to fold upward.
And at that moment Reinhart, who’d been shamming for the past two minutes, suddenly sat up at Lazaris’s feet. He clutched at his two broken ribs and reached up for the wall beside their card table. Lazaris gave a shout and stabbed downward with the knife, sinking it into Reinhart’s shoulder, but he was powerless to prevent what happened next.
Reinhart’s fist punched a red button attached to electrical cords on the wall, and a siren shrieked somewhere on the building’s roof.
The gate was a quarter of the way up when the alarm began. Michael could see four pairs of legs. Without hesitation he clicked off the safety on his gun and sprayed bullets below the gate, chopping down two soldiers who screamed and writhed in agony. Karlsen released the flywheel and tried to scramble beneath the corrugated metal as it clattered down again, but a burst from Chesna’s gun ripped him open and the gate clunked on his butt.
Lazaris repeatedly stabbed down on Reinhart, fierce strength behind the blows. The German crumpled, his face a mass of torn flesh, but the siren kept going. A black-haired figure swept past him. The woman raised her hammer and broke the alarm button to fragments. Still, a switch had been triggered and the siren would not be silenced.
“Get out while you can!” the gray-haired prisoner shouted. “Go!”
There was no time to deliberate. That siren would bring every soldier in the plant down on them. Michael ran for the stairwell, with Chesna a few paces behind and Lazaris bringing up the rear. They came out onto the roof, and already two soldiers were running along the catwalk toward them. Michael fired, and so did Chesna. The bullets sparked off the catwalk railing, but the soldiers flung themselves flat. Rifles cracked, the slugs zipping past their heads. Michael saw another pair of soldiers, coming across the catwalk from the building behind them. One of them fired a shot that snagged Chesna’s parka, and puffed goose down into the air.
Michael readied a grenade, then paused while the fuse sizzled and the soldiers got closer. A bullet sang off the railing beside him. He flung the grenade at the two men who were coming up from behind, and three seconds later there was a blast of white fire and two shredded figures twitching on the catwalk. Lazaris wheeled toward the other pair in front of them and fired short bursts that knocked sparks off the slate roof. Michael saw three more soldiers advancing over the catwalk behind them. Chesna’s gun rattled, and the soldiers crouched down as slugs ricocheted off the railings.
The rooftop was turning into a hornet’s nest. A bullet struck the slates to Michael’s left and spun like a burning cigarette butt less than five inches past his face. Chesna suddenly cried out and went down. “I’m hit!” she said, her teeth gritted with pain and anger. “Damn it!” She was clutching her right ankle, blood on her fingers.
Lazaris sprayed bullets first in one direction, then another. A soldier screamed and fell over the railing to the pavement twenty feet below. Michael bent down to help Chesna to her feet, and as he did he felt a bullet pluck at his parka. They had no choice; they had to get back down the stairwell before they were cut to pieces in the cross fire.
He hauled Chesna up. She fired at the soldiers behind them, even as Michael pulled her to the stairwell door. A bullet hit the catwalk railing beside Lazaris and metal splinters pierced his jaw and cheek. He retreated, spraying bullets across the roof. As they got into the stairwell, slugs marched across the door and knocked it off its hinges. Michael felt a searing sting of pain in his left hand, and he realized a bullet had just gone through his palm. His hand went numb, the fingers twitching involuntarily. He kept hold of Chesna, and they all backed down the stairwell to the workshop. Two Germans entered at the top of the stairs, and Lazaris cut them down before they could aim their weapons. The bodies slid over each other down the steps. More soldiers crawled into the stairwell, and a few seconds later a grenade was flung and exploded with a whump of fire and concussion. But Michael, Chesna, and Lazaris were already in the workshop, where the prisoners had taken cover amid the equipment and oil drums. Soldiers scurried down to the bottom of the smoky stairwell and fired into the workshop. Michael looked over his shoulder toward the metal gate. More Germans were trying to wrench it up by hand from the other side, their fingers curled under the edge. As they struggled, other soldiers fired bullets through the gap at floor level. Michael released Chesna, who fell to her knees, her face glistening with the sweat of pain, and popped a fresh ammo clip into his gun. His hand was streaming blood, the wound a perfect puncture. He shot beneath the gate, and the Germans scrambled away from it.
