In War Times (20 page)

“Just like the good old days,” said Wink, as a cloud of soot settled over them in their pyramidal tent, where Earl T., The Mess, and a few others lay on their cots, reading, writing letters, and sleeping. Rain, sleet, and snow were unrelenting.

The ordnance needed for occupation once the Allies crossed the Rhine was ready to go. But there was, presently, no clear route to Germany. The men lived in increasing apprehension of being sent to the nearby Bulge front, where there was scant chance of living more than a week or so under the joint onslaught of the Germans and the harsh winter weather. If the Germans got to the coast, France would be split into two fronts, and access to the Rhine would be further delayed.

Then Boots and Zenzer and Wilson, men who had been with the company since Camp Sutton, were called. In a unit that had been together for several years, their absence was felt. They heard that Zenzer died in a few days, Boots got a million-dollar wound, which is to say his right arm was blown off, and was sent back to England. They never heard what happened to Wilson. It was being called the Battle of the Bulge.

The war that was going to be over next week might last forever. Casualties were horrific. And hanging over it all was the threat of ever-new weaponry—above all else, an atomic bomb. The V-2 was bad enough, and the Germans were using it to great advantage in Antwerp. If what Hadntz had said about the German’s head start, Sam thought that an atomic warhead for the V-2 couldn’t be far behind.

But most people knew nothing of atomic research. They knew only that captured German soldiers still boasted of the Wonder Weapon that would soon end the war in their favor. Whatever it was, Hitler would soon have it operational. After the V-2 rockets, which were technological marvels, almost anything seemed possible.

No, the war wasn’t over yet.

A few weeks into January of ’45 they got orders to head out, just hours behind the troops that were at that very moment finally breaking through German lines.

The elaborate caravan had been jouncing through destroyed villages in France for eighteen hours, making slow progress. It was well after dark. Snow, at first a subtle pixilation in their headlights, was suddenly all-enveloping. The car in front of them veered right and stopped. Wink followed him into the snowdrift.

“We live and breathe as one,” observed Wink. “Forever and ever, amen.”

“Just so long as I continue to live and breathe,” said Sam. “Are we supposed to sit here all night? I’d rather drive.”

After fifteen minutes they concluded that indeed they were to sit there the rest of the night. “I’m going to take a look around,” said Wink, and soon returned. “We’re in luck.”

The inhabitants of a nearby farmhouse were gone. They’d left behind nothing of value, but on the stone floor was a heavy wooden table. No fuel in the stove, but Sam ventured out and pried some planks from a destroyed outbuilding.

“Hot C-rations, that’s what I like. Living like a king.” Wink, ensconced on a ragged hassock, drank brandy from his tin cup. “Whoo-hoo! Warms you right up.”

Damage to the age-darkened beams overhead was revealed only occasionally as the fire flickered. Sam was brewing ersatz coffee—roasted acorns was his guess—when the door burst open. Wind and snow rushed in. Wink jumped for his never-used rifle.

“I’m an officer, bud.” And indeed, the figure wore an Army jacket, Army fatigues, Army boots, and spoke with an accent somewhat reminiscent of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula—and in a voice undeniably a woman’s.

“Damn, it’s cold,” she said. She pulled off her gloves, flung them on the table, and stamped snow from her boots. “Give me some of that brandy. I’m glad you finally stopped. I’ve been chasing you all day. You pulled out of Lucky Strike ahead of schedule.”

“We’re making up for gained time,” said Wink, handing her the requested brandy in a cracked teacup.

Sam said, “Chasing us? What are you talking about?”

Her blond hair fell in wet dark waves around her face as she yanked off her woolen hat. “Bette Elegante. OSS. I’m here to debrief Sam Dance. Hello, Dance.” She held out her hand, and Sam shook it.

“I’ve seen you before,” said Sam. She had been there when the men in suits questioned him in Washington, the morning after Hadntz had passed him the plans. She had made them warrant officers, like a distant queen knighting them.

She had agreed to send Sam to France.

