The Apocalypse Watch

  “When I see Adrienne, I’ll tell her you are—concerned. Remember, young man, it is only the body, not the heart.”

  “You are a good friend, Fräulein.”

  “I hope to be a better one someday.” The guard named Erich ran off the landing as Elyse came down several steps and whispered to the three intruders against the wall. “Don’t kill that one. He could be of use to you.”

  “What’s she talking about?” said Drew.

  The colonel explained as Elyse continued up the staircase. “She said not to waste him, and she’s right.”

  “Why?”

  “He wants out of here and he knows a lot. Go on!”

  The fourth-floor landing was not, to use Witkowski’s words, very encouraging. A large twenty-foot archway was the open space between the wall that wrapped around the entire top floor. Presumably, it was the same for the back staircase. Two guards stood in the frame, another visible behind them, seated on a bench. Again Latham, E-One, and the colonel stayed out of sight as Elyse stepped up into view of the guards.

  “Halt!” roared the neo patrol on the right, whipping his pistol out of its holster and aiming at the call girl’s head. “What are you doing up here? It is forbidden for anyone to come up these stairs!”

  “Then you had better check with Herr What’s-his-name in the library. He called me away from the new man from Paris and ordered me to be here as soon as I could disengage myself. What more can I say?”

  “Was ist los?” yelled the guard in the rear bench, rising and rushing forward between the two men. “Who are you?” he shouted.

  “We are first names only, you know that,” replied the courtesan angrily. “I am Elyse, and I will not tolerate your discourtesy! I was instructed by that ghoul of a man in the library to come here, and, like you, I follow orders!” Suddenly Elyse sprang away from the line of fire and shouted, “Now!”

  The repeated spits of muted explosions filled the upper regions of the château as the three guards fell. The assault team, led by Drew, raced up the stairs, checking each body for signs of deadly life. Satisfied, they waited, their backs against the inner wall. “Get out of here!” ordered Latham, addressing the white-gowned Elyse, who had crawled up the steps to the archway. “You’ve got your freedom, lady, if I have to blow up the Quai d’Orsay to get it.”

  “Merci, monsieur. Your French improves with every hour.”

  “Go back to the kitchen,” said Witkowski. “Tell them funny stories about us, and keep everyone calm.”

  “It is not a problem, mon colonel. I will sit on a table and raise my skirt. They will be calm on the outside, preoccupied on the inside … Au revoir.”

  “As your capitaine said, it is definitely an unfair world,” mumbled Etranger One as Elyse disappeared.

  “Where are they?” said Drew. “They should be here by now!”

  On the narrow backstairs, Etranger Two, hammerlocking General Monluc’s aide, the garrote in place, propelled him up the staircase after Dietz and the child prostitute. They came to a stop.

  “Bist Du es, Adrienne?” said the quiet voice on the third floor. “What are you doing here?”

  “I wanted to see you, Manfried,” whined the girl. “Everyone is so mean to me and I knew you were here.”

  “How could you know that, Liebste? The posts are secret.”

  “The aides talk when they have too many schnapps.”

  “They will be disciplined for it, my lovely little girl. Come up here, there is a soft rug and we will make use of it. Did I tell you that your breasts grow more beautiful each time you come here?”

  “Kill him!” screamed Adrienne, flattening herself against the wall of the staircase.

  Two muted gunshots and the guard named Manfried fell. The garrote tightened, they proceeded to the last and final floor. At first sight the approach appeared to be insurmountable. Around the corner of the staircase there was a ten-foot archway, a single guard stationed in the center, another behind him, dozing on a bench.

  “Do you know him?” whispered Dietz in French into Adrienne’s ear.

  “Non, monsieur. He is new. I have seen him, that is all.”

  “Do you know if he’s German or French?”

  “Most definitely German, sir. Almost all of the guards are German, but many speak French, the more educated ones.”

  “I’m going to do something that may shock you, but I want you to stay calm and quiet, do you understand me?”

  “What will you do?”

  “There’ll be a big, bright fire, but it won’t last long, it was the colonel’s idea.”

  “Le colonel?”

  “The big fellow who speaks German.”

