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

by William Brown

Esteban knew this job in New York City had gone wrong. The American was supposed to be alone, but he had that girl with him. There weren’t supposed to be any police cars around, either. There wasn’t supposed to be any shooting, and that fool Sanchez wasn’t supposed to be shot. An “easy job.” That was what that oily bastard Steinhuber told them. “It’s a soft target, my friends, very soft. One man. You grab him and the German will do the rest,” he said with that broad, toothy smile of his and an envelope full of money. “You’ll be in and out in a day.”

  Well, the instant they met that blond-haired devil, Esteban knew he should have turned the work down or held out for more money — a lot more money. When he heard those first muffled gunshots in the alley, Esteban nearly died. Then that gray sedan swung in behind them and he knew they were police. It was the way the car nosed into the curb and the way the two men inside eyed the van. They were police all right, but all Esteban could do was sit there and break into a cold sweat. Then that maniac Kruger came running out of the alley, blood on his cheek, and all hell broke loose. Esteban never bargained for any shooting. Not with the police. Steinhuber wasn’t paying them half enough for that.

  “Go!” Kruger screamed, as he jumped in through the side door.

  “What about Sanchez?” Esteban looked anxiously toward the alley.

  “Go! I’m not telling you again,” the German hissed as he turned his Walther on him. Esteban knew he would have used it too, if he didn’t need a driver. Esteban tromped on the gas pedal and held on for dear life, cursing his own monumental stupidity and greed.

  “What happened to Sanchez?” he dared ask again, not that he really missed the big oaf; but Sanchez was a countryman.

  "He had an accident," Kruger finally answered, mocking him. “His forehead ran into a bullet. Now shut up and drive or you’ll run into one, too!”

  Esteban did what he was told. He had met more than his share of mean hombres growing up on the streets of Madrid. And there was that jail guard in Toledo who would kick a man with his steel-toed boots, trying to cripple him just for fun. Or, some Basques who would slit a man’s throat for a bottle of cheap red wine. None of them came close to this German, however. You could see it in his eyes. He was loco. Esteban swore he’d be out the door the first chance he got, running as fast as his lanky legs would carry him. Screw the German. Screw the freighter. And screw Steinhuber’s money.

  That was when Esteban looked in the rear-view mirror and saw a police car closing on them. The police! One second, nothing was there. The next, that damned police car was right up on his bumper with their blue lights flashing and siren screaming. “Dios Mio!” he mumbled as he put the accelerator to the floor. He’d never see Spain again. He’d be lucky if he saw another morning.

  “Relax,” Kruger told him. “I saw it.” His voice sounded bored, even half-asleep; but that was a trick he learned on the long march back from Kiev. Stay calm no matter how bad things got, stay calm; because it kept everyone around you calm. He touched his cheek again. The cut had almost stopped bleeding, almost, but it wasn’t something he’d forget soon. Calmly, he reached across the easel and opened the leather satchel he’d stashed in the rear of the van. Looking into the rear-view mirror, he saw Esteban’s eyes. He was a house of cards, ready to collapse, so Kruger pulled out the short, stockless, Schmeisser submachine gun and held it up where Esteban could see it.

  “A submachine gun?” the Spaniard said, his voice quaking.

  “Keep your eyes on the road,” Kruger warned.

  “That’s the police back there, are you crazy, man?” Esteban screamed, twisting around in the seat. “They’ll…”

  “Be quiet and do what I told you,” Kruger’s voice lashed out. “Let them get up close, just don’t miss our turn-off.”

  That should hold the Spaniard for a few minutes, Kruger thought, and that was all the time he would need. He crawled to the rear door of the van, jammed a full magazine in the submachine gun and pulled back the bolt with a loud “Snick!” Through the rear window, he watched as the police cruiser closed in. It came within fifty feet of their rear bumper, then twenty, then ten, trying to intimidate him. What fools, Kruger thought as his hand closed around the door handle. He counted to three and gave it a quick twist and a push. The door flew open and Kruger smiled. There! Right below him in the bright morning sun sat two police officers in the front seat of the cop car, only a few feet away. They looked up at him, wide-eyed, mouths gaping, until they saw the sadistic grin on Kruger’s face, and their expressions turned to shock and finally horror as he pointed the muzzle of the Schmeisser submachine gun at them.

