A Midwinter's Tale

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “Will we have to shoot at our own troops?” one soldier whined.

  “Only if they shoot at us first or appear to be preparing to do so.”

  “How will we know that, Sarge?”

  “If they aim their weapons at us, asshole!”

  “How long is the ride,” another asked.

  “Maybe two hours, maybe longer. We’ll know how long when we get there.”

  “Will we have to fight in the rain, Sarge?”

  “I’ll hold an umbrella over your head if you want, soldier!”

  Laughter.

  “Who drives the lead jeep?”

  A kid raised his hand.

  “Your name?”

  “PFC Randolph, James, sir, three nine five—”

  “I don’t need your serial number, asshole. Let’s move ’em out.”

  I hoped that I sounded like a commanding officer who knew what he was doing. Obviously I had no idea what I was doing, and standing there in the bitter rain, I was scared stiff. My bedraggled and unhappy force would be utterly useless in a fight.

  As we rolled out of the Bishop’s City, we encountered Colonel McQueen in his Chevy. He stopped and so did we.

  “Off on another mission, Sergeant?”

  “Yes, sir, Colonel, sir.”

  “Where?”

  “North.”

  “God help the Russians!”

  “Sir!”

  “Don’t shoot till you see the whites of their eyes.”

  “Even then I don’t think we would hit them.”

  He laughed and drove on.

  “Which way, Sarge?” Randolph asked.

  “Across the river”—I studied the map—“and the canal, through Bamberg Nord to Hallstadt on Highway 4, continue on Highway 4 to Breitengrüssbach, then left on 279 up to the junction with 303. You go right on that and we’re almost there. . . . Have you ever done any mountain driving, son?”

  “No, sir, I’m from Fargo, North Dakota, and we don’t have any mountains up there.”

  “Well,” I said as we rumbled across the bridge over the RhineMain–Danube Canal, “it looks like you’re going to learn how today.”

  Tough sarge, huh? Then why was he fingering the rosary beads in his pocket?

  “Can we sleep on the way up, Sarge,” one of the two men in the backseat asked.

  “So long as you’re in the state of grace.”

  The rain was terrible. Even with the windshield wipers swishing back and forth, we could see at the most fifty yards ahead of us. Fortunately, there was not much traffic.

  I took fifty bucks out of the wallet I had replenished yesterday and put them in my raincoat pocket.

  Private First Class Randolph turned out to be an excellent driver even in the mountains. Like me, he had joined the Army for veteran’s benefits so he could enroll at North Dakota State. Like me, he wasn’t sure it was worth it. Like me he had fired a weapon a couple times in basic training and never since. Unlike me he was sincerely and totally unafraid. “I put myself in the good Lord’s hands when I came over here,” he said. “He’ll take care of me.”

  Sometimes maybe it’s better to be a Protestant.

  “What do they call the people at ND State, Jim?”

  “You mean our football team?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Fighting Coyotes, Sarge.”

  “Uh.”

  “You going to college when you get home, Sarge?”

  “Sure. Another ND.”

  “Fighting Irish, huh, Sarge? Everyone knows that. Kind of appropriate for you, isn’t it?”

  “You’d better believe it, son!”

  Lie! Lie! Lie! The Irish were not a fighting race. Contentious maybe, but not given to violence save under the influence of the drink taken. And I was the least fighting of all the Irish. I should tell him about my behavior on the football field that had somehow persuaded General Meade that I was the hero type. But, no, let the poor kid think that I was the toughest SOB in the Constabulary and that he therefore had a competent leader on this crazy venture.

  General Meade had not used the hero argument earlier in the morning. Rather he had said that I was smart, dangerously smart. If I were so smart, how come I was out here? And how come I was plotting a clear violation of the military code either tomorrow or the next day? If I was indeed dangerous, I was dangerous mostly to myself.

  And if I were truly smart, why was I being taken in by an operation that had little to do with taming the real black market?

