The Shadowboxer (20 page)

“The Army has nothing to say about it,” Spangler snapped. “It's in the hands of the SS.”

“Sir, if you let me continue I can pinpoint many more facts that definitely establish this as a staging area.”

“Adviser,” Kittermaster interrupted, as he leaned forward and looked over at Spangler, “you're certain this is a camp?”

“Yes.”

“Adviser, I'm starting to get a vision—a vision of the biggest and most stunning scheme those boys in Washington ever did see. It'll be just the extravaganza they've been looking for. So I want you to take your time. I want you to
think
. Are you really sure that is a camp?”

“Yes!”

“How sure?”

“I'll bank my percentage on it.”

“Deal!” Kittermaster started for the door. “We're going to have us some fun,” he shouted. “Get me Black Buck!”

29

Hilka heard the rumbling. She slipped on her dressing gown and went to the window. The moonlit road was jammed with traffic. As far as the eye could see, vehicles of every description were thundering toward the hunting preserve. She pressed closer to the pane. Suddenly she realized she was not alone.

She spun around. Kittermaster was standing beside the bed.

“How did you get in here? The door was locked!”

“There's no door in this entire place that's locked to me, dear child,” he said, lighting a cigar.

“Get
out!
”

“Do you know something? You look a little drawn. What you need is some good night air. What do you say?”

“I want you to leave.”

“Sure thing—in a minute. You aren't going to toss a man out till he's finished his smoke, are you? After all, I'm only interested in your well-being. Say—has anyone ever told you you look just like Jean Arthur?”

“Please leave me. Please go.”

Kittermaster surveyed the room. “You know something, I owe you an apology. Why, this place of yours is nothing more than a glorified jail. Now, you just trust me and do as I say. Grab your things and we'll get you away from Westerly for a spell. What about a nice, long drive out of this trap? When was the last time you saw the ocean? We'll just drive and talk—or not talk if you'd rather not. Come on, it'll do you good.”

Hilka rubbed her hands. “Maybe I should. Yes, maybe it would be a good idea. Thank you, yes. I have been a little nervous lately.”

“Nervous or tense?”

“Both, I guess. Let me get my things and I'll be with you in a minute.”

“Well, we can't have you being nervous and tense, can we? I'll tell you what,” he said, blowing on the glowing cigar tip. “I'm personally going to make sure you get yourself untensed. I've got just the home remedy.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Just trust me. Put your faith in Big Daddy. Yes,
sir
, he's going to fix you up as you're begging to be fixed!” Kittermaster gripped the glowing cigar in his fist, pointed it at Hilka, lowered his arm and began walking slowly toward her. “Yes, sir, Big Daddy is going to fix you up just
fine!
”

30

The bulldozers lumbered down the forest hillside in waves of ten. Dredges and scoops moved along the muddy creek bed and cut out a wide, deep river basin. Engineers worked on two dams at either end. Mobile workshops rolled into a newly hewn clearing. Portable generators were connected to lathes, saws and drills. The convoy of lumber trucks arrived on schedule. Three hundred carpenters did the cutting, two hundred the fitting and nailing and five hundred the erecting and assembling. Squads of soldiers began to enclose the buildings with a twelve-foot fence and built nine guard towers. Barbed wire was strung within the compound as electricians laid cable, spliced feed lines and started connecting the banks of floodlights. Powerful searchlights were hoisted into the guard towers, mounted and connected. The inner compound was completed three hours ahead of schedule. The eleven buildings on the outside of the wall and the electrified exterior barbed-wire fencing came in three hours and forty minutes before the deadline. Railroad crews began laying track along the freshly built roadbed on the western exterior of the compound. Only the paint crews were delayed. Their color charts had been misplaced, and others had to be sent for. They arrived an hour and ten minutes late. Yellow would be for stone, gray for concrete and brown for wood. The twelve-foot-high fence was sprayed gray, its nine guard towers brown, the buildings within yellow.