  What a lovely tableau, Kruger thought. After all those years of intense training and combat, he could evaluate any tactical situation and assess its threats and opportunities in a split second. The cop in the passenger seat was the immediate danger, so Kruger pointed the barrel of the Schmeisser at him and touched the trigger. The gun leaped in his hands with a loud metallic chatter as the old rhythms flowed through his hands, up his arms, and through his whole body, chattering, clattering, and lifting him higher and higher.

  The first burst of nine-millimeter slugs punched a line of holes through the windshield, creating a lacy spider web until the glass disintegrated and blew inward, filling the front seat with shards of glass. The cop in the passenger seat took three hits to the chest, but Kruger wasn’t done. He pulled the trigger again, watching the man’s body dance under the hammer blows of more soft-nosed bullets. The driver was no fool. He saw all-too-well what was coming his way. He swung the steering wheel hard left, desperate to avoid the bullets, but all he did was throw the big cruiser directly into the lane of oncoming cars.

  That was the moment, the moment of death, and it was what Kruger craved — the noise, the jarring recoil of the gun in his hands, the staccato hammering of the bullets, the stench of burnt gunpowder, the screams, the kaleidoscope of glass splintering in the bright sunlight, and the terrible crash of metal on metal. Those images exploded inside the German’s head and lifted him to a new high!

  And just as suddenly, it was over.

  Kruger reached out and pulled the rear door shut, then collapsed on the floor, too drained to pay the slightest attention to the squeal of brakes and the loud crash as the police cruiser plowed into the cars in the other lane. Finally, he smiled. He had painted another masterpiece of death and destruction, one he would frame and hang in a very special place he kept in his mind’s eye. It was his private gallery, where he hung all of his unique images and he could go and enjoy them anytime he wanted.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Michael and Leslie sat side by side in the back seat of Manny’s unmarked police car as it raced through the mid-morning traffic of Midtown Manhattan. Manny slapped a portable red emergency light on the front dashboard, as if that would help. The rhythmic flashing drove Michael nuts, but it did nothing to loosen the thick knot of cars around them. New York! Block after block, Michael felt the anger rising inside. Still, he held it in and said nothing. No one could ever accuse him of learning nothing during those long months in Königsberg with the Russian prisoners. Over the centuries, they had developed a cynical fatalism that enabled them to blend in, to adapt, and to wait for their chance at revenge. That was what Michael would do, too; because time was on his side. He could be patient too. He would use whatever help he could get; but soon, he would get his fingers around the throat of that painter. That phony Admiral in Bonn would come next. Finally, he would deal with whoever sent them; and no one was going to stop him.

  Michael began listening to the rapid chatter on the police radio. As far as he could tell, they were racing south and west through a maze of city streets, chasing the blue van. An armada of other police cars had now joined the hunt, drawing the noose tighter and tighter around the docks on the city’s lower west side. They all wanted a piece of the guy now, and it was hard to see how he could escape this time. It was an island! Dozens and dozens of angry cops against one man; it could only be a matter of
minutes before they had the bastard cornered, or so Michael thought. Thinking back on what the painter did back in the alley, the cynical yet precise way he put a bullet in his fat accomplice’s head, and casually shot up Manny’s gray sedan, the long odds didn’t seem unfair at all.

  When the reports began to flow in about a police car being shot-up near 22nd Street, followed by a five-car smash-up, all hell broke loose on the radio. The cops wanted the painter even worse now; but in the confusion, the blue van vanished once again. Michael focused hard on the radio as one full minute passed, then two, and five. That was when he realized odds did not matter, not with this guy. Maybe they never did, because the painter was very, very good at this and Michael would guess he was long gone.

  “I knew the two guys in that cruiser — Lazarev and Johnson,” Manny said. “The dumb schmucks never had a chance. I want that guy, I want him bad!”

