“She’s mad!” Lazaris hollered, checking his fingers. “Absolutely mad!”
“I’m sorry,” Hurks apologized after Kitty had sheathed her knife and fallen onto the sofa again. “When she drinks… she has this little game she likes to play. But she always misses. Most of the time, that is.” He held up his left hand; part of the third finger was severed up to the knuckle.
“Well, for God’s sake get that knife away from her!” Lazaris shouted, but Kitty was already folded up around it, swigging down more vodka.
Michael and Chesna stuffed their hands into the pockets of their jumpsuits. “It’s important we get to Skarpa as soon as possible,” Michael said. “When can we go?”
Hurks posed the question to Kitty. She thought about it for a moment, her brow knitted. She got up and waddled outside. When she returned, her feet covered with mud, she grinned and answered.
“Tomorrow night,” Hurks translated. “She says there’ll be a blow tonight, and fog follows wind.”
“By tomorrow night I might be down to the stumps!” Lazaris buried his hands in his pockets until Kitty returned to the sofa, then he dared to withdraw them and to finish his meal. “You know,” he ventured after Kitty had begun to snore, “there’s something we all ought to be thinking about. If we get on that island, do whatever it is you heroic types are supposed to do, and get off with all our body parts, then what? In case you haven’t noticed, our Junkers has lived up to its name. I couldn’t put that engine back on, even with a crane. And anyway, it’s burned to a crisp. So how do we get out of here?”
The question was not one that Michael hadn’t already considered. He looked at Chesna, and saw she had no answer for it either.
“That’s what I thought,” Lazaris muttered.
But Michael couldn’t let that problem contaminate his mind right now. Skarpa had to be reached and Dr. Hildebrand dealt with first, then they’d find a way out. He hoped. Norway would not be a pleasant place to spend the summer with the Nazis hunting them down. Hurks got the vodka bottle away from Kitty and passed it around. Michael allowed himself one fiery sip, and then he stretched out on the floor-his hands wedged in his pockets-and was asleep in just over a minute.
5
Kitty’s boat slid through the mist, its engine growling softly. The water hissed as it parted before the figurehead, a wooden gargoyle with a trident, and a shielded lantern illuminated the interior of the wheelhouse in dim green.
Kitty’s hands-broad and coarse-were delicate on the wheel. Michael stood beside her, watching through the dripping windshield. Kitty had been drunk for most of the day, but as soon as the sun had begun to set she put aside the vodka and washed her face in icy water. It was past two o’clock on the morning of the nineteenth, and Kitty had pulled the forty-foot, weather-beaten relic out of its harbor slip about three hours before. Now, here in the wheelhouse, she was silent and brooding, with no trace of the grinning, drunken woman who’d greeted them in Uskedahl. She was all deadly business.
She had been right about the blow on the night of the seventeenth. A fierce wind had rushed down from the mountains and screamed over Uskedahl until dawn, but the houses were built for such caprices and there was no damage except to the nerves. She was correct, as well, about the fog that had crept over Uskedahl and the bay, blanketing everything in white silence. How she could steer in this soup he didn’t know, but every so often she cocked her head and seemed to be listening; surely not for the singing of fishes, but for the sound of the water itself, telling her something it was not in his power to understand. She made minor corrections of the wheel from time to time, as gently as nudging an infant.
Kitty suddenly reached out and grabbed Michael’s parka, pulling him closer and pointing. He couldn’t see anything but fog, though he nodded. She grunted with satisfaction, let him go, and steered in that direction.
There had been a strange incident at the dock. As they’d been loading their gear onto the boat, Michael had found himself face-to-face with Kitty sniffing at his chest. She had sniffed his face and hair, then had drawn back and stared at him with those blue Nordic eyes. She smells the wolf in me, Michael thought. Kitty had spoken to Hurks, who had translated for her: “She wants to know what land you come from.”
“I was born in Russia,” Michael had said.
