4

The Paznaun Valley, Southwest Austria

October 1, 1938

8:53 p.m. (Mitteleuropäische Zeit)

Fat raindrops started to fall, each landing with a slap on the rough-hewn stone tiles of the cowshed. Pulling up the hood of his army mountain jacket, Josef Becker quickly turned for shelter as the wet splashes accelerated to a continuous drumroll, rods of water stabbing the back of his jacket until he could push himself into the low building’s entrance. The young German squatted inside, leaning back against the old door, its iron bolt heads pushing against his spine as he looked out.

The rain is finally arriving. Gunter told us to expect it.

The raindrops splashed and ricocheted, the cowshed’s paddock briefly emitting the wet, sour smell of cow dung and straw before all scent was lost to the cold, metallic wash of the downpour. Beyond, the grey opening that notched the black tree line, the entrance to the track from the valley road he had been watching, disappeared, pushed into the darkness behind black sheets of rain. The only things now visible to Josef were the puddles growing in front of him, pooling and merging until they released urgent, bubbling streams of rainwater to race away down the slope of the hill. He knew they would instinctively seek the two wheel grooves of the unpaved track that led up through the woods.

Would the truck even be able to make it up the hill?

It was suddenly colder too. Josef cupped his hands together. Blowing into them, a tattered cloud of warm breath puffed out from between his fingers only to instantly dissolve in the saturated air.

What must be happening higher up?

Snow above fifteen hundred meters was the forecast. Josef shivered at the thought of it—or was it nerves?

Looking at his watch, he saw there were still five minutes to go. Shielding a match in his wet hands, he lit another Stürm cigarette. Inhaling deeply, he savored the bone-dry paper of the cigarette on his lips and the heat of its smoke, even if he disliked the harsh taste. The party leadership claimed to want to stop smoking, yet the SA now monopolized the sale of all cigarettes to the Wehrmacht—more nonsense from Berlin. Trommler, Neue Front, Stürm, they were all the same, cheap and bitter like the people that promoted them. It was no wonder the demand for contraband foreign cigarettes was so strong.

Josef watched his cigarette’s orange burn defy the cold logic of the rain. It told him to do the same.

Gunter always said that any man who went into the mountains without being nervous was as good as dead anyway.

A sudden braying from behind the door made him jump.

Too nervous, perhaps?

Settle down, it’s only the rattle of the rain disturbing the mules.

Again, Josef looked down at his watch for reassurance.

Maybe they’re going to be late.

Perhaps they’ve already been caught.

It had happened once before. That night, the truck simply never arrived. The three of them had waited for two extra hours, hiding in bushes to the side of the rendezvous building in case their cover was blown. When no one appeared, they still made the trip over the hills to bring the return goods back before dawn. They had really flown that night to make up for the time lost waiting. Josef enjoyed how fast they could go when they were alone. It reminded him of the days when they were boys living in Elmau, and nothing or no one could stop them in the hills above.

The body of the cigarette, absorbing the moisture from his wet fingertips, disintegrated. Josef flicked it away to fizz and die in a puddle still vibrating from the rain. Its companionship lost, Josef let the doorway’s small shelter give him a faint sense of security instead, as if he were hidden behind a waterfall, invisible within a place that no one else even knew existed. The sensation settled him and he began to think again about that climb of the Waxenstein he had made the month before, replaying that small patch of unyielding, crystalline rock that had unfolded its upward story centimeters from the tip of his nose.

Even there, crouched in that cramped doorway, looking out on that slippery, wet night, he could feel his fingers tightly pinching the smallest bumps and folds of the cliff’s dry granite, his toes scratching for purchase on the tiniest edges below. No rope, no climbing partner, no possibility for second thoughts, no deciding to simply stop and descend. One way only: up. Just remembering it made Josef’s breathing instinctively slow and his mind relax.

He smiled to himself at the memory of the celebrations when he’d returned to the barracks that evening. The men of the 99th Gebirgsjäger, his regiment, had huddled around, congratulating him as he parked his pride and joy, his new BMW motorcycle, and unloaded his small climbing pack from its rear rack. They had immediately walked him into Garmisch to buy tall steins of cloudy weissbier and toast him as they recounted how they had followed his every move through their binoculars. They shouted, one over the other, of how it was the most incredible feat of climbing they had ever seen, of how every second they thought he must surely fall, of how, alone, Josef Becker had conquered the one mountain face that everyone had thought impossible. Oberjäger Hubel said that even Generalmajor Ganzler himself had called for a telescope to follow Josef’s progress.

It had never crossed Josef’s mind that anyone might be watching him. He had only gone out to make that climb because he had a free training day and was so sick and tired of looking up at the sheer rocky wall from the monotony of drill on the 1st Division parade ground. There was only one way to find out if it really was unclimbable. The very same thought he’d casually let slip to the guards that manned the red and white pole across the camp gateway as he left on his motorcycle.

Initially, Josef found the attention slightly alarming, but then, aided by the beer, he started to enjoy it. It was only when he returned to the barracks later and Gunter and Kurt sought him out that his personal spell of glory was broken.

Gunter was furious, growling at him in their Bavarian dialect, “You fool. If you let everyone see you can climb like that then they will always be watching. You know what that will mean for you, for all three of us, sooner or later? I already told you buying that damn motorcycle was a mistake—too obvious that you were making extra money—but now this? You need to get back into the shadows, my boy, or we will all be taking the long fall, not just you.”

Three days later, to potentially make matters worse, a small box was delivered to Josef by Generalmajor Ganzler’s adjutant. A handwritten note from Ganzler himself accompanied it:

To the finest climber in Bavaria. Bravo! Your first ascent of the Waxenstein wall has inspired the entire regiment. Yet more proof that the Gebirgsjäger are the finest mountain troops in the world. Wear this with pride—you are worthy of it!

Josef never mentioned it to Gunter and Kurt, suspending the silver regimental ring that Ganzler had awarded him on the cord of his army identification tag, out of sight.

Thinking about it again, Josef reached down into the collar of his shirt and felt for the cord to pull the ring up into his fingers. He touched its relief of a single edelweiss flower to bring him luck.

Almost immediately a light briefly flashed in the rainy darkness below. It reappeared to split into two narrow beams that began to intermittently twist and turn within the black of the woods. Through the beating rain, Josef heard bursts of an engine revving frantically accompanied by the helical whine of tires spinning for grip.

They were arriving.