"Help!" the terrified girl cried as she ran. "Help me! Please help… you've got to protect me! Keep them away from me, please!"
The truck driver swung round – a tough little man with a seamed and weather-beaten face.
"What's that you say?" he demanded. "You were a passenger in the Volks, weren't you Fraulein? God, you were lucky to…"
"Listen to me!" the sobbing brunette interrupted. "You've got to listen to me! I'm being kidnapped! They were taking me away!"
"Kidnapped!" the motor-cyclist echoed. "You can't be serious!"
"I am, I am," Susan babbled, glancing fearfully over her shoulder. "They tricked me into it… back in Konigswinter… Five of them… they're taking me away! Please… don't let them get at me…!"
Beside the shattered mini-bus, Lisa touched Heinz on the arm.
"That should be enough to do the trick," she said. "You three go get her; I'll see you over there."
As they strode purposefully towards the frenzied American girl, she climbed unobtrusively over the steel guard rail beside the road and hurried across a stretch of wasteland beyond which street lamps charted the course of a service road between two factories. Susan screamed as she saw the three youths approach.
"Don't let them touch me!" she cried as she dodged behind the truck driver.
"Thanks, mate," Heinz said to the driver. "We'll take care of her now. She got a nasty bump on the head and she doesn't know what she's saying."
"Just a minute," the driver protested. "The young lady says…"
"I told you: she got hit on the head."
"Don't believe him!" Susan sobbed. "They were taking me away."
"Come, my dear: we'll take you home," Stefan said firmly, reaching for Susan's arm.
The truck driver planted himself firmly in front of the terrified girl.
"I don't know about that," he said belligerently. "The lady says she wants protection. I think we'd better hear a little more about it."
"Get out of my way!" Stefan said through set teeth.
"Better wait until the police come, if you ask me," the motorcyclist said. "Maybe she's telling the truth. Maybe she isn't. Let them sort it out."
"She's coming with us," Klaus said curtly.
"Not while I'm here…" the truck driver began.
The three youths exploded into action. Klaus pivoted on his heel and struck the motor-cyclist a terrible blow on the point of the jaw. The helmeted head snapped back and the man crashed to the ground to lie motionless with widespread arms on the wet tarmac. At the same time, Stefan swung at the truck driver – but the little man blocked the punch expertly with the palm of one hand and jabbed a ferocious left into the boy's stomach. Stefan grunted and doubled forward. The driver drew back his arm again… but Heinz chopped brutally at the side of his neck with the edge of his hand as Klaus hit him viciously on the temple from the other side. The little man gave a choking gasp and sagged at the knee. A moment later he slumped unconscious at their feet. The third man, a pale, sandy-haired individual with spectacles, had retreated hastily at the first sign of violence. Heinz raced after him and caught him by the shoulder, swinging him around savagely as the other two seized the screaming Susan and carried her struggling towards the safety fence.
"I don't want any trouble!" the sandy-haired man stuttered in abject terror. "I believe you! You take her if you like! It's no business of mine, honestly. I don't want any trouble!"
He cringed away from the lean-faced youth, shivering with fright.
"Want it or not, brother, you got it!" Heinz said with a malevolent grin.
Without relaxing his hold on the cowering man, he punched him once pitilessly in the solar plexus. The sandy man's breath whooshed out of his lungs and he dropped instantly to the wet macadam, to lie whimpering with his arms crossed over his head. Heinz shrugged contemptuously and turned to run after the others. Before the bystanders had realized anything was amiss, the kidnapped teenager, slung over Klaus' shoulder with Heinz's cruel hand clamped over her mouth, was being rushed across the vacant lot to join the waiting Lisa.
Colonel Templar adjusted the spectacles on his nose and riffled through the Telex sheets on his desk. He was a spare, hard-muscled man of forty with a clipped, dark mustache and gray eyes in a face now lined with worry and fatigue.
"This seems to be it," he said tersely, selecting a sheet and holding it up. "I just got these from the Chief of Police."
"What is it, Alec?" Eileen Templar asked nervously, shifting her position in the visitor's chair on the other side of the desk. "Not… bad news, I hope? I couldn't bear it if…"
"Depends," her husband said. "At least she's alive – if it's her, and this seems to me the most likely of the lot. Report circulated by the Bureau of Missing Persons in Hamburg, forwarded to them by the department dealing with road accidents."
"Accidents?" Eileen faltered. "Oh, God! Not…"
"Cool it, for God's sake!" the colonel said irritably. "No need to get in a state about it!"
He read the paper in his hand: "Accident on the Hamburg-Hanover autobahn last night… Volkswagen mini-bus and Mercedes sedan in collision with a couple of trucks… one dead, none seriously injured… dark teenage girl, apparently unhurt, speaking German with a strong English or American accent, broke away from the survivors in the Volkswagen and claimed she was being kidnapped."
"Kidnapped!" his wife echoed faintly. "Oh, Alec."
"Asked one of the truck drivers and two bystanders for protection," Templar continued, "but three German youths attacked… beat them up and left them lying in the road… took the girl away before anyone else could intervene. Truck driver reported it to the police as soon as they arrived on the scene."
"But who on…?" Eileen demanded bewilderedly. "Who in God's name would want to kidnap Susan? And why?"
"I think I have an idea," the colonel said grimly.
He scanned the Telex sheet again. "The dead man's name was given as Kurt Frodenberg… 22 years old… driver of the Volkswagen, and it seems there was a blonde girl with them of about the same age. That figures."
"I don't understand."
"Anarchists," Templar said briefly. "Do anything they can to discredit the Americans, the French, the British – even the Goddamn Russkis! Frodenberg was known to have been mixed up with a group that's been active for some months now… here, in Hamburg, in Dusseldorf, in Munich. We think they were behind the murder of that policeman after the demonstration the other night, but we can't prove it." He paused and then added significantly: "A group led by a blonde girl of about 22."
"But what on earth would they want with our Susie?" Eileen asked. "I mean I don't see the point… if it was her… what good would it do them after all?"
Templar sighed. "That's just what I intend to find out," he said forcefully. "I'm leaving for Hamburg right away."
"But I don't understand," Susan Templar wailed. "Why do you hate the Americans so much? What harm did we ever do you?"
"You're the main pillars of a rotten society that's got to be destroyed," Lisa replied. "If it wasn't for your lousy money, this decadent German regime would have tottered long ago."
They were sitting under a naked electric bulb in a small shuttered room at the top of an old house in the St. Pauli district of Hamburg. Susan had no idea how she had got there; somebody had clapped a pad soaked with a sickly, sweet-smelling substance over her mouth and nose as soon as they had reached the far side of the waste ground beyond the autobahn – and the next thing she had known, she was in this bare, cell-like attic furnished only with a trundle bed and a rickety chair.
She had no idea what time it was, or whether it was day or night. The shutters were locked and no light of any kind penetrated the two small windows. She remembered sleeping, she remembered awakening and being given food and drink. She remembered although she preferred to forget – having submitted to her captors' vile and obscene sexual demands, both female and male, again and again in the intervening periods. But of how much time had elapsed, she had no idea. The nightmare journey from Siegsdorff seemed a hundred years ago. Now, wearing only a terrycloth robe they had given her, she lay on the bed talking to the German girl, trying to make some sense out of her abduction and the extraordinary circumstances surrounding it.