***
Holger Frings tracked the strange American by following footsteps in the new snow. He found a burning village, and some dark instinct made him detour down the main street. He kept one arm up to shield his face from the infernal heat, and his other hand held a rag to nose and mouth to block smoke. He came around a slight bend. A German panzer-soldier with a bandaged head slogged toward him lugging two gas cans. The soldier was too close to the flames, his uniform steaming from the heat, his eyes squeezed shut. Frings sprinted around him to get clear.
The explosion engulfed the soldier in flames, the soldier not even squealing, simply lowering to his knees, then dropping forward like a burning signpost.
Frings pressed on, the black smoke swirling in his face and his sweat gushing hot and cold. He heard muffled screams and saw local civilians moaning and wailing, staggering and tottering, some with lacerations from broken glass. They had gathered before a pile of smoldering rubble. Frings pushed by them and saw corpses laid out in rows and scorched black, still emitting little blue flames. Some of the corpses were small.
Rage and tears fought for control of Frings, the tears streaming down but evaporating from the heat on his cheeks. The bombed building facades loomed like gargantuan black skulls, spitting hot flames and turning the dim sky into night. He couldn’t stop staring at the flames, like a boy so horrified and yet attracted that he wanted to jump right in the fire. What if he just sprinted right into that blaze? Would the searing of his flesh make him stop?
He backed away, and ran off, back toward the forest.
He picked up the American’s tracks. He found a clearing. He moved along the perimeter using the tree line as cover. He could make out a rectangular heap of snow, reminding him of a set of torpedoes frosted over on deck. Just some logs or something more? He sat under a nearby tree, casing the scene, listening. A stray chicken wandered up, pecking at twigs. What strange luck. Frings snatched it up, snapped its neck, and stuffed it inside his GI overcoat. And he watched, and he lay in wait. Lauerstellung.
The sun went down, but Frings had hardly noticed. His eyes had adjusted just like on the boat. The heap of snow was a trench hut, he saw. His father had probably spent time in one like this before the mustard gas and shrapnel claimed him. But the American was smart to choose it.
The chicken had long gone cold inside Frings’ overcoat. He faced a choice. He could go find his way back to his lines, the only survivor. Or, he could take this further than he ever had before. Follow his death wish. He could go in there and deal with this Ami right there and now.
Hours after dark, Frings knew what he had to do. He pulled his gloved hands from their warm spot between his legs, released the safe lever on his Thompson gun.
***
In her cellar on December 17, Heloise and her father held each other as they listened to another battle within reach. The neighbors huddled around them. They had heard Americans shouting outside for much of the afternoon but the voices had faded, and all had gone silent. Now they heard more shouts outside—German voices, and the roar of more vehicles muffled the shouts. The neighbors looked to Heloise and the neighbor boy Ruben, but Heloise and the boy could only glare back in fear. Her father Jean put a finger to his lips, shushing all.
When dusk neared again, Heloise couldn’t take it anymore. She and Jean climbed the cellar steps, tiptoed into the front room, and peeked out a window onto the main street. She had to smile, at first, at all the Americans marching by. But these grimy front-line GIs were trudging eastward with hands on their heads, and many were wounded. Germans marched them along, looking in little better shape than the Americans.
Young Ruben and other neighbors emerged from the cellar. Heloise and her father shushed them again and shepherded them back down.
Heloise went back for another look. Most of the GI POWs had passed. German vehicles clogged the road, bumper to bumper. Motley German troops gathered to drink and smoke, their faces gaunt and leathery. Others set upon a few straggling American prisoners, pulling off their boots and warm gear, their cigarettes, their weapons. Another group siphoned gas from abandoned American vehicles. The empty gas cans stood like dominoes, needing to be filled.
They couldn’t last long needing so much gas, Heloise thought. What then? They would know they had lost, finally. They had already lost that sense of order so dear to them. They were half-naked, wild, desperate beasts now. So would they go down moaning, or foaming at the mouth? And amid the chaos, would Wendell find a way back to her?
