The Empire Dreams td-113 Read online

  The sandbags and antiaircraft guns were gone. As he strolled with his wife from Kensington Gardens and across the street into Hyde Park, Smith didn't see a single British soldier or military vehicle.

  On their tour he noted that some of the buildings that had been damaged in the war had been repaired. Others had been torn down to make way for fresh architectural eyesores. It was as if World War II had never so much as brushed the shores of England.

  To Maude Smith's eyes, this was London. She had never seen what Smith had seen, and so to her the images of the war had been restricted to the far-off unreality of newsreels and, in later years, the occasional advertisement for a PBS documentary. She never watched the programs themselves. They were too depressing.

  Happily oblivious to the horrors that had nightly occurred on these very streets, Maude Smith clicked picture after picture on her old Browning camera. Smith thought it likely that she hadn't even loaded the film correctly. She had never been very good at it. Whatever the case, it didn't seem to matter to Mrs. Smith.

  "Isn't it beautiful, Harold?" Maude Smith trilled. As she spoke, she clicked away at the pond in Hyde Park. It could have been any small duck-filled body of water in any city in the world.

  "Yes, dear," Smith agreed.

  "Aren't you having a wonderful time?" she asked. Her face was beaming. Briefly-through the rounder face, the slackness and other marks of age-a hint of the girl he had married peeked through once more.

  "I am, dear," Smith said.

  And the truth was, he meant it. Smith hated to admit it, but he actually was beginning to enjoy himself. He found her good humor to be infectious.

  They crossed the street and were beginning to make their way up Piccadilly to Trafalgar Square when Smith felt an odd electronic hum at his waist. "What was that?" Mrs. Smith asked.

  Smith had already reached beneath his gray suit jacket to shut off the device. It was small and black-half the size of a deck of cards.

  "I took the precaution of renting a pocket pager before we left home," he said, frowning.

  "A pager?" she asked. "I didn't know one would work this far away."

  "It is hooked in to a world satellite service," Smith explained. He glanced around for a phone.

  "Harold," his wife said. It was an admonishing tone, but a mild one. Their day together had been too enjoyable so far to spoil it with nagging.

  "It must be Mrs. Mikulka," Smith said. "I told her to contact me if there was a problem at Folcroft."

  Mrs. Smith tsked. "Can't they run that place for a week without you?"

  Smith spied a red phone box across the street. "It is probably nothing," he said, forcing the tenseness from his tone. "But I should return the call."

  "Oh, very well," Maude said in a mock-impatient tone. "I need some more film anyway. There was a small store near Hyde Park Corner, I think. Yes, there it is. Did you know they call their drugstores 'chemist' shops?" Maude Smith explained, proud of her erudition. Leaving Smith to dwell on this kernel of knowledge, she walked over to the door of the shop. Smith hurried across the street.

  In the phone booth, Smith unclipped the pager from his belt and carefully entered the number on the small display strip. Remo answered immediately. "Sorry to interrupt your vacation, Smitty."

  "What is the problem?"

  "Chiun and I have hit a dead end here. No one's taking credit for the bombing, and the French government hasn't been able to get much of anything from the truck or street, at least according to the DGSE."

  There was a shout of surprised protest from the background. It was a female voice.

  "Hey, it's not my fault you can't keep a secret," Remo called to the voice in the background. To Smith he said, "One thing we have been able to determine is that the bomb that went off outside the embassy probably wasn't really a truck bomb at all."

  "Explain."

  Remo went on to tell him about the metal fragments and his theory that the explosion had been accidental.

  "Does Chiun concur with your hypothesis?"

  "It is true, Emperor Smith," Chiun's squeaky voice called. "The attack on your Gallic outpost does not appear deliberate. And the parts of the boom devices we found were fifty or more years old."

  "Did you get all that?" Remo asked.

  "Yes."

  "There's no doubt about it," Remo said. "The stuff that was stolen from the bases blew up the embassy."

