On the bow Michael stood over the figurehead and probed with the light. Tendrils of fog wafted through the beam. The boat drifted, and waves lapped at the boards. There came the noise of boots on the deck. “Hey!” Lazaris called, his voice as tight as new wire. “What happened to the engines? Are we sinking?”
“Quiet,” Michael said. Lazaris came forward, guiding himself along the rusted railing. Michael slowly swung the flashlight beam from right to left and back again. “What are you looking for?” Lazaris whispered. “Land?” Michael shook his head, because he really had no idea. And then the flashlight hit a faint, ill-defined object off on the starboard side. It looked like the rotten piling of a dock, with gray fungus growing all over it. Kitty had seen it, too, and she guided the bow toward it.
In another moment they all could see it, perhaps more clearly than they’d wished.
A single piling had been sunk into the muck. Bound to that piling by rotting ropes was a skeleton, immersed up to its sunken chest. A bit of scalp and gray hair remained on the skull. Twined around the skeleton’s neck was a noose of heavy wire, and attached to the wire was a metal sign with faded German words: ATTENTION! ENTRY FORBIDDEN!
In the light, small red crabs scuttled in the skeleton’s eye sockets and peered out between the broken teeth.
Kitty corrected the wheel. The boat drifted past the grisly signpost and left it in darkness. She started the engine again, throttling it to a low mutter. Not twenty yards from the piling and skeleton, the flashlight beam picked out a floating gray ball, covered with kelp and ugly spikes.
“That’s a mine!” Lazaris yelped. “A mine!” he shouted at the wheelhouse, and pointed. “Boom boom!”
Kitty knew where it was. She veered to port, and the mine rolled in the boat’s wake. Michael’s stomach knotted. Chesna leaned forward, gripping the port-side railing, and Lazaris watched for more mines on the starboard side. “One over here!” Chesna called. It bobbed and lazily turned, encrusted with barnacles. The boat slid past it. Michael spotted the next one, almost dead ahead. Lazaris scrambled back to the wheelhouse, and returned with another flashlight. Kitty kept the boat at a slow, constant glide, weaving among the mines that now appeared on all sides. Lazaris thought his beard would turn white as he watched a mine, its spines covered with kelp, drift over the crest of a swell almost in their path. “Turn, damn it! Turn!” he hollered, motioning to port. The boat obeyed, but Lazaris heard the mine scrape across the hull like fingernails on a blackboard. He cringed, waiting for the blast, but the mine disappeared in their wake and they went on.
The last of the mines floated away on the starboard side, and then the water was free of them. Kitty rapped on the windshield, and when she had their attention, she put a finger to her lips and then drew it across her throat in a slashing gesture. The meaning was clear.
In a few minutes a searchlight appeared through the fog, sweeping around and around atop its tower on Skarpa Island. The island itself was still invisible, but soon Michael could hear a slow, steady thumping noise like a huge heartbeat. The noise of heavy machinery at work in the chemical plant. He switched off his flashlight, and so did Lazaris. They were getting close to shore. Kitty turned the boat, staying just outside the searchlight’s range. She suddenly cut the engine, and the boat whispered through the swells. Michael and Chesna heard another, more powerful engine growling somewhere in the fog. A patrol boat, circling the island. The noise grew distant and faded, and Kitty throttled up with a careful hand.
The searchlight skimmed past them, dangerously close. Michael saw the glint of smaller lights through the murk: what looked like bulbs on outside catwalks and ladders, and the dark shape of a huge chimney that rose into the mist. The heartbeat thump was much louder now, and Michael could make out the hazy forms of buildings. Kitty was guiding them along Skarpa’s rugged coastline. Soon they left the lights and the sound of machinery behind, and Kitty veered the boat into a small, crescent-shaped harbor.
She knew this harbor, and took them straight to the crumbling remains of a seawall. She killed the engine, letting the boat drift across silvery water at the base of the wall. Michael switched his light on and made out a barnacle-crusted dock just ahead. The rotting prow of a long-sunken boat jutted up from the water like a strange snout, and hundreds of red crabs clung to it.
Kitty emerged from the wheelhouse. She called out something that sounded like “Copahay ting! Timesho!” She motioned to the dock, and Michael jumped from the boat onto a platform of creaking, sodden timbers. Chesna flung him a rope, which he used to tie the boat to a piling. A second rope, thrown from Kitty, completed the task. They had arrived.
Stone steps led up from the dock and seawall. Beyond them, Michael saw by the flashlight beam, was a cluster of dark, dilapidated houses. Kitty’s village, now occupied only by ghosts.
Chesna, Michael, and Lazaris checked their submachine guns and strapped them on. Their supplies-rations of fresh water, dried beef, chocolate bars, ammo clips, and four grenades apiece-were in backpacks. Michael, in his previous examination of their supplies, had also noted something else wrapped up in a little packet of waxed paper: a cyanide capsule, similar to the one he’d popped into his mouth on the roof of the Paris Opéra. He hadn’t needed it then, and he would die by a bullet rather than use one here on Skarpa.
Their equipment ready, they followed Kitty up the ancient steps into the dead village. She probed ahead with the flashlight she’d taken from Lazaris, the beam revealing a rutted main road and houses covered with wet mold as white as ash. Many of the roofs had collapsed, the windows without glass. Still, the village was not entirely dead. Michael could smell them, and he knew they were close by.
“Welcome,” Kitty said, and motioned them into one of the sturdier-looking houses. Whether this one had been her home, Michael didn’t know, but it had become a home again. As they crossed the threshold, Kitty’s light speared through the mist and caught two skinny wolves, one yellow and one gray. The gray one leaped for an open window and was gone in an instant, but the yellow wolf wheeled on the intruders and showed its teeth.
Michael heard the bolt of a submachine gun going back. He grabbed Lazaris’s arm before the Russian could fire, and said, “No.”
The wolf backed toward the window, its head held high and fire in its eyes. Then it abruptly turned, lunged up into the window frame and out of the house.
Lazaris released the breath he’d been holding. “Did you see those things? They’ll tear us to pieces! Why the hell didn’t you let me shoot?”
“Because,” Michael said calmly, “a. burst of bullets would bring the Nazis here about as fast as you could reload. The wolves won’t hurt you.”
“Nazee boys nasty,” Kitty said as she shone the flashlight around. “Wold not much so. Nazee boys make dead, wold yum dead.” She shrugged her massive shoulders. “Such done.”
This house, wolf droppings on the floor and all, would be their headquarters. Most likely, Michael reasoned, the German soldiers who guarded Hildebrand’s chemical plant were as fearful of the wolves as Lazaris was, and wouldn’t come here. Michael let the others start unpacking their gear, and then he said, “I’m going out to do some scouting. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“I’m going with you.” Chesna started to shrug her backpack on again.
“No. I can move faster alone. You wait here.”
“I didn’t come with you to-”