compared to what befell the second tank’s crew.
In the rioting red glare of explosion and flames, Michael saw the entire turret sliced off the other tank like a scalpeled wart. Its cannon fired into the sky as the turret lifted up, spun twice around, and smashed into the dust. Two human torches leaped out of the monster’s body and, screaming, ran in search of death.
Michael smelled cordite and seared flesh. Another explosion erupted from the other tank, sending pieces of metal banging down. Michael hit the brake and steered violently to the right to sweep past the gutted carcass.
German soldiers shouted and fled from the tank’s path. Michael saw two figures through the view slit: “Fire! Fire!” Harzer was shouting, Luger in hand, but all order was gone. A few paces behind him, Boots watched impassively.
“There’s the sonofabitch!” Gaby said. She reached up, unlocked the hatch, and threw it open before Michael could stop her. She lifted her head and shoulders out, took aim with the Schmeisser, and blew most of Harzer’s head away. His body took three steps backward before it crumpled, and Boots threw himself flat on the ground.
The tank roared past. Michael grasped Gaby’s ankle and pulled her back in. She slammed the hatch shut, blue smoke curling from the Schmeisser’s muzzle. “Across the field!” Gaby told him, and he drove straight ahead as fast as the tank could go.
Michael smiled tightly. He was sure Captain Harzer would understand that it had only been Gaby’s job.
Its treads boiling up thick yellow dust, the tank rumbled on across the field, away from the village and the erratic flashes of gunfire. “They’ll track us with the scout cars,” Gaby said. “They’re probably already calling for help. We’d better get out while we can.”
Michael had no argument. He pulled another cannon shell out of the wooden box behind his seat and wedged it against the accelerator pedal. Gaby climbed up through the hatch, waited for Michael to join her, then tossed her Schmeisser over and jumped. He leaped off a couple of seconds later, and finally landed on the chalky soil of France.
For a moment he couldn’t find her in the dust. He saw movement to his left, and she gasped, startled, when he came up silently beside her and grasped her arm. She had the submachine gun, and she motioned ahead. “The woods are that way. Are you ready to run?”
“Always,” he answered. They started sprinting toward the line of trees about thirty yards away. Michael restrained his pace so he wouldn’t get ahead of her.
They made the woods with no difficulty. Standing amid the trees, Michael and Gaby watched two of the scout cars pass, following the tank at a respectful distance. The tank would lead them several miles, at least.
“Welcome to France,” Gaby said. “You believe in grand entrances, don’t you?”
“Any entrance I survive is grand.”
“Don’t congratulate yourself just yet. We’ve got a long way to go.” She put the Schmeisser’s strap around her shoulder and cinched it. “I hope you’ve got a good strong heart; I travel fast.”
“I’ll try to keep up,” he promised.
She turned away, all business and deadly purpose, and began to move quietly through the underbrush. Michael stayed about twelve feet behind, listening for the sounds of anyone or anything coming after them. They weren’t being followed; with Harzer dead, all initiative had broken down and no soldiers were combing the woods. He thought of the man with the polished, cleated boots. Killing an old man was easy; he wondered how Boots might do against a ferocious opponent.
Well, life was full of possibilities.
Michael followed the French girl, and the forest sheltered them.
2
After more than an hour of fast walking in a southwesterly direction, crossing a few fields and roads with Gaby’s Schmeisser cocked and ready and Michael’s ears pricked for sounds, she said, “We wait here.”
They were in a stand of trees at the edge of a clearing, and Michael could see a single stone farmhouse ahead. The house was a ruin, its roof collapsed; destroyed, perhaps, by an errant Allied bomb, a mortar shell, or German SS troopers hunting partisans. Even the earth around the house had been charred by fire, and a few blackened stubs of trees were all that remained of an orchard.
“You sure you have the right place?” Michael asked her; a pointless question, and her chilly gaze told him so.
“We’re ahead of schedule,” she explained, kneeling down with the Schmeisser across her lap. “We won’t be able to go in for…” She paused while she checked the luminous hands on her wristwatch. “Twelve minutes.”
Michael knelt beside her, impressed by her directional skills. How had she navigated? By the stars, of course, or else she simply knew the route by heart. But though they were apparently where they were supposed to be by a given time, there was nothing in the area but the single destroyed farmhouse. “You must’ve had some experience with tanks,” he said.
“Not really. I had a German lover who was the commander of a tank crew. I learned everything from him.”
Michael lifted his brows. “Everything?”
She glanced quickly at him, then away again; his eyes seemed to glow like the hands of her watch, and they held steady. “It was necessary that I… do my duty for the benefit of my country,” she said, a little shakily. “The man had information about a truck convoy.” She felt him watching her. “I did what I was supposed to do. That’s all.”
He nodded. The man, she’d said. No name, no emotion. This war was as clean as a slashed throat. “I’m sorry about what happened at the village. I-”
“Forget it,” she interrupted. “You’re not to blame.”
“I watched the old man die,” he went on. He’d seen death before, of course. Many times. But the cold precision of Boots’s kicks and stomps still made his insides writhe. “Who was the man who killed him? Harzer called him Boots.”
“Boots is-was-Harzer’s bodyguard. An SS-trained killer. Now that Harzer’s dead, they’ll probably assign Boots to some other officer, perhaps on the Eastern Front.” Gaby paused, staring at a fragile glint of moonlight on the Schmeisser’s barrel. “The old man-Gervaise-was my uncle. He was my last blood relative. My mother, father, and two brothers were killed by the Nazis in 1940.” It was stated as hard fact, without any hint of emotion. The emotion, Michael thought, had been burned out of her as surely as the life in that orchard.
“If I’d known that,” Michael said, “I would have-”
“No, you wouldn’t have,” she told him sharply. “You would have done just as you did, or your mission would be over and you’d be dead. My village would be burned to the ground anyway, and all the people there executed. My uncle knew the risks. He was the man who brought me into the underground.” Her gaze met his. “Your mission is the important thing. One life, ten lives, a village lost-it doesn’t matter. We have a greater purpose.” She looked away from his gleaming, penetrating eyes. If she could tell herself that over and over, it might make death more than senseless, she thought. But deep down in her charred soul, she doubted it.
“It’s time to go in,” Gaby said when she checked her watch again.
They crossed the clearing, Gaby ready with the Schmeisser and Michael sniffing the air. He smelled hay, burned grass, the apple-wine fragrance of Gaby’s hair, but no odor of sweating skin that might’ve meant soldiers hiding in ambush. As Michael followed Gaby into the ruined farmhouse, he caught just a hint of a strange oily smell; a metallic odor, he thought. Oil on metal? She led him through the tangle of broken timbers and stones to a heap of ashes. He found the oily metal smell again, around this ash pile. Gaby knelt down and inserted her hand into the ashes; Michael heard the hinges of a little compartment open. The ashes were not all entirely ashes, but a cleverly painted and arranged mass of camouflaged rubber. Gaby’s fingers found an oiled flywheel, which she turned to the right several revolutions. Then she drew her hand out, and Michael heard the noise of latches being unbolted under the farmhouse floor. Gaby stood up. A hatch smoothly lifted, the rubber ashes piled on top of it. Oil gleamed on metal hinges and gears, and there were wooden steps descending into the earth.
“Entrez,” a dark-haired, sallow young Frenchman said, and motioned Michael down the stairs into, literally, the underground.
