Twisted Cross

by Maloney, Mack;

  “Hang on Brothers!” he cried out, then he reached over and cut his engine.

  All three of them suddenly felt weightless—as if they were floating in the air. The F-4 unintentionally zipped right by them, his quick attempt to lower his flaps only playing right into Hunter’s hands. Just as the Kingfisher’s propeller came to a dead halt, Hunter fired off both his mini-Sidewinders and pushed his Vulcan cannon trigger.

  The combined cannon-and-missile barrage hit the F-4 point-blank on its mid-flanks. Even to Hunter’s surprise, the jet fighter split right in half. Then its engine blew up, which ignited its underwing fuel tank. He wrestled with the Kingfisher’s dead stick in an effort to avoid colliding with the skyful of debris. He made it—but just barely. Three quick pulls of his throttle choke followed, then he slammed the airplane’s engine starter button. With a sputter and a cough, the Kingfisher’s engine came to life. He had turned the plane completely over by this time and, gaining his power back, leveled out about 35 feet from the top of the jungle canopy.

  There was still the question of the other Phantom, but Hunter knew it was no problem at all. The airplane came around on them, streaked by like an angry buzzard, yet fired no weapons at them. It couldn’t. Brother David’s quick but timely barrage had effectively emasculated the enemy F-4’s firing systems. Even its cannon could not be fired. The Phantom buzzed them twice more, Hunter giving in to the temptation of flipping the finger to the pilots on the last pass.

  “Fuck you guys,” he yelled as the Phantom’s pilot, unable to do anything but fly, booted his throttle and disappeared off to the south.

  “Still with me, boys?” he called back to his companions. When he received no immediate reply, he turned back and saw both men were staring at him, mouths agape. The pair looked as if they had just endured an hour’s-long roller coaster ride.

  He had to laugh. “That will teach you to volunteer,” he said.

  Chapter 46

  “BUT I INSIST ON continuing this mission!” Colonel Krupp was saying, his voice loud but jittery. “There’s nothing wrong with me.”

  “There will be if you continue that tone of voice!” Major General Udet told Krupp. “You are addressing a superior officer, Krupp. Don’t forget that!”

  Udet, the same high Party officer who congratulated Krupp with a linen and silver luncheon in the shadow of the Chichen Itza pyramid, now stood before him in the recovery mission’s command truck, gritting his teeth. He had flown in at first word of the huge gold find and had just returned from seeing it himself. But what he had assumed would be a triumphant visit had turned sour just as soon as he visited Krupp in his command truck and got his first good look at the officer.

  The man looked as if he had aged 25 years in a matter of weeks. The officer that Udet had commended at Chichen Itza had been a tall, if weak looking man of 42 years. The man before him now was hunched over, with bleary eyes and dark circles under them. Udet, a veteran of the Big War, had seen men with advanced battle fatigue, and still they had looked better than Krupp did right now.

  “Colonel, there is no reason to continue the mission,” Udet said. “The amount of gold found in that chamber exceeds anyone’s wildest expectations. It will take all of our efforts just to retrieve it all.”

  “General, you don’t understand,” Krupp pleaded with the officer. “There is more gold to be found. At the other ruins…”

  Udet was beginning to detest the man. “Look, Colonel,” he said. “You’ve done a fine job here. Your work has been very successful. Why ruin it? You deserve the time off. To… recuperate. Get some rest down in Panama City or on one of the islands, and then, if the High Command recommends it, you can resume the recovery mission at that time.”

  “No!” Krupp screamed at the general. “No, we must push on now. To other sites. There is more gold there, can’t you understand that, General?”

  Udet thought of slapping the man across the face with the back of his leather glove. But even a criminal mind like the general’s was able to feel pity—and slapping Krupp would have been nothing less than pathetic.

  “Colonel,” Udet began, his tone as hard as rock. “It’s enough that the High Commander requested that I come out to this hellhole, I have neither the time nor the patience to listen to you. The recovery mission is hereby suspended. You will be flown to Panama City and report to our hospital there. And that is the end of this discussion.”

