Zealot (18 page)

One of the guards saw him coming at them and shouted out an alarm. “
Uwaga!
Watch out!” He fired off a shot at MacLeod that missed wildly. Before the guard could shoot again, MacLeod fired at him on
the run, hitting him in the shoulder. The guard dropped his rifle and fell to the ground in agony, cradling his useless gun
arm. At the sound of gunfire, the Polish officer and his second guard turned toward MacLeod, leveling their weapons at him.

“Now would be the time!” MacLeod called out to Avram, not really expecting him to hear.

The two Poles fired simultaneously. MacLeod hit the ground and rolled, dodging the volley. If nothing else, at least he’d
drawn their attention away from Miriam.

Rolling to his feet again, he fired off another shot. It barely missed the officer and whizzed dangerously close to Miriam,
who had struggled to her knees and was attempting to stand behind him. “
Vart doh!
” MacLeod called to her, and she obediently dropped back to the ground.

The second guard fired his rifle again and caught MacLeod in the thigh. MacLeod stumbled from the impact, cursing loudly,
but managed to keep on charging, closing the ground between them. Mentally, he fought to block out the pain, block out the
pain, concentrate on raising the rifle, aiming the rifle, firing the rifle. His bullet hit the second guard squarely in the
gut, throwing him back a yard or more before dropping him in the gutter.

Suddenly, MacLeod could sense the presence of another Immortal coming closer. “About bloody time,” he mumbled under his breath
as he charged, then dodged as the remaining officer fired his pistol. MacLeod could feel the hot rush of the bullet just inches
from his head. He spun and fired twice in quick succession, dropping the officer where he stood.

Allowing himself a quick sigh of relief, MacLeod hurried to where Miriam lay in the street, curled in a tight ball to protect
her injured belly. “
Alts iz gut
,” he reassured her. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see a German cargo truck barrel around the corner, Avram at the
wheel. Better late than never, MacLeod thought. He bent down and began to untie Miriam’s hands. “Everything’s all right.”

Suddenly, blam! and a bullet tore into MacLeod’s arm. Through the red-rush of pain, MacLeod looked up to see five guards from
Gesiowska, uniformed Germans and Poles, running down the street toward him, guns drawn and firing. MacLeod raised his rifle
to fire at the closest German.

Click.

Nothing. Out of ammo. Shit.

“Avram!” he called out. The cargo truck drove directly for the Gesiowska reinforcements. “Avra—” the impact of the German
bullet as it ripped into his stomach knocked the air from his lungs. As he fell to his knees, eyes wide with shock, he fought
to retain consciousness. He could barely hear Avram scream out from the truck—

“Protect Miriam!”

With what felt like his last ounce of strength, MacLeod managed to throw his body across Miriam, protecting her body with
his own. Avram’s truck erupted in a tremendous ball of red-gold flame in the midst of the prison guards. MacLeod turned his
face away from the intense heat and blinding light. Then something metal seared into his side, and his world faded to black.

“Duncan? Duncan, please … please wake up. Duncan?”

As MacLeod began to come back to life, he could hear Miriam’s voice, filled with terror. “God in Heaven, help me. Duncan!”
Beneath him, as feeling was slowly restored to his body, he could feel her try to move, trying to escape from under what she
must have thought was MacLeod’s bloody corpse pinning her to the cobblestones. The more her frail, undernourished body fought
and failed to free herself, the more panicked she became. “Oh, God, no … please, no …” she sobbed, struggling. He wanted to
comfort her, but speech and motion had not yet returned to his body.

By the time he was finally able to roll to one side, freeing her, she was nearly hysterical. She turned and looked at him
in horror. “You were … you were … dead,” she said, barely able to catch her breath

“Miriam, I’m fine, really,” he consoled her. He untied the bonds that held her hands. Immediately, without thought, she crossed
her arms in front of her to shield her nakedness. MacLeod tried to explain, “I just blacked out. Must’ve hit my head when
I fell.” He gave her what he hoped was his most sincere and endearing smile. “C’mon, we’ve gotta get out of here before more
company comes.” He scooped her up in his arms as if carrying her over a threshold, and they disappeared into a nearby alley
before more soldiers arrived to investigate the explosion.