One of the dredges was stuck in the completed river bed. Salvage cranes were called for. When they had not arrived by the next day the engineers could wait no longer. The floodgate to the upper dam was thrown open. Water rushed into the basin, swirled about the abandoned machine and began backing up against the second barrier wall. Within an hour all but the top of the dredge lay submerged. The Sola River had been completed. The senior electrician threw the first master switch, and the buildings and the street lights were illuminated. The second switch came down. The full-scale reproduction of Auschwitz glowed in the misty twilight of Westerly.

The railroad gang continued laying a single line of track, which fanned out after three and a half miles into a triple-pronged siding. Here work continued on the second and more massive installation. More than two hundred buildings already stood complete within the fourteen fence-divided compounds. Another two hundred and fifty structures were at various stages of construction. When, shortly thereafter, work was completed, it was named Birkenau Concentration Camp. The name proved to be officially correct, although Extermination Camp would have been the more accurate title.

31

Major D. W. “Black Buck” Cogan jammed his foot onto the brake pedal. The jeep skidded to a stop in a puddle before the guardhouse. He flashed his identification and emergency orders. He pressed the accelerator to the floor. The back wheels spun deep into the mud, hit tight earth and lurched forward onto the three-lane Westerly Freeway.

Cogan's staff of officers, all wearing the screaming-eagle armpatch, were already studying the table-top scale models of Auschwitz and Birkenau in the Strategy Room when the major arrived. Cogan was briefed, and Kittermaster was called. He arrived shortly afterward with Julian and Spangler.

“Hitting the target will be no problem,” Cogan told Kittermaster. “Overrunning the installations will be no problem, if we're given enough time and bodies. Finding your man and the boy, if they're in there anywhere, will be no problem. Getting them out by light plane will be no problem. But how are we going to bring back the fifteen hundred men it will take to do the job?”

“I don't have the foggiest, friend,” Kittermaster answered. “I thought that was
your
department.”

“It is. And my suggestion is to go north to the Russian lines. But I'm told you say no to that?”

“Correct. No contact with the Russians. They can't know we were there.”

“Colonel,
everyone's
going to know you were there. You don't make a raid this size without everyone knowing it. The Russians will probably know as fast as, if not faster than, the Germans. What they won't know is
why
we were there, especially if we bring out a couple of decoy prisoners and say we were after them. Not that there aren't problems going east. First we have to get through German lines, and if we
do
reach the Russians there's a chance they won't let us out for quite some time. Even so, we have to go east.”

“We can't.”

“Then you tell me, Colonel Kittermaster, how we do it. Shall we go south through Czechoslovakia, Austria and Jugoslavia to the Adriatic? What about west through Germany and occupied Europe? North? It is three hundred and twenty miles through occupied territory to the Baltic. If you match this against an eastern escape, you'll see it's only a hundred and eighty miles to the Russian lines, and at the rate the new offensive is going, they may be as close as ninety or a hundred miles by the time we go in. It's our only way.”

“What about coming out by air?” Kittermaster suggested, “I thought you found an airstrip in the vicinity.”

“The photographs show a workable field sixteen miles to the south, but this would require several additional elements. First we'd need an extra thousand men to take and hold the airfield until our return. With the European invasion shaping up so quickly, I'm surprised you got
us
, but asking for another thousand men would probably be laughed right out of Supreme Headquarters. Even if you
did
have the additional men, we'd have to get the Air Force to land there. They don't mind letting you jump out of their planes, but it's a different story when they have to land them deep in enemy-held territory.”

Spangler smiled thinly and spoke for the first time. “Put your men in trucks and head for the Baltic.”

“And what are the Germans going to do when they suddenly see fifteen hundred American soldiers driving down their roads?”