“You’re the one who called when we were at that place in England,” said Wink. “How the hell did you find us?” A gust of wind rushed in through the pantry and their candle flickered.

“Radar. Of a sort.”

Sam was shocked. Hadntz had claimed to use radar as well.

“And why are you in the OSS?” asked Wink.

She shrugged. Wink offered her his hassock. She unzipped her jacket and sat down. “Why are you in the war? Same batch of reasons I guess. Got a cigarette?”

Sam took one from his shirt pocket and leaned over to light it for her.

Her face, in the candlelight, was that of a child. Pale and delicate, with an upturned nose. Wide blue eyes with dark, sooty lashes. Her mother, he learned later, had been a Russian immigrant with a deep ancestral hatred of the Germans. Bette’s real name was Akalina, but she had changed it when she was twelve and somehow made it stick. She spoke Russian, and she had a decided bent for technology. Her father was a chemist and she the sixth and last child in a sea of brothers. Like Sam, her college education had been interrupted by the war. Unlike him, she’d had a “bloody hard time” getting the courses she needed for her degree.

“Look,” she said, “it’s not that mysterious. It’s in your dog tags, Dance. If all else fails. But right now, luckily for me, it’s just in your orders, pure and simple. You’re where you’re supposed to be, more or less. I just used this to find the exact place.”

She leaned over and took a steel case from the outside pocket of her pack. It was five by five inches, three inches deep, with a tracking screen on one side. She handed it to him. “Turn it on,” she said. The knob clicked as he turned it clockwise. A single pale green dot lit the screen. “See? You have coincided with yourself.”

“Makes me feel a little bit too important.”

“I wouldn’t throw your dog tags away if I were you. Really, it’s for your own safety.”

“Right.”

“For instance, if you get stuck inside of Germany. For instance, in that slave labor camp you went to with Dr. Hadntz.”

“I didn’t wear my dog tags. I guess someone decided that they might take them as a sign that I was an American soldier.”

“You were tagged, nevertheless. We could have gotten you out, if we had to. If we had wanted to.”

“Before I revealed valuable war secrets under torture,” said Sam wryly.

Wink looked back and forth between them. “Somebody tell me what’s going on.”

“We can give you one of these too, Winklemeyer, if you’re jealous.”

“I’m not jealous. I’m afraid. This is a free man’s nightmare.”

“None of us are free any more.”

Wink snorted. “What the hell are we fighting for then?”

Bette leaned forward. Her face was no longer childlike. “You call this
fighting
? I’ll tell you what fighting is. My aunt is fighting on the Russian front right now. She’s a tank commander. She has to control a herd of wild men who’re ready to rape all the German women ten times over and burn their cities to the ground. They don’t rest at night in cozy chateaus.”

“Though I’ve heard they do drink a fair amount of whatever is handy.” Wink poured himself another cup. “I’d say we’re holding up our end in that regard.”

Bette ignored him. “They’re out sniping at the enemy, cutting their throats, never letting them rest. This war
means
something to them, soldier. If our side had five Pattons for generals instead of Eisenhowers, Bradleys, and Montgomerys, we wouldn’t have lost twenty thousand soldiers in the past two months.”

“Twenty…
thousand
?” Sam’s voice caught.

“Maybe they should make you a general,” Wink said.

Bette’s glare was brief, but murderous. “I don’t see why not. I could do a better job than the lot of them thrown into the stewpot and cooked into one.” Then her smile was brilliant, again with that childlike innocence. “And speaking of stew, what’s that delicious smell?”

Wink laughed. “Canned mystery meat.”

“I’ve got baked beans,” she said. “And chocolate, and a tin of Bordeaux sardines, and more wine than I can guzzle on my own.” She rummaged through her pack and pulled out a parcel. “And a real surprise,” she said. White paper crackled as she laid the parcel open. She frowned. “Looks like some kind of cheese.”

“Covered in ashes,” observed Wink.

Sam sliced off the end, tasted it, and found it enchanting. He made a face. “Terrible stuff. Just awful. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it myself.”

Wink and Bette would have none of that.

