Cora had been happy living overseas with her parents. Her father's position in the army made it possible for them to meet many interesting people, but many of these international luminaries had more than just politics on their minds.
Cora had a lot of boyfriends, and being she was young and beautiful, she also had many desires which needed to be fulfilled. Convinced that there's never any end to lust, she discovers that her parents are participating in extramarital affairs.
Her true lesson in lust comes, however, when she is kidnapped by a group of terrorists. She must submit to their lecherous demands in order to stay alive. But before long, she realizes that being a prisoner of passion has certain benefits, and the treatment that she gets as a carnally captive hostage is actually very enjoyable!
CHAPTER ONE
At the moment the fracas was going on in town that night, Cora lay in her bed thinking how wonderful it would be to be married, to have a husband coming home each night, kissing her at the front door. She would have made him a wonderful meal and listened attentively to his stories at dinner-stories of what had happened at work that day, stories about their future together, children, a house of their own.
Dreams of an eighteen-year-old girl, far from home.
Of course, her thoughts had one particular face in mind for that husband.
On the radio that day, Cora had heard a new hit song that was nearing the million mark in records sold in the United States. It was a new country-western, and oddly enough, the radio station had played it in its original English version:
A girl in her teens, tries to play the game. She learns what true love means, but it always ends the same. She's the loser, and losers mustn't cry. He played an old game, a kiss and then a lie.
Cora absently stroked her breasts, thinking further of what the rest of an evening as a married woman would be like. TV and then, growing sleepy together next to a romantic fireplace, she and her dream husband would go to their bedroom, she'd lay back the thick, warm quilt while he showered, and shaved. He would use that new aftershave lotion they were advertising, Male Scents, and she would sparingly touch her body with perfume and ... and....
A high-breasted sexy girl threw her leather coat open to reveal a T-shirt, worn braless, and the T-shirt had imprinted on it:
Don't Look at How Perfect These Are Look at How Screwed Up the World Is!
Another, bigger and more buxom, smiled at the girl's daring gesture and threw her own coat open. Her T-shirt read:
Put a Woman in the White House And Save Europe from Destruction!
This was watched, but from a distance, by a group of four young people with a look of hatred in their eyes that seemed as furious as the messages on the two T-shirts. They looked at each other and nodded, indicating they had a plan. Policemen ringed the square, and inflamatory words rang out from the central rostrum. The night was miserable, cold, damp, and foggy, like something out of a Sherlock Holmes story. But this wasn't Sherlock, wasn't Arthur Conan Doyle, and this wasn't Britain.
It was Germany. Oddly enough the group of four took no part in the huge demonstration that chanted slogans against the U.S. and NATO. The four looked like the other students, but they seemed to have grimmer thoughts, knew what they were about.
They seemed to know too that they were in no way part of the solid mass of demonstrators, staring straight ahead as the amplified voices screamed abuse over the heads of the crowd, their breath steaming quietly in the cold night air. All of them were between twenty and twenty-four years old; all of them wore their hair long under peaked students' caps. One had an unlit cigarette jutting from the corner of his mouth.
From time to time, they glanced at the motionless rows of police standing on either side of the square. But they made no movement of their own until the fighting began.
Nobody knew quite how it started. Nobody ever does. Someone up near the rostrum began to heckle one of the speakers. The heckler was shouted down. His supporters began to argue with the shouters ... and in no time at all fists were flying, and the huge crowd was swaying and eddying uneasily in the center of the square: an ugly, organic motion that broke up the tightly packed throng into separate whirlpools of action like the changing bubbles on the surface of a geyser. As the fighting spread, the bubbles grew in size, burst, reformed, and finally coalesced. Soon the whole vast space was seething with a single struggling mass and the loudspeakers were drowned in the menacing clamor of mob fury.
At the first sign of trouble a black-and-white police wagon with a flashing amber light on its roof shot out of a side street with its motor screaming. Through a loudspeaker above its windshield a harsh voice calling for order added to the din. The policemen around the square drew their nightsticks and leaped into action, wading into the rear of the crowd with flailing arms. On the far side of the marketplace a water cannon forced its way slowly toward the rostrum as the soft detonations of exploding tear-gas canisters punctuated the shouts and screams of the mob.
The four young black-jacketed spectators moved smoothly into action at the same time as the police. The boy with the unlit cigarette tapped one of his companions on the shoulder and jerked his head to the right. Together they ran swiftly toward the side street across which the banner was strung, swerving around the passers-by attracted toward the square by noise, and finally vanishing up an unlit alley two hundred yards from the riot. The other two sprinted around the fringes of the crowd toward the rostrum, dodging the groups of quarreling, fighting demonstrators until they were near the police wagon.
Here the violence was at its fiercest. The helmeted, leather-coated riot police, their clubs flashing in the lamplight, were methodically attacking a group of several hundred fighting students, breaking up the individual struggles and manhandling the ringleaders toward the open doors of the Black Maria.
The two youths plunged into the thick of the fray, elbowing their way through the knots of yelling, clawing, punching, kicking, club-swinging demonstrators and police until they reached a particularly savage battle raging over the recumbent forms of two students and a policeman who lay with his bare head shielded by his arms and a spreading pool of blood staining the damp cobbles beside his face. As they approached, a screaming redheaded, wild-eyed girl with her blouse torn open to the waist and one full white breast bounding naked in the misty light burst free of the group and ran frenziedly for the edge of the crowd as police dragged another, sobbing hysterically, toward the wagon.
"Fascist pigs!" the first of the black-jacketed youths shouted in a high voice. "Murdering police bastards! Kill the jackboot thugs!"
"That's all they can do: beat up teenage girls!" the second shrieked. "Kick the shit out of the raping bastards!"
The nearest policeman turned around with a snarl of rage. He was quite a young man, no more than twenty-five or twenty-six, with a red face and a puzzled expression troubling his pale eyes. He didn't understand what the demonstrators were complaining about, nor could he grasp why their adversaries disagreed so violently, but like his colleagues he had his orders to suppress ruthlessly any breach of public order occasioned by either side. It seemed a reasonable and proper order to him. If kids who should still be in school wanted to complain about their elders and betters they could write to the newspapers about it; they'd no business to kick up a fuss and endanger the peaceful existence of ordinary decent citizens, bringing hundreds of men like himself out on extra duty on a cold damp night like this! Now here were two more of them actually inciting the others to resist with violence the law and order he represented! The best place for black-jacketed anarchists like them was inside the jail! Raising his nightstick, he lunged toward the nearer of his two tormentors.
The boy's face was set in a mask of hatred and contempt. Pursing his thin lips, he spat viciously toward the policeman and then ducked and ran. As the uniformed man lumbered in pursuit, the boy's companion darted forward and snatched the riot helmet from his head with a practiced gesture.
The policeman whirled, clubbing viciously down with his baton. But the two youths pranced back out of range and dashed, laughing and jeering, toward the edge of the crowd, passing the helmet between them like a Rugby football. They broke free of the milling throng and pelted up the side street beneath the banner, scattering the bystanders as the bare-headed policeman pounded after them with his boots ringing on the wet cobblestones.
Two hundred yards away from the square, when the clattering of their footsteps was no longer drowned by the angry shouting of the crowd, the youths veered suddenly into the alleyway taken earlier by their friends. They ran for another hundred feet along the narrow twisting passage and then, at an angle where a street lamp high up on the blank wall of a building cast a faint radiance over the wet stone, they turned left into a cul-de-sac littered with garbage cans and empty crates stacked outside the closed doors of a warehouse.
The policeman was about ten yards behind them. As he rounded the corner into the cul-de-sac, the two youths turned to face him as though cornered, crouching slightly with their hands held away from their sides. Beneath the peak of their caps, their eyes glittered in the dim light thrown by the lamp at the corner of the entry.
The officer halted, paused for a moment, and then, tapping the end of his nightstick menacingly into the palm of his left hand, he advanced slowly toward them. "All right," he panted, "now are you going to come back to the square quietly or do I have to beat you into it?"
For a moment neither of them replied. From somewhere above their heads a radio blared a jungle of rock music through an open window. Farther away, a church clock was striking the hour. The policeman's slow footsteps grated on the cobbles. When he was only two or three yards away, the youth holding his helmet, who seemed to be the leader, grinned wickedly and sneered: "You? You couldn't get us back into that square in ten years!" He drew back his arm and hurled the helmet straight at the policeman's head.
Instinctively, the young man ducked. As the steel dome flew over his shoulder to clatter on the stones of the alley, the two other youths who had left the marketplace when the fighting began emerged from a shadowed doorway he had just passed and fell on him from behind. The one with the unlit cigarette struck violently at his bent head with a stave of wood wrenched from an empty crate as the other stooped to whip up the tails of the policeman's leather uniform topcoat.
The ambushed officer's cry of pain and surprise was instantly muffled as the coat was thrown over his head and shoulders and jerked down across his chest to be pinioned there by the boy with the unlit cigarette.
At once, the other three all moved in and began savagely punching and kicking at the helpless man's unprotected back, belly, and groin. The policeman and the youth holding him lurched from side to side of the narrow entry struggling furiously as the three others hammered home their merciless attack.
"He's finished, Heinz," the leader of the group said.
The policeman was indeed dead, and they stared at his coat. The head beneath had become grotesquely deformed. On the dull satin of the coat lining dark patches gleamed stickily in the faint light.
Heinz stepped back and hefted the baton in his gloved hand. "That's it then," he said coolly.
The leader held up a hand for silence and listened. Over the rooftops the angry roar of the crowd in the square was punctuated by the urgent see-saw alarm of approaching police sirens, but there was no sound from the cul-de-sac or the alleyway beyond. "Good," the leader said. "We'd better get a move on and pick up Klaus-and let's hope he's lined up a suitable patsy! We don't want to leave this pig here too long alone. Heinz-you stay here and watch over him until we get back, eh?"
As the youth with the cigarette nodded, one of the others asked nervously: "Are you quite sure he's dead?"
"Dead?" Heinz demanded furiously. "Are you joking? I only beat his head flat, that's all!" Inserting the toe of his boot under the policeman's body, he levered it slightly off the cobbles and then withdrew his foot. The body flopped slackly back on to the wet stones, completely inert.
"Shall we take his gun?" the fourth boy asked, leaning down with a hand outstretched toward the dead man's belt.
"No!" the leader snapped. "Are you crazy? If the man who's supposed to have done it is here and the gun's missing, it'll tip them off right away that someone else was involved. Act your age!"
"But we need guns so badly and that's a good one! They issue them with Mauser-"
"I said no!" the leader interrupted harshly.
The youth shrugged and turned away. As the three of them tiptoed from the entry. Heinz withdrew into the shadow of the doorway, still holding the nightstick. A moment later, the lean, rakish lines of his face were etched against the dark as he thumbed a lighter into flame and dragged gratefully on his cigarette.
Three blocks away, on a narrow but brightly lit street just off a main intersection gleaming with late-night traffic, the other three youths stopped outside a beer hall whose oak-beamed facade was garishly out-lined in red and blue neon. Waves of conversation and raucous laughter crashed past the open doors into the street, and through the mullioned windows a dense crowd of drinkers could be seen packed around the bar and jammed into a row of booths beyond.
"You go on in, Kurt," the leader said to the boy who had asked about the gun-a good-looking dark youth with curly hair. "We'll wait for you here. Got the stuff ready?"
Kurt nodded and patted the breast pocket of his windbreaker. Then, leaving the other two leaning against the fender of a parked Mercedes apparently deep in conversation, he waved his hand and ran up the steps into the bar.
As soon as he thrust his way into the crowded, smoke-filled room, a bulky youth in jeans and a checkered lumber jacket levered himself away from the bar and signaled him to come over. Grasping the arm of his companion, an American army top sergeant in uniform, the youth gestured excitedly toward the new arrival.
"Why, here is my friend now!" he said in English. "This is a good piece of luck! Kurt-I would like you to meet Sergeant Henry Myerson."
"'Hank' to my friends. Glad to know you, boy," the American said, holding out a hand at the end of a wavering arm as he clung to the bar. He was very drunk indeed.
Kurt smiled and shook the hand firmly. "I am pleased to know you too," he said. "What may I order you to drink? Klaus?"
"We're drinking Steinhaegger and Pils," the bulky youth said. He raised one eyebrow and nodded imperceptibly.
Kurt shouldered his way to the bar and shouted his order to the sweating bartender. When the three shot glasses of schnapps were in front of him, his hand rose to unbutton the breast pocket of his jacket. Before the steins of beer joined them, he had removed the thin grease paper packet and slit the flap with his thumbnail. It was a simple matter to tip in the chloral hydrate as he passed his hand over one of the shot glasses before reaching it across to the American.
Myerson swallowed the doctored spirit in a single gulp and held out a shaking hand for his beer chaser. "Goo' luck, boy!" he said thickly.
"Our friend here has a problem," Klaus said confidentially to the dark boy. "He would like to find a nice girl friend ... for the night. But she must be pretty, and she must not be too expensive. I was hoping you would come. I thought perhaps you might introduce him to Lisa."
"Lisa?" Kurt echoed doubtfully. "I don't know ... Well, I suppose I could. Perhaps it would be all right. I don't know.
"Hey, what's all this Lisa routine?" the American demanded. "He's talked abou' ... he's talked about nothin' else for ... for the las' half ... the whole goddamn evening!" He smiled foolishly and clutched at the bar rail for support.
"Very beautiful girl," Kurt said earnestly. "She lives ... on, very close. Just around the corner."
"What's she like?" Myerson asked, squinting his eyes as he tried to focus on Kurt's face.
"Beautiful. Blonde. Slim. But plenty of...." He sculptured imaginary breasts over the front of his jacket and winked. "You know!"
"Well give me her address for Chrissake!" the American shouted. I'll go ri' on up and see her. Come on, boy-stop holdin' out on me!"
Kurt shook his head and tutted. "Oh no, no. You cannot do that!"
"Why not, jus' tell me, eh?" An ugly expression came over the drunken man's face and he leaned forward, breathing heavily on the German.
"Because she is ... special. You have to be introduced," Kurt said.
"That's why I was hoping he'd come in," Klaus explained. "Kurt knows her, you see. He could take you there and get you in."
"Then what are we waitin' for?" Myerson cried, throwing back his head and guffawing. "C'mon, let's go!" He lurched away from the bar and cannoned into a woman who had been listening to their conversation, knocking her elbow and spilling a large splash of beer from her glass onto the floor. She was a red-faced, big-breasted blonde wearing a tight floral silk dress and a fur coat slung over her shoulders.
"That's all right," she smiled as the American tried to apologize. "Did I hear you say you were looking for a girl, soldier boy?"
Myerson swayed on his feet, staring blearily at her over-painted face across the rim of his glass. "Give you a good time," the blonde coaxed insinuatingly. "Only a hundred marks ... and you can stay all night!"
"Hey!" the sergeant exclaimed. "Look, fellers ... maybe I don't have to tr'ble you after all! Maybe I c'n ... maybe I c'n get what I wan' ri' here!"
Kurt had moved swiftly up to the far side of the blonde. Leaning his head close to her ear he whispered menacingly: "Get your fat ass out of here if you don't want to wake up tomorrow morning floating in the river! Quick!"
She swung around to face him, her scarlet mouth dropping open in astonishment. "What the-" she began furiously. And then, as she recognized him: "You! Why the hell didn't you say it was one of your pigeons!"
"Beat it! "he hissed.
The blonde swallowed the rest of her beer and banged the glass down on the counter. Her hand was shaking. "Sorry, soldier," she said huskily. "I just saw a friend. Some other time, perhaps...." Pulling her coat tightly across her bulging breasts, she hurried out into the night.
Myerson stared after her. "What the ... hell got ... into her?" he demanded. "I thought...."
Klaus was shaking his head. "No good," he said decidedly. "She takes your money and ... zero! Besides, she's, like, sick. You know."
"Christ!" Myerson said. He raised a hand to his forehead. "This ... Lisa, did you say? ... This Lisa: she's okay?"
"Okay?" Kurt repeated with simulated indignation. "She is my sister's best friend!"
"All ri'. All ri'. No 'fense, boy. I was just askin'."
Klaus was looking anxiously at the drunken man's face. "I think we should...." he began warningly.
"Quite right," Kurt said. "Sergeant, we must go. There is not much time. If we do not hurry, perhaps someone else...."
"Goo' God!" Myerson exclaimed. "I couldn't stand that! C'mon then: We're on our way!" Lifting his arm, he gulped down the rest of his drink, tipping the glass too steeply so that beer overflowed at each side of his mouth and splashed over his uniform jacket. A moment later, followed by the two German youths, he was tottering toward the door.
Supporting him by the arms, they hurried across the street and into the network of dark alleys beyond. Two minutes later, the pair who had waited outside the beer hall pushed themselves upright from the fender of the Mercedes and went after them.
Myerson's footsteps grew more and more uncertain as they traversed the three blocks separating them from the cul-de-sac where the students had left Heinz. The Mickey Finn was beginning to affect him already.
At first he insisted on singing, shouting out the words of some bawdy army ballad in a tuneless roar. Then he began to improvise drunken doggerel celebrating the charms of the unkown blonde in a raucous voice. "Lisa! ... I wanna squeeze her! ... She has tits as ripe as pears, and on her cunt are golden hairs ... Hey, fellers! Tha's not bad! Tits as ripe as pears! ... A pair of tits, see! ... What about that!" His head fell forward on his chest, and he relapsed into a bray of helpless laughter.
"You must not make a noise!" Kurt whispered anxiously, trying to hurry him along faster without arousing his suspicions. If they weren't careful he'd pass out before they got there and they'd have to carry him! "Lisa has to be very discreet. It's a very smart neighborhood where she lives. If you make a noise she will not see you...."
"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Myerson muttered. "Mus'n' make ... noise. Very 'screet! ... Keep quiet. Qui' ri' too!....
Finally he fell silent and by the time they got to the corner of the cul-de-sac he could scarcely stand upright. As they let go of his arms he staggered from side to side and gazed muzzily up at the lamplight silvering the blank wet walls of the entry. His hand rose again to his forehead and he said indistinctly: "Sma' neighborhoo'? ... Are you sure this's ... ri' place?"
"Yes, yes," Kurt murmured. "Behind these walls there is a garden ... a beautiful garden. Very expensive. The door is only a little way along."
But the American wasn't listening. He took two steps forward on rubber legs and groped unseeingly in front of him. "Chri'!" he exclaimed thickly. "Fellers, I feel awfu'....
"Feeling sick, soldier?" Heinz's voice said suddenly from the depths of the shadowed doorway. "Here ... grab hold of this rail!"
With his gloved hands, he thrust the white nightstick out parallel with the ground.
Myerson reached for it, grabbed it with both hands, and then pitched abruptly forward on to his face to lie like a log on the damp cobbles with the murder weapon beneath him.
Heinz stepped out of the doorway. There was an unlit cigarette between his lips and he was smiling. As the two remaining members of the party arrived at the corner of the cul-de-sac he glanced back at the unconscious American and the sprawled figure of the dead policeman beyond. "Another decent German done to death in the execution of his duty by a decadent, drunken American!" he said lightly. Bending his head, he flicked his lighter and dragged in a lungful of smoke.
"No trouble while we were away?" the leader asked from the corner.
