Cold War Trilogy - A Three Book Boxed Set: of Historical Spy Versus Spy Action Adventure Thrillers

by William Brown

  COLD WAR TRILOGY

  WINNER LOSE ALL

  AMONGST MY ENEMIES

  THURSDAY AT NOON

  by

  William F. Brown

  WINNER LOSE ALL

  In the closing months of WWII, as one war grinds to an end in the rubble of Nazi Germany, all eyes turn to the next ‘cold’ one. The Americans, the Russians, and the British know the future belongs to whomever can grab the plans for Hitler’s deadly new rockets and jet fighters. They will shape the balance of world power for decades to come. It is also the story of the torrid but impossible romance between Ed Scanlon, a young American OSS agent, and Hanni Steiner, the gritty, street-smart leader of the communist resistance cell in Leipzig. They find themselves on opposite ends of an international tug of war over the plans for Germany’s revolutionary Me-262 jet fighter and the scientists who designed it. Combining the best of action romance and World War II historical fiction, this fast-paced murder mystery will resonate.

  Al Brassingham, Amazon Reviewer: “5-Stars! Grab for the Goodies! A multi-layer story with villains and heroes with the fall of German and the coming Cold War as a back drop.”

  Rex, Amazon Reviewer: “5 Stars! Excellent reading! Superb reading with a well-placed story line and very believable characters. A must read if you like spy novels.”

  Glynn Young, Amazon Reviewer: “5 Stars! An exciting, riveting read that explores courage and treachery, love and fear. A crackerjack novel of World War II.”

  AMONGST MY ENEMIES

  Inside a German U-Boat rusting on the bottom of the Baltic lay millions in gold bars, stolen art, and a secret that could tear NATO apart. In this political thriller, the only one who knows the truth is Mike Randall, a battle-scarred American airman who survived four months as a POW in the frozen hell of northern Germany at the end of the war. When Randall does speak up, he puts a target on his own forehead, one which the Russian KGB, the U-boat’s former Nazi owners, the Israeli Mossad, and even his own government quickly take aim at. Some want the gold, some want Randall dead, and some want proof that there is a high-ranking Russian spy inside NATO. Caught between the Kremlin, spies, killers, and a new, deadly Fourth Reich, Mike Randall wants revenge and to pay some old debts with a steel-jacketed bullet.

  G. Patterson, Amazon Reviewer: “5-Stars! A very well written Cold War thriller that has lots of actions and sub-plots that keep you guessing until the very end. Very good indeed.”

  Brad Thiedecke, Amazon Reviewer: “5-Stars! Amongst my favorite reads of the year. A cold-war thriller with plenty of WWII narrative, romance, high seas action, and the spy dramas you would expect. The characters were engaging, the story was tight and well worth the read!”

  James L. Van, Amazon Reviewer: “5-Stars! Terrific! If you like WWII / Cold War era novels, this one is for you. Great plot, difficult to put down. A good read.”

  THURSDAY AT NOON

  Cairo, 1962. Something is about to blow up in the desert at noon on Thursday, and Richard Thomson, a burnt-out husk of a CIA agent, is the only one who can stop it. When his last mission blew up in his face, Thomson was dumped in Cairo by the Agency because they couldn’t think of any place worse to send him. This fast-paced spy thriller that will take you back to a place and time that is long gone, yet as contemporary as today’s newspaper. John Kennedy is in the White House, Nikita Khrushchev is in the Kremlin, and Abdel Gamal Nasser is in Cairo. While the world was focused on newly discovered Russian missiles in Cuba pointed at the US, no one notices the even more deadly ones being rolled out in the Egyptian desert soon to be pointed at Israel. No one except Thomson.

  The New Yorker: “A thriller in the purest cliffhanger vein. The technique is flawless. It could only have been learned by way of a thousand Saturday afternoon matinees.”

  Publisher’s Weekly: “Writing in the vein of Forsythe and Follett, Brown has produced a fast-paced thriller.”

