Rossett checked the people around him. Nobody seemed to notice the almost silent confrontation taking place in front of them. Life went on as usual, and it struck Rossett that maybe the suddenness of unexpected death was a blessing.
He finally slipped the Webley out of his pocket and tucked it behind his leg as two SS trucks skidded to a halt across the road. He glanced back to the Bear and O’Kane, who hadn’t noticed. He looked back toward the trucks and saw Dannecker running toward his side of the road. The troops in the back of the wagons were jumping down, and he watched as Becker pointed toward the Bear and O’Kane.
Rossett knew what was coming next.
He ducked.
The SS started firing.
The scene in front of him broke down into chaos. The soldiers were opening up at anything and everything. The people crouching around Rossett started to push past to get to the safety of the shop behind him. He lost sight of the shooting and had to straighten a little, making room to be able to see what was going on.
O’Kane was in the gutter, and the Bear was gone.
There was only one place for him to have disappeared so quickly. Through the shop and out the back. Rossett took the same route through the shop where he was sheltering.
The chase was on again.
O’Kane gingerly shook off the debris that had landed on him. He lifted his head, saw Dannecker running toward him, and instinctively leveled the Browning.
“No!” Dannecker skidded to a stop fifty feet away and threw up his hands. “Don’t shoot! It was a mistake!”
Dannecker was shouting across the distance between them. O’Kane stared down the sight for a second or two, then lowered the pistol and looked around.
At least four dead, several more injured, and a shop front blown apart by rounds of automatic fire.
That was one hell of a mistake.
He pushed himself up onto one elbow and shook his head to shake off a few pieces of broken glass that had landed in his hair. He stopped, looked back at the shop, and realized the Bear was gone.
Shit.
O’Kane was up and running into the shop in a flash. Once inside, it took his eyes a moment to adjust to the gloom. There were bullet holes all over the back wall and the counter in front of it. Children’s treats and broken glass jars littered the shelves and floor.
Down to O’Kane’s right, crouching below the frame of the window, three women stared up at him. O’Kane pointed to the back of the shop, where he could see an open door, and held a finger to his lips.
One of the women nodded and pointed at the door herself.
He heard Dannecker shouting orders at his men outside, and O’Kane frowned at the thought of having twenty nervous machine guns behind him.
He moved through the shop slowly, over the broken glass. His feet crunched as if he were on a woodland walk, and he grimaced with every step. His head was twitching left and right as he tried to see into the room beyond the doorway.
As he drew level with the shop counter, he saw the shopkeeper slumped behind it. His dead eyes stared up at what was left of his life’s work. O’Kane stepped to the left of the doorway, then took a look over his shoulder to see who had followed him into the shop.
Three SS privates who had the look of fodder on their faces.
O’Kane signaled them to stop moving and to be quiet.
He crouched, then bobbed his head around the door to take a look into the other room. It was almost pitch black. He thought about asking the shopkeeper if there was a light, then remembered the man had just started decomposing behind him.
He looked at the private closest to him and pointed to the back room.
You go first.
The private shook his head.
You go fucking first.
This time O’Kane jabbed a finger.
The private looked at his colleagues behind him, swallowed, and did as he was told.
Private Gunther Waltz was seventeen years old, a long way from home, and very, very scared.
He’d been conscripted, the same as every other sixteen-year-old, the moment that he had left school and informed the local government that he wasn’t intending to go to university.
That was why he was shitting himself in the back of a shop in Liverpool.
He swallowed. It was dark, and no matter how hard he tried to open his eyes wider, he couldn’t grab enough light to see into the gloom. O’Kane, who was right behind him with one hand on his shoulder, was wearing such strong cologne, it seemed to crowd Gunther’s senses and hush them up.
O’Kane gave him a gentle shove and let go of his shoulder.
It was the kind of shove that said “Get moving.”
So Gunther got moving.
The place was full of shadows, shadows that messed with his depth perception and made him feel like he was falling off a cliff.
The light switch Gunther found when he had passed through the second door just clicked with no result. A few seconds later he heard the crunch of the lightbulb under his boot as he crossed the floor toward where he hoped a back wall was.
He wanted to look over his shoulder to see if anyone was behind him, but fear had made his neck stiff and his head dip, so he just kept moving forward.
Just keep going, it’ll be okay, just keep going.
His hands gripping and then flexing, then gripping and flexing again. The cold steel of the StG made them ache with the effort, but he kept doing it until finally he turned a corner and saw a sliver of light.
A door.
Ajar, maybe two centimeters. Whoever they were chasing had fled the building. Gunther breathed out, relaxed his hands on his rifle, swallowed, and called out to his colleagues back in the shop, almost twenty yards behind him.
“It’s okay, there is a door, he’s gone out the back!”
He heard them coming, moving through the shop a lot quicker than he had done. He took off his helmet, wiped his forehead with his sleeve, then put the helmet back on his head.
He’d made it through one more minute in a war zone.
He pushed open the door and heard a click.
