by Dean Hughes
“Don’t sign it then. You can stay in this little cell for as long as you like. But if you sign it, you can get out.”
Wally knew better than to trust this man. Okuda had lived in California at one time and sounded like an American. He pretended to be on the prisoner’s side, but he was devious and would betray a man without hesitation. On the other hand, since the night that Wally and Chuck had been tortured, they had been held in this miserable little jail cell in the prison guardhouse. In all the chaos, after the bombing, Hisitake seemed to have forgotten all about them, but the conditions in the cell were unbearable. “How will this be used against us?” Wally asked.
“It won’t. You’ll return to your barracks and to the mine. But if you ever cause trouble again, you won’t be spared. It will be the death penalty for you.”
Wally glanced at Chuck and saw the dismay in his face, but he also knew that neither one of them would last much longer if they didn’t get out of the guardhouse. They had received very little to eat in this place. “I’m going to sign it,” Wally said.
Chuck nodded, and Okuda led the two of them out of the cell to a little desk, where he handed Wally a pen. Wally dipped it in a bottle of ink and then signed. Chuck did the same.
“All right,” Okuda said. “You can go back to your barracks. But don’t expect to sit around any longer. You’ll go back to work in the morning.”
Wally was too weak, too preoccupied to let Okuda bother him. He was thinking about the days ahead. He would receive nothing to eat until that evening, and there would be no extra ration, no way to recover from what he and Chuck had just gone through. His body was still beaten up, and he wondered how he could get through the coming days in the mine. But it was like everything else he had survived for such a long time. He would simply have to find the strength one more time.
As Wally and Chuck stepped out into the light, they stopped for a moment and shaded their eyes, but then they trudged on across the compound. Wally’s knees were still shredded from the hours he had spent kneeling on the bamboo poles. The wounds were beginning to heal, but the soreness made it difficult for him to walk. His back was worse, however. When Hisitake had beaten him with the shovel, he had injured something in the small of his back. Wally still wondered whether something weren’t broken in his spine. He hunched forward and shuffled across the compound.
Chuck was in pain too, and very weak, but at least he hadn’t taken a beating. “Can I help you, Wally?” he asked.
“No. I’m making it.”
But by the time they reached the barracks, Wally was exhausted. He lay down, thankful that he still had one more day to rest before he had to return to the mine. What he discovered in his room, however, was disturbing. Some of the prison buildings had been destroyed in the bombing, and now the prisoners were forced into tighter quarters. Fifteen prisoners had shared a room in the past, but now thirty mats were crowded together. Wally knew that the men would be sleeping almost on top of each other. The nights were cold, so that was actually not so bad for now, but he could imagine the misery in such confined areas once the heat of summer returned.
Wally and Chuck slept much of the day, and then they limped to the mess hall and received their usual ration—a little rice and a bowl of weak soup. When they returned to their barracks with the other men, now back from the mine, they learned more about the bombing raids. No POWs had been killed, but little was left of the city of Omuta. Incendiary bombs had set off huge fires and wiped out buildings for as far as the men had been able to see as they had marched to and from the mine. Even the buildings at the mine opening had been destroyed.
“A bomb got the mine god,” Don Cluff told Wally. “He’s dead as a doornail.”
“So what did they have you do when you got to the mine the next morning?”
“Nothing. They just sent us on down. I guess they figured that any god who couldn’t look out for himself wasn’t worth bothering with.”
The men laughed, but Art Halvorson asked, “How bad was it, you guys?” and the room fell silent. Everyone knew what the guards had done to Wally and Chuck. Many had seen them out in the compound, kneeling on the poles, and word had spread about all the hours of torture they had been forced to endure.
Wally was lying flat, trying to rest his back, but he was in a lot of pain. He rolled his head to the side and looked at Chuck, who was on the next mat, close to him. “I guess it was the worst thing the Japs have done to me,” Wally said. “I thought I wasn’t going to make it.”
