Blackbone

by George Simpson

  When he was gone, after getting his obligatory peck on the cheek, Loring stripped off her raincoat and pulled off the galoshes, wondering what it was that had convinced Warren to do as she asked. Probably her hand on his shoulder—he always shuddered at her touch, and he would do anything for more.

  Her parents liked Warren Clark, and to Loring that in itself was the kiss of death. Of course, he was careful to promote their approval, always half again as nice to her mother and father as he was to her. For every pair of nylon stockings he brought Loring, there were two for her mother. And then there was the set of tires he had wangled for her father. Even the rich knew shortages in this war.

  To Loring’s dad, Warren had become one of the family, already affectionately referred to as “sonny boy” and “our Warren.” But it would go no farther if Loring had any say in it. She knew that soon Warren would have to be informed that courting her family did not mean he was winning her hand. Whenever she felt guilty over her hesitation about telling him this, she simply reminded herself that he had elected to pursue her, not vice versa.

  But for right now, she would have to use him. He was her only link with a situation that she felt was about to get out of hand. She already knew, with that fine, intestinal-churning sense known as female intuition, that the Delaware Trader was a goner, and her shipment of artifacts that had survived twenty-five hundred years buried in the desert was most probably gone with it.

  But she also knew that she would not be able to sleep or even rest until she knew for certain.

  Commander Bernard Heller considered himself a lucky man. A doctor, he had been called up for active duty in 1942. With the exception of a six-month tour at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, he had done his service at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, less than thirty minutes from his home on Eastern Parkway. Six nights out of seven, he slept in his own bed under his own roof.

  He removed his stethoscope from Kirst’s chest and made a notation on a medical chart. “You can put your shirt on now,” he said in flawless German.

  Kirst murmured, “Danke,” and reached for the garment.

  Heller cocked his head at Kingsly, the intelligence officer. “Artie,” he called, stepping around the shore patrolman standing in the doorway, “I’d like a word with you,”

  Kingsly joined him. “What’s your verdict, Doc?”

  Heller scanned the medical chart. “Same as the others. He’s healthier than you and me put together. Medically speaking, his story doesn’t make sense.”

  Kingsly sighed. “You too, huh? Look. His uniform, his ID disk, and his papers all check out. He’s Rolf Kirst. What’s the big puzzle?”

  “Two days in an open crate out in the Atlantic, Artie. There’s not a goddamned thing wrong with him. No dehydration, no exposure. It doesn’t add up. I don’t want to tell you how to do your job, but if I were you I’d recheck his story.”

  “Already have. I know it’s nutty, but I believe him. Now sign him off, so I can get him the hell out of here.”

  “Forms’ll be ready in an hour. Where’s he being sent?”

  “To the wide open spaces. He’s going to see more of America than I have.”

  Kirst gave up trying to understand the conversation in the hallway. English was a mystery to him. He finished tying his shoes, then straightened up and returned the stolid gaze of the big American guarding him. He opened his mouth to speak and once again, with a familiar, frightening rush, his vocal cords were paralyzed and he choked on his words. His jaw clamped shut involuntarily and the panic in his eyes was instantly clouded over. The guard stared at him briefly, frowning, then relaxed.

  On a drunken binge with fellow officers, Kirst had once boasted that he didn’t know the meaning of fear. In the last several days he had grown to understand it better, never more so than when words formed in his throat only to be torn away by an invisible hand. Fear kept him pressed to the table as he thought of bounding to the door, bowling the guard over, and running away. He tried to move his hand hut it wouldn’t budge. He wanted to stick fingers down his throat and vomit up the oppressive power inside him. Knowledge floated in and out, knowledge and awareness of something beyond himself, stronger than his own will, yet deeply, firmly embedded in his vitals, waiting and drawing on his energy—

  Right now it was closing its invisible grip on his heart, squeezing, sending fear and panic welling up inside him and—

  To the guard, Kirst was just a listless, helpless German perched on the examining table. So far he had offered no resistance. He had sat almost perfectly still as the doctor examined him, had responded almost automatically to the requests to raise a knee, breathe deeply, expose his throat.... A pussy, this one, thought the guard. What weed patch did he spring from? German officer stock—shit

