“They need a signal.”
An explosion shook the earth, followed by a lightning crackle that tore the air and ripped through the sounds of combat. The concussion loosened a rain of stones. Marsh ducked, arms wrapped over his head. To his left, an electric-blue glow strobed the clearing and illuminated the dusty air above the neighboring ravine. All around the camp, the klieg lights died. Darkness reclaimed the battleground. The metallic odor of ozone wafted through the night air, strong enough to sting the eyes. One of the teams had fired its pixie.
Its effort was rewarded with another glow. The haze above the ravine blazed brighter than daylight. The chatter of gunfire intensified, as the spotters atop the ravine walls sighted on the source of the light. The glow became a blinding flash that ignited every speck of grit kicked up by the battle. A fireball enveloped the neighboring ravine. Men screamed. Superheated air smelled like house dust caught in a radiator on the first cool day of autumn.
Marsh knew that glow. He’d seen it before. The ravine would have acted as a funnel, a mirror, for the searing heat of Reinhardt’s body. Their pixie hadn’t worked, and now the men in that ravine were dead.
The other team was having better luck pushing into the camp. The blast from a Mills bomb cratered the nest where two Afrika Korps men had taken position behind a machine gun. Up top, the spotters laid down suppressing fire, while the remaining snipers picked off the men who tried to scuttle between tents for a better position.
And now they knew where Reinhardt was. They needed another pixie. Marsh pulled out his flare pistol.
*
High over our heads, the magnesium flare shone like a star pulled from the firmament. It washed out the moon and scoured shadows from the deepest corners of the ravine. If the moonlight was silvery, this light was pure platinum and stark enough to bleach the color from the world.
We had to keep the path clear for Lorimer’s pixie. I worked the bolt on my pilfered rifle, popped up from behind my boulder, and let off another shot. Desultory return fire knocked chips from the escarpment behind me and pinged from the boulder. Though we’d lost the element of surprise at the last minute, we’d still caught Jerry with his pants down. The spotters and snipers up top were taking a toll on the mundane soldiers of this Afrika Korps outpost. This time around, Gretel (Where was she now? Had Will reached Liv first?) hadn’t dissected the entire plan of our attack days before we knew it ourselves. I tried, and failed, to keep one eye on my younger self and the other open for Lorimer’s advance with the Dingo.
Speaking of which, what kept him?
My counterpart looked at me. His thoughts exactly.
Another concussion reverberated from the sheer cliffs. The ravine behind me erupted in shooting and yelling. My hiding spot beside the boulder didn’t provide a clear view of the staging ground, which was a few dozen yards around the bend. My counterpart and the scout covered my retreat. I worked the bolt on my rifle along the way.
My knee didn’t protest the running. And I felt a strange exhilaration, almost a sense of peace. There was only one person in the entire outpost who could have snuck around behind us. It would have meant holding his breath and navigating through solid rock, but, of course, he’d been trained for that.
The warlocks wouldn’t have a chance against him. It was tempting to take my time, but Lorimer was a good man, as were the poor sods trying to guard the warlocks. They needed help.
Shadows grew as the flare descended. They slithered from their hiding spots among the defile’s fissures and gullies. When a gust of dry desert wind nudged the flare, the lengthening shadows capered in response. I crouched amidst their dance to peer around the corner.
Lorimer had set four men to guarding the warlocks. Three lay dead at Klaus’s feet. From the condition of their scattered bodies, I reckoned he’d emerged through the talus and dropped a grenade into their midst. A man disfigured by pockmarks lay on the sand nearby, hands pressed to his stomach, shuddering. Shrapnel in the gut. His gaze was glassy, unfocused. Grafton wasn’t long for this world.
Lorimer yelled, “Use the pixie!”
But blind panic made the surviving warlocks stupid. They piled into the Dingo. Webber took the driver’s seat, Hargreaves sat beside him, and White climbed atop with the pixie. The engine screamed. Webber flailed at the controls. His panicked attempts to get the Dingo in gear brought the tooth-rattling grind of metal shearing against tortured metal.
“The pixie! Hit it now!”
