Kelly nodded and moved towards Mattia, who was now openly weeping. “Listen, Mattia, we are not going to kill you, do you understand? We need you to take a message back to Father Vilim. Tell him we are coming for him. Skorzeny has ordered us to finish him because he has broken the rules of the Thule Society. Skorzeny wants him to understand that Thule is greater than the Catholic Church, so we have been ordered to hang him, tonight at midnight. Do you understand all that I have told you, Mattia?”
“Yes, Herr Novak, I understand. Please don’t shoot me! I’ll deliver the message, I promise.”
“Good man, Mattia, and stay away from the house tonight or you will be killed too. Now move off the track and lie face down in the grass. We are going to drive off now, but I’ll be watching you out of the rear window. If you move before we are out of sight, I will stop the car and come back and shoot you. Do you understand?”
“I understand, Herr Novak, thank you, thank you.”
Manteufel and Kelly jumped into the front seats of the car, Manteufel in the driving seat, and they moved off back down the track. As they approached the main road, Kelly said, “Turn left onto the main road, Horst, and make for Linz. Take it steady though, not too fast or too slow. We don’t want to attract attention.”
Once on the main road, they settled into a comfortable cruising speed and Kelly felt able to relax slightly. He glanced at Manteufel, who looked back with a face expressing total amazement.
“Something wrong?” asked Kelly nonchalantly.
“What was that pile of horse shit you were feeding poor Mattia back there? Thule taking on the Catholic Church, Skorzeny going to hang Cecelja, what was all that about?”
Kelly laughed. “I just thought it might create confusion among our enemies, keep them occupied with each other for a time. It just might keep their minds off us for a while.”
“Once Mattia gets back, say half an hour, an hour at the outside, do you think Cecelja will raise the alarm, get the police onto us perhaps, search for this car?” asked Manteufel.
“I’m gambling that that won’t happen,” said Kelly. “I don’t know how much you know about our ex-Ustase Lieutenant Colonel Father Vilim?”
Manteufel shook his head. “Nothing.”
“Well, the fact is, he has just come out of prison—only last year in fact—after doing two years for people trafficking and falsifying Red Cross documents. The house he occupies is almost certainly the property of the Vatican, and he probably lives there under sufferance from the Austrian authorities as well as the US authorities, who still have occupational army control over this sector. He will be desperate not to draw attention to his continued people trafficking—and remember, I still have some of those falsified documents on my person. If we were apprehended by the Austrian police, he would have some very embarrassing questions to answer. My guess is that he’s praying we don’t get caught. That said, I could be wrong.”
“Fine,” said Manteufel, “so where are we going?”
“How much petrol do we have?” asked Kelly in response.
“Full tank.”
“Right, I’m going to have to do some maths—in English. This metric stuff baffles me,” said Kelly. “Let’s see now. A car like this will have a fuel tank of about ten-gallon capacity, and it should do about thirty miles to the gallon, say twenty-five to err on the side of safety. That means we have a range of roughly two hundred and fifty miles! Distance from here to Vienna is less than two hundred miles, so we should do it on one tank.”
“We’re going to Vienna?” asked Manteufel, surprised.
“Not quite. We’ll be turning off the main road just before we get there and heading for a small town called Tulln. There’s a US Airforce base there. I’m hoping we can convince them we are who we say we are. If we can, then we’ll be able to claim sanctuary there.”
“Claim sanctuary? Sounds very medieval,” said Manteufel facetiously. “Just hope there’s a cathedral there!”
Kelly laughed. “I don’t think there’ll be a cathedral on the base, but it’s a fair bet there’s a Catholic church, and we both know how accommodating the Catholic Church is when it comes to looking after escaping criminals!”
After they had circumnavigated Linz, they took a short break and changed places, Kelly driving the second leg. They turned off the main road at a village called Einsiedl, following the signs to Tulln. Before reaching the town, they spotted a tac sign to ‘USAFE Tulln’ and followed it. A kilometre or so from the base, Kelly pulled the car off the road and into a wood, with the petrol gauge hovering close to zero.
As they disembarked, Kelly grabbed the two Beretta pistols from the back seat where he had thrown them after they had disarmed the Italians. One he dropped into his pocket; the other, after removing the ammunition clip and dropping this into his pocket also, he threw into the woods as far as he could. He held the knife up for Manteufel to see.
“You want this?” he asked.
“I have my own,” said Manteufel, tapping the pocket which contained his trusty trench knife. Kelly dropped the knife into his own pocket.
“Of course, the first thing they’ll do is remove our weapons,” said Kelly, as they walked towards the main entrance of the airbase, “but hopefully we’ll get them back.”
As they approached the entrance, a guard stepped out of his sentry box and stood with his