  Kirst silently promised the whatever-it-was inside him that he wouldn’t bolt, wouldn’t run or try to escape or do anything it didn’t want done, if it would just leave him the hell alone for a few minutes. Almost magically, it responded to his thoughts and, with great relief, he felt the warmth stir in his stomach and the grip on his heart relax. He felt his eyes directed to the guard and, without understanding why, he gave the man a stare that bore right through him and into his brain and caused him to step forward—

  Kirst’s eyes closed. He could still see the guard floating on his inner lids. There was an aura about him, a pulsing unnameable color that felt to him like the visual embodiment of strength. He wanted to—no, the warmth inside him wanted to—The image on his inner lids shimmered and shook, then exploded into shards—

  Blackness floated in its place, and Kirst knew it was seeing through eyes not his own, that while his lids were clamped shut, it was viewing the world with malevolent delight—

  Panic rose up inside him again. Just as quickly, the blackness engulfed him and drove his feelings down into his stomach until they were no more than a tiny rock-hard knot of tension waiting to spring free once more.

  Kirst’s eyes opened again. The blackness was gone. The warmth shrank inside him and he was permitted to get up. He stood shakily under the guard’s curious gaze. He tried to remember when all this had started. Certainly not when he was aboard U-221. It must have been later, when he was in the water or—

  He saw himself heaving his body out of the sea and flopping down atop that crate. He saw his hands struggling with the knife and the boards, opening it, getting inside—

  The rest faded into nothingness.

  He forced himself to think, but that only brought the warmth rolling up through his torso and into his head, filling it with a blackness that blotted out his growing anxiety. Finally, the only thing he could recall with any clarity was the gray hull of the rescue ship.

  His mind drifted. The blackness subsided.

  Chapter 2

  Captain Roger Wayne Hopkins left the noon mess in a foul mood. He checked his watch and tested the air. The temperature had dropped since this morning. Above the camp, the sky was bleak and overcast. The slopes of Blackbone Mountain glistened with winter dampness. Patches of snow still clung to the rocks. There hadn’t been a storm in ten days but, according to Armed Forces Weather, one was due any minute. And Hopkins’ moods had a habit of fluctuating with the barometer.

  Hopkins zipped up his fur-lined jacket and slogged back to headquarters, glancing through the fence to see what the Germans were up to. A little volleyball, a little schmoozing, a lot of walking around and staring at each other. Same as always. They never did anything unusual. Smoke curled from the stack in the rec hut, and he could see Germans hanging around the front porch. He glanced up at the nearest perimeter guard post. The man in the tower had one leg up on the railing and a hand on his machine gun. Ready but relaxed.

  A rabbit cut across Hopkins’ path and paused to stare at the Germans. Hopkins laughed, then made as if to grab it. The rabbit took off. Maybe it didn’t like the Germans, but it had no use for Hopkins either. Hopkins walked on, scratching flakes off the back of his head and making a mental note to g
et on the quartermaster’s ass about some decent shampoo. Maybe he could heist it from the Germans’ Red Cross packages. They were always getting useful crap like that. The larcenous possibility pleased him. He chuckled to himself, then thought about his leave. He had a couple of weeks coming—a chance to get the hell out of this backwoods Antarctica and go someplace warm and sunny, with hot and cold running women. Oh, Christ, women. He hadn’t seen a real tit in months. Just those magazines that Private Carlton kept getting from his uncle in Jersey. Oh, for those two goddamned weeks and a chance to catch up on his sex life. He closed his eyes and stood rock-still for a moment, and there in the bitter cold, with an icy breeze tickling his nose and lips, he thought of the most beautiful woman he had ever laid eyes on and what it would be like to have his hands on her right now, this minute....

  A rush of cold air cut through his thoughts. He sighed and moved along. Fat chance about leave. Not with the new commandant reporting in today. Hopkins wondered about him. Would he be like the last C.O.—easygoing, disinterested, quiet, keep-to-himself Major Mancroft?