Their feast concluded with hard biscuits from Sam’s rations. Bette turned out to be a serious jazz buff—not unusual, but it gave them some common ground. She was amazed that they had seen Diz and Bird. “They’re legends,” she said. “But I still have no idea what bebop actually is. No records. I’ve been out of the country since ’forty.”

“Since before the war started,” observed Wink.

“It might seem that way to you,” she said.

By the time they bunked down, wrapped in bedrolls on the floor by the stove, they had been singing for an hour, gloriously loud, and swapping stories about Fifty-second Street clubs.

They were awakened rudely the next morning when a soldier burst in the door. “Fun’s over! Time to roll!”

Bette threw off her blankets and jumped to her feet. Grabbing her boots, she began to pull them on, leaning against the wall.

“No Frogs,” he said, but looked at Sam and Wink with envy. “Some people have all the luck. Not only do I have to sleep under a truck, but—”

“You’ll salute when you address me,” Bette said, stuffing her hair beneath her hat and throwing belongings into her pack. “I outrank you.”

She rejected their prized command car, pulling a private out of another and ordering him to take it and follow the bullet-riddled Duesenberg she’d been driving. It took them ten minutes to get the snow off of it.

“You’ll have to drive,” Bette told Wink.

They pulled into the slow-moving line of command cars. Blackened by fire and shattered by mortar shells, the buildings cast no shadows on this gray, overcast morning. The freezing air was tinged with the sour smell of old fires, burning diesel, and dampness. Out in the countryside, bare trees flailed, buffeted by wind.

Bette lit a Chesterfield and retrieved a small stenography machine from her pack. She settled into her corner of the car. “Okay, I need to ask you a lot of questions.”

“I’m not supposed to tell anyone about this.”

“Winklemeyer has been cleared.”

“How do I know?”

She pulled her valise onto her lap, ruffled through papers, and took out an order, which she showed him.

“You will understand through my questions that I am entirely acquainted with this entire mission from the time it was conceived. I know Hadntz.”

After a few halting sentences, Sam moved into reverie, and the ravaged French countryside receded. The low promptings of Bette’s voice were like the crows in the trees, flying into the gray skies of memory and bidding him to follow with his own inner vision, pulling his mind as if it were a kite on a string.

He recalled the medieval village, stone and half-timbered walls, cobbled streets, and the countryside they passed into, still bare and winter-brown, with unmelted snow on the hilltops. Women and boys were in the fields, plowing. Some waved as their truck passed. Cresting a hill, he saw a compound of low buildings surrounded by fences. Hadntz handed the guard their papers and they were found sufficient. The guard directed them to a small, neat cottage on the side of an assembly field.

Hadntz’s black hair was now blond, braided and wrapped round her head in a coronet. She held her head high as she stood next to him. Sam passed for German: he was. But he was merely the driver, she the imperious commander, and so his speech requirements were limited. She had furnished him with a driver’s uniform and a Glock, which gave him little comfort, surrounded as he was by men with rifles and machine guns in addition to their sidearms.

He followed her up the stairs carrying a crate of French brandy which he set in front of the kommandant’s desk. He had to return to the truck for the fur coat and the fine cigars. With a nod, the kommandant accepted them and ordered one of the guards to take them to Haus #4.

Relatively small, it was nonetheless furnished comfortably—even lavishly. An obligatory oil portrait of the Fuehrer, whose image Sam had now seen in the kommandant’s office and in several hallways, surveyed the room sternly. A crystal chandelier hung over the intricately carved dining room table. The room smelled of beeswax. Sam assumed that the woman dusting a display of fine china was a prisoner. She did not even glance at them as they passed through the room. A short hallway led to a bedroom. Their escort unlocked what looked like a closet door, and they stepped into an elevator, where five underground floors were registered on the arrow’s arc.

“Five?” asked Bette. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Did you see what was on the other floors?”

“No.”

“And when you got out of the elevator?”

The concrete corridor of the fifth level down was utterly different from the faux-homey one through which they had accessed the elevator. The air was fresh and cool, piped in through vents in the ceiling.