Projekt Saucer: Inception Part 136

Schaeffer turned away, but Kammler looked almost bored. Nebe took his pistol from its holster and then c.o.c.ked its hammer. He nodded to his sergeant and they both approached the pile of bodies. Nebe fired the first shot. His sergeant fired the second. They took turns, bending over the bodies, the gunshots reverberating eerily while the morning light brightened. The coup de grace seemed to take a long time, though it didn't take long at all. When it was finished, Nebe turned away and gently waved his free hand.

Some men jumped out of the truck. The machine-gun barrel clanged. Nebe returned his pistol to its holster and walked away from the bodies. There was no sweat on his brow. His dark eyes were unrevealing. He simply nodded at Kammler and Schaeffer, and they walked along to the submarine.

Wilson waited until Ernst Stoll had returned, wanting to check his reaction. Stoll glanced at the pile of bodies, at the blood on the walls and ground, then said, unemotionally, 'Now there are no witnesses to the number of the submarine. We've also wired the road leading onto the quay. I think we should go now.'

'We are going,' Wilson said, 'but you have to destroy the evidence. The submarine's leaving now, since the light will show us up, but we're going to wait just outside the harbour until you get to us. Will you do that?'

'Yes,' Stoll said.

Wilson, who knew a disciple when he saw one, just nodded and turned away, then climbed down the ladder to the submarine. * * *

Having landed in one piece, Bradley marched for an hour with the 82nd Airborne Division and arrived at the camouflaged SS bunker as sunlight bled through the mist. He ran across a windblown field, crouched low, a survivor then all h.e.l.l broke loose. German machine guns and bazookas opened up, and he found himself right in the thick of it.

It was a brief but b.l.o.o.d.y battle, because the Krauts refused to give in, but eventually the paratroopers succeeded by sheer dint of numbers to take control of the bunkers.

Bradley was still with them, greatly relieved to be alive, but he didn't forget what he had come for and asked to question the prisoners. There weren't all that many the fields and bunkers were strewn with corpses but that simply made it easier to find out what he wanted to know.

'I don't know what we were guarding,' the first SS prisoner said. 'I can only state that I was disgusted to be asked to risk my life to protect an American scientist. I felt that was too much.'

'And where did the American scientist go?' Bradley asked.

'With all the others,' the SS sergeant said in disgust. 'With all the runaway generals and traitors to the harbour of Kiel. To the submarine dock.'

'When?'

'Half an hour ago.'

'Oh, my G.o.d!' Bradley exclaimed, then turned to the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division. 'We have to get down there right away. That son of a b.i.t.c.h is escaping.'

'My orders were to capture and hold this bunker,' the commander told him. 'I haven't been authorized to go to Kiel. Sorry, Bradley. Can't help you.'

'I could go out there and steal a G.o.dd.a.m.ned jeep.'

'I'm not looking, Colonel.'

Bradley hurried outside, feeling as if he was going mad, impelled by the need to fit a face to the man who had haunted him. It had been nearly fifteen years: so long that he'd turned gray and lost his wife and found Gladys... and fought a war that he was too old to fight, and become an obsessed man.

Yes, obsessed, just like his quarry, though in a different way. As he climbed into the jeep and turned the ignition on, he was convinced that he'd go out of his mind if he didn't get to the end of this.

He had to fit a face to the man whose dreams had made him inhuman.

A genius.

A mutant.

Bradley still could not accept it. As Gladys had said, he was a moral man. He believed that man was both good and evil, a creature of moral choice, and he had to know if someone like Wilson could be as natural as air.

He had to know if Wilson's lack of humanity had been formed in the womb, perhaps by his intelligence; if Wilson's inhumanity, his extraordinary lack of feeling, was as innocent as sunlight or rain, as helpless as a child being born, as alien as Mars.

He had to know if Wilson mirrored his own darker side.

'G.o.dd.a.m.n you!' he said aloud as he drove away from the bunkers. 'I won't let you stay invisible any longer. I'm gonna make you real.'

Then he drove down to Kiel, down that steep, narrow road, seeing the boats out at sea, the water geysering up around them, the bombs falling from the fat-bellied planes flying out of the clearing mist. It was the same everywhere the whole world was at war and the beautiful Earth, its clean air, was being ruined for all time. Death and destruction, smouldering ruins and flame and smoke: Man's genius, his creativity, his science, had sowed what was now being reaped. Not Man, but men, individuals, those like Wilson, and the rubble of Europe, the conflagration of this mighty conflict, was the product of scientific genius used without moral constraints or commonplace feelings.

This was Wilson's inheritance.

Bradley had to see his face, to know if evil was innocent, and so he drove like a lunatic into the docks.

He only saw the wire stretched across the road when it was too late to stop.

The wire snapped and flew past him on a sheet of scorching flame as the distant Baltic Sea turned upside-down and his body exploded. He saw whirlpools of light, heard his heartbeat in silence, returned through a sibilance, a ringing, and saw the world turning over. The sea, which had been the sky, became the Baltic Sea again, and he saw the wrecked s.h.i.+ps, the other debris of the many air raids, then rolled onto his belly and felt the pain devouring his skin.

'Oh, G.o.d.' he groaned. 'Jesus.'