Declare

white-lit pavement, and after passing Hale and his companions once, it swung back and fixed on them.
    Cassagnac hopped and skidded to a halt, crouching, and Hale and Elena stopped beside him and stood bent forward with their hands on their knees. They were within sprinting distance of the north edge of the lot now, with the gleaming lanes of Unter den Linden beyond.
    Cassagnac’s wet face seemed to have been carved out of granite in the harsh white light. “They,” he panted, “won’t shoot—into the Western sectors. But the soldiers—will be here—in moments. You,” he said to Hale, “can surrender. Elena and I—must not be captured.”
    Hale permitted himself a glance at Elena. Under the sopping white hair her youthful face was drawn and pale, with blood at her lips; and too he considered the fact that he had just shot two of the soldiers who were trying to capture them. “I’ll die with you,” he panted dizzily.
    “Good,” Elena gasped, reaching out to squeeze his hand briefly. “We must get—in the boat. The soldiers must be afraid—of the monster, and perhaps won’t—chase us there.”
    “Let us all die on the boat,” agreed Cassagnac with a jerky nod.
    The thing Elena had described as the monster was a whirling, flexing tower of concentrated wind and rain against the Brandenburg Gate pillars, and now with a grinding of gears the crane arm hitched strongly upward, and the rectangular gray stone was swinging in wide arcs on the western side of the gate columns. The whirl-wind crashed in eddying spray against the pediment at the top, seeming to rock the whole battered structure.
    Hale felt physically squeezed between the soldiers coming up from behind him and the huge supernatural creature ahead; and it took an effort for him to keep his throat open, so that he could breathe without a keening whimper.
    “Go,” said Cassagnac, and then he and Hale and Elena were running full-tilt straight toward the old Arab boat on the bed of the truck; Hale didn’t look left or right, and he gritted his teeth and ignored the bangs of rifle fire he heard from the west and from behind.
    Two splintered holes were punched into the boat’s wooden hull strakes as Hale jolted across the final yards of street pavement toward it, but over the thudding of his heart and the roaring of his breath he heard a megaphone-amplified voice shouting urgently, and no further shots were fired.
    Feeling naked in the glare of many pairs of headlamps, Hale clambered up onto the corrugated steel truck bed and helped Elena up beside him. The boat’s hull was a high wooden curve at his shoulder, but Cassagnac had already jumped and caught the bundle of rope that was the vessel’s rail, and after he had swung himself over it, he reached back down; Hale grabbed Elena by the waist, bunching her raincoat to get a good hold of her ribs, and boosted her up; she caught Cassagnac’s hands, and after a few seconds of scrambling and grunting, the three of them were lying in shadow on loose tangles of rope on the boat’s deck.
    “They will shoot through the hull,” said Elena, getting up on her knees. The hot rain was dripping rapidly off the spiky fringe of her white hair.
    Hale had rolled over onto a leather boot, and when he picked it up to toss it aside, it felt heavy. He looked into it and saw glistening meat and stumps of wet bone.
    With a smothered yell he let go of it, then kicked it away across the deck—and he noticed lengths of smeared white bone scattered among the ropes, and a gristly piebald sphere that, when he couldn’t help but focus on it, he recognized as a stripped human head.
    He had tucked his gun back into his pocket to climb aboard, but now without thinking he snatched it out again, and he exhaled so harshly that the breath came out in a grating moan.
    Cassagnac had lifted his head to peer over the gunwale, but Elena looked back at Hale.
    “I think they won’t shoot the boat,” said Hale carefully. “I think it’s the monster’s boat.”
    Elena looked past him at the disordered deck, and shock made the skin of her face seem to contract, widening her eyes and pulling her lips back from her teeth. Perhaps involuntarily, her right hand darted to her forehead and she made the sign of the cross. “Bozhe moy!” she whispered.
    Cassagnac had heard Hale and glanced back, and now he too had taken in the spectacle of the boat’s deck. “Ah, God,” he said bleakly. “I think Lot is right. They will have to…