Dry Bones Read online

  They met up with the other operatives in the officers’ mess. There was a well-stocked bar. Dunne had scotch; Van Hull stuck to water. Gathered around a radio, they listened to the nightly news on the BBC. Trademark tone of the announcer—upper class, educated, serious but not somber, crisp yet unhurried—had an authority American broadcasters imitated but only Edward R. Murrow attained.

  The news was all good. Soviet offensive under way in western Poland, and Prussia was advancing along a broad front. Warsaw and Kraków had been taken. “With the Allies advancing toward the Rhine and the Soviets storming across the Vistula,” the announcer intoned, “it’s only a matter of time before Berlin will fall.”

  Their plates were loaded with mounds of potatoes and overcooked beef. Positive as it was, the news had dampened rather than lightened the mood.

  Only a matter of time: Time enough for Hitler’s hard-core fanatics to drag down as many opponents as possible; time enough to meet the unmet bullet, the one with your name on it, fatal acquaintance, all the worse coming at the war’s finale.

  They went outside. Thick purple twilight poured over the gently sloping hills. Van Hull walked away, stopped, and came back. “You have a cigarette?” Dunne handed him the pack. Van Hull took one and lit it. There was a tiny tremble in his hand. “I’m sorry. I should have taken your advice.”

  Dunne lit a cigarette for himself. It wasn’t unusual to get a case of the jitters on the eve of a drop. Everybody did, especially those who’d been dropped before and knew firsthand how easy it was for a mission to go wrong. Van Hull was usually better than anyone else at not letting it show. “What advice?”

  “‘Never mix personal with professional.’”

  “Lieutenant Michael Jahn?”

  Van Hull nodded.

  “We’ve crossed that bridge, Dick.”

  “I’m lucky you volunteered to come along.”

  “Glad I did.” A lie, but a white one. Given a choice—which admittedly he hadn’t been—Dunne was more certain than ever he preferred serving with a seasoned operative like Van Hull than a crew of rookies.

  “I’m packing it in.” Van Hull strolled away. Dunne thought about joining him but wasn’t tired and didn’t feel in the mood to dive into the briefing book or lie on the bed and stare at the water stains in the corkboard ceiling. He went back inside for a nightcap with the men who remained behind. They smoked, swapped stories about the missions they’d survived, and heaped dead butts and ashes on the tin tray.

  Peter Bunde, the third member of their party, a newly minted, sandy-haired lieutenant from Buffalo, New York, and graduate of Canisius College, arrived from Tripoli that morning. First time out of the States, only son of Slovak immigrants, fluent in their language as well as German, he’d act as radio operator and liaise with the partisans. “I was afraid I’d miss the big show,” he said. “That would’ve killed me.”

  They moseyed together to a Quonset hut set on the northern fringe of the base where the briefing was scheduled. Bunde walked a step or two ahead, barely able to contain his impatience with their laid-back pace. Without looking up from his comic book, the orderly at the entrance tossed his head toward the rear of the hut.

  They sat at a square conference table. Above, a fan rotated in leisurely, feckless circles. A brittle, yellow-brown shade softened the inrush of sunlight through the single window. Turlough Bassante, a tall, thin, balding major with pointed nose, entered. “It might get a little warm, but war is hell, and it won’t get that hot.”

  He pulled a map from his briefing book and pinned it to the cork-lined wall behind. He tapped the pink, peanut-shaped space at the center, which closely resembled the outline Van Hull had drawn on a cocktail napkin, with a rubber-tip pointer. “If you haven’t already guessed, this is Slovakia.” He sat and slid long, bony fingers into a tight clasp. “Before we start, I ask you not to smoke. I’m allergic.”

  “I don’t smoke. Or drink,” Bunde said.

  “A regular Boy Scout.”

  “I was.”

  “Comes in handy in the field,” Van Hull said.

