“Not at the moment,” Hanna replied.
“So there’s a generator, I presume?”
Hanna’s silence was as good as yes.
Sylvie shone the flashlight into the barn, taking care to hold it out from her body in case someone hidden in the dark recesses was looking to take a shot at her. But no one fired, not at her, not at the light. It was too dark to be certain, but there didn’t seem to be anyone around except her and Hanna.
And if there were others around, Hanna would be putting those opera singer lungs to use, trying to attract their attention, I’m sure.
Despite its dim light, the flashlight revealed everything Sylvie was looking for. The car was there, parked in the middle of the barn floor. Scattered about were tools and equipment that looked all too military, not in the least agricultural. And hanging from one wall were coils of rope.
Sylvie walked to the rear of the car and opened the boot. It was empty.
Perfect.
“Hanna, come over here.”
As she gingerly approached the open boot, Sylvie told her, “Get in and lie face down.”
“Why?”
“Why do you think, you dumb goat?” It felt good to return the exact insult Hanna had dealt her just a few hours ago. She used the pistol to motion her captive into the boot. Hanna complied warily.
“Now put your hands behind your back,” Sylvie said.
“You’re not going to tie me up, are you?”
“Why do you ask such stupid questions? Just do it.”
“But my hands…they hurt so much!”
“Oh, stop it. If you can wring them like you’ve been doing, they’re certainly not broken. Now let’s go…hands behind your back!”
“Fine. But if you must tie me up, why can’t I ride in the back seat?”
“I’ll need that for my bicycle. It won’t fit in the boot.”
Reluctantly, Hanna clasped her hands behind her back. Sylvie bound them quickly and expertly. Then she bound her ankles for good measure.
“Can’t have you popping this boot open and making a break for it,” Sylvie said. “Not after all the hard work I’ve put in tonight. Besides, the Gendarmerie will love having a little chat with you.”
The mention of the Gendarmerie struck the same fear into Hanna as it had her husband.
“But they’ll put me in prison!”
“Probably. But you German girls are tough, are you not?”
“But they’ll chop my head off!”
“Yes, maybe that, too.”
Hanna was looking genuinely panicked now. Whether it was the prospect of a French prison, the guillotine, or just the claustrophobia of being bound in the dark confines of a car’s boot, Sylvie didn’t know.
And didn’t care.
As she prepared to slam the boot shut, Sylvie told her captive, “Too fucking bad, pal.”
She said it in English. If Hanna didn’t understand her, she didn’t care about that, either.
The next morning, Sylvie was back at Engelhardt Farm, this time with a company of French soldiers. They were Moroccan colonials who, like any group of soldiers, seemed quite content to be spending time in rural serenity away, if just for a few hours, from imminent mortal danger. They’d even begun an impromptu football match until a white officer broke it up and ordered them back to duty.
Everything looked so different to her in the daylight. Distances that had seemed great in the dead of night were really quite short. The entire complex of farm buildings, cave, and launch ramp was quite compact, covering no more than ten hilly acres. All this might have once been an agricultural enterprise, but any evidence of that—laborers, animals, cultivated fields—had been replaced by something that seemed akin to a makeshift engineering lab.
A few US Army ordnance experts had flown in from Heidelberg at first light to assess this supposed Nazi super weapon launch site. On viewing the track Sylvie had found in the dark, they readily agreed it was a launch ramp, meant to guide the dolly on which a weapon would sit.
“It would probably be a rocket-propelled dolly,” the major in charge of the US team said. “Either that or the thing they were building here has enough thrust to leave the ramp under its own power. But that’s not likely, though. The captured buzz bomb launch sites we’ve seen used a steam catapult, but that takes some machinery we don’t see lying around here. Okay, Madame Bergerac, show us that secret cave of yours now.”
As they walked, the major asked, “You really think there are rockets of some sort up there, ma’am?”
“They’re some sort of something,” Sylvie replied. “A local Nazi sympathizer tried to put them to the torch last night.”