  I thought of my family. And of Rosemarie. What would they think if I was killed today or arrested later in the week?

  I luxuriated in self-pity at the thought of my wake back home. They wouldn’t make fun of me anymore.

  Yeah, in fact, they probably would, damn them!

  And if I was charged with trying to smuggle my mistress out of the American zone? They’d stand by me, arguing that I did the right thing.

  Even Rosie?

  Yeah, even Rosie. Maybe her most of all.

  Jim Randolph was a damn good driver. He managed the Lichtensteinerwald just fine.

  “These mountains are no problem at all, Sarge. They’re not real mountains like the Rockies.”

  “That’s for sure,” I agreed, having never seen the Rockies.

  We turned onto 303. I looked at my watch. Twelve-thirty. My two-hour estimate had not been all that bad. The knot in my stomach hardened. The Red Army, which had smashed the mighty Wehrmacht into little pieces and then chewed them up and spit them out, was about a mile and a half away.

  “Next turn, I think, Jim.”

  We bumped down a rugged, muddy road that petered out into nothing. Two hundred yards away there was a wire fence, maybe twenty feet high.

  “What’s that fence, Sarge?” one of the guys in the back asked.

  “Russia.”

  “Jeez!”

  “Okay, Jim. You got us in here. Now get us out.”

  He laughed. “You got us in, Sarge. You said to take the turn.”

  “That’s neither here nor there. How long you been in the Army? You know the guys with rank don’t make mistakes. You drove the car. Now get us out of here.”

  He laughed more loudly. “You sure are funny, Sarge. You ought to be a clown or something after you go home.”

  “I am a clown already. Now turn us around and get us the hell out of here.”

  “That field sure is muddy.”

  “That’s why we have four-wheel drive. Now move it out!”

  The jeep had little trouble with the mud. We bumped, sloshed, and plowed by our four other jeeps and then hobbled back on the road—such as it was.

  I poked my head out of our plastic window. “What the hell you fucking assholes waiting for? Let’s go!”

  After racial integration I would have shouted “motherfuckers” at them, a much more creative imprecation.

  However reluctantly, they obeyed my orders. We redeployed back to 303.

  “These jeeps sure are tough, Sarge.”

  “They’re supposed to be tough, Jim. You don’t always have good roads in combat.”

  Hardened old combat veteran knows all about it, right?

  “It’s gotta be this turn,” I said when we came to the next dirt road.

  “What if it isn’t?” one of the guys in the back asked.

  “Then we try every turn from here to Prague.”

  Fortunately for me, however, it was the right road. In five minutes we bumped up to a lonely border outpost—a hut, a bar gate, an American flag, and three GIs.

  The rain had diminished to a drizzle. I jumped out of the jeep with as much poise as was possible and strode over to the hut. Even Constabulary raincoats are fancy, covered with white and blue doodads.

  So the sergeant in charge, not able to see my stripes, saluted briskly, figuring I was some kind of big-deal officer.

  “Good morning, Sarge.” I saluted back. “Looks like you guys have done a fine job of holding back the Russkies.”

  He g
rinned. “Repulsed ’em so far, sir. Look, they’re kind of excited about your arrival.”

  He handed me a first-rate pair of Bausch & Lomb field glasses, doubtless liberated at some point from the Wehrmacht and traded around by GIs who didn’t want to bother taking them home.

  I tried to focus them a couple of times and finally got them working. A hundred yards down the road was another hut, bigger than ours with tank traps in front of it and a gate that looked like a fence. About a dozen men were standing around in brown uniforms and funny, peaked caps, one of them with red trim all over.

  Several of the men were pointing heavy machine guns right at us.

  “Must be impressed by our fancy clothes and fancy jeeps.”

  “I guess so,” the sergeant agreed. “Even if the jeeps are a little

  muddy.”

  “Constabulary jeeps, Sergeant, are never muddy. . . . Now, where do these deals go down?”

  “Not far from here, sir. See that second hill out that way?” He pointed to the left of the road on which we had come in.