The pair of men assigned to guarding our retreat path charged into the fight, summoned like me by the commotion. Klaus dropped one with a shot from his sidearm. The bullet became substantial as soon as it left the barrel of his pistol. Lorimer and the surviving soldiers concentrated their fire on Klaus. The bullets passed through him more easily than sunlight through window glass. But he couldn’t hold his breath forever, and the fusillade forced him to remain insubstantial. Timed right, a person could sneak up and cut his battery wires at the moment he rematerialized to take a breath. But the hail of gunfire passing through his body made it impossible to get close.
Klaus used this to great effect. He kept himself between the men while he advanced, so they risked shooting each other. He strolled through the Dingo, trying to draw the soldiers’ fire into the panicked warlocks. He shot another soldier while standing between unarmed Hargreaves and White. Leaving the easiest for last, I realized. Hargreaves flailed at the ghostly man with his knife. Klaus aimed his next shot at Lorimer, who rolled aside at the last second. I glimpsed an attachment to Klaus’s battery harness. I’d never seen it before.
Webber slammed the Dingo into gear. It lurched backwards. Klaus whirled. His outstretched arm swept through the engine block. Chunks of metal flew through the armor plating to clatter against the escarpment. The gutted Dingo rolled to a stop, spewing petrol and motor oil.
Klaus had gone scarlet with the effort to hold his breath. He sprinted into the cliff face. I realized the attachment was a breathing tube. Sneaky bastard was going to catch his breath while safely ensconced in sandstone.
That was new. Even the older, more experienced Klaus had never developed that trick. But the breathing tube was still a weakness. I charged forward, eyes fixed on the patch of cliff where Klaus had disappeared.
“Lorimer!” I screamed. “Phosporus grenade, now!”
But he didn’t hear me. He slammed his fist on a red Bakelite panel at the waist of the pixie. The device emitted a high-pitched whine. Clever fellow. He was trying to time the detonation for Klaus’s reemergence. The three remaining warlocks leapt from the dead vehicle. Lorimer and the last surviving soldier retreated deeper into the ravine. They screamed at the warlocks to evacuate the blast radius.
They did. But they came in my direction instead.
“Not into the camp, you fools!”
The whine from the pixie grew in intensity and pitch, rocketing through registers that vibrated my eyeballs and loosened my fillings. Lorimer and his companion had no choice but to retreat. They dove for cover behind the eighty-eight.
My right hand went to the pistol at my waist while my left beckoned to the fleeing warlocks. “This way! Quickly! Take cover!”
They couldn’t see my face in the moonlight. They couldn’t tell I wasn’t supposed to be there. All they saw was a man directing them to safety.
I shot White in the chest. His momentum sent him tumbling face-first in the gravel. Webber didn’t have time to react. My second shot hit him just below the heart. Hargreaves skidded to a halt. He stared at me.
“I know what you are,” he said. Then he turned and fled the way he’d come.
Which took him straight into the blast from the pixie.
*
Will waited until the driver turned onto Liv’s street before confessing a certain awkwardness to his pecuniary situation. He did try to give the driver his name and address, but the fellow was too busy hurling abuse to listen. The driver shoved Will from the car while unleashing a stream of blue-pencil e
pithets, some of which might have made even Stephenson blush.
Will ran to the door. He knocked. The door swung open. Oh, no.
Light spilled across the pavement, piercing the darkness that had fallen during Will’s journey to Walworth. He scooted inside and closed the door, an automatic reflex born from enduring nearly two years of blackout regulations.
“Olivia? Hello?”
A scuffling sound came from the direction of the kitchen. I’m too late. He bolted through the vestibule.
And plowed into the telephone stand. He went down in a tangle of wires and table legs. The water bowl splashed him. He kicked free of the table. The telephone clattered into the den.
Will entered the kitchen just in time to see Liv’s fist smack into Gretel’s hatchet nose. Liv had a height advantage. The German woman staggered back, fell against the oven, and slid to the floor, legs splayed before her.
“Ouch.” Liv shook her hand. Then she finally noticed him. “Will? What are you doing here?”
“I came to rescue you. From … ah … her.” He pointed at Gretel on the floor. “You see.”
“Oh. Well done, then.”
“How did you…” He made a fist. Shrugged.
