The Hunter From the Woods

by Robert R. McCammon

  Perhaps ten minutes later, Gantt looked into Michael’s face and said, “You English. Playing at war. With your…tea breaks. Your…what was that? Aftershave lotion? Oh, my! Well…you…shall go down to defeat…smelling like gentlemen. For that… I salute you.”

  “Many thanks,” said Michael, who didn’t think he could look into Gantt’s face much longer, for the man was fading away minute by minute.

  And as time was of the essence, suddenly the essence became time.

  Gantt held up his arm and began to remove his wristwatch.

  “What are you doing?” Michael asked.

  “This.” Gantt got the Breitling off. He regarded not the timepiece itself, but the plain leather band. “I want…you…to have it,” he said, and he offered it to Michael.

  “I can’t take that.”

  “If you don’t…they will.”

  True enough. Eventually the Dahlasiffa would come back, Devil or not.

  Michael accepted the watch. “I will take care of—”

  “You’d better,” Gantt interrupted. “It’s come…such a long way.”

  The dice were rolling, back and forth.

  The sun was coming up. A hot, clear dawn. Flying weather, Gantt might have said.

  “Michael?” Gantt whispered, his voice nearly gone.

  “Yes?”

  “We…men…of action,” he said, and then he smiled. “Must never…stop…trying. Eh?”

  “Never,” Michael agreed.

  “Good man,” said Gantt, and then he watched the sun as it rose higher.

  Sometime during the next few minutes, he left this world.

  Michael felt it, and saw the empty stare in the man’s eyes, and when he checked the pulse and heartbeat he verified what he already knew. The boy stopped rolling his dice and he sat looking at the body of Rolfe Gantt, the famous Messerschmitt ace, the shining example to German youth, the celebrity, the great lover, the man of action, the hero.

  After a while the boy crawled forward. He put the pair of dice in Gantt’s right hand, possibly for luck in the afterlife, and then he closed the fingers and he stood up and stretched as if awakening from a long sleep.

  Michael put the Breitling in his pocket. There was no need to bury Gantt; the Dahlasiffa would just dig up the body. But it was only a suit of flesh, and the bird had flown.

  It was time to find another two or three canteens, fill them up and find a way back home.

  The boy motioned him to the camel corral.

  Michael had no idea how to handle one of those creatures. How to saddle them up and get the bridles set. But fortunately the boy did, and he was very efficient about it.

  They wet cloths and wrapped them around their heads and faces. They hung the canteens by leather cords from the saddles. They headed off in the direction they’d come, the boy leading the way on his camel and Michael just along for the ride. His camel seemed to hate him, and spat and fumed like a vindictive old man. Probably something in the way he smelled, Michael thought. But the camel moved onward, and so did the day.

  On the second morning, with a hard hot wind blowing from the southwest, the two riders came across a platoon of soldiers escorted by a pair of tanks. The soldiers wore British khaki, and the tanks were Matildas. When Michael had made the platoon’s lieutenant understand who he was and where he’d come from, he and the boy were placed on one of the tanks and driven to a small air base called Al Massir, about twenty kilometers to the east.

  The base had a hospital. It wasn’t much, but they had soft beds and cooling palm-frond fans that turned at the ceiling. Michael’s broken shoulder was set and put into a cast and his cuts swabbed with iodine. He decided not to look into any mirrors for a while, because he’d seen the expression on the face of the young and attractive brunette nurse. Then Michael and the boy both slept more than twelve hours, and when they awakened they were given glasses of orange juice and plates of scrambled eggs, figs, and olives. An apple-cheeked, serious red-haired captain named Findley-Hughes came in with a clipboard to ask Michael questions and take notes, and this went on interminably until Michael asked the young man if he’d had his eighteenth birthday yet.

  After that they were pretty much left on their own.

  Except for the attractive brunette nurse. She came in quite often to see him, and to fuss over him, and to smooth his hair and once even to sit by his bed and sing to him.

