The Red Eagles

by David Downing

  The American-based operatives were also assigned other tasks. They were to check out the hijack location – Berlin had accepted Sigmund’s choice, though on what grounds Amy couldn’t imagine – and to observe the train on its July 7 run. That was this coming Friday. They were to hire “appropriate accommodation and vehicles” and acquire the necessary weaponry – another list. “Joe will deal with this” Doesburg had scrawled in the margin against the latter.

  There was nothing else of significance. All in all the three pages, which must have taken a whole night to send in cipher, amounted to little more than an announcement of the soldiers’ arrival and departure times, with a few pieces of advice thrown in. They’d bought it hook, line, and sinker.

  Amy walked back to the dock, where the next ferry was already discharging its passengers. We’re halfway there, she thought. The papers in the envelope would convict the Germans on their own, and if the man from the Russian Consulate had done his job, they’d soon have Doesburg’s address.

  She walked aboard, watched the water bubble and thrash as they got underway.

  “Do you know how many stories there are in the Empire State Building?” a voice asked her.

  “A hundred and two,” she said, turning around. “Hello Joe.”

  “Rosa, I presume,” he said, treating her to a display of perfectly even teeth.

  He was not what she’d expected. If anything, the opposite. He was probably younger than she; his hair was light brown and wavy above a friendly face. He had the soft drawl of the South in his voice, and though he wasn’t big, she felt he could take care of himself. Or at least thought he could.

  He wasted no time on pleasantries. “We’ve got an outing to arrange,” he began, and proceeded to tell her the arrangements. He had the car and the gas-ration coupons; he’d pick her up in Washington opposite the Library of Congress at 7 P.M. on Thursday. She must get hold of the necessary maps. He liked night driving. And then he left.

  She watched him thread his way down the deck, the Manhattan skyline rearing above him, and remembered her feelings as a ten-year-old, seeing it for the first time. The Statue of Liberty, the amazing skyscrapers, the huge liners at their berths on the Hudson piers. The New World, which had turned out to be just another slice of the old.

  Joe picked her up in a black Buick at the appointed time, and within half an hour they were driving west through Virginia horse country, the mountains ahead a dark line against the sunset. He drove fast but well, a fact which impressed Amy, who had never liked cars and found no pleasure in driving.

  He talked almost incessantly as he drove. His favorite subject was war, the present one and all those that had gone before. As they crossed the foot of the Shenandoah Valley he treated her to a detailed account of Sherman’s March, adding for good measure an analysis of its significance in the development of modern military strategy. She made what she hoped were appropriate noises on those rare occasions when he paused to draw breath.

  He said nothing about the job at hand, and while he talked Amy occupied her mind writing an imaginary report to Moscow on his motivation. She was just concluding that the game alone was what interested him when he switched subjects and started talking political philosophy. She’d been wrong. He really did believe in the Nazi cause; it fitted perfectly with his views on life in America. Miscegenation was the great evil, Roosevelt a Communist dupe, and Hitler a shining example to the white race.

  “If Roosevelt wins the war,” he said earnestly, “you know what will happen? All the goddamn liberals will make a lot of noise about world democracy and racial brotherhood and all that crap. And there’ll be about two million goddamn niggers coming back from the war who’ve learned to use a gun, and their heads will be full of the same crap. The Klan will have a hard time keeping things under control.” He looked at her briefly, a look of boyish intensity that almost took the sting out of his words.

  “He won’t win the war,” she said. “Not if we’re successful, he won’t.” The Klan, she thought. She suddenly felt as if they were driving into a foreign country. She’d always known it, but feeling it was different.

  He was silent for a few minutes as he guided the car through the center of Harrisonburg. It was almost midnight now, but the main street was still full of people, most of them the worse for drink.

  “Maybe,” he said as they emerged into the country once more. “But the times are against us at the moment. This is a bad century to live in, I reckon. But we’ll come back. Technology’ll do it, you’ll see. The machines’ll get so good we won’t need the niggers anymore. Then we can ship ’em all back to Africa, let ’em learn to look after themselves. See where democracy and equality gets ’em.”

  “But it’s not just the … niggers,” Amy murmured.

  “True enough. But I don’t rightly know where we can send the Jews.” He laughed. “New England maybe. And put a wall around it. Let ’em work for their Friday bread.” He looked at her again, his face so innocent of guile that she felt a shiver.

  “It’s cold in the mountains at night,” he observed equably. “There’s a blanket in the back – why don’t you try and get some sleep? It’s another ten hours yet.”

  “You’re going to drive right through?”

  “Maybe. I slept all day. If I get tired, I’ll pull off the road somewhere and take a nap.”

  She took the blanket and closed her eyes, grateful for the silence even though sleep refused to come. She wondered why he’d said nothing about what her role was. Southern chivalry, she supposed. Marble columns and lace and happy black faces picking cotton …

  It was light when she awoke, and they were parked by the side of the highway in a deep valley. Joe was asleep, snoring softly with his head against the window. She opened the door as quietly as she could and got out. In the near distance she heard a river and walked down through the trees toward the sound. Sunlight hadn’t yet reached the valley floor but it was already getting hot, and the night dew was rising like steam from the ground, spreading the thick fragrance of fresh grass.

