The horror had begun.
THREE
Tavira, Portugal
Wednesday, 23 April
0235 hours (Greenwich Mean Time)
The red-haired man suddenly found himself awake. Sleep had dropped away like a loosened cloak and at first he did not know why. It had been a hard day of fouled nets and rough seas; after turning in at his usual hour, he should have slept through until first light. Yet now, after only a few hours, he was awake and alert. Why?
And then he knew.
Grim faced, he pounded his fist once, twice, into the cool sand around the low wooden frame of his bed. There was anger in his movements, and a certain resignation. He had hoped this moment would never come, had told himself time and again that it never would. But now that it was here, he realized it had been inevitable all along.
He rose from the bed and, clad only in a pair of undershorts, began to roam the room. He had smooth, even features, but the olive tint of his skin clashed with the red of his hair; his scarred shoulders were broad, his waist narrow. He moved with feline grace about the interior of the tiny shack, snatching items of clothing from hooks on the walls, personal articles from the table beside the door, all the while mentally planning his route of travel to Romania. When he had gathered up what he wanted, he tossed everything onto the bed and rolled it up in the bed blanket, tied the roll with string at both ends.
After pulling on a jacket and loose pants, he slung the rolled blanket across his shoulder, grabbed a short shovel and stepped out into the night air, cool, salty, moonless. Over the dunes, the Atlantic hissed and rumbled against the shore. He walked to the landward side of the dune nearest his hut and began to dig. Four feet down the shovel scraped against something solid. The red-haired man knelt and began to dig with his hands. A few quick, fierce movements brought him to a long, narrow, oilskin-wrapped case which he tugged and wrested from the hole. It measured five feet or so in length, was perhaps ten inches wide and only an inch deep. He paused, his shoulders slumping as he held the case in his hands. He had almost come to believe that he would never have to open it again. Putting it aside, he dug farther and came up with an unusually heavy money belt, also wrapped in oilskin.
The belt went under his shirt and around his waist, the long, flat case under his arm. With the onshore breeze ruffling his hair, he walked over the dune to where Sanchez kept his boat, high on the sand and tied to a piling as proof against the unlikely possibility of its drifting away in a freak tide. A careful man, Sanchez. A good boss. The red-haired man had enjoyed working for him.
Rummaging in the boat's forward compartment, he pulled out the nets and threw them on the sand. Next came the wooden box for tools and tackle. This joined the nets on the sand, but not before he had extricated a hammer and nail from its jumbled contents. He walked toward Sanchez's piling, drawing four Austrian hundred-kronen gold pieces from his money belt. There were many other gold coins in the belt, different sizes from different countries: Russian ten-ruble chevronets, Austrian hundred-shilling pieces, Czech ten-ducats, U.S. double eagles, and more. He would have to depend heavily on the universal acceptance of gold in order to travel the length of the Mediterranean in wartime.
With two swift, powerful strokes of the hammer, he pierced the four coins with a nail, fixing them to the piling. They'd buy Sanchez a new boat. A better one.
He untied the rope from the piling, dragged the boat into the quiet surf, hopped in, and grabbed the oars. When he had rowed past the breakers and had pulled the single sail to the top of its mast, he turned the prow east toward Gibraltar, not far away, and allowed himself a final look at the tiny starlit fishing village at the southern tip of Portugal that had been his home for the past few years. It hadn't been easy to work his way into their trust. These villagers had never accepted him as one of their own, and never would; but they had accepted him as a good worker. They respected that. The work had accomplished its purpose, leaving him lean and tight-muscled again after too many years of soft city-living. He had made friends, but no close ones. None he could not walk away from.
It was a hard life here, yet he would gladly work twice as hard and stay rather than go where he must and face what he must. His hands clenched and unclenched tensely at the thought of the confrontation that awaited him. But there was no one else to go. Only him.
He could not allow delay. He had to reach Romania as quickly as possible and had to travel the entire 2,300-mile length of the Mediterranean Sea to get there.
In the recently disturbed corner of his mind was the realization that he might not get there in time. That he might already be too late ... a possibility too awful to contemplate.
FOUR
The Keep
Wednesday, 23 April
0435 hours
Woermann awoke trembling and sweating at the same instant as everyone else in the keep. It was not Grunstadt's prolonged and repeated howling that had done it, for Woermann was out of earshot of the sound. Something else had ripped him gasping with terror from his sleep ... the feeling that something had gone terribly wrong.
After a moment of confusion, Woermann shrugged into his tunic and trousers and ran down the steps to the base of the tower. The men were beginning to trickle out of their rooms and into the courtyard as he arrived, to gather in tense, muttering groups listening to the eerie howl that seemed to come from everywhere. He directed three of the men toward the arch that led to the cellar stairs. He had just reached the top of the stairs himself when two of them reappeared, white faced, tight lipped, and trembling.
"There's a dead man down there!" one said.
"Who is it?" Woermann asked as he pushed between them and started down the steps.
"I think it's Lutz, but I'm not sure. His head's gone!"
A uniformed corpse awaited him in the central corridor. It lay on its belly, half covered with stony rubble. Headless. But the head had not been sliced off, as with a guillotine, or hacked off—it had been torn off, leaving stumps of arteries and a twisted vertebra protruding within the ragged edge of the skin of the neck. The soldier had been a private, and that was all he could tell at first glance. A second private sat nearby, his wide, blank, staring eyes fixed on the hole in the wall before him. As Woermann watched, the second soldier shuddered and emitted a loud, long, wavering ululation that raised the fine hairs along Woermann's nape.
"What happened here, Private?" Woermann asked, but the soldier did not react. Woermann grabbed his shoulder and shook him but there was no sign in the eyes that he even knew his commanding officer was there. He seemed to have crawled into himself and blocked out the rest of the world.
The rest of the men were inching down the corridor to see what had happened. Steeling himself, Woermann leaned over the headless figure and went through its pockets. The wallet held an identity card for Private Hans Lutz. He had seen dead men before, victims of war, but this was different. This sickened him in a way the others had not. Battlefield deaths were mostly impersonal; this was not. This was horrible, mutilating death for its own sake. And in the back of his mind was the question: Is this what happens when you deface a cross here in the keep?
Oster arrived with a lamp. When it was lit, Woermann held it before him and gingerly stepped through the large hole in the wall. The light bounced off blank walls. His breath puffed white in the air and drifted away behind him. It was cold, colder than it should be, with a musty odor, and something more ... a hint of putrescence that made him want to back away. But the men were watching.