No time to worry about it, though, because the officer was quick and much stronger than I thought. He shoved the rifleman to one side and came up off the ground with a disheartening degree of rubbery agility, the Luger still in his grip. There was a fragment of a fragment of a moment open to me and I took the long reach and knuckle-punched the back of his hand. The Luger fired and the bullet tugged at the loose fabric of my upper inner left thigh. Half an inch more and I’d have been singing castrato in the celestial choir. His gun vanished, but the German did not gape or hesitate. Instead he punched me in the face with a pair of rapid-fire jabs that loosened the light bulbs inside my brain. I staggered back and tripped over the rifleman’s outstretched ankle. I went down just as something silver whipped past my face. I turned the fall into a backroll and came up on fingers and toes, spitting blood from my mouth, and saw the knife in his hand. It was another relic of a war that ended decades before I was born. A brass-handled German navy diver’s knife. Twelve and a quarter inches overall, with a wickedly sharp seven-and-five-eighths-inch blade. Sturdy and lethal. He came at me, moving well and low, nicely angled and well-balanced, with the blade shielded by the other hand, doing it all the right way, very smooth and professional and deadly.
I pushed off the ground and danced sideways as I reached for my own knife. The Wilson Tactical Combat Rapid Response folder sprang out of its holster and thudded into my palm and I flicked the blade open with a snap of my wrist. The German saw the knife and smiled. My blade was only three and a half inches long.
I smiled, too. There’s a reason I prefer the shorter, lighter weapon. It’s so light that it puts no drag on my hand speed. He darted in, trying to close the deal with a fake lunge and high short-slash across my throat. He was good and the tip of that knife nicked the point of my chin as I lunged back, but I caught him, too. The key to good fighting is never purely attack or purely defend. There needs to be elements of both in play, otherwise the fight is too long and too fair. As I slipped his cut, I whipped my blade in a very tight slap down across his forearm. The speed and force of his own attack added cutting length and depth to my counter.
A stupid fighter pauses to admire his work. In the movies there’s an exchange of witty taunts, or there’s banter. In the real world, it’s all about killing the other guy as quickly and efficiently as possible. I had a moment, so I took it. His lacerated nerve endings tricked him into recoiling from my cut, and I followed that reflex movement with an attack, elbow-checking his injured arm, cupping my hand around the back of his neck, stepping my right leg in around the back of his leg, and leg-wheeling him down to the ground while my blade chased his throat down and cut him from ear to ear.
Very quick, very messy. His heart stopped beating and the arterial spray hissed down to nothing. I pivoted toward the rifleman, saw a dark bubble form between his parted lips as he struggled to breathe. I clamped a hand over his mouth and corkscrewed my knife into his heart, felt him settle back, removed my hand as he let out a last wet breath against my palm.
The whole fight took about two seconds. From when the rifleman had tried to frisk me, call it five. Fights should be short or you’re one of the dead ones on the ground.
I cleaned my blade on the rifleman’s clothes and my hands in the surf. My SIG’s barrel was choked with sand but I holstered it anyway. Something caught my eye and I peered out to sea and saw moonlight glinting on the conning tower of a submarine. A U-boat? Probably.
I think that’s when the shakes hit me.
I’d survived the moment, but this wasn’t my moment.
There was no reason to stay where I was, so I moved along the beach, running fast in the cold moonlight, trying to find my way out of here.
It took only a few minutes to run to the end of the atoll and then I skidded to a stop. That end of the island was mostly flat and sandy, with trees rising up from the middle of the arms that reached around a kind of small bay. I expected to find nothing but empty sand and dark trees.
That’s not what I found. I stood staring at something that continued to shove the world toward a steep drop-off into the impossible.
The T-craft was there.
It lay in a bowl of ruptured earth at the end of the long impact trench, with burned and shriveled trees on either side of it. But that couldn’t be. The moon was wrong. There was a German U-boat in the water and I’d killed two Nazi frogmen. It was night instead of day.
Then I heard a sound behind me, and as I turned, I knew whatever it was could not be good. It wasn’t.
A ship rose up on night-black waters and then slammed into the hungry teeth of the line of sharp volcanic rocks. Not a World War II submarine. Not a modern navy destroyer. This was an old wooden ship. A brig, I think, though I’m no expert in sailing ships of the nineteenth goddamn century, and I’m pretty fucking sure I was watching one tear its guts out on the rocks. The impact jerked the hull to a stop with such force that several masts snapped, dragging rigging and sails down. I saw men fall, heard them scream as they hit water or stone or debris.
Then behind me a dog barked.
I whirled.
And there was Ghost, running from the exploding forest wall, chased by bits of torn aloe and palm. Top and Bunny dove for cover and I stood there like a goddamn idiot, too shocked to move, or speak.
Or duck.
A big piece of tree trunk slammed into me and I was gone.
-7-
It was the sound of metal clanking on metal that woke me.
I opened my eyes and realized that I wasn’t stretched out on the ground or hanging in zero gravity. I was on my feet. Daylight was warm on my face and there were insects buzzing in the humid tropical air. The greens of the surrounding forest were very green. Intensely so. Unnaturally bright, as if lit from within each leaf. The same with the blue water I glimpsed through the trees, and the sky above was eye-hurtingly vivid.
The metal clank sounded again and I turned. My body was strangely leaden, as if I were sleepwalking. I saw Top and Bunny. I saw Coast Guard and navy. A couple of marines, probably from the Michael Murphy. But there were other people, too. Men dressed in clothes from some weird mix of History Channel wardrobe department. Heavy coats with embroidered cuffs and fringe epaulets, barefoot bearded men in ragged shorts and simple shirts, Germans in the uniforms of the Kriegsmarine, people dressed in lab coats and others in casual sailing clothes from throughout the last century. There were at least three hundred of them.
They each held a tool of some kind. Some of the tools looked vaguely like wrenches or drivers or hammers, but many were so strange that I could not even guess at their purpose. Everyone who held a tool, though, seemed to know what to do with it. All across the bowl of the impact point, all around where the T-craft lay, men worked. Some carried pieces of metal or plastic, but most were hard at work doing repairs on machines. And again, I had no idea what any of the machines were. Some were of metal, but most seemed to be blends of metal, plastic, cloth, and something else, something that pulsed and throbbed and looked as if it were alive. Maybe it was alive.
The T-craft was propped up on some kind of hydraulic struts, and as I watched, Top and Bunny helped two German U-boat sailors lift a glowing device into place and hold it there while a navy helicopter pilot, still wearing his helmet, set to work with a kind of spot welder.
It was then that I realized I was not standing still. I looked down at my legs and saw them moving, walking. And I saw my hands. There were tools in them. A long, flat device with curling wires sticking out of one end, and a pair of something that looked like pliers but had bright blue glowing pads on it. I watched myself walk over to where a piece of machinery lay on a plastic pad near one of the hydraulic jacks; I felt myself kneel; I stared as my hands went to work on the device, using the tools with a precision and efficiency that did not belong to me.