Christopher Reich - The Runner

Seyss felt at home in the darkness, his incipient fear of tight spaces lost amid the trudging of rubber-soled feet and the hushed intake of breath. A frisson of excitement warmed his stomach, the same self-congratulatory sensation he experienced before a race when he sized up the competition and determined he would win. He reminded himself this was only a preliminary heat. The main event would engender a return to Berlin; a return to the city of his greatest triumphs and his greatest defeats.

Reaching a crossroads of sorts, Rizzo thrust his flashlight in front of him. “There you are, Mr Fitzpatrick. Your next exhibit.”

Seyss stepped past Rizzo, making a sweep of the area with his flashlight. The guns and uniforms he’d picked out sat atop a pile of splintered palates in the center of a vast expanse of concrete. Fifteen meters to the left stood two flimsy iron doors separating this, the loading floor, from the garage. In the far corner, he could make out the chain link fence penning in the ammunition. For a moment longer, he listened to the silence, then satisfied they were truly alone, led his men across the floor.

Everything was exactly as he’d left it.

The Mosin-Nagant sniper’s rifle with twenty-seven notches cut into the stock, the Pepshkas with their drum barrels, the Tokarev pistols, the pea green tunics with sky blue epaulets. A metal trunk rested on the ground next to the palates. He flipped open the locks to find the ammunition he’d requested. But all that was no longer enough. Proximity to his goal made him the greedier.

“Grenades,” Seyss called. “For true authenticity, our exhibit will require a few dozen grenades.”

Rizzo hesitated, looking lost. “They’re in the ammo pen.”

“Go get them.”

Rizzo checked over his shoulder, looking toward the entrance to the garage as if expecting someone to answer for him. “They’ll cost you more.”

Seyss pulled an envelope from his jacket and handed it to Rizzo. “Surely, you’ll toss them in gratis. It would be the gentlemanly thing to do.”

Rizzo opened the envelope, running a thumb over ten hundred dollar bills. Again, he glanced over his shoulder toward the garage. “I don’t know. Guns, a little ammunition, that’s one thing. Grenades, they’re a whole ’nother ball game. And if you don’t mind my saying, your friends don’t look too much like gentlemen.”

Behind them, Bauer, Biederman and Steiner were sorting through the uniforms. Though they spoke in hushed tones, one could not mistake the clipped cadence of their language.

“The war has made rogues of us all, I’m afraid,” said Seyss, his patience at an end. Something was wrong. He could feel it. Rizzo was too nervous, too much changed from their last visit. Removing Bauer’s work-issue Luger from the lee of his back, he pointed it at Rizzo’s chest and said “The grenades, Captain. It’s not a point for discussion.”

“Give me a break, will you?” Rizzo’s hands scuttled from one pocket to another searching for his key ring.

“Front left,” said Seyss. “Don’t pretend you don’t know where they are.”

Rizzo muttered something about “fuckin’ Nazis” and how “he never wanted to do this in the first place,” then in a fit of frustration, threw the keys at Seyss. “Get ’em yourselves. They’re free. All you want. Where do you think you’re going, anyway?”

“ Where am I going? ” Seyss cringed at the remonstrative twang in Rizzo’s voice. Staring hard at the American, he caught the man’s gaze dart high above his shoulder, the brown eyes open wide in expectation. He knew the look.

Hope, impatience, desperation rolled into one. Spinning his head, he followed Rizzo’s eyes, but saw only the fuzzy outline of crates receding into the darkness. Someone was there, though. He knew it. He yanked Rizzo by the collar and jabbed the pistol’s snout under his jaw. “What’s happening here, Captain?”

“Nothin’s happening. What do ya mean?”

Seyss levered the barrel up, so that the gunsight punctured his skin. “Say again?”

Rizzo moved his mouth, but no words came out. Or if they did Seyss did not hear them. For at that moment, a siren wailed, a door flew open, and the midnight sun burst into the armory.

Which dumb son of a bitch turned on the kliegs?

Devlin Judge dug his face into the lee of his arm, squeezing his eyelids to block out the brilliant light. Who turned on the lights? Who ordered the siren? No one was supposed to have moved until he gave the signal.

Lifting his head, Judge pried open an eye. Spears of shimmering white punctured his dilated pupils. The light immobilized him, nailing him to his splintery perch on top of a stack of Sokoloy machine guns. One hand slid to the walkie-talkie by his waist. It stood upright, its antenna poking through a draft vent cut in the roof. No, he had not keyed in the signal by mistake.

For two hours, he’d been waiting for Seyss. Waiting for the White Lion to show his prized skin. From his vantage point high above the armory floor, he’d followed Seyss’s progress through the building. Everything had been going according to plan — Seyss and his men arriving at twelve midnight on the nose, Rizzo keeping the conversation light, leading them directly to the guns and uniforms. Then Seyss had asked for the grenades and Rizzo had broken.A few more feet, Judge wanted to yell at him.A few more feet and we would have cast the net!

Once Seyss was safely inside the armory, a company of military police under Honey’s provisional command had taken up position around the compound; 175 men in all. Mullins lay poised with another platoon inside the garage, two Jeep-mounted klieg lights with them to insure proper visibility. But no one was to have budged, no one was to have moved a muscle, until Judge keyed in the signal and Mullins blew his goddamned whistle.

Forcing open his eyes, Judge saw the armory floor awash in spectral light. Seyss stood directly below, a gun in his outstretched hand. He looked no different than he had a few days ago, hair dyed black, dressed in a navy work jacket and trousers. His plan withering around him, he appeared cool and relaxed. Rizzo cowered a few feet away, raising his hands to his face as if to defend himself against a blow. It struck Judge how they looked like actors on a stage, their every feature defined, their motions dramatized by the klieg’s merciless vigil. Then, as if a casual afterthought, Seyss raised the pistol and fired it point blank into Rizzo’s face. Rizzo dropped like a sack of manure. No thespian could replicate the ocean of blood advancing across the concrete floor from the back of his head.

For one long second, all was static; a beautifully lit diorama scored by a bullet’s earsplitting report and a siren’s undulating wail. Seyss stood poised above Rizzo’s body, while his comrades were captured in various positions of distress. Bauer, the stockiest and oldest of them, stared blindly into the maw of the kleig; Steiner, the spindly clerk, checked the chamber of the sniper’s rifle with a marksman’s competence. And Biederman, blond and cagey, crouched behind the steamer trunk packed with ammunition. Then came the bone-crunching staccato of a heavy machine gun and all was motion.

Chunks of wood and tin and concrete erupted from the walls, the floor, the mountains of rotting crates, arcing through the air like exploding rock. Seyss ducked his head and dashed for protection behind the nearest box. With his pistol, he motioned for Steiner to fire at the light. His exhortations came too late. The lank dark-haired man managed only to lift the rifle to his shoulder when he was caught in the chest with a string of bullets. He had no time even to scream. Lifted off his feet, his thorax burst in an ejaculation of torn flesh and viscera. As his body hit the floor, Judge saw that he had been cut in two. Seyss was yelling for Bauer to get down and for Biederman to come to him. But Bauer was already down, digging his nails into the concrete floor as if he were hanging from a cliff. And Biederman, hiding behind the ammunition box, looked as if he wasn’t going anywhere either. A thirty cal bullet penetrated the trunk setting off a chain reaction of small arms fire. A split-second later, rounds began to explode inside the box. Biederman looked this way and that, indecision creasing his features. Just as he began to move towards Seyss, a bullet exited the trunk, finding his jaw and, a microsecond later, his brain and skull. A cap of gore sprayed from his head and he collapsed.