Blackbone (3 page)

Hopkins zipped up his fur-lined jacket and slogged back to headquarters, glancing through the fence to see what the Germans were up to. A little volleyball, a little schmoozing, a lot of walking around and staring at each other. Same as always. They never did anything unusual. Smoke curled from the stack in the rec hut, and he could see Germans hanging around the front porch. He glanced up at the nearest perimeter guard post. The man in the tower had one leg up on the railing and a hand on his machine gun. Ready but relaxed.

A rabbit cut across Hopkins’ path and paused to stare at the Germans. Hopkins laughed, then made as if to grab it. The rabbit took off. Maybe it didn’t like the Germans, but it had no use for Hopkins either. Hopkins walked on, scratching flakes off the back of his head and making a mental note to get on the quartermaster’s ass about some decent shampoo. Maybe he could heist it from the Germans’ Red Cross packages. They were always getting useful crap like that. The larcenous possibility pleased him. He chuckled to himself, then thought about his leave. He had a couple of weeks coming—a chance to get the hell out of this backwoods Antarctica and go someplace warm and sunny, with hot and cold running women. Oh, Christ, women. He hadn’t seen a real tit in months. Just those magazines that Private Carlton kept getting from his uncle in Jersey. Oh, for those two goddamned weeks and a chance to catch up on his sex life. He closed his eyes and stood rock-still for a moment, and there in the bitter cold, with an icy breeze tickling his nose and lips, he thought of the most beautiful woman he had ever laid eyes on and what it would be like to have his hands on her right now, this minute....

A rush of cold air cut through his thoughts. He sighed and moved along. Fat chance about leave. Not with the new commandant reporting in today. Hopkins wondered about him. Would he be like the last C.O.—easygoing, disinterested, quiet, keep-to-himself Major Mancroft?

What a cushy deal that had been! Hopkins smiled, remembering Mancroft closeted with his books, his black-market liquor, and his classical music, venturing out once a day to inspect the camp, but leaving Hopkins to run things. Would the new C.O. be the same?

The scuttlebutt sounded good. Major Gilman. New York boy, prep schools, Dartmouth. Volunteered for service before the war, went through OCS, got his command just as the war got under way. Hopkins had peeked at his dossier, but he didn’t have the latest information. Rumor had it that Gilman screwed up in France and lost a whole battalion. Rumor aside, the end result was clear: Gilman was relieved of command, busted a grade, and shipped back stateside. The assignment to Blackbone was clearly a punishment. Gilman would probably spend his entire tour hiding his head, doing as little as possible.

Fine with Hopkins, but he did find it curious that the camp C.O.s were always losers. Take the last one—Mancroft. Fucked up some things for a general, got himself blown out of a cushy desk job, ended up here a burnt-out case with Hopkins holding everything together. Hopkins shook his head—you really had to be a colossal screw-up to get the top job here.

But what if Major Gilman came boiling in and tried to toss his weight around? Hopkins sniffed and smiled. The climate and the independence of the MPs would put him in his place. Hopkins could just go on being Hopkins, the man in charge.

He entered headquarters, called the clerks to attention, and ran a brisk inspection. The jeep bringing Gilman from his train was due in thirty minutes.

Blackbone Military Detention Facility was little more than a compound of barracks-type huts, surrounded by a chain link fence topped with barbed wire. There were guard posts at intervals around the perimeter—tiny open huts atop wood scaffolding. The support huts, housing the American MPs, were no different from the prisoners’ accommodations. The MPs were assigned to guard more than two hundred German prisoners of war, all of them commissioned officers captured in Europe and shipped to the States for internment. There were other camps around the country, many of them more comfortable than Blackbone. Noncommissioned officers were sent to work camps in sunny California, where they spent the rest of the war picking oranges. Most of the field-grade troublemakers ended up at Blackbone, where there was little to do but think.