  “Oh, oui! What is it?”

  “It’s called a flare,” said Dietz, pulling out a short cardboard-covered tube from his right pocket and lighting the fuse with a cupped match. He peered around the corner banister, paused, his eyes on the fuse, then heaved it up the narrow steps past the guard’s body. Stunned, the neo-Nazi whipped around at the sound of the flare passing him and hitting the floor; before he could adjust, the blinding explosion of a thousand white-hot sparks penetrated his eyes and his flesh. He screamed as the dozing guard behind lurched to his feet in consternation, his figure outlined beyond the moving sheets of flame. In panic, he fired repeatedly with his semiautomatic, the bullets filling the narrow staircase. The girl, Adrienne, yelled in pain; she had been hit in the leg. Dietz pulled her back as Monluc’s aide, held firmly by Etranger Two, released all breath sharply, his head falling forward; he had been shot in the skull. The commando angled his weapon around the banister, his gun on rapid-fire, spraying the opening. The second guard spun around in circles, finally collapsing on the flare itself. Swirling black smoke was everywhere as Dietz grabbed the young girl by the legs, carrying her up the steps cradle-fashion.

  “Bring that son of a bitch up here!” he ordered Etranger Two in French.

  “Il est mort, mon capitaine.”

  “I don’t give a damn about his future, I just want his hand, and not too cold either!”

  In the fourth-floor corridor, the backstairs detail raced to their left, Dietz throwing Adrienne over his shoulder, the French commando dragging the Nazi at his side. Six seconds later they came to the central archway that broke the wall. Latham, Witkowski, and Etranger One were waiting. Dietz gently lowered the girl to the floor; mercifully, she was unconscious.

  “It’s nasty,” said the colonel, examining the wound, “but the blood’s not gushing.” He yanked out his garrote, and swiftly wrapped it around the girl’s leg and tightened the straps. “That’ll hold for a while.”

  Etranger One and Two had pinned the dead Nazi aide against the inner wall to the left of what had to be the electronic print-scan release, a dimly lit space large enough for a hand to be inserted, the palm pressed downward. If the imprint matched a computerized previous entry, the huge steel door would presumably open. However, if a mismatched imprint were made, an alarm would go off in the thick-walled, vaultlike quarters beyond.

  “Ready, monsieur?” asked E-Two, gripping the neo-Nazi’s lifeless right wrist.

  “Wait a minute!” said Latham. “Suppose he’s left-handed?”

  “So?”

  “The photoelectric cells would reject it and the alarm would go off. That’s the way these things work.”

  “We can’t wake him up to ask him, monsieur.”

  “That cigarette holder—it was in his left hand.… Let’s look in his pockets.” The search of the dead man proceeded. “Coins and money clip—left trouser pocket,” continued Drew, “pack of cigarettes, left jacket pocket; two ballpoint pens, right inside jacket pocket, and the suit’s custom-made, not off the rack.”

  “I don’t understand—”

  “Left-handed people prefer to reach for pencils and pens on their right side, just as someone like me, who’s right-handed, reaches over to the left. It’s easier, that’s all.”

  “Your decision, monsieur?”

 
“I’ve got to go with my gut on this,” said Latham, breathing deeply. “Move him over to the other side and I’ll stick his left hand in there.”

  The Frenchmen slid the corpse along the wall to the right side of the space. Drew grabbed the left wrist, and, as though he were dismantling a complicated bomb, he inserted the hand and slowly, cautiously, pressed the palm down on the inside surface. No one breathed until the large steel door silently opened. The dead Nazi fell to the floor and the four men walked inside. The chamber they entered was more a horrifying nightmare than someone’s living quarters.

  The massive room was octagonal in shape with a glass dome that let the moonlight stream through. The courtesan, Elyse, had called it a pharaoh’s tomb, an inhabited grave, and in several ways she was correct. It was eerily silent, no sound permitted from the outside, and instead of a pharaoh’s possessions to see him across the river of death, there was a wall of medical equipment to prevent him from entering those waters. There were eight doors, one for each immense panel of the octagon. Elyse had told them that General Monluc’s aides had their rooms within the tomb; five doors had to belong to the dark suits, leaving three unknown, one presumably a bathroom, two … question marks.

