Under False Flags

by Steve Anderson

  Lett heard something, a clanking sound horribly familiar. He and Weber jerked around to look behind them.

  An armored German half-track was coming from the direction they had come.

  Lett didn’t need to convince Weber. He drove them onward, down the hill. They steered on into the chaotic flow of vehicles and carts and downtrodden, war-weary stragglers. The enemy faces were close, in car windows and open carriages, but no one spoke around them. People focused on the road ahead with sunken eyes. Children stared at them, but right through them. Bandaged soldiers slept, leaning into one another, shuddering.

  Snow fell. They managed to get their canvas top up, which kept them secluded and let them speak some whispers of English. “We can’t go off this road now,” Lett said, the map on his lap. “The side roads could have checkpoints—real ones, with Polizei, SS, military police even.”

  “Know what they call their MPs? ‘Chain dogs.’ And they got ‘head hunters’ too—looking for deserters,” Weber said. “And who knows what else on this side of the border. And if there’s some waiting up ahead? What then?”

  “We just keep going for now, keep it moving. It’s all we can do.”

  Weber nodded. “You know we used up all our good odds on this? You know that, don’t you? Fuck.”

  Lett knew it.

  For an hour they traveled within the highway stream of refugees and retreaters. Up ahead the horizon darkened. Ashes, gray and black, mixed in with the snowflakes. Lett stuck a hand out and let some fall into his hand. The grit darkened the melting flakes in his palm, like liquid charcoal.

  The skyline of a destroyed city appeared on the horizon, burning and smoking. Only a cathedral’s two blackened spires stood tall, but smoke billows dwarfed all. Soon they were passing storefronts and junctions, first of villages and then of dim suburbs.

  A sign read: “Köln.”

  “It’s Cologne? A big city? Oh, my god,” Auggie whimpered.

  Lett didn’t like it either, but they had to make it work. Heloise had given him the strength to make this work. Auggie and Weber would depend on him now. “We’ll get through it, and we’ll get the hell back,” he said in a strong, staccato voice, as if he was promising Heloise herself.

  If anything, they were safer among the untold numbers of fellow lost and weary with nowhere to go, among the orphans and refugees, soldiers and wounded wandering like old goats before them. They drove into the city of Cologne without problem. Somehow. It helped that there had been bombings overnight. The broken cityscape fumed and crackled. Sirens wailed in the distance. They passed through the southern city and street after street of rubble piles, of craters exposing wires and cables and pipes, some half submerged in oily liquids, and of so many skeletal building fronts, their blown-out windows little wind tunnels for grit and stench, the whole city a demolition site, it seemed. Random screams, some muffled, and more rescue whistles told of the many still people under the rubble. And the fetor of decaying, churned-up bodies burned in their noses, making them welcome the smoke drifts that smacked at their faces. Another air attack must have just hit, during the day. Fire crews and police waved them along. No one spoke to them. Just surviving seemed more important than security on the streets they followed.

  “Up ahead used to be the Old Town,” Weber muttered. “We visited when I was a little boy. Holy shit. It might as well be a rock quarry now . . .”

  The Rhine River appeared on their right, the current greasy and black and clogged with wreckage, the grand bridges busted up like balsa miniatures, upended and half-submerged. One bridge still stood. An endless stream of refugees and orphaned military streamed across it in trains. All three knew they had to avoid getting sucked into crossing the Rhine and going farther into Germany or they would never get back. And it was getting dark fast. Lett proposed it was best to hole up a while, out of the open. They parked their Kübelwagen next to others on a square a few blocks from the river promenade, what looked like a makeshift motor pool for soldiers hoping to find their homes or any family at all. There was no check-in, no sentry here, just weary troopers shuffling back and forth. Lett proposed they carry no weapons, to avoid committing perfidy. All agreed. They walked close together, heads down, hands deep in their pockets. Stepping through half-standing buildings, over fallen beams and mounds of loose stones and bricks and crossing cramped lanes, they happened upon a tall and glossy green door with a mighty brass knocker and handle. The building around it was a heap of scorched sandstone. The door opened into the foyer of what must have been a grand dwelling, but now led to nowhere. Inside, stone dust and ash coated the marble, and the ceiling timbers bowed downward, creaking, as if ready to bust at any moment. A perfect hiding hole. It was even warm from some unknown source, perhaps a buried but still functioning radiator.