***
December 17: Evening. In his trench hut hideout, Wendell Lett woke with a start. He sat up on the bedroll, in the darkness. A chill shot down his neck. He sensed something.
A light flashed before him. It was the flame of a lighter.
The German sat on a crate—the German he’d left stranded. The man lit a cigarette from a red pack—a Pall Mall. His US Army overcoat and field jacket were open to show his gray-green German tunic. He had a Thompson gun resting on his knee, pointing at Lett.
Lett didn’t jolt or cower. He sat up straighter, his back against the skinny birch logs. He should have known. The last thing he remembered was lying down after he’d cleared snow from an observation hole, to look out. In his sleep he had thought he heard a chicken, and smelled American tobacco, but had dismissed these as hunger and the usual dreams of dead buddies.
The German had a square face with deep lines—more like a Russian than a German, Lett thought—but thick reddish brown hair. “I thought you never wake,” the German said in accented English.
“How did you find me?” Lett said.
“Fog is like darkness. Snow is so. It only shows what is important.”
“I thought it was the melting part you had to worry about.”
“This is also correct,” the German said. “Why did you let me go? Are you not on a mission anymore?”
“I told you. I’m not on any side.”
For a time, Lett and the German sat facing each other. They had a good staring contest. Lett studied the Germans’ tunic. It was strange. The insignia and buttons were yellow-gold, the buttons bearing little anchors, and the right pocket sported a shiny oval badge with a speeding boat on it.
“You could have sent a unit here,” Lett said. “How do I know you haven’t?”
“You do not.”
“Aren’t you just going to shoot me? How do I know you won’t?”
“You do not. But I repeat myself.”
“You could have stopped them,” Lett said.
“You could have also,” the German said. “Your jeep rammed us, do not forget.”
“No. That’s not what we wanted. What I wanted. Far from it.”
The German shrugged. “I did what you wanted, yes? I killed one of mine.”
“No.” Lett kicked at the bedroll. “I didn’t want anyone to die. I was going to—”
“What? What was there to do? Talk them all out of it? And then what happens?”
The German had a point. Did Lett really think it could have turned out any better? All the more reason to walk away from it, from all of it. The German stared at him, his head cocked, waiting for something like an answer.
“You did some fast work on Auggie back there,” Lett said.
The German shrugged. “You made me do this. Auggie?”
“His nickname. August is his name,” Lett said, and winced inside. Ever the incurably cynical dogface, he had never asked Weber or Auggie about their hometowns, or their families. “What’s your name?” he blurted.
The German narrowed his eyes. He shook his head.
“Come off it. Who am I going to tell?” Lett said. “Military intelligence?”
The German smiled, showing the browned teeth of a veteran. “My name is Frings. Holger Frings.”
“Is that a Navy tunic? Kriegsmarine?”
“Yes. I’m a sailor.”
“What’s that rank there?”
“Obermaat. This is much like a Petty Officer.”
Frings produced a dead chicken from his overcoat, and set it on the ground cover.
Lett’s eyes widened, as he imagined the feeling of a warm full stomach. “You can’t cook down here,” he said. “We shouldn’t even have a candle going.”
“No. Not until it’s safe,” Frings said.
Lett, nodding, pulled out a bundle of wool from his pocket and tossed it at Frings—Weber’s spare socks. “Take ‘em. Me, I still got my own,” he said.
***
In Stromville, Heloise couldn’t take hiding in her cellar one minute longer. At dawn on December 18, a Tuesday, she went upstairs and outside and stood in the icy road. Much of the battle wreckage had been cleared. German military field police wearing crescent-shaped metal gorgets on their chests stood around a command car and a fold-up table. It was a temporary checkpoint. She saw something, a figure, crushed flat and frozen into the road. Two German soldiers dug away at it. They popped it out of the ice. It was as flat as an ironing board, its head intact. The soldiers laughed and held it up. “Boar schnitzel!” one shouted, his words slurred from drink.