  All this registered upon second and third glances, but what first assaulted the eyes of a stranger were the grotesquely enlarged photographs on the walls everywhere, all bathed in bloodred light that shone up from the baseboards. They were a record of Nazi atrocities; it was like a dark corridor in a Holocaust museum—the horrors visited upon the Jews and “undesirables” by the madmen of Hitler’s messianic hordes, with photographs of dead naked bodies piled in heaps. Next to them were pictures of blond men and women—presumably traitors—hanging by their necks from ropes, the faces contorted in agony, reminders that all dissent, no matter how minor, was prohibited. Only the sickest of minds could wake up in the night and be instantly gratified by the obscene panoply.

  The most mesmerizing sight, however, was the night-shirted figure on the bed. It was bathed in dull white light, in contrast to the magenta-red wash illuminating the walls. A very, very old man reclined on soft pillows that dwarfed his body, his wizened face sunk in the billowing silk as if he were in a casket. And that face. The closer one looked, the more hypnotic it became.

  The sunken cheeks, the deep-set eyeballs! Both skeletal with age. The short mustache beneath the nostrils, now snow white but clipped precisely; the pale face, easily remembered as having been flushed with oratorical rage—it was all there! Even the famous twitch in the right eye that had developed after the assassination attempt at Wolfs-schanze. All there! It was the aged face of Adolf Hitler!

  “Jesus Christ!” whispered Witkowski. “Is it possible?”

  “It’s not impossible, Stanley. It would answer a lot of questions that have been asked for over fifty years. Especially two: Who really were the charred bodies in that bunker pit, and how did the rumor start that the Führer had made it to an airport disguised as an old woman? I mean how, why?… No time now, Stosh, we’ve got to secure this pharaoh’s tomb before it becomes one.”

  “Call in the French unit.”

  “Not until we make sure nothing here can self-destruct. Because if there is anything here, it’s in these rooms.… We’ll pull our pharaoh’s four other aides out.”

  “How do you propose to do that, chłopak?”

  “One customer at a time, Colonel. The doors have knobs and you can bet your ass they’re not locked on the inside. Not in the Fourth Reich, where privacy is hardly a priority in the upper ranks, specifically as Monluc—or whoever he is—is surrounded by them.”

  “Good point,” admitted Witkowski, “you’re growing up, lad, getting pretty damn smart.”

  “I’ll treasure that comment.” Latham silently signaled for Dietz and the French agents to join him and the colonel by the steel door. He whispered his instructions and the three men went to work as a team. One by one the doors were opened and closed, the beams of dull blue pen-lights crisscrossing one another while the doors were being closed. When the last of the eight had been visited, Captain Dietz reported to Drew.

  “None of those mothers will move for a couple of hours.”

  “You’re sure of that? Are they tied securely, no glass or knives or razors around?”

  “They’re tied all right, Cons-Op, but we really didn’t have to.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The commando removed a hypodermic needle and a vial of liquid from his pocket. “About a quarter of an inch apiece, right, Colonel?”

  “What?”

  “Well, you can’t think of everything, chłopak. It was just a backup.… Into the left-arm arteries, correct, Captain?”

  “Yes, sir. Number Two squeezed ’em so I couldn’t miss.”

  “You’re very big with surprises, Stanley. Anything else you haven’t told me?”

  “I’d have to think about it.”

  “Please, forget it,” whispered Latham, turning to the commando. “What was in the other three rooms?”

  “The one nearest the bed is the biggest bathroom you’ve ever seen, chrome bars everywhere so the old guy can get around. The other two are actually one room. The wall’s been taken down, and it’s loaded with computer stuff.”

  “Bingo,” said Drew. “Now all we need is an expert with that equipment.”

  “I thought we had one. Her name’s Karin, in case you’ve forgotten.”

  “My God, you’re right! Now, listen to me, Dietz. You, our Colonel Great Spy here, and E-One and E-Two, stay on both sides of old Monluc’s bed—”

  “You say he’s Monluc,” interrupted Dietz, “but I say he’s somebody else, and I don’t even want to think about it!”

