And so, I had BH go out and buy us the best map of the Rhine Valley that he could lay his flippers on. And then we overlaid all the major highways and rail lines.
The letzte Zeile, as they call the bottom line over here, is that I was able to reduce our search area by about two-thirds. The biggest rail yards on the west bank of the Rhine within a hundred kilometers are just to the northwest of Mainz, in Budenheim. After that, there was nothing worth blowing up until you get to the outskirts of Köln—almost two-hundred kliks to the north. We’d run a check in the Budenheim area, but I didn’t expect to find anything there. You can blow a rail yard with conventional explosives very efficiently. And there was no control center near Mainz—that, too, was farther downriver, between Köln and Bonn.
No, I decided that the target environment was much richer highway-wise. German megaroutes, which as you probably know are called autobahns, run more or less parallel to the Rhine. Autobahn number 3 parallels the river’s east bank, and Autobahn 61 parallels the west bank. If one were going to disrupt things (and blanketheads, like SEALs, just l-o-v-e to disrupt things), then you’d cache your explosives near one of the hufucking-mongous bridges spanning the gorges that run through the countryside. I’m talking about two-klik-long, reinforced concrete, arched bridges, eight lanes wide, that would take a fucking year to rebuild.
The biggest of those spans was right outside the AO General Crocker had given me, just to the west and north of a good-sized city called Koblenz, which sits at the confluence of the Rhine and Mosel Rivers. I checked the maps. There are no fewer than six bridge crossings within twenty-five kliks of Koblenz. Now, if I were a war-planner back in the good old days of the Cold War, and I were trying to cache an atomic weapon or two where they’d do my Special Forces some good, I’d put ’em close to where they could blow a whole bunch of bridges at one time—thus bringing the Ivan resupply line to a screeching halt. There was a second factor in looking in the Koblenz area. Koblenz is just about an hour and a half south of Düsseldorf. And despite what the Chairman had said, I wanted to nose around Düsseldorf—check out the places Heinz had pointed me toward.
Which brings me to executive decision number two. We’d take a quick pass through the Mainz area—and then go straight to Koblenz. Yes, I knew it was a risk. But if you will look at the same maps I do, you’d see that the Rhine Valley itself is of little strategic value these days. This is not World War II, when the Allies’ main objective was to move waves of personnel and materiel across the Rhine bridges to press the Nazis farther and farther into Germany. The Soviet war plan called for massive air and chopper assaults, followed by a huge army of occupation. The Soviets, therefore, were preoccupied with keeping their supply routes open. And we were just as intent on destroying those major arteries and letting the invasion bleed to death.
So I wasn’t all that concerned about examining every kilometer of the north-south rail line that ran along the riverbank. But I wanted to check the areas around the huge east/west autobahn bridges. And I also wanted to look in the areas close to those gorges northwest of Koblenz.
It didn’t take us long to verify my hunch. We took a day and a half, cruising the side roads between Mombach and Bingen, working the land-locked equivalent of a checkerboard jackstay search. The RV and Mercedes provided the grid borders, and the two BMWs, ridden by Boomerang and Half Pint, who concealed the devices in shopping bags tied to their handlebars, did the searching. We drove up and we drove down, and we drove all the fuck around. But our jack-stay search didn’t turn up jack shit. Not even a hint of anything—except a persistent and nagging sensation in my Slovak skull that ve veren’t alone.
I made sure that we played all the countersurveil-lance tricks we knew: doubled back on our tracks; abruptly changed course; everything. Our senses were primed. But we found nothing. Saw nothing untoward. Maybe I was getting paranoid. No. I’m never paranoid; I’m only careful. But, since we saw nothing, I circled the wagons, and we headed north.
We hit our first paydirt near a small town called Bassenheim, which sits eight kliks from a pair of huge, multilevel autobahn junctions. When you’re looking to fuck with your enemy’s supply lines, there’s nothing as good as being able to destroy not one, not two, but three or four highways at one time—and major junctions are where you do that. The first interchange, at the junction of Highway 411 and Autobahn 61, crossed the Mosel River gorge and Highway 416, near the tiny town of Dieblich. It had the additional attraction of two sets of railway tracks—one on the Mosel’s northern bank, the other on its southern. A pair of MADMs placed just right would cause months’ worth of devastation, as well as send radioactive debris down the Mosel. It’s the kind of target I’d eat a yard of shit to be able to blow.
