Terror Flower (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 5) (21 page)

Smote yelled in his ear, “Faster, drive through them.”

Julie held up a shotgun. “It was beneath the seat.”

Tench recognized it as the old LC Smith that he and Strake had used to shoot skeet in back of the mansion. She stood in front of her seat, putting the gun over the windshield and aiming it at the two men ahead. Bullets came overhead missing her.

She fired and one of the men went down. The other man dodged to the left of the car as they roared by.

The steering wheel fought his hands as he tried to keep the wheels on the high crested farm road, the front tires equally attempting to run to the side, to hamper forward movement. This run for life on a farm road was not the race that this car had been built to drive.

The road got narrow as it went into the fields behind the hanger. It was not more than a path between the cornfields. The plants were swiping at the car with their leaves and ears of ripening corn, the noise of the slapping competing with the bullets whining overhead and striking the back truck of the roadster.

Julie suddenly fell back against the windshield glass, the shotgun flying up and out of her hands. It cart wheeled beside the car and then fell into the corn plants behind them.

Smote yelled in Trench’s ear, “Julie’s hit.” With that Smote reached forward because Julie was starting to fall out of the car, her body pitching over the low side door. He grabbed at her waist pulling her back into the front seat. Julie was writhing in pain, holding her hand over the blood streaming from her right shoulder.

The car bumped hard on the path. Tench yelled back, “How bad is she hurt?”

“Hit her shoulder and went out, that’s all, but it’s bleeding a lot.”

Julie screamed, “Keep going. We’ve got to make it. My father’s life is depending on us.”

Smote grabbed the flashlight and held it ahead of them. Tench didn’t turn on the headlights. No reason, he thought, to help them target the car. He saw a drainage ditch fast approaching, with small wooden boards across it, enough for a slow moving small tractor, but probably not enough for the width of the car’s wheels. At that tiny crossing were guards who waved machine guns. He saw the flashes from the barrels as they fired at him.

“Hold on tight,” he yelled to Julie and Smote as he cut the steering wheel to the right. The car left the path and tore through the corn plants, knocking them one side or the other as the Vignale designed body of the car sliced between the stalks. He twisted the wheel trying to find the best grip for his fast turning drive wheels which were kicking up mud and dirt behind. Then in front of him Smote’s flashlight picked up the same ditch only this time no boards were across it. He hit the brakes and the wheels rutted into the muddy field pushing the soil ahead of them as Tench brought the car to a stop a few feet short of the ditch. The light showed the depth of the drainage ditch, four feet, and the trickle of water in the bottom of the channel. Tench heard the roughness of the engine idle and knew the machine was falling apart. He heard Julie sobbing with pain and, getting closer, the yells from the pursuing guards. Above them, the blackness of the sky drove down the heat of the summer night.

“We’ll have to try to cross it,” Smote said.

Julie said, “Go for it.”

He put the car into first again and picked up forward speed. The car bent down in the back as it accelerated, the dual pipes spitting smoke into the dirt and mud, the corn plants scraping underneath the frame. The car trembled as it tried to find grip in the soil. The speed approached fifty then sixty and when Tench felt he was at the edge of the ditch he gunned it more, hoping for its last burst of speed to take all of them to safety.

He felt the rear wheels spin as they lost the earth and were airborne. The engine raced and the steering loosened as the front wheels had no traction. Moments passed as the car sailed in the air across the ditch, the ten feet of open space until the front wheels tore into the plants and furrows at the other side. The steering wheel bucked and he tried to hold the wheels straight. He waited for the back wheels to find soil, to find traction and resume forward speed.

In that moment Julie looked at him. Her eyes said what he knew. The car had not made the jump.

The hood went up in front of him as the back of the car descended to the water. Then, as the wheels caught soil and began to drive, the car pushed against the front wheels which had bounced back into the air from the impact. Tench tried to find a direction by twisting the steering wheel but time had run out The car lurched forward for a moment and then to the right, turning on its side as it did and ending up upside down, with all of them falling underneath, the windshield holding the car from crushing them, their bodies slipping into the mud of the ditch. He touched Julie’s hand and their fingers clasped each other. Then he felt a thin stream of gasoline from the broken Chrysler fuel line pouring over him and as he struggled to get free to help her , he felt himself losing consciousness. The last thing he heard was the voice of the first African who reached the wreck.