“Yeah,” Chuck said. “It was probably the worst thing I’ve been through.”
No one had to be told any more.
“Someday these guards are going to pay for all this,” Eddy Nash said. “One of these days troops are going to land, and we’re going to get out of this place. But before we leave, I’m going to get some of these guys—especially Hisitake.”
“I want Okuda,” a man across the room said.
For a time the men talked about the guard or the mine supervisor, or even the American collaborator, all of whom they wanted to get revenge on. Wally didn’t enter the conversation, but he thought of the things he would like to do to Hisitake: maybe rip that sword off him and make the haughty little creature kneel across the blade for a while. He told himself he wouldn’t really do such a thing, but he liked the idea of threatening him, making him plead for mercy.
As soon as the men quieted, Wally went to sleep, but in the middle of the night he moved just a little; pain shot through his body and woke him up. He had slept a great deal the past few days in the jail, and that had been a blessing, but now his body was angry with pain. He knew that before too long he would have to pull himself off the mat and make it to work. He was cold now, the little blanket and even Chuck, next to him, not enough. His knees were throbbing and so was his back. He tried to find a better position, but nothing took away the pain.
Wally was awake and suffering when he heard thunder. And then he realized that the sound was repeating in a pattern, that it wasn’t thunder but bombs dropping. Slowly the noise increased, the crack of the explosions becoming more defined. But just when he thought the bombs might become a threat, the noise stopped. He was sure the city had been bombed again, and he liked the idea. That had to mean he had a right to hope for an end to all this agony before too much longer.
All the same, the next couple of hours passed slowly, and then, when it was time to get up, he had to roll onto his side and struggle to his feet. Chuck and Don helped him, but his first steps hurt so badly he couldn’t imagine walking all the way to the mine. Still, he made his way outside with the others, stayed on his feet through roll call, and then, after eating a ration of rice, began putting one foot in front of the other the way he had been doing in one way or another for almost three years. By the time he reached the mine, he felt that he had expended all the energy he had, and yet he had a full day of work ahead of him.
Wally’s crew was still assigned to an area of the mine that was flowing with cold water. Most of the men found a high spot and sat down, and then they ate their midday ration of rice from their bento box. Wally ate his rice too, but he didn’t sit. His back hurt too much to get up and down.
He was standing near the other men, aware mostly of his pain—his deep weariness—when he noticed that the supervisor was sitting by himself. He was bent forward, his arms on his knees and his forehead against his arms. His body was quivering, and Wally thought maybe he was sick. But then he realized that the man was sobbing.
Wally didn’t know the supervisor’s name, didn’t know anything about him. What he noticed was that he had come to the mine without shoes. That was strange, and Wally had to wonder what was happening. He picked up his lamp and walked to the man. “Are you all right?” he asked.
The supervisor looked up. Wally was holding out the lamp. It cast a rust-colored light across the man’s face. Tears were on his cheeks.
“Can I help you?” Wally asked.
The supervisor showed no r
eaction, and Wally wondered whether he knew any English at all. But then he said. “No. Nothing you can do.”
Wally nodded. He didn’t know what to say.
“Bombs come. Kill children.”
“Your children?”
“Yes.”
Wally stared at the man. He couldn’t think what to say. The supervisor nodded as if to say, “Yes, you heard right,” but then he put his head back on his arms.
“Why are you here?”
The supervisor looked up again. He didn’t answer, but Wally understood. He hadn’t been given a choice.
“I’m sorry,” Wally said. He thought back to the night before when he had been happy to hear the bombs drop. He hadn’t meant to take joy in something like that—not in the death of children. Certainly not in the loss of this man’s children.
Wally, in spite of the pain, bent enough to touch the supervisor’s shoulder. The touch seemed to move the man; he cried harder.
