The Wolf's Hour Part 40

"Bombs! Hundred-pound bombs! That's all I know!"

"Twenty-four of them? A bomb for each crate?"

"Yes! Yes! Please don't kill me!"

"They're being packed up for transport? In the Messerschmitt out on the field?"

The man nodded as his uniform's collar reddened.

"Transported to where?" Michael persisted.

"I don't know." More pressure from the blade. The man gasped. "I swear I don't know!"

Michael believed him. "What's inside the bombs?"

"High explosives. What's inside any bomb?"

"Don't get cute," Chesna warned, her voice crisp and deadly. "Just answer the questions."

"That fool doesn't know. He's just a guard."

They looked to see who'd spoken. It was the frail prisoner who had gray hair and wore wire-rimmed gla.s.ses. He came a few steps closer and spoke in what sounded like a heavy Hungarian accent. "It's a gas of some kind. That's what's inside the bombs. I've been here for over six months, and I've seen what it can do."

"I have, too," Michael said. "It burns the flesh."

The man smiled faintly, a bitter smile. "Burns the flesh," he repeated. "Oh, it does more than burn the flesh, my friend. It eats the flesh, like a cancer. I know. I've had to burn some of the bodies. My wife among them." He blinked, his eyes heavy-lidded. "But she's in a better place than this. They torture me every day, by forcing me to live." He looked at the hammer he held, and then dropped it to the concrete. He wiped his hand on his trouser leg.

"Where are the bombs stored?" Michael asked him.

"That I don't know. Somewhere deeper in the plant. There's a white building next to the big chimney. Some of the others say that's where the gas is made."

"The others?" Chesna asked. "How many prisoners are there?"

"Eighty-four. No, no. Walt." He thought about it. "Danelka died two nights ago. Eighty-three. When I first came here, there were over four hundred, but..." He shrugged his thin shoulders, and his eyes found Michael's. "Have you come to save us?"

Michael didn't know what to say. He decided the truth was best. "No."

"Ah." The prisoner nodded. "Then it's the gas, is it? You're here because of that? Well, that's good. We're already dead. If that stuff ever gets out of here, I shudder to-"

Something whammed against the corrugated-metal gate.

Michael's heart kicked, and Lazaris jumped so hard the blade bit deeper into the soldier's throat. Chesna removed her gun barrel from the man's forehead, leaving a white circle where it had been pressed, and aimed the weapon toward the gate.

Again, something hit the metal. A rifle b.u.t.t or billy club, Michael thought. A voice followed: "Hey, Reinhart! Open up!"

The soldier croaked, "He's calling me."

"No, he's not," the gray-haired prisoner said. "He's Karlsen. Reinhart is on the floor."

"Reinhart!" the soldier outside shouted. "Open up, d.a.m.n you! We know you've got the pretty one in there!"

The female prisoner who'd been poked with the rifle, her black hair framing a face as pale as a cameo, picked up a ballpeen hammer. Her knuckles bleached around the handle.

"Come on, be a sport!" It was a different voice. "Why hog her all for yourselves?"

"Tell them to go away," Chesna ordered. Her eyes were flinty, but her voice held a nervous edge.

"No," Michael said. "They'll come in the way we did. On your feet." Karlsen got up. "To the gate. Move." He followed the n.a.z.i, and so did Chesna. Michael pressed his gun into the man's spine. "Tell them to wait a minute."

"Wait a minute!" Karlsen shouted.

"That's better!" one of the men outside said. "You b.a.s.t.a.r.ds thought you were going to sneak one by us, didn't you?"

The gate was hoisted by a chain-and-pulley device, operated with a flywheel. Michael stepped to one side. "Pull the gate up. Slowly." Chesna got out of the way, too, and Karlsen started turning the flywheel. The gate began to fold upward.

And at that moment Reinhart, who'd been shamming for the past two minutes, suddenly sat up at Lazaris's feet. He clutched at his two broken ribs and reached up for the wall beside their card table. Lazaris gave a shout and stabbed downward with the knife, sinking it into Reinhart's shoulder, but he was powerless to prevent what happened next.

Reinhart's fist punched a red b.u.t.ton attached to electrical cords on the wall, and a siren shrieked somewhere on the building's roof.