  Krupp wiped another bit of foam from his mouth, and dried his eyes on the sleeve of his uniform jacket. He was hearing voices again: You must go on. The only reasonable thing to do is to continue the mission. You alone know that it’s the only avenue that makes sense. Continue the mission. It must go on…

  “It must go on!” Krupp screamed at Udet.

  The general was so surprised at the rising tone of Krupp’s voice, he was speechless. For a moment, he considered calling to the guard. But by the look on Krupp’s face, calling for the unit doctor would have made more sense.

  “I’m the only one who knows, don’t you see?” Krupp said, his voice cracking under the strain. He was crying now. “I alone know that continuing the mission is the only avenue that makes sense. You are a fool to deny that to me, General.”

  Udet never saw the knife until it had been plunged into his neck. He felt his whole left side go numb. He opened his mouth and tried to scream, but the knife had severed a vocal chord. He felt Krupp pull the blade from his throat and plunge it back into him, just above his clavicle. Then he was stabbed again below the rib cage, and in his last dying moments, he saw the contents of his stomach spill out on to the floor of the command truck.

  “My commander,” he whispered, his dying words saved for a man he had never really met. “For you and for our Cause…”

  Udet closed his eyes and felt his soul start the long plunge down.

  Chapter 47

  THE 737 AIRLINER, THE largest airplane belonging to The Twisted Cross, entered United American airspace over Louisiana at 0700 hours, barely eight hours after Jones had sent his acceptance to the Nazis’ offer of “mutual discussions.”

  Three hours and twenty minutes later, the all-black aircraft and its five-plane F-4 Phantom escort, were circling the former National Airport just outside Washington, DC. The airport had been cleared of all unnecessary personnel, and a cordon made up of three reserve battalions of United American soldiers was thrown up around the airfield. The roads leading to the meeting place—the old National Press Club Building in downtown DC—were also blocked off and guarded at every intersection.

  Jones had asked Major Frost to meet The Twisted Cross delegation at the airport. No handshakes were exchanged as the Free Canadian Air Force officer introduced himself to Colonel Frankel at the bottom of the airliner’s access stairs and led him to a waiting limousine. The rest of Frankel’s entourage, including the ten F-4 crewmembers who doubled as his bodyguards, were relegated to a battered Greyhound bus.

  There was no one to meet the Cross delegation at the entrance to the Press Club Building; Frost served as guide as the Nazis were stuffed onto elevators and brought up to the top floor meeting room, a space once reserved as the Press Club’s well-used bar.

  Frankel entered the room first and saw that a long rectangular table had been set up, seven chairs on each side. Sitting in the center chair on the opposite side of the table from him was the small, tough-looking man of 60 that Frankel knew was General David Jones, commander in chief of the United American Army. Six other officers, of various uniforms and rank, flanked the general. No one stood up.

  The Nazi walked to his seat and reached across the table to shake hands with Jones. But this too was met only with icy stares.

  Chapter 48

  “LANDING COORDINATES ARE TWO-FOUR-ZERO…” Cobra Captain Jesse Tyler heard in his headphones. “Come in nine-by-six. No wind at LZ… Over.”

  “Roger Foxhound, I read you, over…” Tyler replied. “We’ll give it another try.”

  He switched his radio over to i
nternal and called ahead to his front gunner. “Hey, Bax, you see anything down there?”

  “Not a thing, Captain,” came his gunner’s reply. “I knew these guys were good at camouflage, but this is ridiculous.”

  They had spent the last 20 minutes circling a dark, heavily wooded area just 25 miles north of Panama City. It was the middle of the night and they were looking for the Radio CATS PDC, code-named Foxhound. It was down there somewhere, hidden in the moonless darkness, down beneath the dense jungle growth particularly suited for broadcasting its clandestine radio programs.

  “Let’s give it another sweep,” Tyler said, activating his NightScope goggles and bringing the Cobra gunship down to treetop level once again, looking for the elusive two-four-zero landing coordinates.

