Post by DocQuantum on Jul 13, 2020 3:29:23 GMT
Author's note: This story follows up on The Marksman: Unusual Suspects. If you haven't read that story yet, no worries. All you really need to know is the epilogue, but the whole story is worthwhile. It's based on The Usual Suspects, but takes place in Europe on Earth-X.
Prologue: Valhalla Base
From the Journal of Wolfgang Hurtz, leader of the Death Patrol:
Nobody ever said transforming a group of hardened criminals into an underground resistance faction called the Death Patrol would be easy. But somehow we managed to do it with the financial support of an utterly ruthless mastermind and Resistance fighter named Baron Povalsky.
Of course, given the strong personalities and questionable motivations of the members of the new Death Patrol, there were a lot of problems and false starts before the team was actually ready to begin operations.
For example, after Baron Povalsky, alias the Marksman, took all the trouble to form the Death Patrol as an independent faction within the greater European Resistance movement, he disappeared completely, presumably to carry on his own fight against the Axis alone as the Marksman. That actually made a great deal of sense. After all, we still knew next to nothing about the real Baron, except what little he had directly revealed, and what his lawyer and Man Friday Perkins had told us:
If we ever did work with the Baron again, we would probably never know it. He was an expert in disguise, and had endless resources to cover his tracks. He was, essentially, a ghost who had vanished back into the ether now that he'd accomplished his objectives.
Before he left, he convinced me to become the new Baron Povalsky. Now that wasn't a role I was terribly comfortable with, but it did make getting things done a lot easier. The many Resistance fighters and support staff who operated out of the same mountain base, and kept our jet planes fueled and ready for us at a moment's notice, didn't necessarily want to take orders from an admitted ex-Nazi named Wolfgang Hurtz, but they would obey the legendary Baron Povalsky.
That left me in charge of an unruly, insubordinate gang of crooks called the Death Patrol, who would never be good at taking orders, even if it did come from the Baron himself. The only proviso the Baron left me with before his departure was that each member of the Patrol was expected to become a top-notch pilot, much like the members of the original Death Patrol led by Del Van Dyne in the last war. To that end, we were given a fleet of specially designed, single-man fighter jets to get us wherever we wanted to be, and allow us to engage in air combat as necessary.
As the only member with any military experience, I took charge of training my men immediately, with mixed results. The others lacked the kind of discipline you'd expect from, say, the Blackhawks -- the original Foreign Legion of the air -- but they each had talents all their own. Still, with the resources of the Baron's criminal empire at our disposal, and the European Resistance to work alongside us, all our basic needs were taken care of.
The jet planes were built to work as simply as possible and were easy for rookie pilots to understand, but we still had to figure out the basics of operating in a three-dimensional battle zone, when we'd spent most of our lives on the ground. Perhaps, because of the unconventional nature of the criminal mind, it wasn't too difficult to pick up the basics. And the lack of flying experience actually ended up making us much less predictable fighters than conventional Air Force types, that the enemy sometimes fled from us instead of taking risky chances.
But there were still a few loose ends. After all, to the outside world, we were all considered very much deceased. As tempting as it was, none of us took risky chances by attending our own funerals. Although he had always been skeptical of the Baron's existence, Count von Stauffen, Hitler's Black Knight, still suspected some or all of us still survived somehow, and would have his agents keep an eye on the funerals. Perkins was nevertheless able to provide us with clandestine video footage of those funerals, captured by cameramen hired for the job, so we were each given the opportunity to watch the few friends and relatives we still had mourning our "deaths."
Red McGraw was particularly moved by the sight of his twin sister Laura McGraw Gruber and her young son Red, named after him. Laura was a widow living in Hamburg whose husband Harald had been drafted into the German Army in '85 and reported KIA on the Eastern Front. With their parents both dead, she had nobody left. McGraw decided to arrange things so he could support her anonymously, but there was always a risk that his sister and nephew could be used against him if he was discovered to be an alive Resistance fighter called the Dragon, rather than a dead crook.
