The world according to Vampir was green and silent.
He felt very patient and helpful almost. He felt not that he was a part of history, but that he was History, a raw force, reaching out of the night to twist the present into the future. Savage, perhaps, in immediate application, but in a much longer run Good and Just and Fair.
A smear of light radiated across the scope as a trillion trillion swirling molecules spilled out the opening door.
Right on time for their appointment with destiny, Repp thought.
A blurry splotch of light jiggled out, barely recognizable as a human shape. And another.
Repp tracked it against the reticule of the sight, as other splotches paraded helpfully along behind.
“There, there, my babies, my fine babies, come to Papa,” Repp began to croon.
Leets was almost dead with exhaustion. He was no runner. He wanted to throw himself onto the grass and suck in great quarts of cool oxygen. Roger was running next to him. He’d caught up, all that idiotic tennis making him strong and fast, but Leets wouldn’t let him get beyond. Wasn’t that Tony ahead at the gate?
The gate!
A sick feeling burned through Leets, almost a sob.
How could they get through the gate?
Tony hit the door in the wall. It didn’t budge.
Repp had nineteen, now twenty.
Repp’s finger was on the trigger, taking the slack out.
Repp had twenty-one, twenty-two.
Leets tried to get there. He’d never make it. He had a terrible premonition of the next several seconds. “Tony!” someone screamed, himself.
Old Inverailor House gimmick, from the first days of SOE training up in Scotland. The man was an ex-Hong Kong police inspector, knew all kinds of tricks of the trade, of which this was but one:
“Now if you’ve got a lock in a door and you want in and you’re in a bit of a hurry, say Jerry’s coming along, take your revolver, just like a chap in a Hollywood cowboy picture, and shoot — but not into the lock, flicks are all wrong about that. You’ll just catch the slug on the bounce in your own middle. Rather, at an angle, into the wood, behind the bloody lock. That big four fifty-five makes a wonderful wrench.”
Funny how it came back, swimming up through five years of complicated past, just when he needed it.
Carefully, holding the Webley snout at an angle two inches from the ancient brass lock plate, Tony fired. The flash spurted white and blinding.
Repp had twenty-five. There was no slack in the trigger. But what was going on?
“Kinder,” yelled Tony, German perfect, “the bad man can see in the dark, the bad man can see in the dark.”
He could see their white faces stark in the night, and eyes white as they fled. They were apparitions. He heard the scuffle of panicked feet across the pavement. He heard squeals and yelps. He must have seemed a giant to them, a nightmare creation. They must have thought he was the bad man who could see in the dark, running through the yard, breathing hard, face blackened, gigantic pistol in one hand. Another irony for his collection.
How quickly they vanished. Several brushed against his leg in their flight and yet it seemed to take only a second. They scurried like small animals. He could not see them anymore.
A woman was crying. Terrified. She didn’t know.
We’re good fellows, madame, he wanted to explain.
He heard Leets yelling. What did the man want?
Repp fired.
Leets reached the gate. He heard them screaming and running. He fixed on fleeing figures that seemed to career through the darkness. Someone was crying. A woman’s voice, pitched high in uncontrollable fear, unfurled. “Bitte, bitte,” please, please.
“Go away, dearest God, go away.”
The bullet had taken most of Tony’s head. He was on the ground in the middle of the courtyard, in a dark pool spilling out across the pavement.
Then Repp shot him again.
PART THREE
Endlösung
(Final Solution)
Dawn, May 8, 1945
30
Leets finally stopped being insane near dawn. He’d really gone nuts there for a while, yelling up at the mountain after Repp shot Tony. Leets even fired off a magazine, spraying tracers hopelessly up to disappear into the dark bank of the hillside. Roger had hit Leets with his shoulder behind both knees, and Leets screamed at the blow and went down; then Roger pinned him flat in the arch of the open gate and, using every fiber of strength he had, dragged him back into the protection of the wall.
“Jesus,” Roger yelled in outrage, “tryin’ to get yourself killed!”
Leets looked at him sullenly, but Roger saw a mad glint, the beam of secret insane conviction spark in his irises, werewolflike, and when Leets twisted savagely for the gun, Rog was ready and really hit him hard in the neck with his right forearm, his tennis arm, big as an oak limb, stunning him.
“Out there it’s death,” he bellowed, deeply offended.
Then Leets had insisted on recovering the body.
“We can’t leave him out there. We can’t leave him out there.”
“Forget it,” Roger said. “He doesn’t care. I don’t care. Those children don’t care. Repp doesn’t care. Listen, you need a vacation or something. Don’t you see? You won!”
No, Leets didn’t see. He looked across the courtyard to Outhwaithe. A hundred streams of blood ran out of him, across the stones of the yard, catching in cracks and hollows. His head and face were smashed, an eye blown out, entrails erupting with gas, spilling out. Repp, in uncharacteristic rage, had fired a whole magazine into him. Then he’d turned his weapon on inanimate things and in a spooky display of the power of Vampir he’d shredded the door through which some few of the children had disappeared, then methodically snapped out windows, sent a burst of automatic across a plaster saint in a niche in the church, and finally, in a moment of inspired symbolism, shot the crosses off the two domed steeples. A real screwball, thought Roger.
Now, hours later, a chilly edge of dawn had begun to show to the east. Leets had been still, resigned finally, Roger figured. He himself was quite pleased with his coolness under fire. His friend Ernest Hemingway would have been impressed. He’d even saved the captain’s life. You saved your CO, you got a medal or something, didn’t you? What’s a captain worth? A Silver Star? At least a Bronze Star. For sure a Bronze.
Roger was wondering which medal he’d get — which to ask for, actually — when Leets said, quite calmly, “Okay, Rog. Let’s take him.”
Repp would have to train himself to live with failure. It was another test of will, of commitment; and the way to win it was to close out, ruthlessly, the past. Put it all behind. Speculation as to how and why he had failed were clearly counterproductive.
He explained all this to himself in the dark sometime in the long hours of the night after the shooting. Still, he was bitter: it had been so close.
Repp had killed one, he knew. Now the question was, How many remained? And would they come after him? And other questions, nearly as intriguing. Who were they? Should he flee now?
He’d already rejected the last. His one advantage right now lay in Vampir. It had run out, but they didn’t know that. They only knew he could hit targets in the dark and they couldn’t. It would be foolish to surrender that advantage by racing off into the dark, up a steep incline, through rough forest with which he was unfamiliar. A misstep could be disastrous, even fatal.