  “Hold on, Captain,” Baxter called back. “I think I see it… Down in that gulley at nine o’clock. Isn’t that leaf netting?”

  Tyler dipped the Cobra slightly to the left, turning a wide arc. He increased the power to his infra-red glasses and scanned the area off to his portside.

  “Christ, that is them,” Tyler drawled, checking his map against the terrain and coming up with an approximate two-four-zero bearing. “Those sons of bitches really know how to hide that thing.”

  They could just barely see the outline of the large container, sitting at the edge of gulley, hard by a small stream. Sure enough, there was a clearing about 20 feet beyond that that was large enough to handle the gunship.

  “No wonder the Canal Nazis have never found them,” Tyler said, heading for the LZ.

  Ten minutes later, Tyler and Baxter were sitting inside the portable radio station, both of them drinking black coffee.

  “So, this is the latest?” the gravel-voice man named Masoni asked.

  “Hot off the presses,” Tyler told him, sipping his java. “It bounced down from DC, to Texas, to Cobra Two off the coast of your island, to us, and now to you. Each time it got scrambled a little more.”

  They had been following this pattern for the past 12 hours. For reasons really only known to Jones and maybe a few others, messages to be broadcast between the music on Radio CATS were being written in DC and “bounced” all the way down to Panama. It was up to the Cobras to relay the messages because their aircraft carried scrambler equipment and the choppers of the CATS did not.

  But to keep the integrity of the system, the messages had to be delivered from the Cobras to Radio CATS by hand. This was the fourth such message of the day, the first three had been ferried in by Cobra Two.

  “Wow,” Masoni said, “this one’s a whopper.”

  “Those are the orders,” Tyler said. “Sounds nutty, but what the hell—I’m no expert in psyche-ops. Not like those guys up in DC are, anyway.”

  A selection of pre-war Panamanian pop music was just ending. Masoni’s partner, Gregg O’Gregg, faded the music out and said: “And now, another news message for our listeners…”

  He gave Masoni the “Go” sign, and the other man moved closer to the microphone.

  “Here’s the latest on the peace negotiations in Washington,” he began. “Representatives of the United American Army and of The Twisted Cross have met for a second time, and at the end of the two-hour session, both sides expressed optimism in reaching a peaceful solution to the crisis here in Panama.

  “As you know, we’ve been keeping you informed on these very important negotiations by the hour and we will continue to do so… And now, here’s some more Carlos Santana.”

  O’Gregg hit the turntable control button and the first strains of Spanish-tinged electric guitar filled the small PDC radio studio. He lowered the in-studio volume and poured he and his partner another coffee.

  “There you go, boys,” Masoni said. “Mission accomplished. By the way, we’ve got to stay on the java until we get off the air, but you guys can lift a beer before you go.”

  Tyler and Baxter looked at each other and shrugged. “Better not,” Tyler said. “We’ve still got some night flying to do.”

  Masoni laughed and reached into his cooler. “Well, here,” he said, retrieving two cold ones. “Take a couple for the road.”

  Chapter 49

  ELIZABETH HAD HELPED KRUPP hide the body.

  They tried putting it into a steamer trunk first, but it was already stiffening and refused to fit. Instead they squeezed it into the command truck’s Lilliputian lavatory. She left cleaning up the body’s leftover mess to Krupp.

  Now that this gory detail was attended to, they sat at the truck’s small table and their strange plotting session continued once again.

  “This is actually a wonderful coincidence,” Elizabeth told him. “It eliminates one big problem for us.”

  Krupp ran his fingers through his hair. “Udet just didn’t understand,” he said, looking back toward the now sealed-up bathroom.

  “Of course, he didn’t,” she said. “Now, let us talk it over again. How will we get a helicopter? How will we get someone to fly it?”

  “That is not a problem,” Krupp said, still not quite believing that they were having this conversation. “You see, by orders of the High Command, at least one helicopter at the recovery site must be ready to take off at a moment’s notice.”

