By the Blood of Heroes (26 page)

Chapter Thirty-two

STALAG 113

W
hen Freeman came to, he found himself being pushed down the hall in a wheelchair.

Or, at least, that’s what he thought was happening.

He couldn’t be sure if his senses were completely accurate; his vision was blurry and kept fading in and out, so all he was getting were quick snapshots of whatever was happening nearby. He could hear people speaking around him, but their voices sounded like they were talking underwater, all liquid tones and incoherent sounds.

He caught sight of a doorway coming up and tried to reach out, intent on stopping any forward movement until he regained some control over his faculties, but his arm refused to obey the commands his mind was giving it. That convinced him that maybe he’d been injured in a firefight, that the POW camp and the pit and the rotworms they’d put in the wound on his leg had all just been hallucinations, a result of the injury he had sustained. Fear shot through him like a three-alarm fire in a paper factory! The idea that he’d been injured made him think that he couldn’t get his arm to move because his arm wasn’t there anymore, blown off in a mortar attack or severed during a plane crash, and he was about to start screaming for a doctor when the wheelchair went over a small bump on the floor and his head tilted down, showing him his arms and hands resting comfortably in his lap. He focused his attention on them, willing them to move, but they just lay there, like lumps of discarded meat, and no matter how hard he willed them to move, he couldn’t get them to budge.

Apparently things were much worse than he thought, for he hadn’t lost his limbs at all, he’d lost the ability to move them. He must have been paralyzed, maybe even brain damaged!

Oh Lord,
he thought,
please Lord, don’t do this to me, don’t, don’t, don’t do this . . .

A hand reached down and patted him on the shoulder as his wheelchair was turned into a room.

“You need to relax, Major,” said a familiar voice, though at the moment he couldn’t figure out to whom it belonged. “The rotworms secrete a rather active psychotropic compound that affects people in different ways, so you might be feeling weird at the moment. I can assure you that you are not paralyzed; just relax, all right?”

Must have spoken aloud,
Freeman thought to himself and then wondered if he’d done it again.

He didn’t have the chance to find out. A siren began to sound, wailing in and out, an eerie cacophony that drowned out everything else for several long minutes. When Freeman could hear again, he realized someone else had entered the room with them and was having a conversation with his caretaker.

“ . . . have escaped!” the newcomer said, rather urgently. “They’ve broken through the first fence line and are swarming over the prisoner barracks as we speak!”

“Why are you telling me? Inform Obertleutnant Brandt. His troops are the ones assigned to deal with outbreaks.”

“I already have, sir,” came the reply, and this time even Freeman, doped up as he was, recognized the fear in the man’s voice. “Oberleutnant Brandt took a team into the compound when the trouble first began. No one has seen him since.”

In the silence that followed Freeman finally remembered who the voice belonged to. It was the doctor who had him removed from the pit and ordered him cleaned up and his wounded leg attended to, Dr. Taschner.

But what were they talking about? And why did they sound so afraid?

“Can you drive?” Taschner asked.

“Yes, Docktor!”

“Good. Get a staff car from the motor pool and bring it around to the rear of the building. You are to take this man to Dr. Eisenberg at the Verdun complex. Is that clear?”

“Right away, sir!”

Freeman must have gone off in his head for a few minutes, for when he came back to himself two soldiers were lifting him out of the wheelchair and into the back of a black staff car with the Imperial Hohenzollern eagle painted on the front doors.

Around them was chaos.

Gunfire and screams split the air, and squads of men in the blue-gray uniforms of the German army ran past, headed for some confrontation deeper in the camp. The guard who was helping him into the vehicle had a couple of long, ragged tears in his uniform tunic, as if he’d tangled with a wild animal, and he kept casting nervous looks over his shoulder as if to make sure that nothing was sneaking up behind him.

When they had Freeman settled into the rear seat and buckled into place, one soldier climbed in beside him while the other took his place behind the wheel.

As the driver pulled away from the infirmary, Freeman glanced out the window and what he saw shocked the fog from his senses.

A man wearing the light gray coverall that designated him as a prisoner of war was running toward them, seemingly intent on catching the car before it could leave the camp. Something about him looked familiar, and by the time the runner had closed half the distance, Freeman understood why. It was Demonet, the French captain the guards had hauled away the day before.

