Defeat Read Free Page B

out and touched his arm. He nodded at
her.
    “ It will be
okay,” he said, keeping his German simple. “Just a silly American
war exercise.” She nodded and he wasn’t sure she completely
understood, but she followed the Americans into the
cave.
     
    Wolfgang caught up to the others
quickly and convinced them to return to the tiny cave. As they
followed him, they heard air raid sirens from the nearby town. Fear
gripped Wolfgang. This was not a drill.
    One of the Americans sat at the
entrance to the cave trying to speak with someone on his cell
phone. He was yelling at the phone, then stopped when he saw
Wolfgang with the others. He waved them inside.
    “ I’m not sure how
much time we have,” he said in English.
    “ Until what?”
asked one of the other members of the club whose English was better
than Wolfgang’s.
    The American shook his head and
pointed up in the air at the sound of the sirens.
    “ Your guess is as
good as mine.”
    The hiking club huddled into the
cave. Leah looked up at Wolfgang expectantly, but he moved to sit
next to two men, thinking about his wife back in ‘Slautern. He
wanted to comfort the girl, but it seemed wrong. She would have to
seek comfort elsewhere.
    The American suddenly swore,
startling Wolfgang. The man seemed to throw his phone, then
himself, diving into the middle of the cave.
    Another American yelled, “Cover
your eyes!” and Wolfgang obediently buried his face in his arms. He
sensed a bright flash of light and there was a scream. No noise
accompanied the light. The explosion, or whatever had caused it,
seemed distant; they were almost forty-five minutes by auto from
Kaiserslautern, a city never called by it’s real name. It was known
as ‘Slautern by the local Germans and K-town by the American
soldiers from the nearby Air Force base. Wolfgang feared what had
caused the bright light and worried about his home, his
family.
    When the bright light faded, he
looked up at the American who had thrown himself into the cave, who
now knelt over his phone as if his life depended on it.
    “ No signal,” the
man cursed but kept jabbing at the screen.
    “ Nuclear?”
Wolfgang asked timidly, afraid, terrified of the answer. He didn’t
want to frighten any of the others, but he had to
know.
    “ I don’t know.
Maybe,” the American responded, not looking at him, still focused
on his phone.
    No one said anything, but several
cried now. They all watched the American jabbing at his
phone.
    “ What comes next,
sir? A blast wave?” one of the other Americans asked. Wolfgang
barely understood their English.
    “ How am I
supposed to know? Do I look like a nuclear physicist?” the central
American replied gruffly.
    The woman with good English
translated rapidly into German for the others and one of the other
hikers explained to her that if it was a small, tactical nuclear
device targeting Ramstein, the name of the Air Force base outside
Wolfgang’s hometown, then they were too far away to be affected by
the blast wave. If it was bigger, they might feel something within
a few minutes. She translated into English for the
Americans.
    “ Then we stay
here for at least ten more minutes,” the American in charge said.
The woman translated and the hiker who seemed to know what he was
talking about nodded his head in agreement.
    Ten minutes.
    Every second seemed like agony to
Wolfgang. When he was hiking in nature, hours were not long enough
and he always had to return home too soon. But when he was hungry
and food took three minutes to cook, every second ticking off on
the microwave oven clock seemed endless. Now was worse. Did his
family survive the blast? Would there be radiation? Which way was
the wind blowing? Would it blow the fallout away from ‘Slautern, or
towards it? Why would someone drop a nuclear bomb? Would he ever
see his wife and daughter again? Would he wish he had been close
enough to the blast to have been killed instantly rather than
surviving a nuclear war and