“But sir, that doesn’t make any sense!”
Nix nodded, contemplating his stubby cigar again.
They were silent for a few moments, then the colonel spoke, and it was as if he addressed the cigar he was holding instead of Captain Slaughter. “So that leaves the big question. So far nobody can answer it—not the techies, not you, not your high-flyin’ team, not me, not the whole bloody brass band.” His puzzled brown eyes settled on the young captain.
Slaughter, forgetting protocol, whispered to himself: “Why?”
THIRTEEN
The seventy years that Count Gerade von Eisenhalt had spent building his life had not drained his vitality. His towering six foot five inches of height lent him an air of majesty, and the fortitude that had brought him to the helm of the Germanic Union still burned brightly. He was the perfect example of dramatic Prussian manhood of the old school, even to the saber scar on the right side of his aristocratic face. The strength and vigor of the count emanated almost as a physical force, and now he was, some believed, the most powerful man in Europe, if not in the world. He was the chancellor of the Germanic Union of Nation-States—which included Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway. He was also first minister of the Western European Alliance, and the expanded European Union that covered the continent like a carpet.
Count von Eisenhalt was by nature a stern, proud man. Leaning back in his nineteenth century “gentleman’s chair,” his glance swept critically over his son. Tor von Eisenhalt, commandant general of the German Bundeswehr, commandant in chief of the Joint Task Forces of the Germanic Union of Nation-States, sat on the other side of an enormous fireplace in another Louis XVI chair, staring blankly into the roaring fire.
Gerade’s gaze roamed over the room where so many critical and historic decisions had been made. Years before the count had ordered this small jagdschloss built at Waldleiningen. Halle Eisenhalt, farther to the east, was too isolated for Gerade to comfortably shuttle back and forth to Berlin. Waldleiningen was far enough away from the capital that he could retire to ponder his schemes for making Germany the premier nation in the world, yet close enough for him to fly to Berlin by helicopter in less than forty-five minutes.
The room itself was a marriage of German gothic and neoclassic English. The ceilings were twenty feet high, dramatically adorned with white plaster, and bordered with a frieze made of intricately carved walnut. The windows were high, admitting the amber light that fell upon the dark crimson carpet. On this rainy and dreary day the thick dark green embroidered curtains were half closed. The baldachin was a rich medieval fabric of silk and gold. The furnishings were eclectic, some brought from Paris, others from Berlin. A massive chandelier made of black iron studded with jewels of every hue hung over the large teakwood library table that dominated the room. Around the walls, bookcases rose as high as the first tier and above that niches were framed with Gothic arches pointed at the top. One end of the room, where Gerade and his son sat, was dominated by a massive fireplace of neo-Gothic design. All of the furniture was upholstered with dark oxblood leather. It was a man’s room—a strong man’s room at that—bearing the mark of its designer. Everything was striking and bold and dramatic, which accurately described Count von Eisenhalt himself.
The door opened and a thin, pale-faced man with iron gray hair entered carrying a square bottle and two balloon glasses. He had eyes the color of spit and not an emotion flickered across his face as he set down the tray and poured a generous two fingers of amber liquid into the glasses. Without a word, he slipped back out through the double black oak doors.
Count von Eisenhalt took one of the glasses and motioned toward the other. He watched while his son picked up the glass. Still silent, the two men caressed the glasses in their palms, swirling the fine old Napoleon brandy to warm it slightly. They sipped at the same time. “It is still fine,” Gerade commented, “even after three hundred years.”
Tor murmured a muted assent, then meticulously dusted an imaginary speck from his mirror-polished jackboots. His uniform was the same style he had decreed for the Joint Task Force personnel; plain blouse, belt, shoulder strap, dagger, jodhpurs, boots—only Commandant von Eisenhalt’s was solid black instead of brown. He also had a peculiar four-leaf-clover design for his insignia that no other soldier wore. The dramatic uniform molded to his body, outlining the deep chest and the natural power of his build. Tor was not as imposing physically as his father, at first assessment, anyway. When in company with his father, however, Tor definitely irradiated an aura of power with an underlying ruthless strength.