  Amy relieved herself in the middle of a thicket, feeling foolish that she felt the need for concealment in the middle of nowhere, and then washed her face in the fast-flowing river. Looking around, she could see nothing but trees and, above them, the higher slopes of the valley. The highway was invisible and there was no sound of traffic. It was years since she’d been so physically alone, and it felt intoxicating. Her feet wanted to dance, but this impulse, too, made her feel foolish for no good reason. She walked back up the slope, taking an almost furtive pleasure in the springiness of the turf.

  Joe was awake when she returned, looking a lot less sprightly than she felt. “Okay,” he grunted, and swung the car back onto the highway. “Let’s find some breakfast.”

  They ate at a truck stop outside Bull’s Gap and continued south through Knoxville, Athens, Cleveland, Chattanooga, the valley widening before them. Soon after eleven they reached Bridgeport, Alabama, found the railroad depot, and cruised the surrounding streets looking for a suitable hotel.

  “That one,” Amy said, pointing out a three-story white building.

  They parked the Buick and went in. “Two rooms at the back, on the top floor,” Joe told the proprietor. “We’ve got work to do,” he explained, “and we need some quiet.”

  “Your secretary, I suppose,” the proprietor said with a grin, looking across at Amy, who was studying a painting on the wall.

  “If she wasn’t, I wouldn’t need two rooms,” Joe said coldly.

  “Okay, no offense intended.” He led them up the carpeted stairs. “This is a decent house. You won’t be troubled by any noise.”

  The rooms looked surprisingly comfortable. Amy went to the window and examined the view. “Fine,” she told Joe. He went downstairs for their luggage, and a few minutes later he pulled two identical leather cases from his bag. “German officer issue, 1910,” he said, handing her one and pulling the binoculars from the other. He studied the railroad depot
through them. “Perfect,” he muttered. “As long as Sigmund has his facts right,” he said, turning to her.

  “He hasn’t been wrong yet,” she said, joining him at the window. “What about the light?” she asked.

  “There’s yard lamps all over the place. No reason why they won’t be on. I’m going to get some sleep.”

  “I’m going for a walk,” she called after him.

  It wasn’t a big town, with just the one main street and about ten perpendicular roads on each side. The faces were mostly white; this was still hill country. She walked down to the Tennessee River, which looked narrower than she’d expected until she realized that the far shore was an island in midstream. The water had none of the blue-green purity of the mountains; it was a dull brown, rolling rather than running.

  She heard giggling behind her and turned to see three black children staring at her over the trunk of a fallen tree. She smiled and walked toward them. They fled, laughing.

  She suddenly felt a little dizzy, and cursed herself for not wearing a hat. The heat was stifling. Back on Main Street, she bought a Coke in a general store, aware that everyone was staring at her. “Where you from, honey?” the woman serving asked her. “If’n you don’t mind me asking.”

  “Washington,” Amy said, adding that she and her boss were driving down to Birmingham on business.

  “Gadsden road would have been quicker,” a man observed.

  Amy didn’t reply. What was she doing wandering about the town, hat or no hat? The fewer people saw her the better. She paid and walked out, feeling the looks aimed at her back.

  From nine o’clock on they took turns at the window in Amy’s room. While she watched he read a well-thumbed copy of a Civil War history; when the roles were reversed she tried without success to begin a Sinclair Lewis novel. As it grew darker the depot buildings grew indistinct, but there was no sign of the lights being switched on. The yard was bereft of activity.

  “I’ll have to go down there,” Joe said, putting down the field glasses.

  “Wait,” she said. “It’s not quite midnight yet.” For the twentieth time she looked at Sigmund’s timetable. “Bridgeport arrive 12:15, depart 12:25.” She was just about to agree that he go down when a car pulled into the yard, passed behind the shadowy bulk of a switching shed, and stopped, its headlights illuminating the side of the depot. Through the glasses they could just make out a figure disappearing through the door. The light inside went on, and a few moments later the whole yard was suddenly bathed in a yellow glow from the yard lamps. The car, they could now see, belonged to the state police. Two men came out of the office and stood by the car. Both lit cigarettes. One roared with laughter at something the other said.

  A whistle sounded in the distance, and both men looked east down the tracks. Another man got out of the car and hitched up his belt. He took two rifles out of the backseat, walked over to the others, and gave one to his partner. They could now hear the train.

  A couple of minutes later it drew smoothly into the depot and stopped, letting off steam, where Joe had predicted, alongside the wooden water tower. The train looked exactly like the one in Matson’s photographs: the black engine and tender, the single long boxcar, and the caboose. The brake-man jumped down from the caboose and joined the state troopers while the engineer and fireman manhandled the hose into the tender. Four more men emerged from behind the train, having presumably come from the boxcar. The engineer left the fireman to turn off the water and joined the others. There were nine of them now in a circle, the low murmur of their conversation barely audible above the hiss of the locomotive.

