A thousand suns

Hauser’s face curled in disgust at the broken man. He raised the gun and pointed it at his head. ‘Oh dear. Well, goodbye, you pathetic Je-’

A loud clatter of gunfire shattered the tableau and a stunned Hauser dropped the weapon as a fleck of stone stung his cheek.

A dozen or more US soldiers had emerged from an archway further down the back street. The American men had instinctively dropped to the ground and leaped for the cover of the doorways opposite them and now lay down a furious volley of gunfire up the street.

Two of Bosch’s men dropped, one of them dead instantly. Another four were wounded. One of them lay on the cobbles and shook uncontrollably as blood and air bubbled from a rip in his neck.

Hauser scrambled away from Schenkelmann, on all fours, back towards the truck as a storm of bullets zipped down the street at head height. He felt a bullet whistle past his ear with a low hum, and the rattle of a dozen more as they hit the cobbles on the ground around him.

The remaining men of the Wehrmacht platoon scrambled for cover on either side of the vehicle and began to return fire, while the SS men in the truck unslung their weapons and let off a volley from within.

A single bullet thudded into Schenkelmann’s back and pushed him over on to his face, where he curled into a foetal position as the gunfight progressed, bullets whizzing in both directions, inches above him.

Hauser managed to make his way back to the truck and opened the cabin door. He waited for a second’s lull to shriek an order to Bosch and his men. ‘You must hold this position at all costs, the truck must get away!’ Hauser’s thin, reedy voice reached Bosch, who reissued the order in a much louder parade-ground voice.

Hauser turned to the driver and screamed as he climbed in. ‘Drive, for God’s sake!’

Bosch heard the truck’s engine stutter to life and it immediately lurched forward as the tyres spun on the cobbles. From his precarious position behind a small sapling he watched the truck rumble down the street and turn a corner before calling out to his men.

‘Right, fuck that idiot’s order. We’ll hold for another minute, no more.’

His voice attracted a burst of gunfire and splinters of wood exploded from the sapling’s trunk. He cursed Hauser for dropping the gun he had handed him in the street like a startled old woman. The gunfire died off for a moment. He could hear one of the Americans shouting orders to his men. Bosch had enough street-fighting experience to know that they were trying for a flanking position. The American officer was sending some of his men into the furniture warehouse to find a way up to the windows that overlooked him and his men.

That’s what he’d do if the situation were reversed.

‘Shit,’ he muttered. He looked around and saw two of his men looking to him for instructions. Silently Bosch pointed at a window overlooking them and held up a fist, which he pulled down in a short tugging action and drew a finger across his mouth.

Grenades — through that window — on my command.

Both men nodded and each pulled out a stick grenade, they unscrewed the caps and made ready to tug on the fuse string. The gunfire had stopped. The Americans down the street were waiting for their colleagues to get into position before pressing home the attack.

Bosch studied the windows intently and soon caught a glimpse of the top of a helmet bobbing inside the building. They were making their way along the first floor to the window that looked down on to his position behind the splintered tree trunk. He nodded to his men and both threw their grenades up. One dropped through the window effortlessly whilst the other clattered uselessly against the window frame and dropped back down onto the stones below. He counted to seven before the first grenade went off inside the warehouse, producing a shower of dust from out of the windows and knocking a frame down on to the street. The other grenade exploded on the cobbles, shattering the few windows left intact on the ground floor of the furniture warehouse.

Bosch waited for the cloud of dust to clear. The grenades seemed to have done the trick, it looked like they had stunned, wounded or killed the men up there. Otherwise he’d have expected a retaliatory volley raining down on them by now.

He looked for the Jewish scientist; he was lying in the road, but still moving. A pool of blood had grown around his torso and a small river trickled across the street, meandering through the cracks between the stones.

He’s lost too much blood to survive the wound.

If he’d had his gun on him he could have made sure of that with a shot or two to the head. Bosch knew enough that the Americans couldn’t be allowed to capture the Jew alive. Hauser had made that quite clear.

Smoke was coming up from the lab below and billowing out through the arched door, thicker than it had been a minute ago, the fire must have caught and already be spreading.

He looked up the street.

The truck must be far enough away by now.