“You really think we can pull this off, Sir?” he whispered.
“We’ll see. Shhh, they’re coming out of the office.”
“Now, do you hear me? Now! I want him here now!”
“Ja, Herr General.”
“And the security, it must be improved! Immediately, do you understand, immediately!”
“Ja, Herr General, Ja.”
“I will question them personally! Schmidt here will assist. We will make them talk!”
“Ja, Herr General.”
“Why are they not here yet? Why are my orders not being carried out? Go yourself; see to it. Bring them to me!”
“Ja, Herr General.” The director was out the door as fast as he could waddle.
The colonel turned to the bandaged man. “Joel, you make a pretty convincing tyrant.”
“Thank you, Mark. I think. It is in my blood.”
Griffin looked at his watch. “C’mon, you little toad, get them here. We have less than thirty minutes to get this done.”
Several blocks away, at the demonstration, Zurcher, the German infantry unterofizier turned demagogue, bellowed out his punch line.
“The detention center is our Bastille! Inside its walls the last of the old order lives on, protected from the force and will of the people while they continue to take the coins from our pockets and suck the blood from our country. On to the center, death to those who would hold us back!”
Several of Griffin’s team were working the crowd below. “On to the center!” they screamed, waving guns in the air. “On to the center!” A polizei cordon tried to hold the crowd back, but they went under in a sea of fists and a hail of bullets. With a frenzy all its own, the crowd surged down the streets, Griffin’s men working their way to the edge of the mass. Then from shop door to shop door, they leapt like salmon going upstream until the team re-formed at its rally point. Sergeant Zurcher made it from the podium to the RP a few minutes late.
The Sep counted noses. “Well, gentlemen — and, Sergeant Zurcher, I use that term loosely — let us go see how well our officers have played their parts.”
Two guards pushed a very confused chancellor and General Ulder-thane into the director’s office.
“Colonel Guterman!” Ulderthane blurted out.
“Silence! Herr Guterman is dead, the traitor,” spat out Joel.
The boy gets an “A” for thinking on his feet, thought Griffin.
“Schmidt, assist me. We will soon learn the truth.” To the guards and the director he said, “Leave us.”
A minute or two after the men closed the director’s office door, the tirade began. It was followed by howls of pain, shouted denials, the slap of fists on flesh. Then only low mumbling. Guterman emerged from the office, his face red with rage.
“I want all of them, every one you have here. Outside, in the back. Now. I have my men. We will end these traitors’ miserable lives and eliminate the threat once and for all!”
The phone rang in the outer office and the director answered it. As he listened to the report from the other end of the line, the sweating director’s face grew pale. “Herr Blacksturm, there is a mob, a huge armed mob! It is coming down the street straight toward the center!” Guterman pulled at his chin, carefully avoiding the bandage, and began to pace. Witnessing this performance from the inner office, Griffin turned his head aside and rolled his eyes.
“Yes, yes. It is their people,” Guterman began. He jerked his head toward the director’s office. “Well, we shall give them what they came for.”
“Herr General?”
“We shall give them their precious politicians. The crowd can claim the bodies.” He swiveled and stared down Special Security captain Brunhoff. “Herr Captain, you will take every man and every Special Security soldier here and place them under your command. You will have the honor of defeating a threat to your leadership by eliminating the rabble in the street. Herr Director, give Colonel Schmidt the cell locations of the other reactionary traitors.”
“But Herr General, there are more than thirty of them!”
“I have five loyal, well-trained, and well-armed soldiers here, and Colonel Schmidt is quite proficient in the art of execution. Is that not true, Colonel?”
Griffin nodded and smiled so nastily that, for a moment, even Guterman was afraid. Guterman turned back to the director. “The cell numbers, you idiot! Unless you wish to join the line that will stand against the wall, you will write them down!”
As the fat man scribbled, Guterman turned back to Brunhoff. “Go. Organize your force. There is little time left. Everyone to the main gate. We will need no assistance in the back.” Guterman rubbed his hands together and gazed toward the director’s office. “I will take great pleasure in this.”
As they opened cell after cell, the sounds of the first spatters of rifle fire drifted through the hallways. The crowd was coming closer. In his mind’s eye Griffin could see the lead edge of people go down, only to be replaced, trampled by the surge from behind. Some would pick up dropped weapons, others would just keep coming. The company of Special Security troops and prison guards would fire, but there would be more people in the crowd than the defenders had bullets. And, if Sep had done his work well, they’d return fire, dropping some of the guards and forcing the others to duck. The mob would keep, perhaps even gain, momentum, the deaths on both sides giving it all the more reason to press on. A good deal, a hundred armed men and twenty thousand others.
Minutes later, even as Griffin and Guterman herded the civilian leaders toward the rear exit, the crowd, which officials would later estimate at twenty-three thousand, hit the front gate of the detention center.
A high stone wall enclosed the entire Frankencitz Detention Center, effectively shutting the world off from what went on inside. Though the front of the center was all driveway and a few small administrative buildings, in back lay a garden and a grassy exercise area. It was into this open space that Griffin, Guterman, and company led their charges.
From the front came the roar of the crowd and the sounds of a pitched firefight. Griffin looked at the wall.
No hole. Shit. He turned around. The mob’s inside. They’ll be coming around the sides of the building any minute.
Instinctively he flattened, shoving the chancellor down with him as he heard the roar. Dust and rocks flew overhead, but when Griffin looked up the rampart of the Frankencitz Detention Center sported a six-foot gap. In the center of it stood The Sep, waving them on. He stood and brushed himself off.
“Gentlemen, exit this way please. We have a bus waiting.”
Although some of Griffin’s team were off on other missions, the tour bus that had carried them to Frankencitz was still crowded with soldiers and civilians as it inched through the city traffic. Griffin and Guterman, the latter now back in his own uniform and without the mock bandages, related the events of the past several days to Germany’s civilian leader and the commanding general of the armed forces.
“Blacksturm must be stopped,” said the chancellor.
“After we take you to a place where you will be safe,” said Guterman, “stopping Blacksturm is our next mission.”
“I will accompany you,” said Ulderthane.
“And I,” added the chancellor.
“I must object,” responded Guterman. “This is a military mission.”
“Your presence could hinder us should events not go as planned,” chimed in Griffin. “Besides, it’s not wise to have all the leaders in one place at one time. The risks are too great and, though we have been extraordinarily lucky so far, that luck may not hold much longer. Only the speed and audacity with which we have acted have given us this much success.”