The Black Prince, Terror of the Kriegsmarine: From the Annals of the Shadow Committee, Part 2 of 3

Quijano Corbeau has been stuck on the sidelines since the Abwehr put a price on his head for disrupting their plans in New Orleans. Now, he’s got a plan, he just needs to get the right person to hear it.

Then, a soldier gains his calling and loses his life.

The Black Prince, Terror of the Kriegsmarine is an upcoming swashbuckling adventure following a warring crew of gangsters, pirates, zealots, and maniacs united in the pursuit of smashing fascism at all costs. From the Annals of the Shadow Committee is an introduction to Prince’s voyages. Start with Part 1.

Content warnings: Mild swearing, alcohol use, tobacco use, drug use, violence, gun violence, death, gore.

THURSDAY AFTERNOON, MARCH 26, 1942
PYKRETE PRODUCTION FACILITY
LAKE SAN CRISTOBAL, COLORADO

Quijano Corbeau didn't cut off the six-foot ice saw until he was sure all the suits were in the building. Slush slid off his rubber apron and splatted against the concrete floor.

“How many'd you clock?” he hissed. The men working around him took off their ear protection and huddled up.

“Four came in,” Banjo Tony replied. “Two heavies outside the door, the Navy guy, and the egghead.”

“I got the same count,” Mangler confirmed. He shoved the milky blue block of Pykrete they'd just cut down the rollers just far enough to hide them from view. He brushed the ice crystals off his gloves and looked around for eavesdroppers. Everyone else in the open-air factory was still working, churning wood pulp into mountain water and hitting it with blast chillers. They were safe to talk.

“I saw the suh-suh-supe and foreman already in there,” Al Zano said. He had a thick coating of icedust frosting his face, turning his beard white.

“Plan's good to go then,” Corbeau confirmed. “We all need to be sure. This what we want?”

“We vuh-vuh-voted on it, didn't we?” Zano asked.

“I ain't trying to freeze my ass off cutting ice all day,” Mangler said. He stuffed the insulated gloves into his back pocket and stretched to his full seven-foot height.

“I always forget how God damn tall you are,” Banjo said, shaking his head.

“Like my mom said: 'corn and milk,'” Mangler replied. Once, Eugene Hobbes had been a curiosity of a prize-fighter, a freak that up-and-comers and down-and-outers would get matched up with to put meat in the seats. Everyone who was anyone in the ring had traded punches with the Mangler at some point. Since he was paid to make the other guy look good, he never got the big purse. It didn't take long for his debts to get one over on him.

When he'd ended up on the run from shylocks, the Muddy Water Gang had taken him in, protected him, let him win. Mangler would follow Quijano Corbeau anywhere he asked to go.

“Alright boys, you got your jobs,” Corbeau said. He pulled his wool hat down and smoothed his beard over his scars. “Let Gator know it's time.”

Mangler grabbed a can of blue spray paint and slashed a huge X onto their freshly cut slab. He and Banjo put on their gloves and shoved it down the rollers until it hit the slope and rolled itself. It hit the lake with a geyser splash and drifted toward the middle, where the cranes and the towering blue hull waited.

Somewhere on the that hulk, Gator Wayne was waiting for the signal, the blue X. He'd worked the port in New Orleans in another life, so he'd ended up working a crane at the factory. He was the feint Corbeau needed.

Corbeau, Banjo, Zano, and Mangler left their station and cut through the middle of the facility. They skirted past blast chillers the size of apartment buildings and standing tanks loaded to the brim with wood pulp. The facility was enormous and brand new. It took them ten minutes to get to the exit.

The Rockall was floating in the middle of the lake like a cloudy, blocky sapphire island. It was the largest ship they'd ever seen, and it was just a proof of concept. Most folks wouldn't build a ship in the middle of a land-locked mountain lake. Their hosts weren't yet sure whether they wanted a ship made out of Pykrete, so they'd put an entire fake town to work to simply make up their minds.

