Dark Full of Enemies(48)

“Their leader,” Petersen said, “His name was Keener.”





9





Captain Fass had expected the indiscipline, but not the lack of morale. He should, he now thought, have expected both. Pessimism was the best preparation for a soldier.

He sat restless in his office. He had last toured the dam only two hours ago, but he could not sleep and another minute in his office would drive him mad. He raised himself, tested the soundness of his leg, and stepped outside. The nice thing about this billet, he thought, was that one never had to take the trouble to put on a coat—one always had it on.

The guard by the headquarters door was one of his—Pfaff—and snapped to attention. Fass acknowledged and asked after Lieutenant Koch, Sergeant B?uml.

“Both in their quarters, Herr Captain,” Pfaff said.

Fass considered sending Pfaff after them but decided against it. He would inspect the dam alone, to clear his head.

He started for the dam and looked, slyly, ahead of him. Awareness of his coming passed in a visible ripple across the men standing in the yellow lampglow at the top of the dam. Backs straightened, boots stepped more sharply, at least one cigarette dropped over the edge and into the darkness below. His few weeks here had shaped the old men up nicely. He was still working on the morale.

The indiscipline he had anticipated, yes. He had also expected the troops he found when given command of the Grettisfjord Dam garrison to be second-rate, older men, asthmatics, flat-footed rearguard types. Here his pessimism had given him its greatest gift—a pleasant surprise. The detachment at the dam consisted largely of older men, to be sure, but men relatively fit despite their inactivity. Their minds wandered on guard duty. He found the men staring at nothing or pacing well outside their ambits. No wonder the American gangsters had almost succeeded in their sabotage.

Gangster—it was not Fass’s word. He might have heard it on the radio. Reportedly it was one of the Führer’s favorite epithets for the Americans. No, Fass’s word for saboteurs and cutthroats was bandit. They had applied the term universally—to partisans, saboteurs, assassins, armed civilians—to anyone they had to shoot in Russia.

The first man on the dam came to attention, one of the reservists, Luckner, a bicycle repairman from—somewhere. Saxony, perhaps. Fass could barely understand the man.

Fass snuck a look up the length of the dam again. The pacing continued, but the guards were watching him. He acknowledged Luckner but kept walking. The posture of the entire dam seemed to relax. He smiled to himself. These men, the old and the new, belonged to him now. He had done one of the things the Army did best, and take disparate, broken parts and forge them into a new and stronger whole. Was not the whole reason he was here—one of them, that is—that his unit had ceased to exist? Its remains folded into another to form a new one? He thought of Siegfried and his sword, broken and reforged. He smiled again. He had once despised opera but had come to find comfort in it. He learned Wagner from a private in his company in Russia, Hansi, who would whistle entire acts of the Ring while they marched or rode to the front.

Russia had required discipline even beyond that he had grown into as a Panzergrenadier. It took discipline to stand in the face of the Ivans’ assaults, discipline to keep from cracking under Red artillery bombardment, discipline to raze villages and hunt down and destroy the bandits, village by village, and show them that their resistance was not only pointless, but wasteful.

Waste. A year and a half in and out of the front had sharpened his pessimism well before the arrival of summer and the offensive into the salient. Then he had learned that his own army could waste just as much as the bandits.

They had moved into the line a week ahead of the attack, in support of a column of Panzers and self-propelled guns. He had felt disappointment—he liked the really heavy stuff, the Panthers and Tigers and tank hunters, and had hoped to join them in the main thrust northward against the Ivans. But he had orders to stand by, to wait for the enemy to collapse. Then would begin the race—into the collapsing pocket, a race to cut off and destroy the hundreds of thousands of Bolsheviks inside. Then, he had been made to understand, with the enemy weakened, reeling from his losses, they could turn eastward again, deliver the blow that would finally bring the rotten but stubborn house down.

So he had been told.

He passed the guards along the top of the dam one by one but did not stop and inspect any of them. His appearance had done the trick.

At the other end of the dam, he walked into the snow and to the little concrete outbuilding that led into the dam’s interior. He opened the door and peered inside. Beyond a small landing and below a block and tackle for lowering tools to the galleries, a well with a metal-runged ladder extended downward. From below came the deep thrum of the dam, the sound of its size. Concrete and water, tons of each, that seemed—somehow—alive. He dismissed the thought. Perhaps the opera had made him sentimental. He closed the door.

The cold made the blood beneath his skin prickle, fight for warmth. He breathed deeply. He had just been thinking about Russia—the steppe in July. They had all moved into the line with their shirtsleeves rolled and their helmets hooked to their belts, clattering against their canteens and gas masks. The men joked—before they no longer felt like it—about drowning in sweat. No such worries here, he thought, and turned to walk back across the dam.