“My goodness, Dr. Gould, you are quite the diplomat yourself,” he remarked as he watched her. Sam and Purdue had left in a hurry after receiving a frantic phone call from Werner.
Werner had sent Sam a text with details on the incoming threat. With Purdue in tail, they’d rushed to the Royal Guard and showed their clearance identification to have a word with the Meso-Arabian wing commander, Lieutenant Jenzebel Abdi.
“Madam, we have urgent intel from a friend of yours, Lieutenant Dieter Werner,” Sam told the striking woman in her late thirties.
“Oh Ditti,” she nodded lazily, not looking too impressed with the two mad Scots.
“He asked to give you this code. An unauthorized deployment of German fighter jets are based about twenty klicks outside the city of Susa and fifty klicks outside Baghdad!” Sam spilled it like an eager schoolboy with an urgent message for the principal. “They are on a suicide mission to destroy the C.I.T.E. headquarters and this palace under the command of Captain Gerhard Schmidt.”
Lieutenant Abdi immediately shouted orders to her men and commanded her wingmen to join her in the covert desert compound to get ready for an air attack. She checked the code Werner sent and nodded in acknowledgment of his warning. “Schmidt, huh?” she sneered. “I hate that fucking Kraut. I hope Werner rips his balls off.” She shook Purdue and Sam’s hands, “I have to get suited. Thank you for warning us.”
“Wait,” Purdue frowned, “are you also engaging in air combat yourself?”
The lieutenant smiled and winked. “Of course! If you see old Dieter again, ask him why they called me ‘Jihad Jenny’ in the flight academy.”
“Ha!” Sam chuckled as she jogged off with her team to arm up and intercept any approaching threat with extreme prejudice. The code Werner supplied had directed them to the two respective nests from where the Leo 2 squadrons were to take off.
“We missed Nina’s signing,” Sam lamented.
“That’s alright. It will be on every bloody news channel you can imagine over the next while,” Purdue soothed, patting Sam on the back. “Now, not to sound paranoid, but I have to get Nina and Marduk to Wrichtishousis within,” he checked his watch and quickly calculated the hours, travel time and elapsed time, “the next six hours.”
“Alright, let’s go before that old bastard disappears again,” Sam grunted. “By the way, what did you text Werner while I was talking to Jihad Jenny?”
Chapter 36 — Face-Off
After they had freed an unconscious Marlene and carried her swiftly and quietly through the broken fence to the car, Margaret felt apprehensive as she stalked the hangar with Lieutenant Werner. In the distance, they could hear the pilots getting restless, waiting for the command from Schmidt.
“How are we supposed to disengage six F-16 looking war birds in under ten minutes, Lieutenant?” Margaret whispered, as they slipped under a loose panel.
Werner chuckled. “Schatz, you have played too many American video games.”She shrugged sheepishly as he handed her a large steel implement.
“Without tires they cannot take off, Frau Crosby,” Werner advised. “Please damage the tires enough to cause a nice blowout as soon as they cross that line there. I have a secondary plan, long distance.”
In the office, Captain Schmidt woke from his blunt force induced blackout. He was tied to the same chair Margaret had sat in and the door was locked, confining him in his own holding place. The monitors were left on for him to watch, effectively infuriating him to a point of madness. Schmidt’s insane eyes only conveyed his failure as the news feed on his screen delivered evidence that the treaty had been signed successfully and that a recent attempted air raid had been averted by the quick action of the Meso-Arabian Air Force.
“Jesus Christ! No! You could not have known! How could they know?” he whined like a child, virtually dislocating his knees trying to kick the chair in a blind rage. His bloodshot eyes stiffened through his blood-soaked brow. “Werner!”
Out in the hangar Werner was using his cell phone as a homing device for a GPS satellite to locate the hangar. Margaret had done her best to slash the tires of the aircraft.
“I feel really stupid doing this old school stuff, Lieutenant,” she whispered.
“So then you should stop doing it,” Schmidt told her from the entrance of the hangar, toting a gun at her. He could not see Werner ducking in front of one of the Typhoons punching something into his phone. Margaret raised her hands in surrender, but Schmidt unloaded two slugs on her and she fell to the ground.
Shouting their orders, Schmidt finally initiated the second phase of his attack plan, if only for revenge. Wearing the dysfunctional masks, his men got into their aircrafts. Werner appeared in front of one of the machines, holding his cell phone in his hand. Schmidt stood behind the aircraft, moving slowly as he shot at an unarmed Werner. But he had not considered Werner’s position, nor where he’d been leading Schmidt. The slugs ricocheted off the landing gear. As the pilot fired up the jet, the afterburn he activated blew out a hellish tongue of fire, straight into the face of Captain Schmidt.
Looking down at what was left of the exposed flesh and teeth of Schmidt’s face, Werner spat on him. “Now you don’t even have a face for your death mask, you swine.”
Werner pressed the green button on his phone and set it down. He quickly lifted the injured journalist on his shoulders and carried her out to the car. From Iraq, Purdue received the signal and initiated a satellite beam to hone in on the homing device, rapidly elevating the core temperature of the hangar. The result was quick and hot.
On Halloween Evening the world celebrated, having not the slightest idea how apt their dressing up and use of masks really were. From Susa, Purdue’s private jet took off with special clearance and a military escort out of their air space to assure their safety. On board, Nina, Sam, Marduk and Purdue wolfed down a dinner while they headed for Edinburgh. There, a small, specialized team waited to apply the Skin to Nina as soon as possible.
The flat screen television kept them updated as the news unfolded.
“A freak accident at a deserted steel factory outside Berlin has taken the lives of several German Air Force pilots, including second-in-command Captain Gerhard Schmidt and Chief of the German Luftwaffe, Lieutenant-General Harold Meier. It is yet unclear what the suspicious circumstances were about…”
Sam, Nina and Marduk all speculated where Werner was and if he’d managed to get out in time with Marlene and Margaret.
“Calling Werner would be of no use. The man goes through cell phones like underwear,” Sam remarked. “We’ll have to wait to see if he contacts us, right Purdue?”
But Purdue was not listening. He was lying on his back in the reclining seat, head lolled to one side with his trusty tablet resting on his belly and his hands folded over it.
Sam smiled, “Look at that. The man who never sleeps is finally resting.”
On the tablet Sam could see that Purdue was communicating with Werner, answering Sam’s question earlier that evening. He shook his head. “Genius.”
Chapter 37
Two days later, Nina had her face back, recuperating in the same cozy institution in Kirkwall where she’d been before. Marduk’s facial dermis had to be peeled off and applied to the likeness of Prof. Sloane, dissolving the fusion particles until the Babylonian Mask was its (very) old self again. Macabre as the procedure was, Nina was delighted to have her own face back. Still heavily sedated for the cancer secret she shared with the medical staff, she fell asleep as Sam wandered off to get some coffee.