One of his great-grandfathers paid the $300 commutation fee to avoid the draft during the American Civil War. Other than an occasional Gilbert and Sullivan play in college, Scanlon men had scrupulously avoided military uniforms for well over one hundred and fifty years. As his grandfather famously said, “We Scanlons have more important things to do than to crawl through the mud and be shot at.” No, the family’s well-trodden career path was through Yale and Columbia Law and on to a private bond house on Wall Street. At Yale, Edward excelled at lacrosse, foreign languages, the bars of New Haven, and coeds. The week after Pearl Harbor, however, he broke with family tradition and joined “the great unwashed,” as his grandfather called them, in a line outside a recruiting office. To compound the folly, he enlisted in the Army, another piece of fresh meat for a long, ravenous war, not that anyone knew it at the time. He even refused to use the family’s numerous connections to secure a direct commission to the Navy or a safe War Department post in plans, finance, or procurement as various cousins did. No, Ed Scanlon had things to prove to himself, and he wanted something far different.
“Frivolous,” was how his father had characterized his son’s decision. “Rash, immature, and thoughtless, as usual,” the older man added with his typically muted rage.
“I guess we’ll see, won’t we?” Ed countered with a cryptic smile. Then, to compound the folly, he chose the infantry and OCS followed by airborne and ranger schools. With his athletic abilities and skills in four languages, one of which happened to be German, after a year and a half of hard training, the OSS came calling. Why not, he thought — adventure, travel, and excitement, meet interesting people in interesting places… It did not take long for him to realize they were right about that last part, if nothing else. When he told his father of this new career twist, all he got was an even colder, angrier stare, but perhaps his father had been his primary motivation for enlisting from the very beginning.
Opposites often do attract. During their three months of rugged training, Will Kenyon and Ed Scanlon became as close as brothers. One night over a pint, Scanlon admitted that he was impressed by Will’s family military history. Kenyon smiled in his usual self-deprecating way and replied, “It’s what we do, old boy. If we look back far enough, I’m sure we’d find a Kenyon who served in Ireland and gave some drunken sod named Scanlon a good whack on his backside with a broadsword.”
“I expect we would. The bastard probably deserved it, too!” Scanlon roared with laughter.
“Didn’t do much to improve the bloodline, though, did it?”
“No, but I’ll bet one of my grandfathers returned to the old country, bought the sword factory, and tried to corner the market.”
Tall, thin, and handsome, Scanlon kept his black hair cut short. Perhaps it was from the years playing lacrosse; he had the smooth, confident, athletic stride of a jungle cat with penetrating gray eyes. They always reminded people of a winter sky, low and dark, as when storms were rolling in. Kenyon, on the other hand, was blue-eyed and fair-haired, quiet and relaxed with the easy confidence of a man who knew who he was, with a future that was predetermined and assured. As to the Nordic looks, “I suppose I have some Viking raider to thank for that,” Kenyon said.
“Weren’t they the ones who ran around England raping nuns?”
“Oh, come now, Edward. If the Viking was a tall, handsome devil, I’m sure it wasn’t always rape. We must make some allowance for a modicum of Scandinavian persuasion and charm, mustn’t we?” Once inside Nazi Germany, those Aryan good looks could not help but come in handy. If they dressed Will in black and silver, Scanlon thought the Brit could have posed for one of Heinrich Himmler’s SS recruiting posters.
In the rear compartment of the Junkers, Will Kenyon sat on the side bench next to Ed Scanlon. Across from them sat Sergeant Major Rupert Carstairs. He was watching them both but watching Scanlon far more intently. Carstairs had been the bane of Scanlon’s existence for the past six months. In public, each man behaved with impeccable military courtesy, especially with Kenyon around. In private, however, they had developed a thorough loathing for each other. Carstairs came from the working class in Birmingham. He rose through the ranks in the peacetime army, driven by a particularly nasty determination and an implacable belief in rank and the British social structure it represented. Carstairs had the utmost respect for a fine, well-bred British officer such as Will Kenyon, but to expect him to grant equal status to any American, much less a piece of upstart Irish trash with an irritating big mouth like Ed Scanlon, utterly galled the Sergeant Major. To Carstairs, it was all about the rigid class system, where everyone knew who he was. Regardless of Scanlon’s New York money, the American came from a middle-class family, which equated to bank tellers, door-to-door salesmen, and shop clerks. That meant he was not a proper officer, never could be, and Carstairs did everything he could to wash him out. When Scanlon proved able to take everything the Sergeant Major could throw at him with a smile and a smart comment, it drove him mad.
