Crack of Doom

CRACK

of

DOOM

WILLI HEINRICH

Translated from the German by Oliver Coburn

Copyright © 1958

CHAPTER

1

There was a bridge over the little stream which ran through the valley. There the valley dwindled to a narrow shaft, between mountains with pointed peaks that shut off the sky on all sides; their slopes were overgrown with pines, bent under a thick layer of snow. The vehicles of a retreating army had pounded the snow on the road to a solid blanket; but on the bridge it lay in black lumps, frozen hard as stone with the return of extreme cold during the past few days. The mountains stood out so brightly against the sky that their silhouettes cut like sharp blades through the clear starry night.

The men under the trees were freezing. They wore the white winter uniforms of the German army and flat fur caps, which they had pulled down over their ears; a thin sheet of ice covered the short squat barrels of the tommy-guns they carried. Now and then a man would step out of the wood and look impatiently at the bridge, about twenty yards from the wood's edge. The others remained motionless, except when one of them, with a cigarette concealed in the hollow of his hand, brought it to his mouth and took a hasty puff. A whole hour passed, and not a word was spoken. Then there was a sudden movement among them.

In the distance they heard the noise of car engines. In silent accord the men ran out of the wood, across the bridge, and disappeared in a ditch the other side of the road. It was a few seconds before headlights shone out from behind the next bend in the valley; then the beams blazed on the bridge. The two cars were still fifty yards away when a man suddenly appeared in the road, flung both arms in the air, and brought them to a stop. They were open command cars, and the first of them carried a flag on its right wing. A face under a peaked cap emerged from behind the windscreen, and a sharp voice asked: "What is it?"

The man on the road blinked in the glare of the headlights. The lower half of his face was hidden by a black beard, and he had his fur cap drawn down over his brow. Now he went up to the first car. There were four people sitting there, and the man sitting next to the driver spoke again in irritation: "Didn't you hear me? Who the devil are you?" The man with the beard took a step backwards. He observed two faces staring at him from the other car. Turning back to the first car, he said: "You can't cross the bridge, it's gone."

"Gone!" The man next to the driver looked at him suspiciously. Another voice joined in from the back of the car: "Must be partisans again, General."

"General?" asked the man with the beard quickly. There was a note of satisfaction in his voice. "Don't move."

"What's that?"

"I said: don't move." He raised his left arm, and a dozen men jumped out of the ditch. The general looked at their tommy-guns, held ready to fire, and at the bearded man's face. He said quietly: "Are you crazy? Who are you?"

"You can call me Andrej," the man told him. "Your gun!" The general did not move. Suddenly he turned his head. The engine of the second car howled into action. The men just had time to jump aside, then it was past them, racing on to the bridge. Despite their surprise they fired after it at once. Taking advantage of the momentary confusion, the general jabbed his driver, but this time the man called Andrej was quicker. He fired into the back of the car and at its wheels. The car sagged as the air hissed out of the slashed tires. The driver was pulled out, and the butt of a tommy-gun smashed his skull. Before the general could recover from the shock, he too was dragged out of the car. His face was white as chalk and his voice quivered as he said: "You'll hang for this."

"After you," remarked Andrej. He pulled a crushed packet of cigarettes from his breast pocket and held them out to the general, who shook his head.

"As you like." Andrej lit a cigarette himself, then addressed the others. "Prosty." They pulled the dead men out of the car and searched them.

The general watched with tight lips. He had a big, hard face, and his voice was still trembling when he said: "It won't pay—a few hundred of your countrymen will hang for this."

Andrej shrugged his shoulders. "There'll be a dozen of you for each of us."

"You're no Czech," said the general with barely suppressed rage.

"What makes you think that?"

"You speak too good German."

"My mother was an Austrian," answered Andrej. "You people put my brother against the wall in Prague. They caught him when he was trying to throw a bomb into a general's car. We have a weakness for generals in our family."

Meanwhile the man had been searching the car. They undressed the dead and threw them into the ditch. "We may need their uniforms," said Andrej. One of the men brought him the general's map case, and he scanned the papers. "It
has
paid," he told the general.