The German soldiers saw Heloise out in the road. They showed her the boar, holding it above their heads like a prize fish. She forced out a smile, and waved. These types won’t be digging up squashed animals for long, she thought. Soon they’ll be searching cellars.
“You must be careful around here, please,” said a voice in French.
Heloise whipped around to see a young German captain, his gloved thumbs tucked into his wide and shiny black belt. His French was respectable, but she would never tell him that. “Oh?” she said.
“Indeed. The Americans laid mines in the valley all around you. Only the road is safe. Please do beware. It’s really best to remain in your cellar. We will come for you.”
***
Morning, December 18. Out in the classical gardens of their villa billet, Archie Archibald and Captain Selfer strolled paths among heroic statues of Neptune, Mercury, Athena. They had a broad view of the horizon that was flashing and showing towering billows of black smoke. The constant thuds of battle sounded in the distance. Selfer and Archie walked with hands clasped behind their backs, looking like relaxed philosophers.
“The German spearhead has to stall sometime,” Selfer said. “They don’t have the gas. They don’t have enough of everything.” He waved a hand at the thinning clouds, and returned to his philosopher stance. “And when this weather finally breaks?”
“Allied air power,” Archie said. “That’ll teach ‘em, really snap their spines.”
Selfer lit a cigarette. They strolled on, further from the villa, and from any who might hear.
“You know, we got some damaged hooves here,” Archie said.
Selfer shrugged. “We’re not alone. Officers all along the front aren’t looking so swell.”
“True. And we’re not the ones heading to the glue factory. Say: Any contact with Z Team?”
“Be a miracle if there was, sending them out like that.”
“Oh, don’t go all mushy now, Charlie. I was just thinking—have we sent out the latest ‘Archie’s Account’?”
“We were holding it back—considering the situation at hand.”
“Let’s do one,” Archie said.
Selfer stopped, pulled his cigarette, and turned to face Archie with a raised eyebrow. “I really don’t advise it,” he said. But then Selfer saw the hard look on Archie’s face, the one that at crucial times always helped the Horseback Hero ride over the next hill. It was rare, this resolve, but also why Selfer had stayed on Archie’s staff. Theirs was a long game.
“I see. You mean, make it backdated?” Selfer said.
“Updated, we’ll call it. It will include those first findings from Z team that I, we—”
“Findings? What findings, sir?” Selfer knew the answer, but Archie always liked it when he drew it out like this. It was the closest Archie probably got to foreplay, Selfer thought.
Archie grinned. “Oh, you’re good, Captain. Smooth as they come, like cream on butter. The findings that I, that we, put on the back burner. I tell you what. Put your own name on it. How about that? About time you got some credit for AA. And give it a zippier title, something like, ‘Germans Readying Large Movement in Sector’.”
Selfer couldn’t say getting the byline didn’t delight. “That’s not bad,” he said, playing along, then doubling down like Archie liked. “Knowing what we know, I have an even better title: ‘Archie says: Captured Intercepts Indicate Combined Enemy Counterattack and False Flag Operation’.”
“Ooh, there you are. Now these, I did read. We saw this coming. We saw it all the way. Best thing is, some historian gets his hands on this in fifty years? He will know so too.” Archie strolled off, squinting with delight.
Yet Selfer, for once, felt a twinge in his gut. Could it be he was reaching some sort of limit? He told himself he wasn’t. Limits were for sops and milquetoasts, his father had told him. That’s how old dad had given the Great Depression the slip and came out a winner. No matter that his father was a con man. A man had to climb his way up, from a city sparrow to a slicker. Selfer drew his chromium flask from his jacket and took a long, slow, burning sip of vintage Armagnac. He looked out over the horizon, and all he saw was that black smoke.