  “But why is that?” she asked, legitimately curious.

  Krupp smiled. “It’s really ingenious,” he said. “We call it the blitz copter, as in lightning quick. It’s always ready to go in case we are attacked or whatever. You see, anytime we recovered gold from any site, we immediately loaded it on to a designated chopper. That way, if something went wrong, the gold we recovered would get out safely.”

  “And that helicopter is ready? Right now?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “No one has rescinded that order.”

  She smiled. That was good news.

  “And the pilot?” she asked. “Will he be willing?”

  Krupp started to answer, then literally bit his lip. Suddenly the expression on his face changed. “I must ask you for something,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “Before…” he said meekly. “Before Udet came here, you had… I mean, your shirt was…”

  She immediately knew what he was getting at.

  “You mean, my shirt was open?” she asked.

  He nodded energetically, wiping quickly-formed beads of sweat from his brow. “Yes…” he said. “Yes, it was…”

  “And you want me to open it again?” she asked, feigning innocence.

  “Yes, I… I would like that very much,” he answered, another nasty stream of foam appearing in one corner of his mouth.

  She laughed a little, then slowly undid her buttons again, watching his spasmatic reaction as each one came undone.

  “There,” she said when she had finished. “How’s that?”

  “It’s just fine,” he said. “Maybe open just a bit more.”

  She shook her head at him as if she was addressing a misbehaved schoolboy. “Just a little,” she said, flopping the shirt tails slightly, exposing the majority of her lovely bosom.

  He was using a white cloth to dab his sweat at this point. Elizabeth imagined that she could see a war going on inside his subconscious. So many confusing signals were being sent to his brain, he looked like he was about to blow a circuit.

  “All right,” she said. “We must move on. The pilot of the helicopter. Will he be willing?”

  Krupp wiped his mouth. “If he’s not, I’ll simply hold a gun to his head.” He pulled up Udet’s pistol and showed it to her for emphasis.

  “Very good,” she said. “And how about full? Do we have enough to get where we are going?”

  “That may be a slight problem,” he said. “I know the chopper is supplied with extra fuel tanks. Just how far they will carry us, I’m not sure…”

  “Beyond Panama?” she asked, pulling back her shirt a little more, and re-exposing one of her soft, pink nipples.

  “Not quite” he said. “But I don’t see it as being a problem. There are many places t
o buy fuel between here and the Canal and certainly south of it. Our pilots do it all the time.”

  Once again she nodded her head approvingly. And now for the final question: “And the ingots recovered already? They will come with us?”

  Krupp nodded gleefully. “Except for the two we will get from your truck, the five others have already been loaded onto the blitz copter. Orders, you see…”

  “Well, isn’t that fine?” she said. “It seems like we have everything covered? Are you ready?”

  “Oh, yes, I am,” he said. “More ready than I’ve ever been in my life.”

  They both stood up, she glancing out the window to see that the sun was about to rise. Her timing had been perfect.

  She purposely backed up against the door and not without flair, opened her shirt wide.

  “Come here,” she said.

  He nearly stumbled as he moved up close to her. She took his hands and placed them on her breasts. His breathing became so labored, she thought he might hyperventilate.

  “Kiss them…” she whispered in his ear. “Kiss them hard and tell me how much you want to go through with our plans.”

  He put his mouth to her right breast and began slurping over her nipple.

  “That’s right,” she cooed in a low voice, reaching between his legs to find the area still soft. “That’s right, keep doing it just like that…”

  Chapter 50

  HUNTER SAT AT THE head of the long table and fingered the finely-woven linen tablecloth.

  “What the hell is this all about?” he asked, turning in his seat to look up at the giant Grand Pyramid at Chichen Itza. “A banquet set up, way out here?”

  The commodore slid into the chair to his right. “It is like a Fellini movie, is it not?” he asked excitedly. “The clash of sensibilities. Of styles! There’s a surrealistic touch in it all.”