The Secret Files of Lucky Ford: The Dragon, the Wolf, and the Maiden, Part 10 of 12
Lucky Ford and the officials are captured! Taken into the depths of Mount Vesuvius, they are now confronted with the horrors crafted by Department Three and its inhuman mastermind, Doktor Metzger.
The Dragon, the Wolf, and the Maiden is now available as a Kindle ebook, in paperback, or as a DRM-free ePub!
This is Part 10 of The Secret Files of Lucky Ford: The Dragon, the Wolf, and the Maiden. If you aren’t caught up yet, check out Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, and Part 9 before reading any further.
Content Warnings: Violence, Animal Violence, Gun Violence, Torture, Gore, Death, Swearing, Tobacco Use, Nazis
SUNDAY MORNING, JULY 10, 1942
SS DEPARTMENT THREE BASE: VESUVIUS
OUTSIDE THE CITY OF NAPLES, ITALY
“Wonderful, magnificent,” Werner von Werner whispered as he scribbled down his observations. Lucky tried not to look past him. Werner continued murmuring: “Those Japanese really knocked it out of the park with this one, forget about those damn icicle swords.”
In the operating room, the orderlies had abandoned their cameras and recording gear and had gathered around Cão's suspended body, taking their own notes and photographs. Even Gerhardt, still beside Lucky, was on the edge of his seat. The ten shots had passed through the steel plate as if it wasn't there and had gone on straight through Cão.
“The Imperial Swordsmiths forged these bullets by folding the purest steel over a thousand times. They call them dōtanuke bullets,” Gerhardt whispered to Lucky. “Our liaison explained that it is the name of a legendary method of swordplay, the 'torso-cutting blade.' I see it has lived up to its name.”
Gerhardt perked up in his chair as the huddled orderlies dispersed, revealing Cão's suspended body.
The sailor looked like he was sleeping off a bad night in port, save for a few thin rivulets of blood running down his chest and stomach. The blood was oozing from tiny wounds, only visible because of pink skin puckered up around each of them. Cão's entry wounds were actually smaller than the diameter of the dōtanuke bullets. They'd hit with such little resistance that his flesh had barely registered that they'd passed through him. The damaged that had taken its toll was inside.
The orderlies unshackled Cão, each taking a limp limb, then tossed him on top of Dutton's bloody corpse in the corner.
The steel table he'd been shackled to looked like it had been infested with termites. The ten bullets that had perforated Cão had punched through the table just as easily, leaving ten perfectly circular holes.
Beyond these holes, the carved stone wall of the room had been ruined. The dōtanuke rounds had exited the table and slammed into the wall like meteors. The stone was pulverized: ten craters, eight inches across and six inches deep, had been blasted into its surface.
“Imagine, Private Ford, a battalion of soldiers armed with the 'torso-cutting' bullet. The Black Dragon Society assures us that these rounds can pierce the side armor of one of your Stuart-class tanks. The possibilities are delightful, my friend.” Gerhardt said.
His praise of the bullets went unheard; Lucky was watching Cão's body settle to the floor, desperate to see the flicker of an eyelid or twitch of a finger.
Gerhardt continued like he had a rapt audience:
“Though the logistics require some adjustment. Reports indicate that a single burst such as this constitutes seventy hours of labor. And the fool Tojo refuses to share the secrets of their manufacture with us. Perhaps his handlers can rein him in. Were their Oriental cunning combined with our ingenuity, any obstacles could be easily overcome.”
The Vargulf commander sighed, adding:
“I'm afraid some distrust still remains between our people, however.”
Cão's blood washed away from the perforated table and the mangled steel plate that had failed to protect him was removed. The orderlies once again piled through the hatch to await Werner's orders. The Nazi was still hunched over his clipboard, scratching down an endless series of notes on the results of the dōtanuke demonstration.
The orderlies stood patiently, familiar with the man's obsession with detail.
Werner glanced over the top edge of his clipboard and noticed his men were ready for their next victim. He nodded in acknowledgment, silently holding up a single finger to show he was just about done; he added a final notation with embellished punctuation and addressed the orderlies in German.
The Nazis gave sharp salutes and left the room.
“Before he retired to his lab, Doctor Metzger wanted me to show you what brought you guys here,” Werner told the officials. He was interrupted by a squeaking sound. The orderlies wheeling a large television into the room. Its screen had to be two feet across. It was the largest set Lucky had ever seen.
