had daughters, no sons to help him in the mine, so they had to live on only his wages. That’s hard. They were always in debt to the company store. Of course, that’s how the company liked it, when you owed them so much money that you couldn’t quit your job. There were lots of different people there. Lots of Finns, Poles, Czechs, Serbs, even a couple of German families. There was only one other Scottish family—my Uncle Ian, Aunt Beth, and my cousins. It was like a little Europe, just a soup bowl full of immigrants. There were a lot of people I liked there, but the work was hard and I wanted to see more of the world than more tunnels of the mines. When Pearl Harbor happened, I was pretty happy. No, that doesn’t sound right. I felt bad for all those families that had lost sons and fathers. Something like twenty-five hundred Americans died. That was sad. I took a bus to Salt Lake two days later and joined the army. Best thing I ever did.”
He paused for breath. He felt like he was chattering mindlessly, dumping out information because he was terrified that he wouldn’t have anything to say. “Enough about me. What about you?”
“What about me?” she smiled widely as she watched him.
“Where’d you grow up?”
“On a farm. Not an estate, I’m no daughter of a lord. It was big enough for our dairy herd. I lived in town so that I could go to school. The nuns were strict, but I miss school.”
“I didn’t get enough schooling,” Napier said. “Just up to eighth grade. But I read a lot, mostly magazines and comic books. The major says that I’ve got a big vocabulary.”
“They gave us books and magazines at the camp. Mostly in German. It kept us distracted as girls were brought, and as girls were taken away, never to return.”
“It must have been hard to find a reason to survive,” he said. “You must have lost hope at times.”
“I prayed,” she said simply. “My faith in Jesus kept me alive.”
“I believe in Jesus Christ.”
“Are you Catholic?” she asked.
“Presbyterian.”
She looked disappointed. “My cousin Claire married a Protestant from Ulster. Our priest refused to give her communion and told her that she was damned to go to hell.”
“That’s not very friendly,” Napier said. “I know of a nice couple from Silver Ridge, back near my hometown. She was Catholic and he was a Baptist. Her priest let her keep going to mass as long as they both agreed to raise their kids as Catholics.”
Her smile crinkled her face, bunching up her freckles on her cheeks into two dimples in a manner that he found utterly charming. “That sounds more reasonable,” she said.
“Do not move!” The harsh voice with the obvious German accent startled Napier into obedience. His body tensed and he clenched his fingers into tight fists as his eyes searched frantically for who had spoken.
The German officer entered the edge of his vision, wearing a black uniform with the black swastika on a red armband. He was a small man, no taller than Napier, and on the slight side, barely able to fill out his uniform. His pistol was still in his holster, but the two SS troopers behind him, with their MP43 assault rifles pointed at Napier and the girl, gave weight to his command.
Napier felt a cold calm come over him. The first time that he had gone into battle, coming under fire in Sicily, he had frozen in panic, unable to move his weapon to return fire. None of his fellow Rangers had noticed, or perhaps they just never said anything, but that act of panic frightened him more profoundly than anything else he had ever experienced. He had resolved to never panic again, and surprisingly, the power of mind over action, he never had.
He did not panic now. Keeping his eyes on the Germans, so that they could not follow his thoughts by watching his eyes, he remembered where his carbine was—propped up between the two front seats, with the safety on, at least a good six feet away. Going for it would be almost certain suicide, since he respected those grease guns that the Germans carried, but the real problem was that Aoife was sitting right next to the carbine. She would certainly be caught in the crossfire. He couldn’t have her death on his conscience and so resigned himself to submission.
The officer walked around the jeep, taking care to not block the lines of fire of his soldiers. Napier watched him. The Nazi peered at the girl and spoke quickly in German. She paled and tears rolled down her cheeks.
“What’s going on, Aoife?” he asked. “What’d he say?”
Her voice quavered. “He knows who I am and he’s going to take me.”
“Over my dead body!” Napier exclaimed, taking a step towards the jeep.
His head exploded in pain.
CHAPTER FOUR
Aoife cried out in dismay, scrambling across the driver’s seat of the jeep and onto the ground next to the soldier. She buried her hands and face into his chest. She heard his heart beating, steady and strong, so reassuring. His uniform smelled sweaty and musty, as if it hadn’t been laundered for weeks, but she liked the scent of this man. As her initial alarm subsided, she heard the German officer order one of his men to get her.
Her father had always said that she was a quick-thinking lass. He did not always mean it as a compliment, especially when she got in trouble, but he was proud of her good marks in school. Aoife slipped a bracelet off her wrist and slid it onto the American’s wrist, whispering an enchantment that her mother had taught her, binding his imagination to the bracelet and to her. It was a most curious piece of jewelry, made of three intertwined golden hairs, and so fine and flexible that it was lost in the arm hairs of even a fair-haired girl like herself. Her mother had given it to her after she had become a woman.
Rough hands pulled her up. She looked into the German’s blue eyes and saw only hard evil. He pawed at her breast as he stood her on her feet.
“None of that,” the officer barked. “She’s to remain a virgin.”
As they dragged her through the forest, away from the jeep, she stubbed her toe on a rock and cried out. Slippers were better than bare feet, but not by much. The soldier yanked her arm to keep her moving.
After only a couple of hundred meters, they came upon another road. A group of German soldiers, wearing camouflage uniforms and carrying short, stubby weapons, waited for them. She counted nineteen of them. The officer stopped to give them orders while the first two soldiers dragged Aoife further down the road.
Her mother had always told her to pay attention, whether when baking a pie, listening to her teacher, or just watching the sea come in and out on the rocky headland near her home. A good rule of life, she always thought. Life was full of surprises when you paid attention.
To her surprise, she realized that the two soldiers were twins, or at least brothers who looked identical. They were big men, well-proportioned, with blond hair and blue eyes. The matrons at the camp had enthused enough about Aryan ideology for Aoife to see that the twins fit the bill. It had probably kept them out of fighting on the front, assigned to the temple.
They reached two trucks parked on the road. One of the men found a piece of rope and tied her hands together in front of her, being unexpectedly gentle to make sure that the rope was not too tight. She figured that she could get out of the bonds if she had five minutes or so to work on them.
The officer came striding up the road. As he approached, Aoife paid attention. Before, the officer had been defined by his black uniform in her mind, but now she looked at his face and realized that she had seen him before. In a different uniform.
As the priest who had sacrificed her friend Elena.
CHAPTER FIVE
SS Colonel Hans von Krohn constantly moved back and forth in the passenger seat of the truck, peering up out of the windshield or the door window. He could only see part of the sky, and was completely blind towards the back of the truck. Fritz was supposed to be watching outside the back of the truck. Driving during the day was