by Matt Killeen
The second warship had made a tight turn and was swiftly romping through the waves toward the German ship, driving up a vast bow wave that would have swamped the smaller vessel.
A white flag was swiftly hoisted on the Ittenbach, as if it had been ready all along. Its captain was now shouting rapid orders from the bridge. The ship began to shudder as it slowed. Some passengers stood openmouthed and confused. Others began to run for their baggage, and an alert few began demanding life jackets.
“Well, you wanted to go to England . . .” Sarah turned to Lisbeth and laughed. “This couldn’t be better. We need to get the samples from your father now—”
“Meine Damen, how did you . . . Why are you on deck?”
They looked around to see Hasse standing between them and the ladder.
Sarah struggled with the urge to attack him, to belittle him, to fight him.
“So what are your plans now, Obersturmbannführer? What are your orders?” she added obsequiously, so the first question couldn’t be construed as rhetorical or mocking.
She was tired and the roll of the deck was worse, now the ship was slowing. She didn’t have a plan and knew that giving him the initiative was probably a mistake, but she needed time to think. In Hasse’s eyes, she could see the same dilemma.
“Dr. Fischer, please help your father with his luggage. I would also advise finding some life jackets . . . there won’t be enough to go around.” He took a step to one side so she could pass him.
Lisbeth paused and then walked to the ladder. Sarah went to join her, but Hasse moved back to block her path.
“You, Fräulein, I need you for something.”
Sarah looked at Lisbeth, who had paused at the top of the hatch. Other passengers were pushing past her. She looked disoriented, uncertain, even helpless.
Sarah nodded. Go on.
It was to be now.
THIRTY-SIX
THE DOOR OF the storeroom swung open, and Hasse pushed Sarah through it. One of the crew was inside gathering life jackets, and he looked up from his work. The SS officer pulled out a revolver and pointed it at the man.
“Out,” he ordered.
The South Asian man—the sailors would call him a Lascar—was surprised, but he didn’t flinch. He picked up the remaining vests and made for the door. As he passed, he handed one to Sarah and then pointedly ignored Hasse on his way out.
Sarah looked around. There was no exit, and no weapons. She dropped the heavy canvas vest over her shoulders. It was too long, too large, and uncomfortable, so she worked at her clothes as she tried to make it fit.
Hasse closed the door. He placed the gun on a nearby shelf and began to empty his pockets next to it.
“You did very well, very well indeed. In fact I have a new respect for the Abwehr, but I’m not convinced that you’re infected at all.”
“Well, we’re not going to America anymore, so that isn’t a problem,” Sarah replied, not looking up.
“There’s certainly been a change of plan, and I have to admit, I’m making this up as I go along. But I think you do need to contract this disease.”
Hasse pulled on a pair of rubber gloves and fiddled with something that Sarah couldn’t see as he continued to talk.
“A British sloop picks up refugees in Africa. One of them, a lovely, innocent-looking little girl, gets sick. That doesn’t sound like a germ-warfare attack, just bad luck. One of the downsides of a global empire.”
“Sounds like a workable plan. Very good work at short notice,” Sarah said, still fiddling with her skirt as if she wasn’t really listening.
“Thank you,” Hasse replied, smiling as he lifted the syringe from the shelf.
“But I’ll just throw myself overboard,” Sarah declared, still readjusting her life jacket.
“No you won’t. Your survival instincts are too strong. You’ll go down fighting.”
“Maybe,” Sarah muttered. “Out of interest, why didn’t you just infect Clementine?”
“Much easier to have a sick European on a ship. Easier to keep them isolated. No, a sick Neger would have been stuck on a messdeck, infecting the crew. They might even have thrown her overboard. Besides, I grew very fond of her.”
“Like a pet,” Sarah sneered.
“Yes. Untermenschen can be cunning, clever, and it’s dangerous to underestimate them. But they will always be less than human.”
He took a step toward her—
“Typical Nazi Quatsch,” Sarah hissed. “Oh, they’re dangerously smart, but they’re only animals. They’re dirty, lazy, and shiftless, but they’ve still taken all the money. They’re Bolsheviks, but somehow they’re capitalists, too. Do you hear yourselves?”
He stopped and put his empty hand to his forehead.
“Goodness gracious,” Hasse exclaimed in English. “You’re not Abwehr at all, are you? I’m such a fool. You’re British?”
“No, I’m a German,” she snapped, taking a step back and planting her legs apart. She began to recite. “Rising like vengeance . . . I am the last true German, and my last act will be to destroy all that is within my power to destroy, kill all those it is within my power to kill, and finding myself in hell, deliver you to the devil myself.”
“Nice speech,” Hasse mocked.
“And I’m Jewish. You’re going to be defeated by a Jew.”
His eyebrows raised, but he didn’t look perturbed. “Defeated? I’m afraid not,” he said, taking another step.
Sarah drew her hand from behind her back. It had taken longer than she expected to pull Claude’s Beretta from her sanitary belt, but it had finally come free and she didn’t need to keep talking.
She tried to straighten her arm, to hold it in two hands, but the life jacket was getting in the way.
