Drakas! Read online

Norway refused to answer, but his face softened somewhat.

  Soon the airship was emptied of all cargo. Her crew marched back inside.

  "Will you require a Draka fighter escort until you reach British airspace?" Verwoerd asked.

  Norway frostily declined.

  "Very well, Captain. A safe journey home."

  Norway saluted and turned about on his heel.

  "Oh, and Captain?" Verwoerd called after him.

  Norway looked over his shoulder.

  "You may not want it," Verwoerd said, "you may not believe, but you still have my word."

  * * *

  "I apologize for the delay," Verwoerd told the British woman as he climbed into the staff car.

  "Hardly a way to start out as an observer," Sally Perkins said, her voice ice. "Being shoved aside—"

  "Being shoved aside where you can't overhear one old man be forced to humiliate a proud younger man?"

  The woman stared ahead stonily.

  "Flight Lieutenant Perkins. You and I are going to have to learn to work together. Our good relationship, our trust in each other, are about all that stands between the Channel Islanders and the auction block."

  "Is that a threat?"

  "It's a plea. I'm begging you: help me save these people."

  She stared at him closely, thoughts flickering across her eyes.

  Slowly, she nodded.

  * * *

  A small crowd gathered behind Verwoerd as he set up his easel on a bluff overlooking Moulin Heut Bay.

  The first weeks of Draka occupation had gone exceedingly well. Verwoerd's hand-picked naval gendarmes had been nothing but unfailingly kind. After the second day they even went about unarmed save for the same nightsticks carried by British bobbies.

  The Draka had distributed great quantities of food, new clothing, shoes, medicine, and little essentials the islanders hadn't seen since before the German occupation. Things like sewing needles and toilet paper.

  The Draka had initiated a spate of sporting events, musical concerts, and theatrical shows. What proved most popular was their bringing to the islands several new Hollywood motion picture films. For the last four years the only motion pictures to be seen were those that had been playing at the Gaumont Palace the day the Nazis had landed—Top Hat and The Barretts of Wimpole Street—of which the islanders were thoroughly sick. The Dancing Cavalier, with Errol Flynn and Carole Lombard, had been a big hit, even if it was two years old.

  But the biggest local attraction soon proved to be Verwoerd himself.

  He'd put away his military uniforms and had taken to wearing smartly-cut Savile Row civilian suits, with his Victoria Cross pinned to his jacket lapel. He seemed to be everywhere on the island at once, to know all of the local children by name, and to be more British than the Islanders themselves.

  He'd taken up headquarters in the old Castle Cornet and had immediately set out to repair the minor damage the old historic landmark had suffered during the brief German invasion. The regular Draka Navy forces on the island were barracked there or in other closed compounds, out of the eye of the local islanders.

  Where Verwoerd went, Flight Lieutenant Perkins went with him: concerts, the cinema, and Verwoerd's strolls around St. Peter Port's Candie Park. Local wags began wondering just what the young RAF officer was supposed to be observing. But most of the islanders warmed to her; one of their own was a genuine war hero, and after four years of Nazi occupation, the islanders sensed that Draka good will depended in part on Sally's daily Draka-monitored reports to London.

  Today Verwoerd had decided to watercolor and had imposed upon Sally as his model. He posed her so she was seated on a large rock, then returned to his easel.

  Verwoerd painted for a while.

  "You've lost your audience," Sally said.

  "Hmmm?" The audience had been behind him. He looked over his shoulder. They were alone on the bluff.

  "I rather suspect the novelty wore off," he said. "The first few washes of a water color do look somewhat random." He swirled a brush in a jar of water and dabbed it in an awful earth tone color.

  "Renoir painted this bay, you know," he said. "If I had any talent, I'd try to capture some of what he saw here." He shrugged. "Oh, well. I have a much better model than he did."

  Sally ignored that last comment. "Lots of famous people have lived here: Victor Hugo . . ."

