"Of course," Maude chimed. She talked excitedly as they walked. "I got some souvenirs today not too expensive, I know. But since it's our last day in London I thought we should get something for Vickie. And Gert has been such a good friend."
Smith bit his tongue. He had no objection to buying a gift for their only daughter, but the prospect of wasting perfectly good money on a nosy neighbor was utterly distasteful to him.
Maude seemed to sense his mild displeasure. It was no secret to her that Harold didn't like Gert Higgins. But the fact that he didn't object to buying the woman a gift spoke volumes about her husband's patience. And-though he didn't like to show it-his love.
She was beaming when they reached the door to the restaurant. Maude opened it, Smith balanced the door with his elbow in order to allow her to pass.
He was about to step inside the hallway after her when he heard a familiar noise. Very distant. Smith paused, half in, half out of the restaurant. It could not be. Not a third time.
He cocked an ear.
"Harold?" His wife had come back out to him. Boom... boom ...boom...
It was like the footsteps of some remorseless movie monster, a celluloid beast come to devour them all.
"Maude, please step outside," Smith said calmly.
"What is it?"
"Please hurry," he pressed, a welling urgency in his tone.
Mrs. Smith obliged. At Smith's urging the two of them quickly made their way back up the sidewalk. There was shouting coming from Trafalgar Square by the time they reached the Piccadilly entrance to London's Underground. Air-raid sirens sounded. Fingers and cameras were aimed at the squadron of incoming fighters.
Smith didn't dawdle. In another minute the crowd would become a mob. As it was, the first clusters of spectators were just beginning to herd themselves toward the safety of the subway as Smith and his wife climbed hurriedly down the stairs.
The stairway ended at a concrete landing that banked right into another staircase. This one was an illuminated tube with a metal railing running up either side.
Smith hurried down through the second enclosed staircase to the train platform below the city. He steered his wife to a spot near one of the largest support columns.
Already behind them the throngs of panicked people from the street were flooding down the stairs. Subway passengers soon got the message. They stopped heading for the exits, staying instead on the platform with the recent street arrivals. Anxious chatter rippled through the crowd.
The station began to quickly fill up.
"They said in the paper that this was over." Maude Smith's voice trembled.
"It is a mistake to trust the London press," Smith replied thinly. He was thinking of how wrong he had been for trusting the RAF.
The bombs hadn't yet begun to strike the streets above them. However, the crowd sensed it was only a matter of time. The smell of fear and sweat from hundreds of anxious people filled the long platform area.
Smith heard a sudden sharp series of noises.
It wasn't the German bombs. The sound hadn't come from outside. It was far too close.
It almost sounded like...
Again. The noise was more insistent. Screams followed.
The rattle of machine-gun fire grew worse. The crowd began to swell toward them. Pressing. Frantic. Behind the pillar Smith and his wife were safe. For now.
"What's happening?" Mrs. Smith begged. Smith did not respond.
The sound of weapons fire ebbed momentarily. During the lull Smith took a chance to peer around the side of the column. He was just in time to see dozens of armed young men dressed in chillingly familiar uniforms. They were stomping up the staircase to the street.
He had to blink back his amazement. The men were dressed in the black-on-black uniforms of Germany's World War II SS. Their black boots clicked on the concrete stairs as they ran out of sight.
A moment later there was firing from the stairwell. Three bloodied bodies dropped into sight on the platform.
Smith wheeled on his wife.
"Stay here," he instructed, his face severe.
He started to go, but was stopped by a timid voice. "Harold, I'm scared."
Smith stopped dead.
He looked down at his wife. A plump woman on the far side of middle age. There was alarm on her gentle features.
Smith touched her softly on the cheek. "Everything will be fine, dear," he promised. Maude blinked back tears. She nodded once, bravely.
The crowd had massed on the far end of the platform. There was no one between him and the stairs. Leaving his wife huddled behind a pillar with her bags of souvenir statuettes of Big Ben and London, England T-shirts, Harold W. Smith ran to the bloodstained subway staircase after the fleeing band of neo-Nazis.
THE SMALL IV ARMY accomplished a feat that the Third Reich had never been able to achieve during the six long years of the war in Europe. They had placed an invasion force on the streets of London. Neo-Nazi ground troops swelled up from the Underground stations, firing as they ran. Others joined them on the street, exiting from buildings and cars. Bodies fell to the pavement as soldiers raced to find shelter in enclosures along the mob scene that was Trafalgar Square. A whistling bomb landed amid a group of three soldiers, tearing a mailbox-sized hole in the pavement and flinging the invaders through the smoke-clogged air.
The Master of Sinanju flew through the worst of the battle, a wraith in fiery red. Even as armed soldiers swarmed the square from hidden positions all around, Chiun ran into the mouth of the nearest subway station.
There was still shooting going on belowground. He would stop as many as he could before they were able to join their murderous fellows above.
The old Korean found himself in a steeply angled passageway. It veered off at a sharp bend far below. Footsteps clicked urgently against unseen concrete stairs.
Chiun raced down a half-dozen steps before flinging himself in the air toward the landing below. The instant he was airborne, a crowd of black-suited men ran into view from the lower staircase. The soldiers didn't have time to be shocked. Chiun sailed in at an angle parallel to the stairs.
The heels of his sandaled feet caught the pair of men in the lead squarely in their chests. They flew backward from the pressure, slamming solidly against the wall of the stairwell. Their spines cracked audibly, bodies folding in half.
Some of the other men began firing. Flying lead pinged loudly in the cramped space. Bullets chipped holes in the sealed concrete walls around them.
Chiun swirled through the volley of projectiles, arriving at the far end unharmed.
His fists shot out in rapid-fire lunges, slamming against gun muzzles in the impossibly brief fraction of time between rounds. The weapons rocketed back with a force far greater than that of any launched bullet. The brittle crack of a dozen sternums collided into one single, horrific symphony of sound.
The men in the first line of storm troopers suddenly found their machine guns protruding from their chests. Blood spurted from around gun stocks as the men dropped to the staircase. They rolled downward, upending the next batch of soldiers who were even now racing up for the confrontation above.
Chiun leaped over the bodies, dropping into the middle of the next advancing throng.
His hands flashed forward.
The foreheads of a dozen men shattered under the force of unseen fists.
Chiun's elbows lashed back.
And the throats of another ten imploded, fonts of blood erupting from shocked mouths.
The Master of Sinanju became a blur of arms and legs. A twisting, hellish dervish. Knees cracked beneath heels; bodies dropped and were finished by lightning-fast toe kicks to the temple.
Some at the back tried to get off a few feeble shots. The nightmare blur in the bloodred kimono had already sliced through their lines with the power of a buzz saw and the speed of a lashing cobra. They were dead before the sounds of their weapons echoed up the stairwell.