***
During the night that became December 18, Lett had wanted to leave the trench hut, but Holger Frings made it clear that it wasn’t safe in the darkness. Lett was stupid to go now, Frings stated, a veteran soldier should know better. Lett found himself believing Frings, even though he wanted to hate the German. He hated the Germans’ blatant frankness. The Mennonite nuns and elders had been the same way. Of course, they would contend that they were only doing it to help. Why hem and haw like the English? It only invited misunderstanding. Tragedies.
The trench hut was less cold with two people inside. Outside, Frings’ chicken lay tucked under the new snow ready for cooking, just in case. Frings had his own bedroll. One slept while the other stayed awake for watch, slumped on a crate, peering out the peephole at the vacant, murky clearing. They hadn’t talked about sharing watch shifts; they had simply done it rote like the old soldiers they were. At some point in the night, Lett woke and saw Frings on watch. Just enough light came in through the peephole to make out contours. A pipe hung from the German’s mouth, unlit. He didn’t blink for a long time. He had the thousand-yard-stare—the bulkhead stare for a sailor. He twitched back to reality, and opened a tubular tin. It held pills.
“No,” Lett croaked from his bedroll.
“What? Why? It’s only Pervitin,” Frings said.
“Uncle Sam gives us pep pills too. They make you jumpy.”
“Are you my wife? They do not make me jumping.”
“Whatever they’re doing, it makes you exactly the way they want you to be.”
Frings, nodding, put the pills away. “It snowed again. Good for us. It covers us up.”
“You got a death wish, don’t you?” Lett said.
“How do you mean?”
“I just mean. Clearing off like you did. Your side hangs you from hooks for that alone.”
“And you? What about you?”
“What about me?” Lett said. “It’s my turn for watch, that’s what.”
Frings straddled backward off the crate. He sprawled out on his bedroll in the opposite corner, his jacket falling open to reveal his German tunic. The boat badge showed again.
“That’s for combat,” Lett said.
Frings looked down, and touched the medal as if he’d never seen one before. “This is what we get when we don’t die soon enough.”
“When you’re beating the goddamn odds, more like.”
Frings grunted. “Yes. It comes with the death wish.”
“Is that some kind of PT boat?”
“Yes. A Schnellboot, we call it.”
“It must have been roug
h,” Lett said, watching Frings’ stare drift off, miles out to some dark sea. “Were there sharks?”
“No. There was us. Humans.”
“And now look at you. Under ground instead of water. Say, why are you wearing your tunic underneath?”
“The German thoroughness,” Frings said. “My commanders, they studied the Geneva rules of warfare and determine we keep our uniforms under the American costume. In this way we are not spies, in principle. But there is one difficulty—to fight as the rules permit we must first rip off our Ami uniforms.”
“Now he tells me.”
“It is silliness, if not suicide,” Frings said. “You know these rules?”
“Not in the way you do. But we’re silly too.”
“I tell you—know where we got the idea? This war trick? You Americans did it.”
“We weren’t the first. Armies been trying it since the dawn of killing each other.”
Frings punched at a log, shaking the roof. “You listen! I’m talking about right now. In this war. It was in Aachen, in September. You sent your soldiers over in our uniforms. It was, how do you say? An attack by surprise. Aus dem Hinterhalt.”
“An ambush?” Lett said. This Frings had obviously heard stories. And he knew from an ambush. “What do you want me to say? Join the club? It wasn’t me.”
Frings grunted, calming, staring at his reddened knuckles. “Perhaps that’s the future way—your true action man of fascism. Anything goes. Yes? Time will tell us for certain. In any case, it’s your Americans’ world now to cock right up.”
“I was a trickster, too,” Lett said. “But, we were in Cologne.”
The words had come out before Lett could stop them. His sorrow about Cologne, and his failure to deal with the jeep face-off, it all pushed him to say and do dangerous things.
“You?” Frings pointed. “This, I don’t believe.”
“It’s true. Just days ago.”
Frings glanced at his Thompson gun leaning next to him. “Shut up,” he spat.
Under False Flags Page 18