Werner smirked, saying:
“Boys, thanks to the eavesdropper your ginger carried around for us, I know you know dick about the Crying Maiden. You want to come into my house and destroy something so amazing, and you know nothing about it? I got to ask, do you understand the difference between a hero and an idiot?”
The traitor looked around the room, waiting for a response. The only thing he got in return was silence and stone faces. He sighed and leaned against the thick window.
“No one? Preparation. Idiots charge headlong into a ruckus, heroes collect the information, plan, set contingencies, execute, and succeed. You guys, strapped into chair, watching your friends die, think you’re what, knights? Operation Damsel, what a crock of shit.”
Werner walked to the television and twisted the power knob, then carefully adjusted the aerials, continuing to speak as he made minute corrections to the fuzzy picture:
“What you are about to see is the unfiltered genius of Johann Metzger. He made this after your little rescue attempt. I wish he stayed to show it to you himself, but the only thing Johann hates more than stupid questions is answering them for stupid people.”
Werner stepped to the side, revealing the flickering screen. A large gray mass lay undulating in the midst of a network of black tubing and beams. Small white things moved about the base of the squirming shape, pausing here and there momentarily but scuttling away after a few seconds.
“With the Brüderlichkeit, Johann showed that he could control the human mind. With the Vargulf, did the same with the human body,” Werner said. “And now, with the Crying Maiden, he proves that he can control over nature itself. This, you idiots, is the Crying Maiden.”
The picture cleared up as the camera focused on the gray shape.
“My Lord,” the Colonel whispered to Lucky's right.
“Holy shit,” Bucket muttered.
The fuzzy gray mass focused into clearly defined fins and flippers, scarred and cracked skin and tired, dry eyes. It was a whale, and the small white dots moving around it were Nazis, tending to their prisoner. It had to be a hundred feet long, massive and miserable, suspended on the metal torture rack the Colonel had shown during the briefing.
The poor creature was clearly emaciated and brutalized. Its ribs were the only things holding its sickly gray skin in the air; it emanated pain with every labored breath. A series of black metal nodules had been embedded into the whale's flesh along the entire length of its spine, each node connected by a thick cable. Its flippers were bound to the black frame with thick straps. Both whale and rack were suspended over a giant pool of fetid, swirling water, churning with enough force to reveal it to be deep and active.
A thick tube snaked up to the whale's mouth from some kind of industrial pump than one kraut the size of a louse was shoveling goop into. The pump throbbed as it drove the mixture up the tube, down the whale's throat, and into its guts. Two thick hoses were affixed to the whale's head above and forward of its dry, dusty eyes with thick fabric tape, crusted adhesive, and a harness so tight that it was pressing into the whale's skin.
The whale still tried to struggle, but it was tired. Some of the straps had worn through its flippers, leaving long scars in its skin.
More white-clad orderlies scrambled on hanging metal walkways all around the animal, checking the various valves and connections on the horrible framework. Two of the Nazis dragged a massive black cable, at least a foot in diameter, along, toward the creature. The pair laid a ladder across the whale's jutting ribs and climbed up, dragging that cable with them. The ladder pressed into the whale's side. It shifted uncomfortably, but was too weak to shake them off. The Nazis socketed it directly into the first node on the whale's spine, right at the base of its skull. Lucky traced the cable back to its source as the two descended the ladder. Bucket had had the same thought.
“A Tesla coil,” he growled, when he saw what it was connected to. “The sick bastards.”
The cable hooked the whale's spine directly into the apex of an alien structure at least forty feet tall. The Tesla coil itself was a metal tower enveloped by coiled insulators that terminated in a massive metal cap the shape of a doughnut.
“I can see the little wheels in your little brains spinning like a hundred little rats are running on them,” Werner sneered. While he taunted the officials, a crew of orderlies manning a fire-hose began to spray down the whale's dry, cracked skin with brownish water drawn from the deep pool seething beneath it. Werner kept speaking:
“You see, our experiments during the Great War with hydrophones as a U-boat detection system yielded interesting results. Did you know that a whale's song can be heard at ultra-low frequency for over one hundred miles? Of course, we can't hear it as humans, but this constant low frequency vibration has quite an effect on many other things. All it took was for a great man to discover how to harness those frequencies to get your planes tumbling out of the sky.”
