Rex Chase: A Novel

by Tim Wheat

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  25.

  George Ahiga took no pleasure in killing the commando. As far as he could tell, the man was a soldier, just like him. Someone, somewhere, had told him that this was the job he needed to get done, so he was here doing it. That is why he had offered to let the man take his own life with honor, but when his adversary had refused, there was no hesitation.

  When the blood spattered on his face, George hadn’t so much as flinched. He often wondered what happened in the time it took for the mind to die, and illusions of bright lights or angels seemed an improbable scenario. Why wouldn’t the mind continue acting like the mind until it was dead? George hoped that when he died it wouldn’t be the execution he had just committed. It would be like his grandfather’s death, surrounded by family and friends.

  His heart was in his throat as he crept around the wood pile to the back of the cabin. It had been at least six or seven minutes since he had heard Angela cry out and as he rounded the corner, the slumped commando against the back wall gave him hope. Perhaps Angela had killed him and the other had run off wounded. He cursed at himself for leaving her there alone. A hasty move to his charges had seemed like the logical risk, and going on the offensive was his best play, but if Angela and her father lay dead inside the cabin, all would be lost.

  “You won’t find her,” came a garbled statement from the slumped commando.

  The words startled Ahiga a bit, but he hadn’t ruled out the soldier being alive. A little information from him could be quite valuable. The forest behind the cabin was serene and right now and he checked the fallen commando for weapons. Without finding any, he peered through the hole in the back of the cabin. Angela was not there, but her father lay in a heap on the floor, his shallow breaths still coming to him in fits as the exertion from the axe still affected his body. George’s instinct was to run up the hill as quick as possible, but if the other commando and Angela were fleeing nearby, he would have heard them. Not even the wind was making a sound right now.

  No, an interrogation with the remaining commando was in order, and from the looks of him it had better be done with expedience. It was obvious the man’s face had taken a hit from the .357 magnum. Although it was a newer load, he had seen what the projectiles it fired could do before, and the wounds on the commandos face and leg were a testament to its power. Ahiga could see where the bullet had entered the man’s lower jaw, just below the chin, passed through his mouth, and blown off a neat pattern on the other side of his face. His eye bulged from its socket and his ear hung in a grotesque fashion. As horrific as the wound was, the hole in his leg was the one that was going to kill him. The commando had fashioned his belt into a tourniquet just above the entry point of the bullet, a slight distance above the knee, but both the tourniquet and his shirt he had pressed into the wound now dripped with blood. He didn’t have much time left.

  “We’ll see about that. Where is she and why are you here?”

  Ahiga’s voice trembled in anger as his emotions got the best of him for the first time since the fighting began. Even with his fatal injuries the commando managed a smile.

  “My partner has her miles away from here by now. You’ll find truck tracks on the road at the top of the hill. It was our extraction vehicle. We wounded her too, so I can imagine there is a blood trail…”

  The commando winced as Ahiga dug a finger into the wound in his leg and questioned him further in a voice now colored in hate.

  “Why is she wounded? She was fine when I left her.”

  “No need to torture me young man.” Ahiga noticed for the first time that the commando was quite old for a fighting man, in his fifties at least, “I’ll tell you whatever I can. She’s wounded because of what she did to my face and leg here. My partner wasn’t going to let her do that to him. We were just here to extract her, not kill anyone.”

  “You started the killing, and by extract, you mean kidnap.”

  “We wouldn’t have killed anyone if the old man hadn’t hired those guards, or if you wouldn’t have started blowing up the whole place.”

  It dawned on Ahiga that in his attempt to become Angela’s protector he had started this slaughter. If he hadn’t blown the guard shack the commandos would have waited for dark, incapacitated the guards, and kidnapped Angela without a shot being fired.

  “Who are you anyway? You aren’t one of those lowlife bouncers the old man hired, that much is for certain.”

  “Who I am is of no concern to you,” responded Ahiga, his voice full of contempt. “Why were you here to kidnap Angela?”

  “Extract, we were here for extraction…”

  The commando’s voice trailed off as he drifted toward oblivion. Ahiga stuck his finger in the wound in the man’s leg, attempting to coax the man’s body into firing out some more adrenaline, or endorphins, but the man was dying.

  “Not yet old man. Not yet. Tell me what I need to know. Why would it be an extraction if the girl didn’t want to go with you?”

  The commando was very near death, but he took a few shallow breaths and uttered a reply.

  “She wanted to remove her from harm, not cause it. We didn’t plan it this way. It was just an extraction…”

  The man’s voice trailed off for the last time as the darkness blanketed over him. His physical capacity ceased, but his mind worked wonders. He felt no more pain, and euphoria unlike any he had ever experienced permeated his very soul.

  “So this is dying. It’s wonderful.” He thought to himself.

  George Ahiga recognized the blank stare and knew he would receive no more information from the man. What had he meant about the extraction? Who was the ‘She’ of whom he spoke? One thing Ahiga knew for sure was that he would scour the earth for his love, and that mission started right now.

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  26.

