Beside him, Nancy was trembling slightly. To her right, Stoll was trembling even more. He was looking down the corridor as though weighing an escape.
“We have a search warrant,” Stoll said softly. “I thought this was all legal.” The leader barked, “Tais-toi.” “I’m not a commando,” Stoll said. “None of us is. I’m just a computer guy!” “Quiet!” Stoll’s mouth closed audibly.
The New Jacobin leader studied them for a moment and then turned back to the doorway. He shouted for the last man to come out.
Ballon yelled back in French, “When you let the others go, I’ll come out.” “No,” said the New Jacobin. “You come out first.” Ballon didn’t answer this time. Clearly, he intended to leave the next move up to the enemy. And the next move was for the leader to nod toward Hausen. The New Jacobin standing behind the German grabbed his hair. Nancy screamed as the man walked him toward the door. Hood wondered if they were even going to give Ballon the chance to come out, or if they were just going to shoot the German and throw his body in and threaten to throw someone else in text.
A gunshot popped from somewhere in the darkness, toward the door which led to the main corridor. It took a moment of searching before Hood could see that with all the shouting and shuffling, no one had heard Ballon’s men remove the ornate knob from the door. They had a clear shot at everyone in this corridor.
The man holding Hausen had fallen. He was squeezing his right thigh and crying. Hausen seized on the moment of confusion to run toward the door, in the direction from which the shot had come. None of the New Jacobins fired.
Obviously, they feared being cut down if they did.
Hausen opened the door and disappeared. There was no one on the other side. They must have seen him coming and taken cover.
Hood didn’t move. Though the man behind him was looking away, he still felt the pressure of the front sight and muzzle on the top of his neck.
Perspiration trickled down his armpits and along the sides of his chest. His palms grew clammy against the cold brick wall and he promised himself that if he survived this he’d not only hug each member of his family for a good long time, but also Mike Rodgers. The man had spent his life surviving situations like these. Hood’s respect for him suddenly grew very, very deep.
As he was thinking that, his hands began to vibrate.
No, Hood thought. Not just my hands. The old bricks themselves were beginning to tremble. Then the sky outside the barred windows brightened. The air itself seemed to rattle. And the New Jacobin leader shouted for his men to finish the job and leave.
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO Thursday, 11:15 P.M., Wunstorf, Germany
The footsteps were gaining on them. But as Herbert wheeled himself through the woods, he wasn’t thinking about them. He wasn’t thinking about anything except what he had overlooked in the pressure of escaping from the camp. The key to survival, to victory.
What the hell was that name?
Jody grunted as they moved slowly through the dark.
Herbert almost asked her to get behind him and kick him.
I can’t remember.
He would. He had to. He couldn’t let Mike Rodgers win this one. Rodgers and Herbert were both fans of military history, and they had debated the point many times over. If you had a choice, they had asked each other, would you rather go into battle with a small band of dedicated soldiers or an overwhelming force of conscripts.
Rodgers invariably favored greater numbers, and there were strong arguments for both points of view. Herbert pointed out that Samson beat back the Philistines using only the jawbone of an ass. In the thirteenth century, Alexander Nevsky and his poorly armed Russian peasants repulsed the heavily armored Teutonic knights. In the fifteenth century, the small band of Englishmen who fought beside Henry V at Agincourt defeated vastly superior numbers of Frenchmen.
But Rodgers had his examples as well. The brave band of Spartans were defeated by the Persians at Thermopylae in 480 B.C.; the Alamo fell to Santa Anna; and then there was the British 27th Lancers cavalry, the “Light Brigade” which was cut down in its self-defeating charge during the Crimean War.
Add to the list of the doomed Robert West Herbert, he thought as he listened to the footfalls and cracking twigs.
The guy who didn’t have the goddamn brains enough to write down the name that could have saved them. At least he would die in good company. King Leonidas. Jim Bowie.
Errol Flynn.
Thinking about Flynn helped him stay loose as he psyched himself up to make a stand against all these enemies. He only hoped that Jody would run. The thought of fighting to save her gave him extra adrenaline.
And then, because he wasn’t thinking about it, the name he’d been trying to remember came back to him.
“Jody, push me,” he said.
She had been walking beside him. She stopped and got behind him.
“C’mon, push,” he said. “We’re going to get out of this.
But we’ll need time.” Jody put her tired back and wounded shoulder into the effort. Herbert reached for his weapon.
Unlike Flynn’s doomed Major Vickers, Herbert was going to hold the enemy off. Though unlike Samson, he wasn’t going to use the jawbone of an ass to do it.
He was going to use a cellular phone.
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE Thursday, 5:15 P.M., Washington, D.C.
The call was put through to Rodgers as he was waiting for an update from Colonel August.
Bob Herbert was on a cellular phone. Rodgers switched on the speaker phone so Darrell, Martha, and Press Officer Ann Farris could hear.
“I’m in the middle of a dark forest somewhere between Wunstorf and a lake,” Herbert said. “The good news is, I’ve got Jody Thompson.” Rodgers sat up straight and triumphantly drove a fist into the air. Ann jumped from her chair and clapped.
“That’s fabulous!” Rodgers said. He shot McCaskey a look. “You’ve done it while Interpol and the FBI are still asking questions and pissing off the German authorities.
How can we help you, Bob?” “Well, the bad news is we’ve got a bunch of Nazi wannabes on our butts. You’ve got to find me a phone number.” Rodgers leaned toward the keyboard. He alerted John Benn with an F6/Enter/17. “Whose number, Bob?” Herbert told him. Rodgers asked him to hold on as he typed Hauptmann Rosenlocher, Hamburg Landespolizei.
McCaskey had swung over to take a look. While Rodgers sent the number over to Benn, McCaskey jumped to another phone and called Interpol.
“This Rosenlocher is a burr in the fur of the head Nazi,” Herbert said, “and he may be the only man you can trust.
From what I overheard he’s in Hanover, I think.” “We’ll find him and get him over to you,” Rodgers said.
“Sooner would be better than later,” Herbert said.
“We’re pushing on, but we’re losing ground to these guys. I can hear the cars. And if they find the bodies we left in our wake—” “I read you,” Rodgers said. “Can you stay on the line?” “As long as Jody holds out I can,” he said. “She’s dead on her feet.” “Tell her to hang on,” Rodgers said as he switched to the Geologue program. “You too.” He brought up Wunstorf and looked over the terrain between the town and the lake.
It was just as Herbert had described it. Trees and hills. “Bob, do you have any idea where you are? Can you give me any landmarks?” “It’s black here, Mike. Far as I know, we may even have done a W.W. Corrigan.” Wrong Way Corrigan, Rodgers thought. Herbert didn’t want Jody to know they might be headed in the wrong direction.
“Okay, Bob,” Rodgers said. “We’ll get you a fix on everyone’s positions.” McCaskey was still on the line with Interpol, so Rodgers called Stephen Viens himself. Even with light-intensification capabilities for night surveillance, Viens told him that the NRO satellites would require up to a half hour to pinpoint Herbert exactly. Rodgers pointed out that their lives might be at stake. Viens said, not dispassionately, that it would still take up to a half hour. Rodgers thanked him.
The General studied the map. They were really out in the boondocks. And if Herbert could hear the pursuers, it was unlikely a car or even chopper could get to them in time.
Rodgers looked over at McCaskey. “Have we got anything on that police officer yet?” “Working.” Working. Rodgers always had a visceral reaction to that word: he hated it. He liked things to be done.
He also hated giving bad news to people in the field.
But bad news was better than ignorance, so he got back on the line.