  “I suppose. But I’m a briefer, not a trainer, and we have business to attend to.” Bassante’s mouth was fixed in a disapproving pout. “Weather permitting, you’ll fly out two nights from now. You won’t be able to see much of Bari. Someday, if you’ve the time, come back for a tour of the old city, Barivecchia, dirty and dangerous but charming in its own way. Don’t miss the Castello Svevo, the twelfth-century fortress of Frederick I, the Holy Roman Emperor. ‘Frederick Barbarossa,’ the Italians dubbed him for his red beard. According to German folklore, he didn’t drown on the Third Crusade but fell into a trance beneath the Kyffhäuser Mountains, in Thuringia, there to wait the hour of the Reich’s greatest need, when he’ll wake and come to the rescue.”

  Bunde raised his hand, tentatively, like a pupil in a classroom. “Barbarossa, that’s the name Hitler gave the attack on Russia.”

  “Congratulations. Submit that as a question to Information Please. You might win a war bond. As for Frederick, the slumbering emperor of the First Reich apparently either hasn’t heard or has decided to ignore the summons from the tottering führer of the Third. A wise emperor, Frederick.”

  Bassante opened his folder. “I presume you’ve read the briefing materials, so I’m not going to waste time revisiting the intricacies of the situation. Any questions?”

  Dunne thumbed through thirty pages of dense, single-spaced text. This was the first time he’d encountered a briefing officer who didn’t begin with a review of the printed materials. But he wasn’t about to fess up to not doing his homework.

  “I take your silence to mean you’ve familiarized yourselves with the materials.”

  “How about putting it in a nutshell?” Van Hull said.

  Head jutting forward, nose like the needle of a compass, Bassante turned to him. “Nutshells are the purview of arborists. I’ll clarify what—if anything—is unclear.”

  Bunde raised his hand. “I think I can help.”

  “That’s quite all right, Lieutenant.” Bassante aimed the needle nose at Bunde. “Though I was never a Boy Scout, I’ve functioned sans assistance for over a year.”

  Bunde’s reddened face registered embarrassment, ire—unhappy fusion of both.

  “You were saying, Major …”

  “Saying what?” The compass point swiveled again toward Van Hull.

  “The situation in Slovakia.” Van Hull tossed a pack of cigarettes and a matchbook on the table. “The big picture.”

  “Light that and the briefing is over. That’s a promise, not a threat.”

  “I’m just going to play with it.” He plucked a match from the book and worked the tight creases between his teeth. “Helps kill the craving.”

  Bassante rested his elbows on the table, refolded his hands, putting them together as if to pray, tips of index fingers touching tip of nose. After a moment of silence, he stood, paced, head down, needle pointing south. The problem with a briefing about a drop outside the perimeter of the war in the west, he said, was that the ordinary ignorance of most Americans about European affairs instantly turned extraordinary.

  “In cases like yours”—he nodded toward Lieutenant Bunde—“those with ethnic connections have some idea of the subtleties involved. Yet, more often than not, those connections encourage rather than constrain a paralyzing parochialism that makes it impossible to make an unbiased analysis.”

  The flush returned to Bunde’s face. He squirmed in his seat but stayed silent.

  Bassante looked directly at him. “Though I might disagree with some of your interpretations, Lieutenant, I’m sure you’ve a grip on the players in Slovakia. Most Americans, on the other hand, are devoid of any historical perspective or nuanced understanding of the complexities outside their borders. It’s part of our national profile and extends to the highest reaches.”

  Van Hull made no effort to hide his boredom, chewing the paper end of the match and doodling in his briefing b
ook a tight, elaborate weave of spirals and curlicues.

  “The Slovaks are Slavs,” Bassante said. “Hitler loathes them as a human subspecies. His goal is to annex the lands of the east for settlement by the Aryan race. The fittest among the Slavs will serve as hewers of wood and drawers of water. The unfit will be eliminated. But for strategic reasons, he made an exception of Slovakia, using it as a wedge to pry apart what he called ‘the wall of Pan-Slavic solidarity.’”

  Oblivious to his insistence a few minutes before that he wouldn’t “waste time revisiting the intricacies of the situation in Czechoslovakia,” Bassante launched into a monologue about the country’s creation after World War I, tensions between Czechs and Slovaks, dubious wisdom of incorporating the heavily German Sudetenland, and formation of a proto-Fascist Slovak independence movement under Father Andrej Hlinka, a Catholic priest, and his successor, Monsignor Jozef Tiso.

