Page 55 of Clive Cussler The Iron Storm
Because of that, Bell noticed that many young women were dressed to do work that had been traditionally men’s jobs. Even the ticket taker on the train to occupied Liège was a pretty blond girl who looked like she was playing dress-up in her father’s conductor’s uniform.
The border into occupied Belgium was even more fortified than the one between Germany and the Netherlands. As before, the entire train was boxed inside a barbed-wire enclosure and every car and passenger was checked. There were more guards, more dogs, and a heightened sense of watchfulness.
It took twice as long to clear the checkpoint as the night before. Bell once again had to show his ball bearing samples as well as having his luggage rummaged through and standing still for a thorough pat down. Bell wasn’t sure if there had been problems that necessitated such paranoia or if it was merely Teutonic efficiency.
In truth the only thing he knew about what was happening in Belgium was that an American mining engineer named Herbert Hoover had been instrumental in getting relief supplies into the country to stave off widespread famine and starvation.
As they pulled away from the frontier outpost and entered the first Belgian town, he saw the contrast immediately. The people may not have been on the brink of starvation, but he was shocked by the hollow cheeks and the sunken eyes and the fact that people were gray. Not pale, not wan, but an ash-gray color that made them look like gaunt living statues. He saw no children playing, no old men chatting over coffee at cafés, no ladies out shopping for their families. He saw misery and defeat and a pall of joylessness that hovered over the town, permeating every nook and cranny as if these people all existed in purgatory.
The German military presence wasn’t overwhelming, but to know your nation was under the boot of another was so demoralizing and dehumanizing that it looked like it wouldn’t take more than a few soldiers in each town to keep the population in line. To think of a country with such vast overseas colonies being brought to its knees in a few short months and now in its third year of occupation made Bell shudder. America hadn’t had foreign soldiers on its soil since the British were routed at the Battle of New Orleans more than a century ago.
The train continued on, chugging lethargically from the border as if it, too, had been affected by the social and economic malaise that had ground Belgium into the dirt. No one was in the fields preparing them for the spring planting season. The few roads he could see from the carriage had been ruined by the passage of heavy German cannons and mortars when they transected the country on the way to France. A couple of farmhouses he noted had been destroyedduring the invasion and now sat abandoned, the adjoining fields overrun with scrub.
They rolled into Liège at lunchtime. Bell was eager to get out of Belgium as quickly as possible and so he bought some black bread and liverwurst at the station and ate while he walked to his final destination. There were no taxis, though he managed to hitch a ride on the back of a wagon carrying milk urns for the final mile into the town where Rath was holed up.
Bell found a hotel first thing. He wasn’t sure how he was going to go about getting information from Rath or one of his men. He hadn’t planned that far ahead, but he figured it would take a couple of days at the least for something to come to him. Best he rent a room. Bell stowed his luggage under the twin-sized bed and then headed out to find the warehouse. The town wasn’t all that large, and he’d seen some of it on the ride to the German airfield, so it took him only a short amount of time.
His nose led him around the last few corners through a run-down industrial part of the town. The smell of burnt wood and charcoal was overwhelming.
He rounded the last turn and saw what he already knew he would see. The warehouse had been burned to the ground. Only a few brick half walls and the stumps of toppled chimneys remained upright. He could see some plumbing fixtures coated in soot among the rubble, but everything else had been reduced to ash. No doubt Rath had doused the building in kerosene or gasoline before putting it to the torch.
There was no evidence that the local fire brigade tried to douse the flames, no puddles of filthy water or wet pieces of crocodile-skin timber. They had likely faced a raging inferno and thought it best to just let the fire do its worst.
Knowing it was a waste of time, Bell was ever the consummate investigator and spent an hour sifting through the wreckage. A few times he kicked up a pile of wood that was still smoldering even though the fire had been days ago, probably the same day he had taken off in the Zeppelin-Staaken with Liam Holmes. He found nothing useful and so dusted off his suit pants and strode from the site.
29
Bell had one hope ofsalvaging this mission. Magdalena hadn’t given him the name of the tavern her father owned, but it stood to reason that the matchbook he’d swiped from Rath’s office had been a promotional item from there. Bell recalled the establishment’s name and after fetching his luggage from the little inn and getting directions from the innkeeper, he soon came to the place. It was late afternoon by this time. Too early for the after-work crowd and well past the late lunch takers.
A little bell tinkled gaily when Bell opened the heavy oak door that was likely two hundred years old. The interior of the tavern was dim, but not dark, the perfect level of light for intimacy or bonhomie depending on what one was looking for. There were a half dozen tables, as solid and ancient as the door, and a long bar running along the rear wall that had places for a dozen drinkers.
A man with an apron wrapped around his waist had just left the room through the door to the kitchen. That left a woman bent over a table with a rag in her hand. Bell had only seen Magdalena on two brief occasions, but he was a master of recognizing people even at angles he’d never seen before.
“Magdalena,” he called softly.
She turned. No amount of makeup could hide the black eye she’d been given. She quickly moved her head so that her coils of hair partially covered the ugly bruise even before she recognized the stranger who’d come to her father’s bar. “You?”
“Like the proverbial bad penny.” He crossed to her, and they both took a seat at the table. Besides the black eye, her lower lip was swollen. Her fingers worked at the threadbare bar rag in her hands.
She could not meet his eye. “Karl said you and the Englishman died when your plane crashed.”
“That was the fate he had in store for us, but we had other ideas.” He cupped her chin gently and raised it so she had to face him.
“Why are you here?” she asked.
“I need to find out what he has planned next. I also need to know what happened to the other English flyers. The three men we left when we took off in Rath’s bomber.”
“I am sorry. He had them killed. I saw their bodies when the police recovered them following the fire.”
Bitterness scalded the back of Bell’s throat. He had guessed their fate straight away, but the confirmation struck deep. He would make sure word got back to the Royal Flying Corps of their fate.
“And Rath’s plans? Where did he go? What is it he hopes to accomplish?”
“He took all his belongings for a long trip, but I do not knowwhere,” she said. “He left not long after you that morning, with all of his people except one, a man they call apyromane.”
“Pyromaniac,” Bell guessed.
“He likes fire. A short while later, the warehouse Karl had rented burned down and thepyromanevanished.”
