And in doing so, Michael put his hand into a final snare.
Because Sandler—shamming again, just as he’d shammed his drunkenness—suddenly uncoiled, his teeth gritted with fury, and the blade of the knife he’d drawn from inside his right boot glinted with yellow sunlight.
The knife came up in a vicious blur, its point aimed at the center of Michael Gallatin’s stomach.
Less than two inches from penetration, the blade was checked. A hand seized Sandler’s wrist, clamping tight. Sandler stared at that hand, his slitted eyes stunned.
The hand was not quite human, but neither was it fully an animal’s claw. It was streaked with black hair, the fingers beginning to contort and retract into talons. Sandler gasped, and looked up into the man’s face.
The baron’s facial bones were shifting, the nose and mouth extending into a dark-haired muzzle. The mouth strained open, making room for the fangs as they slid, dripping saliva from amid the human teeth. Sandler was struck senseless; the knife clattered to the platform. He smelled an animalish reek, the odors of sweat and wolf hair. He opened his mouth to scream.
Michael, his spine already bending, thrust his face forward and sank his fangs into the hunter’s throat. With a quick, savage twist of his head, he ripped out flesh and veins and crushed Sandler’s windpipe. He pulled his head back, leaving a gaping hole where Sandler’s throat had been. The man’s eyes blinked and his face twitched, the nerves and muscles losing control. The scent of carnage overwhelmed Michael; he struck again, his fangs winnowing into the scarlet tissue, his head thrashing back and forth as he chewed all the way to the hunter’s spinal cord. His fangs crunched on the spine, burst it open, and kept gnawing past the splintered edges. When Michael pulled back from Sandler this time, the hunter’s head hung to the body by strands of tough muscle and connective tissue. A moan came from the windpipe’s hole, as Sandler’s lungs stuttered. Michael, his shirt ripping apart at the seams and his trousers drooping around his lower body, put a foot against the hunter’s chest and shoved.
What was left of Harry Sandler toppled backward, and slithered off the speeding train.
Michael spat out a mouthful of flesh and lay on his side, his body between its two poles. He knew he had yet to get to the locomotive and slow the train; a wolf’s paws couldn’t control levers. He held himself back from a complete change, the wild winds whirling in his mind and the muscles rippling beneath the dark-haired flesh under a human’s clothes. His toes ached in the stiff shoes, and his shoulders longed to burst free. Not yet! Michael thought. Not yet! He began to come back, over the primeval distance his body had already traveled, and in perhaps half a minute he sat up, his human skin slick with sweat and his wounded leg full of frost.
He grasped the rifle; there was a bullet in the chamber. Then he stood up, his brain and muscles sluggish, and climbed the ladder to the walkway that went across the top of the coal tender. He crouched to the locomotive, saw the engineer and fire stoker at work beneath the engine’s overhang, and then he eased down the ladder into the locomotive.
When the two men saw him, they instantly lifted their hands in surrender; they were drivers, not fighters. “Off the train,” Michael said, speaking in German again. He motioned with the rifle. “Now.” The fire stoker jumped, rolling down a bluff into the woods. The engineer hesitated, his eyes wide with fear, until Michael pressed the rifle barrel to his throat. Then, preferring a shock to the bones instead of a bullet through the neck, the engineer leaped from the locomotive.
Michael grasped the red-handled throttle and cut the engine’s speed. He leaned out and saw the bridge over the Havel River approaching. In the distance stood the towers of the Reichkronen. Here was as good a place as any. He throttled down and climbed up onto the top of the coal tender once more. The locomotive neared the bridge, its wheels grinding a slower rhythm. A steam valve was screaming, but Michael had no time to worry about that. The train was still going to cross the bridge at a good clip. He stood up, one hand clasped to his wounded thigh. The railroad bridge narrowed, and dark green water beckoned him. He spat out another piece of skin; Sandler’s flesh was caught in his teeth. He hoped the river was deep under the bridge. If not, he’d soon be kissing mud.
Michael took a deep breath, and jumped.
3
The morning sun was warm and placid on Chesna’s face, but inside a storm raged. She stood on the grassy riverbank in front of the Reichkronen, watching the rowboats slowly move with the current, then against it. They had been dragging the river for over four hours, but Chesna knew the nets would only find mud and river grass. Wherever the baron was, it was not at the bottom of the Havel.
