“Yes.”
“Good. Now, I’m going after Von Koerner. You stay here with little Hitler, and if I’m not back by exactly one hour from now, you light that fuse and get the hell out. If we don’t get Von Koerner, at least we’ll be sure the heil boys don’t have him either.”
“It’s a good plan except for one thing,” Victoria said. “I should be the one to go after Von Koerner.”
“Don’t be silly. Just do it my way.”
“No. I’m serious, Steve. There’s a very good reason why you shouldn’t go anywhere near that laboratory of his. It’s the same reason why I was assigned to this case in the first place. Intelligence had good reason for assigning a woman, rather than a man.”
“What reason?”
“I’m not supposed to tell you. And we don’t have time to argue. Please. You stay here and let me go after Von Koerner.”
“Negative,” I told her firmly. “No matter what it is you’re talking about, this is no job for a girl.”
“But it is!” she moaned earnestly.
But I wouldn’t buy it, and with time running out she had to agree to do it my way. I hauled the guard back to the elevator shaft. “Call down to your buddy,” I instructed him, “and tell him to come up here. Tell him the captain wants to see him.”
He obeyed, and after a moment the elevator began to move. I waited patiently until I saw the top of a head coming up from below. I smashed the butt of my gun down on it as hard as I could. Then I hauled the body into the cave with the ammo and tied it up. I trussed up the first guard, gave Vickie, a quick good-bye kiss, and lowered myself on the elevator to the bottom level.
There were some electric lights strung through the caverns, but they were very weak. I kept to the sides of the walls, hugging the shadows. If anybody was coming, I wanted to be sure I saw them before they saw me. I was lucky. I didn’t meet a soul.
Finally, I saw the other sentry at the end of the last corridor. But there was no way to get to him without his seeing me coming. I thought about it a minute and decided that the only thing to do was to make him come to me.
I pulled a handful of bullets from my cartridge belt and threw them back the way I’d come. They made a hell of a clatter in the empty passageway. The sentry sprang to his feet with his gun drawn and ran down the corridor to investigate. Crouching low, I sprang at him just before he reached the shadows concealing me.
I caught him just below the knees with a tackle any lineback might have envied. Then I hit him with both hands simultaneously, karate chops, one to the groin and the other to the windpipe so he wouldn’t be able to yell. He sagged over me and it was only then that I realized how hard I had hit him. His neck was broken. He was dead.
I didn’t have time to hold a wake. I didn’t know what kind of attention the sounds of our brief battle, or of the bouncing cartridges, might have attracted. I sprinted for the entrance to the lab.
It was dark except for a lamp pinpointing a desk at the rear of the cavern. Von Koerner was bent over the desk. By the sudden way his body straightened, I knew he’d seen me. But I couldn’t see his expression because his face was lost in the shadows.
His hand shot out across the desk and I thought he was going for a gun. But I was wrong. It was only a flashlight. The beam centered squarely on my groin, remained there a moment, and then rose slowly to shine in my eyes.
“Turn it off,” I told him, waving my gun in the ray from the flashlight so he’d be sure to see it.
“Of course, Mr. Victor.” He flicked it off. “It is an unexpected pleasure to see you again.”
“I’ll bet. We can talk about it on our way out of here.”
“I’m afraid not, Mr. Victor. I’m very much afraid that my men will not allow you to depart with me.”
“The hell you say. Come on. Move. In case you don’t follow, you’re my prisoner, Von Koerner.”
“You are laboring under a misapprehension, Mr. Victor. It is you who are my prisoner. I have already rung the alarm to summon the guards. Why don’t you just put down your gun and resign yourself to being my guest?”
“No thanks ” I motioned him toward the door. But it was too late. There were already men running toward it on the double with their guns drawn.
I fired two shots and the two eager beavers in front went down. I kicked the stout wooden door closed and waved Von Koerner backed behind the desk. Then I began pushing some of the lab equipment up against the door.
Suddenly, Von Koemer made a break for it. I hadn’t noticed, but there was another door at the rear of the chamber. I chased after him and pushed the door in with my shoulder before he could get through it. But he wasn’t even trying. Instead, he was standing in front of a large kiln. He’d opened the grate and there was a fire roaring inside it. Before I could reach him, he’d thrown some object into the fire and followed it up with a batch of papers. I saw something metallic begin to melt, but the fiery blaze made it impossible to retrieve it.
“Now you have nothing, Mr. Victor. I have destroyed the weapon and the plans for it. All the formulas and blueprints. All that is left is up here.” He pointed to his temple. “And that I shall never reveal to anyone except the disciples of mein Führer.”
“You’re nuts,” I told him succinctly. “You haven’t had a Führer for twenty years.”
There was a stout bolt on the door, and I’d already slid it into place. Now I looked around at my surroundings. It was a very small chamber, perhaps eight feet square. Most of that area was taken up by the kiln. There was no way out except the door by which we’d entered. And the neo-Nazi nuts were already battering away at that.
I looked at my watch. There was about eight minutes left before Vickie would ignite the fuse. Figure another three minutes before the explosives went off. That left me eleven minutes to contemplate my sins.
That sure as hell wasn’t enough time, so I decided not to try. Instead, I tried to figure some way of giving myself a chance to live through the impending explosion. The door looked like it would hold for at least as long as I had left, so I didn’t waste any time worrying about that. What I was looking for was some sort of shield against the blast.
The kiln was the only answer. It was an outside chance, but I had to take it. Von Koerner looked at me as if I’d lost my mind as I picked up the shovel alongside it and began heaving hot coals up against the door to the chamber. After a while the wood began smoldering and the smoke got pretty thick. But that couldn’t be helped and I didn’t waste time worrying about suffocating or burning to death. First things first. And the first thing was to survive the blast.
There were about two minutes of the eleven remaining when I got the last of the hot coals out of the kiln. I took off my clothes, pointed my gun at Koerner and told him to do the same. Now he really thought I’d flipped my lid. But he did as he was told.
I took the clothing and folded it so it would provide some sort of lining for the sizzling sides of the kiln. One minute left now. I doubled over and backed into the mouth of the kiln, jacknifing my body. It was still hot as hell and I could feel my rear end begin to sizzle as I settled myself.
Finally, all of me was inside the stout iron compartment. I could feel my skin start to blister where it touched the inside of it. Time was up.
“So long, Von Koerner,” I shouted, and pulled the grate closed. An instant later there was a blast and everything went black for me.
When I came to, the first thing I was aware of was that I couldn’t breathe. I kicked open the grating to the kiln, and that was a little better, but not much. The little chamber was filled with smoke. The red-hot coals I’d taken from the kiln had been strewn all around it. The wooden door had been blown in. Von Koerner was under it.