“What the fuck is all this?” said one of the soldiers who’d got out of the truck with Bernie.
“Whatever it is, I don’t like it. It feels like a trap,” Bernie said. The other soldier gave him a funny look, but he set his jaw, nodded, and waved to the mountains reaching up to the sky on either side. “Fucking fanatics want to throw stuff down on us, who’s gonna stop ’em? High ground counts for a lot.” He spoke from experience, which was something the other guy probably didn’t have.
A captain came out of a tent, followed by an older guy in black-dyed fatigues without any insignia-some kind of civilian attached to the Army. “It’s not a trap, on account of we hold the heights,” the captain said. By the way he talked, he came from New York or New Jersey or somewhere around there. “We hold this whole goddamn valley, matter of fact. And somewhere under it, I hope like hell, is Reinhard Heydrich. We’re gonna dig the son of a bitch out.”
“How many other Nazis has he got with him?” asked one of the other fellows just off the deuce-and-a-half. “They gonna shoot it out with us?” He didn’t sound delighted at the prospect.
“However many pals he has, that’s their tough luck. We’ve got what we need to blast ’em all,” the captain answered. He was skinny and sharp-nosed. A Jew, Bernie judged. So was the fellow in black fatigues, unless he missed his guess. No wonder the officer’d stayed so gung-ho, then. Bernie wasn’t sure he had himself. Then the captain said, “There’s a million bucks on Heydrich’s head, remember. A cool million, and you’ll never hear from the IRS. Think about that, guys.”
They thought about it. They liked it…better than they had before, anyhow. Bernie looked down the valley. Other encampments were in place. And…He started laughing.
“What’s funny?” the captain snapped.
“Sorry, sir,” he said, “but I been here before-patrol last year.” He remembered the farmhouse with the dirty pictures. “Maybe I walked on Heydrich’s grave.”
The captain’s grin made him look years younger. “Yeah,” he said. “Maybe you did.”
XXIX
There was a graveyard up on the mountainside. The Americans in the valley paid it no attention. Why should they? By the tumbled headstones and leaning crosses over the graves, it had been there a long, long time. No one shot at the Amis from the position. No one down on the valley floor seemed to remember it was around.
All of which suited Reinhard Heydrich fine. One of those leaning crosses was a dummy. It concealed a periscope, from which an observer surveyed the scene below. Heydrich admired the conceit. He’d filched it from a Russian field fortification the Waffen-SS somehow smoked out. This was an improved version. The observer had a field telephone. He wasn’t actually in a grave, but in a passage that led down to the main mine. If he saw trouble coming, he could get away. Explosives in the passage would make sure nobody followed him.
“They keep bringing in more troops and more digging equipment, Herr Reichsprotektor,” he said now, his voice tinny in Heydrich’s ear. “It sure looks like they know something. What are we going to do?”
Heydrich didn’t want to believe the Amis could know where his hideout lay. They’d come through here before, done some superficial damage, and gone on their way. They’d treated this valley no differently from two dozen others in the Alps.
They were treating it differently now, dammit. How? Heydrich wondered. Why? Had they found one of the drops where his people communicated with the outside world? He couldn’t believe it. The drops were well sited, and everybody who knew about them had the discipline to use them discreetly.
A traitor? Heydrich was sure that would have been Hans Klein’s guess. And it wasn’t unlikely, worse luck. Somebody who decided a million dollars would set him up for life could cause a lot of trouble. But everyone who was supposed to be underground here was accounted for. Some men in Jochen Peiper’s underground center knew where this one was. They would have betrayed both of them, though. And there was no sign Peiper’s center was in trouble. One of the outside connections, then? Even if the worst happened here, Heydrich hoped the pigdog wouldn’t live to enjoy his foul loot.
Or-a new thought-could one of the laborers who’d dug most of this place out of the living rock have survived in spite of everything? Could he have figured out what he’d been working on? Could he have gone to the Amis with the story? Would they have believed somebody like that?
Heydrich shook his head. “Impossible,” he muttered. The extermination camps were most efficient. He knew that. He damn well should have. Hadn’t he set the Einsatzgruppen in motion against the Jews of Eastern Europe? Hadn’t he organized the Wannsee Conference, which got all the antisemitic forces in the Reich moving on parallel tracks against the Jewish enemy? So, no, surviving laborers were anything but likely.
But the observer in the graveyard heard him, which he hadn’t intended. “It’s not impossible, Herr Reichsprotektor. I only wish it were. But they’re really here,” the man said. “What will we do? What can we do?”
That was a better question than Heydrich wished it were. He and his men had escape routes. They would have sufficed to let the Germans give most bands of attackers the slip. But the American net was cast wider than Heydrich had ever dreamt it could be.
Decision crystallized in the Reichsprotektor’s mind. “For now, we sit tight,” he answered. “They may have a good notion we’re here, but they can’t be sure. Finding us won’t be easy. Neither will digging us out.”
“I sure hope you’re right, sir,” the observer said, and rang off.
Heydrich hoped he was right, too. The generators would run out of fuel before too long-or maybe he’d have to turn them off to keep their noise from betraying itself to listening devices. The mines had good natural ventilation, but even so…. Heydrich tried to imagine running the war for the liberation of the Reich by candle-and lantern light.
Napoleon had fought his wars that way. So had Clausewitz, and even Moltke. None of them, though, had tried to do it from hundreds of meters underground. The sun rose every day for them. It never rose for Heydrich. When the candles and lanterns ran low…
“Klein!” he called.
“Yes, sir?” The Oberscharfuhrer wasn’t far away. Heydrich hadn’t thought he would be.
The decision that had crystallized broke up and re-formed. “Looks to me like we’ll have to try to break out,” the Reichsprotektor said. “We have…some people who won’t be able to fight or to keep up. You know who I’m talking about?” He waited for Klein to nod, then went on, “Good. I want you to see that’s taken care of, all right?”
Hans Klein nodded again. “I’ll make sure of it. Too bad, nicht wahr? Such a waste, after we went to all the trouble to grab them.”
“It is, isn’t it?” Heydrich sighed. He wanted an atom bomb as fast as he could get one after the Reich was free again. Germany needed that weapon. “Why don’t you leave Wirtz and Diebner for now? We can always tend to them later if we have to. The others…It is too bad, but they’d better disappear.”
“Right you are, Herr Reichsprotektor.” Klein sketched a salute and hurried away.
Reinhard Heydrich sighed once more. He didn’t know how or why things had gone wrong in the valley, but they had. Not everything worked out the way you wished it would. He patted his tunic. He had a cyanide capsule in his breast pocket, and others in other places about his person. Everybody down here did. Even if the Amis caught him, they wouldn’t question him or make sport of him or try him. He just had to bite down. If Himmler had done it, Heydrich was sure he could, too.