Pirate

Chapter Thirty-one

The Bavarian Alps

“MOUNTAIN CLIMBING’S JUST LIKE SMIRNOFF,” STOKE SAID to Jet, trying to make her smile for the first time all morning.

“What?”

“Leaves you breathless.”

She didn’t get it. She was tired, panting, her feet hurt, and it was all his fault.

“Yeah, breathtaking up here, ain’t it?” Stoke said and filled his lungs with pure alpine air. He and Jet had just climbed up another steep rocky rise through the trees. He decided to stop and let her get her wind back. They were standing on an outcropping of rock overlooking something called the Obersalzburg.

He was having the time of his life. Whole damn countryside was beautiful. Even the dirt. The ground, even up here at this elevation, was soft underfoot. Spongy, Stoke thought you’d call it. Light was filtering down through the tall trees onto a soft bed of pine needles and the air was cool and clean. He looked up. There were noisy black birds, jackdaws, riding the currents above the swaying treetops.

Surprise, surprise. He liked Germany. It was pretty.

What he’d seen of it on the way to Salzburg, anyway, whizzing by his window in the dark on the midnight train down from Berlin. Now, in the last couple of hours of climbing, he’d been seeing little white stone villages and green farmland spread out far below. Salzburg, where they’d spent last night, was some twenty klicks to the north. You could still see it in the clear distance. Beautiful. All around him, towering above the thick green forests, were the jagged slate-grey peaks of snow-capped ranges. He pulled his map out of his knapsack and identified them as the Untersberg and Waltzmann mountains. To the southwest, sparkling blue in the sun, was a pretty lake he’d like to see one day, the Konigsee.

“Just smell that,” Stoke said. “Christmas.”

“What the devil are you talking about, Stokely?”

“Christmas trees? Am I right?”

Jet rolled her eyes at him and walked off to stand by herself. She bent from the waist, putting her hands on her knees for support, and took deep breaths. Girl smoked way too much and she was a little out of shape. He’d have to work with her on that. Especially now that they were telling everybody in Germany that he was her personal trainer. It was a good cover story. Jet had thought of it. Told him how to act the role. One thing the girl could do was act. No, wait. He didn’t want to go there.

In fact, Jet was one hell of an actress. And that, he had to admit, was the scariest part about this whole damn trip. Climbing mountains was easy. Figuring out whose side Jet was really on was tough. Just when you thought you had her pegged, wham. You’d see something in those eyes that didn’t seem right.

Stoke, former SEAL and New York City cop, hadn’t done a whole lot of actual mountain climbing himself. But he had to say that after this morning’s experience he had a feeling he’d be pretty damn good at it. How hard could it be? He’d read a book, something about being up in thin air. Maybe thin up on Everest, but the air wasn’t all that thin right here in Obersalzburg, and they were plenty high up.

“Look at that,” he said, looking up from his map to a huge snow-capped mountain rising in the distance above the treeline.

“Look at what?” Jet said, lighting up.

“Over there. That’s the Zugspitze, or however you say it.”

“Zoog-spits.”

“Right. Zugspitze is almost ten thousand feet above sea level. Tallest mountain in Germany. Right about there is where the Bavarian Mountains meet the Tyrolese Mountains. Hell, girl, let’s see a smile. We’re in Germany now. We’re almost there. It’s all downhill from here.”

“Don’t talk about my life like that.”

Girl was tired. Irritated. A little scared, even though she’d never admit it. Her father sounded like a pretty scary cat, all right. And now she’d crossed him, big time. Jet hadn’t wanted to leave her fancy suite at the Adlon Hotel in Berlin in the middle of the night and catch the train to Salzburg. Too bad. There was a chance they’d been made and Stoke had a lot of digging to do before he dealt with Baron von Draxis on a personal basis.

What happened was, he’d seen the two Arnolds in the lobby of their hotel in Berlin. They had their backs to him, standing at the check-in talking to the receptionist, when he’d come back all sweaty from his evening run. He was on his way to the elevator when he spotted them. Kept his head down. Just kept walking and they hadn’t seen him. Maybe. Ah-nold and Ah-nold, he called them. The two blond goons from Valkyrie, who provided muscle for von Draxis.

Still. Kind of odd, wasn’t it? The two of them checking into the most expensive hotel in Berlin. What was that all about?

Stoke had a theory. He’d developed it in Vietnam in order to stay alive. Things that didn’t make sense at first always made perfect sense if you just stopped and thought about them a second. But sometimes you can’t stop, so you got to go with your instincts if you want to keep breathing.

He went right to his room and got on the phone. First he called Jet’s suite, woke her up. Told her he was booking two seats on the midnight train to Salzburg. They had to leave the hotel now. By the service elevator. She wasn’t happy. Even though it was her idea that they should check out Schatzi’s secret Bavarian hideaway.

He was learning about Jet. She wasn’t too big on hiking or mountain climbing or staying in dumpy little guesthouses like where they’d gone after arriving in Salzburg. Didn’t like her room or her bed. Didn’t like the mattress. Didn’t like the pillow. Didn’t like breakfast. Didn’t even seem to like the Christmas trees all that much. Probably didn’t even celebrate Christmas in China, come to think of it, so he’d give her a pass on that one.

