“They are going to attack!” Von Lindemann suddenly warned.
“Yeah,” Scanlon answered, but there were no trees or cover on either side. The best he could do was to steer the Maybach onto the road shoulder, hit the brakes, and scream, “Out, everyone out and into the ditch.” Even that was too late. The two Spitfires began firing at them while the big car was still skidding to a halt. Scanlon glanced up and saw the chattering flashes of their thirty-caliber machineguns along the leading edges of the fighters’ wings, as the slugs began to shred the pavement down the center of the narrow road. It was not the Maybach they wanted, Scanlon realized. They were going for the trucks. He and Von Lindemann had gotten the others out of the car and into the ditch. When he turned his head and looked back, he saw the lead truck shudder under the hammer blows from the Spitfire’s guns. Pieces of shredded metal flew into the air, and the truck careened down the road out of control until it rolled into the muddy ditch on the other side and stopped. A dense cloud of black, oily smoke poured from beneath its hood and covered the scene.
“Oh, my God!” Christina Raeder screamed, wide-eyed as she saw the truck burning. “Rudy is in there.”
“My papers!” Wolfe Raeder screamed even louder. “See what you have done, you fools — my papers and all of my research, they are burning!”
After the British fighters roared past, the second truck rolled to a halt behind the first, screened by the thick cloud of oily black smoke. Its crew jumped out and ran to help the men trapped inside the first one. Scanlon and Von Lindemann did the same, reaching the passenger side first and wrenching the door open. Rudy Mannfried fell out into Scanlon’s arms, and the American half-carried and half-dragged him over to the shoulder away from the smoke and flames. The short, fat engineer’s head was bloody from a collision with the dashboard, and he had a large bullet wound in his chest. One quick look told Scanlon the man was dying. Carefully, he laid Rudy on the gravel and turned back to see Paul Von Lindemann standing on the running board on the other side of the truck, trying to pull the driver out of the flames.
“Paul, get away from there,” Scanlon screamed. “That thing’s going to blow!” he said, as the truck’s gasoline tank exploded and a loud explosion drowned out his words. The force blew the Major off the truck’s running board and tossed him on the pavement like a broken doll. Scanlon ran over, grabbed him under the arms, and dragged him the rest of the way across the road and into the ditch on the other side, away from the flames; but he knew Paul was badly hurt.
“Is he alive?” he heard a soft, troubled voice ask. It was Christina Raeder.
“Yeah,” Scanlon answered, as he looked Von Lindemann over. The German had a lump on his forehead, probably some other bumps and bruises, but Scanlon saw no blood, and nothing appeared broken. It would take a lot more than that to kill a stubborn bastard like him.
“You look after him, Christina, while I see to the others,” he told her.
Scanlon got to his feet just in time to see the British fighters turn and roll in for another pass. Scanlon pulled out his Luger and took aim at the lead plane in a last, desperate act; but he did not shoot, not that he would have done much damage with a handgun. The two Spitfires stayed too high and did not come in for another strafing attack this time. From the air, with the flames and choking black smoke pouring out of the lead truck and the bodies lying scattered on the road, it must have looked like a clean sweep. No sense wasting bullets on an abandoned car and a bunch of pedestrians, they were probably thinking. Not if they wanted to make it back to base for an early tea.
The lead truck was a blazing wreck with its driver dead, but the second one appeared to have avoided any serious damage thanks to the dense smoke that screened it from the view of the pilots. Emil Nossing and its driver were using blankets to beat back the worst of the flames, while Eugen Bracht sat on the ground in shock, holding Rudy Mannfried’s head in his lap. Scanlon ran over to help and found Rudy was still alive. He knelt next to him. Rudy’s eyes were open as he recognized Scanlon, grabbed him by the front of his coat, and pulled him closer. “It is the girl…,” he whispered feverishly. “It is Christina you need… Christina,” he said, as his eyes rolled back in his head and he died.