Dickie Stanton wept like a baby when he saw his family and friends mourning him back in New York City. Our new Madam Fatal kept going on and on about how he never realized how many people back home cared about him so much. All we saw, though, were a few drag queens and burlesque dancers, along with a few stuffy-looking characters who looked to be from the wealthier side of his family, and who didn't waste any time hanging around after the ceremony was over.
Jake Horn, Jr., AKA Denny Dyce, flatly refused to watch his poor elderly mother Mary Horn weeping over the loss of her son while surrounded by a bunch of people who couldn't really care less if he was dead or alive, and were only there to collect money he still owed them. As he put it, there was no point to it. I had to agree. The past was best left where it belonged -- in the past. My Elsa later offered to tell me what she'd seen when she watched our own funerals, but I never took her up on the offer. I already had everything I ever needed there in Valhalla.
Valhalla was what we had begun calling the huge underground base in the Swiss Alps that the Baron had left us as our headquarters. As Norse legend has it, great warriors who die in combat go to live in a kind of Paradise called Valhalla, where they feast on a great boar slaughtered daily and restored every evening, and where the dead warriors can continue battling to their hearts' content, since they're already dead. It had a familiar ring to it, given how the Baron recruited each of us after what had appeared to be certain death. And so Valhalla Base had its name.
We also had a new recruit, since we were down a member without Mouthpiece, the false identity used by the Baron himself. A kid not yet twenty, known only as Sniper, was a man of very few words but lived up to his sobriquet. He was more than a crack shot -- he was an expert sniper. McGraw was jealous, of course, but even he had to admit the kid was better than him. We didn't know much about him except that he was a Spaniard, but he proved himself both capable and useful in a fight -- our protective "angel" who took out targets from a distance before they could take us out.
Since we were all dead to the world, we had little to lose, and typically took on the riskiest jobs against the Axis, flying wherever we needed to be for the planned-out, but down and dirty, hit and run jobs we were known for. Like the Baron, we were ghosts who could disappear as quickly as we came.
Little did we know at the time, though, that someone out there was gunning for us.
Prologue: Valhalla Base
From the Journal of Wolfgang Hurtz, leader of the Death Patrol:
Nobody ever said transforming a group of hardened criminals into an underground resistance faction called the Death Patrol would be easy. But somehow we managed to do it with the financial support of an utterly ruthless mastermind and Resistance fighter named Baron Povalsky.
Of course, given the strong personalities and questionable motivations of the members of the new Death Patrol, there were a lot of problems and false starts before the team was actually ready to begin operations.
For example, after Baron Povalsky, alias the Marksman, took all the trouble to form the Death Patrol as an independent faction within the greater European Resistance movement, he disappeared completely, presumably to carry on his own fight against the Axis alone as the Marksman. That actually made a great deal of sense. After all, we still knew next to nothing about the real Baron, except what little he had directly revealed, and what his lawyer and Man Friday Perkins had told us:
"The Baron rarely works with the same people for very long, and they never know who they’re working for. One cannot be betrayed if one has no people."
If we ever did work with the Baron again, we would probably never know it. He was an expert in disguise, and had endless resources to cover his tracks. He was, essentially, a ghost who had vanished back into the ether now that he'd accomplished his objectives.
Before he left, he convinced me to become the new Baron Povalsky. Now that wasn't a role I was terribly comfortable with, but it did make getting things done a lot easier. The many Resistance fighters and support staff who operated out of the same mountain base, and kept our jet planes fueled and ready for us at a moment's notice, didn't necessarily want to take orders from an admitted ex-Nazi named Wolfgang Hurtz, but they would obey the legendary Baron Povalsky.
That left me in charge of an unruly, insubordinate gang of crooks called the Death Patrol, who would never be good at taking orders, even if it did come from the Baron himself. The only proviso the Baron left me with before his departure was that each member of the Patrol was expected to become a top-notch pilot, much like the members of the original Death Patrol led by Del Van Dyne in the last war. To that end, we were given a fleet of specially designed, single-man fighter jets to get us wherever we wanted to be, and allow us to engage in air combat as necessary.
