His vehicle ground onward, devouring the earth beneath it, setting it to shiver. Its hull machine gun mounted to the left of the center of the frontal armor plate fired spastically, sending out a fan of high-velocity destruction, though without much accuracy. Another flaw: the gunner didn’t have a lot of visibility when the tank was all buttoned up. Though a huge battle beast capable of massive destruction, it was hampered by poor visibility in close-quarters combat; it could destroy enemy panzers but a few scampering rats like the Green Devils, not so much. It felt its way toward the bridge, making corrections in angle every few yards. It was like the blinded Cyclops trying to kill Odysseus’s men by feel. But still, it was getting closer; it would crush them or machine-gun them to death if they ran.
“PANZERSCHRECK!” yelled Von Drehle.
Poor Hubner. He had to dislodge himself from whichever safe borough he had dipped into, lug the heavy tube of anti-tank rocket launcher to the bridge, as well as his STG-44—which bounced painfully against his body, to which it was roped by sling—then sprint the whole way over the triple arches to the sandbag fortification, which contained Von Drehle and a boy named Neuhausen, all under fire.
Yet good Green Devil that he was, that was exactly what he did, amid a storm of enemy ordnance that raised dust in clouds through which he raced. He arrived out of breath, not so much halting at destination as falling wretchedly. Ouch, that must have hurt. He lay there on his back, gulping at oxygen, oblivious to the ruckus, trying to regain dignity, clarity, and composure.
“Too bad we’re out of medals, Paul,” said Karl. “That deserves two or three.”
“I’ll take a three-day pass instead of another Iron Cross,” gulped Hubner.
“Me, too,” said Neuhausen. “Who needs medals?”
“Are you able to shoot?” said Karl. “Hit anyplace?”
“I think I’m okay. But I don’t want to shoot it. I don’t know how. I was never trained. I thought my job was just to carry it.”
“Can you shoot it, Neuhausen?”
“Sure, I can shoot it. But I’ve never shot one, either, so God knows what I’ll hit. Have you shot it, sir?”
“Officers don’t shoot in the German army,” said Karl.
“But aren’t we in the air force?” said Neuhausen.
“Excellent point,” said Karl. “All right, I guess I’m nominated. Is it loaded?”
“Sort of.”
“What do you mean, ‘sort of’? I don’t like ‘sort of.’ ”
“The rocket is in, but the leads haven’t been connected. I’ll connect them when you get it on your shoulder.”
“I am full of confidence.”
Von Drehle somehow got the thing off the wheezing Hubner’s shoulder and transferred it to his own, settling in under it. It was not light, at twenty pounds, with a rocket inserted holding seven pounds of Cyclonite contained in an armor-piercing warhead. Its weight threw him off a bit, and he almost stumbled out of the protective lee of the sandbags. But then he had it.
He sensed Hubner behind him.
“All right, I think I did it,” said the man. “I think I got the right ones connected to the right things, whatever you call them.”
“Watch out. You don’t want to be behind this stovepipe when I light it off.”
“No sir.”
“Ready?”
“All set.”
“Quick, quick, quick,” universal German army speak (Hoppe, hoppe, hoppe) for do it now, and the two men rose, FG and STG on full auto, and barked off twenty and thirty rounds apiece of suppressive. As they completed their magazines, Karl rose behind them, peering through the small opening in the blast shield appended to the muzzle of the Panzerschreck to keep the rocketeers from frying their faces off in the drama of the launch, put the crude sight on the front armor plate of the tank, which had gotten too fucking close, and squeezed the firing gap, a trigger-like device on the rear grip, which did something to a magneto—no one was sure what—with the result that an electrical current zipped through the wires to the rocket engine and set it off.