  Angela awoke with a start. Her captor had bound her hands and feet behind her back and she struggled for a moment, but the knots were tight and well done. The futility was evident so she focused herself instead on her surroundings. Very little light emanated from a single window in the small room. It must still be night. Where was she? How long had she been unconscious? She had so many questions for her captor, but he was nowhere to be seen.

  Hours passed with no human contact of any kind. She was thirsty and had lost a lot of blood, but the bandage on her leg showed that her kidnapper wanted her to stay alive. He had cut her pants off in a neat square around the wound, cleaned it, and given it a professional dressing. If she could have seen underneath the bandage she would have known that he had also retrieved the 9mm bullet from her leg and sewn most of the wound shut.

  All of a sudden the room filled with light. Angela squinted and attempted to focus her eyes, but the lights were so bright, and she had been in the darkness for so long. She heard a door open and saw a shadowy figure move behind her. A knife was in his hand, and for a moment, she thought maybe he meant to kill her. That wouldn’t make any sense, though. Why make the effort to bandage her wounds just to kill her? Then she felt the ropes bounding her hands and feet go slack. Her eyes adjusted to the light and she made out the face of the commando who had kidnapped her. He scooped her up from the floor and carried her a few feet to a large bed, plush with satin sheets. Angela’s body ached from her confinement, and as he laid her on the bed, she stretched her extremities, coaxing blood throughout her body.

  “I know this all must be quite confusing, but I need you to trust me for a little bit. You’ve lost a lot of blood and I need to take care of you.”

  “Why should I trust you? If you wanted to help me so much then why did you shoot me? Why have I been in here for hours bleeding through this bandage? Why would…”

  The commando interrupted her in mid sentence.

  “We will answer your questions in due time. Believe me when I say that our intent was never to harm you. We came to help you. Now I need to tend to your injuries and take care of you. I apologize for my lengthy absence,
but I wasn’t quite prepared to treat the severity of your injuries. If you’ll let me, I’ll get started, but I’ll need you to be still. I can’t stress to you enough how important it is that you let me do this.”

  She didn’t know why, but Angela believed him. It didn’t make sense to her that being shot was somehow in her best interest, but she knew that without his help she might very well die. The wound on her leg was still bleeding, and if someone didn’t fix it she could expire from blood loss.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  “It looks like I nicked your femoral artery. I had most of the things I needed to fix you already here, but when I inspected your leg a little closer I realized I was going to need some more precise tools.”

  “You’re a surgeon?” She looked up at him and concern was the only emotion she recognized on his face.

  “Yes, amongst other things. What I need you to do is just relax. I’m going to be starting an IV in your arm and in a few minutes you will be falling asleep. Believe me, I’d like to do this a million different places than here, but here is all we have right now.”

  The man crossed the room and rolled a cart full of medical supplies toward the bed where she lay. Angela had heard all that he had to say, and though her instinct was to run, she believed him when he said she was near death. Her body felt weak, her thoughts were not sharp, and even her thirst had dissipated. She watched as the surgeon started the IV in her arm, and then the door opened again. A nurse approached the bed, but Angela was already drifting off to sleep.

  “Is she ready?”

  The voice was familiar, very familiar. Then the light evaporated and she drifted into a deep sleep.

  “She is in bad shape ma’am. She’s lost a lot of blood, and even though I tied her up in such a way as to keep the blood toward her vital organs, the wound is still bleeding. You should have let me tie a tourniquet around it.”

  “I will not have her losing her leg,” said the woman. “You will push blood and fluids through that IV, repair the artery, and have her good as new by tomorrow. It is your fault that she’s in this condition and it is on you to fix it. I thought I was clear when I ordered she not be harmed.”

  “Yes ma’am, but the fight was vicious. In all my years I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Anelie wondered to herself if her husband had caught wind of her plan to remove Angela from the mine. If only her father had not insisted that Angela be present with him in Arizona, they would have avoided all of this death. Her husband was not going to be one bit happy when he heard the news that his most elite fighting squad no longer existed, but that was a bridge she would cross when she got to it. One thing Anelie had learned since she had married Dietrich Hoff, though, was that sometimes death was necessary, and for her, in this case, the only life that mattered was Angela’s.

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  27.

  “Embrace me, my sweet embraceable you. Embrace me, my irreplaceable you… “

  Gershwin’s words emanated from the radio inches from his head as he lay on the couch. Though the day’s activities warranted exhaustion he couldn’t contain his excitement. His night with Mary Elizabeth had been something out of a storybook, and though he had arrived home just a few minutes before, he contemplated making his way back to her place. He wanted her to spend the night, but she had explained that her father oftentimes phoned her in the evenings to make sure she was OK. Patrick Castle, she had elaborated, was a very careful man. When Mary Elizabeth had first taken up residence in the quintessential neighborhood he had placed an armed guard on her street at all times. Just a worried father watching after his only daughter was the explanation.

  With great power comes great enemies, was the way Chase had understood it. Now he had made up his mind. He was going back over. Mary Elizabeth had failed to give him her phone number and that would be a fine excuse to make the short walk.

