THE ALPINERS CRAWLED down the face of the cliff via ropes and carabineers. Up top, Macintosh “Mac” Killburn looked down at them with all the burly pride of Reinhold Messner reaching Everest for the first time. “That’s it. Belay! Belay!” he bellowed down to his students. The acne-bloomed fifteen-year-old faces looked up at him, encouraged and terrified all at once.
The Berchtesgaden Alps were the picture-perfect place for mountain climbing. It was Mac’s penance in life that, in order to live there, he was forced to teach the brats of the wealthy how to maneuver a lame twenty-five-foot cliff. He’d much rather have taken his expertise to K2, but climbing the Himalayas was expensive. And there was no need for a children’s instructor there. Broke children didn’t take climbing lessons, and if they did, the Sherpas already had their future jobs covered. Hell, the Sherpas put him to shame. They put them all to shame.
“Mac! Mac!” A young voice below him cried out. He looked down past the snow bank and saw the problem immediately. The rope was caught on a rock and little Dallas Ann Vetrova was dangling over the cliff trying to swing it free.
“Hold on there!” He swooped down on his line. Dallas, all red hair and freckles, smiled her relief. Mac gave her line a confident yank. “You’ve got this!” he told her, pleased by the renewed look of confidence and determination on her face. She gripped the rope and continued her descent. Little Dallas was as hell-bent to rappel the cliff as her mother had been to escape the strip club. Certainly no one could accuse Dallas’s daddy of cowardice. He’d been the first to encroach upon Soviet oil. His buddy Putin, strangely, never put up a grumble.
Mac’s sudden laughter boomed all the way down to the Königssee, the sublime crystal-clear lake below the ice-covered peaks. He sure as hell would rather be in the Himalayas, earning renown, breaking records on K2. But due to a case of adulthood mumps and the news of his dashed dreams of a big family full of children, he’d come to realize that the wholesome smiles of some of these fucked-up kids was, in the end, perhaps enough.
Clinging to the side like Spider-Man, he watched as the other two kids, one, the scion of a tech genius, and the other, a mass-tort attorney who was now two wives removed from this kid’s mom, got to the ledge. The cliff was Mac’s go-to favorite climb, easy for beginners, not too far to fall in case disaster happened.
Plus, it had the benefits of a history lesson. He followed the group to the ledge below, stood, and released his carabineers. Walking to the hump of rusted metal, he placed his hand on the truck door handle, pulling it open in a flurry of green-gray flakes. The truck had been here since the war. It had crashed off the roadside above, probably because of ice, and fell down the mountainside to finally lodge in the crevice between the ledge and the rock face. Other than climbers, most didn’t even know it was there. It was impossible to see from the road, and because of the crevices in the rock face, it was hidden from below. The cleanup after the war had probably left it because it wasn’t really visible, and from the mountain, it would have been cost prohibitive to retrieve.
The three teens released their carabineers and grinned with accomplishment. Chet Logan, the skinny youth with the name of a cowboy and the heart of a bean-counter, was the first to identify it. “It’s a German Eiheits Diesel!” he exclaimed. “Look! You can still see the mount where the Breda gun was on top of the truck bed!”
“How long has this been here?” Dallas Ann asked, perusing it suspiciously.
“A long time. Just look at the rust,” Chet said, watching the orangey red dust sprinkle to the ground where his hand touched the truck.
“Yep, it’s been here since the war.” Mac was happy to give the kids a lesson. “The Nazis planned the Alpenfestung, the Alpine Redoubt, as they called it, where they might make a last stand. It was rumored to mostly just be an invention by their propaganda minister, Goebbels, but it’s a fact they used these mountains to stash arms, valuables, documents, from the beginning.”
He watched Wentford Holmes III climb into the driver’s seat of the truck and pretend to take the wheel, long since pillaged.
Chet cautiously climbed into the back of the truck. Wentford followed, ploughing him aside. “Where’s the gun?” Wentford demanded, kicking the mount as if the huge gun might just appear.
There was always an asshole in the group, Mac thought, and they were usually the children of tort attorneys or evangelicals. Go figure.
“Long gone. The Allies were pretty thorough removing ordnance after the surrender.” He helped Dallas Ann scramble to the truck bed. The sun had melted all the snow, revealing wet rusty metal. “Just don’t fall through. I think it’s solid but it’s been through seventy or more winters.”
Wentford leapt to the top of the mount and pretended to play battle with an imaginary gun, evaporating Dallas Ann and Chet who stood politely by. He leapt and pounded away foolishly, as teens do when they become the perfect storm of Adderall and narcissism.
Dallas laughed. Chet looked resentful. Wentford made particular effort to annihilate him, pounding his feet for emphasis.
Suddenly the truck shuddered. The sound of metal ripping was followed by a heavy boom.
“Whoa!” Dallas Ann exclaimed, lunging for the metal bars along the edge of the truck bed.
They all watched as a huge barrel-like structure was birthed below the crumbling truck. The tank rolled to the edge of the cliff and fell, bouncing once, then twice along the rock face before becoming lodged in a crevice about fifty feet below. Mac squatted and looked down, where the tank clung to the precious space on the ledge.
“That must’ve been the gas tank.”
“Why is it not rusted like the truck?” Dallas Ann asked, squatting next him.
“Not made of steel, that’s for sure. Pretty high-grade aluminum for a gas tank.” Mac shrugged. “Sorry to have to tell you this, guys.” He looked up the face of the cliff. “The fun part’s over. Now we have to go back. Up there.” He jabbed his thumb upward.
The four of them looked up the mountainside, like angels to heaven.
Behind them, the grotesque form of the rusted truck appeared crouched as if it were ready for a meal. A beast out of Dante’s Inferno.