Death's Head Legion (5 page)

Rucker made a mad dash for the car. He jumped on the driver's sideboard as Chuy gunned the engine, peeling out as fast as the automobile would go. Rucker tossed the second grenade at the base of the petrol pump and climbed in over Chuy.

The second grenade went off, igniting the petrol barrels and several of the embassy's cars. As they passed the
wehr-
wolf, Rucker couldn't help but notice it was getting back up despite its disfiguring injury.

“How the hell do you kill that thing?” he wondered aloud. He made a note to himself: tell Lysander about the new and improved
wehr
-wolves. Also, get bigger grenades.

Chuy turned the wheel and headed straight for the squad of guards now firing on the Mercedes. The German sentries were educated enough to know who would win a game of chicken like that and dodged out of the way. The Mercedes crashed through the front gate—a gate made for keeping people out, not in, so it opened outward—and the foursome sped off toward the city of Rome's primary aeroport.

Another explosion rocked the embassy. Had to be the underground fuel tank going off, Rucker thought.

“You know,” he said, “say what you will about the Huns—they're rude, pushy, and between Herr Hitler, Hegel, and Marx, they've given the twentieth century some of the most vile isms in history—but they do make a damn fine auto.”

“And yet all they seem to focus on is whether the trains run on time,” Terah said.

W
hen the stolen Mercedes pulled into the enormous Rome aerodrome with its scores of airship docking bays, mooring and control towers, and airstrips, two things became evident very quickly.

For one, the
Graf von Götzen
zeppelin had already launched. And for two, because of the raid on the German Embassy and the growing ranks of fascist black shirts in the Italian government, the
Raposa
had been seized by the authorities.

“Dammit,” Rucker said.

“What now?” Terah asked. “We have to get Renault away from Skorzeny and Der Schädel, but they're already airborne. And we have no aeroplane.”

“You three hang back,” Rucker said, “and split up. They're looking for us.”

He headed off toward the Lufthansa ticket agent, a blond woman with braided hair, milky white skin, and goggles on her forehead. She used a desktop Difference Engine linked directly to the airport's master Difference Engine to call up the information the man with the lopsided grin and the twinkling blue eyes had asked for, then referred him to the freelance airship master who might be able to solve his problem.

She also gave him the telephone number of the women's group home where she rented a room in Rome.

Ten minutes later Rucker gathered the other three and brought along a short man of about fifty wearing white pants, a denim shirt, a sea captain's hat, a white bandanna around his neck, and at least two days shadow.

“The
Graf von Götzen
launched less than an hour ago,” Rucker told the others. “She's bound for Romania with a stopover in Volos, the port city on the east coast of Greece. Her cruising speed is 110 miles an hour, and she's carrying about thirteen hundred passengers, including the professor, Skorzeny, Schädel, and a small detachment of guards. This is Charlie Almond. He's the skipper of the
Aegean Queen
. A Union States ex-pat to Britain who lives in Italy now.”

Almond wasn't classically handsome, but he had a striking face. He spoke with a touch of a lisp but sounded no less a hard man for that.

“My skyboat isn't a luxury liner,” he said, “but she'll carry up to ten people and she'll make 155 miles per hour with the wind to her back. We can weigh anchor in less than ten minutes. We'll catch up to that behemoth. Never say die, that's my motto. Docking Port 94. See you there.”

Something about the man said he wasn't an empty boaster. His accent said New York, but his attitude was Copperhead, by the way he swooned over Terah's southern charms. Almond headed off to his docking port.

“Fox,” Chuy said, “you take Terah and Deitel and catch up to the professor. I'll stay here and work with the Freehold Embassy to get our plane back.”

Given what they were heading into, Rucker would have preferred to have Chuy watching his six o'clock. But it made sense. They'd need their bird if—when—they got Renault free.

“All right, then. Meet us in Volos,” he said. “You know where.”

“You're thinking of Old Nick?” Chuy asked.

“Until we learn from Professor Renault where the trail is leading us, I can't think of anyone who had more contacts throughout the Near East, Macedonia, Turkey, and Romania, much less Greece.” Rucker said. “Everything in general is pointing in one of those directions. Plus, we need safe harbor.”

“He'll want a piece of the action,” Chuy cautioned.

“How is that not fair?” Rucker asked.

“If you negotiate the deal instead of me. Nicholas Filotoma could talk the pope out of his hat,” Chuy said, crossing himself.