  " . . . Victor Hugo. Oh, and Victor Hugo." Verwoerd smiled. "Yes, I know. `The Channel Islands are little pieces of France dropped in the sea and scooped up by England.' " He took a step back to stare at his progress, then started painting again. "There's a statue of him in the park, and little plaques all over St. Peter Port, I imagine: `Victor Hugo Slept Here.' "

  Sally looked at him. "You're an odd one. Out and about the city you act like a kindly old grandfather. Yet back at the castle you hang those dreadful banners all over the courtyard."

  " `What is the best remedy? Victory!' Or `I want gremlins around me, for I am courageous'?"

  "Yes. What ever does that one mean?"

  "What do Nietzsche's syphilitic ramblings ever mean? `Courage creates gremlins for itself' is the rest of that particular quotation." He washed out his brush and dabbed a new color. "Just be glad I'm not hanging those banners all over town the way Security wants me to. They're supposed to remind my troops they're Draka supermen." He made a face.

  "Are they? They don't act like it."

  He set down his brush. "It may surprise you that there are actually a number of Draka like them. Not all of us are your Hollywood stereotype villains."

  "Your men all seem to have Dutch names."

  "Very observant." He selected another brush. He sucked on the bristles to form a hard tip. "When the British first started arriving in droves in the then Crown Colony of Drakia, they pushed the original Dutch Boer farmers right out of the way. The British expanded northeastward across the Orange and beyond into the power vacuum left by the difaqane."

  He dipped his brush in a bright vermilion. "Millions slaughtering each other with stone age weapons, if you can imagine. Three million dead, thirty million dead—nobody knows for sure." He swept the brush over the canvas. "Maybe if the difaqane had never happened . . ." He selected another brush.

  "A Draka would say they brought their fate on them themselves."

  "Some Draka would," he said quietly. "As I'm trying to point out, we're not all alike."

  "No. Some are faster painters. I think my leg's asleep."

  "Oh. Sorry." He got back to painting. "The Dutch, those few left who refused to be swallowed up by the British at any rate, struck out northwest into the Kalahari. Our Voortrek. Windhoek. Walvis Bay. A rough life, and one with few natives to lord it over." He shrugged. "We developed a bit differently. Rationalists and Navy men now, mostly."

  Sally almost smiled. "Is that why you don't like Nietzsche banners like all good little Draka are supposed to?"

  He daubed his brush in a mixture of colors. "There was a time in my life when I thought of little else but Nietzsche. I was a young man at the time; I'd spent my life in British boarding schools, thought of myself as British, but I was still Draka. I guess I was trying to discover who I was."

  Sally rolled her head around, stretching her neck muscles. She resumed her pose. "He's almost your state religion, isn't he?"

  Verwoerd snorted. "The Draka worship nothing but themselves. `Serfs look up because they wish to be exalted; the superman looks down because he already is exalted.' When you're the oppermans, it's rather hard to admit some entity might be superior to yourself. That's why the attempt to revive the Norse mythology, Naldorssen and all that, failed so miserably. Probably also why religion has always fascinated me so."

  "I'm having a rather difficult time picturing you as a priest."

  Verwoerd laughed. "Actually, before the war—the Kaiser's war—well, I intended to become a theologian."

  "Then the war changed all that?"

  He poured the dirty rinse water out of the jar an
d filled it with fresh, clear water. "Not in the way you imagine. Living, if you can call it that, in the trenches in the Dardanelles changed my intentions, true: it intensified them. Somehow the idea of somebody somewhere having the answers seemed more precious to me than any pearl of great price."

  Sally nodded. She had seen combat, too. " `Thou pure, thou luminous heaven! Thou abyss of light!—because they rob thee of my Yea and Amen,' " she said. "Only in your case, you were looking for your Yea and Amen."

  Verwoerd smiled weakly. "Since when did you start reading Nietzsche?" he asked.

  "Since you started hanging it up in courtyards."

  He gave a truer smile. "After the war, I spent a year studying in the Vatican. Another year in Canterbury. Six months touring the American Bible Belt. Finally three days in Salt Lake City."

  "Only three days? You seemed to have given the Mormons pretty short shrift in your studies."

  "Sometimes three days are enough." He jabbed his brush once or twice, then set it aside. "There. Done."