“My husband. He insisted I know how to defend myself.” She sucked on her knuckles. Frowned. “You’re drenched.”
“I’m afraid I made a mess of your foyer.”
“These things happen,” she mumbled. “Where have you been for the past six months? And how did you know to come here now? Who is this woman? And what are those things in her head?”
Sloe-eyed Gretel glared at her, woozily. The hem of her skirt had slid up to reveal the mottled skin of her lower legs. The burns had healed, but not without scars.
Will looked away before she could turn her gaze at him. She frightened him. The shadows behind her eyes frightened him even more. But instead of turning her glare on Will—or Liv—Gretel started to sob.
“That’s a rather long story.”
“Did Raybould send you?”
“Yes. I mean, no. Well, he and the commander did. Both of them. Together.”
“You wouldn’t believe the terrible things she said about Raybould.”
“Oh, indeed I would. But I shouldn’t take them to heart, were I you.”
“She’s German.”
“As I said, it’s a long story.”
“I think I ought to call the police.”
“Ah.” Will tugged on an earlobe. “Your telephone may be a bit, um, wet.”
“Oh, Will.”
*
The flare sank lower and lower, yet still the Dingo didn’t come. They couldn’t have missed the signal. Instead, the noise of combat filled the ravine behind Marsh.
A solitary figure emerged from the leftmost ravine, keeping to cover as he headed for the camp. Marsh couldn’t see him clearly. But if there was only one survivor of that massacre, he reckoned he knew who that would be.
Reinhardt’s silhouette sprinted another few yards, then dove behind a half-track. He wasn’t glowing, wasn’t armored in his own corona of searing Willenskräfte. But this wasn’t a retreat, Marsh realized. Reinhardt would never do that. No. He was going for another battery.
Marsh tapped the scout’s shoulder. “Cover me.”
Then he was over the shelf and sprinting for the tents. Hoping, belatedly, that any remaining spotters and snipers wouldn’t mistake him for an Afrika Korps trooper. He jumped into the dugout of the toppled machine-gun nest. Marsh unslung his rifle, but wasn’t fast enough. Reinhardt dashed across open ground to another hiding spot. Marsh missed.
Reinhardt passed the gap between two tents, then disappeared again into the shadows. Small camp. He couldn’t be far from the batteries. Marsh scrambled over the body of an Afrika Korps machine gunner and followed. The camp smelled like cordite and ozone. The odor of charred pork wafted from the ravine Reinhardt had just vacated. A burst of automatic fire perforated a tent to Marsh’s left. He ducked around the corner.
He found himself alone in the center of the camp. Behind him, canvas rippled against canvas. Marsh spun. He caught movement in the periphery of his eye, where night vision was strongest. The sound he’d heard was the susurration of a tent flap falling closed.
Reinhardt. The battery stores from U-115.
Marsh plucked a Mills bomb from his belt. Sprinting for the tent, he pulled the pin, yanked the flap aside, tossed the Mills, and dove for cover. He hunkered in the gravel, arms over his head, tensed for a detonation that never came. Instead, a surge of heat ignited the tent and crisped the hairs on his arms.
God damn it. Reinhardt must have swapped out his battery in time to knock out the grenade. But he’d reacted on reflex. And the bubble of Willenskräfte that fried the grenade had engulfed everything else in the close confines of the tent. Crackling flames fanned the cat-piss stink of ammonia into the camp. Marsh remembered a similar stench when Kammler smashed the farm’s battery store.
Reinhardt emerged from the burning tent, wreathed in blue fire. Heat shimmer rippled his silhouette.
Marsh fired his revolver, twice. Both shots flared a dark purple when they touched Reinhardt’s corona. The salamander steadied himself against the momentum of the vaporized rounds, then turned. He saw Marsh.
“Ah! Englishman.” Heat shimmer warbled his voice. “How I’d hoped to find you here.”
Marsh made to fire again, but the Enfield’s octagonal barrel sagged. He dropped the gun before it scorched his hand. He said, “I’m surprised you’re willing to show your face after the debacle at the farm. Can’t imagine the shame, being beaten by Kammler.”
Reinhardt’s corona flared from blue to violet and then to incandescent white. Gravel skittered toward his boots, pulled along by the updraft from his furnace heat.