Because tonight’s drop was important, their commander, Colonel George Bromley at headquarters, sent Carstairs along as his personal minder. The Sergeant Major had donned a heavy down parka matching theirs. It was one of the few concessions to comfort and common sense that Scanlon had ever observed Carstairs make. Under his heavy jacket, he wore the standard British green wool field uniform and combat boots. His shirt would be bereft of any patches, ribbons, or medals, not that Carstairs had not received a chest full, but he never wore them. That was perhaps his only admirable character trait, Scanlon thought. The only ornamentations Carstairs allowed on his uniform were his Sergeant Major stripes and the small, simple, and very elite patch of the British Special Air Service on his sleeve. To Carstairs, the stripes and that badge said all there was to say. Besides, when you are as big and nasty as a side of raw beef, as Carstairs was, you did not need to impress anyone.
When the two-minute amber warning light flashed above the cabin door, Scanlon nudged Kenyon. With bulky “drop bags” tied to their ankles, that contained their clothes, weapons, ammunition, explosives, a radio, and other equipment they were bringing to the Resistance cell in Leipzig, they rose and wobbled to the airplane’s belly-hatch located in the floor further aft. Carstairs rose and joined them, as Scanlon and Kenyon stripped off their parkas and re-checked their gear. Carstairs straddled the hatch and pulled up on the handle until the heavy door opened onto its side and came to rest back on its hinge. With cold air now roaring in, the Sergeant Major stood at the opposite end of the hatch, hands on hips, feet spread, and toes dangling over the edge. He had an amused smirk on his face as he glared at Scanlon, confident that tonight would be the last he would ever see of this arrogant young Yank.
Scanlon chose to ignore the big bastard as the airplane’s floor suddenly tilted upward. Scanlon knew the pilot was taking it up to jump height, so it would not be much longer now. He turned his head and looked back at the lights on the bulkhead, waiting for the jump light to turn green. Like it or not, though, his eyes were drawn back to the hatch and to the dark abyss below. Dimly, he could make out the black, empty German farm fields as they raced by beneath them. With nothing but a smattering of old men and young boys to do the work now, most farms had lain fallow all year, leaving only puddles of dark autumn mud to splash into. Still, the empty landscape appeared more friendly and inviting than the expression on Carstairs’s face.
Scanlon felt an icy chill run down his back. He had made night jumps before, but those were at Fort Benning in Georgia or the rolling farms and forests of Sussex. This was different. That was Nazi Germany down there. The mere thought was terrifying enough, but he was not about to let that bastard Carstairs see it. The jump light on the front bulkhead flashed green, and Carstairs looked at his watch. “Time to go,” he screamed. “Uncle Adolf is waiting for the two of you, so out you go, lads.” He was addressing them both, but Carstairs was looking directly at Scanlon.
Scanlon smiled. “Why don’t you come with us, Rup
ert, old man? The drop’s supposed to be a piece of cake,” he shouted as he toppled forward into the hatch. As he did, he reached out, took a firm grip on Carstairs’s pants leg, and pulled. “But mind the sudden stop.”
The smirk on Carstairs’s face vanished as he jerked his leg back and almost lost his balance. “You bloody Yank bastard!” Carstairs screamed, but Scanlon did not let go until he had dropped through the hatch and the Sergeant Major’s bellowing was lost in the roar of the airplanes’ engines.
