There had been a few candidates for getaway boats along the docks, but Yael didn’t waste time weighing their various merits. The boat she chose was as good as any: small enough to be subtle on the coastline, with enough engine power to handle the chop of deeper waters, enough to get her and Luka across the East China Sea, back to the mainland.
When Yael pried out the motorboat’s starter panel, she found its wiring wasn’t so different from the setup Vlad had used to teach her hot-wiring: tangled and colorful, ultimately simple. It would take only a few seconds to get the engine started.
“He’s over here! I need backup!”
“SCHEISSE on a verdammt stick!”
Two yells in two different languages, both just a few docks over. Yael dropped the panel when she heard them, cursing Luka in every one of her six languages. She should’ve known the victor would refuse to stay put. But Yael hadn’t counted on the boy being brainless enough to blunder into a patrol.
More yells—all Japanese—rose from various locations around the docks. One a few meters northeast. Another from the west. A cry from the south. At least four soldiers, by Yael’s count. Not a manageable number of opponents to take on alone.
Not impossible either.
—LEAVE HIM GO GO GO—
The starter panel dangled from its wires—red, yellow, black. Ten seconds was all it would take to cross them and crank the engine.
Ten seconds and a life.
—DON’T BE A HERO NOTHING CAN FIX WHAT YOU’VE DONE YOU’VE CHOSEN DEATH ONCE WHY NOT AGAIN?—
Why not again?
The shouts were drawing closer. Even if Luka somehow made it off the docks by himself, he wouldn’t make it out of this city. He was too blond, too loud, too there.
She cursed Luka again. She cursed the soldiers for patrolling this exact dock at this exact hour. She cursed herself for jumping out of the motorboat and pulling the P38 from her pocket.
Yael did not run straight into the fray, gun blazing. Vlad had taught her better than that. She clung to the darkness instead, skipping from boat to boat, clambering along their bows until she reached the highest one. From there she was able to assess the situation.
It was not good.
Luka was trapped on the main dock by a trifecta of Arisaka Type 99 rifles. Their muzzles were leveled at his chest, aimed by patrolmen who looked just as shaken as Victor Löwe did. The three soldiers chatted excitedly among themselves.
Soldier one: “It’s one of the victors!”
Soldier two: “What is he doing here?”
Soldier three: “He’s the one who invited the inmate to the Victor’s Ball. He must have fled when she did—”
Luka (in frantic German): “Are you going to put a bullet in me or not? If so, I’d rather you get it over with.”
Soldier one: “Is that rice on his face?”
Soldier three: “He smells like a dog’s ass.”
The men’s dialogue spiraled into a contest of insults. None of them seemed too concerned about what to do with the German victor now that they’d caught him. There was no sign of the fourth soldier. He must’ve gone to radio in their discovery.
If Yael was going to save Luka, she had to do it now.
She rose from her surveillance pose on the bow and crept her way to the dock, stalking closer to where the soldiers bantered. Two of them stood with their backs to her, and the third was too distracted by his comrades’ jokes to notice the shifting shadows on the far dock. Luka’s arms were propped above his head, all his attention focused on the three rifles. His jaw was set on edge.
During the course of the Axis Tour, Yael had seen Luka break noses and disarm Soviet guards with brutal, decisive elegance. The victor was a good fighter when he wasn’t hemmed in by Arisakas. He needed a distraction and she was the one to provide it.
Yael disengaged the P38’s safety, drew its hammer, and aimed at the water. Her finger cradled the trigger, waiting for just the right moment to pull.
It never came.
An O of metal jabbed into her back, followed by an order just as sharp: “Don’t move.”
The fourth soldier hadn’t gone to radio. He’d been waiting for her.
“Over here!” he called to the others in Japanese.
Yael’s heart trilled its old chorus: FLASH, THUD, VERDAMMT! Her brain scrambled through Vlad’s training, against her own dread. Most people would’ve found an Arisaka Type 99 rifle pressed against their flesh paralyzing. Not Yael. She turned and lunged. The fourth soldier pulled the trigger a fraction too late. His bullet missed Yael (though she felt the graze of its breath, death almost death, passing her over once more), plowing straight into the patrol. Yael grabbed the soldier and wheeled him off the edge of the dock. Then she turned to face the rest.
The round had missed every one of them, for when Yael looked at Luka and the other Imperial Army soldiers, she saw not blood but confusion. Rifles swung, arms flailed. Luka sprang at the nearest soldier; the pair became a green-and-leather blur. The other two patrolmen lined their Arisakas’ sights on Yael’s end of the dock and fired. Their aim was sloppy, frantic. One shot splintered the wood by Yael’s toes. The other hissed over her shoulder.
Both men fumbled with the bolts of their guns—giving Yael valuable seconds to stow her P38 and jump. One abandoned his reloading efforts, drawing his bayonet instead. Yael didn’t have time to go for the knife stowed in her boot. They met: hand-to-blade combat. He was a gifted fighter: anticipating her first punch, dodging it, throwing a swipe of his own. Yael’s sidestep wasn’t swift enough; the tip of the bayonet dragged across her jacket, slicing all leather, no skin. Her second hit was more successful. Yael felt her bones connect with flesh, crack into cartilage.
The soldier spun away from her, free hand clasping his face, red leaking through his fingers. Yael was just about to put the man in a headlock when she heard a series of heart-dropping sounds.
Bad: a spent casing tumbling to the dock. Worse: a slick twist and click of a rifle bolt pushed into place. Worst: a command issued first in Japanese, then again in German so precise it was surgical: “Arms up. Or I’ll shoot.”
The second soldier’s reloaded Arisaka was aimed straight at Yael. He was too close, too ready—there was no dodging this bullet. She held her hands up. A side glance showed her that Luka’s fight had fared no better. The victor was on his back, lips snarled, the third soldier’s Nambu semiautomatic pistol shoved against his throat.
“I’m afraid there’s been a mistake,” she began, trying to keep her Japanese fluid. Unrushed. “I was only out here cleaning my father’s boat—”
“Check her!” the fourth soldier barked from the edge of the dock, where he was pulling himself out of the water.
Blood kept rushing down the first soldier’s face as he grabbed Yael’s left sleeve. Pulled. The fabric gave away to wads of unraveling gauze, which the soldier tore off. Beneath, a scene of ink-and-whirlwind wolves: Babushka, Mama, Miriam, Aaron-Klaus, Vlad. Her pieces, her pain, herself. Stripped back, exposed for all to see.
The wounded soldier jabbed a finger at Yael’s skin. His nail landed on the bared fangs of Vlad’s wolf. “These are the markings the SS told us about. It’s her. The inmate.”
“Excellent. Let’s get them back to the palace.”
But… how could the SS know about the wolves?
Felix. The other boy she tried to leave behind. (And did.) Yael had hoped that when the SS found Adele’s brother tied up and gagged in her room, they’d assume his innocence. After all—she’d shouted her own true identity to anyone who cared to listen.
Yael’s stomach swan-dived to her toes. She should’ve known better. Innocence and guilt were irrelevant in the courts of the SS. They judged with far harsher laws.
What had they done to Felix to get him to talk?
What were they going to do to her and Luka?
Yael already knew the answer to these questions. It was the reason many of the resistance operatives hid cyanide pills in the soles of their shoes. It was why after shooting the Führer three times in the chest on May 16, 1952, Aaron-Klaus swung his own pistol to his head and did the unthinkable. It was why her stomach kept falling, past her toes, into despair.
Life or death.
Yael had made her choice in the middle of that boat.
This time, the death would be hers.