The camp was backed up against a hill that contained a played-out silver mine. Behind it loomed Blackbone Mountain. Rugged, sparsely forested, steep and gloomy, it was the most lifeless hunk of real estate in the Little Belt Range, stuck away in a corner of Meagher County, Montana. It was isolated fifty miles from the nearest town, which was the railroad stop at White Sulphur Springs. There was nowhere to go on a weekend pass, so none were handed out. In winter, the MPs couldn’t even go hunting: the animals were smart enough not to hang around. Everybody—Americans as well as Germans—wanted out. So when it snowed—frequently—and it got Wet and freezing cold, tempers would grow short. The Americans would look to the source of their misery, and the Germans would gird their loins for a dose of bad treatment.

Most of it was tolerated with mute approval by Hopkins. But he liked it even better when he started it himself. In his tour of duty at Blackbone, he had evolved into a master of subtle indignities, which he enjoyed inflicting on his prisoners with what he called “the velvet touch.” He would go out of his way to make them uncomfortable while leading them to believe he was sympathetic. They wanted better rations—he got them canned beets and rhubarb, grits and black-eyed peas, porridge and lard, hardtack and matzos. They asked for meat—they got hog jowls, chitlins, and gizzards. They requested reading matter—they got Spanish-language newspapers, government form letters, and old laundry tickets. When they complained of rats and vermin, Hopkins sent them a large cooking pot.

His favorite trick was roll call. He would wait till it was pouring rain or there was a blizzard going, then he would roust the Germans and, from the protection of a covered jeep, slowly and haltingly call the roll. His tongue would tie itself in knots over names like von Lechterhoeven and Schliechenvaldmer. If the Germans protested, he would immediately inflict something worse.

The Germans had resigned themselves to Hopkins. Nevertheless, their morale had hit bottom long before Major Mancroft was transferred. The news that a replacement was coming had little effect. They figured it would still be Hopkins on the throne.

Christmas was coming, and it would be Major Walter Steuben’s second at Blackbone, an anniversary he was not looking forward to. He stepped out on the rec-hut porch and lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and scanned the camp. The volleyball game was breaking up. Some of the men were running in place to continue the exercise. There was some spirited joking, but that faded quickly, replaced by the usual gloom that settled in when nothing was happening.

Steuben thought about organizing another perimeter patrol: the men had responded to the last one enthusiastically. They had stripped to their underwear, lined up in two ranks, and marched around the camp, just inside the warning wire, singing
“Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles
...” and thumbing their noses at the MPs. The men needed something like that to unite them.

Steuben was the senior German officer and as such had appointed himself guardian of the general morale. But he hardly felt successful at it. He glanced back into the rec hut. There was a fast game of poker going on inside. His men had learned at least one vice from the Americans. And they would gamble with anything on hand: pine cones, pebbles, even dried rabbit turds.

Steuben reached inside his open coat and scratched the rash at his groin. Everybody in the camp had something that the medics couldn’t treat. Lice they could handle, but crotch rot, athlete’s foot, acne, and anything related to a vitamin deficiency went practically untreated. At least they ate regularly, but oh, God, what they ate. Steuben winced, remembering last night’s culinary masterpiece. Pork something something, with some horrid greens that could not have grown on any land Steuben had ever seen. His chefs, three German noncoms imported from another camp, were hard-pressed to deal with some of the odd groceries supplied by Hopkins. They always managed to serve something, but not everyone managed to eat it. In the quiet moments before falling asleep, just as his eyes were about to close, Steuben would be haunted by memories of restaurants and beer gardens and cafes, and wonderful meals and marvelous wines.... Then it would be hours before sleep caught him.

Something was happening on the other side of the fence. MPs were running out of the barracks and forming up near the headquarters hut. Steuben drew on the nub of his cigarette, then flicked it into a patch of snow. He crossed the yard and headed up the slope to the fence. Others joined him. Bruckner came up, leading his mutt on a rope leash.

“What do you suppose?” Bruckner said, his eyes moving furtively.

Hopkins came out of headquarters briskly, wearing a clean uniform, sparkling like a tin soldier. He called the ranks of MPs to attention and yelled at them for a few moments.

Several of the Germans looked at Steuben. “New commandant is coming,” Steuben said. “Should be arriving any minute.” Automatically, Steuben buttoned up his coat, then sent someone to fetch his cap.