“From what I understand, Herr Ford,” Gerhardt whispered, “You were among the first to experience the Maiden in the field.”
“Her sound waves can disrupt every aeronautical instrument you use with just a tweak of air pressure,” Werner said, continuing his self-gratifying lecture without pause: “Now, not to sound too self-important, but I was the one who suggested to Johann that it could work as a direct battlefield weapon, too. You buys are going to help me prove that theory.”
Werner turned and motioned to the orderlies in the operating theater. The four men emerged through the steel door and stood behind Werner. He casually flipped through the pages on his clipboard before finally settling on one. He tapped his lips with his index finger as he thought and considered whatever he was reading. Slowly, carefully, he extended his finger and pointed directly at Rossling.
“First, the Kiwi,” Werner said. He studied his notes, then pointed at Ajax, “Then the Greek.”
The orderlies pounced on Rossling, not taking any chances after seeing the fate of their comrades at the hands of Cão and Dutton, using leather restraints to bind his arms to his ribcage even before they freed his arms and legs from the steel restraints on his chair. Rossling didn't say a word, he just looked at Ajax. The young Athenian had tears welling in his eyes, but Rossling did his best to remain calm.
“Chin up, mate,” he said to Ajax.
The orderlies lifted Rossling and carried him into the operating room. The New Zealander didn't struggle as they clamped his arms and legs to the vertical, still-wet steel table and ran the leather straps across him. The steel hatch slammed shut, muting the scene.
Lucky could see Rossling ask one of the orderlies something. The white-clad Nazi reached a gloved hand into his apron pocket and pulled out a pack of kraut smokes. He pulled one cigarette from the pack and placed it in Rossling's mouth, then struck a match on the table next to his head to light it.
Rossling took a long drag then exhaled the smoke slowly. He turned to looked through the window at Ajax, then winked and leaned his head back to rest against the wet steel table, chin in the air.
The orderlies, satisfied that Rossling was secure, quickly passed out large earmuffs made of wood, leather, and rubber. They clamped these bulky devices over their ears, over their gas masks and helmets, then set to work, wheeling a weird machine into the room in front of Rossling. The New Zealander acted as if he did not notice, passively watching them work while he puffed on the kraut cigarette.
The orderlies began inspecting the device, a machine unlike anything Lucky had ever seen. Knobs and bladders sprouted from its twisted metal exoskeleton, hanging off the machine like bubblegum on the understand of a diner table. The device pulsated like a living thing, from its flywheels and belts to the metallic cone that was now directed at Rossling. Wires criss-crossed it while pneumatic tubes dangled like fish guts below. A thick hose extended from the back of the machine and disappeared out of Lucky's view.
“Gentlemen, you'll notice the tubing connected to the rear of the machine here,” Werner said, indicating the hose. He tapped the television screen with his pen, ding, ding, ding, pointing at the two tubes hooked into the whale's skull. “If I can direct you to the television screen, you'll notice that this tubing runs directly from the Maiden's cranial sinuses to an amplifier, to a short-range projector, such as the one in front of...”
The Nazi paused to check his notes again before remembering his captive's name:
“...in front of Sergeant Rossling here.”
“You kolotripa...” was all Ajax could say. He sagged down in his steel chair.
“We’ve never gotten to study the effects of close range Maiden frequencies on the human anatomy in a lab environment before, so I'm very excited to see what happens,” Werner said, almost giddy. He turned around to watch the orderlies make the final adjustments to the frequency projector. Once again, Gerhardt leaned over to whisper some of his macabre insight:
“What your countryman has failed to mention is that the effects of the Mädchen are very well documented in animals, as well as accidents involving some of the Italiener scum outside,” the Nazi said. His grin warped around his scar once again while he spoke: “I would understand if you didn't want to witness what is to become of the sergeant, Herr Ford.”
“All right, there we have it!” Werner yelped, jumping with glee. “We are all ready here!”
The orderlies stepped away from the projector and were giving Werner a thumbs-up. Werner reached to the bare wall and lightly tapped it, opening a cleverly concealed panel. Within the wall was a telephone receiver, which he grabbed and immediately began speaking rapid-fire German into. He quickly hung up the phone and grinned.
“Here it comes...” he whispered.