The second interchange, five kilometers away, was an even more intricate fabrication. It merged three autobahns and two smaller highways. Now, you gotta hand it to the Krauts. They do a wonderful job building highways. The road surfaces are built for speed—in wet weather or dry. The exits and on ramps are clearly marked, and even though some folks tend to drive more than a hundred miles an hour, there are few accidents. That’s because they PFA—Pay Fucking Attention—to what they’re doing; they don’t drive drunk, and they drive according to the rules.
The second interchange—its proper name is the Koblenz-Metternich interchange—is a six-level affair near Bassenheim that forms a triple cloverleaf arrangement so fucking intricate it looks like a department store Christmas bow. The whole thing is built of preformed concrete sections. The highways sit atop pillars five yards in diameter. The interchange itself reaches 180 feet in height at its highest point (that’s more than eighteen stories for you city dwellers), which occurs as the highways span a mile-long gorge. The effect is mesmerizing—all that concrete and stone looking like some great modernistic minimalist sculpture, contrapuntally poised against acre upon acre of lush, green countryside dotted with cows and sheep and other bucolic shit.
I tell you, folks—just looking at it made me want to get my hands on a couple of hundred pounds of C-4. Oh, it was beautiful. Oh, it was a structural work of art. But what can I tell you? I’m a fucking Visigoth. All I want to do when I see something as beautiful as this, is to blow it up.
But enough about my wet dreams. Let’s get back to reality. Just west of the interchange sits the village of Bassenheim, looking like something out of a fucking fairy tale. It’s one of those archetypal German towns you see on the postcards: a cluster of whitewashed, half-timbered houses with dark shingled roofs, looking as if they’ve just posed for a Disney version of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, all sitting cheek-by-jowl along five streets that all meet on a tiny cobblestone town square. On one side of the square sits a medieval stone tower; on the other, a single-spired church whose clock tower rings the quarter hours with Teutonic regularity.
We eschewed the town’s single pension in favor of the touristenpark on the outskirts. There, I let the manager run my AmEx card, we plugged the RV into the power supply and set up our own form of BOQ housekeeping—i.e., we picked up three cases of the local brew, Königsbacher, at the huge Brauerei that sits alongside the Rhine about three miles from the center of Koblenz. Then we piled into the Mercedes and onto the bikes, and set off in search of our new, clear Grail. It was my guesstimation that these interchanges were Class A obligatory targets, and that there’d be a cache somewhere in the neighborhood. The question was where.
I knew there’d be nothing in any of the small towns that dotted the landscape. You don’t cache things in a small town because it’s impossible to keep secrets in a small town—and even more impossible for a stranger or a bunch of ’em to come in and get something done without the locals knowing all about it. And so, you either find a place in the countryside that is isolated but relatively easy to access, or you cache in a city, in which you can remain relatively anonymous.
I drew a thirty-klik diameter around the interchanges, shaded off the area around the two German Army camps obligingly red-lined on
the map (Ich liebe der Krauts—they’re so fucking precise. If we’d had maps this good in Grenada a lot of Americans wouldn’t have been wounded or killed), and off we went.
It took us eight hours of driving to locate two POMCUS caches. The first was secreted in the middle of a small wooded tract between two farms, on a long and winding road leading to a village named Niederbach that was so small it wasn’t on anybody’s map—even ours. The second was in the middle of a huge fucking cattle pasture occupied by a mean-looking bull and eight big-titted heifers. The pasture was bordered by an electric fence and sat adjacent to a neat one-lane road that meandered through the gently rolling countryside, about halfway between the one-street, ein Gasthaus towns of Pillig and Naunheim. No, I’m not making these places up. Check your fucking maps.
Now, you ask, how did I find these cleverly hidden sites when no one else could manage? The answer is because I’m a devious sonofabitch—who knows what to look for. We dealt with the Niederbach site first—the weather was moving immer schlimmer, which is how they say going from bad to worse over here. The cache was concealed below what appeared to be an abandoned barn, although this “barn” had state-of-the-art door locks and security devices. The place caught my attention because abandoned barns don’t usually have any locks on their doors—but as I scanned this one through my binoculars, I counted five separate devices.
