The Apocalypse Watch

by Robert Ludlum

  Again, as one, the small congregation rose, and once more their arms shot forward. “Sieg Heil!” they shouted. “Sieg Heil, Günter Jäger!”

  A slender, blond-haired man of nearly six feet in height and dressed in a black suit, his neck encased in a pure white clerical collar, rose from a center chair and approached the lectern. His posture was erect, his walk a stride, his head that of a sculptured Mars. It was his eyes, however, that demanded attention. They were gray-green and penetrating, at once cold, yet strangely alight with flashes of warmth as his gaze settled on individuals, which it did as those eyes roamed from chair to chair, each recipient bathed in the glory of his stare.

  “I am the one who is honored,” he began quietly, permitting himself a gentle smile. “As you all know, I’m a defrocked father of my own church, for it finds my positions impolitic, but I have found a flock far greater than any in Christendom. You represent that flock, those millions who believe in our cause.” Jäger stopped and inserted his right forefinger between his clerical collar and his neck, adding in self-deprecating humor. “I often wish the elders of my misguided church had made my banishment public, for this white coil around my throat is suffocating. But, of course, they can’t; it would be bad politics. They conceal more infelicitous sins than the scriptures enumerate; they know it and I know it, so an accommodation was made.”

  Softly, knowing laughter came from the audience. Günter Jäger continued. “As Herr Doktor Traupman has told you, we are about to enter our next phase of disorientation among our enemies. It will be devastating, an unseen army attacking the most vital source of life on earth.… Water, gentlemen.”

  The response was now bewilderment; the congregation talked among themselves. “How is this to be accomplished, my defrocked brother?” asked the old Catholic priest, Monsignor Heinrich Paltz.

  “If your church knew who and what you are, Father, we’d be joined at the hip.”

  Laughter again. “I can substantiate our theories back to the book of Genesis!” the monsignor broke in. “Cain was obviously a Negro, the mark of Cain was his skin and it was black! And in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, both spoke of the inferior tribes who rejected the words of the prophets!”

  “Let’s not get into a scholarly debate, Father, for we might both lose. The prophets, by and large, were Jews.”

  “So were the tribes!”

  “Similias similibus, my friend. That was two thousand years ago, and we are here now, two thousand years later. But you asked how this operation can be accomplished. May I explain?”

  “Please do, Herr Jäger,” said Albert Richter, a dilettante turned politician, but with property and another way of life in Monaco.

  “The reservoirs, gentlemen, the main water reserves for London, Paris, and Washington. As we convene, plans are being developed to drop tons of toxic chemicals into those central reservoirs from aircraft at night. Once they are dispersed, thousands upon thousands of people will die. Corpses will pile up in the streets, the governments of each nation will be blamed, for it is their responsibility to protect their resources. In London, Paris, and Washington, it will be nothing less than a catastrophic plague, leaving the citizenry terrified, outraged. As political figures fall, our people will take their places, claiming to have the answers, the solutions. Weeks, perhaps months, later, once the crises have been reduced through specific antitoxins introduced into the water in a similar manner, we shall have made considerable inroads within governments and their militaries. When relative calm has been restored, our disciples will be given the credit, for they alone will know and will order the chemical theriacs or counterpoisons.”

  “When will this take place?” asked Maximilian von Löwenstein, son of the general and Wolfsschanze traitor executed by the SS but whose loyal mother was a mistress of Josef Goebbels’s, a devoted courtesan of the Reich who loathed her husband. “My mother constantly spoke of the extravagant promises emanating from the Chancellory without specifics. She felt they were most unfortunate and weakened the Führer.”

