Berlin was cold, swept still with the remnants of the snow storm that had buried the south, and crisp with the promise of more snow on the way.
The small office that Wolfgang Hochstetter occupied had a single coal stove for heat, and a single window for natural light. The electric bulb over the desk was turned off, as always, for conservation purposes, although the major was aware that he was one of the few in the building to take such precautions.
Despite the dead chill outside the phone against his ear felt alive, and too hot for comfort.
"There are only four roads leading out of Passau. Only four possible directions they could have gone. Half the men were wounded, it should not be this challenging to find them."
The voice on the other end of the line, belonging to a twenty-five-year-old sergeant who had just barely kept his life in the last week, squeaked in protest. The search area was too big, the snow still too deep on the ill-kept country roads. The truck was not made for cross country trips.
Excuses.
Hochstetter was tired of hearing them and hung up on the voice that was making his stomach hurt, only to have a second call ring through the moment the receiver was at rest. To this voice he immediately stiffened to attention, "Yah, Herr Inspector Schimmel. Yah…I was unable to report because.."
Hochstetter winced and found his hand reaching for the sharpened letter opener laying on his desk. As his superior thundered on, Hochstetter jabbed the pointed end into a well worn hole in the blotter and twisted.
"Yah, Inspector Schimmel, if you would just-"
They wanted to know why Hogan had been taken to Austria instead of Berlin. He didn't have answers for them. Try as he might, he was not a man with a gift for creativity or lying. He was honest, stalwart, focused and given to fits of anger, but he was not creative. That was why he had needed Hogan in the first place. It was why he had worked so hard to vet him. And now…
"Yah, Herr Inspector. I will report as you order. Yah, Herr Inspector."
The click filled the small room and Hochstetter sat slowly, releasing the letter opener and staring at the long metal object that was so deeply buried in the desk it managed to stand up on its own.
Hochstetter had had it all. Hogan, most of the American's staff, Caine. But the major's need to follow procedure, his need to double check the paper trail and make sure that everything was in order, had forced him to entrust the most precious things in his care to someone else. And it had cost him.
Threats had apparently fallen on deaf ears, and he'd been unable to leave Berlin as his own superiors were now suspecting him of misuse of Gestapo funds and property. He was under suspicion and his record was doing nothing for him.
Hochstetter hadn't seen his wife or daughter in a month. Julia Hochstetter, to whom he had been married for twenty-five years, had called his office a hundred and twelve times, leaving notes that piled up on the switch board desk, but Hochstetter couldn't face her, or his daughter, without his son safe and sound. He could hardly face himself anymore.
Oddly enough he knew that Caine was safe with Hogan. The American colonel would do everything in his power to keep Caine alive and well, treating him as if he were a fellow American. That he was German, a traitor posing as a Russian soldier, and the son of Hogan's sworn enemy didn't seem to matter.
Hogan was just as loyal to his country and to his duty, as Hochstetter was. Except that Hogan had what Hochstetter wanted, and hadn't needed to betray his country to get it.
Hogan had called Hitler's regime 'madness'. "Only an idiot would go along with the madness that Hitler's been dishing out," he'd said. And Hochstetter's son, his own flesh and blood agreed with the belligerent American. The Gestapo major was no fool. He'd seen the doctored reports coming out of the camps. Thousands of pages of death notifications with causes of death like, "Heart failure." Five thousand heart attacks in two days? Children younger than twelve having heart attacks?
Despite what the secret police seemed to stand for, Hochstetter relied on absolute truth in his work. He did not jump to conclusions, he made logical hypotheses and drew learned results. He could see a lie at a hundred yards. Hitler was using lies that stunk like rotten fish to exterminate those that stood in his way. Not soldiers, but civilians. It was madness.
The major could hardly blame his son for defecting after watching that same madness take over his university.
But Hochstetter had found a way to survive in the madness. To keep himself and his family safe, fed, clothed and housed. They were not rich, but they were comfortable. Had he not then done his duty as a father, as a husband, and as a loyal German? Had he not defied the odds, and done his part? What more could he be expected to do for his country? But was this his country? It certainly was not the Germany he'd been born into.
Caine had said that. "I was born in a country of greatness...a bright future full of invention, wealth and harmony. That is the country to which I remain loyal. But it is not today's Germany."
No…this wasn't Germany. This was Hitler-land.
He was brave enough to admit it in silence, in his mind. Could he be brave enough to act on it?
