One of the boys got lost. He just never joined up with the main group in the target zone, a pasture seven kilometers of rural landscape from the bridge itself. Von Drehle hated to lose men. He had lost so many! He hated it! A certain part of him wanted to abort the job right there, send out search parties, find the soldier, and head straight back to his own lines. But he couldn’t do that.
“Maybe he’ll catch up to us,” Wili Bober said.
Everyone knew this to be unlikely. Dieter Schenker, lance corporal, veteran of Italy and Russia, three wounds, two Iron Crosses, was almost certainly hanging upside down in a tree with his neck or his back broken. If conscious, he would have taken out his gravity knife and cut his own wrists, to bleed out in quiet comfort. If the Russians found him, they might take some bayonet sport with him before killing him. That’s the kind of war it was.
The second thing that went wrong was the map. It took them on detours around two villages that brought them hard against infantry campgrounds, where Ivan had put some of his six billion or so soldiers to rest for the night before moving closer to the front lines for the big show upcoming.
Battlegroup Von Drehle had to detour from two detours, and that cost time. The point was to get to the bridge well before dawn, eliminate any sentries, rig the explosives and leave a timed fuse, and be some kilometers away when the fireworks went off. This fantasy disappeared almost instantly — old racing adage: no plan survives the first lap — and they didn’t get there until the sun began to flare over the edge of the world. So it would be a daylight job.
Fortunately there was foliage along the riverbank, and Ivan hadn’t seriously considered a bridge-blowing raid this far behind the lines. He was getting overconfident with his billions of men, millions of tanks, and thousands of shiny new American trucks to spare him bootleather. Well, that was his big mistake. The parachutists, moving stealthily through the heavy underbrush along the bank, were able to get themselves to the bridge. Now they gathered in its lee, could see the sandbags and K-wire Ivan had dumped and strung nonchalantly, more as ceremony than as tactical necessity.
Karl took a quick look and saw what he expected; across the river, the town of Chortkiv, mostly shabby buildings and muddy streets, deserted in the early morning, though Red Army trucks had been parked here and there and presumably their inhabitants had taken shelter in the buildings. Nothing stirred. On this side of the river would be more but less of Chortkiv, its “outskirts,” if you will, a couple of buildings of whatever agricultural purpose, maybe some of those typical Ukraine steep-pitched, thatch-roofed huts. Again quiet, a few Red trucks parked here and there.
And up above, on the bridge itself? Couldn’t be much in the sandbag nest Ivan had built as a sentry post, more a place for the guards to sit and doze a quiet night well out of the combat zone. So it would be just a few seconds of helter-skelter to reach the sentries and, at least in theory, dispatch them silently.
At this point, communication was mostly by hand gesture. No chatter, and all the boys knew the language.
Four men, Karl signaled, sentry elimination. He and — he pointed to three really good boys, but all were really good when you got down to it — as the designated throat cutters. Then he indicated that two of those four would cross underneath the bridge and come up on the other side for whatever was there. All four would push across the bridge, which didn’t appear to have a sentry post at the other end, and set up with their FG-42s or STG-44s. If assaulted from that direction, they would serve as the first line of defense.
He designated four more as demolition party, with the explosives genius Deneker calling the shots. Nothing fancy here, nobody was going over the side by rope and pulley to wire Cyclonite under the arches. Instead, the four would gouge into the bridge surface with their entrenching tools and excavate as deep a cavity as possible. They would pound the Cyclonite — which in demolition form was a kind of gloppy dough carried in two five-pound canvas sacks — into the cavity and leave a No. 8 blasting cap shoved into it, wired with det cord. The package would be wrapped in det cord, the cord then run back across the bridge to safety, where it was crimped into another No. 8. At go time, Deneker would light the safety fuse into the No. 8, which would go off like a firecracker, ignite the det cord — PETN explosive packed around a wire, going kaboom at twenty-one thousand feet per second — the det cord would burn to the main charge in a microsecond and light off that No. 8, which would make the big wad of Cyclonite vaporize the bridge. It had worked all over Russia and Italy, there was no reason why it wouldn’t work today. The ten pounds should do the job nicely.
But the next part was a little dicey. The fourteen parachutists — Schenker still missing — couldn’t fall straight back along the road on foot, as they’d be intercepted by infantry closing from the flanks. Even as stupid as the Russians were, they’d figure the way out would be to exfiltrate along the riverbank, but they could also run an intercept on that plan and bring fire from the opposite side of the river. The only feasible escape method was to commandeer one of the trucks, disable the others, drive like hell in the aftermath of the blast, ditch it somewhere unseen, and slip back by night across German lines. Some plan. Von Drehle knew it stank, but there wasn’t much he could do except refuse to do it, which would get him shot. Even Von Bink would have to shoot him.
Hmmm, too much sun already, though it was still unseen at the rim of the wheat fields in the distance, announcing its presence only by its penumbra.
He nodded. He and his three co-killers slipped off their rifles and put their helmets on the ground. Each removed a gravity knife from a pocket, and with the push of a lever and a flick of the wrist, each popped four inches of the best Sollingen steel—Rostfrei, it said on the blade — into the cool air of morning.
Each, as a matter of fact, hated knifework. It was awful. It was always intimate and messy and left regret and depression and self-loathing. It wasn’t worth going through for any nutcase paperhanger from Austria, that was for sure, but only out of duty to some other thing, variously defined as the Fatherland or Greater Germany but really just the other guys in the unit, whom you didn’t want to let down.
Karl gave a last-second nod to each man, then turned to the two headed under the bridge. He held up two hands, six fingers, made an O with one, meaning sixty seconds, and then nodded a final time, and off they scooted.
One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, and on and on he went, just waiting in the cool morning air, in the soft breeze, in the gray light, licking his lips a little. It was always like this before the flag dropped, a dry swallow, a feeling of dread and excitement, too and then—
— fifty-nine-one-thousand, sixty-one-thousand, and he was pulling himself up the slope, his limbs filling with energy and purpose, around the bridge wall, and into the sandbag construction, where his noise and energy alerted a man at least enough to turn to face the death approaching him. An older fellow with a pipe and an innocent farmer’s look, even if he had a rifle; he wore a bandolier and a khaki side cap with black infantry piping and a red star and the pullover khaki shirt. His mouth came open as this wild apparition, blond of hair but black of face, with a knife gleaming in the light, closed down on him, his pipe bobbled, and Karl stabbed him in the throat.
It was horrible. Karl heard the gurgle as the blood filled the larynx, drowning any outcry, and then was on him totally, forcing him into the sandbags, stabbing him again and again in the throat and neck while at the same time having jammed his other hand into the mouth, just in case. In and out, in and out, in a killing frenzy, shutting him down, die! die! die! damn you!, feeling the blade sink in, occasionally glance off fibrous internal structures, occasionally slice something gelid and viscous, until the struggle beneath became tremors and the tremors became shivers and the shivers became nothing. Too close, close enough to see the poor bastard’s face, feeling the hot blood pour out, sometimes a sundered artery forcing a little bit of squirt. You couldn’t do it without Russian blood getting everywhere. And the poor bastard always squealed, wept, pissed, and shat as he died. Karl pulled back, let the man fall, and turned exactly as his partner in the pit finished sentry number one, having made exactly the same kind of mess, having besmeared himself with blood across arms and wrist and hands. There was a Degtyaryov light machine gun resting on the sandbag wall and a few Russian pineapple grenades, mostly, Karl guessed, for show. The gun might come in useful.