The men dragged the dead driver across the road, and flung him on to the others. Some were quarreling over the victims' watches and wallets. The general watched scornfully. "Is that why you do it?" he asked Andrej, without looking at him. Andrej crushed the cigarette beneath his boot and went over to the men. He tore a watch out of the hand of one of them and flung it across the road. "We don't need anything from the Germans," he said sharply. He came back quickly. "Your gun!"

The general pulled the pistol from its holster. "What are you going to do with me?" he asked.

"We've got friends who are interested in you." The general hesitated, and his face worked. "Don't try it!" Andrej said, and aimed the barrel of his tommy-gun at the general's stomach.

The general looked at the pistol in his hand and flung it into the snow.

Andrej stared at him. 'Tick it up," he said quietly. When the general did not move, he addressed the others: "Help him!" They pounced on the general, pummeling him with their fists till he fell on his knees. His nose was bleeding and he spat two teeth into the snow; his breath came in gasps. "Come on," said Andrej, pointing to the pistol. The general bent over, and before he could straighten up again, the butt of a tommy-gun came down on his back. He fell on his face, but Andrej pulled him up by the collar. "That's something you'll have to learn," he said. "Now, come on with that pistol." The general gave it to him.

"Why couldn't you have done that in the first place?" asked Andrej, and said to the others: "We'll be off, they'll be coming soon." They took the general in the middle. After walking for some time in the direction from which the cars had come, they struck off on to a narrow track leading steeply up-hill from the road. Walking in the deep snow was difficult and they made slow progress. The general was sweating. Blood still came from his nose and mouth; he wiped it off with the sleeve of his coat. Once he stopped and looked round. Andrej went over to him. "Tired, General?"

"You won't get far," was the answer.

"Wait and see." Andrej's hands described a wide circle. "The mountains don't talk."

"The snow does."

Andrej regarded the deep tracks they had made. "Oh, we've thought of that too. Can't you smell it?" The general looked at him blankly, and he laughed. "We've got a good nose for it—there's snow in the air. By tomorrow morning there'll be nothing left of the tracks."

"Don't be too sure."

"Even then it wouldn't help you. Like to know where we're taking you?" He pointed beyond the snow-covered trees and said: "Ku diabolovi." The men grinned.

For weeks the division had been fighting in the Carpathian Mountains. Then they evacuated their last positions and marched past the town of Uzhorod into the extreme eastern tip of Czechoslovakia, to take up new positions in the wooded slopes of the Sovar Range. While the battalions were settling into their sectors, Captain Schmitt, commander of the second battalion, was called to regimental headquarters; there he was informed that his battalion was not to settle in the new positions with the rest, but was to be placed as a divisional reserve under direct command of the general. He was instructed to take the road over the Durkov Pass and proceed to Kosice, where he should report directly to the general at divisional headquarters.

He left with his men while it was still night. After extremely hard fighting in the West Carpathians the battalion's fighting strength amounted to just over a hundred and fifty men. No replacements had yet arrived for the officers killed or wounded at Turka, and the four companies were being commanded by three sergeants and a corporal. The battalion reached Kosice in the early morning. Proceeding to divisional headquarters, Captain Schmitt heard from a lieutenant that the general had gone to a conference at Dobsina, further west, and would not be back till evening. Schmitt asked for Major Giesinger, the divisional adjutant. He had met Giesinger in Dresden, where they had worked together collecting a reserve battalion from a crowd of men unfit for military service. The major received him in shirt sleeves, with a cigarette in his mouth. "Sit down," he said jovially, but with that slight inflection of superiority in his voice which always succeeded in irritating Schmitt. But he suppressed his annoyance and looked round the room: "You've got a nice billet."

"Naturally." Giesinger grinned. "Aren't you satisfied with yoursF'

"Good Lord, yes," Schmitt answered emphatically. "I suppose I have you to thank."

Giesinger nodded. "That's right. When the general talked about pulling a battalion out, I thought of you at once."

"I'm grateful to you. My men were just about finished, and as for me—well, you know how things have been going. You get on well with the general?"

"I'm quite satisfied."

"You were always adaptable," Schmitt remarked drily.