Zano snipped the wires on the exit door alarm. The four of them peeked outside. The supe's office was lakeside, with large windows looking in on the production floor and larger ones looking out at their project. The men and women within were all leaning over a desk, their eyes bouncing between their blueprints and the Rockall.

They were looking everywhere except at what was coming to them. Corbeau smiled. He was going to give them plenty to see soon enough.

He watched the Rockall for Gator's count-down. He didn't have to wait long: the three quick flashes off a signal mirror couldn't have been meant for anyone else.

“That's it, sixty seconds, you know where you got to be,” he said. Zano and Mangler slipped back inside while Corbeau and Banjo hopped the rail and dashed along the waterline.

The Navy man noticed them coming, but the slab was already airborne.

Out in the middle of the lake, Gator had hooked up a two-ton Pykrete slab to his lifting cable with a quick-release pin. He leaned into the rotation control, his crane whipping around building speed like he was in the Olympic hammer throw. The crew around him took cover, some diving into the frigid lake. They'd all seen cranes out of control before and knew what could happen if they stuck around.

The thing about it was that the crane was not out of control. Gator Wayne knew exactly what he was doing. About four seconds before he was going to lose his lunch, he pulled the release cord. The frozen blue chunk of water and wood pulp tumbled end-over-end, arcing his above the lake. It hit the surface twenty yards from the supe's office, raising a wave that slammed into the floor-to-ceiling windows and blew them inward.

Corbeau and Banjo pulled their rubber aprons up like shields and charged through the surge. The people inside the office weren't so prepared. The water swept them off their feet and slammed them into the wall. Soaked papers stuck to everything.

The two thick-necks who'd come with the Navy man kicked in the door, splashing though ankle-deep water. Before they could pull their charges up off the floor, Zano and Mangler were on top of them with headlocks that sent them off to slumberland in less than thirty seconds.

By the time the washed-out occupants of the office regained their senses, Corbeau was sitting behind the supe's desk with his feet up and Banjo Tony was sifting through the soaked papers.

“What is this?” the Navy man sputtered, a white guy. He seemed young for all the cords and epaulets he was wearing, but Corbeau couldn't say for sure: he'd never spent a day working for Uncle Sam. The Navy man struggled to his feet, shoving his limp brown hair out of his face. His white uniform was soaked through.

“This is a proof-of-concept, I know y'all like those,” Corbeau said. He swung his feet off the desk and stood, hand out. “Quijano Corbeau, junior ice-cutter associate.”

The Navy man ignored him and helped his guest off the floor. He was white too, older, balding, with round glasses and a little black beard.

“Are you alright, Mister Pyke?” the Navy man asked.

“What in the world?” Pyke muttered. He was British and wholly confused. He wrung out his jacket then wiped his glasses off on it.

“Pyke?” Banjo asked. “Like Pykrete?”

“Yeah, you asshole,” the foreman grunted. He peeled a plastered blueprint off his face, glaring at Corbeau all the while.

“God damn criminals,” the supe snapped. “We got no money here, no weapons.”

“We don't want money,” Corbeau said.

“Then what?” the supe asked.

“We want to help,” Banjo replied.

“Help?” Pyke wondered.

“You know you got some of the schemiest, hardiest, sneakiest seat-of-your-pantsers in this country locked up here?” Corbeau wondered. “And you got us mixing wood pulp and cutting ice.”

“I know who you are,” the Navy man said.

“Then that puts me at a disadvantage,” Corbeau said.

“Rear Admiral Julian Desrochers, and this is my project,” he snapped.

“And she's a beaut, whatever she is,” Corbeau said with a nod, looking at the Rockall over his shoulder. He was sure Gator'd had his crane swarmed by then and was already in custody.

“Not just the ship, this whole facility,” Desrochers said. “You don't like cutting ice? That's fine. It's not a job, it's a distraction. We can send you back to sit in your little house and wait out the war.”

