Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(27)

“Seem?”

He shrugged. “Were they agitated? Angry? Bored?”

Fritz gave this some consideration. “The officers seemed agitated,” he said finally. “But that lot always are, the pricks. That’s how you get to be an officer, right?”

Rudi nodded enthusiastically.

“The squaddies...” Fritz shrugged. “They were just doing as they were told.”

“Was...” and here Rudi sat back and looked up at the ceiling, as if casting about for the correct phrasing, before looking at Fritz again. “Was there anyone else there? Civilians, perhaps?”

Fritz’s little eyes narrowed so much they almost disappeared.

“I’m just trying to picture the scene,” Rudi told him. “I can imagine you and the soldiers and stacks of fencing lying around everywhere. It must have looked quite chaotic. I was just wondering if I have the picture right.”

“There were some suits there, as it happens,” Fritz said carefully. “Giving orders.”

“There,” Rudi said with a huge grin. “And that completes my picture.”

“Five of them,” Fritz said. “Older men. One was English.”

“Oh?” Rudi sounded surprised. “You spoke with him?”

“Nah, never got close to him. He was dressed like an Englishman out of a nineteen-fifties movie. You know what I mean? All buttoned up in old-fashioned clothes.”

“So you can’t be sure he was an Englishman, then,” Rudi pointed out. “He was just dressed that way.”

Fritz narrowed his eyes again as if he was suspected of being caught out in a lie. “Yes,” he said. “No.”





3.





BEING INVISIBLE – PROPERLY invisible, not just the everyday invisibility of being a woman – was something of a novelty for Gwen. Rudi had left the flat and returned some hours later with two duffel bags which turned out to contain what seemed, at first sight, to be masses of haphazardly sewn-together rags.

“Stealth suits,” Rudi told her. “For stealthing.”

They’d tried the suits on in the flat, to test the fit and allow Gwen to get used to the fact that, with the suit and its weird mutilated helmet on, Rudi was reduced to a transparent patch of barely-roiling air which only resolved into a recognisable figure when they were almost toe-to-toe.

“It’ll get warm,” Rudi warned. “The suit traps your body heat so it doesn’t show up on infrared. Don’t worry about it; just find somewhere inconspicuous and loosen the collar and wait until you cool down.”

“How warm?” Gwen asked.

“Quite warm.”

‘Quite warm’ turned out to be ‘uncomfortably hot’. In fact, there was a sense, as they crouched down behind this tree, that she was slowly cooking. She loosened the collar of her suit and a geyser of hot, slightly sweaty air fountained up around her face, condensing into a cloud of vapour which anyone nearby, if they were paying attention, could not fail to miss.

“Okay?” asked Rudi from a volume of thin air a couple of metres away.

“Quite warm,” Gwen said.

“Told you.”

“Yes. Yes, you did.” Gwen experimented again with the head-up display of her visor, zooming her view in and out until she felt a little queasy. She was familiar – or at least she’d thought she was – with the Coureurs from films and thrillers, but she’d never thought she’d actually be using some of their kit, or that it would turn out to be quite so uncomfortable.

They were in a forest somewhere to the east of a village called Pintsch, close to the GPS coordinates Fritz had given them. Pintsch’s tiny population had been swollen by a small temporary town of soldiers, many of them, judging by their associated equipment, combat engineering troops. Many of them also seemed to be leaving. She and Rudi had ventured as close to the village as Rudi thought prudent, and watched, invisible, from the side of the road as truck after truck passed by.

Rudi’s opinion was that the engineers had already accomplished their task and were returning to base. “I suppose we could always try talking to one of them at some point,” he said. “But you can never tell with the military. They have surprising attacks of patriotism.”

From Pintsch, they had worked their way from tree to tree through the forest until Gwen spotted, in the distance, the dull grey metal shine of woven metal fencing. And here Rudi had elected to pause, waiting for who knew what.

Periodically, armed soldiers passed by, patrolling outside the fence, their faces bulky with image-amps, and it took Gwen a while to realise that Rudi was timing them. One went by, his boots sucking in the mixture of slush and leaf litter trodden in a path around the fence. He went off into the distance. There was a pause. Then Gwen caught a whisper of motion out of the corner of her eye and a moment later a shower of snow suddenly drifted down out of the lower branches of a nearby tree.

“What are you doing?” she whispered; she still hadn’t got used to the subvocal mike which was part of the suit’s suite of equipment.

“I’m climbing this tree,” Rudi’s voice said in her ear. “It used to be easier for me.”

More snow fell out of the tree. As a covert move, Gwen thought, it left a lot to be desired.