  "Only some of what was stolen," Smith clarified. "From what I learned, there was much, much more than a single truckload of explosives taken from the deminage facilities."

  "That one truckload did a hell of a lot of damage," Remo said somberly.

  "Yes," Smith replied, thinking. He was looking thoughtfully out one of the side glass windows of the phone booth. Across the street, he spotted his wife exiting the chemist's shop. "Remo, I will have to call you back. I do not have access to my laptop at present."

  "You without a computer?" Remo said, surprised. "Isn't that part of your wardrobe? Like that itchy Brooks Brothers suit or that Dartmouth noose you wear around your neck? Better be careful, Smitty. If you keep going out like that in public, you're going to get nabbed for indecent exposure."

  "At what number can I reach you?" Smith pressed wearily.

  "This one'll do fine for now," Remo said. "Very well. When I return to my hotel, I will uplink with the CURE mainframes and see what I can find." Smith hung up the phone before Remo could say anything more.

  On the other side of the street, he found Maude Smith searching the sea of pale faces on the sidewalk. Her eyes lit up when she saw him.

  "I thought you'd left me."

  "I must return to the hotel," Smith said quickly.

  Mrs. Smith seemed crestfallen. "What's wrong?"

  "An emergency has come up concerning one of the sanitarium's patients," he lied.

  She could see from the determined set of his jaw that there would be no arguing with him.

  "I'll go with you," she said, unable to mask the disappointment in her voice.

  "No," Smith said. "It should not take long." He checked his Timex. "I will meet you in front of the National Gallery at five o'clock."

  When he looked back at his wife he could see that she was no longer paying attention to him. She was staring up in the sky. Along the sidewalk many other pedestrians were looking up, as well.

  "What are those, Harold?" Maude aimed a curious finger in the air. Smith followed her line of sight. The day was unusually sunny and mild for England. On a backdrop of thin, virtually transparent white clouds, he spotted several dark shapes flying ominously in from the western sky.

  Smith's heart tripped.

  As the small planes flew toward them, tiny objects began dropping from their bellies. A rumble-like distant thunder-rolled toward them in waves from the approaching aircraft.

  They could feel the sound beneath their feet. Moments after the first rumble began, a different noise filled the air above London. It was a pained electronic screech. The crowd around them became more agitated as the persistent scream continued to assault their eardrums.

  "What is that?" Maude Smith asked, crinkling her nose. She looked around for the source of the ungodly sound.

  Smith was staring up at the sky, his haggard face clouded in disbelief and dread. When he spoke, his words were low.

  "An air-raid siren," Harold Smith breathed.

  And at that the first German bombs began dropping on London's Hyde Park.

  Chapter 9

  Colonel E. C. T. Bexton of Her Majesty's Royal Air Force was single-handedly responsible for permitting the first planes of the modern London blitzkrieg to cross over England and drop their payloads unmolested. He allowed this horror to be perpetrated against one of history's most famous cities because he refused to believe the word of a simple potato farmer.

  His precise words were: "I will not scramble one of Her Majesty's elite RAF squadrons because some obviously pissed-to-the-gills toothless old git sees cabbage crates flying in across
the briny. Tell him to take an aspirin and have a lie down."

  Hanging up the phone, Colonel Bexton attempted to resume his work on next week's flight schedules. He had barely brought pen back to paper before the phone resumed its persistent squawking. Placing the pen on his desk with exaggerated patience, he reached for the receiver.

  "Colonel Bexton's office. Bexton here," he announced to the party on the other end.

  "Listen to me, you fool! There are German bombers flying in an attack formation toward London." Slender fingers tensed on the receiver.

  "Who is this?" the colonel demanded. Though it was the same voice as before, he hadn't bothered to ask the clearly agitated man's name.

  "I am Edmund Carter," the man explained with as much patience as time allowed. "I am a research scientist at the Jodrell Bank Experimental Station in Cheshire-"

  "Jodrell Bank?" Bexton interrupted. "Aren't you supposed to be looking for little green men? I would have thought German warplanes would be a bit too terrestrial for your lot."