Scanlon laid him out on the ground as Otto Dietrich walked over, straightening his suit jacket. He glanced at the bodies and the burning truck and said wistfully, “My, my, Herr Churchill has an interesting way of helping his agents, would you not agree, Edward? One truck down, one to go, and all this bloodshed. It appears the ranks are quickly thinning. Whatever will you do now?”
“We’ll manage, Otto. We’ll manage.” Scanlon looked up at him, his eyes as cold as death as they focused on the arrogant German. “After all, you have a date with the hangman, and nothing’s going to save you from that.”
“Nothing?” Dietrich laughed. “With Hanni on your trail like a female tiger in heat and the British giving you all this wonderful air support, it is nice to see you haven’t lost that famous American sense of humor.”
For once, Scanlon had to agree with him. The white circles were plainly visible on the top of the trucks, and this was no accident. It was Bromley. Hanni warned him about the British the first night they met and so had Dulles. If that damned Colonel was not actually flying that Spitfire, he had ordered the attack. More lies and schemes, Scanlon thought. Well, to hell with all of them, he swore. No matter what they threw at him, he would push on and make that rendezvous in Bavaria, because that was the best way he knew to even the score with Bromley, Otto Dietrich, and perhaps with Hanni Steiner, too. Yes, Dietrich was right. Hanni would not have given up that easily, not Hanni. She would keep coming after him as long as she had breath in her body. Scanlon knew she would. He was counting on it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Berne
The hour was late. From the bay window of his study, Allen Dulles enjoyed a panoramic view across the dark rooftops of the old Swiss city, were he the kind of man who took pleasure in such things. Still, untouched by war, poverty, or the ravages of nature, nothing ever seemed to change here. It was as if time stood still. It allowed him to picture the world as it once was — humane, clean, and with a thousand stars to guide his way. Looking down into the winding medieval streets below, it was hard to imagine that the most savage war since the Middle Ages continued to play itself out all around Switzerland’s borders. It had always been his hope and dream that if he did his job as well as he possibly could; if he was clever, industrious, and worked exceedingly hard, he might actually help shorten all that pain and suffering by a few weeks, a few days, or even a few hours. That would be victory enough for him.
Dulles was peculiar in that regard. The proper son of a Presbyterian minister, he accepted espionage as a noble and very humanitarian undertaking. True, it could be murky, seamy, and have a dark, distasteful underside; but those were the means to a very noble end, or at least it was for him. He knew with absolute certainty that he was fighting on the side of God and battling against the Devil Incarnate and the poor misguided souls who fought beneath his banners. For Dulles, that made it a great, moral crusade. Unlike his father, Allen Dulles not only saved souls; he saved lives. His task was to hasten victory, to influence battles, to shorten the war, and to speed the inevitable triumph of good over evil. To him, there was no cause nobler than that.
Unfortunately, the very nature of his work required Dulles to lie, mislead, and send good men on dangerous missions from which many never returned. Sometimes they had to be sacrificed for the greater good, and Dulles knew that list would probably now include the name of Captain Edward Scanlon. It was a hellish price for anyone to pay, and Dulles prayed on it mightily each morning and night. He prayed for their souls and for his own, he prayed for his conscience, and he prayed to have the courage and the strength to continue sending them out.
It had become a game of numbers, he realized sadly. Many more men lived than had died; and he had saved many, many more than he had lost. That, however, did
not dull the images of their faces. Each night as he knelt in prayer he saw each of the young men he had sent into Germany on one mission or another. There were dozens and dozens of them, standing before him in their dress uniforms at parade ground attention. He knew each of them by name. What was an acceptable ratio, he wondered. Was it ten to one? What about one hundred to one or what if it slipped to five to one? The men who had simply been lost or killed in the line of duty were one thing. He would pray, and his conscience would deal with those. The ones that troubled him the most, however, were the ones to whom he had not been truthful. Those bothered him the most. In a war such as this, however, could moral theology be one more branch of cost accounting? Could God be a CPA who balanced the live versus the dead, the lost versus the saved, the good versus the bad, and the truth versus the lies? Allen Dulles’s heart gave him one answer, but his head told him something altogether different.
