'Hauer!' Stern shouted. 'Come back and help the boy!'
'Yes!' Gadi called. 'Help me, Captain!'
Hauer's answer flared out of the darkness. 'Hess can go to hell!
I'm saving General Steyn! You just hold those Arabs back as long as you
can!'
'You owe it to us!' Stern shouted. 'For Munich! Yes, I know you were
there! Come back, Hauer! For the Jews you let die!'
'Let it go, Stern! That war is over!'
'Leave him, (Yadi,' Stern cried angrily. 'Frau Apfel has the Zinoviev
book and the Spandau papers. That's all the proof you need.
Those papers alone indict the British.'
'Then I'm staying with you!'
'No. You must get that evidence to Israel!'
'The others can do it.'
'A Jew, Gadi. A Jew must do it. To be sure.'
Gadi looked wildly at his uncle for a moment, then made his decision. He
stripped the guns from the South Africans he had killed and laid them at
Stern's feet. 'Kill as many as you can, Uncle. I will get your papers
to Jerusalem.'
Stern smiled. 'I know you Will, MY boy. Now go.' He hugged Gadi's
face to his own. 'Shalom.'
'Shalom, Uncle.' Gadi choked back a sob. 'No Jew will ever forget
you.'
'Go,' Stern commanded. 'My time has come.'
Dragging his bleeding leg behind him, Gadi picked up his rifle and went.
The barrel of Major Karami's howitzer now protruded through the
shattered front door of Horn House. Karami watched the leader of his
search detail race into the reception hall.
'We find only corpses and servants in the house, Major!'
Karami smiled. 'Clear the house.'
Taking a last look at the black shield blocking the elevator, the Libyan
major squeezed between the door frame and the gun carriage and took up a
position behind the howitzer.
He remembered the elevator from his first visit, and he knew that at the
bottom of its deep shaft lay Horn's basement storage facility.
And inside that basement-a sword worthy of Mohammed himself!
'Fire!' he shouted.
Alan Burton had been waiting in the darkness beside the bunker for a
full minute when Dr. Sabri poked his head through the jagged hatch.
'Come on, then!' he snapped as he pulled the Libyan out.
'I heard you speaking Arabic back there, sport. You with these
blighters out here?'
'No, sir! Those men are assassins! They murdered my prime minister!'
Before Burton could reply, Ilse squirmed out of the black hole.
She explained that Hauer and Hans were still struggling through the
tunnel with General Steyn. Burton looked anxiously at his watch.
'We can't wait any longer,' he said.
'You'd better follow me.@ He turned and trotted toward the airstrip. Dr.
Sabri followed , but Ilse hung back, clinging tightly to Hess's
briefcase.
After thirty agonizing seconds, General Steyn's head appeared, his face
a bloodless mask of shock and confusion.
While Hauer and Hans pushed from behind, Ilse pulled.
Hans followed the general through the hatch, and finally Hauer wriggled
through. Ilse hugged Hans fiercely, sandwiching Hess's briefcase
between them. Only Gadi had not yet appeared.
'Come on,' Hauer said harshly. 'Either he makes it or he doesn't.'
Jonas Stern squatted silently on his cylinder of Armageddon and waited
for the Libyans to come. Holding the stripped wires like talismans, he
surveyed the shadows around him. He was king in a world of corpses. At
his feet lay the South African counterterror troops, their futuristic.
gas masks lethally punctured by Gadi's bullets. Behind them, splayed
out on his back like a broken doll, Pieter Smuts lay in a spreading pool
of blood. Only Rudolf Hess remained alive. Too crippled by arthrifis
to drag his frail body to safety, the old Nazi had managed to struggle
into a sitting position against the wall to Stern's left. His eyepatch
had slipped off. Now a scarred, empty socket stared at Stern.
Stern listened for the slightest sound from the far end of the lab.
He heard nothing. He looked curiously at Hess.
Here was the man who had brought them all to this place.
Hess ... The name carried Stern back to a youth so torn by fear, loss,
and pain that he remembered only the ceaseless throb of grief.
He had survived the cruelest war that ever scourged the earth, and near
him now lay one of the men who had unleashed it upon the world.
Strangely, he felt no personal hatred for the bag of brittle bones-only
a detached curiosity, a desire to know if there had ever been some
reason for what was done.
'Hess,' he said softly.
The old Nazi's good eye fluttered open. 'What do you want, Jew?'
'Tell me something. Have you ever come to understand what Hitler did?
The obscenity of it? The inhumanity?'
Hess looked away.
'Tell me,' Stern insisted. 'I want to know why. Why the Holocaust? Why
murder thousands of children? What was it
the Jews ever do to him? Or to you?'
Hess looked back at Stern. Another explosion rocked the ceiling above
them, but Stern saw only Hess. A dark fire had come into the withered
Nazi's solitary eye, a blind, animal hatred so removed from the
community of man that Stern felt driven to cross the room and crush the
skull that conrained it. It was a blindness that could not see murder,
a deafness that could not hear the screams of children, a muteness that
could speak only through violence. Why did I even ask?
he thought hopelessly. It's like asking a bully why he drowns a cat ...
or a father why he molests his infant child or some reason one could
understand. There
... and hoping f
is no reason! Stern lifted an R-5 assault rifle from the floor and
brought its barrel to bear on Hess's crippled body. The old Nazi's
watery eye showed no fear.
