Time of Reckoning Read online

  Time of Reckoning

  Walter Wager

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 1977 by Walter Wager

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, email [email protected]

  First Diversion Books edition March 2015

  ISBN: 978-1-62681-644-2

  Also by Walter Wager

  Sledgehammer

  Telefon

  Twilight’s Last Gleaming

  To Martha Winston and Richard Parks, whose taste and charm are surpassed only by their wisdom and diligence.

  Table of Contents

  Author’s Note

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  More from Walter Wager

  Author’s Note

  This is a work of fiction about imaginary people and deeds. Unfortunately, it is inspired by certain terrible acts done by monstrous individuals whose membership in the human species must be a source of embarrassment to almost all of us. There are some—here as well as in the lands that were ruled by the Nazis—who are capable of the same oppression and mass murder today.

  There are also many good people, real ones. Among them is the able Einstein Medical School professor who gave technical advice on drugs, etc., for this book, Dr. Theodore Smith. I hope that I have used it accurately, for he is not only a perfectionist but also my splendid cousin.

  1

  The heat and the stink of the gasoline fumes in the slow-moving tank were—as usual—almost nauseating, and the thirty-cylinder roar of the powerful Chrysler engines didn’t help either.

  “Tinker Bell…Come in, Tinker Bell,” Arbolino chanted angrily into the microphone.

  The awful blast of the 75-millimeter cannon less than a yard away battered his senses like a blow from a baseball bat, punching through his thickly padded headset as if it were a cheap pair of children’s earmuffs. The thirty-six-ton Sherman lurched—just a bit—under the recoil, and Lieutenant J. M. Arbolino braced to avoid banging his head against some goddam piece of metal. He’d commanded this rolling fortress since Patton’s armored fist smashed the German forces ringing Bastogne, and now—four months later and more than three hundred miles into Hitler’s Reich—Arbolino still hadn’t quite figured out how to avoid cracking his head on something.

  He heard the clatter of Stark and Guber reloading the 75, and then—suddenly—the staccato hammering on the hull that always frightened him. His head knew that the three-inch armor could stop the enemy’s 7.92-millimeter machine-gun slugs, but his stomach was never wholly convinced.

  “Ho-ly shit!”

  He couldn’t help it. Arbolino had completed two years at Columbia before the draft grabbed him, but the rude language wasn’t his fault. They all spoke that way in the goddam army, with the exception of Corporal Jerry Jeff Atkins, whose father was a minister in a northern Alabama region so pious that it was known as the Buckle on the Bible Belt. Atkins rarely said anything, but he hummed a lot of swell gospel songs. That’s what he was doing now as he worked the tank’s .30-caliber Browning, punching out four short savage bursts before he silenced the Kraut machine gun firing down from the guard tower.

  That didn’t help Arbolino’s spirits at all. He saw at least five more such towers ringing this side of the camp and—if Intelligence was right for a change—the defenders were those goddam S.S. fanatics.

  “Hacksaw…Hacksaw,” the commander of a nearby Sherman appealed over the radio.

  Arbolino ignored him, called again for the fighter-bombers they’d been promised.

  “Tinker Bell, this is Hacksaw.”

  There was no reply, only crackling static.

  “Panzerfaust, ten o’clock,” Arbolino announced professionally when he spotted the German bazooka unit beside the gate. The thunder of the 75 filled the hull again, and the S.S. antitank team ceased to exist. There would be other crazies rushing out to die senselessly, Arbolino thought grimly. It was plainly Götterdämmerung time in the Ol’ Third Reich, and those goddam P-47s were nowhere in the sky.

  Shiiit.

  “This is Hacksaw…No sign of our wonderful goddam air support, but we don’t need them anyway. Crank ’em up and pick your spots. We’re goin’ in!”

  Arbolino’s tank dismantled the gate, and nine other Shermans bulled their own entrances through the wire fences. The infantry behind them charged through these gaps and—in the great tradition of ground forces under fire—gunned almost everything that moved. The tanks helped, but it was the frantic, panting foot soldiers who had to snuff out the snipers and the idiot holdouts and the suicidal Wagner fans who charged out tossing grenades. The fighting was savage and bloody. When the surviving S.S. finally stood with their arms raised in a sullen herd, Arbolino sighed and led his crew out of the cramped misery of the massive metal box.

  There was something wrong with this place.

  Something that he couldn’t name spooked the young lieutenant, and there was a strange nasty taste in Arbolino’s mouth as he stood up in the commander’s hatch, his fingers gripping the handle on the swivel-mounted .50 as if the heavy machine gun were some sort of icon.

  The rest of the crew climbed down, stretched and mumbled as they always did. Cotler took a leak—as he always did. The kid from Ardsley was a first-class driver, but his kidneys weren’t really cut out for pushing a tank that couldn’t do more than twenty-two or twenty-three miles an hour. Atkins stood up front, sipping water from a canteen in his left hand while his right held the carbine that he “wore” like a watch. The thin country boy carried that weapon everywhere, and the others kidded him about that. They weren’t joking now. It was as if they all sensed that there was something creepy here.

