Sudden Death Read online

  But now there was movement behind the Executioner. Men jumped down into the room through the shattered window. One, two, three, four — tough-looking hoods with dark features and pockmarked faces. Swiveling desperately to meet the new threat, Bolan saw that he didn't have a chance.

  They were all carrying handguns. One toted a Czech Skorpion machine pistol. Two of them also swung leather-covered lead blackjacks.

  Was this the way it was to end then? He knew it had to come some day… but not trapped like a rat, cornered in a stone room with no exit and gunners in front and behind.

  At least he'd take some of the bastards with him, one for each of the 240-grain deathbringers that remained in Big Thunder's magazine. In the hundredth of a second it took for the thought to form, he raised the gun.

  But instead of the numbing, mind-blowing shock of bullets blasting him apart, a completely different attack surprised him from behind as he pressed the trigger.

  A blanket was thrown over his head, and strong arms encircled him. The shot plowed into the floor. Then he was struggling like a madman as they all rushed in.

  His arms were pinioned. Steely hands grasped his ankles. He heaved and threshed with titanic strength beneath the stifling folds of the covering. The fight swayed left and right over the stone floor. But there were at least four of them, grunting and cursing as they strove to bring him down.

  Then there was the sharp crack of a glass ampoule breaking and a gust of sickening fumes in the dark. Chloroform? Ether? Trilene? Bolan's mind reeled; he felt his struggles become uncoordinated. The black world beneath the blanket spun around him.

  He was down. They held him among the cushions. Was he really floating or just rising up from the divan? After that it was just a stinging sensation, a sharp prick, no worse than a bee sting really, as the needle plunged into his thigh.

  Very slowly, darkness fell in on him through the walls.

  5

  The car was a scarab-green Renault with white leather custom-built seats. It purred sedately along Route Nationale 83 from Cernay to Guebwiller, past the huge Bollenberg vineyard at Rouffach, and on to the outskirts of Colmar, where the medieval frame houses, steep-roofed above their oak-and-beechwood half-timbering, blazed with scarlet geraniums beneath every window.

  There were five men in the Renault. The driver was German, a stocky, bullet-headed character of about fifty, wearing a tan chauffeur's uniform completed by a cap with a shiny peak. The man beside him, tall, heavy and muscular, was completely bald. He looked as though he could have been an enforcer for a collection agency or a punch-drunk ex-pug.

  The two passengers in the back seat nearest the doors had the air of professional men — lawyers or doctors or academics, perhaps. The older one peered out at the Alsatian countryside through thick-lensed pince-nez with gold rims. His companion's eyes were hidden behind dark wraparound sunglasses.

  The man between them was tall, too. His face showed little interest as they passed through Kientzheim, Riquewihr and Hunawihr. Staring right and left at the vineyards flowing like a green sea to wash against the tree-clad slopes of the Vosges, his eyes remained vacant.

  "Don't you remember this journey?" the man wearing pince-nez asked. "Can't you recall any of these towns, these villages?"

  The man in the middle shook his head.

  "Sometimes it helps to revisit the places you knew well. It triggers some kind of release mechanism that brings back the whole picture," the younger man said. Careful shaving hadn't eliminated the blue shadow tinting his cheeks and chin.

  "I don't remember it at all," the man in the middle said.

  "Total memory loss is always distressing," the older man said. "All we can hope to do… Well, let's put it this way. There's this black curtain surrounding you. If we can somehow provoke a tiny rip in the material, then maybe you will see enough through that rip to let you tear the whole curtain apart and see what lies beyond. Or, more properly, behind." He favored the man who had lost his memory with a wintry smile.

  "The rehabilitation of the amnesiac," the man with the blue chin said pompously, "is almost always partial in the initial stages. Like a jigsaw puzzle — first one piece falls into place, then another, until finally the whole scenario is complete. You know who you are, where you are, and why you are. That's important. You must have a reason for existence."

  "We'll do everything in our power to help you," the man with the gold-rimmed pince-nez promised.

