“Lazaris can use your help more than I. No arguing. Just get to the field.”
Chesna was professional enough to know that she was wasting time. She and Lazaris hurried back across the roof to the ladder, and Michael strapped the submachine gun around his shoulder. He eased himself over the skylight edge and caught hold of an iron pipe that snaked across the lab ceiling. Hand over hand, he guided himself toward the catwalk and stepped over its railing.
He crouched down and watched the three men. Hildebrand called one of them over and showed him something on the slide. Then Hildebrand shouted and slammed his fist on the table, and the other man nodded docilely, his shoulders slumped in submission. The work was not going well, Michael thought. What a pity.
A droplet of moisture plunked to the catwalk next to him. He looked up. Set at intervals along the iron pipe were spray nozzles, and one of them was leaking. He held out his palm and caught a few drops, then sniffed at them. The odor of brine. He licked his palm. Salt water. From the tank on the roof, he realized. Plain seawater, probably. Why was there a storage tank of seawater on the tab roof?
He remembered something that Blok had said: Carnagene doesn’t get along well with sodium. As in salt water. Perhaps salt water destroyed carnagene. If that were so, Hildebrand had set up a system so that if any of the gas escaped into the lab, nozzles would deliver a saltwater spray. The system’s controls had to be within easy reach of anyone working below. Michael stood up and walked to the control panel near the vats. There was a row of red switches, all at the ON position. He began to flip them all off. The heartbeat noise faltered and began to die.
A beaker crashed to the floor. One of the men shrieked. It was Hildebrand. “You fool!” he shouted. “Turn the aerators back on!”
“No one move.” Michael walked back toward them, the Schmeisser’s barrel upraised. “Dr. Hildebrand, we’re going to have a little talk.”
“Please! The switches! Turn them on!”
“I want to know where Iron Fist is. How far from Rotterdam?”
One of the others suddenly bolted in the direction of the front door, but Michael shot him down before he could take three strides. The man fell, crimson spreading over his white coat.
The noise echoed within the lab. Someone would have heard it. Time was growing short. He trained the smoking gun barrel on Hildebrand. “Iron Fist. Where is it?”
“The…” Hildebrand swallowed thickly, staring up into the Schmeisser’s eye. “The Luftwaffe airfield at Wassenaar. On the coast, sixteen miles northwest of Rotterdam.” He glanced at the vats. “Please… I’m begging you! Turn the aerators back on!”
“And what will happen if I don’t? Will the carnagene be destroyed?”
“No! It’ll-”
Michael heard the sound of metal buckling.
“It’ll explode in its raw form!” Hildebrand shouted, his voice choked with panic.
Michael looked at the sealed vats. The lids were bulging, and pressure blisters had appeared along the seams. My God! he realized. The stuff was swelling within the vats like yeast!
The other lab technician suddenly picked up a chair and ran toward a window. He smashed the glass with it and screamed, “Help! Someone help-”
Michael’s gun silenced him. Hildebrand lifted his arms. “Hit the switches! I’m begging you!”
The vats were buckling outward. Michael started toward the control panel, and at the same time Hildebrand ran to the broken window and began to try to squeeze his long body through it. “Guards!” he yelled. “Guards!”
Michael stopped, ten feet shy of the switches, and turned his weapon on the architect of evil.
The bullets shattered Hildebrand’s legs. He fell, writhing in agony, to the floor. Michael put another clip in the Schmeisser and started to finish the man off.
One of the vats split open along its seam with a blast of popping rivets. A flood of thick yellow liquid streamed out, spewing across the floor. A siren began to shriek, overwhelming Gustav Hildebrand’s screams. A second vat burst open, like a swollen tumor, and another yellow tide rolled across the floor. Michael stood, transfixed with horror and fascination, as the liquid coursed below the catwalk, its sludgy weight shoving chairs and tables before it. In the yellow swamp of chemicals were streaks of foamy dark brown that sizzled like grease in a frying pan. The third vat exploded with such force that the lid crashed against the ceiling, and the sludge drooled over the rim as Michael retreated toward the skylight.
