Page 44 of Clive Cussler The Iron Storm (An Isaac Bell Adventure #15)

The man shot him a bloodless stare. He had the power to deny Bell entry on a whim.

Bell kept his face open and friendly. The customs agent eventually closed his ledger without looking at it further, sat impassive for several more seconds, and then said in a dismissive sneer, “Welcome to Germany, schwein American.”

Bell didn’t react at all. He simply took his cases and mounted the stairs back into the first-class carriage. Had the light been more natural, the Germans would have seen that his ears had gone beet red with suppressed rage.

Dawn found him in another station inside Germany.

The pastry he had for breakfast was better than the sandwich dinner, but there was no improvement on the coffee.

The Germans waiting for the next train with him were even more grim than the Dutch, and Bell could see that everyone’s clothes seemed a size too large.

The German people were eating, but not nearly as well as a few years earlier.

Another toll being taken by the populace was that there were no young men about unless they were in uniform and headed back to the front or going home on leave.

Because of that, Bell noticed that many young women were dressed to do work that had been traditionally men’s jobs. Even the ticket taker on the train to occupied Liège was a pretty blond girl who looked like she was playing dress-up in her father’s conductor’s uniform.

The border into occupied Belgium was even more fortified than the one between Germany and the Netherlands. As before, the entire train was boxed inside a barbed-wire enclosure and every car and passenger was checked. There were more guards, more dogs, and a heightened sense of watchfulness.

It took twice as long to clear the checkpoint as the night before.

Bell once again had to show his ball bearing samples as well as having his luggage rummaged through and standing still for a thorough pat down.

Bell wasn’t sure if there had been problems that necessitated such paranoia or if it was merely Teutonic efficiency.

In truth the only thing he knew about what was happening in Belgium was that an American mining engineer named Herbert Hoover had been instrumental in getting relief supplies into the country to stave off widespread famine and starvation.

As they pulled away from the frontier outpost and entered the first Belgian town, he saw the contrast immediately.

The people may not have been on the brink of starvation, but he was shocked by the hollow cheeks and the sunken eyes and the fact that people were gray.

Not pale, not wan, but an ash-gray color that made them look like gaunt living statues.

He saw no children playing, no old men chatting over coffee at cafés, no ladies out shopping for their families.

He saw misery and defeat and a pall of joylessness that hovered over the town, permeating every nook and cranny as if these people all existed in purgatory.

The German military presence wasn’t overwhelming, but to know your nation was under the boot of another was so demoralizing and dehumanizing that it looked like it wouldn’t take more than a few soldiers in each town to keep the population in line.

To think of a country with such vast overseas colonies being brought to its knees in a few short months and now in its third year of occupation made Bell shudder.

America hadn’t had foreign soldiers on its soil since the British were routed at the Battle of New Orleans more than a century ago.

The train continued on, chugging lethargically from the border as if it, too, had been affected by the social and economic malaise that had ground Belgium into the dirt.

No one was in the fields preparing them for the spring planting season.

The few roads he could see from the carriage had been ruined by the passage of heavy German cannons and mortars when they transected the country on the way to France.

A couple of farmhouses he noted had been destroyed during the invasion and now sat abandoned, the adjoining fields overrun with scrub.

They rolled into Liège at lunchtime. Bell was eager to get out of Belgium as quickly as possible and so he bought some black bread and liverwurst at the station and ate while he walked to his final destination.

There were no taxis, though he managed to hitch a ride on the back of a wagon carrying milk urns for the final mile into the town where Rath was holed up.

Bell found a hotel first thing. He wasn’t sure how he was going to go about getting information from Rath or one of his men.

He hadn’t planned that far ahead, but he figured it would take a couple of days at the least for something to come to him.

Best he rent a room. Bell stowed his luggage under the twin-sized bed and then headed out to find the warehouse.

The town wasn’t all that large, and he’d seen some of it on the ride to the German airfield, so it took him only a short amount of time.

His nose led him around the last few corners through a run-down industrial part of the town. The smell of burnt wood and charcoal was overwhelming.

He rounded the last turn and saw what he already knew he would see.

The warehouse had been burned to the ground.

Only a few brick half walls and the stumps of toppled chimneys remained upright.

He could see some plumbing fixtures coated in soot among the rubble, but everything else had been reduced to ash.

No doubt Rath had doused the building in kerosene or gasoline before putting it to the torch.

There was no evidence that the local fire brigade tried to douse the flames, no puddles of filthy water or wet pieces of crocodile-skin timber. They had likely faced a raging inferno and thought it best to just let the fire do its worst.

Knowing it was a waste of time, Bell was ever the consummate investigator and spent an hour sifting through the wreckage.

A few times he kicked up a pile of wood that was still smoldering even though the fire had been days ago, probably the same day he had taken off in the Zeppelin-Staaken with Liam Holmes.

He found nothing useful and so dusted off his suit pants and strode from the site.