  What a cushy deal that had been! Hopkins smiled, remembering Mancroft closeted with his books, his black-market liquor, and his classical music, venturing out once a day to inspect the camp, but leaving Hopkins to run things. Would the new C.O. be the same?

  The scuttlebutt sounded good. Major Gilman. New York boy, prep schools, Dartmouth. Volunteered for service before the war, went through OCS, got his command just as the war got under way. Hopkins had peeked at his dossier, but he didn’t have the latest information. Rumor had it that Gilman screwed up in France and lost a whole battalion. Rumor aside, the end result was clear: Gilman was relieved of command, busted a grade, and shipped back stateside. The assignment to Blackbone was clearly a punishment. Gilman would probably spend his entire tour hiding his head, doing as little as possible.

  Fine with Hopkins, but he did find it curious that the camp C.O.s were always losers. Take the last one—Mancroft. Fucked up some things for a general, got himself blown out of a cushy desk job, ended up here a burnt-out case with Hopkins holding everything together. Hopkins shook his head—you really had to be a colossal screw-up to get the top job here.

  But what if Major Gilman came boiling in and tried to toss his weight around? Hopkins sniffed and smiled. The climate and the independence of the MPs would put him in his place. Hopkins could just go on being Hopkins, the man in charge.

  He entered headquarters, called the clerks to attention, and ran a brisk inspection. The jeep bringing Gilman from his train was due in thirty minutes.

  Blackbone Military Detention Facility was little more than a compound of barracks-type huts, surrounded by a chain link fence topped with barbed wire. There were guard posts at intervals around the perimeter—tiny open huts atop wood scaffolding. The support huts, housing the American MPs, were no different from the prisoners’ accommodations. The MPs were assigned to guard more than two hundred German prisoners of war, all of them commissioned officers captured in Europe and shipped to the States for internment. There were other camps around the country, many of them more comfortable than Blackbone. Noncommissioned officers were sent to work camps in sunny California, where they spent the rest of the war picking oranges. Most of the field-grade troublemakers ended up at Blackbone, where there was little to do but think.

  The camp was backed up against a hill that contained a played-out silver mine. Behind it loomed Blackbone Mountain. Rugged, sparsely forested, steep and gloomy, it was the most lifeless hunk of real estate in the Little Belt Range, stuck away in a corner of Meagher County, Montana. It was isolated fifty miles from the nearest town, which was the railroad stop at White Sulphur Springs. There was nowhere to go on a weekend pass, so none were handed out. In winter, the MPs couldn’t even go hunting: the animals were smart enough not to hang around. Everybody—Americans as well as Germans—wanted out. So when it snowed—frequently—and it got Wet and freezing cold, tempers would grow short. The Americans would look to the source of their misery, and the Germans would gird their loins for a dose of bad treatment.

  Most of it was tolerated with mute approval by Hopkins. But he liked it even better when he started it himself. In his tour of duty at Blackbone, he had evolved into a master of subtle indignities, which he enjoyed inflicting on his prisoners with what he called “the velvet touch.” He would go out of his way to make them uncomfortable while leading them to believe he was sympathetic. They wanted better rations—he got them canned beets and rhubarb, grits and black-eyed peas, porridge and lard, hardtack and matzos. They asked for meat—they got hog jowls, chitlins, and gizzards. They requested reading matter—they got Spanish-language newspapers, government form letters, and old laundry tickets. When they complained of rats and vermin, Hopkins sent them a large cooking pot.

  His favorite trick was roll call. He would wait till it was pouring rain or there was a blizzard going, then he would roust the Germans and, from the protection of a covered jeep, slowly and haltingly call the roll. His tongue would tie itself in knots over names like von Lechterhoeven and Schliechenvaldmer. If the Germans protested, he would immediately inflict something worse.

  The Germans had resigned themselves to Hopkins. Nevertheless, their morale had hit bottom long before Major Mancroft was transferred. The news that a replacement was coming had little effect. They figured it would still be Hopkins on the throne.

  Christmas was coming, and it would be Major Walter Steuben’s second at Blackbone, an anniversary he was not looking forward to. He stepped out on the rec-hut porch and lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and scanned the camp. The volleyball game was breaking up. Some of the men were running in place to continue the exercise. There was some spirited joking, but that faded quickly, replaced by the usual gloom that settled in when nothing was happening.

