The Red Eagles (18 page)

“If you take off the handcuffs, I could help,” she said, fighting to keep her voice steady.

He didn’t even seem to hear. She felt him tugging at her skirt, pulling it below her knees, felt a drop of moisture fall on her bare thigh. He was dribbling uncontrollably, a glistening of tears in his eyes.

She closed hers, heard an inhuman gurgle, and almost fainted. But suddenly the hands disappeared, his head jerked back violently, blood spurting as Paul wrenched the barbed wire tight across his throat. It seemed to go on silently forever, then he let the body down onto the bed and lifted her up, and she sobbed into his shoulder. “Paul, Paul …”

“Ssshhh,” he murmured in her ear, and they sat for a moment in silence, her body quivering as the tension dissolved. Then he stood her up, pulled up her skirt and fastened the belt, replaced her brassiere and buttoned her blouse with a doctor’s detachment. He went through the dead man’s pockets, but there were no keys for her handcuffs.

He gestured for her to stay where she was and went through into the sheriff’s kitchen. There was a sharp hunting knife hanging on the wall, but it wasn’t a weapon for throwing.

He went back past her to the top of the stairs, crawling forward to extend his view of the office below, but all he could see was the corner of a desk, the bottom of the open street door, and floorboards. He lay there thinking. He could go down with the dead man’s rifle, probably get the sheriff, and if Gerd was still conscious they’d manage the other man between them. But the whole town would be awake, the camper’s tire still wasn’t fixed, and the crates were still in the camper. He couldn’t fire the gun.

The sheriff didn’t know that, though.

He felt a tug at his ankle, turned, and found Amy sitting behind him. She indicated with her head for him to follow her back into the room, then whispered in his ear. “The sheriff told this one to behave himself. If I make noises as if he isn’t, maybe he’ll come up.”

“Maybe he’ll call his man down,” Paul whispered back.

She shrugged. “And when he doesn’t come?”

“Okay.”

She got back on the bed. “Please, no,” she said in a trembling voice. “Please don’t” – this time louder.

“Jesse, whatever you’re doing, don’t,” the man downstairs shouted up.

Amy groaned, a long shuddering groan that seemed to go on and on.

“Jesse!”

“Aw, let him have some fun,” Jake shouted.

“Yeah, and you’ll explain it all to the Feds, I suppose. Jesse, answer me!”

“Come and get the pig off me,” she sobbed.

“Jake,” they heard the sheriff say, “go up and bring ’em down here.”

Paul took up position behind the door, the hunting knife held in his hand like a brush, as if he were about to cut a line on a wall. They could hear Jake tramping up the stairs, and Amy began to groan again as he opened the door. “Jesse …”
he began, then the knife slit his throat from ear to ear, splashing blood down his bare chest.

Paul lowered him silently to the floor, picked up his rifle, and signaled Amy to walk in front of him. As they began their descent the sheriff glanced up at her, still handcuffed, then resumed his watch on the door.

“Put the rifle down, Sheriff,” Paul said softly, and the man’s head jerked around, his mouth dropping in disbelief. He laid the rifle down on the desk in front of him.

“Throw the keys for the handcuffs onto the floor over there.”

“You …”

“Shut up. I don’t want to use this gun – it’ll wake up the whole town – but if you’re going to do that anyway, then it won’t make much difference … The keys.”

He reached into his shirt pocket, threw them where he’d been told. Paul unlocked Amy’s handcuffs with one hand, holding the rifle aimed at the sheriff with the other.

“Let’s go and get our friend,” he said, pointing the sheriff toward the door that led through to the cells.

Gerd was waiting for them. “You took your time,” he said.

Paul unlocked the cell, and pushed the sheriff in. “I thought you’d have started a tunnel by this time.”

“Where’s my brothers?” the sheriff asked.

“They’re dead.”

The sheriff sat down on the bunk, his head between his hands.

