“There, Captain.” Shmuel Birnbaum pointed to what had been a mineshaft till an explosive charge closed up the front of it. “That one heads straight down. You could do like the people in the Jules Verne story and go straight to the center of the earth.”
“I read that book when I was a kid,” Lou Weissberg said. He’d read it in English, of course. Birnbaum would have seen it in Russian, or maybe Yiddish, or possibly even German. And it was really written in French. Ideas bounced across the world like rubber balls.
The main idea in Lou’s head now was seeing Heydrich dead. Maybe, if you chopped off the German Freedom Front’s head, the body would flop like a chicken that met the hatchet and then fall over and die. Maybe. Alevai. Lou muttered to himself. Please, God. Don’t You owe us a little something, anyway? It wasn’t exactly a prayer-more a bitter question. When the Nazis efficiently went about the business of murdering Jews by the million, God showed He’d got out of the habit of listening to prayers.
If God wouldn’t take care of things (or if God wasn’t there to take care of things, which Lou found much too likely), mere mortals would have to do their goddamnedest. Lou waved to the crews of the waiting bulldozers and steam shovels. “Come and get ’em!” he yelled, as if he were calling them to dinner.
They rumbled forward on their tracks, filling the pure mountain air with the stink of diesel exhaust. Dozer blades and the steam shovels’ buckets dug into the mountainside. Earth and stones went into piles off to either side of the closed shaft. This place wouldn’t be nearly so scenic after the excavators got through. Maybe that bothered the Germans who lived here. Lou was no tourist. He hadn’t come for the view.
Along with the dirt and boulders, the earth-moving equipment also dislodged timbers that had helped support the sides and roof of the shaft. Over the blat! of his engine, a dozer jockey shouted, “Damn things look like they’ve been here since B.C. You sure we’re in the right place, Captain?”
Lou wasn’t sure of anything. The people working under him needed to know that like they needed a hole in the head, though. He didn’t even look back at Shmuel Birnbaum as he nodded. “This is all camouflage,” he declared. “C’mon-you know the Germans do shit like that.”
“Hope you’re right, sir,” the dozer driver said, and plunged forward again.
So do I, Lou thought. If this didn’t work out the way he hoped it would, if he didn’t come up with a big burrow full of Nazis if not with the Reichsprotektor’s head on a platter, the Army would be only too happy to separate him from the service and boot his butt back to New Jersey. Chances were it would throw Howard Frank out, too. They would get exactly what eighty percent of the soldiers in Germany craved most: a ride home. It was, naturally, the last thing either of them wanted. If that wasn’t the Army way of doing things, Lou couldn’t imagine what would be.
The earth-movers were tearing the living crap out of the opening to the mineshaft. Lou wondered if they would just peel back the whole mountainside to get at whatever it concealed. Wouldn’t they fill the valley floor below with rocks and dirt if they did?
But the guys who ran the growling, farting, grinding machinery were more purposeful than that. They stayed on the old mine’s trail. Before long, the dozer blades and the steam shovels’ steel jaws clanged off some serious boulders. Here and there, they had to back out so demolition crews could make big ones into, well, littler ones, anyhow.
That dozer driver said, “Big old honking landslide, I bet. This woulda closed the place down better than our charge of dynamite.”
“Just keep going, goddammit.” Lou had the courage of his convictions. Of course, Hitler had also had the courage of his. Now, am I right, or nothing but a stubborn jackass? Is it the good turtle soup, or merely the mock? Lou wondered. One way or the other, I’ll find out.
Bulldozers and steam shovels kept banging through rocks. The drivers shouted to one another. Lou couldn’t always make out what they said. That was bound to be just as well. When one of them jerked a thumb in his direction and then spun an index finger in a circle next to his temple, Lou couldn’t stay in much doubt about what the GI meant.
Neither could Shmuel Birnbaum. “They think you’re crazy,” the DP said. “So they think I’m crazy, too.”
“Yeah, well, fuck ’em all,” Lou answered. “Long as they do what I tell ’em to, who gives a rat’s ass what they think?” Birnbaum gave him a look. Lou had no trouble translating it-something like You’re the champion of democracy? And, in a weird way, Lou was. But democracy and Army life mixed like water and sodium-they caught fire when they touched. What did democracy give rise to in the Army? We want to go home! and damn all else. The system might stink, but it worked.
The sun sank lower and lower, toward the pass in the west. Shadows stretched. A chilly breeze started moaning. Then one of the dozer drivers urgently waved to the rest. That had to mean Hang on! His cry of amazement pierced the diesel roar: “Fuck me up the asshole!” He pointed to something Lou couldn’t make out.
After scuttling like a pair of ragged claws to position himself better, Lou did see what had astonished him: a black hole driven straight into the side of the mountain. Sure as shit, the mine went on after the supposed cave-in. Which meant…well, they’d have to see what it meant. One thing it meant was that Shmuel Birnbaum wasn’t crazy-or not on account of that, anyway.
Lou was about to send men into that hole when explosive charges went off somewhere deep inside. The black opening fell in on itself. A great cloud of dust and more than a few rocks-some up to fist-sized and beyond-flew out. They clattered off the olive-drab machinery. One smashed a steam shovel’s windshield. Another caught a bulldozer driver in the shoulder. His howl said it sure didn’t do him any good.
But what those mine blasts said…Lou put it into plain, everyday English: “We’ve got the motherfuckers!”
Night. Black night. Black as the inside of an elephant. Cold, too. Bernie Cobb wished he had an overcoat, not just his thin, crappy Eisenhower jacket. He laughed at himself. Why don’t you wish for a hotel room and a bottle of bourbon and a naked blonde with legs up to there? If you were gonna wish, you should wish.
It might be dark, but it wasn’t quiet. Way down the mountainside from where he crouched in the gloom, Army engineers tore away at the blocked mineshaft. Something was sure as hell going on down there. Bernie still thought that was funny as hell. He’d been there when the demolitions guy closed that hole in the first place. If it turned out to be important now, the krauts had done a fuck of a job of disguising it. Well, they were good at that stuff. He’d seen as much since the minute he got to Europe.
Generators grunted down there, powering spotlights that bathed the work scene in harsh white light. Bernie looked every which way but that one. When he watched what was going on down there, his eyes lost their dark adaptation. He wondered how many of the guys scattered over the mountainside with him would think of that. Odds were most of ’em were rubbernecking for all they were worth.
He thought about passing the word to be careful about it. Only one thing stopped him-the likelihood the other GIs would tell him to fuck off. They knew everything there was to know about soldiering. Or if they didn’t, they didn’t want to hear about it. Chances were it wouldn’t matter. If the Germans were trapped down there, they wouldn’t be coming out.