Hasse looked at the gun and back to the shelf, where his revolver sat, just out of reach. Sarah was three meters away, out of grabbing distance. For the first time since the Ju 52 had crashed into the sea, he seemed uneasy. Then a second passed and Sarah hadn’t fired. A new confidence lit up his face.
Do it, Sarah screamed to herself. Do it now.
The safeties!
Click. Click.
“Have you ever fired one of those? Have you ever actually killed someone? Can you even work that?”
Now.
Do it NOW.
Sarah pulled the trigger. There was a slapping crack, and an instantaneous burst of sparks. A shell casing spun up and away. The top of the gun had shot back and torn a wound in Sarah’s hand.
Hasse still stood.
He laughed and lunged.
Sarah closed her eyes, leaned into the recoil, and pulled the trigger again, and again, and again.
He crashed to the floor at her feet, the syringe landing needle first into the planking.
Sarah bent over, shoving the life jacket out of the way, and pushed the shaking gun into the back of his head. She shuddered and fired once more.
His blood splattered onto her shoes as the wave of heat touched her face.
She started to hyperventilate and a shivering overtook her body.
She was no longer alone in the room. Behind her the ghosts gathered. Foch with his open throat, Elsa in her restraints, Stern with blistered and charred skin, the SS guards with bleeding gums and no hair . . . they crowded around the corpse. Even the Mouse was there, shaking her head sadly.
Tell yourself what you need to, meine Schlafsaalführerin, she seemed to whisper.
There was a rattle of chains and a series of thuds through the hull. The boats were being lowered.
Don’t just stand there.
Hiding the pistol back where she had stored it, she snapped the needle from the syringe, and trying not to think what was inside it, retrieved the test tube of dark liquid from the shelf. All that horror, all that pain, a weapon of unspeakable power and fe
rocity, just sitting in her hand, separated by her middle finger.
She tried to take the revolver, but it was too heavy and she had nowhere to put it, so she tossed it into the shadows.
The door opened easily, but when she tried to close it behind her, she couldn’t make it work. She turned the wheel and moved the battens, but the door kept opening.
The crewman appeared next to her, still holding the life jackets. Sarah started and stood back. He seemed only around thirty years old, but he had the same resentful resignation that she had seen in Samuel’s eyes.
He looked at her shoes and stockings, speckled with blood, and then at her face. She opened her mouth to speak.
He pushed the heavy door closed and worked the mechanism so that it locked, battening it shut.
“Verfluchte Nazis.” He snorted and walked away.
* * *
She threw the syringe and test tube as high and far as she could. For a moment it seemed as if the wind and motion of the ship might carry them back on board, but they hit the water ten meters away with a splash soon lost in the foam. They were gone. One down . . . How many more are there?
She turned to the other rail, where members of the crew were waving to her. The two British warships loomed over the merchant. One waiting, one prowling, alert to the least suggestion of impropriety from the German merchant.
Both lifeboats were in the water and extremely crowded. One was already pulling away, the crew managing strong oar strokes despite the swell. Sarah could see Bofinger, sitting miserably in its bow, wrapped in a blanket and an ill-fitting life jacket.
Below Lisbeth had been scanning the rail frantically and then spotted Sarah. She stood up, nearly upsetting the boat, an expression of surprise, fear, and finally joy crossing her face as she saw that Sarah was alone. She began waving frantically to her.
“Down you go, Fräulein,” said one of the sailors, neatly lifting her over the rail and onto the scramble nets. “Be careful now.”
Clambering down the net as the ship rolled and shivered and swung from side to side would have been terrifying, but Sarah was overwhelmed by what she had just done. Her brain was replaying the final seconds over and again. Simultaneously she had a sense of both shame and satisfaction, and the two were incompatible. She dropped into the boat, helped by multiple hands.
She fought them off, forced herself past two people, and was in Lisbeth’s arms.
“The samples, Hasse had the samples. Is that it?” Sarah said breathlessly.
“He has samples?”
“He had samples . . .”
Lisbeth paused, watching Sarah’s face, closed her eyes and screwed up her face. Then she smiled. “Good . . . don’t let it make you hard . . . I didn’t know he had any! How did he do that?”
“Clementine, Klodt . . . doesn’t matter now. Are there more?”
Lisbeth nodded.
“Did you get them, or does your father still have them?” Sarah pressed.
The crew pushed away from the ship with their oars, and the boat rose on the crest of the waves before falling into a trough. The passengers gave a yelping groan as they seized the sides and one another.
“Don’t worry! It’s all over now. Isn’t this amazing? We’re going to England, just like we said we would.”
“We have to get rid of all of it, we can’t let the British have this either.”
“My father won’t give them to the British,” she said, shaking her head.
“Are you sure? He just wants to be acknowledged. He isn’t a Nazi, he’s just a . . .”
“A bastard, yes.” Lisbeth laughed. “He’s still German. Britain is still the enemy. But we can sort all this out later.” She gave Sarah a squeeze. “You did it!”
Sarah wasn’t really listening. She was watching Bofinger’s boat as the oarsmen battled with the rolling surf. Sarah wanted . . . no, Sarah needed this to be over, to finish the job. To destroy the last of the disease. To ensure that she had not killed a man for no reason.