That guard yelled to the others, with his British accent, “I’ve got them. Call back to Stagmatter.”

Chapter Twenty

4AM Saturday August 21

Stagmatter walked by Tench as he, Julie, Smote and her father lay tied up in the belly of the aircraft. He saw that Tench was awake and staring up at him.

“You like my B24 Bomber?” he said, as he stopped in front of Tench.

“It’s not yours,” said Tench. Beneath his bare feet he felt the leaking gasoline and mixed with its smell the urine that the guards had had sprayed on him and the others.

Then the big man calmed himself, letting his fists unclench. “You are a fool.”

“It belongs to the Air force crew who died fighting the Italians. Strake and you stole it from him,” said Tench.

“A technicality, which is unimportant at this moment,” he said, with the part smile that Tench knew so well. Stagmatter looked at his own watch and then glanced forward. Tench followed his gaze and saw Doctor Owerri sitting in one of the pilot seats, reading pages in a large folder.

“She learning how to fly this thing?” asked Tench.

“She can fly any airplane. So can I,” said Stagmatter.

“I figure you clowns will wreck this thing on takeoff,” said Tench.

Stagmatter glanced at him, first angry then calm, and said, “We shall see.”

“I do appreciate you, Stagmatter. I mean, you’ve taken such a derelict airplane and returned it to its former glory. You’ve got a real weapon of great power.”

Stagmatter smiled.

Tench continued, “Hitler would have been pleased at his countryman, that is, if he was still alive. People like that always get killed though, don’t they?”

“They fail and get killed when they rely on fools,” he replied. “I will be proud of my accomplishment myself. That is all that matters.”

“You got me tied up so I can’t congratulate you, shake your hand, about this mechanical wonder. I guess you must be afraid of what I might do to ruin your day, Stagmatter.”

“Yes, you are tied up, Tench, and you will stay there until you die.”

“So tell me how you did it?” Tench asked.

“It was me all right. Right from the beginning. They didn’t do anything until later. They couldn’t understand the front of an engine front from the back. Too stupid. It was all my genius.”

“I figured that. Tell me how you did it.”

Stagmatter stared at him for a long moment, then said, nodding his head, “I see no harm in telling you. You will be dead before long anyway. You see the genius of my plan so you deserve to know.”

“A brilliant man deserves to have his ideas understood by someone who cares.”

“Yes. I agree.”

“You say you repaired this derelict. Where did you ever find one?

“Your country, it has so much power that it forgets, it wastes, and from that waste, we can get what we need to kill you.”

“So you robbed one of our dumps?”

Stagmatter smiled again. “You call it treachery. I call it, how do you say, entrepreneurship.” Stagmatter wrinkled his face, his twisted mouth showing even in the dimness of the aircraft. “You ever heard of the World War Two bomber that was found in 1959 in the middle of the Libyan desert? “

Tench shook his head, “Can’t say as I did.”

Stagmatter ignored Tench’s sarcasm. “It crashed in 1943 after it returned from a bombing run in Italy. It overflew its base at Bengazi in Libya and crashed far to the south in the desert. Search crews never found it or its crew. Then an oil exploration team spotted it in 1959. The bomber was a B24 Liberator four engine aircraft like this one. Its crew had written the name of the plane on its nose and they called it the ‘Lady Be Good.’”

“This is the Lady Be Good?”

“No. That bomber was too far gone. Its fuselage was broken from the crash landing.”

“So where did this plane come from?”

He looked up at the cockpit and saw that Doctor Owerri was deep in study of the airplane manuals. Then he turned back to Tench. “Years after the Lady Be Good was found I traveled in the desert to see that old bomber. I wanted to see up close an aircraft that was similar to the one that had killed most of my family in Germany during the War.”