The chemicals-at this stage an unrefined muck instead of a gas-surged across the floor. Hildebrand was crawling desperately for a red flywheel on the wall; the saltwater-tank release, Michael realized. Hildebrand looked back and gibbered with horror as he saw the flood almost upon him. He reached up, straining to grasp the flywheel. His fingers locked around it, and wrenched it a quarter turn.
Michael could hear the water coursing through the pipes, but in the next instant the raw carnagene rushed over Gustav Hildebrand and he screamed in its acidic embrace. He writhed like a salted snail, his hair and face dripping with carnagene. He began to claw at his own eyes, his voice a wail of agony, and blisters rose and burst on the white flesh of his hands.
The nozzles erupted their saltwater spray. Where the drops fell, the chemicals hissed and melted. But it was of no consequence to Hildebrand, who was a mass of seething red blisters thrashing in the mire. Hildebrand sat up on his knees, the flesh falling from his face in strands, and opened his mouth in a silent, terrible scream.
Michael took aim, squeezed the trigger, and blew most of Hildebrand’s chest away. The body slithered down, smoke rising from the ruined lungs.
Michael strapped the Schmeisser around his shoulder again, climbed up on the catwalk railing, and leaped.
He grabbed hold of a pipe at the ceiling and clambered along it to within reach of the skylight. Then, his shoulder muscles cramping, he pulled himself up to the roof. He looked back down again; the carnagene was evaporating under the seawater shower, and Hildebrand lay like a jellyfish that had washed up in the wake of a storm.
Michael stood up and ran for the ladder. Two soldiers were climbing up. “The carnagene’s gotten out!” Michael shouted, in a display of terror even Chesna might have admired. The soldiers leaped off the ladder. There were three more Germans, trying to break the door open. “The gas is out!” one of the soldiers cried with genuine horror, and all of them scattered, yelling it at the top of their lungs while the siren continued to shriek.
Michael checked the map and ran toward the armory. Everywhere he saw a soldier, he hollered about the carnagene being loose. In another few minutes he could hear shouts from all over the plant. The effects of the carnagene were well known, even by the common guards. Sirens were coming to life from every direction. By the time he got to the armory, he found that a half-dozen soldiers had already broken into the building and were making off with gas masks and respirators. “The carnagene’s out!” a wild-eyed German told him. “Everyone in Section C is already dead!” He put his mask on and stumbled away, breathing from his oxygen cylinder. Michael entered the armory, broke open a crate of concussion grenades and then a crate of.50-caliber aircraft machine-gun bullets. “You!” an officer shouted, coming into the room. “What do you think you’re-”
Michael shot him down and continued his work. He placed the crate of grenades atop the crate of bullets, dragged over a second crate of grenades, and broke that open, too. Then he yanked the pins on two of them, dropped them back in with their brethren, and fled.
Over on the airfield, Lazaris and Chesna crouched near the fuel truck as the sirens wailed. A guard lay about twenty feet away, shot through the chest by a Luger bullet. The truck’s pump chugged, delivering aircraft-engine fuel through a canvas hose into the right wing tank of the Dornier night fighter. Both wing tanks, Lazaris had found, were about three-quarters full, but this would be their only opportunity to fuel and it would be a long flight. He held the nozzle in place, the octane flowing under his hands, while Chesna watched for any more guards. Thirty yards away was a corrugated-metal hut that served as a briefing room for pilots, and after Chesna had broken its door open she’d found a reward inside: maps of Norway, Denmark, Holland, and Germany showing the exact location of the Luftwaffe’s airfields.
The sky lit up. There was a mighty boom that Chesna first thought was thunder. Something big had just blown up. She could hear the noise of firing, what sounded like hundreds of bullets going off. There were more explosions, and she saw flames and the orange streaks of tracer bullets rising into the night over on the opposite side of the plant. A hot wind rolled across the field, bringing a burning smell.
“Damn!” Lazaris said. “When that son of a bitch says diversion, he means it!”
