She became so involved in the particulars of her hijacking, she failed to notice the truck pulling up beside her.
A sweaty-faced sergeant leaned over the back. “What are you doing here?” he demanded. “Do you realize what time it is?”
“Flat tire,” she called back.
“Where? We didn’t see any cars on the way over here.”
She waved her hand, just go on.
The man examined the black uniform she had on. “You are Einsatzgruppe?” He frowned. “I don’t believe it.”
A couple of others were leaning over, watching her in the same critical way. Susan took up her belt a bit, in something she imagined to be a masculine gesture. Her hand managed to rest itself on the holster flap of Berghoff’s Luger.
One of the others chimed in. “You don’t look the type.”
She gave this one the same sort of hard look she had seen men exchange in bars. “What type is that?” She hoped she sounded dangerous.
The truck stopped. The driver leaned out the window to join in the argument. A line of black vans pulled up at the crossing. She didn’t know who they were exactly, but they were right on time to get her out of trouble.
“My ride,” she said.
They looked at the vans uneasily. Hard as they were, they were regular Wehrmacht. These vans with the mobile shower insignia apparently represented warfare beyond the bounds of their ideas of warfare.
“You don’t want to go with them,” the sergeant said. He dropped the tailgate. “Come on. We’re all going to the same place anyway.”
Everyone in the truck was watching her. She laughed. She stuck out her stomach a little, trying to imitate a man’s thickened middle.
“Sure,” she said. “Thanks.”
Someone stuck a hand out to her.
“I can do it myself,” she said.
The hand remained. The face behind it bore blanched, staring eyes surrounded by white, articulated scar tissue in the shape of round motorcycle goggles.
“Don’t mind him,” the kid said. “He’s been blinded.”
A man at the front of the truck bore similar white scars circling his eyes. Susan said nothing as they lifted her aboard. She made no reaction. She wasn’t sure if this was something Einsatzgruppe was supposed to know about or not. No matter, the look on her face was plain enough that everyone laughed.
“Things could always be worse,” the blind man told her. “One thing I’ve learned in this life, things could always be worse.” He just figured they were laughing about him.
“Why don’t you tell the new fish here what your job is, Gerhard? Tell him why we’re spending the next ten hours roped in together, you and Willie, with us in between.”
Susan glanced down and saw Gerhard playing a coil of stiff mountaineering rope from his left hand to his right. Then she noticed the metal rings at each soldier’s belt. When the time came, they would all be clipped into a tether, like a chain gang. With a blind warden at each end.
Why?
“It need not come to any unpleasantness,” blind Gerhard said in a reasonable voice. “Do your job and keep your eyes away from the windows, and I won’t need to do anything I don’t wish to.”
“What if we look out the windows and don’t scream?” This, from a young soldier grinning nervously. “What if we just lock up? How will you know whom to shoot if we don’t scream?”
“In that event,” said the blind man at the other end of the truck, “Gerhard starts at his end, I start at my end, and we just work our way down till we meet in the middle.” Perhaps this was supposed to be a joke. No one laughed.
Sirens lit up across the plant. The truck driver yelled back to pull up the gate.
“Hear that?” He jerked his thumb at the weird ululations filling the evening air. “Das Unternehmen has begun. We’re going to be late.” He jerked the truck into gear. They followed the line of black vans through the gate.
Chapter Ten
THE TRUCK FOUND ITS WAY TO A PROMONTORY at the edge of the V-Werke compound. They overlooked the ocean from here. The site had been excavated for some kind of large-scale construction. Flat spots had been planed out of the earth all around them. But only three buildings had been put up. Susan recognized two of them from Faulkenberg Reservoir; the third she knew from her dreams.
A domed observatory opened toward the western horizon. Beside the observatory rose a second tower, taller and narrower, with a crystal dome and oddly lit windows dug out of the sides.
Between the observatory and the tower sat a little biergarten, set up to take in the leaden Baltic sunset.
She didn’t need to see inside there to know what she would find: brown-shirted astronomers gauging the nanoseconds to apocalypse on their six-handed watches; sullen Wehrmacht officers who could have won the war but for the politicians’ meddling; hangers-on, basking in the bankrupt war stories of resolute men.