Avram found them in a stairwell of an empty building several streets away from the prison. Miriam, wrapped in MacLeod’s shirt,
sat on an upper stair, head against the wall for support, still a little dazed. MacLeod, now shirtless, cleaned the cuts and
abrasions on Miriam’s face as gingerly as he could with some water he’d found.

“Yeow!” Miriam flinched away as his handkerchief dabbed at the pistol gouge beneath her eye.

“We have to get the gravel out or it won’t heal,” MacLeod explained. “Just a little more, then I’ll stop. I promise … okay?”
His voice was tender, his touch gentle. Miriam sighed, nodding, and closed her eyes, allowing him to continue.

“How’s our heroine?”

At the sound of Avram’s voice from the bottom of the stair-well, Miriam’s eyes flew open. “Tzaddik?” she called out, and then
saw him coming up the stairs. “Tzaddik, you’re alive!” His shirt lay in shreds on his back, his trousers torn, but he was
whole and alive. In his arms he carried two rifles, a pistol and an ammo belt he had liberated from their owners before fleeing
the scene of the crime. Miriam jumped up to meet him, eager to touch him, to make sure he was real, but a sharp pain tore
through her belly when she moved too fast. Startled, she started to fall and immediately MacLeod’s strong arms were there
to catch her, and he helped her gently down to the steps again.

“Some cuts, a lot of bruises,” MacLeod filled Avram in. “Probably some nightmares she’ll never be rid of, but nothing we can
do about that right now. I’m concerned about what’s going on inside here, though.” He touched Miriam’s midsection, which she
was cradling protectively. “We should find Dr. Cohen.” Dr. Israel Cohen, one of the only physicians left in the Ghetto, was
a ZOB partisan who during the January uprising had proven himself equally skilled with a grenade as with a scalpel.

“No!” Miriam protested. “There’s no time. I have to see Anielewicz. As soon as we can. It’s urgent.” Using the handrail, Miriam
managed to get back to her feet.

If Miriam needed to see the ZOB leader that urgently, MacLeod realized her news had to be grim. “The
Aktsia
?” he asked, resigned to the answer he knew he’d hear.

“Tonight. The Germans strike before first light.”

MacLeod and Avram exchanged a look, and Avram handed him the weapons he’d scrounged. Then Avram put an arm around Miriam’s
waist. “Anielewicz is at the Mila Street base. Can you walk?” He helped her gingerly down a step, then another, and when the
shooting pain did not return, she pulled away from him and started down the stairs under her own power.

“Looks like I’ll have to,” she said as she reached the bottom landing and turned toward Avram with a little lopsided smile,
the best her bruised face could manage. “You seem to have blown up the only working transportation in the Ghetto.”

Juggling the rifles, MacLeod attempted to put his jacket back on. “Hell of a signal, Avram. Next time, you might try whistling.”

“Hey, stop with the kvetching,” Avram protested, “it worked, didn’t it? Three of the bastards dead, another five out of commission—admit
it, Errol Flynn couldn’t have done it better,” he said, invoking the name of one of his heroes in the American films he used
to like to watch before the war.

“Errol Flynn would have used a stunt man,” MacLeod groused as he followed them down the stairs.

Warsaw: April 18, 1943

MacLeod and Avram escorted Miriam across the Ghetto to the ZOB headquarters in an old building on Mila Street where she could
meet with Anielewicz, the ZOB commander, and be tended to by Dr. Cohen. After they dropped her off safely, MacLeod had thought
they’d return to their unit to prepare for the coming confrontation. But Avram had other ideas.

He led MacLeod into an apartment building a few blocks away at Mila Street 18. They passed through the lobby to a rear hallway,
then down a flight of stairs into an empty basement. Avram knocked twice on a section of the wall that looked no different
than the walls around it. MacLeod knew it was the entrance to an underground bunker.

“Tell Shmuel, Tzaddik’s here,” Avram announced to the empty room. They could hear locks turning, then a section of the wall
swung out. They had been granted admission to the bunker beneath Mila 18.

