On Her Majesty's Behalf (13 page)

Richthofen wouldn't make the same mistakes, Burke knew. Unlike most of those who rose as a result of exposure to corpse gas, the German ace had not only retained full use of his mental faculties but had effectively had those same faculties enhanced, bringing his natural brilliance to near genius levels. Freeman's reports had made it quite clear that the man—­if you could even call him that now—­thought like a world-­class chess player, staying eight, nine, even ten moves ahead of his opponent at any time. Now that same devious intelligence would be directing the enemy forces arrayed against them.

It was exceedingly bad news for the Allies.

Should have let Manning kill him when he had the chance.

That decision was going to come back and haunt them all, he knew.

With nothing more he could do at the moment, Burke flipped off the radio set and went in search of his squad. They had an asylum to visit.

 

Chapter Eighteen

Ranelagh Gardens

London

T
HE PARK WAS
empty, devoid of the life that usually filled it, and as a result felt particularly desolate. Even in the midst of war ­people often gathered here, to find that sense of community that told them they weren't alone; but no one was here today. It was as if the universe understood what was to come and worked to keep the innocent from being here.

Had ­people been standing in the park, they would have heard a faint thrumming sound coming from their surroundings. The sound would have grown slowly louder, filling the air around them, until it would have seemed to be emanating from the very ground on which they were standing.

But no one was there and so the noise, and the earth tremors that accompanied it, went unnoticed.

The earth shook and then split apart, the thrumming sound filling the air as a metallic behemoth emerged from deep within the earth to breach itself like a whale on the grassy sward, the three circular drills on its snout spinning wildly now that there was no resistance for them to chew through.

Some ten yards away another similar craft burst into the open air, adding its own mechanical whirlings and clankings to the already considerable din, and then a third did the same a short distance from them.

When the drills stopped spinning, there was a hiss of escaping steam and then hatches on the sides of all three vehicles dropped open with a clang of steel. Troops poured out and set up firing positions around the vehicles, rifles at the ready.

The empty park stared back at them.

A man in the uniform of a senior NCO, or
vizefeldwebel
in the German army, appeared in the doorway of the first drilling machine. He glanced about, satisfying himself that they weren't in any danger, and then descended the ramp to stand for the first time on British soil.

He was a big man, both in height and in breadth. He stood several inches over six feet, allowing him to see over the heads of the others during routine exercises, and he had broad shoulders that strained the fit of his uniform. His skin was the color of wet ashes, his veins standing out against it like lines of black pitch, thick and dark, and his once blue eyes were now cast in yellow.

Friends had once called him Charlie, but he would answer to that name no more. He was Karl Jaeger now, Vizefeldwebel Jaeger. The transformation that had altered his physical form, that had morphed him into one of the new breed of
Geheime Volks,
had changed his mental state as well. Put him in the same room with his former comrades and while he would have recognized them, he would not have understood them. Their wants and needs were so far from his wants and needs at this point as to be almost alien.

All he cared about right now was pleasing his superior officer by carrying out the mission to the best of his ability. Nothing else mattered.

His team was made of three squads of eight men each, plus one unit of several Death Hounds (
Tot Hunde
) and their handlers under the command of a hound master who reported directly to Jaeger. Two of his squads were
Tottensoldat
infantry units, while the third was a machine-­gun unit armed with a Maschinengewehr 08, or MG 08.

As a whole, the unit was armed heavily enough to deal with anything from a company on down but still light enough that they could make good time in their pursuit of the Americans. Satisfied that his men were getting sorted out properly, Jaeger turned his attention to their current location.

He knew right away that they were not where they were supposed to be; if they had been, he would be looking out across a lawn of well-­kept grass to the wall of Buckingham Palace. Instead, he was staring at footpaths and flower patches.

“Navigator!” he barked.

A moment later a man wearing a white lab coat over an engineer's jumpsuit and boots stuck his head out the door of the drilling machine. He had a pair of goggles pushed back on his forehead over thick, unruly hair, making him look like he'd just woken up.

“Sir?”

“I want to know where we are, Navigator. And I want that information yesterday, do you understand?”

“Ja,
Vizefeldwebel.
At once.”

The man disappeared for a moment back down inside the depths of the drilling machine and then returned with a black case in one hand and a rolled-­up map in the other. From inside the case he withdrew an auto-­sextant, wound it up, and then set it on the ground in a wide patch of sunlight. The clockwork mechanisms that controlled the device went to work, moving the viewfinder and sighting scope and then calculating their present position from the measurements taken. When the machine stopped, the navigator checked the position noted against the map of London in his hands.

