As Max hurried back through the grounds to his motorcycle, the first sliver of the new sun appeared out of the eastern sea, illuminating his path.
At first, he thought the Welshman’s precious cargo must be alight. A dense gray-green cloud was rising over the dockyards, spreading like some malevolent fog. He slowed the motorcycle, listening for the accompanying crackle of exploding ammunition, but heard nothing. A smoke screen, he realized, put up to throw off the aim of the enemy bombers. Moments later, he was swallowed up by it.
Chaos ruled along French Creek, much of it caused by the swirling smoke belching from the generators. With visibility reduced to a matter of yards, Max abandoned the motorcycle and set off on foot, searching for the ambulances. The unloading was already under way, and the quayside was a logjam of trucks waiting to bear off the cargo. Men moved through the miasma, appearing and fading like ghosts to a chorus of muffled shouts and orders. These increased in volume as the Welshman loomed into view, long and trim and battle-worn, with streaks of rust staining her flaking paint. She had her own cranes for loading, which was fortunate. Those on the quayside stood broken and twisted like crippled giants.
Max barged a path up the gangway onto the ship. He collared a crewman and asked for the sick bay. A peculiar stillness descended on him as he made his way belowdecks. He felt utterly divorced from the frenetic activity unfolding around him, focused on the imminent confrontation.
Freddie wasn’t in the sick bay, but a man on a bunk with a big bandage on his head mumbled some directions to the forward dressing station where the wounded were being tended to.
A couple of them hadn’t made it. They lay covered in blankets in a corner of the room. The others were on stretchers, patched up and ready to be moved. Freddie was in the thick of things, administering an injection of morphia to a howling sailor whose thigh was swaddled in blood-soaked rags.
Was that how he did it? Was that how he subdued the girls, with pharmaceuticals?
Freddie seemed to sense Max’s thoughts, turning as he got to his feet.
“My God, Max, what are you doing here?”
“I need to talk to you.”
“Hardly the time or the place.”
Freddie gestured the waiting orderlies forward. “Okay, let’s get them out of here.”
Max could only look on as Freddie marshaled his men, leading the party of stretcher-bearers through the belly of the ship. Max brought up the rear, doing his best to keep Freddie in his sights.
The air-raid siren heralded their appearance on the upper deck. This gave them seven minutes at most before the bombs would begin to fall. Somewhere up ahead, lost in the blanket of smoke, Max heard Freddie call, “Clear the gangway! Make way for the wounded!”
Max imagined Freddie slipping away in the man-made fog, but he was waiting at the bottom of the gangway, seeing the party safely off the ship, pointing a path through the torrent of men and clattering carts loaded with crates.
“Where is she, Freddie?”
“What happened? You look terrible.”
“I know it’s you.”
“And you’re not making a whole lot of sense.”
Freddie turned to follow the train of stretcher-bearers across the quayside. Max held him back by the arm. Freddie shook himself free, angry now.
“I don’t know what’s got into you, but there are men there who need attention. So—if you don’t mind—I’ve got a job to do.”
Max hadn’t spotted the ambulances on the quayside because they were parked in the streets of Senglea, just back from the docks. Senglea was a ghost town, long since evacuated by order of the governor. If anything, the smoke sat thicker there than on the quayside, undisturbed by the urgent passage of men.
There were four ambulances in all, but only three were required for the wounded men. Freddie sent them on their way before turning his attention back to Max. They were alone now, and Freddie was still angry.
“Okay, what the bloody hell’s going on?”
Don’t be fooled by the indignation, Max told himself. You’re dealing with a practiced liar, a dangerous man.
“Where’s Lilian?”
“Lilian?”
“Tell me where she is!”
“How the hell should I know?”
Reaching for his gun seemed the right thing to do. Taking his eyes off Freddie for a split second as he did so was definitely the wrong thing.
The fist caught him square in the mouth, snapping his head back. His knees buckled and the world seemed to recede around him. He was dimly aware of the air-raid siren and the taste of blood in his mouth and the sound of an engine starting. He forced himself back to consciousness in time to see the remaining ambulance disappear into the smoke.
He stumbled off in pursuit, pulling the revolver from its holster. That’s when the Grand Harbour barrage opened up. It hadn’t been heard in months, not on this scale, not since the March convoy. The restrictions on ammunition had clearly been lifted, and guns were letting off from every quarter. The shattering cacophony didn’t assault just the ears but all the senses. The street shivered before Max’s eyes; his legs felt leaden, numbed to the bone by the reverberations.
He didn’t hear the ambulance until it was almost on him, materializing in a moment, its blunt nose bearing down on him head-on.
He hurled himself to the left, landing hard in a pile of rubble. The ambulance veered to crush him, and it might have succeeded if a large chunk of stonework hadn’t deflected it from its course. The front wheel struck the block with a sickening crunch, and the vehicle reared up, flashing him its dark belly as it passed over him, teetering on two wheels.
Because of the smoke, he didn’t see it roll over, but he heard the sound, even above the thunder of the barrage and the scream of diving Stukas.
He groped for the revolver among the rubble, pushed himself to his feet, and set off after the ambulance.
The vehicle lay on its side, its engine still running. He didn’t bother to check the driver’s compartment because he saw Freddie staggering off through the smoke. Max wasn’t capable of breaking into a sprint, but he did his best under the circumstances and was closing in when Freddie cut right, up some steps.
They led to a church, or what was left of it. A large section of the front façade was gone, and the entrance doors hung drunkenly from their hinges. A small voice told Max to holster his weapon before entering the building. He ignored it.
Freddie had made no attempt to hide. The roof had collapsed into the nave, and he was scrabbling his way toward the back of the building over the twisted beams and broken tiles. Max fired a warning shot, the report echoing off the walls and stopping Freddie in his tracks. He stood upright, turning to face his pursuer.
Outside, the crumping barrage began to fade, the first phase of the raid over. Max picked his way through the rubble. Within the four walls of the church, the smoke seemed to hang in the air like incense at a Catholic Mass.
“Is she alive? Tell me she’s alive.”
“She’s alive.”
“Where is she?”
“In a basement.”
“Where?”
“Within a two-mile radius.”
They both knew what that meant. Grand Harbour’s toothy huddle of cities and towns was reputed to be the most built-over place in Europe.
“You’ll never find her, I can promise you that, not if you pull that trigger. She’ll die a slow death, a horrible death, the worst kind. Starvation and dehydration—is that what you want for her?”
“Why, Freddie?”
“Why?” He gave a short laugh. “My God, that’s a question and a half. How long have you got?”
“I don’t understand.”
“I don’t expect you to.”
“We were friends.”
“You mean we aren’t anymore?”
He seemed almost to be enjoying himself, untroubled by the gun leveled at his chest.