The gate was a quarter of the way up when the alarm began. Michael could see four pairs of legs. Without hesitation he clicked off the safety on his gun and sprayed bullets below the gate, chopping down two soldiers who screamed and writhed in agony. Karlsen released the flywheel and tried to scramble beneath the corrugated metal as it clattered down again, but a burst from Chesna's gun ripped him open and the gate clunked on his b.u.t.t.

Lazaris repeatedly stabbed down on Reinhart, fierce strength behind the blows. The German crumpled, his face a ma.s.s of torn flesh, but the siren kept going. A black-haired figure swept past him. The woman raised her hammer and broke the alarm b.u.t.ton to fragments. Still, a switch had been triggered and the siren would not be silenced.

"Get out while you can!" the gray-haired prisoner shouted. "Go!"

There was no time to deliberate. That siren would bring every soldier in the plant down on them. Michael ran for the stairwell, with Chesna a few paces behind and Lazaris bringing up the rear. They came out onto the roof, and already two soldiers were running along the catwalk toward them. Michael fired, and so did Chesna. The bullets sparked off the catwalk railing, but the soldiers flung themselves flat. Rifles cracked, the slugs zipping past their heads. Michael saw another pair of soldiers, coming across the catwalk from the building behind them. One of them fired a shot that snagged Chesna's parka, and puffed goose down into the air.

Michael readied a grenade, then paused while the fuse sizzled and the soldiers got closer. A bullet sang off the railing beside him. He flung the grenade at the two men who were coming up from behind, and three seconds later there was a blast of white fire and two shredded figures twitching on the catwalk. Lazaris wheeled toward the other pair in front of them and fired short bursts that knocked sparks off the slate roof. Michael saw three more soldiers advancing over the catwalk behind them. Chesna's gun rattled, and the soldiers crouched down as slugs ricocheted off the railings.

The rooftop was turning into a hornet's nest. A bullet struck the slates to Michael's left and spun like a burning cigarette b.u.t.t less than five inches past his face. Chesna suddenly cried out and went down. "I'm hit!" she said, her teeth gritted with pain and anger. "d.a.m.n it!" She was clutching her right ankle, blood on her fingers.

Lazaris sprayed bullets first in one direction, then another. A soldier screamed and fell over the railing to the pavement twenty feet below. Michael bent down to help Chesna to her feet, and as he did he felt a bullet pluck at his parka. They had no choice; they had to get back down the stairwell before they were cut to pieces in the cross fire.

He hauled Chesna up. She fired at the soldiers behind them, even as Michael pulled her to the stairwell door. A bullet hit the catwalk railing beside Lazaris and metal splinters pierced his jaw and cheek. He retreated, spraying bullets across the roof. As they got into the stairwell, slugs marched across the door and knocked it off its hinges. Michael felt a searing sting of pain in his left hand, and he realized a bullet had just gone through his palm. His hand went numb, the fingers twitching involuntarily. He kept hold of Chesna, and they all backed down the stairwell to the workshop. Two Germans entered at the top of the stairs, and Lazaris cut them down before they could aim their weapons. The bodies slid over each other down the steps. More soldiers crawled into the stairwell, and a few seconds later a grenade was flung and exploded with a whump of fire and concussion. But Michael, Chesna, and Lazaris were already in the workshop, where the prisoners had taken cover amid the equipment and oil drums. Soldiers scurried down to the bottom of the smoky stairwell and fired into the workshop. Michael looked over his shoulder toward the metal gate. More Germans were trying to wrench it up by hand from the other side, their fingers curled under the edge. As they struggled, other soldiers fired bullets through the gap at floor level. Michael released Chesna, who fell to her knees, her face glistening with the sweat of pain, and popped a fresh ammo clip into his gun. His hand was streaming blood, the wound a perfect puncture. He shot beneath the gate, and the Germans scrambled away from it.

The siren had stopped its shrieking. Over the noise of gunshots a strident voice rang out: "Cease fire! Cease fire!" The shooting dwindled, and halted.

Michael crouched down, behind a half-track load puller, and Chesna and Lazaris knelt in the shelter of oil drums. Michael heard the fearful moaning of some of the prisoners, and the clicks of guns being reloaded. A haze of blue smoke drifted through the workshop, carrying the pungent odor of gunpowder.

A moment later a voice amplified through a loudspeaker came from beyond the metal gate: "Baron? It's time you and Chesna threw out your weapons. It's over."

Michael glanced toward Chesna, and their eyes met. It was Jerek Blok's voice. How did he know?

