Her Majesty's Western Service (33 page)

Perhaps not too much smarter. The enfilade fire was only coming from one side, not the two that it
could
have come from. Perry felt relief despite himself; it was good to know that those race-hating bastards weren’t too competent.

Down to within a few hundred yards, a couple of hundred yards up. The ground was racing past now, loose scrub and trees, and then they crossed into the two-hundred-yard perimiter the SS had swept clean around their base. Low grass, regularly cut. Stubs that might have been mines. Inside the base, men were still running, and the gunfire now was a din; incoming rifle rounds, outgoing machine guns stammering lengthily at every muzzle-flash.

Perry aimed his glider at the roof and hoped, prayed. Unhooked his feet as they passed across the barbed-wire fence, feeling the glider tilt and slow. Ahle was already landing on the secondary building’s sloped wooden roof, shrugging off the glider.

Perry joined her a moment later, his
rubber-soled boots crashing into the roof. The glider wanted to go further, and he wrestled it to the ground. Pulled the nailgun from its upper strut and fired one, two, three, four, five, half a dozen nails into it, to keep it from tumbling to the ground and immediately warning people.

A glance around. They were below the level of the main three-storey barracks building, but that was to their north and all their attention seemed to be focused that way, or to the enfilading fire from the northeast. The secondary building that they were on wa
s south of that.

Ahle
already had her crowbar out, was working at the hatch set tightly in the door. Perry went over, gas gun raised, pointed it down at the hatch as Ahle got the bar placed and began to apply pressure.

The door came open with a crack., and Perry stared straight into the face of an assault rifle. A flash of an instant; a bowl-helmeted SS man who must have heard
Ahle at work, or had a bad feeling or
something
–

His fingers closed around the trigger of the gun he’d already aimed down. A thick stream of gas poured down into the man’s face.

The man pulled the trigger of his own gun, and rounds whistled up into the air, but he was already choking. The rest of his automatic burst thudded into the ceiling; he could feel the rounds impacting under his feet. Ahle was already dropping through, fired her gas gun at something else; Perry braced himself and followed.

They were in a barracks bunkhouse, triple bunks spaced tightly together. They were made and looked unoccupied; definitely guest quarters.
The place smelled of piss, unwashed bodies and old tobacco.

Ahle
gestured toward the place’s one door, stopping for a moment to give one of the two disabled SS men a vicious kick to the ribs. Then another burst of spray to the face, which caused him to redouble his choking. Through the mask Perry heard her mutter something about Raleigh.

“
No time for that shit,” Perry snapped at her. “Let’s move.”

They’d already gassed two men. At some level he’d hoped to accomplish this totally cleanly. Well, they were in it now, in more than one way. Only one way out, and that was through.

Mission confirmed. Engage. Time later to worry about the morality of it all.

Gun raised to his shoulder, he ran forward to the door, stopped at either side. It looked onto a corridor; the big bunkroom seemed to t
ake up about half the building. On the other side of the corridor was a line of doors that seemed to be private rooms.

Which one was the man with the
documents in?

Ahle
arrived next to him.

“Cover me,” Perry snapped, and headed for
– not the nearest door, which said ‘Washroom’, but the next one, about ten feet further down the corridor. Stepped back, braced himself, booted it in.

Bed and dresser. No people.

Wished he’d brought the crowbar down from the roof. Kicking in every last one of these doors...

“Use t
his,” Ahle said, moving toward him with one of the fallen SS men’s automatic rifles. Long barrel and a banana clip. Then dropped it, raised her gas gun, squirted a long burst at a man who’d come through one of the doors with a drawn pistol. The man fell backward against the wall, dropping the pistol to clutch at his face.

“Or there. Oh shit.”

A man emerged from the same door with a submachinegun. Bullets spat. One of them slammed into Perry’s chest, a horse’s kick despite the thick kevlar he was wearing. He threw himself sideways through the door he’d just kicked open, his chest screaming pain.

Don’t think about the pain. Or the busted ribs. We’ve got an armed one ready for us.

Skorzeny ducked back into his room, changed magazines. Two confirmed, but he thought he’d gotten one. Maybe not – that had looked like a
controlled
dive, like a man in armor might make.

Two again
st one. The rest of his escorts – Lieutenant Schierbecker and one man had gone out to see what was going on with the attack, which
had
seemed too well-timed to be truly coincidental. The sergeant, with him, had been the sacrificial lamb for the benefit of Skorzeny getting a picture of the situation.

He had that now. Two attackers who’d come in through the ro
of, probably by glider. His two men guarding the roof hatch had been taken down, and the other two at the front entrance were out of reach. They wouldn’t hear his calling above the sound of the gunfire and the light mortars that seemed to be landing randomly in the compound.

So it was two to one. He’d faced much worse odds than that in his life. And they were using, for some insane reason
, nonlethal gas guns. A competence/qualification exercise?

He hadn’t been notified of that. If that bastard Interior Secretary Hoover wanted to
pull shit like that on him at this time?

Well,
the
Wichser
would be down two agents.

Pulling the mask on over his face, Skorzeny drew
his pistol. When you were outnumbered, only one course of action. It had served him well throughout a long life. Attack.

“He’s wearing a mask!”
Ahle shouted to Perry, and dropped the now-worthless gas gun. Threw herself back into the bunkroom. Her back pressed against the wall, she unslung the submachinegun and prepared to reach out.