  Welcome to the party, Michael thought, but he didn’t need to say it. Eismer and his cronies in the NYPD had screwed this thing up ever since that morning in the hotel lobby. Now they were paying the price, but they didn’t need him to tell them that. He saw it in Manny’s eyes as the fat cop glanced back at them in the rear-view mirror and tried to make amends. “That Walther automatic you picked up in the alley had a silencer on it — very professional. You don’t owe money to some guy in Jersey named Guido, do you?” Manny joked, but Michael just sat there stone-faced. That didn’t stop Manny. “That guy layin’ in the alley looked pretty big. How’d you get it away from him that easy?”

  “That easy?” Leslie answered for him. “Michael didn’t give him a choice.”

  “Okay, okay. Still, a head-shot like that— it was a nice shot you made,” Manny said with a new tone of respect. “I’m impressed.”

  “That wasn’t me,” Michael finally answered. “It was the painter.”

  “Jeez! From way back there at the street? With a freakin’ handgun?” Manny whistled. “You sure he wasn’t aiming at you?”

  "Oh, no, he hit exactly the man he was aiming at, right in the middle of the forehead,” Michael said. “If it had been me he wanted, I’d be the one lying back there, not the Spaniard.” He stared at Manny’s eyes in the rear-view mirror. “You still don’t get it, do you? The painter was tying up a few loose ends before he left, that’s all — cool, calm, and very professional.”

  Michael’s fingers went to the silver cigarette case in his pants pocket. He couldn’t prove it yet, but he knew the guy in the alley was only the most recent in a long line of corpses that stretched back to Königsberg, to Hodge, Eric Bruckner, and the U-boat, and if his suspicions were right, to Heinz Kruger and Martin Bormann.

  “Damn it, Manny,” he finally exploded. “You set us up, Leslie and me, and you had no right to do that. Not without asking.”

  “Ask you? How were we supposed to know he’d try something like that?”

  “How? You were following us!” Leslie said as she leaned forward and smacked Manny on the back of the head. “You knew something was going on or you wouldn’t have been watching; and you wouldn’t have had all those police cars around either, so stop trying to con us. We aren’t idiots, you know.”

  “We thought they might tail you or something, but nobody thought they’d come at you like that. You’re freakin’ civilians!”

  “I’ve been called a lot of things, but ‘civilian’ isn’t one of them,” Michael said. “And you had no right, Manny, not with Leslie around, not without asking.”

  “Mike, be fair. How could we expect somebody to pull something like that, huh?”

  “Certainly not you!” Leslie smacked him on the back of the head again. “You went trolling, and used us for bait.”

  “It worked, didn’t it?” Manny snapped back. “You’re the one who wanted some action. Well, you got it.”

  Michael glared at him, but Manny was right. He got exactly what he wanted. “Okay. The fat one in the alley was dark-skinned, speaking Spanish. But we both saw blond hair on the painter. What do you think he is? American? German? Maybe Russian?”

  Manny shrugged. “We’re still working on that.”

  “Still working? You haven’t got a clue, do you?”

  “We’ll catch him, you’ll see. He can’t get away.”

  “Can’t get away? I was a fool to even talk to you. None of this would have happened if I’d gone after that phony ‘Admiral’ like I wanted to.”

  “That wasn’t going to happen, Mike.”

  “No? You don’t know me very well, Manny; one way or the other, I’d have caught up to him and pried the truth out of him.” Venting his anger on the fat cop made Michael feel marginally better, until he realized neither Manny nor Leslie was listening to him. Their attention had suddenly shifted to the police radio.

  “They found the blue van!” Manny said. “He’s headed for the docks and this time the son-of-a-bitch ain’t getting away. We’ve got the whole area surrounded.”

  Michael leaned back and shook his head. Surrounded? We’ll see, he thought.

  Manny took a dizzying number of quick lefts and rights through long blocks of old brick and metal warehouses that ringed the cargo piers on the lower west side. Finally, the unmarked police car turned down a narrow lane between two long rows of buildings. At the far end, they saw a roadblock with a half-dozen NYPD squad cars and a gaggle of blue uniforms.

  “I suppose they just happened to be in the neighborhood?” Leslie asked, but Manny did not reply.

