sides. Lazaris thought his beard would turn white as he watched a mine, its spines covered with kelp, drift over the crest of a swell almost in their path. “Turn, damn it! Turn!” he hollered, motioning to port. The boat obeyed, but Lazaris heard the mine scrape across the hull like fingernails on a blackboard. He cringed, waiting for the blast, but the mine disappeared in their wake and they went on.
The last of the mines floated away on the starboard side, and then the water was free of them. Kitty rapped on the windshield, and when she had their attention, she put a finger to her lips and then drew it across her throat in a slashing gesture. The meaning was clear.
In a few minutes a searchlight appeared through the fog, sweeping around and around atop its tower on Skarpa Island. The island itself was still invisible, but soon Michael could hear a slow, steady thumping noise like a huge heartbeat. The noise of heavy machinery at work in the chemical plant. He switched off his flashlight, and so did Lazaris. They were getting close to shore. Kitty turned the boat, staying just outside the searchlight’s range. She suddenly cut the engine, and the boat whispered through the swells. Michael and Chesna heard another, more powerful engine growling somewhere in the fog. A patrol boat, circling the island. The noise grew distant and faded, and Kitty throttled up with a careful hand.
The searchlight skimmed past them, dangerously close. Michael saw the glint of smaller lights through the murk: what looked like bulbs on outside catwalks and ladders, and the dark shape of a huge chimney that rose into the mist. The heartbeat thump was much louder now, and Michael could make out the hazy forms of buildings. Kitty was guiding them along Skarpa’s rugged coastline. Soon they left the lights and the sound of machinery behind, and Kitty veered the boat into a small, crescent-shaped harbor.
She knew this harbor, and took them straight to the crumbling remains of a seawall. She killed the engine, letting the boat drift across silvery water at the base of the wall. Michael switched his light on and made out a barnacle-crusted dock just ahead. The rotting prow of a long-sunken boat jutted up from the water like a strange snout, and hundreds of red crabs clung to it.
Kitty emerged from the wheelhouse. She called out something that sounded like “Copahay ting! Timesho!” She motioned to the dock, and Michael jumped from the boat onto a platform of creaking, sodden timbers. Chesna flung him a rope, which he used to tie the boat to a piling. A second rope, thrown from Kitty, completed the task. They had arrived.
Stone steps led up from the dock and seawall. Beyond them, Michael saw by the flashlight beam, was a cluster of dark, dilapidated houses. Kitty’s village, now occupied only by ghosts.
Chesna, Michael, and Lazaris checked their submachine guns and strapped them on. Their supplies-rations of fresh water, dried beef, chocolate bars, ammo clips, and four grenades apiece-were in backpacks. Michael, in his previous examination of their supplies, had also noted something else wrapped up in a little packet of waxed paper: a cyanide capsule, similar to the one he’d popped into his mouth on the roof of the Paris Opera. He hadn’t needed it then, and he would die by a bullet rather than use one here on Skarpa.
Their equipment ready, they followed Kitty up the ancient steps into the dead village. She probed ahead with the flashlight she’d taken from Lazaris, the beam revealing a rutted main road and houses covered with wet mold as white as ash. Many of the roofs had collapsed, the windows without glass. Still, the village was not entirely dead. Michael could smell them, and he knew they were close by.
“Welcome,” Kitty said, and motioned them into one of the sturdier-looking houses. Whether this one had been her home, Michael didn’t know, but it had become a home again. As they crossed the threshold, Kitty’s light speared through the mist and caught two skinny wolves, one yellow and one gray. The gray one leaped for an open window and was gone in an instant, but the yellow wolf wheeled on the intruders and showed its teeth.
Michael heard the bolt of a submachine gun going back. He grabbed Lazaris’s arm before the Russian could fire, and said, “No.”
The wolf backed toward the window, its head held high and fire in its eyes. Then it abruptly turned, lunged up into the window frame and out of the house.
Lazaris released the breath he’d been holding. “Did you see those things? They’ll tear us to pieces! Why the hell didn’t you let me shoot?”