Tor had been ill only once in his life, when he was eleven years old. The cook at Halle Eisenhalt had served him a day-old stew, which had given him a mild case of food poisoning. Tor recalled how his father’s face had grown scarlet with anger. Gerade had beaten the man with a riding crop until the servant cried for mercy. Tor had never seen the cook again; his name had never been mentioned. It was a vivid lesson that Tor had filed away in his mind on how to deal with ineffective people.
“Open the window. The fire is too hot; it’s stifling in here,” Gerade commanded. There was no graciousness in his voice. He had long since forgotten how to do anything but command, if indeed he had ever known. He watched as his son moved with feline grace to the windows and threw the long double panes open. A smell of rich wet turf and the chill of evening wandered into the room. Tor breathed deeply, staying at the window, staring out into the deepening twilight and the gray mists curling sinuously up from the spring-warmed earth.
Gerade studied him, then said, “You look sunburned and stripped down to sinew and ligaments.”
Dryly, Tor said, “I’m well; thank you for your concern, Father.”
“Tor, come back here and sit down. I can hardly hear you. You’re mumbling out the window.”
In spite of his father’s brusque command, Tor did not sit down. He circled the room slowly, looking at the titles of the books. He had endured a hard, vigorous apprenticeship under this man who had all the strength of manhood with few of the graces. After the death of Tor’s mother, the two of them had traveled extensively, but not for pleasure. Gerade had always treated Tor as a student who was slightly backward, and had gruffly demanded an impossible perfection from his son. Count Gerade von Eisenhalt was never satisfied with anything his son had ever achieved.
Tor ran his hand over the leather covers of a line of books, caressing them roughly. “Denwald’s Geometry. I remember this book,” he said. He pulled it out and as he opened it a faint smile relaxed the corners of his stern mouth. “I remember it well. Almost every page of it.” He walked back toward his chair and stood for a moment leafing through the pages. “I remember this problem.” He turned the book so that his father could see it. “I failed to solve it in the proper time and you gave me a thrashing for it.”
“I don’t recall that,” Gerade said evenly.
“I do. I remember it well.”
“And it made you angry.”
“Of course it did. Did you think an Eisenhalt could endure a thrashing without being angry?”
The remark amused the old man. He took another appreciative sip of brandy. “I had to thrash you. I was molding you into the future chancellor of Germany. You don’t make a chancellor with a feather duster.”
“You never mentioned that while I was growing up.”
“I thought you had sense enough to know it.”
“I was intelligent enough, but maybe I needed more. You never told me I was a man of destiny.”
“A man that has to be told that he has a high destiny doesn’t deserve one.”
Abruptly, Gerade’s stern features wavered, distorted, like a man’s face seen underwater. Pain flickered into his eyes and involuntarily his hand moved to his stomach. It was a gesture and an expression that his son did not miss. “Getting worse, isn’t it?” Tor asked neutrally.
Eisenhalt did not like anyone to refer to his illness; indeed, as was so common
in people who had a dark and secret fear, he ignored it except in the deepest depths of his subconscious. Count Gerade von Eisenhalt’s terrible raw ulcers had started producing cancerous cells that were eating away at his intestines and stomach. Gerade had not consulted his physician about it, so it had not been diagnosed, and he pretended to himself that he didn’t know it. His closest realizations of the fact that he was dying came in the form of nightmares. Still, Gerade had taught himself to regard illness as a weakness, and all of his life he had despised weakness in any form, and had denied any manifestation of it in himself.
Now he replied curtly, “No, as a matter of fact I’ve been much better.” Regaining his cold manner, he went on, “At any rate, Tor, I’m aware that you had a hard childhood. But I knew what was facing you, and I believed that you must not be coddled.”
Tor sat down and closed the book, running his hand over the worn cover. He precisely placed it on the table, picked up his glass, and sipped lightly. “I’ve never complained and I don’t now. You did what you had to do. We just missed something along the way.”
