“Four aces!” the guard with a winning hand crowed as he spread his cards out on the table. “Beat me!”
“As you wish,” Michael said, rising up behind the man and slamming him over the head with the butt of his Schmeisser. The guard moaned and toppled, scattering cards. The second man reached for his rifle, which leaned against the wall, but he froze when the Schmeisser’s business end kissed his throat. “On the floor,” Michael said. “Get on your knees, hands cupped behind your head.”
The soldier complied. Very quickly.
Chesna and Lazaris emerged, and Lazaris prodded the unconscious man’s ribs with the toe of his boot. When the soldier groaned softly, he gave him a kick that made him pass out again.
“Don’t kill me!” the man on his knees begged. “Please! I’m just a nobody!”
“We’ll make you a no-head in a minute!” Lazaris said as he pressed the knife blade to the man’s quivering Adam’s apple.
“He can’t answer questions through a cut throat,” Chesna told the Russian. She put the barrel of her gun against the soldier’s forehead and pulled back the cocking bolt. The soldier’s eyes widened, wet with terror.
“I think we have his attention.” Michael glanced over at the prisoners, who had stopped working and were mesmerized with surprise and bewilderment. “What’s going into those crates?” he asked the guard.
“I don’t know.”
“You lying bastard!” Lazaris put some pressure on the blade, and the man yelped as a trickle of warm blood ran down his throat.
“Bombs! Hundred-pound bombs! That’s all I know!”
“Twenty-four of them? A bomb for each crate?”
“Yes! Yes! Please don’t kill me!”
“They’re being packed up for transport? In the Messerschmitt out on the field?”
The man nodded as his uniform’s collar reddened.
“Transported to where?” Michael persisted.
“I don’t know.” More pressure from the blade. The man gasped. “I swear I don’t know!”
Michael believed him. “What’s inside the bombs?”
“High explosives. What’s inside any bomb?”
“Don’t get cute,” Chesna warned, her voice crisp and deadly. “Just answer the questions.”
“That fool doesn’t know. He’s just a guard.”
They looked to see who’d spoken. It was the frail prisoner who had gray hair and wore wire-rimmed glasses. He came a few steps closer and spoke in what sounded like a heavy Hungarian accent. “It’s a gas of some kind. That’s what’s inside the bombs. I’ve been here for over six months, and I’ve seen what it can do.”
“I have, too,” Michael said. “It burns the flesh.”
The man smiled faintly, a bitter smile. “Burns the flesh,” he repeated. “Oh, it does more than burn the flesh, my friend. It eats the flesh, like a cancer. I know. I’ve had to burn some of the bodies. My wife among them.” He blinked, his eyes heavy-lidded. “But she’s in a better place than this. They torture me every day, by forcing me to live.” He looked at the hammer he held, and then dropped it to the concrete. He wiped his hand on his trouser leg.
“Where are the bombs stored?” Michael asked him.
“That I don’t know. Somewhere deeper in the plant. There’s a white building next to the big chimney. Some of the others say that’s where the gas is made.”
“The others?” Chesna asked. “How many prisoners are there?”
“Eighty-four. No, no. Walt.” He thought about it. “Danelka died two nights ago. Eighty-three. When I first came here, there were over four hundred, but…” He shrugged his thin shoulders, and his eyes found Michael’s. “Have you come to save us?”
Michael didn’t know what to say. He decided the truth was best. “No.”
“Ah.” The prisoner nodded. “Then it’s the gas, is it? You’re here because of that? Well, that’s good. We’re already dead. If that stuff ever gets out of here, I shudder to-”
Something whammed against the corrugated-metal gate.
Michael’s heart kicked, and Lazaris jumped so hard the blade bit deeper into the soldier’s throat. Chesna removed her gun barrel from the man’s forehead, leaving a white circle where it had been pressed, and aimed the weapon toward the gate.
Again, something hit the metal. A rifle butt or billy club, Michael thought. A voice followed: “Hey, Reinhart! Open up!”
The soldier croaked, “He’s calling me.”
“No, he’s not,” the gray-haired prisoner said. “He’s Karlsen. Reinhart is on the floor.”
“Reinhart!” the soldier outside shouted. “Open up, damn you! We know you’ve got the pretty one in there!”
The female prisoner who’d been poked with the rifle, her black hair framing a face as pale as a cameo, picked up a ballpeen hammer. Her knuckles bleached around the handle.
“Come on, be a sport!” It was a different voice. “Why hog her all for yourselves?”
“Tell them to go away,” Chesna ordered. Her eyes were flinty, but her voice held a nervous edge.
“No,” Michael said. “They’ll come in the way we did. On your feet.” Karlsen got up. “To the gate. Move.” He followed the Nazi, and so did Chesna. Michael pressed his gun into the man’s spine. “Tell them to wait a minute.”
“Wait a minute!” Karlsen shouted.
“That’s better!” one of the men outside said. “You bastards thought you were going to sneak one by us, didn’t you?”
The gate was hoisted by a chain-and-pulley device, operated with a flywheel. Michael stepped to one side. “Pull the gate up. Slowly.” Chesna got out of the way, too, and Karlsen started turning the flywheel. The gate began to fold upward.
And at that moment Reinhart, who’d been shamming for the past two minutes, suddenly sat up at Lazaris’s feet. He clutched at his two broken ribs and reached up for the wall beside their card table. Lazaris gave a shout and stabbed downward with the knife, sinking it into Reinhart’s shoulder, but he was powerless to prevent what happened next.
Reinhart’s fist punched a red button attached to electrical cords on the wall, and a siren shrieked somewhere on the building’s roof.
The gate was a quarter of the way up when the alarm began. Michael could see four pairs of legs. Without hesitation he clicked off the safety on his gun and sprayed bullets below the gate, chopping down two soldiers who screamed and writhed in agony. Karlsen released the flywheel and tried to scramble beneath the corrugated metal as it clattered down again, but a burst from Chesna’s gun ripped him open and the gate clunked on his butt.
Lazaris repeatedly stabbed down on Reinhart, fierce strength behind the blows. The German crumpled, his face a mass of torn flesh, but the siren kept going. A black-haired figure swept past him. The woman raised her hammer and broke the alarm button to fragments. Still, a switch had been triggered and the siren would not be silenced.
“Get out while you can!” the gray-haired prisoner shouted. “Go!”
There was no time to deliberate. That siren would bring every soldier in the plant down on them. Michael ran for the stairwell, with Chesna a few paces behind and Lazaris bringing up the rear. They came out onto the roof, and already two soldiers were running along the catwalk toward them. Michael fired, and so did Chesna. The bullets sparked off the catwalk railing, but the soldiers flung themselves flat. Rifles cracked, the slugs zipping past their heads. Michael saw another pair of soldiers, coming across the catwalk from the building behind them. One of them fired a shot that snagged Chesna’s parka, and puffed goose down into the air.
Michael readied a grenade, then paused while the fuse sizzled and the soldiers got closer. A bullet sang off the railing beside him. He flung the grenade at the two men who were coming up from behind, and three seconds later there was a blast of white fire and two shredded figures twitching on the catwalk. Lazaris wheeled toward the other pair in front of them and fired short bursts that knocked sparks off the slate roof. Michael saw three more soldiers advancing over the catwalk behind them. Chesna’s gun rattled, and the soldiers crouched down as slugs ricocheted off the railings.