The Hunter From the Woods

by Robert R. McCammon

  “It’s a meeting to make plans, that’s all. Now I’ve said enough about that, and you’ve asked enough questions.” A hint of frost was creeping into her voice. “Honestly,” she said, as if scolding a schoolboy. She finished dressing in silence, putting on her mink coat, her long red leather gloves and getting her handbag, and Michael let her alone.

  When Franziska was ready to go, Michael unlocked the door for her. Before he could turn the cut-glass knob, she placed her hand on his.

  “I am never unprofessional,” she said. “Not when I’m working. Or…when I’m involved in a project. We won’t talk about this anymore.” It was a statement not to be challenged. Her face softened, and with it her voice. “If you’ll be downstairs in front of the hotel at ten-thirty, I’ll come for you.”

  “In public?” he asked.

  A naughty little laugh wanted so much to spring from her mouth. A muscle in her jaw moved to clench it shut, but her eyes were sparkling. “You,” she said, “are part gentleman and all beast.” The way she said it, that put him far ahead of other men she knew. She pushed him playfully on the chest, and then she opened the door for herself, went out into the hallway and closed the door behind her.

  One of the hardest things he’d ever done was not open the door and watch her walk away, heading for the staircase since the elevator wasn’t working due to the lack of lubricating fluids for the motor. He lay on the bed for awhile, but it smelled too much like her. He got up and in the bathroom splashed cold water in his face. The bathroom, too, was heady with her fragrance. She was even still in his own freshly-washed skin and hair. He would have to cut his nose off if he wanted to be rid of her.

  A rather nasty female Nazi, he remembered saying to Mallory.

  Well, she was.

  He’d done his damnedest, but he hadn’t stopped her from going to see Rittenkrett. Maybe he was responsible for the meeting being cut short, as she put it, but that didn’t mean some member of the Inner Ring might not be picked up tonight. Her invaluable communication skills, Rittenkrett had said. New clients on the list. Did that mean she was inserting herself into having affairs with suspected members of the Ring to get information? So she might not be a whore for a single German officer, but she was indeed a whore for the entire Third Reich?

  Oh my God, he suddenly thought with a startle.

  Michael, old chap. Jealous just a little bit, are we?

  He decided to take another shower, and the colder the better.

  Six

  Why Scout Cars Aren’t Silver

  It was Michael’s intention to be a few minutes late striding out onto the Kleiststrasse, in front of the hotel, yet he found himself leaving the Grand Frederik a few minutes early.

  He wore his perfect counterfeit uniform, his cap and boots, a feld-grau overcoat and black leather gloves. It was a chilly morning, though the sky was blue and the sun bright. A breeze moved past him, ruffling his coat and bringing to him the smell of the state of affairs in Berlin, and most likely the pungent aroma of its future. Smoke stained the eastern horizon, reddish in hue. He could smell scorched bricks, burned lumber and the odors of the dust of centuries spun up from the ancient cellars when the bomb-blasted buildings crashed down. True, Berlin was a massive city and there were scores of large buildings remaining, but it was now a town of targets. From his position he could see at the Berlin Zoo one of the three huge gray concrete flak towers that stood like the stalks of poisonous mushrooms in defense of Berlin. They were medieval in design, like Barbarossian castles, suitable to shelter ten thousand civilians and topped with a Hell’s garden of flak cannons. Still, the larger the flak towers and cannons, the bigger the bombers and more deadly the rain. It was just a matter of time.

  And his thoughts on that subject came to an end when a sleek silver Bayerische Motoren Werke 328 sports roadster slid out of the trickle of elderly black cars and cloak-wrapped citizens on bicycles and stopped with a polite growl in front of him.

  It was a convertible, the top was down, and Franziska Luxe sat behind the wheel with a gray woolen cap pulled jauntily over her hair and green-tinted pilot’s goggles on her face, though the glass windshield was up both for driver and passenger.

  “Ah!” Michael said, in appreciation of her machine and of her promptness. He smiled at her smile. “In the style of the Silver Arrows?”