  Bunde raised his hand. Bassante ignored him and went on with his summary. Bunde blurted out, “Just so it’s clear the majority of Slovaks have never been Fascists. The uprising against the Germans has confirmed that.”

  Van Hull pointed at the desultory spin of the ceiling fan. “Can’t that go faster?”

  “That’s as fast as it goes,” Bassante said.

  “That’s fast?”

  “In Bari, yes.” Bassante continued the lecture where he left off before Bunde interrupted, reviewing the Munich Crisis of ’38 and Czechoslovakia’s dismemberment.

  Dunne struggled to keep his eyes open until another vociferous objection from Bunde jolted him to attention: “You’ve got the facts twisted. While I’m no fan of Tiso, the truth is, Hitler gave him an ultimatum, not a ‘nudge.’ Either Slovakia declare independence and ask German protection, or Germany would seize Bohemia and Moravia and let Poland and Hungary divide Slovakia among themselves.”

  Bassante rapped the table with the pointer. “You’re being insubordinate.”

  “That’s enough.” Van Hull stood. “We’re taking a break. Lieutenant, follow me.” He led Bunde out the door. Bassante went directly into his office across the hall.

  Dunne knew a college boy’s argument when he heard one. Van Hull was a college boy, too, except he’d been in the field. Like Dunne, he’d been to a lot of briefings, some bare-bone, others exhaustive, part history lesson, part operational instruction.

  Though he knew 99 percent of this stuff would turn out to be useless, Dunne didn’t find Bassante’s criticisms unfair. He was only half kidding when he’d told Van Hull he was a pupil of Errol Flynn’s. No student of history, he skipped over the unbylined, back-page accounts of squabbles and sideshows outside the heavyweight title fights at Dunkirk, El Alamein, Stalingrad, Normandy, Guadalcanal, Midway—milestones everyone knew—that only muddled the straightforward, go-for-glory narrative of the war.

  Bud Mulholland claimed he always took along several pages of the briefing book to use as toilet paper. “The point is,” he said, “to learn enough so you kill the right people. But don’t be afraid of making a mistake. Shoot the fucker before the fucker shoots you.”

  When they resumed, there was none of the earlier contentiousness. Although he squirmed in his seat, Bunde had obviously been corralled by Van Hull. Bassante launched into a straightforward account of events since Slovakia participated in the German attack on Poland and joined in Operation Barbarossa, committing a relatively small consignment of conscripts to an invasion force of three million.

  Overawed by the early successes of the Germans, the Slovaks proved reliable if restrained allies. However, as the attack faltered and Slovak casualties grew, desertions and defections increased. After the defeat at Stalingrad, everybody but the Nazis seemed to accept they’d lost the war. The Romanians and Hungarians, German allies, looked for the quickest way out. High-ranking officers within the Slovak army followed suit.

  The Russians infiltrated Slovak-Soviet teams to disrupt German supply lines and erode their defenses along the Carpathian Mountains. In June ’44, soon after the Anglo-American landing at Normandy, the Soviets crushed Army Group Center and sealed Germany’s fate. The plotting among the Slovak military command took on a new urgency.

  The Germans grew increasingly suspicious, and when an entire military delegation of Wehrmacht officers was forced from a train and executed, they acted with customary efficiency and ruthlessness to get ahead of the uprising.

  Bassante returned to the map. “Except in this triangle in the center of the country, from Zvolen in the south to Banská Bystrica in the north to Brezno in the east”—he traced the triangle with his pointer—“the rebels managed to secure a redoubt. In order to relieve the pressure on the rebels, the Soviets launched an offensive here”—he moved the pointer north and east of the rebel-held triangle—“at the Dukla Pass, in the eastern Carpathians. They suffered, it’s thought, about one hundred twenty thousand casualties. Having stopped the Soviets, the Germans brought the uprising to a bloody and speedy close.”

  Pinning a second, smaller recon map to the wall, he said, “Here in detail is the triangle in question.” Contour lines and color-coded elevations limned an irregular landscape of rifts and rises.

  Van Hull went to the board and stood beside Bassante for a closer look. Bunde joined them.

