The Wolf's Hour

by Robert R. McCammon

  The Spitfire came head-on at Iron Fist. The wing guns sparked, and in the next instant the cockpit was full of flying glass and flames. Van Hoven slumped forward, his chest punctured by a half-dozen bullets, and Schrader writhed with a broken arm. One of Iron Fist’s engines exploded, sending shrapnel tearing through the cockpit. The bombardier cried out, blinded by metal fragments. The aircraft sank lower toward the waves, flames gnawing in the ruined cockpit and across the starboard wing.

  Boots limped toward Michael, who tried desperately to shake off the pain. Reaching down, Boots gripped his collar and hauled him up, then slammed a fist into his face. Michael fell back against the bulkhead, blood all over his mouth.

  Boots drew his fist back, to smash into Michael’s face again.

  Before the blow could be delivered, Michael twisted to one side and his hands found the red cylinder of the fire extinguisher. He tore it loose from its straps and swung it around as Boots’s fist came at his face. The man’s fist was stopped short by the cylinder, and his knuckles broke like matchsticks. Michael punched the cylinder into Boots’s stomach like a battering ram. The breath whooshed from the huge man, and Michael struck upward with the cylinder into Boots’s jaw. He heard the satisfying crunch of the jawbone breaking. Boots, his eyes glazed with pain and his lips split open, grappled with Michael for the cylinder. A knee drove into Michael’s side, and as he sagged to his knees Boots wrenched the cylinder away from him.

  Boots lifted the fire extinguisher, intending to smash Michael’s brains out with it. Michael tensed to lunge at him before the cylinder could slam down.

  Over the shriek of the wind Michael heard the chatter of the Spitfire’s guns. Fiery tracers came through the plane’s side and ricocheted off the bulkheads. He saw three holes, each the size of a fist, open across Boots’s broad chest. And in the next instant a bullet clanged against the fire extinguisher, and it went off with a blast like a miniature bomb.

  Michael flung himself flat as pieces of metal clattered in all directions. Chemical foam hissed on the bulkheads. He looked up, and saw Boots standing there holding on to a machine-gun mount with one arm.

  Boots’s other arm lay a few feet away, the hand still twitching. He looked at it, blinking with dumb amazement. He released his grip, and staggered toward his arm.

  When Boots moved, his intestines began to slide from the gaping wound in his side. Pieces of red metal glistened in the hole, and his clothes were drenched with chemical foam. Another wound had been torn open on the side of his throat, the blood streaming down from the severed veins like a crimson fountain. With each step Boots diminished. He stopped, staring down at his hand and arm, and then turned his head to look at Michael.

  He stood there, dead on his feet, until Michael got up, walked to him, and knocked him over with a finger.

  Boots crashed down, and lay still.

  Michael felt near passing out, but one glance out the portal and the realization that the sea was less than three hundred feet below cleared his head. He stepped over Boots’s grisly bulk and went toward the cockpit.

  In the bomb bay he recoiled at the smoke and the hissing noise. One of the carnagene bombs was about to detonate. He went on, finding the navigator desperately trying to fly the plane as the pilot lay dead and the copilot was severely wounded. Iron Fist was dropping steadily, the Spitfire circling above. The coast of England was less than seven miles away. Michael said to the terrified navigator, “Put us down. Now.”

  The man fumbled with the controls, chopping the power off and trying to get the nose up as Iron Fist—now truly a crippled bird—dropped another hundred feet. Michael braced himself against the pilot’s seat. Iron Fist fell, plowing into the Channel with a surprisingly gentle bump, its force at last spent.

  Waves washed over the wings. Michael didn’t wait for the navigator. He went back through the bomb bay to the plane’s waist and unlatched the entry door. There was no time to search for a life raft, and he doubted if one had survived that hail of bullets. He jumped into the Channel’s chilly water, and swam away from the aircraft as fast as he could.

  The Spitfire came down low, skimming the surface, passed over Michael, and headed toward the green land beyond.

