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.
Chapter Thirty-two
The Indian Ocean
HAWKE HAD HAD HIS FIGHTER PILOT’S BREAKFAST—TWO ASPIRIN, a cup of coffee, and a puke—and headed for his airplane. Engines spooling up. Green jackets, purple jackets, yellow jackets, the color-coded crewmen ranging over the broad flight deck. The swarm of F/A18 Super Hornets, just arrived from the Nimitz, loaded and lethal, still, looking prematurely antiquated by the presence of the sleek, sculpted, single-seat F-35 in their hive.
And, too, there were the young aviators gawking lovingly at his plane. Kids who never ever wanted to do a damn thing in this world but fly airplanes. See if they had the stuff, ace.
Turn inside the other guy, turn your damn plane inside out if you had to, pulling nine or ten g’s and close as billy-be-damned to a suicidal red-out, all the blood rushing from your brain to your extremities. Get on some faceless boy’s six, unleash a Sidewinder and blow his punk ass out of the sky.
Yeah. Rain death and destruction down on invisible strangers and then fly home to a warm bunk on a big boat with a few thousand other guys. Get drunk and fight with your fists and sleep it off in the brig. Shed friends, shed wives, shed family. Even shed a few tears maybe when it was all over, when even the great shooting match in the sky was finally over.
All for what, hotshot? Hawke thought.
Honor? Danger? Death? Glory?
Who the hell knew?
It was a stupid question, anyway, Hawke told himself as he reached forward to adjust his suddenly squawking radio. Because the only pilots who would ever really know the one, true answer were dead.
“That really you down there, Hawkeye?” Alex heard a familiar voice say in his headset.
“Roger, sir, it’s me all right,” Hawke replied, tightening his harness. Girding my loins, he thought, and smiled.
“Well, I’ll be damned, it shore as hell is him! Look at this, boys, Captain Hawke’s flying himself a real bona-fide airplane this time!”
It was the Lincoln’s new air boss. A crusty old bird named Joe Daly. Lately arrived from the Kennedy, where the American jocks called him the Iron Duke. Hawke recognized Daly’s droll twang from his own brief sojourn aboard the American carrier Big John. Alex had caused a bit of consternation on board when he’d landed his little seaplane on the carrier three years ago. This was at a critical moment during what he’d come to call his personal Cuban crisis. Irritation was more like it. For some reason, he and the Iron Duke just hadn’t clicked. Checking his fuel, he heard a crackle in his phones and the Duke was back.
“Last time I saw you, Hawkeye, you were flying that little toy airplane of yours. Built it yourself out of tinfoil and rubber bands. Took you four or five passes to get that dang Tinkertoy down on my deck. What’d you call that thing?”
“Kittyhawke, sir. Finest airplane in the sky.”
“You’re bleeping nuts, boy. Get your ass off my deck.”
Hawke laughed. He followed the taxi director’s hand signals and moved the plane the last few feet into the catapult shuttle of cat number 1. Flaps and slats to takeoff, he merely sat and watched. A green-jacketed crewman instantly knelt on the deck and attached the towbar connecting his nose gear to the shuttle in the slot. Get ready for the cat-shot.
“It was actually only two passes, as I recall, sir,” Hawke said, craning his head around for one last look at the Lincoln. “Third time’s the charm. I see you got yourself a new boat.”
“Yeah, well, the cream rises to the top in this man’s navy, Hawkeye. You sure you know how to fly that damn thing?”
“We’ll find out soon enough, I guess.” Hawke noticed that the hand on the control stick was shaking a bit. Adrenaline. Had to be. C’mon, boys, hook me up. He wasn’t scared of the monster, he told himself. He was just excited about what a carrier launch would be like in this thing. Right. He was just shaking a little because he was ready to light the candle.
C’mon, Momma, now light the candle ’cause you know your poppa is too hot to handle…
“Okay, Hawkeye, you are number two for launch,” the Iron Duke said in his phones. “You, uh, you might want to let that Super Hornet there in front of you get airborne before you push any unfamiliar buttons. Sound good to you?”