"What was that?" The voice came from far above.
"What?"
"I thought I saw a light!"
He waited. The headlamps above had paused.
"I don't see anything."
"You're spooked," someone growled. "Come on, let's get out of this pit." It was Hans, the pilot guessed. "I'd feel safer on the Russian Front." The lights began moving again, Hart following as he heard them shouting instructions to each other to belay their heavy packs.
Finally the lamps began to wink out: the Germans had reached the steep tunnel at the top of the chimney that would take them to the outside and were slowly climbing into it. He waited a moment until the last one disappeared and then gratefully flicked his own headlamp on, momentarily half blinded. One more rope to go! He still had a chance! The damn Nazis would have to pause at the top exit to set further charges. He'd catch them there.
With his light on he could move faster. He'd never worked so hard in his life, lungs aching, muscle fiber screaming. Up, up, up. The dread of being trapped in the mountain electrified him. Somehow, he would get to Greta, take the food, say goodbye...
"Goddamn!"
The oath made Hart jerk in alarm. There was a bang and a bullet whined off the face of the shaft, the pilot instinctively ducking his head. Then another, closer this time. He switched off his lamp.
"What is it?"
"The American! He's following us up the rope!" Another shot.
"What! Impossible! Cut the line, cut the line!"
"No, wait! I think I can hit him..."
Another bullet slammed inches above the pilot's head. Owen planted his boots on a ledge and hugged the cliff face, trying to melt into it. More shots, wilder this time in the dark. Then a headlamp beam was dancing as it tried to find him.
"There he is!"
Hart froze in the illumination.
"I've got him..."
The rope went slack.
"No!"
Hart clutched the cliff.
"Jesussss... !" The cry above dissolved into a scream and the headlamp beam began revolving. One of the Germans had cut the line while the shooter was still hanging on it. The rope slithered down past Hart, its end slapping him in the face, and the gunman hurtled by at the same time, his body cleaving the air, his wild screams echoing and reechoing as his light tumbled down into the pit. There was a sickening thud, far below, and the lamp went out.
"God in heaven! What happened?"
"It was Oscar! He went back down the rope, you fucking idiot!"
A moment of silence. Then, "Where's Hart?"
"How the hell do I know?"
"If you'd just shot him at the bottom like I told you— "
"Shut up. I'm going back down to look for him."
"No! There's no rope!" A pause. "He can't follow us."
"Maybe. Come here." The voices grew quieter. Were they climbing again?
Hart was trembling, afraid his fear would shiver him right off the cliff. There was nothing to do for it but struggle upward. He risked his light, tensing for a gunshot, and then, when no bullet came, picked out handholds he'd used before. Amazing what the brain remembered! So he climbed like a man possessed, his gaze fixed on the tunnel hole at the ceiling. His lamp was growing faint, his muscles trembling, his mind screaming at itself not to think about the hundreds of feet of yawning blackness below. And then at last he was at the tunnel too, jamming his exhausted arms and kicking his way upward, his breath coming in gasps, sweat stinging his eyes. He switched off his lamp to disguise his success and crawled hard up the lava tunnel. Time. Time! Soon they'd be setting the last charges. As he crawled upward, sometimes banging painfully into unyielding rock, he tried to listen for sounds of the Germans ahead. Silence. Were they simply out-running him?
Suddenly light blazed and he was squinting into the glare of a headlamp. Hans was filling the tunnel ahead with his giant's body, his head uphill, grinning at Hart over the cocked readiness of his upraised knees. "Now we fight one last time, yes?" the German greeted. Then he lashed out with his boots.
Hart reared back, the leather missing his nose by the width of a sole. The pilot skidded downward into safer shadows, braced, and yelled. "Too slow, you Nazi gorilla!"
"Come here, Hart! Fight like a man, you coward!"
Owen reviewed his mental map of where they were. Switching on his lamp for an instant he spied a side tunnel. He turned the light off and writhed into it.
"You kick like a girl, Hans! You fight like your mother!"
Cursing, the German fired. A pistol bullet whined off the rocks. Then more shots, an angry fusillade more to vent anger than hit anything. He heard the click of a fresh clip being slipped into the gun. "Hart!" The pilot was silent. Hans worked down the tunnel after him. Owen waited.