The engine was still burning as it drove the 88mm rocket from the tube, trailing a noxious spray of exhaust and flame that dilated roaringly—hence the blast shield—obscuring clarity, but the rocket hit the tank dead-on, detonated, and in a split second something inside the tank co-detonated. The explosion was tremendous, and the tank shivered as it went all Mickey Mouse on them. That is, the interior blast was so percussive that it blew the twin oval hatches of the 34 into the open position, where they stuck, giving the turret the profile of the famous cartoon rodent’s circular ears. Smoke and tornadoes of flame gushed from the open orifices that Mickey’s ears had revealed. It was best not to consider what was happening to the Ivans in the guts of what had become a crematorium.
“Set to blow!” came a scream from behind them.
Karl dumped the Panzerschreck, not caring whether Hubner bothered to save it, and yelled, “Fall back, fall back!”
By commander’s obligation, he felt the need to be the last across, so as his men peeled back, headed over the arches of the bridge and past the primed and set chunks of explosive buried in the roadway, he stood and fired three round bursts at the clumps of Ivans he could see moving toward the bridge through the city streets. Some he dropped, some he persuaded to think up another solution. When he ran dry, he quickly switched magazines, pulling a fresh one from the shoulder-harnessed line of pouches, even as he was moving backward step by step, aware that death whistled by and around at jet speed, protected only by the belief that God favors pretty boys. He almost made it. In fact, he had made it when something hit his water bottle hard and the shock transferred through his body, corkscrewing him down. His head hit hard against the bridge stone, and steel football helmet or not, the shock reached his brain, too. Instant headache, brief moment of where-the-fuck-am-I? confusion, the sensation of hot, thick syrup pouring through his system, making him stupid and slow. He groped, found his FG-42, meant to pull it toward him, and saw that three Ivans had made it to the bridge, seen their opportunity, and now dashed to finish him with their tommy guns.
He struggled to arm himself for the close-up gunfight, but his dull fingers couldn’t find enough purchase on the FG, so he diverted to the thirteen-round Browning Grand Puissance he carried in his holster. Again the sluggish fingers wouldn’t get the hasp off the holster flap.
Then suddenly the three Ivans went down, knocked asprawl from behind by a burst of fast pistol fire, and who should come hustling out of the smoke of battle, face smeared with sweat and blood, Luger with toggle locked back signifying empty magazine, but long-lost orphan of the storm Dieter Schenker, who raced to him and pulled him to his feet.
“Dieter, what are you doing on that side of the bridge?”
“I couldn’t remember which side we were attacking from. I guess I got it wrong.”
“Remind me to get you two or three more medals.”
“Come on, Karl, we’ll discuss it later. Aren’t they going to blow this thing?”
“I believe so.”
The two men hobbled across the bridge, sheathed by smoke from the burning T-34 and the heavy suppressive fire from the parachutists on the far side, who hammered every living thing they could see and by simple luck, which seemed always to favor the brave in war, except when it did not. At the same time, it was quite a long thirty seconds, proving the relativity of time, because to Karl it seemed like thirty years, and he was only twenty-six.
At last, more or less unscathed but for the ringing in his ears and a variety of soon-to-sting scrapes, bruises, and contusions, he made it to the bridge’s end and rolled clumsily to the left with Schenker all twisted up against him, both of them screaming, “Blow it! Blow it!”
Explosive genius Deneker lit the one-second fuse to pop the No. 8 cap, which in turn set off the det cord, which exploded its way to the ten pounds of Cyclonite wadded into the center arch of the bridge, and the world yielded to a grand clap of chaos and energy.
The charisma of the explosion once again asserted itself as all fell back before the titanic rupture in the atmosphere, since when energy changes form, it’s not a good thing to be too close.
The geyser speared 250 feet into the air, at the same time sending a hard surf roaring along the surface of the River Seret to shake the boats moored in oily serenity. There was a bridge at Chortkiv, and in the next nanosecond there was no bridge at all, only a sheer gap of thirty feet in the center stone arch, while all around clumps of rock and timber floated down out of the cloud that had been raised and was itself, after having reached apogee, beginning to collapse.
“Karl, Karl, are you all right?” someone was yelling into his ear. It was Wili Bober.
“Who are you?” Karl asked.
“He’s concussed,” somebody said.
