The Wolf's Hour (63 page)

Good shooting, she thought grimly.

Lazaris got his seat belt off while Chesna unsnapped her own. Water was flooding into the cockpit. Chesna stood up, her ribs throbbing with pain, and went back to the rack where a life raft was stored. The escape hatch was nearby, and together she and Lazaris forced it open.

Michael saw the orange life raft bloom on the Channel’s surface. A British destroyer was already moving toward the downed Dornier. The two Spitfires circled Iron Fist, then took up positions on either side and slightly behind. Escorting us home, Michael thought. He leaned out the starboard portal, into the wail of the wind, and frantically waved his arms. The Spitfire on that side wobbled its wings in a sign of greeting. Damn it! Michael raged as he pulled back in. He smelled blood, and saw it all over his hands. It had come from the corpse that had been leaning out of the plane. Blood had streamed down the bomber’s side.

He leaned out again, smeared more blood on his hands, and began to paint a Nazi swastika on the olive-green metal.

There was no response from the Spitfires. They held their position.

Desperate, Michael knew he had only one remaining option.

He found the safety on the starboard waist gun. He unlatched it and trained the barrel on the slow-flying Spitfire. Then he squeezed the trigger.

Bullets ripped holes along the plane’s side. Michael saw the amazed expression of the pilot, staring right at him. He swung the gun back and kept shooting, and an instant later the Spitfire’s engine belched smoke and fire. The aircraft dove away, still under the pilot’s control but heading for the drink.

Sorry, old chap, Michael thought.

He went to the opposite portal and started to open fire with the gun there, but the second Spitfire zoomed to a higher altitude, its pilot having seen what had happened to his companion. Michael gave a few bursts to drive home his point, but the bullets-thankfully-missed by a wide margin.

“What was that damned noise?” Van Hoven shouted in the cockpit. He looked at Schrader and then at Boots, whose face had become pallid at the reality of riding in this death plane to London. “It sounded like one of our own guns!” Van Hoven looked out the glass, and gasped with horror as he saw the flaming Spitfire gliding toward the sea. The second Spitfire buzzed them like an angered hornet.

Boots knew the colonel had killed the gunners. That was part of the plan, though the guns had been loaded to lure the crewmen into believing they would be alive when they crossed the Channel. So who was back there manning the machine gun?

Boots left the cockpit, moving through the bomb bay where the carnagene was armed and ready.

Michael kept firing as the Spitfire circled them, the gun shuddering in his hands. And then he got what he wanted: the Spitfire’s wing gun sparked. Bullets thunked into the side of Iron Fist and threw sparks around Michael. He returned the fire as the British plane turned in a swift circle. The bastard was mad now, ready to shoot first and ask questions la-

Michael heard the clatter of hobnails on metal.

He looked to his left, and saw Boots coming at him along the walkway. The huge man stopped suddenly, his face a rictus of shock and rage at seeing Michael manning the machine gun, and then he came on with murder in his eyes.

Michael swiveled the gun to the left to shoot him down, but its barrel clunked against the rim of the opening and would go no further.

Boots hurtled forward. He kicked out, and before Michael could protect himself the big boot smacked into his stomach and sent him reeling backward along the walkway. He fell and skidded, the breath knocked out of him.

The Spitfire delivered another barrage, and as Boots reached Michael, machine-gun bullets tore through Iron Fist’s skin and ricocheted around them. Michael kicked into the man’s right knee. Boots howled with pain and staggered back as Van Hoven put Iron Fist into a shallow dive to escape the enraged Spitfire pilot. Boots went down, clutching his knee, as Michael gasped for breath.

On its next pass the Spitfire sent bursts of bullets into Iron Fist’s bomb bay. One of those bullets ricocheted off a metal spar and glanced away to hit a carnagene bomb’s fuse. The fuse sputtered, and smoke began to fill the compartment.

