Sarah crouched next to Rosenthal’s body, and closed his eyes. Then she wrapped a pancho around the flier’s horribly gutted torso to enable Deschin and Ettore to more easily carry him when they returned.
They were sliding the stretcher into the truck when a shot rang out. The round whistled between them, punching a hole in the sheet metal. They whirled to see three German soldiers moving along the side of the granary in the downpour. One raised his rifle and fired again. Deschin and Ettore scrambled behind the truck, rounds chipping into the trees behind them.
“I’m going back,” Deschin said.
Ettore nodded that he knew what to do and leaned out from behind the truck, firing bursts from his carbine, pinning down the German patrol.
Deschin took off between the trees. Despite Ettore’s cover, one of the Germans popped up firing. Deschin dove headlong into the entrance that led to the staircase as rounds powdered the stucco facade.
“Sarah? Sarah come on!” he shouted as he ran down the stairs into the basement of the granary.
“What about him?” she exclaimed, gesturing to Rosenthal’s body.
“German patrol!” Deschin interrupted. “Come on!”
Sarah hesitated momentarily. And in that instant, a blinding flash of lightning, followed by a primordial crack of thunder that sounded as if it split the earth, illuminated San Gimignano like a dozen noons. Traveling over one hundred million feet per second, the jagged bolt stabbed from billowing thunderheads ten miles up, and, like the wrath of an angry diety, struck the spired campanile of Cappella di Santa Fina.
The carillon’s bells glowed like huge Christmas tree ornaments as fifteen million volts of electrical current coursed through the bronze. Crackling blue fuzz zigzagged along cracks and licked at the edges of stone as the current raced down the church’s wet facade and surged into the porous rock beneath.
In the limestone catacombs, the German soldiers, working to cover the crates of ammunition and drums of fuel with tarpaulins, watched horrified as the current darted out of fissures and crevices, and crawled across the moist surfaces buzzing with high energy. For the briefest instant, the caverns glowed with an ultraviolet fluorescence. Then the bristling voltage discharged in angry sheets across the ankle-deep water and through the ammunition and fuel at temperatures close to 50,000°F. The entire cache exploded in a chain reaction that accelerated through the network of tunnels beneath San Gimignano.
The whole town shuddered as if struck by a devastating earthquake. Buildings crumbled. Streets buckled and collapsed. Church bells rang wildly. Flocks of ravens erupted from the towers, filling the air with their angled black shapes. Thousands of cats darted wildly through the streets. Townsfolk and German soldiers ran panicked into the heavy rain.
The German patrol, advancing along the side of the granary, was buried in an avalanche of rubble as the wall above them collapsed. Et-tore jumped into the truck and drove off with his badly wounded passenger.
Deschin had just grasped Sarah’s hand to drag her from the basement when the granary came crashing down around them. She screamed as a huge section of the concrete-and-stone slab overhead fell, knocking them to the ground in a shower of dust and grain. Tons of rubble cascaded down, mercifully burying Rosenthal’s body. Then the frightening roar and quaking gave way to an eerie silence, and the sounds of rain.
Sarah and Deschin were lying on the floor, a short distance apart. But neither could see the other through the dust-filled air and darkness.
“Sarah?” Deschin called out.
“Here,” she replied. “Over here.”
Deschin crawled in the direction of her voice. His fingers found her hand, and he kept going until they were face-to-face.
“Are you hurt?”
“No. I’m okay,” she replied. “You?”
“Okay,” he parroted.
“What happened?”
“The German supply depot must have blown,” Deschin replied, smiling and sniffing at the air that was thick with the pungent odor of cordite and fuel.
He worked himself into a sitting position, and helped Sarah do the same. His smile vanished when he saw they were encircled by a wall of rabble and grain sacks, capped by the slab above.
The falling concrete floor had slammed into the sacks, which had been stacked high around them. The uppermost bags burst, absorbing the impact; while those below supported the weight, keeping the slab from crushing them to death.
“We’re trapped,” Sarah exclaimed, a tremor in her voice. “We’re buried alive, Aleksei. There’s no way out of here.”
“I’ve already found two,” he said brightly.
“Two?” she wondered, with a puzzled look.
He took her hands in his, and held them up for her to see. “Now there are four!” he said. “We’re going to dig our way out.”
She smiled, the tension eased by his charming manner and undaunted optimism.
Deschin paused to get his bearings, then began drawing in the dust on the floor. He calculated the location of the staircase relative to then-position, and crawled to that section of the rubble, carefully working free a jagged piece of stone.
“That way,” he announced.
He removed another piece of rubble, and then another, sliding each behind him to Sarah, who pushed it aside. In a few hours they had dug a narrow tunnel about five feet deep into the densely packed rubble. But night fell quickly, and soon they were working in total darkness, and numbing cold.
Sarah fell back against the sacks of grain. “I’m cold, Aleksei. I’m cold and tired.”
“So am I,” he replied wearily. “My hands are numb.”
He fell against the sacks next to her, and huddling for warmth, they slept. They awoke hours later to see a few pencil-thin shafts of light that pierced the tons of rubble overhead. Heartened by the new day, they ate some of the grain and sipped water from his canteen, then emptied Sarah’s haversack of medical supplies, using it to collect the rainwater that dripped from above.
And Aleksei dug. Hour after hour, he tunneled through wet stone, brick, and mortar, shoring up the walls of the narrow shaft with pieces of wood he unearthed along the way. Patiently, cautiously, he dug, until his hands were raw and bloodied; until Sarah had used up all the soothing medication and bandages; and until having dug far enough to reach the staircase, having every reason to believe their release was imminent, Sarah heard Aleksei’s angry, frustrated wail coming from the far end of the tunnel.
“Aleksei? What is it? You all right?”
He emitted another agonzing bellow in reply.
She crawled the length of the tunnel and found him clawing at a wall with his fingers; clawing futilely at the thick, unmoving concrete and stone surface against which the shaft had ended — instead of against the base of the staircase as they had hoped. Aleksei heard her behind him, and turned from the wall. She took his bloodied hands in hers, and they knelt in the cramped tunnel, silently staring at each other for what seemed like an eternity.
Then, their spirits crushed, they crawled back to their space beneath the slab; and as their terror gradually subsided and was replaced by a forlorn acceptance of their fate, they fell into an exhausted embrace, heads buried in each other’s shoulder, drawing strength and support. And finally, in what they believed to be their last moments of life, in the absolute blackness of night, without a word being spoken, they lifted their heads slowly, their cheeks delicately brushing until their lips touched; and then, bringing the spark of life to the cold, damp hellhole that entombed them, they became lovers.
It was slow, unhurried lovemaking, not wildly passionate or frenzied, more like a gentle, tender, everlasting embrace; as if, perhaps, seated face-to-face, rocking back and forth in each other’s arms, in vibrant silence, they might ignore the rising stench of death, and forget where they were and why, and fall asleep in a warm, blissful haze, and never wake up, and never know they had died.