***
Alex Thomas was in Lyons, France, or at least close by. But he wouldn’t have known that if someone hadn’t told him. He had seen nothing of the city. He had spent his time camped in a tent at an airfield. Every day for two weeks he had been told that “very soon” he would know what was going on, but that he should “sit tight for the present.” He had gone through much harder times, but never a period that had made him more nervous. All the hours with nothing to do—and no idea what he would be doing—had been torture for him.
Finally one afternoon early in March he was asked to report to the office of a Lieutenant Colonel DeSantos—someone he had never heard of. When he reached the office, another man was already waiting in the outer office. He was a dark-haired man, shorter than Alex and more slightly built. He was wearing a civilian suit that was clearly European, and Alex assumed the man was French. But when Alex announced his name to the sergeant at the desk, the civilian stood up and said, in German, “I’m Otto Lang—your partner.”
At the same time the sergeant said, “You two can go on in. The Colonel is waiting for you.”
Alex had no idea what was going on, but he followed Lang into the office, where DeSantos had Alex and Lang sit down across from him, near his big desk. “Did you two get a chance to meet?” the colonel asked.
“Yes. Only just now,” Lang said, in English.
“Lieutenant Thomas, I’m sure you’re wondering what’s going on.”
“Yes, sir.”
Colonel DeSantos was a slender, dark man with a thin face and a long, narrow nose. He seemed a little rough around the edges, more like a blue-collar worker than a gentleman officer. His teeth were stained dark, and his shirt was too big around his neck. He took a puff on a huge cigar and then set it across a glass ashtray on his desk. The office was almost empty. It was a crudely thrown together shelter with wall studs and ceiling rafters showing. The big cherrywood desk was the one sign of elegance in the room, and it seemed out of place.
The colonel leaned forward and looked directly at Alex. “I understand you speak fluent German.”
“Yes.”
“You were a missionary. Right?”
“Yes.”
“Well, we’ve got a mission for you. But it sure ain’t religious. The report I have is that you don’t soldier like a choir boy.”
Alex didn’t reply.
“I’m an atheist and a communist, myself,” Lang said, and he laughed, almost silently, his breath sucking in. “I can look out for the missionary.”
DeSantos glanced at Lang and seemed a little less than pleased at the remark. “Well, in any case,” he said, “we have a tough assignment for the two of you. Lang here has been through OSS training. He just flew in from London. He’s going to be the team leader. Thomas, if you decide to take this assignment, we’ll give you what training we can before you make your jump, but for the most part, you will have to rely on Lang to get you in and out.”
“In and out of where?”
“Well, yeah. I’m getting a little ahead of myself. Let me tell you, quickly, what’s going on. You’ll get more details before the mission begins. But you need to know, this is absolutely top secret. Don’t tell anyone what’s going on. Don’t write home even a hint about it. Do you understand that?”
“Sure,” Alex said, but he thought the warning almost funny. He wasn’t allowed to leave the field, and he had already been told that even though he was an officer every letter he wrote would be read and censored.
DeSantos picked his cigar up, took a draw on it, leaned his head back, and blew the smoke into the air. Alex hated the smell of it. “The British Second Army and the Canadian First are going to cross the Rhine before too much longer—we don’t have an exact date yet, but in a couple of weeks—and to do that, we’re going to drop the Seventeenth Airborne, along with the British First and Sixth Airborne divisions, on the other side of the river. They’ll knock out some guns and establish a salient where the crossing can take place. We won’t tell you where this is going to happen for right now, but here’s what we want you to do. You two will drop in by parachute a few days ahead of the main drop. You’ll locate the artillery in the area and let the paratroopers know what they’re up against. You’ll also identify the best drop zones for the troopers and the best landing zones for gliders. We have pictures of that area, but we’ve learned on past drops there are things you can only spot when you’re down there at ground level. That’s why we want to send you, Thomas. We need someone with airborne experience who can also speak German.”
Alex nodded, but he suddenly felt light-headed, dizzy.