"Hart?"
There was silence.
"Hart, where are you?"
Cautious now, his gun out, the German slid past the side tunnel, dropping toward the junction of tube and chimney.
"Hart? Did I get you, yellow man?"
The pilot pushed off into the main tube and dropped toward the German. Hans twisted with a curse, trying to bring his gun around in the restricting tube, but before he could get his arm free Owen struck with his own boot, catching the storm trooper on the nose. The man howled and slipped toward the abyss, his vision blurred by his own blood. The gun skittered out from under him.
"Boots hurt, don't they?" the American growled.
Hans had jammed himself into the tube at the lip of the chimney, his legs kicking in empty air as he arrested his fall. "You
bastard!
" he roared. "I'm going to
choke
the life out of you! I'm going to squeeze until you
beg!
"
"Fuck you, Hans." Owen braced himself uphill from the German and pulled on a loose rock, yanking it free and shoving it downward as hard as he could. The exertion cost him his own grip and he slid after the small boulder as it banged down toward the storm trooper. Hans instinctively put out his arms to protect his face, a fatal error. He lost his grip on the tunnel.
"Shit!"
There was a thud as the boulder hit, a howl of outrage, and a rattle of loosened rocks. Then Hans's light disappeared. He was gone.
Hart thrust out his own arms and legs to brake himself at the edge of the chimney and skidded to a stop, listening in horrified fascination to the long, trailing scream. Then it stopped abruptly, the sound dying in its own echoes.
Two down, one to go.
Panting, the pilot began climbing again, yanking away the route-marking ribbons he'd left on their initial descent.
When he neared the surface he switched off his light and crept ahead cautiously. Had the remaining Nazi simply set the charges and fled? Hart almost hoped so. He was too exhausted for a fight. He debated, sweating.
Then he risked a shout. "Rudolf!" The yell echoed through the cave.
"Hart?" The voice was wary.
Owen tightened his voice as if he was in pain. "It's Hans. Hart hurt me, but I got him! Help!"
"Hans?"
"Help me, dammit! I can't climb out! I lost my light!"
There was an uneasy silence. Then a scraping as the German began to slowly descend. "I'm coming!" He added a cautious warning. "I have a gun!"
"For God's sake don't shoot!" Hart slipped down into a side tunnel he'd explored earlier. "Help me! I'm bleeding!"
"Try to climb up, Hans! We have to hurry! The timers are set!"
"Please! It hurts!"
"Fuck." The German scrabbled lower. His light began to glow on the tube walls.
Hart retreated into the side tunnel. "In here!"
There was a splash of light. Bristle-Head followed, swearing. "It's too tight! What are you doing in here?"
"I'm lost!" Hart groaned. "Hurry!"
Then he dropped quickly and silently to the main tube and began to double back toward the surface.
"Hans! Where are you? Hans?"
Quickly now, very quickly.
"Christ! The markers are all gone! Hans?" Silence. "Where the hell are you?"
Time. How much time?
Realization dawned. "Hart! Hart, you son of a bitch!" Bristle-Head began to climb back. "A dead end! Where are the damn markers? Hart, you sneaking bastard..."
Owen switched his lamp on to hurry. Bristle-Head must have seen its receding glow because another shot rang out far below him, its energy consumed by ricochet.
"Hart... !"
The pilot staggered into the small, sandy-floored room at the cave mouth. His battery was nearly exhausted, its light duller than a candle. In the feeble gleam and the pale light from the nearby entrance he saw explosives wired as before. Behind and below he could hear the German swearing furiously as he tried to find his way up the cave. The pilot looked at the timers. Eleven minutes. Too long. Taking a breath, he shoved the minute hand on the dial to one, praying he hadn't disrupted its mechanism. "Time's up, Rudolf," he whispered.
He hurtled forward on hands and knees toward the low slit of the cave opening, clawing for its brightness. His head popped out into the shock of Antarctic cold and he rolled out onto the shelf and over its lip to the snow below, landing with a thud and digging in with fingers and toes to arrest his slide. Then he pressed his face into the slush and waited.
