Hunt Beyond the Frozen Fire (13 page)

Gabriel kept at it for what felt like an hour, though he knew it probably was less—it was hard to tell much about the passage of time here. The reddish light streaming down from above remained unchanging, and the only sound was the scrape of bone against rock.

Gabriel wondered what he would find when he finally hauled himself up over the rim of the pit. What if he was too late? Velda might have figured out how to set the coordinates, in which case Berlin might be gone, or all of Germany—who knew what sort of devastation the Nazi doomsday device might be capable of. Or, of course, the machine might no longer work properly after sixty-five years, and might casually destroy the wrong country. Perhaps it had been locked on Washington for so long it would be impossible to redirect it, and when Velda pushed the button…

He shook his head. He couldn’t let himself think about it. He had to clear his mind of everything but the climb. One thing at a time, and right now the one thing that mattered was getting out of this pit.

When Gabriel finally had the bone pieces as sharp and smooth as he wanted, he stood, stretching his arms and shoulders. He felt the pull and sting of every cut and bruise. His calf throbbed where it had been clenched in the unclean jaws of one of the biggest of the shrews, a long-fanged monster that had been murder to pry loose. It was going to be a tough climb and
he was hardly in the best shape for it. But what choice was there? He took in a deep breath, stepped forward, and sank one of the bones into the highest crack he could reach.

Raising his feet off the ground, Gabriel swung by the arm holding the bone wedged into the wall. At the top of the swing, he reached up and planted the second piece of bone about six inches higher than the first. Hauling himself up on the second piece, he pulled the first piece free and swung up to plant it higher. Then he repeated the process. Again and again he pulled out the bones and drove them in higher, sometimes as much as a foot above his previous handhold and other times only a few inches. There were times when he failed to drive the end of the bone into the wall at all and swung back away, returning a moment later for another attempt. His arms were already aching although he’d barely climbed five feet, but he kept on going, scanning the rock wall for cracks and crevices that might admit the bones—and that would hold his weight.

By the time he had made it halfway up the sheer face, his arms and chest were trembling from the effort and he was barely able to pull himself up inch by excruciating inch. Only thoughts of Millie waiting below with his broken ankle and Rue being forced at spear point to work on the plane—and Velda, half mad with grief,
with the lives of millions in her hands—kept Gabriel pressing on. He didn’t look down and barely looked up, concentrating instead on the wall directly in front of him: the next crack, the next handhold. Twelve feet became fifteen; fifteen became twenty. He was less than three feet from the lip when the stones supporting his latest handhold began to crumble.

It began with a faint rain of grit and dirt on his arm; then the terrible feeling of the bone in his hand coming loose. The stone below his fist had a crack running down its face, and as he watched it slowly widened.

Desperately, Gabriel swung the bone in his other hand and jabbed it into the wall just as he lost his grip on the first. It slipped from his hand and plummeted end over end to the bottom of the pit. As he swung reflexively out of the way of a small avalanche of stones, he heard Millie’s voice from far below. “You okay?”

“I’ve been better,” Gabriel called back. He held tight to the one remaining bone. This one remained embedded, but at a bad angle—tilted slightly downward and looking as if it were seconds from coming loose.

He looked up. He was close—so close. But still more than an arm’s length away. He planted his toes against the rock, scrabbling for any sort of hold at all, and swung his free arm up. It caught nothing. No handhold, nothing to grab onto.

He tried again, aiming this time for the crumbling ledge where the stones had come loose. It was dodgy at best, unlikely to support his weight for long, but it was the best hope he had.

He reached it, caught hold. His fingers bit down fiercely, clamping onto the stone. It did feel loose, unstable—but he held tight and shifted until he felt the balance settle, and when it felt about as good as it was
likely to get, Gabriel yanked the sole remaining bone free.

He swung by his fingertips twenty-three feet above the ground, holding onto this unsteady bit of rock, his heart racing. He could picture Millie looking up at him, holding his breath in fear, maybe holding his arms out to catch him if he fell, though the impact would surely shatter the already fractured bones of his ankle, maybe crippling him for life.