  Rex Chase stepped out into the brisk night air feeling like the bees knees. Nothing in this world could have made him more alive. He coasted around the corner of Conant Hall and onto the sidewalk. The streets were oddly empty despite the early hour. Normally, on such a beautiful evening students would be outside cooking dinner, or playing catch in the street, or any number of activities.

  “Midterms.”

  Chase muttered the dreaded phrase to himself. On his way down the street he could see students in open windows, and on porches, pouring through textbooks. If there were two things that could shut down Harvard University social life, it was midterms and finals. He smiled to himself since he had never studied for a test in his life. Information went into his brain and never left. Once, he had failed to do the reading for an upper level economics course, and had not attended most of the classes. He had been nervous going into the comprehensive final since it was the only grade the class was going to register. Most of his classmates had attended with stringent fervor and studied even harder. Rex Chase, though, had done nothing to prepare, and passed the test with a 98%. It had always been that way for him, though. Luce Chase called it his “picture memory.”

  He rounded another corner and was now a couple blocks from his destination. A large black Lincoln Model K was making tracks down the street ahead of him and he looked at it in fascination. The unmistakable roar of the V12 engine reverberated down the quiet avenue and pierced the night air. Young men had a tendency to drive fast sometimes, but this driver was cooking. Chase had heard squealing tires the block before, figuring someone must have been showing off for his girlfriend or something, burning rubber all over campus. He watched in wonder as the giant black sedan tore down the road, in his direction, at no less than seventy miles an hour. If the driver had been doing this for long Chase was certain the cops were out looking for him. Perhaps that was where the speeding patrol cars he had just seen were heading. As the car approached him, he squinted at the beams of the headlights which seemed to be following his path. Too late, he realized that they in fact were following his path. The big black car barreled straight toward him and instincts started him in a dead run to clear the way of the auto. Out of control the vehicle slid sideways and was on top of him in an instant and in a last ditch effort to vacate the area Chase leapt into the air.

  His athleticism saved his body from taking the brunt of the impact. The hood of the Model K, careening sideways, struck Chase just above the ankles, sending him tumbling, end over end through the air. The nose of the vehicle had clipped his feet and its momentum carried the gleaming black sedan crashing into the front of a nearby house. Rex Chase hit the ground with an audible thump, his body limp and unmoving.

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  28.

  He had spotted Chase a block before. After leaving Mary Elizabeth’s house he stole the black Lincoln he had used as a prop in his ruse, and started toward Conant Hall. Luckily for Hans, he happened to look down a side street and caught a brief glimpse of Rex Chase, heading back in the direction of Mary Elizabeth’s apartment. It would not have been ideal for Chase to discover her body so soon, and Hans made a swift decision. His tires squealing, he tore around four blocks, flanked Chase, got out ahead of him, and ran the unsuspecting quarry down in the street.

  The crash had not been easy on Hans either. Stars danced in front of his eyes, and a high pitch squeal reverberated in his ears from within his head. He was dizzy and nauseous, and became aware of a severe laceration on his right hand. While massaging his jaw with his left hand, he remembered where he was and what he was doing. Through the windshield of the Lincoln he saw the lifeless body of Rex Chase forty yards away, lying in the sidewalk. A woman was kneeling next to him, but Hans couldn’t tell who she was.

  “He said to make it look like an accident.” Hans muttered to himself.

  In the crash the manual transmission Lincoln’s engine had gone silent. He pushed in the clutch, pumped the accelerator three times, and turned the key. At the same time the V12 engine roared to life he saw something through the windshield that he
couldn’t believe. His senses must still be dulled, because standing next to the girl, no longer lying on the pavement, was Rex Chase.

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  29.

  Douglas’ Dc-3 was a first class commercial aircraft. It was one of the first passenger planes to combine the speed of flying with the comfort of train travel. This particular airplane was even more special than its brothers and sisters. Dietrich Hoff had purchased one of the first ten models off of the line the year before, and since, he had taken extensive steps to make it a first class flying experience.

  He had first removed the factory seats meant to carry passengers. Next he lined the walls with luxurious silks and had the floors covered in a thin walnut veneer. Near the back of the plane, he had installed a separate compartment that held a large king sized bed, a dresser, and its very own toilet. The Douglas company would have done all of the work for him, had he just asked, but Hoff preferred to keep a low profile when at all possible. He had routed purchase of the luxury airliner through a number of his subsidiaries and it would have taken a small army of accountants years to trace it all back to him. Nonetheless, he hadn’t gotten to where he was by spending money out in the open where everyone could see him. Very few men in the United States had firsthand, personal knowledge of Dietrich Hoff, the businessman. Even fewer had firsthand knowledge of him as an individual. A strategic vision years ago, Hoff had realized that the fewer number of people who knew him, the better.

  The number of people who knew his wife, Anelie, played an intricate role in his business affairs was even fewer. She was a true master of putting on airs. Powerful men in Germany and all over the world had never realized the kind of influence she possessed. When they had first met, she was just a young girl and he a smitten older man. A half century before no one would have questioned their love, but in the world today, fathers wanted different things for their teenage daughters. Over a short period of time, though, Dietrich Hoff had won the heart of his future wife, and it was her idea, not his, to buy the country estate in the Rhineland.