Jeremy Robinson - SecondWorld

“I’m here, Cowboy.”

“They are here.”

“Can you get out?”

“I am gunslinger.”

Miller appreciated the man’s confidence, but didn’t share it. The men he’d faced were well-trained professionals. The only reason he’d survived was because he was better. “We need to meet.”

“Agreed. One hour at—”

“I’m in the United States.”

“Can you get here?”

Miller considered this and said, “Yes. I can be there tomorrow.” The president could make it happen.

The banging on the door grew loud. They were kicking their way in.

“Wunderwaffe,” Vesely said quickly. “Page one forty-two!”

The door shattered.

Miller heard shouting.

Gunshots.

Then a dial tone.

Miller stared at the phone. Had Vesley been killed? He hated being one step behind, especially when every step forward resulted in someone dying.

The passenger’s door opened and a woman with short black hair and large sunglasses got in. Miller nearly pulled a pistol on the woman, but then she spoke.

“How do I look?” Adler said. “A good disguise?”

Miller took a deep breath and leaned his head back. “I damn near shot you.”

Adler looked at the phone in his hand. “Who were you speaking to?”

“I found Vesely. We’re going to meet him.”

“But that’s great,” she said. “Why do you look so upset?”

Miller handed the phone to Adler and started the engine. “Because he might be dead when we get there.”

“Four hours,” Miller said before hanging up the phone with President Bensson. Normally, he’d consider arranging a covert international flight in just four hours good time, but under the circumstances it felt like an eternity. Of course, with commercial flights grounded and the military full of homegrown Nazi spies, there were very few options on the table. The president’s solution would be hard to miss, but would nicely conceal the true purpose of the flight—to deliver him to a secret rendezvous with a Czech conspiracy theorist who might have information that could save the world.

Miller leaned back in his green metal chair. He looked at the clear blue sky and saw no hint of red. He allowed a slight grin to form on his face. In addition to providing a flight, Bensson had delivered some good news. Brodeur survived, thanks to a bulletproof vest Miller didn’t know the man was wearing. The impacts had knocked him unconscious and bruised his ribs, but he had suffered no serious injuries. That didn’t mean he’d be happy about being back on duty. Brodeur was one of the few men Miller currently trusted, and he’d requested that the FBI agent be on the flight when it arrived at the nearby Portsmouth International Airport at Pease—formerly known as the Pease Air Force Base until 1991 when the Strategic Air Command closed up shop. The base was still home to the Air National Guard and a variety of specialized military refueling aircraft, but the majority of the two-hundred-acre base had been converted for civilian use.

“One cheeseburger with Swiss, mushrooms, Thousand Island, and enough calories to kill you before the Nazis get a chance,” Adler said as she walked out of the seaside grill carrying two red baskets filled with sandwiches and fries. She put Miller’s burger down on the table and joined him. The restaurant stood on the bank of the Piscataqua River in Portsmouth, just ten minutes from Pease. “You realize you had a burger a half hour ago, yes?”

“Who knows when our next meal will come,” Miller said. “Calories equal energy.”

Adler smiled. “Like a seal storing blubber for the winter?”

“Actually,” Miller said, took a bite, and offered a food-muffled, “exactly.”

The pair dug into their food and ate quickly. When their sandwiches were gone and they turned to the fries, Adler restarted the conversation.

“Any luck with the president?”

Miller ate a French fry and nodded. “We’ll be airborne in four hours.”

Adler froze with a fry halfway to her mouth. “What? How?”

“You’ll find out when we get there.” Before Adler could object, Miller added, “Brodeur, the FBI agent from my apartment. He’s alive. He’ll be joining us.”

She placed the fry down and rested her head in her hands, as though she’d found out she hadn’t been convicted of a crime. “Thank God.”

Her reaction surprised Miller at first, but then he understood. “You’ve been blaming yourself for what happened?”

“If I hadn’t been there, things would have turned out differently.”

“Actually, you’re right,” he said.

She looked up at him.

“If you hadn’t been there, I would have been in the shower when they stormed the apartment. I would be dead.”

Adler sat back. “But Brodeur nearly died.”

“It’s likely he would have been shot either way.”

“But—”

Miller grew serious. He leaned forward, elbows on the red-painted picnic table. “Elizabeth. We are at war. We are outgunned, outnumbered, and have zero intel on the enemy. It is very likely more people are going to die. Including me. Including you. You need to be prepared for that. We are the last-ditch effort to stop this thing. If I die, you and Brodeur will take it to the end, even if it kills you both. If you die, I won’t stop to mourn your death until these people are stopped or I’m dead, too.”

Adler pushed her remaining food away and leaned back. She crossed her arms. “That’s cold.”

“Going to be a hell of a lot colder when six billion people are asphyxiating in five days.” He pushed her food back to her. “Finish it. Might be your last real meal.”

“Because I might be dead, you mean?”

Miller gave a nod. “And because as soon as we take off, we’re not going to stop moving until this thing is run down.”

He gave that a second to sink in. She sat forward and continued eating, although each bite was now forced. But the reality check would help keep her alive.

Miller turned his attention back to the iPhone. It was time to find out what was on page 142. He’d called the president first because he needed to set things in motion. But the pilots wouldn’t know where they were flying until Miller told them. And Miller wouldn’t know where that was until he reopened the digital copy of Nazi Wunderwaffe and Secret Societies.

The opened the e-book and scrolled through pages. As he neared page 142 a chapter heading caught his attention. “The Bell.”

“What?” Adler asked.

“The Bell. It’s the title of the chapter Vesely sent us to.”

“Is it a church bell?”

Miller ignored her. Something about the words sounded familiar. Then he remembered. “This is it!”

“You found something?”

“The Bell. Before Huber died, he said, ‘The bell tolls.’ I thought he was talking about his death, but he could have been referring to this.”

Adler slid her chair around the table and they read it together.

The Bell was one of many code names for a secret project that the Nazis began in 1944. The sole goal of this Wunderwaffe, or “wonder weapon,” was mass destruction on a grand scale. The program grew in tandem to the nuclear arms development in Germany, but was considered a higher priority. While weapons like atom bombs, fuel air bombs, guided missiles, stealth planes, sound cannons, and a variety of other exotic weapons were classified as Kriegswichtig, or “important for the war,” the Bell had been deemed Kriegsentscheidend, which translates to “decisive for the war.”

The project was seen as a game changer. Something so important that only those integral to the project’s success were allowed to live to the war’s end. The pages mentioned several names Miller now recognized and explained the parts they played in the weapon’s development. Debus, Huber, Oberth, Gerlach—they were all there, including—