7
As he lay on the filth-clotted hay in the foul darkness with the other prisoners mumbling and moaning in their sleep, Michael felt a sadness creep over him like a silken shroud.
Life was a precious thing; what was it about men who hated it so much? He thought of the dark smoke belching from the chimneys and tainting the air with the smell of burning flesh. He thought of pinewood boxes full of hair, and how someone-a mother, a father-in a kinder world had combed that hair, and stroked it, and kissed the forehead it fell upon. Now it was gone to the wig makers, and the body up in smoke. More than humans were being destroyed here; whole worlds were being charred to white ash. And for what? Lebensraum-Hitler’s vaunted “elbow room”-and Iron Crosses? He thought of Mouse, lying dead in the thorns, the little man’s neck broken by a quick and merciful twist. His heart clutched: perhaps killing was his nature, but it was far from his pleasure. Mouse had been a good friend. What better epitaph was there? To mourn a single human being in such a death-torn land seemed like standing in a flaming house and blowing out a candle. He sheered his mind away from the memory of Boots crushing the dead hand and plucking the medal from it. His eyes were wet, and he realized he could lose his senses in this hellhole.
Something Blok had said. What was it? Michael tried to concentrate past the carnage. Something Blok had said about a fortress. Yes, that was it. Blok’s words: No one knows where the fortress is but myself, Dr. Hildebrand, and a few others…
The fortress. What fortress had he meant? Skarpa Island? Michael didn’t think so; it had been simple enough for Chesna to find out that Hildebrand had a home and workshop on Skarpa. That fact wasn’t a closely guarded secret. So what other fortress could Blok have meant, and what might that have to do with how Iron Fist was going to be used?
Bullet holes on glass and green-painted metal, Michael thought. Olive-green-painted metal. Why that particular hue?
He was pondering that when fingers touched his face.
He jumped, taken by surprise, and grabbed the slim wrist of a crouching figure outlined in dim blue. There was a muffled gasp; the figure thrashed to pull away, but Michael held firm.
Another figure, this one larger and also silhouetted in blue in Michael’s night vision, uncoiled from the gloom to his right. An arm shot out. At the end of it was a fist, which cracked against Michael’s skull and made his ears ring. A second blow grazed his forehead as he ducked beneath it, crouching on his knees. They were trying to kill him, he thought. A surge of panic rose within him. Were they that hungry that they wanted raw human flesh? He let go of the first figure, which scurried to the safety of a far corner, and concentrated on the larger, stronger one. A third blow was swung; Michael chopped at the open elbow and heard a satisfying grunt of pain. He saw the outline of a head and faint facial features. He slammed his fist into the face. A bulbous nose exploded.
“Guards!” a man shouted in French. “Guards! Help us!”
“Mercy of God! Mercy of God!” the shrieker began again at the top of his lungs.
“Stop that, you fools!” This man’s language was German with a thick Danish accent. “You’ll use up all the air!”
A pair of sinewy arms twined around Michael’s chest. He rocked his head back and smashed his skull against another man’s face. The arms lost their strength. The large figure with the burst nose was still full of fight. A fist hit Michael’s bruised shoulder and drove a cry of pain from him. Then fingers were on his throat, the weight of a body pressing down on him. Michael brought the palm of his hand up in a short, vicious blow against the tip of the man’s bearded chin and heard the crack of his teeth hitting together, possibly catching part of the tongue between them. The man groaned but kept squeezing Michael’s throat, fingers digging for the windpipe.
A piercing scream overwhelmed all the other frantic voices. It was the scream of a young girl, and it rose to a hysterical crescendo.
The kennel door’s small inset slid back. The brass nozzle of a fire hose was pushed through.
“Watch out!” the Dane warned. “They’re going to-”
A high-pressure flood of water shot from the nozzle and hit the prisoners, its velocity flinging Michael and his combatant away from each other. Michael was driven against a wall, the water battering his flesh. The girl’s scream became a strangled coughing. The shrieker had been silenced, his frail body hammered by the deluge. In another few seconds the water stopped, the fire hose was withdrawn, and the door’s inset slid back into place. It was all over but the moaning.
“You! The new one!” It was the same gruff voice that had told Metzger to shut up, except now the man was speaking around a badly bitten tongue. His language was coarse Russian. “You touch the girl again and I’ll break your neck, understand?”
“I don’t want to hurt her,” Michael answered in his native language. “I thought I was being attacked.”
The other man didn’t reply for a moment. Metzger was sobbing, and someone else was trying to soothe him. Water trickled down the walls and pooled on the floor, and the air reeked of sweat and steam. “She’s out of her mind,” the Russian told Michael. “About fourteen years old, is my guess. No telling how many times she’s been raped. Somewhere along the line, somebody put out her eyes with a hot iron.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Why?” the Russian asked. “Did you do it?” He snorted blood from his broken nose. “Gave me a hell of a knock, you son of a bitch. What’s your name?”
“Gallatinov,” he answered.
“I’m Lazaris. The bastards got me at Kirovograd. I was a fighter pilot. How about you?”
“I’m just a soldier,” Michael said. “They got me in Berlin.”
“Berlin?” Lazaris laughed and snorted more blood. “Ha! That’s a good one! Well, our comrades will be marching through Berlin soon enough. They’ll set fire to the whole damned city and drink a toast to Hitler’s bones. I hope they catch that bastard. Couldn’t you see him dancing on a meat hook in Red Square?”
“It’s a possibility.”
“Never. Hitler won’t be taken alive, that’s for sure. You hungry?”
“Yes.” It was the first time he’d thought of food since he’d been thrown in this hole.
“Here. Hold your hand out and you’ll get a feast.”
Michael did. Lazaris found his hand in the dark, gripped it with wiry fingers, and put something into the palm. Michael sniffed it: a small clump of hard bread that smelled bitter with mold. In a place like this one didn’t turn down handouts. He ate the bread, chewing it slowly.
“Where are you from, Gallatinov?”
“Leningrad.” He swallowed the bread, and his tongue searched his teeth for crumbs.
“I’m from Rostov originally. But I’ve lived all over Russia.” That was the beginning of Lazaris’s recitation of his life history. He was thirty-one years of age, and his father was an “engineering specialist” with the Soviet air force-which meant, basically, that his father was head of a team of mechanics. Lazaris went on about his wife and three sons-all of them safe in Moscow-and how he’d flown more than forty missions in his Yak-1 fighter and shot down twelve Luftwaffe aircraft. “I was working on my thirteenth,” Lazaris said wistfully, “when two more dropped out of the clouds right on top of me. They shot poor Warhammer to pieces, and I hit the silk. I landed less than a hundred yards from an enemy machine-gun nest.” Michael couldn’t see the man’s face in the dark, but he saw the blue-outlined shoulders shrug. “I’m courageous in the sky. On land not so much so. And here I am.”
“Warhammer,” Michael repeated. “That was your plane?”