“Because,” Michael said calmly, “a. burst of bullets would bring the Nazis here about as fast as you could reload. The wolves won’t hurt you.”
“Nazee boys nasty,” Kitty said as she shone the flashlight around. “Wold not much so. Nazee boys make dead, wold yum dead.” She shrugged her massive shoulders. “Such done.”
This house, wolf droppings on the floor and all, would be their headquarters. Most likely, Michael reasoned, the German soldiers who guarded Hildebrand’s chemical plant were as fearful of the wolves as Lazaris was, and wouldn’t come here. Michael let the others start unpacking their gear, and then he said, “I’m going out to do some scouting. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“I’m going with you.” Chesna started to shrug her backpack on again.
“No. I can move faster alone. You wait here.”
“I didn’t come with you to-”
“Argue,” Michael finished for her, “and that’s not why we’re here. I want to get in closer to the plant and take a look around. Better one scout than two or three. Right?”
Chesna hesitated, but his voice was firm and he was staring holes through her. “All right,” she agreed. “But for God’s sake, stay low!”
“I plan on it.”
Outside, Michael strode briskly along the road and away from the village. Woods and sharp-edged boulders began about seventy yards east of the last house and ascended toward Skarpa’s heights. He knelt down, waiting to make sure Chesna hadn’t followed him, and after a couple of minutes he unstrapped his gun, took off his backpack and his parka. He began to undress, his skin rippling in the chill. Naked, he found a secure niche to wedge his backpack, clothes, and Schmeisser into, and then he sat on his haunches and began the change.
As a wolf, he realized the scent of the food in his pack would draw Skarpa’s wolves like a dinner bell. One way to fix that. He urinated all over the rocks around his cache, and if that smell wouldn’t keep the wolves back, they were welcome to his dried beef. Then he stretched, getting blood into his muscles, and he began to lope nimbly over the rocks above Wolftown.
After he crested the ridge, it was a half-mile jaunt through dense forest before he smelled the reek of men. The thumping noise was louder; he was going in the right direction. Other aromas crowded into his senses: the bitter smell of exhaust from the plant’s chimney, the smell of wet steam, hares, and other small animals quivering in the woods at his passage, and… the musky perfume of a young female.
He heard the soft cracking of a twig off to his left, and when he glanced that way, he caught just the quickest glimpse of yellow. She was keeping pace with him, probably made a little nervous with curiosity and his own male aroma. He wondered if she’d witnessed his change. If so, she’d have interesting tales to tell her pack.
The bitter smell got worse, and so did the man-reek. The yellow she-wolf began to lay behind, intimidated by the nearness of humans. After a moment she stopped, and Michael heard her make a high-pitched yip yip yip. He understood the message: Don’t go any closer. He wouldn’t have cared to if he’d had a choice about it, but he kept going. About fifteen yards later he came out of the woods and there was Hildebrand’s creation, rising like a dirty mountain beyond a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire.
Smoke chugged from a massive chimney of gray stones. Around it were concrete buildings, connected by catwalks and pipes that snaked through the place like one of Harry Sandler’s mazes. The thumping heartbeat noise was coming from somewhere at the center of the complex, and lights shone through the shutters of windows. Alleys wound between the buildings; as Michael watched, on his belly at the edge of the woods, a truck turned a corner and grumbled away like a fat beetle into another alley. He saw several figures up on the catwalks. Two workmen twisted a large red flywheel, and then a third checked what looked like a panel of pressure gauges and signaled an okay sign. Work was going on here around the clock.
Michael got up and slinked along the fence. Soon he made another discovery: an airfield, complete with hangars, a fuel tank, and fueling trucks. On the field, lined up in an orderly row, were three night fighters-a Dornier Do-217 and two Heinkel HE-219’s, all with nose radar prongs-and a wicked-looking Messerschmitt Bf-109 day fighter. Overshadowing everything on the field was a huge Messerschmitt Me-323 transport aircraft, its wingspan over a hundred and eighty feet and its length almost a hundred feet. The Nazis were obviously doing some serious business here. For now, though, there was no activity on the airfield. Beyond the field the cliffs of Skarpa fell to the sea.
