The road to Siegen had been tough, but not as tough as it had been for the men before them who had pushed the German stronghold ever eastward. They passed endless evidence of heavy fighting. While the corpses had been removed from the roadside, there were still burnt-out Jeeps, tanks peppered with holes, shell holes blown in the earth, discarded weapons scattered across the hillsides. And bloodstains. They lay in dark patches in the hills, smeared where bodies had been dragged out of them. One large stain was still bright red and sticky when they had passed, an American helmet lying half soaked in it. The sight made Dominic’s heart break. He wondered if anyone had told Paul Blakely’s family what had happened to him. Now Francine would be just another girl robbed of her future by the war. The wedding she and Paul had dreamed of, the children he’d hoped would have their mother’s eyes—none of these would ever happen. Dominic wondered if his little Cecilia would see her father again—and if his new baby would know her father at all.
“There!” Hancock spurted the word so suddenly that Dominic’s finger jumped onto the trigger, but their commander’s expression was one of glee. The Jimmy crunched to a halt. Hancock pulled a flashlight from his pocket and shone it into the gloom. Its thin beam illuminated a dark opening in the hillside, an ugly gap cut roughly into the smooth soil; it was covered by the remains of a great metal gate. The gate hung from one hinge, the sharp indentations of bullet holes shining on its surface.
“Open it up!” cried Hancock. Dominic jumped out of the truck. While the other men stood warily, scanning the woods for danger, Dominic seized the cold iron and pulled. Dominic’s muscles screamed in protest as he strained against the weight of the gate, but it began to budge, and to a sound of squealing metal, he and two other men managed to move it aside.
Hancock disembarked from the Jimmy and stared into the darkness, playing his torch through the opening, as Dominic and the others stretched their aching backs and picked up their rifles again. “Bonelli, grab four others and come with me,” he said. “The rest of you, stay here and watch the convoy.”
There was a chorus of “Yes, sir,” and Hancock stepped forward, Dominic close on his heels.
“Wait!” The voice from the truck made Hancock’s shoulders slump in dismay. “I come!”
Dominic saw Hancock steel himself before turning around, the rest of the men following suit. Stephany had hooked one knee over the back of the Jimmy in his attempts to get out; the vicar’s robe he insisted on wearing made matters difficult as he struggled to climb out. Panting, he hoisted himself to the ground with a creak of old bones before hurrying over to them, straightening his robes.
“Stephany . . .” Hancock began.
“No, no, no.” Stephany waved a hand at him, eyes shining. “I know what you will say. It is too dangerous, I must stay with the trucks. You know you will lose this fight, Walker.” He reached up and gave Hancock an affectionate pat on the cheek. “Come, we find my relics, yes?” Beaming, he strutted off toward the entrance to the mine.
Hancock uttered a strangled expletive. “Fine. Do what you want, Stephany. I can hardly stop you.”
Lieutenant Commander Stout was waiting for them at the entrance to the mine. He’d been waiting for reinforcements before going in; of the unit he’d left Aachen with, only five men remained, huddled around him as if for warmth. But Stout’s determined posture had not changed. His mustache curved up in a smile. “Hancock!”
“Sir!” Hancock saluted.
“I heard you had some trouble outside of Bonn. Come on, let’s see what we’ve got.” Stout led the way into the copper mine, his flashlight held high, its puny beam struggling against the thick darkness and utter cold.
A long, arched tunnel had been cut roughly into the gloom. The low ceiling was oppressive, and the air would have been stifling if it hadn’t been so bitterly cold. Dominic felt his hands grow numb on the barrel of his rifle. The tunnel twisted and widened with pockets and dark chambers opening off to the sides.
As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he began to spot them. First, just the whites of their eyes; then their round faces, glowing in the weak beam of light.
Civilians.
Stragglers, survivors, who’d somehow managed to escape Siegen during the fighting. Huddling together in little clusters in the small pockets, they watched with hunted eyes as the Americans trooped past. Stout and Hancock, seeing that they were unarmed, paid them little attention. But the fear in their eyes chilled Dominic to the bone.
He assumed there would only be that handful hiding near the entrance of the mine, but the deeper the men advanced into the darkness, the more humid the air grew. Warmth started to fill the air around them, making Dominic’s frozen fingers cramp. With it came the smell. It was familiar from the badly sanitized refugee camps they’d visited outside Aachen, only amplified a thousand times in the mine’s closed air: the smell of humanity at its worst. Sweat. Urine. Excrement. One of the other young soldiers gagged quietly beside Dominic, and he found his own stomach turning as he checked the floor periodically to see where he was putting his boots. It was so cold lately that he’d been sleeping with them on, and he didn’t want to tread in anything that he didn’t want smeared inside his blankets. More pressing was the thought that for this smell to be so pervasive, there had to be many people in here. Dominic’s stomach tightened.
“Be ready,” Stout obviously shared Dominic’s concerns. He had one hand on the pistol on his hip. Hancock pulled out his own pistol. The ugly weapon looked wrong in his lean, elegant fingers.
A thin, piercing sound rose into the air. The noise was plaintive and reminded Dominic so much of home that it made his heart pang: the cry of a baby.
Only this was not the regular scream of a fussy baby. This child was cold and hungry and afraid, and it gave voice to its unhappiness in the only way it knew how. Dominic swallowed hard as they advanced and the terrible truth came to the front. The tunnel branched and, as they followed, they saw many small cavities cut into the cave, all of them filled with people. None of them stood; they were all slumped in various attitudes of defeat on benches, stones, the odd cot. Women. Children. Men. Babies. The flashlight beams flitting through the impenetrable darkness revealed hundreds of pale and dirt-stained faces staring out at them with deep mistrust.
It seemed that the entire population of Siegen was hiding in the mines, waiting for the war to be over. Dominic wanted to tell them not to be afraid, that they wouldn’t be hurt, but he spoke no German. And he realized with a shock that they were not afraid, either. These people were the Germans; not the minority bent on exterminating the Allied armies, but the real German people who lived and slept and ate and wanted nothing other than to get their lives back, to do what they did before the war had torn their country to pieces.
“Amerikaner.”
Whispered by every mouth as soon as they spotted their uniforms, the word bounced from wall to wall in a susurrus of mistrust. Dominic looked into the eyes of a little girl and smiled instinctively; she smiled back, but her mother grasped her tightly and pulled her closer, her eyes filled with terror.
The tunnel opened out into another cave so big that the men’s flashlights could not pick out the end. The adults who had been lying around the cave jumped up as one and shuffled back against the walls, clutching their rags more tightly around their shoulders as they stared in mute horror. Stephany tried speaking a few words of reassuring German, but even his enthusiasm waned in the face of such collective fear. They all stared silently, Germans and Americans alike.