Destroyer - The Empire Dreams Part 3

His wife continued to snore softly from beneath the ma.s.sive pile of bedcovers. He watched her sleep as he drew on his gray three- piece suit.

How many mornings have I left her like this? Smith wondered.

He knew how many years it had been. Fifty. Fifty years of marriage. Quite an accomplishment in this day and age.

They had married young. After Smith had returned from the war.

Maude Smith had stuck by him during those early days when the war's Of?ce of Strategic Services was being transformed into the peacetime CIA. She had been a dutiful wife up to and beyond the time of Smith's "retirement." When he had settled in as director of Folcroft Sanitarium, a private health facility here in Rye, New York, Maude Smith had gone with him. Just as any good wife would.

What Maude never knew-could never know-was that Harold Smith hadn't retired from the intelligence service.

His appointment as head of Folcroft had been a cover. The sleepy sanitarium on the sh.o.r.es of Long Island Sound was in reality the headquarters of the supersecret government organization CURE. Smith had been its one and only director for more than thirty-four years.

As the incorruptible head of CURE, Smith directed vast amounts of information to covertly aid law-enforcement agencies in their ?ght against crime. Set up as an organization whose mandate was to rescue a country so endangered that the Const.i.tution had become an impediment, CURE used extralegal means to achieve its ends.

If his quietly sleeping wife only knew the power wielded by the nondescript gray man who had shared her bed for the past ?ve decades, she would have been shocked. And Maude Smith would have been even more stunned to learn that her seemingly una.s.suming Harold would have liked nothing more than to level the most fearsome power at his disposal directly at the woman whom Mrs. Smith had considered to be her best friend for the past ?fteen years.

The lump beneath the mound of blankets stirred. The snoring grunted to a stop.

"Are you going to work, Harold?" Her voice was hoa.r.s.e in the early-morning hours.

"Yes, dear."

"Don't forget our ?ight,"

"I won't, Maude."

Maude Smith was already rolling over. Already going back to sleep. The snoring resumed.

Smith left her in the predawn darkness. Let her enjoy the rest he couldn't. He made his quiet way downstairs.

Two minutes later, Smith was backing his rusting station wagon out of his driveway.

Four houses down he pa.s.sed the sleeping home of Gertrude Higgins, a matronly widow who had made it her business to regularly poke her nose into the affairs of everyone else in the neighborhood.

Gert Higgins was the person against whom Smith had-however ?eetingly-contemplated employing the most lethal power in CURE's a.r.s.enal.

Of course, it had only been a ?ight of fancy. Brought on by...what?

Not anger. There was little that could get Smith truly angry these days. He had seen so much that inspired anger in his long life that he had become desensitized to much of it.What Smith felt was just a hair over the other side of perturbed. This peevishness had surfaced the day Maude Smith had presented him with the plane tickets.

It was for their ?ftieth wedding anniversary, she had said. He worked so hard. Other people had vacations. They had never gone anywhere together.

The list was well-rehea.r.s.ed. It was unlike Maude Smith to do anything as spontaneous as purchasing airline tickets to Europe.

Even to celebrate ?fty years of marriage.

It hadn't taken Smith long to learn that it was Gert Higgins who had pushed Maude along. She was the one who had encouraged Maude to buy the tickets without "bothering poor, overworked Harold."

Of course, his ?rst impulse was to return the tickets.

Maude had prepaid for them.

He was going to cash them in just the same. He had even gone so far as to contact the airline from his computer at Folcroft. But at the last minute he hesitated.

Fifty years.

There was a small part of Smith that felt a pang of guilt for the many years of deceit. For the years of placing his own life in danger without concern for his family. For years of being a bad husband.

In the end Smith had kept the tickets.

His wife had been overjoyed. Her reaction had produced even more guilt. The feeling had lasted several weeks.

Later that afternoon Harold and Maude Smith were scheduled to leave for Europe together. A couple in the twilight of their years enjoying a second honeymoon together. And Harold W. Smith had every intention of hating every minute of his time away.

For now, Smith had work to do. As the earliest streaks of dawn painted the sky, Harold Smith crawled through the silent streets of Rye to Folcroft.

Chapter 5.

