Winner Lose All

by William F. Brown

  Scanlon turned back to the operating table where the two prisoners were bandaging Von Lindemann’s head and his side. “How is our patient coming, Bauerschritt?”

  The inmate-doctor cringed at the use of his surname in front of the camp Commandant, but he managed to respond. “The Major has a bad concussion, two broken ribs, and a dislocated shoulder. Some sedatives and a week in bed would be advisable.”

  “No.” Von Lindemann struggled to sit up, his eyes glazed. “We must go.”

  Scanlon patted Von Lindemann’s arm and nodded. “The Major is right. We are already behind schedule. You wouldn’t have any sedatives here, would you?” he asked Bauerschritt.

  “The SS infirmary across the road has anything you need,” Weiter answered, still in a daze. “I will send for morphine and sulfa.”

  “Thank you,” Scanlon said with a slight bow to the Commandant. “We appreciate all your help.”

  “And I appreciate your… candor, Captain,” the red-faced Commandant replied. “It has been shall we say… original.”

  “What about this fellow, Bauerschritt?” Scanlon asked as he eyed the two prisoner-doctors as if he was bidding on a horse. “He doesn’t look like he’s doing much here. You don’t suppose we could borrow him for a few days until the Major mends?”

  “Borrow him?” Weiter glared at the two inmates. “Take them both and good riddance. With everything they heard in this room today, I would have had them shot anyway. So you will be saving me two spaces in the oven.”

  With the Maybach safely down the road and out of sight of the concentration camp, they stopped to transfer Paul Von Lindemann to the truck. They laid him in the rear cargo bed between two wooden crates where he would be more comfortable, and Scanlon told the two doctors to ride with him. The Major was conscious, but he was weak and groggy from his injuries and a shot of morphine. Christina Raeder insisted on riding in the truck with him too, refusing to return to the big touring car with her father and Otto Dietrich.

  “Not another minute,” she said.

  “But, Christina, your mother made me promise that I would protect you,” her father begged.

  “Don’t you dare!” she said through clenched her teeth. “I know the truth now.”

  “You should tell your daughter what really happened in Berlin,” Dietrich laughed at Raeder, unable to resist the opportunity to inflict more pain.

  “You be quiet!” Wolfe Raeder’s voice threatened.

  “What does he mean, Papa?”

  “Nothing, it is all lies!”

  “The official report called it an accidental fall,” the Chief Inspector hinted darkly. “Of course, your friend Göring controlled the Berlin police back then, did he not, Herr Doktor? What an interesting coincidence, eh?”

  “Be quiet! I warn you, Dietrich.” Raeder glared at him.

  “Your wife had a terrible fall, and out of nowhere you accept his job in Volkenrode,” Dietrich asked with a sadistic grin. “Was that the trade? Göring covered up your little fit of anger, and you designed some airplanes for him, or were you so overwhelmed with grief that you just felt a pressing need to get out of town?“

  “I swear, I will kill you,” Raeder said as he lunged at him.

  Dietrich laughed as he turned aside Raeder’s awkward charge, knocked the scientist to the ground, and put his foot on Raeder’s throat. “Yes, like Himmler and all the rest of them, Göring can be most accommodating when he wants something. But kill me? I do not think so, Herr Doktor.”

  “That’s enough!” Scanlon said as pushed Dietrich back. “The only one who’ll be doing any killing around here is me. You two get back in the car and be quiet.”

  “Not without my daughter!” Raeder demanded, suddenly terrified.

  “The choice is entirely hers,” Scanlon told him, “and I think she made it.” He shoved Raeder and Dietrich toward the Maybach. “Now, get in the back and shut up.”

  “Thank you,” Christina said as she broke into a broad, childlike grin.

  “Let’s go. We still have a long trip ahead of us,” he told them, and a dangerous one, he thought.

  “By the way,” Dietrich laughed as they walked away, “black sprinters with Jewish officers to hunt down the SS? You really are a man after my own heart, Scanlon.”

  “As you said before, the man heard what he wanted to hear. Now let’s go.”