“Missed what?”
“Why, the usual closeness between father and son,” Tor said, with an irony as cold as frozen steel. “You never came to my soccer games even when our team won the national championship.”
“I was a busy man, with very important matters to attend to. Germany was my interest, not games.”
“Of course. Well, I have survived and so have you, Father.”
Gerade was somewhat shaken by his son’s words. He did not know how to handle these personal references, indeed he never had. Now he drained the last of his drink and set the glass down too hard on the tray. Almost inaudibly, he murmured, “I attended your championship game.”
Tor’s glacier blue eyes flickered. “I never knew that. You never told me.”
“I didn’t want us to get involved with a sticky, sentimental relationship. But I was proud of you. That last goal you made, it was the finest achievement I ever saw on an athletic field.”
Tor stared at his father, feeling no sudden rush of gratitude nor sympathy. He could clearly see death in his father’s face. He gets weaker every day, but that’s only in the flesh. His mind and stubborn will are as strong as ever. The old man might be sick, even unto death, but he was still as dangerous as a coiled snake when he was crossed.
Coolly Tor shrugged, dismissing remembrances, now irrelevant, of a cold and loveless past. “Why did you want to see me, Father?”
Gerade’s eyes narrowed. The blue had faded somewhat with age, but they still looked out on the world with the same penetrating calculation and barely disguised arrogance. “I was concerned about you, of course. What happened in the Syrian campaign?”
Tor laughed, an ugly sound that made Gerade flinch inside. “You were concerned about me? You mean you were concerned about replacing the commandant in chief of the forces.”
“No. I was concerned about you, Tor. You are my son.” It was the closest Gerade could come to expressing warmth and affection.
Shrugging one shoulder carelessly, Tor leaned back into his chair, swirling his drink in hypnotic circles. “Yes, you are my father, and it would seem that you, the only person on this earth who is of my blood and bone, would be able to comprehend what happened to me in Syria. But I know beyond all doubt that you never will.”
Gerade was growing impatient. “Just tell me, Tor. You disappeared for nine days! Surely you do have an explanation, and I assure you I still have the mental acuity to understand it.”
“Mental acuity, yes. Spiritual depth, no.”
A sharp pain, like a fire-heated dagger, ripped through Gerade’s gut. With almost inhuman control, he didn’t grab his stomach, but his faded blue eyes darkened to indigo. Stoically he waited until the torrid waves of pain subsided. With only a slight coarsening of his tone, he said, “Don’t be melodramatic, Tor. Of course I possess a soul. I would think that would supply any credentials I need to understand your spiritual journey, or revelation, or whatever it is.”
“Ah, yes, the soul. The inner spirit of a man. The seat of all mystic knowledge and understanding. Let’s talk about your soul, Father. And then, perhaps, I will tell you about mine.”
Abruptly, Gerade was exhausted. A weariness, of age and debilitating sickness, coursed throughout his body like a fever. His mind seemed to sag, like a rotting curtain at a window looking out only on darkness. A bitter taste invaded his mouth, and with a grimace he swallowed hard. “My . . . soul,” he grated. “I have lately been considering the state of my soul more than I ever have in my entire life. I have been thinking about God.”
A spasm—whether of shock or distaste—flitted across Tor’s roughly handsome features. Gerade thought he might have imagined it, however, as only a moment later Tor looked quite as smoothly intent as he had when they began this odd conversation. “Another subject that never came up between us. What conclusions have you reached, Father, about the state of your soul and God?”
Gerade dropped his eyes. His answer was oblique. “Your mother was a Christian, you know.”
Tor was so stunned, it was almost a physical sensation. Jerking upright in the chair, he leaned forward, his eyes fiercely brilliant. “You’ve never said a word to me. You never showed the least interest in Christianity.”
“I may not have shown it, but no man could have known your mother without feeling the power. Her power.”
