by Kay Kenyon
“Yes, Erich.” Her thoughts had gone slow and dark. “Perhaps I will.”
He closed his eyes. His head fell forward. Gone. Erich von Ritter was dead.
Hannah came over to them. “I know that one,” she said, shrugging. “He was SS.”
Kim stood, leaning against the rough bark of the tree to anchor herself. “They are coming,” she said softly. “Our escape went badly. They know we ran.” The brutal night was about to turn into the brutal day.
“And what of Annakova?”
Kim cut a glance at Nikolai and shook her head.
Hannah nodded and pointed away. “Let’s go.” Her head jerked up as she saw something on the hillside.
“They’re here.”
On the slope, a line of soldiers in black, snaking down the steep face of the ridge. The Nachkommenschaft.
Swearing under her breath, Hannah said, “We can’t get to the truck! The road is on the other side of the lake. They’ll see us and open fire.”
Hannah grabbed Nikolai by the arm and the three of them began to run into the woods, away from the hut and the lake.
Kim thrust von Ritter’s gun in her pocket as she ran. “But where can we go?”
“I don’t know,” Hannah said. “Find a place with some cover. Fight them. For a while.”
Their alternate plan of the service road now abandoned.
Dawn came on relentlessly. They would be easy to spot now, but with no gunfire, perhaps they hadn’t yet been seen.
“They will see our footsteps in the snow,” Kim said.
“I made tracks all over the lakeside. It will confuse them for a little.”
Once they were deep in the woods, they stopped to catch their breath. Around them, the sharp smells of pine sap and needles.
Nikolai sat on a fallen log, looking lost.
Hannah drew Kim aside. “When they come, do we let them have him?” Alive, Hannah meant.
“Yes.” Maybe they would try to make him tsar. She doubted it, but there was still that chance. The odds were always bad, trying to imagine what Hitler would do.
Hannah placed her hand on Kim’s arm. “It is over. I am sorry.”
“Oh, Hannah.” Kim took in a deep breath of cleansing cold air. “But we did it. We stopped them.”
“I know. I am proud of this, very proud. But I am sorry that it ends this way.”
Kim was facing the slope up to the tunnel. Just visible between the trees, the Nachkommen working their way down, carrying automatic weapons that at this distance looked like black sticks.
Yes, it was over. No other plan. Over because they were only two women and an eleven-year-old boy vastly outnumbered by trained German soldiers. The summary did not sound promising.
And yet.
They were armed. No matter what happened, they were not without a fighting chance. Kim had been preoccupied for the last hour with the threat of von Ritter killing her, killing the boy, but now . . .
From someplace deep inside, the strength of her Talent surged through her. Flooding her mind, a conviction: she could not die here, would not die this way. It might be an unnatural rapture, a false sense of mastery, but there was, she felt, one more chance.
Kim gazed steadily at Hannah. “We’re not giving up. We have to keep moving.”
Hannah snorted. “Move where?”
“The road. The main road. Tannhäuser is coming with a car.” At dawn, he’d said; still two hours away. But now that the Aerie was alerted, he might be leaving early.
“You are not thinking straight. The SS are everywhere and watching the road especially!” She grabbed Kim by the shoulders. “How far did Annakova take you? 8? 9?”
A short laugh escaped Kim’s lips. “A 10, Annakova guessed.” She saw Hannah’s incredulous look. “The road, Hannah.” She pointed east, where the valley sloped up to the main road.
Kim rushed over to Nikolai and pulled him to his feet.
A boom in the distance.
“What was that?” Hannah asked.
“I don’t know,” Kim said. It sounded as though it came from the Aerie.
She set out with Nikolai, hoping Hannah would follow. At last she did, bringing up the rear, but turning to gauge when the soldiers would overtake them.
5:05 AM. Adler finally made it down in the lift with four other soldiers. The moment they exited the lift carriage, one of the soldiers pushed the button to return it to the top.
Bassman had ordered Adler to collect four or five others and reinforce the new control point that they were setting up outside of Tolzried.
