‘I’ve got no bright ideas, sir,’ said Claussen. ‘I don’t know this country at all, but’ – he paused, looking back over his shoulder – ‘that platoon is coming up behind us. We might tag along with them. Safety in numbers.’ The trucks clanked past, open-topped and filled with soldiers, some of whom glanced over at them incuriously, and Reinhardt nodded at Claussen.
The sergeant accelerated the kubelwagen after them, keeping a short way back as the road wound along the steep sides of the hills along the south bank of the Drina. Ahead, one of the soldiers flicked his cigarette butt out into the road, where it bounced and sparked. Reinhardt followed it as it rolled to the side of the road and saw movement out of the corner of his eye behind them. Shifting in his seat to look back down the road, he saw a flash of grey through the trees.
‘Trouble?’ asked Claussen, as he straightened in his seat.
‘I think those motorcycles are behind us.’
Claussen glanced into the kubelwagen’s wing mirrors. Reinhardt could hear them after a moment, the high pitch of their engines getting louder and louder. ‘It’s those two, sure enough,’ said Claussen, tightly. He shifted the car to the side of the road and waved them by. They went past in a surge of noise and dust, the rider of each sidecar holding on to a mounted machine gun. The second one seemed to pause, just a moment, the passenger’s eyes lost behind his goggles as he looked at them. Reinhardt went cold, a chill erupting all over him as he forced himself to remain still, and then the motorcycles were onto the road ahead of them. Reinhardt’s breath came short and high as he waited for them to stop, to pull them over, but they caught up to the trucks, weaved around them, and were gone.
Claussen puffed out a breath and exchanged a wry look with him. Reinhardt laughed, an explosive release of tension, and Claussen laughed back. The sergeant shook his head. ‘Like geese before Christmas, the pair of us,’ he snorted. Ahead and below them, a cluster of buildings stood inside a tight bend in the Drina, the river flowing up from the south and swinging sharply to the east. A road wound out of a steep-sided valley ahead of them and split, one fork continuing south on the far bank of the river, another crossing the Drina over a stone bridge. From here, they could see that the crossroads was busy, vehicles backed up on all three of its forks.
‘Not out of the woods yet, seems like,’ muttered Claussen as he followed the trucks down into the town, which, apart from the military traffic through it, seemed abandoned.
‘Listen, Claussen, if it goes bad, you say you knew nothing. Understood? You were just following my orders to drive me here.’
Claussen did not look back at him. ‘Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it, shall we, sir?’ he said, as he braked behind the last truck. They moved forward slowly, the soldiers in the truck in front engrossed in a card game, and Reinhardt’s nervousness grew as they crawled through the town and then over the bridge. They could see the checkpoint up ahead on the far side: sandbagged machine gun emplacements, a half-track, a tent with a radio mast. ‘Here they come,’ said Claussen, softly. A Feldgendarme walked up to the cab of the truck in front, said something to the driver, then waved it on. The truck pulled away, following the others as they went south. Reinhardt saw what he took to be one of the two motorcycles with its crew parked by the tent as the Feldgendarme waved them up, standing in front of a block of concrete placed in the road at the end of the bridge.
‘Papers.’ The Feldgendarme’s eyes were hard and focused under the brim of his helmet. He checked their documents, then handed them back. ‘Very well, proceed.’
Claussen pulled away, then paused as a convoy began passing in front of them. A space opened up between a truck and a pair of Kettenkrad half-tracks, and at a nod from Reinhardt, Claussen slipped the kubelwagen into the convoy. Reinhardt craned his neck to look in the mirror but saw no one at the checkpoint paying any attention to them, and then it was gone. He breathed out and exchanged a look with Claussen. The sergeant shrugged, no words needing to be said, the release of tension almost palpable.
The road ran almost due south here, clinging to the steep western bank of the Drina, the river flowing up from Montenegro down a narrow gorge thick with trees. The tarred road petered out soon after Brod, becoming a dirt track the engineers had resurfaced and reinforced in places. The trucks lifted plumes of white dust into the air, and Reinhardt and Claussen were soon covered in it until the sergeant was able to overtake them, and then the road was open to them, unrolling before them like a ribbon in twists and turns around the sides of the gorge. It was midafternoon, now, and very hot.
Reinhardt had no idea how far they would have to drive to find the 121st. If the unit was still in Predelj, it was about a dozen kilometres or so south of Brod, but on these roads that could take well over an hour. Thinking about it, he saw the first signs of fighting. A pair of burned-out trucks, a swath of forest that looked like it had been shelled, and farther on a chunk of earth gouged from the embankment that looked like it had been mined. As the road swung around the flank of the gorge, he saw, far off over the humped back of a ridge, plumes of smoke rising up into the sky and a spotter plane, a Storch, scribing tight circles over the hills. It swooped up, and moments later it seemed there was a shiver in the air, studs of light along the underside of the smoke as an artillery barrage came down. Seconds later came a ripple of noise, the crackle of explosions.
Claussen snaked around a big crater, and there was more wreckage by the roadside. Down in the trees above the river the back end of a half-track poked up from a cradle of bent and burned trees. Houses appeared, ones, twos, a ruined hamlet that still smoked, and then there, in the road, a Feldgendarmerie motorcycle with a trooper hunched over the foreshortened barrel of a machine gun. A second Feldgendarme stood in the road. As Claussen braked hard, Reinhardt spotted two more behind the cover of a low wall. He watched the Feldgendarme walk up to them. The man’s MP 40 was held in both hands, not exactly aiming at them, but not turned away either. He looked at them expressionlessly, eyes tracking from one to the other.
‘Pull the car over there.’
‘What is the problem, Sergeant?’ asked Reinhardt, putting an emphasis on the man’s rank and holding his eyes. He was scared, again. From his breast pocket, he took Thallberg’s paper naming him a GFP auxiliary.
‘No problem. Sir. Over there, please.’
‘Better.’
Claussen drove slowly to the side of the road and parked by the Feldgendarme behind the wall, the machine gunner on the sidecar following them all the way. ‘Out of the car,’ one of them snapped.
‘What the hell is going on?’ demanded Reinhardt, rising up in his seat.
There was a metallic rattle as the Feldgendarmes levelled their MP 40s at them. ‘Out. Now.’ Reinhardt and Claussen exchanged glances and stepped out of the car. ‘Hands up.’
‘I am with the GFP, Sergeant.’
‘Shut up. And get your hands up.’ The sergeant took the paper, gave the order to disarm them, and then at gunpoint ordered them up a narrow track towards a house. Farther up the path, across an open patch of ground, was another cluster of houses, with men lined up in front of it who had the hunch-shouldered look of prisoners, but that was neither here nor there as the Feldgendarmes pushed them inside, and face to face with Becker.