The Hunter From the Woods

by Robert R. McCammon

  She shivered like the ship. Her head had also been lowered. She had her arms around herself. She was wearing the ugly mouse-colored overcoat and a gray head-scarf, which allowed just a glimpse of her blonde hair. Tonight, of course, there was no need for sunglasses. Her eyes were a cool shade of aquamarine under unplucked blonde brows. Her nose was small and sharp-tipped and her chin was adorned with a small dimple. She looked at him with something like horror in her face, and then she put her head down again and tried to get past as quickly as her weight of a left shoe would allow.

  “May I walk with you?” Michael asked, before she could escape him.

  “No,” she said, more of a whispered breath than a voice. “Please. Leave me alone.” She was trying to move faster, but she suddenly stumbled and had to catch her balance against one of the funnels.

  “Don’t you want to see Vulcan at his forge?” Michael asked. She was still trying to get away, not daring to meet his gaze. He gently spoke her false name: “Kristen?”

  The teenaged girl took two more staggering steps before she looked back over her shoulder.

  “Come watch Vulcan at work,” he told her, standing against the gunwale. “Just for a moment.”

  “I have to go,” Marielle said, but she wasn’t moving. Her eyes darted here and there; anywhere but to his own eyes. And then: “How do you know my name?”

  “I suppose I heard someone mention it. From the passenger list.” He smiled again. “I think it’s a very pretty name.”

  “I have to go,” she said again.

  The right foot moved, but the heavy left foot remained where it was.

  Lightning flared amid the clouds.

  “There!” Michael said. “Vulcan at his forge. Did you see it?”

  “No.”

  “Keep watch, then. It’ll just be…there! Did you see it then?”

  “It’s lightning,” she said, with a trace of irritation.

  “It’s Vulcan,” he corrected. “Working at his forge. He’s the god of blacksmiths, you know. Ah, listen…hear the sound of his hammer on the anvil?”

  “Thunder,” she muttered.

  “Vulcan has an interesting history.” Michael made a half-turn so he could watch the display in the clouds but she could also still hear him. “He was the son of Jupiter and Juno. But Juno thought he was ugly. She cast the baby off the top of Mount Olympus into the sea. When he fell all that way, he was injured.”

  There was no response for a little while. Then her quiet voice asked, “Injured? How?”

  “He broke one of his legs,” said Michael. “It never developed properly. After that, he was always crippled. There he is again! Listen to that hammer!”

  Marielle Wesshauser, the daughter of Paul and Annaleisa and sister to Emil, was silent.

  At last she said, “I shouldn’t be talking to you. Father said not to talk to anyone.”

  “He’s right. There are some men on this ship who are not very nice.”

  She frowned at the deck. Michael saw her glance quickly up at him and then away again. “Are you nice?” she asked cautiously.

  “If I said I was, would you believe I was telling you the truth?”

  She had to think about that one for a moment.

  Michael watched the lightning. The sound of thunder was nearer now; a storm was on the move. North Sea weather, particularly at the change of seasons, was never predictable. “You don’t have to talk, Kristen. I’ll talk. Can I tell you some more about Vulcan?” He turned to face her.

  She kept her eyes averted. She shrugged beneath her overcoat.

  “Vulcan,” said Michael, “sank down to the bottom of the sea. The sea-nymph Thetis found him and took him to her grotto, and she raised him as her son.” He paused, firming up the memory of this story from his mythology studies. “Vulcan had dolphins for playmates. He had all the sea as his world. Then one day he found what was left of a fisherman’s fire on the beach. Do you know what it was?”

  She shook her head. Again, her eyes slid to his, lingered for just a few seconds, and then darted away.

  “A single coal,” Michael continued. “Glowing red-hot. Well, he became fascinated with it. He became fascinated with fire, and with creating things from fire. He made rare and beautiful necklaces and bracelets out of sea stones and metals for his mother. He could make anything out of fire. It was his element to be used and adored. There!” That particular flash had been tinged with vivid electric-blue. “He’s working extra hard tonight.”