  Arbolino saw them first.

  “Jeezus,” he said and he swung the machine gun as if they were a threat.

  They weren’t.

  There were scores of them—gaunt, ravaged, shuffling scarecrows in tattered uniforms. Not S.S. uniforms, something very different. Men, women and children with dazed-crazed eyes moved warily around the corner of a nearby wooden building. The human tide inched forward toward the tank, hesitated and stared. Arbolino had never seen such desperation as that frozen on those faces, and he told this to Captain McInerney when the intelligence officer drove up in a jeep a moment later.

  “What the hell’s going on here, Mac?”

  “It’s a murder fact
ory, a slaughterhouse!”

  McInerney’s frowning driver shook his head. “Nah, I worked two years in a slaughterhouse,” he said in a choked voice. “I never seen anything like this in my whole life.”

  Arbolino pointed at the gaunt, frightened herd. “Mac, who are these people?”

  The intelligence officer didn’t answer.

  “In my whole life,” insisted his driver hoarsely.

  It was crazy, like some weird fugue or a film whose sound track had slipped out of sync.

  “They butchered thousands every week,” McInerney suddenly announced in that flat Boston accent. “Men—women—kids. Thousands and thousands! Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”

  “Why?”

  It was obvious that McInerney hadn’t even heard the question.

  “They starved them, shot them, gassed them—burned them like cordwood,” he half-screamed. “Dante’s inferno—go see for yourself!”

  Arbolino walked back to his crew, told them what the intelligence officer had said and gave the order. “Mount up.”

  Cotler climbed back inside to drive, and Arbolino took up his position at the .50 again. The others sat on or hung on to the hull as the big tank crawled forward. The mob of gaunt prisoners drew back in naked fear. The Sherman clattered past them, moved on into the center of the camp. There was the building where the Nazis gassed people, a lanky infantryman from Baltimore explained helpfully, and that was the place where the bodies were incinerated like garbage.

  “Thousands?” tested the tank commander.

  The foot soldier nodded.

  “Every week?”

  The rifleman’s helmeted head bobbed again, and the tankers looked at each other in silent shock.

  “Hundred fifty, maybe two hundred thousand, I hear,” the infantry sergeant said. “There’s a whole damn pit full of bodies down beyond them barracks.”

  They reached it ninety seconds later. It was just as the NCO had said.

  There was a huge hole in the ground, longer than a football field and half as wide.

  It was filled with corpses.

  Hundreds and hundreds of those pitifully thin bodies—more than a thousand, for sure—lay piled and intertwined. It might have been more than two thousand, Arbolino thought. There was no way to count this, no way to cope with the incredible impact of this nightmare vista.

  Stark began to shake, and then he threw up. He had three Purple Hearts for wounds taken in North Africa and Normandy, and he had a Bronze Star he’d earned in the Ardennes—and he kept vomiting. He’d never seen anything like this.

  At that moment the lieutenant noticed the child. He hadn’t seen him approach, but suddenly he was there—a little desperate boy of three or four in scraps of cloth. He whispered something, and Guber understood.

  “He’s hungry,” translated the gunner.

  The child raised his left hand, pointed to his upper arm. There was a number on it, tattooed. The tankers gave him the bars of bitter chocolate from the emergency rations in the Sherman, and he ate ravenously, chewing blindly like an animal. The Americans watched him, and Atkins offered the boy his canteen. In a little while the child stopped drinking and politely returned the metal flask. Guber asked him a question, and the boy pointed to the pit.

  “His parents are in there, lieutenant.”

  Arbolino swore, and then the child pointed again, at the building behind them. Corporal Jerry Jeff Atkins reacted first, swiftly and instinctively. His carbine pointed at the second-floor window, snapped. The S.S. sniper tumbled out, and the Alabama country youth’s weapon sounded twice more. The bullets tore at the falling body, confirming those years of duck-hunting experience. Atkins lowered the carbine, bent down awkwardly to put his arm around the little boy. He tried to comfort the child, and he did his best to fight back the tears that furrowed the dust on his face.

  It was Atkins who wept, who hummed his gospel song and cried. The three-year-old just looked at them from somewhere inside his head, watching with the gutted eyes of a burned-out old man.

  “Hacksaw, this is Tinker Bell,” squawked the radio.

  Arbolino glanced up, saw the dots moving in from the horizon. “Seven…eight…nine,” he counted aloud.

  The goddam air support had arrived.

