Five Past Midnight - James Thayer [63]
"Really?" Enge blurted. "We can go free?"
"Walk back the way you came."
The sergeant said sourly, "He's going to wait until we are five meters away, then shoot us with your Mauser."
Cray spread his hands in a gesture of reasonableness. "Would I do that?" He started north, his boots splashing puddles of rainwater. He rested the rifle on his shoulder.
Enge followed him. "Our lieutenant is going to murder us for being absent without leave. He's a real bastard."
"That really isn't my concern, Private." Cray picked up his pace.
Enge matched the American step for step. "Well, it's your fault."
"My fault? The whole war is your fault."
"And the SS is shooting soldiers for running away. Maybe some Blackshirts will find Sergeant Keppler and me and shoot us. You'd have that on your conscience."
Cray sighed, something he didn't like to be heard doing. He turned to the private. "What do you want me to do?"
Enge pulled out his flyer of the American commando. "You can write a note to my lieutenant."
"Write him a note?"
Enge nodded earnestly. He pulled a pencil from a front pocket and pushed it and the flyer into Cray's hand.
"Enge, you are a moron," Sergeant Keppler called.
The private turned around to offer his back as a surface for the paper. "Write this: I am the American terrorist whose photo is on this poster. I kidnapped Sergeant Keppler and Private Enge so they were late to return to their duty.'"
Cray transcribed the dictation. "Anything else?"
Enge thought for a moment. "They acted honorably and bravely, especially Private Enge."
Cray added the sentence. "Anything else?"
Enge pursed his lips. "How is the lieutenant going to know it was really you who signed this?"
Cray offered, "I'll add something about the Vassy Chateau that very few people know, that you couldn't know."
"Like what?"
Cray scratched his chin. "The third soldier I killed had a white patch over one eye. How's that?"
"Perfect."
Cray finished the note, signed his name, then passed the flyer back to Private Enge.
Enge grinned his thanks before trotting back toward Sergeant Keppler.
"The Russians will overrun this place someday soon," Cray called. "Don't let them kill you, Private."
Enge cackled victoriously as he rejoined his sergeant. "If you couldn't kill me, neither can the Russians."
Cray resumed his walk north. "No, probably not."
8
THE WEIGHT of the message slowed her, seemed to be a yoke around her shoulders, and she had to will her legs to carry on. She could feel her heart in her chest. Katrin von Tornitz suspected she was a coward.
She had yet to decode the message, but its length terrified her. She had transcribed the dots and dashes, and toward the end of the message her hands had been shaking so badly she could hardly keep the dots from being dashes. She had come to calling the faceless sender of the messages the Hand, and the Hand was asking her to break its own rule about her making long broadcasts because the information it had wanted had then taken five minutes to send. She had signed off with her Vs and fled the ruins of the abandoned house a kilometer from her own home, and now walked in the darkness of Berlin's Nikolassee neighborhood, carrying the radio in her suitcase.
Night covered the neighborhood. Streetlights were out, blackout curtains hid windows, and the few automobiles on the road had tape over their headlights that allowed only thin beams of light. Katrin made her way along the street, stepping over small, stray branches of oaks and elms that had been cut down for firewood. A slight scent of smoke hung in the air, but she could not tell if it was from her neighbors' fireplaces or from that day's bombing runs in the eastern part of the city.
When she passed the home of Gauleiter Eckardt, the smell of pastry made her slow, made her glance up the brick walkway to the door. The gauleiter had an inexhaustible supply of food because he controlled the city's warehouses. The day after Adam's arrest, Eckardt had appeared on her doorstep offering