  A hundred yards beyond the roadblock, they saw the painter’s blue van partially hidden behind a tall stack of wooden shipping pallets. Manny parked well short of the roadblock, and they all got out. The other cops were crouched behind their squad cars, guns drawn; but Michael remained standing, leaning against the fender of the gray sedan, refusing to take cover. He couldn’t do that any longer. He counted the seconds, hoping to hear a fusillade of gunshots; but he knew in his gut that wasn’t going to happen. Even from this far away, the blue van looked stone cold and abandoned. He couldn’t explain it; he just knew. The van had been dumped here and the painter was long gone. That was why Michael continued to stand, leaning against the police car, fully exposed, while all the others cowered behind their parked cars. He just knew.

  The minutes passed in slow motion, as a ring of cops slowly closed in on the van from both ends of the street, pistols and shotguns at the ready. Their leader crept to the rear door and dropped a rope around the door handle. He backed off and yanked it open, rolling off to the side, but still, nothing happened. Slowly, he crept back to the van and looked inside. He turned and shook his head. The van was empty and quiet as a tomb.

  Michael stepped around the front of the police car and began walking toward the van, but Manny stopped him. “Take it easy, Sport,” he warned, pointing toward two men in visored crash helmets and thick padded jackets approaching the van from the far end of the alley. “That’s the bomb squad.”

  Michael looked at him, rolled his eyes, then started toward the van again.

  And Manny stopped him again. “Smarten up, kid. It never pays to get between a dog and a fire hydrant, not until you’re sure the dog’s done doing what he went there to do.”

  Michael frowned, but he stopped and watched as two men from the Bomb Squad inched their way inside the van. After five long, painful minutes, one of them came back out the door, gingerly cradling a small box in his hands. An old black Army jeep with a boxy red trailer quickly pulled up next to him. While his partner opened the trailer’s top hatch, the man carefully set the box inside the trailer, carefully, almost reverently. With the top hatch securely back in place, the jeep slowly drove off, leaving the blue van standing alone in the bright sunlight.

  Then it was over. No shots, no explosions, nothing but a deadly calm hanging in the air, but it was over. They had just got their butts kicked by an expert and there was a brief pause now, but Michael knew it was far from over.

  Exhausted, the two men from the bomb squad pulled off their helmets
and gloves and sat in a patch of shade at the side of the van. Even from this distance, Michael could see the sweat rolling off both of them. In a matter of seconds, Manny was halfway there, moving with surprising quickness for a big man.

  “There’s a dead guy in the driver’s seat, slumped over the steering wheel. Dark, skinny, somebody put a bullet in his ear. Real messy,” the first officer said.

  “Yeah, and they left a little surprise in there just for you, Manny,” his partner chuckled. “Somebody rigged a charge underneath the stiff, if you can believe it.”

  “Jeez,” Manny shook his head. “Two dozen cop cars looking for him, and the guy takes the time to rig a freakin’ booby trap.”

  “He ain’t no slouch with explosives either,” the first bomb squad officer quipped. “It was well hidden, and the charge was big enough to blow even your fat ass through the roof if you’d gotten here first.”

  “That’s why I called you in, Joe,” Manny gave him an affectionate slap on the shoulder. "Because Mama Eismer wants her baby boy’s fat ass to stay right here on the ground where it belongs.”

  Manny climbed inside the van and Michael quickly followed. What could he say? Even the sight of a body with half its face blown away no longer affected him. It had not since the war. What did the Russians POWs call it back in Königsberg? Calluses? Calluses on a man’s soul? Yeah, a long war can do that, but it never kept him from being able to tell a dead good guy from a dead bad one, and in the end, that was all that mattered. Michael stepped closer and saw the guy had black hair and dark skin. “Just like the other one. Mexican? Turkish? An Arab? They were hired help. Disposable.”

  “You’re right,” Manny answered. “Both of them.”

  Michael looked around. The floor of the van was littered with the abandoned easel and the tubes of paint the guy had at the mouth of the alley. None had been opened. They had been tossed inside like the stage props they were. In the corner lay the painter’s broad-brimmed hat. Around Michael’s feet lay dozens of bright, brass shell casings, nine millimeter, Michael guessed, and a smashed tape recorder. In the other corner, he saw a black leather doctor’s bag. The bag lay on its side, and its contents of vials and syringes had spilled out across the floor. Michael picked one up and read the label. Sodium pentothal, “truth serum.”