As Boots tried to haul himself up, Michael hit him on the point of the chin with an uppercut that snapped his head back. But Boots was as strong as an ox, and in the next second he heaved himself up and crashed headlong into Michael, throwing them both back against a metal-ribbed bulkhead. Michael hammered his fists down on Boots’s cropped skull, and Boots punched into Michael’s bruised stomach. Spitfire bullets ripped through the bulkhead beside them, showering them with orange sparks. Iron Fist shuddered, an engine smoking on its starboard wing.

In the cockpit Van Hoven leveled the plane off at one thousand feet. The Spitfire kept flashing back and forth, determined to bring them down. Schrader shouted, “There!” and pointed. The hazy landmass of England lay within sight, but now a third engine was smoking and beginning to miss. Van Hoven throttled forward, giving the bomber all the power it could handle. Iron Fist headed toward England at two hundred and ten miles per hour, Channel whitecaps breaking in its wake.

A fist cracked against the side of Michael’s jaw, and Boots drove a knee into his groin. As Michael crumpled, Boots grasped his throat and lifted him, slamming his skull into the metal overhead. Stunned, Michael knew he had to change but he couldn’t get a grip on the thought. He was lifted again, and again his skull hit the overhead. As Boots started to lift him a third time, Michael cracked his forehead against Boots’s face, crunching the man’s nose. Boots dropped him and staggered back, blood streaming from his nostrils. But before Michael could set himself for another attack, Boots swung a kick at his ribs. Michael dodged the blow, catching most of its impact on his right shoulder, and the breath hissed between his gritted teeth.

The Spitfire came head-on at Iron Fist. The wing guns sparked, and in the next instant the cockpit was full of flying glass and flames. Van Hoven slumped forward, his chest punctured by a half-dozen bullets, and Schrader writhed with a broken arm. One of Iron Fist’s engines exploded, sending shrapnel tearing through the cockpit. The bombardier cried out, blinded by metal fragments. The aircraft sank lower toward the waves, flames gnawing in the ruined cockpit and across the starboard wing.

Boots limped toward Michael, who tried desperately to shake off the pain. Reaching down, Boots gripped his collar and hauled him up, then slammed a fist into his face. Michael fell back against the bulkhead, blood all over his mouth.

Boots drew his fist back, to smash into Michael’s face again.

Before the blow could be delivered, Michael twisted to one side and his hands found the red cylinder of the fire extinguisher. He tore it loose from its straps and swung it around as Boots’s fist came at his face. The man’s fist was stopped short by the cylinder, and his knuckles broke like matchsticks. Michael punched the cylinder into Boots’s stomach like a battering ram. The breath whooshed from the huge man, and Michael struck upward with the cylinder into Boots’s jaw. He heard the satisfying crunch of the jawbone breaking. Boots, his eyes glazed with pain and his lips split open, grappled with Michael for the cylinder. A knee drove into Michael’s side, and as he sagged to his knees Boots wrenched the cylinder away from him.

Boots lifted the fire extinguisher, intending to smash Michael’s brains out with it. Michael tensed to lunge at him before the cylinder could slam down.

Over the shriek of the wind Michael heard the chatter of the Spitfire’s guns. Fiery tracers came through the plane’s side and ricocheted off the bulkheads. He saw three holes, each the size of a fist, open across Boots’s broad chest. And in the next instant a bullet clanged against the fire extinguisher, and it went off with a blast like a miniature bomb.

Michael flung himself flat as pieces of metal clattered in all directions. Chemical foam hissed on the bulkheads. He looked up, and saw Boots standing there holding on to a machine-gun mount with one arm.

Boots’s other arm lay a few feet away, the hand still twitching. He looked at it, blinking with dumb amazement. He released his grip, and staggered toward his arm.

When Boots moved, his intestines began to slide from the gaping wound in his side. Pieces of red metal glistened in the hole, and his clothes were drenched with chemical foam. Another wound had been torn open on the side of his throat, the blood streaming down from the severed veins like a crimson fountain. With each step Boots diminished. He stopped, staring down at his hand and arm, and then turned his head to look at Michael.

