Emerald Death by Bill Craig Read Free Book Online Page B

airship, making it look like the vengeful spirits that were her namesake.
     
    Valkyrie - LZ 131 - was the pinnacle of German engineering.  Powered by four 1,200 horsepower Daimler-Benz diesel engines, she was capable of a ponderous but steady 135 kilometers per hour, and her pressurized hull could take her high above the weather, where the air was too thin for modern airplanes to fly. Three hundred meters long, she was larger even than the mighty Graf Zeppelin II, but her lightweight skin of cotton, doped with iron oxide and a substance impregnated with aluminum powder concealed far more than just 250,000 cubic meters of hydrogen gas in twenty individual cells.  The Valkyrie carried an entire squadron of Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighter planes, which could be launched or landed from the long suspended runway concealed inside the cavernous hull.
     
    Unlike other military dirigibles, which could only carry parasite fighters for their own protection, the Valkyrie was the first true aerial aircraft carrier; an airbase in the sky.  Fighters could be transported anywhere in the world, flown high above the range of attack planes and anti-aircraft guns, and launched directly on the target, with plenty of fuel and ammunition to ensure victory.  With a fleet of airships like her, the Reich would rule the skies, and thence the world.
    He wished that his men could spend more time aboard the magnificent ship but Doctor Ragnarok would have none of it.  He was totally focused on retrieving the so-called Emerald of Eternity.
     
    He scowled at the thought of his immediate superior.  Doctor Ragnarok was a strange one.  He wore a steel mask over his head to conceal his true face from everyone.  Yet, he had emerged seemingly from nowhere to earn Der Fuhrer’s full confidence in matters of the occult.
    Rumors had begun circulating among the crew of the Valkyrie; rumors that had spread to his own special team of Waffen troopers that attributed the disfigurement to a ritual had gone wrong - a demon he had summoned had melted his face. 
    Demons .  Wessel scoffed at the thought.  There was no such thing.  No demons, no magic power, no Emerald of Eternity.
    If the good doctor’s face had actually been melted, it was from some sort of fire, no doubt by some of the strange electronic devices that the man surrounded himself with. Wessel shook his head.
     
    He was an atheist in the truest sense.  A pragmatist that believed in nothing he could not see, touch or quantify in some way.  He believed only in the one entity that had never disappointed him: himself.  Those poor deluded fools who chose to believe in gods, fairies or whatever else, interested him not in the slightest.
    Then again, science certainly held its share of strange phenomena.  What if the so-called Emerald of Eternity was not a mystic treasure, but simply a physical object with remarkable properties?  The debate was irrelevant; he had his orders.  Follow the instructions of Doctor Ragnarok, and find the emerald.
     
    Degiorno's escape bothered him more than he cared to admit.  The Italian had found allies - mercenaries perhaps - who had proven unusually effective against his men.  There was a shrouded corpse in the back of one truck to prove it.  The matter was proving to be more than just an annoyance.
    As the trucks pulled to a stop, he was surprised to see Ragnarok himself on the ground striding towards him.  The sunlight gleamed off the metallic mask, flashing intensely bright.
    “Where is the Italian?” Ragnarok demanded as Wessel stepped from the truck.  The doctor’s voice was as cold and metallic as his visage.
    “He escaped,” Wessel replied curtly, aggravated with himself for giving his after action report on the tarmac of the airfield.
    “How?” Ragnarok asked, his tone conveying his shock.  “I thought your men were the best at this?”
    “He had help,” Wessel snapped.  “And I believe that our earlier concerns have proven justified.  We