Except that wasn’t it, not today. Things down underground kept falling over. It was like listening to a house of cards collapse, if you could imagine cards made of rock and each about the size of a bus.
“Holy Moses!” said one of the GIs standing alongside of Bernie.
“Son of a bitch!” another one added, meaning about the same thing.
“Jesus H. Christ!” said the first sergeant with the detonator. “I figured this was a little blind shaft like all the others I closed off. Sure don’t seem like it. God only knows what all’s under there. We sure as shit can’t get at it from here any more-you can sing that in church.”
For a bad moment, Bernie’d feared the top kick would order the men to get out their entrenching tools and start digging through the rubble clogging the top of the shaft. But, for a wonder, the man had better sense. Maybe he realized he’d get the shaft if he tried giving an order like that.
“Whatever was in there, you’re right-we won’t get at it now,” Bernie said, to drive home the point.
“Nope,” the demolitions man agreed. “Sounded like a whole bunch of dominoes falling over down below.”
“Yeah. It did!” Bernie grinned. The other guy’d come up with a better figure of speech than he had himself. Somewhere back in the States, an English teacher would have been happy if only she knew.
“Maybe we could use POWs to dig it out,” the first sergeant said thoughtfully.
“Yeah. Maybe.” Bernie didn’t want to come right out and say he didn’t think that was such a hot idea. He let his tone of voice do it for him.
And the demolitions man’s rueful chuckle said Bernie had got the message to Garcia. “Or maybe not,” the explosives expert said. “Some of those guys hate the Nazis worse’n we do. Can’t blame ’em, either-the Nazis got their asses shot off.”
“Sure, Sarge. But most of the POWs who hate the Nazis hate ’em because they lost the war, not because they started in the first place,” Bernie said.
“I know. But I wasn’t done yet,” the demolitions man answered. “Some of ’em hate the Nazis, like I said before. But there’s others-if they saw a chance to duck into a tunnel and run straight to Heydrich’s assholes, they’d do it like
Bernie grinned at him. “You find a couple of those fucking light bulbs, pass one on to me. All I’ve seen is the regular kind.”
“Shit, you don’t need a special light bulb to fuck these kraut broads,” the first sergeant answered. “A pack of Luckies’ll do it, or a few cans of K-rats. You can’t get your ashes hauled here, you ain’t half tryin’, man.”
Since Bernie’d discovered the same thing, he would have left it right there. But one of the guys in his squad-a new draftee, poor devil-said, “What about the orders against waddayacallit-against, uh, fraternization?” He pronounced the word with the excessive care of somebody who wasn’t sure what it meant.
“Well, what about ’em?” the first sergeant returned. “Look, buddy, nobody’s gonna make you fuck one of these German gals. But if you want to, they’re pushovers. Hell, after the Jerries knocked France out of the war, the French broads lay down and spread for ’em like nobody’s business. Now
“It’s against orders,” the new guy said. Some people were like that: if somebody told them what to do and what not to, they followed through right on the button. And they were happy acting that way. Bernie’d seen it before: it saved them the trouble of thinking for themselves. He figured a hell of a lot of Germans worked that way. What else did such a good job of explaining how they’d lined up behind Hitler?
“Fine. It’s against orders.” The demolitions man spoke with exaggerated patience. “I look at it this way. If the broads ain’t playing Mata Hari with me-or if they are, long as I don’t tell ’em anything they shouldn’t know-I’m gonna have me a good time. And the way things are nowadays, even if I come down venereal, so what? A couple of shots in the ass and I’m ready to hop in the sack again. Hell of an age we live in, ain’t it?”
“You come down venereal, the brass’ll give you a bad time,” the draftee observed.
“Sure they will-if they hear about it,” the first sergeant agreed indulgently. “Some people, though, some people know a corpsman or a sawbones who’ll give ’em some of this penicillin shit and not bother filling out all the paperwork afterwards, know what I mean?”
After some very visible thought, the new guy decided he did know. By his expression, he hadn’t been so surprised since his mother regretfully informed him the stork didn’t bring babies and leave them under cabbage leaves. And how long ago had that been? Maybe six months before he got his Greetings letter from Selective Service? Bernie wouldn’t have been surprised.
But what the kid knew about the facts of life wasn’t Bernie’s problem. This underground collapse was, or could be. “Maybe we don’t use POWs to find out what happened under there,” he said. “We ought get there some kind of way, though.”
“Bulldozer crew. Nah, a coupla dozers,” the first sergeant said. “Beats working. Those mothers can dig faster’n a company’s worth of guys with picks and shovels.”
That idea Bernie did like. “You have the pull to get ’em?” he asked.
“Oh, hell, yes,” the demolitions man answered. “The first sergeant in an engineering battalion, he owes me from before the surrender. I tell him we need a couple of D-7s up here, they’ll come pronto. Don’t worry your pretty little head about that.”
Bernie snorted. “I been called a whole lotta things since I got sucked into the Army, but never pretty. Not till now, anyway.”
The demolitions man eyed him. “Yeah, well, I can see why.” The other guys in Bernie’s squad chuckled. Even the new draftee thought that was funny.
“It’s okay. You won’t put Lana Turner out of business any time soon, either,” Bernie said. The first sergeant grinned at him. They’d probably never see each other again, so they could both sling the sass without getting hot and bothered.
It also wouldn’t bother Bernie if the bulldozers uncovered something juicy. He didn’t expect it-he’d given up expecting anything much-but it wouldn’t bother him one bit.
XXI
One of the first tricks Heydrich’s fanatics had tried was still among the nastier ones they used. As a matter of fact, the Germans had trotted this one out even before the surrender, so maybe some bright
Scuttlebutt said the diehards had decapitated a few GIs with that little stunt. Lou Weissberg didn’t believe it, and he was in a better position to know than most American soldiers. He supposed it might be possible, if the wire was stretched good and tight and the jeep was really hauling ass. But the next confirmed report he saw would be the first.
Which didn’t mean a wire stretched across a road couldn’t put an unlucky or careless dogface in the hospital. In miserable winter weather like this, snow alternating with freezing rain, you’d never see a wire till you were way too close to stop.
That was why the jeep Lou rode in, like most in the American zone, had a wire cutter mounted on the hood. (Most jeeps in the British, French, and Soviet zones also mounted wire cutters these days.) The contraption, made from a couple of welded steel bars, would part any wire like Moses parting the Red Sea.
These days, casualties from murder wires were few and far between. Lou wondered why the fanatics kept running the risk of stretching them across highways. He supposed it was because they’d got used to doing it when it still accomplished something. It wasn’t as if they were the only military force ever to get bogged down in routine.
He remarked on that to his current driver, a swarthy fellow who went by Rocky and had five o’clock shadow at ten in the morning. Rocky swore and spat as the jeep rattled along between Nuremberg and Munich. “Fuck, Lieutenant, nice to think
“Well…yeah.” Lou hadn’t thought of it like that. He wished Rocky hadn’t, either. The driver had a grease gun
