Return From the Inferno (18 page)

Jones blinked away some rainwater and stared hard at the two other men standing in back of the soldier. One was a Fourth Reich officer, his face pale with either fear or disbelief. The other man, ragged and weary-looking, was Thorgils.

It took Jones a few moments to realize what had happened. He and the dog man had taken their coma-inducing myx solutions just before dawn that day, Thorgils doing so only at the prompting of Jones's razor sharp knife. But it was apparent now that Thorgils-either by design or fate-had taken less than Jones, had come out of it earlier, and then turned him in.

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Suddenly, the Fourth Reich officer was in his face.

"We know all about you," he told Jones in threatening German-tinged English.

"And all you've accomplished in this death masquerade is that we will now have the opportunity to do it to you for real."

Less than one hundred fifty feet away, hidden on the side of a small rise, Lieutenant Bonn Kurjan, code named "Lazarus," was watching the disturbing scene unfold before him through his crystal clear infrared NightScope.

"This is not good" he whispered, carefully adjusting the NightScope goggles to his eyes. "Not good at all."

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The young Dominican priest walked slowly along the dockway, saying his morning prayers and pacing every other step with the phrase mea culpa.

The piers had the same dreary look today as they did every day. Fog, a light drizzle, and various engine exhaust combined to blanket the place in a dirty cloud. As a boy, the priest used to come to this part of the New Orleans waterfront and spend hours watching the ships come and go. It all seemed so much brighter back then. The sun splashing on the harbor, seagoing vessels of all types moving in and out, some off to the world's most exotic locations.

No surprise then that the young priest originally aspired to be a tugboat captain.

But his mother convinced him that he was too sickly for such a demanding job (he'd had bronchitis as a kid) and steered him to the priesthood instead. It only took eighteen years of badgering-and another four in the seminary-for him to be allowed to take the final vows. His mother passed on soon afterward, and that's when he started questioning the authenticity of his vocation.

Simply put, he just didn't believe he was worthy enough to be a priest.

Just like every other morning, these were his thoughts as he paced along the rickety dockway. The harbor was just as busy,

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just as congested as the old days. And some big ships still came and went. But they were not filled with sugar, rice, or oil like they were back when he watched them as a child. No, these days they were more than likely filled with Fourth Reich weapons and soldiers coming in, and a galaxy of looted American treasures going out.

In and out. In and out. In and out. . . .

It was a slow rape, but a typically efficient one.

Among the smaller boats fighting for space were dozens of shrimp boats, oyster bedders and deep-sea fishing yachts. But even seeing these smaller vessels failed to fulfill his nostalgic desires. Each one of them was skippered by a Nazi thug. Each one carried slave workers. Each one turned over its catch to the brutal occupying government.

Still even in the oppressed atmosphere that had engulfed the formerly free-spirited New Orleans, the priest knew he was lucky. The threadbare tolerance the Fourth Reich had for Catholic priests allowed him to move somewhat freely about the city, working his myriad of jobs. One concerned collecting tax money from the poorest people in the city, the ones that lived in the shantytown just south of the main harbor. Another found him teaching basic education to children between the ages of four and eight. Still another had him operating a railroad switching station in the yards north of the city.

And then, of course, he was the one who buried the dead.

Today was tax day. His prayers said, he picked up his pace and turned to the pierwalk which would lead him to the shantytown. The route was lined with knots of grimfaced NS who specialized in disdaining him and ignoring him at the same time. As always, a few civilians greeted him as he passed, some more openly than others. Occasionally, someone would press a few coins in his hand (low denomination real silver coins usually, give him a quick nod, and keep right on walking. Whenever this happened, he'd always use the money to help pay the chronically short shantytown tax bill. To do anything else with it, such as spend it on something for himself would be, to his mind, unforgivable.

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He always knew he was coming to the halfway point in his trip to the shantytown when he saw Old Pegg, sitting as always on his battered wheelchair, with enormous wraparound sunglasses tight against the bridge of his nose, a frayed captain's hat for begging in his outstretched hand.

