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

by William Brown

  Two Ends of the Pen

  5-Stars! “A must read for historical fiction and suspense fans! I really enjoyed this story of Mike Randall and the U-Boat from Nazi Germany. It had a very realistic feel. The descriptions of the Nazi SS guys had me cringing… a great pick for history and suspense buffs.”

  The Alaska Bookie

  5-Stars! “This is not just another war story! It takes the reader to the heights and dregs of the human condition… speeds along like a Ken Follett or Eric Ludlum novel of old. For those who love adventure, thrills, this novel will leave you breathless and wanting more from this skillful writer. Splendidly written!”

  Crystal Book Reviews

  5-Stars! “An entertaining historical thriller! Reminds me of Jeffery Deaver’s Garden of Beasts and Frederic Forsythe’s The Odessa File. It provides one answer to the eternal question: What must good men and women do when evil walks among them? Dean Koontz has made a career answering this question.”

  Book Pleasures

  5-Stars! “A Highly Entertaining and Nail-Biting Read! I’d forgotten how much I could enjoy a good story… a fast, exciting read. The author excels at keeping the reader both gasping for air and reading on.”

  Glynn Young Reviews

  Reviewer Comments on Thursday at Noon. A Joan Kahn Book published by St. Martins Press, and on the new Kindle E-Book update and release (a sampling from 44 Five-Star Kindle reviews):

  “A thriller in the purest cliffhanger vein… Mr. Brown’s technique is flawless. It could only have been learned by way of a thousand Saturday afternoon matinées.”

  The New Yorker

  “Writing in the vein of Forsythe and Follett, Brown has produced a fast paced thriller…”

  Publisher’s Weekly

  5-Stars! “Bond Meets Indy Jones! This is my first review of any book. I’m glad I can promote "Thursday at Noon." The settings were real and the characters believable — esp. the cynically incompetent officials above Thomsen. I was left wondering, if this was based on some actual incident or similar situation. I’d buy more books by this author.”

  Ralph Glaser, Amazon Reviewer

  5-Stars! “Non-stop energizing plot! ‘Thursday At Noon’ is a thrilling, adrenaline rush novel by terrific author William F. Brown. I read and reviewed his novel, ‘Amongst My Enemies’, earlier this year and thought it was spectacular. He pens a thrilling espionage adventure that will capture the reader from page one. I could see the events unfold like you would in a movie, with great character depiction, vivid backgrounds and a non-stop energizing plot. If you enjoy espionage thrillers that will keep you thoroughly entertained, pick up Thursday at Noon!

  Wendy L. Hines, Minding Spot Book Reviews on Amazon

  5-Stars! “Another Winner! Brown has penned another great read! This story pulls you in and won’t let go — taking you through twists and turns you could never predict. As in the other Brown novels I have read, it was hard to read quickly enough to learn about what would happen next. Though it was set in the early 1960s, the reader might easily imagine it happening in today’s world. References to the Bay of Pigs and the Kennedy administration create a brilliant historical slant. I am looking forward to the next book Brown will share with Kindle readers!”

  GinnyReader, Amazon Reviewer

  Winner Lose All

  Copyright 2013 by William F. Brown

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Cover Design by Todd Hebertson

  Digital Editions produced by: Booknook.biz.

  Amongst My Enemies

  a novel by

  William F. Brown

  In the spring of 1948, the newly created State of Israel was attacked from three sides by the regular armies of five Arab nations. The Israeli ‘army’ consisted of ill-trained militia units armed with old rifles and a handful of light machineguns. They had no tanks, no artillery, and no air force. Eight years later, in the Sinai War of 1956, the Israelis were able to field highly effective armored, mechanized infantry, airborne, artillery, and air force units in a lightning attack that crushed the Egyptians and pushed them back to the Suez Canal. How did a little country like that get all that stuff?

  PART ONE

  KÖNIGSBERG

  GERMANY

  FEBRUARY 1945

  CHAPTER ONE

  Dante had it wrong. Hell wasn’t a blazing inferno filled with the mournful cries of the damned; it was the frozen plains of northern Germany, and it could be quiet as a grave.

