Death's Head Legion (3 page)

Skorzeny and the guard who'd taken the chair in the stomach were just recovering. Rucker spun to his right and sprinted toward the nearest window, firing a shot to break the glass. He holstered his revolvers just before he reached the ledge and dove out.

Suicidal idiot, Skorzeny thought for just a second. But no. If he wanted to die, he would have stood his ground and fought to the end.

Skorzeny and his men rushed to the window.

Rucker had grabbed one of the ropes used to haul mortar and bricks up the scaffolding and was swinging out toward one of the conifers. He let go—still a good forty feet off the ground—and fell through the branches, letting them break his fall all the way to the ground.

Not graceful, Skorzeny thought, but effective.

Oh, very graceful, Rucker thought, coincidentally, feeling the small explosions of pain in his ribs and along his arms with every impact on every branch until the final impact on the ground. He made a point to remind himself later: just because Daniel Boone had jumped off a cliff, broken his fall by crashing through the branches of a large tree, and walked away uninjured, it didn't mean he could.

He pulled himself off the ground, almost threw up, and then saw Skorzeny and his goons still in the fourth floor window. With great pain he pulled himself up and limped off across the campus park to the side streets.

Skorzeny's men couldn't get out the door fast enough.

Skorzeny watched Rucker until he disappeared around the corner. Helmut was still on the floor, stoically applying pressure to his gunshot wound. He would need medical attention.

“Well played, Captain,” Skorzeny said in English.

As Rucker ran though the streets of Rome, he did the math. Five well-trained plainclothes killers right on his tail. Dr. Renault was in the German Embassy. Likely the trap was closing on Terah and Deitel. They probably already had Chuy.

He passed a street cart vendor making his way up the avenue toward a tourist section, and as he sprinted past he grabbed a city map while dropping a copper coin.

As with air combat, Rucker needed altitude. Altitude and speed were life for a pilot. Sprinting through a back alley with the sounds of the pursuers on his six o'clock echoing off the sidewalks and cobblestones, he scanned the horizon.
Come in out of the sun,
he thought. He vaulted atop a refuse bin and leapt to the railing of the second-story fire escape. He didn't have time to think about how he'd just smashed his finger or the bruising his knee took. Up and over the railing and up the fire escape as the first bullets struck all around him.

He reached the ceramic tiled roof on the fifth story and spun around, taking in his route and a quick glance at the map. He saw the top of the fire escape shaking as the Germans started climbing.

“Fine. I'll race you,” he said to himself.

Rome's inner city streets had an advantage—they were designed when most of the traffic was by foot or cart, placing the buildings closer together than in modern cities. He leapt across the chasm between two buildings and made his way across the rooftops, swinging down onto a balcony and running through an apartment and out to a second story lanai. He vaulted over the railing, landed in the back of a cart being pulled by a donkey, then scrambled to the ground. Behind him he could hear the Germans struggling to keep up. One was way ahead of the others.

Fine, deal with the jackrabbit first.

Turning into an alley, he came to a halt and pressed himself against the wall. As the German rounded the corner at a dead run, Rucker threw a forearm that caught the man in the neck. His legs whipped out from under him and the back of his head hit the stone street with a sickening thud.

One down. Four left.

Why am I running anyway? he thought. They had his friends and they were after the Spear. They should be running from him. At the least, he should be following them.

Rucker took off at a sprint right back the way he'd come, passing between two Germans so caught off guard it took them precious seconds to realize what they'd seen. As he rounded another corner into an alley, bullets pinged off the wall next to him.

The tailing two Germans, following the sound of the gunshots, found the alley just as Rucker was out the other end, which opened up on a wine barrel manufacturer's loading dock.

The nice thing about a .45 caliber, as opposed to the 9mm, was that it brought to bear a hell of a lot more foot-pounds of energy on impact. A shot from a Lugar or Walther, with its mere 350 foot-pounds of energy, would have just penetrated the wood of the chock that kept the line of wine barrels from rolling. A shot from one of the Webley .45 pistols, however, sent the chock spinning away, freeing four of the barrels to fall from the second story into the alley below, where one of the four Germans had just come to a halt trying to determine which way Rucker had gone.

A fifty-nine-gallon oak barrel weighs about 120 pounds when empty and six hundred pounds when full. These barrels were empty, so the German only suffered multiple broken bones and a massive concussion instead of a terminal case of flatness.

Two down, three to go.