“A civilian? Not military?” the major asked.
“That’s correct, Major. There were no military personnel here when I arrived last night. No one at all except me and that female arsonist.”
“Where’d the military personnel go, then?”
“I’m afraid I have no idea, Major.”
His experts examined the seared something for all of ten minutes. They walked out of the cave with looks of annoyance on their faces.
“Interesting pieces of junk,” a master sergeant said. “Eventually, they might have been unguided rockets—you know, rocket artillery—but how far they could go is a big question.”
“You don’t think they could hit Paris from here? Or maybe London?”
The sergeant laughed. “Paris? London? I’m afraid not, ma’am. Those things are low-trajectory, non-precision area weapons. Maybe they could reach Strasbourg from here…maybe as far as Nancy. But I’m betting that’s about it. I mean, even with this launch site having the advantage of elevation up in these mountains and everything, it would be a stretch for them to fly any farther than that.”
“But still you call them junk, Sergeant?” Sylvie asked.
“Well, they’re junk, ma’am, because since they ain’t finished, they ain’t nowhere near fulfilling their purpose. They have no fuel and no warheads. If they had, you can bet there would’ve been one hell of an explosion, not just some little fire.”
“In other words, super weapons, my sweet ass,” the major said. “This isn’t worth getting excited about.” Then he cast his dismissive glance Sylvie’s way and added, “And that’s exactly what my report on this location’s going to say.”
She replied, “But suppose there are more locations, Major…and they’ve had more success than this one?”
“We’ll worry about it if and when we see it, Madame Bergerac.” Then he added, “But I must remind you that everything you’ve seen here is classified. You’d best keep it to yourself.”
She knew it wasn’t merely a reminder, but a threat, complete with the hint of draconian punishment for those who spilled secrets.
Sylvie and Luc found Philippe Ledoyen in the hospital, recovering from a nasty blow to the head. He’d managed to walk back to town last night after being dumped in the woods. He didn’t know how he’d gotten there or who’d attacked him.
A fistful of aspirin had dulled his thunderous headache. Once armed with his spare eyeglasses, he was clear-headed enough to leave the hospital and lead a team of Affaires Civiles personnel through a quick but thorough inventory of the warehouse.
“They took different commodities this time,” he told Sylvie when he returned to her office. “Mostly canned goods and petrol. I guess they weren’t planning on baking any bread for a while.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” she replied. “Whoever was staffing that rocket factory is on the move now.”
“On the move?” Luc Vachon asked. “In what?”
“Trucks, probably, disguised as civilian vehicles. There were fresh tire marks from trucks and carts all over the farm, but there were no such vehicles there last night or this morning. The Army is aware they might be on the roads. If they try to go through checkpoints, they’ll be caught.” Then she asked, “Do we have an update on Herr Vogel’s condition?”
“He’s recovering,” Vach
on said. “He can speak and take nourishment.”
“Then we should go talk with him.”
An intelligence officer met them as they arrived at the hospital. “I’m so glad you’re here, Madame Bergerac,” he said. “The old man insists he won’t speak to anyone but you.”
She found Vogel sitting up in his hospital bed, looking far rosier than he did last night. He even smiled when Sylvie entered the ward, beckoning her to his side.
“You gave us quite a scare last night, Herr Vogel,” she told him. “I’m so glad to see you’re looking better.”
“Don’t let looks deceive you, Frau Bergerac. I’m an old man. Every sunrise could be my last.”
His play for sympathy fell on deaf ears.
“Yes, of course they were building rockets at Engelhardt Farm,” Vogel said in reply to her pointed question. “But no, I don’t know at what they intended to fire them. They only told me so much, you understand. My job was to provide for their more basic needs.”
“Like a hidden location, food, fuel, horse-drawn carts for spiriting away supplies…”
“Yes, Frau Bergerac. You understand all too well, I’m afraid.”
“How many were there at the farm?” she asked.