He stood there, dead on his feet, until Michael got up, walked to him, and knocked him over with a finger.

Boots crashed down, and lay still.

Michael felt near passing out, but one glance out the portal and the realization that the sea was less than three hundred feet below cleared his head. He stepped over Boots’s grisly bulk and went toward the cockpit.

In the bomb bay he recoiled at the smoke and the hissing noise. One of the carnagene bombs was about to detonate. He went on, finding the navigator desperately trying to fly the plane as the pilot lay dead and the copilot was severely wounded. Iron Fist was dropping steadily, the Spitfire circling above. The coast of England was less than seven miles away. Michael said to the terrified navigator, “Put us down. Now.”

The man fumbled with the controls, chopping the power off and trying to get the nose up as Iron Fist-now truly a crippled bird-dropped another hundred feet. Michael braced himself against the pilot’s seat. Iron Fist fell, plowing into the Channel with a surprisingly gentle bump, its force at last spent.

Waves washed over the wings. Michael didn’t wait for the navigator. He went back through the bomb bay to the plane’s waist and unlatched the entry door. There was no time to search for a life raft, and he doubted if one had survived that hail of bullets. He jumped into the Channel’s chilly water, and swam away from the aircraft as fast as he could.

The Spitfire came down low, skimming the surface, passed over Michael, and headed toward the green land beyond.

Michael kept going, wanting to get as much distance as he could between him and the Fortress. He heard hot surfaces sizzling as the plane began to sink. Perhaps the navigator got out, perhaps not. Michael didn’t pause. The salt water stung his wounds and kept him from passing out. Stroke after stroke, he left the airplane behind. When he had gotten a distance away, he heard a rush and gurgling and looked back to see the plane going down at the tail. Its nose reared up, and on it Michael could see Frankewitz’s drawing of Hitler squeezed in an Iron Fist. If fish could appreciate art, they’d have a grand time.

Iron Fist began to disappear, sinking rapidly as water gushed into the waist gun portals. In another moment it was gone, and air bubbles rose and burst at the turbulent surface. Michael turned away and swam toward shore. He was weakening; he felt himself wanting to let go. Not yet, he told himself. One more stroke. One more, and one after that. Breaststrokes definitely were superior to dog paddling.

He heard the chugging of an engine. A patrol boat was coming toward him, two men with rifles on the bow. A Union Jack pennant whipped in the rigging.

He was home.

They picked him up, wrapped a blanket around him, and gave him a cup of tea as strong as wolf piss. Then they trained their rifles on him, until they could get to shore and turn him over to the authorities. The boat was about a mile from harbor when Michael heard a distant, muffled whump. He looked back, and saw a huge geyser of water shoot up from the surface. One or more of the carnagene bombs had exploded in their bomb bay at the bottom of the English Channel. The geyser settled back, the water thrashing for a moment, and that was the end of it.

But not quite.

Michael stepped out on a dock, a harbor village behind him, and scanned the Channel for a British destroyer that he knew must be arriving soon. He shook himself, and water droplets flew from his hair and clothes. He felt overcome with happiness, even standing at the point of Home Guard rifles.

So happy, in fact, that he felt like howling.

ELEVEN – Unforeseen Circumstances

1

His eyes were rimmed with red, his face chalky. It was a very bad sign.

“None of it survived, I’m afraid,” Martin Bormann said. He cleared his throat. “Dr. Hildebrand is dead and… the project seems not to have borne fruit.”

He waited for more of it, his hands clenched into fists on his desktop before him. On the wall behind him a portrait of Frederick the Great watched in judgment.

“We… don’t think the aircraft ever reached London,” Bormann went on. He glanced uneasily at the other man in the room, a gray-haired, stiff-backed field marshal. “That is to say, there’s no evidence the carnagene was delivered to its target.”