“They're going to think their Army has just won a great victory and is transporting the prisoners somewhere—especially if the drivers and the soldiers guarding these prisoners are wearing German uniforms. And if the prisoners themselves ripped off their collars and insignias and rolled around in the dirt a little, you'd be amazed how difficult it would be to tell them from Russians. Also, you wouldn't have a language problem, would you? No one expects Russian prisoners to speak German. But I would suggest that the men you pick for the drivers and guards speak German perfectly.”

The silence was immediate and prolonged. It was finally broken by Kittermaster.

“You know what this accommodating fellah's just done for you?” he shouted ecstatically to Cogan. “Why, in one sentence he's opened up not one or two, but
three
escape routes for you. He's shown you how to go north and south—and, if I ever get a change of heart, even east—without the Germans ever giving it a second thought. I think the least you can do is say thanks.”

“It will never work,” Cogan said grimly. “You'll never be able to disguise our uniforms to make them look Russian.”

“Tell you what you do, Major,” Kittermaster replied jovially. “You send the measurements of every last one of your men, because I'm not only going to have the best goddam Russian uniforms ever made, I'm also going to give each man a German uniform to boot—just in case you decide to go south. On a long trip they might do better as Germans.”

Cogan's staff avoided his glance. The major turned back to Kittermaster. “I want one thing clearly understood. From this point forward I'm in sole command of this rescue operation.”

“Haven't you always been, pal? Haven't you always? Now we have to discuss our little rehearsal. Yes, your boys get a crack at jumping down on the real thing right here at home. We've
built
it for you, life size.”

For the first time, Cogan felt fear.

Spangler stood watching the alarm clock. At one minute past midnight, February 8, he lit the nine candles on the mantelpiece and began pacing the room. He felt the pains begin in his head. New symptoms he had never imagined began to develop. His hands opened and contracted out of his control. The throbbing rose at his temples, an invisible band tightened slowly around the top of his head. The spasms started and mounted in intensity. The agony grew sharper. His scream was low, guttural and long. It was barely audible above the roar of the endless convoys coming from the road below his window.

When he opened his eyes daylight was streaming through the windows. The candles on the mantel had completely burned out. He rose unsteadily and tried to take a step. His knees buckled, and he fell to all fours. He crawled cautiously to the desk and reached for the phone.

“What day is this?” he asked weakly.

“Tuesday, sir.”

“Not the day, the
date!
What's the date?”

“The tenth, sir.”

It's getting worse, Spangler told himself, much worse. “Get me a doctor,” he cried into the instrument.

32

Spangler hobbled down the hospital steps and climbed into the waiting limousine. The evening drive to the hunting preserve was uninterrupted by gate checks.

Cogan was busy on the field phones as Spangler climbed to the observation post along the ridge. Kittermaster stood with raised binoculars farther up the path, directing combat photographers in their documentation.

“Sorry I couldn't drop in on you,” he said as Spangler reached him, “but the medics say there's nothing wrong with you. Meantime, as you can see, we've been kind of busy. Here, have a look for yourself.”

Spangler took the field glasses, and focused. The lights of Auschwitz and Birkenau glowed in the forest below. Red-helmeted sentries paced the complexes, others leaned over their machine guns in the guard towers, still others patrolled the outside fences. A locomotive chugged and whistled and slowly backed its twelve cars onto the first siding at Birkenau.

“What do you think?” Kittermaster asked proudly.

“That I'd like to go back and get some sleep,” Spangler said, lowering the glasses.

“And miss all the fun and fireworks? We got a great big dress rehearsal just beginning. Not that we're using planes tonight. The jump comes tomorrow. Even so, you'll see quite a sight.”

“I'm not well, I need rest. I have to get back.”

“Not a chance. I need your opinions, adviser.”

“Get Julian's opinions.”

“Oh, you mean good old Julie. Haven't you heard, Julie isn't with us any more? He sort of misplayed his hand. Nope, Julie's probably landing in D. C. this very minute. So you see, it's important you stick by—I've elected you his replacement. How does it feel to have all those spies under your command?”

“Find someone else.”