  “Then don’t. Just flank him and if he wakes up, don’t let him touch anything. Not a button, a switch, a wire he might pull out, anything! We’ve got to invade those computers and learn whatever’s there.”

  “Why not use the colonel’s magic needle, Cons-Op?”

  “What …?”

  “Instead of a quarter of an inch, maybe an inch.”

  “I don’t know, Captain,” said Witkowski, “I’m not a doctor. At his age, that stuff might not be exactly restorative.”

  “So we go back to a quarter, what’s the difference?”

  “Not a bad idea,” whispered Drew. “If you can do it.”

  “Hey, that Number Two’s a whiz with the veins. I think he must have been a medic.”

  “All Foreign Legionnaires have medic training,” explained the colonel. “What are you going to do, Mr. Cons-Op?”

  “What you want me to do. I’m closing that steel door and calling in the assault unit. Then I’ll reach Karin and our lieutenant and tell them to follow.” Latham pulled out his radio, switched military frequencies, and ordered the French Etranger unit to blow out the front gates and use its loudspeaker equipment before attacking the château. He switched back to the promontory. “Listen up, you two. The French are coming in. When the place is secure, I’ll call you back; and, Karin, come up to the top floor as fast as you can, but only when everything’s under control! Not before! Understood?”

  “Yes,” replied the lieutenant. “Then you guys made it?”

  “We made it, Gerry, but it’s far from over. These people are Fascist maniacs; they’ll hide in corners just to take one of us out. Don’t let Karin get ahead of you—”

  “I’m quite capable of making those decisions—”

  “Oh, shut up! Out!” Drew raced over to Monluc’s bed as Etranger Two and Dietz prepared to fully sedate the withered old man.

  “Now!” said the commando. E-Two gripped the thin left arm, pressing the flesh of the inside elbow. “Where’s the vein?” cried Dietz in French.

  “He’s old. The first blue you see, hit the center!”

  “Mein Gott!” screamed the bedridden ancient, his eyes suddenly bulging, his mouth twisted, the twitch in his right eye going spastic. What followed caused Witkowski to blanch, his whole body trembli
ng. The diatribe in shrieking German was electrifying, the voice strident beyond any normal use of vocal cords. “If they will bomb Berlin, we shall destroy London! They send a hundred planes, we will send thousands upon thousands until the city is no more than blood and rubble! We shall teach the English a lesson in death! We shall—” The old man collapsed back into the silk pillows.

  “Check his pulse!” said Latham. “He’s got to stay alive.”

  “It is rapid, but it is there, monsieur,” said Etranger Two.

  “Do you know what that son of a bitch just recited?” asked Stanley Witkowski, his face pale. “He gave Hitler’s response to the first bombing of Berlin. Word for word!… I can’t believe this.”

  Below, outside on the road in front of the château, armored trucks of the assault unit fired their rockets, blowing apart the gates. A voice from a loudspeaker filled the night, heard thousands of yards away. “All inside throw down your arms or be killed! Come outside and show yourselves without your weapons! The government of France has so ordered and our men will sweep this château, firing on any personnel who remain inside. You have two minutes to comply with our demands!”

  Slowly, in fear, dozens of men and women walked out, their hands raised in surrender. They lined up in the circular drive, guards, cooks, waiters, and whores. The voice from the loudspeaker continued. “If any are left inside, we tell you now—you are dead!”

  Suddenly a blond man broke a window on the third floor and shouted. “I will come down, sirs, but I must find someone. Shoot me if you will, but I must find her! You have my word, my weapons!” A further crash of glass preceded the hurling out of a pistol and a semiautomatic; they crashed on the drive and the figure disappeared.

  “Entrez!” cried the voice on the loudspeaker as eight men in combat gear raced into the various entrances like spiders crawling swiftly toward insects caught in their webs. There was sporadic gunfire, not a great deal, as a few fanatic diehards died in pursuit of the obscene. At the last, an Etranger officer emerged from the front doors, a drunken Jacques Bergeron stumbling before him.

  “We have our traitor from the Deuxième!” he announced in French. “And he is as drunk as a politician.”