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  MacLeod watched them start to go—Miriam, her head bent low with shame but her eyes defiant, searching for any avenue of escape; the Polish police officer, impatient and flushed with his own power; and his two eager lackeys, their rifles ready and trained on Miriam. “Gesiowska,” he said, invoking the name of the hated prison less than half a mile to the east, the direction Miriam was being led.

  “I think you’re right. Plenty of private little rooms. Very cozy. Damn them.” All of a sudden, Avram was a flurry of motion, checking his pistol, grabbing two grenades from a small cache near their lookout position.

  “So, what’s Plan B?” MacLeod demanded.

  “You stay with them. Keep an eye on her—make sure they don’t get her inside. Be ready to ride in like John Wayne and get her out of there.”

  Avram started toward the stairs leading down from the roof. “What’s the signal?” MacLeod called after him.

  “You’ll know it when you see it,” MacLeod heard him say as he disappeared down the stairwell.

  “Avram!” he called down after him, but there was no response. Damn him and his complicated plans. “Just great,” MacLeod grumbled under his breath, but one thing he’d learned in three hard months in Warsaw was he could trust Avram’s instincts when it came to the Ghetto. He quickly checked over his rifle. Fully loaded, the old German Mauser took five rounds, but he knew there was precious little ammunition left for it. The fact the ZOB had entrusted it, one of less than a dozen they’d managed to procure, to him was proof of how highly they valued his marksmanship. He’d have to make every shot count.

  He ran to the far edge of the roof, climbed a short ladder onto the roof of the adjoining apartment building. Racing across the rooftop, he vaulted over the side of the building and landed with a tuck and a roll on another building two floors below. Almost before he landed, he was running again.

  In the months since MacLeod had helped Rabbi Mendelsohn escape Warsaw and had seen him on his way to rendezvous with his son, the ZOB had tried as best they could to prepare for the inevitable day the Germans would return to finish clearing out the Ghetto. No one deluded themselves that the brief show of resistance MacLeod had witnessed at the Umschlagplatz and in the streets of the Ghetto back in January had caused the Germans to retreat for good. When MacLeod had surprised Avram by keeping his promise and returning to the Ghetto, he found the survivors of the Germans’ aborted January Aktsia working feverishly, digging a complex series of underground bunkers, called malinas, throughout the Ghetto, bunkers in which the noncombatants could hide to ride out the coming fury for as long as they could. For the fighters of the resistance, a web of ladders and bridges and chutes was constructed between the closely packed buildings to give the ZOB a stronghold to fight from cover. They all knew if forced to fight the Germans openly in the streets again, the battle was doomed before it began. Their skirmishes with the Germans during the three-day January uprising had routed the Germans from the Ghetto and stopped the expulsions. But the cost in Jewish lives had been high, and they knew the Germans would not be surprised a second time.

  Reaching the end of the next building at a run, MacLeod climbed carefully out onto the narrow wooden bridge across Smocza Street. He kept low so as not to be spotted against the blue sky. He kept moving parallel to Miriam’s captors three stories below. Miriam was walking as slowly as she dared, buying herself time, but MacLeod could tell the guards were dangerously close to running out of patience with her.

  “No more little Jewish half-men for you,” the Polish officer taunted Miriam. “Soon you’ll know what a real man feels like.” He grabbed her from behind and wrapped his beefy arm across her naked breasts. “I’m going to fill you up until you scream for more, little doll,” he whispered in her ear, and pulled her faster down the street.

  MacLeod couldn’t hear the man’s words, but he could read them in the revulsion on Miriam’s face. His hand tightening on his rifle, he hurried from the wooden causeway and sprinted across the next two rooftops, clearing the low brick wall separating them like a champion hurdler. After another short ladder and another sprint, he’d pulled ahead of the police by half a block. He hoped to cut them off before they could reach the prison. All the while he was alert for Avram’s signal.