CHAPTER TWO
The first time Ed Scanlon saw Hanni Steiner was in the basement storeroom of Georg Horstmann’s boarded-up bookshop in Leipzig. It was anything but love at first sight. He and Will Kenyon had landed six miles west of the city in an area of broken forest and muddy farmland. With dawn less than an hour away, they slogged their way east until they found an abandoned hay barn where they could hide through the daylight hours, and then continue east along a series of dirt roads into the old city after dark. Months before, the OSS had stopped the practice of having the locals meet their agents at the drop zone. First, the parachute drops were rarely that accurate, especially at night. Second, far too many locals had been compromised and turned by the Gestapo. The upside was, the fewer number of people who knew their plans, the better off everyone was. The downside was they were on their own, inside the belly of the beast.
Their contact was to be an old bookseller named Georg Horstmann, and they were to meet him in the city’s abandoned produce market. The Nazis had closed his bookshop years earlier. Somehow, the old man continued to live on in the building’s basement, where he had carefully cultivated the image of an odd, slightly mad recluse. With a single electric wire bootlegged from the nearby post office and no hot water, the basement of his derelict bookshop made the perfect base for what was left of the city’s last Communist resistance cell. The pale, bony old man had been a tough, dedicated Communist since 1912. He had been Hanni Steiner’s closest confidant and her father’s before that. A near-cripple now, he needed two canes to negotiate the dark city streets. Eight years before, he had been badly beaten and had both legs broken by the same brown-shirted SA mob that sacked his small bookshop. As Scanlon would later learn, the Brown Shirts might break his bones, but they could never break the man.
Leipzig was a Major German rail crossing, and the Allies frequently bombed it at night. The central switchyards were their usual target, but the near misses often hit the neighborhoods around them; so old Horstmann led them on a slow, circuitous route through the blacked-out streets and alleys to the bookshop.
“The Gestapo and their informants don’t venture out at night any longer,” he told them. “Thanks to your B-17s, we should have the city streets to ourselves.”
“Unless we run into a stick of thousand-pounders,” Kenyon quipped.
“I’m a very old man with too many aches and pains, Captain. I should be so lucky.”
The mission that sent Ed Scanlon and Will Kenyon to Leipzig on that September night was to deliver detonators and explosives and coordinate with the local Underground cell. They had been having considerable success with sabotage and assassinations of prime Nazi targets. With few resources, London wanted to know how the hell they were doing it. Unfortunately, the only locals who were not long dead or rotting in a Gestapo jail cell by then were Communists, and they didn’t need or want help from anyone, least of all the British or the Americans. These were grizzled veterans of dozens of street brawls with the SA dating back to the early 1930s. The fact that they took their orders from Moscow, not London, must have completely escaped the attention of anyone in the Allied hierarchy. Oh, the locals would gladly accept the explosives and anything else Scanlon and Kenyon brought them, but they had no intention of letting these two young foreigners tell them what to do or let them coordinate much of anything.
What an arrogant farce he and Will found themselves in, Scanlon quickly concluded. Cold, wet, and muddy, they were supposed to be the boys from London out to dazzle the locals with their deft, professional footwork. Long on ideas but short on experience, at least London did not send them in empty-handed. In each of their drop bags, they carried thirty pounds of badly needed plastique explosive and detonators, items the Russians could not supply.
When they stepped inside the bookstore’s basement storeroom that night, they were politely directed to two rickety kitchen chairs, which sat on one side of a small table. Horstmann quickly brought them two mugs of hot but weak tea and stepped back, as Scanlon and Kenyon found themselves staring across at three scruffy-looking old men sitting on the other side of the table, who were eyeing them suspiciously. Scanlon assumed they were the leadership of the cell, hardly the dashing saboteurs and freedom fighters he and Kenyon expected to find. The leader was probably the wrinkled scarecrow in the center, with the head of operations on his right and the party chief on his left. From their appearance and manner, they could have been day laborers, hod carriers, or workers from a nearby factory who had been summoned to the foreman’s office for a good dressing down.
