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

by William Brown

  “I know this fellow Hitler, too,” Stalin said as he splashed still more vodka into his glass. “I have dealt with him before. He is a snake. He might be cornered, but I know he is maneuvering right now, bargaining for a separate peace with the British.”

  “That fascist dog!”

  Stalin locked his eyes on Beria’s anew. He was never interested in other men’s opinions, and he obviously had no interest in Beria’s. “Hitler is not the one who is behind this business. It is that devil Churchill. I know him even better. He will strike a deal with Hitler, grab those scientists from under your very nose, and leave you holding the bag.” Stalin sneered. “And that bag will end up containing your own head, if you are not careful.”

  “But Comrade Stalin,” Beria pleaded. “The agent they sent is an American. He is not British.”

  Stalin belched with a painful grimace. “Nonsense. I went eye-to-eye with Roosevelt at Yalta. He is a senile old woman now, a worn-out cripple in a wheel chair. It is that bastard Churchill who is pulling all the strings.”

  “Yes, Comrade Stalin, I see.”

  Stalin tipped his head back, downed the rest of the vodka in one long gulp, and threw the bottle in the fireplace with a loud, demonstrative Smash! “I want those jet airplanes, Beria. I want the plans and I want the men who drew them. Do you hear me?”

  “I have my very best people on it,” Beria pleaded. “I heard from Leipzig this very evening. Those airplane designers are almost in their grasp now.”

  “Your very best people, Beria? And almost?" Stalin’s voice seemed to slither out across the desk and wrap itself around Beria, suffocating and squeezing the life out of him. “These people of yours, these agents, tell me who they are? Russians? Gypsies? Armenians? Who?”

  Beria mopped his brow and tried to think. “They are Germans," he finally admitted.

  “Germans!” Stalin spat on the floor. “Turning on their own countrymen? I hate traitors, Beria. I hate them worst of all. How much are we paying these German vermin of yours?”

  “Nothing, Koba. They are committed NKVD agents, local party members since long before the war… and Jews,” he finally admitted as his voice dropped to a whisper.

  Stalin glared at his secret police chief as if he were a disobedient child. “Did I hear you say they were Jews, Beria? Jews? Working for free? Then they are the same kind of idealistic trash that ran with Trotsky and Zinoviev — internationalists, “socialist” reactionaries, unreliable double agents, and none of them can be trusted.” Stalin leaned across the desk and pointed an accusing finger at him. “When this business is done, I want them shot, all of them.”

  “Of course, Koba. I was only using them until…”

  “Shoot them!” Stalin went on, ignoring his spy chief. “If you do not, they will surely put a bullet in both of us one day.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Bayreuth, Bavaria

  It was shortly after noon when Scanlon drove the powerful Maybach into the center of Bayreuth. The two trucks from Volkenrode sat waiting for them in front of the Festspielhaus, the large concert hall, which dominated the center of the small city. Scanlon pulled in behind the rear truck, where he saw Eugen Bracht pacing nervously up and down the sidewalk, deep in thought. Emil Nossing sat on the running board of the lead truck, looking relaxed and investing his time studying a road map. Rudy Mannfried, on the other hand, lay sprawled across its tailgate like a large cat napping in the sun. If Rudy was sleeping, however, it did not take him long to react to the throaty roar of the Maybach’s big twelve-cylinder engine.

  “My God, it is good to see you,” Rudy gushed as he rolled off the tailgate and ran to the car, obviously referring to Christina Raeder. He wrapped his arms around her and hugged her tight as she got out. “I was beginning to think you would never get here, little one,” he said.

  She lowered her head and turned her eyes away, embarrassed to be the center of attention. “It was a… a very difficult trip, Rudy,” was all she would say.

  “A trip you never should have made,” Rudy replied, wagging his finger at her. “You left without as much as a good-bye for your portly old friend.”

  “I am sorry," she answered, looking confused and guilty. “Truly, I am.”

  “Well, now that you’ve come to your senses, all is forgiven,” he beamed as he released her. “Believe me, you would not have liked it in Russia. A steady diet of borscht and Mussorgsky would turn a delicate little stomach like yours, accustomed as it is to sacher torte and Puccini. Blah!” he chortled. “It is a dark land of boiled cabbage and potatoes with tea served in dirty glasses, and winters that would frost your little knickers. It is not for you, little one; it is not for you.”