“I tell you, it’s a lie,” Mouse said, standing next to Chesna. He was speaking quietly, because the search for the Baron von Fange had attracted a throng of onlookers. “Why would he have come down here, alone? And, besides, he wouldn’t have gotten drunk. Damn it, I knew I shouldn’t have let him out of my sight.” The little man scowled and fretted. “Somebody had to take care of the fool!”
Chesna’s tawny eyes watched the progress of the row-boats, the soft breeze stirring her golden hair. She wore a black dress: her trademark color, not her mourning suit. Soldiers had searched the banks several miles downriver, in case the body had washed up in the shallows. It was of no use, she thought. This was a sham; but whose sham, and why? One possibility had occurred to her, and sent shocks of alarm through her nerves: he’d been caught while exploring Jerek Blok’s suite and taken away for questioning. If that were so, Colonel Blok hadn’t given anything away when he’d told Chesna earlier this morning that the police had been summoned to start dragging the river. Other thoughts gnawed at her: if the baron broke under torture, he might tell everything he knew. Her own neck, and the necks of others in her finely tuned anti-Nazi organization, might be destined for piano-wire nooses. So should she stay here and continue to play the role of worry-wrought fiancee, or get out while she could? And there was the matter of Blok and Frankewitz, as well; the colonel had told a Gestapo doctor he wanted Theo von Frankewitz able to answer questions within twelve hours. That time limit was ticking away.
The river nets were not going to find Baron von Fange. Perhaps he was already snared in a net, and perhaps a net was about to enshroud her and her friends, too. I’ve got to get out, she decided. Make up some excuse. Get to the airport and my plane and try to make it to Switzerland…
Mouse glanced over his shoulder and inwardly quaked. Coming toward them were Colonel Blok and the monstrous man who wore polished jackboots. He felt like a pigeon about to be plucked and boiled in oil. But he knew the truth now: his friend—the baron, ha!—had been right. It was Hitler who had killed Mouse’s wife and family, and it was men like Jerek Blok who were Hitler’s weapons. Mouse slid his hand into the pocket of his perfectly creased gray trousers and touched the Iron Cross there. It had sharp edges.
“Chesna?” Blok called. The sun glinted off his silver teeth. “Any results?”
“No.” She tried to keep the wariness out of her voice. “They haven’t found so much as a shoe.”
Blok, wearing a crisp black SS uniform, positioned himself on Chesna’s other side, and Boots stood like a mountain behind Mouse. The colonel shook his head. “They won’t find him, I’m afraid. The current’s very strong here. If he went in anywhere near this point, he might be miles downriver by now. Or snagged on an underwater log, or caught between rocks, or…” He noted that Chesna looked pallid. “I’m sorry, my dear. I didn’t mean to be so vivid.”
She nodded. Mouse could hear the huge man breathing like a bellows behind him, and drops of sweat fell from his underarms. Chesna said, “I haven’t seen Harry this morning. I would’ve thought he’d be interested in all this.”
“I called his room just a few minutes ago,” Blok said. “I told him what must’ve happened to the baron.” Blok squinted in the glare off the gently rippling water. “Harry isn’t feeling too well. Sore throat, he said. I think he’s planning on sleeping most of the
day… but he did tell me to convey his condolences.”
“I don’t think we know the baron’s dead yet, do we?” Chesna asked coldly.
“No, we don’t,” Blok agreed. “But two witnesses said they saw him stumbling along the riverbank, and—”
“Yes, yes, I know all that! But they didn’t see him fall into the river, did they?”
“One of them thought he heard a splash,” Blok reminded her. He reached out and touched Chesna’s elbow, but she pulled away. His fingers lingered in midair for a few seconds, then he dropped his hand. “I know you… had strong feelings for the man, Chesna. I’m sure you’re quite upset as well,” he said to Mouse. “But facts are facts, aren’t they? If the baron didn’t fall into the river and drown, then where is—”
“We’ve got something!” shouted one of the men in a rowboat, about forty yards offshore. He and his companion began to pull mightily at their dredge. “It’s heavy, whatever it is!”
