She grabbed onto a jutting rock and pulled herself up onto her elbow to improve her view. To the east lay a limitless horizon, the light falling through cloud banks far out to sea.
She figured it for the Baltic. The water was as gray as she had seen the Baltic get in winter. It certainly was cold enough for the Baltic. Where was she really? She knew only that she wasn’t dead. Everything else was negotiable.
She heard a truck whining through the low gears as it made its way up a two-lane highway a hundred yards to the south. She saw the buff-colored camouflage and the black cross on the door. She froze. The truck continued on, ignoring her. It topped the rise and was lit by a blaze of late-afternoon sun.
She started to slide down the hill, past the rock that had given her purchase. She reached out a hand and grabbed a thick chunk of root covered with an oddly tough and springy bark. She held on, barely breathing till the truck disappeared.
Only then did Susan glance up at her handhold. It turned out not to be part of a tree after all, but a boot, poking straight up from the side of the hill. Susan jerked her hand away, started to slide down a long slope toward the sea. She grabbed on again. Nobody complained.
Whoever was inside that boot had been inserted, headfirst, into the solid bedrock of the island. The leg poked straight out. Another one shot up next to it.
Carefully, she managed to climb. A few feet up the hill, an elbow rose up from the gravel, as if someone were swimming from the road to the mountain peak just above her head.
A tank barrel stuck out of the crest of the mountain. Beside it rose an aircraft wing. She guessed by the shape that it was an FW-190.
She knew where she was—this was a staging area. She had found the other end of the pipeline that stretched clear back to the warehouses on the docks of Kiel. The half-buried soldiers, and pilots, and tank drivers that littered this expanse of blonde rock had made injudicious travel arrangements, and paid the price.
A second truck hit the bottom of the incline. Susan watched from behind an aircraft wing as it bounced past.
This was a smaller vehicle, opened in the back. Two soldiers held something that looked like a limp bag of laundry.
They were shaking it. They were making facetious gestures about tossing it off the back of the truck. One of them made a pistol with his hand and jerked an imaginary shot at it—ka-pow. Susan looked closer. They were tossing around Charley Shrieve.
She didn’t believe it at first. She thought maybe it was some dead German soldier they had dug up for proper burial, but no, the guy wasn’t dead. He was unconscious. They were watching him too closely for the man to be dead.
She thought maybe it was Malmagden. But Charley Shrieve’s slumping dignity had become something familiar to her in the last few days. Bad eyesight or not, she couldn’t miss him.
Susan darted from airplane wing, to tank turret, to boulder, keeping Charley in sight. When the truck passed over the horizon, she broke from her cover and sprinted to the crest of the mountain.
The road turned down; the truck bumped along until it disappeared into the great expanse of some giant factory, spread out over the western side of the island.
The evening sun gleamed off giant cubes built of open steel girders, strung with red lights that painted the ground with a dim, sulfurous glow. A chain-link fence followed the road right up to the crest of the hill. A sign bolted into the fence referred to the place as “Vergeltungswerke #16”: The Reprisal Works. If Studebaker were in the apocalypse business, this is where they would be.
She realized she had arrived at Das Unternehmen.
She pushed herself up on wavering legs to try and take the whole of the place in. She couldn’t from here. V-Werke #16 was a whole great necropolis of open-girdered structures, smokestacks, and elevated railroads. It covered the western face of the island right down to the waterline. The only way she was going to find Charley in this place was to walk through the gate.
There was a thought to dry her throat.
She slid back down the mountain. Ten minutes of hunting among the forest of half-buried soldiers, she found an Einsatzgruppe technician named Berghoff, not so fresh as to be gamy, not buried so long that his uniform looked weather-beaten.
She changed quickly and made her way down to the fence. She had no idea what she would say if anyone stopped her at the gate. She didn’t want to rely on her ability to lie her way into a place like this. Even here on an island in the middle of the Baltic, they’d be suspicious. She tucked her hair up under Berghoff’s cap; even then she wasn’t sure she could pass for a man.
A truck full of aviation fuel rumbled past, on its way to the hangar down the road. It occurred to her she might hijack a truck. How hard could it be? Wait until somebody slowed down, swing up on the running board, and jam a gun in their neck. Berghoff had obliged her with a P-08 Luger. Who could say? The gun might still work. It looked scary.