  Christina’s lips formed a thin smile as she finally looked up at the fat weapons expert. By then, the others had gotten out of the big touring car and joined them in the street.

  “Five minutes to stretch, then everyone in the trucks, please. We must be on our way,” Paul Von Lindemann reminded them. “It is over fifty miles to Nuremberg, and we cannot waste a minute if we hope to get through the city before nightfall.”

  Scanlon herded everyone back into the vehicles and they drove out of town, heading south using the same seating arrangement. Raeder, his daughter, and Otto Dietrich sat in the rear seat of the Maybach, while Scanlon and Paul Von Lindemann took turns driving and keeping a pistol pointed at the back seat. They divided the rest of the crew from Volkenrode between the two heavy trucks, each having its own Luftwaffe driver behind the wheel.

  “Some trip,” Ed Scanlon thought to himself as the soft, green spring landscape rolled past the car windows. Leipzig to Bayreuth to Nuremberg was a journey that could be measured in more than just miles. Like Leipzig, Bayreuth had been a center of German music and culture for decades, but it projected the darker side. While Leipzig in nearby Saxony had been the home of Bach, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Schiller and Goethe, its smaller Bavarian neighbor became the shrine to just one man — Richard Wagner. He was the patron saint of Aryan and Norse mythology, German nationalism, and blatant anti-Semitism, making him Adolf Hitler’s favorite composer. Torch-lit formations of men marching in huge geometric patterns in the stadium at Nuremberg gave the Nazi party a powerful image, but Wagner gave it its voice and rhythm. He was so popular with the Nazi leadership that they named SS divisions after characters in his operas; and the city, the man, and his message became part of a vicious national ethos. Still, the music of a long-dead opera composer was only music. On that lovely spring afternoon in April 1945, with the sun shining, the bright-green leaves unfolding on the trees, and the fields full of wildflowers in bloom, it was hard for Ed Scanlon to imagine that men were actually killing each other to defend that perverted ideal, until Wolfe Raeder managed to break the spell.

  “Kidnapping me like this will gain you nothing,” he announced indignantly. “This entire episode is merely a temporary setback, nothing more.”

  “We’ll see how temporary it is, Herr Doktor,” Scanlon answered.

  “It is silly and ineffective. In the end, I shall do whatever I wish; I shall go where I wish; I shall work for whomever I wish; and you cannot stop me,” he said, his voice beaming with confidence.

  “You are a disgusting fraud, Herr Raeder,” Paul Von Lindemann said angrily.

  “I did not start this war, Von Lindemann. It was you Prussians who brought this ruin on our people, just as the Führer told us. Look at you,” Raeder sneered. “You are nothing but a whore, a hopeless cripple who is selling my work to the highest bidder.”

  “Papa, that was cruel!” Christina scolded him. She looked at Paul Von Lindemann and made eye contact, but she did not look away this time.

  “Cruel, Christina?” her father asked. “Who was it who said, ’And not one of the wicked nation shall escape their just punishment.’ Was that not what your Norma sang on the opera recording? So do not lecture me, young lady.”

  “Let her talk,” Scanlon warned. “You’ve kept her bottled up far too l
ong already.”

  “This is a family matter. How dare you interfere!” Raeder’s face grew red.

  “It’s high time someone did,” Scanlon shot back. “A life in Moscow is one hell of a price to make anyone pay for loyalty.”

  “Loyalty? Who are you to lecture me on loyalty?” Raeder sneered. “You are a thief and a traitor, like that parade-ground martinet sitting next to you. So, tell me, Captain Thief, what is your real name?”

  “His name is Scanlon, Captain Edward Scanlon,” Otto Dietrich said, his slow, sullen voice muffled by his swollen jaw. “Do not let his fluent German fool you, Herr Doktor. He is in the American Army where he is a spy in their OSS. He flies over here to Germany every few months to take the waters with me and get a massage and manicure in my basement beauty parlor. Is that not why you graced us with your presence, Edward, my boy?”

