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"Elena!" he screamed as he yanked the Walther out of his pocket and pointed the muzzle at the broad back of the closest soldier, "wait!"
The other soldier hitched around toward Hale, reaching for a holster, and Hale swung the muzzle toward him and pulled the resistant trigger.
The hard pop! of the gunshot battered his ears and the muzzle flash dazzled him, but Hale simply crouched to make sure of not hitting Elena and then blindly fired another shot, upward toward the man wrestling over her.
He could see past the flash-glare in his retinas now, and he raised the barrel of his pistol as Elena rolled to her feet and fired her own gun once at the man Hale had just shot at, and then a second time toward the figures rolling along the irregular wall.
Another gunshot flared and cracked close at hand, and then through the ringing in his ears Hale heard Cassagnac's voice: "Is it Lot? We must run north, look."
Cassagnac nodded behind, toward the hollowed buildings to the south, and when Hale looked back that way he saw silhouettes with rifles jogging this way.
Elena grabbed Hale's arm and yanked him forward, after Cassagnac, and then the three of them were simply running north across the shadowed, rubbled lot, hopping over chunks of stone and skidding in puddles. Hale glimpsed her face under the flying white hair-dark blood slicked her mouth, but her teeth were bared in what might have been at least partly a desperate grin.
The lorry with the gray rectangular stone in the bed of it had sped up, and now rocked to a halt right next to the Brandenburg Gate columns on the eastern side; and on the western side the crane had been driven up to within a hundred feet of it. Through the hot rain Hale could see men carrying the end of a cable east between the columns.
Hale saw a man briefly tumble through the air as the roaring whirlwind moved out across the pavement away from the boat, toward the gate; its droning inhuman syllables shook the air and seemed to rattle Hale's teeth even at this fifty yards' distance, and bits of stone were falling from the gate's high pediment.
Though Hale and his companions were being pursued from the south, none of the Soviet soldiers around the lorries appeared to have noticed the intrusion yet-their attention was doubtless focused on the stone and the crane and the living tornado, and certainly radios wouldn't work correctly on this night.
But a jeep at the west end of the square had started forward, and though it halted at the edge of the lot, the driver was backing and filling to keep the headlamp beams on the three fugitives who were running toward the Unter den Linden pavement and the Arab boat, and Hale could hear the jeep's horn honking out the old Rote Kapelle radio code for danger, danger.
And now to the east he saw headlamps moving north along the boulevard that passed Hitler's Chancellery; and from somewhere out there a searchlight beam swept the lot in a moving fan of long black shadows on white-lit pavement, and after passing Hale and his companions once, it swung back and fixed on them.
Cassagnac hopped and skidded to a halt, crouching, and Hale and Elena stopped beside him and stood bent forward with their hands on their knees. They were within sprinting distance of the north edge of the lot now, with the gleaming lanes of Unter den Linden beyond.
Cassagnac's wet face seemed to have been carved out of granite in the harsh white light. "They," he panted, "won't shoot-into the Western sectors. But the soldiers-will be here-in moments. You," he said to Hale, "can surrender. Elena and I-must not be captured."
Hale permitted himself a glance at Elena. Under the sopping white hair her youthful face was drawn and pale, with blood at her lips; and too he considered the fact that he had just shot two of the soldiers who were trying to capture them. "I'll die with you," he panted dizzily.
"Good," Elena gasped, reaching out to squeeze his hand briefly. "We must get-in the boat. The soldiers must be afraid-of the monster, and perhaps won't-chase us there."
"Let us all die on the boat," agreed Cassagnac with a jerky nod.
The thing Elena had described as the monster was a whirling, flexing tower of concentrated wind and rain against the Brandenburg Gate pillars, and now with a grinding of gears the crane arm hitched strongly upward, and the rectangular gray stone was swinging in wide arcs on the western side of the gate columns. The whirlwind crashed in eddying spray against the pediment at the top, seeming to rock the whole battered structure.
Hale felt physically squeezed between the soldiers coming up from behind him and the huge supernatural creature ahead; and it took an effort for him to keep his throat open, so that he could breathe without a keening whimper.
"Go," said Cassagnac, and then he and Hale and Elena were running full-tilt straight toward the old Arab boat on the bed of the truck; Hale didn't look left or right, and he gritted his teeth and ignored the bangs of rifle fire he heard from the west and from behind.
Two splintered holes were punched into the boat's wooden hull strakes as Hale jolted across the final yards of street pavement toward it, but over the thudding of his heart and the roaring of his breath he heard a megaphone-amplified voice shouting urgently, and no further shots were fired.
Feeling naked in the glare of many pairs of headlamps, Hale clambered up onto the corrugated steel truck bed and helped Elena up beside him. The boat's hull was a high wooden curve at his shoulder, but Cassagnac had already jumped and caught the bundle of rope that was the vessel's rail, and after he had swung himself over it, he reached back down; Hale grabbed Elena by the waist, bunching her raincoat to get a good hold of her ribs, and boosted her up; she caught Cassagnac's hands, and after a few seconds of scrambling and grunting, the three of them were lying in shadow on loose tangles of rope on the boat's deck.
"They will shoot through the hull," said Elena, getting up on her knees. The hot rain was dripping rapidly off the spiky fringe of her white hair.
Hale had rolled over onto a leather boot, and when he picked it up to toss it aside, it felt heavy. He looked into it and saw glistening meat and stumps of wet bone.
With a smothered yell he let go of it, then kicked it away across the deck-and he noticed lengths of smeared white bone scattered among the ropes, and a gristly piebald sphere that, when he couldn't help but focus on it, he recognized as a stripped human head.
He had tucked his gun back into his pocket to climb aboard, but now without thinking he snatched it out again, and he exhaled so harshly that the breath came out in a grating moan.
Cassagnac had lifted his head to peer over the gunwale, but Elena looked back at Hale.
"I think they won't shoot the boat," said Hale carefully. "I think it's the monster's boat."
Elena looked past him at the disordered deck, and shock made the skin of her face seem to contract, widening her eyes and pulling her lips back from her teeth. Perhaps involuntarily, her right hand darted to her forehead and she made the sign of the cross. "Bozhe moy!" she whispered.
Cassagnac had heard Hale and glanced back, and now he too had taken in the spectacle of the boat's deck. "Ah, God," he said bleakly. "I think Lot is right. They will have to...storm the boat, board us."