“I ain't trying to wait,” Corbeau snapped. He could hear sirens coming. “I'm trying to end your war.”

“And how's that? By sabotaging my vision?” Pyke asked. He was shivering.

“By doing things a little different,” Banjo said.

“You invented bulletproof ice, friend, and now you want to build a whole damn floating city out of it,” Corbeau pointed out. “If anyone can appreciate trying something new, it's you.”

“Security will be here in less than a minute,” the supe hissed.

“That's fine,” Corbeau told her. One of Desrochers' body men groaned and held his head. Mangler looked ready to choke him out again, but a look from Corbeau stopped him.

“Think on this, admiral: if we wanted to off y'all, we could have done you a dozen times over,” Corbeau pointed out. “You boys got some busted glass, some goose bumps, and a couple headaches.”

“Yes, if that hull plate had been flung with even ten percent higher velocity, we'd have been crushed,” Pyke agreed.

“So you wanted to show that you could kill us?” Desrochers asked. “Congratulations.”

“Like I said, a proof of concept. We can use limited resources to hit from angles that no one is looking at,” Corbeau said with a shrug. “Your Navy fights like a navy. I fight like something else.”

“And what might that be?” Pyke asked.

“Like the-the-the skip,” Zano said.

“And the skip is a picnic basket of cottonmouths with a thermos full of crazy,” Banjo added.

“This nut's been cutting ice for six days,” the foreman snapped. “You suddenly become some kind of mastermind from behind a saw?”

“How many ships have wolfpacks taken out in those six days, huh?” Banjo snarled.

“Oh, we're talking wolfpacks now?” the foreman said mockingly. “Yeah, just bump 'em off like it's a mom-and-pop sunset cruise.”

“The Nazis in those ships are people, and people don't want to be done like my boys can do to them,” Corbeau said.

“How's that? Butchered?” Desrochers wondered.

“Scared, distracted, tricked. Best heists we ever pulled, no one fired a shot,” Banjo said. “Then we'll leave 'em to tell the tale. Once they get to talking, our name's going to do more work than our guns.”

“And this is how you would do it?” Pyke wondered, looking around at the trashed room, the flung slab, the KO'd guards.

“The Nazis won't even know what hit 'em,” Corbeau promised. “Nobody will. You let us out there, the krauts will be spending more time looking over their shoulders and scrubbing their freshly-skidded britches than they'll spend wolf-packing.”

“These are unprecedented times, Jules,” Pyke said. “Unprecedented strategies are required.”

The old man got it.

Mangler heard a squad somping through the factory, on their way to thump ‘em all.

“Boss...” he said. Corbeau smirked and nodded.

“Think about it, admiral,” Corbeau said. He and his men got down on their knees, squishing down into the sodden carpet. They raised their hands above their heads and waited for a heartbeat.

Facility security burst into the office, shouting, waving guns and billy clubs. The four pirates were trussed up in seconds.

“Hey, you think about it!” Corbeau shouted at the dripping admiral while he was carried out in chains. “We got plenty of ideas for taking out Nazis! You want to talk more? You know where to find me, I ain't going anywhere!”

TUESDAY MORNING, APRIL 24, 1928
THE BONANZA GOLD MINE
ZELAYA, NICARAGUA

The wall behind the charred body tied to the charred post was so cratered with bullet holes that Chief Warrant Officer Clark James could barely read the graffiti painted across it.

“'EDSN' my ass,” he grunted. Sandino's men had left their mark in more ways than one. But if an army was actually concerned with sovereignty and defense, they wouldn't be throwing folks in front of firing squads before burning their corpses.

James was fairly certain that this particular body was exactly who he'd been sent to look for, a hard case named Gerald Smith. The man had come to Sandino's territory to take the mines back. He was supposed to teach these malcontents the lesson that no one could steal from the United States.

Based on how he'd been received, the terrorists had likely not taken well to his delivery.