Bruckner looked at his dog. It was sniffing the ground, lapping at a puddle of melted snow. Always drinking, that dog. Bruckner worried that it suffered from dehydration. It was a mongrel—no wonder. One could expect sickness in an impure animal. But he had grown attached to the little bastard. They were inseparable. Leutnant Hans Bruckner was thin and pinch-faced, and his dog was the opposite, broad and puglike. Bruckner kept a little stick in his pocket and, whenever MPs were in the camp, he would throw the stick. The dog would fetch it and come back with the stick wedged in a corner of its mouth like a cigar, and Bruckner would call out loudly, “Here, Churchill!” The MPs, if they had never heard it before, would stop in their tracks and look around and, when they realized the joke, they would laugh with Bruckner. But Bruckner had only pulled that gag once around Hopkins. Hopkins had threatened to kill the dog and make Bruckner eat it.

Everyone fell silent as a jeep appeared around the back bend and roared up the road.

Dortmunder returned with Steuben’s cap, which he quickly put on. Then he clasped his hands behind his back and stepped in front of the growing crowd of prisoners. He stood stiffly, watching the jeep come to a stop near the line of MPs.

The officer who got out of the jeep looked to be in his early thirties, seasoned and muscular, with angular features that stood out sharply. As the jeep slewed around and shot toward headquarters, the officer stood alone for a moment, his stocky body taut as he surveyed the camp. Steuben knew immediately this was no
dummkopf.
This one looked
kräftig.

Major David Gilman’s gaze skimmed past the MPs to take in the entire camp. The isolation, the cold, the soldiers lined up—all instantly reminded him of France and the Second Battalion. He wanted to call that jeep back, leap in and drive on, just go off into the mountains and lose himself. This was his first command since the battalion, and he had been dreading it all through the cross-country train ride. He wanted to be anywhere but facing a bunch of soldiers who would be looking to him for their welfare.

Then the captain was walking toward him, and it was too late to run.

“Captain Hopkins reporting, sir. Welcome to Blackbone.”

Gilman returned the salute. “Major Gilman, Captain.”

Hopkins grinned and stuck out his hand—the gesture was openly informal and seemed to say, Let’s show the men that you and I are gonna be pals.

Gilman made no move to acknowledge the gesture until Hopkins’ grin faded, then Gilman gripped his hand. Thereafter, Hopkins was in an uncertain mood.

Gilman rushed through the formalities of assuming command. Hopkins called the MPs to attention, and they ran a quick inspection.

Gilman came to the end of the first rank and realized he hadn’t looked a single one of these soldiers in the eye. He had stared at their boots, their belt buckles and buttons, but not their faces. He did the second rank less quickly, forcing himself to display some humanity, some interest, though doing so only made him anxious.

This was not going to be easy. He kept seeing those faces in France. Second Battalion.

He returned to position himself in front of the men. Hopkins stood before him stiffly. Gilman looked past him, through the fence at the row of Germans lined up behind the warning wire. He stared at them and for a moment the MPs didn’t exist: there was only David Gilman and a bunch of Germans, the enemy.... Some feeling he didn’t understand welled up inside him. Gilman thought it might be hate, but it felt more like despair.

He caught Hopkins staring at him. The captain’s face betrayed nothing, but what had he seen in Gilman’s eyes? Fear? Terror? Weakness? Gilman didn’t give him a chance to think about it.

“I’d like to tour the camp, Captain.”

“Wouldn’t you rather get settled first, sir?”

“I’m settled just dandy. Let’s go have a look at those Germans.”

They went through the gate—Gilman, Hopkins, and four MPs. It was closed, chained, and padlocked after them. They went down the slope and were met by Steuben and Bruckner.

Ignoring Bruckner, Hopkins introduced Steuben. “Major Gilman, this is the senior Nazi officer at Blackbone, Major Walter Steuben.”

“German officer,
Captain Hopkins,” Steuben said, matching the precise inflection of hostility that Hopkins had directed at him. “As I have reminded you many times, the Nazis are a political party of which I am not a member. I am an officer of the Wehrmacht. I realize it’s difficult for you, but please make that distinction.”