Iron to Iron (Wolf by Wolf) (3 page)

The next day was straightforward: no sabotage, no subterfuge. Just an eight-hour stretch of road from Rome all the way to the edge of Europe—where the Mediterranean lapped at Sicily’s shores and the racers were allotted an entire day of rest for the ferry crossing to Tunis. This boat trip was one of Luka’s favorite parts of the tour. Over twenty-four hours without riding. No crowds screaming
Sieg heil!
His road jitters had faded into the backdrop, even though he was now technically in third. Luka had dropped back outside of Rome, allowing Kobi Yokuto to pass him. It was a necessary sacrifice. He needed the space to plot with his new ally, and riding close would afford them that.

Salt and wind lashed Luka’s hair as he leaned against the deck railing. The sea unfolded beneath his feet. Shades of aqua and sapphire, echoes of the cloudless sky as far as the eye could reach.

The rest of the Axis Tour riders sprawled across the deck, letting their muscles mend just in time to be ripped apart again by unforgiving desert roads. (Luka’s
least
favorite part of the Axis Tour: potholes, sand-clouded vision, dust in his teeth.) Even Katsuo was curled up in a chair, napping.

Felix—
oh, wait
,
Adele
—walked up to the railing, keeping a whole section between herself and Luka. Instead of leaning, she sat with her boots dangling off the side of the ship. She closed her eyes and lifted her paste-covered face to the sun. Again, the zinc oxide was very strategic, distracting the eyes from the fräulein’s more feminine features.

“What’s the plan?”

The volume of her question made Luka wince. There weren’t any other racers in their vicinity, but boat winds had a habit of snatching words and spreading them. He stepped closer, lowering his own voice to a rough whisper. “The plan is not to talk about the plan where everyone might be eavesdropping.”

“So when can we talk about it?” Adele’s eyes snapped open. They were even more striking under daylight: clear as the Mediterranean shallows, something you’d want to swim in.

“We’ve got about three and a half days of riding to Cairo—provided the desert doesn’t decide to play hide-the-road. Camps are longer in this stretch, since sand makes for
Scheisse
night visibility. Ride close, and we’ll camp together.”

“Camp?” Adele grunted.

“Trading night watches. Breaking bread—er, dehydrated meat. Trying not to cuss while figuring out how to set up those
verdammt
pup tents.”

“I know what camping is.” Her boots thumped the side of the ferry, offbeat. “I’m just not sure about camping with your ogling eyes.”

“Worry not, Herr Wolfe. My intentions are completely honorable.” Luka’s fingers wandered to the welt on his face. It was mostly bruise now, set exactly where his goggles fitted. “Aside from plotting Katsuo’s eventual demise, of course.”

“Of course.” She nodded, both feet drumming in agreement. “I’m glad we understand each other.”

Did they? Maybe Adele thought she understood him (most people thought so, another hazard of being 1953 Poster Boy Wonder), but Luka was having a very hard time understanding her. The ladies in his life were his mother—a sweet woman whose shoulders had a habit of hunching every time his father walked into the room—and his fans: girls with pressed blouses and pinned-up curls, who smelled like gardens and smiled as if they had something stuck in their teeth. They were perfectly pleasant, but uninteresting. There was no…
challenge
in them. All they did was listen to Luka’s tales about the Axis Tour and nod, hoping he’d wrap up the story and kiss them. (Sometimes Luka did. Their lips were red and velvet soft, and—just like the first victory, just like his smokes—they did not fill him.)

Adele Wolfe wasn’t like them at all.

Luka found it fascinating.

“Anything else?” Adele asked.

He’d been staring, he realized. Caught up in those drown-worthy eyes. Luka overcorrected, swinging his stare out to sea. “Make sure you’ve got a scarf for the next leg, to cover your mouth and nose,” he told her. “That sand will shred apart your insides if you let it.”