“Kind of a morbid guy, aren’t you, Stagmatter?”

Stagmatter almost snarled as he said, “You Americans could never understand this, the hatred of defeat, of being destroyed like an animal.”

Stagmatter stooped in front of Tench and spoke in a lower voice as if he were confiding a secret. Tench realized what was happening. Stagmatter’s pent up ego was forcing the man to speak, to tell his story to someone like Tench who he apparently respected as a fellow mechanic. At the same time the big man was afraid of Owerri hearing him do it. She must be the real power in this escapade, Tench thought.

Stagmatter said, “I was working in southern Africa on a project designing a new Mercedes repair station for its automobiles. I went north to see the plane on my vacation. Yes, I was the best of their men in Africa, a trained mechanic setting up garages to repair cars for the rich whites.

“I found the old wreck after much trouble and discovered that it was not worth saving. You see I wanted to restore it, to fly it to America, even then and load it with bombs. I was going to take the revenge on one of your cities, using the same incendiary bombs and fire that killed my family. It was not to be, however, at least with that old wreck. The plane had not rusted, the engines were still in good shape, but, unfortunately for me, the fuselage and the wings were cracked from the landing impact.

“When I was there I befriended a tribesman from a local village who had traveled far in the desert region. His family had served the German Army years before when they had ruled the lands under General Rommel. When he found that we had a love of Germany in common, we had much to discuss.”

“You befriended someone. That must have been a thing to see.”

“He was my friend until I killed him.” Stagmatter laughed. “I think you have an insight into my character, Mister Tench. Stagmatter beamed, and Tench could see he was reveling in pride for himself as he told of his quest for the aircraft.

“This man told me of another wreck, one that the Europeans had not found, one that he was keeping for someone who had money to buy it. He assured me that he was the only one who knew where it was and that I should deal only with him.

In those days I did not have money, but he trusted me which was his mistake.”

“Why did he trust you, a European?”

“He and I found we shared the same hate of the other Europeans and especially the Americans. He was a devout man and believed that the West was destroying his religious world.”

“Foolish him. You were going to destroy him,” said Tench.

“Yes, but he did not know that,” said Stagmatter, with his snarl of a smile. “I set out with him across the desert to the east from where the first wreck was located. You see, these bombers had a base to the north on the coast and sometimes they would come back from bombing runs in the Mediterranean and overfly the base. The Lady Be Good that I first visited was lost for decades because the records showed it crashed much closer to the base than it really did. The searchers never found it. The plane that he was leading me to had a different story. This plane was supposedly lost at sea in the Mediterranean. No one at the base knew for sure as it lost radio contact and couldn’t report its condition or its location. Apparently the plane flew on like the first and landed far into the desert. The men on board deplaned and walked away to their death, lost without water in the dry desert.

Tench could see his eyes light up, even in the dimness of the airplane. “The plane itself was a great find. If you have ever seen a valuable antique that was untouched by weather or any kind of rot this was it. It had landed in a valley between dunes and was almost completely hidden from passersby had any come. Commercial flights did not go over this part of the desert. As a matter of fact the plane was resting on its landing gear in perfect upright condition and simply stated could have been flown away had it been refueled and fitted with a new set of rubber tires. My belief was that the aviators landed it carefully thinking that they would be able to fly it away later. It had run out of fuel and, of course, they were completely lost.”

“This was the Black-eyed Susan that we are inside at this moment?” asked Tench.

He nodded. “I could not have picked a more perfect name for a plane that was intended to destroy the State of Maryland.”

“What happened to the fliers?”

“I never found out. Of course I spent little time looking for them. I supposed they were like the crew of the first plane, starved and dehydrated on the desert and lying dead for years perhaps twenty miles away in their untouched uniforms, their flesh dried out by the desert air.”

“I’m sure you didn’t care.”

“Of course not. Nor did my guide. He and I began to negotiate for the plane. He wanted a substantial amount of American dollars for it, you can be sure. After all the plane even had some of its bombs aboard and he knew that it was a weapon to be treasured and used by the right party. He knew it was worth a good fortune for him.”