Flowers From Berlin

by Noel Hynd

  First Laura, then the Englishman. A quick, essential military operation. He moved to a position behind them and slipped quietly through the water toward shore. He reached to his leg and unsheathed the knife.

  Then Laura and Peter Whiteside made things easier. Laura stayed behind and Whiteside went on ahead, They split by about fifty feet.

  Siegfried was out of the water. For good measure, he reached within his diving suit and unwrapped his pistol. He placed it back within the suit, ready to draw it if necessary. There were benches and shade trees along the promenade. But Siegfried also would have to cross open spaces where he was exposed. He would have to kill Laura quickly, then catch the Englishman equally by surprise.

  He started after her, holding the dagger in his fist. He would grab her from behind, he quickly calculated, cover her mouth, and put the knife between her ribs. She would never know what happened.

  He was thirty feet behind her now. Laura stopped and again scanned the surface of the water with her flashlight. Siegfried moved to the side of a kiosk. He stood with his back flush to it on a side facing away from her.

  Siegfried could hear his own heart pounding. He edged toward the corner of the kiosk and inclined his head to peer around the corner. She still had the flashlight beam illuminated. She looked back in his direction as if she might have heard something. She even took a step in his direction. But then she turned and followed Whiteside.

  Siegfried studied his two victims. Now he understood: Whiteside was covering the ground along the promenade. Laura was watching the water. By slipping behind them, Siegfried knew, he had them both at his mercy. He could blindside both of them. I will cut her throat, he consciously decided. Messier, but there will be no scream. Same with the Englishman.

  Laura was in the open and Siegfried started after her.

  She held the lantern in her left hand and scanned the water, and he was within twenty feet of her. Then fifteen. He bolted forward in full flight, the knife aloft in his fist, ready to cut.

  Laura swept a strand of hair from her face and turned her head slightly. Out of the corner of her eye, she thought she saw-!

  She turned as he hit her. She ducked but he had her with one hand and her mouth opened in horror-just like the poor woman who was murdered behind the church! She thought-and she launched an unholy piercing scream unlike any other in her life.

  As she clutched the lantern, she saw the glint of light off the blade of the knife. She cried out again as it moved toward her throat.

  His hands were wet and cold. The rubber suit was wet and slick. His grip on her was not firm. She had one hand free and held off the knife. She managed to turn. Laura's other hand crashed into his face. The steel flashlight hit him in the eye with much more force than he ever could have imagined.

  Then she brought her knee upward and it was his turn to bellow. She hit him in the face again with the flashlight, across the bridge of the nose, and he slashed at her with the knife.

  But he was off balance and missed. She broke away.

  Siegfried cursed violently. The pain in his groin rocketed through him, but he remained on his feet.

  "Laura! Laura!" Whiteside called out, and Siegfried could see the Englishman running in their direction, marked by his own lantern beam.

  Siegfried staggered for a step, then pulled his revolver. It was his only option now. He raised the pistol. She was thirty, forty feet away and moving. The Englishman was maybe sixty. Easy pistol range, but Laura was directly in the line of fire. Thought to Siegfried was now all simultaneous: Have to hit the Englishman first. No time. Just shoot!

  Whiteside dropped his lantern and raised his own weapon. But Siegfried fired first. Then bullets were everywhere, and Laura hit the ground.

  Whiteside squeezed off two shots, then a third, but he was moving to one side as he fired. His aim was off. Siegfried's first bullet hit him in the leg, and the next smacked into his flesh a few inches above the heart. His own weapon flew from his hand and he went down.

  In his pain, as he held his hands to his wounds and felt the warmth of his own blood, Whiteside stared at Siegfried. Fowler was like a black specter, something evil and violent risen from hell itself, framed by the light from a distant streetlamp and standing erect, triumphant, and proud on the other side of Laura's fallen, prostrate body.

  Whiteside gasped and went to find his pistol. But his left arm wouldn't work at all. He was helpless. Siegfried-the executioner-stepped closer. Then even closer.

  Laura was moving again. She whirled and threw up her hands, turning back toward the man she had once loved.