The desert road was just as terrible as Luka remembered. Worse, perhaps, because this year he wasn’t leading the pack and Katsuo’s wheels did an excellent job of spewing dust at Yokuto, who in turn flung it toward Luka. It didn’t matter that he was wearing protective gear. The sand always found a way in, lodging between his molars and making the insides of his ears itch. His goggles acquired a fine film that made pothole spotting much more difficult than normal. There were plenty to spot. The road was a maze of them—so many that Luka wondered if the Axis Tour officials hadn’t just gone ahead of the racers with pickaxes and chopped up the roads to make things more interesting.

Despite the constant swerving, Luka didn’t let Katsuo and Yokuto get more than a few seconds ahead. Adele kept the pace, her fist hungry on the throttle. A few times she swerved the opposite way around potholes, pulling ahead of Luka and teasing Yokuto’s flank. She had eyes for first: pushing, pushing into Katsuo’s piece of road, trying to get her bike in position to pass the Japanese victor. The attempt could have been successful, except for Yokuto’s sudden veer in her direction. Adele tapped her brakes, and Luka was forced to do likewise to keep them from becoming a tangle of metal and bloody limbs.

“Don’t do that” were Luka’s first words to her when they stopped to set up camp on the night-smothered sands.

Adele tugged down her mask. Dust marks slashed across her cheekbones. These plus the dark made her eyes ten times more cutting. “You wanted someone with ambition.”

“Ambition!” Luka unstrapped his pup tent from the back of his bike, threw it into the sands. “Not stupidity.”

“I saw an opening, and I went for it. How is that stupid?”

Let me count the ways.
Luka fought the urge to roll his eyes, and did not win. “Never mind Katsuo’s pride. Trying to make passes in pothole central is
pleading
for a wreck. Yokuto almost turned you into road jam.”

The fräulein wasn’t fazed. “But he didn’t.”

“Because you slammed on your brakes, which almost turned
me
into road jam and yet didn’t because I slammed on
my
brakes, which took seconds off my time. I don’t like seconds being scraped off my time.” Luka tugged the tent parts from their bag and began assembling them. “This isn’t some asphalt track. You don’t just loop around a few times and win by muscling your way ahead. If you want to do well in the Axis Tour, you have to be in it for the long game.”

“Fine, then. Let’s talk the long game. That’s why we’re here, right?”

The tent came with instructions, but Luka tossed them aside. It was too dark to read anyway. “Our move, when we make it, will be after Hanoi.”

“Hanoi!” Adele’s breath hissed in, cut off. “That’s thousands of kilometers away!”

“The long game is long. Katsuo’s on his guard. If we make a move now, we’re going to fail. You have to let your competition think he’s winning. Let his pride put him at ease.”

“So you just want to let him stay in first?”

“Yep. Why are there so many
verdammt
pieces to this thing?” The poles and tarp were straightforward enough, but the stakes… there were supposed to be eight of them. Luka could only count seven. “Always something missing…”

“Why Hanoi?”

“The Li River,” he answered, patting the sand for the escapee stake. “It’s just a few hours outside of Hanoi. The bridge across it got blown to high heaven during the war, and the Japanese never replaced it. The ferry they use to cross it can only fit three riders at a time. If you’re not in the first batch, you automatically lose ten minutes. If you’re not in the second batch, you lose twenty. The area is a natural bottleneck.”

Adele walked back to her bike. There was a rustling, and at first Luka figured she was getting out her own pup tent. She held up an electric lantern instead.
Let there be light!
It poured across her face and over the sands. Luka spotted the missing stake by his knee. If it were a scorpion, it would’ve stung him.

“You want to use the river crossing to squeeze Katsuo out of the lead?” She was quick. No denying that.

Luka snatched up a hammer and started driving the support poles into the ground. “Strategically it’s the best place. Ten minutes is impossible to reclaim at that point. It’s the second-to-last leg, and there’s no more overnight camping after that for Katsuo to enact his revenge. He’ll try something on the
Kaiten
, of course, but we’ll be ready.”

“Lull him into false security, stay on the defensive, strike at the end when he least expects it.” Adele counted out the points of the conversation: thumb, forefinger, middle. “Got it.”

“That’s right, lo”—Luka caught himself, midhammer—“vely Adele.”

