“Karl!” I cried. “Are you all right?” There was no answer but his weight on the rope seemed to have increased.
“Let’s get him out of there!” Schulze shouted. Bracing ourselves we hauled on the rope like a pair of madmen. I could hear a strange grating sound as Karl came up.
“Gott im Himmel!” Riedl cried, his face ashen.
We lifted Karl to the ground. Blood was oozing from his breast and he was breathing his last. A four-foot spear with a two-inch-wide blade had been driven into his chest. His eyes were open but he could not speak. Moments later he was dead.
“Sauhunde!” Erich swore. He sprang to the well, his face distorted. Tearing a grenade from his belt he threw it into the well, then staggered away as the blast erupted from down below. He grabbed the spear in Karl’s breast and pulled it free.
“Keep this!” He handed it to Krebitz, who had just arrived panting at Karl’s body. “I will put the blood of a hundred terrorists on this blade,” he cried. “By God, I will!” Taking his kerchief, Riedl wiped the blood from Karl’s face. He was sobbing openly. “We are going, we are all going… Eisner, Schenk, now Karl… we are too few and we are all damned…”
“Shut up, Helmut!” As the news spread, small groups of troopers gathered around us in silence. Sergeant Zeisl and the girls came. Realizing what had happened, Noy uttered a faint cry and collapsed beside Karl. Riedl lifted her and led her away. With his eyes narrowed and his lips set in a savage thin line, Schulze walked back to the well. He flashed his light into the depths, then turned toward me.
“What do you intend to do about it, Hans?”
“We are going to blast them, Erich.”
“Shall I go down to see what we can do?”
“Like hell you will!” I snapped. “We have had enough climbing for today.”
“Now we know what to expect.”
“Not on your life.”
Sergeant Zeisl and the medics laid Karl on an improvised stretcher and covered him with a blanket.
“We will take him into the hills and bury him decently,” I said slowly, then turned to Riedl. “Deploy around every hut, every barn, and every object that might conceal an exit from the tunnel. Open those which the boy spoke of and fill the holes with earth and rubble. No one is to enter any cellar or tunnel. Understood?”
“Understood!”
“Take Noy with you,” I added after a moment. “Take care of her.”
“I will do that, Hans.”
I spoke to Krebitz. “Do you think we can blast the way open from the well?”
“I should first see where to put the charge.”
“That’s out of question. You cannot go down.”
He pursed his lips. “Then it’s going to be difficult, Hans. To blast the entrance we would have to suspend a charge down below, approximately opposite the. opening, then cover up the well to force the blast to work horizontally instead of escaping upward into the open.”
“You may have the whole village to work for you.”
He shook his head. “It is not a question of workmen. The terrorists would cut the rope and drop the charge long before we could cover up the well and prepare for the blasting.”
“What do you suggest then?”
“I can blast a hole down to the tunnel from above.”
“From where?”
“From here—where we are standing. Karl said that the entrance appeared to face the house.”
He walked slowly in the direction of the tunnel, then stopped. “From here!”
“How long will it take?” Schulze queried.
“Who cares?” I said. “We are going to stay right here until we have gotten all those bastards.”
“I should say ninety minutes. It depends on the ground,” Krebitz said.
“Do it then.”
Sergeant Krebitz collected his men and they set to work, digging a shaft. Ten minutes later Krebitz yelled: “Take cover!” An explosion rocked the village; at the well a twisting pillar of smoke spiraled skyward. I went to see the crater. It was about six feet deep and ten feet wide. When the dust settled, the men clambered down to bore another shaft for the subsequent blasting.
With the fourth charge, Krebitz blasted into the tunnel. At the bottom of the now twenty-foot-deep crater we saw a wide jagged hole. Krebitz flung four grenades into the opening, then descended. Keeping clear of the hole, the men of Gruppe Drei set up a flamethrower with its muzzle pointing down into the hole at an angle. Soon a cloud of thick smoke emerged from the crater. Holding on to the ropes, Sergeant Krebitz ascended, coughing and spitting. “Now let’s get out of here just in case the thing is blazing away at an ammo crate,” he yelled.
With hand grenades we demolished every hut that concealed a tunnel exit, then, accompanied by Schulze, I went down to the river. “Now they will either roast alive or swim for it,” Schulze said bitterly.
Back at the hole Sergeant Krebitz installed the second flamethrower that was soon followed by a third one. Suddenly a pair of hands popped to the surface, eighty yards downstream from where we stood. They submerged instantly.
“There they go!” a trooper yelled and cut loose with his submachine gun.
The hunt was on! More hands appeared, singly or in clusters of threes and fours—a couple of heads broke the surface, but stayed in sight for only a fraction of a second. As the guns sprayed the water, Schulze yelled, “Use hand grenades, men! The grenades will bring them up or send them down for good.”
Many of the swimmers escaped the bullets but none survived the subsurface explosions. The grenades were deadly. As the river erupted in a dozen muddy funnels of water the swimmers popped to the surface, many of them dead. Others who suffered internal injuries from the concussions thrashed aimlessly until the machine guns silenced them forever. Twenty yards from where we stood a pair of hands rose from the subsiding waves of a blast; the fingers moved, twisting and grasping like a disembodied pair of ghastly limbs trying to signal. The nearest trooper pivoted his light machine gun toward the easy target. A hail of slugs hit the hands and tore them away at the wrist. The bleeding stumps shook crazily, then sank out of sight. A wounded guerrilla emerged and stood waist-deep in the water with blood oozing from his ears and nostrils; raising his arms he staggered toward the bank; he fell, rose again, crying: “Mercy… mercy.”
An instant later the slugs knocked him back into the water.
One after another the guerrillas surfaced—dazed, shocked, exhausted, unable to swim the corridor of death. A few of them tried to crawl ashore, others just stood in the shallow water dumbfounded or blinded, until the bullets spun them back into their murky graves.
Suddenly there were no more guerrillas in sight. The river flowed peacefully as if nothing had happened.
When the smoke cleared, Sergeant Krebitz surveyed the tunnels, altogether two hundred yards long. It was a well-built complex with several large chambers for stores and sleeping quarters. Krebitz counted three hundred bunks.
Three of the chambers were loaded to capacity with weapons and ammunition. Sergeant Krebitz selected what we could use, then the tunnels were blown up . with delayed-action charges. The explosion tore a thirty-foot-wide and twenty-foot-deep trench across the village; the ensuing air pressure flattened every hut within a radius of five hundred steps in either direction.
None of the villagers had been hurt, except by the sad fact that they had no village to return to, but, alas, c’est la guerre! If one plays with fire, one can burn oneself.
We buried Karl Pfirstenhammer on a hill and placed a heavy boulder over his improvised grave. I sat there for a long time with Noy, telling her of my meeting with Karl on the Danube in 1945; the wine we drank, the fried fish we ate, his clay pipe… his little sister Erika, who was now a young lady, studying to become a doctor. In my kit I had Karl’s wallet with her picture, and it was my gloomy task to write her a letter—the last letter she would receive from Indochina.