Free White Death: An Alex Hawke Novella by Ted Bell Page A

might double or triple it for our purposes. Mountains everywhere have been made so porous that entire Swiss Army divisions are based inside them. Even as we speak there is one not five miles away.”
    “You’re joking,” Sigrid said.
    “Oh, but I’m not. There are weapons and soldiers under barns. There are countless long-range cannons inside pretty houses. Where Swiss highways run on narrow ground between the edges of two lakes, like the highway you just took, or run at the bottoms of cliffs, man-made rock slides high above the roads are ready to slide. We still throw rocks at the enemy, you see. Voila—the Porcupine Principle.”
    “Which is what, exactly?” Sigrid asked.
    Blinky smiled and said, “You even think about pricking us, we prick you back. And we prick you exponentially harder than you can even conceive. It’s why we’ve never endured wars or occupations in over seven hundred years.”
    Hawke smiled. “They all know you’re bad, Blinky, they just have no bloody clue just how bad you are.”
    “Precisely,” he said. “And believe me, we are far, far badder than I’ve led you both to believe. Our forces spend twelve months of every year learning how not to go to war. Sorry, what were you saying, Alex?”
    “Tell us more about these Luftwaffe bases hidden inside the Alps. The ones where our mysterious Sorcerer may have been hiding in plain sight for lo these many years.”
    “Of course. Our F/A-18 fighter bases, too, are all hidden in plain sight. That is to say, Schweizer Luftwaffe squadrons and attack helicopters reside within hangar complexes constructed deep inside hollowed-out mountains, from one end of the country to the other. Obviously, in order to shield them from enemy air attacks.”
    “Obviously,” Hawke smiled. He was a bit incredulous about Blinky’s revelation, having never been made aware of Switzerland’s secret fortifications and hidden air force before. That information was clearly one of the country’s most closely guarded secrets.
    Sigrid said, “This is astounding. How in the world do they get the jets out of the hangar and up into the sky?”
    “Simple. Airplanes and choppers are brought up from the vast underground hangar facilities by a system of high-speed elevators. And then launched by catapults, exactly like those found on modern aircraft carriers.”
    “Launched how, exactly?” Hawke asked.
    “The peaks of countless numbers of our Alps contain runways hidden behind extraordinarily realistic granite-plastic blocks. They are, in effect, movable sections of fake rock. Hydraulically controlled. Virtually undetectable. Climbers make their way up to the summits every day without any idea of what lies inside the face of the mountain they’re on. In case of attack, all of these false sections withdraw hydraulically inside the mountain, creating airfield runways in the sky. Our commanding officers are so good, we can now get an entire squadron airborne in twelve minutes.”
    “Good God,” Hawke said. “Astounding.”

 
    C HAPTER S EVENTEEN
    “S o what you’re saying is that it’s entirely possible that Sorcerer is living somewhere inside a mountain?”
    “More than possible. If he’s still alive, that’s where Wolfie and I believe we’ll find him.”
    Hawke was scratching his day-old casual Friday stubble.“And thus the focus on Leo Hermann, the man in the three-piece Savile Row suit who fell off the top of a mountain and lost his head.”
    “Yes, Alex, that is correct. As you know, Hermann was discovered near the range of mountains where records indicate the honeycombs were sealed with cement in the 1930s.”
    “Yes. He was found on a ledge halfway up Der Nadel, was he not?” Hawke said.
    “All the more reason to zero in on that particular mountain.”
    “Any hard evidence that your suppositions are correct?”
    “Yes. Ambrose called me early this morning from Stadtspolizei HQ. The official police forensic autopsy indicates injuries consistent