Sun Cross 2 - The Magicians Of Night (36 page)

“It was astounding, Captain,” Saltwood heard the little Reichsführer-SS say. “You have completely vindicated the Occult Bureau! Completely vindicated the true purposes of the SS as the spearhead of our Race’s destiny. And if you have, as you say, found a method to release the
vril
, the sacred power bequeathed to the Aryan Race from the root race of Atlantis, we will indeed have nothing further to fear from those who oppose us. I have already put you in for promotion to full Colonel and a position as First Assistant to the head of the Occult Bureau…”

“I am honored,” Von Rath inclined his head respectfully to the nervous, bespectacled bureaucrat before him. But by the steely edge of his soft reply, Saltwood guessed that Sara had been right.
Completely vindicated Himmler’s pet bureau and all he gets out of it is full Colonel? First Assistant?
He’d heard Himmler was stingy and jealous of his influence and power. How long would it be, he wondered, before the Reichsführer-SS went diving out a window for fear of something he thought he saw in the middle of the night, leaving the power of the SS like a honed dagger in von Rath’s patrician hands?

Did von Rath believe it was magic? Or were the chain of faintly clinking amulets and the concealment of the control mechanism of Sligo’s hellish device as an iron circle that, sure enough, he now carried on the head of a bona fide wizard’s staff merely cover, a ruse to approach that clever, sneaky, powerful little man on his credulous blind side?

Sara was right about the Spiracle, too. It
did
give him a faint creeping sensation. Not when he looked at it straight, but a moment ago, glimpsing it from the corner of his eye, he’d seen—he didn’t know what he’d seen—a darkness that wasn’t really darkness radiating around it, a sense of spider strands of something too fine to see floating in all directions, webbing the air…

A fragmented picture flashed through Saltwood’s mind, something driven from his memory by the blow that had knocked him out—maybe only a hallucination itself… Rhion Sligo had been perched in the darkness on his tall-legged stool, watching raptly as a ball of bluish light drifted slowly up from his hand…

But before he could think about it, he was being shoved over the lowered tailgate and walked between four guards to where Paul von Rath, accompanied now by Himmler and Goering as well as the inevitable swarm of bodyguards, stood beside a slightly smaller—maybe two-ton—covered flatbed transport truck.

A man in the clay-colored uniform of the motor pool was holding the hood propped open, and a Luftwaffe Captain reverently held Goering’s white gloves as the big Reichsmarshall poked around the engine.

“It hasn’t been out of my sight all day, Herr Reichsmarshall,” the driver was saying. “You can see yourself there’s nothing in the engine…”

The huge man grunted and straightened up, chest ribbons flashing like an unimaginative rainbow in the pale sunlight. Saltwood remembered Sara’s joke and grinned. “I’m more familiar with a plane’s engine than a car’s,” Goering said, as the driver shut and latched the hood, “but I’ll swear he’s right. Very well, then.” He slapped the fender. “Let him drive this.”

Himmler said nothing, but his dark eyes blazed with suppressed excitement, like a child about to see a show. Saltwood felt his flesh crawl.

Von Rath turned to him, his voice soft and polite, as if he barely remembered striking him—barely remembered, except in a cursory way, who he was. “You will drive the truck around the course marked by those orange flags.” They were only scraps of cloth tied to weeds and brambles, and here and there to a stake where the ground was bare. “You may drive inside or outside of them, but if you attempt to crash the fence I can assure you that you will be killed instantly.”

There were no guards on the perimeter of the field. Looking back at von Rath’s calm smile, Saltwood knew that their absence was not an oversight.

“May I walk the course?”

The Captain—
oops, sorry, Colonel now, thank you, Mr. Himmler—
considered it for a moment, one hand idly fingering the pale staff of stripped, close-grained greenish wood on which the iron Spiracle was mounted. Then he shook his head. “I assure you it has been examined for hidden devices by men at least as skeptical as yourself.”

Saltwood almost asked,
Who, for instance?—
Himmler and Goering both seemed to have swallowed the whole malarkey hook, line, and sinker. But he knew that particular piece of smartassery would only get him another smack in the mouth. So he shrugged and said in English, “It’s your ball game.” He turned to the cab of the truck.