  She just couldn’t seem to leave that boy alone.

  She brought him some jacks and a ball. Michael watched him shaking the jacks in his hand, and he saw the boy cast them on the floor and bounce the ball. And as he scooped up the jacks in the hand that used to hold a pair of dead man’s dice the boy smiled, and from then on the brunette nurse had him running errands around the hospital and the base. The doctor gave him a nickname: Jacky. Then one afternoon Michael heard the brunette nurse call him Jack, and the boy looked at her as if all his life he’d been waiting to hear that name spoken by a voice just like hers.

  Michael learned that the nurse’s husband had been a Spitfire pilot who’d lost his life over Dunkirk. Her infant son had been killed in a German bomb raid in London in 1940. He didn’t ask her what the boy’s name had been. He didn’t think he had to.

  Even the roughest road led somewhere, he thought.

  On the morning of the fifth day, two officers in clean uniforms with polished buttons arrived at the base in a Douglas Dakota transport plane. Michael knew one of them as the man sometimes called ‘Mallory’, who wore a Colonel’s insignia. It was explained to him, as they sat under a striped awning facing the airstrip and drank Guinness Stout brought in a keg with the Dakota, that it was imperative he return to Cairo and, as Mallory put it, “get back on the horse”.

  It was explained to him that he could fly back with them in the Dakota or, if his recent experience had somewhat sullied his desire for air travel, he might be driven in a truck back to HQ in Cairo. Of course, there was a very large difference in travel time between plane and truck, but it was his decision.

  Not to put any pressure on him, of course.

  Michael Gallatin sipped from his glass of Guinness and listened to the noise of an aircraft’s engine revving across the field. The sky was clear and untroubled by German fighters, yet who could say where the next Messerschmitt ace lurked? Michael had been dreading this moment, and his heart had begun beating harder. Perhaps, too, a fine sheen of sweat had risen at his temples.

  He drew from his pocket a wristwatch.

  He examined its face only briefly. It was the plain brown leather band that drew his attention. He thought of the old planes of the Great War, and how they were put together with wires, fabric, leather, and wood. How also they were taken up, as flimsy as they were, into the huge sky by small men with large dreams and the bravery of giants.

  He ran his fingers across the brown leather. He listened to the engine revving, and heard it miss a beat.

  They were still brave giants, in those cockpits.

  Maybe it was time for him to grow a little larger, too.

  He gave his answer.

  “I’ll fly.”

  The

  Room

  at the

  Bottom

  of the

  Stairs

  One

  Gone Too Deep

  When Michael Gallatin could force himself to meet his own eyes in the mirror, he opened the flawless silver case that lay atop the blue porcelain sink. It was monogrammed, in simple capital letters, with an H and a J. He removed from the case the two pieces of the Solingen travel razor. The Germans made such beautiful instruments, especially those that could kill.

  He put a fresh blade into its resting place and screwed the pieces of the razor together to make a whole. He turned on the cold water tap and ran the blade’s edge beneath it. Then, completely naked, he stared into his face as if looking for recognition there. He was no longer sure what he was seeing, in those green eyes that held secrets even from himself. To him they looked smoke-
hazed, bloodshot, weary from the constant war.

  But a gentleman must be well-groomed, and so with just a few seconds’ decision to employ no lather he began to shave the stubble from his right cheek. On the first stroke his hand betrayed him. He went too deep, felt first the nick and then the heat of blood rising from the cut on his cheekbone.

  Michael watched the drop of blood roll down through the small hairs toward his jawline. Another followed, and then a third. They smelled of blood sausages in the Paris market, fresh after midnight. He was hungry, roused to appetite by his own juices. But he continued to shave, stroke after stroke—some smooth, some ragged—and when he was done with the massacre of his face he began to shave his throat and down across his chest, cleaving the field of black and gray hair, cutting himself here and there, no matter, no matter at all, for this little pain was nothing, and what would his Russian family think of him if he could not stand a little pain?