Heinz shook his head. "Not a soul," he said. "And the representative of law and order didn't utter a sound!"
"Good! We'd better get back, then, and make that call." Without another look, they turned into the alleyway and hurried toward the city center.
Twenty minutes later, a pale green Volkswagen pulled up beside a public telephone booth on the outskirts of town. The passenger door opened and Kurt ran across the sidewalk and slipped inside. Dialing hastily, he lifted the handset and spoke breathlessly into the mouthpiece: "Hallo? ... Hallo? ... Police? ... Look, this as an emergency! I just saw one of your fellows being savagely beaten by a drunken American ... Yes, an American! He was in uniform....It was in an alley a couple of blocks off the marketplace....It looked as though he was pretty badly hurt...."
Back in the car, he turned to the leader and said: "Okay. Only one more chore and then we can all go home to bed!" Heinz, who was behind the wheel, stuck a cigarette between his lips, slammed the lever into first, and hauled the Volkswagen round in a U-turn to head back toward the city.
It was after midnight now. The river mist had thickened a little, hanging like gauze curtains in the patches of shadow between the street lamps, blurring the outline of the great spire of the Minster where it pierced the blank sky. Traffic in the center was light and the few pedestrians walked quickly, their heads bent and their coat collars turned up. Apart from a group of leather-clad policemen gathered around a patrol car even the litter-strewn marketplace was deserted. Skating uneasily on the wet tramway lines, the Volkswagen crossed the square and sped along a broad curving avenue bordered on one side by the yellow, poster-hung wall of the university.
The Rhine was yellow too-flat, depthless, and oily under the mist, its surface wrinkled with eddies in the lamplight where the current carried it under the arches of the bridge. On the far bank, a vanishing perspective of street lights punctuated by the green and red disks of traffic signals charted the course of the empty road. Heinz rocketed the car along between the converging ribbons of wet trolley lines, braked to allow an unlit street car to lumber past on its way to the depot, and then turned left into a maze of narrow streets which eventually led them back to a shabby district enclosed by a curve in the river.
They left the Volkswagen on the forecourt of a shuttered warehouse and walked in single file down a narrow passageway leading toward the waterfront. A block away from the river, the crumbling walls of a derelict factory reared up into the mist. The remains of a rusty derrick projected over the rotten planking of a loading bay, and above, through a gaping window embrasure, they could see a single star between the rafters of the roofless building.
There was a flight of steps beyond the bay which led down to a cellar area. At the far end of the area was a heavy wooden door.
Mist had gathered in the narrow basement well, and the wet stone exuded a dank chill that caused them to shiver inside their leather jackets as they crowded around the door, waiting while Kurt fumbled in his pocket for the key.
The antique lock had evidently been recently oiled, for the key turned without a sound, and the door swung silently away into the darkness beyond. The damp, musty air they breathed as they trooped inside carried the antiseptic odor of printer's ink overlaid by another sourish, ammoniac smell. Water dripped in the distance. And nearer at hand a curious muffled mumbling accompanied by a strained creaking noise broke the silence. As Kurt closed the door, surprisingly loud in the fog, a barge hooted on the river.
The blackness suddenly dissolved as Heinz's lighter flared into flame and he lit the stump of a candle stuck in a bottle standing on an empty packing case. The cellar revealed in the wavering light was brick built, with vaulted arches disappearing into the shadows. In one corner a shallow sink projected beside an old-fashioned hand-operated printing press. Beside it, sheafs of anarchist leaflets were stacked on a trestle table. On the outer wall, which was running with moisture, a large poster announced: Western Society Must Be Destroyed Before It Can Be Rebuilt! Kill the Pigs Now! In the center of the room, a fair-haired youth of about twenty sat bound to a sturdy kitchen chair.
He was completely naked and his whole body was shuddering spasmodically with cold and with fear. His legs had been spread and his ankles wired to the chair legs with electrical cord. His arms, lashed tightly together at the elbow, had been drawn over the chair back and wired cruelly to one of the braces. A third length of cable passed around his middle and secured him to the seat slats. Apart from his staring, terrified eyes, little could be seen of his features, for a tennis ball had been jammed into his gaping mouth, forcing his jaws agonizingly apart, and tied in place with a woman's nylon stocking knotted behind his neck.
The mumbling, gargling sound they had heard as they entered increased in volume now as the prisoner's eyes darted wildly from side to side, and he tried desperately to speak through the gag.
Stripping off cap, gloves, and jacket, the leader turned to face him-and at once what had been concealed in the streets was apparent: despite the deep husky voice and the positive, masculine bearing, the leader was a girl!
High-set rounded breasts thrust out the tight wool of her white sweater, with the nipples clearly out-lined against the clinging material. Below her slender waist, voluptuous hips stretched the stiff denim of her blue jeans, and the laced boots beneath the pale pants cuffs were slim and small. Her blonde hair, shoulder length like the boys', was lustrous and silky, framing a determined chin, a wide-lipped, slightly cruel mouth, and deep-set gray eyes.
As Kurt, Klaus, and the other boy stepped back into the shadows with folded arms to gaze sternly at the tableau illuminated by the flickering candle flame, the girl advanced until she was only a yard away from the naked boy in the chair. Heinz was standing behind him, the inevitable unlit cigarette between his lips, holding a silk scarf knotted into a loop and a short length of wood.
"All right, Gerhardt," the girl said. "You were found guilty earlier today of being a traitor and an informer. I telephoned our cells in Stuttgart, Dusseldorf, and Hamburg this afternoon. They all agreed with our findings and the sentence is unanimous."
Behind the gag, the bound youth uttered a strangled cry. His head flailed frantically from side to side as he hurled himself against his bonds, rocking the chair vainly above the stained, broken concrete of the floor.
"You know we insist on absolute loyalty," the girl continued calmly. "It's made perfectly clear when you join. And you know the penalty for informing. If you hadn't opened your mouth, the pigs wouldn't have taken eight of our friends last night and we'd have had three groups operating at the demonstration today-not just us. Instead of one policeman murdered by an American soldier, there would have been three. And one isn't enough to make the impact we planned. Because you blabbed, the whole campaign to discredit NATO and the Americans before the Berlin talks has been set back by weeks. Now we shall have to start another project altogether."
A piteous blubbering groan had now replaced the incoherent mumblings forcing their way past the tightly tied nylon masking the lower half of the prisoner's face. From his desperate, pleading eyes, large tears had begun to fall, coursing down his cheeks to splash onto his nakedly heaving chest.
The girl drew a deep breath. "The sentence is death," she said hurriedly. "We'll try and make it as quick as we can, but we dare not use a gun because it can so easily be traced. Heinz...?"
A wild, despairing scream choked its way past the boy's gag as Heinz nodded briskly and stepped forward. Twining his fingers in Gerhardt's hair, he dragged back the boy's head. "So be it," Heinz said.
CHAPTER TWO
Petite, dark-haired Cora Templar opened the garden door and rushed into the breakfast room, pitching her schoolbooks onto the table with a sigh of relief. The handball practice had been canceled because of the rain, and now she had the whole of the afternoon unexpectedly to herself!
What should she do with it? She could stay home and work or read, of course, or watch television. But she didn't want to read, and German television was so dull. She supposed she could call one of her friends and go on over to see her. But all the classmates she really liked at the American school at Konigswinter lived across the river at Bad Godesberg, nearer to Bonn. Besides, the only person she really wanted to see was Stefan. Stefan was dreamy! He was a student, almost twenty, with blond hair and a way of looking at her through slitted eyes that made her come up in goose bumps all over! The only trouble was that Stefan was German, and her parents didn't approve of him. He was mixed up in politics, her father said sternly, and it wouldn't do at all! They had absolutely forbidden her to see him anymore.
She sighed. It wasn't easy, being just a high school senior and the daughter of a United States army man posted to the Federal Republic!
She looked out the window. The wooded cones of the seven hills of Konigswinter loomed mistily through the downpour above the suburban roofs. The nearest one was called the Petersberg. There was a hotel at the top that had once housed the Allied Control Commission. Next to it was the Drachenfels, where Siegfried had slain the dragon.
Had her mother heard her come in? If not, maybe she could slip out again quietly. Maybe she could even go see Stefan!
As she stood listening, her eye fell on a copy of the local paper lying on the table. Automatically, she took in the headlines. The French were quarreling with the Americans over the agenda of the forthcoming four-power talks in Berlin. There had been seventy-three arrests at some demonstration in the city last night. Six people had been killed in a pile-up on the autobahn. The strangled body of a student had been found on a vacant lot near the river. And then, paneled in heavy black type in the center of the front page, she saw: POLICEMAN BEATEN TO DEATH: AMERICAN ARMY MAN ACCUSED.
It would mean trouble. That would mean more headaches for her father. Colonel Templar held an important liaison post with the United States NATO forces based in Germany, and part of his duties was to smooth out any difficulties which arose between the American troops and their German hosts. In a few weeks he was to head a completely new mission formally attached to the German government to make cooperation between the two countries even closer. A murder case at such a time involving Army personnel could be a grave embarrassment to him.
She raised her eyes from the paper and met her own troubled gaze in a large mirror set in an ornately carved wooden frame screwed to the wall. Critically, she examined her young body-bulging with appealing curves-and her pretty face. She had soft dark eyes; a short straight nose; a full-lipped generous mouth. Half-hidden between the open edges of her yellow nylon parka, the ripely swelling mounds of her budding breasts uptilted beneath the clinging black cashmere of her jersey. She lifted her hands up to feel the melons-as she pushed them up and in she marveled at the way they held their rounded shape. She brought her palms up a bit further and rubbed at her pert nipples. They pulsed with tiny spurts of growing hardness.
From there she rubbed her hands sensually down across her stomach, along the lines of her flaring hips, and back across, to where she started rubbing her covered pussy. The strength of her hands made the fleshy mound twitch and burn.
It wasn't a bad shape, she supposed. At least Stefan found her attractive enough. He was always going on and on about it! If only she could grow just a little taller....
For the third time the young brunette sighed, and gave her quim another last massage with her hands. Would there be a chance of seeing Stefan if she could get out of the house again unseen? Her parents would not be expecting her again until five-thirty. If he was by any chance at the cafe on the corner, they would have over two hours together before she need come back ... and nobody would know they met!
She decided to try. But first she had to fix her hair, and she needed to get to her room to do that. If she walked down the hall past her mother's room, she'd probably wake her if she was resting. There wasn't a sound in the house, and the door to her room creaked loudly. She was bound to be heard!
Cora decided her only chance was to tiptoe past on the balceny and get into her room through the French window.
Holding her breath, the girl eased open the door of the breakfast room and stole upstairs.
There was a door to the balcony on the landing, and she slipped through and crept silently along the rain-wet slate floor towards the far end of the building.
Inside her mother's bedroom, the drapes were drawn across the window and the Venetian blinds were down. Cora gave a small tut of annoyance. Although this meant that she could pass by the window without being seen, it meant that her mother was almost certainly there, so she would have to be very careful getting into her room.
As she slipped past her mother's room she heard a loud deep groan through the window!
Oh, my God! Cora thought. She's sick! I must go in and help her. She reached for the handle of the window ... and froze again.
A guttural male laugh reverberated inside the bedroom!
Cora was transfixed. The laugh was not her father's, but the groan had certainly come from her mother. What in God's name was going on! Who was in there with her mother.
Mrs. Templar groaned again-a longer one this time, with a strange pleading note to it. The groan was followed by another laugh and a series of flesh slapping sounds, like a child's bottom being spanked.
Cora was trembling. Was it a burglar who'd broken into the house and was now beating her mother. Maybe it was even some kind of spy! She had to get to a phone, and call the police, or her father at his office. Maybe she could save her mother's life.
She was just about to turn away when she heard her mother's groaning turn into words.
"Oh God! Do it to me like that! Do it again! Yessssss!"
Standing in the light rain outside the window, the teenage brunette paled. The voice had been slurred, almost as though her mother was drunk, but there was no mistake about its tone: it was one of passionate pleading!"
The girl hesitated again. What should she do? She had to find out what was going on.
She knew that the drapes in the room were badly fitted, and there was often a tiny gap in the center even when they were closed.
Holding her breath fearfully, the teenaged girl crouched down and inched forward until her eyes were at the window. There was a narrow gap in the curtains, and she could see inside clearly. The bedroom lights were on, and she saw the foot of her parents' bed and part of the armchair standing beside it.
Cora turned her face to see in a little further and then sucked in her breath with horror. Spread-eagled naked on the bed was her mother, thighs spread shamelessly wide, locked in a lewd embrace of intercourse with a strange man.
"Oh please...." she heard her moan again, this time even more feverishly. "Fuck me hard with your tool!!"
Cora leaned back, her head dizzy from the sight.
"Oooooooooo!!! Give it to me!!!" she heard coming again from inside.
Cora felt her heart race. She didn't really know what to make of the sight that she'd seen. She lifted her hand to her bust and felt her fluttering heartbeat.
Cora could also feel her nipple start to bulge, and a twitch in her pussy. The sight had also turned her on, so she returned her gaze to the tiny viewpoint, amazed at what she saw.
Cora stared mesmerized. The man's muscular buttocks and shoulders were covered with a buzz of coarse black hair. His lips were clamped greedily over one of her mother's nipples, and Eileen Templar's fingers were digging into her own breast, thrusting it hard up against his lewdly sucking mouth. His hips were pounding savagely up and down against the naked woman's undulating loins, and from her position below the foot of the bed, the girl could see the man's thick hard penis disappearing and reappearing with each cruel thrust he made into the hair-covered furrow up between her mother's legs.
His hands were cupping her naked white buttocks with a fierce strength that cut red bloodless grooves into the pliant flesh, squeezing the firmly rounded moons tight together, forcing the walls of her vagina closer around the thickness of his hard-driving penis. Cora could see the moist pink lips of her mother's cunt clasping hungrily around the stranger's cock, her sparse pussy hairs grazing against the narrow sperm-filled ridge that ran the length of the swollen shaft's underside.
The shocked teenager felt the blood draining from her head and fought to save herself from falling backward. She felt sure she was going to faint from the shock of seeing the unbelievable scene taking place before her eyes. There, on her own father's bed, her mother was obscenely coupled with another man, making violent love to him with every sign of eagerness! She could hear the sounds of heavy breathing and the lustful grunts of animal pleasure uttered by the lewdly embracing pair from where she crouched.
The man raised his head to gasp some remark as Eileen Templar's long trembling legs suddenly kicked high in the air and then locked behind his thighs, pulling his driving buttocks into her with all her strength. Cora gasped aloud herself: she recognized him now. It was Herr Eisenach, the local Burgomaster! He had often driven over after dinner to have drinks with her mother and father. How dare he abuse her father's hospitality by taking advantage of his hostess in her husband's absence!
Cora wanted to wrench open the French window and rush into the room to tear him off her mother's body. She felt a scream building in her throat-and a savage desire to hit and scratch the interloper until she drove him away forever. She tried to blot the horrible scene from her eyes, but she could not; some obscure compulsion froze her to the window, unable to move away as she watched in detached revulsion the ravishment of her mother's more than willing body. She could see the corded muscles standing out on her inner thighs as she struggled like a crazed nymphomaniac to force the man's long thick penis deeper inside her. Her nakedly churning buttocks were grinding faster now, and the groans and mewls of lewd pleasure bubbling in her throat were louder as she thrust her loins demonically upward to meet the pounding drives of the Burgomaster's hips. Cora could clearly hear the squeaking of the bedsprings from her spyhole of the I balcony.
Suddenly her mother let out what was an almost horrifying scream. "OOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHH MMMYYYYYYY GGGGOOOOODDD!!!" she shrieked. "I'M COMING!!! AND COMING!!! AND COMING!!! ARE YOU GOING TO COME SOON!!!??? PLEASE-SHOOT IT TO ME!!!"
Cora couldn't believe her mother's unbridled passion. She watched Eisenach rise to stab her mother's womb repeatedly with hurried thrusts. He grunted wildly, telling her that he was about to come too-that his hot juices were going to spit.
Suddenly the wildly fucking lady let out a shrill howl and Eisenach slowed his thrusts to an agonizingly slow parry. The both of them let out trilling moans as he slipped the huge pecker inside her soaked and panting cunt lips. Cora could see the thing throbbing and his testicles heaving and pulsing. The scene was shocking, but she felt yet another sexy twitch in her slit.
Eisenach rolled off and out of Eileen Templar and lay back on the bed. Cora was amazed at the thickness and length of his loins-his penis still rock hard and gleaming from the searing juices inside her mother's mushy center. That fat mound of pussy lips was now flushed with moistness, which flowed from the fat twitching lips onto the sheet. Eileen just lay there for a minute, breathing hard while her body quivered.
Cora crouched there listening to her heart thump. In her own quim she could feel little seeping bits of humidity start to form. There was a very light aching burn in her insides. She started rubbing her pants down at the crotch, which in her kneeling position was neatly opened wide. She could feel the shape of her own love nest-the ridges and furrows, and the jutting pelvic mound underneath where the little clit lay. She rubbed herself there hard and felt a twinge of excitement.
Suddenly from inside she heard her mother again. "Mmmmmmmmm!!!" moaned Eileen Templar loudly. "Your cock is still hard as a rock. I must do something about that."
Cora looked back in and watched as her mother brought her face to Eisenach's fat thick tool. She licked at the nest of pubes below it, spreading them apart, and then started a slow climb up the healthy fleshy shaft.
Cora was mystified by her mother's sexy and wet moves on the long piece of meat. Eileen Templar licked at it like it was a sweet stick of candy, swirling her tongue about the rounded tube while her lips pressed at it and pulled the skin into her mouth. She licked, sucked, and played at the whole length, until finally she was lapping her way around the underside of his bulging head.
She engulfed the fat helmet in a fast swoop, putting her lips across the peckerhead in a puckering kiss. Then she jabbed at the thick bulging tip with her mouth like that for a few minutes, until her mouth dripped with saliva and the sensitive skin of his cockhead was red with rushing tingling blood.
As she pulled her lips off she started running her tongue around the place, licking it like it was ice cream. Then she sucked him back in and jabbed a few hunky inches into her mouth. Cora could hear the low grunting and smacking sounds her mother made as she was wolfing the pecker down. She watched Eileen's cheeks swim and buckle as she petted the fleshy rod with her face, slapping around the ticklish underside with her tongue.
Eileen engulfed another couple of inches, this time drawing his cock almost all the way into her face. Cora heard her gulp a bit, then watched with wide-eyed awe as she saw her mother force the thick head of Eisenach's penis slowly into her throat. Her mother screwed her face around the bulging pecker, finally getting it to draw down inside her and lodge in her tight throat.
Eisenach lay there grunting, his bucking hips urging Eileen on. Then Eileen fluttered her mouth back up the flesh-tube, sucking at the full length until she hit the head. Then she jabbed him back deep.
Suddenly she began a quick thrusted suck of his tool that was dangerously erotic-her teeth lightly scraping his tight cockskin on the way up and down. After getting him tingling with erotic pulsations, Eileen plunged her lips and tongue around the fat rod and washed it off lovingly. Eisenach was now humping about below her bellowing grunts of glee.
And then suddenly a cold chill ran the whole length of her spine.