"Baron?" Blok continued. "You're not a stupid man. Certainly not. You know by now that this building is surrounded, and there's no possible way you can get out. We will take you, one way or the other." He paused, letting them think it over. Then: "Chesna, dear? Surely you understand your situation. Throw out your weapons, and we'll have a nice talk."

Chesna examined the blue-edged hole in her ankle. Her thick woolen sock was wet with blood, and the pain was excruciating. A cracked bone, she thought. She fully understood the situation.

"What are we going to do?" Lazaris asked, with a note of panic. Blood trickled down into his beard from the splinter wounds.

Chesna got her backpack off and unsnapped it.

"Baron, you amaze me!" Blok said. "I'd like to know how that escape from Falkenhausen was engineered. You have my deepest respect."

Michael saw Chesna reach into her pack. Her hand came out with a square of waxed paper.

The cyanide capsule.

"No!" Lazaris grasped her arm. "There's another way."

She shook her head, pulling free. "You know there's not," she said, and began to unwrap the packet.

Michael crawled across the floor to her. "Chesna! We can shoot our way out! And we've still got grenades!"

"My ankle's broken. How am I going to get out of here? Crawl?"

He gripped her wrist, preventing her from putting the capsule on her tongue. "I'll carry you."

She smiled faintly, her eyes dark with pain. "Yes," she said. "I believe you would." She touched his cheek, and ran her fingers across his mouth. "But it wouldn't do any good, would it? No. I'm not going to be caged and tortured like an animal. I know too much. I'd be sentencing a dozen others to-"

Something clattered across the floor about fifteen feet away. Michael looked toward it, his heart pounding, and saw that one of the soldiers in the stairwell had just thrown a grenade.

It went off, before any of them could move.

Flame sputtered from the fuse. There was a pop! and a bright flash, then chalky-white smoke began to pour from it. Except it was not smoke, Michael realized in another two seconds. It had a sickly-sweet, orangelike odor: the smell of chemicals.

A second gas grenade popped, near the first one. Chesna, her eyes already stinging and watering, lifting the cyanide pill to her mouth. Michael couldn't bear it. For better or worse he swiped the capsule out of her hand.

The chemical smoke settled over them like the folds of a shroud. Lazaris hacked and coughed, struggled to his feet with tears blinding him, and flailed into the vapors. Michael felt as if his lungs were swelling up; he couldn't draw a breath. He heard Chesna cough and gasp, and she clung to him as he tried to pick her up. But his air was gone, and the smoke was so dense that direction was destroyed. One of Hildebrand's inventions, Michael thought and then, blinded and weeping, he fell to his knees. He heard the prisoners coughing, being overcome as well. A figure appeared through the smoke before him: a soldier wearing a gas mask. The man aimed his rifle at Michael's head.

Chesna slumped beside him, her body hitching. Michael fell over her, struggled to rise again, but his strength was stolen. Whatever the chemical was, it was potent. And then, with the reek of rotten oranges in his nostrils, Michael Gallatin blacked out.

7.

They awakened in a cell, with a barred window overlooking the airfield. Michael, his wounded hand bound with bandages, peered out into silvery daylight and saw the big transport Messerschmitt still there. The bombs hadn't been loaded yet.

All their equipment and their parkas had been stripped away. Chesna's ankle was bandaged as well, and when she peeled the bandages away for an inspection, she found that the wound had been cleaned and the bullet removed. The effects of the gas grenades remained; all of them kept spitting up watery mucus, and found a bucket placed in the cell for just that purpose. Michael had a killer headache, and all Lazaris could do was lie on one of the thin-mattressed cots and stare at the ceiling like a drunkard after a vodka binge.

Michael paced the cell, stopping every so often to look through the wooden door's barred inset. The corridor was deserted. "Hey!" he shouted. "Bring us some food and water!" A guard came a moment later, glared at Michael with pale blue eyes, and went away again.

Within an hour two guards brought them a meal of thick, pasty oatmeal porridge and a canteen of water. When that had been consumed, the same two soldiers wielding submachine guns appeared once more and ordered the captives out of their cell.

Michael supported Chesna as she limped along the corridor. Lazaris stumbled, his head fogged and his knees as soft as taffy. The guards took them out of the building, a stone stockade on the edge of the airfield, and down an alley into the plant. A few moments later they were entering another, larger building not far from where they'd been captured.

