For once, something came out the way I wanted. The black-clad Palestinians—or whoever they were—disappeared into the darkness. Gary and I waited until the sound of their footsteps had died completely away; then I rested my forehead on my arm and started breathing again. I tried not to shiver too loudly in case the sound carried.
Then, noticing for the first time the wonderful, Christmasy smell of the pine tree, I squeezed Gary's arm in silent thanks. I nodded when he made a motion with his thumb. We crawled cautiously out from under the pine tree. The hedgehog still hadn't moved. Poor little guy...
Then, like a swimmer coming up from a long dive, I took a deep breath and let it out again silently.
Looked like I owed Odin a knife.
And Gary my life.
Chapter Three
I finally managed to get the sparker going. The carbide lit with a hissing pop. The cave was so quiet I could hear the silence listening to me, waiting for me to make a move. So I just sat still for a moment and let my eyes adjust to the grey light pouring from my helmet. There should've been a warm yellow glow; but the walls swallowed the color, leaving only an eerie, dead grey to light the low-ceilinged cavern. Even my skin looked grey. The only exception was that deep black hole beside me.
When I got a good look at it...
There was literally no way I could have avoided stepping into that hole.
It was a good four feet across, nearly round, and smack in the middle of the passage Bjornssen and I'd been following. If it had been there, I would either have seen it or fallen into it. No question. But a hole that size couldn't have opened up between us without either of us noticing—a cave-in is not a quiet phenomenon. If it was an illusion, it was a damned good one.
I leaned cautiously forward. The walls were absolutely perpendicular. No ledges, no bumps, no projections—it plunged straight down like an enormous sewer pipe farther than my light could penetrate into the blackness. I hadn't heard Bjornssen hit bottom. I sat back again, knowing that I had to stand up, move, do something; and wished intensely for a cigarette. I hadn't smoked anything in three years.
My lamp flickered; then flared bright again, and sent shadows rippling across the walls. Odd kind of rock in this part of the cave. Stranger yet, hadn't I just been thinking that when Bjornssen disappeared? My brows puckered and I chewed at my upper lip, moving my head to play the light across the opposite wall.
The surface was jagged, and unused to light. Even the shadows it cast were wrong. Nothing I could put my finger on, exactly...
I got to thinking about the marks Bjornssen had made with his surveyor's tape, and a feeling I didn't stop to analyze hauled me to my feet. I piled my gear in a heap and went back to verify the last marker, which my guide had made about ten feet the other side of the chimney.
Jumping over the gaping hole gave me a case of serious sweats—which was stupid. I was too smart—or too well trained, anyway—to let fear get the best of me like some half-brained Stone Age savage. So I worked harder at reminding myself that I was a modern, civilized, highly trained combat soldier on a very simple recon mission. Christ—it was only a ten-foot recon at that. In a totally empty cave. No problem.
After two full minutes of steady hiking, I still hadn't found it. I looked back the way I'd come, and absently scratched my elbow. Odd, I didn't think I'd walked that far from the spot where we'd spent the night. I went back to the chimney and started again, watching both walls this time and paying closer attention.
It still wasn't there.
Just when and where had Bjornssen made that last mark? I knew he'd put a marker along the straight stretch here, and Bjornssen always plastered a bit of tape at every turn. I'd watched the "mark-the-trail ritual" too many times to doubt that. We'd come through a whole series of turns and side tunnels fifty feet back, or so. I'd miscalculated, was all.
I started from the chimney again. Sixty-five feet of carefully measured steps later, I stopped. Nothing. Not a trace of where we'd spent the "night." Not even a hint of old adhesive on the walls. And while I never actually saw them change, the shadows looked different every time I glanced away and back.
Worse, the side tunnels were missing. As far as I could see, ahead and behind, there was nothing but unbroken grey rock wall.
At one hundred twenty feet I stopped again, breathing hard. My shirt was soaked and sweat trickled down my skivvies (I hoped it was sweat) to run past my knees and into the tops of my socks. It tickled like blazes—and I was too worried to scratch.
Those tunnels couldn't be gone. They couldn't. But they were. Suddenly I wondered what else might disappear—
Goddamned one-eyed son-of-a-bitch!
I broke and ran like hell for my pack, leaping the chimney like a running longjumper. My gear was still piled where I'd left it, complete with food, canteens, carbide—and the Armalite AR-180 assault rifle strapped across it... .
I slid down against the wall, barely feeling the needle-sharp projections that scraped my back, and sat swearing at the wall opposite me. Odin was playing games again.
I scrubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands and tugged on my hair for a moment, and wondered with a nagging sense of futility what would have happened if I hadn't kept my half of that misbegotten bargain with Odin? Surely it couldn't have been much worse than what had happened. I laughed aloud, and shuddered at the same time.
It was far too late, of course, but I couldn't help wishing I'd kept the knife and said the hell with Odin and every other god ever invented. What a waste of a perfectly good blade... and a pile of money, not to mention my time, and Gary's.
I even found myself wishing for Frau Brunner's company. Odin himself would've thought twice about crossing her.
Frau Brunner—a shrewd old woman who had survived everything from the Allied Blitz to navigating landmines at the East German border—was known throughout town as a shark.
Her standard sales-floor expression was a scowl that routinely cowed GIs, tourists, and rabid dogs. By the time I'd bargained my way to a final sale on the Mauser K-98-k bayonet I'd chosen, I was sweating into my uniform, and was convinced that Frau Brunner was a throwback to the original Viking traders she was descended from. She might have been closer to eighty than seventy, and was homely as a bald crow—but the lady was sharp.
Which made the compliment Gary paid me when we walked out the door even sweeter.
"Pretty good, RB." He grinned. "Most of the officers on base warn guys away from her; but you got a good price on that. Nice blade, too." Then his grin turned nasty. "Too bad you can't bargain like that when it really counts. If you could talk like that to the brass, you wouldn't get yourself in half the jams you end up in. And you might just get yourself out of the other half."
I grunted and didn't deign to respond.
He chuckled. "Cat's got your tongue, eh? Well, you did a good job, anyway. Sometimes Frau Brunner reminds me a little of my grandma. She used to make me bargain for cookies when I was a kid. Nobody ever got anything over on her. You'd love her."
"I'd like to meet her," I said, thinking about the lonely old woman who'd cried over the letter Gary'd shown me. "Think you could talk her into visiting you over here?"
Gary shrugged. "Don't know. She's kind of funny about traveling. Says the men in the family have done enough traveling for several lifetimes. She's got a point, I guess, considering the odd corners of the world we've been sent to fight in. Grandpa, Dad, and now me. She never figured on a bunch of ragheads shooting at me over here. Poor Grandma." Gary shook his head; then got an evil glint in his eye. "One of these fine nights, you know, those bastards are going to overrun the site, and leave brass holding a bunch of bodies in the bag. Ought to be some fight, huh?"