“Stay in back of me,” Jager whispered to Ludmila.
“Chivalry is reactionary,” she said. “You have the better weapon. I should lead and draw fire.” In strictly military terms, she was right He’d never thought strictly military terms would apply to the woman he loved. But if he failed here out of love or chivalry or whatever you wanted to call it, he failed altogether. Reluctantly, he waved Ludmila ahead.
She didn’t see the motion, because she’d already started moving forward. He followed, close as he could. As Anielewicz had said, the path wound but was easy enough to use. With his pupils dilated by the nerve gas antidote, he could see exactly where to place each foot to make the least possible noise.
What he thought was about halfway to the bomb, Ludmila stopped in her tracks. She pointed round the corner. Jager came up far enough to see. A Jewish guard lay dead there, one hand still on his rifle. Ever so carefully, Jager and Ludmila stepped over him and moved on.
Up ahead, Jager heard tools clinking on metal, a sound with which he’d become intimately familiar while serving on panzers. Normally, that was a good sound, promising that something broken would soon be fixed. Something broken would soon be fixed now, too. Here, though, the sound of ongoing repair raised the hair at the back of his neck.
He made a mistake then-brushing against some rubble, he knocked over a brick. It fell to the ground with a crash that seemed hideously loud. Jager froze, cursing himself.That’s why you didn’t stay in the infantry, you clumsy son of a whore.
He prayed Skorzeny hadn’t heard the brick. God wasn’t listening. The handicraft noises stopped. A burst of submachine gun fire came in their place. Skorzeny couldn’t see him, but didn’t care. He was hoping ricochets would do the job for him. They almost did. A couple of bouncing bullets came wickedly close to Jager as he threw himself flat.
“Give up, Skorzeny!” he shouted, wriggling forward with Ludmila beside him. “You’re surrounded!”
“Jager?” For one of the rare times in their acquaintance, he heard Skorzeny astonished. “What are you doing here, you kikeloving motherfucker? I thought I put paid to you for good. They should have hanged you from a noose made of piano wire by now. Well, they will. One day they will.” He fired another long burst. He wasn’t worried about spending ammunition. Bullets whined around Jager, striking sparks as they caromed off bricks and wrecked machines.
Jager scuttled toward him anyhow. If he made it to the next heap of bricks, he could pop up over it and get a decent shot. “Give up!” he yelled again. “We’ll let you go if you do.”
“You’ll be too dead to worry about it, whether I give up or not,” the SS man answered. Then he paused again. “No, maybe not. You should be dead already, as a matter of fact. Why the hell aren’t you?” Now he sounded friendly, interested, as if they were hashing it out over a couple of shots of schnapps.
“Antidote,” Jager told him.
“Isn’t that a kick in the balls?” Skorzeny said. “Well, I’d hoped I’d get out of here in one piece, but-” Thebut was punctuated by a potato-masher hand grenade that spun hissing through the air and landed five or six meters behind Jager and Ludmila.
He grabbed her and folded both of them into a tight ball an instant before the grenade exploded. The blast was deafening. Hot fragments of casing bit into his back and legs. He grabbed for his Schmeisser, sure Skorzeny would be following hard on the heels of the grenade.
A rifle shot rang out, then another one. Skorzeny’s submachine gun chattered in reply. The bullets weren’t aimed at Jager. He and Ludmila untangled themselves from each other and both rushed to that pile of bricks.
Skorzeny stood swaying like a tree in the breeze. In the gloom, his eyes were enormous, and all pupiclass="underline" he’d given himself a stiff dose of nerve-gas antidote. Right in the center of the ragged old shirt he wore was a spreading red stain. He brought up his Schmeisser, but for once didn’t seem sure what to do with it, whether to aim at Anielewicz or at Jager and Ludmila.
His foes had no such hesitation. Anielewicz’s rifle and Ludmila’s pistol cracked at the same instant in which Jager squeezed off a burst. More red flowers blossomed on Skorzeny’s body. The breeze in which he swayed became a gale. It blew him over. The submachine gun fell from his hands. His fingers groped toward it, pulling hand and arm after them as they struggled from one rough piece of ground to the next, a centimeter and a half farther on. Jager fired another burst. Skorzeny twitched as the bullets slammed into him, and at last lay still.
Only then did Jager notice the SS man had pried several planks off the big crate that held the explosive-metal bomb. Under them, the aluminum skin of the device lay exposed, like that of a surgical patient revealed by an opening in the drapes. If Skorzeny had already set the detonator in there-
Jager ran toward the bomb. He got there a split second ahead of Anielewicz, who was in turn a split second ahead of Ludmila. Skorzeny had removed one of the panels from the skin. Jager peered into the hole thus exposed. With his pupils so dilated, he had no trouble seeing the hole was empty.
Anielewicz pointed to a cylinder a few centimeters in front of his left foot “That’s the detonator,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s the one we pulled or if he brought it with him, the way you said he might. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that he didn’t get to use it.”
“We won.” Ludmila sounded dazed, as if she was fully realizing for the first time what they’d done, what they’d prevented.
“Nobody will put the detonator in this bomb any time soon,” Anielewicz said. “Nobody will be able to get close to it and keep living, not for a while, not without the antidote, whatever that is. How long does the gas persist, Jager? You know more about it than anyone else around here.”
“It’s not exposed to bright sun. What’s left of the roof will keep rain off. It should last a good while. Days, certainly. Weeks, maybe,” Jager answered. He still felt keyed up, ready to fight. Maybe that was the aftermath of battle. Maybe, too, it was the antidote driving him. Anything that made his heart thump like that probably scrambled his brains, too.
“Can we go out of here now?” Ludmila asked. She looked frightened; the antidote might have been turning her to flight, not fight.
“We’d better get out of here, I’d say,” Anielewicz added. “God only knows how much of that gas we’re taking in every time we breathe. If there’s more of it than the antidote can handle-”
“Yes,” Jager said, starting toward the street. “And when we do get out, we have to burn these clothes. We have to do it ourselves, and we have to bathe and bathe and bathe. You don’t need to breathe this gas for it to kill you. If it touches your skin, that will do the job-slower than breathing it, but just about as sure. We’re dangerous to anyone around us till we decontaminate.”
“Lovely stuff you Germans turn out,” Anielewicz said from behind him.
“The Lizards didn’t like it,” Jager answered. The Jewish fighting leader grunted and shut up.
The closer Jager got to the street, the brighter the glare became, till he squeezed his eyes almost shut and peered through a tiny crack between upper and lower lids. He wondered how long his pupils would stay dilated and then, relentlessly pragmatic, wondered where in Lodz he could come up with a pair of sunglasses.
He strode past the outermost dead Jewish sentry, then out onto the street, which seemed to him awash in as much brilliance as if the explosive-metal bomb had gone off. The Jews probably would have to cordon off a couple of blocks around the wrecked factory on one pretext or another, just to keep people from inadvertently poisoning themselves as they walked by.
Ludmila emerged and stood beside him. Through his half-blind squint, he saw hers. He didn’t know what was going to happen next He didn’t even know whether, as Anielewicz had suggested, they’d ended up breathing more nerve gas than their antidote could handle. If the day started going dim instead of brilliant, he still had two syringes left in his aid kit. For three people, that made two-thirds of a shot apiece. Would he need it? If he did, would it be enough?