She couldn't distinguish the words, but a man's voice called out something urgent and harsh ... and it wasn't the voice of Eisenach! There was a second stranger in the room, and it sounded as if he was egging the couple on! Two of them in there ... taking turns fucking her mother!
The distraught girl's mind reeled. She shifted her position slightly, trying to get a glimpse of the other man. But the two cracks she had to line up were too small: The edge of the curtain restricted her view.
A moment later the second man moved into her field of vision. The appalled teenager saw a pair of hairy legs, the blur of a descending body, and then the lower half of a naked figure which had dropped into the chair only a couple of feet away from the lewdly coupled pair.
The other man she didn't recognize, but after seeing his cock she knew she'd recognize him anywhere again-if naked. His prick was a bit shorter than Eisenach's, but much thicker-like a fat log. He was literally hung like an elephant, and the fat stump was sitting erect with a small bend upwards. She found the sight of it shocking.
The man began stroking his massive throbber, putting his hand around it in a fist and drawing up his foreskin into a bunch as he drew upward. He pumped at it with steady mechanical precision, watching the couple on the bed with ardor.
Eileen was now kneeled into Eisenach's crotch and sucking him with a wet and noisy suction-her ass swaying to the air. Cora could see her mother's tight fisted asshole between the spread cheeks, and a cunt that dripped with white fluids.
The new man in her vision could too, and Cora gasped as she saw him move to the edge of the bed and place his horny flagpole right at Eileen's rear gate. Her mother made a horrible gurgling sound, Eisenach's sword still stabbing her tonsils.
Cora ran from the window in fright as she saw the man jab into her mother's tight passage. She didn't care if she made noise-she had to get out of there. She ran down through the house into the rainy street.
She walked faster and faster, her heart pounding, her feet sliding in the puddles.
Where would she go? Not to her father-that was for sure. She couldn't tell him. But the problem was too big for her to handle and the shameful secret had to be shared with someone before she could decide what to do.
Who could she go to? For the moment, Stefan was forgotten. The only person she could think of was her Aunt Marian, who was a ward nurse in the American hospital at Seigsdorff, near Bad Honningen, fifteen miles further upriver. Marian Templar had been the girl's confidante since she was a young child.
A quarter of a mile further on, the street turned into the main road leading south to Bad Honningen and Koblenz. Within minutes Cora had hitched herself a ride. By the time she got to the hospital it was almost dark. She was cold, hungry, and soaked from head to foot.
The man on the gate knew her, for she was a frequent visitor with her parents, so she had no trouble getting in. She made her way to the surgical wing where Aunt Marian worked-on the ground floor at the rear of the building. If she was busy Cora would slip into the nurses' office and wait until she was free.
She turned the corner to the wing just in time to see her Aunt's back, neat and slender in her starched uniform, disappearing through the swing door leading to the ward beyond. Cora went into the nurses' office and took off her waterlogged parka, and then planted herself by the heater.
Cora sat there for some time waiting, until she began to wonder if her Aunt had gone off duty without stopping by the office. After fidgeting for another five minutes, she got up and went into the ward looking for her.
She didn't see her in the dim ward filled with sleeping patients, but her attention was caught by a screened off bed at the far end which was lit by a dim bulb. Cora walked quietly down the ward until she was right outside the partition, standing away from the shaft of light thrown by the bulb through the doorway.
Suddenly Cora heard Marian's voice-"You know I can't do that!" she whispered, obviously to the requesting patient. Cora peered over to a crack in the curtain partition and peered in. The sight she saw made her stop herself from letting them know of her presence.
Marian was kneeling on the foot of the bed, her dark hair neatly coiffed in a nurse's cap, and her full, high-set breasts thrusting out the standard white apron she wore over her tunic. But the real surprise for Cora was to see the soldier in the bed holding a long erect penis in his hands.
"Besides...." said Marian, "what will you do for me?"
"I'll eat your pussy!!!" hissed the soldier. Cora blinked in amazement as Marian lifted her dress up and started crawling towards his face. Underneath she had on hose and a garter, but no panties. She let her neatly folded patch slash over his cock and then crawled on, until her quim was aligned with the soldier's face.
"All right, Sergeant," Aunt Marian barked. "Chew me and chew me good, because if you don't eat all your dinner you won't get any dessert!"
Cora's eyes became wide as she saw the sergeant lick out at the nestled and puckered lips between Marian Templar's graciously spread thighs. He slapped at her quim, breaking open the folded seal and lapping the pink insides. Marian turned her hips up to him to give him further access.
The soldier took her ass in his hands and cupped her pussy around his mouth, obviously digging deep into the succulent honey-pot. Marian let out little peeps and shrieks as he made a meal of her insides. After a minute, she climbed off and started to walk away.
But the voluptuous woman in her crisply starched uniform only went as far as the trolley. Picking up a surgical glove, she thrust the fingers of her right hand hard down into it. Cora could hear the dry squeak of the rubber as she eased it over her skin. She could hear something else too; the man on the bed was suddenly breathing fast and heavily. A glazed look had come over his eyes.
Above the iron-hard veined stiffness of the shaft, the circumcised glans, smooth as the head of a giant mushroom, quivered imperceptibly in the diffuse light.
"My!" Aunt Marian said chidingly. "We are in a state, aren't we!"
The breathing of the man in the bed had become more ragged still. "Go on!" he whispered hoarsely. "Do it to me! Do it to me now! Please!"
Lowering herself gently to the side of the bed, she reached across with her rubber-gloved hand and grasped the pulsating shaft of his cock, moving the tip of the thumb caressingly over the plum-colored head to smear the seminal fluid seeping wetly from the slit at the top.
The Sergeant jerked convulsively at her touch and arched his loins slightly off the bed. "Ooooooooooh!" he groaned. "That's so gooooooooood! Go on! Go on! Oh, you darling! Aaaaaaaah!"
Slowly she increased the movement of her thumb, spreading the viscous fluid over the acorned head, past the taut ridge of flesh separating it from the shaft, and then down the throbbing stiffness of the shaft itself.
He grunted, biting his lip and staring up into the light directly over his head. "Harder!" he gasped. "Hold me harder! Ohhhhhhhhh!"
When the entire rigid length of his penis was gleaming greasily, Marian altered the position of her hand so that the head was nuzzling into her palm and her fingers and thumb were wrapped around the shaft like a close-fitting sheath. Gently at first and then with increasing speed and force she began to milk his eagerly throbbing cock, pulling the loose skin up over the quivering head and then dragging it hard down until the whole pulsating penis was as stretched and tight as an overfilled balloon, the glistening skin almost transparent under the pressure of her hand.
Over the whisper of music from the earphones at the far end of the big room, Cora heard the harsh panting of the Sergeant's breath and the lewd sucking squelch of her Aunt's rubber-gloved hand sliding rhythmically up and down the lustfully expanding staff of his penis. Behind her, the rain drummed incessantly against the windows of the empty office.
"There!" Marian whispered huskily to the wildly excited man. "That makes us feel better, doesn't it? That's what we needed, isn't it? ... It feels so gooood ... to have a warm hand ... giving us just a little bit of massage ... in the right place!....
"Christ!" the Sergeant whispered tremulously. "Oh, Christ!"
"It's such a big one too! And so hard!" Marian murmured. Her breasts were rising and falling rapidly beneath the starched apron, her eyes were shining, and there was a crooning note in her voice that the transfixed teenager behind the door had never heard before.
But suddenly Cora could stand it no longer. There was a thundering in her ears and she felt as if she was choking. She could never confide in Aunt Marian now; she was no better than the others herself! Dear God, was the entire adult world sex-mad? Did none of them do anything else but give in to the lecherous and obscene urges that made them behave like lust-crazed animals? Stifling a sob, she let the door swing silently shut. Then, grabbing her parka she raced from the hospital out into the street.
She slowed to a walk, but that walk was a blind one, not knowing in which direction to head.
She did not notice the Volkswagen van that was following her.
CHAPTER THREE
Look up the word Fasching in a GermanEnglish dictionary, and nine times out of ten the relevant entry will be confined to a single word. The English equivalent of Fasching, the compiler will prudently have revealed, is simply "Carnival."
This is both something more and something less than the truth. Western Bavarians and those inhabitants of southern Germany living between the Rhine and the Moselle would consider such an answer reticent to the point of being misleading. On the other hand, there is in fact no English equivalent of Fasching. Which large numbers of Anglo-Saxons think a shame.
Carnival it is in the sense that it is a traditional celebration held at the same time-and stemming from the same roots-as the Central and South American Mardi Gras. Traditional it is in the sense that, as in France, Italy, and many other Catholic countries, it is an ancient pagan festival adopted by the Church and religiously observed through many centuries. But the way in which it is celebrated is something the Germans have made peculiarly their own.
Perhaps as a relief after the bitter winters of the region, perhaps as a necessary safety valve to balance the strictly enforced day-to-day ethos of the community and its pastors, perhaps even as a salute to the coming rebirth of the spring, the season of Fasching has developed into a period of total license.
To put it more bluntly, it's a sexual free-for-all.
Certainly there are masked balls and special masses, fairs and fetes, speeches and street parades ... but the really important thing about it, for those who observe it, is the fact that you can do what you like, with whom you like, wherever you like-and nobody in the world has the right to reproach you for it afterward!
For one week at the end of the winter, the towns and villages of the region-especially the smaller ones-shut up shop and have themselves a ball!
Ideally, at the beginning of that week, the stores put up their shutters (for there is a great deal of wine and beer drunk and a certain amount of rowdiness results), the office workers leave their desks, the farm workers come in from the country, and husbands and wives, bidding each other an affectionate farewell, arrange to meet again in seven days' time. What happens in between is nobody's business but their own ... and there are no recriminations. The whole population set out to join in the merriment, spending the time with the partner or partners of their choice.
In practice, of course, it is by no means as clear-cut or as simple as that. The custom is not universally followed, for one thing. For another, the complexities of modern life have inevitably modified the original romantic conception. But the fact remains-in that part of Germany, at that time of year, ladies requiring a temporary change of mate and gentlemen out for an easy lay have it all their own way, married or unmarried.
Which explains why young, confused Cora Templar, running away from the American hospital that rainy evening in late February, found the village of Siegsdorff in a state of suppressed excitement bordering on hysteria.
The street lamps at the entrance to the village were unlit and the shop fronts shuttered and barred, but there were floodlights illuminating the steeply gabled gingerbread houses grouped around the cobbled central platz, and over the drumming of the rain a big brass band blared bravely through the open doors of a flag-decked town hall. A car passed Cora just before she reached the square, spraying a fan of water over her from a huge puddle in the road, but otherwise there was no traffic to be seen.
Groups of villagers with linked arms ignored the rain to surge across the shining cobbles laughing and singing. Through the leaded windows of the gasthaus and two beer gardens on opposite corners of the square, a high-pitched roar of conversation penetrated the night. And among the crowd, masked revelers in costume darted manically, whooping, and giggling.
Cora pulled up short as soon as she reached the fringe of the illuminations, astonished by what she saw. She had forgotten it was the week of Fasching.
Two hussars and a black-bearded pirate, accompanied by a Gretchen whose cotton bodice was plastered to her taut-nippled breasts by the rain, bore down on her shouting. "Thursday night, fraulein, and still alone?" the pirate called. "A kiss on those young lips, and you'll know what to do with the rest of the week!"
Laughing foolishly, the others danced around her, crowding her against the wall as he pushed the domino mask up on to his forehead and seized her familiarly around the waist. She twisted out of his winey embrace and ducked hastily into the open door of a biergarten on her left.
The place was a bedlam of frenetic activity. Beneath the low-beamed ceiling, waiters in white coats swooped bearing trays laden with bottles and glasses. Among the crowded tables an accordian player in lederhosen and a Tyrolean hat tried vainly to make himself heard above the waves of drunken chatter that crashed off the walls. At the far end of the smoke-filled room red-faced men stood four deep around the bar shouting their orders. The overheated atmosphere was heavy with the smell of damp clothes and cheap cigars, and even the slight, sweet smell of pot.
He was sitting, miraculously alone, at a small table not far from the door.
"Stefan!" she cried excitedly. "What on earth are you doing here?"
"Cora! What a splendid surprise!"
He rose to his feet, his slim body lithe in its roll-neck sweater and jeans, the narrowed eyes beneath the thatch of blond hair as compelling as ever. "Sit down," he said. "What can I get for you?"
She let herself drop gratefully into the vacant chair. And all at once she was agonizingly conscious that she was faint with hunger. "I think I ... Could I possibly have ... Could you get me something to eat?" she asked weakly. "Oh, Stefan, I am glad to see you!"
"But, my dear, of course." Effortlessly, he secured the attention of a perspiring waiter, ordered her hot sausages and beer, smiled at her invitingly over the table. "And what happy wind blows my little Cora into Siegsdorff, of all places?"
"I've just been ... I had to ... I've been visiting at the American hospital," the exhausted girl said awkwardly.
"You're here with your parents, then?"
"Er-no. I came on my own."
The boy raised his eyebrows. "On your own?" he repeated. "But how? By bus? No ... you're soaking wet. On some kind of bicycle? A motor bike? And how are you going to get back?"
"I'll manage," Cora said, wondering how she would or if she even wanted to try. By now her father would be home and she would be missed. What would they do?
Stefan shot her a look from under his eye brows. "How? In this rain? There are no more buses. And don't forget the Fasching. You may not find a car so easily on the way back-or if you do it may be too easy!"
The girl looked up suddenly. Her mouth was full of sausage and her spine was still shivering under the impact of his look. "How d'you know I hitched here?" she demanded.
"Simple deduction," he said easily. "How else could you have gotten here? No-I think you'd better let me take you home. But first there's a little place around the corner I'd like you to see."
"Oh, Stefan, would you really? That would be wonderful!" Cora's eyes were shining. She'd even be prepared to go home and face the music, she could worry about her attitude to what she had seen when she got there, if Stefan was going to take her! "What did you say about some other place?"
"I'll take you there as soon as you're through," he said.
When they got outside, the rain had eased off a little and the square was crowded. They were threading their way through the jostling throng by the Rathaus when Cora was suddenly seized around the waist and dragged off to one side in the middle of a group of whooping students in costume. She called for Stefan, but the crowd closed in behind her and cut him off. Struggling ineffectually, she saw that her captors were the pirate and the two hussars she had escaped from before she went into the biergarten. "Put me down!" she cried. "Let go of me this minute!"
They grinned at her, still hauling her through the crowd. They were much drunker now, and they had lost their Gretchen somewhere along the way. "Come on, sweetheart," one of the hussars panted. "We'll give you a much better time than he could!"
"Let me go!"
"Not until you've seen what a real man looks like!" the pirate leered.
"Cora!" Stefan shouted somewhere behind them. "Where are you?"
As she opened her mouth to call back, the other hussar grabbed her by the shoulders and sank his mouth on hers, spearing his tongue wetly in between her lips. Half crying, she struggled to break free, nauseated by the beery stench of his breath. But before she could yell for Stefan again, they whisked her around a corner and laughing drunkenly dashed down a narrow alley running at one side of the town hall, carrying her screaming and protesting with them.
They clattered along the wet cobbles, ducked around a corner at the far end-and stopped dead. There were three youths in jeans and black leather jackets standing in the narrow, ill-lit street beyond the alley spaced out across the roadway, blocking their passage.
"Come on, fellows!" the first hussar said. "Make way, will you?"
"I don't think the lady's too keen to go with you," the youth in the middle said. There was an unlit cigarette jutting from the corner of his mouth.
"Look, get out of our way," the pirate said truculently. "We're in a hurry!"
"If you don't want to get hurt, that is," the second hussar added.
"I think the lady wants to go the other way."
"She's coming with us," the pirate shouted. "Get out of the way!"
"She stays here," the boy with the cigarette said evenly. "You can go on or go back, whichever you like. But she stays here. She's a student, and we're here to see no student gets hurt."
"For Christ's sake, who do you think you are? We saw the bitch first."
"Let's push them out of the way, Franc!"
"Give it to the bastards!"
The three youths barring the road stared at them and said nothing.
Cora stared from one group to the other, her heart thumping. She was still powerless to escape, her arms tightly held by the two hussars, and she was frightened. In the distance, she could hear Stefan shouting for her at the far end of the alley.
Abruptly the pirate lost his temper. Uttering a string of curses, he sprang at the boy with the cigarette and aimed a vicious right at his jaw. The boy swayed back slightly on his heels so that the blow caught him on the collarbone, knocking him slightly off balance. Before he had regained his equilibrium, his two companions leaped at the aggressor. The boy on the left, a bulky youth with dark curling hair, crashed the sole of his boot sickeningly into the pirate's groin as the other punched him savagely on the side of the head. The pirate grunted and doubled up-to meet the bulky youth's knee, which jerked up sharply to smash with stunning force against the bridge of his nose. The pirate groaned and dropped to the cobbles with blood streaming from under his black mask.
Meanwhile the two hussars had released their grasp of the terrified girl to launch themselves at the boy with the cigarette. He braced himself and jolted his forearm stiffly against the Adam's apple of the first, then whirled to trade a fierce flurry of blows with the second.
As the first hussar staggered back, the bulky youth locked an arm around his neck, turning sideways to bend the struggling reveler backward over his hip in a judo lock. At the same time the third youth-a handsome boy with dark hair-slammed three murderous right-handers low into the pit of his stomach. Released suddenly from the neck lock, the hussar reeled to the wall groaning, fell to his knees, and vomited noisily into the gutter.
All three of the strangers now fell on the remaining hussar. They battered him about the head and shoulders, knead him in the groin, and finally beat him to the ground, where he lay face downward in the mud, covering his head with his arms and moaning faintly. The boy with the cigarette drew back his foot, but the dark youth laid a hand on his arm and shook his head. "That's enough, Heinz," he said quietly.
"Perhaps you're right," the other said. Producing a lighter, he held the flame to his cigarette, which had remained in his mouth throughout the encounter, and squinted over it at Cora as he dragged smoke into his lungs. "I think that's your friend coming now, isn't it?" he said to the frightened girl, jerking his head toward the alley as he exhaled through his nostrils.
She swung around. Stefan had just turned the corner and was running toward them.
"Y-y-you mean I can go? I'm free?" she stammered.
"Free? But of course!" the youth looked pained. "We don't like to see drunken hooligans running off with young girls, that's all." He looked contemptuously at the three groaning figures on the ground and added: "I don't think they'll trouble you again."
Stefan arrived breathless. "Thanks, that was real nice of you," he panted, linking his arm with Cora's and squeezing her hand.
The dark boy grinned. "Be our guest!" he said in English.
The three of them were still standing in the middle of the narrow street, watching, as the couple turned the corner and hurried back up the alleyway toward the square.
Stefan's "little place around the corner" turned out to be a pint-sized bar in a back street crammed with an older generation of villagers. The conversation was lively but low-pitched, and there was little evidence here of the manic gaiety seizing the costumed crowds outside-though Gretchen, drunker than ever, was draped over one end of the counter with her arms twined around the neck of a red-faced farmer. In a corner, a group of Bavarians in narrow-brimmed, decorated tweed hats jested over their beer with much subdued laughter.
They found a place in an alcove at the far end of the beamed, low-ceilinged room, and the blond boy elbowed his way to the bar to return with two small glasses of clear, bright red liquid. Cora sniffed at it experimentally. "What is it?" she asked.
