Destroyer - The Empire Dreams Part 11

"No thanks to you," Chiun clucked unhappily. "When I saw that you would be no help, I was forced to risk life and limb by jumping from that ?ying Hun contraption. First I made it so their aircraft would not gain alt.i.tude."

There was a hum of engines on the cliffs far above them.

Both men looked up.

Like angry wasps leaving their nest, a line of aircraft began launching into the air above the channel. There were eight of them in all. The swarm of planes collected into a tight ?ight formation and took off across the channel toward the English mainland. "It appears we were only partially successful," Chiun intoned gravely. "Hurry!"

As Remo swam to sh.o.r.e, the old Asian began picking his way across the uneven pile of rocks toward the main island.

WHILE REMO AND CHIUN were still clinging to their respective planes high above the English Channel, Helene Marie-Simone was racing on foot alongside the runway.

Her lungs burned from the long climb up the stairs. Though it was late summer, the air on the island was cold. Her throat was raw by the time she began gaining on the cl.u.s.ter of small airplanes.

Aside from a lone Fokker, the planes that remained were all Messerschmitt Me-262As. She recognized the early jet aircraft. Built during World War II, it could achieve a top speed of more than ?ve hundred miles per hour. For these planes, it would be a short hop over the channel for London.

Helene couldn't allow that to happen.

The Fokker was much slower than the others. The runt of the litter, it lagged behind the rest of the pack, its engine humming with the manic intensity of a frantic puppy.

The bombs would be somewhere between the tail section and the c.o.c.kpit. She was close enough now. Dropping to one knee in the high gra.s.s, Helene lifted her pistol and began ?ring into the fuselage of the taxiing plane.

No sooner had the second bullet struck its target than the entire Fokker erupted in a ball of ?re. The pilot threw himself out the door, his clothes ablaze. Helene caught the screaming skinhead in the forehead with a carefully placed round.

Burning, the old plane continued rolling forward down the small runway.Helene heard shouting behind her. With the explosion, someone had radioed the other aircraft to stop. One did not heed the order.

It launched itself out over the channel after Remo and Chiun's ?eeing planes.

Helene saw several men running from the open mouth of the small hangar. One remained near the door. An old man, he screamed orders in German to the group of men.

They were coming toward her!

Helene dropped into the gra.s.s and began crawling toward the rest of the planes. They were close together, their engines idling. If she could take just one of them out, she might succeed in starting a chain reaction that would destroy all of the remaining planes.

A heavy footfall dropped nearby.

Helene rolled onto her back. She saw the young skinhead running into sight above her. A pair of n.a.z.i swastikas had been etched in blue in the ?esh at his temples.

The man jumped back, as if startled to be the one to ?nd the object of their search lying in the gra.s.s before him.

In that split second of hesitation, Helene ?red. The bullet grabbed the young man in the throat, ?inging him back into the gra.s.s in a violent spurt of blood.

The angry yelling increased.

She crawled faster now. With frantic purpose. But it was no use. She had given her position away. The next men to ?nd her were not as timid as the ?rst. They fell atop her from three different directions. A football tackle.

She tried to get off even a single shot, but a knee had dropped solidly onto her wrist. Something hard-perhaps a rock, perhaps a gun b.u.t.t-slammed against her curled ?ngers. She dropped her weapon.

The group of skinheads dragged her roughly to her feet. Grabbing her arms and loose clothes, they hauled her back through the gra.s.s and onto the tarmac.

The lone ?gure was still waiting at the large door to the hangar. Even from this distance she could see that the old man's face was a mask of rage.

"Get her in here!" Hans Michtler screamed. Furious, he ducked back inside the hangar.

A minute later the engines of the planes whined back to life. The aircraft pulled farther down the runway in the direction of the building before wheeling back around. Two at a time, they began zipping once more down the strip of asphalt.

As Helene watched, the ?rst pair launched out into the air over the channel.

The French spy felt the tingle of failure in her chest and stomach. She barely noticed the surrounding men as they dragged her into the hangar.

