt’s thick, dark hair and continuing to rock gently back and forth despite the aggravating effect it was having on her own hangover. “There-there, my love… everything’s fine now… just a bad dream… that’s all…”

  “Mama…! Mama: the man… the man…!” Kurt moaned, leaning backward in her arms so he could actually look at her in the room’s vague, pre-dawn darkness. “The man hurt, mama… hurt…!”

  What struck Maria most about that moment – what would stay with her and haunt her thoughts for a long time to come – was the earnest seriousness with which the boy was desperately trying to form words, clearly struggling to describe something terrible that lay beyond the limits of his toddler’s vocabulary, excellent as Kurt’s generally was.

  “What man, dear…?” She asked warily, a sudden, mostly-unfounded fear striking her as she glanced sharply around and found, to her relief, that the window to the boys’ room appeared to be locked as securely as ever. “Was it papa…? Was the man papa…?”

  “No…!” He answered definitely, shaking his head with exaggerated solemnity. “Not papa… funny man… funny face…” Tears welled up in eyes then as he remembered something particularly vivid. “Not funny… not laughing… hurt… red… big red…! Sorry, mama… sorry… sorry…!”

  A chill shuddered through Maria as she heard those words, an adult’s mind all too easily able to consider any number of terrible situations that might include the words ‘hurt’ and ‘red’, none of which should have been anything a toddler should have experienced.

  The two boys had been adopted two years before following the rape and murder of their mother at the hands of the SS. Her husband had been the first to find the orphaned, screaming baby that had since become their son, Kurt, and he had sworn at the time that the boy couldn’t have seen anything that had happened in that French farmhouse so long ago, yet now these childish words that seemed to tell of pain and blood sparked a fear in Maria that perhaps her youngest had seen something so terrible it had been locked away in his subconscious, only now showing themselves in the nightmares of a three-year-old boy.

  “There’s no need to be sorry, my darling: you’ve done nothing wrong. What happened to the man, baby…?” She asked carefully, holding her own fear in check as her older son – listening intently to everything and old enough to draw conclusions that stirred darker memories of his own – pulled the covers over his head and tried to control his own mounting terror. “Was the man hurt?”

  “I hurt the man, mama! Sorry… sorry…! I hurt the man… all red…! Sorry mama… sorry…!”

  As her older son also burst into tears beneath the covers, having lost his own battle of denial regarding terrible memories he’d spent two years trying to forget, Maria Ritter could only hold her youngest tightly and do her failing best to soothe his terror, tears streaming down her own cheeks now as her mind whirled and she wondered in vain over what any of it could possibly mean.

  Ambon Island

  Dutch East Indies

  The hold was dark and dank and reeked of stagnant water and God knew what else as Reuters reached the bottom of those long flights of steps and limped across the floor toward where the broken bodies of the dead Japanese had landed. There’d been no attempt whatsoever to close the hatches above during the night and water lay at least two feet deep at the bottom of the hold as a result, soaking Reuters’ feet inside his boots as he sloshed awkwardly across the submerged steel deck.

  He granted that at least there was one small bonus in the situation in that the corpses were far easier to drag out of sight than would have been the case, had they not been floating happily in the left overs of that torrential downpour. Taking a collar in each hand, he towed them away from the centre of the hold, moving toward the rear where a number of bulkhead hatches were fitted into the far wall. He and Schiller had inspected the hold the day before, prior to having been escorted away by Hasegawa, and he therefore knew exactly what to look for as he struggled through its semi-darkness with his lifeless cargo.

  By a large bulkhead door near the port side, he found a man-sized hatch they’d discovered on their previous visit, although it was now covered by a two-foot layer of stinking, oily water. Releasing his charges, he struggled for a moment or two, wheezing and cursing, and eventually unlatched the locking mechanism with a clang loud enough to make him start in fear that perhaps the other guards or someone outside the ship might hear and come running.

  He remained undisturbed however as he hauled the circular hatch back on its thick hinge, forcing aside surrounding water that immediately began to pour through the opening below in a wild torrent that almost swept him off his unsteady feet with its sudden ferocity. Staring down, he could see nothing in the pitch blackness below, but he knew what was there all the same. They’d seen it well enough the day before: an inspection hatch leading down into one of the ship’s cavernous fuel bunkers, deep within the hull of the ship.

  It had been no more than a third full, fortunately, which prevented the far lighter diesel fuel from bursting forth into the hold as the water surged in, but it was deep enough to suit his purposes for all that. Searching about, he quickly found what he was looking for and took a few steps to one side to gather up a long section of thick, heavy chain that had presumably been used to assist in the loading and unloading of cargo.

  It would serve him well enough now, and Reuters dragged it across the floor as quietly as he was able, then proceeded to make a creditable effort of wrapping it around both bodies as best he could with the fast-emptying water still rushing past him into the hatch. Deciding the job was done as
well as it was ever likely to be, he heaved the combined mass forward, aided substantially by the flow of the draining water as he hauled the bodies up and over the low lip of the darkened opening.

  They toppled through with a clatter and a fainter splash, sinking quickly into the murky, fathomless depths of the fuel bunker where, he was fairly confident, no one was likely to search for them any time soon without either emptying the tanks or making use of specialist equipment he very much doubted could be found anywhere on the island. With the immediate task of body disposal taken care of, he made his way back toward the errant nuclear device that had caused the entire mess, lying motionless as usual, further toward the bow.

  Reuters had spent his time well in the intervening weeks since the interrogation and subsequent execution of Direktor Wilhelm Hegel. While it had been extremely difficult to extract information from that cursed instigator of this insidious plot, some of the man’s lesser associates had been far more accommodating when faced with the threat of torture, and several had been kind enough to furnish detailed plans outlining the construction and operation of the two devices they’d secretly stowed aboard Kormoran so many months before.

  He’d pored over every one of those notes in the days since, memorising every minor detail regarding how to arm and disarm the weapon, and he intended to put that knowledge to use in a very practical fashion. Upon reaching the huge device, Reuters proceeded to open the cover for the main control panel exactly as Donelson had done almost a week earlier. Unlike Eileen however, the Reichsmarschall knew exactly what he was looking for, and he immediately connected the internal power and carried out a preliminary battery check, breathing a sigh of relief when the panel test light lit up green to indicate it still carried sufficient charge.

  From around his neck he withdrew a thin silver chain, suspended from which was small key similar to one used to open an equally-small padlock – identical to the key Donelson had found there and taken with her, days earlier. He used this to unlock the dust cover for the inbuilt timer and proceeded to activate its clockwork mechanism, winding it fully via the large, plastic rotary key fitted into the fascia beside the timer’s watch-like, analogue display. At all times, his hands moved slowly and with extreme care.