“We have to talk,” said Amy from the next cell. She’d been examining Kuznetsky, who was still unconscious but seemed to be breathing regularly. “But not in front of him,” she said, reappearing and nodding in the sheriff’s direction. “And we’d better get the lights out.”

Without waiting for an answer, she walked through to the office and up the stairs. Her feet faltered at the top, but she went on in, ignoring the two corpses. When she came back down Gerd was fixing the “Gone Fishing” sign back in the
door window. Paul came through from the cells, switching off the office lights.

“There’s something you don’t know, Paul,” Amy said, grateful that she couldn’t see his face in the dark. She told him what she’d told Gerd back on the road.

“And this was Berlin’s plan from the beginning?” he asked bitterly.

“Yes.”

“And the sixty men on the U-boat?”

She said nothing.

“The bastards.”

“We never thought they were saints,” Gerd said. “Or even normal people, come to think of it. Anyway, we’re stuck with the plan. And no matter what we think of the bastards, we’ve still got to get out of this country.”

“How long to change the tyre?” Amy asked Gerd.

“Ten more minutes. I’ll get on with it.” He opened the door, looked right and left, then came back in. “We’ve forgotten their car.”

“When we leave I’ll drive it,” Paul said. “We can dump it a few miles down the road … No, why don’t we take it, use it as a recon vehicle? I can keep half a mile ahead and look out for trouble.”

“Right.” Gerd disappeared.

Amy and Paul sat in silence, each absorbed with the other. He wondered where the woman who’d sobbed on his shoulder not ten minutes before had gone; she remembered the look on his face as he’d tightened the barbed wire around Jesse’s neck. It was for the best, she thought; at least she knew now that neither of them were the same people who’d fallen in love all those years before. Or did she just want them to be different? Stop it, she told herself. Gerd was right: all that mattered for now was getting out of America, or all four of them would be dangling from nooses, or whatever it was that happened to murderers in this state.

And then she remembered the sheriff, opened her mouth to say something, but closed it again. It was up to her this time. She didn’t know why, but it was.

The camper pulled up outside the door. “You and Gerd bring out Smith,” she told Paul, and went out to find her bag in the front seat. After screwing together the revolver and a silencer, she waited for them to come out, and as they were maneuvering Kuznetsky into the back, she walked again through the office, trying to conjure up anger against this man who’d let his idiot brother slobber all over her. It didn’t work. The moment she saw his petrified expression the anger dissolved, leaving her with nothing but logic. Quickly, Amy told herself. She aimed and fired before he had time to speak or shout, one bullet through the chest, then another through the head.

The dull pops seemed to echo through the cells, and she turned to find Paul staring at her as if he’d never seen her before.

“We can’t leave any witnesses,” she said, almost succeeding in keeping the tremor out of her voice.

“Makes sense,” he said automatically.

She walked straight past him and out to the camper. Gerd was already behind the wheel. She got in beside him, heard Paul gun the motor of the convertible, and they were on their way again. As they left the shelter of the buildings she could see the first hint of dawn in the eastern sky.

Lieutenant Jeremiah Allman examined his watch by the light of his car’s headlamps. It was 4 A.M., another two hours till dawn, perhaps an hour and a half. Not that he particularly wanted to see the scene in the cold light of day. Seven corpses, one of them just a kid. And they still hadn’t found the fireman. Of course he might have been one of the gang. If it
was
a gang.

It didn’t look like an ordinary holdup: two of the victims bore the signs of execution rather than simple murder. It would help if he knew what the train had been carrying; maybe Walsh would enlighten him when he arrived from Bridgeport.

“There’s nothing in the car,” one of his subordinates called out.

“Just get the plate number down – we’ll check it when we get back. No, you might as well go back now.” When was he going to get radios in his cars? “No, wait,” he said. Christ, he hated being called out in the middle of the night. His brain refused to function. “Let me think. Check the plate, that’s the first thing. Then check the area for strangers – the hotels, realtors, everything. Huntsville and Scottsboro first, then spread out.”