"What I want you to try. This place is run by Bavarians. The owner comes from Obergunzburg, near Munich. It's a specialty of his part of the country. Try it."
She sipped cautiously, swallowed, and then smiled. "Why it's quite nice! Sweet, and sticky, and ... and, yes, it's like that stuff they give babies!"
He nodded. "Rose Hip Syrup, yes. Hardly surprising, because that's what they distill it from! Every rose grower and Gasthof in the hills down there has a still in the backyard."
Cora took a larger swallow. "I like it," she said. "Is it ... alcoholic?"
"Just a little," Stefan said.
They had a second, and then a third. Cora never knew whether it was the apparently innocuous drink itself, or the weakening effect on her mind of the shocking things she had witnessed, or the delayed action of cold and hunger-or perhaps even a combination of all three-but somewhere between the second and third, the evening shattered into pieces ... and she was never able to reassemble them again into a coherent whole!
The full effect of the deceptive liquor didn't hit her until they were out in the street again. Before that there was a period in which Stefan, his blue eyes blazing with earnestness, leaned confidentially across the table and told her how beautiful she was, how grown up for her age, how much he had been longing to see her. People were singing in the bar too, but that was at a different time. She remembered lying on the floor-had she fallen over?-looking up past a forest of legs to see the face of Gretchen bending down toward her, screaming with drunken laughter. An old woman in the powder room handed her a face cloth soaked in cold water to put on her forehead and then giggled as though she would never stop, but the giggle sounded exactly like Cora's own. Then there were voices, growing louder and louder, crashing in on her like waves as the town hall spun off to her left and the street lamps spiraled away and up behind her. But no ... that must have been after they left the bar.
She didn't actually remember leaving ... or even deciding that she must leave. There was just this sudden and alarming sensation of the whole world canting slowly to one side as her nerveless legs stepped down through the wet cobbles of the street as if they had been made of molasses. It was difficult trying to drag her feet up again through that sticky fluid that sucked so persistently at her heels.
But then suddenly she was free of it, walking lightly, as though she was on a sheet of glass a foot above the sidewalk, with no sensation of her feet touching anything. Stefan was with her ... a long way off to one side, holding out his hand to help her as he receded further and further into the distance.
Then she was lying on an old-fashioned feather bed in a warm room with a fire burning brightly in a polished grate. The old woman drew across the heavy drapes and walked across to the bed to remove the damp face cloth from her brow. Cora blinked dazedly at her. "But ... what are you doing here?" she stammered. "Weren't you in the bb-bar?"
"Bar?" the woman echoed blankly. "What bar? You've been to a few bars too many, Fraulein, and that's the truth!" She sniffed severely and turned to leave the room.
Cora shifted on the bed. The satin covers were cool under her skin. She was lying outside them ... and, dear God, she was completely naked! She didn't have a stitch on her!
As she gasped in consternation, a warm hand grasped her suddenly around the ankle. She cried aloud and sat up in terror. It was only Stefan. He sat at the foot of the bed, smiling at her in the firelight as his supple fingers absently massaged the flesh of her leg. And then-her mind reeled as she took in the full implications of the scene-she saw that he too was wearing no clothes.
"Stefan!" she cried wildly. "What's going on? Where am I?"
"It's all right," he soothed. "It's all right. Don't panic. You were taken a little faint when we left the bar. Probably you didn't eat enough today and then you got cold. Anyway, I thought you weren't in a fit condition to go home, so I brought you here to rest up a little."
"Where's here? Where are we? What time is it?"
"A little hotel I know not far from the Town Hall. Don't worry. They're very discreet."
"Discreet!" Cora repeated, her voice rising to a squeak. "Discreet about what? Stefan-why have you brought me here?" She tried to look angry but the room started to spin around just as the street had done, and she was forced to drop back once more against the pillows. She must have eaten something that disagreed with her, she thought confusedly. Perhaps those sausages at the biergarten...? Or could it possibly have been...? No, not those nice drinks at the bar! They were so sweet, almost like kids' sodas back home, and besides they had only had three tiny ones. In any case, Stefan would have warned her if they were intoxicating, wouldn't he?
Wouldn't he?
A prey to sudden suspicion, she raised her swimming head slightly and stared toward the foot of the bed. He was still holding her ankle, caressing the slender swell of her calf with his other hand, a slight smile on his lips and his eyes shadowed beneath those jutting brows.
She was all at once conscious of her nakedness, aware of her shamelessly exposed genitals alone with him in the fire-lit hotel room. She knew that he was looking at her pussy, and she could feel the insides of her folded center start to grow warm. But there were some things she didn't understand. Why had they taken all her clothes off? Why had they brought her to the hotel room. And above all, why was he naked too?
She hesitated to speak to him. He would look up at her when he replied ... but his gaze was mainly at her silky brown patch of curls. As he looked up at her his eyes would also stop to glance at her budding young breasts and the tender petaled nipples at their tips. Her virginal body trembled under his sexy gaze.
Stefan himself had a hearty boner that looked awfully good to young Cora, but she wasn't about to just give in. She had a few questions to be answered.
But Stefan beat her to it; "My darling, I don't see you enough. It's been too long."
"I try to see you, Stefan, but my father...."
"I know ... that's why I brought you here tonight. You must relax....You are here to relax."
She hardly felt relaxed, and even though they had kissed and petted a lot, she had never gone beyond letting him stroke and fondle her, or lick at her breasts through an open shirt.
Stefan leaned over to her and gave Cora a warm and lilting kiss. She responded with trepidation, and almost jumped when he took hold of her hand.
"Here," he said, bringing the hand to him, "Feel this!"
She felt him place her palm against the stretched skin of his manhood. It felt strange to her touch, a little rough and bumpy, and very hard and muscular. She was afraid to grip it. Then she moved her palm a slight bit and the long shaft bucked.
She latched onto it and pressed it in her fingers.
"That's it," he urged her. "Like that!"
She was ashamed, but excited. His pecker felt as hard as a rock, but when she pulled at it she could feel it bulge and something inside surging. She let her hand loosen a bit and started to explore the whole length, rubbing it lightly, running her finger along the thin sperm tube that ran the length to the bottom.
Stefan groaned with a smile, and she tried pulling at him again. "Yes," he told her, "that's the way you stroke a cock. For a beginner, you know quite a lot."
If only he knew all that she had learned in this one day. In fact, she might even show him some tricks he didn't know. Because by now she knew from the trickle in her womb that she would have to give in to his affections.
Then she felt a pang of guilt, and she pulled her hand away from his tool. "I can't," she pleaded.
"But you don't have to do anything!" the blond boy protested. "That's what I keep telling you! Just lie back there and relax, honey."
Cora closed her eyes. If he was going to be sensible, if he was just going to stroke her a little, if she wasn't expected to do anything about it-well, it was really too much trouble to argue. She would lie there a while until the world stopped going around, and then she would get right up and go on home, Stefan or no Stefan!
The smooth caress of his fingers-on the sensitive inside of her upper thigh now-the gentle warm plucking of his lips and the occasional flicker of his tongue against her skin, the firm grasp of his hand that had moved from her ankle to the back of her knee, the crackle of the flames in the fireplace and the drumming of rain on the window pane, all fell into a kind of rhythm ... a monotonous, hypnotic cycle of sensation born of the alcohol still singing in her blood and the heat of the room.
After awhile the giddy swinging movement inside her head slowed down to a manageable rocking. At the same time she became aware that Stefan had altered his position. His two hands were now locked over the outsides of her thighs not far below her naked hips, and the thumbs, reaching over to the soft inner flesh, were gently rotating the skin as his wetly heated mouth played from side to side on her tightly closed legs.
She opened her eyes. To her astonishment she found that the lamp had been extinguished. The room was illuminated only by the redly flickering firelight, which cast long bobbing shadows up the walls and across the ceiling as the flames rose and sank. Stefan must somehow have reached out and found the switch as he lay beside her. Only now he was kneeling up on the mattress, his eyes closed and a look of utter contentment on his face as he gently kissed her legs with little nibbling motions of his lips and the same soft flexing of his thumbs.
Yet she hadn't felt the bed shift as he moved! Had she perhaps fallen asleep for a moment? She couldn't remember.
She closed her eyes once more. And then suddenly she realized that his caresses, which had started modestly at her ankle and calf, were now perilously near her vagina.
She was about to protest when she became aware with a thrill of horror that there was a heated dampness up between her legs! Almost without realizing it, lulled by the seductive effect of the firelight and the drowsy aftermath of the drink she had taken, she had been squirming slightly against the pressure of his thumbs ... squirming down into the satin edge of a sensual bedspread just beneath her buttocks. There was a ridge of thick braid piping around the outside of the coverlet and this had gradually worked its way into the crevice up between her legs, stimulating the tender lips of her vagina!
Without thinking, she spread her thighs slightly to gain greater contact with the braid, hoping perhaps that the contact would still the unfamiliar ache now burning deep within her belly.
The rough braid, and the down-filled bedspread beneath it, excited the sensitive pink lips of her cunt even further. The wetness spread among the spiny hairs concealing her virginal slit. The naked teenaged girl felt tiny throbs of excitement pulsing in the tender bud of her clitoris, and bit her lower lip tightly to hold back the forbidden sensations flaming through her loins.
Stefan was still sucking and kissing the flesh of her inner thighs. But hadn't his lips moved a fraction higher still, even nearer to the intolerable tremors threatening her pussy? She dare not look. She knew she ought to sit up right now and tell him to stop it. She ought to twist away from those hungry lips and order him to get her clothes and take her home. She had relaxed as he suggested and the giddy sensations in her head were better now-infinitely less troubling than the waves of excitement trembling inside her wetly throbbing cunt.
She ought to ... but somehow she didn't! She lay trembling on the soft bed, feeling the hard edge of the coverlet below her desire-dampened pussy and the pressure of alien fingers and an alien mouth across her thighs.
But the hot fluid of excitement between her legs was increasing. Suddenly she felt a sharp pang of pleasure and felt her dampness sizzle. His tongue had quickly slid past her lips, and she writhed in unbearable pleasure as he started reaming her pink soft flesh below. She couldn't believe how great it felt-the tongue was tickling the rippled folds as it slipped past them, while underneath, her cunt flesh was being smoothly and expertly lapped at and massaged by the flat of his tongue.
He pulled away for a second from her crotch and Cora felt twinges of degradation. She had to do something to stop him!
"No!" the aroused brunette girl cried desperately. "No, Stefan ... you mustn't ... I can't...."
But with an animal groan of lewd hunger, Stefan dropped his face between her legs. Mumbling incoherently, he flicked out his tongue, and the naked teenager jerked galvanically as it came in contact with the smooth wet flesh within the narrow slit of her vagina.
He licked gently at the swollen bud of her clitoris, snuggled just above the wide-stretched entrance to her virginal young cunt, pressing his thumbs further apart to splay the hair-fringed edges of the pussy slit wider still. His tongue traced a path up and down its full length, probing the wet crevices hidden up between her thighs. Cora groaned aloud, a mindless slave now to the lewd sensations whirling in her dazed head.
The excited German boy gradually warmed to his task as he became more and more familiar with each tiny fold of the hotly pulsating flesh quivering under the ministrations of his lips and tongue ... teasing for an instant at a particularly sensitive spot, listening to the girl's impatient mewlings about him, and then darting his tongue forward lizard-like at the last moment when he sensed she could wait no longer. She was groaning and writhing in complete wantonness on the bed now, with droplets of perspiration forming on the surface of the skin all over her body. Her forehead was beaded with it and she could feel a trickle running down the valley between her ripely budding breasts. Stefan thrust his head forward and sank his tongue deep into the scalding wet opening of her lewdly squirming pussy. She gave a throaty cry ... and then began a slow, powerful grinding of her tongue-impaled cunt against his face, moaning loudly now in the fire-lit room.
Her fingers clenched and unclenched convulsively as she put her hands on his head, intending to push it firmly away, but the fingers instead twined themselves in his thatch of blond hair to lock his face between her widespread thighs.
"Oooooohhh! That's so good!" she whimpered. "Oh, God! Aaaaaggh! Don't stop, Stefan!" Her head was raised again from the pillows, watching in lewd fascination her own willing depravity as the German boy's head rocked up and down in greedy feast at her secret genitals.
Sure of himself now, Stefan slid his hands down from between her thighs and cupped them under the smooth, rounded globes of her squirming buttocks, pulling her loins up tighter into his face. He nipped gently with his teeth into the soft fleshy folds surrounding the wetly widening hole of her cunt and reveled in the small squeal of excitement it brought from Cora's throat. He was suddenly enjoying the power he was exerting over her and extended himself to display his complete domination over her every breath. His tongue fucked on and on in the succulent moistness of her loins, increasing little by little in speed and depth until he had brought the shamelessly aroused teenager to the point of absolute subjugation to the whims of his practiced mouth.
As Cora's fingers tangled ever deeper in his hair, he slid his arms under her nakedly trembling hips, reached for her soft warm breasts, and rolled their taut little nipples between his thumbs and forefingers.
Staring down the naked length of her own wantonly writhing body at the muscles of his shoulders rippling in the firelight, Cora moaned in desperation. Her head fell back on the pillows and flailed from side to side as his tongue noisily speared in and out of the wet dilating walls of her vagina.
The shudders of forbidden pleasure rippling deep down in her loins were increasing in urgency ... and there was nothing she could do about it! Tears of shame and humiliation, tears of anger at her own helpless weakness, filled her eyes. Oh, God, how could she ever dare to criticize her mother again after allowing her own virginal body to be subjected to the lust of this foreign boy hunched down between her lewdly spread legs? How could she face herself, knowing that she was enjoying it so much. She clenched her teeth tightly and fought with all her will against the sparks of delight that threatened to burst into sudden uncontrollable flame and consume her.
Cora's hands clasped themselves over the back of his blond head. It was soon over for both of them, and she turned her face toward the embers of the dying fire, heaved a slow and satisfied sigh.
But she was not able to stare at the fire for long, as Stefan added a new twist. What twisted was his body, while his face still lapped at her quivering center, his lower torso began to crawl around towards her. As she sensed the shift Cora looked up. What she saw swinging her way was a massive throbber that now looked even bigger than when she had fingered it before.
She took it between the hands she lifted from his gobbling head. She grasped the thick rail on either side, pulling it to see how far she could jerk the tight flesh. Pressing on the skin hard, she pulled at it. The log swung ever closer to her mouth.
Soon he was positioned overhead, and all she could do was hold the throbber to the side to keep it away from her mouth. She was tempted to suck it-it looked so smooth and satiny and had a softly appealing feel, but she was scared.
She looked at his tool as she played with it, marveling at the way she could control its twitches with her hand. She would pull hard and the thing would buck upward. She could slowly rub and feel the pulsing muscle underneath. Then she began to jerk him with a firm grip, first pulling slow and with thought, but soon tugging hard and passionately at his love stick.
Of course what he was doing to her underneath was a big encouragement-locking her clit in a lip embrace and rolling it happily around. She groaned in appreciation and stroked him harder.
He pulled with tough suction at her clit, drawing it inside his simmering mouth. Cora let out a gasp as an electric shock of pleasure travelled her spine. She could feel her musky inner sweat seep across his chin, which nuzzled her very excited young lips.
She jerked him faster, and looked up at the head of his tall pecker to see him seeping with a small bit of fluid from the tip. She was curious, and put her lips around the spot and very carefully licked at the salty drop. She could feel and hear the vibrations of Stefan groaning with pleasure at her clit-bud.
She decided that the taste wasn't so bad, and that she sort of liked the way his helmet molded to her lips. She held them there for a second and dug a little deeper at the tiny sperm hole in his cocktip. She felt him quiver as she did so. She knew she had something.
Suddenly he egged her on with a little buck of the hips and a tiny love bite on her clitoris. His head slipped all the way past her warm and soft lips, and was soaked and swirled by the warmth of her tongue and cheeks. She grazed her tongue across the bulging roundness of his head, making it feel numb and ticklish.
Then she swallowed him halfway to the hilt, his hugeness making her face bulge and her mouth start to swim with saliva. To him it felt glorious-a warm and simmering spot that massaged his tool with loving softness.
Of course right now Cora was in sexual seventh heaven, her clit getting an exclusive lip, tongue and teeth treatment from Stefan's talented mouth. It made her feel like her insides would swell and explode.
His amorous chewing made her even hotter to trot, and she swallowed another few inches of his thick tool, not really able to get it all the way in her mouth. For a second she tried screwing it into her throat, but it wouldn't seem to give room for the fat bulger to enter. But she could feel that her efforts were making the hot piece of hard flesh get even more excited. It bulged in size and the foreskin rippled as she tried.
Then as he sucked her clit hard and far into the back of his mouth, rubbing it with the coarseness of his tongue, she began to suck him in a rhythmic pattern, pulling off with tight lips and then slamming her mouth back on as far as it would go. The downward motion was light, with lips pursed to kiss wetly at the whole fleshy length. As she ran her way along it, he could feel his skin ripple in little circular motions.
She increased her speed as his chews on her tiny hot spot made her feel more flushed and aroused. She couldn't believe the way she was wedging him into her warmth, as if she had been doing it for years. But in a way, it all felt natural to her. She even liked the way his foreskin slipped past her bulging and sweaty lips.
She pulled at him harder, this time raising a sucking pressure from her lungs and trying to pull at his jewels below until she finally begged them hard enough and her mouth was filled with sticky fat gobs of semen that burned her throat and stuck to the roof of her mouth and her cheeks. She was able to gulp some of it down, but as she rolled aside she felt the salty taste in her mouth run across her lips, where it stayed as she fell asleep....
CHAPTER FOUR
It was still raining the following morning-a relentless downpour that fell from a gray sky ragged with low clouds scudding in from the west, drumming on the roofs, bouncing high off the sidewalk, gurgling furiously in the gutters, and lying in huge pools across the concrete surface of the autobahn.
Cora and Stefan stood at the exit from a Tankstelle service area, their sodden gar merits whipped around their limbs by the wind, their eyes screwed up against the assault of the driving rain. They had thumbed a ride east to the Frankfurt-Cologne turnpike, thinking that, despite the extra mileage, they would arrive in Bonn more quickly this way than by the trafficchoked Koblenz-Bad Godesberg road on the left bank of the Rhine.
Now they were waiting for a ride on the second leg of their journey, hunched against the cold and the wet. Stefan had already declined offers from an Opel Rekord and a Mercedes sedan, saying rather primly that he didn't like the look of the drivers. Cora was beyond caring. Her teeth were chattering-not so much because of the climate as at the terrifying thought of what might await her at home!
It was bad enough having been away all night. But to have been away with no reasonable explanation ... her mind quailed at the thought of what her father might say! For she couldn't possibly explain why she had gone; nor could she reveal where she had been. Saying she had been with Stefan would only add fuel to the fires of his rage.
There was no friend who could alibi her, and she would be forced either to invent some implausible story about wanting to see the Fasching ... or refuse to give an explanation at all. Her heart sank at the thought of the reception either would receive!
By now Colonel Templar would probably have alerted the police. There might even be a check when they took the slip-road leading to Bonn and Konigswinter. What could she possibly say?
She had been worrying about it ever since she woke up in the strange hotel room with the blond boy still collapsed across her. They had got up quickly, snatched a cup of coffee, and set off as fast as they could. And the problem had seemed to get worse and worse with every minute!