They rushed into the car park, with Adler making sure he was in the lead. Soldiers had formed a barricade butted up against the cliff, MG-34s trained on the road and surrounding forest. He made for the last motorcar left, the one that he had disabled so that at least one would be left. As Lieutenant Hoff tried to start the engine, it did not turn over.
Sitting in the front seat with the driver, Adler leaned in close to the dashboard, pretending to make a discovery. He pointed to the loose wires, and Hoff spent several frantic moments connecting them to the ignition. When the connection took hold, they roared away from the Aerie. At the intake center control point, they stopped as a guard looked into the car. He waved them on.
The road with its walls of trees was still dark. When they had gone far enough that no sounds would draw undue attention, he called for his driver to stop the car near an overgrown forest service road.
“Light!” he barked. “Up there. Someone with a flashlight.”
“One of ours, Captain?”
“No. Pull off the road farther.” The side road was impassable, but it afforded a parking place, and one that had a chance of not being spotted from the road. Cutting a look at Adler, Lieutenant Hoff pulled the car to a stop.
“Silence,” Adler ordered the men. He got out, gently clicking the door shut, and the others followed suit. “Fan out.” He pointed to right and left, and the group split up, Adler with a corporal.
After two or three minutes, the others were out of sight.
“There, at the top of the hill. You see?” Adler pointed. As the corporal peered into the darkness, Adler shot him in the back of the head.
“Over here!” he called to the others to get them running toward him, into his trap.
When he had finished them off, he would walk toward the lake, hoping to find Nora Copeland. But if not, he would return to the car and drive down the mountain and effect his escape, alone.
5:10 AM. Black forms stalked the forest. Submachine guns strapped around their necks, they slowly paced through the woods, appearing now and again in the near distance, then disappearing behind rocks or the black pines.
The trees afforded Kim and her companions cover, and they moved from tree to tree, with Kim leading the way, choosing a path east, toward the main road.
Hannah had spent the night making tracks around the hut and in various directions into the trees, so, until daylight made clear it was a ruse, the Nachkommen and the other SS among them were thinly spaced.
Kim pressed her body close to a fir tree, its sap sharp in her nostrils. She held von Ritter’s gun. Perhaps you will follow me. The moments they had spent by the lake had been expensive. While von Ritter lay dying, she had stayed, and that might have made the difference now, with the Nachkommen moving through the woods.
She wouldn’t have left him dying alone in the trees. Even though he had forced her to give up Hannah’s location, that terrible betrayal, she would not have abandoned him. More fool, she. But he had tried to give her a chance to leave. She believed he would have done so because he had let her go once before, at Rievaulx. He had been sitting against one of the fallen stones of the abbey and said they would die together. Then, impossibly, he decided to let her go. He stayed behind with his gun. The shot rang out . . .
A dozen feet away, a Nachkomme stepped out from behind a tree. His long face, turning, turning.
He smelled her.
She pointed her gun up
, to keep her profile small, protected by the tree.
The fiend came into view, head down, following her tracks in the snow. Closer to the lake, there had been tracks everywhere, but here, it could only be his quarry.
From the direction of the road, the sound of a gunshot.
The Nachkomme’s head came up, alert. Turning in her direction, he spotted her.
He shouted a command in German.
Kim stepped out. She still held her gun, pointing it in the air, as though surrendering, but ready to bring it down to take her shot. Then she saw Hannah behind him.
Kim dropped her weapon to the ground, playing for time.
Hannah stepped forward and plunged a knife into his back. He fell forward, sprawling. Like a fiend herself, Hannah jumped on his body, yanking the knife out and using it on his throat to finish the job.
Kim grabbed her gun from the snow. She saw that Nikolai stood to one side, lowering his pearl-handled revolver, which he had apparently been pointing at the man.
Hannah stripped the submachine gun off the Nachkomme and pulled the sling over her head.