Was there anything else? No. Whoever they were, they’d done a first-class job of covering their tracks. No witnesses left alive, telephone wires out, just like a military operation. But why had they left the car? Tried to turn it and overshot,
he supposed. And they hadn’t stripped off the license plates. Clumsy. It didn’t fit in with the rest.

He realized the sergeant was still waiting. “Okay, that’s it … Oh, hold on.” Another car was coming up the valley. “The cavalry,” he murmured to himself. How in the hell was the sergeant going to get his car out? What a goddamn mess. He rubbed his eyes and waited.

It was George Walsh, who was quite human for a Fed. They’d worked together against the moonshiners, with a little hindrance from the Treasury men, a few years back.

The two exchanged greetings and Allman showed Walsh around the exhibits. The FBI man whistled under his breath, chomped his gum, and scratched his ear. “Well,” Allman said at last, “what was in the goddamn train?”

Walsh looked, if possible, even less willing to talk. “Crates,” he finally said, making the most of the word’s consonants.

“Crates containing what?”

“Army people wouldn’t tell me. I pointed out that it sometimes helps to know what you’re looking for, and they gave me this.” He showed Allman a diagram. “That’s the marking on them. It must be some military secret – probably supplies of krypton. They’re flying two men down from Washington now. I’m just here to keep you company until they get here.”

“Thanks. How many crates? How big?”

“Ten. Three foot by two foot by two.”

“A truck for certain, then.”

“Has to be. No tracks I suppose?”

“Ground’s too dry. We might find something when it’s light, but I wouldn’t bet my pension on it. This was a real peach of a professional job.”

The streets of Birmingham were bathed in the light of half-dawn and virtually empty. A few trucks making deliveries, the occasional paperboy on his bicycle, and one police car
parked near City Hall. Its occupants, as Gerd drove the camper past, were deeply involved in a conversation with Paul, all three men being bent over a map spread out on the vehicle’s hood. Ten minutes later Paul overtook them again and resumed his position a quarter of a mile ahead.

They drove southwestward now, through the heart of an industrial area that seemed to Gerd more like a stretch of the Ruhr than Alabama. There were more people on the streets, most of them in blue overalls. The road passed under a series of railway bridges, then rose sharply to display a line of huge blast furnaces silhouetted against the rising sun.

“I never realized it was a place,” Gerd said to himself.

“Where?” Amy asked through a yawn.

“Bessemer. We just passed the sign. It’s a steelmaking process, but I never knew it was a place where they made steel.”

“Oh.”

He laughed. “I was a teacher once.”

“Teaching what?”

“Science.”

She pulled herself upright in the seat and gazed out at more factories, their tall brick chimneys standing out against the blue line of distant hills. “Did you like teaching?” she asked.

“Some of the time.” He lit another cigarette. “But in the end there’s only one thing science teaches you – that all truths are relative.”

She glanced sideways at him. “And isn’t that a useful thing to learn?”

“Not in a world run by believers.”

In Huntsville, Jeremiah Allman put the phone down when Walsh got back from the airport with the two men from Washington.

“Sam Benton,” the taller one introduced himself. “And this is Don Mitchell. Any developments?”

“Would you like to fill me in first?” Allman asked.

It was Mitchell who answered. “There’s a distinct possibility that foreign nationals are involved. In other words, enemy action, Japs or Germans.”

“Japs would be rather noticeable around here.”

“Yeah, probably Germans.”

“And are we going to be told what’s in the crates?” Allman asked.

“I’m sorry, but no. Not without Roosevelt’s say-so, anyhow. But it would be hard to exaggerate how important it is we get them back.”