  Michael kept going, wanting to get as much distance as he could between him and the Fortress. He heard hot surfaces sizzling as the plane began to sink. Perhaps the navigator got out, perhaps not. Michael didn’t pause. The salt water stung his wounds and kept him from passing out. Stroke after stroke, he left the airplane behind. When he had gotten a distance away, he heard a rush and gurgling and looked back to see the plane going down at the tail. Its nose reared up, and on it Michael could see Frankewitz’s drawing of Hitler squeezed in an Iron Fist. If fish could appreciate art, they’d have a grand time.

  Iron Fist began to disappear, sinking rapidly as water gushed into the waist gun portals. In another moment it was gone, and air bubbles rose and burst at the turbulent surface. Michael turned away and swam toward shore. He was weakening; he felt himself wanting to let go. Not yet, he told himself. One more stroke. One more, and one after that. Breaststrokes definitely were superior to dog paddling.

  He heard the chugging of an engine. A patrol boat was coming toward him, two men with rifles on the bow. A Union Jack pennant whipped in the rigging.

  He was home.

  They picked him up, wrapped a blanket around him, and gave him a cup of tea as strong as wolf piss. Then they trained their rifles on him, until they could get to shore and turn him over to the authorities. The boat was about a mile from harbor when Michael heard a distant, muffled whump. He looked back, and saw a huge geyser of water shoot up from the surface. One or more of the carnagene bombs had exploded in their bomb bay at the bottom of the English Channel. The geyser settled back, the water thrashing for a moment, and that was the end of it.

  But not quite.

  Michael stepped out on a dock, a harbor village behind him, and scanned the Channel for a British destroyer that he knew must be arriving soon. He shook himself, and water droplets flew from his hair and clothes. He felt overcome with happiness, even standing at the point of Home Guard rifles.

  So happy, in fact, that he felt like howling.

  ELEVEN

  Unforeseen

  Circumstances

  1

  His eyes were rimmed with red, his face chalky. It was a very bad sign.

  “None of it survived, I’m afraid,” Martin Bormann said. He cleared his throat. “Dr. Hildebrand is dead and… the project seems not to have borne fruit.”

  He waited for more of it, his hands clenched into fists on his desktop before him. On the wall behind him a portrait of Frederick the Great watched in judgment.

  “We… don’t think the aircraft ever reached London,” Bormann went on. He glanced uneasily at the other man in the room, a gray-haired, stiff-backed field marshal. “That is to say, there’s no evidence the carnagene was delivered to its target.”

  He said nothing. A pulse beat steadily at his temple. Through a gilt-edged window the shadows of June 6 were spreading over Berlin. Tacked up on another wall were maps of Normandy, showing beaches that the world would soon know under the code names Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword. Everywhere on those maps, red lines were pushing inland, and black lines marked the retreat—oh, what traitors! he thought as he looked at them—of German troops.

  “The project was a failure,” Bormann said. “Due to… unforeseen circumstances.”

  “No, it’s not that,” Hitler answered in a small, quiet voice. “It’s that someone didn’t believe strongly enough. Someone didn’t have the necessary willpower. Bring me Blok.” His voice was more strident. “Colonel Jerek Blok. That’s who I’d like to see. At once.”

  “Colonel Blok is… no longer with us.”

  “The traitor!” Hitler almost rose from his desk. “What did he do? Run and give himself up to the first British soldier he saw?”

  “Colonel Blok is deceased,” Bormann said.

/>   “Yes, I would’ve committed suicide, too, if I’d botched things like he has!” Hitler stood. His face was flushed and moist looking. “I should’ve known not to give him any responsibility! He was a failure, pretending to be a success! The world is full of them!”

  “At least Germany is, I fear,” the field marshal said under his breath.

  “When I think of the time and money spent on this project, I’m almost ill!” Hitler came out from behind his desk. “So Blok took his own life, did he? How was it done? A pill or a pistol?”

  “A…” Bormann almost said propeller. But telling the Ffchrer what had really happened would open a real can of worms. There would be the matter of the German Resistance—those foul pigs—and the secret agents who somehow destroyed all of the carnagene. And the distasteful matter of Chesna van Dorne, too. No, no! It was best to let the story stand as it was: that a fleet of bombers had hit Skarpa’s tanks and armory, and the explosion had ruined the chemicals. The Ffchrer, in these troublous times, had more to worry about than reality. “A pistol,” he said.