Do the math—greenhorn or experienced, these were SD men. Getting either of those fanatics to talk would be damn near impossible. He needed one to lead him back to their rendezvous point. To do that, they'd need to think, think, think—

Got it!

The gunfire just seconds before sent Roman citizens scrambling in every direction, which separated the last three Germans. Good, Rucker thought, watching them in the middle of the street from the second story balcony of a building adjacent to the barrel maker. He whistled to get their attention, gave them a single-digit salute, took off across the balcony and leapt down to the street. He was a good fifty feet ahead of the lead German and a hundred feet ahead of the other two.

Rucker's nose found it before his eyes—a stable. Coming up on his left. Without slowing, he leapt head first and caught a wooden pillar, using his momentum to swing his legs around and in through a raised door used for the delivery of bales of hay—a ninety-degree turn with no loss of speed.

The lead German saw Rucker's detour, and motioned for the other two to hold back. He drew his pistol and cautiously peered around the main stable door into the darkened stables.

He went in alone.

The two Germans outside watched and waited, pistols at the ready, now nervous about this man who was picking them off one at a time. They heard a scuffle, a slap, the whinny of a horse, and then came a scream before a horse charged out of the stable at a full run, dragging a very scared-looking Wilhelm, whose feet were caught in a lasso.

They heard a whistle and looked up. On the roof, Rucker was holding up three fingers.

Three down. Two to go.

He waved and jumped across to a building still under construction. He started climbing the latticework and frame, higher and higher.

The Germans looked at each other and agreed—the resolved that the Freeholder was dead. One of them would follow Rucker, while the other would cut him off on the ground.

S
even blocks away, Chuy couldn't see through the blackout hood and could barely breathe. His hands were bound behind him, and the two Germans who had jumped him in the apartment breezeway each had an elbow, guiding him down the stairs, presumably into the alley behind the apartments. He felt them frisk his pockets and heard a new voice chewing out his two escorts in German. He had no idea how much time passed.

“Why do you have him blindfolded?”

“Sorry, sir, it's the usual procedure.”

“It's going to look rather conspicuous driving through the city to the embassy with a hooded man in the back, don't you think?”

When the hood came off it took a second for Chuy's eyes to adjust to the mid-morning sun. Yep, there were his two escorts. The third German—the one apparently with some common sense—was looking Chuy up and down and assessing the threat he posed.

“You managed to take him without shots fired?”

“
Jawohl
. He was prepared to resist with these, but Heinrich had him covered,” the first of Chuy's captors said, handing the man who was clearly his superior officer Chuy's
escrima
sticks and his Beretta pistol.

The officer nodded as he looked the fighting implements over.

“He's a large one. I'm not sure how tough that means he is, but during transit I want you both on your—”

All three Germans turned when they heard fast footsteps coming up the alley. Around the corner came one of their own, one of the six who had been chasing the other Freeholder, Rucker.

“Nicht schissen!”
said the soldier, whose name was Bauman, holding up his hands and screeching to a halt. The others lowered their pistols.

“Report,” the officer ordered.

“The Freeholder is dead,” Bauman reported.

Chuy had a decent grasp of German, and felt the blood drain from his face.

Fox? Dead?

How?

“Where are the others?” the officer demanded.

“Rucker managed to take out four of us, plus Kreiger,” Bauman said, “whom he injured in the academic offices with two pistol shots.”

“Where are the others, and what happened to Rucker?”

“That's why I came here, sir. I need help getting our men together—most are injured,” Bauman explained. “As for Rucker—the man was like a feral animal. He took our men out one at a time. Finally, we chased him to the rooftops. He climbed up the girders of a ten-story building still under construction. That's where he managed to knock out Gunter.”

Chuy smiled wistfully. At least he went down fighting. Tears welled up for his friend, but Chuy swore he wouldn't let these Hun bastards see him cry.

“I was on the ground below,” Bauman said, “and I saw Rucker trying to cross a wide chasm on a six-inch-wide girder. He was running and apparently lost his balance. I saw him fall but I could not recover the body without help.” The officer nodded.

Chuy, lost in his own moment of sorrow, wasn't sure he'd heard that right. What did the Hun say about Rucker?

Not that it mattered.

The team captured, Fox dead—how could they stop the Germans now?

Hun bastards.

The German officer was talking again.

“Very well. Secure this prisoner in my car. I will take him back to the embassy. You three go and recover our men and Rucker's corpse.”

All three saluted, shouted, “Heil Hitler!” and were off.