“Power!” Tor almost choked. “She died. What power is that? And you—you taught me that there is no power, unless it is exerted over other men. Power is only to control men: their health, or their decisions, or their minds, or their will, or their money, or their life and death. You taught me that!”
Gerade finally met his son’s enraged gaze and still refused to answer him directly. “I loved her, you know. I have never loved anything on this earth as I did your mother. If she had lived I might have been different.”
“You might not have been chancellor of Germany,” Tor argued heatedly. “You know how debilitating a woman’s influence can be.”
“So I once thought. That is why I did not allow you to have women . . . I taught you to despise them as the weakest of all creatures . . . but I may have been wrong about that.” It was the first time in his life that Tor had heard his father admit to a possibility that he might have been wrong.
Tor jumped out of his chair, went to the fireplace, and crashed his fists against the great marble mantelpiece. Gerade waited, watching his son with an expression that might have been pity in a man of more human compassion.
After a long and loaded silence, Tor asked gutturally, as if the words were forced out of his mouth against his will, “What was she like?”
“She was a strong woman, as strong as I. No, she—she was stronger, inside. In her will, in her spirit, in the depth and breadth of her courage. You’ve seen her pictures. You know what a lovely thing she was, how fine, how delicately made. But inside she was iron, strong and pure.”
Tor whirled, and Gerade was taken aback at the tight fury marring his features. “And now, after forty years, you have decided to tell me, old man, that she believed in the Christian God?”
Tor’s fury merely made Gerade more distant. “Yes. She made no show of it, but I knew it before I married her. But I, who had already conquered so many enemies, failed to conquer the spirit that was in your mother. I also failed to conquer the love I had for her. When she died it broke my heart, and almost ruined me as a man.”
“That must have surprised your enemies who thought you never had a heart. It certainly would have surprised me, if I’d been old enough to understand,” Tor remarked coldly.
Anger flared through the older man. “What possible use can there be in this maundering, Tor? You’ve had a classical education. You know that a man is more than a body and more than a mind. One of the old English poets wrote: ‘I tune my instrument here at the door.’ He spoke of going to be with God.”
Tor, with measured steps, return
ed to his chair and sat. Crossing one booted ankle over his knee, he said in a curiously flat voice, “And now, just at this time, you have decided to contemplate your mortality and the disposition of your soul. How very odd.”
Gerade ignored his son’s peculiar demeanor and words and continued with the thoughts that were just now surfacing in his mind. “I have always thought that Christianity was very foolish, just a weak man’s excuse for silly delusions of grandeur after he died, when he didn’t have the courage to rise above mediocrity and stupidity and timidity on this earth. But sometimes . . . more often now . . . I wonder if it is real, very real, perhaps the only truth.” He smiled faintly. “I’m like the old Roman emperor—which one was it? He had done all he could to stamp out the Christian church but failed. When he died, his last words were, ‘Galilean, Thou hast conquered!’”
In a voice so quiet Gerade could barely hear him, Tor said, “Never. Not in the past, not now, not forever.” His eyes burned.
Gerade was shocked and bewildered . . . but he lost the thread and the ominous foreboding of the moment, for the infernal pain racked him again. His sculpted features washed out a sickly gray, while the cruel saber scar was a ropy worm of red. He leaned back in his chair, his body stiffening with the unbearable pain. It was so appalling this time that not only could Gerade not hide it, he could barely keep from wailing.
This time his son offered no solicitations. In an odd, surreal dream-tone, he began to speak. Gerade could hardly hear him for the shrieking of blood in his ears, and he could barely see him, for in his agony his eyes were not focusing clearly.
“You’re dying, aren’t you? It’s odd. I always thought that you would live forever, that you were so strong and invincible that nothing would ever weaken you or kill you. As it has turned out, however, I am the one who has triumphed, Father. I am banishing my enemies; I have won over the hearts and minds and even the very souls of tens of thousands of strong men; I never waver in my determination or my purpose. But most important, Father, I have triumphed over you.”
The Beginning of Sorrows Page 21