He said nothing. A pulse beat steadily at his temple. Through a gilt-edged window the shadows of June 6 were spreading over Berlin. Tacked up on another wall were maps of Normandy, showing beaches that the world would soon know under the code names Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword. Everywhere on those maps, red lines were pushing inland, and black lines marked the retreat-oh, what traitors! he thought as he looked at them-of German troops.

“The project was a failure,” Bormann said. “Due to… unforeseen circumstances.”

“No, it’s not that,” Hitler answered in a small, quiet voice. “It’s that someone didn’t believe strongly enough. Someone didn’t have the necessary willpower. Bring me Blok.” His voice was more strident. “Colonel Jerek Blok. That’s who I’d like to see. At once.”

“Colonel Blok is… no longer with us.”

“The traitor!” Hitler almost rose from his desk. “What did he do? Run and give himself up to the first British soldier he saw?”

“Colonel Blok is deceased,” Bormann said.

“Yes, I would’ve committed suicide, too, if I’d botched things like he has!” Hitler stood. His face was flushed and moist looking. “I should’ve known not to give him any responsibility! He was a failure, pretending to be a success! The world is full of them!”

“At least Germany is, I fear,” the field marshal said under his breath.

“When I think of the time and money spent on this project, I’m almost ill!” Hitler came out from behind his desk. “So Blok took his own life, did he? How was it done? A pill or a pistol?”

“A…” Bormann almost said propeller. But telling the Führer what had really happened would open a real can of worms. There would be the matter of the German Resistance-those foul pigs-and the secret agents who somehow destroyed all of the carnagene. And the distasteful matter of Chesna van Dorne, too. No, no! It was best to let the story stand as it was: that a fleet of bombers had hit Skarpa’s tanks and armory, and the explosion had ruined the chemicals. The Führer, in these troublous times, had more to worry about than reality. “A pistol,” he said.

“Well, it saved us a bullet, didn’t it? But all that time and effort, wasted! We could have developed the solar cannon with that money! But no, no-Blok and his conspirators had to talk me out of it! I’m too trusting, that’s the problem! Martin, I think the man might have been working for the British after all!”

Bormann shrugged. Sometimes it was better to let him believe as he would. He was easier to handle that way.

“My Führer?” The field marshal motioned to the Normandy maps. “If you might turn your attention to the current situation, please? You’ll notice here, that the British and Canadians are moving toward Caen. Over here”-he touched another portion of the map-“the American troops are progressing toward Carentan. Our troop disposition is stretched too thin to contain both problems. Might I ask your opinion on which divisions to block this threat?”

Hitler said nothing. He stood staring not at the maps, on which life-and-death struggles were displayed, but at his collection of watercolors, in which imaginary wolves lurked.

“My Führer?” the field marshal urged. “What shall we do?”

A muscle twitched in Hitler’s face. He turned away from the paintings, went to his desk, and opened its top drawer. He reached in, and his hand emerged with a knifelike letter opener.

He walked back to the paintings, his eyes glazed and his gait that of a sleepwalker, and he plunged the blade through the first one, ripping the farmhouse scene from top to bottom and with it the wolf that hid in a shadow. The blade pierced the second watercolor, the one of a mountain stream in which a wolf crouched behind a rock. “Lies,” Hitler whispered, tearing the canvas. “Lies and deceptions.”

“My Führer?” the field marshal asked, but there was no answer. Martin Bormann turned away and went to stand at a window overlooking the Thousand-Year Reich.

The blade tore through the third painting, in which a wolf hid amid a field of white edelweiss. “Lies,” the man said, his voice strained with tension. The blade went back and forth, and shreds of canvas fell around his polished shoes. “Lies, lies, lies.”

In the distance an air-raid siren went off. Its howl reverberated over the broken city, hazed with dust and smoke from previous bombing raids. To the east lay oncoming night.

Hitler dropped the blade to the carpet. He clapped his hands over his ears.

A bomb flashed on the outskirts of the city. Bormann put his hands over his eyes to shield them from the glare. As Hitler stood trembling with the remnants of his visions underfoot, the German field marshal placed his hand over his mouth, for fear he might scream.