But they had miscalculated.
Scale, she realized, is a hard thing to judge without landmarks. Even as Illyenov’s gun crews had dwindled in the smoky distance, the limestone cliffs seemed to grow larger.
The things she had taken for rocks at fifty yards seemed now to be boulders at one hundred. The boulders turned out to be cliffs. Illyenov’s soldiers won their foot race to the limestone wall only to realize that the nearest handhold was beyond their reach.
Susan knew what was coming. She could not look away. Even as Charley turned her toward the camp, she struggled to know their fate.
The smoke was thin that far out. The attack came from nothing more than an eddy in the darkness. It scythed the boys from the wall in a single unhurried stroke. Some turned to face it. Some pulled frantically at the rock above them. Three soldiers at the end were able to run a few yards.
They were gone before their cries arrived in Susan’s ears.
Illyenov paced back and forth. He shook his head to himself in amazement or disbelief. His face was fixed in this monkey smile of rage. Susan had seen commanders like Illyenov before, among the partisan units in Yugoslavia. If they felt privileged to spend the lives of their subordinates, they were also jealous of that privilege.
Even before Illyenov turned back to her, she knew what he wanted.
“You can’t kill Malmagden,” she warned him. “He’s in my custody.”
“Your custody?” He cocked his head at her like a wry uncle. “Tell me, Comrade Foreign Service Officer. If Malmagden is in your custody, where is he?”
Susan heard Charley swearing even before she turned around.
But he couldn’t be gone. She had saved his life just a few moments ago. Damn it, she seethed. He couldn’t be gone.
They stood alone in a circle of empty glass.
Bad enough he had disappeared. But Susan had been the Malmagden expert. She had been witness to all his tricks. This, she suspected, had been the real reason she was along on this ride at all.
Charley spotted movement a hundred yards to the east. They had passed the wreckage of the Güterzug freight locomotive; Malmagden must have been planning his escape since then. She could see him leaning from the shattered boiler as if catching his breath. He was turned toward a cleft at the north end of Faulkenberg Tal. The dam had been there. Perhaps whatever was left made for a traversible incline.
Illyenov picked a Masin-Nagant rifle off the glass. His eyes never left the figure at the train as he ejected a spent round and raised the muzzle.
“We need him,” Susan said. “Malmagden knows what happened up here.”
“Of course he knows what happened up here! Ask your John Dillinger what happened to all those banks. He might have surprising insights as well.”
Susan grabbed at his arm and he shooed her off. She grabbed again. Illyenov spun on her. Suddenly, she was staring down the barrel of his rifle.
“You put pistol on me once already,” he reminded her. “And I did not like that. How personal would you like this to be?”
Susan could not help a feeling of awkwardness. They had just done this a few minutes ago, hadn’t they? Some scenes did not bear repeating.
Charley Shrieve placed his Colt against Illyenov’s temple. To no effect. Illyenov held his eyes steady through his breech sight.
A sound passed beneath them—a pop, and then a squeal of fissuring glass. Illyenov lifted his foot as a fracture slid under it. A second crack came in from the lakeshore, just a little south of the hydroelectric plant.
The smoke was dense out there. It was denser than it had been just a moment before. Or maybe it was simply piling up against the bow shock of some large body coming this way, very fast.
Illyenov lowered his rifle. “You lead a charmed life, Comrade Foreign Service Officer. Perhaps your luck sustains you through next ten minutes.”
He reached into the bag and brought up gasoline bombs for each of them.
“I will kill Malmagden when we are done,” he said in a tone of mild reason. Susan did not bother to dispute this. By the way the glass trembled beneath her feet, she guessed she had moments to live anyway.
“There is an art to throwing gasoline bomb!” The shriek of fracturing glass was so loud that Illyenov had to yell to be heard. “You wait till your target is just within throwing range, and light rag on top. Tip the bottle forward—so. You want to keep the flame away from the bottle without spilling petrol. You want to burn creature, not yourself.”
A spotlight from the western face of the valley swung around to touch the flank of something too large to take in with a single beam. She watched in awe as the spotlight penetrated a gelatinous wall.
She fired into the front of the thing. It flinched slightly. It seemed to become aware of her, so that it tracked her as she moved away. She fired again. The thing moved toward her.