Tom Kelly 02 - Fortress by Drake David

Author:Drake, David [Drake, David]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 9780312930011
Google: H-J3GwAACAAJ
Amazon: 0312930011
Goodreads: 3542759
Publisher: Tor Books
Published: 1987-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Some of the spacecraft were in the hands of Nazis whose motives were not doubtful in the slightest.

Kelly started back to Diyarbakir with Gisela slumped as his passenger against the other door. He drove with the caution demanded by the loose steering and his own unfamiliarity with the roads.

Besides, there was no longer any reason for haste.

"I didn't think they'd leave before dark," Gisela said.

A front wheel bucked in a rut, jolting her hard against the doorframe and recalling her to her dignity. She straightened in the seat and gave a body-length quiver like the motion of a snake casting its skin. "But of course, now it doesn't matter - secrecy. No need for it, no chance for it either. And they left me behind."

The sky had darkened abruptly, as if the flying saucer had punched a hole in the stratosphere and let the storm rush in. That was what had happened, near enough in the larger sense, Kelly supposed. Not asking the question wouldn't make the situation go away, though.

"Exactly what is the Plan?" the veteran asked, while his hands and eyes drove the truck and left his intellect free for things he would have preferred not to think about.

"To control the world by using your Fortress," the dancer said, destroying with her flat voice any possibility that Kelly's imagination might have run away with him.

"At first we had the base in Antarctica," Gisela continued. "My father was commander of the detachment guarding the salt mines at Kertl, in Bavaria. When British troops were within five kilometers and they could hear Russian guns in the east, so near were they, a motorcycle arrived with orders that they should leave at once for Thule Base in the Antarctic, taking all flyable Special Applications craft."

The woman was speaking in German, and her voice had the sing-song texture of a tale which had been repeated so many times.

"Only Dora, the fourth prototype, could be flown," said Gisela. "Some of those at Kertl wished to wait still further for the aircraft from Berlin Tempelhof they had been hoping would arrive. Others would have fled to the British in order to escape the Bolsheviks, but they feared to entrust themselves to a journey of twenty thousand kilometers in a craft which had thus far been the subject only of static testing.

"But my father understood that orders must be obeyed, not questioned; and he understood that there was sometimes no path but that of ruthlessness to the accomplishment of a soldier's duty."

Kelly's hands gripped the steering wheel more fiercely than the road itself - the highway to Diyarbakir, now - demanded. The American agent had seen enough things in his own lifetime to be able to imagine that scene in the foothills of the Alps close to the time he was being born. Electrostatic charges from Dora, the prototype built so solidly that she still flew like nothing else on Earth, must have lighted up the salt mine in which the laboratory hid from Allied bombers.

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