The general returned, scooted forward in the backseat, and looked over Pino’s shoulder at the map.
“The main route will be the best defended,” Leyers said. “You’ll want to go up that secondary road near Stazione, take it to the northwest of Bolzano, all the way to Andriano/Andrian on the Switzerland road. The Swiss border is shut to us, so the Wehrmacht doesn’t care about that route. You’ll get past the Americans, then across the Adige River on their far left flank. Across the river, you go back along the mountains there, right behind the Germans, until you reach the Brenner Pass road. Do you see it?”
Pino hated to admit it, but his plan seemed their best chance. He nodded and looked in the rearview, seeing how animated Leyers was as he locked himself to his suitcase once more. The general was enjoying himself.
It is just a game to him, Pino thought, and got angry all over again. It’s all a game of favors and shadows. Leyers wanted to have fun? He’d show him fun. He threw the Fiat in gear, popped the clutch, and drove on like a man possessed.
It was full daylight when they rolled up to a US checkpoint blocking the road near the mountain town of Laghetti Laag. A US Army sergeant walked toward them. They could hear the echoes and thuds of combat somewhere not far ahead.
“Road’s not open,” the sergeant said. “You can turn around here.”
Pino handed him the envelope. The sergeant took it, opened it, read the letter, and whistled. “You can go. But are you sure you want to? We’ve got companies battling with Fascists and Nazis for Bolzano. And sometime in the next couple of hours, the Mustangs are going to strafe the German column, try to wipe out what they can.”
“We’re going,” Pino said, took the envelope, left it in his lap.
“Your lives, gentlemen,” the sergeant said, and waved at the gatekeeper.
The barricade was pulled aside. Pino drove through.
“My head hurts,” Carletto announced, and rubbed at his temples before taking another swig of wine.
“Knock the wine off for now,” Pino ordered. “There’s a battle right ahead of us, and we’re going to need your help to live through it.”
Carletto stared at him, saw he was serious, and corked the bottle. “Get the gun?”
Pino nodded. “Put it on your right side, parallel to the door, the butt up against the side of the seat. You’ll get to it quicker.”
“How do you know that?”
“Just makes sense.”
“You think different than I do.”
“I guess that’s true,” Pino said.
Ten kilometers beyond the checkpoint, he took a secondary road heading northeast, as Leyers had recommended. The way was rough and ran through little alpine settlements, twisting toward Saint Michael and northern Bolzano.
Clouds rolled in. Pino slowed enough to hear the artillery, the tanks and rifles engaged to their right and south, at least a mile, maybe more. They could see the outskirts of Bolzano and plumes of smoke rising as the Fascists tried to hold ground and the Germans tried to defend their rear to give their countrymen more time to make Austria.
“Head north again,” General Leyers said.
Pino did as he was told, taking a sixteen-kilometer detour that brought them to a bridge across the Adige that was unguarded, just as Leyers had predicted. They reached Bolzano’s northwestern outskirts around eight forty that morning.
The fighting to the immediate southeast was intense now. Machine guns. Mortars. And so close they could hear tank turrets pivoting. But it looked like Leyers was right again. They’d managed to stay nearly four hundred meters behind the battle lines, slipping along a rear seam of the conflict.
At some point, though, we’ll see Nazis. They’ll be on the Brenner Pass road for—
“Tank!” Leyers cried. “American tank!”
Pino ducked his head, looked fast to his right, trying to see past Carletto.
“There it is!” Carletto cried, pointing across a large open lot on the outskirts of the city. “A Sherman!”
Pino kept them moving, flanking to the tank’s left.
“He’s turning his cannon on you,” General Leyers said.
Pino glanced, saw the tank seventy meters away, the turret and the barrel pivoting toward them. He hit the accelerator.
Carletto leaned out the window, waved both arms at the tank, and yelled in English, “American friends! American friends!”
The tank fired a shell that went right behind them, right off their rear fender, and blew a smoking hole in a two-story factory building on the other side of the street.
“Get us out of here!” Leyers bellowed.
Pino downshifted and took evasive action. But before he could get out of the tank’s line of fire, machine guns opened up from the smoking building.
“Duck!” Pino shouted, and crouched down, hearing bullets cracking overhead and pinging downrange off the tank’s armor and treads.
They shot into an alley and out of sight.
Leyers pounded Pino on the shoulders. “A genius behind the wheel, this one!”
Pino smiled sourly, weaving them through side streets. US forces seemed bogged down behind the confluence of two streams that joined the Adige River. Leyers found a way around the pinch point, beyond the battle, and then away from the city itself, heading east toward the village of Cardano/Kardaun.
Pino soon turned onto the Brenner Pass road, finding it nearly empty. He accelerated, heading north again. Ahead, the Alps vanished in a gathering storm. Mist began to fall, and chains of fog appeared. Pino remembered the slaves digging at the snow here only a month before, flailing in the slush, collapsing, and being dragged away.
He drove on past Colma and Barbiano. It wasn’t until they were on a curve south of the village of Chiusa/Klausen that he was able to see far ahead up the road to the tail end of a long German column clogging both sides of the route, a crippled army creeping north toward Austria through the town of Bressanone/Brixen.
“We can get around them,” General Leyers said, studying the map. “But this little road goes off to the east just ahead here. It climbs, goes way up to here, where you can take a road north and then this one back down to the Brenner Pass road. Do you see?”
Pino saw it, and again took the route Leyers chose.
They spun their way across a short, muddy flat before the road began to climb a steep, narrow draw, which broadened into a high alpine valley choked on the north flank by spruces and by sheep meadows facing south. They continued up the north flank through switchbacks that took them beyond the alpine settlement of Funes.
The road ascended another thousand meters almost to the tree line, where the fog and clouds began to break. The road ahead was two-track and slick. It cut through a sea of yellow and pink wildflowers.