He awoke having to relieve himself. Taking the toilet paper from the K ration he’d eaten, he cloaked himself, checked the corridor, returned to the unbarred entryway and left the building. It was still daylight but the sun was low, the side yard mostly shadowed by bordering trees.
Even so, crossing it made him twitchy. This was the SS wing, and if someone saw him through a window … His jumpsuit didn’t look remotely like an SS uniform, or anyone’s uniform except the American airborne.
Macurdy, he told himself, quit your damned worrying. It’s worked every time. Even Hansi didn’t see you till you fumbled that file folder.
After relieving himself in the forest, he walked to the lake, and in the early dusk, refilled his canteen. Then he returned to the building, to one of the magazines. Once more he filled the drop bag with TNT, this time taking it not to the stack behind the old table, but out the back entryway. He packed it about 500 yards, including a couple hundred feet up the four-wheel-drive road that climbed the Witches’ Ridge. There he stashed it behind a patch of fir saplings, cloaking the stash. He marked the place-it would soon be too dark to find it otherwise-by breaking off a dead fir sapling and laying it across the truck trail. Using the pen light would be risky, so near the county road.
That trip too he repeated, till he’d transferred some 300 half-kilo blocks, and had started back for more. By that time it was fully night, and moonless. When he’d almost reached the graveled road, he heard footsteps walking in the direction of the schloss. Motionless, he listened while the person passed, invisible to him in the moonless, tree-shadowed dark. Even after he could no longer hear the sounds, he waited a couple of minutes before following. Sound could betray him.
But he did take something for granted. In the entryway he opened the door-to find two SS men coming toward him down the corridor, talking! One glanced toward him, stopped and stared, then swore. “That damned Josef! The fool left the door wide open! If Mueller or Lipanov find it like that, it will ruin everything!”
“It could have been the woman.”
“That’s beside the point! It’s Josefs responsibility!” He strode toward Macurdy, who backed away, holding his breath. Grabbing the door, the soldier closed it in his face. Chagrined, Macurdy climbed the dozen steps to the yard and retreated to the forest’s edge. The person who’d passed on the road had been “the woman,” it seemed to him: some farmer’s wife or daughter whose husband or boy friend was fighting in the Ukraine, or sitting in a bunker on the Channel coast. A woman feeling desperate with life, and perhaps short of money.
How long would she be in there? He’d planned to take twice as much TNT to the hill, then perhaps start packing it up the ridge, if it wasn’t too damned dark.
But hell, even with his tiny pen light, it was too dark. The best thing to do was resign himself to patience. He still had a few days.
Or did he? What if they decided to transfer the Voitar early? With a muttered curse, Macurdy moved back to the entryway and down the stairs, to try the door. It was not barred, and he opened it a few slow inches. No one was in the corridor, so he slipped inside, moved quickly to the nearest magazine, picked the lock and entered. Again he blocked the space beneath the door and turned on the light. Working faster than before, he filled the bag with blocks, shouldered it, turned the light out again, removed the towel, and listened hard with an ear against the door. The party room was just a few yards away across the corridor.
Listened with worry and self-anger. What he’d just done was foolhardy, had endangered his whole mission for no adequate reason. The best thing to do now, he told himself, was catch a few hours sleep behind the stack of TNT
But hearing nothing, and driven by a sense of urgency, he held his breath, opened the door, and peered out. No one. Quickly he stepped into the corridor, closed the door silently behind him, and without locking it, went to the entryway and left. Then, crossing the lawn, he hiked to his stash by the ridge road, where he unloaded the bag and considered. He decided to go back for one more load, but not go inside till after the woman came out. When she left, the guardsmen would surely go up to bed.