“The net’s probably caught on a sunken log,” Blok said to Chesna. “I’m afraid the current carried the baron’s body far down—”
The net broke the surface. In its folds was a human body, dark with clinging mud.
Blok’s mouth hung open.
“We’ve got him!” the man in the rowboat shouted, and Chesna felt her heart swell. “My God!” came the man’s voice. “He’s alive!” The two men struggled to pull the human body up over the rowboat’s side, and the muddy figure splashed in the water and heaved itself in.
Blok took three steps forward. Water and mud swirled around his boots. “Impossible!” he gasped. “It’s… utterly impossible!”
The onlookers, who’d been expecting a soggy corpse, if anything, surged closer as the rowboat angled toward the riverbank. The man who’d just been hauled from a wet grave pushed aside the folds of the net to get his legs free. “Impossible!” Chesna heard Colonel Blok whisper; he glanced back at Boots, his face white as cheese. Mouse gave a joyful cry when he saw the black hair and green eyes of the man in the rowboat, and he ran out into the water in his creased trousers to help pull the craft to shore.
As the boat keel bit solid earth, Michael Gallatin stepped out. His shoes squeaked, and mud clung to what used to be a white shirt. He still wore his bow tie.
“Good God!” Mouse said, stretching to put his arm around the man’s shoulders. “We thought we’d lost you!”
Michael nodded. His lips were gray, and he was shivering. The water had been quite chilly.
Chesna couldn’t move. But then she remembered herself, and rushed forward to throw her arms around the baron. He winced, supporting his weight on one leg, and he clasped his muddy arms to her back. “You’re alive, you’re alive!” Chesna said. “Oh, thank God you’re alive!” She summoned tears, and they trickled down her cheeks.
Michael inhaled Chesna’s fresh aroma. The chill of the river had kept him from passing out during the long swim, but now the weakness was catching up with him. The last hundred yards, then a short underwater swim to get himself tangled in the dredging net, had been brutal agony. Someone stood behind Chesna; Michael looked into the eyes of Colonel Jerek Blok.
“Well, well,” the colonel said with a brittle smile. “Returned from the dead, have you? Boots, I do believe we’ve just witnessed a miracle. How did the angels roll away your stone, Baron?”
Chesna snapped, “Leave him alone! Can’t you see he’s exhausted?”
“Oh yes, I can see he’s exhausted. What I can’t see is why he isn’t dead! Baron, I’d say you were underwater for almost six hours. Have you grown gills?”
“Not quite,” Michael answered. His wounded thigh was numb, but the bleeding had ceased. “I had this.” He lifted his right hand. In it was a hollow reed, about three feet long. “I’m afraid I was careless. I had too much to drink last night, and I went for a walk. I must’ve slipped. Anyway, I fell in and the current took me.” He wiped mud from his cheek with his forearm. “It’s amazing how you can sober up when you realize you’re about to drown. Something trapped my leg. A log, I think. Gave me a nasty slash on the thigh. You see?”
“Go on,” Blok commanded.
“I couldn’t get loose. And the way I was held under, I couldn’t lift my head to the surface. Luckily I was lying near some reeds. I uprooted one, bit off the end, and breathed through it.”
“Very lucky, indeed,” Blok said. “Did you learn that trick in commando school, Baron?”
Michael looked shocked. “No, Colonel. Boy Scouts.”
“And you’ve been underwater for almost six hours? Breathing through a damned reed?”
“This ‘damned reed,’ as you put it, is going home with me. I may gild it and have it mounted. One never knows one’s limits until life is put to the test. Isn’t that right?”
Blok started to reply, then thought better of it. He glanced around at the people who had come forward. “Welcome back to the living, Baron,” he said, his eyes cold. “You’d best take a shower. You smell very fishy.” He turned and stalked away, followed by Boots, but then stopped abruptly and addressed the baron again. “You’d better hold on to your reed, sir. Miracles are few and far between.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” Michael said; he couldn’t turn down the opportunity. “I’ll hold on to it with an iron fist.”
Blok stood very still, ramrod stiff. Michael felt Chesna’s arms tighten around him. Her heart was pounding. “Thank you for your concern, Colonel,” Michael said.