Hardly noticed when he and Kenyon sat down was a young blonde woman sitting cross-legged on a coarse wool blanket in the far corner of the room, cleaning and oiling the parts of a German submachine gun, which lay in a neat semicircle around her. After a quick, indifferent glance at the two young foreigners, she resumed her work and paid no further attention to them as her fingers danced through the small metal parts. She must be someone’s daughter, Scanlon quickly concluded, come here to clean and cook for the men. A great disguise, too, he thought. With her rosy cheeks and blond hair braided into rings above her ears, all she needed was a dirndl to pass for a Charter Member of the BDM, the Nazi League of German Girls, or a waitress in a beer hall during Oktoberfest entertaining the tourists. Soon, however, a new crowd of tourists would be arriving in Bavaria. They would be riding Sherman tanks and they were not coming for the beer or the wurst.
The longer he examined the faces of the four old men who sat in that damp, cold basement, the more he could see that he and Kenyon were being played for fools. With a furtive glance here and a nervous gesture there, the old men, he realized, were taking their cues from the girl. She was not someone’s daughter sent to clean and cook. She was the boss, and that sudden revelation left Scanlon feeling incredibly stupid. While the three men asked questions and kept Scanlon and Will talking, the girl had been listening and giving away nothing while she studied them and decided for herself what they were worth and how best to use them.
Finally, Scanlon turned and looked down at her. “Why don’t you come up here and join us?” he asked.
“Because this is more important,” she answered as her quick fingers continued to clean and reassemble the submachine gun.
“I thought we were working together.”
“Working together?” she scoffed as she oiled the mechanism on the submachine gun and let its bolt snap shut with a loud Click! “I trust this, because I know it will not quit on me,” she said as she finally glanced up at him. “You? I do not know you, and I am not certain I want to.”
“Are those your orders from Moscow?” he asked.
“Captain Scanlon,” she shook her head, amused at the thought. “Moscow is a thousand miles that way,” she threw a thumb over her shoulder, “and London is six hundred miles the other. This,” she patted the bare ground she was sitting on, “this is Leipzig, once a proud city in the former Free State of Saxony. Now, it is merely a painful boil on the backside of National Socialist hell. Occasionally, our little group makes it hurt a bit more for them. We do, not you, not London, and not Moscow.”
“We came to help,” he said with a forced smile.
“Help? Other than bringing in the plastique, what is it you think you can help us with? The men sitting at the table with you — Johannes, Peter, Franz, even old Georg — they have survived in this prison camp called the Third Reich since 1933 without help from anyone except each other. Look at them,” she said as she pointed at the three grizzl
ed old men hunched over the table. “Your German is excellent, but is that what you and Kenyon look like? I do not think so. Anyone younger than them with even one good leg, was drafted into the army years ago or is rotting away in a labor camp. Two healthy young men like you, without a good wrinkle or scar between you, how the hell do you expect to fool the Gestapo?”
Scanlon glanced away, feeling very foolish.
“Do you know how they managed to survive all these years?” she asked. “By keeping their mouths shut, listening, and hating the Nazis even more than they hate us. Do you think you can help them improve on that?”
The girl was right. He couldn’t. It was the height of arrogance for London to send him and Kenyon here. They should simply hand over the plastique and the detonators and then take off with their tails between their legs before things got any worse.
One evening, while Kenyon was checking out the rail yard, she relented. “I suppose this is not entirely your fault, Captain,” she said as her bright blue eyes flashed and turned his knees to jelly. “You cannot possibly understand what it has been like. The Nazis have systematically destroyed this beautiful old city, its culture, and its people, leaving us to watch helplessly as they hauled friends and relatives away in the middle of the night. It only took a whisper, sometimes not even that, for people to be grabbed off the streets, arrested, and tortured at Gestapo Headquarters. That is why our work here is so deadly serious, and why you cannot expect us to place what precious time we have left into your nervous, fumbling hands.”
“I understand. Truly, I do,” Scanlon admitted, “but we risked our lives to bring you the plastique. We are here and we are part of it now, every bit as much as you are.”
“Ah, the plastique,” she nodded. “That is the only reason I permitted you to get within a mile of us in the first place, Captain.”
Cold War Trilogy - A Three Book Boxed Set: of Historical Spy Versus Spy Action Adventure Thrillers Page 2