"I do what I can." Giesinger smiled and looked at Schmitt disparagingly, thinking how the barrel had been scraped for an infantry battalion to be commanded by a sort of cripple. A year ago it would have been unthinkable, he told himself, but times had changed, and so had the war. Schmitt had come to the division three months earlier, after making vain efforts to do so for a long time. He was a hunchback and had bandy legs, so he kept being pushed from one garrison to another. Only Giesinger's sponsorship had persuaded the general to ask for Schmitt as a battalion commander. Giesinger couldn't quite analyze why he had put himself out on Schmitt's behalf. The man's appearance disgusted him, and their work together in Dresden hadn't always gone smoothly. He had only been a lieutenant in those days and Schmitt was his superior officer. Perhaps this was the reason for his contradictory behavior: it gave him satisfaction to rub Schmitt's nose in their new service relationship at every opportunity. When he talked to Schmitt in the presence of a third person, he did it in the pose of a good-looking man who has himself photographed stroking an ugly animal. "You're lucky to find me," he said now. "Originally the general wanted to take me to Dobsind. But then he changed his mind; I'm indispensable here. A year ago I was just an assistant adjutant running errands for the general, and today he can't do without me. From first lieutenant to major within a year. You wouldn't have thought that in Dresden, eh?"

"I certainly wouldn't," Schmitt looked past him. "But I remember that you've always been ambitious."

Giesinger gave him a cautious look, narrowing his cold, bulbous eyes. Then he reached under the table and, bringing out a bottle, remarked in a hearty voice: "You'll have something to drink, won't you?"

"No thanks, I'd better be going. Will it be enough that I've seen you now or do I still have to report to the general this evening?"

"He wants to speak to you personally," said Giesinger. "I wonder what news hell bring from Corps. . . . What do you think of the Ardennes business?"

"Let's hope for the best."

"We can do that all right," observed Giesinger condescendingly. "In four weeks the invasion army will be back in the sea and then well have the Russians on the run again. I've been looking forward to that for a long time."

He stood up. "Better come about eight, the general is sure to be back by then."

Back at Schmitt's quarters, his adjutant, Lieutenant Menges, was waiting for him impatiently. With a puzzled face Schmitt took the signal Menges thrust at him and read it.

"From division," he said, his face growing even more puzzled. "Odd that Giesinger didn't say anything about this. I left him only half an hour ago. Well, inform the company commanders: strict confinement to billets for the whole battalion. Looks as if we won't be here much longer." He sighed. "By the way, I didn't see the general yet but I will this evening."

Dismissing Menges, Schmitt went over to the window. While he gazed at the hills surrounding the town on all sides he thought about Giesinger. The former lieutenant with the broad shoulders was just the same as ever. He recalled that he had always taken a special interest in married women. How many of them had there been in Dresden? There was the Nazi official's wife who had deceived her husband with him almost every night; the surgeon's wife who felt neglected because her husband sawed off bones and patched up holes till the early hours of the morning instead of bothering about her psyche; the wife of the air force officer with his legs amputated—Giesinger used to have a good laugh at the casino describing how she would run away screaming whenever her husband took his trousers off. There were several others, not counting those Giesinger hadn't talked about. Oh yes, he had developed his weakness for married women into a fine art. But, after all why not? Schmitt smiled bitterly. The ambitious major was endowed with every quality a woman looks for in a man: charm, intelligence, brutality. If you were dragging around a hunchback on the other hand, it was irrelevant whether you covered it with a general's uniform or a captain's.

In deep self-disgust he contemplated his face staring back at him from the window pane: pale eyes, brows that met over the top of the nose, a high forehead heavily lined, gaunt cheeks with skin like crumpled parchment and a thin mouth pinched down at the corners as if in constant pain. An old man's face. Nobody would have thought of putting him twenty years younger; women wouldn't either, not even the one who had stuck it out with him for fourteen months, whether from a whim, sympathy or some perversity in herself he could never find out. She had married him when he was thirty-five—more than six years ago—but even then she had treated him as if he were seventy. Yet she had made him happy for fourteen months. He felt his eyes grow misty and was surprised again at the way he had never got over it, not over the woman and not over the hunched back. Forty-odd years, he thought, what a strange creature a man is.