A biscuit-colored Volkswagen minibus approached slowly along the road leading from the gas station to the autobahn, with fans of water spraying out on either side of its wheels. Stefan ran into the roadway and signaled. The minibus braked, hesitated, and finally pulled up a few yards beyond them. He ran up to the driver's window, talking and gesticulating, and then turned to beckon to the soaked girl. "It's all right," he called. "They'll take us!"
There were plastic-covered benches running the length of the vehicle's rear end. Two youths in black jackets sat at the back, staring glumly out at the rainswept landscape, the tops of the tree-covered hills lost in scurrying clouds. A third boy was driving, and there was a slim, blonde girl with a slender body and a wide-lipped, rather cruel mouth curled up on the passenger seat beside him.
Cora and Stefan sat gratefully opposite the two boys, and Stefan began desultorily to exchange platitudes about the awfulness of the weather. Paying little attention because she was too occupied with her own thoughts, the girl stared at them idly, thinking to herself that there was something familiar about them, something that she couldn't quite place. It was only when she looked to the front and happened to see the driver turn his head, noticing with a sudden pang of unaccountable alarm the unlit cigarette jutting from his mouth, that she finally realized.
"W-w-w-why," she stammered, breaking into Stefan's conversation, "you're the three boys who ... the three boys we saw in Siegsdorff last night!"
The bulkier of the two youths grinned. "Why so we are!" he said in English, winking at Stefan. "Whaddaya know!"
For some reason Cora felt obscurely uneasy. She looked out the rain-streaked window at the Rhenish countryside speeding past. The dreary urban landscape of concrete factories, pylons, refineries, and dollhouse developments stretched away toward the river and the wilderness of diplomatic blocks between Bad Godesberg and Bonn on the far side. Somewhere over there her father would be sitting at his desk, staring grimly out at the rain as he barked orders and questions into the phone. Most of them would be about her! She would be glad just the same when they reached the turn-off. It wouldn't be long now.
The Volkswagen was hitting 120 kilometers per hour as they swished past the huge green and white sign announcing: Bad Godesberg, Bonn: 1000 m. The approach indicators-three chevrons, two, one-swept up and fell behind, and the cloverleaf slip-road appeared, curling off to the right among the featureless, rain-flattened grasses.
Without slackening speed, the minibus roared past and sped on up to the autobahn towards the north.
"Hey!" Cora exclaimed. "Just a minute...! Stefan...!"
Nobody paid her any attention. The two youths sat staring out the back window. Stefan had moved up to the front and was leaning forward looking through the windshield between the girl and the driver. There wasn't another turn-off until they got to Cologne! By the time she got back to Bonn it would be after lunch, and things would be worse than ever!
"Stefan!" she called again, more urgently this time. "They missed the turning! We've gone past it!"
He didn't reply. His blond head remained obstinately staring ahead through the windshield at the twin gray ribbons of wet asphalt unrolling toward them.
By now thoroughly alarmed, the worried teenager shifted up to the front of the minibus and took the boy's arm. "Stefan!" she said for the third time. "Don't you understand? We've gone past the turn-off for Bonn!"
"That's all right," he said without turning his head. "We're not going to Bonn!"
"N-n-not going to Bonn?" Cora faltered. "Where are we going then?
He turned and looked at her. "Hamburg," he said briefly.
"Hamburg!" Cora squeaked in a voice shrill with foreboding. "B-bbut that's hundreds of miles away! What do you mean, Hamburg? What's going on, for God's sake?"
The blonde girl in the passenger seat swung around and spoke for the first time. "Look, sweetie," she said, "you might as well get used to the idea: You've been snatched!"
"S-s-snatched?" Cora quavered. "But I don't...."
"Kidnapped, abducted, held for ransom, removed without your parents' consent," the blonde explained sardonically. "And very expertly too, if you don't mind my saying so!"
"But I don't understand!" the frightened girl burst out!
"Stefan! Do something, for goodness' sakes!"
The blond boy didn't reply. He was staring fixedly through the windshield again, apparently absorbed in a long line of trucks and trailers whose giant wheels were spewing out a thick spray of rain and mud and diesel fumes as the Volkswagen roared past them.
"Save your breath," the girl in the front seat advised. "Don't you understand, you little fool: He's one of us!"
"One of...?" Cora's voice trailed away into silence. She was thunderstruck.
"Of course, he's one of us!" the blond continued inexorably. "Why d'you think he's been hanging around you all this time, for God's sake? D'you imagine he just happened to be sitting in that beer garden in Siegsdorff when you chose to walk by? Don't make me laugh! We'd been following you ever since you left school yesterday!"
The dumbfounded girl sank back on to a seat with her mind in a whirl. "You ... you mean ... everything ... everything he said
... and did ... it was all some kind of a setup?" she queried with a sob in her voice.
"What do you think?" the blonde answered contemptuously. "But!"
"Look, baby, be your age! Do you really think a good-looking kid like him is going to get hot pants all of a sudden for a eighteen-year-old American brat. You've been on a string for weeks. We thought we'd lost you when your old man cut up rough and refused to let you see him. But we kept tabs on you-and then when another deal misfired we came back, and you played right into our hands! You quit school early, went home ... and came running out into the rain as if the end of the world had come! We followed you to the hospital and then back to Siegsdorff-and we'd just time to plant Stefan before you walked right into the trap!"
Cora was speechless. She didn't understand all this talk of being "on a string" and "deals" and "planting," but one thing was agonizingly clear: Stefan, her adored Stefan, had been deceiving her all the time! It was all a part of some obscure plot; he hadn't meant a single one of all those things he had said! And last night-she felt a hot flush of shame flooding her petite young body as she remembered-last night hadn't meant a thing to him either. It was all part of the plan, a means to make sure she would agree to hitch on the autobahn today!
No wonder he had refused the offers of lifts from the two other cars! He'd been waiting for the minibus and nothing else! No wonder he'd known she had thumbed a ride to the hospital: He'd been following her there himself! No wonder she had run into him in the beer garden: he was waiting there just for her! He must have been in that car that passed her just before she got to the village.
And finally, no wonder the three youths had so providentially appeared to rescue her from the two hussars and the pirate: They were part of the gang, and it would have upset their plans if she had been spirited away by anyone else! Their role had been simply to eliminate the interlopers and hand her back to Stefan, so that he could get on with the big seduction scene....
Feeling more cheated and disillusioned and heartbroken than she ever had before in her whole life, she bit her lip hard to check the tears that threatened to overflow her eyes.
"But why?" she burst out suddenly, struck by a sudden thought. "Why, why, why? What good's it going to do you, after all? Okay, so you tricked me into this truck. Maybe you can take me to Hamburg, if that's where you're going. Maybe the police won't catch up with you when my father finds out I'm missing. But it won't do you much good, I promise you. He's not rich. All he has is his pay. You won't get much ransom out of me."
The girl laughed. "You're not being held for ransom, sweetie," she said.
"Then why...?
"We've got plans for you," the girl said curtly. And she turned around to the front again and refused to say anymore.
Cora looked desperately over her shoulder-and saw to her horror that the windows of the Volkswagen had been covered while her back was turned with Venetian blinds. The two youths must have lowered them while she was talking to the blonde in front. They were sitting now, one on either side of her, quite close, staring at her in a speculative way that she found more alarming than anything she had experienced yet.
Now she would be unable to fling herself at the glass as they passed slow-moving traffic and mime frantically her appeal for help. If they were really going all the way to Hamburg, they woud have to stop for gasoline-at least twice-probably. Perhaps she could scream for help then. Although, judging from the ruthlessness with which they had dispatched the revelers in Siegsdorff last night, they were quite capable of forcibly silencing her or even binding and gagging her.
Her only hope-and one that she had mercifully remained silent about when talking to the girl-was the fact that they did not know she had been in Siegsdorff without her parents' knowledge or consent. They would think, therefore, that she would only be missed when she failed to return last night or this morning, whereas, the alarm would have been given late yesterday afternoon. If they were trading on this in the hope that they would be well clear of the area before Colonel Templar took any steps to inform the police, there was a chance-a slim one, but it was there-that they could be caught unexpectedly in a road block somewhere along the autobahn.
And then suddenly, with a sickening pang of dismay, the frightened girl saw in her mind, as clearly as if she had been looking at a photograph, the breakfast room at home.
With her school books on the table.
In her distress at the scene she had witnessed from the balcony, she had run straight out of the house without giving them another thought. As soon as her mother saw them there she would know that Cora had come home early for some reason ... and she would guess at once that she must have seen or heard something of the debauch with the Burgomaster and the unknown man in her bedroom. Knowing, or believing that she knew, that Cora's absence was because of this, she would do everything in her power to reassure Colonel Templar that there was nothing suspicious about it. She might even say that she had allowed Cora to go and stay with friends for the night.
Her father might not even miss her until this evening when she failed to arrive from school again. And even if her mother had confided in him the fact that she had run away, she would have taken care to disguise or gloss over the real reason, so that in any case he would imagine it was simply some school girl excess rather than a case of foul play.
So the police might not be looking for her at all!
Feeling more frightened and more alone than she ever had in her life, the voluptuous young brunette shrank back against the cushions as she cast frenziedly about her for some ray of hope, some idea, however farfetched, that might offer a way out of her predicament.
"Hey, Lisa!" the bulky youth sitting opposite her called out suddenly to the blonde in the front seat. "Don't you think maybe it's time our friend here started her training sessions?"
The blonde turned around, her wide lips curving into a sadistic smile and her eyes glinting. "Klaus," she said, "you're right! Stefan-take over the wheel at the next pullout ... and you, Heinz, go and help Klaus and Kurt in the back."
Cora's lips were trembling. What could they mean? She watched in dread as Stefan rose and stood swaying slightly, crouched between the front seats while the boy with the unlit cigarette steered the minibus at full speed into a wooded parking area at the side of the turnpike. They passed a line of heavy trucks, slackened speed, and then, as Heinz took his foot from the throttle pedal, changed places adroitly before the Volkswagen had rolled to a standstill. Seconds later they were speeding down the curving slip road to rejoin the autobahn.
As Lisa turned around to kneel on the passenger seat with her arms crossed on the back, Heinz moved into the rear of the vehicle and stood, his head bent forward by the roof, towering above the fearful girl.
"Take your clothes off," he said quietly.
"W-w-what did you say?" Cora gasped.
"You heard me. Take them off."
"I'll do no such thing!" the captive brunette flared with a pathetic attempt at defiance. "Why, I never heard ... I've never ... I-" She broke off with a cry of pain as Heinz brought up his hand and slapped her viciously across the face.
Instinctively she raised her arms to ward off the blow, but Kurt and Klaus moved up quickly behind her and pinioned them to her sides. Heinz shifted his unlit cigarette to the other side of his mouth and began methodically to slap her again, using both hands to assault each side of her face alternately ... short, hard, cruel blows that rocked her head on her shoulders, brought tears spurting from her eyes, and made her ears ring intolerably.
Once, twice, three times, four times, five times, six times he brought his open palm cracking across her tender flesh.
Cora screamed, writhing and jerking in her captors' arms as she sought vainly to escape the punishing slaps. By the time he stopped, to stand swaying slightly with the motion of the vehicle, surveying her through slitted eyes, she was sobbing uncontrollably.
She raised frantic eyes-and for an instant her gaze locked in the driving mirror with the troubled glance of Stefan. But before any communication could pass between them he had shifted his angle of vision nervously back to the road, staring through the streaming glass swept by the wiper blades at the monotonous gray landscape rushing toward them.
Below the mirror Lisa's blonde head was poised expectantly, her parted lips glistening and her eyes brittle bright with anticipation.
"Go on, Heinz," she said. "Give her a couple more-just to make the point!"
But the remorseless hand exploded twice more savagely against each smarting cheek. "All right," Heinz panted when he had finished. "Now-are you going to take your clothes off, or do we have to tear them off?"
"Please!" the terrified teenager sobbed. "Please...." She lifted her imploring, tearstained face toward him, the cheeks striped crimson with the marks of his fingers.
He raised his hand again.
"All right!" Cora screamed, cowering back against the two who were holding her arms. "All right! Anything ... I'll do anything. But don't hit me again!"
With trembling hands, as Kurt and Klaus relaxed their grasp on her arms, she unzipped her parka and hauled the black cashmere jersey over her dark head. Klaus drew in his breath with a hiss as the tender flesh of her full, high-set young breasts, snugly encased in their simple white nylon brassiere, came into view.
Under the watchful eyes of the three young men and the blonde in the front seat, the shivering girl bent down and took off her sneakers and jeans, a hot flush of embarrassment turning the marks on her face an even deeper red.
Now she stood before them, her head hanging with shame, naked except for the brassiere and a flimsy white triangle of nylon panties at her loins.
"Take those off too," Heinz ordered.
"B-b-but...." Cora faltered piteously, "but I'll be cold!"
For the first time she saw him smile. "Not with what you'll be doing!" he said grimly. "Take them off!"
Whimpering softly, she reached behind her to unfasten the clasp of her brassiere. A moment later, her tautly budding breasts with their sensitive uptilted nipples sprang free, and she slid the flimsy garment down her arms to the floor. As she bent once more to strip the panties from the smoothly rounded taper of her legs, Lisa scrambled over the seat and joined them in the back. "All right," she said crisply. "Kurt, spread the rug. You others, look after the girl."
"W-w-what are you going to do?" Cora quavered fearfully.
"I told you we had plans for you," Lisa said with a malicious smile. "But I don't think you'll have enough experience to carry them out ... yet. So, like I said, we're going to give you a little training session. Right now!"
As Kurt spread a tartan steamer rug on the floor between the seats, Cora burst into tears and hid her face in her hands. Pitiful incoherent pleadings forced their muffled way through her clenched fingers as her naked shoulders quivered and her chest heaved with racking sobs. "Don't ... please...! Let me go...! Please don't do it...."
Behind the wheel, Stefan cursed suddenly, shifted down, braked, and then swerved around a slow-moving car pulling out in front of him as he overtook a heavy truck.
With her eyes hidden by her hands, Cora was unprepared for the maneuver. She was thrown off balance, and fell to the floor. At once the three youths leaped on her and threw her back across the rug.
Kneeling behind her, Kurt seized her wrists and stretched her arms above her head while Klaus and Heinz, grasping an ankle each, hauled her legs brutally apart.
The petite brunette teenager lay naked and defenseless before her captors, spread-eagled and open, as cruelly stretched as a victim on a medieval torture rack!
Shuddering with terror, she gazed wild-eyed from face to pitiless face as they stared lasciviously at the quivering mounds of her breasts, the softly trembling bulge of her young belly, and the dark triangle of soft pussy hair nestling up between her lewdly splayed legs.
Dear God! There was nothing she could do against four of them! Shut away in the speeding minibus as it roared northward along the interminable autobahn, she was utterly alone and at their mercy! The only victory she could win was a mental one: They could conquer her body, as she knew now they must, but it would be an empty triumph if her spirit remained unbeaten.
Stretched helpless on the throbbing floor of the Volkswagen, she lay listening to the whine of the flat four-cylinder motor, the rumble of wheels beneath her, and the swish of tires on the wet road as she closed her eyes and prayed for strength.
Abruptly she opened them again as an alien touch on her flesh drew an involuntary gasp from her trembling lips.
Lisa was kneeling between her spread thighs pawing obscenely at the soft flesh of her belly with slender, red-nailed hands. "Veery nice!" the sadistic German girl said tauntingly. Her hand moved lewdly upward, caressing the fullness of one firm breast. "Now you just lie back, sweetie, and take your choice: You can cooperate, and we'll all have fun; or you can try and fight it, and just the four of us will have the fun. It's up to you!"
They took her, one by one, the girl first.
Then it was Heinz's turn.
As the ravished girl sobbed and gasped, squirming and struggling against the cruel grips pinioning her hands and feet, he arched his own hips, slowly withdrawing the raping cock until only the throbbing head was only just inside the clasping mouth of her cunt. "My God, but it's tight in there!" he panted. And then, tensing the muscles of his buttocks, he thrust the whole stiffened length of his big pulsating penis relentlessly back in again.
For the third time, Cora screamed, but her cry was less frantic and less wild than before. As the German boy began a slow, teasing in-and-out rocking movement of his hips, plunging and withdrawing the rigid staff of his penis, she became gradually accustomed to the thick pole of inflexible flesh wedging apart her tender vaginal walls.
Lisa's breath was hissing between her teeth. "Go on, Heinz!" she urged. "Give it to her! Ram it into her! Fuck that cock so far up that she can taste it!"
Panting with lustful excitement, Heinz increased the speed and power of his thrusts. His groin slammed rhythmically down against Cora's loins, his thick hardened cock plowing in and out of her ravaged little pussy as her spread-eagled body jerked and twitched with the fury of his assault.
Slowly the mewling sobs tearing at the cute teenager's laboring lungs altered their quality. Once more the unbidden flickers of lustful arousal stabbed through her nerves with mounting intensity. Her hot young cunt was aflame once more with wanton desire as Heinz pounded his raping cock with ever-increasing violence into the scalding wet depths of her belly. Forgotten was her humiliation, forgotten the shame, forgotten the bestial violation she was suffering. The demons of lust were dancing again, and the sole thought left in her passion-crazed mind was that he must go on and on forever and ever.
But as she mouthed out her incoherent cries of lewd encouragement, Heinz's body suddenly stiffened. A strangled groan burst from his open mouth as his hips shuddered convulsively-and his expanding penis rammed far up into Cora's wetly clasping cunt began a wild staccato jerking that spewed his white-hot cum in spurts against the neck of her womb.
She moaned her disappointment aloud as she felt the savagely invading shaft wilt and deflate. God Almighty, she was being brutally raped, and now that it was over she wanted more! More than anything else in the whole world she needed cock! It was humiliating, it was degrading, it was wicked and depraved, and it meant that her mind was totally subjugated by the clamoring demands of her sensually awakened body ... but she had to have more cock!
Writhing frenziedly between the imprisoning hands, she was dimly aware of Heinz's penis pulling free of her demanding cunt with a sucking squelch. As he scrambled to one side, leaving a long string of sticky sperm trailing across her naked thigh, she saw Lisa make a sign to the other two youths ... and a moment later her hands and legs were free, and Kurt was hunched down between her trembling legs as he unzipped his fly and yanked out his long, thin, eagerly upstanding shaft of hard flesh.
Involuntarily she reached for him, hauling down his head as she arched her pelvis upward, frantically kissing his lips, his nose, his eyes, as her tongue slavered over his handsome face. Then, gasping in hoarse passion, she guided the wet seeping head of his cock straight into the gaping chasm of her hungrily yearning vagina, his lean young body wringing a deep groan of contentment from her lips as he rammed his angrily throbbing cock as deep as it would lunge into her quivering pussy.
Cora strained against him, wanting him even deeper, wanting him further still up this insanely quivering cunt of hers! "Go on!" she gasped in a frenzy of lustful abandon. "Go on ... deeper ... deeper ... fuck deeper! ... Oh, God! You're not getting in far enough!....