  Still driving north, they passed through Ribeauvillé. Between white slatted shutters, the window boxes here too were bright with flowers. Storks had built huge spiky nests on metal frames above the chimneys. "I don't remember anything at all," the amnesiac complained.

  "You will," the German chauffeur said over his shoulder. Five miles before Selestat, he turned left off the highway and took a white dirt road that twisted up toward the hills.

  Far above the plain, the Renault skirted the horizontal strata of a sandstone bluff crowned by the ancient château of Haut-Koenigsbourg. The turreted castle, built of honey-colored brick with a square-towered keep topped by a pyramid of green tiles, looked out from its wooded height across receding parallels of vines toward the thin gray ribbon of the Rhine.

  Up here the village houses were no longer frame but stone-built, with overhanging eaves to protect the inhabitants from winter snows.

  Higher still, curious gray outcrops appeared among the tall grasses of the upland meadows. Some were domed, some barrow-shaped, with rounded or rectangular apertures situated among weeds and tangles of briar. Occasionally, half hidden by saplings or thickets, smaller cylindrical shapes were visible with horizontal slits facing east. For the first time, the man who had lost his memory showed some interest.

  "What are these?" he asked when the road had circled a particularly large barrow that seemed to be sunk below a grassy bank and surrounded by a narrow trench choked with nettles.

  The man with pince-nez laughed. "One of the most expensive mistakes in history," he said. "They called it the Maginot Line. You're looking at the remains of one of the linked forts. They were supposed to beat off the attack in World War II if the Germans crossed the Rhine."

  The amnesiac's eyes brightened. He repeated the words. "Maginot… Line."

  The men on either side of him exchanged glances.

  "It was built between 1930 and 1936," the younger man said. "It cost three hundred million francs, and it covered the French frontier all the way from Luxembourg to Switzerland. The French had learned the lessons of 1914, and they weren't going to be invaded by the Germans again. Too bad it never occurred to them that the Germans would be ungentlemanly enough to walk around one end of it, through Belgium and Holland, and attack from the rear!"

  The chauffeur laughed.

  "The casemates you see aren't stone but prestressed reinforced concrete — twelve feet thick with a twelve-inch steel lining. They used to have case-hardened steel covers over the lookout posts and observation towers, but of course they're gone now."

  "Maginot!" the man who had lost his memory said once again. The word seemed to fascinate him.

  "He was the minister who signed the order for it to be built. It was he who gave the go-ahead," the chauffeur said.

  Fifteen minutes later, on the western side of the crest, the car turned through a crumbling gateway and stopped in the yard of an abandoned farm.

  Bleached rafters showed through the roofs of the outbuildings where the tiles had become dislodged. There was no glass in the farmhouse windows, and the wall above one had been blackened long ago by a fire. When the five men got out of the Renault, thistles and weeds growing in the yard reached their knees.

  The chauffeur led the way to a brick wall that surrounded two sides of the derelict property. It was about fifteen feet high with a grassy bank on top of it — and the bank, too, was overgrown with briars and other vegetation.

  In one corner of the yard, a fig tree grew out of the wall. Below it were the rusted remains of what had once b
een a three-ton army truck. A sycamore sapling had split apart the floorboards of the tireless wreck and was growing out through one of the cab windows. Hidden behind its three-pointed leaves there was a low, arched opening in the brickwork.

  The chauffeur brushed aside a curtain of creeper and disappeared from view. The others followed.

  They were in a dark vaulted passageway smelling of mildew and damp. Somewhere ahead of them, water dripped.

  As light from the entrance faded, the tunnel turned a corner. Ten yards farther on, the chauffeur halted. His knuckles rapped metal five times.

  Light flooded the passageway as a steel door opened. On the far side stood a swarthy man with close-cropped hair who could have been the twin brother of the chauffeur. "You're late, Klaus," he said.

  "Who's complainin'?" the chauffeur said. "We're here, aren't we? Nobody asked me to clock in yet."

  "Some people have other commitments. Some of us have to keep a believable cover going," the swarthy man said.