He looked stronger than Freeman remembered him being, as if he’d been eating four-course meals for the last few months in captivity rather than the meager sustenance that their captors provided, and any trace of the limp he’d moved with yesterday was gone. As he drew closer Freeman could see black lines running beneath his skin, like routes on a map, but his head was too full of rotworm secretions to understand just why he should be alarmed by that fact.

It seemed to him that Demonet was moving extraordinarily fast as well, for he closed with their vehicle even as it was picking up speed, and Freeman’s anxiety grew accordingly the closer the other man got. A normal human being shouldn’t be able to do that, Freeman told himself, and he knew that it was more than just a visual illusion caused by the drug in his system.

Something was wrong.

Demonet was no longer Demonet.

Freeman tried to move, to alert the soldier beside him, but all he succeeded in doing was jerking his foot back and forth ineffectually beneath him.

As it turned out, he needn’t have worried; Demonet managed to get their attention all on his own when he leaped ten feet through the air and landed with a loud crash on the rear of the vehicle, sinking his claws—
claws?
—into the surface of the trunk.

The soldier in the rear seat spun around to see what had caused the ruckus and found himself face-to-face with the thing that had once been Claude Demonet.

The man yelped in fear and snatched at the pistol in the holster on his belt, all the while shouting something at the driver in German.

Apparently the shouts had been a command for the man to take evasive action for the driver began swerving the vehicle back and forth in an effort to dislodge their unwanted passenger. The shambler just sank his claws deeper into the metal and wouldn’t let go. When the driver was forced to straighten the car out for a moment to avoid running down a group of fellow soldiers, the shambler scurried up to the rear window and peered inside.

The creature’s mouth split open in a wide, froglike grin, and Freeman could see row upon row of razor-sharp teeth lining it.

The shambler drew back one fist and prepared to smash the rear window, but the soldier finally had his gun out and fired through the glass.

The bullet struck the shambler in the chest and knocked it right off the rear of the vehicle, rolling several times in the street before coming to a rest.

It wasn’t moving, but Freeman wasn’t convinced it was dead, either.

Then the driver shot through the gates of Stalag 113 onto the open road beyond.

Chapter Thirty-three

VERDUN

T
he ride was long and uneventful. At first Freeman tried to speak to his guard, wanting to talk about what had happened back at Stalag 113, but neither of them spoke the other’s language and gestures weren’t adequate when discussing the transformation of men into monsters and attacks by rampaging shamblers. Unable to communicate, Freeman settled back against his seat and quickly fell asleep, exhausted both mentally and physically from all he’d been through over the last several days. The relative safety and the rocking motion of the car lulled him into a deep sleep.

The guard nudged him awake as they approached the main gates to the facility at Verdun. The driver had a brief conversation with the guards, the barriers were lifted, and they drove through. This camp was much bigger than the previous one and there was a great deal more activity, causing Freeman to wonder just why he was being brought here.

The driver took them through camp, giving Freeman a good view of the local garrison and the shambler pens, and then he stopped in front of a row of small cottagelike buildings. An officer stood in front of one of them, accompanied by several soldiers, all dressed in the blue-gray of the German infantry. They were waiting patiently, it seemed, for his arrival.

When the car stopped, the guard beside Freeman ordered him to get out. Expecting to have difficulty with his leg, the Allied pilot was surprised to discover that it felt as good as new. The flesh beneath the bandages no longer felt hot and swollen, and it supported his weight without difficulty when he went to stand on it.

The officer, a lieutenant from the insignia on his uniform, stepped forward, and Burke tried to suppress the instant reaction that overcame him at the sight of the man. It was clear that he was no longer human. His black veins stood out prominently against his gray skin, and his eyes had the yellow cast to them that was so common in the shamblers. But he walked and talked and moved like one of the living.

Freeman’s first guess was that he was looking at a revenant, one of those extremely rare shamblers that came back with their physical and mental faculties intact, much like Richthofen himself. But from what he’d heard, such creatures didn’t exhibit the physical characteristics of the shamblers, either, and Adler certainly did.

Perhaps he’s a new breed of shambler,
Freeman thought. He’d already encountered one variation, in the houndlike creatures that had hunted him after the crash. Could this be another?

The officer said, “Welcome to Verdun, Major Freeman. I am Leutnant Adler. Rittmeister Richthofen regrets that he could not be here to meet you personally. If you would follow me, please.”