  That day began like all the ones before it, with Stolz, the German Kapo or head guard, pounding his meaty fist on the side of the rusty old truck as he screamed, "Raus! Raus!" Out! Up in the truck’s canvas-covered cargo bed, a mound of ragged, emaciated prisoners would shudder and shrink into the shadows; but the sad truth was there was no place to hide and they knew it. They were what was left of a forced labor battalion trapped here in the frozen rubble of Königsberg on the Baltic coast in East Prussia. Remnants of the German Army and the SS still held the old port city, surrounded and hopelessly outnumbered by a vengeful Red Army; and life can’t get any more tenuous than that.

  Most of the prisoners huddled together in that old truck bed were Russian, with a smattering of Poles, Lithuanians and Czechs, but no one cared. Michael Randall and Eddie Hodge were American, but no one cared about that either, Randall thought, as he rolled over and looked outside through a tear in the ragged canvas. In late winter at this latitude, the light was thin and the days pathetically short; but as he looked, he saw the first pink line of another cold, clear dawn creep over the horizon. Slowly a frozen landscape of broken buildings, bomb craters, and rubble began to emerge in tones of dirty gray on sooty black. It must be morning, he thought. Somehow, he and Eddie had survived another miserable night as they had survived the many long, painful ones that had preceded it. Not that it mattered; they were all going to die here and every poor wretch inside that truck knew it.

  Two years before, the Red Army rolled out of the steppes of Central Asia like an angry tidal wave and no force on Earth was going to stop it until it crashed down on Berlin. However, the main Russian thrust had gone much further south, through central Poland. Königsberg and the remaining German enclaves along the Baltic coast had been bypassed and there is no glory in a sideshow— no medals and nothing worth dying for. So Ivan let the cold weather, starvation, and his artillery do the killing. Each morning, he would drink his tea, eat some black bread, and lob a few shells into the rubble, leaving an acrid haze over the city that reeked of burnt wood, burnt brick, and burnt rubber. All it accomplished was to rearrange the bricks, turn the gray snow a bit darker, and kill a few more of the poor dumb bastards caught inside. Fortunately, spring was still months away. When the thaw came, the ice would slowly give up its dead and the city would really begin to stink.

  Randall nudged the pile of rags lying next to him. “Eddie, we gotta get up. Come on,” he said, but his friend did not move.

  “Mikey, I can’t,” came the weak reply. “It’s the legs, I…”

  “You gotta try; you gotta get them moving.”

  “Moving? Jeez, I can’t even feel them anymore.”

  In the dim light, Randall could barely make out Eddie’s pale, sweaty face, but he knew his friend was dying. That would be the ultimate outrage, the one he would never accept. They had been inseparable since their aircrew met at that Army Air Corps field back in West Texas early in 1943. That flight school was the first time either of them had strayed more than a hundred miles from home. Eddie came from a long line of watermen in Rock Creek, South Carolina, who spent
twelve hours a day in small boats dredging clams and oysters from the heavy river muck. Mike grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin, milking cows at 5:00 AM. He was a muscular six-foot-three, two-hundred-ten-pound tight end for his high school football team while Eddie was a wrestler, maybe five foot five, one hundred thirty-five pounds, and taut as a steel cable. Now, after a year of training, nineteen combat missions over Germany, and four months trapped inside this hell-hole, they had become two halves of a whole, brothers pulling, pushing, and taking turns keeping the other one alive. “Hey, what’s a pal for?” one of them would say, because without a buddy, life hung by a very thin thread in a place like that.

  Then Eddie got frostbite. First, it was his toes. Michael kept rubbing them, changing the dressings, and forcing Eddie to keep the circulation moving, but it was too damned cold. The frostbite slowly spread from the toes to his foot. Soon, the leg began to swell. Eddie grew feverish and weak, his eyes red-ringed and his skin a waxy pale. It was gangrene and everyone inside that truck knew it.

  “We’ve gotta get them moving,” he said as he reached over to rub Eddie’s legs again.

  “Mikey, stop it!” Eddie moaned and pushed him away. “It hurts too much.”