  "We were alerted to this by a local farmer," the voice explained.

  "Ah, yes," Bexton sympathized, "the poor old sot who still thinks he's seeing monkeys on the ceiling. You sound like a sensible chap, Carter. Surprised a man of science would be taken in by a boozer with one foot in the past and the other in the Boar's Head Tavern."

  "I saw them!" Carter yelled. "My entire team saw them. We are tracking them as we speak."

  "And what have you been drinking, Carter?" the colonel asked thinly.

  "Let me talk to your superior officer."

  "Oh, no," Bexton said, bristling. "You won't make me a laughingstock. Your old friend is merely reliving the war, Carter. Now I suggest that you and your colleagues over there in Cheshire spend more time in the heavens and less time in the pubs."

  He slapped the phone down in the cradle.

  If this was meant as some sort of prank, that should put a stop to it once and for all.

  When the phone rang a third time several minutes later, Colonel Bexton lost what little reserves of patience he had left.

  "Bexton!" he snapped into the receiver.

  His face grew pale as the nasal voice of his immediate superior outlined the situation. This time the instant he hung up the phone, Colonel E. C. T. Bexton was placing an emergency call down the defense chain of command.

  Per Bexton's order, a squadron of eight British Aerospace Harriers took off from a base in the London suburb of Croydon less than six minutes later. From what he later learned, it was already too late.

  Chapter 10

  The first aerial bombs ripped through the neatly trimmed lawns of Hyde Park Gardens, spraying the cars and people on the streets and roadways with clods of rich black English soil.

  The crowd on the sidewalk around Smith and his wife had panicked the instant they realized the significance of the high-pitched whistling sounds of the falling bombs, which were audible over the blare of the air-raid siren.

  Crowds of people were running in every direction. Smith pulled his wife into the relative safety of a stone overhang in the doorway of an old storefront. "Harold!" Maude Smith shouted in terror.

  He gripped her arm.

  "We have to get to the Underground," Smith stressed, referring to the subway system beneath London.

  It wouldn't be safe for them to try at the moment. The crowd was too unruly, the people too frantic. Smith watched for the initial mob of running men and women to thin.

  As he waited, the bombers grew closer.

  Smith was as surprised by the look of the planes as by the attack itself. They all appeared to be surplus World War I and II aircraft. By the looks of it, they were all in perfect working order. He had counted more than a dozen of the planes as they flew in. The aircraft remained clustered tightly together. Even with so few of them, the sky seemed thick with menacing shapes from his past.

  Screaming down out of the midafternoon sky, one plane-Smith saw now that it was a Messerschmitt-buzzed the building across the street. It opened fire with a set of wing-mounted machine guns.

  The staccato gunfire was deafening. Bullets ripped into the glass and brick of the building's uppermost stories. Shattered glass and chunks of brick and mortar exploded outward, falling like hail to the street below.

  The plane looked as though its forward momentum would surely slam it into the side of the building. But at the last minute the pilot cut his angle sharply. With a whine of engines, the plane did a rolling maneuver away from the building back out over the street. It soared back up into the air, dropping a dozen screeching bombs as it did so.

  They impacted in the street among the gnarl of small British cars. A BMW near Smith became an explosion of flame and metal, its hood flipping up as the shell struck its mark.

  Mrs. Smith screamed.

  They couldn't wait any longer. As the crowd continued to break around them, as the planes continued to disgorge bombs from their bellies, Smith hustled his wife from the protective archway.

  Like leaves dropped into a raging spring river, they were immediately caught up in the stream of people flooding for the nearest entry to the London Underground.

  Mrs Smith clung to her husband's arm both for support and in fear. Face hard, Smith did his best to keep her safe from the panicked, shoving masses as they moved along the sidewalk.

  Fear rippled palpably through the crowd. Someone had shut off the air-raid siren. The sounds of dropping bombs could be heard both nearby and from farther away. One struck very closely, pelting the crowd with bits of tar and dirt. And something else.