  “And to take out the trash,” Scanlon answered, catching Dietrich’s eyes in the rear view mirror. There was hatred and anger penned up inside the Chief Inspector, and Scanlon took careful note of it. “However, if Major Von Lindemann is a traitor, Herr Doktor, what would your precious Führer think about you selling out to the Russians?”

  Wolfe Raeder’s eyes flashed. “The sun is setting on the west. You Americans are ample proof enough of that. It is rising in the east, because the Soviets have brought something new and fresh into this world. Socialism is the only hope for the next generation.”

  “Personally, I don’t care what you believe in, Herr Doktor," the Major told him, "but don’t infect the girl with that nonsense.”

  “So! The traitor is now an expert on political science, too?” Raeder stated sarcastically as his face turned red. “What do you believe in, Herr Major?”

  “Me? I believe in Germany and the Kaiser, if the truth be known,” he answered proudly. “We Von Lindemanns have been monarchists for over four hundred years. Compared to that, your Austrian corporal is a rude, undistinguished upstart — a first-rate actor, a second-rate artist, and a third-rate dictator.”

  Scanlon watched the three faces in the rear view mirror. As the arguments clashed and the sparks flew, Christina Raeder’s eyes became more and more troubled. She looked at Von Lindemann and then at her father, her head swiveling back and forth like the umpire at a tennis match. Clearly, she had doubts about the truths her father pounded into her head year after year. Meanwhile this reserved Luftwaffe pilot, a throwback to an era of the officers, mess, swords, and good manners, had blown into her life like a breath of cool, fresh air, precisely at the time a young girl desperately needed to know how to become a young woman.

  “I am from East Prussia, Herr Doktor,” the Major said. “We have been fighting the Slavs for a thousand years, and we learned a few things for the effort. Your jet airplane is a wonderful machine. I flew it in combat, and I am one of the few men left alive in this world who is qualified to make that statement,” he acknowledged with a slight bow of his head. “That is why I can also state that putting it in the hands of the Russians would be a monstrous crime against the German people. We would be paying for it for the next hundred years.”

  “Is it the welfare of the German people you are so concerned about, Herr Major, or the welfare of your British masters?” Raeder crowed, leaving Von Lindemann seething.

  “Let it go, Paul,” Scanlon nudged him. “I just hope he never sees the truth.”

  It was late afternoon when they reached the outskirts of Nuremberg. A soft, golden sun threw long shadows across the road as Scanlon skirted the central city. He swung south and then east through the suburbs, hoping to intersect the main highway to Munich and the Alps without being stopped. Unfortunately, there was no way to avoid the sense of doom that hung over the city. Along the eastern side of the road, in the fields and in the woods, they passed unit after unit of the Volksturm militia. They were old men and fifteen-year-old boys for the most part, dressed in ill-fitting, second-hand uniforms. They leaned on their rifles, sat on the ground near freshly dug tank traps and makeshift barricades of tree trunks and old automobiles; but Scanlon noted that the fortifications were all facing east, not west.

  “It would appear that the Führer’s Fortress Europe still has some cracks, Herr Doktor?” Scanlon mocked him.

  Wolfe Raeder stared at the grim scene and offered no reply.

  Along the barricades, they saw groups of haggard-looking men dressed in torn, gray work clothes with closely cropped hair and thin, unshaved, emaciated faces. They labored over picks and shovels to dig still more ditches and tank traps along the side of the road.

  “Who are those wretched people?” Christina Raeder asked as she watched them through the car window. “Are they convicts?”

  “No, Fraulein,” the Major answered. “Those are prisoners, volunteer laborers as Herr Goebbels calls them, mostly Russian prisoners and forced labor conscripts from the east. It makes you wonder what they volunteered to get away from, does it not? With the SS at their backs and the Red Army in their faces, it is little wonder they look so forlorn.”

  Scanlon guessed they understood their dilemma better than anyone, and they knew the long odds against surviving it. More troubling was the column of young boys they passed on the road. They were twelve to fourteen years old at the most. At another time or place, they might be a Boy Scout troop out on a nature hike were it not for the heavy rifles, the “Panzerfaust” antitank weapons slung over their shoulders, and uniforms that hung on them like children playing in their father’s clothes. Hitler Youth, Scanlon realized sadly. Ludicrous, he thought, until he saw the hard expressions on their faces. Like everything else in this madhouse, it would all come to a grim and bloody end.

