Woermann's practiced military eye immediately assessed the strategic values of the keep. An excellent watchpost. This entire stretch of the Dinu Pass would be in plain view from the tower; and from the keep's walls fifty good men could hold off an entire battalion of Russians. Not that Russians would ever be coming through the Dinu Pass, but who was he to question High Command?
There was another eye within Woermann, and it was assessing the keep in its own way. An artist's eye, a landscape lover's... to use water colors, or to trust oil pigment to catch that hint of brooding watchfulness? The only way to find out would be to try them both. He would have plenty of free time during the coming months.
"Well, Sergeant," he said to Oster as they halted at the edge of the causeway, "what do you think of your new home?"
"Not much, sir."
"Get used to it. You'll probably be spending the rest of the war here."
"Yes, sir."
Noting an uncharacteristic stiffness in Oster's replies, Woermann glanced at his sergeant, a slim, dark man only slightly more than half Woermann's age.
"Not much war left anyway, Sergeant. Word came as we set out that Yugoslavia has surrendered."
"Sir, you should have told us! It would have lifted our spirits!"
"Do they need lifting so badly?"
"We'd all prefer to be in Greece at the moment, sir."
"Nothing but thick liquor, tough meat, and strange dancing there. You wouldn't like it."
"For the fighting, sir."
"Oh, that."
Woermann had noticed the facetious turn of his mind moving closer and closer to the surface during the past year. It was not an enviable trait in any German officer and could be dangerous to one who had never become a Nazi. But it was his only defense against his mounting frustration at the course of the war and of his career. Sergeant Oster had not been with him long enough to realize this. He'd learn in time, though.
"By the time you got there, Sergeant, the fighting would be over. I expect surrender within the week."
"Still, we all feel we could be doing more for the Führer there than in these mountains."
"You shouldn't forget that it is your Führer's will that we be stationed here." He noted with satisfaction that the "your" slipped right by Oster.
"But why, sir? What purpose do we serve?"
Woermann began his recitation: "High Command considers the Dinu Pass a direct link from the steppes of Russia to all those oil fields we passed at Ploiesti. Should relations between Russia and the Reich ever deteriorate, the Russians might decide to launch a sneak attack at Ploiesti. And without that petrol, the Wehrmacht's mobility would be seriously impaired."
Oster listened patiently despite the fact that he had heard the explanation a dozen times before and had himself given a version of the same story to the men in the detachment. Yet Woermann knew he remained unconvinced. Not that he blamed him. Any reasonably intelligent soldier would have questions. Oster had been in the army long enough to know that it was highly irregular to place a seasoned veteran officer at the head of four infantry squads with no second officer, and then to assign the entire detachment to an isolated pass in the mountains of an ally state. It was a job for a green lieutenant.
"But the Russians have plenty of their own oil, sir, and we have a treaty with them."
"Of course! How stupid of me to forget! A treaty. No one breaks treaties anymore."
"You don't think Stalin would dare betray the Führer, do you?"
Woermann bit back the reply that leaped to mind:
Not if your Führer can betray him first. Oster wouldn't understand. Like most members of the postwar generation, he had come to equate the best interests of the German people with the will of Adolf Hitler. He had been inspired, inflamed by the man. Woermann had found himself far too old for such infatuation. He had celebrated his forty-first birthday last month. He had watched Hitler move from beer halls, to the Chancellory, to godhood. He had never liked him.
True, Hitler had united the country and had started it on the road to victory and self-respect again, something for which no loyal German could fault him. But Woermann had never trusted Hitler, an Austrian who surrounded himself with all those Bavarians—all southerners. No Prussian could trust a bunch of southerners like that. Something ugly about them. What Woermann had witnessed at Posnan had shown him just how ugly.
"Tell the men to get out and stretch," he said, ignoring Oster's last question. It had been rhetorical, anyway. "Inspect the causeway to see if it will support the vehicles while I go over and take a look inside."
As he walked the length of the causeway, Woermann thought its timbers looked sturdy enough. He glanced over the edge at the rocks and gurgling water below. A long way down—sixty feet at least. Best to have the lorries and the supply truck empty but for their drivers, and to bring them across one at a time.
The heavy wooden gates in the keep's entrance arch were wide open, as were the shutters on most of the windows in the walls and in the tower. The keep seemed to be airing out. Woermann strolled through the gates and into the cobblestone courtyard. It was cool and quiet. He noticed that there was a rear section to the keep, apparently carved into the mountain, that he hadn't seen from the causeway.
He turned around slowly. The tower loomed over him; gray walls surrounded him on every side. He felt as if he were standing within the arms of a huge slumbering beast, one he dared not awaken.
Then he saw the crosses. The inner walls of the courtyard were studded with hundreds of them ... thousands of them. All the same size and shape, all the same unusual design: The upright was a good ten inches high, squared at the top and lipped at the base; the crosspiece measured about eight inches and had a slight upward angle at each end. But the odd part was the height on the uprights at which the crosspiece was set—any higher and the cross would have become an upper-case "T."
Woermann found them vaguely disturbing ... something wrong about them. He stepped over to the nearest cross and ran his hand over its smooth surface. The upright was brass and the crosspiece nickel, all skillfully inlaid into the surface of the stone block.
He looked around again. Something else bothered him. Something was missing. Then it hit him—birds. There were no pigeons on the walls. Castles in Germany had flocks of pigeons about them, nesting in every nook and cranny. There wasn't a single bird to be seen anywhere on the walls, the windows, or the tower.
He heard a sound behind him and whirled, unsnapping the flap on his holster and resting his palm on the butt of his Luger. The Romanian government might be an ally of the Reich, but Woermann was well aware that there were groups within its borders that were not. The National Peasant Party, for instance, was fanatically anti-German; it was out of power now but still active. There might be violent splinter groups here in the Alps, hiding, waiting for a chance to kill a few Germans.
The sound was repeated, louder now. Footsteps, relaxed, with no attempt at stealth. They came from a doorway in the rear section of the keep, and as Woermann watched, a thirtyish man in a sheepskin cojoc stepped through the opening. He didn't see Woermann. There was a mortar-filled palette in his hand, and he squatted with his back to Woermann and began to patch some crumbling stucco around the doorframe.
"What are you doing here?" Woermann barked. His orders had implied that the keep was deserted.