Winner Lose All

by William F. Brown

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Berne

  The hour was late. From the bay window of his study, Allen Dulles would have 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 it was 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.

  “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 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.

  Dietrich turned down the side road headed for the gate and said wistfully, “Well, if you want a doctor, Edward, I suspect they will have one here.”

  As they drew closer, Scanlon’s heart sank, but what choice did he have? It was a prison camp, and a very large one at that. The first guard tower they passed was not some makeshift affair open to the weather. It was a permanent hut towering twenty feet in the air with a shingled roof, a wide overhang, and a wrap-around deck outside. It had clapboard siding, glass windows, a heater, and permanently mounted machineguns and spotlights. The guards could cover the entire encampment or aim down the fence line if they wanted. Further on, Scanlon saw another guard tower like it, and then another off in the distance. There were four in all, on just this one side of the huge rectangular compound. Inside the fence, were row after row of perfectly aligned, wooden barracks, hundreds of them. Worse, he saw that the fence had small, white ceramic insulators on each strand of wire, which meant it was electrified.

  “You bastard, Dietrich,” Scanlon said as he felt an icy chill run down his spine. “What the hell is this?”

  The Chief Inspector’s eyes danced contentedly across the large compound. “I am surprised at you, Edward. This is one of the seven wonders of the modern world; it is Dachau. I doubt you will find it on any map, but for the past twelve years, this is where the Third Reich performed one of its signature magic tricks. Like Dora, Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and many, many more, they make people disappear.”

  Dachau! No wonder the bastard seemed so confident, Scanlon groaned. Dietrich had known all along where they were headed. It was too late to turn around, and Paul Von Lindemann desperately needed a doctor. They would just have to bluff their way through, as they had ever since they left Leipzig. As they drove along the fence toward the main gate, he looked inside the compound and saw hundreds of emaciated, gray men in striped pajamas milling about the central parade ground.

  “You have no idea how hard I had to work to get Berlin to leave me in Leipzig, in the law enforcement end of the business,” Dietrich told him. “I never did like these places.”

  “It won’t matter, Otto.” Scanlon shook his head in disgust. “No one is going to forget them, the SS, the Gestapo, and all the officials who put people here. These camps will get you hung whether you worked at them or not.”

  Tiny beads of sweat formed on the bridge of Dietrich’s nose as he stared out at the grim compound. “You surprise me, Edward.” He put on a plastic smile. “You are an educated man. With your history, I would have thought you Americans might appreciate our problem with the Jews, the Gypsies, the Communists, the homosexuals, and all the other social misfits. After all, you had your Yellow Peril and even Red Indians. We may have taken our social engineering a tad further than some, but personally, I fail to see the difference.”

  Scanlon stared. “We don’t kill people, Otto.”

  Dietrich smiled. “Now who is being naive, Edward?”

  Scanlon had heard stories about Dachau and the other Nazi concentration camps. Like everything else in Adolf Hitler’s Germany, hearing or reading about it never prepared you for the grim reality. This was no prison camp. It may have begun that way in the early 1930s, with the short-term internment of a wide variety of Hitler’s political enemies, but when the war started and German armies fanned out across Europe, it evolved into something infinitely more sinister and evil.

  “I will admit, the place does look a bit grim,” Dietrich added. “You know how the SS can get so full of themselves.”

  Inside the fence and beyond the gate, Scanlon saw the administration building. At the far end, there was a small office with a red cross painted on the door. “Turn in the gate and get us into that infirmary, Otto. You have the rank, and if you don’t get us in and back out again, that’s where they’ll take your corpse.”

  “No need for threats, Edward. I believed you the first time, even before you hit me with that pistol. Truly, I did. So just tell me what you want, because I plan on living past this afternoon. In fact, I plan on living for a very, very long time.”

  The main entrance to the prison c
ompound was through a decorative brick, arched tunnel built through the front wall of a wide two-story building. Dietrich swung the Maybach into the driveway and stopped at the tall, wrought-iron gate that blocked entry. An SS guard carrying a submachine gun strode over to the car and glanced inside, cautiously but politely. Big cars usually meant big shots and that was grounds to cause any mere Private to worry. Dietrich held out his Gestapo medallion and identification book at the guard and roared, “Open the gate, you moron. My pilot is injured and we need to see your camp doctor.”

  The guard saw the Gestapo ID and snapped to attention. “My apologies, Chief Inspector, but this is a closed compound.”

  “Who’s the Commandant now?” Dietrich roared. “Is it still that fool Weiter?”

  “Yes, Sir! Uh, no… I mean…”

  “Get him on the telephone, man. Tell him Oberführer Dietrich from Leipzig needs his immediate assistance. Do it now, you idiot. If this man dies, you shall find yourself on the other side of that fence, wearing the striped pajamas.”

  The guard dashed back to the gatehouse, and Dietrich turned toward Scanlon with a self-satisfied smile. “Lord, I almost forgot how much fun being a thorough bastard can be, Edward. As your Bob Hope says, ‘Thanks for the memories.’ ”