  Before he could stop her, Sally raced over to the easel. "Let me see."

  Verwoerd's painting was a beautiful, intricate seascape of the bay below. Every detail, including the rock Sally had sat on, was in the picture. Sally, however, was not.

  "You had me sit like a human pretzel on that hard cold rock for hours and you didn't even paint me?"

  "My dear," he laughed, "I couldn't paint a portrait to save my life. Let's eat."

  * * *

  They sat down on a nearby grassy knoll. Sally opened the wicker basket. "Ploughman's lunch, I'm afraid. I'm a better fighter pilot than I am a cook."

  Verwoerd sliced off a huge hunk of cheese. "I've spent all morning talking about myself. What's your story?" He broke open his loaf of French bread.

  She shrugged. "Not much to tell. I was sixteen when the war started. Seventeen when they started evacuating women and children off the Channel Islands before the Germans came. Twenty when the RAF was desperate enough to start recruiting women fighter pilots. Twenty-and-a-half when I pranged my plane and banged myself up. Now I'm on the RAF dog-and-pony circuit giving hero speeches."

  "That's all?"

  "That's all." She rooted around in the basket until she found the sour pickled onions. "What made you leave Salt Lake City after three days?" Her eyes narrowed. "You didn't convert, did you?"

  He laughed. "Those Mormons have the craziest ideas. They usually manage to get everything backwards. Take for example: the New Testament has the Pharisees use the excuse `it's better that one man die than a whole nation perish' to kill the Nazarene. The Mormons stick that same excuse in the front of their scripture, only they have one of their prophets use it as an excuse to cut off the head of an evildoer."

  Verwoerd licked his fingers. "That wasn't their craziest saying, though. Try this one: `As man is, God once was; as God is, man may become.' "

  "Crazy is right."

  "All I was struggling with was the concept of setting myself up as one of Nietzsche's supermen. Here were what I was supposed to think of as serfs, dreaming of themselves as Gods in embryo." He shook his head.

  He brushed the crumbs off his clothes. "The belief may be absurd, the belief in it is not. I had the son of a friend tell me that a while ago."

  "But what made you leave?" she asked again.

  He paused before he answered. "In a way, I suppose I found what I was looking for."

  She looked at him sharply. "No you didn't. You found something else. What?"

  A longer pause. He fingered the Victoria Cross on his jacket.

  "Something to be frightened of. Something that scared me so bad I ran away."

  She waited for him to tell her, but he wouldn't.

  "You'll know," was all he said. "One day you'll know."

  * * *

  Late that evening—long past midnight, in fact—Verwoerd sat in his office in Castle Cornet with his intelligence officer. An American Williams-Burroughs tape recorder lay on the table. The aide rotated the chrome dial to Play.

  " . . . your judgement's a bit suspect, dear," an old woman's voice said. "You're sweet on him."

  "Nonsense." That was Sally's voice. "I am not. I—"

  "It's all right, dear. You're young and these things happen. Heaven knows enough of our girls fell for the Germans when they were here."

  "Now wait just a minute—"

  "How long do you think they can keep up this act of theirs?" A man's voice now. Several voices murmured assent.

  The aide switched the tape off for a moment. "We think there were at least a dozen present. Hard to be sure, even with telescopic lens. Too many ways in and out of that old abandoned factory. We have pictures of some of them."

  Verwoerd impatiently waved his hand for the aide to start the tape again.

  Sally's voice: " . . . I keep telling you—I don't think it is an act. I think for the first time in their lives they don't have to be Draka supermen, they can be plain human beings. I think they're enjoying it."

  "Sure, maybe—the ones we see." A younger man's voice. "And what about the ones we can't see? What about the ones on the mainland? What about the ones back in Draka-land? The Intervention Squads, and the Order Police, and the Krypteria?"

  An older man grunted in agreement. "At least the Germans saw us as fellow human beings. These Draka—" he spat out the word like it was deadly poison "—when they look at us they don't see anything but an animal to be tattooed and chained and worked in the fields until we drop in our tracks and die. I say we fight."

