The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,115
be until I made them up! And you on the other side of Berlin, miles away... For him to see them in that kind of detail...”
“It is... quite commonplace,” von Rath’s soft voice said.
“I only wish you’d had this perfected a month ago! Because of the damned British air cover, Hitler’s been vacillating on the invasion plans for weeks! We’re down to the last possible days—and if he puts them off again we might as well forget it until next spring! Dammit, I keep telling him I only need four clear days...”
“You shall have them now.” Von Rath’s voice was clearer, then softer as if he were pacing; Saltwood bent his head, listening, knowing if he could only get this information back to Mayfair somehow... “And as you see, you will no longer be troubled by the RAF. I am sorry about the delay—it was a question of accumulating—ah—sufficient strength. We came to Berlin as soon as we could. If the invasion itself can be launched on the twenty-fourth—”
“The day after tomorrow?”
Holy Christ! He wondered if he could make it to Hamburg, get in touch with the radioman there—to hell with getting himself taken off, if he could just warn them...
“Is it possible? Is that time enough?”
There was a long pause. “Just,” Goering said at last. “The forces are assembled, the landing barges are ready... We’ve been on standby, then standdown, then standby again since July. All we need is to convince our Führer that such an enterprise will, in fact, succeed.”
“After the demonstration you will have this afternoon, believe me, you need have no fear.”
“Damn it, Captain...” The chair creaked again, and Goering’s voice got louder. Saltwood could almost see them standing together, overweight Thor and darkly shining Loki.
“You will have your four days of clear weather,” von Rath promised again, his voice sinking low, “and the wherewithal to blast the RAF from the sky. And in return...”
Boots thudded in the hall. Saltwood was on his feet and over to the window in one swift move as a key rattled in the lock. He had a brief glimpse of three Storm Troopers, guns pointed, in the hall as the door was opened and a woman shoved unceremoniously in. Then the door banged, and the lock snapped again.
Not a woman, he thought, taking another look—a girl.
She looked about twenty-two, her pointy white face framed in hair that was frizzed electric from her red ears to her slender shoulders, and above that, along the part, dark and luxurious brown-black with highlights of mahogany. Her eyes, taking in the black uniform pants and boots he wore, the clay-colored regulation shirt with its Deaths-Head emblems, were soot-dark and filled with spit-cat hate.
“Don’t jump to conclusions,” Saltwood said. “I’m an American—a Captain in the M09.”
In English she said, “Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah,” he replied in the same language with as flat a mid-western accent as he could still conjure to his tongue. With a shock he realized she was American, too.
“So who pitched for Cincinnati in ’thirty-eight?”
Saltwood stared at her, appalled. “I don’t know, I always thought baseball was a Christly dumb game! I mean, Jesus, paying two bits to watch a bunch of guys in knickers stand around in the sun all day and scratch and spit?”
She perched one slim haunch on the corner of the table and shook back her particolored hair. “Some American!” But the hate was gone from her eyes.
She dug in her pocket for cigarettes and a lighter—she wore some kind of ill-fitting uniform, short-sleeved white blouse, gray skirt, and sensible shoes wildly at odds with the voluptuous figure beneath. As he took the smoke she offered him he saw her nails were bitten to the quick.
“You have any idea what’s going on around here?” he asked, raising his manacled hands to take a thankful drag. “Those hallucinations... That—that hornet, and the fire... that thing that flew at me through the air...”
“What?” She blew a line of smoke. “You missed the trapdoor?”
Twenty-one
“YOU GOTTA REMEMBER I grew up with this stuff.” Sara crossed one knee over the other—she had beautiful legs, shapely, strong, and slim-ankled, and to hell with the black stubble that sprinkled them and the white ankle socks of the League of German Maidens—and drew on her cigarette while Saltwood prowled, for the fifth time, from the window to the inner door to the outer door, checking, testing, trying to put something together before it was too late. The guards were always there outside.