By the Blood of Heroes (28 page)

Chapter Thirty-six

HEADQUARTERS BUILDING

A
staff car was parked just in front of the building. The car’s windshield was cracked and its tires shredded to ribbons. It was surrounded by the half-eaten bodies of several German soldiers. A handful more bodies, both human and shambler this time, led up the stairs and through the shattered front doors of the building. Burke surveyed the carnage, eventually deciding that the command staff had tried to make a run for it and had been forced to retreat back inside the house when the shamblers attacked.

A quick search of all but the commandant’s office confirmed that the rest of the house was empty. They left the office for last, because of the barricade that guarded the entrance. The men assigned to hold the position had died where they stood, but the doors beyond were still intact and gave Burke some hope that there might be someone still alive in there who could give them some answers.

Those hopes were dashed, however, when they broke down the doors and discovered the commandant, one Oberst Schulheim, according to the plaque on his desk, sitting in his chair, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. On the floor nearby was a second man, this one lying in a puddle of his own blood. From the bullet holes in the back of his white lab coat it was clear that he had been shot from behind by the commandant. A briefcase lay near the man’s outstretched hand, the files inside spilling out across the floor.

While Charlie checked the rest of the room, Burke walked over, scooped up the files, and began looking through them.

They were in German, but Burke was still able to recognize their contents as scientific notes of some kind. The long chemical formulas were a dead giveaway. He could pick out certain words here and there, mostly names, like that of Manfred von Richthofen. In fact, Richthofen’s name appeared in various places in several of the files, which Burke found curious.

“Anything interesting?” Charlie asked, from where he was currently rifling through the papers on the commandant’s desk while trying not to get the dead man’s blood on himself.

“I’m not sure,” Burke replied, still looking at the papers. “Ask Graves to come in here, will you?”

Charlie nodded and stepped outside to find the professor.

While he waited, Burke tried to quench the sense of unease growing in his chest. The intelligence they’d received claimed Jack was being held at this facility, but so far they had found neither hide nor hair of him. If he’d been here, he was gone now.

With no clue as to what might have happened to him or where he might have gone, their options were severely limited. Occupied France was an awfully big place. Jack, if he was still alive, could be anywhere within its boundaries.
Hell,
Burke thought,
at this point he could be anywhere within the German Empire
.

Equally disturbing were the events that had apparently unfolded prior to their arrival. How had a group of shamblers gotten loose among the general population of the camp and gone on a feeding frenzy, attacking guards and prisoners alike? It was clear that faced with a common enemy, the two groups had banded together in an attempt to stop the threat, but what wasn’t clear was how it had all started. He could guess at the end, though; large gaping holes in the outer fence suggested the surviving shamblers had forced their way out of the camp only to disappear into the depths of the forest.

Where they were now was anyone’s guess.

Charlie returned at that point with Graves in tow, stopping Burke’s musings. Burke handed the professor the files he’d been looking at and asked him to translate as best he was able.

It didn’t take him long. “Hmm,” Graves said, as he looked them over. “These look to be records of experiments, some current, some going back several months. This one is from February, this one from the November before that, and this one . . . wait a minute. What’s this . . . ?”

Graves began reading aloud, mumbling about chemical reactions and methodologies to get specific populations to react within certain guidelines and . . .

The professor abruptly stopped talking to himself, flipped forward several pages, read some more, and then collapsed into a nearby chair, a shell-shocked look of horror on his face.

“It can’t be,” he said, more to himself than the others.

Burke heard him clearly, though, and something in Graves’s tone sent shivers up his spine. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be good news, and that made him nervous.

“Talk to me, Graves,” he said. “What do they say?”

The professor looked up, and in his eyes Burke saw that wild look that people get when they’re on the verge of panicking. The man kept glancing down at the pages of the file in front of him and then around the room, like a caged animal searching for a way out.

“Take it easy, Professor,” Burke said. “It can’t be all that bad.”

But apparently it was, for rather than answering, Graves began flipping through the file again, frantically rereading certain sections and muttering to himself. “No . . . no no no . . .”

That was as much as Burke could take. “What the hell’s going on, Graves?!”

The professor started and then visibly pulled himself together. He turned to Burke and took a deep breath.

“They’ve found a way to modify the corpse gas so that it affects both viable and necrotic tissue.”

Viable and necrotic.

Living and dead.