Rossling, still calm and unaffected, must have noticed the horror growing on the faces of those outside the glass. He took a long drag of the German cigarette, then spit the spent butt from his mouth. Slowly, gently, he leaned his head back and closed his eyes, resting like the dog-tired soldier he was. He let a short breath of smoke out of his mouth, then quickly sucked it in through his nostrils.
In that instant, he looked at peace.
The frequency projector was like a Flash Gordon creation mashed together by a railroad hobo, a high-iron welder, and a mad artist. It lit up and quaked for just a second, but that was enough to end Rossling's moment of tranquility.
A powerful vibration shook the entire room, rising up from the floor and penetrating deep into Lucky's bones. His stomach twisted and his eyesight went blurry as the quaking echoed through his body. Lucky felt like his spine was a fishing line getting yanked on by a prize-winning trout. Bile rose in his throat but he battled it back down. The sensation only lasted for a second but the results were instantaneous on the other side of the glass.
The low frequency sound wave slammed into Rossling like a bulldozer.
The New Zealander's chest crumpled in on itself like a milk carton. He spasmed twice as his lungs collapsed and heart burst, then hung limp with blood dripping from his ears and mouth. His last lungful of cigarette smoke slowly escaped from his ruined lungs.
Ajax sobbed.
“Do you finally understand how it works? Did you see?” Werner asked. He excitedly ran around to get a better view of the television. Nothing had changed in the view of the dying whale's torture chamber. “Oh damn it, I always forget this feed is delayed.”
He patted the top of the TV set.
“Don't worry boys, it's coming,” he said. The traitor squatted in front of the screen like a rugrat waiting for the Kix Cereal commercials to end so he could hear more of The Lone Ranger.
The scene on the TV remained unchanged. A Nazi officer stood ready at a console overlooking the mutilated whale, while the two soldiers that had been attaching the cable to the whale's spine to the Tesla coil double- and triple-checked all their connections.
It had to be about another two minutes that the officials waited in silence, watching for anything on screen to change. Suddenly the two Nazis looked up to the console, where their officer had snapped to attention. The officer snatched up a phone and spoke for a short moment. There was no sound, but Lucky knew that this was the call Werner had made.
The two technicians scrambled up the steps and joined the officer at the console. The officer hung up the phone and nodded at his two men, each manning controls on either side of him. The three grabbed the same type of earmuffs the orderlies in the room were wearing and secured them on their heads. The officer looked over his console once again, then signaled to his men; they signaled an affirmative back to him.
The officer took a deep breath then grabbed hold of a massive switch, one that would make Doctor Frankenstein jealous.
The Nazi slammed the switch down, igniting the Tesla coil. Lightning arced out of the coil's chromed apex, quickly and mercilessly racing down the thick cable and dancing up the emaciated whale's spinal cord. The seemingly comatose beast spasmed to life in excruciating pain, arching its scarred body up and away from the metal rack that suspended it in the air.
“Electrical stimulation is the catalyst for the Maiden's auditory output,” Werner whispered, entranced by the flickering screen before him. The whale's skin steamed where the metal nodes were embedded in its flesh and spine. Its formerly dead-looking eyes had become alive and terrified, desperate to escape the pain.
The Nazi officer let the electricity course through the beast for just a second, then cut the switch off. The massive cavern around the whale fell into shadow without the racing electrical arcs of the Tesla coil lighting it. The whale seemed to deflate, settling onto its torture rack in exhaustion and relief.
“And there you have it,” Werner said, standing and brushing off the seat of his pants where he had been sitting on the concrete floor. “Even momentary exposure to the Maiden's cry is enough to elicit catastrophic results in the human body, as is evidenced by the late sergeant.”
The orderlies had already unhooked Rossling and tossed him into the corner, draped across Cão and Dutton. Ajax couldn't even look up from the floor, he just keep crying.
Werner made a quick couple notes on his clipboard and again turned to rap his knuckles against the thick glass. The orderlies again entered through the hatch.
They did not speak as they bound Ajax's arms. The Greek commando hung there limp as a dead fish when they carried him by his shoulders and knees into the operating room.
Lucky's restraints were tight and unyielding and the strychnine needles were waiting only inches from his veins. The only thing he could do was watch as Ajax was clamped onto the steel table to die as well.
Gerhardt yawned, bored as he counted down the minutes until he could subject Lucky to whatever horror he had in store.
Ajax closed his eyes and rested his chin against his chest as they hung him spread-eagle on the upright table. He had given up.