  “Well, it saved us a bullet, didn’t it? But all that time and effort, wasted! We could have developed the solar cannon with that money! But no, no—Blok and his conspirators had to talk me out of it! I’m too trusting, that’s the problem! Martin, I think the man might have been working for the British after all!”

  Bormann shrugged. Sometimes it was better to let him believe as he would. He was easier to handle that way.

  “My Ffchrer?” The field marshal motioned to the Normandy maps. “If you might turn your attention to the current situation, please? You’ll notice here, that the British and Canadians are moving toward Caen. Over here”—he touched another portion of the map—“the American troops are progressing toward Carentan. Our troop disposition is stretched too thin to contain both problems. Might I ask your opinion on which divisions to block this threat?”

  Hitler said nothing. He stood staring not at the maps, on which life-and-death struggles were displayed, but at his collection of watercolors, in which imaginary wolves lurked.

  “My Ffchrer?” the field marshal urged. “What shall we do?”

  A muscle twitched in Hitler’s face. He turned away from the paintings, went to his desk, and opened its top drawer. He reached in, and his hand emerged with a knifelike letter opener.

  He walked back to the paintings, his eyes glazed and his gait that of a sleepwalker, and he plunged the blade through the first one, ripping the farmhouse scene from top to bottom and with it the wolf that hid in a shadow. The blade pierced the second watercolor, the one of a mountain stream in which a wolf crouched behind a rock. “Lies,” Hitler whispered, tearing the canvas. “Lies and deceptions.”

  “My Ffchrer?” the field marshal asked, but there was no answer. Martin Bormann turned away and went to stand at a window overlooking the Thousand-Year Reich.

  The blade tore through the third painting, in which a wolf hid amid a field of white eidelweiss. “Lies,” the man said, his voice strained with tension. The blade went back and forth, and shreds of canvas fell around his polished shoes. “Lies, lies, lies.”

  In the distance an air-raid siren went off. Its howl reverberated over the broken city, hazed with dust and smoke from previous bombing raids. To the east lay oncoming night.

  Hitler dropped the blade to the carpet. He clapped his hands over his ears.

  A bomb flashed on the outskirts of the city. Bormann put his hands over his eyes to shield them from the glare. As Hitler stood trembling with the remnants of his visions underfoot, the German field marshal placed his hand over his mouth, for fear he might scream.

  2

  Big Ben chimed the eleventh hour. In another circumstance Michael Gallatin mused, that would be known as the wolf’s hour. In this case, however, it was eleven o’clock on a sunny morning in the middle of June, and even a wolf wouldn’t be brave enough to face London traffic.

  He watched the traffic from a window over Downing Street, the cars moving alongside the Thames into the swirl of Trafalgar Square. He felt fresh and alive. It was always so when death was faced and beaten—at least for a time. He wore a dark blue suit, a white shirt, and a blue-printed tie, and under his clothes his ribs were laced with adhesive tape. His palm wound was still bandaged and his thigh gave him some trouble, but he was all right. He would run again, as fast as ever.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked him, coming up behind.

  “Oh, that it’s a beautiful day and I’m glad to be out of the hospital. Days like this don’t look so nice from a bed.”

  “I’d say that depends on the bed, wouldn’t you?”

  Michael turned to face her. Chesna looked refreshed, her face free of the lines that pain had put there. Well, perhaps a few remained; that was life. “Yes,” he agreed. “I certainly would.”

  The office’s door opened, and a large-boned, big-nosed man in the uniform of a Royal Air Force captain entered. Lazaris’s hair was growing out, and he had kept his beard, though it was now neatly trimmed. He was as clean as soap, and he even smelled soapy. His left arm and shoulder were covered with plaster under his RAF jacket, a plaster patch mending the broken collarbone. “Hello!” he said, glad to see them. He smiled, and Chesna realized that in his own coarse way, Lazaris was very handsome. “I’m sorry I’m late.”

  “That’s all right. Evidently we’re not on military time.” Their appointment had been scheduled for eleven o’clock sharp. “Speaking of military, have you enlisted in the RAF?”

