7
They awakened in a cell, with a barred window overlooking the airfield. Michael, his wounded hand bound with bandages, peered out into silvery daylight and saw the big transport Messerschmitt still there. The bombs hadn’t been loaded yet.
All their equipment and their parkas had been stripped away. Chesna’s ankle was bandaged as well, and when she peeled the bandages away for an inspection, she found that the wound had been cleaned and the bullet removed. The effects of the gas grenades remained; all of them kept spitting up watery mucus, and found a bucket placed in the cell for just that purpose. Michael had a killer headache, and all Lazaris could do was lie on one of the thin-mattressed cots and stare at the ceiling like a drunkard after a vodka binge.
Michael paced the cell, stopping every so often to look through the wooden door’s barred inset. The corridor was deserted. “Hey!” he shouted. “Bring us some food and water!” A guard came a moment later, glared at Michael with pale blue eyes, and went away again.
Within an hour two guards brought them a meal of thick, pasty oatmeal porridge and a canteen of water. When that had been consumed, the same two soldiers wielding submachine guns appeared once more and ordered the captives out of their cell.
Michael supported Chesna as she limped along the corridor. Lazaris stumbled, his head fogged and his knees as soft as taffy. The guards took them out of the building, a stone stockade on the edge of the airfield, and down an alley into the plant. A few moments later they were entering another, larger building not far from where they’d been captured.
“No, no!” they heard a high, boyish voice shout. “Dribble the ball! Don’t run with it! Dribble!”
They had walked into a gymnasium, with a floor of polished oak boards. There were rows of bleachers and frosted glass windows. A knot of emaciated prisoners were struggling for possession of a basketball as guards with rifles looked on. A whistle blew, deafening in the enclosure. “No!” The boyish voice cracked with exasperation. “That’s a foul on the blue team! The ball belongs to the red team now.”
The prisoners wore armbands of blue or red. They stumbled and staggered, stick figures in baggy gray uniforms, toward the goal at the other side of the court. “Dribble the ball, Vladimir! Don’t you have any sense?” The man who was shouting stood at the edge of the court. He wore dark slacks, a striped referee’s shirt, had a long mane of blond hair hanging halfway down his back, and stood almost seven feet tall. “Get the ball, Tiomkin!” he shouted, and stomped his foot. “You missed an easy shot!”
This had gone from the crazy to the insane, Michael thought. And there was Jerek Blok, standing up in the bleachers and motioning them over. Boots was sitting a few rows above his master, perched like a glowering bulldog. “Hello!” the seven-foot-tall, blond-maned man said, speaking to Chesna. He smiled, showing horselike teeth. He wore round glasses, and Michael judged him to be no older than twenty-three. He had dark brown, shining, childlike eyes. “Are you the people who caused all that noise this morning?”
“Yes, they are, Gustav,” Blok answered.
“Oh.” Dr. Gustav Hildebrand’s smile switched off, and his eyes turned sullen. “You woke me up.”
Hildebrand might be a chemical warfare genius, Michael thought, but that fact didn’t prevent him from being a simpleton. The towering young man turned away from them and shouted to the prisoners, “Don’t stop! Keep playing!”
The prisoners stumbled and staggered to the opposite goal, some of them falling over their own feet.
“Sit down here.” Blok gestured to the bleacher beside him. “Chesna, will you sit beside me, please?” She obeyed, nudged by a gun barrel. Michael took the next place, and Lazaris, as puzzled by this display as by anything in his life, eased down beside him. The two guards stood a few paces away. “Hello, Chesna.” Blok reached out and grasped her hand. “I’m so glad to see you a-”
Chesna spat in his face.
Blok showed his silver teeth. Boots had risen to his feet, but Blok said, “No, no. It’s all right,” and the huge man sat down again. Blok withdrew a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the spit from his cheek. “Such spirit,” he said quietly. “You’re a true German, Chesna. You just refuse to believe it.”