  Blood spattered the faces of some of the nearer pedestrians. Smith saw that he and his wife had been lucky. They were in the center of the crowd and were thus shielded from the heaviest flying shrapnel. Screams of agony erupted around them as the whine of the attacking plane's engine faded away.

  As they ran, Smith saw one man with a streak of crimson flowing down the side of his head. A woman-presumably a wife or girlfriend-was trying to staunch the flow of blood with a strip of cloth as the crowd continued to race forward.

  Some people had fallen, bloodied, to the pavement. The panicked mob trampled over them. Smith saw the mouth of the Underground over the bobbing heads before him. They had only a few yards to go.

  A new sound caught his attention. It was heavier than that of the other planes. The noise from the older aircraft was more of a whining complaint. This sound was a ferocious, thick rumble that rattled the buildings around them and shook the ground beneath their feet.

  A huge shadow passed above them. Still moving, some, including Smith, cast wary glances at the sky. There were more planes above London now. They had roared into view seemingly with the purpose of avenging angels. Smith saw that they were RAF Harriers.

  Without hesitation, the newer planes opened fire on the German attackers.

  The crowd had dragged the Smiths to the stairs leading down into the bowels of the British subway system. Smith guided his wife's hand to the metal railing. She hurried down the stairs away from him, so concerned with finding safety that she was oblivious to the fact that she was now alone. No matter. She would be safe.

  Smith pushed flat against the wall of the subway stairwell, pausing briefly to look up at the dogfight above the skies of London. People jostled him as they bustled down the stone stairs.

  A Harrier tore into sight from the east, leveling off after a fleeing Messerschmitt. As the newer aircraft banked over the string of sedate buildings, a long missile detached itself from the underside of the wing. For a moment it seemed as if this bomb would drop to the street, as well. But the tail quickly ignited and the missile was launched forward with a propulsive force greater than that of the Harrier itself.

  The missile ate up the space between the two mismatched planes in an instant. The Messerschmitt took the full force of the explosion in a spot to the rear of its cockpit. The fragile explosives within the old plane detonated a split second after the fiery impact of the missile.


  The plane erupted in a ball of flame, screaming down out of the sky in the direction of Hyde Park Corner. It hit earth a moment later.

  Other Harriers roared in across the tall buildings. The small planes were outdated and outmatched. They broke off the attack and headed away from the skies above Piccadilly. Some looped away from the others, streaking off in the direction of Buckingham Palace.

  Two Harriers pursued the rogue planes; the rest gave chase to the largest group of fleeing aircraft. It was over.

  Not that it mattered to the terrified crowd.

  Smith tried to move away from the wall in order to climb back up the stairs. He found it impossible to negotiate through the sea of running people.

  Though the danger had passed, Smith was caught up in the rushing tide. Against his wishes he found himself being swept down into the subway along with the rest of the frightened crowd.

  Chapter 11

  Helene Marie-Simone had to be certain she had lost Remo and Chiun before she could talk freely. She had just received an urgent call from a most delicate source and had been forced to put the matter off for a few minutes until she was certain she was away from prying ears. Somehow-impossibly-the two men from America had been able to eavesdrop on her private conversations with the DGSE.

  After hissing to the caller that she would return the call immediately, Helene had clicked off the cellular phone.

  She shot a look at Remo and Chiun.

  They didn't appear to notice. The old one was engrossed in the work of the American investigators. The young one didn't seem very interested in anything that was going on at the scene. He was yawning as he stared at the edge of the cordon.

  Quickly she ducked out through a gap that the truck explosion had created in the courtyard wall. She headed down the street.

  Helene didn't know who these men represented, but she knew one thing for certain. They were not with the American State Department. The men were obviously spies. Though for what agency she had no idea. They didn't seem like CIA. They were certainly not FBI. Probably they were with one of the more obscure American security agencies.

  The Paris police had established a wide cordon around the bomb scene. Barricades had been constructed in the streets. Uniformed gendarmes kept the curious at bay.