Bernie Cobb sat on a boulder, watching the firefight down below. He wished like hell he were on his way down there to give the guys on his side a hand. He could slip off in the darkness, and that officer would never be the wiser…. How many other GIs had already done just that? More than a few, unless he missed his guess.
For the moment, discipline held Bernie here. For the moment. When they asked him why he hadn’t helped out, what would he say? I was only following orders, maybe? That didn’t cut it. Bernie knew it didn’t. They’d already hanged plenty of death-camp guards who tried singing that song.
“Shit,” he muttered, and then “Fuck,” and then “Motherfucking son of a bitch.” None of which helped. He stood up and took a couple of steps down the mountainside, drawn by the racket of automatic weapons and bursting shells.
Then he heard a much smaller noise behind him. There weren’t supposed to be any noises back there. It might have been another American soldier heading down toward the fight. It might have been, yeah, but it didn’t quite sound like that. Next thing Bernie knew, he was flat behind that boulder, the grease gun cradled in his hands, his index finger on the trigger. He didn’t know what was going on up there, and he didn’t want to find out the hard way.
The noise went on. It got louder. It sounded like somebody or something trying to push up through the grass from below. Unless it was the world’s biggest fucking gopher (did they even have gophers over here?), that should have been impossible outside of a horror movie. It should have been, unless….
Abruptly, the noise cut off. What followed was a perfectly human grunt of satisfaction, and what sounded like footsteps on stone or concrete. Then the footsteps were on dirt instead. And then somebody spoke in a low voice-but, unmistakably, in German.
Even as Bernie grabbed for a grenade, more people came up out of, well, whatever the hell that place was. An escape tunnel, he supposed. He waited. He’d only get one chance at this. He had to do it right the first time. How many of those assholes were there, anyway? Was it the whole fucking Reichstag? No-the other house was over on the far slope of the valley, making life miserable for the Americans down below.
At last, after what seemed like twenty minutes longer than forever, he didn’t hear any more footfalls on stone. The krauts milled around on the grassy mountainside, muttering in soft voices. Sorting out what to do before they do it, Bernie thought. Yeah, they’re Germans, all right.
Any second now, though, they’d go do it instead of talking about it. If he was gonna get ’em, best to do it while they were still bunched up. As quietly as he could, he pulled the grenade’s pin. Then he rose up onto his knees and flung it into their midst. He heard a thump, a startled exclamation, a blam! and all the screams he could’ve hoped for.
He fired a short burst from his grease gun. More screams! “Jerries!” he yelled at the top of his lungs. “Whole buncha fuckin’ Jerries!” He squeezed off another burst and bellyflopped down behind the boulder again.
Just in time, too. Quite a few of the Germans had to be hurt. They all had to be discombobulated. All the same, some of them were pros. Bullets from one of their nasty assault rifles spanged off the boulder in front of Bernie and snarled by overhead. He slid to the left and returned fire again, more to give the krauts something new to worry about than in the serious expectation of hitting them.
If too many GIs had ignored the officer’s orders, he was screwed. The Germans would flank him out and slaughter him like a fat hog on barbecue day. Sure as shit, here came urgent running footsteps, around toward the right side of the boulder. Hardly even looking, Bernie twisted and fired. His magazine ran dry, but not before he won himself a screech and a moan from the Jerries.
And then fire started coming in on the krauts from both sides. M-1s and grease guns could put a lot of lead in the air. “Thank you, Jesus!” Bernie murmured-he did still have friends in the neighborhood, after all. With those friends raking the Germans, they had too much on their plate to care about finishing him off.
He stuck another magazine on his submachine gun and banged away at them again. It wasn’t aimed fire, but it didn’t have to be. If you spat out enough bullets, some of them were bound to bite. And even the ones that didn’t scared the crap out of people they just missed.
“Surrender!” somebody shouted in English, following it with “Hande hoch!”
Damned if that wasn’t the officer who’d told everybody to sit tight. He’d turned out to be 112 percent right-probably right enough to win himself a medal.
Bernie wasn’t sure any Germans were left to surrender. But someone called, “Waffenstillstand! Bitte, Waffenstillstand!” They wanted a truce. They even said please. No matter what they wanted or how polite they were, Bernie didn’t stand up.
XXX
When Lou Weissberg heard the shooting start on the mountainside above him, he thought he was really and truly screwed. How many troops had the Nazis hidden in this stinking subterranean fortress of theirs? A division’s worth? That had to be impossible…didn’t it?
But the shooting up there didn’t last long. As soon as it stopped, he forgot about it, because the diehards on the far slope were still doing their goddamnedest to murder him. And then, off in the distance, he saw the headlights of a truck convoy coming down from the head of the pass. He breathed a long heartfelt sigh of relief. As soon as the reinforcements arrived, his ass was saved.
And a great burden slid off his shoulders. He might have fucked up, but the radioman hadn’t. As long as somebody’d kept his head, the story would probably have a happy ending.
Not right away, though. “They better kill those lights, or the krauts’ll knock the shit out of ’em when they get a little closer,” said a GI not far from him.
Sure as hell, mortar bombs did start dropping near the oncoming trucks. One of them took a direct hit, caught fire, and slewed off the road. The other drivers suddenly got smart. Almost in unison, their headlights went out.
The trucks stopped close enough to let Lou hear the order the officer in charge gave his men: “We’re going up that hill, and we’re gonna clean those assholes out!” Then he said one more thing: “Come on!”
They went. Every so often, one of them would shoot at something. That let the diehards know they were on the way. Machine-gun tracers stabbed through the night toward them. Other tracers replied-the new guys had machine guns of their own. And they had a mortar crew. Lou cheered when red sparks rose steeply into the air. But the American bombs burst short of the enemy positions. The Germans, damn them, had more range because they were shooting downhill.
Even so, they could see the writing on the wall. They quit pounding the men by the mineshaft. A couple of MG42s-Hitler’s saws, the Russians called the vicious German machine guns-kept spraying death at the Americans advancing upslope. What were the fanatics not manning those machine guns doing? Trying to get away, unless Lou had lost his marbles.
He hardly cared. “Jesus,” he said. “I think I lived through it.” He realized how much he wanted a cigarette. He also realized a sniper still might ventilate his brainpan if he lit up. Regretfully, he didn’t. He discovered he had a hunk of D-ration bar in the same pocket as his Luckies. Gnawing on the hard chocolate wasn’t the same, but it was better than nothing.
He knew the Jerries’ jig was up when the MG42s stopped ripping the air apart. Maybe their crews were dead, or maybe those men were trying to escape, too. Again, he had trouble caring. Nobody was trying to shoot him right this minute. That, he cared about. A few spatters of gunfire went on, up there on the mountainside, when Germans and Americans got too close to one another. But the main event was done.