14.

“Are you hurt.…”

“I’m all right.” There wasn’t much life in his voice but he hadn’t been injured.

Spaight and Buckner crowded around. “What happened?” Faintly she was aware of Prince Leon hurrying forward, hobbling.

“We had to fight our way out. Most of us didn’t make it. We were strafed on the lake—we had to lie low under the dashboard until the pilot was convinced we were all dead. If he’d blown the fuel tank we’d all have gone up. We couldn’t move until after dark.”

Spaight said, “Someone’s got a lot to answer for.”

Prince Leon reached them; pressed past her and pulled Spaight out of the way and embraced Alex. Tears were frozen on Leon’s face.

But Alex’s face was changing. Muscles stood ridged at his jaw hinges and the bones at brow and cheek became harder, more prominent. With gentle pressure he thrust Leon aside.

“We heard it on the radio in the Finnish border camp,” he said. “The news from Pearl Harbor. The Japanese attack on Hawaii. The broadcast must have come just when Felix was taking off.”

John Spaight’s head rocked back. “What?”

Glenn Buckner’s face had closed up abruptly—like a blind pulled down over a window. “Is that right? The Japs attacked Pearl?”

Prince Leon said, “I don’t—”

Buckner was still talking very fast. “It means you’ll have a job to go back to, Alex. With your combat experience they’ll need you bad. You’ve got a hell of a future with.…”

“You bloodless bastard,” Alex whispered.

Buckner showed his alarm: wild white rings showed around his eyes. “Look—I’m in the war now.… My country is.… I had to make the decision, don’t you see that? Maybe if the Reds hadn’t counterattacked last week it would have been different.… But Stalin’s going to hold them now, anybody can see that—he’ll be able to buy us the time we need. We couldn’t risk rocking the boat. You can see that. For God’s sake I had my orders, Alex.…”

Alex’s arm shot forward, palm up. He hooked his fingers deep into the American’s flared nostrils and pulled him forward. He didn’t hit at Buckner’s face. He hit through and beyond it and it crushed the nose flat against the bones and all but snapped Buckner’s head off his neck and then Alex was hammering Buckner’s mouth bloody with his fists until Buckner fell down and rolled away and came up with a revolver in his fist; but the blood was in Buckner’s eyes, he couldn’t see his opponent and Alex jumped him. The two men wrestled for the gun and she heard it when Alex broke the American’s finger in the trigger guard. Then the revolver came spinning away because Alex had no use for it—a gun was the wrong thing now; it had to be flesh on flesh for this. There was no damming the flood of it. When Buckner tried to get up Alex grasped the back of his head and hammered it down into the tarmac. Then he locked his fists together and she heard his inhuman roar when he struck the American at the base of the neck.

Alex stood up and waited for him to rise. Buckner came out of his wreckage crawling mindlessly, dragging himself in a blind circle, breathing in broken gasps, spitting teeth.

A throbbing vein stood out in Alex’s forehead. He braced himself to kick Buckner’s face.

John Spaight grasped him from behind—pinned his arms, locked a grip around Alex’s chest. “Stop it, Alex. It’s enough.”

The bullet slammed into Buckner with an awful deliberate precision of aim: dead center between the eyes.

She turned and saw Prince Leon drop the gun back to the frozen ground from which he’d picked it up.