  “But,” said Marielle. She hesitated, as if thinking she’d already said too much. “But,” she went on, “how did Vulcan get back up to the clouds? You said he was in the sea. How did he get back to the sky?”

  “His real mother invited Thetis to a party on Mount Olympus. Those old Greek gods were always having parties. Then Juno saw the magnificent necklaces and bracelets of rare sea-metals and wanted to know who forged them, because she wanted some too. So she invited the son of Thetis to come up and make some for her. That’s how he got back to Mount Olympus, and after that Juno realized who he was.”

  “And then he lived there with his real mother?” Her frown deepened. “Even though she didn’t like him?”

  “He tricked her,” Michael said. “He built a fantastic metal chair for her that trapped her with its arms and wouldn’t let her go. Jupiter couldn’t even free her. Jupiter begged Vulcan to let Juno free. Finally Vulcan, because he had such a kind heart, let his mother go. And because of that, Jupiter told Juno to leave the boy alone, and then do you know what happened?”

  “No. What?”

  “Venus fell in love with Vulcan. The most beautiful of the goddesses, in love with him. And him only a crippled blacksmith. But Venus saw his heart, and that was what she loved. It was enough. After that, Vulcan went to work making arms and armor for all the heroes of Olympus, and he made thunderbolts for Jupiter. Look there! See? He just made a new one.”

  She cocked her head to one side and studied him. A little shy smile came up and, like the quicksilver lightning, flashed away. “I think you’ve been on this ship too long.”

  “True, very true,” he agreed. “My name is Michael Gallatin.” He offered his hand to her.

  Now her heavy left shoe did move, scraping across the boards. She stepped back, as if she’d been presented not with a human hand but with the claw of an animal.

  “I’m tame,” he told her. When I need to be, he thought.

  But she was having none of it. Without looking at him again she turned away and struggled onward across the moving deck. Michael decided to let her go. It was a long voyage yet; there would be plenty of time.

  Time for what? he asked himself. A shipboard romance with a sixteen-year-old girl? Certainly not! But watching her pulling herself along that first day, making herself faceless to hide from the world…

  He knew what hiding from the world was all about, and he didn’t wish that on anyone. Particularly not on a girl with such beautiful eyes and a shy smile. Perhaps there had been sadness in that smile, too. He sighed. In any case, it was time for him to move along. The smell of advancing rain thickened the air.

  He walked briskly toward the stern. And just past another lifeboat he came upon two figures standing together, peering through binoculars at ship’s lights off in the distance. Michael judged the second vessel to be possibly three or so miles away.

  His sudden approach and footfalls, clumsy rather than careful, caused the two men to lower their glasses and turn toward him. One of the men was Medina, who screwed up his black-bearded face in a rictus of anger. “What do you think you’re doing, man? You’re not on duty! Why are you out of your bunk?”

  “I’m walking,” was the calm reply.

  “Walking?” Medina pressed forward, his chest pushed out and his chin pulled in. “This isn’t a stadium! It isn’t a road! Tell him what this is, Mr. Kpanga!”

  “It’s a ship,” said Enam Kpanga, but his attention had already returned to focusing the lights on the horizon in his bin
oculars. Michael thought Kpanga was awfully unconcerned about the fact a first mate had just taken an order from a second mate. The African wore a black suit and an open-collared indigo shirt. Kpanga’s flesh was the hue of purest ebony from the heart of the dark continent. He was thin and tall, about the same height as Michael. He had a cap of close-cropped hair with a widow’s peak. He wore wire-rimmed spectacles with round lenses, and Michael thought he looked more like a first-year law student than the first mate of a rust-gnawed freighter.

  “Where were you walking to?” Medina inquired acidly. He grinned, which was almost his undoing. “Home to your momma?”

  Michael Gallatin increased the intensity of his green eyes. He said nothing, his face placid. Medina’s grin vanished.

  “Careful the way you look at me, man!” the second mate warned, which was nearly his second brush with disembowelment.

  “Very strange, this is,” said Kpanga, lowering the binoculars. He had a melodic British accent tinged with the smooth rhythm of his tribal tongue. He cast a gaze at the wayward crewman. The Sofia’s lights sparked off his eyeglasses. “Return belowdecks, if you please.”