The guard at the door was a big, hulking lug who didn’t so much talk as he did grunt as he gestured them down the stairs,
and MacLeod couldn’t remember seeing him before at any of the ZOB meetings or drills. And a face like that one he knew he
would’ve remembered.

“Who’s that?” MacLeod whispered to Avram, as they started down the stairs to the
malina
. Avram shushed him with a wave of his hand.

“Later.”

The stairwell was a long one, the bunker far deeper than any MacLeod had seen so far, and there was an odd quality to the
light. It was a few moments before MacLeod realized that the light seemed strange because it was coming from light-bulbs in
the ceiling. He’d grown so used to candles and oil lamps in the power-deprived Ghetto, he’d nearly forgotten what electric
light was like. “Avram, what
is
this place?” he hissed in his comrade’s ear.

Avram took a quick look over his shoulder to make sure they were out of earshot of the bruiser manning the entrance. “Welcome
to the gangsters’ lair, MacLeod.”

“Gangsters?”

“You know. Dillinger, Capone, Cagney. ‘You’ll never take me alive, coppers,’ all that stuff—gangsters.”

“James Cagney is an actor, Avram, not a gangster,” MacLeod corrected.

“Gangster, actor, what’s the difference?” Avram said as they continued down the stairs. “Anyway, Shmuel Issachar is the king
of the thieves, pickpockets, blackmailers, hired killers—name your vice, he’s probably got a piece of it. Chicago hasn’t got
a lock on corruption, you know.”

“And this place is his?” MacLeod looked around in the bright, steady light as they reached the bottom of the stairs. On either
side of him, the corridor stretched on for hundreds of yards. He could hear voices through some of the open doorways, and
occasionally someone would move from room to room down the hallway.

“When the king needs a place to hole up from the Nazis, he builds the Taj Mahal. Generators, hot and cold running water, game
room, library. Rumor has it if the
Aktsia
doesn’t start soon, old Izzy’s putting in a pool over the summer.” Avram pointed out a large, broad-shouldered man moving
quickly toward them down the corridor. “Speak of the devil.”

“Tzaddik!” Issachar engulfed the smaller man in a bearish hug. “It’s been far too long!”

Avram grinned and bore it. “Shmuel, this is—”

“Duncan MacLeod!” Issachar released Avram abruptly and turned to MacLeod. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

“I’m sure you have.” MacLeod found something obscene about the gangster’s pudgy hands and fatty chins in a city where starvation
was the way of life.

Issachar laughed. “A rat can’t shit in the Ghetto without me knowing about it. Isn’t that right, Tzaddik?” Without waiting
for an answer, the man put a beefy arm around MacLeod’s shoulders. “So, they tell me you have connections in the French Underground
…”

“Later, Shmuel,” Avram interrupted, pulling MacLeod away from him. “First we need to talk some business.”

“Isn’t that a coincidence, business is my middle name. Step into my office, gentlemen.” Issachar ushered them into a side
room full of fine art and antique furnishings, and a desk to rival King Arthur’s round table. “Take a seat,” he said as he
lowered himself into the thronelike chair behind the desk.

MacLeod noticed two more hulking goons, like the one guarding the bunker’s entrance, placed strategically in the room. “We’ll
stand, thanks,” he said.

“Suit yourself,” the gangster said. “So, boys, what can I get you? Whiskey? Women?”

“Guns,” Avram said with finality. He wasn’t buying into Issachar’s joviality any more than MacLeod.

The false smile left Issachar’s face. “Guns,” he repeated. “Now, Tzaddik, my dear boy, what makes you think I can arrange
for guns any better than you can?”

“Because arranging them wasn’t the problem. We’d already done that for you. One dozen brand-new Russian rifles. That conveniently
disappeared two days ago between the Aryan side and the Ghetto.” Avram sat on the edge of the enormous desk and leaned into
the gangster’s face. “Face it, Izzy, I know you’ve got them. Now I want them.”

The gangster leaned forward as well, until he was nose to nose with Avram. “Go away, kid. You’re scuffing the furniture. I
never heard of your damn guns.” Issachar raised his hand, and the two goons hauled Avram off the desk.