Bullets smacked at her. She pressed herself back. Shit. Shit, shit.

Perry would hesitate. And the bastard would get them both. She was fairly sure that this one was the ranking SS emissary.

Ranking SS meant he’d probably been active
twenty years ago. Probably had rank then, too.

Probably been in Wake Forest
.

Wish I had a
usable grenade
, she thought, glancing out and ducking back again. A bullet chewed splinters from the doorway an inch from her face.

Skorzeny advanced down the corridor, his ears focused, listening. His submachinegun was trained on the door the
man he’d shot had fallen into; he was going to go in, spray the room with lead while keeping the other one pinned, then take the pinned one down. Another shot – and another – served to keep that one pinned.

Wish I had a couple of grenades
, he thought.

Advancing. Another shot at the door, keeping the one in there pinned. And – on the ground, a boot and a heavy shape.

I
did
get you!

He threw himself into the room, emptying fire into th
e shape, realizing as he lunged over it that it was two-dimensional and empty –

Perry, in socks and shirtsleeves, launched himself at the man in a punishing rugby tackle. His shoulder crunched into the bastard’s stomach, slamming him once then – half a second and three feet later – again, as the momentum slammed the already-dazed man against the facing wall.

He heard, rather than saw or felt, weapons clattering to the ground, but there was no time to do anything but press the advantage. Punched him in the stomach, then a hand found the man’s forehead – he was turning his head, trying to bite, one hand reaching already into his belt – and slammed it against the wall, once, again, three times.

He straightened up, kept slamming the man’s head against the wall until the man stopped moving. Then Perry let him slump to the ground.

“Bastard,” he hissed, recovering his breath. The last five or ten seconds had taken more out of him than the entire operation until that point.

Ahle
appeared, saw the unconscious SS man. Looked to be about sixty, maybe late fifties. Prominent scar on his cheek. Shoulderboards had some organizationally-unique insignia that Perry couldn’t read – a U-shaped pattern of stripes – but there were a lot of them. High-ranking guy. That and his age almost definitely made him the emissary.

“That’s Skorzeny,” said
Ahle. She turned back to the door, covering the corridor with her submachinegun. “Shit, Vice. You took down Otto Skorzeny.” She glanced at his feet. “With your boots off.”

“
Never
thought I’d use rugby once I got out of the Academy,” Perry gasped. He picked up his gas gun, gave the unconscious man a burst in the face for good measure. Couldn’t be too careful. He let the gun drop on his sling and reached down for his boots.

“I could do him more permanently.
Please
let me do the bastard more permanently.”

“No.”

“He might get up. Men like that can take almost anything. If we don’t take him down, he’ll be a problem in future. If he lives, he’ll be a problem in future.”

“For someone else.”

“For
my
people. I have an account in Sonora, Vice. Successful pirate. I’ll give you two years’ worth of your pay, write you a check as soon as we’re back in New Orleans, if I can just cut his throat. Please.”

“No. Not going to kill a man who’s down. Thought you had your Code?”

“The man’s a war criminal. Member of a criminal organization.”

“He’s gassed and unconscious,” said Perry. “You’re going to cut the throat of an unconscious man? Would your K
ennedys approve of that?”

Ahle
mouthed something pissed-off – she’d lost the mask when she pulled the rifle – and turned back toward the corridor.

“Didn’t think so. Get that mask back on and we’
ll grab the documents and scram.”

Perry carefully behind
Ahle – he was fairly sure she wouldn’t turn around and try to kill Skorzeny, but he
knew
how much she hated these guys and their senior officers especially – they headed down the corridor for Skorzeny’s room.

Inside was a rumpl
ed bed, a duffel bag and a compact briefcase chained to the radiator.

“
Shit
,” Perry muttered. “Give me that rifle.”

“Could be chips in there,” said
Ahle. “Cover me. There’ll be more.”

“What are you doing?”

In answer, Ahle reached for a thigh pocket and showily palmed a set of lockpicks.

“D
idn’t you once call me a thief?” she asked.

From
the gunner’s seat of his command car near the head of the half-battalion that had been sent down from Columbia to escort Colonel Skorzeny back, Major Brent Roeder looked at the sky on the horizon. There were flashes and flickering, coming – he confirmed on his compass and map – from the exact direction of the base at Joplin.

That meant a firefight. The flares had been sent up by the local garrison, which he knew wasn’t very big.

His vehicles had been moving slowly, at about fifty percent of the Tiger II and IIb tanks’ safe maximum speed –
twenty
percent of the light Cheetah armored cars’ maximum – for the sake of saving fuel and not inflicting needless damage on the roads.

Now, the garrison seemed to have come under attack. Roeder was an experienced soldier in his early forties, a man who’d come up from the ranks and had his share of skirmishes in the violent Silesian borderlands even before joining the Squadrons. You didn’t win battles by hesitating.

And you
definitely
didn’t win battles by pretending there wasn’t one happening.

“Full speed ahead!” he shouted. Leaned down to his driver. “The hell with fuel and we don’t have an hour. Get us to the Joplin base
now
.”

It was a tense few minutes
, the sound of the firefight going on outside. Perry had to remind himself that although it
felt
like half an hour since they’d landed, it had really been – he checked his watch to confirm; less than quarter of an hour past four – yes, barely five minutes. Unitas’ men and the Klan wouldn’t last forever, but they’d hold on longer than
that
.