“Arrangements?” His throat felt bruised from the pressure of Bauman’s boot. “What arrangements?”
“To get you out of here. And also to find a plane and set up the fuel stops. You were planning on going to Norway, correct?”
Michael was shocked speechless. It had to be a trick! My God! he thought. Chesna’s been captured, and she’s told everything!
“Listen to me very carefully.” Bauman stared into Michael’s eyes. A pulse beat rapidly at the German’s temple. “I am here because I had a choice. Either fieldwork, which meant risking getting my ass shot off or being hung up from the balls by the Russians, or working here in this… this slaughterhouse. In the field I could do nothing for our friends; here I can at least communicate with them, and do what I can to help certain prisoners. Incidentally, if your intent was to get everyone in your cell murdered, you came very close to accomplishing it.”
That explained the dramatics with the machine gun, Michael thought. Bauman was trying to keep the others from being killed. No, no! Blok or Krolle had set him up to this! This was all stage play!
“My task,” Bauman said, “is to keep you alive until the arrangements are worked out. I don’t know how long that will be. I’ll get a radio code that will tell me how your escape’s going to be managed. God help us, because prisoners only leave Falkenhausen as bags of fertilizer. I’ve made a suggestion; we’ll see if Chesna thinks it’s worthwhile.”
“What suggestion?” he asked warily.
“Falkenhausen was built to keep prisoners in. The camp is understaffed and the guards are used to docility. Which is why you were very stupid just now. Don’t do anything to call attention to yourself!” He paced back and forth as he talked. “Just play the brain-dead prisoner, and you might survive a week!”
“All right,” Michael said, “let’s pretend I believe you. How would I get out?”
“The guards-and Krolle, too-have gotten lazy. There are no uprisings here, no escape attempts, nothing to upset the day-to-day routine. The guards don’t expect anyone to try to break out, simply because it would be impossible. But”-he stopped pacing-“neither do they expect anyone to try to break in. And that may be a distinct possibility.”
“Break in? To a concentration camp? That’s crazy!”
“Yes, Krolle and the guards would think so, too. As I said, Falkenhausen was built to keep prisoners in, but maybe not to keep a rescue team out.”
A faint ember of hope sparked within Michael. If this man was acting, he deserved star billing with Chesna. But Michael didn’t let himself believe it yet; it would be utter foolishness to go along with this, and perhaps spill precious secrets in the process.
“I know this is difficult for you. If I were in your position, I’d be skeptical as well. You’re probably thinking I’m trying to lead you into a trap of some kind. Maybe nothing I can say will make you believe otherwise, but this you must believe: it’s my job to keep you alive, and that’s what I’m going to do. Just do what you’re told, and do it without hesitation.”
“It’s a huge camp,” Michael said. “If a rescue team did get through the gate, how are they going to find me?”
“I’ll take care of that.”
“And what if the team fails?”
“In that case,” Bauman said, “it’s my responsibility to see that you die without revealing any secrets.”
This hit a true note. If the rescue effort failed, that solution was what Michael would expect. My God! he thought. Do I dare trust this man?
“The guards are waiting outside. Some of them have loose lips, and they tell everything to Krolle. So I’ll have to beat you, to make this look real.” He began to wrap the handkerchief around the knuckles of his right fist. “I’ll have to draw blood. My apologies.” He drew the handkerchief tight. “When we finish here, you’ll be returned to your cell. Again, I beg you: don’t put up any resistance. We want the guards and Major Krolle to believe you’re broken. Understand?”
Michael didn’t reply. His mind was too busy, trying to sort all this out.
“All right,” Bauman said. He raised his fist. “I’ll try to get this over as quickly as I can.”
He punched with the spare economy of a boxer. It didn’t take very long for the handkerchief to become spattered with scarlet. Bauman gave Michael no body blows; he wanted all the damage-as superficial as it was-to be on display. By the time he was finished, Michael was bleeding from a gash above his left eye and a split lower lip, his face mottled with blue bruises.
Bauman opened the door and called the guards in, the bloodstained handkerchief still bound around his swollen knuckles. Michael, almost unconscious, was unstrapped and dragged back to his kennel. He was thrown inside, on the damp hay, and the door was sealed.
“Gallatinov!” Lazaris shook him back to his senses. “I thought they would’ve killed you, for sure!”
“They… did… their worst.” Michael tried to sit up, but his head felt like a lump of lead. He was lying against another body. A cool, unbreathing body. “Who is that?” Michael asked, and Lazaris told him. The bursts of machine-gun bullets had delivered the mercy of God. The Frenchman was also hit, and he lay huddled up and breathing heavily with slugs in his chest and stomach. Lazaris, the Dane, and the other prisoner-a German who moaned and cried without pause-had all escaped injury but for stone splinter cuts. The fourteen-year-old girl had not returned to the kennel.
She didn’t come back. Sometime during the next eight hours-or at least Michael judged it to be so, though his sense of time had all but vanished-the Frenchman hitched a final breath and died. The guards brought another small loaf of black bread and allowed another dip of the sponge in their bucket, but they left the corpses among the living.
Michael slept a lot, rebuilding his strength. His thigh wound began to crust over, and so did the gash above his left eye: more signs of time’s passage. He lay on the kennel floor and stretched, working the blood back into his stiff muscles. He closed his mind to the walls and ceiling and concentrated on visions of green forest and grasslands sweeping toward the blue horizon. He learned the routine: the guards brought bread and water once every day, and every third day a bucket of gray gruel that Lazaris sopped the sponge in. It was slow starvation, but Michael made sure he got every bit of bread, water, and gruel that he could scoop up and squeeze out.
The corpses swelled and began to reek of decay.
What was Blok up to? Michael wondered. Possibly going over the histories of the Reichkronen employees, trying to uncover a traitor who wasn’t there? Possibly trying to find the fictitious camera and film? Or leading the search for Chesna? He knew that a resumption of torture was imminent; this time it would be with instruments instead of fists and Krolle’s rubber baton. Michael wasn’t sure he could survive it. When his torturers came for him again, he would let the change take him, he decided. He would tear out as many of their throats as he could before their bullets cut him to pieces, and that would be the end of it.
But what about Iron Fist, and the forthcoming invasion? The gruel bucket had come twice; he’d been in this filthy hole for at least seven days. The Allied command had to be warned about Iron Fist. Whatever it was, it was deadly enough to make delaying D day imperative. If the soldiers who hit the landing beaches were exposed to the corrosive substance that had caused those wounds in the photographs, then the invasion would be a massacre.
He awakened from a restless sleep, in which skeletons in green fatigues lay in huge piles on the shores of France, to hear the sound of thunder.
“Ah, listen to that music!” Lazaris said. “Isn’t it lovely?”
Not thunder, Michael realized. The sound of bombs.
“They’re hitting Berlin again. The Americans in their B-seventeens.” Lazaris’s breathing had quickened with excitement. Michael knew the Russian was imagining himself up there with the swarms of heavy bombers, in the turbulent sky. “Sounds like some of their bombs are falling short. The woods’ll be on fire; it usually happens that way.”
The camp air-raid siren had begun to wail. The thunder was louder, and Michael could feel the vibration of the kennel’s stones.
“Lots of bombs coming down,” Lazaris said. “They never hit the camp, though. The Americans know where we are, and they’ve got those new bomb sights. Now there’s an aircraft for you, Gallatinov. If we’d had Forts instead of those lousy Tupolevs, we’d have knocked the Krauts to hell back in forty-two.”
It took a moment for what Lazaris had said to sink in. “What?” Michael asked.