  MacLeod knew more was at stake than just Miriam’s life if he allowed them to take her into Gesiowska. Under interrogation, especially if these pigs turned her over to the Gestapo when they were finished with her, Miriam could compromise the entire operation—not only the ZOB fighters in the Ghetto, but the thousands of Jews in hiding on the Aryan side of Warsaw and the handful of sympathetic Poles, Miriam’s contacts, who protected them. Miriam was strong, he knew, but he’d seen firsthand what the Gestapo was capable of. And he didn’t want to imagine what they might do to a woman. Almost subconsciously, he checked the sight on his rifle. One way or another, MacLeod knew Miriam would never enter Gesiowska Prison.

  With a leap he cleared the narrow on passageway that separated Gesia 122 and Gesia 120, then shouldered on the door to Gesia 118 and started down the stairs, taking them three and four at a time. The building was abandoned and his steps echoed as he pounded down the stairwell. Avram had once described to him the Ghetto before the cattle cars, how the Germans had forced nearly half a million people behind the Wall, crammed ten and fifteen to a room, but the Ghetto MacLeod knew was practically a ghost town.

  He kicked open the door of a first-floor apartment whose windows fronted the prison. He passed through the kitchen, where a pot of rotted food stood on the stove. As he moved into the living area, he could see the dust-covered dining table still carefully set for dinner, patiently waiting for the family whose meal was so violently interrupted to return. He opened the front window, looked out cautiously. Miriam and her guards were approaching, less than a hundred yards away. MacLeod readied his rifle. “Any time now would be fine, Avram,” he muttered.

  Out in the street, as the prison came into view, Miriam realized her time was running out. Rescue was not coming. Any escape she made, whether by foot or by death, she would have to make on her own. Her arms still awkwardly bound behind her neck, she swung back hard, catching the greasy Polish officer in the throat with her elbow, hoping that in his surprise he’d loosen his hold on her. Instead, he threw her to the ground.

  “Bitch!” he screamed.

  As she lay in the street, he drove the steel toe of his jack-booted foot brutally into her stomach, dragging her across the sharp cobblestones. She cried out in pain and struggled to move away as he drew his foot back and rammed it home again.

  Signal or no signal, MacLeod would not stand by and watch Miriam beaten to death. He was out the window and into the street before the third steel-toed blow found its mark.

  One of the guards saw him coming at them and shouted out an alarm. “Uwaga! Watch out!” He fired off a shot at MacLeod that missed wildly. Before the guard could shoot again, MacLeod fired at him on the run, hitting him in the shoulder. The guard dropped his rifle and fell to the ground in agony, cradling his useless gun arm. At the sound of gunfire, the Polish officer and his second guard turned toward MacLeod, leveling their weapons at him.

  “Now would be the time!” MacLeod called out to Avram, not really expecting him to hear.

  The two Poles fired simultaneously. MacLeod hit the ground and rolled, dodging the volley. If nothing else, at least he’d drawn their attention away from Miriam.

  Rolling to his feet again, he fired off another shot. It barely missed the officer and whizzed dangerously close to Miriam, who had struggled to her knees and was attempting to stand behind him. “Vart doh!” MacLeod called to her, and she obediently dropped back to the ground.

  The second guard fired his rifle again and caught MacLeod in the thigh. MacLeod stumbled from the impact, cursing loudly, but managed to keep on charging, closing the ground between them. Mentally, he fought to block out the pain, block out the pain, concentrate on raising the rifle, aiming the rifle, firing the rifle. His bul
let hit the second guard squarely in the gut, throwing him back a yard or more before dropping him in the gutter.

  Suddenly, MacLeod could sense the presence of another Immortal coming closer. “About bloody time,” he mumbled under his breath as he charged, then dodged as the remaining officer fired his pistol. MacLeod could feel the hot rush of the bullet just inches from his head. He spun and fired twice in quick succession, dropping the officer where he stood.

  Allowing himself a quick sigh of relief, MacLeod hurried to where Miriam lay in the street, curled in a tight ball to protect her injured belly. “Alts iz gut,” he reassured her. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see a German cargo truck barrel around the corner, Avram at the wheel. Better late than never, MacLeod thought. He bent down and began to untie Miriam’s hands. “Everything’s all right.”