There
was a happy prospect—Millie walking with a cane for the rest of his life, and all because of him. Gabriel forced the image out of his mind and swung his arm up, up, as high as he could, and stabbed the bone savagely into the space beneath one of the stones at the pit’s edge. He didn’t let himself swing back. Instead, he clenched the muscles of his abdomen and with an enormous effort swung his legs up. For an instant he hung sideways, like a gymnast on a pommel horse, then he managed to hook one ankle over the lip. He paused for breath in that awkward, stretched out position and then carefully worked his knee up over the edge, then got his other leg up beside the first. It took almost as great an effort to unlock his grip from around the bone clenched tightly in his fist, but he did, and wrenched himself up and over till he was lying flat on his back, looking up at the underside of the crimson dome of ice.

For several seconds, all he could do was lie there and breathe, trying to bring his heartbeat back down to something resembling its normal pace and hoping no one decided to show up and jam a spear into him while he lay there gasping like a gaffed bass. He slowly rolled over and raised himself to his hands and knees, adrenaline pulsing in his aching limbs and readying him for
yet another fight. But nothing happened. There weren’t any guards around, only two old women and one young girl, the one he’d seen when they’d entered the village; she sat alone, working on stringing a long necklace of seedpods and bone beads. The two old women sat side by side about ten feet away from her, next to what looked like a crude well, and were concentrating on grinding some sort of wild grain. One was cracking open the thick outer husks and placing the softer grains into a hole in the ground while the other was lifting and dropping a heavy wooden post to crush the grains to flour. None of the three were paying any attention to him. Gabriel was about to slip away and quietly hunt for something that might help him get Millie out of the pit, but the sight of the old woman cracking the husks made him do a double take. The implement she was using—it was the butt of a gun. Not just any gun, either. Gabriel’s Colt.

“Hey!” he said. All three of the women looked up at the specter before them, a nearly naked man covered with rock dust and streaks of mud and angry red scrapes and swollen bite marks. The two older women fled like startled pigeons, the wooden post and gun left lying where they’d fallen from their hands.

The young girl stood unmoving, gaping at him wideeyed. The paralysis was only momentary, though. When Gabriel took a step toward her, open hands held out in a nonthreatening display, she bolted, too, leaving him alone in the center of the village.

Where was everyone else? Were they all guarding Rue? Or were some in the tall central building, watching unwittingly while Velda turned their god machine against innocents in their ancestors’ homeland?

Gabriel walked over to the primitive grain mill and
picked up his Colt. It didn’t seem obviously worse for wear, other than a dusty coating of cracked hull fragments clinging to the grip. It was an antique that had once belonged to one of the Old West lawmen, either Wyatt Earp or Bat Masterson; it had been through worse. He brushed it off and slipped it under the waistband of his bark kilt. The gun wasn’t loaded, but its familiar weight still felt reassuring.

The structure next to the grain mill was indeed a well, and Gabriel swiftly hauled up the large hollow gourd that served as a bucket, greedily sucking down massive gulps of the cold, clean water. Then he filled the gourd again and untied the sturdy rope from the wooden post from which it hung. He brought the gourd to the edge of the pit and set it down while he anchored the rope to one of the support poles of a nearby hut. The rope was damp but seemed flexible and strong. He hoped it would hold Millie’s considerable weight.

“Hey, Millie,” he called, lifting the water-filled gourd and carefully lowering it into the pit. “Room service.”

Gabriel saw Millie pull himself up on his good leg and reach for the lowering gourd. When it landed in his hands, he drank deeply, emptying it in a single gulp.

“Damn,” he said. “It ain’t Abita, but it’ll do.” He gripped the rope and gave it an experimental yank. “This anchored?”

“Yes,” Gabriel said. “Do you need me to rig some kind of pulley system to get you up or do you think you can make the climb?”

“My arms ain’t broke,” he replied and immediately started climbing, fist over massive fist.

In thirty seconds, Millie was up, sitting on the lip of the pit, bathed in sweat, teeth clenched tight from his obvious pain.

” We’ve got a choice,” Gabriel said. “We can go in there—” Gabriel nodded toward the tall central building “—and deal with Velda, or we can see if we can spot the plane first.”

“You’re the one who’s always saying to have an escape route planned out before you go in somewhere,” Millie said, wincing as he got to his feet.

“True enough.” Gabriel walked to the tallest nearby tree. “You stay put, rest that ankle.” He jumped and grabbed hold of a low-hanging branch, chinned himself on it and got one leg up and over. From there he was able to make his way up, a branch at a time, to the upper regions of the tree. When he neared the top, he could see the plane. It was in a slightly different location than the first time they’d seen it and was surrounded by what looked like nearly the entirety of the village’s ablebodied population. Everyone wanted to see what Rue was doing with the Father Bird, apparently—or maybe all hands had been needed in order to move it.