  "Willi!" the man with pince-nez said sharply. "Klaus! We can do without this kind of nonsense. There's a job to be done here. In any case, Willi, we won't keep you long."

  "Okay, okay. No offense, Doc," Willi said.

  They were standing in a cellarlike, brick-floored room, not much bigger than a cell. The light came from an old-fashioned oil lamp. A broken chair, an empty wooden crate and a table covered in rat droppings were the only furnishings. There was no window, no skylight, no other door.

  Willi shifted the table, kicked aside some dead leaves and revealed a trapdoor. He seized an iron ring and pulled it open. Carrying the lamp, he climbed down the iron rungs of a ladder to a much dryer, airier corridor below. When the others had followed and Klaus, who brought up the rear, had lowered the trapdoor, he blew out the flame in the lamp and clicked a switch. At once the passageway was illuminated by a row of low-power electric bulbs set in the arched roof.

  They walked perhaps a hundred yards along a straight flagstoned tunnel. Willi unlocked another steel door. Beyond it was a room that looked like the entrance hall in a hospital — white walls, shining tiles on the floor, fluorescent lighting above a gray steel desk with a telephone switchboard installation.

  At the far end there was an open-cage elevator.

  They crammed in. The grille slid shut with a hydraulic hiss. Slowly the car descended past a metal catwalk that overlooked a cavernous chamber fitted out with monitors and a vast computer terminal winking with red, blue and green lights. A distant generator hummed, and there was the smell of ozone in the air.

  The elevator bounced to a halt on a lower level in what seemed to be a gymnasium. The amnesiac saw wall bars, a punching bag, a rowing machine. "You have been here before," the doctor with pince-nez said. It wasn't a question.

  The amnesiac smiled. "Maginot," he said.

  "You know who you are now. You know your name."

  "Maginot."

  "No, no. Your name, not the name of the place." The voice was gentle. "Your name is Baraka, is it not." Again this was a statement, not a query.

  "I don't remember."

  "You must remember. Your name is Baraka. Ba-ra-ka. Under no circumstances must you forget. If you forget, we cannot help you. What is your name?"

  "Baraka?"

  "That's right. Good. You must remember that."

  The man with wraparound sunglasses had said nothing for a long time. He spoke now. "Isn't it time we ran a check? Identification is fine, but we want to know, don't we, if the expertise can still be tapped? If the previous acquired skills remain?"

  "Quite right, Paul," the doctor said. He turned to the bald ex-pug. "Mazarin. Get the dog."

  The huge thug grinned, revealing yellowed tombstone teeth. He turned and went out through a door at the far end of the gymnasium. Baraka walked to a row of filing cabinets, opened the door of a steel cupboard at one end of the bank and took a bottle of mineral water from the miniature refrigerator inside. He drank.

  "You see, Paul!" the doctor said excitedly. "He can remember — he does. When there's no pressure, no strain, the old instincts, the conditioned reflexes take over!"

  Mazarin returned, leading a snarling Doberman pinscher on a leash. "All right," the doctor said. "Let him go."

  Mazarin unclipped the leash. The dog growled, its teeth bared. Saliva dripped from its slavering jaws. The doctor feigned a kick in its direction. Howling, the big dog leaped for him.

  The doctor drew a small automatic from his pocket and fired once. The Doberman yelped, staggering in the middle of its spring, and dropped to the floor, threshing from side to side. Blood flowed from its chest.

  The doctor fired a second shot, loud under the low ceiling. The dog twitched and lay still.

  "The animal was about to attack me," the doctor said calmly, turning toward Baraka. "It was an enemy. You know what an enemy is — someone or something that threatens you. What do you do if you are threatened by an enemy? To protect yourself, you kill him. If he is dead, he cannot harm you."

  "This is a lesson you must learn," Paul added. "We believe you have the skills to eliminate enemies, buried someplace in your past. Soon we shall find out. For the moment, it is enough that you show us you have… digested… the doctor's lesson."

  "What do you do if someone shows you an enemy?" the doctor asked softly.

  Baraka's face hardened to a chilly mask. "Kill," he said. "Kill, kill, kill."

