In War Times (43 page)

“West Germany.”

“Why do we always have to be at war?”

“This is NATO. NATO is maintaining the peace.”

“Right.”

“I’ll be teaching at the NATO school.”

“On a military base. In Oberammergau. Which is, as we have ascertained, in Germany. Relatively close to East Germany, Berlin, and Russia. You’d be teaching in the service of war.”

“The kids will love it. We can take them all over Europe.”

“I’ve been all over Europe. I didn’t like it. It was full of dead people.”

“They can learn German.”

“They’re learning Japanese here.”

But in the end, she agreed, reluctantly, to go.

Can we carry through in an age where we will witness not only new breakthroughs in weapons of destruction—but also a race for mastery of the sky and the rain, the oceans and the tides, the far side of space and the inside of men’s minds?

—
J
OHN
F. K
ENNEDY
July 15, 1960

B
ETTE LOVED OBERAMMERGAU
. Instead of shopping at the PX, she went to the German shops in the small village, and made friends among the Germans, many of whom were professors or former professors.

Sam, in a switch from fire protection to his long experience in ordnance, was teaching the latest advances in antiballistic missiles to officers. He and Bette attended classes in political theory. Bette soon stopped going. “I know more than they do,” she said. “And it’s all depressing.”

In October, soon after they arrived, the entire base was suffused by almost unbearable tension. The Soviets were installing missiles in Cuba, missiles that could easily carry nuclear warheads to Washington, D.C., in minutes, too quickly for any fire director, such as the M-9 or its present incarnation, to intercept it.

Amid the fall glory, the family hiked up the Lauber, one of the peaks that surrounded Oberammergau. Nearby, the Lauber Bahn, the cable car that ascended to the top, languidly pulled cars toward a
biergarten
with a panoramic view. The kids ran on ahead, and Bette vented her anger.

“It’s Kennedy’s fault. He gave the Soviets an opening. Castro obviously
needed
those missiles to keep the United States from taking over Cuba after the U.S. tried to take over the country with the Bay of Pigs invasion.” She moved quickly up the mountain, stabbing her walking stick into the trail as she climbed. Sam could barely keep up with her.

“Well, what do you think is going to happen?” The aura of fear was great, and he could imagine that it was paralyzing in the eastern United States. In the Washington, D.C., area, schools had closed early the day of the announcement that Soviet missiles were in Cuba. The children were hustled home as air raid signals mourned in the voices of prehistoric beasts, but not on their appointed weekly schedule, when schools did their duck-and-cover routine. This was
the real thing
.

And it
was
the real thing. No doubt. All that Churchill had warned of. Soviet aggression extending to their own backyard, ninety miles from Key West.

“Maybe World War Three is going to start,” said Bette. “Scuttlebutt is that Kennedy is going to sacrifice some of our missile bases for theirs, though. He is negotiating, unfortunately, from a position of weakness. He can’t attack Cuba again. If he does, the Soviets will use it as justification to take the rest of Berlin. All we can do is wait and see. Just wait and see. Fuck it. We can just all go hide in the Messerschmitt caves until the fallout blows over, right? Oh, except that the Soviets have missiles aimed
here
, too. There’s no place to hide. It’s insanity. Absolute insanity.”

“Would it be better,” Sam asked, puffing alongside her, “if Nixon were president?”

She glared at an innocent hemlock tree, and then at him. “Hell no, Dance. This is
Nixon’s
idea. Nixon’s and Eisenhower’s. To invade Cuba and get them all stirred up. Kennedy merely took it over, like a dunce. All that anticommunist rot that they’ve been using to try and control everybody infected his brain too. Well, I’m not a Red, and I’m not red, white, and blue, or the color of any flag. Maybe I’m…green, the color of life. Just plain blue, the color of the sky and the sea.”

“Green and blue. The Hawaiian Islands and the blue Pacific.”

“I told you I didn’t want to come.”

The crisis subsided, just as Bette predicted, except that the public didn’t know that Kennedy had given up one of their missile bases in exchange for the dismantling of Soviet missiles in Cuba.