  Ralph Glaser, Amazon Reviewer: “5-Stars! Bond Meets Indy Jones! The settings were real and the characters believable.”

  AIM TRUE, MY BROTHERS

  Middle East terrorism explodes on American shores as Islamist terrorists seek to decapitate the US government. Ibrahim Al-Bari is a skilled Hamas commander who has battled Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan. After losing two brothers in a bloody attack on a civilian bus in Israel, Al-Bari takes his private war to the heart of America itself. Nothing as simple as a sniper in a book depository window; in this FBI assassination thriller, when Al-Bari strikes, he will unleash a firestorm that will take out the President, other international leaders, and half the US government, national television. It falls to Eddie Rankin, a maverick FBI agent, who has never met a rule he couldn’t break; Moustapha Khalidi, Chief of Security at the Egyptian Embassy, and Rachel Ullman, a hard-edged Mossad agent and killer, to stop him. Can this dysfunctional alliance hold together long enough to catch Al-Bari before they kill each other — and the clock is ticking.

  To get a FREE COPY of this best-selling international suspense novel, email me at BillThursday1@gmail.com to join my Reader’s Group. I’ll personally Gift a copy to you directly from Amazon, so you’ll know it is a good, safe copy. To do that, I’ll need your name and e-mail address. The only thing I’ll use it for is to send you the book and to put you on my early release list for my next book, which should be coming out in a few months.

  Contents

  WINNER LOSE ALL

  AMONGST MY ENEMIES

  THURSDAY AT NOON

  Winner Lose All

  a novel by

  William F. Brown

  Why is it that the next war always begins

  before the corpse of the last one is even cold?

  PART ONE

  LEIPZIG, GERMANY

  SEPTEMBER 1944

  CHAPTER ONE

  Throughout 1944, even after the Normandy landings and the recapture of Paris and western France by the Allies, the American OSS and British SOE continued to insert agents into the Nazi-occupied Low Countries, even into Germany, from their top-secret joint training and operations center near London. Some were trained in sabotage and demolition, some in observing and reporting, and others in liaison and resupply for the Underground in occupied countries. All were important. Initially, they dispatched agents to the continent in small boats and even submarines, but as the Allied armies pushed the Germans farther back from the coast, the majority were airdropped from their base in England. They flew a long, looping route over the North Sea and the Baltic, entering German airspace across its lightly defended northern coast. The distance was greater, but it was decidedly safer than attempting to cross Holland, France, and the Western Front, where the German air defenses and night fighters were always on high alert.

  They used a variety of aircraft, depending upon the mission and the distance to be flown. This time, with the sun finally down, it was an old German Junkers tri-motor cargo plane, a Ju-52, which they pushed out of the hangar at the small, high security airfield outside London to top off its dual tanks. She was a nighthawk, hiding in her nest during the day, only to come out after dark to rise into the evening sky, turn northeast, and head out over the gleaming expanse of the North Sea. Their former owners called the Ju-52 an “Iron Annie.” They were a mainstay of the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force since the mid 1930s. This one had been cobbled together from bits and pieces captured in North Africa two years before, providing a perfect disguise for these surreptitious drops behind enemy lines in Europe. The fuselage was painted a dull da
rk gray, and its insignias and numbers were sufficiently worn and faded to create the impression of just another old, derelict cargo plane. However, it was not. This Ju-52’s three pre-war BMW rotary motors had been replaced with newer and far more powerful British Merlins. They were not enough to outrun a determined Messerschmitt or Focke-Wulf fighter, but they helped and were far more efficient. With the extra fuel tanks built into the rear cargo hold, they could make long, deep runs inside Nazi Germany.