“I am a true German,” she agreed coldly, “but I’ll never be the kind of German you are.”
Blok left his handkerchief out, in case it was needed again. “The difference between winning and losing is a vast chasm. You are speaking from the bottom of that chasm. Oh, that was a good shot!” He clapped his hands in appreciation, and Boots did, too. Hildebrand gave a glowing smile. “I taught him to do that!” the mad doctor announced.
The game went on, the prisoners halfheartedly grappling for the ball. One of them fell, winded, and Hildebrand shouted, “Get up! Get up! You’re the center, you have to play!”
“Please… I can’t…”
“Get up.” Hildebrand’s voice was less boyish, and brimmed with menace. “This minute. You’re going to keep playing until I say the game is over.”
“No… I can’t get up…”
A rifle was cocked. The prisoner got up. The game went on.
“Gustav-Dr. Hildebrand-loves basketball,” Blok explained. “He read about it in an American magazine. I can’t fathom the game myself. I’m a soccer fan. But each to his own. Yes?”
“Dr. Hildebrand certainly seems to rule the game with an iron fist,” Michael said.
“Oh, don’t start that again!” Blok’s face took on a shade of crimson. “Haven’t you gotten tired of barking up that trail yet?”
“No, I haven’t found the trail’s end.” Michael decided it was time for the big guns. “The only thing I don’t know,” he said, almost casually, “is where the Fortress is hangared. Iron Fist: that’s the name of a B-seventeen bomber, isn’t it?”
“Baron, you continually amaze me!” Blok smiled, but his eyes were wary. “You never rest, do you?”
“I’d like to know,” Michael urged. “Iron Fist. Where is it?”
Blok was silent for a moment, watching the hapless prisoners run from one side of the court to the other, Hildebrand shouting at their errors and misplays. “Near Rotterdam,” he said. “On a Luftwaffe airfield.”
Rotterdam, Michael thought. Not France after all, but German-occupied Holland. Almost a thousand miles south of Skarpa Island. He felt a little sick, knowing that what he’d suspected was true.
“That said, I’ll add this,” Blok continued. “You and your friends-and that bearded gentleman down there I haven’t been introduced to and neither do I wish to be-will remain here on Skarpa until the project is concluded. I think you’ll find Skarpa a more difficult nut to crack than Falkenhausen. Oh, by the way, Chesna: turnabout is fair play, don’t you agree? Your friends got to Bauman, my friends got to one of the gentlemen who met your plane near Uskedahl.” He gave her a brief, bone-chilling smile. “As a matter of fact, I’ve been on Skarpa for a week, tidying up affairs and waiting for you. Baron, I knew where you would go when you got out of Falkenhausen. It was just a question of how long it would take you to get here.” He winced at a collision between two prisoners, and the basketball bounced away down the court. “Our radar watched you weave through the mine field. That was nice work.”
Kitty! Michael thought. What had happened to her?
“I think you’ll find the stockade more roomy than your quarters at Falkenhausen, though,” the colonel said. “You’ll get a nice fresh sea breeze, too.”
“And where will you be? Getting a suntan up on the roof?”
“Not quite.” A flicker of silver. “Baron, I’ll be getting prepared to destroy the Allied invasion of Europe.”
It was said so offhandedly that Michael, though his throat felt constricted, had to answer in kind. “Really? Is that your weekend job?”
“It will take much less than a weekend, I think. The invasion will be destroyed approximately six hours after it begins. The British and American troops will be drowning each other trying to swim back to their ships, and the commanders will go mad with panic. It will be the greatest disaster in history-for the Reich’s enemies, of course- and a triumph for Germany. And all that, Baron, will happen without our soldiers having to fire a shot of our precious ammunition.”
Michael grunted. “All because of Iron Fist? And Hildebrand’s corrosive gas? Twenty-four one-hundred-pound bombs won’t stop thousands of soldiers. As a matter of fact, your troops are more likely to get gas blown back in