  The plan that Bromley laid out back in London was for Scanlon to swing around the eastern outskirts of Munich, run south 70 miles to the Austrian border, go through the high passes into the mountain valleys beyond, and hide out there until the war ended. Ed Scanlon, however, did not intend to follow the British colonel’s plan and become another “accidental” target for the RAF. His goal was to head for the Bavarian Lake District in Germany, some 40 miles away, and hide out in the mountains above Tegernsee. Allan Dulles had told him about valleys and small mountain roads that were not on anyone’s map. Tegernsee was just off the main axis of Patton’s Seventh Army’s planned route east, so that was where Ed Scanlon headed. That was where he would hole up and wait.

  Seeing the burned-out hulk of a German Army truck lying by the side of the road was a common enough occurrence these days. The same could be said for the two fresh graves Hanni saw in the adjacent field. There was nothing unusual about that either, she admitted grimly. She could not be certain who was in them without digging up the bodies and that was something for which she had neither the time nor the stomach. Still, the truck had Luftwaffe markings on the bumper, this was the right road, and she had that feeling.

  She stopped the car, walked into the muddy field, and stared down at the two freshly dug graves. A piece of broken board lay on the ground near them. Someone had used it as a shovel to gouge the two shallow trenches in the soft dirt. Quick and efficient, she thought, with no time for formalities. Still, it was more consideration than Georg Horstmann had gotten, she remembered with a sharp pain. At the head of each grave, she noticed a short section of board had been wedged in to the ground as a makeshift tombstone. Crudely scored onto each in pencil was a name and today’s date. The one on the right said, “Ernst Langebein, Sergeant,” and the one on the left said, “Rudolph Mannfried, Friend.” Well, that was one consolation, she thought. Neither bore Edward’s name.

  She went to the burned-out truck. Standing on her toes, she peered over the tailgate into the truck’s blackened rear cargo bed. Little remained except for burned wood and charred paper — lots of charred paper — as if someone was determined to leave nothing behind. Edward, you meticulous bastard, she thought, taking reluctant pride in knowing she was the one who had trained him. Apparently, she had done her job too damned well, she realized. If he had been killed here, she would have found the truck wrecked but not burned. It would still be full of papers and blueprints. The airplane engineers would be sitting by the side of the road next to it, not knowing what to do next. Instead, with good leadership, they had taken the time to bury their dead, burn the truck and the rest of the papers, tidy up the place, and not leave a single clue behind. This is exactly what she would have done, which meant he was still very much alive.

  The stench of burned rubber and gasoline hung in the air like death itself. It was enough to turn her stomach, which was happening more and more these days. Regardless, Hanni shook the nausea off, reached into the truck bed, and ran her hand through the ashes. They were warm. The truck must have burned this morning, which meant that Edward could not be more than a few hours ahead of her. Hanni looked up the road. Two parallel lines of large-caliber bullets had shredded the pavement. An airplane, perhaps two, had found some fat targets on the road and dived down, guns blazing. She saw several sets of black skid marks, one of which ended at the burned truck. It had been caught on the open road, tried to avoid the sudden onslaught, and failed. The truck was German, so the airplanes had to be American or British. Poor Edward, she realized. It took some serious bad luck to have your meticulously laid plans wrecked by your own people, and Hanni had been in
this business far too long to believe in accidents or bad luck. Perhaps no one told the pilots, she thought. Then again, perhaps someone back in London wanted Edward to fail and decided to stop him right here. But why?

  Hanni shook her head. She was beginning to think like an NKVD officer again, which was exactly the way Moscow Center wanted her to think. Lavrenti Beria would be so proud, damn him. She was seeing conspiracies and double agents under every bed, but the rest of the world did not really act like that; surely, it did not. As she looked at the lines of bullet holes in the pavement and at the burned truck lying on the road shoulder, Hanni knew she could not be sure of anything anymore. Whom could she trust now? It had all become so insane, so twisted, and so dirty. She once heard someone say that truth was the first casualty of war. If it was, then integrity did not lag far behind.

  She turned and looked down the long, lonely road to the south and wondered where it would end for Edward and for her. He was somewhere down there. She would find him or she would die trying.