From the backseat of the officer's Mercedes, Chuy was still trying to reconstruct the conversation he'd heard. His German was spotty at best. Finally, he just asked the officer.

“Sir, if you could please just let me know, what happened to my friend?”

The officer was annoyed but thought, What was the harm? Maybe it would put some fear in the giant Negro.

“He was fleeing our agents,” the German said. “He ran across a steel girder some ten stories up. He lost his balance and fell to his death.”

Chuy blinked. He blinked again.

Come again?

“Rucker? Lost his balance, you say?” Chuy said.

“Ja.”

Was this mud-colored mongrel deaf as well as stupid? the officer wondered.

A smile played on Chuy's lips.

Emotional and hysterical. These tropical types, he thought sourly as he started up the Mercedes. No surprise they couldn't govern their own banana republics when in fact they couldn't even govern their emotions.

Chuy just sat back and waited. He saw the three German agents running to the far end of the alley and then turn onto the street, out of sight.

Any second now, Chuy thought.

Just as the German officer was putting the car in gear, a tapping at the driver's window almost made him jump. He did actually jump a half a second later when he saw the large pistol that was doing the tapping. The officer's subsequent squeal would have been more appropriate for an adolescent girl. That came when he saw the barrel of a second pistol, which looked about the size of a train tunnel.

The wielder of the revolvers—battered, bloody, and bruised, wearing a leather jacket and an insolent grin, and most notably not dead—motioned for the German to roll down the window.

The officer complied meekly.

“Howdy,” Rucker said. “How do you say ‘Reach for the sky' in German?”

 

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Outside the German Embassy

Rome, Italy

T
he German agent that Rucker bushwhacked—Gerhard Gruber, his papers said—fit perfectly in the trunk of the Mercedes, so having a bound and gagged Teutonic thug was one mark on the left side of the ledger. In the debit column, there was the fact that the Germans had consistently been a step ahead of them since they touched down in Rome.

This put the Nazis well in the lead in the race to get the Spear of Destiny. And then Gruber confirmed that agents had captured Deitel and Terah. They were jumped not long after they'd arrived at the Vatican.

Another mark in the debit column.

Rucker backed the Mercedes into a blind alley about four blocks from where the map said the German Embassy should be. A poster on a wall advertised
CYCLES MOTO TERROT
—the latest model out of Paris; the garage next to the poster was boarded up.

Rucker and Chuy opened the trunk. Gruber looked no less angry and indignant than he had twenty minutes before.

“It's time to get out,
boche
,” Chuy said, removing the man's gag as Rucker pulled out his Bowie knife. “End of the road for you.”

To his credit, the German's voice didn't crack.

“Swine. I will show you how a German dies,” he said defiantly.

Rucker shrugged. “It's nothing new to me.”

That rattled the German.

“Oh quit being so dramatic,” Rucker said. “I'm not gutting you, I'm cutting your ropes.”

Rucker kept his Webley on the German. “Take off the coat.”

Chuy looked at the German and considered.

“You know,” he said to Rucker, “we're lucky there's not a German outside Hugo Boss that has any fashion sense, and that for these Gestapo types, their idea of discreetly undercover is to dress like a heavy from a
Bulldog Drummond
comic strip.”

Rucker furrowed his brow. “How do you mean?” He opened a crate he'd found in the backseat of the car. Model 24
stielhandgranates
– potato mashers in the British slang. He shoved two into the inner pockets of the overcoat he took from Gruber.

“Of all the times we've tried this routine, has the fish we caught ever been the right size?” Chuy asked. “The German uniforms are always too big for you, what with their military service height requirements.”

Rucker gave him the finger.

“But these Gestapo and SD boys—all in the same dark business suit, black overcoat and black fedora. They make it easy. This is pretty much their uniform when they're out of uniform. And surely his overcoat and hat will fit you.”

Rucker tied Gruber up again and put the gag back on. He thought Gruber's coat fit about right even if, he hated to admit, it was too long. The black fedora was a little snug. He found black leather gloves—of course—in the pocket.

Chuy looked him up and down.

“It is a shame us never getting a full SS uniform that fit you. You'd make a great Nazi,” he said.

Rucker's eyes widened. “I think that's the worst thing you've ever said to me.”

“Probably not,” Chuy replied.

“Yeah, you're right,” Rucker said.

“Do you have a plan for getting us into the embassy, and more importantly, getting us out?”

Rucker nodded his head vigorously.