The blood pounded in his ears as they handcuffed his left wrist to the steering wheel, leaving his right hand free to work the ignition and gears. Were they counting on him to make a run for it? It would be child’s play to crash the fence, a jolting dash to the driveway or, if necessary, cross-country to the Alt-Moabitstrasse—he was pretty sure of his way back to the house on Teglerstrasse where Sara and her father were…

The house on Teglerstrasse
? he demanded, aghast at himself.
What the hell are you thinking? You’d be GUARANTEEING your capture by going back there. Your first duty is to get your arse to Hamburg and get London word of the invasion. Sara knows that, if anyone does
.

And what makes you think you’re coming out of this alive anyway?

Dammit
, he thought, studying those beautifully smiling lips, those weirdly empty gray eyes,
what the hell has he got? Does he believe this crap himself?

“Drive three times around the course,” von Rath said, as Tom turned the key in the ignition, “and then return here.”

And disregard any fire-breathing monsters that get in your way
. He pressed the accelerator, let out the clutch, and jolted toward the first of the orange flags.

On the first half of the circuit he was taken up with getting the feel of the truck over the bumpy, unpaved ground and with scanning the earth all around him, particularly around the stakes and flags for signs that it had been dug up or tampered with. Though of course Goering had had a much better view… At the far end of the field he had a panicky impulse to crash the fence, head like hell toward the Spandau canal, but a second later cold feet overcame him. There was something wrong with the setup. He knew it, smelled it, as he had smelled thunderstorms when he was a kid riding herd and as he had smelled ambush in the dry canyons of the Meseta. He had no doubt that if he tried it, somehow, von Rath would kill him. Or were they counting on that fear?

Rounding the far turn he saw them standing like an official photograph in
Das Reich;
Goering in white and Himmler in black, with von Rath holding his iron-headed staff like some strange, glittering angel between them. Around the cars and back toward the house a shifting mill of men formed an obscuring backdrop from which an occasional face emerged—he thought he saw the pale flutter of Gall’s long beard, the glint of glasses that had to be Baldur’s. But he sensed all eyes on him, all attention on the gray truck as it moved and jerked over the rutted ground.

Then Himmler, his glasses gleaming in the wan light, leaned over and said something to von Rath, and the SS Captain lifted his hand, the crystals in the staff-head flashing…

The explosion of light nearly blinded Saltwood, the roaring blast deafening, and for one second he thought,
That’s it
… But with almost comic simultaneity he realized he was still alive and that the only jarring came from the truck bouncing over the field.
No blast effect
, but only light that turned his vision to a whirling mass of purple spots and a noise like the German ammo dumps at Boulogne going up.

The next second the shooting and yelling started, as if all spectators from Goering on down had simultaneously discovered that their hair was on fire. As Saltwood’s vision cleared a little, he saw Storm Troopers dashing from all corners of the field toward the place where the two Reichshonchos were staggering about, half doubled over and holding their eyes. Lights ripped the afternoon brightness like flashbulbs at a Hollywood premiere and someone was running toward the truck, desperately waving the iron-circled magic staff and yelling for him to stop.

He recognized Rhion Sligo.

The truck fishtailed in a cloud of thrown dirt as he hit the brake. Bullets had begun to spatter, but because of the lights still popping with gut-tearing intensity all around them, nobody could aim. Rhion flung himself up on the off-side running board and hooked one arm in a death grip through the frame of the open window—the other hand still firmly hanging onto the staff—and yelled, “Get us out of here FAST!”

Saltwood was already in gear and heading for the fence.

“You know the city?” the little professor panted, as bullets ripsawed the ground a dozen feet away and a few strays pinged off the hood of the truck. “Seven twenty-three Teglerstrasse—it’s out past the Weisensee. Don’t pay any attention to anything you see or hear…”

Seven twenty-three Teglerstrasse was the Gestapo safe house where Sara and her father were kept.

Wire whipped and sang around the radiator, then ground lumpily under the tires. Saltwood pointed to the right. “Blow the top off that pole.”

Rhion shook his head, too out of breath to explain.

“Catch it on fire, then—it’s the phone junction.”
What the hell am I saying? This isn’t even REAL
.

The pole was in flames as Rhion scrambled through the door and dragged it shut after him, awkwardly because he would not release his hold on von Rath’s infernal stick. Things were not helped by the fact that Saltwood had begun to veer and swerve to avoid the hail of bullets now spattering all around them.

“And get down on the floor. I’m Tom Saltwood, American volunteer—British Special Forces.”