  “And our history books will extol the contributions your mother made to the Third Reich; how she exposed her treacherous husband among them. However, in the current situation, tactics are being studied, including the payloads of radar-eluding, low-flying aircraft. Everything is in place within two hundred kilometers of the targets, our specialists on the scene. According to the latest projections, Operation Water Lightning will occur between three and five weeks of this date, each national catastrophe taking place at the same moment, in the darkest hours of night on both sides of the Atlantic. It is now determined that it will be at four-thirty A.M. Paris time, three-thirty London, and ten-thirty P.M. of the previous evening in Washington. They are the most accommodating hours of darkness. That is as specific as I can be at this juncture.”

  “It’s more than sufficient, mein Führer, our Zeus!” exclaimed Ansel Schmidt, multimillionaire electronics tycoon who had stolen the majority of his high technology from other firms.

  “I see a problem,” said a heavyset man whose enormously large legs dwarfed his chair, his face balloonlike, devoid of lines despite his age. “As you know, I’m a chemical engineer by training before branching out. Our enemies are not fools; water samples are constantly analyzed. The sabotage will be revealed, and treatments prescribed. How do we handle that?”

  “German inventiveness is the simplest answer,” replied Günter Jäger, smiling. “As several generations ago our laboratories created Zyklon B, which rid the world of millions of Jews and other undesirables, our people have developed another lethal formula employing soluble compounds of seemingly incompatible elements, made compatible by isogonic bombardment prior to mixture.” Here Jäger stopped and shrugged, continuing to smile. “I am a man of the cloth, our cloth, and do not pretend to be a master of the subject, but we have the finest chemists, a number of whom were recruited from your own laboratories, Herr Waller.”

  “ ‘Isogonic bombardment’?” said the obese man, a thick-lipped smile slowly spreading across his large face. “A simple variation of isometric fusion, semetrizing the hostile elements, forcing compatibility, like a coating on aspirin. It could take days, weeks, to break down the compounds, let alone isolate them for specific counteractants.… Absolutely ingenious, Herr Jäger—mein Führer—I salute you, salute your talent for bringing together other brilliant talents.”

  “You’re too kind, but I would not know my way around a laboratory.”

  “Laboratories are for cooks, the visions must come first! Yours was in ‘attacking the most vital source of life on earth. Water.…’ ”

  “The rich and even the less affluent will buy their Evians and Pellegrinos in the markets,” countered a short man of medium build and close-cropped dark hair. “The lower classes will be ordered to boil water for the prescribed twelve minutes for purification.”

  “The accepted twelve minutes will be insufficient, Herr Richter,” interrupted the new Führer. “Replace that number with thirty-seven, then tell me how many can or will comply. Granted, the bottom rungs of the social ladder will be affected most severely, then again, that is not antithetical to our cleansing purposes, is it? Whole ghettos will be wiped out, saving us time later.”

  “I see an even greater advantage,” said Von Löwenstein, son of a Reich’s courtesan. “Depending on the success of Water Lightning, those same compounds could be dropped into selected reservoirs throughout Europe, the Mediterranean, and Africa.”

  “Israel first!” shouted the senile Monsignor Paltz. “The Jews killed our Christ!” A number of the congregation looked at one another, then up at Günter Jäger.

  “Surely, my brother priest,” said the Brotherhood’s Zeus, “but we must never raise our voices about such solutions, no matter how justified our anger, must we?”

  “I simply wanted the logic of my demand made clear.”

  “It is, Father, it is.”

  On this same evening, at a long-forgotten airstrip ten miles west of the legendary Laken
heath in England, a small group of men and women studied blueprints and a map under the glare of a single floodlight. Behind them, in the distance, was a partially camouflaged vintage 727 jet, circa the middle 1970s. It stood by the bordering woods, its cloth covering pulled up to permit entry into the forward cabin. The language the group spoke was English, several with British accents, the rest with German.

  “I tell you it’s impossible,” said a German male. “The payload capacity is more than adequate, but the altitude is unacceptable. We’d shatter windows for kilometers from the target and be caught on radar the moment we ascended. It’s a harebrained scheme, any other pilot would have told you that. Insanity coupled with suicide.”