If there was one poor soul in all of occupied New Orleans that the young priest would have liked to have soothed, it was Old Pegg. The seventy-ish man had miseries beyond words. He was blind. He was mute. He was ninety-five percent deaf. He'd lost the use of both legs years before, and his left arm always hung limp at his side. He had no teeth.

The young priest always made it a point to stop and visit with Pegg whenever he passed his way. He would first make a slight sign of the cross on Pegg's forehead, just to let him know who he was. This action would inevitably result in a wide, toothless grin and a stately nod of the head. The young priest would then sit and talk to the man about the weather, the harbor, or old mutual friends. Pegg always seemed to enjoy the visits, nodding and bobbing back and forth as he listened with what was left of his hearing.

And always, he would dig deep down into his beggar's hat and come up with a coin to give the padre. This meager offering too would be added to the destitute' tax fund.

"How are you today, Mister Pegg?" the young priest screamed into the old man's good ear after making the salutatory cross on his forehead.

Pegg nodded, I'm okay.

"Are you getting your food rations on time?"

Again Pegg nodded yes.

"Have you been able to locate any arthritis medicine?"

Pegg shrugged and shook his head no.

"I will try again to get it for you."

A big smile. No teeth.

The young priest took the next few minutes describing the nonmilitary boats passing them in the harbor.

"There are two big shrimpers out there today," he told Pegg. "I hear they're over from Shreveport. Saw an old-fashioned

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ferry earlier, too. I think it was bringing cars over from Galveston, just like the old days."

This brought an even wider smile and some merry rocking.

"Saw three more sludge barges today too . . ."

Suddenly Pegg stopped smiling.

"That makes about twenty in the past few days. They must be doing a very large dredging job further up the river. Way up I should say. The stuff they are hauling is awfully red in color, nothing like what they pull up around here."

Pegg's eyes narrowed behind the huge sunglasses. He held out two fingers on his good hand and put them together. This was his sign for twenty.

"Yes. Twenty or more," the priest replied to the silent question. "The largest barges I've ever seen."

Pegg nodded slowly and squeezed the priest's hand.

"You're welcome, Mister Pegg. I will see you next week."

The young priest walked away and found Pegg had pressed an old Kennedy half-dollar into his hand. He stared at that coin for a full minute, tears welling up in his eyes with the thought that a man so afflicted would choose to give money to others.

/ am not worthy to be a priest, he prayed silently, but I would move heaven and earth for that man to be somehow healed.

Wiping the tears from his eyes, the young priest resumed walking toward shantytown.

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In all the years before World War HI, and in the turbulent years ever since, he'd never had occasion to venture down to what Americans used to call The Big Easy, and Canadians, the Big Sleazy.

But now here he was, dressed in the clothes of a fisherman, thinking the thoughts of a spy.

He'd received this mission after relanding on the New Jersey. The entire ship was abuzz over the stunning victory the nascent United American forces had scored against the Fire Bats sub, though just how the vessel was found in such a vulnerable position was not entirely clear. However, with the action, the nuclear blackmail threat against the imprisoned American people had been reduced by a full twenty-five percent. And though brief, in the annals of American military history, the battle had to rank right up there with Midway and Kuwait in importance.

But Frost was only halfway into his first victory beer when one of the ship's intelligence officers tracked him down in the crew's mess. He was bearing another written message from the unseen Wolf, one which contained orders that appeared quite bizarre. Frost silently questioned whether Wolf might indeed have gone too far around the bend.

But after reassurances from the intelligence officer, Frost was given the set of fishy rags and put on a super quiet Seaspray helo for the three-and-a-half-hour flight to a small

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island off the southern tip of New Orleans. From there, he was picked up by a fishing boat hired for that very purpose. Then, after working the boat for three full days, he was delivered ashore shortly after sunset this day.

