Offspring

Stan Mason

Description

A new movement has been formed intending to take control of Europe. Jimmy Savage, a newspaper reporter finds himself at the forefront of the assignment, investigating matters far beyond his capability having been recruited, reluctantly, for the mission. He discovers the movement is being operated by the children and grandchildren of World War Two Nazis, supported by funds secured from liquidated Nazi war treasures which have been invested internationally. The plan is to progress the Fourth Reich in Europe after which world domination will be in their sights The offspring of the Nazis rise in a new form to present an even more hideous spectre than in the past. If they succeed, the world will never be the same again!

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 30 janvier 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783335787
• Langue: English

Extrait

Title Page
OFFSPRING

By
Stan Mason



Publisher Information
Offspring
Published in 2014 by Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Copyright © 2014 Stan Mason
The right of Stan Mason to be identified as author of this book has been asserted in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyrights Designs and Patents Act 1988.



Chapter One
The sad news heralded a bad day! The office was filled with gloom; everyone was depressed. The death of a reporter was always felt deeply by all those who worked on the newspaper... from messenger boy to the chief editor. Death was not new to any of us. We wrote about it every day. But such matters related to other people... the general public... not to the writers who communicated the news. Certainly not to the main three reporters... Petrie, Barnaby and Savage. They called us the “hot-shots”, reporters with a high-reputation who had been writing for the newspaper for many years. Now we were down to two; and even less than that, because Barnaby had been injured in a road accident and had broken his leg.
Petrie and I joined the newspaper at the same time many years earlier. We were not only colleagues but good friends. In time, he became a war correspondent while I took on a multitude of indifferent activities. Now he was dead. When I read the initial report sent through on the facsimile machine, all the anguish inside me frothed over. I was angry... furious... filled with despair. ‘Bastards!’ I shouted across the office. ‘Shot him in the back! Shot my best friend in the back! God, you knock your guts out trying to make a living by reporting the news and some trigger-happy fool ends it in one second with a single shot from a Kalashnikov rifle. No time to pray. No time to say goodbye to the wife and kids. No time for messages to relatives or friends... nothing! What a waste of a life!
“I’m going places, Bellamy!” he once told me. “I’m going places. Just you wait and see! Hang on to my shirt and you’ll be in for a great ride!” Well he went places all right, ending up in a ditch in some God-forsaken country with a bullet in his back. How could anyone in the world shoot an innocent man in cold blood? Surely they must have seen he had a pen in his hand and not a gun! But then he was shot in the back. The cowards! He wasn’t wearing a uniform. Jesus! Couldn’t they see he wasn’t wearing a uniform! Were they blind? We all know that ugly things happen in the heat of war which are best left unsaid and forgotten... but to shoot an unarmed man in the back when he’s not wearing a uniform is way out of line! I hope they rot in hell!’
The occasion was so sad that even Ted Flanders, my bad-tempered, miserable, ulcer-ridden editor whose sole aim was to expose current situations operating against the public interest to sell more newspapers, wasn’t around to shout at the staff. Nonetheless, he managed to sneak in to leave a memo on my desk... to cover a story. I fumed even more when I read it. It had been given initially to Barnaby. However, a relayed message explained that the luckless reporter had been struck down by a taxi, an act which removed him from all worthwhile activity, causing him to lay prostrate in a hospital bed suffering a broken leg and internal injuries. Despite his brilliance in the newspaper field, Barnaby had been proved to be a reprehensible liar many times in the past in order to avoid seedy assignments. A man with a silver tongue, he had the ability to draw on the most remarkable tales which poured smoothly from his misbegotten lips. On this occasion I gave him the benefit of the doubt because if he turned up on the following week fully fit I would surely break one of his legs myself! Whenever Flanders sought a replacement for him, it always fell to me to cover for him. In the heat of the moment, I offered no token of sympathy to my colleague... albeit he was probably painfully hospitalised. For the time being, my mind was wounded and bruised by the news of the sudden death of my dear friend and colleague, Jeff Petrie. He would be hard to replace on the newspaper; there was no one with whom to compare him in real life!