  “We’ll have to hunker down here,” Lett said. The other two nodded, too exhausted and horrified to speak.

  More air raids came overnight, and the horrid racket kept them in their hovel.

  The dawn brought December 13, a Wednesday. Outside, a bluish haze from the river had settled within the dips between the rubble dunes. Frost coated the debris. The three of them had slept foxhole-style, curled together for warmth—Lett’s latest hole buddies. The tall green door looked out onto a lane in the rubble, the last trace of a street. Auggie kept watch by peeking out into the new daylight, keeping the door cracked open.

  Lett kept his eye on Weber. Weber had been sweating all night despite the cold, his face pasty. “So hot in here,” Weber muttered. “Why so damn hot?” He had loosened his German greatcoat, which revealed his American uniform. He tugged at it, wanting to loosen it more.

  Lett pushed the coat tight. “It’s just another panic attack,” he said. “Hold on. The sun’s coming up. We’ll get back by lunch, I promise.”

  “You keep saying that.” Weber raised a fist to his mouth. Lett grabbed Weber and pried open his fist, revealing two pills. “Just pep pills,” Weber said, “best Army ration going.”

  “Those aren’t helping you.”

  “Quiet!” Auggie whispered. “Someone’s coming.”

  Lett crawled over for a look. He saw a silhouette in the fog, then it became a man patrolling the lane, a rifle slung on his shoulder. The man wore an army-style field cap but his overcoat was civilian, the wool so worn it looked shiny. Lett could make out a black armband with red piping and white letters. He was Volkssturm, the Nazis’ last-ditch home guard. The guard took his time. He looked in doorways and windows, but moved woodenly.

  Lett pulled back from the door, trying to think. Weber glared at him, sweating, shaking. The man was in no shape to talk to anyone, much less in German.

  Always keep moving, don’t bunch up. Or seize up. Keep it moving.

  “We can’t let that man in,” Auggie said.

  “Just, stay put,” Lett said. “Okay? The both of you.”

  Auggie nodded. Weber squeezed his eyes shut.

  Lett pushed the door open, pulled it closed behind him. He stood out in the lane, and let the guard come to him.

  “Morning,” Lett said in German.

  They stood a couple yards apart. The guard looked to either side, as if at imaginary comrades. Lett could see hints of white hair under the man’s cap. He was an old man. The skin hung on his neck and his cheeks showed his bones. “Morgen,” the guard said, and stepped toward Lett. He had a whistle hung around his neck—

  The door flew open behind Lett. Weber rushed out, pushing off Auggie trying to hold him back. Weber’s German greatcoat had fallen open, showing his American uniform.

  The guard stumbled back, reaching for his whistle. Lett lunged and grabbed at the whistle, snapping its string.

  The guard’s eyes flashed a brilliant gray. “What is this? Who are you?” he said in German.

  Seeing the guard, Weber found his feet and stood frozen. Auggie’s American tunic showed now too. Auggie pushed his German greatcoat closed, but it was too late.

  The guard backed up, tryin
g to unsling his rifle. Lett sprung at him and seized his elbows. The guard shouted: “Help! Americans! The enemy!—”

  Lett slapped a hand over the guard’s mouth and thrust an arm behind his back, the guard groaning. Auggie and Weber surrounded him. Auggie unslung the rifle. They closed around the guard and moved him into a doorway arch blocked by debris on the inside. Lett released half a hand, giving the man a chance.

  “Please, don’t hurt me, please,” the guard whispered.

  Weber pushed and pulled at his German coat and American tunic underneath. “What’s the rule now?” he said. “Which we wearing? Huh, Lett, huh?”

  “We’re not spies, we’re not,” Auggie said to the guard.

  “We keep them on,” Lett said.

  The guard watched their panic with increased panic, his eyes darting between them, his breaths shorter, panting, his lungs rasping, rattling. He shouted again: “Hilfe! Amerikaner! Der Feind!—”

  Lett pressed his hand back over the guard’s mouth and the old man struggled, moaning with muffled screams. Lett scowled at Weber and Auggie, his grip tightening. He felt his chest and neck and brain growing hot and red and fierce, violent. The old man kicked and ran in place, stuck.