He was going to kill you—
Because I put myself there. The British would have captured him anyway.
And maybe that crewman would now be sitting in this boat with a bloodstream full of disease . . .
Bofinger’s boat seemed to be pulling farther away. In fact, it seemed to be turning and heading in a completely different direction.
“Wait a minute, where are they going?” Sarah asked.
“What do you mean?” Lisbeth replied.
“They aren’t going to the same ship!” Sarah cried, standing up.
“Settle down,” shouted the man sitting next to them.
“Hey!” Sarah screamed, pointing at the other boat. “Where are they going?”
“Sit down,” someone else called.
Sarah looked around. It was their boat that was peeling away.
“Where are we going?” she howled.
The crewman at the tiller called out. “They want us on different ships, we’re heading for the destroyer. Sit.”
“No!” Sarah looked at the other boat, at Bofinger, still clearly visible, and at the pack in his lap.
“Ursula? What’s wrong?” Lisbeth asked. “It’s fine, we’ll meet up—”
They could be sent to different places, dropped at different times. He could make it to Vichy territory, or Spain, or back to Germany. She’d stopped nothing.
Sarah put her hands on Lisbeth’s cheeks. “I’ll see you again. I’ll find you,” she whispered.
“What?” Lisbeth managed.
Sarah stood, pushed past her, and before anyone could react, dived into the water.
THIRTY-SEVEN
SARAH THOUGHT SHE was ready for the shock. But she wasn’t. It was cold. Colder than the Müggelsee as the sun was rising. Colder than the rain-filled ditches near Rothenstadt.
The life jacket stayed afloat and she sank inside it, swallowing a mouthful of saltwater. Sarah had never swum in the sea before and her whole body revulsed at the moment, demanding that this caustic, thirst-inducing horror be expelled.
She tried to surface, but the life jacket was keeping her under, and the more she thrashed the more lost in it she became. Then, just as the pressure in her chest was starting to make her panic, she pushed her head out of the green blur and took a raw lungful of cold air.
She spotted the other boat between the rollers, and, ignoring the shouts and screams, she started to swim for it.
The life jacket stopped her arms from moving properly, and the motion of the sea made every meter forward seem like ten lost sideways. The nausea, her body’s rage at the stomachful of brine, and the gathering sense that she had, on impulse, thrown away her life, all conspired to rob her of her strength and will.
The boat seemed farther away than ever, then she lost sight of it. She lost sight of everything but the green and gray and foaming white that surrounded her, buffeted her, and then broke over her face to sting her eyes. Again. And again. And—
The peeling white wooden fence hove into her view and arms, so many arms, slapped her and pinched her and gripped her, only to slide away again. Something tugged at her life jacket, insistently, before two thickset, bare arms reached under hers and hauled her up and out and over into the freezing wind.
Something dry was wrapped around her and stopped the ceaseless chill, but her shivering continued. She ignored the words and noises about her. Eventually she could open her smarting eyes without them filling with tears. She feared that she would find herself back in the same boat, but looking about she couldn’t see Lisbeth. She uncovered her head, immediately feeling the wind like knives on her wet hair, and leaned back and forth looking for Bofinger.
“Hey, rest, child,” grunted the tillerman, his German thick with an Italian accent. “We’ll find your daddy.”
“Not my daddy . . . a mass murderer,” she said in Ita
lian.
He chuckled and patted her shoulder. “They shouldn’t have split everyone up like that.”
She stood with difficulty and spotted the professor in the bow. She stumbled through the passengers to swearing, anger, and protests. There was no aisle, just benches to scramble over and people to push out of the way. At one point someone grabbed her, and she swung her arms at them until they let her go.
Finally she squeezed past the last passengers and sank into the footwell in front of Bofinger. She was breathless and quivering, incapable of talking. She sat wrapped in the blanket, staring up at him for what seemed like an age.
He seemed not to see her at first, although he couldn’t have missed her arrival. But he sat, staring at his pack. He hadn’t shaved in some time, and his mustache had lost its curl and consistency. It had grown ragged and wild. His eyes were dark and baggy. He looked paler, older, like a shadow of the former brusque, raging narcissist.
They sat in silence, as the boat approached the smaller warship.
He raised his head. “Why are you here?” he croaked.
From under her blanket, she replied, “You know why.”
“I really don’t.”
“I want the samples,” Sarah went on. “All of them. The weapon, the experiments, it all stops now.”
He looked back to his pack. “Go away, little girl,” he grunted.
Sarah tugged at something under the blanket for a long minute and then pushed the Beretta through the gap in the blanket.
“Give me the samples, or I’ll shoot you and throw the whole pack overboard.”
Bofinger looked up again and started to laugh, a slow, coughing cackle, like a rusty gear turning and slipping.
“She fooled you as well . . .” he managed between wheezes. “And I thought you of all people might see through her.”
“What are you talking about?”
“But then she worked hard on you, really hard.”
Sarah pushed the blanket off her head, shaking her head in small quivers. “Worked hard . . . on-n-n m-m-me,” she managed as her breathing grew shallow and frenetic.