“Right. Okay, crew, saddle up,” Rucker said.

Chuy headed out to make calls to the Texas and Brazilian embassies. Rucker, Terah, and Deitel headed off to Almond's skyboat in Docking Port 94.

Terah gave Rucker an earnest smile and nod. As usual, it confused Rucker. When she was earnest, he assumed it was an act, and she was really good at acting earnest. In one moment it seemed like the fires were still smoldering. Then she would turn in a New Orleans minute and come across as distant and cold. Was it a defense mechanism or was she just playing him, as she did so well? He went with his own defense mechanism this time. He simply ignored her. As they walked, studiously avoiding any uniforms they saw, Rucker put his arm around Deitel's shoulder.

“So,
Kurt
, do you know anything about rappelling? Or skydiving?” he asked.

“No, why do you ask?”

“No reason. Just idle conversation. Don't sweat it.”

They walked on quietly.

“I hope you're a quick study,” Rucker said under his breath.

“What was that?” Deitel asked.

Rucker smiled magnanimously. “Nothing.”

“Right.”

 

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Aboard the Aegean Queen

Over the Adriatic Sea

“S
ome historians argue that many of mankind's greatest technological advances come from war,” Charlie Almond said. “I can't disagree that they come up with new ways to kill people with each new war that governments start.”

Almond was chewing on a cigar—airship crew were even less likely than fliers to smoke, even though modern airships of the 1920s exclusively used helium now instead of the hydrogen of decades past. The brass fittings and instruments of the
Aegean Queen
were tarnished, and water dripped from a number of fittings in the cockpit. Makeshift vents in the fore and aft of the cockpit allowed a steady stream of cold air to come in while venting out the coal smoke from the primary boiler just below the cockpit. Rather than achieving a comfortable mean, the net result was that the cockpit had pockets of steamy heat and bitter cold, depending on where one stood.

“But the measure of these advances doesn't take into account the opportunity cost,” Almond continued, sounding like a textbook. “States that make war have to tax money and draft engineers and scientists for war-based research and development. This is money and intellectual capital that would otherwise be spent on market-driven, life-enhancing innovations instead of the machinery of death.”

Almond held strongly to the belief that the best example of the contrarian view—that the greatest advances come in peacetime—was the development of the modern airship.

Decades before Glenn Curtiss made the first powered, heavier-than-air flight in a tobacco field in South Carolina in 1901, the merchants in the burgeoning Western nations faced a trade dilemma. Overland shipping in both North and South America involved the dual challenges of terrain and politics. This wasn't much of a problem for destinations with seaports, but there were four landlocked nations on the North American continent alone.

Furthermore, the canal linking the east and west coasts of Texas was still on the drawing boards. A manufacturer in the Yucatan who shipped to the port of Los Angeles in the California Republic faced costly arrangements no matter which route was taken. Further complicating matters, some nations were hostile to free trade and demanded costly tariffs and tributes, or even barred the passage of goods through their borders.

Thus came the age of the airship.

By the late 1850s aeronaut pioneers were developing faster and more stable designs of powered dirigibles with both static and nonstatic frames. Advances in metallurgy—particularly among Brazilian manufacturers—produced lighter and higher strength aluminum and steel composites, while advances in the refinement of Noble gases allowed cheap and easy helium extraction.

“Soon, airships were everywhere,” Almond said. “They were a mainstay of domestic and international transportation and travel. The largest cargo airships were capable of carrying half again the load of the largest rail lines and at twice the speed. The largest passenger air cruisers were capable of carrying up to two thousand passengers, and the elite airship companies provided a luxury experience that rivaled the most sophisticated seabound cruise ships.”

It was Almond's standard tour guide's speech—well-rehearsed and recited from rote memory. Skipper of the battered old light air cruiser, the
Aegean Queen,
he felt like he was in constant competition with the growing airplane industry, and so he tried to sell anyone who would listen on the grand, stately tradition of commercial airships.

“Airships were far less expensive to build and operate than airplanes,” he went on. “Safer, too. Of course, airplanes were generally faster and less susceptible to adverse weather conditions, but the low cost of airships meant that aviation was able to spread far beyond the Western nations to the most remote and primitive of countries, further expanding trade and prosperity. And all of this was made possible precisely because of the demands of peace, not war.”

That was how the evolution of the airship and its dominance was explained to Deitel in the first hour of flight.