“Fair enough,” Allman said. “Here’s where we’re up to. The hunting lodge on McCoy Mountain – that’s about ten miles from where the train was stopped – was hired out last Saturday to a guy named Joe Markham. The realtor in Scottsboro said he had a woman with him when he picked up the key, and she was also there earlier when they first looked it over. Some business associates were going to join them later. Markham had a Tennessee accent, about five foot nine, a hundred and fifty pounds, dark hair, brown eyes – do you want all this now?”

“No, just get it out,” Benton said. “The woman?”

“He didn’t see her clearly either time; she stayed in the car. Black Buick, by the way. She had dark hair, sunglasses – that’s all he saw. Could have been just a hooker for Markham’s friends.”

“They’re checking the lodge now?”

“Yeah, and we’re still waiting for Washington to come through on the car plates.”

A sergeant arrived with coffee and a sheet of paper. “The lodge is empty,” Allman read out. “Clean as a whistle.”

The telephone rang. Walsh listened, made notes, and put the receiver down with a grim expression. “You’d better get a forensic team up to the lodge,” he told Allman. “They’ve traced the car,” he explained to the others. “It
was hired by a man in Washington two weeks ago. He doesn’t fit Markham’s description – he was a big man with a Midwest accent. But he did give a German name – Doesburg. Address in New York.”

“Give that here,” Mitchell said. He was already asking the operator for the FBI’s New York Central office.

Walsh and Allman looked at each other. “Now if you were a German commando team humping a truckload of crates containing krypton, where would you be heading?” Walsh asked.

“Germany.”

“Right. The quickest way home would be through Georgia or South Carolina.”

“How long would it take?” Benton asked, standing up to examine the map behind Allman’s desk.

“Twelve hours minimum.”

“So they haven’t got there yet, and they’re not going to risk a pickup in daylight—”

“They could be going south to the Gulf,” Mitchell said, joining him.

“Why would they do that? It would add about a thousand miles to the sea journey.”

“Yeah, but they’d know that we’d know—”

“Yeah, yeah, there’s no end to that.”

“I don’t think we’re dealing with people who are relying on luck to get away,” Mitchell insisted.

“Jesus, German commandos in Jackson County,” Allman muttered to himself.

“That’s not for publication, Lieutenant,” Benton told him. “Okay, Don, they could have gone south. Walsh, work out how far they could have gotten by midday in any seaward direction and then start phoning around. Get Birmingham, Atlanta, and Columbia to put blocks on all the major roads. Tell them what we’re looking for, not what’s in the crates.”

“I don’t know what’s in the crates.”

“Right, right.” He looked up at the map again, then at his watch. “We’ve got about twelve hours to catch these bastards.”

Wim Doesburg was in the bath when they hammered on his front door. He heard Elke shout that that she was coming, stepped out, and wrapped his bathrobe around him. It was impossible. Even if things had gone wrong, they couldn’t be here this soon.

He stepped into the hall and was almost knocked over by a tall young man in plainclothes. At the door there were two uniformed police with drawn guns. “What is …?”

“Wim Doesburg?” the man said, flashing a card at him.

“Yes, but …”

“FBI. We have a warrant to search this house.”

Doesburg controlled himself. Let them search! It would take them forever to find anything incriminating.

The FBI man looked into each room. “Come in here,” he said, entering the kitchen. “We have some questions.”

Doesburg followed him. “There must be some mistake,” he said, conscious that he was parodying a thousand Hollywood villains. “What’s your name?” he asked belligerently.

“Kowalski. It says on the card. Okay, you can start,” he told the other plainclothesmen who had just appeared in the hall. Doesburg heard one of them ascending the stairs. Oh God, he thought suddenly. The money.

“Mr. Doesburg, have you rented a car in the last month?”

“No.”

“In Washington. A black Buick.”

“I said no. I don’t drive. I’ve never driven a car in my life.” What was happening? Was this something else entirely? “Ask anyone around here if they’ve ever seen me drive a car,” he added hopefully.

“Do you know” – Kowalski consulted his notebook – “an Aaron Matson of 221 Mountain Boulevard, Knoxville?”