“Probably not,” he said.

“Great.”

Rucker started up the Mercedes. “Let's ride.”

But as he drove he kept fidgeting with the fedora. It just didn't feel right. He wasn't a fedora man.

T
erah paced the holding cell somewhere in the bowels of the German Embassy, rubbing the knot on her head and muttering obscenities to herself. She kept replaying the capture in her mind, trying to figure out what she could have done differently.

She and Deitel had made it through the entry to Vatican City and to the Vatican Library. While far from open to the public, it was open to established scholars who went through the lengthy and rigorous application and screening process. Such scholars were allowed limited, supervised access to historical documents, books, codices, and other materials gathered by the Church over the millennia.

Of course, Lysander Benjamin, who served as “Coordinator of Information” for the Prometheus Society, had what he called “friends” in every dark corner of the world. They ranged from royalty and prime ministers to street hustlers and prostitutes, and all manner of men and women in between. Lysander also had quite a bit of leverage on a surprising number of key ministers and policy makers in countries throughout Europe and North America. That, along with his close relationship to Colonel Henri Roux, head of France's Deuxième Bureau, had secured for Terah and Deitel an impressive array of academic credentials and no less than a “signed” invitation from Cardinal Francis Aidan Gasquet, the Vatican Librarian himself. This may have come as a surprise to Cardinal Gasquet, Lysander told them, so best not to mention if they should see him.

After Terah managed to secret three books from the archives, they were in the vast open courtyard on the south end of St. Peter's Square when she spotted the agents surrounding them. There were just enough people around—both tourists and Vatican workers—that she knew she had to avoid gunplay. She grabbed Deitel by the coat sleeve and pulled him into a smaller open plaza. She'd hoped for a recess where they could hide or a doorway through which they could escape, but it was a dead end. Deitel searched frantically for any way out. He found nothing.

Four of the SD agents entered the plaza; the fifth stood vigil at the archway. They fanned out. They didn't pull whatever weapons they were carrying, so clearly they no more wanted gunfire and the attention it would draw from the Swiss Guards than Terah wanted to endanger bystanders.

Okay, she thought, let's do this. She raised an eyebrow and smirked at the men.

The closest agent grabbed her shoulder with his meaty right hand. He smelled of sweat and sun-baked wool. In a flash, she clamped her hand down on his, grabbing the underside of his palm with her right hand and his right elbow with her left. She wrenched his palm over and torqued it upward, simultaneously pulling his elbow outward. The agent's knees buckled and she heard a sickening snap. He fell to his knees cursing and cradling his now shattered wrist.

The three agents around Terah had assumed it was just a matter of intimidating a helpless woman and her weak counterpart. Now they took fighting stances, alert and wary. Terah's expression never changed.

She didn't wait for them to move in. She couldn't engage them straight on, knowing that despite all her training in Japan, a 120-pound woman couldn't go toe-to-toe with a trained 180-pound man. Speed and deception were her weapons now. That, and her intimate knowledge of human anatomy and leverage grappling.

She leapt toward the one on her right, stepping a foot down at the last second to catch on the lip of the fountain between them—launching and redirecting her body ninety degrees to the left, straight at the middle SD man, the shortest of the three. She landed on his shoulder with his head between her thighs. Snaking her hand around his neck, she grabbed his arm, then her wrist with her right hand, and yanked hard, pulling his chin and arm in directions neither was designed for, dislocating his shoulder. Before he hit the ground she rolled away.

The remaining two SD men didn't make the same mistake as their partner. They rushed her from both sides, pinning her against a marble column by sheer weight. Deitel, frozen in place during the mere seconds that had passed, made a game try of assaulting one of the agents from behind. But it was less like he did damage than simply got the man's attention. Deitel found himself thrown head first into the fountain. Terah managed to rake one of the men's faces with her nails, scratching him deeply and cutting his eye. She drove a thumb into the other's throat, hoping to pierce the skin and windpipe. She never felt the blow to the head but saw the exploding lights before everything went black. Gathering their wounded and Deitel, the agents were leery of her even after she was unconscious.

And now they had her here. This wasn't the full-on dungeon cell she'd expected, with stone walls and a skeleton in chains. It was something much worse—a small, featureless gray room with no windows, a locked door, two chairs, a table, and nothing else. She had to hand it to the Huns—they were as much masters at inflicting psychological misery as the physical kind. There was no clock and their watches and other personal effects had been taken.