As the only member with any military experience, I took charge of training my men immediately, with mixed results. The others lacked the kind of discipline you'd expect from, say, the Blackhawks -- the original Foreign Legion of the air -- but they each had talents all their own. Still, with the resources of the Baron's criminal empire at our disposal, and the European Resistance to work alongside us, all our basic needs were taken care of.
The jet planes were built to work as simply as possible and were easy for rookie pilots to understand, but we still had to figure out the basics of operating in a three-dimensional battle zone, when we'd spent most of our lives on the ground. Perhaps, because of the unconventional nature of the criminal mind, it wasn't too difficult to pick up the basics. And the lack of flying experience actually ended up making us much less predictable fighters than conventional Air Force types, that the enemy sometimes fled from us instead of taking risky chances.
But there were still a few loose ends. After all, to the outside world, we were all considered very much deceased. As tempting as it was, none of us took risky chances by attending our own funerals. Although he had always been skeptical of the Baron's existence, Count von Stauffen, Hitler's Black Knight, still suspected some or all of us still survived somehow, and would have his agents keep an eye on the funerals. Perkins was nevertheless able to provide us with clandestine video footage of those funerals, captured by cameramen hired for the job, so we were each given the opportunity to watch the few friends and relatives we still had mourning our "deaths."
Red McGraw was particularly moved by the sight of his twin sister Laura McGraw Gruber and her young son Red, named after him. Laura was a widow living in Hamburg whose husband Harald had been drafted into the German Army in '85 and reported KIA on the Eastern Front. With their parents both dead, she had nobody left. McGraw decided to arrange things so he could support her anonymously, but there was always a risk that his sister and nephew could be used against him if he was discovered to be an alive Resistance fighter called the Dragon, rather than a dead crook.
Dickie Stanton wept like a baby when he saw his family and friends mourning him back in New York City. Our new Madam Fatal kept going on and on about how he never realized how many people back home cared about him so much. All we saw, though, were a few drag queens and burlesque dancers, along with a few stuffy-looking characters who looked to be from the wealthier side of his family, and who didn't waste any time hanging around after the ceremony was over.
Jake Horn, Jr., AKA Denny Dyce, flatly refused to watch his poor elderly mother Mary Horn weeping over the loss of her son while surrounded by a bunch of people who couldn't really care less if he was dead or alive, and were only there to collect money he still owed them. As he put it, there was no point to it. I had to agree. The past was best left where it belonged -- in the past. My Elsa later offered to tell me what she'd seen when she watched our own funerals, but I never took her up on the offer. I already had everything I ever needed there in Valhalla.
Valhalla was what we had begun calling the huge underground base in the Swiss Alps that the Baron had left us as our headquarters. As Norse legend has it, great warriors who die in combat go to live in a kind of Paradise called Valhalla, where they feast on a great boar slaughtered daily and restored every evening, and where the dead warriors can continue battling to their hearts' content, since they're already dead. It had a familiar ring to it, given how the Baron recruited each of us after what had appeared to be certain death. And so Valhalla Base had its name.
We also had a new recruit, since we were down a member without Mouthpiece, the false identity used by the Baron himself. A kid not yet twenty, known only as Sniper, was a man of very few words but lived up to his sobriquet. He was more than a crack shot -- he was an expert sniper. McGraw was jealous, of course, but even he had to admit the kid was better than him. We didn't know much about him except that he was a Spaniard, but he proved himself both capable and useful in a fight -- our protective "angel" who took out targets from a distance before they could take us out.
Since we were all dead to the world, we had little to lose, and typically took on the riskiest jobs against the Axis, flying wherever we needed to be for the planned-out, but down and dirty, hit and run jobs we were known for. Like the Baron, we were ghosts who could disappear as quickly as we came.
Little did we know at the time, though, that someone out there was gunning for us.