Burke couldn’t believe what he was hearing. If Graves was right, the implications were staggering. The war would be over in a matter of days, the kaiser’s army sweeping over the Allied defenses as the gas turned everyone it touched into flesh-eating monsters.

“Are you sure?” Burke said at last, when he’d found his voice.

“No,” Graves replied, “but I think I know a way to test my theory.”

He got to his feet, handed the files to Burke, and disappeared out the door. He was only gone a moment; when he came back, he was dragging the corpse of a shambler by its heels.

“Don’t just stand there; give me a hand with this,” he said, when he realized the other two men were staring at him in surprise.

Charlie jumped to help, and they managed to get the corpse up onto the commandant’s desk. Like the shambler that had attacked Burke earlier, this one too was dressed in a green jumpsuit. Graves pulled a knife off his belt and began to cut the clothing off the body, explaining as he went.

“I’ve examined hundreds of shamblers over the last several months. Most were frontline soldiers killed in the line of duty and raised by a touch of the gas, only to be killed a second time by our troops.”

He finished cutting the jumpsuit open and peeled it back, revealing the shambler’s gray skin.

“Every shambler I’ve examined had had two sets of mortal wounds as a result, the one that most recently ended its unlife and another, earlier wound that served as the original cause of death. If the information in the files is accurate, if our enemy has, indeed, managed to alter the composition of the gas enough to impact living tissue . . .”

“ . . . then we should only see one set of injuries,” Charlie finished for him.

“Sergeant Moore is correct,” Graves replied, bending over to examine the corpse more closely. “This should only take a few minutes.”

Burke didn’t want to watch. Excusing himself, he stepped outside for a bit of fresh air, pulling the pack of cigarettes he’d been carrying since this whole mess started out of the inside pocket of his uniform as he went. One final cigarette stared back at him. He hesitated for a moment, muttered a low “Fuck it,” and then lit up.

A few minutes later, Graves came out the front door, wiping black shambler blood off his hands with a towel he’d picked up from somewhere inside. Charlie followed close behind. Seeing the troubled expressions on their faces, Burke asked, “Well?”

“One set of injuries. Definitely postmortem,” Graves said.

“Which means what, exactly?” Burke didn’t want there to be any room for misunderstanding.

“Either that . . . man in there died of some internal injury, a heart attack, maybe even a stroke, something that might not be obvious any longer due to physical changes incurred during the resurrection process, or else the files are correct and he was alive when he was exposed to the gas.”

Shit.

Chapter Thirty-seven

STALAG 113

B
urke opened his mouth, not yet knowing what he was going to say to Graves but knowing he had to say something, when a sharp whistle caught his attention.

Glancing toward the sound, Burke saw Private Jones standing in the watchtower by the gate, pointing frantically to something out on the road.

A moment’s study revealed a vehicle of some kind making its way toward the camp. It was traveling quickly, kicking up a plume of dust behind it, which was what had caught Jones’s attention. It would be here in a matter of minutes.

Burke turned and began shouting orders to the rest of the men. “Manning! Get up in that watchtower with Jones! Charlie, you’re with me. The rest of you get out of sight back inside the commandant’s office. Move! Move! Move!”

Burke hunkered down behind the nearby staff car with Charlie at his side. From their position they had a clear view of the vehicle as it approached the gates. It was a single-seat motorbike, the kind that couriers use to take messages between locations. The driver was dressed in a long coat and a leather cap with goggles. He must not have been paying attention, for he was through the gates before he seemed to notice the wreckage in front of him. When he did, he braked hard and brought the bike to a sliding stop.

Charlie tensed, as if about to step out from behind their cover, and Burke put a hand on his arm to stop him. “Wait,” he said, “let him get off the bike . . .”

The driver straddled the bike for a long moment, looking around. When nothing came charging out at him, he cut the engine, put down the kickstand, and climbed off.

That was all Burke needed.

He stepped out from behind the car with his Tommy gun in hand and shouted, “
Einfrieren!
”

Freeze.

The driver, already spooked by what he saw around him, didn’t listen. He started to turn, a pistol appearing in his hand from the depths of his coat. The crack of a rifle split the afternoon air before he’d completed even a quarter of that turn, and a bullet plowed into the ground directly in front of him in such a way that it was clear the shooter had missed only because he’d wanted to. Faced with an enemy he could not see, the German did the only reasonable thing, dropping his weapon and putting his hands in the air.