  Choruses of agreement.

  "Amateurs!" Sally said in disgust.

  "Maybe so," the old man said, "but we're all you've got."

  The aide clicked off the tape. "I also have a further report from the Uitdager."

  Verwoerd snorted. The Uitdager lived up to her name, although she challenged her creators more than her opponents. The Domination was woefully behind in submarine and torpedo technology. Lurking and spying were about all Draka submarines could hope to do and survive.

  "The Uitdager took up station in Rocquaine Bay as you suggested. Shortly after this meeting, they spotted a flashlight on shore blinking what could only be a coded message. Presumably to another submarine in the vicinity. Allied, undoubtedly. British, presumably."

  "Presumably." Rocquaine Bay lay on the west tip of the island. A light flashed from there wouldn't be seen from the French coastline, or by the Draka Security troops on Alderney to the north. Verwoerd half-dreaded the next item of information.

  "My men followed Flight Lieutenant Perkins out of the recorded meeting. They place her on the shore of Rocquaine Bay at the approximate time the coded message was sent."

  Verwoerd nodded. None of the night's events were much of a surprise. Still, it was unpleasant to confirm as fact what could pleasantly be considered only a possibility.

  "Initiate phase two," he said.

  The intelligence officer picked up his own flashlight laying on the floor beside his chair.

  He set out for Rocquaine Bay.

  * * *

  Four bodies were laid in a line side-by-side on a table inside the airport's hangar. A wool blanket had been draped over each of them to cover their faces.

  Verwoerd looked down on them and sighed. "A British Catalina float plane was mistakenly shot down over the island early this morning. The bodies were recovered in the wreckage," he told Sally.

  " `Mistakenly!' " Sally spat.

  Verwoerd looked at her. "Do you want me to say I'm sorry? We're at war, still. Mistakes happen. How many times did you shoot at one of your own planes?"

  Sally turned her face away.

  "I'd like you to arrange a public funeral," he told her. "A very public funeral. Saying I'm sorry won't help matters any; showing I'm sorry, perhaps, just might."

  Red, white, and blue bunting was hung in Candie Park. The white gingerbread-style bandstand where the coffins lay in state was festooned with Union Jacks. Portraits of the British king were hung in all
the shop windows facing the park.

  Nearly the entire island population attended the services. Over two thousand wreaths were laid.

  Verwoerd had insisted every available man in his command attend as well. A few Draka gendarmes stood their post around the park, but the vast majority of Verwoerd's men were lined up beside him in their dress uniforms. Even Verwoerd himself wore his uniform, the first time in weeks.

  The looks the islanders gave them turned from unease, to baleful stares, to bitter resentment. The Draka, too, were uneasy. The holsters hanging from their dress belts were empty on Verwoerd's orders.

  Then, spontaneously, before the services were even finished, someone in the crowd started singing "God Save the King." The audience picked it up. Then, once that anthem was finished, they began singing Rule Britannia. With each verse, their voices grew louder.

  Rule, Britannia! Britannia rules the waves!

  Britons never never never shall be slaves!

  Over and over they repeated it until the very ground shook and the roar became a single voice, a chime, a chant:

  Britons never never never shall be slaves!

  * * *

  Verwoerd's men fingered their empty holsters, helplessly waiting for the tumult and the shouting to die.

  Verwoerd grabbed Sally by the shoulders and shook her until she stopped singing, until she finally stared up at him with tearstained eyes.

  "You wanted to know what I was frightened of?" he shouted above the roar of the crowd. He pointed at the swaying crowd.

  Britons never never never shall be slaves!

  "Run," he told her. "Hide. Because when the Draka are afraid . . ." He shook his head.

  She placed the tips of her fingers to his cheek, and stroked gently, cat-like. The first and last time they would ever touch.

  She vanished into the crowd.

  Rule, Britannia! Britannia rules the waves!

  Britons never never never shall be slaves!

  The chant continued long after Sally had gone. And somewhere, Verwoerd knew—somewhere in the ranks of men next to him—Skull House's spy was afraid. Very, very afraid.

  * * *