  “Exactly. Get in, I’ll take you for a ride.”

  How could he not accept such an offer?

  It was a tight squeeze. A car with a Grand Prix pedigree was not necessarily built for a man his size. Even for that, he felt it was the type of car one might need to be strapped into, because he saw on the speedometer the top marking of one-hundred-and-fifty kilometers per hour. Then Franziska put the white-knobbed gearshift into First, tapped the accelerator and they were off along the Kleiststrasse like a silver swan amid the waddling, somber geese.

  He was glad she had the good sense to be wearing a fawn-colored overcoat and brown driving gloves. She kept increasing the speed, shifting through the gears with an expert hand. Michael remembered driver of racing cars from his briefing about her.

  Franziska whipped to the right on Motzstrasse, crossing over the tram tracks and ignoring the shout of a traffic warden to slow down. A whistle was blown, which caused Franziska to shrug her shoulders and grin into the wind. Her foot descended on the accelerator again, Michael held his breath as they passed through a flurry of bicyclists, and they sped along toward the southwest.

  “Your car?” he asked. “Or a friend’s?”

  “Mine, all mine,” she answered, as she cut around a fat-assed sedan that flew a Nazi flag from an aerial on its roof and looked terrifyingly important. But it was left behind when she made a quick right onto the broad boulevard of the Hohenzollerndamm. “I was part of the Grand Prix Mercedes-Benz team in ’39,” she explained. “This was as close as I could get to a Silver Arrow for the road.”

  Michael nodded. The story was that in 1934, prior to a Grand Prix race at the Nurburgring, a competing Mercedes tested one kilogram over the limit on the weight scales, so the racing manager and driver at that time removed all the white paint from the car to lose the offending kilo. The next day, the shining silver car won the race, and a legend was born. Between 1934 and 1939, all the great German racing cars of Mercedes-Benz and Auto Union were bare silver, and all were referred to as ‘Silver Arrows’.

  Franziska and Michael arrowed along through the city, at one intersection causing a horse drawing a coal wagon to rear up in angry defiance of the 20th century.

  “My studio’s over there,” she said, pointing to a concentration of gable-roofed buildings to the right. Not a minute afterward, she turned off the avenue and began a twisty-curvy tour that took them across cobblestoned streets not suited for speed, and as Michael had already seen the haze of smoke and dust in the air he knew she was trying to avoid the bombed-out sections.

  It was an impossible task, because there had been so many bombs. Thousands of them, most likely. Rubble and twisted metal were so common in some places here that the unmarked buildings looked strange. Some of the destruction resembled what might have been Axel Rittenkrett’s birthday cake baked to gargantuan size, set on fire and allowed to melt into the street like black tar stubbled with fist-sized nuggets of cemented sugar. Buildings leaned against each other like drunken buddies, their faces full of cracks. Seas of broken glass glittered before the roadster’s tires, but in this area of Berlin Franziska was always twisting and turning the wheel, getting out of danger an instant before it got to her, avoiding the shattered bricks of buildings cleaved down the center so all the burned-up entrails showed, avoiding the dusty rag people with wheelbarrows who searched through the cratered wreckage, and avoiding the roaming packs of dogs that used to be household pets and now had no masters but Fate.

  She didn’t speak while they were driving through or around these sections, and neither did Michael. He wanted to ask her how she was getting the fuel and oil to operate this buggy, sin
ce for every car he saw there were a half-dozen wagons and a dozen more bicycles, but he decided it was not a prudent question.

  The clusters of buildings thinned to outskirts. Suddenly they came upon a checkpoint with a lowered gate and four soldiers with machine guns. Michael’s gut clenched, even as he returned the salute the soldiers gave him. Franziska showed one of the men a small booklet with a yellow cover stamped by the Nazi swastika. He opened it briefly to look at something—a special permission to come and go, Michael assumed—and then the booklet was returned to her, the gate opened and the 328 shot through onto what Michael realized was the Fuhrer’s pride, the Reichsautobahn.

