“Green Devils, one-eyed Wotan himself salutes you!” he shouted, putting a fist to his plunging eagle badge and saluting, a tradition, and though nobody could hear him, they shouted back, in unison, the same imprecation; he couldn’t hear them, either.
The plane suddenly seemed to lift, the pilots got it to altitude in just a few seconds, the light went green, the young man pulled mightily and got the hatch open against the suction of the wind.
Von Drehle stepped into the cold air, went into the spread-eagle as the wind hit him, felt the rush of the fall as gravity claimed him and he had a giddy second of weightlessness—it still thrilled him—and the battering of the propwash against his face. The tail boom sailed by and his static line snatched the RZ-20 canopy from its packing and another second later he was jerked heavily as the canopy took on a full load of suspending atmosphere. Below him, dark and quiet, was Russia.
* * *
One of the boys got lost. He just never joined up with the main group in the target zone, a pasture seven kilometers of rural landscape from the bridge itself. Von Drehle hated to lose men. He had lost so many! He hated it! A certain part of him wanted to abort the job right there, send out search parties, find the soldier, and head straight back to his own lines. But he couldn’t do that.
“Maybe he’ll catch up to us,” Wili Bober said.
Everyone knew this to be unlikely. Dieter Schenker, lance corporal, veteran of Italy and Russia, three wounds, two Iron Crosses, was almost certainly hanging upside down in a tree with his neck or his back broken. If conscious, he would have taken out his gravity knife and cut his own wrists, to bleed out in quiet comfort. If the Russians found him, they might take some bayonet sport with him before killing him. That’s the kind of war it was.
The second thing that went wrong was the map. It took them on detours around two villages that brought them hard against infantry campgrounds, where Ivan had put some of his six billion or so soldiers to rest for the night before moving closer to the front lines for the big show upcoming.
Battlegroup Von Drehle had to detour from two detours, and that cost time. The point was to get to the bridge well before dawn, eliminate any sentries, rig the explosives and leave a timed fuse, and be some kilometers away when the fireworks went off. This fantasy disappeared almost instantly—old racing adage: no plan survives the first lap—and they didn’t get there until the sun began to flare over the edge of the world. So it would be a daylight job.
Fortunately there was foliage along the riverbank, and Ivan hadn’t seriously considered a bridge-blowing raid this far behind the lines. He was getting overconfident with his billions of men, millions of tanks, and thousands of shiny new American trucks to spare him bootleather. Well, that was his big mistake. The parachutists, moving stealthily through the heavy underbrush along the bank, were able to get themselves to the bridge. Now they gathered in its lee, could see the sandbags and K-wire Ivan had dumped and strung nonchalantly, more as ceremony than as tactical necessity.
Karl took a quick look and saw what he expected; across the river, the town of Chortkiv, mostly shabby buildings and muddy streets, deserted in the early morning, though Red Army trucks had been parked here and there and presumably their inhabitants had taken shelter in the buildings. Nothing stirred. On this side of the river would be more but less of Chortkiv, its “outskirts,” if you will, a couple of buildings of whatever agricultural purpose, maybe some of those typical Ukraine steep-pitched, thatch-roofed huts. Again quiet, a few Red trucks parked here and there.
And up above, on the bridge itself? Couldn’t be much in the sandbag nest Ivan had built as a sentry post, more a place for the guards to sit and doze a quiet night well out of the combat zone. So it would be just a few seconds of helter-skelter to reach the sentries and, at least in theory, dispatch them silently.
At this point, communication was mostly by hand gesture. No chatter, and all the boys knew the language.
Four men, Karl signaled, sentry elimination. He and—he pointed to three really good boys, but all were really good when you got down to it—as the designated throat cutters. Then he indicated that two of those four would cross underneath the bridge and come up on the other side for whatever was there. All four would push across the bridge, which didn’t appear to have a sentry post at the other end, and set up with their FG-42s or STG-44s. If assaulted from that direction, they would serve as the first line of defense.
He designated four more as demolition party, with the explosives genius Deneker calling the shots. Nothing fancy here, nobody was going over the side by rope and pulley to wire Cyclonite under the arches. Instead, the four would gouge into the bridge surface with their entrenching tools and excavate as deep a cavity as possible. They would pound the Cyclonite—which in demolition form was a kind of gloppy dough carried in two five-pound canvas sacks—into the cavity and leave a No. 8 blasting cap shoved into it, wired with det cord. The package would be wrapped in det cord, the cord then run back across the bridge to safety, where it was crimped into another No. 8. At go time, Deneker would light the safety fuse into the No. 8, which would go off like a firecracker, ignite the det cord—PETN explosive packed around a wire, going kaboom at twenty-one thousand feet per second—the det cord would burn to the main charge in a microsecond and light off that No. 8, which would make the big wad of Cyclonite vaporize the bridge. It had worked all over Russia and Italy, there was no reason why it wouldn’t work today. The ten pounds should do the job nicely.