The orderlies buzzed around him like a swarm of albino buzzards, each with a set task they performed mindlessly. They calibrated the frequency projector, examining every knob, tube, and gasket on the thing. Ajax didn't pay them any mind, or their weapon, or the bodies of his friends piled just feet away.
On the television, the krauts were continuing to spray down the steaming whale with fire hoses. The whale shifted and shuddered pathetically, but with its fins and tail banded to its rack, the poor animal couldn't do much except squirm like it was on a hook. The Nazi officer on the other side of the screen pulled out a checklist and began methodically going through all his switches and dials, making sure everything was right to activate the machine again.
Werner bounced his knee in anticipation while he watched his men prepare Ajax for execution. He was barely holding himself back from pressing his face against the glass like a kid at the puppy store. The orderlies finalized their preparations, one checking all the recording equipment and instruments in order to get Metzger his raw data, while another double-checked Ajax's restraints.
While they worked, heads down, autonomic, the lights on the frequency projector begin to glow again. They we so engrossed in their tasks that they did not notice. Werner realized after a moment that the machine was coming to life.
He charged the long window, shouting:
“Not yet, you idiots!”
He yelled in German and English and pounded on the glass. The orderlies noticed Werner's commotion and turned just as another sonic vibration coursed through the floor. The sensation wasn't as severe as the one that had killed Rossling, but it jellied Lucky's marrow and got his guts to a nauseous boil nonetheless.
The Nazis in the room reacted instantly. They dropped to the floor, curling into balls as they ripped their gas masks off to clamp their hands over their ears.
The projector shocked Ajax from his comatose state. His whole body went rigid and his mouth dropped open in a silent howl. Blood began dripping from his ears, and he clenched his eyes shut as tight at they could go. Whereas the test on Rossling lasted a instant and killed him in that time, this activation had already been going ten seconds.
“Turn it off, damn you!” Werner screamed. His men twisted in pain.
One orderly had managed to crawl out from the frequency projector's direct line of fire and was able to claw his way up the wall to regain his feet. He lurched to the corner and ripped the harpoon free from Dutton's chest.
“Wait, no!” Werner howled. The orderly stumbled toward the projector, harpoon in hand, electrical arcs whip-snapping off its barbed head.
“That fool is going to waste hundreds of thousands of Reichsmarks,” Gerhardt snarled.
He pushed Werner aside and pounded on the thick glass, trying to get the attention of the staggering orderly, shouting:
“You'll die if any harm comes to that machine, sturmmann!”
Oblivious, the orderly grasped the wooden shaft in both hands and raised the silver-tipped weapon into the air over the vibrating frequency projector.
“You're a dead man,” Gerhardt growled.
Lightning flashed across the spearhead and the orderly plunged it deep into the projector's inner workings. A shower of sparks, a spray of scalding steam, and a cloud of foul black smoke all erupted from the device. The hum in the floor instantly ceased, Lucky's spine unclenched, and all the lights on the projector dimmed down until the machine went dark and died. Steam and smoke roiled from the damaged device in impossible volumes, quickly blanketing the operating room in a thick gray haze.
“What happened?” Gerhardt demanded, grabbing Werner by his perfectly pressed collar. “What went wrong?”
“Get off’a me,” Werner snapped.
He twisted out of Gerhardt's grip and rushed to the telephone while keeping an eye on the television, nearly tripping over his own feet in the process.
The scene on screen had yet to change, but by Lucky's count they were still at about a minute and a half before the delay caught up. Werner picked up the phone and stood, silent and anxious, tapping his jackboot impatiently. After a long moment he slammed the handset down, cracking the receiver.
“No answer,” he stammered. “Why wouldn't they answer?”
“Close your mouth,” Gerhardt growled.
The two Nazis turned their attention the television, hoping to find their answer in black and white. Another thirty seconds. Blinding gray swirled behind the glass.
The three Nazis on the TV were still at their the console, adjusting knobs and dials, readying for the next test. The whale pitifully shifted on its rack. Whatever was about to happen would be a surprise for them as well.
Only one of the orderlies looked up with a start as dozens of machine gun rounds tore through him and the rest of Nazis. They staggered and dropped in seconds.
Blood showered from the shredded Nazis onto the bullet-mangled console as sparks are metal fragments erupted over their crumpled bodies. The officer, hat thrown from his head and black uniform torn to shreds, gripped the edge of the console and hauled himself to his knees. He reached with one shaking hand to the phone but another burst of point-blank fire sent him back to the floor, stilled.