  PART FIVE

  THE BAVARIAN ALPS

  APRIL 1945

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  From Munich, Ed Scanlon led their small convoy south into the foothills of the Alps, passing through the small mountain villages of Holzkirchen and Gmund, then still higher toward Tegernsee. The slopes grew steeper and the alpine peaks more jagged as they rose to their full postcard splendor. Spring came late to the high mountains. This was only April, but the air was still crisp and cold. The north- and east-facing slopes and the shaded parts of the valleys remained covered with the last of the deep winter snow; yet where the upland meadows caught the midday sun, they were already filling with bright wildflowers, rushing water, and the smells of spring. In each valley sat one or two stout log houses with steep-pitched roofs and still prodigious piles of logs. Running water was everywhere, cascading down the face of the rocks, then down through the meadows, and finally across the road. It was almost enough to make you forget that there was a war going on, Scanlon realized.

  At Gmund, they crossed the main highway that ran west to Bad Tolz and east to Rosenheim and Austria. Bad Tolz! It had been a small, lovely Bavarian village ten years before, until Heinrich Himmler built the largest SS officers’ training school there, and the SS’s holiest of shrines. Now, it was a prime objective of Patton’s onrushing tank columns. The school itself was a huge white-walled fortress built on a hilltop to fit Himmler’s perverse notion of what a medieval castle from the First Reich should look like. American bombers had repeatedly pounded it, but air power alone can never root out entrenched infantry. No doubt, a major battle would be fought there soon, because Himmler’s true believers would never surrender. Their backs were to the wall now, and this was as good a place to die as any. That would suit Patton and his Third Army just fine. They would flatten the place and turn it into loose gravel. When that started, he would be able to hear the big guns many miles away.

  They drove through the crossroads and continued south until they came to the small town of Tegernsee. It sat on a cold, blue alpine lake surrounded by thick forests of pine and spruce and high, snow-capped peaks. On the far side of the town, he saw the narrow gravel road that Dulles had pointed out to him on the map. It wound its way up the side of a hill and quickly vanished in the trees beyond. This was exactly what he was looking for, Scanlon thought as they turned onto it. The road grew rocky and rutted as it rose higher into the mountains until they came to a colorful upland meadow with a stout log cabin and a small lake. It was probably an old, deserted hunting lodge. With the gray-green of the tall spruce and pines, the red and yellow wildflowers, and the vivid blue of a flawless alpine sky, it was the perfect place to get lost and forget, at least for a while.

  “What a marvelous setting you have chosen for us, Edward,” Otto Dietrich laughed as he got out of the car and stretched, pretending to admire the view. “But where is little Shirley Temple in her dirndl; and what of the Grandfather and Peter the goatherd? If you want to remake Heidi, you must bring the entire cast, you know.”

  Scanlon almost smiled. After the pain and anguish of Leipzig, the white sterility of a hospital room, and the gray pallor of a London winter, he had been living in a colorless world for far too long. He had to admit that this breathtaking mountain scenery did take on a near-Hollywood atmosphere. Dietrich was right about that, but he had been the one to blame. The war and the chief bastard himself were the grim reality against which the normal now seemed surreal. However, scenes like this beautiful mountain valley created sensual traps which he knew not to let himself fall into. The war was not finished with him, not yet; and neither was Hanni Steiner nor the German Army. It might be on life support, but it still had a few teeth left. Small units and patrols could still be operating even in a place like this, and there would be detachments of the ubiquitous Gestapo and its companion, the Cripo, or Criminal Police, in Tegernsee and all the other nearby towns. As much as he would like to do it, Scanlon knew he could not simply hole-up here and wait until the war ended. The National Redoubt, or Alpenfestung, was probably a figment of London’s imagination, but he could not take that risk. If it was real, there would soon be SS and German Army troops retreating into the mountains in large numbers. Scanlon knew he had to find Patton’s Third Army before that happened, which meant driving back to Gmund and heading west until he ran into the lead tanks.

