“I said, if we’d had B-seventeens instead of those damned Tu-”
“No, you said ‘Forts.’ ”
“Oh. Right. Flying Fortresses. B-seventeens. They call them that because they’re so hard to shoot down. But the Krauts get their share.” He crawled toward Michael a few feet. “Sometimes you can see the air battles if the sky’s clear enough. Not the planes, of course, because they’re too high, but their contrails. One day we had a real scare. A Fortress with two burning engines passed right over the camp, couldn’t have been a hundred feet off the ground. You could hear it crash, maybe a mile or so away. A little lower and it would’ve come down on our heads.”
Flying Fortress, Michael thought. Fortress. Long-range American bombers, based in England. The Yanks painted their bombers a drab olive green: the same shade as the metal pieces Theo von Frankewitz had decorated with false bullet holes. Blok had said, No one knows where the fortress is but myself, Dr. Hildebrand, and a few others. Frankewitz had done his work in a hangar on an unknown airfield. Was it possible, then, that the “fortress” Blok had been talking about was not a place, but a B-17 bomber?
It hit him then, full force. He said, “The American bomber crews give names to their planes, don’t they?”
“Yes. They paint the names on the aircraft nose, and usually other art, too. Like I said, they paint their planes up like floozies-but get them in the air, and they fly like angels.”
“Iron Fist,” Michael said.
“What?”
“Iron Fist,” he repeated. “That might be the name of a Flying Fortress, mightn’t it?”
“Could be, I suppose. Why?”
Michael didn’t answer. He was thinking about the drawing Frankewitz had shown him: an iron fist, squeezing a caricature of Adolf Hitler. The kind of picture that no German in his right mind would display. But certainly the kind of art that might be proudly displayed on the nose of a Flying Fortress.
“Sweet music,” Lazaris whispered, listening to the distant blasts.
The Nazis knew the invasion was coming, Michael thought. They didn’t know where, or exactly when, but they’d probably narrowed it down to the end of May or beginning of June, when the Channel’s tides were less capricious. It stood to reason that whatever Hildebrand was developing would be ready for use by then. Perhaps the weapon itself was not called “Iron Fist,” but “Iron Fist” was the means of putting that weapon into action.
The Allies, with their fighter planes and long-distance bombers, owned the sky over Hitler’s Reich. Hundreds of bombing missions had been flown over the cities of Nazi-occupied Europe. In all those missions how many Flying Fortresses had been shot down by German fighters or antiaircraft guns? And of those, how many had made crash landings, shot to pieces and with engines aflame? The real question was: how many intact Flying Fortresses had the Nazis gotten hold of?
At least one, Michael thought. Perhaps the bomber that had passed over Falkenhausen and come down in the forest. Maybe it had been Blok’s idea to salvage that aircraft, and that was why he’d been promoted from commandant of Falkenhausen to head of security for the Iron Fist project.
He let his mind wander, toward fearsome possibilities. How difficult would it be to make a damaged B-17 airworthy again? It depended, of course, on the damage; parts could be scavenged from other wrecks all over Europe. Maybe a downed Fortress-Iron Fist-was being reconstructed at that airfield where Frankewitz had done his paintings. But why bullet holes? Michael wondered. What was the point of making a reconstructed bomber look as if it had been riddled with-
Yes, Michael thought. Of course.
Camouflage.
On D-Day, the invasion beaches would be protected by Allied fighters. No Luftwaffe plane would be able to get through-but an American Flying Fortress might. Especially one that was battle-scarred, and limping back to its base in England.
And once that aircraft got over its target, it could drop its bombs-containing Hildebrand’s new discovery-onto the heads of thousands of young soldiers.
But Michael realized there were holes in his conjecture: why go to all that effort when Nazi artillery cannons could simply fire Hildebrand’s new weapon amid the invasion troops? And if that weapon was indeed a gas of some kind, how could the Nazis be sure the winds wouldn’t blow it back in their faces? No, the Germans might be desperate, but they were far from being stupid. How, then, if Michael was right, was the Fortress going to be used?
He had to get out of here. Had to get to Norway and put more pieces of this puzzle together. He doubted if the B-17 would be hangared in Norway; that was too far from the possible invasion sites. But Hildebrand and his new weapon were there, and Michael had to find out exactly what it was.
The bombing had ceased. The camp’s air-raid siren began to whine down.
“Good hunting to you,” Lazaris wished the flyers, and in his voice there was a tormented longing.
Michael lay down, trying to find sleep again. He kept seeing the grisly photographs of Hildebrand’s test subjects in his mind. Whatever could do that to human flesh had to be destroyed.
The swollen corpses of Metzger and the Frenchman gurgled and popped, releasing the gases of decay. Michael heard the faint scratching of a rat in the wall next to him, trying to find its way to the smell. Let him come, Michael thought. The rat would be fast, a canny survivor, but Michael knew he was faster. Protein was protein. Let him come.
9
The gruel bucket was brought again, marking Michael’s tenth day of captivity. The guards retched at the odor of the corpses and slammed the kennel door as soon as they could. Sometime later Michael was drifting in the twilight of sleep when he heard the latch sliding back. The door opened again. Two guards with rifles stood in the corridor, and one of them pressed a handkerchief over his mouth and nose and said, “Bring the dead men out.”
Lazaris and the others hesitated, waiting to see if Michael would comply. A third figure peered into the kennel and shone a flashlight on Michael’s pallid face. “Come on, hurry!” Bauman ordered. “We haven’t got all night!”
Michael heard the tension in Bauman’s voice. What was going on? Bauman slid his Luger out of his holster and pointed it into the kennel. “I won’t say it again. Out.”
Michael and Lazaris grasped Metzger’s bony corpse and hauled it out of the kennel while the Dane and the German brought the second corpse out. Michael’s knees groaned when he stood up, and the Dane fell to the stones and lay there until a rifle barrel prodded him up. “All right,” Bauman said. “All of you, march.”
They carried the corpses along the corridor. “Halt!” Bauman ordered when they reached a metal door. One of the guards unbolted it and pushed it open.
Michael knew that however old he lived to be, he would never forget that moment. Fresh, cool air drifted in through the doorway; maybe there was a trace of burning flesh in it, but it was sweet perfume compared to the kennel’s stale rankness. The camp was quiet, midnight stars afire in the sky. A truck was parked outside, and Bauman directed the prisoners to it with their baggage of corpses. “Get them inside!” he said, tension still thick in his voice. “Hurry!”
The back of the truck was already loaded with over a dozen naked bodies, male and female. It was difficult to tell, because all the corpses had shaved heads, and the breasts of the females had flattened like dead flowers. The flies were very bad. “Come on, move!” Bauman said, and shoved Michael forward.
And then Bauman turned, with the grace of a motion he’d played out a hundred times in his mind in preparation for this moment. The knife slid down into his left hand from the inside of his sleeve, and he took a step toward the nearest guard, plunging the blade into the man’s heart. The guard cried out and staggered back, scarlet spreading over his uniform. The second guard said, “What in the name of-”
Bauman stabbed him in the stomach, pulled the blade out and stabbed again. The first guard had crumpled to his knees, his face bleached, and he was trying to get his pistol out of his holster. Michael let go of Metzger’s corpse and grabbed the man’s wrist as the pistol came out. He smashed his fist into the man’s face, but the guard’s finger twitched on the trigger and the gun went off, startlingly loud in the silence. The bullet fired into the sky. Michael hit him again, as hard as he could, and as the guard crumpled he took the pistol away.