It said a lot about the Western perspective of free enterprise. It explained even more about how the fastest means of travel between Rome and eastern Greece was by commercial airship.

What it didn't explain at all was how Dr. Kurt von Deitel—fourth son of a Prussian
freiherr
, the second youngest graduate of the Universitätsmedizin Berlin, a boy inspired to pursue medicine by a grammar school visit from Dr. Albert Schweitzer, who told the class that, “A man is truly ethical only when he obeys the compulsion to help all life which he is able to assist, and shrinks from injuring anything that lives”—found himself dangling from the
Aegean Queen
by a slender nylon rope, fully 10,000 feet above the sea.

And yet there he was: attached by a small metal clip and harness to a rope hanging from Almond's small airship, flying about a hundred feet above and right behind the much larger cruise ship, the
Graf von Götzen,
at more than 110 miles per hour
.

From above came a familiar voice that always accompanied preposterous situations like this.

“I said increase your descent and steady yourself, Doc,” Rucker shouted over the howling wind, then craned his neck around to look down at Deitel. “Feeling alive, Doc?”

Deitel only had one response. “I hate Texas.”

Bundled against the cold and buffeted by the high winds produced by the hundred-mile-per-hour speed, Deitel kept repeating this mantra regarding his feelings about the Lone Star Freehold and the sons of questionable parentage it produced. Meanwhile, he had to hold his body rigid; the smallest movements could send him swinging or spinning. He touched the hull of the
Graf von Götzen
, immediately hooked his first anchor line to a ring, and slid the rest of the way down to where his body hugged the zeppelin. He really didn't want to unhook his rappelling rope, but he did.

Rucker landed beside him and had to shout over the howl of the wind.

“We have to get to that hatch up there and get in. Stay low and make sure at least one of your anchor lines is hooked on. At this speed one slip and you'll be blown right off this thing.”

Terah came down next. The three crawled to the hatch, Deitel fighting away frostbite and abject fear. The hatch was flush and, once unlatched, slid laterally to one side. Deitel crawled to it, and only after he was more than halfway in did he unclip his anchor line.

Rucker followed. He found Deitel standing at the foot of the ladder, his hands up. A uniformed zeppelin crewman was holding a Luger and pointing it at them. Terah was still outside the hatch—Rucker had given her a signal to stay put.

“This again,” Rucker said, standing up and raising his hands when he was down the ladder. The German was young and looked nervous.

“He's part of the airship's crew and he wants to know what we think we're doing,” Deitel said over the howl of the wind. Rucker hadn't closed the hatch.

“Yeah, I figured that,” Rucker said. Then he switched to his somewhat primitive German. “You didn't tell him about the explosives, did you?”

The crewman's eyes widened.

“The what?” Deitel said.

“Oh come on, clearly he's on to us. He must know we're with the Austrian underground, here to plant explosives on the hull as a message to the New Order.”

“Where are the explosives?” the crewman said.

“Yes,” Deitel said helpfully. “I mean—”

“Look, there's no point in us denying it,” Rucker said. “We boarded back at Rome, and we snuck up here to plant the explosives outside the hull and set the timers. Only he was too smart and caught us red-handed.” To the nervous crewman, he said, “They're in our backpacks.”

“Backpacks?” Deitel said. Rucker evil-eyed him. “I mean, yes, our backpacks.”

Despite the wind, the crewman was sweating.

“Hand them over, slowly,” he said.

Rucker pulled the pack off his back and held it out to the crewman. The crewman had to wrap one of the straps around his arm so he could keep his pistol on Rucker and Deitel. He couldn't find the zipper or button.

“You open it by pulling this,” Rucker said. To Deitel, he said, “Duck.”

Rucker pulled the ripcord on the parachute and grabbed the outlier, tossing it up toward the hatch. It caught the wind and pulled the whole parachute out.

“ 'Bye,” Rucker said.

The crewman's eyes looked like two billiard balls as he realized his arms were wrapped in the straps. The next second he was gone.

Terah finally climbed in and closed the hatch.

“Who was that?” she said.

“A crewman,” Deitel gasped. “He was only doing his job. He wasn't a soldier.”

“He had a parachute,” Rucker said. “And there's a life vest built into it. He'll be fine. He works on an airship. You just know he's always wanted to do something like that.”

Deitel couldn't help the smile that crept onto his face. They all started removing their heavy coats and protective gear.

“Now what?” he asked.

“Now we get the professor, who will get us the spear,” Rucker said.