The wolf skidded to a stop in a flurry of dust, and the bullets ripped a fiery pattern across the earth in front of it. The motorcycle zoomed past, its driver fighting the brake and handlebars. And then the wolf changed course and started running again at full speed, still heading east, still gripping the handcuff.
The machine gun kept chattering. Tracer bullets carved orange lines through the dark and ricocheted off stones like spent cigarette butts. But the wolf zigzagged back and forth, its body hugging the earth, and as the tracers whined around, the animal went over another hillock and out of the spotlight’s range.
“Over there!” the gunner shouted against the wind. “It went over that hill!” The driver turned the bulky motorcycle and headed after it, white dust whirling through the headlight’s beam. He gave the engine full power, and it responded with a throaty roar of German machinery. They topped the hill and started down-and the headlamp showed an eight-foot-deep gulley just beneath it, waiting like a jagged grin.
The motorcycle crashed into it, turned end over end, and the machine gun went off, spraying bullets in a wild arc that ricocheted off the sides of the gulley and slammed through the bodies of the driver and gunner. The motorcycle crumpled, and its gas tank exploded.
On the other side of the gulley, which the wolf had cleared with a single spring of its hind legs, the animal kept going, dodging pieces of hot metal that clattered down around it.
Through the echoes of the blast came the noise of another predator, this time coming from the right. The wolf’s head ticked to the side, sighting the sidecar’s spotlight. The machine gun began to fire, bullets thudding around the wolf’s legs and whistling past its body as it ran in quick, desperate circles and angles. But the motorcycle was closing the distance between them, and the bullets were getting nearer to their target. One tracer flashed so close that the wolf could smell the bitter scent of a man’s sweat on the cartridge. And then it made another quick turn, leaped high in the air as bullets danced underneath its legs, and scrambled into a gulley that cut across the desert toward the southeast.
The motorcycle prowled along the gulley’s rim, its sidecar occupant searching the bottom with the small attached spotlight. “I hit it!” he vowed. “I know I saw the bullets hit-” He felt the hair on the back of his neck crawl. As he twisted the spotlight around, the huge black wolf that was running behind the motorcycle leaped forward, coming up over the sidecar and slamming its body against the driver. Two of the man’s ribs broke like rotted timbers, and as he was knocked out of his seat the wolf seemed to stand up on its hind legs and lunge over the windshield as a man might jump. The tail slapped the gunner disdainfully in the face; he scrambled madly out, and the motorcycle went about another fifteen feet before it reeled over the edge and crashed down to the bottom. The black wolf ran on, coming back to a due easterly course.
Now the network of gullies and hillocks ended, and the desert was flat and rocky under the blazing stars. Still the wolf raced on, its heart beginning to beat harder and its lungs pumping the clean smell of freedom, like the perfume of life, into its nostrils. It snapped its head quickly to the left, released the handcuff, and gripped the satchel’s leather handle so the bag no longer bumped the ground. It fought and defeated the urge to spit the handle out, because it held the foul taste of a man’s palm.
And then, from behind, another guttural growl, this one lower-pitched than the voices of the other two predators. The wolf glanced back, saw a pair of yellow moons speeding across the desert, following the animal’s tracks. Machine-gun fire erupted-a red burst above the double moons-and bullets shot up sand less than three feet to the wolf’s side. It jinked and spun, checked its speed, and darted forward again, and the next long burst of tracers singed the hairs along its backbone.
“Faster!” Stummer shouted to his driver. “Don’t lose it!” He got off another burst, and saw sand kick up as the wolf angled sharply to the left. “Damn it!” he said. “Hold it steady!” The animal still had Voigt’s satchel, and was heading directly toward the British lines. What kind of beast was it, that would steal a case full of maps instead of scraps from the garbage heap? The damned monster had to be stopped. Stummer’s palms were sweating, and he struggled to line the thing up in the gun’s sights, but it kept dodging, cutting, and then picking up its speed as if it…
Yes, Stummer thought. As if it could think like a man.
“Steady!” he bellowed. But the car hit a bump, and again his aim was knocked off. He had to spray the ground ahead of the thing and hope the beast ran into the bullets. He braced himself for the gun’s recoil and squeezed the trigger.
Nothing. The gun was hot as the midday sun, and it had either jammed or run dry.
The wolf glanced back, marking that the machine was closing fast. And then it returned its attention to the distance ahead-but too late. A barbed-wire fence stood just ahead, less than six feet away. The wolf’s hind legs tensed, and its body left the ground. But the fence was too close to avoid completely; the wolf’s chest was sliced by barbed knots, and as its body went over, its right hind leg caught in the coils.
“Now!” Stummer shouted. “Run it down!”
The wolf thrashed, muscles rippling along its body. It clawed the earth with its forelegs, to no avail. Stummer was standing up, the wind rushing into his face, and the driver pressed the accelerator to the floorboard. The armored car was about five seconds away from smashing the wolf beneath its stubbled tires.
What Stummer saw in those five seconds he might never have believed, had he not witnessed it. The wolf twisted its body, and with its front claws grasped the barbed-wire that trapped its leg. Those claws parted the wire, and held them apart as it wrenched its leg loose. Then it was on all fours again and darting away. The armored car ground the wire under its bulk, but the wolf was no longer there.
But the headlights still held it, and Stummer could see that the animal was bounding instead of running, leaping right and left, sometimes touching a single hind leg to the earth before it leaped and twisted again in another direction.
Stummer’s heart slammed in his chest.
It knows, he realized. That animal knows…
He whispered, “We’re in a mine fi-”
And then the left front tire hit a mine, and the blast blew Major Stummer out of the car like a bloody pinwheel. The left rear tire detonated the next mine, and the shredded mass of the right front wheel hit the third one. The armored car buckled, its gasoline ignited and tore the seams apart, and in the next second it rolled into yet another mine and there was nothing left but a center of red fire and scorched metal flying heavenward.
Sixty yards ahead, the wolf stopped and looked back. It watched the fire for a moment, its green eyes aglow with destruction, and then it abruptly turned away and continued threading through the mine field toward the safety of the east.
2
He would soon be here. The countess felt as excited as a schoolgirl on a first date. It had been more than a year since she’d seen him. Where he’d been in that time, and what he’d done, she didn’t know. Nor did she care. That was not her business. All she’d been told was that he needed a sanctuary, and that the service had been using him for a dangerous assignment. More than that, it was not safe to know. She sat before the oval mirror in her lavender-hued dressing room, the golden lights of Cairo glittering through the French doors that led to the terrace, and carefully applied her lipstick. On the night breeze she could smell cinnamon and mace, and palm fronds whispered politely in the courtyard below. She realized she was trembling, so she put her lipstick down before she made a mess of her mouth. I’m not a dewy-eyed virgin, she told herself, with some regret. But perhaps that was part of his magic, too; he had certainly made her feel, on his last visit here, that she was a first-grader in the school of love. Perhaps, she mused, she was so excited because in all this time-and through a procession of so-called lovers-she had not felt a touch such as his, and she longed for it.