So she sat. Before she'd emigrated west, Terah had worked in the Confederate State's foreign service. For more than eighteen months she'd been a staff member at the Confederate legation in Osaka, Japan. There, she'd delighted in her first exposure to a truly foreign culture, and spent every hour she wasn't working exploring the ancient city, the people, and the culinary marvels—the city, after all, was known as
tenka no daidokoro
, the nation's kitchen. Most especially she loved learning about the practices of the ancient religion known as Shinto, the way of the gods, at the Sumiyoshi Taisha shrine. While never embracing the mythology of Shinto, she came to appreciate the practice of a number of meditative techniques that allowed her to think outside her usual patterns and to find a sense of inner peace and tranquility.

Absolutely none of it was helping now.

She let fly a string of English, Spanish, and Japanese curses that would have melted steel.

“Why don't you try the door latch again?” Deitel said. “Maybe that will help.”

She glared at him.

“
Scheiss
. We're kaput. Done for,” Deitel whispered. “They probably already have Rucker and Chuy.”

“Not likely,” Terah said.

“What makes you so sure?” Deitel asked.

“The place would be in lock-down if they had Rucker in custody, because he wouldn't be in custody,” she said. “That man may have plenty of faults, but one thing about him, you can't keep him locked up for long. I don't know if it's that he's such a good escape artist so much as he's got a horrible fear of confined spaces.”

Deitel wondered at this.

“How is it he makes his living shutting himself in a winged metal tube that's not even open cockpit?”

“I asked him that once. He says he can always get out of the plane, and there's no wide open space like the kind you get freefalling from several miles up.”

So the Germans likely didn't have Rucker and Chuy.
Zehr gut
. But it didn't help their predicament, which couldn't be more serious. Deitel, not normally a religious man, said a prayer.

“Gott helfen uns,”
he said.

But he had doubts that God was listening.

No one on the outside could or would violate the one fundamental, unbreakable law of international relations: it was tantamount to an act of war to set foot uninvited on an embassy's grounds. Dr. Kurt von Deitel was a defector and a traitor to the Third Reich. Terah was likely dead, too, since it would probably be easier for her to “disappear” than for them to deal with any diplomatic fallout. She was too dangerous to let live, and too naturally defiant to be bribed or coerced.

As a doctor, he'd long considered death his enemy. But the death he struggled against in his profession was always something that threatened other people's lives. It was an abstraction. It's not that he was a coward. And maybe he hadn't reached the age where he'd fully accepted his mortality—that one day death was something that would come for him. No, that wasn't it. He understood, intellectually, that one day he would die, but not like this. Not marched off and placed against a wall. Not shot by semiliterate mouth-breathing thugs who had no conscience or morality. Maybe it was the helplessness, the lack of control, that terrified him. Maybe it was the unfairness of it—he was barely twenty-six. He hadn't begun to live his life, and now these mindlessly obedient murderers were going to take all that away from him. They would take his life—everything he was and everything he might be.

He tried not to sob, but he couldn't help it. It just wasn't fair.

Terah put her arm around him. She knew where his mind was.

“If it comes to that, don't give them the satisfaction,” she said. “But we're not licked yet. There's always hope. I don't mean that to sound like a revival tent preacher. I mean you don't stop looking for options, because they only beat you when they make you give up.”

Deitel nodded. “You're absolutely full of the horse's manure,” he said.

Terah laughed aloud.

“We live in hope,” she said. “Maybe it's blind hope. Maybe it's denial. But either you face life thinking you can take it on or you let it beat you down, because if you stop hoping you stop trying.”

A smile crept across Deitel's face. God, Terah was beautiful. He could see why Rucker was so lost in her.

“It seems like you're taking the easy way of looking at things; only seeing the good,” he said.

She shook her head.

“Life is harder than death. Living is harder than dying. Anyone can die. It's easy. But it's just like how creating is harder than destroying,” she said. “You can be the hammer or the anvil. But it's your choice.”

Deitel took a moment to think about that.

“I wonder if that's what we lost along the way, what led us to this New Order. The easy way. It's easier, after all, to let other people make your choices for you and blame others when you fall down.”

The sentry outside opened the door then, and two Gestapo men in suits entered. Terah saw Deitel's face go white.

“
Guten tag,
Frau Spencer.
Guten tag,
Herr Schmidt. Or should I say, Dr. Kurt von Deitel,” the first Gestapo man said. His wispy accent matched his wispy mustache perfectly.