  “Yeah.”

  “There’s a little saucerlike depression over there. Our guys would normally deploy themselves and let the Russkies come in on the north side. The Russkies would dump their stuff, our guys would throw a bag of money, and the Russkies would run like hell.”

  “Why?”

  “Our guys had automatic weapons aimed at them. Russkies figured they might blow them away. I wouldn’t be surprised if they would one of these days.”

  “How many of our guys?”

  “Four or five, a couple of jeeps.”

  “What time does it go down?”

  “Our guys come up here”—he glanced at his watch—“about ten-thirty, give or take. They go out there and wait. You can’t be sure when the Russkies show up, but our guys are usually out of there by fourteen hundred.”

  “Same day every week?”

  “Not every week, sir. Every couple of weeks. Usually on Tuesday like today, but not always.”

  “You guys got it pretty well staked out, Sarge?”

  He shrugged. “At first we figured it was none of our business. But these guys treated us like we were shit, stupid shit at that. So we figured it was our business.”

  “Are they up there now?” I waved toward the second hill.

  “Nope.”

  I heaved a big sigh of relief. “So they didn’t come today?”

  “Nope. A tip-off, I suppose. One guy, the worst fucker of them all, said they’d never get caught because they had everything wired.”

  “We’ll get them yet, Sarge.”

  “I sure hope so. If they figure we peached on them, they might come back here and get us.”

  “When they learn about our raid, they’ll probably close this part of their operation down. It wouldn’t make much sense for them to come back. Too big a risk. But I’ll see that a recommendation goes to Seventh Army that you be reinforced.”

  “Thank you, sir. We appreciate it.”

  They were guys who were willing to go along on the great American principle that “it’s no skin off my ass.” But they had been pushed too hard. The black-market people didn’t need a murder rap so they’d leave the border guards alone. Still I did recommend that they be reinforced and later discovered that it had been acted on.

  “And thanks for the information, Sarge.”

  “Good luck, sir.”

  “We may need it. I don’t want these young dolts of mine starting World War Three.”

  I lifted the glasses again. The Russkies were watching us still. I raised my hand and waved at them. The guy with red trim waved back. I saluted and he did too.

  I gave the glasses back to the border guard. “I think we’ll drive back over that rise in the road a hundred yards or so before we head for your saucer. We don’t want our friends over there to know where we’re going.”

  “Good thinking, sir. . . . Did they wave back?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Never did that before. But then we never waved at them. Strange.”

  “Yeah. Well, keep holding back the Red horde, Sarge.”

  We both laughed and shook hands.

  I gathered my men around behind the ring of jeeps.

  “Now, get this straight. A hundred yards down that road there are a crowd of Russkies with automatic weapons aimed right at us. Their CO breathes heavy and we’re dead.”

  A couple of my guys looked as if they were about to bolt.

  “Before you try to bug out, you should realize that if we do anything abrupt, they’ll certainly blow us away.”

  I don’t think they would have. Their shavetail who had waved back was as much afraid of World War III as I was. But I wanted my guys to be careful.

  “Now this is what we’re going to do. We’re going a hundred yards down the road behind that rise and then turn right and proceed across the fields to that second hill. When I stop, you guys stop too and dismount from your vehicles. Keep the safeties on your weapons unless and until I give the order. We are not about to start World War Three. Understand?

  “Dismount from your vehicles.” I was sure picking up the lingo of command.

  “It’s pretty muddy out there, Sarge.”

  “Really, I thought it was the Sahara Desert. Okay, let’s move it.”

  Before I mounted my vehicle, I turned and waved good-bye to the Russians.

  “God damn it,” the border guard yelled. “Their officer waved good-bye.”

  “You were waving at their CO?” Jim Randolph asked with wide-open eyes. “Why?”

  “I figure he doesn’t want to start World War Three any more than I do. . . . Now, let’s get this moving.”