We slogged through a hundred feet of brambles, along a track that appeared to have been used recently. First things first. I switched the radiation detector on. Nothing. It registered zero. Well, maybe whatever was inside had been shielded. I let Boomerang play with the locks. It took him seventeen minutes to defeat ’em. Once we got inside, we had to break through the floor of the structure to get to the cache area.
There, we were greeted by a pile of empty crates, cartons, and boxes. Fuck—this site had been looted. We ran our nuclear-detecting devices carefully—but came up dry. If any ADMs had been stored here, they’d been removed long enough ago so that there was no residual radiation.
It was raining the well-known Katzen und Hunden by the time we drove past what turned out to be site two—the cow pasture. We were moving slowly down a one-lane blacktop road (the kind of German byway that has yellow disk signs posted every couple of kliks, explaining in universal pictographs that the speed limit for trucks is fifty kilometers an hour and for tanks it’s forty kliks an hour. That’s the kind of speed signs you put up if you live in a country where tanks and army convoys used to be as prevalent as tractors and plows). Anyway, all of a sudden I saw a four-foot-high chain-link fence, sans any gate, surrounding what appeared to be a small, brick pump house, about five hundred feet off the road. I raised my binoculars. Small signs on the fence told me that the pump house belonged to the Cochem district water management bureau, and to Keep the Fuck Out.
Now, this fence attracted my attention because it sat splat in the middle of the sort of countryside in which chain-link fence is a rarity. In this ’hood, most farmers use electric fence—single wire—or wire mesh, or some form of board und batten to border their land or contain their animals. And the municipalities? All the municipal fences I’d seen had been made of wood post and wire. So this twenty-by-twenty square of chain link, which looked as if it had come straight from Sears or Home Depot, was enough to pique my interest.
I signaled for our little convoy to stop. We pulled the RV off onto the wide shoulder adjacent to the pasture, and parked the Mercedes and the bikes under a convenient tree about fifty yards farther up the road on the opposite side. Boomerang and Gator, who’d been riding ’em, went into the RV to towel off and grab a cup of steaming coffee from the thermos.
I climbed out into the rain and eyeballed the site. About a quarter mile off to the east, most of it hidden by a slight crease in the countryside, I could make out a one-story farmhouse. Its red roof was silhouetted against the gently rolling hills across the gently rolling hills. On the far side of the house, I could pick out two sheds, and a barn. Off in the distance, a horny Rogue rooster was crowing. Rogue, you ask? You fucking bet: I listened very carefully as he crowed, “Suck my doodle-doo!” three, four, five insistent times. All of a sudden I felt Roguishly lonely. Like, I mean, I haven’t had my doodle-doo sucked since I don’t remember when.
Ah, gentle reader, this is but one of the prices I pay to defend your freedom. But I put all thoughts of pussy out of my mind (okay, I put most thoughts of pussy out of my mind. You know as well as I do that putting all thoughts of pussy out of my mind is impossible), and I turned my attention to the work at hand: i.e., the pasture.
While Duck Foot and Nod distracted the bull and the cows, and BH and Half Pint provided touristlike camouflage, I grabbed the nuke detector, churlishly threw my crew the bird, vaulted the electric wire fence (it was only four feet high), and landed—squish—in a nice, moist, fresh, and very fragrant cow pie that immediately soaked clear though my nylon running shoes. That will teach me to churl. I wiped what manure I could off my feet against the rough pasture grass and made my way across the greensward34 to the chain-link fence, as careful as a point man in enemy territory watching for bovine mines. Hey, one squishy cow pie a day between the toes is enough.
I examined the fence. Its condition told me it had been maintained until maybe eight or nine years ago. That put it within the right time frame for POMCUS caches. I went over the fence and looked at the pump house. It was unremarkable—but it was no pump house. There was not a single water connection inside. No valves. No pump. This place was a shell—as in shell game.
There was a single door, facing away from the road. The door was secured by a big padlock. I turned my nuke-spotting device on and got an immediate positive response. Ja—this must be der platz.