“We're more than a mile south of our intended destination,
Vizefeldwebel
. According to my readings, we are in a place called Ranelagh Gardens.”

The name meant nothing to Jaeger, just another location on the map. But that location allowed him to triangulate on his destination and determine how much longer it was going to take to get there.

The kaiser wanted the stone recovered as quickly as possible; he intended to deliver on that desire.

He turned to the soldiers standing nearby. “Release the hounds,” he ordered.

A few minutes later he watched as half a dozen of the strange, twisted creatures were led up from the storage units down in the hold. He checked their control harnesses himself, not wanting any of them to fail over a trivial issue, and then signaled to the controller that they were ready.

Commands were given, doses of the gas topped off inside their masks, and then the hounds were released to hunt those they had come here to find.

As he watched them slink sinuously away into the trees at the edge of the park, Vizefeldwebel Jaeger smiled to himself.

Wouldn't be long before they had the stone, and the princess, in hand.

 

Chapter Nineteen

Beneath Westminster Bridge

London

T
HE SQUA
D REPLENISHED
their ammunition, packed some extra food to take with them, and filled their canteens with water from the boat. It was midafternoon and Burke fully expected to be back to the sub before dark, but they didn't know what condition any survivors they discovered at Bedlam might be in and it seemed prudent to have something to offer if the need arose.

After a quick lunch consisting of bread, cheese, and hard salami eaten on the deck of the
Reliant,
Burke and his team clambered back into their inflatable dinghy and pushed off from the submarine for a second time that day. This time, however, they were headed for the opposite side of the Thames.

They hid the boat in the shadows beneath Westminster Bridge and got under way as swiftly as possible, not wanting to linger in any one location very long. Due to the nearness of Waterloo Station, one of London's largest railway terminuses, this side of the river had suffered as much heavy bombing as the other. Many of the buildings along the river were in ruins, and more than once they could see corpses lying among the rubble.

It was less than a mile to Bedlam and they saw only a single shredder, easily dispatched, during that entire distance. The reason for this was only made clear when they arrived at their destination.

Bedlam Hospital was a long, three-­story building with a towerlike structure at either end and a colonnaded entrance with a soaring domed roof in the very center. The entire property was walled off from the surrounding neighborhood by an eight-­foot brick wall along the front and sides and a cast-­iron fence with a small gate in the back. Sergeant Drummond explained that brick walls had also been used to separate the grounds inside the fence into individual courtyards for use as “airing yards” for the patients and a garden for the staff. A larger, more prominent garden stretched out from the colonnade surrounding the main entrance to the front gate.

They had hoped to slip in through the back gate and gain entry to the hospital from the rear, but a quick bit of reconnaissance showed that entrance to be blocked by a milling crowd of more than three dozen shredders. The front entrance wasn't much better; shredders pressed against the doors with single-­minded determination and the never-­ending hunger of the undead.

Drummond cursed at the sight.

Burke, however, was a bit more upbeat about their presence. “Look at it this way, Sergeant. This many shredders is a good indication there's still someone alive in there.”

All they had to do now was figure out a way to get them out.

The squad hunkered down amid the ruins of a doctor's office across the street from the western wing of the hospital and tried to come up with a plan. Drummond had been to Bedlam several times in the past with the Queen, so Burke had him draw a rough map to allow him to better visualize the place. It wasn't perfect, and nowhere close to scale, but it would have to do.

After studying it for a moment, Burke decided that a full frontal assault was out of the question. Although they had enough arms and ammunition to make short work of the shredders crowding the entrance, the noise they would generate would simply bring more of them running. The same held true for any attempt to get in through the back gate. What they needed was a spot where they could go over the wall and reach the main structure quickly enough that the shredders wouldn't have time to do anything about it.

“What about here?” Burke said, pointing to a spot about midway along the western wall where the building seemed to come quite close to the edge of the property. “Is there a way into the tower if we climb over the wall at this point?”

Drummond thought about it for a moment before eventually nodding. “I haven't been inside for a while, but I think that's the wing for female patients. If so, there's a small courtyard on the other side of the wall that's only accessible from the offices at the end of the ward.”

That should do the trick,
Burke thought.

While there was usually safety in numbers, in this case he thought a smaller group might give them the best chance of success. They wouldn't have as much firepower at their disposal, but they'd be able to move a bit quicker and a whole lot quieter, two things that would come in handy if they had to evade a pack of shredders.