  Even in the autumn of 1944, masquerading as a German transport plane in the skies over Nazi Germany was considerably safer than trying it in an American DC-3, a British Lancaster, or a B-17, but there was the little matter of getting safely in and out of British airspace to consider. It would be hard to blame a nervous Spitfire or Hurricane pilot who happened upon a “German” airplane and shot it up by mistake, but that would not be much consolation to the men inside. Two hours after they cleared British airspace and were far out to sea, the pilot finally relaxed enough to drink some of the coffee in his thermos. In two more hours, the tension would mount again, as he swung the gray bird southeast and then took her down to the deck. Skimming low over the waves, he would make the quick run to the German coast, crossing the sand flats and dunes west of Bremerhaven. Once inland, he would press on across the open north German plain, praying the unremarkable Junkers remained unnoticed on the long, crooked run around Bremen, Hanover, Braunschweig, and Magdeburg. In three more hours, as he neared the drop zone west of Leipzig, he would take it back up to three thousand feet for the jump and then turn, drop back down, and run toward the North Sea, the English coast, and home. It was that last leg which would be the point of maximum danger, when his stomach turned sour and the sweat on the palms of his hands turned ice cold, one slow, agonizing minute at a time.

  The pilot was a grizzled twenty-eight-year-old-vet who had flown Special Operations missions like these for the past ten months. He knew this was not a simple re-supply drop. Tonight, there was nothing in back except his three passengers. Other than them, the Ju-52’s cargo compartment was empty. Nonetheless, with the weight of the extra fuel tanks and aviation gasoline, outbound, she flew like a pregnant cow. On the return trip home, with half his fuel gone and less to weigh the old bird down, it could finally soar, skipping and bouncing on the gusts of wind. That would come as a welcome relief, the pilot thought. After all, he wasn’t doing this for the glory; he was doing it for the money. Yet other than the big paydays, there had to be something about these goddamned “black” missions to like. Maybe it was the incredible high he got when they were over.

  For security reasons, in the unlucky event he went down behind German lines, they never told the pilot who or what he was carrying; but he had eyes and was not stupid. He figured tonight was another “insertion mission” for the American OSS and its British counterpart, the SOE. That business had picked up sharply since D-Day. All summer and fall, the OSS and SOE had been dropping agents behind German lines like leaves falling from the elm tree in his front yard in Ohio and with about as much emotional attachment. The pilots were given the coordinates of the drop zone, but all the rest — the course, altitude, and speed — were up to the pilot and his navigator. He had to admit that was best for everyone concerned. Still, his hand was on the stick and his life on the line right along with them, whether the poor dumb bastards in back knew it or not.

  Earlier, while they were still on the ground and the pilot and his co-pilot were going through their final equipment checks, he saw three men in heavy parkas walk up to the plane, climb into the cargo hold, and close the side door behind them. Two were carrying parachutes and wearing black jumpsuits under their parkas. He immediately knew they were the ones who would be doing the jumping. The third man wore a British Army uniform under his parka and was presumably their “minder.” He would stay onboard for the round trip. While the three men did not say much, the pilot had heard enough through the side window to know that one of the two agents was British, as was the minder, and the other agent was American. The minder appeared relaxed. Why not? He was staying on the airplane. The other Brit looked somewhat relaxed, too, but the jaunty demeanor and wisecracks he heard from the American were obviously papering over a bad case of nerves. Clearly, it was his first time going in, and if he really understood what he was getting himself into, he would not have been so flippant. The pilot knew better. As with the two Brits, this was not his first turn in the barrel either. On the previous trips, the men he dropped — and it was almost always men — were German Jews, Dutch, Czechs, or Poles, because they knew the territory and might blend in more easily. However, that was Nazi Germany down there. It was the most airtight police state the devil ever invented. No one could blend in down there except the devil himself, and most were destined for a quick and very painful death at the hands of the Gestapo, not that it was any of the pilot’s business. Like a piano player in a New Orleans cathouse, he was paid and paid well to stroke the ivory and keep his big yap shut.