“Surprisingly few. No more than ten at a time.”
She was startled by his answer. “You’re telling me ten people constructed that entire complex?”
“Oh, no. In the beginning there were many more…when there were excavations to be done and much material to be moved up the mountain.”
“Were they military?” she asked.
“The military supervised the initial construction work, which was done by prisoners.”
“You mean slave labor?”
“Call it what you like, Frau Bergerac.”
“But once the construction work was done, the personnel who remained—were they military?”
“Oh, no, Frau Bergerac. They were civilians, like you and me. Engineers and technicians. Military officers would visit once in a while. When it came time to fire the weapons, the military was supposed to come and oversee the launch.”
“And when was that launch scheduled?” she asked.
Vogel struggled to laugh, wheezing like a train whistle fading far into the distance. When he regained his breath, he replied, “As far as those engineers were concerned, it was scheduled for never, as near as I could tell.”
“Were they unable to finish the project?”
“Oh, no…they were more than able.”
“So you’re telling me they didn’t want to finish it, Herr Vogel?”
He nodded.
“They were sabotaging their own project?”
Vogel replied, “No, not actually sabotaging. Just making a grand show of progress without managing to complete the weapons. At this point, Frau Bergerac, I think the only thing on their minds was not being captured by the Russians. But they weren’t fond of the idea of French captivity, either.”
“So where have they gone now?”
“Probably to a place where they can surrender to the Americans or British.”
“Are there others like you, Herr Vogel, shielding secret installations in the mountains?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Do you know what those other installations are working on?”
“No,” Vogel replied with a look in his eyes that made her believe him without question.
“Can you help us find these installations, Herr Vogel?”
He seemed apologetic as he replied, “No, probably not. Not anymore, anyway. There was a list. And a map. They were among the many things my Hanna was tasked with destroying at the farm. Was she….?”
“Successful?” Sylvie offered. “Very much so.”
She noticed the flicker of a proud smile cross his face.
“No, I meant alive, Frau Bergerac. Is she alive?”
“Yes, Herr Vogel. She’s alive. And in custody.”
He sighed heavily, seeming to accept that of all the possible outcomes to Hanna’s mission, at least that wasn’t the worst one.
“But why didn’t the engineers destroy it all themselves?” she asked.
“Ah, they were in too much of a hurry to make their escape. You French were getting too close. And the burglaries of the warehouse were so foolish, so obvious. But hungry people do desperate things. I told them we’d finish the job of destroying their work for them.”
There was only one more question to ask.
“Well, then…tell me this, Herr Vogel. Are all the secret locations identified by geographic coordinates, just like Engelhardt Farm was?”
“You mean Forty-Eight slash Nine?”
“Yes,” she replied. “That’s exactly what I mean.”
“So you found the sign…”
He muttered a curse under his breath. “I was supposed to destroy that, too.”
Chapter Fifteen
April of 1945 was only days away, and 3rd Army’s race across Germany could only be described as accelerating. It wasn’t uncommon for mechanized units to make huge gains of ten or more miles in a twenty-four-hour period. They were besting the enemy at each contact, routing them, pushing them back without bothering to stop and regroup, a practice Patton often referred to as the curse of warfare. German soldiers grew more disorganized and demoralized as they reeled backward, unable to mount a coordinated stand. Their numbers diminished steadily; in the past few weeks, they’d lost the better part of two field armies—the 7th and 1st—with over eighty thousand of their troopers added to the already overcrowded POW pens. German casualties were twice that number.
The sheer volume of prisoners was a logistical disaster for Patton’s staff, the equivalent of trying to feed and shelter yet another entire army. No GI was surprised—or much cared—when the situation became unmanageable and the camps became dens of horror, riddled with starvation, typhus, and a host of other communicable diseases. Yet, the German troops continued to surrender, maybe in even greater numbers than those who chose to fight on. The hauptmann commanding a company of panzertruppen captured by 37th Tank near Worms happened to speak English. He told Sean Moon, “Sergeant, it is better to face possible death in an American camp than certain death in a Russian one.”