  When he finished this task, he was going to have to decide what to do about the dead woman in the bed.

  So he kept shaving, and he kept cutting.

  Here and there, but this little pain was nothing.

  He regarded the first nick he’d made, on his right cheek, and thought he fully understood his problem. He had certainly gone too deep.

  So he stood in this bathroom, in room number 214 of the Hotel Grand Frederik, with its gold-colored walls and blue porcelain and its matching gold-and-blue tiles on the floor, and he dripped blood from seven cuts and mused on how his odor of wounded weakness would have had him torn to pieces in a certain area of Russian wilderness very distant from this dying city of Berlin. They would have consumed him, eaten his lungs and heart and all the meat that meant life for the strong, and they would have left his bones for the little scavengers who hid in the rotten logs, and all would be right with the world.

  Michael Gallatin, born Mikhail Gallatinov in St. Petersburg thirty-four years ago, was no longer sure he was fit.

  Nothing had changed about him, except for the slips of the razor. Except for the haze in his eyes. The tightness of his mouth. He was lean and healthy, his shoulders were broad and his waist narrow and he had enough muscle to get his work done. His thick hair was black, streaked with gray at the temples and cut short in the military style. Across his left cheek was a scar that began just under the eye and continued back into the hairline, the gift of a would-be assassin in North Africa in 1942. He bore other scars, nothing too ghastly, nothing that could not be explained to a woman between the damp sheets, with her head leaning against his shoulder and her fingers wandering the fields of his flesh, as the demands of a soldier.

  He was going to have to go and look at her again. He steeled himself for it, but his metal had become tin. He wondered, as he put the bloodied razor away into the beautiful silver case she’d bought for him two days ago, if after he drank the last glass of champagne and put on his uniform of a German major he should set fire to the bed and send her to Valhalla in the proper fashion.

  It had begun barely a month ago, when Michael had returned from an early-morning run through the cold January sleet of Wales and found a black Bentley Mark V in front of his proudly isolated house. At its wheel waited the older man Michael knew as Mallory, who said he would wait while Michael put on some clothes, and then they needed to take a drive and have a chat.

  “The Inner Ring has been penetrated,” Mallory said as they drove along the tracks that passed as roads and sleet slashed across the windshield.

  Michael knew, of course, about the Inner Ring. The group of Germans who were still doggedly fighting Hitler and the Nazis from within. They were scientists who did their best to delay or sabotage weapons projects. Secretaries and aides who made notes on overheard conversations or intercepted messages. More than one railway dispatcher who sent a munitions train onto a track laid with explosives. A priest or two who kept a radio tuned to the British secret service wavelength, and a codebook hidden where only Christ might find it. Prostitutes and pickpockets, old white-haired soldiers who carried scars from the first Great War, and ordinary citizens with extraordinary courage who had come over to the hope that Germany would surrender to the British or Americans, and that it would happen before the Russian wave smashed over the crumbling rock of the Fatherland.

  “A woman has penetrated the Ring,” said Mallory. “She has seduced her way in. Her name is Franziska Luxe. She’s a photographer and a journalist for Signal.”

  Signal magazine, as Michael also knew, was the glossy, lavishly-illustrated propaganda magazine of the German armed forces, enjoyed—if that was the right word—at the height of its popularity by over two million readers.

  “The Ring is being taken apart,” Mallory went on. “Person by person. They are disappearing into the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. Fraulein Luxe is a bit of a… I would call her a huntress. She’s gotten on the scent of the Ring through a stupid, love-stricken man, and she is working with a Gestapo official named Axel Rittenkrett to uncover and destroy—a kind way to put it—every member of the Ring and their families. Out of a hundred or so, there are maybe fifty left. We’ve been helping as many as we can, but some have complications and can’t get out. Some refuse to leave, they consider themselves martyrs for a cause. This is why you’re needed.”

  “I knew it was coming to that,” said Michael, as he stared at the black briefcase that lay on the biscuit-colored leather next to him.