  “We ought to make an example of him.” Medina didn’t quite know when to stop edging toward a fast and brutal reckoning.

  “Return belowdecks, if you please,” Kpanga repeated, as if the second mate had not only never spoken but wasn’t even standing there.

  Michael nodded. The African once more peered through the binoculars. Medina waited for a further provocation. Michael thought he could tear the Spaniard’s beard off in about three seconds. He looked toward the distant lights. Another freighter, most likely. Also headed for England? Before Medina could speak again, Michael turned away and went forward to the stairs he’d ascended from his little bunk in Hell.

  Five

  The Captain

  It was a small movement. A small sound. A change in the thudding of waves against the hull. A quietening of the labored diesels.

  Michael Gallatin sat up on his bunk.

  Had he been asleep at all? Maybe for two hours. Everything was still semi-dark. A few other crewmen had felt the change in their sleep as well, and were groggily stirring. Someone spoke out in Polish, as if from a dream. A question that had no answer.

  Michael’s heartbeat had quickened. He swung himself off the bunk and because he was still mostly dressed all he had to do was pull on his boots, his jacket and his woolen cap. Then he was up the stairway into the night.

  A cold, stinging drizzle hit him in the face. He saw, first of all, that the lights of a ship were about five hundred meters off the port beam. The ship’s bow was aimed toward Sofia. Michael judged it was making maybe ten knots. A shrill alarm went off in him. Sofia was slowing nearly to a glide. He saw a signal lamp blinking up at the second ship’s wheelhouse. Sending morse code to Sofia. He took a moment to decipher it.

  Stop your engines. We are overtaking.

  “Damn it,” he breathed, and then he went to the stairs leading up along the side of the superstructure and raced to the wheelhouse at the top. At the locked door, he balled up his fist and started hammering.

  The door opened and a startled-looking Enam Kpanga peered out. Raindrops flecked his glasses. He said, “What are you—”

  Then he stopped speaking, because Michael shoved him back and walked into the low-lamped wheelhouse, where a Swede with a face like the business end of an axe was manning the helm. Before him, the wide rectangular windowglass was streaked with rain.

  Medina was standing at the engine order telegraph, the brass instrument by which the bridge communicated speed changes to the engine room. Michael saw that the pointer was set to the Ahead Two-Thirds position instead of what would normally be All-Ahead Standard. Medina’s hand was on the pointer and was about to ring the next lowest engine speed, Ahead One-Third.

  “Keep your speed up!” Michael commanded.

  The moment was frozen. Rain pattered against the window’s glass. Sofia moved over a wave and down, then began to rise again. She moaned somewhere amidships.

  “Seaman!” Kpanga had not shouted it, but nevertheless his voice carried absolute authority. “Get off the bridge!”

  Michael turned to face him. “I want to see the captain.”

  “Are you insane?”

  “I said, I want to see the—”

  A pistol’s barrel was placed against the back of his skull.

  “Get out of here now,” said the Spaniard, “or I will blow your fucking head off.”

  “My name is Michael Gallatin,” he said to Kpanga. “I’m an agent with the British Secret Service. Special Operations. Your German passenger is a weapons expert named Paul Wesshauser. He’s trying to get himself and his family to England and away from the Nazis. Obviously the Nazis don’t want that to happen. We believed a freighter was the safest way over. Their secret police were watching all the airports, civilian ship lines and train stations.” Loose ends, he thought grimly. Someone in the network had either been paid to talk or had his mouth loosened by the ugly end of a pair of pliers. “That ship is coming to take him, and I can tell you he doesn’t want to go. Neither do we want him to be taken.” He turned his head a fraction. “If you don’t put that gun down in three seconds, I’ll kill you.”

  The pistol wavered.

  “I’m counting,” Michael vowed, smelling fear.

  “Put it down, Monsieur Medina,” said another voice, heavy with a French accent.

  The pressure of the pistol against the back of Michael’s head went away.