  “In theory it could work,” observed an Englishwoman, “a single low pass as in a final landing approach, then rapid acceleration in the sweep away, staying below three hundred meters, thus avoiding the grids until over the Channel. But I see your point. The risk is enormous, and the slightest malfunction definitely suicidal.”

  “And the reservoirs here are relatively isolated,” added another German. “But Paris is treacherous.”

  “Are we back to land vehicles, then?” asked an elderly Briton.

  “Ruled out,” answered the pilot. “It would take too many large ones to be feasible, and it eliminates the spreading effect, requiring weeks for the poisons to enter the major sluice flows.”

  “Then where are we?”

  “I believe it’s obvious,” said a young neo-Nazi who had been at the rear of the group; he now walked forward, arrogantly brushing aside the aircraft blueprints. “At least to anyone who kept his eyes open during our training in the Hausruck.”

  “That’s a gratuitously harsh remark,” objected the Englishwoman. “My eyesight’s quite splendid, thank you.”

  “Then what did you see, what did all of you see, frequently swooping and circling down from the sky?”

  “The glider,” replied the second German. “A rather small glider.”

  “What did you have in mind, mein junger Mann?” asked the pilot. “A squadron of such aircraft, say fifty or a hundred, colliding above the water reserves?”

  “No, Herr Flugzeugführer. Replace them with aircraft that already exist! Two giant military transport gliders, each capable of carrying twice or three times the tonnage of that excessively heavy relic across the field.”

  “What are you talking about? Where are such aircraft?”

  “At the aerodrome in Konstanz, under heavy coverings, there are some twenty such machines. They have been there since the war.”

  “Since the war?” cried the stunned German pilot. “I really don’t understand you, junger Mann!”

  “Then your studies of the Third Reich’s collapse fail you, sir. During the final years of that war, we Germans—who were the experts in gliding equipment—developed the massive Gigant, the Messerschmitt ME 323, which evolved from the ME 321, both the largest transport gliders in the air. They were initially created to aid the supply lines to the Russian front in full expectation for use in the invasion of England, their construction of wood and cloth eluding radar.”

  “They’re still there?” asked the elderly Briton.

  “As is much of your Royal Navy and the American destroyers—‘in mothballs,’ I believe is the phrase. I’ve had airmen check them out for me. With minor modifications they can be operable.”

  “How do you propose to get them airborne?” said the second German.

  “Two aircraft carrier jets can easily lift them off from short fields, assisted by disposable booster rockets under their wings. The Luftwaffe proved it can be done. They did it.”

  There was a brief silence, broken by the older Briton. “The young man’s idea has merit,” he said. “During the invasion of Normandy, scores of such gliders, many carrying jeeps, small tanks, and personnel, were released behind your lines and wreaked havoc. Good show, chap, really very good.”

  “I agree,” said the German pilot pensively, his eyes squinting. “I take back my sarcasm, young fellow.”

  “Further, if I may, sir,” continued the delighted younger neo, “the carrier jets could drop off both gliders from an altitude of, say, three thousand meters above the reservoirs, then rapidly ascend to forty thousand, sweeping across the Channel before the radar operators could piece anything together.”

  “What about the gliders themselves?” asked a skeptical British neo. “Unless the mission is specifically one of no return, they have to land somewhere—or crash somewhere.”

  “I’ll answer that,” replied the pilot. “Open fields or pastures close by the water reserves should be the designated landing sites, and once on the ground, the gliders will be blown up while our flyers race away in pre-positioned vehicles.”

  “Jawohl.” The second German held up his hand in the spill of the floodlight. “This strategy could well change many things,” he said with quiet authority. “We’ll confer with our aircraft engineers as to the modifications of these gliders. I must return to London and call Bonn. What is your name, young man?”

  “Von Löwenstein, sir. Maximilian von Löwenstein the Third.”

  “You, your father, and your grandmother have erased the treachery on your family’s escutcheon caused by your grandfather. Walk with pride, my boy.”