When Sandino's people had evicted the rightful owners of this mine, brothers to the U.S. ambassador to Italy, no less, the United States had not had much choice but to respond. Gerald Smith had been that response. The terrorists had shot him through the throat and kept him alive long enough to take photos with him.

When James had been dispatched from his unit, he'd only been given one directive: retrieve Smith's weapon. The body didn’t matter, it was his weapon. They had given him a photograph of it. He did not know quite what he had expected, but it was not the pitted, gnarled chunk of oak and iron that they'd asked for.

The object they wanted was ancient. It was a fighting weapon: a thick hardwood shaft with a heavy cylindrical head. The grip was hobnailed and reinforced. It looked like a blacksmith had made it in a rush, from whatever he had on hand.

James had been a student of warfare since the Great War. The weapon he'd been asked to find appeared to exist somewhere between the Japanese kanabō and the Aboriginal nulla-nulla. The clubs he'd seen men carry in the trenches were of a similar ilk: engineered to end life by any means. The only difference was that Gerald Smith’s weapon was nearly a century-and-a-half older.

When his captain had ordered him onto this mission, he had not asked why. The captain liked to use James. When a man needed to answer questions, James never hesitated to ask. When a house needed to burn, James knew the fastest way to set it alight. When any manner of horror needed to be accomplished in the pursuit of American interests, he knew that James would enact that horror with both eyes open and a steady hand.

The orders sending James to the mine had came from higher up than the captain could determine. A suicide mission into a fanatic's camp was needed, so James was the first one the captain called up.

James did not question their judgement. Someone with the God-given authority to make such a decision needed the weapon back, and he would get it for them.

His platoon's camp was over twenty miles from his target. The captain had given him a black velvet bag containing one photo, a map, a gun, a transmitter, several shaped charge explosives, and a case of ammunition. In exchange, he took James' dog tags and set him out on his own.

Whoever had the power to send him to kill wanted the weapon and did not want anyone to know they had lost it to untrained terrorists. They needed a steady hand to reinstate their authority.

It was well after midnight when James entered the mine compound. Most of the terrorists were asleep, and the rest were drunk. They had won there, a feeling there were unaccustomed to when fighting U.S. forces: thus they reacted to the rare experience gracelessly.

James had found just a single two-man patrol circling the upper edge of the pit mine. He had dispatched them easily enough, one with his knife and the other with a stone, the second and third terrorist he had killed that evening. The rest were carousing in the barracks and the foreman's office.

As with most amateur armies, Sandino's was formed with passion but ran on alcohol. The thrums of victory had reverberated through them, rattling off whatever vestiges of discipline that had carried them through the raid. Without that ounce of control they had devolved almost to a man. James had already killed the only three who'd kept their heads.

He slipped between the pulsing light thrown off by lanterns and abandoned bonfires. He danced between abandoned bottles and greasy chicken bones. The barracks was packed with filthy, sweaty men yelling at each other over a straining radio. James risked a peek over a sill. Beyond the broken glass, he saw a veritable bacchanal. The men of the EDSN thought themselves the conquering Macedonians, and Sandino was their Alexander. In truth, they were Vandals, sour barbarians treading on the greatness of those with greater vision and will.

Half of the terrorists still carried their weapons, dragging them, leaning on them, swinging them around in their drunken fervor. The rest had cast their firearms aside, discarded on tables and in corners. To a man, they left their weapons loaded.

It was disgusting.

Between the fools drinking, dancing, rolling dice, playing cards, James did not see the weapon he had been sent for. It had been carried by a remorseless killer, an infiltrator who had killed them indiscriminately until he had been felled by a sniper's bullet. It would not be among these animals. It was a trophy. It would be with the men who held the leashes.

James pasted the shaped charges beneath each window sill as he passed, taking his time.

He needn't worry about the bullet to the back of the neck that had felled his predecessor: he had made sure to find that sniper first. The coward was in his little roost near the entrance of the compound. He had fought desperately for his life, but his true strength was limited to the far side of a telescopic sight. His neck broke in James' hands.