  Dunne excused himself and headed to the latrine. Fueled by five cups of morning java, he pissed a stream in the steel trough. He aimed at the cigarette butt in the drain, steady, explosive rain on the Japanese carrier Hiryu at Midway, a turning point. The best way to fight any war: Imaginary aerial bombardment of a make-believe enemy vessel. We will fight them in our urinals, and on our maps, and in our minds. The paper hull broke apart and spilled cargo and crew into a yellow sea. Bull’s-eye. Bingo. Banzai. Remember Pearl Harbor. Heigh-ho, it’s off to Banská Bystrica we go.

  When Dunne returned, Van Hull was still huddled with Bunde and Bassante around the map. Bassante waved the pointer, wand-like, over the paper landscape. “This is the terrain you must live with. The Tiso regime kept American and British fliers downed during raids on the oil refineries under its own jurisdiction. Nearly twenty were held here.”

  He rested the rubber tip on Banská Bystrica. “Once the rebels liberated them, Operation Dawson was sent in to bring them out and, simultaneously, land supplies and prepare the way for additional OSS teams to assist the rebels and gather intelligence.”

  “Which I’m sure the Soviets regarded with suspicion.” Bunde retook his seat.

  “Yes, Lieutenant, precisely. They regard this theater as theirs alone, and unlike the rebels within the Slovak military, loyal to the government-in-exile in London, the partisans take their orders directly from Moscow. Yet they’ve proved cooperative, or at least not as paranoid and secretive as the Russians.

  “In the middle of October, along with arms and medical supplies, a half-dozen B-17s delivered additional agents led by Lieutenant Michael Jahn. This was Jahn’s first mission. His job was to set up a permanent base for American support of the surrounded insurgent Slovak military forces until either the Soviets or the Allies broke through.

  “The rebels’ position deteriorated rapidly. It was soon clear the Germans and their Slovak minions would crush all resistance. The insurgents were told to flee best they could and join the partisans in the mountains. By then the contingent consisted of thirty-seven men, twelve OSS agents and the rest newly rescued pilots. They waited on an airfield outside Banská Bystrica. Dense clouds made it impossible to land or take off. Jahn finally divided them into six units and sent them on different paths into the mountains.

  “The SS teamed up with the Hlinkla Guard to hunt them down. Jahn’s party reunited with several others. They suffered frostbite. Nurses who’d served in the Slovak army treated them. The SS captured the nurses the following day. They raped and killed them.

  “Unfortunately for Jahn and companions, the pursuit was led by Sturmbrigade Dirlewanger, a collection of multinational thugs and psychopaths whose wanton ferocity has made it notorious ev
en within the ranks of the Waffen-SS. You can recognize them by their collar patch.” Bassante formed an X with his forefingers. “Crossed potato-masher grenades on a black shield.”

  Dunne looked over at Van Hull. He sat with shoulders slumped, eyes shut. If Bassante knew of Van Hull’s friendship with Jahn, he didn’t bring it up.

  “We know from the partisans that Jahn and his men eluded their pursuers for another week. The day before Christmas, they stumbled on an abandoned lodge and were able to get out of the cold. They woke to find themselves surrounded.

  “The Slovaks and Czechs in the party were shot. Despite Hitler’s threat to execute enemy troops caught assisting partisans, the Americans and Brits were spared. Jahn is Jewish, which of course puts him in special danger. Our contacts report that he and the others were taken back to Banská Bystrica. That’s the last report we have of their whereabouts. We’re acting on the presumption they’re still there.”

  “Are they still in the hands of the SS?” Van Hull had gone back to doodling.

  “That’s for you to find out.”

  “Anyone use Victor?” The circles Van Hull drew folded themselves around lightning-bolt runes, insignia of the SS, and crossed potato-masher grenades.

  “Not that we’re aware of.”

  “You’ve lost me,” Bunde said. “Who’s Victor?”

  Van Hull fished in his pocket. He took out a dime and a plastic-coated lozenge. He put the dime back. “Ecce Victor.” He laid the lozenge on the table. “Behold the lethal pill—the LP—the ‘new and improved’ insoluble capsule, not glass like the Brits use, filled with potassium cyanide. Swallowed, it travels through the digestive system harmlessly; chewed, it causes instant death. Operatives behind enemy lines have the option to take Victor along. It’s up to them when and if to use it.”