next kennel down the corridor was opened.
“Dinnertime,” Lazaris said as he crawled past Michael again. “Everyone gets a drink from the sponge. Hey, you bastards! Leave something for my comrade!” There was the noise of a quick and decisive struggle, and then Lazaris nudged Michael’s arm. “Here.” He put a damp bit of bread in Michael’s hand. “That damned Frenchman always tries to get more than his share. You’ve got to be fast around here if you want something better than a crust.”
Michael sat with his back against the rough stones and chewed on the bread. He stared at nothing. His eyes stung. Tears crept from them and trickled down his cheeks, but who they were for he did not know.
8
The iron bolt shrieked back.
At once Michael was on his haunches, roused from a nightmare of chimneys whose black smoke covered the earth. The door opened. “Send the girl out!” one of the three soldiers who stood there commanded.
“Please,” Lazaris said, his voice husky from sleep. “Please let her alone. Hasn’t she suffered e-”
“Send the girl out!” the man repeated.
The girl had awakened, and was shivering in a corner. She made a soft whimpering noise, like a trapped rabbit.
Michael had reached the end of what he would bear. He crouched in front of the doorway, his green eyes glittering above the darkness of his fresh beard. “If you want her so badly,” he said in German, “then come in and take her.”
A rifle bolt was cocked. The barrel thrust in at him. “Out of the way, you vermin.”
“Gallatinov!” Lazaris pulled at him. “Are you crazy?”
Michael remained where he was. “Come in, you sons of bitches. Three against one. What are you waiting for?” He shouted it: “Come on!”
None of the Germans accepted his invitation. They wouldn’t shoot him, Michael reasoned, because they knew Blok and Krolle hadn’t finished with him. One of the soldiers gathered saliva in his mouth and spat at Michael, and then the door was slammed shut and latched again.
“Now you’ve done it!” Lazaris fretted. “God knows what you’ve awakened!”
Michael spun around and grasped the other man’s beard. “You listen to me,” he said. “If you want to forget you’re a man, that’s fine with me, but I’m not going to lie here and moan for the rest of my life! You protected the girl when you thought I was after her; why won’t you protect her from those bastards?”
“Because”-Lazaris worked Michael’s hand off his beard-“you’re only one, and they are legion.”
The door was unlocked again. “Mercy of God!” Metzger shrieked. The door opened. Now six soldiers stood in the corridor.
“You!” The beam of a hand torch found Michael’s face. “Come out of there!” It was Bauman’s voice.
Michael didn’t move.
“You won’t like it if we have to drag you out,” Bauman promised.
“Neither will the Kraut who tries to drag me.”
A Luger emerged from Bauman’s holster. “Do it,” he told the other soldiers. They hesitated. “Do it, I said!” Bauman thundered, and he gave the nearest man a kick in the pants.
The first soldier crouched and started into the kennel. He reached out to grasp Michael’s arm, and Michael smashed a handful of filthy hay into the man’s face and followed that with a blow to the jaw that cracked like a gunshot. A second man hurtled through the door, and a third right behind him. Michael warded off a punch, then struck into the second soldier’s throat with the flat of his hand. The third man caught Michael’s jaw with a glancing blow, and a fourth soldier lunged upon him and hooked an arm around his throat. The girl began to scream, a high thin shriek that had years of terror behind it.
The sound-so much like the voice of a wolf, calling in the night-galvanized Michael. He drove his elbows backward into the rib cage of the man who was throttling him. The soldier grunted with pain and his grip loosened, and Michael thrashed free. A fist struck his bruised shoulder, and another hammered at his skull. He shook off a body with such force that the man was slammed against the wall. A knee thudded into his back, and fingers raked his eyes. There was a shrill cry of pain, and suddenly the soldier who was trying to gouge his eyes out flailed at the emaciated figure that had leaped upon him. Metzger’s teeth had sunk into the soldier’s cheek, and he was ripping the flesh like a maddened terrier.
Michael kicked out, and caught another soldier on the point of the chin. The man was hurled through the door and clipped Bauman’s legs. Bauman lifted a whistle to his mouth and began to blow quick, shrill notes. A fist swung past Michael’s head, thunking into a Germanic face; with a hoarse roar Lazaris swung again, and this time burst the man’s upper lip open in a spray of crimson. Then Lazaris grasped the hair of a guard whose SS cap had spun away, and slammed his forehead against the man’s skull with a noise like an ax blade meeting timber.
A blackjack rose up like a cobra’s head. Michael grabbed the wrist before the soldier could strike, and drove his fist into the man’s armpit. He heard a rush of air behind him. Before he could twist around, a rifle butt hit him in the center of the back, between his shoulder blades, knocking the breath from his lungs. The blackjack crunched down on his arm, just above the elbow, and froze it with pain. A fist struck him on the back of the head, stunning him, and though he kept fighting wildly, he knew he was all but used up.
“Bring him out!” Bauman shouted as other soldiers came to his assistance. “Come on, hurry it up!”
The blackjack wielder began to beat at Lazaris and Metzger, driving them back against the wall. Two of the soldiers grabbed the blind girl and started hauling her out. Michael was thrown onto the corridor floor, where Bauman put a boot on his throat. The rest of the guards, most of them bruised and bleeding, scrambled out of the kennel.
Michael heard a submachine gun being cocked. He looked up, his vision misted with pain, and saw a guard pointing his Schmeisser into the kennel. “No!” Michael croaked, Bauman’s foot pressed to his neck.
The gun fired, two short bursts amid the remaining five prisoners. Spent cartridges clattered to the stones.
“Stop that!” Bauman shouted, and uptilted the Schmeisser with the barrel of his pistol. Another quick burst pocked the stone wall and rained fragments and dust around them. “No firing without a direct order!” he raged, his eyes wild behind his glasses. “Do you understand me?”
“Yes, sir,” the guard replied, thoroughly cowed, and he clicked the safety on his smoking gun and lowered it to his side.
Bauman’s face had turned scarlet. He removed his foot from Michael’s neck. “You know every round of ammunition has to be accounted for!” he shouted at the gunner. “I’ll be filling out reports for a week with all that damned firing!” He motioned disdainfully to the kennel. “Close that up! And you men, get this trash on his feet!” He started striding along the corridor, and Michael was made to follow, his head pounding and his knees threatening to give way.
He was returned to the room with the X-shaped metal table. A light bulb burned overhead. “Strap him down,” Bauman said. Michael began to fight again, dreading the bite of those straps, but he was exhausted and the issue was quickly settled. The straps were pulled tight. “Leave us,” Bauman told the soldiers. When they were gone, he removed his glasses and slowly cleaned the lenses with a handkerchief. Michael noted that his hands were shaking.
Bauman put his glasses back on. His face was haggard, dark circles under his eyes. “What’s your real name?” he asked.
Michael remained silent, some of the fog clearing out of his mind but his back and shoulders still hurting like hell.
“I mean what they call you in Britain,” Bauman went on. “You’d better talk quick, my friend! There’s no telling when Krolle might come around, and he’s aching to use that baton on you!”
Michael was puzzled. Bauman’s tone of voice had changed; it was urgent, not superior. A trick, he thought it must be. Of course it was!
“Chesna van Dorne hasn’t been captured yet.” Bauman lifted the table so Michael was almost upright, and locked it in place. “Her friends-our friends-are helping her hide. She’s also working on the arrangements.”