Brian ran wild on the mountain along with the other boys on the base. One day he brought back an SS knife—the exact same kind that Company C had given as prizes in the athletic games they’d put together the summer of ’45 in Muchengladbach, bought for ten cents from the factory in Essen.

After some intense questioning, Sam found out that Brian and his friends had discovered access to the bombed entrance of the Messerschmitt factory and were going in with torches of rags wrapped in kerosene. Bette hit the roof.

“What, Bette? Do you want them to grow up in ignorance of what happened here?”

“They’re too young. I found Jill with a library book about concentration camps last week. I don’t know why they let her check it out. It was an adult book. She was crying her eyes out. Now she can’t sleep. I can’t sleep. I’m up half the night.”

“You always are.” Usually, she read. Sometimes, she cleaned.

“That’s beside the point and you know it.”

“Look, Dad. There’s the entrance.”

Sam and Brian were high above the lush Bavarian valley. It was a beautiful place to live, with plenty of things for them to do. The family had biked to Neuschwanstein the week before and visited one of the legendary castles of King Ludwig, all of which had bankrupted his country.

The valley was almost completely walled in by mountains. Crosses adorned the surrounding peaks. A passion play was performed here every decade to fulfill the bargain the villagers made with God in the seventeenth century. It had worked; the plague bypassed the valley.

The village itself, far below, might have been a miniature train model of a Bavarian town. Sam picked out the violin shop, the woodcarver’s shop, and the
biergarten
. The white steeple of the Catholic church gleamed in the sunlight, and the huge city pool, filled directly with water that had quite recently been icemelt running down the mountain, glittered.

They had been climbing over boulders for almost an hour, having followed a barely visible footpath Brian pointed out that passed through a cow field. Finally, they rested on a boulder and watched a hawk circle overhead against the clear blue sky. Sam was sweating and wished he had a cold beer. He took a drink of water from the canteen slung over his shoulder and got bratwurst and rye bread from his pack. “Want some?”

Brian wrinkled his nose. “I brought Oreos.”

“With a perfectly good bakery in town?”

“Are you finished yet?” Brian was eager to show him the cave, after sulking so hard about being banned from it that Sam had arranged this outing.

It was the danger, Sam told himself as they climbed over more boulders. There were no doubt unexploded charges inside the facility—a huge network of tunnels stretching to Munich. The Army had set charges to close this entrance, many years ago, but a landslide must have opened it.

They paused in the cold wind that emerged from a space between the rocks. “You’ve got to put on your sweater,” Brian told him, getting his own out of his pack.

Sam carried a heavy battery-operated floodlight and had provided Brian with the strongest light he could comfortably manage. “Stay behind me.”

“Oh, Dad.”

“No whining or we’ll go back. This is dangerous.”

“I’ve been in here a million—”

“Brian?”

“Okay.”

As they stepped inside Sam switched on his light. The area was so vast, and the darkness so complete, that his light did not reach any limits, but illuminated only a tiny portion of the network of tunnels he knew were there.

“We used rags wrapped around sticks and soaked them in kerosene. They worked a lot better.”

“But that’s not very safe.”

“Jack said that one time he got all the way to the concrete road. I think he got scared and came back. What did they do in here?”

“They were building rocket planes.”

“Why did they have to build them here?”

“Because the Allies were bombing Germany. They would bomb any installation, supply depot—in the end, just about everything above ground.”

He could almost see the brightly lit network of German efficiency as it must have been only fifteen short years ago. Twenty-two miles of air-conditioned tunnels, on three levels. He’d seen it in a report. It was honeycombed with offices, supply depots, and housed an entire airplane plant, a facility so modern that it still would be considered cutting edge. It had been rumored that a Nazi superweapon, one of those that captured SS soldiers bragged about, was being constructed here—another superweapon that would win the war for Germany at the very last minute.

And indeed, it had been a very near thing. A change in only a few variables could have had them under Nazi rule this very day.

The superweapon. They had it now, all right, super as all get-out. The atomic bomb.

This outer citadel was ruined, with a musty, ancient smell, and strewn with blast-twisted machinery. “Look,” Sam said, training his light on a scattering of grenades. He could almost feel Brian quivering with excitement, like a dog on point.

