Knights of the Blood by Katherine Kurtz & Scott MacMillan

Author:Katherine Kurtz & Scott MacMillan [Kurtz, Katherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Event Horizon EBooks
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

MUNICH

THE TRAPP Family Singers, fresh from their triumph at the Salzburg Festival, had just eluded their Nazi pursuers and were busily hiking over the Alps as the captain of the Lufthansa jetliner turned on the “Fasten Seat Belt” signs and began his descent to Munich’s Riem Airport. The fat woman next to Drummond was still humming, “The Hills Are Alive,” as the wheels screeched into contact with the runway and the pilot threw the jets into reverse—thrust to slow the big Boeing 747, preparatory to taxiing up to the terminal building.

Once the plane had come to a complete stop, Drummond unhooked his seat belt and tried stretching his legs in the confines of his mini—seat. The flight–all eleven hours of it–would have tried the patience of even Maria Von Trapp. Wedged into a seat designed to accommodate a bicouperal amputee, Drummond had been unable to escape the babbling of the woman next to him.

Across two continents and an ocean, he had been subjected to an oral biography of Julie Andrews that would have embarrassed even the most puerile fan magazine. Between snippets about Julie’s pets and her dietary foibles, the immense Mrs. MacDowell had regaled him with a scene—by—scene retelling of the film, commenting along the way that it was far better than the real life adventures of the Trapp Family Singers.

About the time that Drummond was seriously beginning to think about applying his thumb to her carotid artery, the cabin lights dimmed and the inflight movie flickered into life on a wavy screen pulled down six feet in front of him, and Julie sprang into view larger and more distorted than life. Far from quieting down Mrs. MacDowell, the flickering image of her celluloid goddess at once gave her the gift of second sight, enabling her to accurately predict what would happen next in each and every scene.

Drummond decided that he was somehow fundamentally flawed–the result, no doubt, of being that rarest of all earthlings, a native Californian. That same laid—back temperament that allowed him, and hundreds of thousands like him, to live perched on the edge of potentially the most cataclysmic seismic disturbance in the history of the planet, without the least concern that at any moment their entire glittering civilization could be dashed into the sea, also made him constitutionally unable to be rude to the fat lady in the seat next to him.

Perhaps, he thought, if I’d been born in New York, I could lean over and tell her to take it outside, or I’d serve her up a knuckle sandwich.

But even the thought of behaving like some misfit from the Big Apple drove Drummond deeper into a cocoon of courtesy. Instead of shoving his thumb against her neck and putting her to sleep for a couple of hours, he found himself making polite noises.

Finally, Julie warbled her last song, the plane landed, and 357 people all leaped to their feet, anxious to crowd the narrow aisles of the aircraft as they pushed and shoved their

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.