"You tell Michtler to be prepared."
"Yes, sir," Fritz snapped, clicking his heels. The movement came so naturally it was as if he had been magically transported back fifty years. "And what of the Frenchwoman?"
Schatz shrugged. "I do not care. Kill her." He began rapping his cane against the floor once more. Fritz nodded his understanding. He started walking toward the living room, where the apartment phone was located. He hadn't gotten more than a few paces when the tapping of the cane stopped.
"Wait," Schatz called. His tone had grown considerably lighter. "I believe I have an idea."
His yellow teeth bared in an evil rictus of a smile.
HERRE MICHTLER THOUGHT it was stupid to await the arrival of men who would never come.
The two fools who had leaped atop the planes as they soared off over the channel were dead.
The other aircraft had radioed back news of the wreckage moments after takeoff. Michtler had been late to the radio, so busy was he with capturing the French spy.
One plane had crashed into the bluffs just below the end of the runway. It had flown in too low for them to see from atop the rocky plateau. The other two were simply missing.
It was the bombs they had been carrying, Michtler concluded. They must have gone off prematurely. He had told this to Fritz in his second phone conversation with Paris, once it was learned why the planes had lost contact with the Guernsey base.
Their cargo was unstable. The pilots had simply panicked when they found two fools clinging to the skins of their aircraft and somehow had shifted the dangerous cargo. Boom. It was that simple.
But it was only that simple for Hans Michtler. Schatz thought otherwise.
So, because of a couple of fools who had died twenty minutes before, Hans Michtler had to deal with this idiocy.
He was a good soldier. Always had been. He followed every order given him. Whether it was shooting at Russians, hurling grenades at Americans or marching his fellow countrymen into ovens. An order was an order. Hans Michtler couldn't be held accountable for the things his superiors had commanded him to do.
After the war he found that the world thought differently.
His zeal for his work in the Treblinka concentration camp had made him a target for the various Jew-sponsored groups whose job it was to persecute simple soldiers who were only following orders.
Michtler had been forced from his homeland to the small IV village in the mountains of Argentina. When Nils Schatz had come to the other old Nazis with his bold proposal, Michtler had jumped at the chance to leave. The truth was, in life there were those who gave orders and there were those who executed those orders. Hans Michtler was one of the happy few who actually enjoyed following orders. Until now.
"Your friends are dead. You know that, do you not, girlie?" Michtler sneered. He was a big, lummoxy thing. His hands were as large as small baseball gloves.
"They are not my friends," Helene replied evenly. She was strapped to a chair in the middle of the hangar. There was a wooden floor beneath her, stained with oil. All around were stacked piles of ordnance stolen from the deminage depots. Helene had found some of what she was after, but was maddeningly unable to do anything about it.
Michtler curled his lip in disgust. He turned to the skinheads spread about the hangar. "Has the boat moved?"
"It is still docked below," one of the men enthused.
"No one aboard has made a move toward us?"
"There are only four aboard that we can see. They have remained on the boat."
Michtler nodded. "After we take care of her, we will kill them and scuttle their boat," he announced. He slapped his big hands together for warmth, glancing at the men. "For now we wait. Pointlessly."
There were about a dozen skinheads standing around the room. They each held a Schmeisser submachine gun. Michtler was so confident that the men they awaited were dead that he had left his own gun on a nearby table.
The man shot by Helene in the field beside the runway had been propped up next to a door that led into a small office. He sat wheezing and bleeding. Someone had given him a filthy cloth to hold over the gurgling wound in his neck. It was already drenched with blood. His complexion had grown waxy over the past several minutes. He appeared close to death.
Michtler glanced over to the open doorway. An oversize garage door, it was wide enough for two planes to roll in and out of the hangar.
Ordinarily there was room for four of the small aircraft inside at one time. But there were two partially dismantled Messerschmitts in the hangar now. They had been scavenged for parts for the working planes. These, along with the rusted shell casings, left little room for functioning planes.
When not being worked on, the IV air force had bided its time outside beneath heavy tarps and camouflage mesh.
Michtler looked out at the spot on the grassy field where the planes had sat idle for weeks. Two skinhead guards stood on either side of the open doorway.
Bored, he began to daydream.
He pictured the planes en route to England. His mind drifted to thoughts of London. Ablaze.
It was a beautiful sight.
REMO KNEW that their greatest challenge would be to keep the Germans from blowing them all sky-high. When they had rounded the shore and gone back up the stairs to the plateau airfield, the first thing he and Chiun had done was to sneak a peek inside the hangar from one of the side windows. They were disturbed to see explosives stacked everywhere.
Helene Marie-Simone sat strapped to a chair beside a doltish-looking, aging Nazi. The French agent was, in effect, seated in the middle of one gigantic bomb.
"That complicates things," Remo whispered to the Master of Sinanju. He was peering at the bound Helene.
"Why?" Chiun said blandly.
"For starters we've got to save Helene and one Nazi for interrogation without getting ourselves blown up."
"What need have we of the woman?" "For one thing, I could use her phone."
"Save her phone, then," Chiun sniffed. "Allow fate to take charge of the daughter of Gaul."
Remo raised an eyebrow. "You're sounding more mercenary than usual."
"Sinanju has not found work from France for many years. Let the Bourbons worry about their own."
"Let's give them a freebie this time out, okay?" Remo replied deadpan. He looked back in the window. "Okay, here's the plan. We get the younger nasties out of the hangar. Less chance of their bullets setting off the bombs. Once we've thinned their ranks, we can go in after Kaiser Baldy. Does that sound good to you?"
"Everything save the part where we are to follow a plan of your design," the Master of Sinanju replied.
"If you've got a better idea-" Remo began. But Chiun was no longer there. The diminutive figure was already flouncing around to the front of the hangar where the first of the skinhead guards stood. Remo had to run to keep up.
STILL LOST in his own thoughts, Michtler had just drawn up an image of the stodgy British parliament building gutted by dancing flames when something flashed across his line of sight.
It was a subtle movement. So small Hans Michtler could not quite figure out what it was.
He blinked.
The hangar door was there. Open, as before. The grass was still pressed down in the field beyond where the planes had sat. The guards...