“Well, drag him along to the truck,” said Wili, “and the rest of you, disable the ones we don’t take. We’ve got to get out of here before Ivan figures out what’s happening.”
Two men more or less pulled the daffy Karl along, though in his brain fog, he had a tendency to wander off. He started noticing things of no consequence, like some placid chickens in some peasant yards, unperturbed by the human drama ongoing before them, with no comment on life, death, honor, courage, whatever; a deserted tractor, actually red, a half-hoed garden plot, a barn. Most of the grass and shrubbery needed trimming, though in summer, growth went wild. All of this was of no use to the parachutists, who ran to the four trucks parked haphazardly along the roadside, their crews having disappeared somewhere out of the free-fire zone. With no one really telling them to do so, a couple of the Green Devils ran to three of the trucks and fired a three-round burst into the engine blocks, then put a single shot through the rear tires on such an angle that it would proceed under power of its high velocity to the other tire and puncture it as well.
Someone shoved Karl into the cab of the remaining truck while talented Wili Bober cracked the plastic dashboard with his rifle butt, pulled out a wad of wires, did some diddling, and the truck shivered to life.
“Everybody aboard?” he hollered, and the truck bounced on its springs as the boys climbed on. “Wave good-bye to the nice Russian fellows,” said Wili, and cranked through the gears as the vehicle accelerated down the dust road out of Chortkiv and hurtled along through wheat fields at forty-five miles an hour. They were miles behind enemy lines, but the truth of military operations was that no land is ever completely suffused with troops. Instead, units are like amoebas sprawled across the landscape, taking up positions, intensifying in density as they get closer to the battle zone and the importance of logistics becomes paramount, with all the auxiliary units clustered close to the combat troops, but for huge amounts of area, there’s really no military presence at all. The truck roared through quiet rural zones and copses of trees, once passing a Soviet truck whose driver merrily waved, causing Wili to wave back. Two things were immediately clear: Ivan wasn’t quick enough to get airplanes into the air, and the Russian communications efficiency left much to be desired.
The Germans, for their part, had no idea the name of the road they were on and no idea specifically where they were headed, other than to some mythic west, defined by a line descending from around Tarnopol down to Kolomiya and even farther to Romania, that demarked the place where the two vast armies faced each other, known as a front. It might have looked coherent on the maps, but the maps were always delusionary: it was more like a random assortment of those amoebas slopped everywhere, and on any given day within the framework of operations the general east-to-west course of the war was not observed. No matter your affiliation, you might find yourself in the local theater fighting and withdrawing in any direction. In this vast zone of chaos, the parachutists were relatively unnoticed, though they knew at a certain point they’d have to get off the road, hide the truck, and find a soft place in the lines to get over to their own side. They’d done it enough times to know it could be done, even if it was never fun, because a bullet fired mistakenly by one of your own would kill you just as dead.
The key navigational instrument was the compass, which indicated the road traveled westward. That was good enough. It rolled down empty farm roads; always turning to the west and the mountains when faced with a decision, they’d be all right.
Around about now, an hour into the journey, Karl began to come out of his brain fog. “Ach,” he said with a little jerk. “Where are we?”
“Who knows,” said Wili. “No Ivans about, so wherever we are, it feels all right. How do you feel?”
“Like the hangover I had after the party in ’38,” he said. “I’ve got someone else’s head where mine used to be, and it’s stuffed with concrete.”
“I’ve always wanted to ask,” said Wili. “Did you actually sleep with Ginger Rogers?”
“A gentleman never tells,” Karl said. “I will say, though, I had a drink with her at a Monaco club and she was delightful, like all of them I suppose, somewhat more human in the flesh than on the screen. Got any Bayer?”
“In my kit. You’ll have to twist and dig to get it out. Wash it down with schnapps.”
“Excellent, Wili.”
Karl did exactly that as the truck gobbled up kilometers of emptiness in a universe largely of summer wheat under an immense Ukraine sky, though now and then they’d pass a farm or, more likely, some kind of Stalinist agricultural collective, and now and then a sullen peasant woman would watch them go, waving mildly to cheer them up. It was unclear if these poor souls thought they were German or Russian; more likely they didn’t care and just waved on the sound principle that, in a time of war, it was best to wave at any truckload of men with guns.
