Page 40 of Clive Cussler The Iron Storm
When it finally hove into view around a final bend in the road, the young sergeant was on his feet to greet the newcomers. The truck was a typical three-ton Daimler with a four-cylinder engine and solid rubber tires that made riding in one a bone-jarring experience. It braked to a stop. The sergeant approached the driver’s door, saw the rank of the man behind the wheel, and snapped a crisp salute.
They spoke for a few moments, the officer in the truck pointing to Bell and his group of captives and asking about them. Thesergeant gave him an answer that somehow displeased the driver. He stepped out of the truck. Bell could see he was a large man, a commanding presence that made the sergeant take an involuntary step back. The light from the sentries’ fire was erratic, but it looked to Bell that the man’s face was scarred, and he had a patch covering a missing right eye.
What happened next took Bell several seconds to process. The big driver pulled a gun from his hip holster and shot the sergeant in the chest as four men leapt from the back of the truck and began gunning down the rest of the soldiers. Bell felt bullets passing over his head as he sat under the watch of the two guards. They were the next to die, struck multiple times and collapsing in formless heaps. The remainder of the gun crew weren’t armed, so they put up no resistance. Raised hands and pleas for mercy were ignored.
It was over in seconds, and in its aftermath, the echoes of gunfire faded just as quickly.
Bell and his companions remained where they were, struck dumb by the surprise and savagery of the massacre. It was then that Bell saw blood seeping through John Fox’s shirt and that his boyish face had gone as white as marble. He managed only ragged sips of air. Bell scrambled over to check on the young pilot. The bullet had hit his shoulder, and when he peeled back Fox’s flight jacket, he could see the joint looked like it had been smashed with a hammer.
The truck’s driver, seeing that one of the captives had been wounded in the melee, glared at the men who’d killed the two guards until one couldn’t meet his malevolent stare. The driver crossed over to the guilt-ridden killer and pistol-whipped him across the face hard enough to open a gash in his cheek so deep the bone was briefly visible before the wound filled with blood.
The driver approached the captives. Bell and Holmes got to theirfeet, letting the former tankers tend to Fox as best they could with no medical supplies. The approaching driver was several inches taller than Bell’s six feet. He was broad across the chest and thick-necked. Not as big as Schmidt, but a formidable opponent if it ever came to that. He wore an eyepatch and the upper right side of his face was made shiny and tight by an old burn scar. Bell noticed the ear on that side was a gnarled stub.
“You are the pilots?” he asked in English. His accent wasn’t German.
“For the most part,” Holmes said. He gave a salute. “Liam Holmes. Captain, British Royal Flying Corps. Despite the uniform you’re wearing, I take it you are not part of the German army.”
“My name is Karl Rath. We are partisans trying to bring an end to this war. We were on our way to Falkennest to rescue you.”
“Falkennest is the castle?” Holmes asked.
“Yes, where the German intelligence is headquartered in this sector. We also know it is where newly crashed pilots are interrogated.”
“Can we hurry this along?” Bell said. “There are two more men from this gun crew who could be back with reinforcements at any time and we have a wounded man here who needs a doctor.”
“Yes, we must.” Rath hesitated. “I have a man in the prison who was to help us. His name is Schmidt. He was to come with us.”
“He had an accident,” Bell said without a lick of guilt. “He won’t be going anywhere.”
Rath caught his drift and nodded.
Two of the Brits helped Fox up into the back of the truck. The bleeding had slowed, but he was growing more unresponsive as he sank deeper into shock. Rath got behind the wheel, while the rest of his men packed themselves into the covered bed. Bell understood how sardines felt.
The ride over the dirt roads was spine-crushing and every deep rut made Fox moan in his delirium. They motored for hours, stopping once to fill the gas tank from one-gallon tins stored in a compartment between the front and rear tires. Bell suspected they were on an old smugglers’ route and had crossed out of France and into occupied Belgium.
The sun was beginning to pink the horizon when they approached the outskirts of a large town, or perhaps small city. Traffic was light at the early hour, mostly delivery drivers in one-horse carts.
With no firm plans on how to escape German-occupied lands once they’d gotten out of the castle, Bell was content to let events unfold rather than try to control them. He was wary, of course, but had no better option than to allow Rath and his guerrilla band take them where they were headed.
With an eye pressed to a small tear in the canvas side of the Mercedes truck, Bell saw they passed through the town’s medieval central square. There was a large bronze fountain at one end and encircling buildings that looked unchanged for hundreds of years. Past the old town, they entered a more industrial area that was built along wharves that fronted a broad river. The truck finally came to a warehouse made of brick with a metal roof that looked to be a hundred years old. A guard swung open the fence gate surrounding the structure and another was there to open one of the big doors.
Bell joined the others, jumping down from the truck on knees that had gone stiff over the long ride.
Rath was already out of the truck, issuing orders in a language Bell didn’t recognize. By the speed with which his men moved, his authority was absolute.
The interior of the building was gloomy, its distant corners inheavy shadow. Rather than a large open space full of cargo ready for transshipment on river barges, it looked like small buildings had been constructed within the echoing volume. A man with a medical bag, though perhaps not a medical license, came out of one of the buildings at the urging of the partisan who’d accidently shot Fox, eager to get back in his commander’s good graces. A pair of men carrying a canvas stretcher also appeared, and in moments Fox was out of the truck and on his way to what Bell assumed was the guerrillas’ makeshift surgical dispensary.
Holmes, as the ranking British officer, nodded to Logan and Baltimore, the two clutchmen from the tank, to follow and make sure Fox received proper care. Rath came over to Holmes and Bell, as they both knew he would once he’d gotten his men settled in.
“I think breakfast is in order, yes?” Rath read their expression. “He is not a doctor, but he has been looking after my crew for months now. He has seen many bullet wounds and knows how to treat them. Come. There is much I would like to discuss with you.”
The big freedom fighter led the pair to another of the wooden structures built within the large warehouse. It had a door and a single window, and when Rath gestured for them to precede him inside, it showed that it had no roof and was open to the high ceiling above. The building was laid out like an apartment, with the appropriate furniture including a dining table, though there was no kitchen or bathroom visible. A bedroom lay beyond a partially closed door. A woman had been sitting on the couch when Rath had thrown open the door and she guiltily leapt to her feet.
She was pretty, about twenty-five, with dark hair and eyes. She crossed to Rath and he kissed her cheek. The light touch made her wince ever so slightly. He was twenty years her senior and his bulk made her appear so small and fragile.
Fragility, Bell thought. That was the exact word. She had a fragility about her that he had seen a thousand times over the course of his career. Women too scared of their man to ever leave. Living in constant fear made them timid and unable to express themselves for fear of retribution. He had known agents who’d tried to rescue such women from their psychological captors only for them to physically resist being taken away or, more disturbingly, returning to their abusers at the first opportunity. Bell didn’t understand the dynamic himself, but knew each one, abuser and victim, exploiter and exploited, fulfilled some dark need by staying together. It made his blood boil because in such an uneven relationship the man generally flourished, while the woman withered away.
He looked at her more carefully and noted the color on one of her cheeks was slightly more yellow than the other, the final stage of a fading bruise.
