Lasari felt through the man’s pockets. There were no papers, no wallet, nothing but a set of car keys, several fine linen handkerchiefs and a roll of breath mints.
Lasari ran to the Mercedes. General Weir had fallen to his knees and was leaning against the car, a hand to his chest. “It’s never as bad as it looks, soldier,” he said.
“I’ll get you to a hospital,” Lasari said.
“No. The German highway patrol will be by within the hour.” The general tried to rise but the effort was too great. “I’m giving the orders here. Take this car and get back to camp. Don’t break that loop, Lasari.”
“I can’t leave you here.”
“You’ve got to. Get those bastards, soldier.”
“How can I go it alone? Who can I trust? Who’ll trust me?”
“Call the States, use a public airport phone. Get John Grimes, my place in Springfield. He’ll need General Stigmuller and Sergeant Gordon, tell him I said so. And here, soldier.”
With ragged breathing and in obvious pain the General slipped his hand inside his tunic and took out a wallet, sorting through it with numbing fingers. Between bits of tissue paper he located the Medal of Honor, the Liberty head, stars and the single word Valor clearly visible in the moonlight. “Take it,” he said. “That will show them Scotty Weir sent you.”
Lasari hesitated only a moment. “I won’t need the car, general,” he said. “Let me help you out of this wind.” He switched off the Mercedes engine, then lifted Weir into the car on the driver’s side.
Back in the lodge Lasari took the skis off the wall racks, pulled a blanket from the couch and went back to the car.
“It’s never as bad as it looks,” the general said, barely audible, as Lasari bundled the blanket around him. Then he turned the headlights to bright, cradled the general’s head on a folded arm and arranged the body to lean against the steering wheel. A shrill wail sounded in the night as the general’s inert weight pressed against the horn.
Lasari strapped on the skis, picked up the duffel and glided over the snow to the top of the old ski run. There was just enough light to pick out the path down the mountain, lined on either side with pines and tufted with scrub growth. About six or eight miles down the trail, the general said, with twists and turns and unknown terrain ahead.
Lasari hoisted the duffel over his head, ignoring the painful spasms in his bruised chest, and tried a couple of tentative knee bends. It was not the challenge of the slope that worried him; it was the network of nerves that were tingling through the old wounds in his thigh and calf, a betraying sign of weakness or crippling fear.
Lasari pushed off and started down the slope, the cold wind bringing tears to his eyes and wetting his cheeks. It seemed to him a long, long time, dodging scrub and gliding past tall conifers, before the wailing sound of the Mercedes’ horn faded behind him into the night.
He halted with a sharp Christiana a few hundred yards above the maneuver area, where he could see lights and make out signs of movement.
Concealing the skis in deep brush, he took out the American passport and tore each page into a dozen pieces, letting the fragments mix with the wind. From his pocket he removed the bottle of pills (“... take three,” Vayetch had said) and shook out six small capsules, washing them down with a mouthful of snow.
For the first time he noticed heavy blood stains on his tunic and spent several minutes rubbing at the spots with handfuls of snow, leaving crimson stains on the ground around him.
Lasari had begun the final walk downhill, duffel in hand, when the first wave of nausea struck him. He began to walk faster, breathing deeply and trying to focus on the lights below. The quantity of blood on his uniform had surprised and disconcerted him.
“It’s never as bad as it looks”... the general had said that twice. And Lasari was determined to believe him.
Chapter Thirty-nine
The airport at Frankfurt had been a maelstrom of confusion, hundreds of passengers hurrying in every direction toward the more than fifty international airline terminals that left from the aerodrome. The city itself, rebuilt from World War II rubble in neomodern style, was a sprawl of blocky concrete in the late afternoon light. As Lasari looked down from the plane window, the movement of cars and autobahns below spent spasms of nausea through his body, and when the plane passed over the broad band of the River Main reflections from the water sent slices of pain through his eyeballs. He would like to have shaded his eyes, tried to sleep, but he was hoping for at least a glimpse of the Am-Main Military Hospital. General Weir had been flown there from Ludensdorf in a military transport, John Grimes had told him.
Their conversation had been brief, a collect call made to the Tarbert Weir home outside Springfield from a phone booth in the airport. Even in the privacy of the booth Lasari had talked urgently, a hand cupped around his mouth and his back to the shuffle of traffic passing the glass door.
He had asked first about the general. “He’s holding his own,” Grimes had said.
“Did you talk to him?”
“No, he’s not up to that yet. A doctor called.”
“What do you think, Mr. Grimes?”
“He’s got the constitution of a horse, always had.”
Lasari hesitated a moment. The connection was good, Grimes’ voice was clear, but Lasari had the impression that someone might be listening in on the line, at the Springfield end. It was not a noise that alerted him but rather a feeling of presence, the silence of breath being withheld.
“Is it safe to talk, Mr. Grimes?”
“Shoot, fellow. Say what you’ve got to say,” the man said. “I’ve been expecting some sort of instructions from the general. He gave me a rough idea what he was up to.”
Lasari gave Grimes the number of the Lufthansa flight, his arrival time in Chicago and a description of the single item he would be carrying. And then he gave him General Weir’s instructions about Sergeant Gordon and General Stigmuller.
“I have their numbers,” Grimes said, his voice suddenly hard. “I’ll tell them what the general wants them to know.” He broke the connection.
Before entering the waiting area for his flight, Lasari stood to one side and watched as passengers were guided through the metal detectors used to search out concealed weapons. On a moving belt attendants arranged hand luggage to pass through a separate detector, to be picked up on the other side of the barrier.
Two minutes before flight time he handed his duffel to an attendant and walked through the detector arches. A variety of luggage moved past him before he saw his duffel emerging on the belt. He stepped over to pick it up, as casual as any other traveler, then blended into the line of passengers holding boarding passes.
Sergeant Karl Malleck had rung for fresh coffee. Since five o’clock he had been out of bed and restless. With the business on schedule, it was too early for whiskey, yet he desperately needed a pickup. The waiting, the goddam silence, the creaking floors, the smells of the horse stalls that became miasmic in the damp — it was all getting on his nerves. He needed someone to talk to.
When Private Andrew Scales came in with the tray Malleck thought of sending him back for another cup. Instead he said sharply, “You been checking up on your mailbox regularly, Scales?”
“Yes, sir,” the black man said. “I goes over every two days or so.”