Still, their surrender after the briefest of fights didn’t make much sense to Sean. He asked, “You had us outnumbered and outgunned. You could’ve ripped the living shit out of our lead platoon and beat it out of here before we had a chance to bring holy hell down on your heads. Why’d you give up so quick, for cryin’ out loud?”
A sad smile spread across the hauptmann’s face as he replied, “We were not as formidable an adversary as you imagined, Sergeant. Our Tigers had no petrol, and we were down to just a few rounds between us. It was a shambles.”
“Still, you knocked out one of our Zippos and killed a couple of our guys.”
Whatever smile had been on the German’s face vanished. “I can take no comfort in that,” he replied. “Not anymore. It is all for nothing.”
The Rhine stretched before the Allied armies, a narrow ribbon of blue whose crossing would mark that crucial waypoint on the path to victory. To the north, Montgomery prepared for his 21st Army Group’s crossing of that river with all the deliberateness of another D-Day invasion. His ground troops cooled their heels as bombers pummeled the far bank and hinterland beyond for weeks in advance. In the days just before his planned crossing, a continuous artillery barrage—reminiscent of the one he’d used to break the back of the Afrika Korps at El Alamein—would rain down on whatever German troops were still unlucky enough to be alive. He meant it to be a spectacle, commemorating himself as the first general to assault across the Rhine in modern times. He’d invited Winston Churchill himself to attend the historic event. The BBC would broadcast the crossing blow-by-blow to the cheering populace of Britain.
Farther south, as the vehicles of 37th Tank refueled and rearmed on the fly, preparing to make their own plunge across the river, Colonel Abrams offered hi
s opinion on Montgomery’s view of warfare: “Every time I hear something Monty said, it reminds me why this mud we slog through is referred to as a theater of war.”
Without pausing to wait for artillery or air support, the US 5th Infantry Division had crossed the Rhine near the town of Nierstein a few mornings ago, a day ahead of Monty’s attempt. It had been done without fanfare. The heavy German resistance they’d expected crumbled quickly; the assault boats bringing later elements across operated in an almost relaxed posture, as if transporting troops in a land not at war. The next day, 4th Armored followed them over the Rhine, attacking through the GI infantry and expanding the bridgehead to thirty-five square miles.
Patton himself crossed the Rhine that same day. Rather than drive across the pontoon bridge in his vehicle, he dismounted, sent the jeep across, and took the bridge on foot. Halfway across, he stopped, undid his trousers, and urinated into the Rhine in plain sight of hundreds of his cheering troopers.
Watching his general’s watery gesture, Sean told his crew, “You know, when Monty finally gets his ass across, he’ll be downriver from here. Wouldn’t it be hot shit if he takes a drink outta the son of a bitch?”
With all its combat power now across the Rhine, 4th Armored was handed a new mission. “Our division’s wheeling north,” Colonel Abrams told the men of 37th Tank Battalion. “The plan is to encircle the three to four Kraut divisions in the pocket between the river, Darmstadt, and Frankfurt. Once we get them locked up, we’re to continue north and link up with First Army. This is an important and prestigious assignment for us, boys.”
“North, sir?” Sean Moon asked. “You mean like north toward Berlin?”
“That’s exactly what I mean, Sergeant.”
Sean spoke for the entire battalion when he asked, “You mean we’re gonna get a crack at Hitler himself, sir?”
“It’s kind of looking that way, Sergeant Moon.”
Thirty-Seventh Tank made six miles by noon. Fair weather allowed them good air support, and the fighters took a fearsome toll of the German armor, wheeled vehicles, and artillery in their path. But that same fair weather brought a rare and unexpected event: the return of the Luftwaffe, who seemed to wait until the American planes had cleared the area to refuel and rearm before appearing out of nowhere to begin their attack.
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