His breath smoked. His short Eisenhower jacket didn’t keep him warm enough. Fall was here, sure enough. Erlangen was cooler than Albuquerque-all of Europe that he’d seen was cooler than Albuquerque-but in summer that was okay. Now, tramping through these miserable mountain valleys…He shook his head and exhaled more fog.
Haystacks dotted the valleys. All the grass was going yellow because of the night freezes, so the stacks were less picturesque than they would have been a few weeks earlier. That didn’t mean they were any less dangerous. Haystacks were great to sleep in and to hole up in. Bernie’d found that out for himself plenty of times before the surrender.
He and his buddies warily approached the closest stack. They fanned out so they could make sure nobody was hiding on the far side. Inside was harder to be sure about.
Nobody came out with his hands up. “Want me to give it a burst?” another dogface asked, hefting his grease gun.
“Bet your ass, Roscoe,” Bernie said. The rest of the GIs stood clear. Roscoe sprayed three short bursts through the haystack. Nobody staggered out bleeding and wailing, either.
“Okay. This one’s clean,” another soldier said.
“Is now, by God,” Bernie agreed. If some German hiding in there had just quietly died with his brains blown out, Bernie wouldn’t shed a tear. Son of a bitch had the chance to give up. That was more than he would’ve given the guys hunting him.
The Americans tramped on. Bernie lit a cigarette. A few hundred yards off, a GI in another group of troops waved, silently asking what the gunfire meant. Bernie’s answering wave said everything was jake. The distant soldier gave back one more flourish to show he got it. Then he returned to his own hunt.
Bernie’s bunch came to a farmhouse and outbuildings. The farmer was about fifty, so maybe he’d put in his time and maybe he hadn’t. His skinny wife eyed the Americans as if she’d just taken a big swig of vinegar. They had a daughter who might’ve been cute if she hadn’t looked even more sour than her ma.
And, on the mantel, they had a framed photo of a young man in the uniform of a
“Dead or captured fighting the Russians,” said Roscoe, who had the usual GI bits and pieces of German.
“Yeah, I got it, too,” Bernie said. He pointed at the farmer.
And maybe the kraut was even telling the truth. He was wearing patched overalls, like an Okie fleeing the Dust Bowl in the ’30s. His shirt and shoes weren’t
“Let’s search the joint,” Bernie said.
Maybe Mother and Daughter Vinegar Phiz knew some English, because they looked even nastier than they had before. It did them exactly no good. They might have got themselves shot if they did anything more than glare, but they didn’t.
The GIs turned the place upside down and inside out. They opened drawers and scattered clothes all over the floor. Some of them got a giggle out of throwing women’s underwear around. They poked and prodded the mattress and bedclothes, and lifted them up to check underneath. They found a stash of dirty pictures, with plump, naked
What they didn’t find were any weapons. The most lethal things in the place were the kitchen knives. They went out to the barn and the other outbuildings. Guys who’d grown up on farms back in the States led the search there. Again, they came up with nothing. Maybe these people really didn’t hang around with bandits.
By the farmer’s expression, and by some of the things he muttered under his breath, it didn’t. If any of Heydrich’s fanatics wanted to hide here from now on, the guy would probably serve them roast goose and red cabbage. Well, too goddamn bad.
As the GIs trudged away, the farmer’s wife started screeching at him. “Oh, boy, is he gonna catch it,” Roscoe said, not without sympathy. He had one of the farmer’s finest photos carefully tucked into a breast pocket.
They hadn’t gone more than a few hundred yards when they came to the place where a mineshaft plunged into the hillside. It wasn’t much to look at: a roughly rectangular hole, a little bigger all the way around than a man was tall. Bernie went in as far as the light reached, which wasn’t very. Spider webs shrouded support timbers that looked as if they’d stood there since Napoleon’s day, or maybe Martin Luther’s.
But you never could tell. This was the kind of stuff they’d been sent out to find. One of the guys had a radio set on his back instead of his ordinary pack. He was already on the horn to divisional HQ when Bernie came out of the shaft. Bernie told him what little he’d seen, and the radioman passed it on.
He listened for a little while, then gave the word: “They’ll send a search team and a demolition team. We’re supposed to wait till they get here, and then support the search team.”
“Suits,” Bernie said. He flopped down in front of the big, black hole in the ground and lit a cigarette. Some of the dogfaces dug out K-ration cans and chowed down. Others promptly started snoring. Bernie had lost the knack for sleeping on bare ground, and wasn’t sorry he had. But if they kept giving him shit like this to do, he might have to get it back.
The demolition squad and the searchers showed up a couple of hours later. Bernie wasn’t anxious to go back into the mine, but he did it. The search team brought flashlights that could have doubled as billy clubs.
“You oughta sell these suckers to MPs,” Bernie said, turning his this way and that. All he saw was carved-out gray rock and more of those ancient support timbers. His boots thumped on the stone floor of the shaft.
“Not a half-bad notion. Damn snowdrops’d be dumb enough to fork over,” said a corporal on the search team. Bernie snickered. The MPs’ white helmets and gloves gave them the scornful nickname.
“Hold up,” somebody called from ahead. “Big old cave-in here. This is the end of the road.” Bernie glanced at the corporal. The two-striper was already turning around. Bernie wasn’t sorry to follow him out-not even a little bit.
“Everybody out?” a man from the demolition squad yelled into the shaft. No one answered. Bernie looked around. All his people were standing outside the mine. The sergeant in charge of the search team seemed to have all his guys, too. The demolitions people placed their charges. They backed away from the opening. Again, Bernie wasn’t sorry to follow. The man who’d yelled used the detonator.
“Yeah,” agreed the soldier who’d touched off the blast. “Nobody going in or out of there. Now all we gotta do is seal off about a million more of these motherfuckers and we’ve got it licked.”
“Er-right.” Bernie wished he hadn’t put it that way. It made him think he’d be tramping through these miserable mountains forever. He looked around. Hell, he was liable to be.
Things had picked up. The Amis wanted him dead. They’d wanted him dead before, of course, but now they