The siren had stopped its shrieking. Over the noise of gunshots a strident voice rang out: “Cease fire! Cease fire!” The shooting dwindled, and halted.
Michael crouched down, behind a half-track load puller, and Chesna and Lazaris knelt in the shelter of oil drums. Michael heard the fearful moaning of some of the prisoners, and the clicks of guns being reloaded. A haze of blue smoke drifted through the workshop, carrying the pungent odor of gunpowder.
A moment later a voice amplified through a loudspeaker came from beyond the metal gate: “Baron? It’s time you and Chesna threw out your weapons. It’s over.”
Michael glanced toward Chesna, and their eyes met. It was Jerek Blok’s voice. How did he know?
“Baron?” Blok continued. “You’re not a stupid man. Certainly not. You know by now that this building is surrounded, and there’s no possible way you can get out. We will take you, one way or the other.” He paused, letting them think it over. Then: “Chesna, dear? Surely you understand your situation. Throw out your weapons, and we’ll have a nice talk.”
Chesna examined the blue-edged hole in her ankle. Her thick woolen sock was wet with blood, and the pain was excruciating. A cracked bone, she thought. She fully understood the situation.
“What are we going to do?” Lazaris asked, with a note of panic. Blood trickled down into his beard from the splinter wounds.
Chesna got her backpack off and unsnapped it.
“Baron, you amaze me!” Blok said. “I’d like to know how that escape from Falkenhausen was engineered. You have my deepest respect.”
Michael saw Chesna reach into her pack. Her hand came out with a square of waxed paper.
The cyanide capsule.
“No!” Lazaris grasped her arm. “There’s another way.”
She shook her head, pulling free. “You know there’s not,” she said, and began to unwrap the packet.
Michael crawled across the floor to her. “Chesna! We can shoot our way out! And we’ve still got grenades!”
“My ankle’s broken. How am I going to get out of here? Crawl?”
He gripped her wrist, preventing her from putting the capsule on her tongue. “I’ll carry you.”
She smiled faintly, her eyes dark with pain. “Yes,” she said. “I believe you would.” She touched his cheek, and ran her fingers across his mouth. “But it wouldn’t do any good, would it? No. I’m not going to be caged and tortured like an animal. I know too much. I’d be sentencing a dozen others to-”
Something clattered across the floor about fifteen feet away. Michael looked toward it, his heart pounding, and saw that one of the soldiers in the stairwell had just thrown a grenade.
It went off, before any of them could move.
Flame sputtered from the fuse. There was a pop! and a bright flash, then chalky-white smoke began to pour from it. Except it was not smoke, Michael realized in another two seconds. It had a sickly-sweet, orangelike odor: the smell of chemicals.
A second gas grenade popped, near the first one. Chesna, her eyes already stinging and watering, lifting the cyanide pill to her mouth. Michael couldn’t bear it. For better or worse he swiped the capsule out of her hand.
The chemical smoke settled over them like the folds of a shroud. Lazaris hacked and coughed, struggled to his feet with tears blinding him, and flailed into the vapors. Michael felt as if his lungs were swelling up; he couldn’t draw a breath. He heard Chesna cough and gasp, and she clung to him as he tried to pick her up. But his air was gone, and the smoke was so dense that direction was destroyed. One of Hildebrand’s inventions, Michael thought and then, blinded and weeping, he fell to his knees. He heard the prisoners coughing, being overcome as well. A figure appeared through the smoke before him: a soldier wearing a gas mask. The man aimed his rifle at Michael’s head.
Chesna slumped beside him, her body hitching. Michael fell over her, struggled to rise again, but his strength was stolen. Whatever the chemical was, it was potent. And then, with the reek of rotten oranges in his nostrils, Michael Gallatin blacked out.