Of all the men he had sent and lost, there was one whose face he could not get out of his mind: Captain Edward Scanlon. Dulles had always managed to blank out their faces for a respectable amount of time after they left on a mission, especially if they did not come back; but this fellow simply would not fade back into the dark corners of his memory with all the others. Perhaps it was because he was the most recent. Perhaps it was the mission itself, Dulles wondered. This one had far too many lies, too many twists and turns, and too much duplicity. Or, perhaps it was the young man. That was why it never paid to get close to them. He knew better than to do that, not that there was anything special or unusual about this fellow Scanlon. They had come brighter, more handsome, and more talented; but for some reason, Dulles could not shake the anguished look in that boy’s powerful steel-gray eyes.
Dulles sank to his knees and prayed. Let this one come back, and let him find that woman of his. Somehow, the boy had managed to survive and come back once before, and he deserved something good for all his pain and sacrifice. Dulles knew his Dante. Scanlon had already been to the ninth and lowest circle of hell. In the Divine Comedy, the Italian poet had named each one of them. The upper eight were named for increasingly darker degrees of wickedness and sin, but it was the ninth and lowest circle that Dante reserved for the greatest evil of all. He titled it “Treachery.” How appropriate, Dulles realized, for he had just sent the young man on a return trip.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Dachau
Hands on hips, Scanlon stood in the noonday sun and stared dejectedly down the empty highway. Farther south, he saw the smudged outlines of a small village in the distance. A thin, wispy column of smoke rose high into the sky from the building on the far right. The plume arced gracefully to the west, and then slowly dissipated to nothing on the light wind. The village did not look to be more than a few miles away, Scanlon thought; and Paul Von Lindemann and several of the others needed to see a doctor quickly. Paul’s skin was pale and clammy, his face etched with pain, and Scanlon’s Boy Scout first aid only went so far.
“We’ll try that town up ahead,” he told the others as they gathered around. “Maybe they have a doctor.”
“No,” Paul Von Lindemann’s thin voice called out. “There is no time to waste on things like that. This bump on the head is nothing. I insist you push on.”
Well, at least the irascible aristocrat was conscious and his brain was not completely scrambled, Scanlon thought as he knelt on the ground next to him. “Paul, you have a knot on your head the size of a golf ball, some broken or badly bruised ribs, and I don’t know what else. Besides, that town is on our way.”
“I shall be perfectly fine, Captain.”
Scanlon did not agree and neither did Christina Raeder. She knelt next to the Major and mopped his forehead with her handkerchief, trying to make him comfortable.
“Here’s what we’ll do,” Scanlon told them, realizing he had a new and increasingly dangerous security problem on his hands. “I’ll take the Maybach. Christina, you and Emil sit with the Major in the back seat. Dietrich, you get in the front with me. You get to drive your old car again, with both hands on the wheel, and no tricks.”
“That is very sporting of you, Edward, my boy,” the Gestapo chief grinned. “Are you sure I will not hit anything?”
“And damage your precious Maybach? I don’t think so.”
“An excellent point,” Dietrich conceded as his eyes wandered down the road toward the small town. "One cannot be too careful, can one?"
“That’s why I’ll have the Luger pointed at you the whole way. Driver or not, if you try anything, I’ll blow a hole straight through you and I don’t care if the car gets wrecked,” Scanlon said as he stepped closer, crowding the Gestapo Chief until Dietrich took a step back. “I’m not afraid of you any longer, Otto. The sweats, the tingling in the finger tips, the shakes — they’re all gone now.” With their faces only inches apart, Scanlon locked his cold gray eyes on Dietrich’s and saw the Chief Inspector flinch. “Without that basement torture chamber of yours, without the electrical toys, and without your muscular monkey soldiers to do your dirty work for you, you’re just a pathetic, ordinary coward like the rest of us. You’ll bleed and die just like the rest of us, too; so be careful that it doesn’t happen today.”