“We have a safehouse set up for you. Resistance in Germany isn’t strong, but some of these workers in the Socialist Workers union are willing to help. They’re going to run some sabotage operations to slow down trains, blow up power stations—that kind of thing. They’ll also put you up and help you with your cover story.”
Alex was hardly hearing any of this. He was thinking about Anna, about the baby. What would his chances be of getting back to them?
“Now listen to me. I mean this. I’ve told you just enough to give you an idea what you’re up against. But I don’t want to send you in there against your will. You’re the best man we could find to pull this off—but some things a man shouldn’t be forced to do. If you want out of this, say so right now. No questions asked.”
Alex hesitated, tried to think whether he could really say no.
“You’re married, right? Got a baby on the way?”
“Yes.”
“So do you want to do this?”
“No. Of course not. But if I don’t go, who does?”
“I don’t know. We’d try to find someone else. But it’s hard to find a man with your experience who also speaks German.”
“I speak fluent German, but not without an accent. Anyone who hears me will know immediately that I’m not a native German.”
“We know that. We’re not stupid around here, Thomas. I’m not with OSS, but I’m with the army Counter Intelligence Corps. We’ve been putting teams into Germany for several months now. We’ve got a story ready for you. You won’t talk any more than you have to. Lang here will deal with anyone who questions you—as much as possible, anyway. If a question comes up, you’ll say your mother is an American, and you were raised in Nebraska or Iowa, or wherever it was—the whole thing will be scripted for you. You’ll claim that your family moved back to Germany, and you were in the Hitler Youth, and you saw the light—or something of that sort. You get the idea.”
Alex nodded. “Will there be details? Where I lived in Germany and—”
“Sure, sure. And we’ll have all the fake papers made up. That’s exactly why I’m talking to you now. We need to know who’s going so we can get everything ready. We’re going to send you in there with full military papers, wearing Waffen SS uniforms.”
“Isn’t that against the Geneva treaty—wearing an enemy uniform?”
“Thomas, don’t start that. The Germans did it in the Bulge, and they�
��ve done it in other places. We need to have you moving around once you get in there, and who can move around better than a military man? You’ll claim you fought in the Ardennes. And now you’re on leave.”
“If we are caught, they will shoot us,” Lang said.
“No question. Especially you, Lang. You’re a traitor from their point of view.”
“I’m a traitor from any point of view.” He laughed that airy laugh of his again, and he looked at Alex. “The OSS recruited me from a POW camp.”
“So what are you, Lang?” DeSantos asked. “Some kind of anti-Nazi?”
“Certainly,” Lang said, but he laughed again, and then he said to Alex, in German, “They promised me I could migrate to America. That’s all the anti-Nazi training I needed.”
Alex thought he understood. Most Germans knew the war was lost, and they also knew how bad conditions in Germany would be once the war was over. Lang was obviously worried more about himself than he was about politics. His honesty was appealing, in a way, but Alex didn’t think he liked his flippant attitude.
“Well, anyway, that’s the outline of things,” the colonel said. “So what about it, Thomas?”
Alex wondered. Maybe he owed it to Anna to refuse. But who didn’t have someone at home? How could he say no and cause some other guy to go? “I’ll do it,” he said, but the words almost made him sick. He thought about the few minutes he had spent across the Moder when he and his men had taken those German prisoners. He remembered the terror he had felt at being in enemy territory.
“Aren’t you going to ask me the obvious question?” DeSantos asked.
“Yes, sir,” Alex said. “How do we get out?”
The colonel smiled. He stuck the cigar back into his mouth and leaned back in his chair. “That depends. If all goes well, Allied forces will get across the Rhine quickly and overrun the area where you’ll be operating. We have code words you’ll use. So you’ll approach the lines, give your password, and be allowed to go on through. Then you’ll come back to us, and we plan to use you in the CIC.”
“Sir, I just left the front lines. If a soldier meets up with a couple of men in SS uniforms, he isn’t going to wait long enough to listen for a code word.”