  It was four lanes of white concrete separated by a grassy median about five meters wide. It stretched on across the rolling winter-brown landscape like a ski trail, which Michael thought touched two of Franziska’s interests, both involving speed. As far as he could see, and he could see very far, today the Reichsautobahn belonged to her and her alone.

  She had the BMW in fourth gear, her mouth was grinning below the goggles and the elegant Roman nose, the engine roared and the speedometer’s red needle was climbing rapidly toward that one-hundred-and-fifty mark.

  “Do you like to go fast?” she shouted to him against the wind.

  “I do,” he answered. “When do we start?”

  She gave him a quick elbow in the ribs. He grasped his cap to keep it from flying away.

  They went into curves that Michael was certain they could never take at this speed, yet they were kept on the concrete by Franziska’s undeniable skill with the clutch, gearshift and quick taps of the brake. They hurtled onward. The smells of engine oil, grease and hot metal washed back through the cockpit. The engine noise was nothing short of apocalyptic. Michael had been in speeding aircraft before, yes, but never in a road rocket. The winter trees on either side blurred together. Now the BMW came out of a curve onto a straightaway, and as the engine screamed impossibly louder Michael looked at the speedometer and figured that at this rate they’d be in Amsterdam by early afternoon.

  There was an idea, he thought. Just drive all the way to the American or British lines, turn her over to the first officer he saw, and there would be no more rivers to cross. She would be spared from the oncoming and unstoppable horde, in spite of herself.

  He wondered if she kept a pistol in the glovebox, and if it would be loaded. But he felt that even at gunpoint she might fly this machine off into the woods, and it was a ridiculous thought anyway because there would be many checkpoints ahead just for the reason that Hitler wanted no capitulation with the Allies on the western front.

  “You’re very quiet!” she shouted after a few more minutes of racing along the perfectly-smooth roadway.

  “I’m enjoying the ride!” he shouted back, which was absolutely true. He expected she’d be turning back before long. He intended to ask her where he might take her to lunch, and after that he would say he wanted to see her studio and maybe this afternoon, if she was willing, to get the photographs done. After that, if she was willing…

  His reverie on matters of the bedroom was interrupted by a quick glint of metal.

  Up in the sky, at about the two o’clock position.

  He looked for it again. They were going down into a small decline. The hills and trees obscured his vision on the right. Then they curved to the left and started upward once more, and at the top of the rise the pair of aircraft, one following off to the side of the other, shrieked about fifty feet above their heads with a noise that enfeebled the 328’s husky voice.

  The car briefly slewed from side to side until Franziska got full control again. She glanced back over her shoulder, and Michael’s head also swivelled.

  They both knew their aircraft. The two planes were P51 Mustangs, bright silver as the BMW, and marked with American stars. Michael saw that the aircraft in the rear position, the wingman he thought that would be, carried four air-to-ground rockets. As Franziska returned her attention to the roadway and her fingers tightened on the wheel, Michael saw the two planes began to turn to the right.

  His heart had given a lurch. He leaned toward her and said as calmly as his voice would allow, “I think we’d better get off this—” Road, he was about to say, for obvious reasons, but already the first Mustang was straightening out and coming in for the kill.

  Sparkles of fire erupted from the leading edges of both wings.

  He imagined the fighter jocks had been train-hunting today, and maybe one had already used its rockets to knock a locomotive off the rails. In any case, the little silver roadster with two Nazis in it was just too good a target for a trigger-happy Yank to pass up.

  In the next instant the Browning machine gun bullets began to march in rows across the other side of the Reichsautobahn, on a collision course with the BMW. Michael nearly reached out to grab the wheel, but Franziska hit the brake. The car skidded in the smoke of burning rubber. The section of roadway it would have passed over if she’d kept up the speed was torn into pieces of flying concrete that thunked into the hood, smashed the windshield in front of Michael’s face and passed over their heads almost as deadly as the slugs.

  The carefree girl was gone. She whipped the wheel around and downshifted as she punched the accelerator again and the BMW fishtailed and spun in a circle that left a perfect O of black rubber. The second Mustang flashed over their heads.

