Voices of the dead

Harry drove the curved tip of the shovel into the soft ground, levered the handle back and brought out a shovel full of dirt. Dug down a foot or so, didn’t find anything, and moved along the edge of the clearing covered with grass, leaves and pine needles. Was he in the right place? There was no way to be sure. The scenery looked different than he remembered it. The trees, mostly pines, were taller, and far in the distance was a factory, a series of low-slung buildings and an asphalt parking lot filled with cars, spread out on what might’ve once been farmland. It was the open angle, the view beyond the forest that seemed vaguely familiar. One hundred yards from where he was standing was a steel chain-link fence marking the perimeter of the property.

He tried to picture the pit, tried to calculate where it was in relation to the tree line. Harry moved along the edge of the clearing, went ten feet out and sunk the shovel in the soil again. Dug a hole a foot and a half deep. Nothing. Now he went out farther from the tree line, drove the shovelhead into the ground, dug down and hit something. It felt like a root. He cleared the earth around it, and wedged the tip of the shovel under it and it came up, a stick caked with dirt. He bent down and picked it up. But it wasn’t a stick. He wiped it on the grass to clean it and now recognized it as a human bone, a piece of a leg, one end brittle, decayed.

Harry dug around the hole, clearing more dirt, making it bigger and deeper, found a stained, tattered piece of cloth, part of a striped Dachau uniform-the number 027 still legible. But now he felt guilty for disturbing the grave of his parents and so many others. Filled in the hole and scattered leaves and pine needles over it.

He moved back toward the tree line, heard the hum of a motor, looked up, saw the Zeppelin coming in just over the treetops, casting a shadow, man with a gun in the open window of the gondola. He dropped the shovel and ran.

Rausch told the pilot to go in as low as he could. He saw Harry Levin at the edge of the trees, a clearing behind him, holding a shovel, and fired a burst from the silenced machine gun, rounds chewing up bark, blowing off branches, Levin running and disappearing in the forest.

The airship spun around, hovering and then gliding back the way they had come, Rausch scanning the ground, looking for any sign of movement. The gun felt good in his hands like it was part of him. He saw Levin appear from behind a tree, emptied the magazine, ejected it, popped in a fresh one, racked it and kept firing, pieces of bark and branches flying. They hovered and waited. He looked down, the floor of the gondola littered with shell casings.

They glided south fifty meters, Rausch and a spotter next to him with binoculars, looking for any sign of movement. He did not see anything. The Zeppelin drifted east and then north, circling back around to where they had started.

He directed the pilot to go west and south this time, making another circle, gliding over treetops. Nothing moved. And now Rausch believed he had shot Harry Levin and Levin was somewhere down there wounded, or more likely, dead. The only way to be sure of course was to land the airship and search the area. They flew back to the clearing. The airship went down close to the ground. Rausch jumped out with the machine gun and went into the woods.

Harry had been lucky, that’s all there was to it. There were trees to take cover behind, trees to hide him as high-velocity rounds tore up everything around him. It had all happened so fast he hardly had enough time to react. The Zeppelin circled around a couple of times, Harry burrowing half under a fallen tree trunk. It continued on, going north, and disappeared. He got up and hid behind a giant oak tree, gripping the Colt in his right hand.

He looked in the direction the Zeppelin had gone and thought he saw something, and then did, someone coming toward him, moving through the trees, a dark shape carrying a machine gun on a strap around his neck, holding it with two hands across his chest. Harry went down on his knees. The man, dressed in casual attire, like he was going out to dinner and a movie, passed right by, and Harry recognized Rausch.

When the bodyguard disappeared from view Harry took off, went back toward the clearing, taking cover just inside the tree line. He saw the Zeppelin hovering about ten feet off the ground over the grave site.

Twenty minutes later the bodyguard returned, got back on the airship, and Harry watched it rise up over the trees, heading for Munich. This time he was reasonably sure it wasn’t coming back.