Werner and Gerhardt stood in shocked silence as they watched their comrades gunned down in front of them.
“Who...” Werner whispered.
A group of four men walked into the picture. They weren't soldiers, their ragged civilian clothes and Al Capone-style Tommy guns and pump-action shotguns showed that clearly enough.
The first man, large and dressed in worn slacks and stained undershirt with black suspenders, waved at more men swarming the cavernous chamber. He faced the camera and leaned against the shattered console to light a match on the sole of his shoe. He took a moment to puff a cigar to life while his compatriots mowed down the last of the Nazi technicians clamoring around the whale.
The man's hardened eyes, wild hair, and mustache was familiar to Lucky. He was the Italian laborer that had drawn Lucky's eye on the road to Vesuvius. The man whose could put his anger at the death of a fellow prisoner aside long enough to clock the Nazi convoy rolling by.
Now, that man was smiling. He carried his forty-five-caliber sub-machine gun like he had ripped men apart with lead a hundred times before.
“Italians!” Gerhardt shouted. “Get Meyer down there now, Untersturmführer!”
Werner started for the hatch, but was interrupted by the Colonel who was still watching the television feed.
“Hah!” he chuckled, “I knew the frog had it in him.”
Werner stopped in his tracks and spun to watch.
On the screen, a fifth man joined the four Italians on the control platform. This man was squat and muscular, and even in the dark chamber never removed his aviator sunglasses. He stood next to the Italian leader and exhaled a cloud of smoke.
It was Neff. He stepped through the machine gun-splattered gore, looking over the blood-stained control panel with a studied eye.
Beyond him, the whale stirred. Her dry eyes blinked open, clear, as if she knew someone there was on her side. She recognized that her torturers were dead, their lives sprayed across the machines that had been used on her for as long as she had known of people.
The massive beast stirred, breathing heavily and shifting on the rack. Werner went two shades paler as the whale came alive; the Nazi deaths had reinvigorated her.
The whale's massive flippers and flukes flexed, shearing through the banding she had been bound with like it was wet tissue paper. With her tail free, she slammed all of her hundred-ton bulk down on the rack, shaking the entire cavern. The pressure tubing on her head, used to absorb and project her cries, popped loose, revealing circular pink scars above her furious eyes.
The massive rack shuddered under the whale's violent thrashing, visibly bending and even cracking over the deep seawater pool. One Nazi, shot but still crawling, caught her eye. The whale twisted and slammed its tail down onto him, leaving a dark smear down her fluke and nothing left of him. Neff and the Italians watched with the same silent, cautious awe as Werner, Gerhardt, and the officials.
The whale bucked again, dropping the rack down another few feet as she vomited out the force-feeding tube in a spray of liquified krill pulp. With one final slam against her constraints, the rack's bolts and structure shattered, dropping the massive whale toward the slow-moving pool. The thick cable connecting her to the Tesla coil went taut and the sockets in her spine held strong. Bolts popped and beams gave way, and the towering Tesla coil snapped from its foundations, tumbling down toward the water, still alive with whipping lightning arcs. Lucky's stomach clenched. Once those arcs touched the pool, the whale would be fried alive.
Neff shouldered his anti-tank rifle and fired.
A single anti-tank fifty-caliber silver bullet pierced the shining dome at the top of the coil. The heavy round punched into the metal structure and shattered inside, tearing it apart in a blast of flayed metal and smoke.
The rifle was thirty-five pounds and five-and-a-half feet long but Neff handled it like a BB gun. He racked and fired two more rounds before the coil collapsed fully, gutting the device in sprays of molten copper wire. The lightning evaporated in mid-air.
The whale, rack, and disabled Tesla coil disappeared into the green pool with a monstrous splash that swept over the whole cavern like a hurricane surge. Water washed back into the pit, pulling the dead Nazis with it, cleaning the cavern of lingering filth. The pool roiled as the whale struggled to free itself from the Tesla coil's snarl of wires.
Neff scanned the bloody control board and selected one switch of the dozens there. On the far side of the cavern, a gate rose out of the green water. The fetid seawater swirled and became clearer as a stream of fresh ocean water mixed in. The gate must to have led to the Gulf of Naples through an underground channel. It was the only way they could have gotten the huge whale from Sicily into the middle of a volcano almost two hundred fifty miles away in less than a day.
