The Wolf's Hour (59 page)

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 glass 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 shirt, 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. “Hello!” the seven-foot-tall, blond-maned man said, speaking to Chesna. He smiled, showing horselike teeth. He wore round glasses, and Michael judged him to be no older than twenty-three. He had dark brown, shining, 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. “Hello, 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 cocked. 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.”

Rotterdam, Michael thought. Not France after all, but German-occupied Holland. Almost a thousand miles south of Skarpa Island. He felt a little sick, knowing that what he’d suspected was true.

“That said, I’ll add this,” Blok continued. “You and your friends-and that bearded gentleman down there I haven’t been introduced to and neither do I wish to be-will remain here on Skarpa until the project is concluded. I think you’ll find Skarpa a more difficult nut to crack than Falkenhausen. Oh, by the way, Chesna: turnabout is fair play, don’t you agree? Your friends got to Bauman, my friends got to one of the gentlemen who met your plane near Uskedahl.” He gave her a brief, bone-chilling smile. “As a matter of fact, I’ve been on Skarpa for a week, tidying up affairs and waiting for you. Baron, I knew where you would go when you got out of Falkenhausen. It was just a question of how long it would take you to get here.” He winced at a collision between two prisoners, and the basketball bounced away down the court. “Our radar watched you weave through the mine field. That was nice work.”

Kitty! Michael thought. What had happened to her?

“I think you’ll find the stockade more roomy than your quarters at Falkenhausen, though,” the colonel said. “You’ll get a nice fresh sea breeze, too.”

“And where will you be? Getting a suntan up on the roof?”

“Not quite.” A flicker of silver. “Baron, I’ll be getting prepared to destroy the Allied invasion of Europe.”

It was said so offhandedly that Michael, though his throat felt constricted, had to answer in kind. “Really? Is that your weekend job?”

“It will take much less than a weekend, I think. The invasion will be destroyed approximately six hours after it begins. The British and American troops will be drowning each other trying to swim back to their ships, and the commanders will go mad with panic. It will be the greatest disaster in history-for the Reich’s enemies, of course-and a triumph for Germany. And all that, Baron, will happen without our soldiers having to fire a shot of our precious ammunition.”

Michael grunted. “All because of Iron Fist? And Hildebrand’s corrosive gas? Twenty-four one-hundred-pound bombs won’t stop thousands of soldiers. As a matter of fact, your troops are more likely to get gas blown back in their faces. So tell me: what asylum were you recently released from?”

Blok stared at him. A muscle twitched in the side of his face. “Oh, no!” He giggled, a terrible sound. “Oh, my dear Baron! Chesna! Neither of you know, do you? You think bombs are going to be dropped on this side of the Channel?” His laughter spiraled upward.

Michael and Chesna looked at each other. A horror, like a knot of snakes, began to writhe in Michael’s stomach.

“You see, we don’t know where the invasion is going to be. There are a dozen possibilities.” He laughed again, and dabbed his eyes with the handkerchief. “Oh, my! What a surprise! But you see, it doesn’t matter where the invasion is. If it happens this year, it’s going to happen within the next two to four weeks. When it begins,” Blok said, “we’re going to drop those twenty-four bombs on London.”

“My God,” Michael whispered, and he saw clearly.

No German bomber could pierce England’s aerial defenses. The Royal Air Force was too strong, too experienced since the Battle of Britain. No German bomber could get anywhere even remotely close to London.

But an American B-17 Flying Fortress could. Especially one that appeared to be a cripple, shot full of holes and returning from a bombing mission over Germany. In fact, the Royal Air Force might even give the struggling craft an escort. How would the British fighter pilots know that the bullet holes and battle damage had been painted on by a Berlin street artist?

“Those twenty-four bombs,” Blok said, “have a center of liquid carnagene within a shell of high explosives. Carnagene is the name of the gas Gustav’s created, and it’s quite an accomplishment. He’d have to show you the equations and the chemical notations; I don’t understand them. All I know is that when the gas is inhaled, it triggers the body’s own bacteria: the microbes that cause the decay of dead tissue. The microbes, in a sense, become carnivorous. Within seven to twelve minutes the flesh begins to be… shall we say… eaten from the inside out. Stomach, heart, lungs, arteries… everything.”

Michael didn’t speak. He had seen the photographs, and he believed it.

One of the prisoners had collapsed, and did not move. “Get up.” Hildebrand prodded at the man’s ribs with his sneaker. “Come on! Get up, I said!” The prisoner remained motionless. Hildebrand looked up at Blok. “He’s broken! Bring me a new one!”

“Do it,” Blok told the nearest guard, and the soldier hurried out of the gymnasium.

“The red team will have to go on with four players!” Hildebrand blew his whistle. “Keep playing!”

“That’s a fine example of the master race,” Michael said, still stunned. “He’s too dumb to know he’s an idiot.”

“In some ways he is an idiot, I’m afraid,” the colonel agreed. “But in the field of chemical warfare, Gustav Hildebrand is a genius, surpassing his father. Take carnagene, for instance; it’s fantastically concentrated. What’s contained in those twenty-four bombs is enough to kill, at a rough estimate, thirty thousand people, depending on the prevailing winds and rainfall.”

Chesna had roused herself, fighting off the same shock that had hit Michael. “Why London?” she asked. “Why don’t you just drop your bombs on the invasion fleet?”

“Because, dear Chesna, bombing ships is an unprofitable undertaking. The targets are small, the Channel winds unpredictable, and carnagene doesn’t get along well with sodium. As in salt water.” He patted her hand before she could jerk it away. “Don’t you be concerned. We know what we’re doing.”

Michael knew, as well. “You want to hit London so word can be communicated to the invasion troops. When the soldiers hear about what that gas does, they’ll be paralyzed with terror.”

“Exactly. They’ll all swim home like good little fishies, and leave us alone.”

A panic amid the landing troops would end all chances for success. There was no way the soldiers wouldn’t hear about the attack on London, if not over the BBC then over the scuttlebutt network. Michael said, “Why only twenty-four bombs? Why not fifty?”

“The B-seventeen we have can only hold that many. It’s enough for the purpose. Anyway”-he shrugged-“the next batch of carnagene isn’t refined yet. It’s a long, expensive process, and one mistake can destroy many months of labor. We’ll have some ready, though, in time to perfume your comrades from the East.”

The twenty-four bombs contained all the carnagene that was ready for use, Michael realized. But it was more than enough to destroy D-Day and strengthen Hitler’s grip on the throat of Europe.

“By the way, we do have a target in London,” Blok said. “The bombs will fall along Parliament Street to Trafalgar Square. Perhaps we can even get Churchill, as he smokes one of those disgusting cigars.”

Another prisoner fell to his knees. Hildebrand grasped the man’s white hair. “I told you to pass the ball to Matthias, didn’t I? I didn’t say for you to shoot!”

“We won’t see each other again,” Blok told his unwilling guests. “I will have other projects, after this one. You see, this is a feather in my cap.” He gave a silver smile. “Chesna, you have broken my heart.” His smile faded as he placed a long thin finger beneath her chin. She twisted away from him. “But you’re a wonderful actress,” he said, “and I’ll always love the woman in your films. Guards, will you take them back to their cell now?”