softness or give in the bone, so he assumed that the skull hadn’t been cracked.
A Ranger returned to report that he had come across a German truck on a nearby road, hood still warm, but no enemy soldiers around. From the looks of the tracks on the ground, there had been another truck there.
The obvious conclusion made Carter feel sick. “They must have taken the girl.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Carter was torn. He wanted to accompany his friend back to the medical corps at the battalion bivouac, but what about Aoife? The image of the big tree, the rings, and dried blood, kept intruding in front of his eyes.
Rapid orders followed. Carter took two men in the jeep. One of the trucks was to be driven down to the temple, and the rest of the men took the other truck to transport Napier back to the bivouac.
Carter normally let Napier drive the jeep—an annoying consequence of rank, because Carter really enjoyed being at the steering wheel. As a child he had ridden horses competitively, continuing a family tradition, leaning into the horse as if they were one organism as they jumped over poles and water. The jeep consumed gasoline, not hay, but its four-wheel drive was as versatile as a horse. Carter had seen lots of horses during this war, many of them dead or dying. Many farms in Europe still used horses, not tractors, and he had been surprised to find that both the Italian army and the German army still used horses. He had not seen a horse in either the American or British armies, except for a few in England that senior officers used for recreation. Perhaps this one insight told much about the industrial struggle of factory output between the Allies and the Axis and why the Allies were on the verge of victory.
As Carter drove by the temple to get to the other road, he found his Rangers laying out the dead Germans in a row. Now that spring had arrived, burying the dead quickly was always a good idea, before putrefaction turned the bodies all gooey.
A quarter of a mile up the second road, they came across the German truck. Carter stopped for a moment and stood up to get the lay of the land. Putting the jeep into gear, he drove around the truck, bumping over the rough ground and over a half-buried log, and accelerated as he regained the road. The trees rushed by faster, forcing Carter to concentrated on staying in the two brown ruts among the blur of green.
Ferro sat in the rear, with Carter’s carbine in his hands and his own rifle jutting up between his knees, its scope resting against his thigh in order to keep it protected and aligned. “You think that maybe you are going a little fast, sir?” the Italian from Boston asked.
“We need to catch them before the road meets some other road and we lose them.”
“What about mines, sir?”
Carter slowed for a moment. The standard tactic was to drive slowly enough to be able to see if the ground had been disturbed, which only worked if the mines had been recently laid. He hated mines, with a passion born of raw fear; six of his men had been maimed by them, and two others had died. In one of those sick twists of logic that war thrived on, antipersonnel mines were designed to wound and cripple, not kill. A wounded man delayed a military unit, as his comrades stopped to care for him and get him to medical attention, while a dead man did not slow the unit down. Of course, an antipersonnel mine would probably not wound them in the jeep, but roads didn’t have the small AP mines, they had bigger mines to destroy vehicles. Outside Cherbourg, he had seen a jeep hit an antitank mine. Not pretty. The mine had ripped up like a molten geyser from hell and left only charred metal and men.
“They wouldn’t have put a mine on this road,” Carter said as he pressed on the accelerator. “The Germans would have expected their squad to overrun us back at the temple, since they had the element of surprise. Mining this road would have just as likely have caught their own, as us.”
“Life ain’t logical, Major,” Ferro said. The soldier sitting in the passenger seat, his hands clutching the grips of his .30-caliber machine gun, nodded his agreement with Ferro. He was new to the unit, a greenhorn replacement brought in from the paratrooper pool. Carter could not remember his name. Carter understood that no one wanted to die in the last days of a war—where’s the fairness in that?
Carter responded with determined words. “We don’t have time to stop.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
The chalet had belonged to a Jew. When Krohn had showed up in 1937 and demanded the deed to the home, accusing the old man of getting the money for the summer home by betraying the Germans during the First World War, the Jew had shown him an Iron Cross and indignantly explained that he had earned it on the front, in the trenches, just as the Führer had. Krohn had smiled tightly, hiding his surprise that any Jews had fought during the war, and coldly insisted that he wanted the chalet.
Of course, laws had been followed. The Jew had signed the deed over for a cheque drawn on a Swiss bank for what amounted to a tenth of the true value of the chalet. The Jew then disappeared, using the money to flee the nation. Krohn would have arranged for the man’s arrest, but this was five years before the Final Solution began, and Krohn didn’t have time to complete the required paperwork.
Krohn moved into his new home as he supervised the construction of the temple, ensuring that only workmen of pure blood applied the best of their skills, building always in the traditional manner, using only hand tools invented thousands of years ago.
He loved his chalet, the wooden floors worn shiny by years of use, a grand fireplace in the center room that lit the room up magnificently on cold winter nights, reminding him of how he imagined Nordic warriors must have felt in their longhouses thousands of years ago. In fact, he had built a longhouse behind the chalet for his soldiers to live in, but for himself, he preferred the red bricks and iron stoves of his own chalet. As a realist, he recognized that his romantic views of the past had limits when it came to personal comfort.
As was his habit, to know the true and pure history of all things, he researched the history of his new home. He was not surprised to find that it had been built in 1843 by a pure-blooded German, a tax collector from Munich. It had stayed in his family for generations and only fell into the hands of the Jews in 1923, when inflation had destroyed the wealth of so many good Germans.
“Fritz, stand guard,” Krohn ordered as they drove up to the chalet. “Karl, bring the girl in the house.”
She didn’t struggle, but obediently followed, with Karl’s hand on her shoulder. Krohn appreciated that; he despised it when the girls struggled. Could they not see the honor that he had bestowed on them? In quieter moments, sitting in his library with the phonograph playing some Litz, schnapps in his hand, he admitted that the other sex bewildered him. They always seemed to act differently from what his scholarship told him to expect.
He had been married for three years, to a beautiful peasant girl with blonde hair, full breasts, and hips that promised healthy children, of the purest blood, not a hint of any flaws. What a miserable experience. She had refused to be obedient, ignored the Nazi doctrine that he had tried to teach her, and worst of all, failed to become pregnant. The doctors said that she should be fertile; he suspected that she had used some peasant poison to bind up her womb tightly, the kind that medieval witches used. There were many sources of ancient wisdom, not all of it good.
After he cast her out, sent her home to her parents, and arranged for a divorce, he had burned her possessions. A year later he found that he had missed one trunk of clothes and had never gotten around to destroying it. The passion to burn had ebbed.
Pulling the trunk out of a closet in the guest room, he flung it open. “Put some of these clothes on,” the colonel ordered.
She seemed to balk at his instructions, twisting her fingers around each other, glancing at him and back at Karl, who stood at the doorway, another of those sloppy grins on his face.
“Now, quickly!” Krohn barked. “He won’t touch you.”
Grabbing a large valise, Krohn left the bedroom and hurried to his library. Floor-to-ceiling bookcases covered two walls of the room, filled with books and stacks of papers. He paused, overcome with emotion, almost ready to weep. How could he leave all