  “You got to,” Weber said. “We got no choice.”

  Lett felt a snap. The guard’s arm had broken under pressure, behind his back. The guard shrieked and tried to bite at Lett’s hand, the teeth slimy and sliding with nowhere to go. Weber and Auggie stood close, on their toes, keeping watch. Lett tightened his other arm around the guard’s neck and clamped down. He kept pressing, pressing. The muffled screams ceased. The gray eyes stopped rolling, still like marbles. The guard went limp and his body heavy, and they lowered him to the ground.

  As Lett took point, Weber and Auggie propped up the guard’s corpse on their shoulders like a drunken comrade and carried him down to the river wall, the guard’s toes striking and bouncing off debris. A cluttered mess of burnt-out autos and trucks gave them cover on the promenade. Lett kept watch, whispering instructions. They tore off his Volkssturm armband. They stuffed bricks and rocks into his pockets and clothes. They hustled him down a half-submerged, wobbly boat ramp, using the drifting smoke and river haze for more cover. They used wood scraps and timbers to push him out under the cold water. He sunk fast. A hand remained, as if reaching for the sky. A drifting plank of debris struck the hand, and it vanished under. Bubbles popped at the surface.

  The three walked back, Weber and Auggie looking drawn and spent. Lett knew his face still showed the vicious, bloodthirsty scowl. It was slathered on his face, like a hardening plaster. They wouldn’t look at him.

  They stopped. Looked up.

  A little girl stood before them in the rubble-strewn lane. She was no more than ten, eleven years old and had her hair in long braided pigtails as dark as her long black skirt. A white lace collar offset her stark military-style short coat.

  She was backing up. “Opa? Where is my Opa?” she said in German.

  Lett’s face hadn’t changed. She saw his dark mien. She turned and ran off down the cratered lane. “Enemy! Spies! Enemy spies!” she shouted in German.

  Weber and Auggie looked to Lett with contorted, begging faces.

  He sprinted after the girl.

  She was heading for a directional sign that read: “Zur Volkssturmwache.” To the Volkssturm guards station. But she had it wrong—she zigzagged around rubble and debris while Lett leapt over it all, stepping off stones and fallen beams for more speed.

  He caught up with her. She gasped, tried to scream. He covered her mouth, muffling her shrieks, and came around her back and put her in a hold. After all he’d been through it was all too easy, like snatching up a sickly cat.

  ***

  On Stromville’s main street Heloise stood beneath the lamppost, hands clasped at her waist, looking down the road stretching into the snowy valley beyond. The clouds hung low, heavy.

  “Mademoiselle?” a voice said.

  Heloise started, whipped around. It was Doctor Servais, from Malmedy. He stood at her side in a long overcoat and homburg hat. She’d been so deep in thought worrying about her Wendell that she hadn’t noticed the doctor walk up.

  “Oh. Good day,” she said, and her heart raced.

  The doctor tipped his hat. “I can tell you that the frog, it produced.”

  “What does that mean?” Heloise said. “I’m sorry, I don’t know.”

  “The frog test. It’s positive. You are pregnant.”

  ***

  For Holger Frings, hibernating in the barn near Schmidtheim had been like waiting in the pens before a sortie run. In the dim light, even their utilitarian American uniforms resembled the hodgepodge of S-boat gear. Most of his fellow doomed commandos didn’t feel so natural. They sat slumped, with heads bowed as if they were praying. It was late morning. Another night had passed. The barn had grown more damp and cold, the soggy ground seeping through the hay. Frings joined the group of sailors who huddled under the loft and shared the scuttlebutt. They said: In the forester’s house nearby that was the command post, their famed leader had supposedly arrived after staying at his Berlin HQ during much of Grafenwöhr. He was none other than SS Lieutenant Colonel Otto Skorzeny. As Hitler’s favorite commando, Skorzeny featured in magazines and top Nazi rallies. Skorzeny was the newsreel hero with the frat boy dueling scar, the type who fucked the mistresses of the generals asking for his autograph. Grabbed all the glory and slathered the gleaming metal all over his tunic—the man had more chest disease than a regiment of storm troops. But Germany needed a bold warrior of action, its walking Wonder Weapon, and a poser like Skorzeny had won the part. Meanwhile, the sailors whispered, some of their comrade commandos were receiving special assignments, such as venturing out to assassinate Eisenhower in Paris or to help retake Normandy.

