with the moisture of effort. Chesna moaned as Michael balanced above her and teased her soft folds until she was near the point of release, then he plunged into her and she thought she might sob with the sheer ecstasy of it. She shivered, whispering his name, and his rhythm took her to the edge of delight and then over it, as if she’d leaped from a cliff and was falling through a sky that shimmered with iridescent colors. Michael’s sure strokes did not falter, until he felt the hot clenching followed by an eruption that seemed to stretch his spine and muscles almost to the point of pain. He remained part of Chesna, nestled between her thighs, as they kissed and whispered and the world turned lazily around their bed.
The following morning Dr. Stronberg pronounced Michael well on the way to recovery. His fever was gone, and the bruises on his body had almost faded. Lazaris, also, was stronger and able to walk around the house on stiff legs. Dr. Stronberg turned his attention, however, to Chesna, who appeared not to have gotten much sleep the night before. She assured the doctor that she was feeling fine, and would make sure she got at least eight hours of sleep tonight.
After nightfall a brown car left the house. Dr. Stronberg and Chesna were in the front and Michael and Lazaris, both wearing their baggy gray-green jumpsuits, sat in the back. Stronberg drove northeast on a narrow country road. The trip took about twenty minutes, then Stronberg stopped at the boundary of a wide field and switched his headlights on and off twice. A lantern signaled back, at the field’s opposite side. Stronberg drove toward it and pulled the car beneath the shelter of some trees.
Camouflage netting had been draped over a framework of timbers. The man with the lantern was joined by two other men, all in the simple clothing of farmers, who lifted an edge of the netting and motioned their visitors in.
“This is it,” Chesna said, and Michael saw the airplane in the lanterns’ yellow glow.
Lazaris laughed. “Saint Peter’s ghost!” he said, speaking a mixture of crude German and Russian. “That’s not a plane, it’s a deathtrap!”
Michael was inclined to agree. The tri-engined transport aircraft, painted dark gray, was large enough to hold seven or eight passengers, but its airworthiness was suspect. The machine was covered with bullet-hole patches, its wing-engine cowlings looked as if they’d been attacked with sledgehammers, and one of its wheel struts was badly warped.
“It’s a Junkers Ju-fifty-two,” Lazaris said. “That model was built in 1934.” He looked under the aircraft and ran his fingers along a rusted seam. He muttered with disgust as he found a hole as big as his fist. “The damned thing’s falling apart!” he said to Chesna. “Did you get this from the garbage pile?”
“Of course,” she answered. “If it was perfect, the Luftwaffe would still be using it.”
“It will fly, won’t it?” Michael asked.
“It will. The engines are a little rough, but they’ll get us to Norway.”
“The real question,” Lazaris said, “is will it fly with people in it?” He found another rust-edged hole. “The cockpit floor looks as if it’s about to fall through!” He went to the port wing engine, reached up, and put his hand past the propeller into the machinery. His fingers emerged slimed with dirty oil and grease. “Oh, this is wonderful! You could grow wheat on the dirt in this engine! Goldilocks, are you trying to commit suicide?”
“No,” she said tersely. “And I’ve asked you to stop calling me that.”
“Well, I thought you must like fairy tales. Especially now, since I’ve seen this wreck you call an aircraft.” Lazaris took a lantern from one of the men, walked around to the fuselage door, and ducked low to enter the plane.
“This is the best I could do,” Chesna told Michael. “It might not be in the best condition”-they heard Lazaris laugh harshly as he shone the lantern around in the cockpit-“but it’ll get us where we need to go. Regardless of what your friend thinks.”
They had to travel more than seven hundred miles, Michael thought. Part of that journey would be over the bitterly cold North Sea. If the airplane developed engine trouble over the water… “Does it at least have a life raft?” he asked.
“It does. I patched the holes in it myself.”
Lazaris emerged, swearing, from the Junkers. “It’s all rust and loose bolts!” he fumed. “If you sneeze too hard in there, you’ll blow the cockpit glass out! I doubt if the damned thing can do over a hundred knots, even with a tall wind!”