Richthofen! So the bastard had lived.

Freeman wasn’t surprised; after all, he himself had managed to walk away from the crash. Doing the same when you were already dead must have been that much easier. Still, it was disappointing to hear. He’d hoped he’d downed the German ace once and for all.

Adler didn’t appear to notice his scrutiny but turned and led him inside the building before them.

The little cottage turned out to be the visiting officer’s quarters, with a bed and a desk and a small sink for washing up. A clean set of clothes was laid out on the bed, and there was a plate of fresh fruit on the desktop.

As Freeman stepped inside, Adler said, “Rittmeister Richthofen will be with you as soon as he can. If you need anything in the meantime, ask the guards and they will contact me.”

It sounded good, but from the tone of his voice, Adler made it clear that he didn’t expect to be bothered for any reason. Nor did the way he pulled the door shut without a backward glance leave any room for misunderstanding.

Freeman waited a moment, until he heard the car pull away out front, then he opened the door.

The two guards stationed outside turned to face him, their weapons at the ready and pointed in his direction.

Freeman smiled tightly at them, then shut the door before they could say anything.

He crossed the room and looked out the window on the wall opposite the door. Another guard stood a few feet away, watching the house from that direction, ostensibly preventing Freeman from climbing through the window and making a run for it, though where he would go in a camp surrounded by hundreds of enemy soldiers was up for grabs.

The sound of an approaching plane drew his attention away from the guard to the airfield he saw on the northern edge of the camp. A red triplane was just coming in for a landing and Freeman watched the pilot put the aircraft down, a sense of jealousy stirring in his heart. It had been days since Freeman had been in the air and his longing to be up among the clouds was like a physical weight, dragging him down. He’d flown nearly every day since arriving at the front; being stuck dirtside was its own special torture. Richthofen had to know what he was going through; otherwise, why situate him where he could hear and see the airfield all day and night?

He moved to close the curtains only to discover there weren’t any.

Oh, Richthofen knew all right!

Bastard.

Wandering back over to the sink, Burke found a straight razor and a cup of shaving powder resting on the edge. He eyed the razor for a long moment, as thoughts of using it to kill the guards out front ran through his mind, but he dismissed them as quickly as they came. He was starting to understand that everything about his presence here was calculated, no doubt by Richthofen, and snatching up the weapon and trying to use it was exactly what they expected him to do.

He refused to be their patsy.

Instead, he decided to have a shave. He’d always kept himself clean-shaven, and his face itched terribly from the several days of beard growth that now covered it. A good shave would make him feel better mentally as well as physically. Once he was finished with that, he changed into the clean set of clothes and sat down on the bed to await whatever was next.

They came for him an hour later.

He heard the car pull up and was on his feet by the time there was a swift knock on his door. He opened it to find Adler waiting on the step outside.

“If you would come with me, please,” Adler ordered.

Freeman had the sudden urge to tell him no, just to be a pain in the ass, but he conquered the feeling and did as he was told.

Adler let Freeman precede him into the rear of the vehicle and then leaned forward to give some instructions to the driver in German.

As the driver pulled away, Freeman was unable to keep himself from glancing out the window toward the airfield and was met with a startling sight. A massive airship was now moored alongside one of the hangars, the black crosses painted on its tail stark against its gleaming silver skin. It was at least three times the size of any he’d seen before, with an oversized gondola to match, and had several flat platforms hanging beneath its bulk. He caught a glimpse of long rows of narrow openings piercing the underside of each platform. He didn’t know what they were for, but one thing was certain; if those were weapon bays, that ship would carry one helluva punch. The airship must have just arrived, for mooring lines were still being secured and a ground crew was working frantically to get it settled into a makeshift berth.

The driver pulled up before a two-story manor house and let them out. Adler led Freeman inside. The American glimpsed several richly furnished rooms as they passed by. He was led into a study at the far end of the hall.

“Please make yourself comfortable,” Adler said. “Rittmeister Richthofen will join you shortly.” He left Freeman alone in the room, pulling the door shut behind him as he left.