She had failed.

The next wave of bombers was on its way to London.

Chapter 13.

Nils Schatz accepted the news from Fritz with an angry tapping of his walking stick. When they had ?rst set up shop in the small Parisian apartment, he had made a habit of striking the bronze cane tip against the bowed slats of the aged wood ?oor.

It was not long before the downstairs neighbors had complained.

After that he'd gone to great pains to muf?e the sound by drumming the cane on the rug. It had been a supreme effort, but Schatz had no desire to call undue attention to himself in the early days of this great action.Now he no longer cared. Now they were close to completion of his great plan.

Der Geist der stets verneint.

The words came to him now. Mocking him.

He banged the cane loudly against the wooden ?oor beside his straight-backed kitchen chair. There was a muf?ed shout of complaint from the apartment below.

"This is Michtler's fault," Schatz complained hotly. "Is there no one in the SS that could have handled this a.s.signment?"

Fritz shook his head. "There are few of us left, Nils," he apologized.

"Pah. How many planes were destroyed?"

"Two. Both Fokkers. The rest left the base unharmed. Although Michtler admits that he lost radio contact with three of them.

There was some frantic talk of a dog?ght."

Schatz closed his eyes. He was attempting to access stores of patience that he didn't possess.

As his thoughts roiled, he rammed his cane harder and harder in short, desperate jabs against the ?oor. A small section of the wood began to splinter, splitting away in long slivers at the force of the metal tip.

"Sinanju," he hissed.

"Surely they could not have survived," Fritz said. "They were atop the planes."

Schatz opened his eyes. He gave his a.s.sistant a glare that in his younger days had caused subordinates to release the contents of their bladders down the legs of their starched n.a.z.i uniforms.

Fritz swallowed nervously.

Schatz pointed his cane at the man with whom he had grown old in that accursed South American village.

"You tell Michtler to be prepared."

"Yes, sir," Fritz snapped, clicking his heels. The movement came so naturally it was as if he had been magically transported back ?fty years. "And what of the Frenchwoman?"

Schatz shrugged. "I do not care. Kill her." He began rapping his cane against the ?oor once more. Fritz nodded his understanding.

He started walking toward the living room, where the apartment phone was located. He hadn't gotten more than a few paces when the tapping of the cane stopped.

"Wait," Schatz called. His tone had grown considerably lighter. "I believe I have an idea."

His yellow teeth bared in an evil rictus of a smile.

HERRE MICHTLER THOUGHT it was stupid to await the arrival of men who would never come.

The two fools who had leaped atop the planes as they soared off over the channel were dead.

The other aircraft had radioed back news of the wreckage moments after takeoff. Michtler had been late to the radio, so busy was he with capturing the French spy.

One plane had crashed into the bluffs just below the end of the runway. It had ?own in too low for them to see from atop the rocky plateau. The other two were simply missing.

It was the bombs they had been carrying, Michtler concluded. They must have gone off prematurely. He had told this to Fritz in his second phone conversation with Paris, once it was learned why the planes had lost contact with the Guernsey base.

Their cargo was unstable. The pilots had simply panicked when they found two fools clinging to the skins of their aircraft and somehow had s.h.i.+fted the dangerous cargo. Boom. It was that simple.

But it was only that simple for Hans Michtler. Schatz thought otherwise.

So, because of a couple of fools who had died twenty minutes before, Hans Michtler had to deal with this idiocy.

He was a good soldier. Always had been. He followed every order given him. Whether it was shooting at Russians, hurling grenades at Americans or marching his fellow countrymen into ovens. An order was an order. Hans Michtler couldn't be held accountable for the things his superiors had commanded him to do.

After the war he found that the world thought differently.

His zeal for his work in the Treblinka concentration camp had made him a target for the various Jew-sponsored groups whose job it was to persecute simple soldiers who were only following orders.