The whale surfaced in the middle of the inflow of clean seawater, showing off her back free of the Tesla coil's cables. The metal nodes were still there, implanted directly into her spinal cord and not going anywhere, but she was free. She let off a triumphant geyser of water through her blowhole and dove once again, her scarred tail waving goodbye as she entered the dark tunnel out to the open ocean.
“So the last audio output was feedback from the pressure-phones hitting the water,” Werner whispered to himself, entranced by the scene. He unconsciously pulled his pencil from behind his ear and began flipping through his clipboard, searching for a place to write down this latest observation.
Gerhardt was not so mystified. The Vargulf officer smacked the pencil from Werner's hands and shoved him toward the hallway door.
“I ordered you to get Sturmmann Meyer, verräter,” the gaunt officer snarled. He was already formulating plans to hunt down Neff and the Italian infiltrators. Lucky could only hope that Meyer's panzerritters found the commandos before Gerhardt and his Vargulf did. Death in a hail of gunfire would be blessing compared to what the Vargulf would do to anyone they caught.
Again, Werner stumbled to the hatch, and again he was interrupted, this time by a loud thud against the operating room window. Werner turned to see one of his orderlies pressing his helmeted forehead against the glass, the only visible thing amidst the gray smoke swirling around the room.
The orderly stood still for a moment, then leaned back, away from the window. He stood, trembling, then whipped himself forward, slamming his head slamming into the glass. The impact left the front lip of his helmet dented in. He leaned back again and slammed his his head full speed into the window once more, shaking the slab of glass in its metal frame.
“Whatever he is doing, this glass in sixteen centimeters thick and shatter-resistant, it would take...” Werner said, but was cut off as the orderly's head slammed into the glass a third time, this time with such force that spider-web cracks blossomed deep inside the thick pane.
The orderly's helmet was crushed inches inward, and pink and red liquid dribbled from beneath it. The white-aproned Nazi seemed to hang limp in midair for a moment, then dropped from view, like a puppet with its strings cut. The smoke spun around his suddenly vacant air, then parted as a second man stepped into view.
Cão looked as if he had been pin-striped red: the ten thin rivulets of blood had run down his chest in eerily straight paths. He was breathing heavily, half from the smoke and half because of the horrible dōtanuke wounds in his chest. The Portuguese sailor stared through the glass at Werner for a second, then looked at the Colonel. The old soldier took a drag of Gerhardt's cigarette, then nodded. Cão winked and smiled, a ferocious expression on his scarred face, then disappeared into the smoke.
“He's going to release the restraints!” Gerhardt yelled, then attempted to dash to the door. Before he could get there, the shackles up and down the entire row of chairs popped open with a snap.
Lucky, suddenly free, lunged forward without a second's thought, going for Gerhardt's ankles with both arms. The Nazi spun quickly, catching him on the forehead with an vicious knee-strike. Bucket charged at him as well, but Gerhardt deflected his attack as easily as he had put down Lucky's, leaving the young sergeant in a heap on the floor with a brutal hip-throw.
Gerhardt's skeletal hand snaked inside his coat to draw his pistol. Before he could find a target, a thundercrack shook the room that sent Gerhardt flying in an explosion of lightning and dagger-thick shards of glass.
Gerhardt collided with the wall, cracking his skull against stone with a sickening pop. A harpoon was quivering in his shoulder as he slid down into Dutton’s empty seat. Electricity coursed through him, sizzling and snapping, leaving him seizing and rigid.
The harpoon's battery died after a few seconds and he collapsed into a limp heap. He was out cold, but he still kicked and jerked every few seconds, and his wound hissed steam.
Two silhouettes emerged from the swirling smoke filling the operating room. It was Cão and Ajax, both bloody and wounded. Werner was paralyzed with shock, and the Colonel stepped past him and to help Cão lift Ajax over the window sill, careful to avoid the jagged teeth of shattered glass sticking out of its frame. Bucket dusted himself off and took Ajax's arm over his shoulder, supporting the bloody, dazed commando. The Colonel then helped Cão back into the room. The wounded Portuguese man seemed even more dangerous than ever, and it was his glare that snapped Werner out of his trance.
In an instant of panic-induced bravado, Werner spun around, clumsily unsheathing his saber, holding the straight blade between his newly freed victims and himself.