  Michael turned to the left, toward the voice. A figure emerged from a shadowed corridor at the back of the wheelhouse. It was a man of stocky, broadchested build and Napoleonic height, standing five-feet-six at most. He came forward into the dim glow of the yellow-shaded lamps. He was dressed not as the captain of the Sofia, but as her lowliest and most decrepit ordinary seaman. The front of his grimy once-white shirt was a nasty mural of coffee stains, grease smears, food spatters and other less definable artwork. His belly bulged over his canvas trousers, which in turn bagged around his stubby legs and were held up by a pair of vomit-green suspenders. His shoes were so scuffed it was nearly impossible to tell if they’d been brown or black; they were the washed-out hue of careless despair.

  Captain Gustave Beauchene approached Michael and peered up into the other man’s face. Beauchene had a grizzled gray beard and heavy jowls, his cheeks pitted with the small round scars of smallpox. His eyes, sunken in wrinkles that made Michael think of cargo netting, were nearly the same gray as his beard. His hair, too, was gray and unkempt, ratty in front and hanging down over his ears and the back of his neck. Michael had already caught the noxious fumes of very strong body odor, and also…whiskey, of course. No, that was wrong. Brandy. After all, the captain was a Frenchman.

  Beauchene reached out and took the pistol from Medina’s hand. Without hesitation he put the barrel against the center of Michael Gallatin’s forehead.

  “I will give you three seconds,” he said, as a small red glow of fury burned deep in his eyes, “to convince me you’re not either a liar or a madman.”

  Michael saw no need to waste time. “I was placed here to protect the Wesshausers if necessary. But mostly to watch the crew, just in case a member of the secret police got aboard. I know the histories of everyone here. You, Mr. Kpanga, are a very intelligent and ambitious man who did extremely well with his studies at the University of London. Medina, you broke your wife’s right arm in a fight two years ago and your brother-in-law swore to kill you. You wound up putting him in the hospital in Seville with a knife to the belly. And you, captain…well, I know you also. Want me to tell you about the Swede?”

  “No,” said Beauchene.

  Michael nodded. The less said about that child-molester at the helm, the better.

  Beauchene handed the pistol back to Medina. Then, moving surprisingly fast for a man his size, he slapped Michael across the mouth with his right hand so hard the blood bloomed from Michael�
��s lower lip and for a few seconds tears of pain fogged his vision.

  “How dare you,” said the captain, in a voice made of sharp-edged gravel. “How dare you bring this on my crew and on my ship. You British! You self-centered prigs! Playing your spy games! Fuck you and fuck all of you!” The spittle flew from his mouth. “I hope you will be very happy with the outcome of this! Monsieur Medina!”

  “Sir!” said the Spaniard.

  “All Stop.”

  Medina moved toward the engine order telegraph.

  “Don’t touch that,” Michael said.

  “Oh, how he threatens!” Beauchene’s ugly mug twisted in an uglier grin. “And him without a gun! Go on, give the order!”

  “You stop those engines,” Michael said, “and every man on this ship is dead.”

  “Christ, this one believes in himself, doesn’t he? All right, my fine fucking fellow, how do you propose to kill every member of my crew?”

  “I won’t. You will. By stopping those engines. You let that ship take the Wesshausers, and you’ll think that’s the end of it. But then the men on that ship will bring their machine guns and grenades and whatever else they have aboard, and they will begin murdering everyone here. Why? Because the Nazis want no international incident. They don’t want the British press or the press of any other country on earth to get wind that they’ve kidnapped a weapons expert who was trying to get away from them. And taken his family, as well.” Michael paused to wipe his lip with the back of his hand. The smell of his own blood, to him, filled up the wheelhouse.

  “You know what they’ll do,” Michael continued, and now he cast his gaze around at Medina and Kpanga to draw them in. “They’ll kill everyone and then sink the Sofia. And I’m sure they didn’t come unprepared for that. The Sofia becomes another statistic. A freighter, lost in the North Sea. Who can say what happened? But I can promise you, there will be no one left alive to tell the tale. So, Captain Beauchene, you stop the engines and give the Wesshausers over, and you and I and every man on this ship are dead.”

  No one spoke.