Within minutes the man was tied up with some rope they found in the wreckage of the headquarters building. While Sergeant Moore kept watch, and the rest of the team rejoined them outside now that the immediate danger had passed, Graves read and translated the dispatch cable the messenger had been carrying and then filled Burke in.

“It’s addressed to a Doctor Taschner,” he said.

Operation Stormcloud to launch as planned. Prisoner 459831 arrived and will be prepped for resurrection process. Bring sample of new formula and all relevant data to Testing Facility 89 Verdun soonest. Richthofen.

The paper was marked with Richthofen’s personal seal, a black eagle with its wings outstretched over a pair of grinning skulls, confirming its authenticity.

Burke wasn’t interested in the insignia, however. His attention was on the contents.
Operation Stormcloud? Prisoner 459831?

Burke pointed at the messenger and said to Graves, “Ask him about Stormcloud. What is it and when is it supposed to happen?”

Graves nodded, then spoke a few words in German to the sullen-faced messenger. The reply was both short and swift.

“He doesn’t know,” Graves translated. Burke wasn’t surprised. He would never trust a courier with sensitive information like that, so expecting the other side to act differently was asking too much. Still, one never knew what men like this overheard, which was why he bothered to ask in the first place.

“What about prisoner 459831? Does he know anything about who that might be?”

Graves spoke to the other man again, and this time there was a bit more back and forth. Burke waited patiently for them to finish.

Finally, Graves turned back to Burke and said, “He says all he knows is that a new prisoner arrived at the camp yesterday and is being treated more like a guest than a POW. Rumor has it that the prisoner’s an important American officer, but our man here doesn’t know for sure.”

Burke did though; it had to be Jack. There just wasn’t any other prisoner who might be worthy of that kind of treatment. If they were going to use him as a propaganda piece, they would want to be sure he was being treated decently.

Knowing Jack’s whereabouts presented a bit of a dilemma to Burke. He’d been ordered to rescue his brother, or, at the very least, keep him out of enemy hands. But that had been before they’d discovered the advances the enemy had made with regard to that damned corpse gas. Word of those advances had to get back to the Allies; if they were caught unprepared, the consequences would be apocalyptic. Entire cities could be gassed, their populations turned into hordes of the hungry dead.

The problem was that he didn’t have enough proof yet to be certain those higher up the chain of command would listen. The files he had would be enough to show that the Germans were working on the process, but Graves said that there weren’t any documents claiming it to be a complete success. Burke doubted that would be enough. There would be plenty of naysayers claiming it wasn’t possible, that the enemy couldn’t have made the requisite scientific advances quickly enough for the threat to be real, and the urgency of the problem would likely get lost in the bureaucratic tendency to talk everything to death before taking action.

It was clear this Operation Stormcloud had something to do with the new gas, otherwise, why would Richthofen have mentioned the two in the same message? But the brass wasn’t likely to risk the kind of assault they would need to eliminate the threat completely, especially this far behind enemy lines, without concrete proof.

Thankfully, Burke knew just where he could get that and perhaps rescue his brother at the same time.

“Graves, see what you can do about getting him to draw us a map of that testing facility mentioned in the communiqué. Charlie, I want you to round us up some enemy uniforms, including a couple of lab coats if you can find them. Williams, you’re with me. The rest of you round up as much food and water as you can find. Go!”

As the men split up to handle the various activities assigned them, Burke and Williams walked over to the motor pool they’d searched earlier.

The large garage contained several vehicles in various stages of repair. Burke selected a staff car and a two-ton lorry, then asked Williams how long it would take to get them up and running.

The younger man gave them a quick inspection.

“An hour, maybe two?”

Burke nodded. “All right, get to work. I’ll send a couple of the other boys down to help you out.”

W
illiams was as good as his word. He had the staff car and the lorry back together and running smoothly inside of ninety minutes. At that point it was time for Burke to gather the men and let them know what he had planned.

“Our target has been moved to a scientific research station outside of Verdun,” Burke began, “so that’s where we are headed as well. I, for one, am sick of walking, however, so we’re going to be taking some alternate transportation.”

He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, where the two vehicles Williams had repaired were parked, and that earned him a cheer.

“We’re going to need to blend in as much as possible in case we pass another convoy coming the other way, so we’re going to look the part. Grab a uniform from Sergeant Moore and put it on. If you’re out of ammunition for your Enfield, grab some ammunition for it or take one of the Mausers from the pile over there. We leave in twenty minutes.”

