The Project (23 page)

“So soon?” Fricke asked.

“Yes. Some important business has come up. I would be honored if you would allow me to use your carriage.”

Don’t let him!
Luke willed Fricke to say no.

“My apologies, Herr Mueller, but I am not permitted to let anyone use the carriage,” Fricke said.

“I understand, Herr Fricke, but perhaps this will persuade you.”

Even without seeing it, Luke could guess what Mueller was showing Fricke. His Werewolf identity card. Powerful magic.

“I did not realize, and I wish I could oblige. However, I myself do not have the authority to—”

“Herr Fricke, need I remind you that the Führer himself said that Werewolves are to be afforded every assistance?”

“Yes, but—”

Fricke was trying his best not to let Mueller use his compartment with Luke and Tommy stuck in the closet. But clearly he was not going to win.

“Every assistance. Perhaps we should telephone Herr Speer for authority.”

“There is no need. I will get my coat,” Fricke said.

The door to the closet opened, just enough for Fricke to retrieve his overcoat. He mouthed
Sorry
before shutting the door again.

The closet was barely big enough for the two of them, and Luke was very conscious that the slightest noise would lead to their discovery. He couldn’t imagine how they were going to remain hidden for the whole journey back to Berchtesgaden.

A few minutes after Fricke left, there was a knock on the door and Luke heard Jumbo’s and Mumbo’s voices as they entered the compartment. He prayed that none of them would decide to check the closet.

It took at least half an hour before the searchers decided that the two hunted boys were not on the train, and released it for its return trip to Berchtesgaden.

There was some movement after a while, and Luke guessed that they were removing some of the more damaged carriages and replacing them with new ones. He and Tommy braced themselves against the sides of the closet as best they could. It would be a disaster if the train jolted suddenly and they burst out of the closet door right under the nose of their hunters.

Eventually, the train began to move and gather speed. It was a curse and a blessing. A curse because the rocking meant constantly bracing themselves this way and that. After just ten minutes, Luke’s arms and legs were aching. But it was a blessing because the noise of the train covered any small sounds they made.

Still, it was with great relief that he finally felt the train begin to slow as it pulled into Berchtesgaden.

T
he big wheels of the locomotive came to a final, shuddering halt, the metallic squeals and grinding of the carriage contrasting with the delicate tinkling of the chandelier in the compartment.

They waited for the three men to leave before inching open the closet door.

“What now?” Tommy asked. “Try and get clear of the station before he spots us? Or wait till he’s gone?”

“I’m not sure,” Luke said. “We have to beat him back to the chamber, but we can’t risk being seen.”

A moment later, the question was out of their hands. A low siren sounded somewhere near the station, a loud whining that grew even louder and higher in pitch.

Luke peeked through the curtains to see the platform was in pandemonium, with people running in all directions. Some dropped their suitcases where they were standing; others ran with them, using them as
battering rams to barge through the crowds.

Tommy looked at Luke, and Luke looked back, both uncertain what to do.

“Let’s go,” Luke said at last. “We can mingle with the crowds so Mueller doesn’t see us. If we can stay out of his way in the air-raid shelter, then we can try and beat him up the hill to Obersalzberg.”

Luke peered out from the doorway before stepping down onto the platform. Mueller was nowhere to be seen.

He scanned the faces in the crowd, all of them panicked and hurried, making for the exits as quickly as the crush of bodies would let them.

No Mueller. No Mumbo or Jumbo. Time to go.

“Stay frosty,” he said, then jumped down and waited for Tommy to land beside him before pushing into the thick of the crowd.

A soldier at one of the exits was handing out something to the crowd. Some took it; some didn’t. As Luke approached, he saw the soldier was giving away corks from wine bottles. He took one, as did Tommy, but they must have looked confused, because the soldier mimed putting the cork between his teeth and said something in German.

“You put it in your mouth,” Tommy told him as they emerged from the Bahnhof into the sunshine outside. “Between your teeth, for the percussion.”

Luke guessed it acted a bit like a mouth guard.

