He would rather have come out here by himself, or just with Toby Benton. Several horrors had proved that Americans traveling alone or in pairs weren’t safe, though. And so he had a squad along to remind the krauts that they’d been defeated and surrendered and given up.
Of course, he wasn’t exactly safe even with the hired muscle along. As the corporal had reminded his men, Heydrich’s goons liked booby traps. The fanatics were too goddamn good at concealing them, too.
Sergeant Benton was an artist in his own right. He also had some specialized tools: a battery-powered detector to find metallic mines and a long, thin wooden probe to find the ones that weren’t. And he had wire-cutters to take care of the trip wires he-like the corporal-assumed would be there. And they were.
“Okey-doke, Lieutenant,” he said after a good deal of careful work. “Looks like we can dig now.”
Lou nodded to the corporal. That worthy said, “Rojek!”
One of the GIs jerked as if stung by a wasp. “What’d I do to deserve this?”
“You was born lucky,” the corporal answered. “C’mon. Get your ass over here.”
Muttering bitterly, Rojek did. He used his entrenching tool with a marked lack of enthusiasm. “I oughta write my Congressman,” he said.
The corporal gave him the horse laugh. “Yeah, like they give a shit about us. Now tell me another one.”
Before long, Rojek banged the tool against a roof of logs and planks. “Can’t go through that,” he said with some satisfaction. “I ain’t no beaver.”
“You want beaver, go back to Nuremberg and fraternize with some,” the corporal said.
“We’ve got saws along,” Lou said. The look Private Rojek gave him proved glares weren’t lethal.
But the corporal spread the wealth. Another GI got to play woodsman. He cut through enough logs to open a space a skinny man could use to get in. Lou filled the bill. Before dropping down, he shone a flashlight into the bunker. He didn’t want to land on a detonator-or on a bunch of knife blades or bayonets pointing up. The fanatics came up with lots of ways to make the occupation more…interesting.
This time, he didn’t see anything like that. “I knew I should’ve been a dentist,” he remarked as he lowered himself into the hole. “Then I wouldn’t’ve had to mess around with crap like this. But no. I wanted to study English lit, so when I volunteered they put me in CIC. My mother gets to say ‘I told you so.’”
He let himself drop, and landed with a thump on the floor of hard-packed dirt. A damp, musty smell filled his nostrils. Nobody’d been in this bunker for a while. A prisoner had told the Americans about it, though, so they had to find it and take it out of circulation.
Which would do how much to win the fight against the fanatics? How many of these bunkers were scattered all over Germany-and Austria, and the German-settled parts of Czechoslovakia, and maybe other places, too? Heydrich was a son of a bitch, no two ways about it, but by all the signs he was a goddamn thorough son of a bitch.
Lou turned slowly, playing the flashlight around the bunker. A small stove sat in one corner, with a pipe leading up through the roof to the forest floor above. Neither he nor Benton had spotted where the stovepipe emerged. However much you hated them, nobody could say the Jerries weren’t good at what they did.
The walls were planked. Neat metal brackets on them held Mausers and Schmeissers and close to a dozen of the halfway-between weapons the Germans had started fielding in the last year of the war. Assault rifles, they called them; some people said Hitler himself hung the handle on them. True or not, it wasn’t a bad monicker. They used a longer, heavier cartridge than a submachine gun’s pistol round, and fired at full automatic out to three or four hundred yards. GIs who’d run into them said they were very bad news.
Sergeant Benton’s head and shoulders appeared above, blocking most of the cold, gray light that drizzled in through the hole. “Is it the goods, Lieutenant?” he asked.
“Looks that way,” Lou said.
“Shucks.” Benton sounded disappointed. “Reckon Ludwig gets to keep his family jewels after all. Too goddamn bad.”
“Heh,” Lou said tightly. He didn’t think CIC would have made the prisoner sing soprano if he’d tried to string his U.S. interrogators along, but he wasn’t sure. With the war allegedly over, nobody seemed sure what the rules were for Germans captured in arms against the occupiers. Some U.S. officers called them francs-tireurs and shot them without trial. Some grilled them mercilessly, declaring that the Geneva Convention didn’t apply. And some treated them as POWs. There were no orders from on high; the brass was as confused as everyone else.
Just to make matters even more delightful, the fanatics kidnapped GIs and murdered them and left their bodies in prominent places with placards saying things like VENGEANCE FOR OUR FALLEN COMRADES. Sometimes they would just cut a man’s throat. Sometimes they’d get more creative. Lou remembered the poor bastard with his cock stuck in his…. He shook his head-shuddered, really. He didn’t want to remember that.
He used the flashlight again. A makeshift desk-a filing cabinet, a couple of crates, and boards across them-stood in the corner opposite the stove. Lou walked over to it. He started to open the top file-cabinet drawer. Then he thought better of it.
“Hey, Toby!” he called.
Benton came back. “What have you got, Lieutenant?”
“Stick your head in a little further and see.” Lou lit up the desk. “Just the kind of thing the Jerries’d booby-trap, looks like.”
“Want me to pull its teeth?”
“If you think you can. Maybe we’ll get lucky. The Germans love paperwork. If they give us a roster of half the bastards who’ve been driving us buggy-”
“We’ll take it. Yeah.” Sergeant Benton nodded. “Okay. I’ll have me a look.” His shoulders were wider than Lou’s; he had to wiggle to fit through the hole. He dropped into the bunker.
“Don’t do anything you’re not sure about,” Lou told him. “A booby trap here could be wired to enough TNT to blow up this whole fucking forest.”
“Uh-huh. Don’t I know it?” Benton advanced on the desk with unhurried calm. “I ain’t gonna get cute-believe you me I ain’t. I aim to climb on a ship and go home one of these days whether the krauts like it or not.”
“Sounds good to me,” Lou agreed.
As if he hadn’t spoken, Benton went on, “So if I think they’re getting sneaky, I’ll just back off. I’m good at this business, but I know there’s guys where I’m not even in their class. So…”
He went to work on the top drawer. Lou stood there and waited. He did his best to act relaxed, but sweat trickled from his armpits down his sides. Sweat was supposed to cool you off. These beads felt boiling hot. He told himself that was his imagination. It had to be, but so what?
Benton started to open the drawer, then paused. With a grunt, he went around to the side of the file cabinet and shone his flashlight into the narrow space between its back and the wall. “Uh-huh,” he said on a thoughtful note.
“What’s up?”
“Looks like a wire goin’ back there-two wires, matter of fact, one for top and one for bottom. If I’d’ve pulled…Well, who knows? But I don’t aim to find out.”
“Can you cut ’em?”
“Oh, sure.” Benton seemed surprised he needed to ask. “Be a second or two-gotta fit the wire-cutters to the extensions so they’ll reach. Can you lean over and shine a light down while I work? Otherwise I kinda need three hands. Lean over the desk, I mean. Don’t touch nothin’ if you can help it, you know?”
“I’ll try.” Lou did, wishing he were six inches taller so he had more to lean with. “How’s that?”
“Over to the left a tad…There you go.” Lou couldn’t see what Benton was doing. He heard a couple of clunks, then one soft twang, then another. The sergeant sighed. “Okay-now I’ve pulled all its teeth. Let’s see what we’ve got.”