Either way, the plane had been moved and uncovered; the encroaching vines and brush had been cleared away, revealing not just the plane but also a makeshift runway before it. The plane itself was a curious-looking antique, with far too many wheels along its belly and four huge propellers lined up in a row along the wings, two on either side of the cage-style cockpit. The long skinny tail ended in a broad, H-shaped fin that was decorated with a pair of black swastikas outlined in white. The body was battered and rusted but looked intact. Gabriel was pretty sure that he was looking at an Arado Ar 232 transport aircraft. Built to transport heavy cargo, including vehicles, it would have been an obvious choice to carry the bulky Untergang device. But why had a plane equipped with wheels rather than
skis been chosen for an Antarctic mission? Could the Nazis have somehow known in advance about this warm tropical anomaly? How, when even modern satellite imaging had been unable to detect it? And if they had, why was there no record of the discovery found among Nazi papers at the war’s end?

Gabriel had no answers to these questions. And he knew there was no time for pondering them, not now. The plane had been moved, the runway cleared. And as he watched, he saw two of the propellers cough into motion, slowly at first, then faster. A moment later, they cut out—but in Rue’s hands they’d be going again, he knew that. And then the other two would. With Rue working on it, that plane was going to take off, with or without them on board.

And that meant there was no time to spare.

“The good news,” Gabriel said, “is that most of the village is over there, meaning there can’t be more than a few people guarding Velda.”

“From what you described,” Millie said, “I’m not surprised. She’s not gonna want a lot of witnesses to what she’s up to—someone might figure out what she’s doing and try to stop her.”

“The bad news,” Gabriel said, “is that I’m sure the ones she’s kept around her—or, what may be more likely, the ones who refused to leave her side—are the diehards, the ones who’ll fight the hardest to protect her.”

“You really think they’ll fight for Velda the way they did for Uta? They never even met her before a day ago.”

“It’s not Velda they’re fighting for,” Gabriel said. “It’s the queen of Kahujiu.”

Millie threw up his hands. “So what do you suggest, boss? We haven’t got any spears, that gun of yours is empty—”

“They might not know that,” Gabriel said.

“Maybe not the locals,” Millie said. “But I’m pretty sure Velda can count to six.”

Gabriel pulled it from his waistband anyway. “She might have forgotten.”

“And I’m limping like Long John Silver. Won’t be much help in a fight.”

“Then we’ll just have to try and take her without a fight, won’t we?” Gabriel said, and stepped through the skull-framed archway, gun held high.

The first room they came to, with the pools and the flickering oil flames, was empty, the surface of the water in each pool still. They passed through to a short corridor and from there could see around the edge of a hanging animal hide into the room where Gabriel had been staked to the floor. The furs were still there, and the stakes, too, and the spherical machine at the far end atop its tall metal frame. Velda was crouched by its base, facing away from the doorway, peering at what looked like the yellowed pages of a notebook lying spread open on the ground. Anika stood beside her, waiting for a command, while two young huntresses, each gripping the wooden shaft of a spear in both hands, flanked them and kept an eye on the entrance.

Gabriel raised his left hand with three fingers extended, then silently curled one inward toward his palm. A second later he curled the next one in, leaving only his index finger sticking out. Millie nodded. Gabriel curled the last finger in. Sweeping the hide to one side, he burst through into the chamber and ran all out toward Velda, leveling his gun at her back. He heard Millie enter behind him and saw the eyes of the two guards widen as they saw him. Six foot seven, muscled like a stevedore, and completely naked except for the splint on his ankle, Millie would have widened the eyes of anyone who saw him coming toward them—but for these two young women, whose lifetime
exposure to the male of the species had been limited to the sickly examples in the men’s tent and more recently the elderly Dr. Silver, Millie must have been an imposing sight indeed. That didn’t stop them from lowering their weapons and racing to block Gabriel’s charge—but it did buy him a few seconds, and in that time he was able to cross half the room.

He tucked his head down and somersaulted past as one guard stabbed her spear at the spot where his chest had been. The other darted to intercept him, but he dodged around her and grabbed Velda as she rose to her feet. She was dressed in a crimson gown like garment that crisscrossed over her barely covered breasts, wound around her slender waist and then flowed open to the ground behind her, revealing every inch of her tan, muscular legs. On her head was the feathered headdress.