"No, no!" they heard a high, boyish voice shout. "Dribble the ball! Don't run with it! Dribble!"

They had walked into a gymnasium, with a floor of polished oak boards. There were rows of bleachers and frosted gla.s.s windows. A knot of emaciated prisoners were struggling for possession of a basketball as guards with rifles looked on. A whistle blew, deafening in the enclosure. "No!" The boyish voice cracked with exasperation. "That's a foul on the blue team! The ball belongs to the red team now."

The prisoners wore armbands of blue or red. They stumbled and staggered, stick figures in baggy gray uniforms, toward the goal at the other side of the court. "Dribble the ball, Vladimir! Don't you have any sense?" The man who was shouting stood at the edge of the court. He wore dark slacks, a striped referee's s.h.i.+rt, had a long mane of blond hair hanging halfway down his back, and stood almost seven feet tall. "Get the ball, Tiomkin!" he shouted, and stomped his foot. "You missed an easy shot!"

This had gone from the crazy to the insane, Michael thought. And there was Jerek Blok, standing up in the bleachers and motioning them over. Boots was sitting a few rows above his master, perched like a glowering bulldog. "h.e.l.lo!" the seven-foot-tall, blond-maned man said, speaking to Chesna. He smiled, showing horselike teeth. He wore round gla.s.ses, and Michael judged him to be no older than twenty-three. He had dark brown, s.h.i.+ning, childlike eyes. "Are you the people who caused all that noise this morning?"

"Yes, they are, Gustav," Blok answered.

"Oh." Dr. Gustav Hildebrand's smile switched off, and his eyes turned sullen. "You woke me up."

Hildebrand might be a chemical warfare genius, Michael thought, but that fact didn't prevent him from being a simpleton. The towering young man turned away from them and shouted to the prisoners, "Don't stop! Keep playing!"

The prisoners stumbled and staggered to the opposite goal, some of them falling over their own feet.

"Sit down here." Blok gestured to the bleacher beside him. "Chesna, will you sit beside me, please?" She obeyed, nudged by a gun barrel. Michael took the next place, and Lazaris, as puzzled by this display as by anything in his life, eased down beside him. The two guards stood a few paces away. "h.e.l.lo, Chesna." Blok reached out and grasped her hand. "I'm so glad to see you a-"

Chesna spat in his face.

Blok showed his silver teeth. Boots had risen to his feet, but Blok said, "No, no. It's all right," and the huge man sat down again. Blok withdrew a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the spit from his cheek. "Such spirit," he said quietly. "You're a true German, Chesna. You just refuse to believe it."

"I am a true German," she agreed coldly, "but I'll never be the kind of German you are."

Blok left his handkerchief out, in case it was needed again. "The difference between winning and losing is a vast chasm. You are speaking from the bottom of that chasm. Oh, that was a good shot!" He clapped his hands in appreciation, and Boots did, too. Hildebrand gave a glowing smile. "I taught him to do that!" the mad doctor announced.

The game went on, the prisoners halfheartedly grappling for the ball. One of them fell, winded, and Hildebrand shouted, "Get up! Get up! You're the center, you have to play!"

"Please... I can't..."

"Get up." Hildebrand's voice was less boyish, and brimmed with menace. "This minute. You're going to keep playing until I say the game is over."

"No... I can't get up..."

A rifle was c.o.c.ked. The prisoner got up. The game went on.

"Gustav-Dr. Hildebrand-loves basketball," Blok explained. "He read about it in an American magazine. I can't fathom the game myself. I'm a soccer fan. But each to his own. Yes?"

"Dr. Hildebrand certainly seems to rule the game with an iron fist," Michael said.

"Oh, don't start that again!" Blok's face took on a shade of crimson. "Haven't you gotten tired of barking up that trail yet?"

"No, I haven't found the trail's end." Michael decided it was time for the big guns. "The only thing I don't know," he said, almost casually, "is where the Fortress is hangared. Iron Fist: that's the name of a B-seventeen bomber, isn't it?"

"Baron, you continually amaze me!" Blok smiled, but his eyes were wary. "You never rest, do you?"

"I'd like to know," Michael urged. "Iron Fist. Where is it?"

Blok was silent for a moment, watching the hapless prisoners run from one side of the court to the other, Hildebrand shouting at their errors and misplays. "Near Rotterdam," he said. "On a Luftwaffe airfield."