“Hurry!” Hannah said, and they rushed up a ridge, Nikolai in tow, leaving tracks more clearly than ever in the snow that had drifted deeper here.
They clambered up the slope. “I thought you took Nikolai’s gun,” Kim said.
“Why? He is a good shot.”
They topped the ridge. An SS officer crouched behind a massive rock. “Nora,” he said. He came out.
Hannah took aim, but Kim pushed her hand down. “It’s Tannhäuser.” Pocketing her weapon, Kim walked toward him.
“I have a car,” Adler said. He glanced at Hannah and Nikolai. “The trunk. It only has room for two.”
Kim turned to Hannah. “You go with him.” England had more need of her, a catalyst, than they had of a spy who didn’t follow orders.
Hannah shook her head. “I am going back.”
“Back?” Kim asked. Back to a valley filled with Nachkommen?
“Remember that I told you that a Nazi murdered my father?” Numbly, Kim nodded. “He is down there in the forest.”
“Hannah, don’t do this. I won’t let you.”
A smile, half affectionate, half ironic. “As you have seen, I tend to be disobedient.”
Kim wondered if she could bear losing this friend. Lamely, desperately, she threw out, “Your father wouldn’t have wanted revenge.”
“But my father is dead. Now it is about what I want.”
A noise from behind her. Kim saw that Adler had taken a step toward Nikolai.
“They want the boy for their Russian plans,” Adler said, “now that his mother is dead. We cannot allow that.”
Kim rushed over to Nikolai, pulling him in back of her. “They can’t have him.”
“No? Well, there is only one way to be sure.” He fingered his gun.
“Captain,” she said. “He goes to England.”
They faced off. Adler hissed, “You do not know what you are doing.”
“He’s coming with me.”
Adler shook his head in frustration, holstering his gun.
When Kim turned back to Hannah, she was already striding down the side of the ridge. Without looking back, Hannah lifted her hand in farewell.
49
THE VALLEY BELOW THE AERIE
5:20 AM. At the top of a low, scrub-covered hillside, Kim and Adler watched the road. A towering cloud of black smoke had risen high above the Aerie, although they couldn’t see the compound from there. The wind had sheared off the smoke into an anvil-shaped cloud, black against the pewter sky.
“I left them a Christmas present,” Adler said. “Strong enough to take out the front of the Festival Hall. Perhaps it helps.” He went on. “I have a safe place in the village. We will change cars there.”
“There will be soldiers everywhere.”
“No more so than here.” He yanked open the trunk of the car and gestured for her to get in. He would brook no more opposition. “I have had months to think it through. A change of clothes, and we take a mountain road into Switzerland. They have not had time to set up checkpoints everywhere yet. Get in.”
She looked at Nikolai. He nodded, eyes trusting, exhausted. They crawled into the empty trunk.
“No talking,” Adler said. “Not even a whisper.” The lid slammed over them.
Then they were on the road, moving very fast. Nestled in her arms, Nikolai, his knapsack underneath his head for a pillow. Her heart, already scraped and bruised, ached anew for Hannah. Had she really seen the Nachkomme who had killed her father?
Or had she just wanted to make room in the trunk?
She remembered asking Hannah how all this striving would end, and she had answered, When they kill me. Then Evgeny’s words came to her, how he had said Hannah was the one who was truly broken. Perhaps only the broken ones could carry out the darkest missions, those in which no one would survive.
They swayed as the car rounded a curve. Kim hugged Nikolai tighter to keep him from rolling into the metal sides of the trunk.
5:25 AM. Hannah made her way down the hill, into the patch of forest where the Nachkommen were methodically hunting.
She had seen Juergen Becht just before the other Nachkomme called Kim out and Hannah had used her knife on him. Becht’s was a face she could not forget; the long scar splitting his right cheek from eye to chin. His face, impressed on her memory, not from those confused minutes in her home’s parlor, but from the terrible screen, the flickering light of the cinema. He was a man needing death. She would give it to him.