Michtler had been forced from his homeland to the small IV village in the mountains of Argentina. When Nils Schatz had come to the other old n.a.z.is with his bold proposal, Michtler had jumped at the chance to leave. The truth was, in life there were those who gave orders and there were those who executed those orders. Hans Michtler was one of the happy few who actually enjoyed following orders. Until now.

"Your friends are dead. You know that, do you not, girlie?" Michtler sneered. He was a big, lummoxy thing. His hands were as large as small baseball gloves.

"They are not my friends," Helene replied evenly. She was strapped to a chair in the middle of the hangar. There was a wooden ?oor beneath her, stained with oil. All around were stacked piles of ordnance stolen from the deminage depots. Helene had found some of what she was after, but was maddeningly unable to do anything about it.

Michtler curled his lip in disgust. He turned to the skinheads spread about the hangar. "Has the boat moved?"

"It is still docked below," one of the men enthused.

"No one aboard has made a move toward us?"

"There are only four aboard that we can see. They have remained on the boat."

Michtler nodded. "After we take care of her, we will kill them and scuttle their boat," he announced. He slapped his big hands together for warmth, glancing at the men. "For now we wait. Pointlessly."

There were about a dozen skinheads standing around the room. They each held a Schmeisser submachine gun. Michtler was so con?dent that the men they awaited were dead that he had left his own gun on a nearby table.

The man shot by Helene in the ?eld beside the runway had been propped up next to a door that led into a small of?ce. He sat wheezing and bleeding. Someone had given him a ?lthy cloth to hold over the gurgling wound in his neck. It was already drenched with blood. His complexion had grown waxy over the past several minutes. He appeared close to death.

Michtler glanced over to the open doorway. An oversize garage door, it was wide enough for two planes to roll in and out of the hangar.

Ordinarily there was room for four of the small aircraft inside at one time. But there were two partially dismantled Messerschmitts in the hangar now. They had been scavenged for parts for the working planes. These, along with the rusted sh.e.l.l casings, left little room for functioning planes.

When not being worked on, the IV air force had bided its time outside beneath heavy tarps and camou?age mesh.

Michtler looked out at the spot on the gra.s.sy ?eld where the planes had sat idle for weeks. Two skinhead guards stood on either side of the open doorway.

Bored, he began to daydream.He pictured the planes en route to England. His mind drifted to thoughts of London. Ablaze.

It was a beautiful sight.

REMO KNEW that their greatest challenge would be to keep the Germans from blowing them all sky-high. When they had rounded the sh.o.r.e and gone back up the stairs to the plateau air?eld, the ?rst thing he and Chiun had done was to sneak a peek inside the hangar from one of the side windows. They were disturbed to see explosives stacked everywhere.

Helene Marie-Simone sat strapped to a chair beside a doltish-looking, aging n.a.z.i. The French agent was, in effect, seated in the middle of one gigantic bomb.

"That complicates things," Remo whispered to the Master of Sinanju. He was peering at the bound Helene.

"Why?" Chiun said blandly.

"For starters we've got to save Helene and one n.a.z.i for interrogation without getting ourselves blown up."

"What need have we of the woman?" "For one thing, I could use her phone."

"Save her phone, then," Chiun sniffed. "Allow fate to take charge of the daughter of Gaul."

Remo raised an eyebrow. "You're sounding more mercenary than usual."

"Sinanju has not found work from France for many years. Let the Bourbons worry about their own."

"Let's give them a freebie this time out, okay?" Remo replied deadpan. He looked back in the window. "Okay, here's the plan. We get the younger nasties out of the hangar. Less chance of their bullets setting off the bombs. Once we've thinned their ranks, we can go in after Kaiser Baldy. Does that sound good to you?"

"Everything save the part where we are to follow a plan of your design," the Master of Sinanju replied.

"If you've got a better idea-" Remo began. But Chiun was no longer there. The diminutive ?gure was already ?ouncing around to the front of the hangar where the ?rst of the skinhead guards stood. Remo had to run to keep up.

STILL LOST in his own thoughts, Michtler had just drawn up an image of the stodgy British parliament building gutted by dancing ?ames when something ?ashed across his line of sight.