He looked down, and saw the potato masher grenade booby trap, which was about to explode.
Gunther realized he wasn’t going to make it through the next minute.
O’Kane heard the explosion but didn’t feel the blast as the two soldiers in front of him blocked the wave.
He guessed it was a hand grenade, probably a potato masher tied to the door handle. Just another booby trap catching someone who took his mind off what he was supposed to be doing.
Didn’t they teach these kids anything?
He moved past the men on the ground without looking at them.
He was on point again.
Rossett was in the alleyway, straining his ears and eyes, trying to catch sight or sound of the Bear. It took a few seconds, and then he heard the back door to a yard being dragged open somewhere up ahead.
The Bear was coming.
Rossett crouched down behind some metal rubbish bins against the moss-covered wall and thumbed the hammer on the Webley.
He waited, pistol ready, letting the Bear come out of whichever backyard he was hiding in.
Rossett had a plan. It wasn’t much of one, but it was the kind he liked the best. Simple.
He would make it quick, a straight choice.
Be arrested or die.
The gold didn’t matter to Rossett. What mattered was doing his job. The right thing, the simple thing. He wasn’t going to give in to anger, he wasn’t going to give in to revenge, he wasn’t going to give in to violence.
Not this time.
He just wanted to do his job.
Rossett would sooner snap on the handcuffs than pull a trigger, but he was certain he could do either with a clear conscience, for the first time in a long time.
The Bear came out the backyard up the alleyway at a full-on sprint.
Rossett caught sight of him and ducked down unseen. He couldn’t see the Bear, b
ut he could hear him. Splashing through puddles, getting closer, closer to justice with every step.
There was a whump of an explosion.
Rossett ducked, then recognized the percussion as a grenade, probably left as a booby trap. He knew German potato mashers came with a string in the handle that made setting a trap a ten-second job.
He’d done it himself in another life.
It was a sound he’d heard so many times, he could imagine the scene of the explosion without having to close his eyes.
The Bear had killed someone else.
Rossett stood up and pointed the Webley down the alley at where the Bear should have been.
There was no one there.
He crouched back down behind the bins, cursed, then lifted his head again.
The alley was still empty, but Rossett guessed it was going to be filling up shortly with German soldiers. He had to get moving.
He started to make his way in the same direction he figured the Bear had headed. He stopped when he heard the sound of falling rubble and scrambling boots up ahead, maybe forty feet past where the booby trap had been. It sounded like it was coming from the bombed-out houses that backed onto the alleyway.
The Bear climbing for cover, or maybe heading up to a sniping platform?
Rossett dodged flat against the left-hand wall. It was seven feet high, on the same side as the scrabbling. Seconds passed. Silence. Rossett slowly moved forward. He reached a yard gate, half propped up by a rotten frame and rusted hinges.
The gate had scraped an arc of grit against the flagstones when it had last been opened.
The shifted dirt looked fresh, so fresh it must have been moved in the last minute or so.
The Bear.
Rossett stared at the gate but didn’t touch it. The sound of the recent explosion was still ringing in his ears, making him cautious. He checked for signs of a trap and listened for sounds of movement in the backyard beyond it.
Sudden scrambling again. Feet on rubble. Someone was climbing up to the first floor of the bombed-out tenement behind the gate.
Rossett gripped the Webley a little harder and considered shoving the gate open and shooting at the Bear as he climbed. He rocked on his toes, the cold wall flat against his back, then gone, flat against his back, then gone.
Wait.
He stopped rocking. The Bear had a reputation for being the best. If Rossett was going to catch him, he’d have to be better. Blasting into the yard would probably get him killed, and Rossett was better than that.
This was chess, not bowling.
Rossett looked around. Each of the tenements had identical yards and adjoining back walls. He counted off two backyards down the alley, then moved silently toward it.
He gripped the top of the wall, climbed, then rolled over the top. He was in the yard two buildings to the right of where the Bear had gone.
He pulled the Webley, scanned the yard and then what was left of the building it backed onto. The house was almost as badly damaged as all the others.
It was as though someone had ripped the guts out of the buildings and dragged them out into the backyards. A few outhouses remained standing, but pretty much everything else was buried under the bricks that had been blasted out of the back walls.
Rossett moved slowly across them. He kept close to the building line, eyes looking up into the carcass of the houses as he passed. It took him a minute of creeping before he made it to the house next door to where he believed the Bear had gone.
The whole of the back of the tenement was missing. Plaster hung from splintered slats, and dark smears of soot alluded to the fire that had gutted the place after the bomb blast. Rossett climbed the rubble to the first floor as quietly as he could. Once there he found remnants of a rug still lying on the floorboards. He stepped onto it off the rubble. The floor moved under his feet as he crossed to the front of the property. The boards on the windows were thin, and in places too small to cover the gaps. Rossett gripped the bottom of one and eased it back a few inches.
He looked out onto the street. It was deserted, blitzed until nearly all of the buildings looked like rotten teeth in a skull. Behind him he could now hear German voices in the alleyway. They were looking for the Bear, which meant they might discover Rossett by accident. He tried a door and found a narrow stairwell that looked fairly undamaged.