  2

  There’s no official record of exactly what Captain McInerney said over the radio that gray afternoon, but somebody back at division must have believed him, because the ambulances and trucks loaded with food arrived just after dawn the next morning. They drove all night, a big convoy of more than a hundred vehicles. The medics and the GIs and the cooks surveyed the incredible situation swiftly, went to work at once. They did an excellent job, even if they were too late to save ninety-eight of the ex-prisoners who died quietly of hunger and disease in the dark hours.

  The general reached the camp at noon. Three silver stars, pearl-handled pistols and balls of brass. The toughest son of a bitch on wheels—that’s how he had once described himself to a snotty Time magazine reporter on the eve of the Normandy breakout, and he wasn’t kidding. He wasn’t joking now either. He arrived in a covey of armored cars and goggled motorcycle outriders, jumped out of the staff car before his aide could open the door.

  “Let’s hear it,” he ordered bluntly.

  A stocky major stepped forward to report.

  “No bullshit,” warned the general as his eyes swept the scene.

  “No, sir.”

  The major told what had happened, how Arbolino had led the armored attack to the edge of the camp and spearheaded the final thrust through the enemy defenses.

  “Get him.”

  Somebody found the young lieutenant, and he tried to stand strong and tall as he described the previous day’s battle. It wasn’t easy, for he hadn’t been able to sleep.

  “So you were the point, and you decided you weren’t going to wait for the air support?” the general challenged.

  “That’s it, sir.”

  “And who the hell gave you the authority to ignore orders, sonny?”

  Arbolino looked at him with red-ringed eyes, fought down a yawn and resisted an impulse to hit him.

  “Nobody gave it to me. I took it. It goes with these,” the lieutenant said, pointing to the gold bar on his left shoulder.

  The general grinned—the big one that those Stars and Stripes photographers loved. “Bet your ass it does,” he agreed.

  “The air support was late, sir,” Arbolino added. He couldn’t quite understand why the general was smiling.

  “The goddam air support’s always late,” the general said, then jerked one finger at his aide. “Get the goddam box. We’ve found ourselves a gen-u-wine goddam soldier.”

  Arbolino was wearing a new Bronze Star fifty seconds later when the general asked that he guide him around the camp.

  “Me, sir?”

  “Why not? You took it. It’s yours.”

  Now the general noticed the pitifully thin child who stood a few feet behind the lieutenant, who hadn’t left Arbolino’s side since they’d met at the pit.

  “Can I bring him, sir? They killed his parents, and he’s sort of adopted me. He’s scared, general.”

  “Bring him.”

  They drove around the camp slowly in the staff car, with a radio command truck tagging along as it always did. When they emerged from the crematorium, the aide reported a message from a Colonel Duckingham—he’d halted his armored task force until the infantry trucks could catch up.

  “Tell that dumb shit to keep moving!”

  The aide translated smoothly with a speed born of experience. “Please radio Colonel Duckingham that it’s imperative that he continue the advance according to schedule,” he told the communications sergeant.

  The general didn’t utter another word for the next forty minutes. He had a reputation as a man who talked freely—sometimes too freely—but he didn’t speak again until they’d completed the grisly tour.

  “This isn’t the only butcher shop,” he told Arbolino fiercel
y when they’d seen it all. “The British took one just as bad at a place called Belsen, and there are more the Russians found. Do you know what those Krauts who lived near the Belsen camp told the British?”

  Arbolino shook his head.

  “Said they had no idea this sort of thing was going on—no fucking idea. Well, they’re not going to pull that crap on me,” the general vowed.

  He turned to his aide again. “Marty, I want all those food trucks emptied—fast. Send every one of them into the nearest town, and bring the whole crowd out here. Everybody—every goddam man, woman and child from thirteen to a hundred and thirty. I want those innocent bastards to see this.”

  There was chaos in the town of Dachau when the trucks first arrived, and the mayor protested indignantly and made several references to the Geneva Convention until a certain Captain Begelman—whose father was a lawyer in Akron—explained that the general was an angry, ruthless man who might well order the entire community bombed into rubble. That would come after all the adult males had been machinegunned in the main square, an event that would be preceded by the hanging of the mayor. Of course the general hadn’t said any of those things, but Begelman had a flair for the theatrical.

  The convoys rolled back and forth between Dachau and the death camp all afternoon and late into the night, and resumed the next morning at first light. The last truckloads of stunned civilians were at the gas chambers early that afternoon when Arbolino’s tank detachment received orders to move.

  East.

  Fast.

  They were to help mop up the last remnants of enemy resistance, to hammer their way through to meet the advancing Soviet juggernaut that was grinding west across Czechoslovakia. The Russians had already taken a burning Berlin after bloody street fighting, Captain McInerney told Arbolino.

  “They say Hitler’s dead,” he reported.

  “Whoopee,” Arbolino replied sarcastically.

  “Don’t you give a damn?”

  The tank commander shrugged, gestured to Stark to climb into the Sherman. “I give a damn about this kid,” he said, nodding toward the nearby child.