Flanders used Barnaby and myself as his trouble-shooting squad. It was the equivalent role of a commando in the army, or a professional in the S.A.S. There were times when it became really rough out in the field. The editor had developed this idea on his own and often boasted about its value, efficiency and success to the Chief Editor. His argument stressed that sales of the newspaper had risen fairly steeply in the past ten years, and there was no reason to challenge him on the issue. However, neither Barnaby nor I ever felt it was anything special... other than for the editor to gain himself another promotion point with his superior. We were chosen to undertake the most hazardous and difficult tasks to entertain millions of readers who would probably use yesterday’s paper to light the fire, empty the ashes in the hearth, wrap refuse in it, eat chips from it, or use it for some other mundane purpose. News items were quickly expendable.
Barnaby never seemed to care if an assignment was tough or perilous. He seemed to thrive when danger lurked in the wings. I was far more concerned about my own welfare... being a coward at heart... but then every job had its risks. There was no rhyme or reason to dwell on the possibility or probability of personal danger. Personally, I had no pretensions of longevity. A long life meant little to me. I wanted only to live for today and relax in comfort by myself whenever the opportunity arose.
It was an hour later when Ted Flanders returned to his office. He stared at me through the window and then buzzed me on the telephone.
‘Why am I not blessed with good reporters?’ he demanded, although I knew he never meant it. ‘I gave you an assignment early this morning and you’re still sitting at your desk. What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
‘I’m writing an obituary to Jeff Petrie, if you must know!’ I wasn’t going to take any guff from him this morning. ‘Anyway, it’s not an assignment as such. Your memo doesn’t make sense. Maybe you should go back to night-school to learn English!’
He was shocked at my brazen attitude. Normally, we tolerated each other without being rude. Today it was different.
‘You’re upset. Well that’s understandable. Look... come into my office and have a drink. We’ll run through it together.’
I pressed the cross-bar on the telephone gently a couple of times to cause a clicking sound without cutting him off. ‘I didn’t quite get that, Ted!’ I complained falsely. ‘Couldn’t hear you.’
The editor replaced the receiver and emerged from his office with an old-fashioned expression on his face. ‘All right,’ he said tiredly as he approached my desk. ‘Don’t push me too hard, Jimmy.!’ He put out his arms which he rested on the desk and leaned across towards me. ‘This assignment’s a piece of cake. I’m just testing it out for a story’.
My ears perked up suspiciously at the ostensible simplicity of the task. ‘Details, Ted. Details!’ I tried to stifle a yawn as he droned on.
‘A certain amount of turbulence in Eastern Europe. That’s the trouble.’
‘Are we talking about the weather, German reunification, or what? You’re not making sense.’
‘It seems that a group of young people have conceived an idea that sounds sinister. We ought to take a look. If it’s correct, there could be major problems. I want this paper to be the first one to publish the story. It all started here!’
I yawned loudly, unable to repress my feelings any longer. ‘Is this going to be one of those kite-flying assignments where you end up screaming how expensive I am and what a waste of money it was to the paper?’
He seemed to be staring into the distance, not having heard my tirade.. ‘The information concerns some people who organised themselves into a group a while ago, waiting for the agreement on German unification. Now the time is ripe.’
‘Ripe for what, Ted? Unification took place a long time ago.‘ It occurred to me that perhaps Flanders had been overworking and needed a vacation. The continued pressure of editing a major newspaper had caused him to become jaded. He needed a rest!
‘I’ll tell you what they’re ripe for!’ he rattled sharply. ‘The group’s been growing secretly over the past thirty years and now has a core membership exceeding a hundred thousand people. You may also be interested to know it has links with twenty other countries in Europe and that each one has about the same number of recruits. If you take account of all that, we may be talking of two million people ready to form the United States of Europe. And many of them are fairly young. Am I getting through to you?’
‘How come they’re young people?’
‘Because most of them are. That’s what I hear.’
‘But the European Community is in full flood. Why would anyone want to form a separate group covering the same countries?’
‘That’s one of the questions I want answered. So get the cobwebs out of your mind and come back to civilisation. Petrie’s gone. No amount of remorse will bring him back. The public want to read the next edition of the paper. We can’t stand on ceremony.’
I ignored his comments as so much rhetoric. His words swiftly reinforced the myth that he had no heart at all. The paper was his life... his only interest... nothing else mattered.
‘Does this organisation have a Head Office? If so, where is it located? Who’s in charge? Where can