  Suddenly, blam! and a bullet tore into MacLeod’s arm. Through the red-rush of pain, MacLeod looked up to see five guards from Gesiowska, uniformed Germans and Poles, running down the street toward him, guns drawn and firing. MacLeod raised his rifle to fire at the closest German.

  Click.

  Nothing. Out of ammo. Shit.

  “Avram!” he called out. The cargo truck drove directly for the Gesiowska reinforcements. “Avra—” the impact of the German bullet as it ripped into his stomach knocked the air from his lungs. As he fell to his knees, eyes wide with shock, he fought to retain consciousness. He could barely hear Avram scream out from the truck—

  “Protect Miriam!”

  With what felt like his last ounce of strength, MacLeod managed to throw his body across Miriam, protecting her body with his own. Avram’s truck erupted in a tremendous ball of red-gold flame in the midst of the prison guards. MacLeod turned his face away from the intense heat and blinding light. Then something metal seared into his side, and his world faded to black.

  “Duncan? Duncan, please … please wake up. Duncan?”

  As MacLeod began to come back to life, he could hear Miriam’s voice, filled with terror. “God in Heaven, help me. Duncan!” Beneath him, as feeling was slowly restored to his body, he could feel her try to move, trying to escape from under what she must have thought was MacLeod’s bloody corpse pinning her to the cobblestones. The more her frail, undernourished body fought and failed to free herself, the more panicked she became. “Oh, God, no … please, no …” she sobbed, struggling. He wanted to comfort her, but speech and motion had not yet returned to his body.

  By the time he was finally able to roll to one side, freeing her, she was nearly hysterical. She turned and looked at him in horror. “You were … you were … dead,” she said, barely able to catch her breath

  “Miriam, I’m fine, really,” he consoled her. He untied the bonds that held her hands. Immediately, without thought, she crossed her arms in front of her to shield her nakedness. MacLeod tried to explain, “I just blacked out. Must’ve hit my head when I fell.” He gave her what he hoped was his most sincere and endearing smile. “C’mon, we’ve gotta get out of here before more company comes.” He scooped her up in his arms as if carrying her over a threshold, and they disappeared into a nearby alley before more soldiers arrived to investigate the explosion.

  Avram found them in a stairwell of an empty building several streets away from the prison. Miriam, wrapped in MacLeod’s shirt, sat on an upper stair, head against the wall for support, still a little dazed. MacLeod, now shirtless, cleaned the cuts and abrasions on Miriam’s face as gingerly as he could with some water he’d found.

  “Yeow!” Miriam flinched away as his handkerchief dabbed at the pistol gouge beneath her eye.

  “We have to get the gravel out or it won’t heal,” MacLeod explained. “Just a little more, then I’ll stop. I promise … okay?” His voice was tender, his touch gentle. Miriam sighed, nodding, and closed her eyes, allowing him to continue.

  “How’s our heroine?”

  At the sound of Avram’s voice from the bottom of the stair-well, Miriam’s eyes flew open. “Tzaddik?” she called out, and then saw him coming up the stairs. “Tzaddik, you’re alive!” His shirt lay in shreds on his back, his trousers torn, but he was whole and alive. In his arms he carried two rifles, a pistol and an ammo belt he had liberated from their owners before fleeing the scene of the crime. Miriam jumped up to meet him, eager to touch him, to make sure he was real, but a sharp pain tore through her belly when she moved too fast. Startled, she started to fall and immediately MacLeod’s strong arms were there to catch her, and he helped her gently down to the steps again.

  “Some cuts, a lot of bruises,” MacLeod filled Avram in. “Probably some nightmares she’ll never be rid of, but nothing we can do about that right now. I’m concerned about what’s going on inside here, though.” He touched Miriam’s midsection, which she was cradling protectively. “We should find Dr. Cohen.” Dr. Israel Cohen, one of the only physicians left in the Ghetto, was a ZOB partisan who during the January uprising had proven himself equally skilled with a grenade as with a scalpel.

  “No!” Miriam protested. “There’s no time. I have to see Anielewicz. As soon as we can. It’s urgent.” Using the handrail, Miriam managed to get back to her feet.