Now, I checked the single door more carefully. What appeared to be hinges were in fact a second series of locking devices. There was probably a third device, too. Perhaps it was even booby-trapped. I’d just begun to figure out how to break in without blowing us all up when I heard an urgent, two-fingered whistle.
I looked up. Duck Foot was waving frantically and the message was loud and clear: Get your ass back here, Skipper—on the double.
I hauled butt back toward the road. “What’s the prob?”
“We got visitors coming—”
That’s the nice thing about country roads in gently rolling countryside—you can see for miles and miles and miles—even in the rain. And there, in the distance, making good time given the condition of the road, I could make out a pair of black cars coming directly at us. Their brights were on. And they were traveling at flank speed.
The hair on the back of my neck stood up. You know what that means—it means that the sensor in my brain that sits below and behind the pussy detector has just gone off. Now, this could all be very innocent. But I wasn’t about to take chances—and my instincts have never let me down in cases like this one. “Gator, Boomerang, Nod—get in the fucking RV and keep your heads down.” No way was I going to let anyone see how many we were.
The rest of us played at being silly tourists in the rain. It didn’t take much playing, either. Duck Foot tried to entice the bull with a carrot from the RV’s fridge. Baby Huey sucked his Königsbacher. I played with the camera, fiddling with the zoom lens as the cars bore down on us.
They were big mothers, too—500- or 600-series Mercedes (I can seldom tell the difference), with extraweight suspensions, oversized tires, and enough radio antennas to remind me of the armored Town Car limo that the director of the CIA travels in. The lead vehicle slowed precipitously as it came abreast of our RV, which was fifty, perhaps sixty yards down the road from the Mercedes and the bikes. The big car’s single windshield wiper slapped furiously across the wide expanse of tinted glass. There was a coat of arms on the rear door. Instinctively, I squeezed off three frames, then lowered the camera and peered at the windshield. Like I said, it was tinted, but I could see enough. The driver was wearing Oakley ballistic wraparound glasses—the kind you see on sh
ooters. Riding shotgun was a man dressed in a black turtleneck, with close-cropped steel gray hair, cruel eyes, and a scar running down his cheek. He turned as the Mercedes cruised past at SLOW, those cold eyes boring into my own. Then his expression changed. He double-taked, a look of shock and surprise washing over his face.
Hey—I’d seen that puss before. I knew him, too. He was a big ugly Kraut—police or SpecWar. But I was fucked if I could put a name to him. It had been TMY/TMB (too many years and too many beers) in between sightings.
And then, the big Mercedes sped up, and then it was gone. I peered at the chase car as it passed. Two men in the front seat—and dark smoked glass that kept me from seeing anything else. I turned to watch as the brace of big sedans accelerated out of sight. Fuck—I raised the camera, pressed the zoom button to get full benefit of the hundred and whatever millimeter lens, and pressed the shutter so I could get the license plate numbers. Thank God for autofocus.
We’d have the film developed—and then I’d check out the license plates and the coat of arms. I still have a few friends in low places here, and I wasn’t going to be reticent about calling on ’em for some help. But that was for sometime in the future. Right now, we had some work to do here in this cow pasture. Like retrieving the ADM that I knew was somewhere behind all those locks and security devices.
6
I CHECKED MY WATCH. 1540. THE RAIN WAS REALLY coming down now. But I wasn’t about to be deterred—or interrupted. I posted Duck Foot two and a half kliks up the road, and BH the same distance on my opposite flank. Each man had a radio. If we were about to be interrupted, at least we’d have adequate notice.
1550. We moved the RV closer to the site, parking it on the opposite side of the road. Then Boomerang and I started work on the first of the locking devices. It was a Mark-1 Mod-2 version of something I’d seen a dozen times on nuclear weapons depots back in the States. Nothing much. The second device, however, was going to give us trouble. It was one of those keyless locks, where you punch a series of numbers and the lock drops open. You can sometimes bypass keyless locks with electronic gear, listening to the way the tumblers work. Or you can dust ’em with graphite powder and see which digits are the most used, then play with all those combinations. But I didn’t have either graphite powder, or a lot of time. And I didn’t have any electronic gear either. Boomerang and I went over the devices and decided that they hadn’t been booby-trapped. So, we’d simply blow the sucker with some of the C-4 I’d cadged from John Suter, grab the ADM, and scoot.
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