Screams echoed across the glass. They quickly dwindled under the onslaught to a single, aspirated cry. And then a final, sustained round of gunfire—one pistol: crack, crack, crack.
Susan counted three more shots, six in all. She couldn’t help counting.
When the time came for whoever was out there and the monster was on him, she heard the seventh.
She thought of Malmagden. “Where is he?” she wondered aloud.
“Forget about him,” Charley told her. “The only way he got out of here was playing a harp.”
But Susan wasn’t so sure. Malmagden knew the angles and the planes and all the formulae between Yr and Nhhngr. All he needed was a moment alone, something to draw with.
She quick-glanced out a shattered window that had been upended toward the sky. She saw him—he was stepping into an Angle Web in the ground just as the creature came back for him. It circled him the way a dog worries at a trapped rodent. But Malmagden was taking his leave. He turned to the light, smiled his lazy, charming smile at her and then was consumed by azure flames.
The creature bellowed and raked the ground where Malmagden had stood, dragging bodies and machine guns back and forth as it dug.
Susan thought about getting off this glass. But the nearest cover was a hundred yards east of here, under moonlight. They stayed with the train. The bellowing and destruction grew distant. At some point it may have passed on into dream. She woke up on Charley’s shoulder. Dawn light slanted across the glass.
“You smell like gasolne,” Charley said. At 5:30 in the morning, this seemed the sweetest endearment ever whispered in her ear. Who can say why?
A path of charred earth and glass, thirty feet wide, crossed the crater floor, from the Soviet camp and on over the rim, into a dense wall of trees beyond the open northern end of Faulkenberg Tal.
They followed it back to the Russian camp. Everywhere were signs of desperate battle. Shell casings clicked and crunched under their shoes as they re-entered the perimeter. The giant fire at the center of the crater now lay scattered into guttering embers. Small pits from hand grenades dug the ground all around it.
The only thing missing were the people. Impressions of bodies were everywhere, crushed through the glazed sand and into the rocky soil; their legs and arms were bent at excruciating angles.
But no bodies—no bodies, no drag marks, no blood.
She cast about for the place where Malmagden had made his exit, but everything looked different in the daylight.
Charley silently watched her awhile. He shook his head to himself. Eventually, he said, “Don’t do this to yourself. We’ll find him later. He’s not getting away unpunished.”
But vengeance was the last thing on her mind. She was thinking about Das Unternehmen. Only two men knew enough to stop it—Carl Leder and Krzysztof Malmagden. And only Malmagden was sane.
This seemed like a lot to explain at 5:30 the morning after a massacre. She just kept searching.
She found it at last. The Angle Web had been drawn in a hollow left by a Russian hand grenade. The sun was coming on and the Web faded every place the long morning rays slanted through. Only a bit of it glimmered at the bottom of the crater.
“Here.” She pulled Charley over to see. “This is where Malmagden went.”
It flared briefly to life beneath his shadow.
“Can you read it? Can you tell the location?”
“He went back to Kiel,” she realized as she spoke. “He’s waiting for us there.”
Charley frowned at her. “You can read that much?”
Not really, no. She didn’t base this conclusion on her reading of the Angle Web, but her reading of Malmagden himself.
Malmagden, she realized, was as scared as they were. He hadn’t escaped the creature to go into hiding—there was no place to hide. Malmagden was going ahead of them to track down Jürgen Kriene.
They found the Plymouth turned over on its side. Some corrosive agent had washed over the hood and right front fender. The paint was eaten right through to the bare metal. The chrome trim was a dull orange. The front tire looked soft. Susan wondered if it would hold up, but it did.
They pushed the car onto its wheels, drained their last spare gas can, and rolled up the twisting road out of the valley.
* * *
A godawful creaking sound woke her from her third nap. She placed the sound immediately—they were back in Kiel, in the waterfront district. That creaking, groaning sound in the background, that was the conclusion of the day’s drag race.
She figured it to be about six. Right about now, a couple thousand kids and old people would be dragging the last of somebody’s U-boat out of the shipping channels in the harbor. They’d be getting their pay, maybe a few cans of C-Rations. The thought of food made her mouth water. When had she eaten? She couldn’t think.