Posted As Missing

Chapter Seventeen

"Two soldiers. Probably searching for Herzog's gun. Back inside ladies. Look around carefully. Make sure there is no trace of us. I'll grab the blanket, Maria the towels, Rachel the soap over there by the pool. What else is there?"

Once they were back inside, David said, "The shelter is completely invisible from over there. The gully looks impassible from the corner. The ledge is tricky, and it offers no temptation to continue unless you're seeking a perfect hiding place and a delightful spa."

"What's a spa?" Maria asked as they began dressing. "I love the way you flip your trousers to flop your penis inside."

"Mineral springs, hot springs. The relaxation and health resort built around them. We have some fine ones in the Rockies. Radium Hot Springs just starting. Banff Springs Hotel, such a marvellous place, an immense castle-like hotel built up in the mountains. I was there at an Alpine Club event two or three years ago."

"This would be a much better spa if Fritz would go away," Rachel said, as she leaned against the base of the rock face. "There's a town in eastern Belgium named Spa, I was told that's where the name comes from. Here, they're called baden. This whole area of Germany we're in is the Grand Duchy of Baden. There's a town north of Freiburg, I guess it's a city, named Baden-Baden."

"Baden, those are baths in English, aren't they? We went down through Bath on our way to Bristol a couple of times on leave when we were training on the Salisbury Plains. Stopped there for a night the second time. They said the Romans established baths there in the first century, eighteen or nineteen hundred years ago."

"Looks like we're not the first ones to enjoy bathing and luxuriating," Maria said with a laugh.

"Probably goes back thous..." He paused, put his hand up, then pointed to the gabbro block, toward the entrance to the gully.

They heard the scraping again. David reached across for the weapon, flipped off its safety and sat at the edge of the triangle. Relaxed, but ready.

"Helmut! Helfen, helfen Sie mir. Ich schlüpfe," came a desperate voice from close in front of them. There was a louder scraping, a scream, a hollow crack, a dull thud and a splash, followed by a clatter of falling rocks below.

David had quickly glanced out around the block of gabbro, sensing the source of the voice would be too concerned to see him. He saw the soldier hanging by his fingertips to the edge of the ledge below the bulge, on the slippery wet rocks in the splash of the waterfall. Then he had watched as the fingers lost their grips. First, one slowly, then another, followed quickly by all of them. He watched as a trouser leg snagged on a spike of rock just into the fall and spun soldier sideways, slamming his head onto the lip of the slab before he disappeared.

"Horst!" came the cry from below. "Horst! Mein Gott! Horst, nicht du auch."

David sat at the edge and listened, staring intently at the entrance ledge with one eye barely around the corner of the rock. He ran the scenes of the past several minutes through his mind.

Then he repeated them quietly for the women to hear, "I had seen only two soldiers below when I was at the corner, but I had taken little time to look. Horst had called for help from Helmut, not from anyone else. Is that Helmut below us now? Or is Helmut on the entrance ramp? I've heard no other voices, heard no other sounds. Is that Helmut below?"

Before either of them could answer, there was a loud, breaking voice from below, bellowing up the hillside, telling whoever that Private Smidt was dead, that he needed help to bring up the body.

There was no reply, his voice most likely lost in the noise of the continuing target practice. A minute later, with still no reply, the voice from below bellowed again, then they heard loud sobbing.