“We’re more or less on course,” said Wili. “I mean, we hold the mountains, and those are mountains, right?”
Karl looked and indeed they were. Somehow the Battlegroup Von Drehle had crept to the horizon dead ahead, a blue blur turning green as the sun rose, revealing a frozen sea of rolling landform, random and clotted, hill on hill, all carpeted in high pine.
This meant they were approaching their own zone of operations, where they knew the land and where the lines were soft and they could negotiate the front and get back to their comfortable palace in Stanislav for a few days of drunken recreation after this mission and before the next one.
“We’re pressing our luck in the truck,” said Wili. “Another few kilometers and we should dump it and get out on foot by night. We can rest tomorrow and cross between the lines tomorrow night.”
“An excellent plan,” said Karl. “I’m glad I thought it up.”
“It’s my plan,” said Wili. “I’m the clever one, remember? But go ahead, take credit for it. You always do.”
Interlude in Tel Aviv II
Platinum was mined mostly—but not entirely—in South Africa, where it was controlled by a corporation called AngloAmerican Platinum, AMPLATS. It was a dense precious metal, the metal of kings and conquerors, even if it lacked the sexy glow of gold and no one ever made a movie in which its dust drove Humphrey Bogart insane. It was mined north of Johannesburg in the Bushveld Igneous complex, then shipped to AMPLATS headquarters in Jo’burg for refinement, processing, and further distribution. The jewelry it yielded was, like so many things rich people adore, exquisite and dull. It had other uses, which was primarily why it was so aggressively traded. It was a staple of the catalytic converters used in American automobiles, where most of its production went; it was used in electronics, in turbine engines, in oxygen sensors, and in cancer treatment. It also had certain catalytic functions useful in production of certain widely applied compounds that were useful in the manufacture of other compounds, and on and on. Its advantage, also a disadvantage, on the world market was that it was highly liquid (and thus highly volatile), which made it a compact form of wealth to exchange for goods and services; second, being ubiquitous, it was considered banal and uninteresting so that it was not much tracked by various market monitors, including intelligence agencies, a
s were gold and blood diamonds and cash.
Gershon quickly made himself an expert on its mining, marketing, and usefulness, as well as its history, culture, and reputation. He saw that, like the world as a whole, recession had bitten deeply into the industry, with the giant AMPLATS in the process of cutting jobs, against the wishes of certain powerful South African labor unions, and much trouble was ahead, lowering the value even more. On the plus side, the Russians (the second largest producers) and the South Africans were looking into the possibility of starting a kind of regulation board and exchange, to bring discipline and steady pricing to the unruly business, which was swell but didn’t help the current downward trend.
Gershon saw that the peak he had detected was indeed anomalous, given the economic climate. In other weeks, maybe not. But in this week, unusual. So he ran his finding against market averages in other markets and confirmed his thesis: an unusually large amount of industrial-grade platinum had been purchased on a certain day in the last month, that was what the market was telling him. Demand drove up cost, the law of the universe. For one day, someone went a little platinum-crazy, gobble gobble hungry bird, and on that day the COMEX market showed gains of a little over half a percent, not much . . . but enough to demand scrutiny.
* * *
Within a few days Gershon had learned from something called the Precious Metals Industry Reporter, an expensive, exclusive wire service he was able to penetrate, that an entity called Nordyne GmbH, new to the precious-metals market and headquartered in Switzerland, had indeed bought over ten thousand troy ounces of platinum from AMPLATS. What was Nordyne, and what did it need all that platinum for?
It turned out that Nordyne didn’t exist before it bought and paid (promptly) for its platinum. It had a website of exquisite beauty and zero information, fronted by one of those logos that are high on style and brilliantly devoid of content. Looking carefully at it, Gershon noted two graceful lines running parallel to each other in the right half of an oval, the other half filled with the company’s motto, which was:
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