Heroes, David Hagberg [me reader .txt] 📗

only in her nightgown, was seated at the kitchen table. She looked up, her eyes going wide, her mouth open. He shook his head urgently and hurried across to her.

“What do they want?” he whispered.

He was bent over her, and she was looking up into his eyes.

Her lips were working; she was trying to form words, but she could not.

They were moving around upstairs. It sounded as if they were in the front bedroom. Probably going through his things. But there was nothing up there. Or elsewhere in the house.

If they were merely Oak Ridge security people, it would be one thing; if they were FBI, it would be totally different.

He turned back to his wife. “Listen, Katy, did they have a warrant? Did they show you a piece of paper?”

Catherine was frightened. “What … what’s happening, Bob?”

she stammered. “Why are they here?” She was too loud.

There was a silence upstairs. “Mrs. Mordley?” one of the men called.

The color left Catherine’s face.

Schey straightened up and hurried into the living room as one of the men started down the stairs. He flattened himself against the wall next to the opening to the stair hall.

“Mrs. Mordley?” the man called again, just around the corner.

Then he stepped into view.

Schey reached out, grabbed a handful of the man’s coat, and pulled him the rest of the way around, his arm encircling the agent’s head, his hand clamped powerfully over the man’s mouth and nose.

The agent grunted, his eyes bulging nearly out of their sockets as he tried to reach inside his coat for his gun. But Schey was much stronger, and he had had the advantage of surprise.

“Jerry?” his partner called from the head of the stairs.

The agent’s efforts to free himself increased when he heard his partner’s voice, but then subsided, and slowly the man’s eyes rolled back up into his head, and his body went slack.

“Jesus H. Christ, what the hell is going on down there,” the agent upstairs shouted, and he started noisily down the stairs.

Catherine had come to the kitchen door and saw her husband as he pulled the agent’s body aside.

The baby cried out and Catherine screamed, her tension and fear bubbling suddenly to the surface.

She leaped forward, and before Schey could do a thing to stop her, she was across the living room when the second agent came around the corner, his pistol drawn.

She charged him, and reflexively he fired, the single shot catching her just to the left of her breastbone, shoving her backwards over the coffee table.

“No!” Schey screamed in rage, and he was on the agent before the man understood what was happening. He batted the pistol away with one hand, chopped at the bridge of the man’s nose with the other, then rounded the heel of his left hand to the tip of the agent’s nose, driving the broken bone and cartilage directly into his brain, killing him instantly.

The baby was screaming as Schey threw himself down beside Catherine’s body. Her eyes were open. There wasn’t much blood.

The bullet had evidently pierced her heart, killing her at once.

She was dead! There’d be no bringing her back. There’d be no explaining to her about the Thousand Year Reich. The Americans had killed her.

Still the baby cried and coughed as Schey knelt beside his wife’s lifeless body and rocked back and forth. He was a professional. Time now was of the essence if he was going to have any chance at escape. He would have to go now. He couldn’t help Catherine. Dear God, she was beyond his help. But he still had a job to do.

Slowly he got to his feet and went through the pockets of the two dead men, shuddering when he touched the body of the man who had killed Catherine. They were both FBI agents: Jerry Pole and Thomas Chastigin.

He was not surprised. Not really. They had evidently been on to him for some time now. But why had they picked this morning to come after him?

He looked again at Catherine’s body lying on the floor, and slowly the baby’s crying entered his consciousness, and he turned and went up the stairs to the back bedroom.

The baby’s diaper was soaking wet, and he was warm with fever. He had lost his bottle.

Quickly but gently Schey changed the baby’s diaper, speaking to the boy all the while in soothing tones. Then he covered him up again and propped his bottle up for him.

At the door he looked back, his eyes filling with tears. It could have been so different. It should have been so different. After the war they were supposed to have taken up their lives again.

He turned away and went into his room where he packed a single bag. Then he went downstairs as Robert, Junior, began to cry again. He picked up the phone and dialed the operator, asking to be connected with the hospital at Knoxville. When he had them on the line, he left a message for their doctor to come out this morning as soon as possible.

“It’s my son,” he said. “I think he has pneumonia.”

The baby was still crying when Schey got his coat. He let himself out of the house, climbed into the gray government sedan and drove off without looking back.

Deland crouched just within the protection of the thick forest at the crest of a hill several miles to the northwest of Wolgast and watched the army truck rumble past on the highway in the valley.

The wind was raw and blew snow in long plumes across the open field below.

When he was certain the truck was not coming back, he ducked back into the woods and glanced up at his wire antenna tossed up into the tree branches, then sat in the snow in front of his radio set.

The cold air was very hard on the warm tubes, but just lately Wolgast had become far too dangerous a place for him to transmit his weekly messages to Alien Dulles in Switzerland. Radio detection