She spoke through Hurks, pointing at Lazaris: “He stinks like a Russian. You have a perfume like Norway.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Michael answered.
And then Kitty got very close to him, staring intensely into his eyes. Michael stood his ground. She spoke again, this time almost in a whisper. “Kitty says you’re different,” Hurks translated. “She thinks you’re a man of destiny. That’s a high praise.”
“Tell her thank you.”
Hurks did. Kitty nodded, and moved away toward the wheelhouse.
A man of destiny, Michael thought as he stood beside her and she steered deeper into the fog. He hoped his destiny-and that of Chesna and Lazaris as well-wasn’t a grave on Skarpa Island. Hurks had stayed in Uskedahl, a stranger to travel by water since the U-boat torpedoing of his freighter. Lazaris was no lion of the sea either, but fortunately the water was glassy and the boat’s progress smooth, so Lazaris had only heaved twice over the side. Perhaps it was nerves, or perhaps it was the reek of fish that clung to the boat like a miasma.
Chesna entered the wheelhouse, the hood of her parka up over her head and her hands in black woolen gloves. Kitty kept staring straight ahead, guiding the boat toward a point the others couldn’t see. Chesna offered Michael a drink from the thermos of strong black coffee they’d brought, and he accepted it. “How’s Lazaris?” Michael asked.
“Conscious,” she answered. Lazaris was down in the cramped little cabin, which Michael had noted was even smaller than the kennel at Falkenhausen. She peered out at the fog. “Where are we?”
“Hell if I know. Kitty seems to, though, and I guess that’s what matters.” He returned the thermos to Chesna. Kitty turned the wheel a few degrees to starboard, and then she reached down to the greasy throttles and cut the engines. “Go,” Kitty told him, and pointed forward. Obviously she wanted Michael to watch for something. He took a flashlight from a corroded metal locker and left the wheelhouse with Chesna following.
On the bow Michael stood over the figurehead and probed with the light. Tendrils of fog wafted through the beam. The boat drifted, and waves lapped at the boards. There came the noise of boots on the deck. “Hey!” Lazaris called, his voice as tight as new wire. “What happened to the engines? Are we sinking?”
“Quiet,” Michael said. Lazaris came forward, guiding himself along the rusted railing. Michael slowly swung the flashlight beam from right to left and back again. “What are you looking for?” Lazaris whispered. “Land?” Michael shook his head, because he really had no idea. And then the flashlight hit a faint, ill-defined object off on the starboard side. It looked like the rotten piling of a dock, with gray fungus growing all over it. Kitty had seen it, too, and she guided the bow toward it.
In another moment they all could see it, perhaps more clearly than they’d wished.
A single piling had been sunk into the muck. Bound to that piling by rotting ropes was a skeleton, immersed up to its sunken chest. A bit of scalp and gray hair remained on the skull. Twined around the skeleton’s neck was a noose of heavy wire, and attached to the wire was a metal sign with faded German words: ATTENTION! ENTRY FORBIDDEN!
In the light, small red crabs scuttled in the skeleton’s eye sockets and peered out between the broken teeth.
Kitty corrected the wheel. The boat drifted past the grisly signpost and left it in darkness. She started the engine again, throttling it to a low mutter. Not twenty yards from the piling and skeleton, the flashlight beam picked out a floating gray ball, covered with kelp and ugly spikes.
“That’s a mine!” Lazaris yelped. “A mine!” he shouted at the wheelhouse, and pointed. “Boom boom!”
Kitty knew where it was. She veered to port, and the mine rolled in the boat’s wake. Michael’s stomach knotted. Chesna leaned forward, gripping the port-side railing, and Lazaris watched for more mines on the starboard side. “One over here!” Chesna called. It bobbed and lazily turned, encrusted with barnacles. The boat slid past it. Michael spotted the next one, almost dead ahead. Lazaris scrambled back to the wheelhouse, and returned with another flashlight. Kitty kept the boat at a slow, constant glide, weaving among the mines that now appeared on all