The girl scowled. “If I’d wanted to be flirted with, I would’ve stayed in Frankfurt with a decent head of hair.”

Both tents went up, ration packets were ripped open, canteens uncapped, and water guzzled. They were so close to the Mediterranean that Luka could hear the sea hushing as they dug into their food. It was a low, constant noise. Enough to mask the footsteps of any unwelcome guests who might come sneaking around at odd hours. Luka doubted Takeo would try any knife work so soon after Rome, but he didn’t want to bet both tires on it.

“I’ll take the first watch,” he told Adele after dinner, reaching into his jacket pocket for the perfect pairing: cigarette and match. “I’m not tired yet.”

Apparently Adele wasn’t either. Her empty ration packets sat crumpled in the sand, but she made no move to switch off the lantern or return to her tent. Instead she nodded at the unlit cigarette between Luka’s fingers. “Are those any good?”

“Not really. They’re… an acquired taste.”

“Then why do you smoke them?”

“Because I’m not supposed to.” At least, that’s why Luka tried them the first time, in the alley behind Herr Kahler’s shop, at the tender age of eleven. Word was going around that the Führer wanted to outlaw cigarettes, which only made the demand for them even higher. His childhood friend Franz Gross had snuck one out of his father’s pack to try. It took them five whole minutes to get it lit. One whole minute to inhale without spluttering. Luka coughed on and off the entire next week.

It wasn’t until after his victory—three years later—that his smoking habit really set in. There were several reasons. He could get away with it as a victor. With his Axis Tour winnings, he could afford them at black-market prices. He needed something, anything, to prove that he was more than just a sketch on a poster on wall after wall after wall.

“They help me feel more like myself. Less like a lemming.”

“Lemming?”

“You know… those little rodents that supposedly follow each other off cliffs in droves. They just run right off because the lemming in front of them did it. Tumble,
splat,
dead!”

“Let’s have it, then.” Adele held out her hand.

Luka stared at the fingertips. Against the lamplight, they had a plasterlike appearance. Breakable.

“What?” She frowned. “You think I can’t handle it?”

“I—” Luka had no idea what to say. It wasn’t a sensation that happened very often, but this fräulein and her un-fräulein-ness put him on needle points. His usual lines would not work with her.

Adele’s palm stayed open. Luka handed her the smoke and light, then dove back into his jacket pocket for more of his own.

“Is that the story behind the jacket, too?” Adele struck her match against her biking boot. It fizzed to life, fluttering as she brought it to the end of the cigarette. A breath in, a fire caught, a smooth, smoke-spiral exhale. “Black leather is too lemming for you?”

“Something like that.” Luka lit his own cigarette, let the tobacco hum through his veins. Good timing. Thinking about his jacket—the
real
story behind it—always put him on edge.

“How’d you get permission to wear it?”

“After my first victory, I convinced the tour officials to let me wear it in my father’s honor. It was his prewar riding jacket. Motorcycles were his life. He was a member of the Kradschützen during the war, but he lost his arm on the eastern front. Couldn’t ride after that. He gave this jacket to me as—as a reminder.”

“And what does the jacket remind you of?”

“The kind of man I’m supposed to be.” (Two-Cross strong. Not just hard, but unbreakable.) This was dangerous territory. Luka moved on quickly. “That was just an excuse. Really it’s because I look much better in brown leather than I do in black. How’s the cigarette?”

Adele smoked like a natural, wielding the cigarette without so much as a cough. “Full of ashy rebellion. I like it.”

“So what’s your story, Adele Wolfe?” he asked after a drawn-out drag. “Why aren’t you back in Frankfurt, breaking all the boys’ hearts with your decent head of hair?”

Her eyes lit up behind the cigarette’s glow. “Racing’s in the Wolfe blood. My father’s a mechanic, owns a garage in Frankfurt, Wolfe Auto Shop. There were always racers from the Nürburgring tracks coming in and out of the place. My brothers and I begged our father to teach us how to ride. He did. We were all good. Good enough to start racing. Only I wasn’t allowed on the tracks.”