Five men and one woman stared at a brightly glowing light bulb. The metal socket into which it had been screwed, sat on top of a spare piece of board with a single wire leading from the light to an ice cream churn sitting on the floor. While Carter cranked the handle, Ida Werner, LeBeau, Newkirk, Private Caine, and Colonel Hogan watched as the filament hummed and the rounded glass gave off waves of heat.
It had taken the group twenty-eight hours of little sleep and non-stop work but under Carter's direction they'd done it. They'd busted three light bulbs and burned up at least fifteen feet of wire, but they'd done it.
"How did you end up regulating the power output?" LeBeau asked, remembering the disheartening pops of overheated glass.
"It's kinda anti-intuitive, but I created a friction brake on the handle. It produces just a little more electricity but it'll keep the wattage from overloading the circuits. Makes it harder to keep the crank going though." Carter responded, letting go of the handle. The generator gave a dying whine and the light from the bulb faded.
A barely audible voice, croaked. "You did great, guys. Get some slee-" The rest of the word was cut off with a weak coughing spell but Carter understood the gist and shook his head.
"We'd love to, sir, but we wanna see just how much we can get outta that radio before we lose anymore daylight."
"We're all with him, sir." Newkirk piped up, and LeBeau and Caine both nodded their heads in agreement.
They'd carted the ice cream churn and the lightbulb apparatus up to Hogan's room to show him that it worked and get the approval that they didn't really need before moving on with the next stage of repairs. It'd been an excuse to see the colonel who had been forced into solitude and rest by Ida.
The cough was weak, and it sounded terrible. The word pneumonia had been whispered through the house more than a few times. The men were already under the disapproving glare of the colonel's nurse, but waited for him to give the ok before they filed out.
They avoided looking at each other as they scattered, each with his own mental list of supplies that would be needed for the long hours of daylight they intended to spend working at the top of the windmill.
An hour later they had begun to take the radio apart, cleaning it and diagramming and labeling each piece before setting it carefully to the side. By noon the men were dragging, but determined to continue. A basket of hot sandwiches and tea was delivered by one of the children and the group ate, practically asleep while they chewed.
By four that afternoon they were forced to stop, despite the lack of progress. They almost lost Carter as they climbed down the ladders, the sergeant so tired that he missed three rungs and might have fallen the forty feet to the ground if LeBeau and Newkirk hadn't both latched on to a body part at the exact same time.
The following morning the day was warmer, the work a little easier with a full night's sleep. Using the diagrams and the repair book they started to build a smaller compact unit, making do with the parts they had and sacrificing or manufacturing other parts as they could.
"What I wouldn't give to have Kinchloe here." Newkirk said, for about the fifteenth time.
"Oui. I never would have thought it before, but we had it good at Stalag XII. If a part broke all we had to do was risk our lives to go into town and get another one from the underground." LeBeau said, facetious and earnest at the same time.
"Right, we didn't spend hours staring at ruddy German diagrams, no offense, Caine."
Caine shrugged. "It is Greek to me, too. I was studying aeronautics. No, that part goes there, Sergeant."
"What did you study?" Carter asked, removing and resituating the tiny piece of metal and glass in his hands.
"The year I left the polyteknicum I had been studying machining, aerodynamics and French literature."
LeBeau perked up, his face appearing above the back of the mostly empty radio shell. "Really? Who is your favorite?"
"I of course liked Dumas, Verne and Hugo."
"Hugo!?" LeBeau asked, making a face. "That unromantic, windbag!?" The Frenchman shook his head, muttering in his native tongue.
Caine smirked. "I'm a detail man. I like to know why something is the way it is, and how it got there."
"Then maybe you can answer a detail oriented question." Newkirk began, handing another part to Carter. "Why is your pop Hochstetter the way he is, and how did he get in the Gestapo?"
Caine studied the diagram, for all appearances ignoring the question. After a few minutes of silence he looked up and told Carter where the part in his hand had to go, then said carefully. "I thought I knew my father, a long time ago. But then the country turned on its ear. And now…I don't think any German truly knows who he is."
Newkirk exchanged a glance with LeBeau that Caine caught. He glanced between the two men expectantly and Newkirk finally said, "I'm sure my French mate and I would rather the Germans figure out who they are without invadin' and bombin' our countries."
The statement was mildly put, and showed incredible restraint once Caine remembered who he was talking to. Finally he said, "So do I…" and the group fell silent, speaking only when corrections or instructions had to be given.
A few hours later Caine asked, "What do you have against Hugo?"