  If Miriam needed to see the ZOB leader that urgently, MacLeod realized her news had to be grim. “The Aktsia?” he asked, resigned to the answer he knew he’d hear.

  “Tonight. The Germans strike before first light.”

  MacLeod and Avram exchanged a look, and Avram handed him the weapons he’d scrounged. Then Avram put an arm around Miriam’s waist. “Anielewicz is at the Mila Street base. Can you walk?” He helped her gingerly down a step, then another, and when the shooting pain did not return, she pulled away from him and started down the stairs under her own power.

  “Looks like I’ll have to,” she said as she reached the bottom landing and turned toward Avram with a little lopsided smile, the best her bruised face could manage. “You seem to have blown up the only working transportation in the Ghetto.”

  Juggling the rifles, MacLeod attempted to put his jacket back on. “Hell of a signal, Avram. Next time, you might try whistling.”

  “Hey, stop with the kvetching,” Avram protested, “it worked, didn’t it? Three of the bastards dead, another five out of commission—admit it, Errol Flynn couldn’t have done it better,” he said, invoking the name of one of his heroes in the American films he used to like to watch before the war.

  “Errol Flynn would have used a stunt man,” MacLeod groused as he followed them down the stairs.

  Chapter Twelve

  Warsaw: April 18, 1943

  MacLeod and Avram escorted Miriam across the Ghetto to the ZOB headquarters in an old building on Mila Street where she could meet with Anielewicz, the ZOB commander, and be tended to by Dr. Cohen. After they dropped her off safely, MacLeod had thought they’d return to their unit to prepare for the coming confrontation. But Avram had other ideas.

  He led MacLeod into an apartment building a few blocks away at Mila Street 18. They passed through the lobby to a rear hallway, then down a flight of stairs into an empty basement. Avram knocked twice on a section of the wall that looked no different than the walls around it. MacLeod knew it was the entrance to an underground bunker.

  “Tell Shmuel, Tzaddik’s here,” Avram announced to the empty room. They could hear locks turning, then a section of the wall swung out. They had been granted admission to the bunker beneath Mila 18.

  The guard at the door was a big, hulking lug who didn’t so much talk as he did grunt as he gestured them down the stairs, and MacLeod couldn’t remember seeing him before at any of the ZOB meetings or drills. And a face like that one he knew he would’ve remembered.

  “Who’s that?” MacLeod whispered to Avram, as they started down the stairs to the malina. Avram shushed him with a wave of his hand.

  “Later.”

  The stairwell was a long one, the bunker far deeper than any MacLeod had seen so far, and there was an odd quality to the light. It was a few moments
before MacLeod realized that the light seemed strange because it was coming from light-bulbs in the ceiling. He’d grown so used to candles and oil lamps in the power-deprived Ghetto, he’d nearly forgotten what electric light was like. “Avram, what is this place?” he hissed in his comrade’s ear.

  Avram took a quick look over his shoulder to make sure they were out of earshot of the bruiser manning the entrance. “Welcome to the gangsters’ lair, MacLeod.”

  “Gangsters?”

  “You know. Dillinger, Capone, Cagney. ‘You’ll never take me alive, coppers,’ all that stuff—gangsters.”

  “James Cagney is an actor, Avram, not a gangster,” MacLeod corrected.

  “Gangster, actor, what’s the difference?” Avram said as they continued down the stairs. “Anyway, Shmuel Issachar is the king of the thieves, pickpockets, blackmailers, hired killers—name your vice, he’s probably got a piece of it. Chicago hasn’t got a lock on corruption, you know.”

  “And this place is his?” MacLeod looked around in the bright, steady light as they reached the bottom of the stairs. On either side of him, the corridor stretched on for hundreds of yards. He could hear voices through some of the open doorways, and occasionally someone would move from room to room down the hallway.

  “When the king needs a place to hole up from the Nazis, he builds the Taj Mahal. Generators, hot and cold running water, game room, library. Rumor has it if the Aktsia doesn’t start soon, old Izzy’s putting in a pool over the summer.” Avram pointed out a large, broad-shouldered man moving quickly toward them down the corridor. “Speak of the devil.”