Outside, Luke looked up at the clear blue sky, expecting to find it darkened with the black shapes of bombers, but there were none.

The soldiers manning the anti-aircraft gun were at their posts, searching the skies, but the gun was stationary.

Perhaps it was a false alarm.

Perhaps not.

People abandoned cars in the middle of the road, leaving doors wide open as they ran for the shelters.

As Luke and Tommy hurried along with the crowd, a motorcycle and sidecar swerved violently up to the footpath. The rider and his passenger jumped out and dashed along the road in front of them.

The stream of people poured across the road, disappearing into a big stone building with a large sign on the front:
LUFTSCHUTZBUNKER
.
That had to be the shelter.

Luke and Tommy ran with the crowd, breathless, frightened, sweating despite the cold. Around them the siren filled the air, rising and falling in a horrible moaning sound. In the distance, Luke could see some dark dots that had to be aircraft.

Tommy stopped suddenly in his tracks. “Danger close. Twelve o’clock,” he said in a low voice.

Luke’s eyes left the sky and landed on the back of the head of the person in front of him.

It was a man in uniform.

An SS uniform.

There was something about the build and the shape of the neck that made his spine shudder, and even before the man turned around, Luke knew who it was.

Then he did turn around.

Jumbo’s eyes widened, and he stopped dead.

He shouted in German, and Luke saw Mueller and Mumbo stop and turn also.

“Oh, crap!” Tommy said.

Tommy and Luke turned and ran, ducking and weaving through the crowd.

There was more shouting from behind them, and Luke looked back. Jumbo and Mumbo were using their bulk to barge people out of the way.

Somehow they dodged through the flow of human traffic, and the first thing Luke saw as they emerged into the open was the motorcycle and sidecar parked haphazardly against the footpath.

“Get in!” Luke yelled, leaping over the motorcycle frame.

“Can you drive one of these things?” Tommy shouted over the scream of the siren, and jumped into the sidecar.

“Let’s find out!” Luke shouted back. It couldn’t be too different from the quad bike he used to ride on the farm.

He stood on the kick-starter, and the engine, still warm, revved and caught. He toed it into gear and let the clutch out. The bike jerked, jolted forward, and stalled.

Jumbo and Mumbo were free of the crowd now and were running after them, pistols raised.

Luke kicked the starter again, and the bike roared to life. He eased out the clutch, and the back wheel spun but then gripped, and the bike shot off.

He twisted the handlebars around, and the bike slewed away from Jumbo and Mumbo. There were shots now, and he could hear a zinging noise as bullets punched holes in the air around them.

Then they were moving down the main road of Berchtesgaden. Luke swerved the bike from side to side, hoping to spoil their aim, throwing Tommy around in the sidecar. Tommy gripped the sides with clawed hands and looked behind with terror in his eyes.

The roads were still icy, and mounds of snow were piled up around telegraph poles and in snow hedges along the pavement where the plows had been at work that morning.

Luke spun the bike around the corner toward Obersalzberg and glanced back to see a black open-top German army staff car pull out after them. Jumbo was driving, with Mumbo next to him and Mueller in the rear.

Mumbo had acquired a machine gun, and he let off a long burst, which was terrifying, although the bullets came nowhere near them, his aim thrown off by the motion of the car.

The sun was blotted out for a moment, and Luke glanced up to see not clouds but the long dark shape of airplane after airplane droning overhead.

The anti-aircraft gun was shooting now, spitting fire into the sky, each recoil raising a cloud of dust around it.

He expected bombs, but there were none, and that was when he realized with sheer and utter horror what their target was.

The Allied bombers had no interest in Berchtesgaden, a sleepy little Bavarian alpine town.

They were after the Nazi party stronghold, and perhaps Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest, at Obersalzberg.

Right where Luke and Tommy were headed.

L
uke slid the back wheel of the heavy motorbike around a corner, the bike skidding toward a snowdrift and a sheer drop beyond.

The handlebars shuddered in his hands as he fought to control the machine, which behaved almost nothing like his quad bike back home.