  One by one, the other prisoners slipped past them, climbed over the tailgate, and dropped to the ground, leaving the two young Americans alone in the truck bed. “I was having that dream again,” Eddie said with a thin smile. “It’s November back home, the first day of duck season. The marsh and cane fields lie all flat and brown and there’s a thin mist floating on the river, just enough so you can’t tell where the land ends and the water begins. You and me, we row my Daddy’s old skiff up river to the duck blind. We climb up in there and have a beer and a couple of them ham sandwiches my sister Leslie made us for breakfast— country ham on homemade bread with lots of butter. I can almost taste ’em, Mikey. And when them birds finally do come over, the flock’s so thick it fills the sky. We shoot and we shoot until our shoulders ache from the kick of them shotguns. And God, it feels good, Mikey, it feels so damned good!”

  "Yeah," Michael sighed, letting Eddie stay in the dream for a few minutes, anyway.

  Four months ago, their B-17 took off into a clear, Italian sky for the long leg north to Berlin. They hit their marks and dropped their bombs, but before they could make the big turn west, the German flak guns found them. A B-17 is a tough bird and Lieutenant Jensen, their pilot, fought hard to keep it in the air as they lumbered north and east, out of control. The smoke and flames got worse and worse inside, until the plane went into a steep dive. Mike and Eddie clawed their way to a side door and bailed out, but they were the only ones who made it. They came down in a muddy wheat field somewhere in East Prussia. Long columns of refugees choked the roads heading west, desperate to stay ahead of the Russians. Discarded furniture, mattresses, pianos, steamer trunks, and suitcases lay strewn along the roadsides. He and Eddie found some civilian clothes and it was easy for them to blend in — not that it mattered. Two days later, they were stopped at a German Military Police roadblock, and the joke was on them. The Germans weren’t looking for American airmen. They were looking for strong backs to dig tank traps and clear rubble. Instead of a POW camp or being thrown against the closest wall and shot as spies, they were dragooned into a forced labor battalion headed north to Königsberg.

  Michael nudged him again and pleaded, “You gotta get up, Eddie. We’ve been through too much together. You can’t quit on me now.”

  “Quit?” Eddie moaned. “My legs are all froze up; they won’t move.”

  “Then let me help.” Michael tried to rub them again.

  “Oh, God!” Eddie moaned, so Michael stopped. He could see the pain was too intense now, and he didn’t know what else to do. “Eddie, if you don’t get up, they’ll kill you and this time, I won’t be able to stop them.”

  “Promise?” the little guy answered with a pleading smile. “You and me, we should’ve stayed inside that old B-17. We shoulda gone down with Jensen and the rest of them; but no, we were too smart for that, weren’t we? We went out that hatch and we thought we were safe, that we could just walk away.”

  “We still can walk away…”

  “No, you can, not me; ’cause I’m not like you, Mikey. They hit you, you bounce back up even higher. They hit me and I hurt. Besides, none of this is real,” he said, waving a limp hand toward the frozen landscape outside. “This is Saturday afternoon at the old Orpheum. Remember? Flash Gordon and Doctor Zarkov? That’s you and me, and this here is the Planet Mongo. See, it’s all pretend, Mikey. It ain’t real. It can’t be, because nobody can make up anything this crazy mean. Nobody.”

  That was when Stolz beat his fist on the side of the truck again, and Michael knew Mongo was all too real. “Raus!” Stolz bellowed. “It is a fine morning in the glorious Thousand Year Reich and the Führer wants you two American swine to earn your keep.”

  “Eddie, I can’t just leave you here to die,” Michael whispered.

  “Then don’t! Don’t leave me here to die.” Eddie grabbed Michael’s coat and pulled him closer, pleading. “You’d do it for a lame horse, wouldn’t you? You’d do it for a lame horse. Besides, what’s a pal for? Huh? What’s a pal for?”

  Stolz’s voice grew louder. “Herr Randall, you know I get cranky in the morning. You too, Hodge. If I have to roust you out, by God, I’ll thump the both of you good!”

  Michael’s stomach was tied in knots, but he knew Eddie was right. So he crawled to the back of the truck and dropped off the tailgate onto the ground. The big German stood directly in front of him, hands on hips with his usual amused, arrogant smile. Not that Stolz was all bad. He wasn’t SS or even Army. He was a civilian, a shipyard worker dressed in a threadbare infantryman’s greatcoat, a pair of knee-high Polish cavalry boots, and a knit seaman’s cap, pulled down over his ears. He could occasionally be human and he could always be bought.

