Marek drove north for a time, then turned onto a deeply rutted dirt road, swearing under his breath as the car rocked and bucked, and the wheels spun on mud beneath puddled water. The lights of Katowice fell away behind them, and the road was closed in by tall reeds. The Buick worked its way up a long, gentle slope, then a farmhouse, with dim lights in the windows, appeared, and Marek stopped the car. With the contented grunt of a job completed, he shifted into neutral and turned off the ignition. Two dogs came bounding toward the car, big mastiff types, barking and circling, then going silent when a man came out of the house, adjusting his suspenders over his shoulders. He said a sharp word to the dogs and they lay down, panting, on their bellies.
“You remember Jozef,” Marek said.
Mercier did-Marek’s relative, or maybe his wife’s. He shook hands with the man, who had a hand like a board covered with sandpaper.
“Good to see you again. Come inside.”
They walked past a small pen with two sleeping pigs, then into the farmhouse, where a pair of women rose from the table, one of them adjusting an oil lamp to make the room brighter. “You’ll have something to drink, gentlemen?” said the other.
“No, thanks,” Marek said. “We can’t stay long.”
“You made good time,” Jozef said. “The next patrol comes through at eleven-thirty-five.”
“They’re always prompt?” Mercier said.
“Like a clock,” Jozef said.
“Dogs?”
“Sometimes. The last time I was out there I think they had them, but they don’t bark unless they smell something.”
Mercier looked at his watch. “We ought to get moving,” he said.
“You’ll pass Rheinhart’s place, about fifteen minutes north of here. Better to swing wide around it. You understand?”
“Yes,” Mercier said. “We’ll be back in two hours. If we don’t show up, you’ll have to do something with the car.”
“We’ll take care of it,” Jozef said.
“Just be careful,” the younger woman said.
When the lights of the farmhouse disappeared behind a hill, the night was almost completely black, a thin slice of waning moon visible now and then between shifting cloud. A sharp wind blew steadily from the west and Mercier was cold for a time, but it was marshy ground here and hard going, so soon enough the effort warmed him up. He kept the flashlight off-the German border patrol wasn’t due for some time, but you could never be sure. To Mercier, the night felt abandoned, cut off from the world, in deep silence but for the sigh of the wind and, once, the cry of a night-hunting bird.
They kept their distance from the Rheinhart farm, a German farm, then climbed a steep hill that led to the Polish wire. Mercier had been shown the Polish defenses from the other side, an official visit with an army captain as his guide. Not very deep: three lines of barbed wire-tangled eight-foot widths of it-a few camouflaged casemates, concrete pillboxes with firing slits. Death traps, he well knew, designed to hold up an enemy for a few precious minutes. Where the Polish wire ended at the hillside, they climbed to the other side, bearing left, onto German soil.
Mercier tapped Marek on the arm, Marek held his coat open, and Mercier used the cover to run the flashlight beam over his map, refreshing the memory work he’d done early that morning. The first German wire was two hundred yards or so to the west, and they headed directly for it. They slowed down, now, feeling their way, stopping every few minutes to freeze and concentrate on listening. Only the wind. Once, as they resumed walking, Marek thought he heard something and signaled for Mercier to stop. Mercier reached into his pocket, feeling for the grip of his pistol. And Marek, he saw, did the same thing. Voices? Footsteps? No, silence, then a grumble of distant thunder far to the east. After a minute they moved again, and found themselves at the German wire, a snarled mass of barbed concertina rolls fixed to rusted iron stakes driven into the earth. Mercier and Marek, using heavy wire cutters, worked their way through it, gingerly holding the strands apart for each other until they were on the other side. Thirty yards forward, a second line, which they negotiated as they had the first.
A few yards beyond the wire, Mercier stumbled-the ground suddenly sank beneath him and he almost fell, catching himself with one hand on the earth. Soft, loose soil. What the hell was this? By his side, Marek was probing at the ground with his foot and Mercier, resisting the urge to use the flashlight, got down on his knees and began feeling around in the dirt, then digging with a cupped hand. Crawling ahead, he dug again and this time, down a foot or so in the loose soil, his hand encountered a rough edge of concrete, aggregate; he could feel the pebbles in the hard cement. As he dug further, Marek came crawling up beside him and whispered by his ear, “What is it?”
Dragon’s tooth, but Mercier couldn’t say it in Polish. “Tank trap,” he said.
“Covered over?”
“Yes, abandoned.”
“Why?”
Mercier shook his head; no reason-or, rather, too many reasons.
They crawled forward, their knees sinking into the soft earth, until they reached solid ground, which made the tank trap much as all the others Mercier had encountered: a ditch with steep sides about twenty feet wide, with a row of sloped concrete bollards midway across. If a tank commander didn’t see it, his tank would slip over the edge, tilted forward against the so-called dragon’s teeth, unable to move. Not an unexpected feature in border fortifications, but the Germans had built this, then filled it in, the disturbed soil settling with rain and time.
And Mercier knew it was not on the map, which showed a third line of wire. This they found a few minutes later and cut their way through it. Just barely visible, about fifty yards ahead of them, was a watchtower, a silhouette faint against the night sky. Suddenly, from somewhere to the right of the tower, a light went on, its beam probing the darkness, sweeping past them, then returning. By then, they were both flat on the ground. From the direction of the light, a shout: “Halt!” Then, in German, “Stand up!”
Mercier and Marek looked at each other. In Marek’s hands, a Radom automatic, aimed toward the voice, and the light, which now went out. Stand up? Mercier thought. Surrender? A sheepish admission of who they were? Phone calls to the French embassy in Berlin? As Marek watched, Mercier drew the pistol from his pocket and braced it in the crook of his elbow. The light went on again, moving as its bearer came toward them. It was Marek who fired first, but Mercier was only an instant behind him, aiming at the light, the pistol bucking twice in his hand. Then he rolled-fast-away from Marek, away from the location of the shots. Out in the darkness, the light went off, a voice said, “Ach,” then swore, and a responding volley snapped the air above his head. Something stung the side of his face, and, when he tried to aim again, the afterimages of the muzzle flares, orange lights, floated before his eyes. He ran a hand over the skin below his temple and peered at it; no blood, just dirt.
Silence. Mercier counted sixty seconds, seventy, ninety. The light came back on, only for a second or two, aimed not at them but at the ground beneath it, then went off. Mercier thought he heard whispers, and the faint sounds of people moving about. Was it possible they were going to get away with this? Very cautiously, he began to slide backward and Marek, when he saw what Mercier was doing, did the same thing. Again they waited, three minutes, four. Then Mercier signaled to Marek: move again. Another ten yards, and they stopped once more.