As the men moved to obey, Burke pulled Graves aside and handed him one of the two officer’s uniforms he’d scrounged up. “How do you feel about impersonating a German scientist?” he asked.

T
he roads to Verdun were well paved and, for the most part, intact. This far behind enemy lines the team didn’t have to worry about nonsense like roadblocks or random checkpoints, and they were able to keep to a decent speed.

Burke, dressed in a leutnant’s uniform, drove the staff car with Professor Graves posing as Dr. Taschner in the back. They passed several other motorized vehicles headed in the other direction, and each time one appeared Burke would stiffen, worried that their ruse would be discovered. Visions of being run off the road, dragged free of the wreckage, and executed flashed through his head, but each time the other vehicles simply drove past without bothering them, leaving Burke to breathe a sigh of relief.

In the end, it took them a little over two hours to make the fifty-mile trip between Vitry-le-François and Verdun. About half a mile short of their destination, Burke spotted the narrow dirt track the messenger had told them about and pulled onto it, leaving the main road behind. He drove far enough into the woods that they wouldn’t be easily visible from the main road, then pulled to a stop. He shut off the engine and got out of the car.

Behind him, in the lorry, Charlie did the same.

A sharp whistle from the sergeant brought Graves out of the staff car and the rest of the men out of the back of the truck. The group gathered between the two vehicles, using the lorry’s headlights to check their weapons and adjust the stolen German uniforms they wore. Graves actually looked right at home in the dead doctor’s lab coat. When they were ready, Burke addressed them all.

“This is it,” he said, pointing behind him into the copse of trees. “There’s a small ridgeline on the other side and from that we’ll be able to look down on the camp and get an idea of what we’re facing. Manning and I will check it out while the rest of you stay here with Sergeant Moore. Keep your eyes open and be ready to fade into the trees if you need to.”

With a final nod at Charlie, Burke slipped into the trees, Manning at his heels.

The courier had been correct; the hike up to the top of the ridge took less than ten minutes. From there they could look down a few hundred yards below.

This facility was laid out similar to the last, though it was about twice the size of the other. From up on the ridge they could see several clusters of buildings and even a small airfield on the far side of camp. Burke was digging in his pack for his viewing goggles when he felt Manning stiffen beside him.

“What is it?” he asked.

The other man hesitated, then inclined his head slightly. “Look. The airfield.”

Burke glanced in that direction and was just in time to see several mechanics pushing a bright red triplane inside the field’s solitary hangar.

He didn’t need to be told whose plane it was, as there was only one bright red Fokker triplane in the entire German Air Corps.

Richthofen!

Burke watched the mechanics for a moment through the open doors as they went to work examining the aircraft, one climbing up a small stepladder to access the engine while the other walked around the craft itself, checking the fuselage for God knew what.

A flurry of activity from beside him drew his attention away and back to Manning. The other man had his pack off and was digging through it, pulling out cloth-wrapped items and laying them down on the ground in front of him. A palpable sense of excitement washed off him in waves.

“What are you doing?” Burke asked, more curious than worried at that point.

“What I came here to do,” Manning replied.

His tone was all business, as were his actions—swift, sure, but decidedly unhurried as he unwrapped each cloth-covered piece and began to assemble the object before him.

A glance at the various pieces told Burke it was a gun, but as it came together he had to admit it was a gun unlike any he’d seen before. It looked as if it had started life as a Lee Enfield, but had morphed from there into something with cooling tubes, an extra barrel, and a snap-on sight. Manning sighted through the glass and then began dialing it in with the help of a small geared mechanism to the left of the optics.

No sooner had he done so than Manning let out a startled “Sonofabitch! That’s him!” and scrambled to lower himself into a firing position.

Alarmed with the speed at which things were happening, Burke tried to get control of the events around him. A figure could now be seen standing on the front porch of a house not far from the airfield, watching a black staff car approach from up the road. Something about the man’s stance screamed “officer” to Burke, and he slipped his goggles down over his eyes and dialed them in for a better look.

The indistinct figure on the porch resolved itself through the lens of his goggles and Burke noted with surprise that Manning was right.

It was Richthofen.

As Burke realized who he was looking at, the door behind Richthofen opened and another man stepped into view. The newcomer was dressed in the standard jumpsuit that served as a POW uniform, and although Burke hadn’t seen him in several years, he still had no problem recognizing his own brother.