Kurt speared his tongue hotly into her wide-open mouth, hoping to compensate, the saliva from his working lips drooling into her throat. Rapidly, she sucked on it, her body caught up in a crazy vortex of naked raw lust, a whirlwind of desire such as she had never known existed! Cock! Cock! Cock! That was all she wanted, all she would ever want again, now that she had felt it. She had to have cock!
The German boy's pulsating penis pistoned mercilessly into her, splatting pelvis against pelvis with every brutal hammering thrust. He was bringing her almost to climax with the savage drubbing of his body alone! ... And then suddenly, as she bucked wantonly, maddeningly, uncontrollably beneath him, she sensed his plunging rod of flesh stiffen without warning, squirting its heated liquid passion far up into the obscenely milking walls of her tortured womb.
The lustfully aroused brunette cried aloud in frustration and disappointment. She'd been so nearly there! The peak had been only a fraction away! How could they do this to her? Straining crazily for his deflating cock until he pulled it from her with a wet sluicing sound, she twisted from under him, passionately calling for more, more, more, as the fires of unassuaged desire raged on in her loins.
Tears streamed from her eyes as she saw the astonished face of Kurt swim away from her; she gazed unseeingly up through the windshield of the Volkswagen, past the swishing wiper blades at the gray skies and the rain still falling in torrents. She turned her head mindlessly from side to side as she thrust her empty loins convulsively into the air.
And then suddenly she saw it!
They were crowded around Klaus. The other two youths were stripping his pants off and Lisa was obscenely milking his shaft. Cora stared at it unbelievingly: it couldn't be true!
She gaped at them as they guided him between her thighs, gaped at the giant penis rearing up from his muscular belly like a third arm with a huge pair of fists beneath it balled between his legs. It was monstrous! It was the most frightening thing she had ever seen!
There was silence-broken only by the hum of the Volkswagen bus's motor and tires on the wet autobahn as Cora gazed wildly around the circle of lustfully intent young faces. Suddenly, she was afraid. For a moment the demons retreated again, and she drew her thighs tightly against her belly, locking them together as fear snaked through her veins. It couldn't be true she thought in terror. None of it could be true!
Good God, Klaus would split her wide open! He wasn't human! That horrendous cock would tear her apart!
The three other faces came closer, avid for the marvel about to take place before them. Heinz and Kurt squatted beside her on the rug, wrenching her legs far apart and then bending her writhing body double so that her toes touched the floor behind her and she gasped aloud with the stretching pain. Her entire vaginal plane was offered up to the kneeling German youth in defenseless sacrifice ... and then Lisa, leaning over with a depraved smile twisting her scarlet lips, reached out to splay apart with her middle finger and thumb the delicate coral slit nestling among Cora's soft pussy hair.
Klaus's eyes glistened with anticipation as he stared greedily at the helplessly upturned cunt before him. As he shuffled his bulky body forward, the blond gang leader plunged the fingers of her other hand between the swollen hair-fringed lips of Cora's plundered vagina and smoothed the secretions streaming wetly from it around the quivering lips, lubricating the way.
Recoiling from her obscene touch, the helpless teenager gaped up between her splayed thighs in awed terror at the huge bulging penis inching slowly toward the vulnerable crevice up between her legs. Her tremendous passion of a few minutes before quenched by the fearsome sight, she was unable to drag her eyes from the horrifying instrument that was only seconds away from ripping her tight young cunt into a million shards of agony. For a moment she froze in abject stillness.
Then, without warning, Klaus tensed his loins, and she unexpectedly found herself lifting her pelvis upward as if she was under some kind of evil spell, searching with her gaping cunt for the massive rod of flesh that was going to split her apart! She wanted it, she realized with a thrill of horror! She cringed in terror from its size ... but she wanted it! And in the next extraordinary hour of lust, she had it! Every last wonderful inch of it!
CHAPTER FIVE
Stefan cursed and pulled over on the hard shoulder of the road. "We're out of gas!" he announced.
The crash came when they were actually on the outskirts of Hamburg. Night had fallen. The Volkswagen had just passed under the massive iron girders of the Elbe bridge, and the darkly shining surface of the three-lane carriageway was glittering with a confusion of reflected lights-an endless succession of glaring headlamps approaching, the flashing scarlet and green and blue neon of factory signs, an infinity of crimson tail-lights, winking amber direction indicators, the sudden red flare of brake lamps, all cast dazzling streamers of color along the wet asphalt.
They came up fast on a knot of slow-moving traffic. Ahead of them a sixty-ton articulated truck pulled out suddenly to overtake a long trailer loaded with two bulldozers. Kurt, who was driving in the center lane, flashed his indicators and pulled over to the left to pass the two juggernauts. But just before he drew level a small sports car, its exhaust crackling, shot right across the road from the inside lane in an attempt to get through in front of him.
Swearing, Kurt braked and signaled his intention to resume the center lane. But at the very last moment the driver of the sports car, perhaps catching sight of the Volkswagen's lights in his mirror, decided against the maneuver and tucked in behind the outer truck.
To avoid running into the back of him, Kurt was forced to wrench at the wheel and swerve momentarily back into the fast lane-this time without signaling.
The driver of the heavy Mercedes sedan coming up behind him at 120 miles an hour didn't have a chance. His brake lights blazed momentarily; his headlamps flashed as he leaned on the horn ring ... and then the big car, slewing drunkenly sideways under the fierce braking, slammed with devastating force into the Volkswagen's rear quarter.
Over the thunderous impact of the collision the shrill scream of tires on the wet road lanced the night. The minibus, struck with shattering violence by two tons of machinery going at almost twice its speed, catapulted forward to smash savagely into the solid back of the truck, bounced from there into the rear of the trailer, spun around twice and finally crunched to a halt against a steel guard rail on the hard shoulder.
The Mercedes, its nearside fender crumpled against the wheel by the shock, skidded crazily across the greasy surface of the road, cannoned off a concrete mile-post, shot back to the central reservation, and over turned in a shower of mud and breaking glass.
Both the truck and the trailer, hardly damaged in the accident, lurched slightly and then rolled to a stop with a hiss of their powerful air brakes. The sports car, miraculously escaping harm, had dodged back into the outside lane and accelerated away toward the city.
For Cora Templar, hunched shuddering in the back of the minibus, the crash was just one more nightmare to follow the others. Her sudden wild hope of rescue when they ran out of gasoline had been dashed as soon as it was born; there were spare jerri cans under one of the seats. Later, as the dusk thickened over the rain-swept heath north of Hannover, she had been brutally forced to suck off each of the male youths in turn and finally lick the cunt of the sadistic Lisa herself. And it was not so much the ruthless subjugation of her innocent body to their vile demands that worried her-it was the horrifying realization that, despite the shame and humiliation flooding over her at this second debasement, there had been a part of her that had actually enjoyed, even reveled in, the debauch!
She wasn't watching the road when the accident occurred. The world erupted without warning into an inferno of noise and movement in which the monstrous clangor of the collision, the shriek of tortured metal, the squeal of tires, and the splintering of glass all combined with a sudden stunning blow on the back of her head to render her temporarily senseless.
When the red mists cleared from her eyes and the clamor in her ears subsided she was standing shuddering in the pouring rain with Stefan and Heinz supporting her by the arms. Her clothes, which she had only been allowed to put back on a few minutes before, were already drenched. Her head ached abominably and there was a painful graze on her right arm.
Beyond the silver spears of rain lancing through the headlamp beams of cars and trucks already halted by the accident, she could see figures moving. There was a crowd in the center of the road. A Citroen sedan had turned around with its spotlights facing the wrong way to warn approaching traffic of the hold-up. In the garish illumination of a neon factory sign on the far side of the autobahn, a short stout man in glasses-presumably the driver of the Mercedes, miraculously unhurt-was gesticulating wildly toward the gaping door of his overturned sedan.
There were voices shouting near her. She turned to her left and saw the wreckage of the Volkswagen. The whole of the front was smashed into an unrecognizable tangle of twisted steel in the middle of which a single screen wiper jerked uselessly to and fro like the leg of a dying insect.
Through the distorted gap where the windshield had been, the top half of Kurt's body slumped with lifelessly hanging arms. Mercifully his face was hidden, but occasional gouts of blood and brains still splashed sluggishly down from his shattered skull to the crumpled bodywork.
Averting her eyes with a shiver of horror, Cora wondered why none of the people milling around had at least tried to remove him from the telescoped cab. A moment later she saw why.
A loud-voiced man with a powerful electric torch was striding down the line of halted vehicles, attempting to guide the crawling traffic past the fragments of twisted steel and glass littering the road. For an instant the beam of light swung across and lit up the wrecked interior of the minibus.
In the fraction of a second before it was plunged into darkness again, the dazed teenager saw with ghastly clarity the jagged shaft of the steering post, glistening a gruesome red, projecting between the dead boy's shoulder-blades.
As his head and shoulders had been hurled through the windshield, the dreadful impact of the collision had forced the offside wheel up into the Volkswagen's floor and driven the column straight through his chest, impaling him like a moth on a board!
Choking down her nausea, Cora turned aside to see Klaus, limping heavily, help Lisa around the battered rear end of the vehicle. The blonde's hair was in rats tails around her shoulders and there was an ugly gash bleeding on her forehead, but otherwise she seemed unhurt. Shot violently forward by the shock, the five of them had been saved by the front seats, against which they had ended up in a tangled heap, bruised and shaken but still alive.
Looking carefully away from the front of the Volkswagen, Lisa leaned close to Heinz and whispered: "Might as well let her try it here. We can take advantage of the situation now that it's arrived."
"Right," he murmured back with a crooked grin. "It might even go better here than it would in the middle of the city!"
She nodded. "I'll tip off Stefan," she said in a low voice.
Numbed with shock, Cora paid no attention. In a sudden silence that fell over the nightmare scene, she heard the raindrops sizzling gently against the hot metal of the wagon's wrecked motor.
And then suddenly she became aware that the grip on her arms had relaxed a little. Her captors were muttering together and seemed almost to have forgotten her! What on earth was she thinking of, standing here meekly like an obedient child! She wanted to escape, didn't she? Well here was a God-sent opportunity; if she couldn't get away now, she never would!
Summoning all her energy, she drew a deep breath and wrenched her arms suddenly free. Ten yards away, the driver of one of the trucks was standing talking to a crash-helmeted motorcyclist and another man. Frantically she rushed towards them as she heard Stefan and Heinz shout behind her.
"Help!" the terrified girl cried as she ran. "Help me! Please help ... you've got to protect me! Keep them away from me, please!"
The truck driver swung round-a tough little man with a seamed and weather-beaten face. "What's that you say?" he demanded. "You were a passenger in the Volks, weren't you, Fraulein? God, you were lucky to-"
"Listen to me!" the sobbing brunette interrupted. "You've got to listen to me! I'm being kidnapped! They were taking me away!"
"Kidnapped!" the motorcyclist echoed. "You can't be serious!"
"I am, I am," Cora babbled, glancing fearfully over her shoulder. "They tricked me into it ... back in Konigswinter ... Five of them ... they're taking me away! Please ... don't let them get at me!...."
Beside the shattered minibus, Lisa touched Heinz on the arm. "That should be enough to do the trick," she said. "You three go get her; I'll see you over there." As they strode purposefully toward the frenzied American girl, she climbed unobtrusively over the steel guard rail beside the road and hurried across a stretch of wasteland beyond which street lamps charted the course of a service road between two factories.
Cora screamed as she saw the three youths approach. "Don't let them touch me!" she cried as she dodged behind the truck driver.
"Thanks, mate," Heinz said to the driver. "We'll take care of her now. She got a nasty bump on the head and she doesn't know what she's saying."
"Just a minute," the driver protested. "The young lady says-"
"I told you: she got hit on the head."
"Don't believe him!" Cora sobbed. "They were taking me away."
"Come, my dear: we'll take you home," Stefan said firmly, reaching for Cora's arm. The truck driver planted himself firmly in front of the terrified girl. "I don't know about that," he said belligerently. "The lady says she wants protection. I think we'd better hear a little more about it."
"Get out of my way!" Stefan said through set teeth.
"Better wait until the police come, if you ask me," the motorcyclist said. "Maybe she's telling the truth. Maybe she isn't. Let them sort it out."
"She's coming with us," Klaus said curtly. "Now."
"Not while I'm here...."the truck driver began.
The three youths exploded into action. Klaus pivoted on his heel and struck the motorcyclist a terrible blow on the point of the jaw. The helmeted head snapped back, the man crashed to the ground to lie motionless with widespread arms on the wet pavement. At the same time, Stefan swung at the truck driver-but the little man blocked the punch expertly with the palm of one hand and jabbed a ferocious left into the boy's stomach. Stefan grunted and doubled forward. The driver drew back his arm again ... but Heinz chopped brutally at the side of his neck with the edge of his hand as Klaus hit him viciously on the temple from the other side. The little man gave a choking gasp and sagged at the knee. A moment later he slumped unconscious at their feet.
The third man, a pale, sandy-haired individual with spectacles, had retreated hastily at the first sign of violence. Heinz raced after him and caught him by the shoulder, swinging him around savagely as the other two seized the screaming Cora and carried her struggling toward the safety fence.
"I don't want any trouble!" the sandy-haired man stuttered in abject terror. "I-believe you! You take her if you like! It's no business of mine, honestly. I don't want any trouble!" He cringed away from the lean-faced youth, shivering with fright.
"Want it or not, brother, you got it!" Heinz said with a malevolent grin. Without relaxing his hold on the cowering man, he punched him once pitilessly in the solar plexus. The sandy man's breath whooshed out of his lungs and he dropped instantly to the wet ground, to lie whimpering with his arms crossed over his head.
Heinz shrugged contemptuously and turned to run after the others.
Before the bystanders had realized any thing was amiss, the kidnapped teenager, slung over Klaus's shoulder with Heinz's cruel hand clamped over her mouth, was being rushed across the vacant lot to join the waiting Lisa.
Colonel Templar adjusted the spectacles on his nose and riffled through the Telex sheets on his desk. He was a spare, hard-muscled man of forty with a clipped, dark mustache and gray eyes in a face now -lined with worry and fatigue.
"This seems to be it," he said tersely, selecting a sheet and holding it up. "I just got these from the Chief of Police."
"What is it, Alec?" Eileen Templar asked nervously, shifting her position in the visitor's chair on the other side of the desk. "Not ... bad news, I hope? I couldn't bear it if...."
"Depends," her husband said. "At least she's alive-if it's her. And this seems to me the most likely of the lot. Report circulated by the Bureau of Missing Persons in Hamburg, forwarded to them by the department dealing with road accidents."
"Accidents?" Eileen faltered. "Oh, God! Not ...?"
"Cool it, for God's sake!" the Colonel said irritably. "No need to get in a state about it!" He read the paper in his hand: "Accident on the Hamburg-Hannover autobahn last night ... Volkswagen minibus and Mercedes sedan in collision with a couple of trucks ... one dead, none seriously injured ... dark teenage girl, apparently unhurt, speaking German with a strong English or American accent, broke away from the survivors in the Volkswagen and claimed she was being kidnapped."
"Kidnapped!" his wife echoed faintly. "Oh, Alec...."
"Asked one of the truck drivers and two bystanders for protection," Templar continued, "but three German youths attacked them ... beat them up and left them lying in the road ... took the girl away before anyone else could intervene. Truck driver reported it to the police as soon as they arrived on the scene."
"But who on earth...?" Eileen demanded bewilderedly. "Who in God's name would want to kidnap Cora? And why?"
"I think I have an idea," the Colonel said grimly. He scanned the Telex sheet again. "The dead man's name was given as Kurt Frodenberg ... twenty-two years old ... driver of the Volkswagen. And it seems there was a blonde girl with them of about the same age. That figures."
"I don't understand."
"Anarchists," Templar said briefly. "Do anything they can to discredit the Americans, the French, the British-even the goddamn Russkis! Frodenberg was known to have been mixed up with a group that's been active for some months now ... here, in Hamburg, in Dusseldorf, in Munich. We think they were behind the murder of that policeman after the demonstration the other night, but we can't prove it." He paused and then added significantly: "A group led by a blonde girl of about twenty-two...."
"But what on earth would they want with our Cora?" Eileen asked. "I mean I don't see the point ... if it was her ... what good would it do them after all?"
Templar sighed. "That's just what I intend to find out," he said forcefully. "I'm leaving for Hamburg right away."
"But I don't understand," Cora Templar wailed. "Why do you hate the Americans so much? What harm did we ever do you?"
"You're the main pillars of a rotten society that's got to be destroyed," Lisa replied. "If it wasn't for your lousy money, this decadent German regime would have tottered long ago."
They were sitting under a naked electric bulb in a small shuttered room at the top of an old house in the St. Pauli district of Hamburg. Cora had no idea how she had got there; somebody had clapped a pad soaked with a sickly, sweet-smelling substance over her mouth and nose as soon as they had reached the far side of the waste ground beyond the autobahn-and the next thing she had known, she was in this bare, cell-like attic room furnished only with a single bed and a rickety chair.
She had no idea what time it was, or whether it was day or night. The shutters were locked and no light of any kind penetrated the two small windows. She remembered sleeping, she remembered awakening and being given food and drink, she remembered-although she preferred to forget-having submitted to her captors' sexual demands, both male and female, again and again in the intervening periods. But of how much time had elapsed, she had no idea. The nightmare journey from Siegsdorff seemed a hundred years ago. When this nightmare would end, she had no idea.
Now, wearing only a terrycloth robe they had given her, she lay on the bed talking to the German girl, trying to make some sense out of her abduction and the extraordinary circumstances surrounding it.
"Are you Communists, then?" she asked.
"Good God no!" Lisa said angrily. "Their society's as rotten as yours! The West is stifling through overindulgence and corruption; the East is stifling through narrow-mindedness and bureaucracy. Both of them have got to go before there's any real freedom!"
"And you're helping them on their way?"
"The East will destroy itself ultimately," the blonde explained loftily. "Because of the money your country's pouring into Europe, the revolution will take longer here. People are too well fed and too complacent to bother. So it's left to groups like ours to take the initiative."
"But what are you trying to do?" Cora asked bewilderedly.
"I told you. This society's too complex and the capitalists have the reins too firmly in their hands-for it to be altered. It's got to be destroyed, totally destroyed, before anything worthwhile can be built."
"But supposing you did destroy it-what would you put in its place?"
"Others who come after us can decide that," Lisa said. "It's enough for us to hasten in whatever way we can its destruction. And one of the ways is to get you and people like you thrown out of Europe. If we can get the Americans discredited by showing them up for what they are, the disintegration will be that much quicker!"
"And you think it's right to kill people ... to have innocent folks suffer ... just because it suits your plans?"
"In all revolutionary movements the few have to suffer in the cause of the many," Lisa said virtuously.
The captive brunette sighed and shook her dark head. "I still don't see what good it does you, having kidnapped me!"
"You're not supposed to see. But it will help certain plans we have."
"How?"
"You ask too many questions. Take off that robe and lie down."
"Oh no!" Cora gasped. "Please ... not again!"
"Yes again," the German blonde girl said inexorably. "And again and again and again, just as often as we want." Her red-nailed fingers dropped to the captive girl's exposed thigh and moved lasciviously toward the vee of dark, silky pubic hair showing between the open edges of the loose robe.
