met Chesna, what your escape route was going to be, and so much more. And you’re right: I won’t kill you.” He jabbed the fork’s tines into the flesh of Michael’s left arm and drew it out. “You do have a certain value, after all.” Again the fork jabbed down, piercing Michael’s shoulder. Michael flinched, sweat on his face. The fork was withdrawn. “I’m going to consume you,” Blok said, and drove the tines into Michael’s chest just below the throat, “like a piece of meat. I’ll chew you up, digest what I need, and spit out the rest.” He pulled the fork out, the tines tipped with blood. “You might know about Iron Fist-and about Dr. Hildebrand and Skarpa Island-but you don’t know how Iron Fist is going to be used. No one knows where the fortress is but myself, Dr. Hildebrand, and a few others whose loyalty is unquestioned. Therefore, your Russian friends don’t know either, and they can’t pass the information to the British and Americans, can they?” He jabbed the fork into Michael’s left cheek, then he drew it out and tasted Michael’s blood. “This,” Blok said, “is only the first course.” He snapped off the spot lamp.
Michael heard him cross the room. The heavy door opened. “Bauman,” the colonel said, “take this trash to a cell.”
He had been holding his breath; now he let it go in a hiss between his teeth. For the time being, at least, there would be no more torture. Bauman entered, along with three other soldiers. Michael’s wrists and ankles were unstrapped, and he was pulled up off the X-shaped table and guided by gunpoint along a stone-floored corridor. “Go on, you swine!” Bauman-a slim young man with round-lensed spectacles and a long, gaunt face-growled as he shoved Michael forward. On either side of the hallway were three-foot-high wooden doors with iron latches, set at floor level. In the doors were small square insets that could be slid back for, Michael assumed, either air or the passing in of food and water. The place smelled damp and ancient, with suggestions of sodden hay, human excrement, sweat, and unwashed flesh. A kennel for wild dogs, Michael thought. He heard the animalish moans and mutterings of his fellow prisoners.
“Stop,” Bauman commanded. He held himself stiff-backed and looked at Michael with disinterest. “Get on your knees.”
Michael hesitated. Two rifles jabbed his back. He bent down, and one of the soldiers drew the iron bolt back with a rusty shriek. Something scurried beyond the door.
Bauman opened it. A hot, sickening wave of stale air rolled out into Michael’s face. In the kennel’s rank darkness he could make out five or six skinny human bodies, perhaps others crouched up against the walls. The floor was covered with filthy hay, and the ceiling was only five feet off the floor.
“Go in,” Bauman said.
“Mercy of God! Mercy of God!” an emaciated, bald-headed man with bulging eyes cried out, and lurched toward the door on his knees, his hands upraised and running sores all over his sunken chest. He stopped, shivering, and looked hopefully at Bauman, his eyes blinking in the gloom.
“I said, go in,” the Nazi repeated. Two seconds after he’d spoken, one of the soldiers kicked Michael in the ribs with his booted foot, and the others shoved him into the hellish cubicle and slammed the door shut. The iron latch scraped into its socket. “Mercy of God! Mercy of God!” the prisoner kept shouting, until a gruff voice from the rear of the cell silenced him by saying, “Shut up, Metzger! No one’s listening to you!”
7
As he lay on the filth-clotted hay in the foul darkness with the other prisoners mumbling and moaning in their sleep, Michael felt a sadness creep over him like a silken shroud.
Life was a precious thing; what was it about men who hated it so much? He thought of the dark smoke belching from the chimneys and tainting the air with the smell of burning flesh. He thought of pinewood boxes full of hair, and how someone-a mother, a father-in a kinder world had combed that hair, and stroked it, and kissed the forehead it fell upon. Now it was gone to the wig makers, and the body up in smoke. More than humans were being destroyed here; whole worlds were being charred to white ash. And for what? Lebensraum-Hitler’s vaunted “elbow room”-and Iron Crosses? He thought of Mouse, lying dead in the thorns, the little man’s neck broken by a quick and merciful twist. His heart clutched: perhaps killing was his nature, but it was far from his pleasure. Mouse had been a good friend. What better epitaph was there? To mourn a single human being in such a death-torn land seemed like standing in a flaming house and blowing out a candle. He sheered his mind away from the memory of Boots crushing the dead hand and plucking the medal from it. His eyes were wet, and he realized he could lose his senses in this hellhole.