Knoxville. Could it be Sigmund? “No,” he said calmly. “Who is he?”

“Was. He was shot dead in Knoxville this morning.”

“That can hardly concern me. Or are you suggesting I can be in two places at once?”

“Do you know a Joe Markham?”

“No.”

Someone was coming down the stairs. “Found this, Charlie,” he said, putting the pile of notes on the table. “About four thousand dollars, I’d say.”

Kowalski looked at Doesburg, raised his eyebrows.

“My savings,” he said indignantly.

“Get dressed,” Kowalski said, “we’re going downtown.”

“But …”

“Now.”

In the back of the car Doesburg held his wife’s hand, trying to communicate the need for silence. There were tears in her eyes and he realized, with something of a shock, that he had no idea how she’d react under pressure. She didn’t know everything, but she knew enough.

They were separated the moment they arrived, and Doesburg was led to a small windowless interview room. He was left on his own for several minutes, then Kowalski came in with an older, gray-haired man who didn’t bother to introduce himself.

“I’d like to see my lawyer,” Doesburg said immediately.

“Bullshit,” the man said, in a quiet voice that somehow seemed full of menace. “I’m not going to play games with you, Herr Doesburg. You know what this is about and I know what this is about. You’re thinking that we have no proof, and you’re quite right. But we’ll find some, starting with a trace on that money and finishing by taking your house apart brick by brick. We may find it too late, but not as far as you’re concerned. For you, there’s a straightforward choice. You talk now and you get fifteen years.
You don’t talk now and you go to the chair. Which is it to be?”

Could they trace the money? Perhaps. He wouldn’t want to stake his life on it. And if they had Markham, he was done anyway. But that, he realized with a flash of insight, was all irrelevant. The only one who knew his address was Kroeger, and if Kroeger had talked, then he must too. He sighed, looked across into the man’s blue eyes.

“What do you want to know?” he asked.

For a few seconds Amy was conscious of bumping up and down, but it was the cessation of motion that finally woke her. They seemed to be in the middle of a forest, and the sun shining down through the yellow-green foliage invested everything with amber light.

“We’ve been driving through this for about ten miles,” Gerd said, “so I thought it was time to get off the road.” He yawned, stretching out his arms above his head. “And I was having trouble keeping my eyes open,” he added.

“Where’s Paul?” she asked, noticing the empty convertible in her side-view mirror.

“Call of nature, I expect,” he murmured, his eyes already closed. “Wake me when the war’s over.”

She was extremely hungry. In the back of the camper Kuznetsky seemed much the same, though perhaps there was more color in his face. She took a can opener and a tin of peaches from the supply box and opened it on the camper’s hood.

Paul reappeared, his face and hair glistening with water. “Stream over there,” he explained, leaning across her and digging a hand into the tin.

The consciousness of his body forced her to move away. “You can get some sleep too,” she said.

“Someone’ll have to stay awake.”

“I’m not driving,” she said levelly.

But there must have been something else in her voice. “Are you okay?” he asked, touching her lightly on the shoulder.

“Fine,” she said. “I’m fine.” She walked off toward the stream.

Benton and Mitchell arrived in Savannah early in the afternoon. There was no fresh news from Huntsville or New York. Benton called New York and was told that they were bringing Doesburg in now. “Half an hour,” the voice promised.

It was an hour before the call came through. Benton listened, moved his finger down the coastline on the map in front of him. “Got it,” he said into the phone. “Anything more precise?”

“Where the road hits the sea,” New York told him. “There’s only one, according to our German friend here.”

“We’re on our way.” He put down the phone, showed Mitchell Ossabaw Island on the map. “Everything set?” he asked.

“The troops are lined up for inspection outside.”

The phone rang again, Washington this time. “Benton? Charleston just called us. They’ve had a reported sighting of a U-boat. Someone called in from Folly Beach – place just outside the city – said it was heading south about a half mile out.”