When Claude Civray had ?rst come to work at the old deminage depot in the town of Guise one hundred miles northeast of Paris, he was more than just a little ill at ease. After all, he knew the history of the depository for old mines.

The depot had originally been constructed on the banks of the Oise River. A foolish decision, it was later learned, as no one had taken into account the fact that water had a messy tendency to rust metal. If such a consideration had been entertained, the location would certainly have been changed because no one at the Guise facility wanted the metal casings of the old mines to deteriorate.

It had.

The French government only discovered the shoddiness of its planning when the original facility had blown itself to kingdom come after a particularly soggy spring.

Afterward the Guise depot had been moved far away from the river. It was an easy move. After the explosion, what was left of the base ?t into the back of an old dairy farmer's truck.

The accident had occurred back in 1951. The French government was never certain what had caused the base to go up the way it had. It could have been a sudden jostling of stored materials. A guard might have tripped and fell.

Eventually the blame was placed on a single chain-smoking watchman and a carelessly discarded cigarette. However, this was mere speculation. The real truth of what had happened would never be learned. Fiery death had erased all traces.

Claude wasn't sure what had caused the accident, either. But one thing was certain. Given the possibility of even a kernel of truth to the rumor, Claude Civray never, ever smoked at work.

He toured the facility now, cigarettes tucked away inside his pocket, careful of where he stepped. Though it was night, there were small spotlights positioned at strategic points around the various yards and buildings.

Claude found that the lights helped very little. Several had been angled, it seemed, to blind a casual stroller. One misstep and it could be 1951 all over again.

Worse than 1951. There were many more bombs now.

They were everywhere. Even in the shadows cast by the uncertain spotlights, Claude could make out the rusted casings piled high in the open yards. It wouldn't take much to set them off.

France had had the unlucky fate of being a focal point of the two major global con?icts of the modern era. For the French people, even after the armies had left, the wars were not over. By some estimates more than twelve million unexploded sh.e.l.ls from World War I alone lay hidden in the ?elds and forests of Verdun.

The closer an area was to con?ict, the more densely packed were the bombs that were left behind. And while Guise was certainly not Verdun, it had still seen its share of military action.

More than its share, if anyone had bothered to ask Claude Civray.

Claude was acutely aware that there were dozens of deaths or injuries every year directly attributed to sh.e.l.ls that turned up in unexpected places. French farmers tilling their ?elds seemed to suffer casualties most frequently.

What was unearthed intact was brought here, to the depot at Guise and others like it. All around the acres of grounds that comprised the storage facility were piles upon piles of unexploded military ordnance.

The French government did try to safely detonate as many of the explosives as they could, but there were simply too many. All would be gotten to someday. In the meantime, they were stored away for that eventuality.

It was Claude's job to watch the bombs rust. And to hope that they didn't blow up in his face. Claude made his way around the far end of the depot. Back here were huge aerial bombs-?ve feet tall and so thick a man's arms could stretch around the corroded casing and still not meet on the other side. They sat upright on their ?ns-stranded birds with clipped wings.

Some of the ordnance had been at the depot so long that the earth was beginning to reclaim them. Mud had collected up around the bottommost sh.e.l.ls. High weeds grew up around the stacks, partially obscuring them.

Civray rounded a cl.u.s.ter of rotting pallets laden with tons of unexploded 170 mm sh.e.l.ls. This spot always made his stomach tingle. It was here that he was at the farthest point of his nightly circuit. He always imagined that this would be the place he would be when the depot went up in ?ames.

Holding his breath as he did every night, Civray quickened his pace. He stepped around the many stacks of huge sh.e.l.ls and back out onto the road used by the demineurs' trucks. He moved swiftly away from the long 170 mm casings.

Only after he was a few yards distant did he release his breath. He had made it.

Claude wouldn't have to tour the yard for another two hours. Moving more briskly now, he made his way back to the main clapboard building near the barbed-wire-festooned gate of the large facility.

When Claude had hiked the quarter mile back to the front of the yard he was surprised to ?nd the main gates open.

There were two large halogen lamps positioned on curving poles on either side of the gate. Insects ?uttered crazily in the light.

Claude could make out a line of trucks sitting idle along the desolate dirt road leading into the depot. This was more than just a little unusual. The demineurs never worked at night. It was dangerous enough to stumble around ?elds in broad daylight looking for eighty-year-old sh.e.l.ls. To do so at night would be suicide.