Clark James killed Nicaraguans as simply as he had killed Germans, Turks, Austrians, and Russians. One vertebra separates as easily as any other.

He slithered through the oily shadows. A small plot of crosses lay in shadow, each inscribed with the name of a fallen terrorist. Some graves were fresher than others, most of them, in fact. Only two battles had taken place at the mine: first when the EDSN had invaded, and second when Gerald Smith had attempted to liberate it single-handed. Counting the terrorists' graves, Smith had killed more of them with an ancient bludgeon than they had lost taking the mine.

Yes, the weapon that had wrought such death would be a trophy indeed.

The chances were low, but James hoped he would find it in the hands of Sandino himself. If he could chop the head off the serpent, he would.

He studied the foreman's office across the compound. It was perched on an incline above the tailings pit. The steep hill terminated at a still pool, its surface crusted with chemical runoff and broken up by angular spoil. The office was clearly occupied, with shadows moving behind the curtains. Those men were as foolish as the idiots in the barracks, save that they had discarded wine bottles rather than beer and their radio lacked the static of the cheaper model.

The smell rising from the pool was astringent from afar, but as James made his way over, the stench of rotting flesh overpowered everything else.

“Jesus,” he whispered. It wasn't spoil in the toxic pond, but bodies. The shapes poking through the surface were knees, elbows, faces. They were the miners who had simply wanted to put in a hard day's work.

“Animals,” James grunted. He sheathed his knife and removed the strange gun's receiver and barrel from their holsters inside his coat. He snapped them together and hooked in the drum magazine.

He no longer had the desire for the terrorists to not know that he had been there, or why he had come.

The machine pistol was heavy in his hands. To call it a Thompson would have been inaccurate. It was a custom build, beyond anything he had used before. The quick-assembly mechanism was just the beginning. It had radiator fins on the barrel to disperse heat, an up-angled compensator to negate recoil, a counter-balance in the pistol grip for ease of aiming. The benefactor that had removed him from his platoon had supplied him with the maps, the photos, the gun, and the bullets.

And what bullets they were!

James stood in front of the foreman's office and leveled the firearm.

“¡Hola!” he shouted. Someone inside dropped a glass. The instant a face appeared between the curtains, he squeezed the trigger.

The bullets exploded on impact, shredding the single story building. Shrapnel reduced the facade to splinters and the terrorists inside to meat. James held the trigger until the drum clicked empty. He tossed it down the hill and hooked a fresh one in.

The shattered door gave way after single kick. A few men were moving inside. He shot them in turn, one after the other. The explosive bullets popped each like a frog under a boot heel. He did not recognize any of them as Sandino. A shame.

He was wiping red out of his eyes when he saw the weapon. A single bare bulb dangled above it, casting it in a yellow glow.

It was sitting on a desk that had been dragged to the middle of the office. It lay among cards, gold flakes, and cash. They had thought it some prize, some bauble to be bet and bartered. They didn’t know what it was capable of.

“You fools,” James muttered.

“¿Qué pasó?” someone yelled outside. James massaged his forehead. He let the machine pistol hang on its sling under his coat before he spun and stepped out of the front door.

The entire terrorist camp was assembled outside the shattered office, surveying what he'd done. All were drunk, half were shirtless, only a few carried weapons, and none of those had them at the ready. He understood their confusion: it didn't look like he'd shot it up, instead it seemed like he'd driven a thresher through the front door.

They were dumbfounded.

“Un momento por favor,” James said, holding up a finger. The soused idiots looked at each other. James stalked back into the office and grabbed the weapon off the desk.

Its leather grip creaked in his hand. It was heavier than it looked, and solid. The cylindrical head was pitted with age but dense as a meteor. Its spikes were long enough to drive through a skull. A practice swing sent a jolt of excitement running from his arm to his chest. He felt like a blacksmith, a knight, a buccaneer, an executioner, a god.