Something Blok had said. What was it? Michael tried to concentrate past the carnage. Something Blok had said about a fortress. Yes, that was it. Blok’s words: No one knows where the fortress is but myself, Dr. Hildebrand, and a few others…
The fortress. What fortress had he meant? Skarpa Island? Michael didn’t think so; it had been simple enough for Chesna to find out that Hildebrand had a home and workshop on Skarpa. That fact wasn’t a closely guarded secret. So what other fortress could Blok have meant, and what might that have to do with how Iron Fist was going to be used?
Bullet holes on glass and green-painted metal, Michael thought. Olive-green-painted metal. Why that particular hue?
He was pondering that when fingers touched his face.
He jumped, taken by surprise, and grabbed the slim wrist of a crouching figure outlined in dim blue. There was a muffled gasp; the figure thrashed to pull away, but Michael held firm.
Another figure, this one larger and also silhouetted in blue in Michael’s night vision, uncoiled from the gloom to his right. An arm shot out. At the end of it was a fist, which cracked against Michael’s skull and made his ears ring. A second blow grazed his forehead as he ducked beneath it, crouching on his knees. They were trying to kill him, he thought. A surge of panic rose within him. Were they that hungry that they wanted raw human flesh? He let go of the first figure, which scurried to the safety of a far corner, and concentrated on the larger, stronger one. A third blow was swung; Michael chopped at the open elbow and heard a satisfying grunt of pain. He saw the outline of a head and faint facial features. He slammed his fist into the face. A bulbous nose exploded.
“Guards!” a man shouted in French. “Guards! Help us!”
“Mercy of God! Mercy of God!” the shrieker began again at the top of his lungs.
“Stop that, you fools!” This man’s language was German with a thick Danish accent. “You’ll use up all the air!”
A pair of sinewy arms twined around Michael’s chest. He rocked his head back and smashed his skull against another man’s face. The arms lost their strength. The large figure with the burst nose was still full of fight. A fist hit Michael’s bruised shoulder and drove a cry of pain from him. Then fingers were on his throat, the weight of a body pressing down on him. Michael brought the palm of his hand up in a short, vicious blow against the tip of the man’s bearded chin and heard the crack of his teeth hitting together, possibly catching part of the tongue between them. The man groaned but kept squeezing Michael’s throat, fingers digging for the windpipe.
A piercing scream overwhelmed all the other frantic voices. It was the scream of a young girl, and it rose to a hysterical crescendo.
The kennel door’s small inset slid back. The brass nozzle of a fire hose was pushed through.
“Watch out!” the Dane warned. “They’re going to-”
A high-pressure flood of water shot from the nozzle and hit the prisoners, its velocity flinging Michael and his combatant away from each other. Michael was driven against a wall, the water battering his flesh. The girl’s scream became a strangled coughing. The shrieker had been silenced, his frail body hammered by the deluge. In another few seconds the water stopped, the fire hose was withdrawn, and the door’s inset slid back into place. It was all over but the moaning.
“You! The new one!” It was the same gruff voice that had told Metzger to shut up, except now the man was speaking around a badly bitten tongue. His language was coarse Russian. “You touch the girl again and I’ll break your neck, understand?”
“I don’t want to hurt her,” Michael answered in his native language. “I thought I was being attacked.”
The other man didn’t reply for a moment. Metzger was sobbing, and someone else was trying to soothe him. Water trickled down the walls and pooled on the floor, and the air reeked of sweat and steam. “She’s out of her mind,” the Russian told Michael. “About fourteen years old, is my guess. No telling how many times she’s been raped. Somewhere along the line, somebody put out her eyes with a hot iron.”