“Stop right there!” Werner yelled desperately. “I can have the panzerritters in here in an instant! They'll blast you all!”
The Colonel nodded, then stepped forward, still holding Gerhardt's lit cigarette in his mouth.
“Werner,” he started, “I can only assume this facility was constructed with the same merciless paranoia that every single other Department Three facility I've destroyed has been.”
As he spoke, the Colonel began making subtle hand gestures behind his back. Lucky saw Miller tense up, ready for action. He inched in close behind the Colonel, little by little. The Colonel continued, all the while rubbing his sore wrists and puffing his near-spent cigarette:
“As such, I would guess that this room is completely sound-proof, your men outside are unable to determine what, if anything, might be happening in here,”
Werner, already pale from the loss of the Maiden, turned damn-near translucent. A blue vein visibly pulsed a mean jazz beat in his forehead and the blade wavered in his hand.
“That's what I thought,” the Colonel confirmed. He sighed and took another puff of the cigarette, pulling the cherry down to the very end, then said: “It's about time this mess ended, I'd say.”
All that instant, Werner broke. He screamed and lunged, his voice cracking pathetically. He was obviously untrained and unfamiliar with the feeling of having a weapon in hand.
The Colonel read him like a book. He danced around the blade, plucking the red-hot cigarette from his lips and stabbing it down on the back of Werner's sword hand. The Nazi howled in pain as it sizzled his flesh.
He stumbled back, tripping over his own jackboots, twisting away as he fell. The right side of the his face raked across the shard-studded window sill, sending a spray of blood with him to the floor. He clamped his hand over his face as he screamed, red pouring between his fingers as light glittered across the glass slivers lodged in his ruined cheek and eye.
MacLeod moved to disarm the fallen traitor, but Werner scrambled to his feet and began swinging the sword with renewed vigor, slashing at everything around him in a half-blind fury. The Colonel held MacLeod back.
“He'll tire himself out in a moment, Fergus,” the Colonel said. MacLeod took a step back, and the old soldier patted him on the shoulder.
“Damn you, Halistone,” Werner growled, blood streaming. He stopped swinging his sword around and glared at the Colonel with his one good eye. “If you know so much, old man, why do you even fight us? You've seen what we can do.”
Lucky thought of all his friends who had died because of this Nazi's organization, because of his work and his contributions to thousands of murders.
“Because we can stop you, you asshole!” Lucky yelled, unable to hold it in anymore. “You traitor, that eye is better than you deserve.”
“You! You don't even know the hole you've dug yourself into!” Werner shrieked. The Nazi stared at Lucky madly, tears of pain flowing from his remaining eye, blood oozing from the other. “You're up to your neck in it now, kid! The things you'll see, the things you'll do...”
Werner actually smiled, like Bruder Sechs, the dying albino SS officer in Sicily, like Gerhardt before he'd shot Lee. He hissed:
“You'll never be free of this. Things will never be normal again. Not for you, not for anyone, not if you leave this mountain.” Werner pointed to the unconscious Gerhardt with his sword, saying: “He has made sure of it. The whole world will know what he can do once this night ends. That is, unless you all give up right now.”
“Nary a fawkin' chance, ye nutter,” MacLeod growled from behind him.
“Then it doesn't matter what happens to me, does it?” Werner said. He wiped the tears from his good eye with the back of his black sleeve. His body tensed and he slowly spread his feet, gaining an aggressive footing, staring at Lucky all the while.
Werner exploded into motion, surging forward with his sword. Lucky tried to dodge backward, but stumbled over Gerhardt's boots. A pair of hands grabbed him and threw him the rest of the way to the floor, under the Nazi’s stab. Werner's sword passed inches above Lucky's head, so close he could hear its edge sawing through the air.
Lucky found his footing and prepared to lunge off the ground, but something wet dripped from the sword, icy against Lucky's face.
Werner's blade was buried to the hilt in Miller's chest.
The masked man stumbled away, twisting the weapon out of Werner's grasp while the gleaming point of the blade protruded eighteen inches out of his back. He took three staggering steps back before collapsing next to Gerhardt.
Miller wheezed. His eyes were wild and unfocused. He sagged forward, chest dropping to his knees, and stayed still.
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Copyright © 2022 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.
Written and edited by Daniel Baldwin. Art by Dudu Torres.