  Scanlon continued to drive on, but the hour was growing late. He was exhausted and if he continued driving with his headlights off on these twisting country roads, he would wreck the car for certain. Their only choice was to hole up for the night, he concluded, as he looked for a deserted side road where they would not be bothered. When he became tired, he became irritable and was even known to lose his famous sense of humor. When he lost his sense of humor, he became junkyard mean, and it would not be a good idea to have Otto Dietrich within a hundred miles of him.

  He saw a side road going into a small stand of trees, so he pulled in and parked. They handcuffed Dietrich and Wolfe Raeder to the door handles in the Maybach’s rear seat. “That should do nicely. Wake me in four hours, Paul,” he mumbled as he threw a blanket on the ground, feeling the exhaustion piling on. “I’ll take the next shift.”

  Funny, Scanlon thought as a half-smile crossed his lips. It had been four days since he had a drink, a SPB, a Scanlon Personal Best, as his Ivy League father would call it. That had been surprisingly easy without Sergeant Major Rupert Carstairs and the Right Honorable Colonel Sir George Bromley to hassle with him. Maybe there was some cause and effect there, he thought as he quickly fell asleep.

  It was the bright sunlight streaming in his eyes that finally woke him. He blinked and looked at the Luftwaffe Major sitting next to him. “Why didn’t you wake me, Paul?”

  “You needed the sleep more than I,” the German answered with a pleasant smile. “Besides, they train fighter pilots to sit for hours in an uncomfortable seat with absolutely nothing to do. Frankly, I enjoyed the time to think.”

  “Come to any earth-shattering conclusions?”

  “Yes, I am hungry.”

  After a cold breakfast of canned, army field rations, they continued to push south through the small towns of Roth, Weissenburg, Eichstatt, and Neuburg, which lay in the rolling valleys on the way to Munich. These were picture-postcard villages at a crossroads with narrow, twisting streets, an old stone church, and town square with a fountain in the middle. The houses and shops along the main streets were half-timbered, with heavy overhanging roofs, exposed rough-hewn wooden beams, white plaster walls decoratively painted with flowers and farm scenes, balconies with flower boxes, and the occasional Nazi flag still hanging from the balcony. A year ago, every balcony
in town would have one. Now, the displays were a bit more tentative. In another week, Scanlon had no doubt the flags, gaudy lapel pins, and party membership cards would be buried deep in the rose garden or fed into a roaring fire.

  The drive south into Bavaria proceeded without incident until they were ten miles north of Munich and Scanlon got his first premonition of trouble. He was at the wheel on an open stretch of flat road. Empty fields lay on each side and there was no place to hide. Inexplicably, the fingers on his left hand began itching, and his stomach turned strangely sour. Through the windshield, he saw two small, black specks high in the bright blue sky ahead — airplanes! Fighters, he realized, but whose? If they were German Focke-Wulfs or Me-109s, there was no reason for them to attack two German trucks a hundred miles behind German lines. If they were American P-51 Mustangs, British Spitfires, or Hurricanes, Bromley said the pilots were to ignore any trucks with two white circles painted on the tops of their cabs. The circles were up there, so why worry? Unfortunately, the answer his stomach kept providing was the Right Honorable Bastard George Bromley.

  “Those are British Spitfires,” Paul Von Lindemann told him, sounding relieved, “God in Heaven, but I used to hate those things.”

  As Scanlon watched, the two fighters passed high overhead. Slowly, they banked and made a lazy turn, dropping low as they came in for a second, closer look. Scanlon leaned out the driver’s window and waved as the two long-range fighters flashed overhead no more than a few hundred feet above the roof of the trucks and the Maybach. Paul was right. There was no mistaking these khaki brown airplanes with blue, white, and red concentric circles on their wide wings. They were British, no doubt about it, Scanlon thought, as he watched them come around for a third pass, nose down this time, head on, aiming straight at them.