“Wow! Wait till I tell Jack!”

Sam could not believe that he was sweating in this cold. The darkness was all-devouring, a vacuum, sucking him outward into the cold, vast reaches where he had seen pure evil.

“Let’s go back.”

“Da-ad.”

“Come over here. Be careful. Here’s the track.”

“A train track?”

“Yes. There were three levels here. If the war had gone on longer, they might have been able to use this facility to help win.”

“Why didn’t they win?”

“Because a lot of men died so that they wouldn’t. Because we had better radar. Because they drove away their best scientists. Because they picked too many fights. Because Hitler was an idiot. Because the Germans did what they were told. Because they ran out of money.”

“Oh. Well, when you were in the war, you had fun, didn’t you?”

“I did some satisfying work. But I didn’t have to fight in any battles.”

“Because you were so smart. That’s what Mom says.”

“A lot of very good and very smart men and women weren’t so lucky, Brian. War isn’t fun. It’s one of the most terrible things that can happen. It’s something that humans do to themselves. If you don’t die, you can still be terribly injured, lose your loved ones, lose your home and everything that you have worked for and that you own. Your mother and I would do everything we could to prevent another war from ever happening.”

“Well, let’s go,” said Brian. “We never came in this far. I never saw any hand grenades. You take all the fun out of everything.”

“This place takes all the fun out of me, that’s for sure.”

They hiked over to the ski lift and took it up to the top of the mountain. Brian had a hot dog and a root beer float. Sam had a beer.

In three days, a heavy chain link fence covered the opening to the cave.

Before he had it closed, Sam went back in, all the way to the concrete road, where the shrine to the construction of secret weaponry began. Germany had built their vengeance weapons, the V-l and V-2, underground, and had planned many more along that line.

There he knelt and planted a small cube of HD 10, Hadntz’s answer, perhaps now to grow an M-17 or better, something that might navigate the deeps of time, take aim at heartache, disease, suffering, and war, and vaporize it, as the M-9 had ultimately deflected most of the V-l’s Hitler had fired toward England. It would be a missile piloted by the concerns that made up the best of humanity’s desires. Right now, those desires seemed focused in John F. Kennedy, who was leading the world away from war with strength and insight and technological progress and education, despite Bette’s present irritation with him.

But now, Sam was in a dark cave. Suffused with wrenching memories, he turned and found his way out, heading toward the brilliant entrance, the weight of futility lightened by just the smallest shred of hope.

Early one November morning, Brian burst into their bedroom. “Mom! Dad! President Kennedy is dead!”

Bette sat bolt upright. “What?”

“It’s on the radio. Hurry!”

They crowded into Brian’s little bedroom under the eaves. Brian had a radio he’d built from parts a German electrician, one of their friends, had given him. Every morning it was tuned to the BBC and he woke up to it. Brian burrowed back under the covers and Sam and Bette sat on the bed. Jill came in the door. “What’s up?”

“Listen.”

The President of the United States has been assassinated by a gunman in Dallas, Texas.

Bette shook her head slowly, staring out the window. Absently, she took Sam’s hand. “It’s over.”

“What’s over, Mom?” asked Brian.

She was silent for a moment and bit her lip while the announcer gave more details. She nodded to herself.

“What?” asked Brian again.

Jill turned and left the room, her face pale.

“Things will change,” Bette said, and followed Jill.

Sam had a sensation of a steep, fast fall. Outside Brian’s small window, it was snowing.

“Dad, what can we do?” asked Brian.

He sighed. Had he done all he could? Was Kennedy still alive in Wink’s shiny world? “We’ll just have to see.”

Talk was rampant on the base. At home, Bette was uncharacteristically silent. She took long walks alone in bad weather. Sometimes in the middle of the night, Sam woke to the staccato sound of her typewriter. One day she said that she was going shopping in Munich for Christmas presents and would spend the night there. Sam left work early to take care of the kids.

She returned the next evening, her face haggard, after Sam had put the kids to bed. Blowing snow followed her in the door and she shut it gently behind her, setting two large bags of gift-wrapped boxes in the foyer.