With the weapon in hand, he became someone new. The moment he lifted it, he knew that his life had changed. He would no longer be a soldier, he would be the man that carried the weapon and the keeper of its legacy.

Clark James waded into the clustered terrorists, swinging the weapon like a carpenter. He was a large man, towering head and shoulders above even the largest terrorist. It was so obviously useless to stand up to a man like him that it was only their fault when they died. Against James, with the weapon in hand, he was an inevitability. Heads and arms split under each blow. The terrorists scattered and their dead fell.

A few put up a fight, but James felt like he was fighting with the strength of eight men. Each strike carried the weight of history. He shattered knives, broke rifles, stoved in skulls, folded arms.

Another wave of confused terrorists stumbled out of their barracks in a drunken stupor. They raised their rifles and fired, uncaring that their own men were still in the way. James stood up straight. Bullets whipped past, snapping the air around him.

“Terrible,” he said. He threw his coat aside, snatched up the hanging machine pistol, and let her rip. Explosive rounds took men apart. The red-misted remainder dropped their guns and bolted back toward their barracks. He unleashed a few more rounds into their backs, igniting eruptions in crimson.

They were bold behind those walls. For a moment, at least. James removed the transmitter from his belt and pressed the red button on its face. The shaped charges he’d planted went up in unison. The barracks and its contents became smoke in an instant.

James did not count the dead, nor did he bury them. He did not even kick them down the hill into the tailings pond. He left them for the bugs and the birds and left the ruins for the flames.

He was miles into the forest before he realized that some of the blood oozing down his face was his own. His scalp flapped against his ear with each step. He tied a strip of cloth around his head to hold it in place.

Each step wore him down. The machine pistol felt like an anvil hanging off his shoulder. He could not even feel the weight of the ancient weapon; it never left his hand and if he had been in the dark he would have forgotten he was carrying it.

It was long after dawn before he stumbled from the treeline at his camp.

“What the Hell?” he wondered.

Everyone and everything was gone: the tents, the trucks, the platoon and the captain. Bare earth remained, just dead squares in the grass. The only thing they had left was a carved wooden cross.

“God damn,” he said once he'd read the name painted on it. It was his own, his date of death listed as the day before, his dog tags nailed to the wood.

James spun in circles, confused, exhausted, nearly bled dry.

He didn't notice the black bag until his third spin.

“What are you?” he muttered. He nearly tipped over picking it up.

He found two bundles of American dollars inside, an unmarked envelope, and a passport. He tore open the envelope first.

“'A smith builds something that stands the test of time and is a paragon of skill and tireless dedication,'” he read aloud. “'Your calling begins when you bring the weapon to this address...'”

He didn't recognize the location, but how many addresses in Washington, D.C. could he have known off the top of his head?

He flipped through the cash. Four hundred dollars, more than he made in two months as a warrant officer. More than enough to get from Nicaragua to Washington, even with a terrorist army on his tail.

The red on his hands told him what would happen if the weapon did not return to those who desired it.

He wondered about the rest of the note. The long shadow cast by his own grave stretched across the abandoned camp.

He opened the passport. His own photo stared back at him, though nothing else printed within matched save for the first name.

“Clark Smith,” he said, trying it out.

It would work. The people who had arranged everything had absolute trust in him. They could order the military around on a whim, have dozens of people wiped off the face of the Earth with a whisper. With an unquestioned word, they had erased him from everything he’d known. He wanted to see how deep it all went, he wanted to make it his.

He wanted to forge this new life himself.

Clark Smith stretched, stuffed the passport, letter, and cash into his pocket, threw the weapon over his broad shoulder, and stepped over a dead man’s grave. The march north would be treacherous, through jungle and mountain with enemies all around, but he had to see what was on the other side.

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Copyright © 2024 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Written and edited by Daniel Baldwin.