The car slid around the same tight corner, not far behind them, and Jumbo let loose another burst of wild machine-gun fire.

Luke looked at Tommy to make sure he was okay and got a quick thumbs-up. He had his cork clenched firmly between his teeth. Luke had forgotten about his, so when they hit a straight stretch, he fished it out of his pocket and jammed it into his mouth.

Lightning flashed ahead of them and thunder rumbled—only, Luke knew it was neither lightning nor thunder. A blast of air buffeted the bike.

There were more explosions, closer now, massive fists of wind that knocked the bike around the road. He leaned low over the handlebars, urging the machine forward. The explosions were a continuous roar as tons of high explosives hit the mountainside over Obersalzberg.

And they were heading into the heart of it.

There was a flash on the mountainside above them, and a cloud of snow erupted above their heads. Huge splinters of wood, entire branches and pulverized tree trunks, flew through the air.

One massive chunk of wood landed on the road, and Luke swerved madly up onto the embankment to get around it, hoping it might create a roadblock for the staff car behind them. But when he looked back, it was still on their tail.

Even more explosions, lifting whole trees up by their roots and spinning them into the air.

The bike heaved and bucked, and he hung on grimly as snow and smoke filled the road. Any sharp corners ahead and they would be toast. Luke could see no more than ten feet in front of his face.

The cloud cleared and he was staring at a paper-thin wooden barrier guarding the edge of a sheer drop. He yelled and twisted the handlebars, swinging the machine around. It slipped and skidded but turned, the sidecar scraping along the barrier, avoiding the cliff face by a few shavings of wood.

The road straightened out into the center of Obersalzberg.

It was smoother here, too, which made for easier going,
but Luke realized suddenly that it also made it easier for Jumbo to aim.

The zinging sound of bullets flying past his head was only slightly less terrifying than the enormous shattering crump of the explosions around them.

“I thought he wanted you alive!” Tommy yelled.

“Not anymore!” Luke yelled back.

If they could beat Mueller back to the chamber, they could go through it and change the settings, trapping Mueller in the past.

Mueller must have realized that, too.

The guardhouse ahead was deserted. It did not seem to have been hit, but it was on fire, perhaps from hot shrapnel.

He saw the Berghof, Hitler’s luxurious alpine mansion, take a direct hit, wood and stone spewing into the air in a horrifying volcano of masonry and smoke. Incredibly, he saw a toilet, completely intact, come flying up out of the eruption. It somersaulted end over end and disappeared somewhere in the woods behind the house.

He glanced upward again and was shocked to see the planes still coming, wave after wave of them.

The sky filled with swarms of small black insects, flying in jagged lines—only, they weren’t insects; they were bombs falling from the aircraft above.

The mountains around them were dancing, and the god of thunder was clapping his hands and stamping his feet to keep time.

It seemed incredible that anything or anyone would be able to survive the obliteration that was happening before
their eyes. No sane person would keep going, but if Mueller caught them, it was the end of everything.

Luke gunned the bike up the road that led to the now-ruined Berghof, and the Hotel zum Türken beyond that.

They hit the corner on just two wheels, the sidecar lifting off the ground, and that was the position they were in when the bomb hit close by.

The entire motorcycle was hauled from the ground by a huge, hot balloon of air and debris and was thrown sideways as if it were just a cheap plastic toy. Luke lost his grip on the handlebars and tumbled through the air, seeing the edge of the drainage ditch drift past in slow motion, then the far edge approach. Then nothing but blackness.

He was conscious. He was alive. At least he thought he was. There wouldn’t be so much pain if he were dead.

His ribs were on fire, and one of his legs was throbbing with stabbing spikes of pain that shot through his whole body.

The ground beneath him was bucking and heaving, the ditch shaking like jelly as explosion after explosion pounded around him.

He couldn’t breathe. His throat was blocked, and when he tried to suck in air, there was just a high-pitched croaking sound. His hand flew to his throat. Was his neck injured? His windpipe crushed?

He managed a gasping, choking cough, and something shot into his mouth and his airway cleared.