It couldn't be a delivery.So what was going on, then?

Maurice St. Jean, the second man on duty that night, had been working alone in the main of?ce when Claude left on his rounds.

Now there seemed to be several ?gures moving in the windows of the wooden building. Something was wrong.

Thoughts of 1951 immediately sprang up in Claude's mind.

Heart ?uttering, he hurried over to the of?ce.

CLAUDE FOUND several men inside. None was a demineur. St. Jean was nowhere to be seen. As one, the men inside turned to the door when Claude entered.

"What is wrong?" he demanded anxiously. "You are Claude Civray?" one of the men asked. The speaker was old. Perhaps seventy, perhaps older. Though his words were French, they were spoken clumsily. He was clearly a foreigner.

Claude became immediately suspicious. And haughty.

"This is a restricted facility," he said, pulling himself up proudly. "What is the meaning of this invasion?"

The foreigner carried a walking stick. He tapped it on the wooden ?oor.

"Curious choice of words," he said, casting a glance at the others in his party.

Some of the men laughed. The younger ones in particular. They guffawed loudly, slapping one another on their backs at the wit of the old man.

One man pulled off his winter hat. His head was shaved bald. Tattoos covered his bare scalp. Though the others didn't remove their hats, it was apparent from what could be glimpsed of their scalps that they were adorned like the ?rst.

Civray had seen their kind before. Skinheads. Neon.a.z.is. Though the young men laughed loudly and nervously, the leader of the group didn't even crack a smile.

The old man used his cane to point at Civray. "Put him with the other one."

The skinheads pounced. Claude found himself being grabbed by the arms, by the legs. He was half dragged, half carried out the door and into the yard.

"Unhand me!" Civray cried, twisting in their hard grips. His pleas fell on deaf ears.

They carried the struggling guard back several yards to an isolated spot off to the right near the side hurricane fencing.

Claude saw Maurice immediately. When he did, he stopped ?ghting. The other guard had been beaten to insensibility and tied to a wooden pallet beside a pyramid stack of 75 mm sh.e.l.ls. For whatever reason Maurice must have foolishly opened the gate for these men. Civray would never ?nd out why.

The skinheads didn't pause to give Claude the same treatment they had given his compatriot. They forced him down atop a neighboring pallet. They lashed him quickly and ef?ciently to the wood.

Even before he was tied down, the trucks began rolling through the gates.

There had been only the two of them a.s.signed to guard the facility. Maurice must have told them that. With Claude out of the way, the intruders would meet no opposition.

An army of men swarmed from the backs of the trucks. They went to work immediately, gingerly collecting rusted sh.e.l.l casings and hauling them off as speedily as possible into the rear of the awaiting vehicles.

They worked for hours, carrying and loading. At one point one of the men working the truck nearest Claude dropped a case of "racket" German grenades. Claude was certain that it would go off.It was a miracle that it didn't. "Dummkopf!"

The skinhead was berated for his carelessness by one of the supervisors of the operation. The grenades were carefully collected and the box was placed in the rear of the truck.

Eventually the trucks were packed to the point where they could hold no more. Only then did they begin turning slowly around.

They headed in a long, careful convoy back out the gates of the Guise facility.

Claude couldn't see his watch, but he felt that it had to be somewhere near 3:00 a.m. The intruders had toiled for nearly four hours.

The last truck stopped in the inverted-V-shaped clearing made by the stacks of bombs that had been left near Claude and the still- unconscious Maurice.

The elderly man who had spoken to him in the main guard house stepped down from the pa.s.senger's side of the truck.

Several of the skinheads came running in from a point somewhere farther up the convoy. They each carried a large red metal can.

The men shouted encouragement to one another in a language Claude was now certain was German.

Claude could hear liquid sloshing within the cans. The young men began dumping the contents of the containers in a trail from the gate up to the bombs nearest Claude.

While the young ones worked, the old man strolled over to view Civray, trussed up like a lamb for slaughter. He tsked when he glanced at the stack of 75 mm sh.e.l.ls.

"Very dangerous," he con?ded to Civray, tapping the column of bombs with his cane. It made a dull rapping noise. The bombs sounded as solid as an anvil.