  “I’ve prepared myself for these moments all my life, sir.”

  “So be it. You’ve prepared yourself brilliantly.”

  “Mon Dieu!” exclaimed Claude Moreau as he embraced Latham. They stood by a stone wall overlooking the Seine, a blond-wigged Karin de Vries several feet to their left. “You are alive and that is the most important thing, but what has that madman Witkowski done to you?”

  “Actually, I’m afraid it was my idea, monsieur,” said Karin, approaching both men.

  “You are the De Vries woman, madame?” asked Moreau, removing a visored walking cap.

  “I am, sir.”

  “The photographs I’ve seen say you are not. But then, if this yellow-haired gargoyle is Drew Latham, I suppose anything is possible.”

  “The hair is not my own, it’s a wig, Monsieur Moreau.”

  “Certainement. However, madame, I must admit it is not in concert with such a lovely face. It is, how can I say it, somewhat more blatant?”

  “Now I understand why it’s reported that the head of the Deuxième is one of the most charming men in Paris.”

  “A lovely sentiment, but please don’t tell my wife.”

  “Would anybody mind,” interrupted Drew. “I’m the one he’s happy to see.”

  “You are, indeed, my friend, but I mourn the loss of your brother.”

  “I do too, so let’s get on with the reason we’re here. I want the sons of bitches who killed him … among other things.”

  “We all do, among other things. There’s an outdoor café up the street; it’s usually crowded and no one will notice us. I know the owner. Why don’t we stroll up there and get a table far from the entrance? Actually, I’ve arranged it.”

  “An excellent idea, Monsieur Moreau,” said Karin, taking Latham’s arm.

  “Please, madame,” continued the chief of the Deuxième Bureau, putting on his cap as they started walking. “My name is Claude, and I suspect we’ll be together until the finish, if there is one. Therefore, the ‘monsieur’ is hardly necessary, but you don’t have to tell my adorable wife.”

  “I’d love to meet her.”

  “Not in that blond wig, my dear.”

  The owner of the sidewalk café greeted Moreau quietly behind a row of flower boxes and escorted the three of them to the farthest table from the latticed entrance. It abutted the bordering shoulder-high row of flowers, more in shadows than in light, a single flickering candle in the center of the checkered tablecloth.

  “I thought Colonel Witkowski might be with us,” said De Vries.

  “So did I,” agreed Latham. “How come he isn’t? Sorenson made it clear that we needed his expertise.”

  “It was his decision,
” explained Moreau. “He is a large, imposing man known by sight to many in Paris.”

  “Then why didn’t we meet somewhere else?” asked Drew. “Say a hotel room?”

  “Again, the colonel. You see, by extension his presence is here. Parked at the curb in front is an unmarked American embassy car. The driver will remain behind the wheel, and his two marine companions in civilian clothes are roaming among the strollers beyond our garden wall.”

  “He’s running a test, then,” said De Vries, making a statement, not posing a question.

  “Exactly. It is why our mutual friend here is still posing as a soldier, a most contradictory role. Witkowski wants to make certain that there are no other leaks, but if there are, he intends to take a prisoner and learn the source.”

  “That would be Stanley,” Latham again agreed. “The only chance he’s taking is with my life.”

  “You’re perfectly safe,” said the Deuxième chief. “I have the utmost regard for your aggressive marines.… Karin,” he added, seeing her bandaged hand, “your hand … the colonel told me you’d been wounded. I’m so sorry!”

  “It’s healing well, thank you, and later a small prosthesis will complete the cosmetics. I’m seeing the doctor tomorrow, after which I shall be wearing a fashionable pair of gloves, I expect.”

  “A Deuxième vehicle is at your disposal, of course.”

  “Stosh already made the arrangements,” said Drew. “I insisted on that because I want everything on the embassy record. I’ll be damned if she pays a sou for her medical bills.”