Read Online Iron to Iron (Wolf by Wolf) by Ryan Graudin - Free Book Online

rolling through the gates of Tokyo’s Imperial Palace, with flashbulbs bursting, the first double victor in the history of the Axis Tour. Best of the best.
    But tonight Luka’s thoughts were trapped in the New Delhi bathroom, living and reliving his exchange with Adele. All that blood and their almost-kiss, the words flung at each other in between.
    I can’t lose you
. But he would, after the Li River. Once Katsuo was out of the picture, the race would be down to him and her. First and second, neck and neck. No more laughter and cigarettes stubbed out by their pup tents. Luka thought of all the soft lines that made up Adele’s lips. The kiss that wasn’t.
    Could Luka miss something he never had?
    (It sure felt like it.)
    For now Adele was still behind him, blocking any riders who tried to advance from the rear. Most didn’t. Takeo had taken Luka’s warning to heart, and Katsuo’s pace was too grueling for most of the cataclysmic racers to keep up. The herd of headlamps that made it to Dhaka together was a small one, rolling into the city well past midnight, where a bleary-eyed timekeeper recorded their places.
    1st: Tsuda Katsuo, 9 days, 19 hours, 41 minutes, 18 seconds.
    2nd: Luka Löwe, 9 days, 19 hours, 41 minutes, 37 seconds.
    3rd: Felix Wolfe, 9 days, 19 hours, 41 minutes, 50 seconds.

Chapter 11
    There was another day of rest in Dhaka, used for napping, a second visit to Nurse Wilhelmina, and more Reichssender interviews while the last of the pack reached the checkpoint, filling the board from fourth place ( WATABE TAKEO, 9 DAYS, 19 HOURS, 44 MINUTES, 6 SECONDS ) all the way to August Greiser’s sixteenth, followed by four crossed-off names. The road had been whittling away stragglers through accidents, illness, and sheer despair. The next few days were about to claim more.
    If the desert was boring, the jungle was anything but. The journey to Hanoi was littered with perils. The luxury of pavement did not extend far beyond Dhaka. Neither did bridges. In several places the road’s dirt vanished into riverbeds thinned out by the region’s dry season. Shallow, but still dangerous. There were always one or two boys who submerged their air intakes or got mired in mud so deep it took an entire team of men to free the wheels.
    Heat exhaustion was also common. Gone were the chilled temperatures of a European spring, replaced with humidity thick enough to swim through. The very same jackets that protected riders from road rash now clung to them with miserable sweat—black leather baking beneath the sun. Brown wasn’t much better, but Luka didn’t dare take his jacket off. He’d seen too many cases of mangled-meat skin to risk it.
    Then there was the wildlife. Snakes, monkeys, tigers, creepy-crawlies. The jungle had them all. Luka had personally never seen a tiger, but several years ago a Reichssender cameraman had managed to catch the magnificent beast on film. Monkeys were much less rare and much more likely to rip apart the motorcycles’ panniers in search of food. But by far, the worst creature of the jungle was the mosquito. There were millions upon millions of them, all starved for juicy racer flesh.
    Smoke helped keep them away, which was one more reason to keep the cigarettes coming. Luka had no problem whatsoever ripping the final pack open, if it would get the
gottverdammt
bugs off his neck. He could only imagine how many of them were trying to poison his blood with tropical diseases—yet
another
hazard of the jungle stretch.
    “Don’t forget to take this.” He tossed a chloroquine tablet to Adele along with her cigarette. “Tastes like tinfoil, but it keeps the disease away. You don’t want to end up like Adolf Schäfer. Poor
Saukerl
won the race in 1952, but then he up and died of malaria just a few weeks later because he forgot his tablets.”
    “That’s… anticlimactic.” Adele opened the tablet, swallowing it in a swift silver-wrapper movement.
    “He was a decent guy, Schäfer.” Luka