The flank of the mountain heaved.
There was a roar and a fountain of rock debris made an arcing plume from the cave entrance. The fragments sailed over the pilot's head and spattered onto the cone far below Hart's position. He could hear the grinding collapse of rock inside the mountain.
Was it over?
Then there was an ominous rumble, outside this time. He lifted his head. Beyond the haze of smoke and dust at the collapsed tube's mouth, farther upslope, a slice of snow had sheared away and was avalanching downward like an advancing wave. Hart staggered upward to the basalt outcrop and threw himself at its toe. Thundering snow blasted over his head and crashed onto the slope where he'd lain moments before, churning like a threshing machine, eating space. He pressed himself into the outcrop. Then the avalanche guttered out on the slopes below and the mountain's quivering stopped. Sound growled away.
Numb, he stood up. The cave was gone, erased by a smear of rock. He was alone and the world was still.
Turning, he looked out over the immensity of Antarctica. A clean sharp wind snapped at his filthy clothes. The cove far below still beckoned.
He took a deep breath. It was time to get back to Greta.
The
U-4501
was quiet again, most of its crew asleep. It was dark outside and the submarine rocked slightly in a rising wind, waves splashing against the side of the boat. Greta sat on her bunk, impatient and angry. Owen should be back by now with the men from the cave. Had Jürgen betrayed them? She felt with her heels under her bed. Instead of one crammed pack there were now two, filled with food she'd quietly stolen from the Antarctic stores, as well as some rope and twine.
She'd made a decision. If God granted her wish and she saw Owen again, she was going to go with him. She'd begun seeing her situation with unusual clarity since that morning's conversation with Schmidt. She now knew— if, indeed, she'd ever doubted it— that she lived in a dark world of betrayal. If she remained in the sub, sailed home with Jürgen, the darkness would only deepen. Jürgen would continue his power over her, keep her around as a witness to his bizarre schemes. So hopeless. So crazy. The unspeakable misery they'd cause.
Contemplating her future, the only light she saw was Owen. She was enough of a realist to realize the light would be brief, that two people couldn't survive the small-boat ocean crossing he hoped to attempt. But at the moment of her death, there would be a certain satisfaction. She would know that, even if she hadn't
lived
her life well, she'd
ended
it well, with the man she loved.
To hide her preparation she'd been snarling at anyone who so much as bumped her cubicle curtain, claiming a right of privacy as a female. It had the desired effect, the sailors giving her a wide berth. Now she could only wait. Where
was
he? Restless, she got up to confront her husband.
Schmidt met her in the corridor before she could reach a ladder, carrying a sturdy metal tank the size of a large sausage.
"Another safe for your microbes, Max?" she asked caustically.
"For your antibiotic, actually. The drug powder should fit in this gas cylinder, the toughest container I could find. In case we're attacked again on the way home."
"Ah. Well, in that case the lab cultures you made from the spores need to be boxed or destroyed too. We can't risk them breaking."
"Yes, but I'm experimenting with growth variables. One colony is really exploding! I should be able to use these findings to accelerate production when we reach Germany. I want to give them as much time as I can. Don't worry. I'll see to the cultures before departure."
She looked at him doubtfully. "You've already hidden your spores from me. Don't take foolish risks with the ones you've hatched and grown."
"No risk, Frau Drexler. We doctors respect disease."
She bit her lip at that and gestured down the corridor. "Is Jürgen in his quarters?"
"No, on deck, preparing to go ashore. The last soldiers haven't returned from the cave. He's leading a search party."
She started, looking dismayed. "Did something go wrong?"
"Who knows?" Schmidt smiled at her weakness for the pilot. "That's what he's checking."
Greta put on her parka and climbed to the deck. It was very dark and the strength of the wind caught her by surprise. She had so little sense of the elements inside the submarine. The sky was like a tattered sail, streamers of cloud blowing past the stars. A storm was building and the realization dismayed her. Would nothing favor them?
The motor launch was alongside, bumping against the hull as Jürgen's search party of storm troopers boarded by the illumination of flashlights. She walked along the wet deck, whipped by spray.
"Going for more microbe spores?"