Still, Blok didn’t move. Michael knew those two words were wheeling in the man’s brain. Was it a figure of speech, or a taunt? They stared at each other for a few seconds, like two beasts of prey. If Michael was a wolf, Jerek Blok was a silver-toothed panther. And then the silence broke, and Blok smiled faintly and nodded. “Good health to you, Baron,” he said, and walked up the riverbank toward the Reichkronen. Boots glared at Michael for perhaps three seconds longer—enough to convey the message that war had been declared—and then followed the colonel.
Two German officers, one wearing a magnifying monocle, came forward and offered to help Michael to his suite. Supported between them, Michael limped up the riverbank with Chesna and Mouse behind him. In the hotel lobby the flustered and red-faced manager appeared to say how sorry he was for the baron’s misfortune, and that a wall would be put up along the riverbank to prevent such future calamities; he suggested the services of the hotel physician, but Michael declined. Would a bottle of the hotel’s finest brandy help to soothe the baron’s injuries? The baron said he thought that would be a perfect balm.
As soon as the door of Chesna’s suite closed and the German officers were gone, Michael eased his muddy body down onto a white chaise longue. “Where were you?” Chesna demanded.
“And don’t give us that six-hours-in-the-river crap, either!” Mouse said. He poured himself a shot of hundred-year-old brandy, then took a glass to Michael. “What the hell happened to you?”
Michael drank down the brandy. It was like inhaling fire. “I took a train ride,” he said. “As Harry Sandler’s guest. Sandler’s dead. I’m alive. That’s it.” He undid his bow tie and began to strip off his tattered shirt. Red razor slashes streaked his shoulders and back. “Colonel Blok assumed Sandler would kill me. Imagine his surprise.”
“Why would Sandler want to kill you? He doesn’t know who you really are!”
“Sandler wants—wanted—to marry you. So he tried his best to get me out of the way. Blok went along with it. Nice friends you have, Chesna.”
“Blok may not be my friend very much longer. The Gestapo has Theo von Frankewitz.”
Michael listened intently as Chesna told him about the phone call Blok had made. In light of that fact, his remark about “iron fist” seemed rather reckless. Frankewitz would sing like a bird once the Gestapo went to work on him. And though Frankewitz did not know Michael’s name, his artist’s eye—however bruised and bloodshot—would remember Michael’s face. That description would be enough to bring Jerek Blok and the Gestapo down o
n all of them.
Michael stood up. “We’ve got to leave here as soon as we can.”
“And go where? Out of Germany?” Mouse asked hopefully.
“For you, yes. For me, I’m afraid not.” He looked at Chesna. “I have to get to Norway. To Skarpa Island. I believe Dr. Hildebrand’s invented a new type of weapon, and he’s testing it there on prisoners of war. What that weapon has to do with Iron Fist I don’t know, but I’m going to find out. Can you get me there?”
“I don’t know. I’ll need time to arrange the connections.”
“How much time?”
She shook her head. “It’s difficult to say. A week, at the least. The fastest route to Norway would be by plane. There’ll be fuel stops to arrange. Plus food and supplies for us. Then, from the coast of Norway, we’d have to use a boat to get to Skarpa. A place like that is going to be under tight security: offshore mines, a coastal radar station, and God only knows what else.”
“You misunderstand me,” Michael said. “You won’t be going to Norway. You’ll be getting yourself and Mouse out of the country. Once Blok realizes I’m a British agent, he’ll figure out that your best performances have not been in films.”
“You need a pilot,” Chesna replied. “I’ve been flying my own plane since I was nineteen. I have ten years of experience. Trying to find another pilot to take you to Norway would be impossible.”
Michael recalled Sandler mentioning that Chesna had flown her own stunts during one of her films. A daredevil, he’d called her; Michael was inclined to think that Chesna van Dorne was one of the most fascinating women he’d ever met—and certainly one of the most beautiful. She was the kind of woman who didn’t need a man to direct her, or to praise the insecurity out of her. She had no insecurities, as far as Michael could see. No wonder Sandler had wanted her so badly; the hunter had felt the urge to tame Chesna. To survive this long as a secret agent in the midst of the enemy camp, Chesna had to be someone special indeed.