Marsh scooted backwards. The gravel turned tacky beneath his boots. Firelight from the burning tent illuminated something he’d missed in the photographs in Stephenson’s office. The salamander wore a double harness. Two batteries. That explained how he’d weathered the pixie blast. He must have switched to the spare after the pulse knocked out his first.
Reinhardt said, “I knew I’d be the one to avenge the doctor. My partner’s mongrel blood makes him weak and unreliable. Like his sister.”
The bubble of heat expanded. Marsh ran. All around him, tents flared into ash. Gravel turned to molten slag, gripping the soles of his boots like thick molasses. He staggered, tripped over a tent stake. He rolled, trying to bring his rifle to bear on the blazing figure who loomed like an avenging angel.
Thunder shook the camp. The lightning crackle of a pixie detonation echoed through Halfaya Pass.
*
The blast that engulfed Hargreaves flung me like a scrap of newspaper in a gale. Don’t know how far it tossed me, but I remember flopping to a halt in the bend of the ravine. Took me a moment to regain myself. I came to atop the jagged scree at the base of the escarpment that formed the western wall of the canyon. I had too many cuts and bruises to count. But I slid to my feet, gingerly, and found I hadn’t broken my legs.
The Afrika Korps outpost burned to my right, past the knife-narrow opening in the canyon. To my left, behind the bodies of the warlocks I’d shot, a wall of flame blocked off the northern egress. The pixie blast had ignited the spilled petrol from the Dingo.
Thinking of the pixie roused me to action. Where was Klaus? After checking my revolver, I crept toward the charred hulk of the Dingo. I paused to check Webber and White for signs of life. No heartbeat. They’d bled out. The blast hadn’t left much of Hargreaves, nor Grafton.
I scoured the ravine for signs of Klaus. A rock bounced down from one of the high tables. I spun. But I was alone. Had Klaus moved elsewhere? Had he ghosted into another ravine, to cut down more of our men?
But then I found him. Well, part of him.
Flames licked at a hand protruding from the stone cliff. Klaus’s olive skin turned a shriveled black. As I neared the stone, I could see part of his fac
e: the curve of a cheekbone, an eyebrow ridge and part of his forehead, the tip of his nose. The smooth fabric of a trouser leg, from waist to knee, broke the gnarled surface of the escarpment. The rest of his body was permanently embedded into the rock. I wrestled the battery from the remains of his harness. I checked the gauge. It was dead.
The pixie had gone off just as he emerged. He was frozen in the act, like a diver perpetually gasping for air.
An autopsy would be impossible. Even if the Jerries found him and decided to chisel him free, his brain was fused with sandstone. Klaus’s corpse would be useless to anybody seeking to reverse-engineer von Westarp’s work. Before long, scavengers would clean away any flesh the fire didn’t consume. In time there would be nothing but a scattering of finger bones among the talus, and a few smooth protuberances that happened to look, just a bit, like bone. And the dusty desert wind would take care of those.
A pang of emotion caught me off guard. It wasn’t regret—this man was an enemy of my country, and his destruction had been necessary for the greater good. Instead, I felt pity. This Klaus would never learn to paint. He’d never learn what sort of person he could be when not yoked to the ideologies of twisted madmen. When he wasn’t a test subject. When free of his sister.
I’d known that version of Klaus briefly, and even worked alongside him. Through Gretel, our lives had been tied together. Our fates spun in related orbits. He could have been a good man, if life had let him.
The pop of gunfire broke my reverie. Reinhardt was still out there. I raised one hand in respectful farewell to Klaus, and broke into a tired run.
*
The pixie’s electric-blue flash swept over the camp. It snuffed Reinhardt’s Willenskräfte like a candle. His corona blinked out.
“Scheisse!”
He fumbled at his waist. The inrushing superheated air ignited his uniform. Without the protection of the Götterelektron, his human body couldn’t withstand the heat he’d willed into his surroundings. Reinhardt burned like a Hindu widow.
Marsh fired. The shot clipped Reinhardt’s shoulder and spun him around. He dropped to the ground, blazing, writhing, and grasping for his battery.
Necessary Evil (Milkweed Triptych) Page 40