  These were all pipe dreams. Frings had only his one pipe dream: He would return, kick the brownshirt Scherenberg’s ass and take his daughters back. He knew this would never happen. The end was coming too fast. If the girls were still alive by then, and if the Russians hadn’t raped them, their mother and aspiring stepfather would only sneak them off to some final fairytale-land like Bavaria—to commit suicide with the rest of the rotten seducers.

  And so it went from the top on down, an imposing and ancient machinery of power-seekers and small-dicked glory-worshippers, the sole of every polished dress boot pressing down on the hair tonic-slick head of another puffed-up seeker-worshipper, and that big head licked the shiny boot, and his boots gave and received the same beneath him, and down and down it went, the boots less polished and the heads more hopeless, until the chain of exploiters finally reached them here, in this barn. Where no more boots could be licked. Where they could only be blown apart.

  And finally, that morning, the word came down: They could go out any time. It was December 15.

  ***

  On the morning of December 15, Wendell Lett sat in a corner of S-2’s requisitioned barn, on his own, his butt down in the straw and dirt and his back against the splintery siding. Lett, Weber and Auggie had made it back from Cologne. They had escaped the city by jumping on a local westbound train stuffed with refugees, foreign laborers and silent, hollow-eyed soldiers. Lett and his two sorry companions looked like all the rest. They evaded checkpoints somehow. They had hitched a ride on a farmer’s cart too near the border, and passed back over the American lines on foot. It had taken them all of a day and into the night. The odds kept favoring them, after a sick and grisly fashion. Lett had led the way. All spoke little, though Lett heard Weber and Auggie whispering at times behind him. Near the insertion point the Belgian guide had found them and delivered them to S-2’s secluded barn in darkness. They had collapsed in exhaustion and slept most of December 14. At some point during that evening, Selfer had come and taken their statements for a report.

  S-2 kept them in the barn. Their German uniforms and gear still lay in a pile. They had a field stove going for warmth. At the long plank tabl
e Weber and Auggie sat close together, facing away from Lett. They passed a bottle of rotgut local cider. A single light hung above them, enclosing them within an illuminated shaft of swirling cigarette smoke, as if to spotlight their unified evasion. Pussyfooting. Giving him the cold shoulder.

  Lett stared up into the hanging light, letting it burn in his eyes. He seemed to have stopped blinking altogether. Cologne had ravaged all his thoughts, worries. He must have gone over it five hundred times in the day and night and day. He had dragged that German girl to the same doorway as her Opa. His combat-hardened senses had hashed it all out in split seconds. At first he had thought there must be some way to take the girl with them, keeping her quiet until clear of the city and then letting her run off, out of some forest. But she wouldn’t stop screaming. He had tried to stuff his scarf in her mouth and tie her up with something, anything, but she wouldn’t stop screaming. She kicked at his crotch, as if thinking he would rape her. “No!” he shouted. “No!” He tried to shush her. She only seemed to gain in strength, fury, desperation. She spat at him, she punched him. Weber and Auggie had caught up to him. They stood out in the lane keeping watch but hopeless, flat-footed, unable to help. She spat out his scarf and screamed, shrieked. He pushed her back to a column and pressed a hand to her mouth, and pressed, and kept pressing. He squeezed his eyes shut at one point, so he wouldn’t have to see her pleading eyes fade. When he opened his eyes again, he saw that her face had gone pallid and her skin had set, like a cooling wax.

  Lett had made Weber and Auggie dig out a grave in the rubble but he had insisted on laying her in there himself and covering her up. He had to be sure not to bruise her too much, or cut her, or break anything.

  ***

  December 15, afternoon. Lieutenant Colonel Archie Archibald and Captain Selfer rode in the rear seat of their late-model US Army Cadillac staff car ensconced in leather, velour and chrome. Archie had Z team’s after-action report resting on his knees. He squinted at a page. “No one would believe this,” he said, but absently, as if Selfer was not there. “Why, it simply does not correlate with any ‘Archie’s Account’ in one iota. Absolutely not. Here.”