“All right, here's what we're going to do . . .”

B
URKE RAN ALONG
the outside of the brick wall surrounding the hospital grounds with Sergeant Drummond and Doc Bankowski on his heels. The ground here was free of undergrowth and the soft earth beneath their boots did a good job of absorbing the sound of their footfalls. Once or twice he thought he heard a shredder moving about on the other side of the barrier, but without being able to see over it, there was no way to know for sure.

When he drew opposite the tower marking the end of the building, Burke came to a stop and leaned his left side against the wall. Lacing his fingers together to form a cradle, he bent slightly, braced his feet, and then turned to nod at Drummond.

The British sergeant took a ­couple of steps forward, put his foot into the makeshift stirrup Burke had created, and then used that plus the momentum Burke imparted to him to spring upward and grasp the top of the wall several feet above their heads. Burke steadied the man's feet until Drummond could get a solid grip and pull himself up to straddle the wall.

“Clear,” Drummond called down.

They repeated the process with Doc, though he had it a bit easier than Drummond since the other man was in a position to help pull him up. The two men then straddled the wall and extended a hand down for Burke.

He needed a running start to vault himself high enough to catch them both about the wrists, but once he had, it was a simple matter for them to pull him the rest of the way to sit between them.

Drummond had been right; the section of the wall on which they now sat looked down on a small, isolated courtyard that backed up to the end of the west wing of the main building. The yard was empty and the building didn't offer much in the way of clues as to what the conditions inside would be like for there were no windows on this level, only a single door hanging sagging in its frame.

Burke had left Corporal Williams in charge in his absence, with orders to wait two hours for their return. If they weren't back by then, he was to get the rest of the squad back to the boat and report to Colonel Nichols. Jones had protested against leaving him behind, but Burke had been adamant. Bedlam was only so big; if they weren't back in two hours, they weren't coming back.

He'd have preferred to leave Drummond in charge, as he clearly outranked all the others except the major himself, but Burke needed his knowledge of the hospital's interior and couldn't spare him. Burke had a quiet word with Jones before leaving as well, telling the other man that he was counting on him to get the squad back in one piece under Williams's leadership if Burke and the others didn't make it. Jones had sworn on his mother's grave that he would.

Anticipating that those inside Bedlam might be in need of a doctor, Burke had asked Doc Bankowski to join their party and the three men had then set off, conscious that the day was growing later and wanting to be back on the river before sundown.

With that thought still playing out in his head, Burke swung his legs over and dropped to the ground on the other side of the wall.

Behind him, first Sergeant Drummond and then Doc Bankowski followed suit.

Burke advanced slowly, his Tommy gun in hand and ready at a moment's notice should he need it. Due to the way the light struck the side of the building, he couldn't see inside the partially opened door in front of him and that worried him a bit. A dozen of the things could be waiting just beyond the doorway. He might be able to handle one or two by hand, but any more than that and he was going to need some firepower, hence the Tommy gun. If he ended up facing that many of the creatures, noise would be the least of his worries.

Step by step, he continued forward, his gaze fixed firmly on the doorway in front of him.

He was halfway across the courtyard when the first of the shredders reared its head.

It stumbled past the partially broken door and into the sunlit courtyard. It stood there a moment, blinking in the light, and Burke had a chance to get a decent look at it. Between its gray-­green flesh, its bulky, oversized straitjacket, and head shorn free of hair, it was hard to tell if it had been a man or a woman. Burke supposed it didn't really matter; given its transformation, all it would ever be now was hungry.

The straitjacket was a dead giveaway that this had once been a patient rather than a member of the staff, which made Burke wonder just how many more of them were loose inside the building. He'd been hoping they wouldn't have to fight for every inch inside the place, but that might have been wishful thinking.

A few seconds passed and finally the creature's cerebral processes caught up with what its eyes were seeing as it focused on Burke. It opened its mouth, let loose some kind of strange half groan that sounded like it was gargling with fist-­sized rocks, and then it rushed toward him on unnaturally agile feet.

The major sized up the threat the creature posed with a single look; with its arms buckled behind its back, it couldn't do anything but try to sink its teeth into him. If he could get it on the ground, he shouldn't have too much trouble pinning it down while waiting for one of the others to step up and finish it off with a quick smack of their gun butt.

It was a plan he was perfectly happy with until he looked over its shoulder and saw the swarm of other shredders pouring out of the doorway after it.