  “All right, Herr Randall, where’s your little friend?” he asked, the sarcasm billowing like frozen clouds on the cold morning air. “Is he ‘sleeping in’ today? Waiting up in ‘Gasthaus Stolz’ for some room service?”

  “It’s his legs, they’ve swollen up bad.”

  Stolz shrugged with complete indifference. “So?”

  “Let him stay in the truck today, Stolz. I’ll do his share of the work. Okay? A little rest and he’ll be fine tomorrow.”

  “You know the rules,” Stolz bellowed so all the prisoners would hear. “You all do! If you don’t work you go back to the SS, where you won’t have old Stolz to wet-nurse you.”

  Michael edged closer. “The SS will shoot him; you know they will.”

  “No, no,” Stolz corrected him. “Even the SS is running out of bullets, so my guess is they’ll just break his legs and toss him off the pier. But no, I don’t think they’ll shoot him.”

  “You bastard!”

  “I don’t make the rules, and I don’t argue with the men in black who do."

  Michael stared at him. “Will you do it then?”

  “Do it? Do what?” Stolz frowned, as if he did not understand the words. “Me? Shoot your friend? Surely, you are joking, Randall.”

  “He is dying.”

  Stolz threw a contemptuous glance toward the Russians. “Randall, I’d put a bullet in that lot without a second thought, but shoot an American? Me? I know you Yanks. The stench of a thing like that will stick to a man, and I have no interest in becoming one of Herr Roosevelt’s ‘war criminals.’ So if your friend needs killing, that is something you must do yourself.”

  Michael looked at him for a long, excruciating moment, and held out his hand. “Give me your gun, then.”

  “Give you my gun?” Stolz snorted. “You really have lost your mind!”

  Michael bent down and pulled off his boot. Reaching up into the toe, he pulled out a dirty American five-dollar bill, the last of the meager hoard he and Eddie had squirreled away for their big escape. At least it would help one of them escape, he thought.
>
  Stolz snatched the American money out of Michael’s hand, and jammed it into his pocket. “You’re a fool. What makes you think I’ll give you a damned thing now?”

  Michael stepped closer and locked his black eyes on the big German’s, letting them bore in. “Stolz, when the Red Army finally gets here and starts hanging Germans from the street lamps — any German — you’re going to need every friend you can get.”

  Stolz laughed, but he wasn’t very convincing. Finally, he reached into the worn leather holster hanging on his hip and pulled out the old Czech revolver the SS had given him. “All right, my young Ami friend,” he said as he opened the breach and let the bullets drop into his hand. “You may have my pistol," he said as he pushed one bullet back into the cylinder and snapped it shut. “One shot, that’s all you get. Use it on your friend or use it on yourself, I don’t care which you do,” Stolz said, motioning toward the Russians. “But I’m the only thing standing between that lot and Herr Himmler’s men in black. Use it on me, and they’ll tear you to pieces.” That said, he handed over the pistol. “So go kill your friend, Randall. The sun is up now, and we have work to do.”

  Michael looked down at the revolver, remembering the old Greek saying, “When the Gods really want to punish a man, they grant him his wish.”

  Slowly he climbed back over the tailgate. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he realized how badly the truck stank of dirty men, rotting flesh, and death. “Oh, good,” he heard Eddie say as he saw the revolver and held out his hand, but Michael wasn’t ready for that yet. “Give it to me, Mikey, we both know you can’t do it yourself,” Eddie added, as he pulled the pistol from Michael’s hand. “Thanks. And I want you to go hunt those ducks for me, you hear? Hunt them for both of us.”

  “Yeah, the ducks, I’ll do that,” Michael mumbled.

  “You go down to South Carolina, to Rock Creek and see my Daddy. See my little sister Leslie, too. You’ll like her. Daddy, he’ll understand, but Les won’t. She didn’t want me to leave, so this is gonna be hard on her, real hard. So you go on down and tell ’em what happened here. See, it’s not the knowin’ that’s hard; it’s the not knowin.’ ”