Freeman assumed this was Richthofen’s personal residence. He wandered about the room, trying to get a sense of the man he was about to meet, the man who had been his personal nemesis for what felt like years. Richthofen clearly enjoyed reading, as the walls were covered with shelves full of well-worn books, mainly historical treatises or military examinations of particular battles and tactics. A copy of the Baron’s own
Der Rote Kampfflieger,
or the
Red Battle Flyer,
the autobiography he had written just before being killed the first time, was stuck between a copy of Caesar’s
Gallic Wars
and Bismarck’s memoirs. Freeman found himself wondering how the Baron would deal with his subsequent “deaths” if he ever got around to writing a revised version.

He left the bookshelves, glanced idly at the papers on the man’s desk; most was correspondence to his brother, Lothar, it seemed. He turned his attention to the chessboard set up on its own table in the corner. He was standing in front of it, studying the game already in progress, when a voice spoke from behind him.

“Knight to Queen’s Rook 4. Checkmate in 16.”

Freeman turned around and found himself looking at a man who, just days before, he’d done his best to kill and who had tried to kill him in turn.

Rittmeister Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen.

The Red Baron himself.

He was dressed in a well-tailored uniform of dark gray that buttoned across the front in double-breasted fashion. A red ribbon around his throat held a medallion in the shape of a blue-enameled Maltese cross with eagles of gold between its arms, which was Germany’s highest military honor, the
Pour le Mérite,
otherwise known as the Blue Max. Hung over the back of his shoulders was a fur-lined leather flight jacket that looked as if it had seen a fair bit of use.

Richthofen wore his hair slicked back and parted in the middle, which only served to exaggerate his long, narrow face and to highlight the spot along his left jawline where Freeman could see bone poking through a section of missing flesh the size of a half dollar, a remnant left over from when the Rittmeister’s body had started to rot after being shot down and killed the first time.

“Do you play?” Richthofen asked, indicating the board and watching with blue hawklike eyes as he crossed the room.

“Occasionally,” Freeman replied, glancing down to buy some time while he tried to get his thoughts in order.

He had no idea what he was doing here or what it was that Richthofen wanted from him. Make no doubt, Richthofen wanted something; you didn’t think sixteen moves ahead in chess and not apply that kind of thinking to everything you did. There was a reason Richthofen had rescued him from that pit and brought him here, wherever the hell
here
was. Not that he was complaining; this was a damn sight better than being surrounded by the rotting corpses of dead shamblers, so he wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. He needed to remember, though, that the German ace had a purpose for rescuing him, even if that purpose wasn’t obvious.

Richthofen shook his head, as if he’d just remembered something. He marched across the room to stand before Freeman and extended his right hand.

“Please, forgive my rudeness. I am Freiherr von Richthofen.”

Determined not to let the other man get the better of him, Freeman shook the offered hand.

“Major Jack Freeman,” he said as he did so, pleased that his voice didn’t betray any of the discomfort he felt at the cold, clammy feel of the other man’s skin.

“Your reputation precedes you, Major.”

“As does yours,” he answered politely.

Richthofen moved over to the pair of leather chairs near the fireplace and settled into one of them. He waved his hand at the other. “Please, join me.”

Not seeing any reason to not do as he was asked, Freeman sat down opposite the German ace.

Richthofen got right down to business. “I wanted to apologize for what you went through while under the supervision of Oberst Schulheim. I acted as soon as I learned that you had survived the crash, and I give you my word, both as an officer and a fellow flier, that he will be dealt with appropriately.”

Freeman shrugged, not knowing what to say. Richthofen sounded sincere, but Freeman had no way of knowing if his captor truly meant what he said or not. The best strategy seemed to be to say nothing at all.

A few moments of silence passed as Richthofen seemed to evaluate what he wanted to say. At last, he asked, “Tell me, Major, why did you join the AEF?”

The question surprised Freeman. “To fly, of course,” he replied.

That, apparently, was an answer Richthofen could understand. “It is glorious, is it not? To slip the bonds of earth and soar among the clouds? To pit your skills against those of another flier, like knights of the air fighting for the favor of the Queen?”

Freeman was surprised. It was almost as if Richthofen had reached down right into the center of his soul and read his secret heart.
Knights of the air, indeed!

“Flying has certainly been one of the few pleasures of this war, yes,” Freeman replied, not wanting to admit how the other man had struck the heart of his emotions.

Richthofen’s next comment, however, showed he wasn’t fooled by Freeman’s casual reply.

“It must be hard, for a man like you, to deal with the realization that your flying days are over. At least, that is, for the duration of the war.”