  “Hang on!” Franziska shouted.

  He surely wasn’t going to get out and walk. The 328 seemed to pause for a few precious seconds even though the accelerator was pressed to the floorboards, and then it gave what was nearly a forward leap that rocked Michael’s head back and cracked his teeth together. When he got his neck working again and looked over his shoulder he saw the two angels of death turning for another pass.

  Franziska didn’t look. She just drove, now jinking the BMW to left and right, refusing to give the planes an easy target. Berlin, and its flak towers, was more than ten kilometers distant. Michael thought he should be pleased at this development of Allied fighters seeking kills on the edge of Berlin in broad daylight, but somehow he was not so pleased.

  Another burst of bullets tore across the concrete and median in front of them, and then Michael heard a whoosh and felt something scorching hot pass seemingly right behind his neck. Over on the right, trees blew out of the ground, a geyser of dirt exploded and small things on fire began to run wildly across the hillside. Michael could imagine the radio chatter: Direct hit today on a rabbit burrow, flight leader.

  Franziska was nearly standing on the accelerator.

  The two planes roared over them, marking them with their shadows, and again made a circle.

  It had already gone through Michael’s mind that she should get off the roadway and make for the woods, but he understood why she didn’t. In this case, speed was life. The car’s silver gleam would not be hidden by leafless limbs. The only chance they had, if indeed it was a chance at all, was to outrun both bullets and rockets. One advantage owned by Franziska: the fighter pilots were used to attacking trains, tanks and trucks, which moved considerably slower and more predictably than the small quick 328.

  To emphasize that point, Franziska suddenly swerved the wheel to the right and they crossed the median onto the other pair of lanes. Two rows of Browning bullets rushed after them but were late to catch their target, and so pocked the concrete and threw up plumes of dirt in the median. The first Mustang zoomed over their heads, but the second had eased back on the throttle and Michael knew the pilot was lining up a shot. Franziska knew it too; she hit the brake, violently downshifted and fought the wheel to veer again over the median to the other side. Heat waves shimmered past the car, there were two bright flashes and a black-edged crater suddenly marred Hitler’s highway. Chunks of concrete crashed down, but the BMW was already racing out of the next curve.

  Michael lost sight of the planes. An onrush of panic seized him. He twisted around, and there directly behind them the Mustangs were coming down side-by-sid
e, like vultures, almost floating toward them. Taking their time, he thought. Waiting for Franziska to commit to a move. Where was the Luftwaffe, for Christ’s sake? Closer still came the Mustangs, and lower.

  It was just a matter of seconds now before the machine guns started firing and the last rocket ignited. The Mustangs were nearly wingtip-to-wingtip. Michael had the feeling they were going to let go at the same time with everything they had, and it was probably going to happen when the BMW started up the slight incline that was just ahead.

  He sensed her trying to decide what to do. Over the noise of the wind they heard the low roar of the Mustangs right at their backs. She decided, and he saw her grasp the gear knob to shift down. She was going to stomp the brake and make the Mustangs overshoot.

  Michael had had enough of playing with death. He made his own decision. He reached out and pulled the cap off Franziska’s head, letting the ebony hair boil out and stretch behind her like a banner. She looked at him from the green-tinted goggles as if she thought he’d gone stark raving mad.

  The flesh on the back of Michael’s neck crawled. Time seemed to hang, even at one-hundred-fifty kilometers per hour.

  The two Mustangs passed overhead, still side-by-side. Picking up speed, they waggled their wings. Then they turned to the right, and Michael watched them as they flashed away, silver-bright and shining, toward the west.

  “It’s all right!” he shouted, the wind in his face through the broken glass. “They’ve gone!”

  “They’ve gone? How do you know?” Her voice was admirably controlled, but he could see that her eyes were wet. “And what was that with my cap?”

  “I decided that no fighter pilot worth his wings,” he said, “would kill a woman in a sports roadster. But they had to see you were a woman.” He thought the waggling of the wings was the same unspoken message that the Luftwaffe captain had given him at the party last night: good luck.