I’d come back to Germany for a reunion with my NATO unit. In the early 80’s, we’d been assigned to bury nuclear land mines in the Fulda Gap if war broke out. The Reagan administration had just come to power, and they had a load of techno hawks gung-ho about using tactical nuclear weapons in battlefield situations. There’d been genuine fear the tank superiority of Warsaw Pact forces would enable them to overwhelm NATO defenses along the German border. An invasion route since the Roman Era, the Fulda Gap offered the best place for mechanized divisions to operate, the only spot in the rugged midsection of Germany where the land softened into gently rolling country.
I’d been a staff sergeant with the 11thArmored Cavalry Regiment based at Fulda, but attached to a special service division that operated in conjunction with the 22ndPanzergrenadier headquartered in Brocken. Out the barracks window I could see the looming hulk of the Brockenberg whenever the weather cleared which hadn’t been often. The tallest peak in the Harz Mountains, I’d always wanted to climb it, but the summit was in East German territory, and bristled with radar domes and watch towers. I’ve seen the Berlin Wall. The two mile long wall the Soviets built around Brockenberg’s summit was taller and more heavily guarded.
My old pals in the Panzergrenadier had rented all the rooms at the biggest inn in the village of Schierke just below the Brockenberg for our get together. They’d even invited a bunch of Ruskies who’d once upon a time looked down on us from their mountain watchtowers. We planned to party hearty through the night then climb the mountain the following morning. Now that the narrow gauge railway was running again it would be a short hike so it wouldn’t matter so much if we were hung-over.
Everyone in these parts goes a little crazy near the autumnal equinox. There’s a Harvest Moon Festival when all the locals get blasted on the night of the full moon. They have for centuries. In days of old, they used to decorate trees with candles. Sometimes they’d even strap someone to a tree trunk and torch him in a Burning Man Ceremony. Goethe immortalized the festivities here by having the witches in Faust hold an orgiastic Sabbath atop the Broekenberg. Mussorgsky helped too. The natives getting estatic and insane over September’s equinox inspired his Night on Bald Mountain concerto. Small wonder considering the way mists and cloud cover clinging to the mountains midsection can make a climber’s shadow appear as a wraith rising up from below. I suppose even Disney had a hand in the legend with that scene from Fantasia set to the ominous strains of Mussorgsky’s music. God, I love that film.
“We don’t give a damn what movies you like. We’re not interested in any of this drivel.”
The interrogator crumpled the sheets he was reading into one big wad which he flung contemptuously into a corner of the small barren room. The other interrogator, a shorter man, remained seated at the table opposite someone who looked worse than death. His ashen face was lumpy with suppurating boils and tumors, and it obviously took effort for him to remain upright in a chair. The smaller interrogator spoke to him softly, soothingly.
“You’re dying, you know that, right? The rest of your regiment’s already dead and you were hit with eight, nine hundred rads, just short of what it would take to fry your brain on the spot. You know what that dose of radiation will do. There’s no point now to not talking.”
“Yeah,” the taller man said planting his knuckles menacingly on the tabletop and leaning towards the sickly man who struggled to focus on him. “You and your band of sickos got what you wanted, vaporized half a dozen villages. The whole world will be in a panic. That’s what you wanted, right?”
When he spoke, the sick man’s cheeks began to puff out. Lesions blistered his neck, and a tuberous purple tumor across his forehead throbbed.
“This isn’t what any of us wanted. My account explains how the witch, Hanna, had us dig the nuclear bomb out of the spot where we’d been assigned to bury it. You had to have read about my mission assignment in the Fulda Gap. It’s how my statement begins.”
“That was over twenty years ago,” the man sitting across from him at the table said. “And no real nuclear devices were ever planted. You know dummy warheads were used in maneuvers.”
“Oh, the witch took care of all that, right?” The tall interrogator said pacing along the wall angrily kicking at the ball of sheets as he walked.
“Yes, that’s in my account too,” the writer said.
His face was going from gray to bluish green, and it was apparent from the way he pursed his cracked and swollen lips that he was in pain.
“Suppose you just tell us how she did that,” the guy playing good cop said.
“Actually, that part’s not in my report. I know my time’s limited, and I wanted to concentrate on what I understood and knew was important. Knowing why she did it might prevent this tragedy from reoccurring. I can’t explain how she did it,” the writer said.
He had to rest his head on his hands.
“Try,” the good cop said.
“All right. I think it’s the ergot in the local rye that originally gave Hanna her power, and once she learned to cheat death, she just kept getting stronger through the ages. The fungus is endemic to the region and acts like LSD. I read up on all this when I was stationed here. Apparently, the ergot was most potent around harvest time. Locals would go nuts after eating it and dance around like maniacs. They’d hallucinate they were cavorting with demons so it wasn’t that big a leap for an adept like Hanna to take power of them.”
“That what happen to you. You guys drop acid along with the boozing,” the tall man said pulling one of the three Spartan chairs in the room around and straddling it backwards with his arms flopped over the highest part.
He towered above the writer who hunched over the table, elbows splayed holding his chin in his palms.