  The mud in the field was worse than what we had encountered on our previous attempt. Some of the jeeps bogged down temporarily. I shouted curses I had never used before and I hardly realized I knew. The guys were afraid to use full power for fear they’d dig in deeper and maybe have to walk back to Bamberg. They didn’t realize how good the jeep was.

  We beat you on that one, I said to my friend Max Albrecht back in his camera shop. After all, we had invented Henry Ford.

  Finally, we crunched to a stop at the foot of the hill.

  “Now get this straight,” I whispered to them as we crowded together at the foot of the hill. “A group of Russians are expected to deliver contraband in a depression over the top of that hill. I’m going up to the top to watch for them. I want you guys to deploy, first squad to the right, second squad to the left, third squad behind me. If they’re not there, you stay down here. If they are or when they come, I’ll raise my right hand, you scramble up the hill. Quietly! You keep your heads beneath the rim until I give the order. When I shout ‘Polizei,’ which is Russkie for ‘police,’ you pop up and point your guns, ah, weapons at them—with the safeties on, get it? I don’t think they’re armed. If they are, I’ll come back and modify the plan. Got it?”

  They nodded solemnly.

  “All right, fan out, quietly.”

  I watched them fan out, stumbling and bumbling.

  So I climbed the forty or fifty feet up the hill, slipping and sliding as I went and not exactly quietly either. Carefully I peered over the rim, expecting to see a squadron of T-34s.

  The saucer, a small grassy meadow about five feet deep and maybe thirty feet wide, on a gentle slope beneath me, was empty.

  I waited, glancing at my watch every couple of minutes. It was thirteen-fifteen (I was even thinking in military time!). How long would General Meade expect me to wait?

  Till the Russians came.

  If they didn’t? Till about two hours before sunset. Sunset was at twenty-two hundred. Almost nine hours. I sighed and thought of all the women I loved—the good April, Jane, Peg, Rosie, Brigitta, Trudi. I would miss them all if I were dead.

  Dumb thought.

  Then I remembered that there was always the possibility that the black-market crowd would be late today. I began to watch the other direction too. What if t
heir jeeps left the road and headed our way? I’d have to figure out an ambush in a hurry. Maybe when they turned the corner of the hill beneath us and bumped into our vehicles.

  A lot of weird ideas floated around in my head while we waited. What if the Russkies were planning to ambush us? What if we had been set up by someone? Who could have set us up? What if Polly had planned it all and then used morning sickness as an excuse to be absent when the tip came so she would not be blamed for the leak?

  There was something wrong with that idea, but I couldn’t figure it out.

  What about my planned run to Stuttgart tomorrow or the next night at the latest?

  I couldn’t force myself to think about it. Probably I shouldn’t try. I ought to pay attention to the present situation. So, I swiveled my head back and forth between the road and the saucer. I had removed my helmet so that when I peeked, only the top of my head would appear. The red hair might make an appealing target.

  And the rain began again. Our fancy Constabulary slickers helped, but they didn’t cover everything. Soon my arms and legs were soaked with rainwater. I wondered how durable my slicker was. Beneath me, my men were also dripping wet and fidgety and uncomfortable. How long would they last?

  I looked at the road again. Still no sign of our smugglers. That was good. There must have been a tip-off. Someone who knew that the tip from Ninth Corps had come to General Meade as soon or almost soon as the general knew.

  Maybe the general himself. Maybe Dick McQueen. Maybe Sam Houston Carpenter. Maybe John Nettleton. Maybe all of them together.

  My head was whirling. I couldn’t think clearly. My body was growing stiff from clinging to the side of the hill. My back hurt more every minute. Then I peeked over the rim.

  They were there, four bedraggled kids, soaking wet, in Russian fatigues. I mean kids. They all were younger than I was. Each was carrying a box, maybe weighing ten or twelve pounds. They appeared to have no weapons. They placed the boxes on the ground and, huddling against the now driving rain, looked anxiously around the lip of the saucer.