He handed her the canteen and she tilted it back, the muscles in her throat going up and down. Thirsty girl.

Stoke pulled his black wool sweater over his head and tied the arms around his waist. It was getting a little warm up here as the sun rose over the Alps. They had been in the mountains for about six hours now. An hour before sunup, they’d slipped out of the small gasthaus deep in the woods above Salzburg. He felt great. He’d liked his bed and his pillow. Slept like a baby under the soft eiderdown thing they used instead of blankets. He’d knocked on Jet’s door at 4:00 A.M. and again at four-thirty. Give her credit; she was standing tall at five.

Not happy, but awake and dressed.

He figured his only real problem was the drowned guard on Valkyrie. But to be realistic about it, it wasn’t much of a problem. Nobody had seen Stoke aboard. Guy was taking a leak and fell overboard. Happened all the time. Biggest cause of death on boats was guys pissing over the side and falling overboard. He’d read that somewhere. So. Baron von Draxis probably wasn’t really expecting his former girlfriend and a giant black guy tracking his ass all over Germany. Still, seeing the two Arnolds in the Adlon lobby bugged him sufficiently for him to bust a move.

He’d finally reached Alex on board the USS Lincoln. Hawke was in a bad mood, too. He’d been cooped up in some briefing for about twelve hours and not happy about it. The man still wasn’t all that crazy about the idea of Stoke bringing Jet to Germany. Stoke had pointed out that she could speak German and could be a big help digging around in Schatzi’s life. Plus, Stoke told Hawke, he thought she was in love with his ass.

Hawke said, yeah, okay, but she was also a Chinese secret police captain who had at one time considered killing him. Stoke said he didn’t want to argue. He’d keep an eye on her. And anyway, Hawke sounded like he was a little preoccupied with getting his ass the hell off the Lincoln and trying to prevent World War III.

Few things in particular Hawke told Stoke to dig into: One, what the hell was Tempelhof? The Chinese general who had recaptured Brock had said the word “Tempelhof” like it was some big deal. Hell, it was an old airport in Berlin, everybody knew that. But Brock had no idea what the hell Tempelhof had to do with all this. Find out. Two, were the bloody Germans involved with the French—and how? Third thing. What was the von Draxis connection exactly? The baron was certainly tied to both the frogs and the Chinese. But, how?

Stoke said he was on the case and hung up.

“How much further?” Jet asked, handing him back the canteen. Empty. She was hot and tired and thirsty but he was having a hard time feeling sorry for her. She knew what to expect on this trip.

She’d said there were no roads to the place. Inaccessible by automobile. She said you had to take a helicopter to get there. Stoke had said choppers tended to attract unwanted attention. He said they’d have to walk. They could pretend to be hikers. She agreed. Now she obviously wasn’t so sure she should have. He told her the good news. According to what he saw on the map, they had only a mile to go. He said mostly downhill but that was a stretch.

Half an hour later, sticky with perspiration, he was standing in a sunny clearing on the side of a thickly wooded hill. At the base of the postcard mountain stood a very large Hansel and Gretel–type house. A Tyrolean château, he supposed you called it, built up against the sheer face of the rock. A narrow winding path of crushed pebbles disappeared around one side of the house and into the woods to the east. On the west side, a grassy clearing big enough to accommodate a chopper. The grass had that fresh smell and look of having been cut recently. Maybe they kept it cut. Or maybe they were expecting company. The big, black Nazi helicopter, for instance.

The first floor was white stucco with big red-shuttered windows. The top three floors were dark and wood-sided with balconies railed with white flower boxes on all four sides. Red geraniums filled the boxes on every floor. Stones had been laid on the wide overhanging roof. Hold the wooden shingles down in the high winds, Stoke guessed.

“Is that it?” he asked Jet.

“That’s it,” she said, holding on to his forearm while she bent and massaged her sore ankle.

It certainly didn’t look like a billionaire’s mountain getaway to him. Looked like something Snow White might have lived in after she got married and had a bunch of rugrats. It looked like a fairy-tale house. But maybe that was the whole idea.

“I thought you said he had a big schloss,” Stoke said, trying not to laugh.

“I’ve tried to explain this. The castle is hidden inside the mountain behind the house,” Jet said. “This charming little guesthouse is just there for appearances. It’s a false front hiding the secret entrance.”

“Pretty damn realistic, though,” Stoke said. “Now, I get it. Zum Wilden Hund. Did I say that right?”

“No.”

She pronounced it correctly but Stoke was damned if he could tell much difference from the way he said it and the way she said it. German was such a weird-ass language anyway. No matter what you said in German it sounded like you were going to rip someone’s throat out. Ich liebe dich. Translation: I love you. Sounds like: I’d like to eat your nuts for supper.

“Let’s go say hello to Frau Wienerwald,” Stoke said. This was the woman who ran the baron’s phony gasthaus and from what he could gather from Jet, she was the kind of innkeeper who ate any small children who got lost in the woods.

“Winterwald,” Jet said. “Trust me, she won’t think it’s funny if you get it wrong. She’s the official gatekeeper to Schatzi-World.”

“This whole damn country feels like Disneyland,” Stoke said.

“It isn’t,” Jet said.