The Nazis killed the love of his life. Now a former Austrian mountain climber will join a daring plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler.
DIE, FÜHRER is available as a low priced Kindle e-book: DIE, FÜHRER
EXCERPT:
Chamonix, the French Alps, 1931
Rock!
Stefan Zeit hugs the face. He hears the bouncing clatter from above. Then a fist-sized stone whistles past his helmet and shatters on a frozen ledge with a crack like artillery.
Heinrich's outcry made him react without thinking. He now becomes aware of the disaster he has just missed. He licks his dry lips, longing for the succor of a cigarette. From below, Paul Vree shouts,
Christ!
Stefan leans out from the face to look, the cleats of his Swiss made climbing boots braced on bare rock. He sees the third climber in the little team spread-eagled on the face, his fingers clinging to a knife-sized fissure.
I am fine! Vree shouts – though, his tin helmet askew and hair wild, he looks like Charlie Chaplin in Alpine climbing gear.
Stefan now tilts his head to look up. Heinrich Aschen is a rope length above, perched on a small outcropping. He watches as Heinrich, grinning through his frozen beard with effort, taps in a piton. He listens to the rings of the hammer, the comforting snap of a carabiner.
Some of the holds on this pitch are barely depressions, smudges in the pale granite. Daylight is failing fast and they have yet to reach the first bivouac.
Stefan concentrates his mind to try to stop his muscles from shivering or going numb. He already tastes that cigarette. The rope that runs straight down to Stefan vibrates with Heinrich's effort as he glides to a safer hold on the implacable, dark face of the Dru.
*
They crossed the glacier, clanking under their gear, in darkness just before yesterday’s sunrise. Between the rim of the glacier and the peak was a deep crevasse, a bergschrund: Heinrich tossed their bags and equipment over, then each man took a running start and jumped across. Far below, a grinding roar of water. They sat at the base of the Dru and smoked, waiting for first light. Across the glacier, the Charmoz rose out of darkness, its shoulder glowing white. Damp earth smells rose from the ground amid twisted fir trees. Stefan tucked his head between his knees wondering if he would vomit. His nerves always made him suffer terribly at the beginning of a climb.
Finally Vree picked up a coil of rope. Heinrich flicked away his cigarette.
Well, gentlemen?
Stefan stood, put on his gear and backpack, and strode onto the rubble at the base of the Dru. He took hold of the rock and, without a glance backward, not even bothering to rope up, began to climb.
*
There are three pitons, in a zigzag pattern, set into the blank, slick-looking vertical expanse of rock between Stefan and Heinrich. Stefan blows on his searing fingers, flexes his hands one by one. Shouts, Climbing.
At Heinrich's answering shout, he launches himself up on a slab of stone that flutes outward, giving him an odd sense of climbing into an abyss.
Wind scours the exposed rock and blasts his eardrums, muffling the clink of the spare pitons, hammer, and ice-axe Stefan wears on his belt. Though the gum-cleats of his boots adhere lightly to the rock, he has a sensation of weightlessness. He might be climbing on Mars.
His legs are shaking. The sky looks black. At moments he feels he is climbing with the pads of his fingertips. It is with a shiver of relief that he places the toe of his boot on an iron piton.
He looks up. Heinrich still seems far, far above. Dwindling into bleak space.
Climb to your right, Heinrich shouts through cupped hands.
Stefan begins to see the path Heinrich has sketched out. It is a matter of moving smoothly from hold to hold.
Paul Vree shouts, Cold down here!
Stefan smiles.
When he steps off the piton, he knows, both he and the weight of his backpack will be suspended for a long moment by the fingertips of his right hand. He will have to pull himself up in one smooth lunge, finding the foothold for his right boot toe by instinct, all the while fighting gravity. Should he fall, Stefan thinks the rope will probably hold. But it would not be easy to regain the face; he would dangle twirling upside down in space until one of the other two climbers reached him with a line.
Go.
His boots scrabble on the rock as he clamps his fingertips into the fissure and wrenches himself upward.
There.
With a shout of effort, he launches himself into the next stance. And now Stefan is finding the holds without thought.
He is drenched in sweat. Blasts of wind shake him like a leaf.
He sees Heinrich's hand. Takes it. Heinrich hauls him over the last outcrop. The arm is powerful. The grip is sure. Stefan clips his harness to a piton and lets his body go slack with relief. He gazes out over the valley, at the stark gray-black peaks wreathed in cloud. Glimmers of snow, dark fissures. Hieroglyphs. They are thirty meters below the planned site of the first bivouac and daylight is dwindling fast. The chilling air bites his nose and ears.