  Still, he had to admit that these insertion and resupply missions were not quite as gut wrenching as they had been even six to twelve months before when flying into Germany in an unarmed cargo plane of any kind bordered on suicide. Back then, the tension in the officers’ club on their private base in England was so thick around sunset that it ran down the walls. Now, the war was winding down. One would expect the taut nerves to begin to ease up. Unfortunately, they did not, because no one wanted to be the last man killed in a war — in any war. It was as simple as that. The Luftwaffe bases and the deadly radar-guided flak guns that protected them had been smashed by flight after flight of American B-17 and British Lancaster bombers since the previous summer, and there were very few German night fighters left to send up after anyone. Still, bad luck had a way of sneaking up and biting one on the ass when it was least expected. Once his passengers jumped, the pilot’s plan was to take the Iron Annie down to the deck and hightail it back northwest to England. As dangerous as that would be, he guessed it would be far safer than staying behind in Germany, as those two poor bastards in the cargo bay were about to do.

  It was midnight.

  US Army Captain Ed Scanlon and British Army Captain Will Kenyon had trained together for the past three months. Kenyon was an upper-class career professional and an aristocrat from His Britannic Majesty’s Royal Horse Guards, no less. He had jumped in once before. That mission, however, had been a quick in-and-out turnaround to France, and Kenyon was safely back in England a week later. That was enough to give the Brit an unjustified sense of confidence, but this was Scanlon’s first trip in and he did not even have that. His adrenaline had him pumped up higher than a barrage balloon.

  It was bitterly cold in the back of the unheated Junkers. All three men wore bulky parkas over their winter flight suits to try to stay warm, but even the thick down did little to stop the numbing cold in Ed Scanlon’s feet and hands as the long hours passed. With the roar of the twin engines, the stench of aviation exhaust, and the loud creaks and groans of the airframe, flying inside the old cargo plane was as pleasant as rolling down a mountain inside a fifty-five-gallon oil drum. Finally, his ears popped as he felt the Junkers drop to wave height and head for the German coast. Outside the small side window, the night sky was pitch black with only the faintest hint of a crescent moon shimmering across the open sea. Up ahead he saw the thin white line of surf breaking over rocks onto the beach. That was Germany down there, the Third Reich, and he felt the goose bumps rise on his forearms.

  As the Ju-52 raced on at tree-height level, he saw the first dull orange glow on the far horizon. Glancing at the map in his lap, he knew that it must be the once-quaint northern German city of Bremen going up in flames. It must be, he thought, because off to his left he saw the glow of Hanover, which was still burning from the pounding she took two nights before. ‘Vengeance is Mine, Sayeth the Lord,’ Scanlon thought; but since He was a bit busy these days, the American Army Air Corps would gladly oblige.

  William Grenville
Kenyon was half of their “hands across the sea” team. He had been assigned to the operation by the British Special Operations Executive or SOE, as had Colonel Mervin Bromley, their Chief of Section, and Sergeant Major Rupert Carstairs, its ranking NCO. The London staff consisted about equally of Brits and Yanks up and down the chain of command. Bright-eyed and smiling, with a dry, unflappable, upper-class British wit, Will was the younger son of a baronet. “That is a very small baron,” he would offer over a pint in the pub, “or it could be an odd-looking instrument in the brass section, I never could remember which.” While he joked about it, his family’s military record stretched back unbroken for more than three hundred years. Kenyons fought beside Marlborough and Wellington. They commanded British squadrons, regiments, and divisions at Blenheim, at Waterloo, in the Crimea, in the Sudan, and on the Somme. Following his graduation from a top “public school,” he had also graduated from the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst before being posted to one of His Majesty’s elite regiments, one that both his father and grandfather had commanded, of course. The Americans thought of him simply as a nice young man with an odd sense of humor but the Brits in SOE knew without being told that Will was destined for much higher places.

  Edward P. Scanlon III, on the other hand, came from the American “aristocracy” — a wealthy New York Brahmin family, a Yale Skull and Bones, and a third-generation trust fund. While some thought that shanty-Irish would always be shanty-Irish, the Park Avenue Scanlons were about as “upper class” as American society had to offer. Impetuous and headstrong, he had been a maverick since the day he learned to crawl. His family called him “the Third” when he was not around, or they used the diminutive “Eddie” when he was. He hated both names with a passion, preferring to be called “Scanlon” or even “Edward,” if absolutely necessary.