  “Well, I’m still an officer of the Russian air force,” he replied, speaking his native tongue, “but I’ve been made an honorary captain, just yesterday. I went up in a Spitfire. Oh, that’s a plane! If we’d only had Spitfires, we could have—” He smiled again, and let it go. “I’m going back, as soon as I can.” He shrugged. “Like I say, in the sky I’m a lion. What about the both of you?”

  “I’m home,” Michael said. “For a long time. Chesna is going to California.”

  “Oh yes!” Lazaris tried English: “Cal-e-for-nye-ay?”

  “That’s the place,” Chesna said.

  “Verra gut! You be a verra beeg stir!”

  “I’ll settle for a small part. Even maybe as a stunt pilot.”

  “Pilot! Ya!” The mere mention of that word made a dreamlike expression surface on the Russian’s face.

  Michael slipped his hand into Chesna’s and looked out at London. It was a beautiful city, made more beautiful by the fact that there would never again be Nazi planes in the sky over it. Bad weather had forced the postponement of D-Day from the fifth of June to the sixth; since that day, hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers had gone ashore on the Normandy beaches, steadily pushing the Nazis back toward Germany. The war wasn’t over yet, of course; there would be more trials and tribulations once the Nazis were pushed back into their own den. But the initial step had been taken. The invasion of Europe was a grand, if costly, success. It was only a matter of weeks now before Paris would be liberated, and Gaby’s homeland set free.

  Hitler’s advance was ended. From this point on there would be a long retreat, the lurching German war machine caught between the crushing—dare he think it?—iron fists of America, Great Britain, and Russia.

  As the sun fell upon his face, Michael thought of the path. Of McCarren and Gaby, the underground passages, Camille and Mouse, the rooftop battle at the Paris Opera, the fight in the woods before Berlin, Mouse’s ruined house and ruined life, the Iron Cross that meant nothing. He thought of the Reichkronen, and Harry Sandler’s murder train, the kennels of Falkenhausen, and the long flight to Norway. Of Kitty, and a knife with a hooked blade.

  There had been another path, too: he had been walking it since a boy chased a kite into a Russian forest. It had led him through a world of joy and sadness, tragedy and triumph, to this point in time, and beyond this point lay the future.

  Man or beast? he wondered. He knew now which world he truly belonged to. By accepting his place in t
he world of men, he made the miracle true. He did not think he had failed Wiktor. In fact, he thought Wiktor might be proud of him, as a father is proud of a beloved son.

  Live free, he thought. If that were at all possible in this world, he would try his best at it.

  A buzzer went off on the receptionist’s desk. She was a small, lantern-jawed woman with a carnation on her lapel. “He’ll see you now,” she told them, and got up to open the door into the inner sanctum.

  The man within, bulldog stocky, got up from his desk and came forward to meet them. He had heard grand things about them, he said. Please sit down! He motioned them to three chairs. The medal ceremony, he said, would be a small, quiet affair. There was no use in alerting the press to such a sensitive undertaking. Did they agree to that? They did, of course.

  “Would you mind if I smoked?” he asked Chesna, and when she said she wouldn’t, he produced one of his long trademark cigars from a rosewood cigar case on his desk and lit it. “You must realize the service you’ve performed for England. For the world, actually. Incalculable service. You have friends in high places, and you’ll all be well taken care of. Ah, while we’re on the subject of friends!” He reached into a desk drawer and brought out an envelope sealed with wax. “This is from a friend of yours, Major Gallatin.”

  Michael took it. He recognized the seal on the blob of wax, and smiled faintly. The envelope went into his coat pocket.

  The prime minister went on at length about the ramifications of the invasion and that by the end of summer the Nazis would be fighting on the borders of Germany. Their chemical warfare plans had been miserably dashed; not only in this Iron Fist affair, he said, but also because of Gustav Hildebrand’s… ah… shall we say dissolution?

  Michael studied his face. He had to ask a question. “Excuse me, sir?”

  “Yes, Major?”

  “Do you… just happen to have any relatives in Germany?”

  “No,” Churchill said. “Of course not. Why?”