  Steuben thought about organizing another perimeter patrol: the men had responded to the last one enthusiastically. They had stripped to their underwear, lined up in two ranks, and marched around the camp, just inside the warning wire, singing “Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles...” and thumbing their noses at the MPs. The men needed something like that to unite them.

  Steuben was the senior German officer and as such had appointed himself guardian of the general morale. But he hardly felt successful at it. He glanced back into the rec hut. There was a fast game of poker going on inside. His men had learned at least one vice from the Americans. And they would gamble with anything on hand: pine cones, pebbles, even dried rabbit turds.

  Steuben reached inside his open coat and scratched the rash at his groin. Everybody in the camp had something that the medics couldn’t treat. Lice they could handle, but crotch rot, athlete’s foot, acne, and anything related to a vitamin deficiency went practically untreated. At least they ate regularly, but oh, God, what they ate. Steuben winced, remembering last night’s culinary masterpiece. Pork something something, with some horrid greens that could not have grown on any land Steuben had ever seen. His chefs, three German noncoms imported from another camp, were hard-pressed to deal with some of the odd groceries supplied by Hopkins. They always managed to serve something, but not everyone managed to eat it. In the quiet moments before falling asleep, just as his eyes were about to close, Steuben would be haunted by memories of restaurants and beer gardens and cafes, and wonderful meals and marvelous wines.... Then it would be hours before sleep caught him.

  Something was happening on the other side of the fence. MPs were running out of the barracks and forming up near the headquarters hut. Steuben drew on the nub of his cigarette, then flicked it into a patch of snow. He crossed the yard and headed up the slope to the fence. Others joined him. Bruckner came up, leading his mutt on a rope leash.

  “What do you suppose?” Bruckner said, his eyes moving furtively.

  Hopkins came out of headquarters briskly, wearing a clean uniform, sparkling like a tin soldier. He called the ranks of MPs to attention and yelled at them for a few moments.

 
Several of the Germans looked at Steuben. “New commandant is coming,” Steuben said. “Should be arriving any minute.” Automatically, Steuben buttoned up his coat, then sent someone to fetch his cap.

  Bruckner looked at his dog. It was sniffing the ground, lapping at a puddle of melted snow. Always drinking, that dog. Bruckner worried that it suffered from dehydration. It was a mongrel—no wonder. One could expect sickness in an impure animal. But he had grown attached to the little bastard. They were inseparable. Leutnant Hans Bruckner was thin and pinch-faced, and his dog was the opposite, broad and puglike. Bruckner kept a little stick in his pocket and, whenever MPs were in the camp, he would throw the stick. The dog would fetch it and come back with the stick wedged in a corner of its mouth like a cigar, and Bruckner would call out loudly, “Here, Churchill!” The MPs, if they had never heard it before, would stop in their tracks and look around and, when they realized the joke, they would laugh with Bruckner. But Bruckner had only pulled that gag once around Hopkins. Hopkins had threatened to kill the dog and make Bruckner eat it.

  Everyone fell silent as a jeep appeared around the back bend and roared up the road.

  Dortmunder returned with Steuben’s cap, which he quickly put on. Then he clasped his hands behind his back and stepped in front of the growing crowd of prisoners. He stood stiffly, watching the jeep come to a stop near the line of MPs.

  The officer who got out of the jeep looked to be in his early thirties, seasoned and muscular, with angular features that stood out sharply. As the jeep slewed around and shot toward headquarters, the officer stood alone for a moment, his stocky body taut as he surveyed the camp. Steuben knew immediately this was no dummkopf. This one looked kräftig.

  Major David Gilman’s gaze skimmed past the MPs to take in the entire camp. The isolation, the cold, the soldiers lined up—all instantly reminded him of France and the Second Battalion. He wanted to call that jeep back, leap in and drive on, just go off into the mountains and lose himself. This was his first command since the battalion, and he had been dreading it all through the cross-country train ride. He wanted to be anywhere but facing a bunch of soldiers who would be looking to him for their welfare.