32

Corey knew in a flash that a Throwback could die in the past. Because a bullet was a bullet, and flesh was flesh.

It was sheer physics.

But before he could react, the soldier’s body jerked, as he were doing a sudden dance. His eyes never moved from Corey. He lowered his pistol slightly, then raised it again. With a nasty squint, he opened his mouth for one last statement. One last gloat.

But all that came out was a stream of blood.

With a last wheeze, the soldier fell to the ground, dropping his pistol. Corey crawled around the Mercedes to the other side. There, a few feet away, Stanislaw held a smoking gun.

“You—you did that?” Corey cried out.

“And now I will do something that I have been wanting to do for this whole war,” Stanislaw said, reaching for the handle of the Mercedes’s rear door. “Guten Nacht, Adolf!”

But before he could pull the door open, the rear window rolled down. The barrel of another pistol peeked through.

Stanislaw’s eyes widened. He tried to jump away, but another shot caught him in the shoulder. He spun and fell to the ground again. Corey leaped after him, pulling him into the ditch. “Are you all right?”

From the caravan, a bottle-shaped missile flew directly toward them. An explosion sent up a geyser of dirt, not ten feet from them.

But Stanislaw’s eyes were on something behind Corey. He whirled around to see Adolf Hitler running away, heading toward the Nazi caravan with one of the other soldiers who had been in the Mercedes. The caravan’s lead vehicle, a nasty-looking Nazi truck, was stuck in the pothole Corey had made.

“Stay down, Corey!” Stanislaw said.

He let off a couple more shots toward Hitler, but they missed. The two other Nazi soldiers were lying in the dirt. Stanislaw sank to his knees. He dropped his gun and supported himself on his hand.

Corey turned to Stanislaw and pulled him away from the road. “Come on, we have to get out of the line of fire.”

He ran toward a gully just beyond the road, pulling Stanislaw along. Staying low, they descended into it. Stray bullets whizzed way over their heads as they flopped down into a snowbank. “We have to get you to a hospital,” Corey said.

Stanislaw reached for his gun and tried to scramble upward, but Corey yanked him down. “What are you doing?”

“I want to personally kill that monster!”

“Are you crazy?”

Corey wrestled the gun from Stanislaw’s hand. Blood was oozing again from the head bandage, from his arm, from his shoulder. He collapsed against the side of the gully, breathing hard. Corey heard the sound of heavy footsteps on the road and gripped the gun with both hands.

Peeking over the top, he saw Adolf Hitler catching up to the caravan. At least five other soldiers, dressed in flak jackets with guns at the ready, were racing toward him.

Corey thought of shooting, but he knew they’d both be killed in an instant.

He waited until the men ushered the Führer out of sight. In a few minutes they’d figure out how to get past the grenade hole, and the next stop would be Kurtstadt. “They’re planning to blow up the village,” Corey said.

“A spy . . . must have . . . told them . . . about the Allies . . . occupying the village,” Stanislaw said through clenched teeth.

Keeping low, Corey pulled Stanislaw along the ditch, which followed the road toward Kurtstadt. By now, the noise had drawn a crowd. In a moment three Jeeps sped toward them, followed by a group of armed men running toward them. “Was ist los?” one of them called out.

Stanislaw, grunting through his pain, explained what had happened. The men listened, pointing the Jeeps toward the caravan. One of the men was picking up the wounded Nazi soldier from the road.

A strong-looking, sandy-haired woman in a heavy wool coat approached them. “I am Dr. Feder,” she said, taking Stanislaw’s other arm. “I will help you with . . .”

“Stanislaw,” Corey said.

“We were not expecting an attack,” she said. “If we had not heard the noise, they would have arrived into Kurtstadt.”

“They have . . . much explosives,” Stanislaw said.

“Where did they get you?” Dr. Feder asked.

“My . . . left arm . . . and oh yes, my left shoulder,” he said, turning to show the two growing bloodstains. “Just . . . a couple of small pieces.”

Dr. Feder was now eyeing Stanislaw’s head and ankle injuries too. She removed a bulky walkie-talkie from her belt and shouted something in German.

In a moment, one of the vehicles veered toward them. As it neared, Corey could see the Red Cross symbol of an ambulance. It screeched to a halt, and a team of workers scrambled to remove a stretcher from the back.

“Well then,” Stanislaw said with a laugh. “Do I look that bad?”

Corey took a deep breath, eyeing the masses of deep-red stains that were growing together. “Honestly, you’re a mess.”

Stanislaw smiled. “No. No, Corey,” he said. “I am the luckiest man in Germany.”