“No one’s twisting your arm to go with us.” Chesna took the lantern from him and returned it to its owner. “But we’re leaving on the twelfth. The night after tomorrow. Our clothing and supplies should be ready by then. We’ll have three fuel and security stops between here and Uskedahl. With luck we should reach our landing strip on the morning of the sixteenth.”
“With luck”-Lazaris placed one finger against a nostril and blew his nose-“this damned plane won’t lose its wings south of Denmark.” He turned to regard the Junkers again, his hands on his hips. “I’d say this poor creature must’ve tangled with a Russian fighter pilot. Yes, that’s what I’d say.” He looked at Michael, then at Chesna. “I’ll go with you. Anything to get German dirt off my feet.”
Back at Dr. Stronberg’s house, Chesna and Michael lay together in bed as the wind rose outside and swirled through the trees. There was no need for talking; their bodies communicated with an eloquence that was at first fierce, then gentle.
Chesna slept in Michael’s arms. He listened to the roving wind, his mind on Skarpa and Iron Fist. He didn’t know what they would find on that island, but the memory of the grisly photographs in Blok’s satchel was leeched to his brain. The weapon that made such hideous wounds had to be found and destroyed, not just for the sake of the Allied invasion, but for the sake of those who had already passed through the Nazis’ trials of torture. With such a weapon in the hands of Hitler, the entire world might yet be branded with a swastika.
Sleep called him and took him away. In his nightmares soldiers goosestepped through the shadow of Big Ben, Hitler wore a coat of black wolf fur, and Wiktor’s voice whispered, Don’t fail me.
4
Airborne, the Junkers was more of an eagle than it appeared, but the plane shuddered in rough air and the wing engines smoked and shot bluish-white sparks. “Drinking oil and fuel like a fiend!” Lazaris fretted as he sat in the copilot’s seat and watched the gauges. “We’ll be walking within two hours!”
“Just so we can reach our first fuel point,” Chesna said calmly, her hands on the controls. Conversation was difficult, due to the hoarse roar of the engines. Michael, sitting at a cramped navigator’s table behind the cockpit, checked the maps; their initial stop-a hidden airfield operated by the German Resistance-lay just south of Denmark. The second stop, tomorrow night, would be at a partisan field on the northern tip of Denmark, and their final fueling point lay within Norway. The distances looked huge.
“Never make it, Goldilocks,” Lazaris said. The Junkers trembled in a sudden seizure, and loose bolts rattled like machine-gun fire. “I saw those parachutes back there.” He jerked a thumb toward the cargo bay, where their packets of food, canteens, winter clothes, submachine guns, and ammunition were stored. “They’re made for babies. If you expect me to jump out of this crate wearing one of those, you’re insane.” As he talked, his eyes scanned the darkness, searching for the telltale blue sputters of Nazi night-fighter engines. He knew, however, that they would be hard to see, and by the time you saw, one of the bullets would be on their way. He cringed at the thought of what heavy machine guns would do to this flimsy cockpit, and so he kept talking to hide his fear, though neither Chesna nor Michael was listening. “I’d have a better chance of surviving if I jumped for a haystack.”
Little more than two hours later, the starboard engine began to miss. Chesna watched the needles of the fuel gauges settle toward zero. The Junkers’s nose kept wanting to sink, as if even the plane itself was in a hurry to get back on the ground. Chesna’s wrists ached with the effort of holding the Junkers steady, and before long she had to ask Lazaris to help with the controls. “She flies like a battleship,” was the Russian’s comment as he steered toward the map coordinates that Michael gave him.
An arrow of fire appeared on the ground: friendly flames, pointing toward their first landing strip. Lazaris took the Junkers in, circling down over the arrow, and when the wheels bit the earth, there was a collective sigh from the cockpit.
Over the next eighteen hours the Junkers was refueled and the engines oiled as Lazaris took charge of the ground crew-most of them farmers, who’d never been within a hundred yards of an airplane. Lazaris got hold of