  The fireman, his task finished, walked out of sight of the others and urinated against the wall of the depot. He then moved down to join them, and for several minutes they stood together some twenty yards from the rear of the train. Then the gathering broke up. The two state troopers joined the pair in the boxcar, the crew returned to the engine, the brake-man to the caboose. The car swept out of the yard; the train, blasting smoke, began to move. The depot lights went out, followed by those in the office. Amy and Joe looked at each other.

  “Couldn’t be better,” he said.

  Next morning Amy and Joe checked out of the hotel and drove another thirty miles down the valley to the larger town of Scottsboro. The realtor’s office was in the center of town and Amy stayed in the car while Joe conducted their business inside. She could see him through the window talking to a gray-haired man, who then disappeared and returned with a set of keys. The two men shook hands. The agent mimed the shooting of a rifle, and laughed. Boys will be boys, she thought.

  “No problem,” Joe said as he climbed back into his seat. “They’re glad to have us. We’re the first this year. Probably be the only ones this year. The war’s not helping the hunting business.”

  “It is now,” she murmured.

  He laughed.

  They took the Guntersville road along the banks of the newly created lake, another New Deal creation which Joe found unfortunate in principle but probably useful in practice. “Technology needs power,” he told her.

  After ten miles or so they found their turnoff, a dirt road leading up the side of a steep ridge. They passed through two shanty towns, seemingly empty save for staring groups of children in ragged clothes. Scottsboro was only an hour behind them, but it seemed to belong to a different century.

  Another hour and they’d left all signs of civilization behind. The road wound up and over the highest ridge, presenting them with a panoramic view of mountains stretching into the distance. A sign pointing drunkenly into the ground bore the legend “Jefferson Lodge.”

  “Nice name,” Joe said, bumping the Buick onto a dirt track that made the one they’d left seem smooth as Pennsylvania Avenue. A quarter of a mile farther and they reached the lodge, a sprawling wooden cabin built against the ridge slope, flanked by enormous hickory trees. Above the door the skull of a deer gazed sourly down.

  “It was built by some Birmingham big shot who went bust in ’29,” Joe told her. “He shot himself here. With a derringer, would you believe?”

  There were six rooms and a kitchen. The furniture was minimal but clean, the kitchen adequately equipped. A large pile of logs was waiting by the stove.

  “It’ll do,” Amy said, sitting down on one of the bunk beds. “But that rough road worries me. There won’t be any time for changing tyres if we run into a problem.”

  “Not much we can do about that. We have a couple of spares for the car and I’ll check out the road for sharp stones.” He walked to the window, pushed back the shutters, and looked out. “Now that’s America,” he said.

  She joined him. Far to the west the lower Tennessee Valley could be seen, a yellow-green swath framed by the dark green slopes of the forested hills. To the north there were only mountains, ridge after ridge fading into the blue haze of the horizon. In front of the cabin the dust-coated Buick looked like a bedraggled alien spacecraft.

  “Yes,” she murmured, turning away. That was one America. She didn’t understand him and didn’t want to. Though she loathed his opinions, there was something about him she found disturbingly likable, some boyish innocence that seemed far removed from the evil he represented. She took a conscious grip on herself. They were enemies, enemies at war, only that. In a few weeks he would be dead.

  He went out to check the road, and she did another tour of the cabin, wondering which room the unfortunate “big shot” had killed himself in.

  “Okay,” he shouted from the door. “Let’s move.”

  The Buick bounced its way back to the main road, where they turned north, motoring gently downhill across the plateau. A solitary peak – McCoy Mountain, the map said – loomed in front of them, but as they approached its base the road plunged down to the right, and before the pines engulfed them Amy could see road, river, and railroad tracks sharing the narrow valley below.

  They hit bottom at the small town of Lim Rock, another group of shacks seemingly devoid of inhabitants,
though rather more modern than those on the mountain. Following the valley westward, they reached their destination in less than a mile. Here the road and the main railroad line pushed on toward a gap in the ridge ahead, while the stream, a spur line, and another dirt track veered north up a narrow valley.

  Joe stopped the car at the point closest to where the tracks diverged and they both got out. “Keep your eyes peeled,” he told her, and she leaned back against the hood watching the road while he took the large iron key from the boot and carried it across the tracks. She heard a click, a grunt, and a metallic thud. “No problem,” he shouted.

  “Nothing coming,” she shouted back.

  The noises repeated and he returned to replace the key in the boot.

  “A truck,” Amy said, and they watched it approach and thunder past. The driver acknowledged Joe’s cheerful wave.

  He turned the car and drove it up the dirt road and into the narrow valley. It ran straight for half a mile, then took a bend that brought them out of sight of the main road. Joe drove slowly forward as they both surveyed the area.

  “This’ll do,” he said.

  “The bridge will do for a marker,” she added, pointing forward to where both road and rails crossed the stream on a wooden trestle.

  They continued up the valley to its head, turning the car in the space between some old abandoned mine buildings. On the way back they stopped again at the chosen spot. Visibility in each direction was about a quarter of a mile; the valley sides were covered in densely packed pines and already, in the late afternoon, the rays of the sun had departed for the day. The valley floor was no more than fifteen yards wide, leaving room for just the stream, the tracks, and the road. It was easy to imagine how dark it would be at night, even with the half-moon.