  What about Hanni, he wondered. He had no doubt that if she could run, walk, or crawl, she was already hot on his trail. So the quicker he got Raeder, Dietrich, and the rest of his unwanted baggage safely into American hands, the quicker he could turn around and let her find him. Scanlon looked back down the narrow mountain track and wondered. Lord knows Hanni was good, but could she be good enough to make it to Munich or even Nuremberg through all that chaos without the cover of a big Army truck and Otto Dietrich’s Gestapo badge? It seemed inconceivable to him, but if anyone could do it, it was Hanni. Make it or not, she would try, and nothing seemed more certain to him than that. When she did, he would have her right where he wanted her, inside American lines and a hundred miles from the Red Army. After all, that was what he wanted all along. She would not come with him voluntarily, so he must leave her with no other options. He would make her chase him all the way back into his arms.

  They parked the truck and the Maybach behind the hunting lodge and quickly unloaded the wooden crates and boxes, covering them with the canvas from the cargo bed. Scanlon looked around the meadow and knew they should be safe here for a while, safer than driving around the countryside. He would drive the truck west toward Bad Tolz and leave the Maybach up here on the mountain. Military trucks were a common enough sight on the roads, but Dietrich’s touring car had proven far too distinctive.

  He searched the glove compartment and the trunk of Dietrich’s well-equipped limousine and found a pair of heavy steel manacles. “Let’s go inside,” he told them, where he shackled the Chief Inspector and Wolfe Raeder to the iron legs of a large cast-iron stove that sat against the far wall. The others would stay put and do what they were told, but he would never trust Dietrich or Raeder. The stove must weigh five hundred pounds, so now he didn’t have to.

  “Oh, come, come, Edward, you have my solemn word that we will stay put and behave, one gentleman to another,” Dietrich offered with a sincere smile and the sharp teeth of an alligator. He saw his answer in the American’s cold, humorless eyes. “No, somehow, I did not expect you would,” he sighed.

  “Christina,” Scanlon said as he put his arm around her shoulder, “I know you and the two doctors will take good care of the Major.” She nodded solemnly, not that he had any doubt. “And, Emil,” he turned toward the engineer, “I’m leaving you and Eugen with two of the pistols. Be careful; watch them while I’m gone, one of you inside and one of you outside. I should be back tonight or tomorrow at the latest. If there is any trouble, aim low and keep pulling the trigger. Especially with these two," he said as he glanced down at Otto Dietrich and Wolfe Raeder, mak
ing certain they both heard. “Don’t hesitate to shoot them both.”

  “Edward, Edward, you so disappoint me,” the Chief Inspector said wistfully as Scanlon turned to leave. “You could have the world, but you insist on throwing it all away.”

  “Guess I’ll have to live with that, Otto… and with the prospect of watching you hang.”

  “What a marvelous imagination you have,” Dietrich answered confidently. “They have not made the rope that will hang me, and they never will. You shall see.”

  The clear, crisp alpine morning softened into a warm, lazy afternoon, thick with the rich smells of heather, wet pine and spruce boughs, and a sea of wildflowers in full bloom. The sun stood high above the snow-capped mountain peaks, and the sky seemed to go on forever. Listening intently, the only sounds were the insects, the birds, falling water, and the timeless calm of the mountains.

  Scanlon had taken the truck and disappeared down the long, twisting road hours ago. Eugen Bracht remained inside the cabin where he kept his unwavering Luger pointed at Otto Dietrich’s head. The two doctors from Dachau had bathed in the icy water of the nearby lake and now lay in the tall grass on the far side of the cabin with the truck driver, where their thin, pale bodies dried in the warm sun. Emil Nossing also lay stretched out in the grass near the cabin, enjoying a panoramic view of the mountains.

  Christina Raeder wanted no part of the cabin or the two men chained inside. There was a rough-hewn bench on the open front porch that looked across the meadow and down the valley, and she insisted that Paul Von Lindemann sit outside with her. The Major’s head was wrapped with a white bandage, his right arm hung limp in a sling, and his torso was heavily wrapped to protect his broken ribs. With his gray wool officer’s tunic draped over his shoulders, he leaned back and basked in the warm sun next to her.