The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,119

He slapped the fender. “Let him drive this.”

Himmler said nothing, but his dark eyes blazed with suppressed excitement, like a child about to see a show. Saltwood felt his flesh crawl.

Von Rath turned to him, his voice soft and polite, as if he barely remembered striking him—barely remembered, except in a cursory way, who he was. “You will drive the truck around the course marked by those orange flags.” They were only scraps of cloth tied to weeds and brambles, and here and there to a stake where the ground was bare. “You may drive inside or outside of them, but if you attempt to crash the fence I can assure you that you will be killed instantly.”

There were no guards on the perimeter of the field. Looking back at von Rath’s calm smile, Saltwood knew that their absence was not an oversight.

“May I walk the course?”

The Captain—oops, sorry, Colonel now, thank you, Mr. Himmler—considered it for a moment, one hand idly fingering the pale staff of stripped, close-grained greenish wood on which the iron Spiracle was mounted. Then he shook his head. “I assure you it has been examined for hidden devices by men at least as skeptical as yourself.”

Saltwood almost asked, Who, for instance?—Himmler and Goering both seemed to have swallowed the whole malarkey hook, line, and sinker. But he knew that particular piece of smartassery would only get him another smack in the mouth. So he shrugged and said in English, “It’s your ball game.” He turned to the cab of the truck.

The blood pounded in his ears as they handcuffed his left wrist to the steering wheel, leaving his right hand free to work the ignition and gears. Were they counting on him to make a run for it? It would be child’s play to crash the fence, a jolting dash to the driveway or, if necessary, cross-country to the Alt-Moabitstrasse—he was pretty sure of his way back to the house on Teglerstrasse where Sara and her father were...

The house on Teglerstrasse? he demanded, aghast at himself. What the hell are you thinking? You’d be GUARANTEEING your capture by going back there. Your first duty is to get your arse to Hamburg and get London word of the invasion. Sara knows that, if anyone does.

And what makes you think you’re coming out of this alive anyway?

Dammit, he thought, studying those beautifully smiling lips, those weirdly empty gray eyes, what the hell has he got? Does he believe this crap himself?

“Drive three times around the course,” von Rath said, as Tom turned the key in the ignition, “and then return here.”

And disregard any fire-breathing monsters that get in your way. He pressed the accelerator, let out the clutch, and jolted toward the first of the orange flags.

On the first half of the circuit he was taken up with getting the feel of the truck over the bumpy, unpaved ground and with scanning the earth all around him, particularly around the stakes and flags for signs that it had been dug up or tampered with. Though of course Goering had had a much better view... At the far end of the field he had a panicky impulse to crash the fence, head like hell toward the Spandau canal, but a second later cold feet overcame him. There was something wrong with the setup. He knew it, smelled it, as he had smelled thunderstorms when he was a kid riding herd and as he had smelled ambush in the dry canyons of the Meseta. He had no doubt that if he tried it, somehow, von Rath would kill him. Or were they counting on that fear?

Rounding the far turn he saw them standing like an official photograph in Das Reich: Goering in white and Himmler in black, with von Rath holding his iron-headed staff like some strange, glittering angel between them. Around the cars and back toward the house a shifting mill of men formed an obscuring backdrop from which an occasional face emerged—he thought he saw the pale flutter of Gall’s long beard, the glint of glasses that had to be Baldur’s. But he sensed all eyes on him, all attention on the gray truck as it moved and jerked over the rutted ground.

Then Himmler, his glasses gleaming in the wan light, leaned over and said something to von Rath, and the SS Captain lifted his hand, the crystals in the staff-head flashing...

The explosion of light nearly blinded Saltwood, the roaring blast deafening, and for one second he