Now he was making his way down the famous roadway once known as Bourbon Street, avoiding the gaze of the ever present NS troopers and doing his best to mix in with the assortment of rabble moving continuously up and down the damp and dirty thoroughfare.

He was astonished by what he saw. Gone were the barrooms, strip joints, jazz halls and Cajun restaurants that had once dominated the famous street. Now they were all replaced with the peculiar Nazi equivalent of decadence. Dozens of storefronts were covered with photographs of naked women, but all being offered in the guise of "scientific" paraphernalia. All kinds of people-young, old, male, female, and a few unidentifiable-were plying the street, offering their bodies to the hundreds of off-duty NS troops. The oddest of the odd might have been the bizarrely dressed characters who were walking the streets, each carrying a goose. Frost could not help but listen in on the conversation as one of these people propositioned an off-duty NS major.

"We both fuck the goose," the prostitute was telling him in broken English, their common language. "Then we cook it and eat it."

Frost hastened his step after that encounter. Moving down the street he came upon what might have been the strangest, most disturbing sight of all.

It was on the marquee of a dingy theater on one of Bourbon's many side streets. There was a crowd of about five hundred waiting outside. The number of Nazi soldiers and the absolute stoic air hanging over those gathered told Frost that this audience was about to view the coming feature under duress.

But it was the name of the movie, spelled out in cracked plastic letters on the marquee, that startled Frost the most.

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The name of the movie was: "Hawk Hunter, Death of a Criminal."

He finally reached the spot indicated on the small but detailed map Wolf had provided for him through his staff intelligence people.

It was a deserted pier down to the south of Bourbon, a place so dilapidated it looked like even the rats avoided it. A low fog was rolling in as the tide was going out. Partially covering his nose with a fisherman's kerchief to ward off the thick odor of rotten fish, Frost stood in a nearby shadow and checked the time. His contact was due to appear in exactly five minutes.

Five minutes and six seconds later, he heard a clapping sound coming from the end of the pier. It was footsteps, one leg scraping along after the other.

Frost reached for the 9mm Beretta in his boot pocket. He was sure the person coming from the other end was checking his weapon too.

A silhouette appeared in the fog and quickly took on a distinct shape. Short, husky, a wooden leg, dragging a wheelchair behind him.

He stepped out of the shadows just as the other man stepped out of the fog.

" 'Adolph is my driver,'" Frost said.

" 'I drive Leela's car,'" came the raspy reply.

Frost let out a quick breath of relief. With the correct sign and countersign given, he knew it was the man he was supposed to meet.

"Good to meet you, Captain Pegg," Frost said in a whisper.

"And to meet you, Major Frost..."

"Have there been any changes in the mission?"

"No, none," Pegg replied, slipping back into his wheelchair. "We are to proceed as planned ..."

One hour later they were sitting beneath a dying willow 154

tree, their NightScope-aided eyes scanning the mouth of New Orleans harbor.

"Twenty just in the past few days, you say?" Frost whispered to the grizzled old sea captain.

"That's what I heard," Pegg replied, leaning against the folded-up wheelchair.

"And I saw at least twelve myself the week before. How do you figure that?"

Frost shook his head. "Who knows? It could mean anything. That's what we're here to find out."

An hour passed. Frost constantly checked that their position was still secure, while Pegg kept an eye on the end of the harbor channel.

"It's too bad about our friend, Hawk," Pegg sadly said out of the blue. "You just think that people like him will never die. We're all a little bit lost without him I'm afraid. .."

Frost almost bit his tongue, knowing Hunter was the common bond between him and Pegg. The old man had aided the Wingman in the opening phases of the campaign against the Panama-based, nuclear-armed, neo-Nazis of the long-gone Twisted Cross. He knew that Hunter and Pegg went way back. Still he hesitated a heartbeat. Should he tell the old man just what he'd seen on board the abandoned aircraft carrier?

Suddenly they heard the low moan of a tugboat whistle.

"Here they come," Pegg said excitedly.