“Yes. As a matter of fact, I think I was having something of a flashback at one point in my account. Maybe, it’s just my brain cells dying. In any case, it gets a bit lurid by page four. I suggest you read it. I don’t think I can talk anymore.”
“You’ll talk,” the tall man said lifting the writer’s head up by grabbing a handful of hair.
The tall man rocked back in his chair as the tuft of hair came off in his hands along with a large clump of scalp. The writer’s head fell onto the table and lay sideways on the surface, the eyes staring glassily.
“Christ, is he dead?” the tall man asked.
The other man had retrieved the wadded sheets and was straightening them on the table beside the writer’s head.
“He will be soon. Let me read through this, see if there any points he can clarify before he kicks.”
It was midnight when someone got the bright idea we should climb the Brockenberg in the moonlight. Everybody in the place was pretty wasted by this point, but still the idea wouldn’t have gone anywhere if a couple of the guys who run the narrow gauge railroad that goes up the mountainside hadn’t happened to be in the bar. They said they were willing to take a chance on giving us a wholly unauthorized ride. That was a train trip for the ages.
We were singing rowdy songs, and the wind was whistling up from below adding to the clang of steel wheels riding metal rails through the thinning forest near the summit. As the trees gave way to the barren limestone of Brockenberg’s uppermost reaches, a full moon shone down upon us. We were giddy in the ghostly light, and somebody shouted out something in Russian that the guy on the bench seat beside me had to translate.
“He said he put acid in the rum punch we were all drinking because he wanted to make this a real Witches’ Sabbath.”
I had the impression that his words made it so because the moment he said them I saw the silhouette of someone riding a broomstick cross the face of the moon. Next thing I knew Hanna herself was looming overhead though I’m not sure how I knew her name anymore than I could figure how the train suddenly flew off the rails and began sailing up through the air over the crest of Brockenberg.
Next thing I knew, the lot of us, thirty, forty guys, were digging in the earth with our bare hands. I recognized the region, the Fulda Gap. I’d dug here before, in war games in the 80’s when my platoon buried facsimiles of nuclear weapons. Only this time we were unearthing a weapon, and it wasn’t fake.
“Grab it, laddies,” Hanna kept saying in encouragement as she hovered overhead on her broomstick.
Our obedience was slavish, frenzied. In the moonlight, I could see a writhing mass of fingers darken with blood as people pawed the nuclear device out of the earth. I’d always assumed the models they’d given us to plant in war games had been scaled down for ease of handling, but this thing was smaller than the fakes, no larger than your standard suitcase though heavier by far what with the sturdy metal casing and plutonium fuel.
I’d never been told how the devices operated, but somehow I knew the combinations to the outer locks, and then I was staring at the control panel inside. I knew how to work that too and effortlessly made the weapon ready.
“All you need now is the authorization code,” I said to no one in particular.
“Come fly with me, laddie. I’ll tell ye on the way.” Hanna whispered in my ear as she scooped me up with her broomstick.
Up we went, higher and higher into the sky, her in back, me in the middle, and the nuclear device hanging in front by its handle. Somehow I managed to dangle upside down and type the code Hanna gave me on the control keyboard arming the weapon. When Hanna aimed her broom downward and we began to descend, the weapon slid off the front of the stick. I guess the device must have detonated closer to the ground than to us up in the air because as you know, all my compatriots died on the spot.
If you think that last part was opaque, the rest is really a blur. I remember endlessly somersaulting through a shocking white abyss as the blast wave hit a split second after the alpha radiation blinded me with light. Through it all, I heard the voice of Hanna telling me how she wouldn’t stand for locals laughing at her and turning her into a tourist attraction.
“I’ll not abide having souvenir shops selling cheap copies of me riding me broom,” I specifically remember her saying.
Then I was back on the ground, wandering in a daze in that field where the police found me what seems a lifetime ago.
The interrogator put the sheets back down before the head lying sideways on the table which gave no sign of life. The taller man snapped his fingers near the watery eye trying to elicit a response, but all he got in reply was a thin line of bloody drool oozing from blistered lips.
“The police picked you up two hours ago. Six hours after the bomb blast,” the large man said in disgust.
“Look, we know you have the code book for setting off one of the suitcase bombs in storage at Fulda’s nuclear weapon depot. The police found it on you. That’s why you were brought here to us. And we know that one of the bombs is missing. And it’s pretty obvious that it’s been detonated. Now what we need to know from you is how did you get the bomb out, and how did you get the code book?” The other agent asked.
The only response was a death rattle. With a wheeze, the man breathed his last.
“It’s a miracle he lasted this long,” the tall man said and began pacing.
He stopped in one corner of the room and looked up at the small camera mounted unobtrusively near the ceiling.
“That concludes the interrogation,” he said for the record and then turned to his partner and asked, “Well, intelligence will study the tapes and make their assessment, but what do you make of his statement?”
“I think we should close down all the souvenir stands and confiscate the dolls they sell of Hanna,” his partner replied. “What else do we have to go on?”
The end
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