LeBeau shrugged, pouring the last of the tea into a cup and serving it to Newkirk before he said, "I like Hugo. He wrote important things, and he had great passion, grande patriotisme, but he liked to linger. The truth is, I couldn't get through his novels when I was a child so, I decided I didn't like him."
"Oh, like Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Man can that guy talk…" Carter said, absently, pronouncing the Russian writer's name with such uncharacteristic perfection that LeBeau and Newkirk froze and stared. "I had to read part of Crime and Punishment for high school. We even had to read some of it in the original Russian, and we only had one Russian English dictionary. With some of the pages missing."
With nothing left to put into the radio Carter looked up to find the others in the room staring at him, even Caine. He looked down to the radio, wiped his fingers on his overalls and said, "We done?"
Newkirk mumbled a response and LeBeau snapped out of his surprised daze, looking earnestly at the diagram book. Caine smiled softly and focused too on the book then nodded his head.
"Yah. In theory it should work. We need an antennae to get any sort of distance out of the radio, but…we should connect the power now."
The group mobilized for the moment they'd been waiting for. Newkirk sat to take first turn at the ice cream churn and LeBeau put on a pair of heavy leather gloves, prepared to yank the power cord free should anything go wrong. Carter connected the positive and negative wires from the generator and Caine stood by with a bucket of sand, should they start a fire.
Wiping his hands nervously on his overalls again Carter stepped back from the set and nodded to Newkirk.
The handle turned, but not freely and Newkirk grunted softly in surprise, mumbling, "Blimey, Carter." It took a few turns for any sign of life to come to the makeshift set, a single tiny spark leaping through specks of dust before the green light behind the indicators started to glow and sweet beautiful static rang through the speakers.
Their celebration was cut short at the sound of a frantic voice behind them all. They turned to see Fredriech, the eldest of the children in hiding, breathless and frightened poking his head up from the floor of the small room.
"Gestapo…coming…started down the road…you have to hide!" He said, in gasps, then disappeared again.
"What about the radio?" Newkirk asked, looking around him.
"We'll hide it." Carter said.
"We can't move it!" Caine argued.
"Then we'll cover it. Disguise it somehow."
"We can't do that either." Newkirk said, "Look, I'll stay up here with the radio. You get to the house and keep an eye on the colonel."
"I can't let you do that, Newkirk." Carter warned.
"Get goin' I said." Newkirk tried again, and LeBeau finally jumped forward, pushing Caine to the trap door that opened over the first ladder. "You too, Carter."
"No." Carter said, shoving his hands into his pockets.
"What about Hannah, Carter? Who's gonna look after her if you get found by the Gestapo?"
With a wince that spoke of remembered pain Carter awkwardly said, "Hannah can take care of herself."
Newkirk had to admit he had no argument there.
The compliment of soldiers that had been forced to march down the long country lane were not happy about slogging through the melting snow, but the troop truck would never have made it down the narrow private road. Their spirits improved a bit when they noticed the wintering vines and they perked up at the thought of being offered, or stealing, a bottle or two of the house's vintage.
Aldrich Werner met the group, much as he had met Carter and Private Caine the first day they arrived, standing calmly in the door of the barn with a pistol kept hidden in his hand.
"Guten Tag." The leutnant leading the group called.
Werner considered the group and nodded his head. "Guten Tag. Willkommen zu meinem Weinberg."
"You are Herr Werner." The leutnant asked, not in the least bit interested if the man owned the vineyard or not.
"Forgive my bluntness, but what do you want Herr Leutnant?"
"We are looking for escaped POWs. Five men. Two or more of them would have been wounded. Two Americans, one Frenchman, one English, and one Russian."
Werner thought for a long time, then finally nodded his head. "I had some food disappear about a week ago, after the big storm came through. There were some tracks near the southern fences. Someone had leaped the fence and tried to break into my smoke house."
The leutnant followed Werner's hand closely as the master of the farm pointed to the south, then to the brick building that was half-hidden behind a bunk house. "You investigated this?" He prompted.
Werner nodded, continuing to keep his speech pattern slow and mildly slurred. Playing the dumb hick to the letter. "Yes. There were no prisoners. Only tracks."
"We will search for ourselves. To ensure your safety." The leutnant said, directing his men to break up in groups of two and search every building on the property.
"Of course." Werner said. He had expected as much, and the hiding places that he and his people had constructed had worked once in the past. He could only hope they would work again. "But try not to break anything." He added, then walked as calmly as possible back into the barn.