Greg Iles - The Spandau Phoenix

walk. He gasped with each step, fighting the searing fire in his leg.

Like a boxer knocked senseless but still on his feet, he reeled backward

toward Stern.

"No, Gadi!" Stern barked. "The other way! Forward!"

The young commando tottered a moment, then collapsed.

Hess hit the floor hard this time and didn't move. Sobbing with rage

and pain, Gadi got to his knees and tried once more to lift the old man.

He summoned every ounce of strength he had left, but Smuts's bullet had

done too much damage.

46I can't do it, Uncle! I'll never get him through the tunnel!"

"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.

"You want to kill me, Jew?" he said softly. "You can kill me.

But you cannot kill what I lived for. Captain Hauer said Phoenix will

be wiped out. But he is wrong. What united the men of Phoenix exists

everywhere. In Germany. South America. In the Soviet Union.

The United States and Britain. Everywhere. All governments know about

our groups, but they do nothing. The press calls them ultra-right

organizations. A few members go to jail now and then, so what?

Why are they tolerated? Because deep down, people understand these

movements. They express something every civilized man feels-the '

justified fear of anarchy, of racial destruction. They know that one

day the great struggle will come ... the struggle against the Schwarze

and Asian and the Jew-"

"Didn't you hear what I said this afternoon!"

Stern cried.

"The Jews don't want to destroy anyone! That's the difference between

us and you. We have the power to vaporize our enemies, yet we choose

not to."

Hess smirked. "I'll tell you what that tells me, Jew. It tells me that

your race is weak. The Jew is clever enough to build atomic weapons,

but he lacks the moral courage to use what he has created."