  6

  The "impregnable" forts of the Maginot Line were designed to cover overlapping fields of fire with a high-explosive barrage from 75 mm and 88 mm artillery, supported by 135 mm howitzers, mortars, grenades, various calibers of antitank cannon and machine guns fired from armored "pepperpots" strung out on the heights between each strongpoint. Observers in a steel command post sunk in the highest part of each bunker coordinated the defensive strategy.

  Each concrete shell, shored up by a twelve-foot-thick rampart of earth and rocks, its casemates bristling with gun barrels, was something like an ungainly warship sunk up to the turrets in the green slopes of the Vosges.

  The firing points were linked by a honeycomb of galleries, passageways and staircases, with elevators to three or even four lower levels that could penetrate as far as three hundred feet below the surface.

  The blockhouses were provided with dormitories, an infirmary, a telephone exchange, mess halls, recreation rooms, electricity generators, air-conditioning, poison gas filters and armories housing several thousand shells. Steel bulkheads sealed off each sector of the redoubt, there was an ammunition hoist with an eighteen-ton counterweight, and aerial monorails transported charges of up to two and a half tons at a time to each firing point.

  The larger forts were staffed by a crew of up to twelve hundred men; some were used as barracks for infantry who were supposed to stream out and mop up the vanquished remnants of the attackers once the artillery had done its deadly work. There were separate entrances for men, munitions and stores as well as the tractors that worked inside the bunkers. Some of the entry tunnels surfaced as far as a mile behind the line.

  In fact Hitler's generals ignored the Maginot Line until they had overrun practically the whole of the rest of France. When they did attack at last, the pepperpots proved extremely vulnerable to the Wehrmacht's 88s — and the "impregnable" casemates, undamaged by the shells of the German artillery or the bombs of Stukas, fell easily to the determined assaults of grenades, flamethrowers, smoke bombs and, once the French machine gunners had been silenced, parcels of explosives inserted on long poles.

  The survivors, their weapons destroyed, were forced to seek shelter on the lower levels. And there, because the ventilation system was unable to extricate either smoke or the heavier-than-air carbon dioxide, most of them asphyxiated.

  Forty-seven years later, their machinery and equipment long gone, the entrances sealed or mined, the interconnecting network of tunnels closed off, the blockhouses had become part of the landscape, of no more interest than the natural rocks or trees
.

  The stronghold in which the man called Baraka was to be programmed was an exception.

  The doctor had bought the derelict farm many years ago as a speculation, intending one day perhaps to transform the property into some kind of mountain clinic. It was only later that he found the sole entrance to the bunker that the demolition squads had missed. Once he and his associates realized the complexity of the galleries to which it gave access, they saw immediately the multiple uses to which such a vast secret enclave could be put. And they began secretly refurbishing the interior with the latest mechanical and electronic apparatus.

  It took a long time. They would never have gotten away with it if it wasn't for the fact that this entrance was on the doctor's private property, that the nearest village was almost ten miles away… and that immense care was taken to maintain the farmyard in its derelict state.

  Adventuring children, gypsies or hoboes who did stumble on the creeper-covered arch could in any case penetrate no farther than the first steel door, when they would naturally assume that the rest was sealed off in the usual way.

  Among the doctor's more sophisticated innovations was a small biochemical laboratory, high-tech video equipment with a specialized viewing room and underground advanced technology workshops where microelectronic detection and bugging devices could be perfected. On the lowest level, a soundproofed 150-yard firing range had been installed.

  Before Baraka was taken there, Paul and the doctor wished to test the effect of the Doberman "lesson" on his damaged mind. The younger man signaled to Mazarin and pointed to a wrestling mat occupying a fifteen-foot square in the center of the gymnasium. "All right," he said. "Take him."

  The tombstone teeth gleamed briefly. Without warning, the bruiser leaped at Baraka, kicked his feet from under him, caught him as he fell and threw him bodily onto the mat. He launched himself through the air and landed heavily on the fallen amnesiac, groping for nerve centers he could use to immobilize him.