The American girl was crying now. "Please!" she sobbed, clamping her legs together and drawing the garment tighter around her. "Please...." She didn't want to do this because, God help her, she was beginning to like it ... beginning to like being Lisa's love slave ... beginning to love being brought to orgasm by the gang males. "No," Cora said in a sudden defiance, "I'm not going to ... anymore!"
Lisa drew back her hand and slashed her viciously across the face. "Do what you're told, you little bitch!" she snapped. "Take that thing off and lie on your back holding your cunt open, or I'll get Heinz in to beat you into obedience!"
As Cora cried out with pain and alarm, the urgent shrilling of a telephone sounded in an adjoining room. For an instant both girls, the prisoner and the jailer, froze. They heard the scrape of a chair, a man's voice speaking, the sound of footsteps. The door opened and Heinz put his head into the room. "That was Elsa," he said briefly. "In one hour's time."
A slow smile spread over Lisa's face. "Saved by the bell," she said to Cora. "Quite literally! Well-you were asking how it helped us, having you here. Now you're going to find out!"
"W-w-w-what do you mean?" the frightened teenager quavered.
"Usually," the blonde explained, "when someone's kidnapped the ransom's paid by somebody else. Then, if they're lucky, they're set free."
"B-bb-but you said ... you said you weren't asking a ransom for m-m-m-me."
"We're not-in the usual sense. If you want to be set free, the price has been paid by you yourself."
"I don't understand," Cora said tearfully. "I don't understand any of it."
"You don't have to. But if you ever want to get out of here alive," Lisa said with a harsh, menacing note in her voice, "you've got to do something for us ... and you've got to do it exactly as you're told ... or else! Now listen carefully while I tell you what you do...."
CHAPTER SIX
The St. Pauli district lies to the west of Hamburg, on the right bank of the river. The rich bankers and industrialists of the city, being driven home in their Mercedes and Opels to the shady mansions of the expensive suburb of Blankenese, switch on the interior lights of their limousines and bury their noses in their papers as they drive through. Respectable inhabitants of the center eye tourists and newcomers warily, fearful that they may ask the way of the notorious Reeperbahn, that street of sin that bisects St. Pauli. Hamburg citizens, in fact, seem slightly ashamed of their entertainment area.
But the Reeperbahn is no unsavoury back-street alley. To begin with it's almost two miles long and about as wide as the Champs Elysees in Paris. Behind the jammed car parks and service roads bordering its curving, tree-fringed length, glittering lines of theaters, cinemas, clubs, and restaurants tempt the reveler with money to spend. For in St. Pauli entertainment is big business-and business is as usual twenty-four hours a day, with every conceivable taste catered to.
At the far end of the avenue the more sinful establishments prosper. The cinemas are blue; the clubs offer entertainments more bizarre than beautiful; the whores choke the doorways. There's a cabaret where the floorshow presents naked women wrestling in liquid mud; another that challenges its clients to ride a donkey drunk on buckets of beer; a third specializing in transvestism and flagellation. They used to tell a story in Hamburg about a rich American visiting a St. Pauli club, empty except for a handsome dark girl sitting at the piano. After waiting some minutes, the American asks: "Don't I get any service around here? Where's the waiter?"
"So sorry," the girl said. "The waiter's in love with the hat-check boy, and tonight's the hat-check boy's night off."
"Well, couldn't the chef come and take my order?"
"Alas," the girl sighs, "Tuesday is the night the chef is beaten by the doorman of the club across the street."
"Well, what about the doorman here?"
"His friend is a sailor-and he's on furlough right now."
"Hell," the American says disgustedly, "doesn't anyone around here like girls?"
The lady at the piano strikes a chord. "What do you think I come here for?" she says.
There are two streets in the strip-club area called the Grosse Freiheit and the Kleine Freiheit-the Greater and the Lesser Freedom-where once the whores sat in shop windows waiting to be hired. But the shutters are permanently closed now and the bust-and-belly business has taken over. Instead, a block away, rises the multistory steel and concrete Eros Center-the only apartment block in the world inhabited exclusively by prostitutes, who promenade in its central courtyard hoping to attract clients to their king-sized beds above.
Beside the police station is the Zillertal-a huge, gaudy restaurant noisily featuring those three B's-beer, brass bands, and belching-that represent Bavaria's contribution to the humor of the world.
And across the road from the Zillertal is the sole remaining of the "little streets" of St. Pauli-the Herbertstrasse.
Barred off at each end with urinal-like steel partitions carrying huge warnings forbidding entry to minors, the Herbertstrasse is only just over a hundred yards long. The bulbs in the street lamps are pink. An old man plays a sentimental tune on an accordion in one corner. And along the broad cobbled precinct, in the shadows of the one cul-de-sac that leads off it, a constant flow of men-a surprising number with a wife or girl on one arm-promenade the thirty-odd brothels whose madams rent the three-story houses on the street.
In the wide ground-floor picture windows sit the girls ... fat girls, thin girls, black girls, white girls, big-breasted jolly girls in decollete nightgowns, severe girls in corsets with whips tucked into their boots, girls in leather, girls in rubber, girls in fishnet tights, and girls in skin-hugging wool catsuits. Whatever your fetish, whatever your fantasy, you have only to knock on the window and ask. The Herbertstrasse (theme tune: "I Can Give You Anything But Love, Baby") can cope.
And it was to the Herbertstrasse, two miles from the center with the precise verticals of its buildings bordering the lakeside lawns of the Alster, that Cora Templar was brought shortly after Lisa and her companions had received their telephone call from the mysterious Elsa.
Shivering with apprehension, her arms tightly held by Heinz and Klaus, the kidnapped girl followed the sadistic blonde along the rain-wet street and across the crowded, traffic-jammed width of the Reeperbahn. Because it was the season of Fasching, there was a special Bavarian night at the Zillertal and the sidewalks were reeling with drunken, perspiring southerners, red-faced and paunchy, some of them in costume and many wearing domino masks. Through this walpurgisnacht of shrill laughter, bawdy pleasantries, and beery breath, the frightened teenager was hustled, past the barriers, past the men with calculating eyes, into the rose-red street which tonight wore a festive, almost a family air of relaxation.
They hurried to the door of one of the houses in the cul-de-sac. The picture windows were brightly lit but there were no girls sitting on display behind them. Lisa's knock was answered at once by a tall, big-breasted woman in black with a hard, enameled face. She nodded to the blonde German girl and said briefly: "Upstairs. Number six on the second floor."
"Thanks, Elsa," Lisa said. Beckoning to her companions and their captive, she began to climb a narrow staircase at the back of the hallway.
"Isn't Stefan here?" Klaus asked as they mounted behind her.
Lisa shook her head. "He went to collect the green Volks. Heinrich brought it up from Siegsdorff today. We're going to meet at his studio later in Oldenburg. But Stefan should be here in a few minutes."
"I hope so," Heinz said. "Because we're going to need him for-"
"Don't worry," the blonde cut in. "It's all taken care of."
They led Cora into a small room stuffy with central heating. There was a low divan covered with black satin against one wall. Two chairs, an old-fashioned wardrobe, a washbasin and bidet behind a screen, and several large mirrors completed the furnishings. A table lamp with a red bulb provided the only illumination.
Lisa opened the wardrobe and took out a black leather corset with trailing laces, a pair of high-heeled knee boots, and a black papier-mache face mask with elastic earpieces. "Put these on," she ordered.
Cora's face was a study in bewilderment. "But I don't understand," she began tearfully.
"How many times do I have to tell you-you don't have to understand!" the blonde snapped. "Take off your clothes and put those on!"
Repressing a sob, the voluptuous young brunette reluctantly undressed and drew on the black boots. When they were tight enough for Lisa's satisfaction, she stood helplessly in the hot room, her softly curved body gleaming whitely in the seductive light, while they laced her into the form-fitting waist corset. Finally, Lisa handed her the mask.
"Why do I have to...?" Cora faltered.
"Will you do what you're told? All you have to do is follow our instructions. I've explained already: there's a certain client of this establishment we wish to compromise. All you need to know is that! You're dressed like this, and you're to wear that mask, because it's the season of Fasching ... it's the custom to dress up in the south, and they follow it here during this week as a sop to their clients from that part of the country."
"But why me? Why must I...?"
"Because the client likes a new girl each time he comes and you happen to be the type he likes. If you do what you're told, you can buy your way out of this-pay your ransom if you like-and we'll let you go. If not...." The blonde nodded toward Heinz.
The lean-faced youth had taken a wicked-looking, short-barreled revolver from his pocket. Cora gasped with fright as he broke the gun, spun the cylinder, and inserted six cartridges into the chambers. "I'll be right here," he said menacingly, going to the wall and tapping a moulding above one of the mirrors. They took the trembling girl into the adjoining room and showed her how there was a spy hole commanding the whole of the room they had just left. "The gun'll be pointing through this gap," Heinz said bleakly, opening the shutter concealing the hole. "I'll be standing here the whole time, watching. And if you take one wrong step-if you breathe a word to the client-there's a slug for each of you! We won't hesitate to kill him too."
Lisa held up a hand for silence. Outside in the passageway, there was the sound of footsteps, a man's voice, a laugh from Elsa, the soft closing of a door. "Right-you know what you have to do," the blonde whispered. "You go on in there and you do exactly what the man says. Exactly. If you do it right, we'll let you go. If not...." She left the sentence unfinished and again jerked her head at Heinz, drawing a hand across her throat in a gruesome gesture.
They took the bewildered teenager back into the corridor, opened the door of the room they had first been in, and pushed her inside. The door closed softly behind her.
She stood shuddering with anticipation. There was a pile of clothes on one of the chairs now and a naked man bending over them. He was tall, lean, and muscular, with a down of dark hairs tracing the course of his spine. Beyond the taut curve of his hip, she could see the rigid staff of his penis jutting from the vee of wiry pubic hair at his loins like a thick quivering arrow. The bulbous, purple head was already emerging from the foreskin. As he heard the girl enter he swung around to face her and Cora repressed a gasp of petrified amazement.
The man whose whims she was there to serve was her own father!
She was aghast, stunned, speechless with horror. Behind the mask, which covered her face from brow to upper lip, she blanched.
What in God's name was he doing here? Did they know? Had he recognized her?
The last question was answered at once, for he moved toward her, his rigidly erect cock wagging from side to side above the sperm-bloated pouch of his testicles, with a lustful expression on his face that she had never seen before. "Very nice!" he said caressingly, reaching out his hand to cup the full globe of one breast as it swelled seductively above the leather corset. "Elsa always did know just what I wanted!"
Cora recoiled away from his familiar touch with a shudder of disgust. This mustn't happen, she thought wildly. It mustn't! But how could she possibly stop it, knowing that Heinz and his gun were so near?
Her heart thudding in her chest, she sat weakly on the divan.
Feasting his eyes lustfully on the triangle of silky hair at her loins, Colonel Templar took his penis in one hand and began skimming the loose skin rapidly up and down the throbbing shaft. "Come on then," he said hoarsely. "You know what to do. Let's get down to it, baby."
Behind her disguise, the girl stared at him piteously.
"G-g-g-get down to it?" she repeated in a quavering voice. What on earth was she supposed to do? What sexual technique was she supposed to know?
"Get your legs up on the bed and roll over on your tits," Templar commanded harshly.
"W-w-w-what do you mean?" Through the slitted eye-holes of the mask, his daughter stared up at him in blank incomprehension.
"Do as I say. Didn't Elsa tell you, for God's sakes? I like coming in the back way."
"The bb-back way? Oh, no!" Cora whimpered as the full realization of the indecent ravishment he was proposing burst on her mind. "Not that, please! You ... you can't do it to me there! You can't...."
Her father chuckled. "I knew Elsa wouldn't let me down!" he said. "I go for a bit of play-acting. It turns me on when you girls play the innocent like that!" Bending down, he seized her legs and yanked them roughly up and over the bed, at the same time twisting her violently so that she was flung face downward on the mattress. Then, as she sobbed helplessly into the pillow, he leaped and kneeled between her widespread naked thighs, forcing them ruthlessly apart with his knees.
The frightened teenager's mind was a chaos of conflicting emotions. She was sickened first of all by the thought of her own father visiting a whorehouse; and the knowledge that he was an old client, coupled with the realization of the horrible, obscene and unnatural thing he wanted to do, upset her more than ever. Why, he was no better than her mother, amusing herself with the local Burgomaster when the Colonel was away! But worst of all, of course, was the fact that he was unsuspectingly about to disgrace his own daughter! How could she possibly allow him to do such a thing?
It would bring him down to the level of Lisa and her vile gang of ravishers! It would destroy for ever the whole secure domestic foundation on which her young life was based!
Yet how could she possibly stop him? The only conceivable way would be to reveal her true identity ... and the spine-chilling thought of the sadistic Heinz and his gun ruled that out from the start. The fanatic German youth would not hesitate to shoot if he thought their plans-whatever they were-were in danger of being thwarted! And even were she not terrified for her own life, the thought that she would automatically sign her father's death-warrant as well was enough to scotch the idea.
At that very moment the strobe flashes of cameras flashed the room into continued streaks of light.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Lisa had what she wanted, the plan had succeeded. She was out of the room with the door slammed shut before he realized what was happening.
The Colonel whirled on his daughter. "What's going on, for God's sakes?" he shouted again, advancing on the cringing girl. "You better spill it fast, baby, or you're going to get the shit beaten out of you!"
The frightened teenager cowered against the bed. "I d-d-d-don't know," she stuttered wildly. "I-I-I ... please...."
"We'll have that mask off for a start," Templar said grimly, reaching for the black domino covering his daughter's face.
But the enraged military man's fingers curled around the edge of the flimsy covering and yanked so savagely that the elastic straps ripped clean away from the mask and he found himself staring into the horrified eyes of his own daughter!
For a timeless instant he gaped at her, thunderstruck with astonishment and total disbelief. "Cora!" he cried wildly. "But how ... Why? ... What on earth?...." And then, dropping his face momentarily into his hands as he remembered. "Oh, my God! ..
Cora flung herself weeping on his naked chest, her hands clasping and unclasping on his muscular shoulders. "Oh, Daddy!" she sobbed helplessly. "Oh, Daddy!...."
Gently but firmly, Templar disengaged himself. "We'll see about this shit!" he said grimly, striding toward the door.
"Daddy, don't!" his daughter screamed. "They'll kill you! They have a gun!"
He shook his head. "Now, now," he said. "I know the way these merchants work. They've already got what they wanted. They'll be out of here in a flash if I don't stop them." He seized the door handle and tugged.
The door was locked.
"Fuck!" Colonel Templar said feelingly. He dashed across to the corner where his clothes were neatly folded over a chair and yanked his revolver holster from the pile of garments.
The holster was empty. His gun was gone.
Breathing heavily, he began frantically dressing himself. "W-w-w-what are you going to do?" his daughter quavered.
"If I can't shoot out the lock, I'll kick the door in," Templar said, drawing on his boots.
"B-bb-bbut suppose they're waiting outside and they-"
"I know what I'm doing," Templar cut in. "They won't!"
"Do you ... do you mean I'm free then?" Cora faltered.
"Yes, darling, you're free. I'm the one that's trapped now!" her father said.
"But I don't understand...." the girl began in bewilderment.
"Later," the Colonel said curtly. He picked up a black leather dress hanging from a hook behind the door and tossed it over. "Put this on over those things. We haven't time to find your own stuff now."
As the voluptuous teenager eased the tightly shining garment over her ripely swelling breasts and smoothed the skirt down past the corset hugging her slender waist, he stepped back three paces and launched himself at the door, shooting out his foot at the last moment to crash against the woodwork just above the lock.
The door shivered but held.
Templar retired and hurled himself forward a second time. His heel thudded jarringly against the wood and the panel above the lock splintered. But still the door remained locked.
Again the American slammed his heel against the woodwork with all his weight behind it. This time the whole panel split from top to bottom and the lock sagged drunkenly from the frame. Templar dragged the door open and charged out into the corridor.
The doors to the three rooms from which Heinz and the others had taken the photographs stood ajar. Each was lit with a low-power red bulb; each was furnished exactly like the one they had just left-a divan, a couple of chairs, large mirrors, a washbasin, an old-fashioned wardrobe. In one, huge photo blowups of naked fat women wrestling occupied a whole wall. In another, a rack supporting a collection of whips, canes, chains, and strange appliances in leather and steel stood next to a bizarre trestle table equipped with wrist and ankle cuffs. The spy hole shutters in all three were open. But of Stefan, Lisa, and the others there was no sign.
Cora sniffed. There was a hint of tobacco in the air and layers of blue smoke wreathed above the crimson lamp. "Now I know they've gone," she said. "Heinz always has an unlit cigarette in his mouth; he only lights it when the job is done!"
"We'll just make sure," the Colonel said grimly.
But the other rooms on the floor were empty and unlit. So were those on the floor below. On the ground floor, the door to the front room with the exhibition windows was open ... but there was nobody there and the lights were out. The front door itself was barred and padlocked.
They hurried through to a kitchen and liquor store at the back. There was a cool, moist draft blowing through an open window and the back door was not quite closed. Outside, they found themselves in a narrow unlit alley parallel with the Herbertstrasse. There was nobody to be seen.
Templar breathed heavily. "Just as I thought," he said. "The birds have flown! They must have taken the place over for the evening and paid Elsa to preside just as though business was as usual! I'll see she never gets the chance to operate again, the bitch!"
Standing beside him on the greasy cobbles, the bright lights from the far end of the alley casting a halo around her dark hair, Cora looked the picture of puzzled bewilderment in the sophisticated knee boots and tight leather dress that served only to accentuate her youth and innocence. "What are you going to do?" she queried nervously.
"Do my damnedest to get my hands on those pictures!" the Colonel said.
"But why? Couldn't we just ... Why not go to the police? There's a precinct house just across the street. I saw it as we came in. It must be just beyond the end of this alley."
"This is not a matter for the police!" her father snapped. "Look-the place where they've been keeping you: is it far? Could you find it again?"
"I ... I think so. It's not far. Just around the corner really. Across that big street with all the lights, and then about two blocks away on the left."
"H'mm ... that must be off the Grosse Freiheit. The car's parked in front of the police station. You can show me the way. Let's go!" Templar said. Seizing the girl's hand, he ran down the alleyway toward the lights.
Dodging through the laughing, singing drunken crowds streaming from the Zillertal, they piled into the Colonel's BMW coupe threaded their way across the traffic choking the Reeperbahn, and drove past the neon signs flashing their invitations to the strip clubs lining the Grosse Freiheit. "I think it's the next on the left," Cora said. "No-the second on the left ... there!"
Passing the Kleine Freiheit, dark and deserted now that the brothels were closed, Templar turned the BMW into a narrow, twisting street. As their headlamp beams illuminated the shuttered facades, they saw a pale green Volkswagen without lights pull away from the curb at the far end of the thoroughfare and disappear around a corner in the direction of the Reeperbahn.
"There they are!" Cora shouted excitedly. "That's it ... that's the house! I recognize it! And that's the car they had down in Siegsdorff ... I heard them say some friend was bringing it back for them!"
"Right!" her father said. "They're getting out ... with the stuff, no doubt. Well, we'll see about that!" Treading heavily on the throttle pedal, he sent the BMW hurtling after the green car.