He climbed the stairs, pistol out in front, ducking as he passed holes blasted in the wall that ran between the two houses. He paused at a rear window on the third floor and looked through the shattered glass down into the alley. There were squads of SS moving along it in both directions.
Rossett caught sight of O’Kane.
He was working with the Germans.
You learn something every day.
No time to think about that now. Concentrate on the Bear. He was the one that mattered. He was the one who had to pay for what he had done.
Rossett started moving again, silent, slow, each step a whisper of menace into an unhearing ear.
He came to a gap in the wall that separated the two houses. Four bricks, a diamond-shaped hole through to the other side, a space just big enough to stick his head through. He didn’t have to; he could smell the Bear on the other side.
A faint whiff of cordite and body odor. Rossett listened. He could hear the other man breathing.
They were inches apart.
Rossett didn’t move. He waited.
Patience was a virtue.
Chapter 18
The Bear had heard the grenade booby trap going off, but he’d taken no satisfaction from it.
He’d made a mistake.
He’d allowed himself to be drawn out.
He’d confronted O’Kane on the street instead of following him back home, and that had nearly cost him his life. He’d behaved like an amateur, a fool, and he was angry. He’d nearly missed out on the duel with the Lion because he’d allowed himself to be distracted by the gold.
He was supposed to be better than that.
Rossett was the only thing that mattered. He was the test, the worthy opponent, the one who would finally prove that the Bear had nobody left to beat in Great Britain.
When Rossett was dead, then he could think about the future, about the gold, about America.
But only after Rossett was dead.
Only after he knew he was the best.
He wouldn’t make another mistake. The prize was almost in his hands; he wouldn’t drop it now.
He’d recced and established the safe house that morning, before he had primed the bomb in the pub. It was eighty yards and an eleven-second sprint from where he had almost been pinned down outside the shop. In case of emergency he’d scouted four routes to, and six routes from it. He knew that some people might think it was too close to where he had been shot at, but the Bear liked close. Close meant that he would have less time to wait for them to pass by when they started the search.
At the safe house he had a change of clothes, a store of ammunition, and, in the event of the worst-case scenario, food and water to last a couple of days. Staying alive was all about patience and preparation, and the Bear had a gift for both. He’d picked the place carefully. It was an old tenement, the center of which had taken a few artillery strikes during the fall of the city. The roof was mostly gone, the back wall was three-quarters missing, and the back rooms that remained were exposed to the elements.
From the alleyway, if you were to take time to look up, the whole place looked like a tumbledown doll’s house with the walls removed. Tattered pale-blue-striped wallpaper wafted in the breeze, while odds and ends of furniture had slid down slanted floors and hung off the edge as if they were too scared to jump down to the rubble below.
It didn’t look like it would shelter a rat, let alone a Bear.
He had stashed his stores on the fourth floor, after he had found that the stairwell was mostly clear at the front of the house. Only the two ground floors had been boarded up at the front, which meant that if he climb
ed up to the top, he had an option to escape with a rope from a front window. In a real emergency, say an assault from the back and the front at the same time, he could reach the roof and run almost the full length of the road. He’d be a full four stories above anyone searching for him, and he could drop through one of the many skylights to safety below.
Preparation would keep him alive, just as it always did.
After the booby trap had gone off he had ducked into the backyard of the tenement and, once on the other side, skidded to a stop, spun, then lifted the wooden back gate into the hole in the wall.
The grenade had made them cautious. He’d slowed them down, but he hadn’t set another trap. The alley had several exits; he wanted them to think he had gone out of one of them, moving fast without stopping.
He’d wanted them to chase his ghost.
The night before he’d marked out a route to the first floor and practiced it a few times. Today, he’d paused halfway, listened, then finished making his way into the safety of the ruin. Once inside he’d ducked through a smashed doorway and on through the first room, with its delicately balanced floor and furniture. There was enough light from the back of the house to move along the narrow corridor, and then to the front of the building with its boarded-up windows.
At the foot of the stairs he’d stopped, checked the fine trip wire he had set carefully the day before, and then finally, when certain all was well, headed up.
He climbed to the top of the stairs, crouched, then craned his neck over another pile of fallen bricks. From his vantage point, his head low behind the cover, he could just see into the backyard and the alley beyond.
Soldiers, moving slowly, looking over walls and testing gates. He edged forward so he could see farther along the alleyway.
O’Kane, directing the soldiers with gestures and silent points of his hand.
The Bear had considered O’Kane and his offer about the gold.
Who was he? He wasn’t a Liverpool policeman. The Bear knew every police detective in the city by sight, and he’d never seen O’Kane before.
He wasn’t resistance. He was working with the SS.
The Bear tried to place O’Kane’s accent. American? Canadian? Irish maybe? Hard to tell, all of them and yet none of them. A little like the Bear’s own English.
An Army of One: A John Rossett Novel Page 26