Gabriel pulled her to him with one arm around her waist. With the other he pressed the barrel of the Colt to her temple. He held her, squirming, as a barrier between him and the guards, both of whom were making tentative stabs in the air with their spears, trying to find an opening that would let them get at him without injuring Velda. He kept angling and re-angling her body to prevent them from getting through, but one darted her blade past Velda’s shoulder, driving it two inches into his. He jerked back, blood flowing down his arm.

“Tell them to drop the spears,” Gabriel said to Anika, “or your new queen dies.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Velda said. “That gun’s got no bullets in it.”

“It’s got one,” Gabriel said, “and one’s enough.”

“You’re lying.”

“You sure?” Gabriel said coldly and pressed the metal harder against her skull.

Velda didn’t answer, but her squirming subsided.

“The spears,” Gabriel said again. Anika said something to the other two in their native tongue, and the young women responded in kind, the tone this time less musical than martial. Gabriel pulled back the hammer of his gun, producing an unmistakable sound that instantly plunged everyone into silence. “The spears,” Gabriel said.

With angry expressions, the women reluctantly bent to obey, laying their spears on the ground. Millie limped over and collected them. Gripping both spears point-upward in one hand, he leaned on them and breathed a sigh of relief. He hadn’t only stripped them of their weapons; he’d gotten himself a decent walking stick in the bargain.

“Now, tell them to step away,” Gabriel said, and Anika translated. The two huntresses shook their heads, said something angry in protest, but Anika insisted and they backed off. Not very far, though.

“Tell them to leave the building,” Gabriel said. The protests were louder this time and the women refused to budge. “You take them,” he told Anika. “Leave and take them with you.”

Now it was Anika who protested, in her halting English. “I cannot…go. I needs remain with…queen. With Unterg.”

“Velda,” Gabriel said, “order her to go.”

“You won’t shoot me,” Velda said, her courage returning as more time passed without Gabriel pulling the trigger. “Even if you do have a bullet left, you won’t use it on me. I know you well enough to know that.” And with a powerful twist of her torso that tore the thin fabric of her gown open, she wrenched herself free.
“Now!” she shouted, ducking and racing back toward the machine. “Get them!”

The two guards leapt forward, one toward Millie, who swung the pair of spears at her legs; the other at Gabriel, who sidestepped out of her path. The one attacking Millie jumped lightly over the spears as he swept them toward her. She rammed into him, overbalancing him and taking him down to the floor. But he turned as he fell and landed on her, his three hundred pounds pinning her to the ground. She clawed and kicked, but had no way to lift him off her. “Sorry, miss,” Millie said gently, in his sonorous voice. “I sure hate to do this to you.” And he brought his forehead down with a swift crack, smacking hard against her brow. She went out like a snuffed candle.

Gabriel, meanwhile, was circling with the other guard, their arms outstretched. She took swipes at his torso, raking him twice, her nails scraping painfully across his chest. He swung the Colt at her but she avoided it nimbly and came in under his arm with a head butt to the sternum. He staggered back a few paces and she followed relentlessly, flailing at him with punches that carried more force than her slight build would have led Gabriel to expect. He shoved her back and shot a glance over his shoulder. Velda was at the machine again, one hand on the dial that set the coordinates. Her other finger hovered near the black button.

“Damn it,” he muttered, and he flipped the gun in his hand, reversing it so he was holding it by the barrel. He swung, feinting left and then bringing his arm down and up hard from under, catching the guard squarely beneath her chin. Her head snapped back, and her whole body went limp. Millie, who’d just made it back up to
his knees, caught her as she fell and laid her on the ground beside the other guard.

“Go,” Gabriel said to Anika, and this time the older woman didn’t argue, just slipped out through the doorway, a frightened expression on her face.

Gabriel turned to face Velda. She was kneeling on the ground by the machine, the notebook in one hand. The numbers on the readout by the dial now said 5231N1317E.

The coordinates for Berlin.

“Don’t do it,” Gabriel shouted, launching himself toward her with one arm outstretched. He had a sudden image of himself barreling down the stone stairs in the castle in Transdniestria, Djordji by his side, Fiona Rush bound helpless at the knife thrower’s mercy. That had been bad enough. This was worse—far worse. “Don’t,” he said again, reaching for her, a note of pleading in his voice. “Millions of people could die—”

“Good,” Velda said, and pushed the button.