Scanlon bent down, pulled Von Lindemann’s Luger from its leather holster, and handed it to Emil Nossing. “Emil, if he tries anything, anything at all, you and I will take turns blowing some very large holes in him.”
“Oh, yes, Captain,” the German scientist said as he hefted the heavy 9-millimeter automatic in his hand. “I was never very good with these things,” Nossing admitted, “but with an entire clip to work with, I should be able to hit him two or three times, I think.”
Dietrich’s moustache drooped at the corners as he saw at the hard expression on Emil Nossing’s face. The young scientist meant every word of it.
Scanlon turned away, knowing that part of the operation was well in hand, even if nothing else was. He walked to where Eugen Bracht sat on the ground next to the bodies of Rudy Mannfried and the Luftwaffe sergeant who had been driving the lead truck. Bracht looked totally lost.
“Eugen, I need your help,” Scanlon said as he knelt next to him, speaking in a calm, firm voice. “You and the other driver need to dig through the wreckage of the first truck and see if there’s anything we can salvage. Load what you can into the good truck and meet us on the other side of that town in an hour. Can you do that for me?” Tears were running down Eugen Bracht’s cheeks as he stared at Rudy Mannfried’s body. “Can you do that for me, Eugen?” Scanlon asked again, putting a reassuring hand on the man’s shoulder.
“I want to bury Rudy first,” Bracht whispered as he looked at the freshly plowed farmland next to the road. “I can’t leave him here like this.”
Scanlon nodded in agreement. “That’s fine, Eugen, I understand. Bury them both, but then I need you to drive the truck to the other side of town. Got that?”
Bracht finally nodded. “He was a funny little fellow, wasn’t he? Always the joker,” he said, still trying to understand what had happened and trying to understand himself. “After all these years, I should have treated him better; he deserved that from me, didn’t he? If he was here, I think he’d tell me to stop sitting in the dirt feeling sorry for myself, and do something, wouldn’t he?”
Scanlon nodded as he rose to his feet and turned away, knowing Bracht would now be fine. “Remember, Eugen, one hour and burn anything you can’t get inside.” That left Papa Raeder as the final problem to be resolved. He sat on the running board of the remaining truck, apparently still in shock from the savage air attack.
“Herr Doktor, you don’t leave me with many choices,” Scanlon told him. “I don’t want to bring you along or have you anywhere near me for that matter, but I sure as hell don’t trust you enough to leave you behind; so you’re coming with us. You’re getting in the front seat between me and your pal the Chief Inspector."
“I beg your pardon…?” Wolfe Raeder asked indignantly.
&nb
sp; “I’m tired, Doktor, bone tired, so don’t give me any more of your crap,” the American said as he locked his eyes onto Raeder’s until he felt the heat. “I’ll have my Luger jammed in your ribs the whole way, pointed right through you at Dietrich. One shot ought to solve both of my problems, because a 9-millimeter will go through both of you and make a hole big enough to put my hands in and clap. You got that?” Scanlon paused to let that vivid image sink in. Raeder grew wide-eyed and quickly nodded.
Once they took their places inside the now cramped car, the Chief Inspector turned the key in the ignition. He raised his chin, slowly put the car in gear, and set off driving down the country road with a pleasant smile, as if he were out for a Sunday afternoon drive. In the back seat, Emil Nossing and Christina Raeder flanked Paul Von Lindemann, propping up the nearly unconscious Luftwaffe pilot.
“Remember, Emil,” Scanlon turned and looked back. “If they try anything hinky, anything at all, point your Luger at Herr Dietrich and start pulling the trigger… and save one or two for the good Doktor.”
“If it is the last thing I do,” came the earnest reply from Emil.
As they drew closer to the small town, the hazy scene Scanlon saw from a distance became clearer. The town itself appeared dwarfed by two military encampments. The smaller was on the left side of the road, and the larger off to the right. They began to pass large warning signs, and Scanlon’s heart skipped a beat as he saw a black and silver SS flag flying over the smaller compound. It signified an SS garrison, while the one on the right had an entry road and gate, with tall barbed wire fences and guard towers around its perimeter.
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