Page 29 of Clive Cussler The Iron Storm (An Isaac Bell Adventure #15)

He was grateful to be chasing a chef in white and not a soldier in a dark uniform.

Ahead, the cook reached an unseen ramp because he started rising up from the alley floor in an odd, jerky fashion.

The ramp seemed to slow him because Bell caught up in just a couple of long-legged paces.

It was then that he realized there was no ramp.

The young conscript was climbing the walls using a foot on each side to propel himself upward.

Bell saw the man had a destination in mind.

There was a window opening halfway up that was a shade darker than the stone.

The teen had momentum to help him make the climb.

Bell didn’t have time to backtrack, so he shoved the Luger behind his back, found a toehold against the mortared stone wall on his right, and used his hands as a brace as he lifted himself off the ground.

He found a spot higher up on the left wall and repeated the process, bracing himself with the muscles of his legs while maintaining balance with his hands.

Above him, the soldier was nearing the window.

He’d run out of momentum by this point and was forced to climb like Bell.

He might have been younger, but Bell had him on strength and sheer determination.

Bell found perfect holds each time for his feet as though he could see what he was doing rather than making the climb by feel.

It was obvious the cook had done this before, a game he’d likely played with others stationed at the base, but fear made him cautious and Bell was gaining on him once again.

The kid reached the window. It was wooden framed and from the outside he could swing it open toward him.

The frame barely missed the opposite wall.

He slithered through less than fifteen seconds ahead of his pursuer.

Bell redoubled his effort, taking higher steps each time.

He had no idea what lay on the other side of the window and needed to prevent the young soldier from taking advantage.

He ignored the burning pain in his thighs and the scraped skin off his hands and kept climbing.

In his haste, the cook hadn’t closed and locked the window, maybe it couldn’t be. It didn’t matter. Unlike the German, who’d crawled through the window like a snake, Bell kicked off the opposite wall with everything he had in order to launch himself into the building.

And he nearly fell to his death.

The planks of the second-story floor had been removed at some point in history, so the building was now an open-plan space with soot-blackened wooden columns and a lattice of massive joists where the second floor had been.

Bell had landed on a narrow shelf that ringed the building some eighteen feet above the floor and nearly rolled off.

A few lights had been left on in what was obviously a large warehouse full of all manner of military supplies.

Below the spot where he clutched at the shelf were stacks of razor wire in tightly coiled loops.

If the fall hadn’t broken his neck, he would have suffered the death of a thousand cuts.

Bell got to his feet. Like a tightrope walker, the chef was crossing the warehouse on the heavy beams that once supported the second floor, his arms out and his feet dancing like a gymnast’s.

Bell considered using the Luger, as he suspected the thick stone walls would trap the sound, but didn’t know if there were others in the building.

He took off after the cook. Whenever he came to one of the vertical columns that barred his way, he had to stop, grab on to it with both hands, and feel around it with a foot.

Once he found the next beam, he used his shoulders to pivot himself around the column and ran after the chef once again.

Here he was slower than the cook, and any advantage that Bell had made during the climb soon evaporated.

At the next column, Bell tried to slingshot around it using momentum and almost toppled from his perch into a bin of obsolete Pickelhauben , the iconic spiked helmets the Germans issued their soldiers until they realized they were useless on the modern battlefield.

He went back to his tried-and-true slower technique at the next column.

The kid had nearly reached the far wall.

Bell didn’t see anything of note in that direction and wondered what the endgame of this chase would be.

That’s when the chef came to a complete stop, looked back in Bell’s direction, and then allowed himself to topple backward off the beam, his arms outstretched. He looked like a falling crucifix.

He landed flat on a six-foot stack of mattresses for army cots.

They more than absorbed the impact and he rolled off the mound with a cat’s agility.

That was the game he and his buddies had invented—climb the alley walls and cross the warehouse in order to jump onto the mattresses.

Young men would do anything to alleviate boredom.

Hell, Bell had once stolen a train when he was about the same age as the cook.

Bell didn’t wait until he was directly over the mattresses. He leapt and rotated in mid-flight so that he landed on his back with enough force to launch him off again and back in pursuit.

The cook raced for a door that exited the building on the opposite side from the alley. He had to unlock it and Bell nearly got a hand on him, but he squirted through just beyond Bell’s fingers.

The soldier darted left toward another building, a long, low affair that had been erected by the German army when they’d taken over the castle.

It had light spilling from every window and aromatic smoke coiling from several chimneys.

The last leg of the chase was a footrace across a courtyard and the cook found a final burst of speed because he reached the door to what was apparently the kitchens ahead of Bell, though not by much.

The kid nearly yanked the door off its hinges when he reached the building and started yelling in excited German as soon as he was inside the industrial kitchen.

Bell bounded in a few seconds later and came to a sudden stop.

There were a half dozen men in whites getting ready to feed the garrison their breakfast. Some were stirring huge vats with what looked like boat oars, others were feeding split wood into stoves and ovens, while a pair were working mounds of dough with floured hands.

They all looked up from their tasks as their young assistant tried to explain what was happening in between great asthmatic breaths.

The cooks seemed utterly bewildered by what the lad was trying to say, but in a corner near a little potbelly stove a man enjoying a coffee, and the first of the day’s strudel, lowered the two-day-old paper he was reading.

Bell felt the stare as if he’d been physically poked.

He turned just as Sergeant Schmidt tossed aside the paper and came out of his seat as though he’d been launched by a catapult.