  “We’re trying our best to get everyone out. We won’t be fully successful, but we need time. And we need you, Major, to give Franziska Luxe something to think about other than tracking down members of the Ring and sending them to be tortured to death at the hands of the Gestapo.” He paused for a few seconds, during which only Michael saw the pack following along, just loping easily through the sleet, almost grinning in the cold bracing air with lung-steam curling from their snouts. “Do you understand the mission?”

  “Go into the chaos of Berlin, masquerade as a German—an officer, most likely, and a man with an interesting back-history—to seduce a rather nasty female Nazi? I’m flattered, but I believe there are other men who are better suited for this job.” And who most probably would die trying, he thought.

  “Read her dossier, there in the briefcase,” Mallory instructed. “She’s thirty years old and quite beautiful. She’s a champion skiier, an expert marksman and driver of racing cars as well as being fluent in French, Italian and English. Her father was a daredevil pilot who ended his life last year testing the new German jet aircraft. Her mother at seventeen was a circus lion-tamer, has been an Olympic swimmer and a member of the most recent German expedition to Antarctica in 1938. Here, now…what’s this?” He put his foot to the brake and stopped the car. He leaned forward, peering through the windshield as the wipers scraped back and forth. “I presume that’s one of your companions standing on the road? Am I in some kind of violation I need to know about?”

  “A precaution,” Michael said. “No one can take me beyond this point without my agreement. And theirs, also.”

  “My God, that’s a big one,” said Mallory, still looking forward. “Um…may I ask…?”

  “Animal,” came the response. “As far as I know, there is no one else…” Michael looked at the briefcase and put two fingers against it. “Like me,” he finished.

  “One never knows what the Germans, if not stopped, might try to create in their laboratories.” Mallory winced a little, even before he’d finished saying it. “Oh, my. That didn’t sound right, forgive me.” He cleared his throat and put the stick into Reverse. “I’ll back up, shall I?”

  It was very important that Michael do this, Mallory told him on the return drive. By diverting Fraulein Luxe’s attention and managing to stay at her side for one week in February, Michael might save the lives of twenty people…a dozen…five or six, but at least the Inner Ring would not be, so to speak, thrown to the wolves.

  The German Army was reeling back from the Ardennes in the aftermath of Operation Wacht Am Rh
ein, Mallory said. Divisions would be refitting, restaffing and waiting for further orders. There would be some confusion to take advantage of. This mission involved no parachute jump, just a truck trip in the company of British commandos and a river to be crossed at night by rubber raft. On the other side would be some soldiers of the Inner Ring, to get him into Berlin by staff car. He would have a solid identity, papers made up by someone who made real papers, and a safe house to go to if things went wrong. He would be contacted as when to end the mission, and leave the same way. What made him so valuable was that he knew his way around Berlin.

  And around and around, Michael thought, recalling a certain train trip he’d taken there on his last visit. “All measured out,” Michael said as they neared the house. “So simple, in theory. I understand the capture of the bridge at Arnhem was also a simple theory.” He expected no response on that one, and got none. “How am I supposed to meet Franziska Luxe?”

  “I said the German Army was reeling back, and there’s confusion to be used in our favor. I said nothing about the end of parties and merrimaking in Berlin, did I?”

  Michael nodded. They would carry on their parties in Berlin until their world was on the verge of destruction. Then, if the Russian tanks rolled into what was left of that city before the Americans or British got there, it would be a party in a vast blood-drenched boneyard. Even the remaining members of the Inner Ring would be crushed beneath the treads…if any still remained by then.

  “Can I count on you?” Mallory asked as he stopped the car. It was a polite question, from one gentleman to another.

  Michael took the briefcase, and got out.

  A river to be crossed, he thought. And leave the same way.

  But it occurred to him that no river could be crossed twice by the same man, because the river was never exactly the same, and neither would be the man.

  Two

  The Hunter Who Lives In The Woods