They followed the Volkswagen back into the city along the glittering, curving length of the Reeperbahn, turned left to skirt the Rathaus and the long blank wall of the Platen und Blomen, almost caught up passing the bright display windows of the boutiques at each side of Colonnaden-and then sat fuming, waiting for a taxi to turn around ahead of them in front of the floodlit neoclassical entrance to the Fier Jahreszein hotel.
By the time Templar could squeeze the coupe past, the Volkswagen was halfway across the bridge spanning the Alster. Setting his teeth, the Colonel swerved outside a bus, jumped a set of lights changing to red, and roared in pursuit.
Traffic on the bridge was heavy. In the dark, still water on either side of them, reflections from the lighted windows of buses mingled with the images of long strings of street lamps garlanding the lake. A crowded ferry ablaze with lights shivered the calm surface just off the pier.
They passed the Atlantic Hotel, circled the central station, and sped along the wide, undulating Heidenkampsweg toward the eastern outskirts of the city.
But it was not until they were nearing the approach roads to the autobahn that the traffic thinned enough to allow Templar to use the BMW's superior acceleration and close the gap between the two cars.
Then, as they passed a modernistic office block gleaming with steel and black glass, an Opel Kapitan driven by an elderly man so short that he could scarcely see over the rim of the steering wheel pulled out of a side street and blocked their way.
A hundred yards ahead, traffic signals showed green. The Opel slowed ... and as it drew abreast the lights changed to red.
"Get on with it, man!" Templar shouted. "You can make that, you old bastard!" But the big car rocked to a halt halfway across the intersection, forcing him to stamp on the brakes and bring the BMW sliding to a stop just behind them. The twin tail-lights of the Volkswagen, which had been switched on as soon as they reached the city center, dwindled down the long perspective of street lamps and were finally lost to sight among the winking reds and greens of a signal light over a railway bridge spanning the road.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Cora settled herself in the front seat of the BMW as they drove on to the autobahn and her father sent the speedometer needle trembling toward the 180-kilometer-per-hour mark. "Gee, that's over a hundred!" she cried admiringly. "But how do you know they'll have taken this road, Daddy?"
"I'm playing a hunch," Colonel Templar said, twitching the wheel to surge past a group of trucks in the slow and center lanes.
"They must know I have connections with the police here. They'll want to get out of town as fast as they can, now that they have what they want."
"But why do they want ... Oh, I don't know; it's all a complete mystery to me!" the girl complained.
Her father permitted himself a wintry smile. "Like all good mysteries, it ends with a car chase!" he said. "The whole thing was obviously a setup from beginning to end."
"A setup? You mean....?"
"I mean that youth-that boy your mother and I disliked so much-was deliberately planted in Konigswinter with instructions to make you fall for him. So that when the opportunity came, he could trick you into going away with him and they could take you to Hamburg."
Cora had told him briefly everything that had happened while she was in the hands of Lisa and her gang. But she had said nothing of the reasons for her running away from home in the first place. "They must have been watching me for months," Templar continued. "Whatever they told you, the reason behind the whole operation was simply to get me to Hamburg."
"But why Hamburg? I don't see-"
The Colonel cleared his throat. "They'd have noticed that whenever I went there, I-uh-visited a certain place," he said awkwardly. "I can't expect you to understand why ... but there it is. You were deliberately allowed to get away after the crash on the autobahn-just long enough to tell your story before they took you back. They knew I'd receive the police reports. They beat up the people you spoke to to make sure there were police reports. And they figured I'd rush up here as soon as I heard. They were right."
"Yes, Daddy, but-"
"Let me finish. They guessed, too, that even if I was looking for you, I'd still find time to see my-uh-friend in the Herbertstrasse. They must have bribed her to let them know when I arrived. All they had to do then was tell you some cock-and-bull story to make sure you'd play ball. It didn't matter too much if you revealed yourself to me or not. Once you were ... once we...." The Colonel flushed and cleared his throat again. "Once their spies had taken their pictures, they were okay."
"But why did they want them?" the puzzled teenager asked. "Are they going to try and blackmail you?"
"Nothing so simple, I'm afraid," her father replied, shifting down to third to streak past a Mercedes roadster. "You know the aims these people profess?"
"They call themselves anarchists. Yes, they told me. They want to destroy-"
"They want to destroy everything. They're totally negative. And they'll do anything ... anything ... to discredit us, the Americans. They pick fights with soldiers in bars. They provoke GI's to behave badly. They'll even commit murder so they can pin the deaths on us. There was a case in Bonn this week...."
"I know. I read about it in the paper. They were boasting about it."
"There you are, then. Now you know I have this new liaison job starting next month? Supposing they are able to print certain pictures in their goddamn underground newspapers ... pictures proving that the man who's going to represent the United States in this new setup not only visits ... places like the one we just left ... but that he ... takes his pleasures with more than one lady at once...."
Templar was flushing awkwardly again, but he continued valiantly: "Supposing also that those pictures show him having sexual relations with-uh-with his own daughter! Can you imagine the effect such a scandal would have on our image? On me? Can you imagine the headlines? 'Is this the kind of man we have to rely on for our good relations with the United States?' 'Are these the kind of people we're supposed to trust?' You can see why I've got to get those pictures back and destroy the negatives!"
Cora whistled. "My God!" she said feelingly.
Her father tutted irritably. "How many times do I have to tell you not to swear!" he said sharply.
They roared across the Elbe bridge. Soon afterward a huge direction sign loomed up in the BMW's headlights: Bremen, Oldenburg-1000m.
"The turnpike splits here," Colonel Templar said. "Have they headed back south
-or will they decide it's better to lie low in another direction until they can use their lousy photos? We have a fifty-fifty chance of guessing right."
"Oldenburg!" Cora exclaimed suddenly. "I think ... I heard something, but I wasn't really listening ... but I think one of them said something about meeting a friend who had a ... a studio, I think it was ... in Oldenburg...."
"We'll take a chance!" Templar said crisply. He swung the wheel over to the right and sent the BMW skimming toward the west.
They caught up with the pale green Volkswagen on a deserted stretch of road only ten miles short of Bremen. The Westphalian countryside lay dark and featureless on either side of the autobahn. Beneath the clouds blotting out the stars there wasn't a single light to be seen.
"Be careful!" Cora warned as the livid beetle shape of their quarry gradually increased in size at the far end of the tunnel carved from the night by the coupe's headlights. "They had one gun already. Now they'll have yours, too!"
The needle on the speedometer dial was quivering on the 190 mark. Templar reached across and flipped open the glove box. "I wasn't Small Arms Champion of the Pacific Theater for nothing!" he said grimly, taking out a small but beautifully finished target pistol. "She's only a .22 bore, but she shoots straight, and she shoots good!...."
The firing didn't start until they had almost overtaken the Volkswagen. The gang must either have been keeping watch out the rear windows or have spotted that they were being followed back in Hamburg. The sounds of the shots were lost in the howl of the BMW's motor, but orange flashes blossomed almost simultaneously from the side windows of the speeding beetle.
With a crack like a giant whiplash, the windshield of the coupe went suddenly opaque as wind screamed through a small hole drilled beside the driving mirror.
Cursing, Templar stood on the brakes as he wrestled with the wheel. The BMW shuddered, lurched sideways with locked wheels, straightened up as he released the pressure on the pedal, ran on to the hard shoulder, bumped across a stretch of rough grass, and then shot back on to the greasy road with tires shrieking.
Blinded by the opacity of the screen, the Colonel hammered his fist violently against the toughened glass and punched a hole through it at the height of his eyes. As the icy wind whistled through the jagged aperture, he saw the steel fencing on the central reservation whipping past sideways in the swinging beams of his lights. The coupe, still traveling at over 100 miles per hour, was spinning around in the center of the wet road!
Shifting down to third, and then to second, he sawed desperately at the wheel as the protesting motor drove the needle on the revolution counter far up into the red quaddrant on the dial. The car straightened momentarily, was overcorrected, began to slide the other way ... and then slammed its tail jarringly against the metal barrier with a shock that rattled Cora's teeth in her head.
She cried aloud with fright-but the impact knocked the BMW back onto the carriageway pointing in the right direction, and her father immediately put his foot down again and resumed the chase. The twin tail-lights of the VW, tiny crimson specks in the distance, were just disappearing over the brow of a hill far down the darkened autobahn.
"Climb over into the back and drop down behind my seat," Templar ordered as the speedometer needle quivered around the dial once more and the noise of the wind blasting in through the holed screen rose to a scream.
"Daddy, please...." Cora began. "There are four of them and-"
"Get back there!" her father shouted. "And keep your head down!"
Meekly, Cora complied. When she was crouching in the narrow well behind him, he called over his shoulder. "Did you see their gun? Was it like mine, with a revolving chamber? Or was it an automatic with a magazine in the butt?"
"I don't know ... I ... I think it was like yours. Yes, it was."
He nodded and stamped the pedal flat to the floor. The needle mounted inexorably toward the 200 mark as the motor bellowed its challenge into the night. Lights flashed past them on the eastbound carriageway. They howled toward the dark bulk of a truck festooned with red position lights, roared pas-t it, and caught the distant Volkswagen in the beams of their headlamps.
When they were a hundred yards behind the pale green car, Templar throttled back the BMW and stayed in position, swinging the coupe from side to side on the roadway as the dazzling high beams of his lamps raked the fugitive. The Volkswagen was swaying on the wet road surface, rising and falling on its swing-axle suspension as the driver coaxed the last ounce of power from the robustly willing motor.
"What are you doing?" Cora called from her unsighted position on the floor.
"Trying to draw their fire," her father replied. "Too dangerous to come alongside while they have two loaded guns in there! But there are only six shots in mine-and if theirs is a revolver too, there can't be more than eight at the most in that. They already used two!"
He swerved violently out toward the center of the road as orange flame stabbed the dark again from each side of the VW. A second time-and a third-the unseen marksmen fired. Fragments of glass erupted inward from the BMW's shattered screen. Somewhere in front, metal spanged loudly beneath the hood; Templar set his teeth and swung the car again.
A road sign swam up from the dark, flashed past, and was lost in the night. Delmenhorst, Bremen-5000 m. They were cutting it fine!
After the sixth fusillade spat fire toward them, the Colonel accelerated brusquely, sending the BMW careening forward to surge alongside the slower car. There were no more shots from the near side, but a seventh blazed toward them from the lowered rear window on the off side. This time, the report was clearly audible ... and it was instantly drowned in a louder, sharper detonation as the coupe's right front tire exploded and wrenched the steering wheel from Templar's hands.
The coupe swooped out of control to the right and its fender slammed with shattering force into the side of the Volkswagen just behind the door. With a shriek of tortured metal the two cars, locked together, slewed across the hard shoulder, spun crazily onto the grass, and came to rest halfway up an earth bank with a clang of twisted steel and the splintering of glass.
Breathless with the impact which had jammed the wheel against his chest, Templar thrust open the wide door and allowed himself to fall out on to the wet ground. His gun was already in his hand. "Keep down!" he yelled to Cora as he crawled toward the crumpled front of his car.
"Daddy!" the terrified girl screamed suddenly from behind him. "Look out! ... Behind you!...."
The army man flung himself around into a sitting position. The lights of the wrecked BMW had been extinguished in the collision but the Volkswagen's still stared uselessly up into the sky. In the dim back-reflection from the beams, he saw the sinister figure of Heinz clambering onto the curved roof of the vehicle. The light gleamed dully on the barrel of the revolver pointing straight at him over the hood of his own car.
Templar's right hand flashed up, gripping the tiny target pistol. Fully extending his arm, he pressed the trigger. There was a stab of orange-blue flame, a sharp coughing explosion, and the German youth staggered back clutching his arm and fell to the ground as the heavy revolver spun away into the dark. The steel-jacketed slug had caught the cylinder of the gun and torn it from his numbed hand!
The Colonel scrambled to his feet. Klaus and Stefan were advancing menacingly toward him around the battered front of the coupe! Each of them held a squat, leather-covered blackjack in his upraised hand.
Okay, Templar thought firmly, pocketing his gun and preparing for the next attack. When outnumbered in a roughhouse, go back to first principles: Dispose of at least one adversary before the fight has really started. It gives the opposition a false sense of your strength and at the same time reduces the odds!
As the thought formed in his mind, his trained eyes spotted an opportunity. Stefan had approached a shade too close to him....
Quick as an adder's tongue, his left foot snaked out to connect with the boy's kneecap. Stefan howled with pain and jackknifed nearer as his body involuntarily dou bled up. Templar elbowed the youth's jaw, judo fashion, and whirled to meet Klaus, dodging to one side as the wicked blackjack thudded agonizingly into the muscle of his shoulder.
As Stefan slumped to the ground, the American's fist thudded to the bulky youth's jaw ... but Klaus simply shook himself and raised the hand holding the blackjack again. Heinz had now reappeared with a length of bicycle chain dangling from his good hand. Templar had just time to dance out and lance three lefts to Klaus's body before the chain flailed out at him like an iron whip. Instinctively, he threw up a protective arm, which kept the murderous weapon from connecting with his head, but even so it seared across his bicep, the pain robbing him of breath and numbing the arm from shoulder to wrist.
Agony flamed behind his eyes as the blackjack slammed into his neck. And then Stefan was in the fight again, hanging on to his undamaged arm, pummeling and striking against his inner thigh. As he managed with a supreme effort to wrest his arm free and jolt the elbow back against solid flesh, he saw from the corner of his eye a faint gleam of light reflected on the chain as it was flourished again.
There was another flare of pain as the blackjack struck his head-and then he gave a great upward heave ... to go abruptly limp at its zenith and plummet to the wet earth.
He heard an anguished yelp as the chain found an unintended victim, and then he was hurling himself sideways against Heinz's legs, grasping them above the knees as he went. For a moment the German teetered upright, and then he came down on Templar, bringing Klaus with him. The American rose eel-like to his feet, struggling and back-kicking, to plant a long, loping left squarely in the solar plexus of Stefan. The blond boy deflated like a rubber toy, folding forward across Heinz to lie retching on the ground.
Templar dragged the gun from his pocket and, reversing the butt, leaped on the fallen Klaus. But the bulky youth drew his knees back into his stomach and jolted his legs straight into the Colonel's unprotected belly just as the officer landed on his prone figure.
Winded, Templar sailed through the air to crash sprawling on his back across the hood of the BMW.
Heinz was up and at the fallen man in a flash. Desperately, Templar twisted aside as the chain whistled down to clang with shattering force on the steel hood of the car. Recovering from the follow through of the savage blow, the German stumbled slightly on the slippery ground ... and Templar uncoiled like a spring, thrusting himself upward to scythe his gun butt across and strike his attacker ferociously behind the ear. Heinz grunted, staggered against the bodywork, slid suddenly to the ground, and rolled over onto his face.
Panting, the Colonel whirled to meet his remaining adversary. Klaus was already lunging forward with his blackjack upraised. Toe to toe, they stood slugging it out, fist to fist, gun butt to blackjack, as the red waves of agony surged behind the Colonel's eyes and he fought to preserve the last remaining ounce of his strength to combat the seemingly invincible German battering remorselessly at his head and body.
It was the slippery ground again that saved him. His fist had slammed without apparent effect into Klaus's diaphragm and he was desperately trying to ward off a vicious sideways swipe with the blackjack when his foot unexpectedly skated from under him and he pitched backward to the grass.
Caught off balance, Klaus was unable to check the wild swing of his arm. The momentum of the blow, meeting with no resistance, carried him a staggering step to one side-and at that moment Templar thrust out a foot and tripped him.
As the German plunged forward, the Colonel leaped tiger-like to his feet and whipped the butt of his pistol murderously down on the base of the falling man's skull. Klaus uttered a sharp cry and doubled up, his forehead connecting with Templar's brutally rising knee as he dropped. Before the sickening thud of the impact had registered on his mind, the American slashed fiercely at the youth's neck with the flat of one hand and then kicked him expertly on the side of the jaw. Klaus hung for an instant on sagging knees ... then he dropped to the ground like a felled tree, twitched once, and lay still.
In the BMW, Cora had watched wide-eyed with horror as the fight ran its savage course. When her father was hurled across the hood of the car, she started up, her hand flying to her mouth-and it was then she saw the shadowy figure scrambling hastily up the bank with three heavy camera cases slung over its shoulder on straps. Lisa was getting away with the incriminating films!
Without another thought, the teenager shouldered open the door and dashed after her.
There was a ploughed field at the top of the bank and the fleeing blonde was already some way ahead, her slender body a blur against the night. The ground was soft and full of clay, drenched by the rains of the past few days, and the sticky clods adhering to the high heels of her boots, allied to the hampering effect of the tight leather skirt, impeded Cora's progress as she squelched frenziedly in pursuit.
Finally, however, her lungs bursting, the young American overtook the escaping girl and flung herself in a football tackle at her pounding legs. Lisa crashed to the wet earth with all the breath knocked from her body.
Dragging herself to her hands and knees, covered with mud, Cora grappled with her-but she was unprepared for the fury of the German girl's assault. Nails raked viciously across Cora's cheek. A bony knee slammed savagely into her belly. Her head was twisted agonizingly back as fingers tangled brutally in her dark hair. The next moment she had been flung on to her face and Lisa was sitting triumphantly astride her shoulders, forcing her mouth and nose mercilessly down into the waterlogged soil.
Cora squirmed and writhed desperately, bucking her body frantically in a vain attempt to shake free of the cruel hands at the nape of her neck. Her mouth and nose were clogged with the sticky mud. She was unable to breathe. But still the relentless pressure forced her face farther and farther into the suffocating wet soil.
She could hear her heart hammering furiously in her chest. There was a terrible pain in her head and a roaring in her ears that threatened to engulf her ... and then suddenly there was a sharp smack of flesh against bone, a choked cry from behind her, and the pressure was miraculously released!
Shaking, she levered herself painfully upright. Her father was standing above her, supporting the sagging, unconscious figure of Lisa by the collar of her jacket. "I keep telling you, you should take lessons in judo!" he said mildly. Flinging the body of the inert blonde across his shoulder, he led the way back to the wrecked cars.
They were a sorry sight, the two of them. Cora was covered in mud from head to foot, her face bleeding and scratched, the leather dress split across the shoulders. There was an elongated swelling caked with dried blood above Templar's right ear. The great welt from the bicycle chain that had almost paralyzed his arm showed black and blue through his torn sleeve. The skin above one cheekbone was split and blood had coursed down his jaw to stain his shirt. The whole surface of his body was ravaged with cuts and abrasions. But the expression on each of their faces was triumphant.
In the light from the Volkswagen's canted lamps, they saw Stefan groaning feebly on the ground. Heinz and Klaus were still out for the count. "We'll tie up these gentry and go for the police in a minute," Templar said through swollen lips. "But first there's a little matter to attend to."
Dumping the unconscious Lisa unceremoniously on the ground, he opened the backs of the cameras one by one and ripped out the exposed film, holding it up in the blinding beams of the VW's headlamps to destroy the offending images enshrined in the emulsion.
"There's only one thing I don't get," Cora said shakily. "Why didn't you use the gun again after that first shot?"
Templar plucked a crumpled unlit cigarette from Heinz's unconscious lips, put it between his own, and lit it. His battered face cracked open into a smile. "It would have been a little difficult," he said, blowing out a grateful cloud of smoke. "There was only that one bullet!"