The forest was strangely silent. She walked carefully, placing her feet tentatively before giving them her full weight. Her senses on alert, the submachine gun held at the ready, she swiveled from side to side, watching for the slightest movement.
The predawn twilight grew stronger, a wan light finally making it to the forest floor. Her eyes watered as she strained to see any movements, hardly daring to blink.
She saw no one. Perhaps, with the explosion at the Aerie, the soldiers had been ordered back. But what would they be protecting? The Russian witch was dead, her son fled from the compound.
Using the larger trees as cover, she moved onward.
Then she saw him. He had been crouching down looking at something in the snow, and she caught his movement as he stood up. A short burst from her weapon sent him flying. Rushing up to finish him off, she saw there was no need. His face was half torn off. The good half.
Blood speckled the snow.
She backed away, watching for the Nachkommen who would have heard the machine gun burst. The forest was eerily silent after the burst of gunfire.
Where were they?
Slipping quickly through the trees, she put distance between herself and those who were sure to come.
If they did come . . . Well. She had an extra clip for the machine gun. Because she knew there could be many black forms converging. Let them come. She would lead them on a merry chase.
From tree to tree. Dances with demons.
5:41 AM. In the trunk, Kim sensed that the car was slowing down. Her throat was sticky and tight, preventing her from swallowing. She stroked the hair on Nikolai’s head, calming him. He was shaking so hard he might draw attention. Voices, speaking German. She couldn’t make out what they were saying.
Nikolai’s hand found hers and they held on to each other.
Then, to her immeasurable joy, the car got underway again.
Switzerland. They were going to Switzerland. With just a little more luck. But in case luck ran out, she was armed. Hannah, she thought, you could have been the one to leave. I promised to bring you home.
Terror had driven lesser feelings out of reach. Thoughts came unraveled and reformed—memories of the last hours.
Erich von Ritter. Her enemy, who had helped her escape at a terrible price for himself. His entrance into the Great Hall with Irina Annakova on his arm. The embrace in his quarters. Under the tree, blood welling through his
jacket. Kim, you are my undoing, he had said. And so it was. Underneath it all, the thought that Erich von Ritter had loved her, perhaps even past honor.
The car made a turn. Then another. She heard Adler shut the driver’s-side door. She heard the trunk latch release, and the lid came up. Fresh, frigid air.
They were in a small barn.
Adler helped her and Nikolai out. “There is a control point at the bottom of the forest road. More soldiers are arriving to set up other checkpoints. We must leave here before the highway is blocked.”
He opened a box on a shelf and began removing civilian clothes. “I have to change. You can use the toilet through the door over there.”
Kim pulled a sandwich out of her pocket and gave half of it to Nikolai. He sat on the floor of the barn and looked doubtfully at it, but soon was hungrily eating.
The door led into a small farmhouse, dusty from lack of use. She found the toilet and cleaned herself up.
Coming back into the barn, she found Adler dressed in a wool cap, stout boots, and a loose wool jacket over baggy trousers. He looked like a different person without the powerful, emblematic SS uniform. She handed him her half of the sandwich.
He pulled the meat out of the sandwich and gave it to her, keeping the bread.
Within another minute they were in an old pickup, its cargo area loaded with a chest of drawers and a cardboard-sided suitcase for show.
The sound of the motor coming to life was a great, rumbling, thrilling sound.
When Kim opened the barn door, he drove the pickup out. Closing the door on the Mercedes, she hopped in next to him, Nikolai between them. They drove down the deserted street, their thin cover agreed upon, that they were a German family up before dawn to make a trip to Zurich.
In the middle of the village, a commotion. Two trucks had collided, and men were crowded around them, voices raised, flashlights slashing the air.
“This is trouble,” Adler said under his breath. The accident was on the main roadway north and south that went through the village. They were blocked.
Adler began to back up, intending to find a new route, but a car had come up behind them. They had to move forward. Closer to the scene, they saw that one of the trucks with an open bed and high sides had spilled an enormous load of potatoes onto the roadway. Several soldiers were directing villagers to shovel it clear.