“Rhion Sligo.” He raised his hand in an unsteady Nazi salute and added politely, “Heil Roosevelt.”

And at that moment, far off, barely to be heard above the chaos of submachine guns, shouting, and revving engines, rose the long, undulating wail of air-raid sirens. Tom twisted in his seat, scanning the colorless sky. Through the window of the cab he saw them, the black silhouettes of the escorting Hurricanes, the heavier, blunter lines of a phalanx of Wellingtons and Whitleys, swinging in from the northwest.

“It’s a raid!” He let out a long rebel yell of delight. “It’s a…”

There had been sporadic raids on Berlin for nearly a month, but if Mayfair had known one was due to coincide with his own project, he hadn’t said anything about it. Though the main bomber group was still far off, there must have been one overhead he hadn’t seen—hadn’t heard, either, when he thought of it—for as the first of the swastika-marked cars swung onto the drive to pursue the escaping truck there was a groundshaking roar and every vehicle in the field behind them went up in flames.

“Fast,” Rhion whispered, slumped gray-faced and sweating against the grimy cloth of the seat. “For God’s sake, get out of here fast.”

Like a cow climbing free of a mudhole, the truck heaved itself onto the Alt-Moabitstrasse and ran before the bombers like a stampede before summer lightning.

The first bombs started falling as Saltwood and Sligo hit the outskirts of Berlin. As their truck cut onto See Strasse to avoid the thicker traffic of the city center, a half-dozen yellow-white flares sprang up, dazzling in the waning afternoon light, ahead of them and to their right. “They’re going for the railroads,” Saltwood guessed, veering sharply around a panicked flock of women dragging children across the road to a shelter. “That’ll be the Settiner Station. Those off to the far right will be the Anhalter goods yards… Dammit, lady, look where you’re going!” he yelled as a young blond woman, eyes blank with terror, came pelting out of an apartment house with her arms full of something lumpy wrapped in a blanket and dashed almost under his wheels. He missed her with a screeching of tires and, in the rearview mirror, saw two gold-rimmed Meissen teacups fall out of the blanket and shatter on the tarmac of the road.

Another explosion went off close enough to make the ground shudder. “For Chrissake, they’re not anywhere
near
you yet,” he muttered, slamming on the horn, then the brakes, and swerving around a panic-stricken elderly couple in the road. “Worse than the goddam Londoners.”

The Berliners, of course, were not nearly as used to air raids—
yet
, he thought grimly—as Londoners. And it was obviously the first time for Sligo, though, locked up in the Jungfern Heide, he might have heard the sound of far-off bombs. The little professor’s face was gray with shock, appalled horror in his blue eyes behind their rimless specs as he looked around him at the panic and the rising flames.

“This is… how you people fight wars.”

“You oughta see London if you think this is good,” Tom muttered savagely, slewing through the intersection of Turm Strasse, the steely waters of the Landwehr
Canal winking bleakly through brown and yellow trees. “Or Rotterdam—what the Luftwaffe left of it. Or Guernica and Madrid, for that matter.” An explosion to their left jerked the vehicle almost off its wheels. Saltwood flinched at the roar of the blast, the shattering storm of fragments of brick, window glass, and filth that came spitting from the mouth of one of those narrow gray working-class streets that surrounded the canal locks. For a moment, the cloud of plaster dust and dirt was a yellow-gray fog through which nothing was visible, and Tom slowed as much as he dared, knowing by the droning buzz that the Wellies were directly overhead now. “I’m just hoping to hell the bridge across the locks is still standing when we get there—it’ll be one of their main targets.”

“It will be,” Rhion said softly. His hands, chubby, yet curiously skilled-looking, moved along the rune-scratched wood of the staff. His eyes were shut.

“Right,” Saltwood muttered, gunning again through the clearing fog of debris, the wheels jerking and bumping over the edge of a vast talus slope of loose bricks, broken lath, twisted pipe, and shattered glass that lay half across the road.

And by some miracle, the bridge over the Landwehr
Canal still stood, though the locks themselves were a shambles of burning weirs and floating debris. Looking across that vast span of unguarded concrete, Saltwood felt his stomach curl in on itself. Buildings were burning on all sides here, the heavy gray nineteenth-century warehouses and the massive, six-story tenement warrens of the working-class districts all around. He slowed, feeling safer in the shadows of the buildings.