Deadly Sanction by Roger Elwood

Author:Roger Elwood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2013-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

14

THE TUNNEL SEEMED little different from the one connected to the house where Field Marshal Erwin Rommel had taken him.

They had reached it after traveling over tree- and rock-strewn terrain that caused stress to vehicles that already seemed on the verge of collapse, battered and rusty cars and trucks that in better times would have been consigned to scrap-metal heaps.

“Are these found throughout this entire region?” Bartlett asked as he stood before another cave some fifteen miles away from the one the partisans had made their headquarters.

“It is honeycombed with them,” Snyder assured him. “Amazingly, the Nazis have no idea about what exists right beneath their feet. The military implications are devastating. If, someday, we are able to organize operations properly and get the Allied support we need, well, we could literally pull the ground out from beneath these monsters.”

“You have a map concentrating on the tunnels’ relationship to the camps,” the American inquired. “But what about military installations? Is there some possibility of an underground offensive against any of those?”

“We are working on that, Stephen. All of this is very new to us, of course. You have to remember, my friend, that because we are Jewish partisans, none of us have come from the military. We are primarily educators, farmers, accountants, lawyers by profession. And we have only limited resources at present.”

“From what I’ve seen,” Bartlett told him, “you can be sure that the Allies will want to work with you.”

Five dozen men had gathered at this newest cave entrance, deliberately making the trip in battered old cars and trucks from widely disparate locations, to avoid causing suspicion. There was no curfew in effect as yet in the countryside, only in cities such as Berlin, Frankfurt, Dusseldorf, and others, though the driver of each vehicle had to be ready with a seemingly reasonable explanation for his nighttime travel just in case he happened to be stopped by a Nazi patrol.

“Fortunately, by their very nature, all of these caves are in the remotest possible regions,” Snyder added. “Also, the Nazis seem to concentrate their patrols on the well-traveled roads, oblivious to what is happening off the beaten track.

“But I cannot suppose their ignorance will last forever. Someday a patrol might stumble upon part of the network of tunnels; someday a traitor might leak to the Gestapo what we have here. We must do what we can while we are the only ones aware of all this.”

They were less than five miles from Dachau.

Kellar had drawn a rough map for them, in addition to providing the poignant reason why he never told the commandant of Dachau what had happened.

“As I said earlier, I had never been to a camp before,” he recalled. “I had heard the stories, yes, but tended not to believe most of them, assuming they were nothing more than Allied or partisan-inspired propaganda. I no longer clung to the delusion that the war was a righteous one but I had not, then, allowed myself to see that it was little more than a brutal facade for the insane actions of some unbalanced fanatics.

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