  "No! Stephen! No!" she cried out in terror. Fowler raised his gun again-First Laura, then the Englishman, the proper order after all-and the night was alive with the crackling of pistol fire. Laura closed her eyes.

  She waited for the pain. She waited for the bullets to tear into her flesh, for the agony of death and the inevitability of the onrushing final blackness… three, four, five shots. Then a sixth!

  The first two shots from Cochrane's pistol sailed wide of Siegfried. Fowler was not the easiest target for Cochrane, shooting as he was from many yards behind Peter Whiteside. But the first shots had forced Siegfried to fire at the gunman, who must have been farther up the promenade, only to come racing back at the first sounds of violence.

  Cochrane's third shot hit Stephen Fowler in the center of the chest and drove him backward. On instinct and strength he fired again, but now for Siegfried all was pain and confusion. He fired again wildly and then his empty gun clicked harmlessly. From out of the darkness more bullets came at him.

  Bill Cochrane emptied his gun at the Nazi. One bullet hit Stephen Fowler in the throat and, tumbling viciously from that range, tore open the flesh, ripping inward at the Adam's apple and bursting in a red explosion out of the back of the neck.

  But in some ways it barely mattered. Siegfried was already falling. Half a second later he was sprawled on the cold grass in an unearthly configuration. Blood poured from him. Part of his body shook, then he was completely still.

  Sounds: quiet, building sounds of pain. Laura was crying, but no bullet had touched her. When she had fallen she had dived forward and tumbled to avoid his gunfire. More sounds, as Bill Cochrane rushed to Whiteside and Laura: Whiteside moaning and begging for a doctor. Then Laura was beside him, also, and she clutched Bill Cochrane, sobbing wretchedly and wanting to hold him very tightly and not look back at the dead man behind her.

  "A doctor, please, a doctor…" Peter Whiteside begged.

  Cochrane used Whiteside's necktie to tie a tourniquet around the Englishman's leg. He forced the lantern upon Laura and he pressed a handkerchief to the chest wound near the heart.

  "Help him up, help him up!" Cochrane ordered. The Englishman's legs were unstable. But as quickly as they could they pointed him toward the car.

  AlexandriaCounty Hospital, Cochrane knew from his days at the National Police Academy, was ten blocks away.

  Then all three of them froze. Their eyes were upon the Potomac. United States Navy PT 622 was moving down the river toward the ocean. It grew steadily larger as it approached. But the eyes of Laura, Bill, and even the wounded Whiteside were upon the vessel behind the naval patrol boat.

  It was The Sequoia, smooth, white, and sleek compared with the gray naval gunboat. Like its escort, it moved resolutely through the black river.

  "Fowler came out of the water," Cochrane said. "The bomb is already in place."

  "A doctor," Whiteside moaned again, losing consciousness. "Please

  … I beg of you… a doctor."

  FORTY-THREE

  On their way to the hospital Cochrane practically took he corners on two wheels. They were at the emergency- room entrance within five minutes, and had Whiteside upstairs in an operating room within eight.

  To the astonished nurses and physicians, Bill Cochrane brandished his F.B.I. identification and asked the hospital staff to telephone the police.

  "Tell the police they'll fin
d another body on the promenade by the river," he told them as he assisted the wounded Englishman onto a stretcher. A more complete explanation would be forthcoming later, he promised, "But the body down by the river doesn't need an ambulance. Just the wagon from the morgue."

  Then he and Laura drove at a dizzying speed back to Washington, picked up a pair of police cars, which chased him but for which he did not stop, and came to a screeching halt before the Naval Station basin, which, with the Sequoia departed, seemed all but asleep.

  Cochrane and Laura were stopped at the iron gate by Navy Shore Patrol who now had strict orders not to let anybody pass. The F.B.I. shield did no service to him, and as he argued with one sailor, another stood to the side, a mean glint in his eye, holding an M-1 carbine at port arms.

  "What I'm telling you is that an explosive device may have been placed against the President's yacht. I want to see the officer currently on duty."

  The sailors were both skeptical and impassive. "We'll make a note of it for the morning," one of them said.

  "Morning's too late!" Cochrane raged, "Where's the duty officer?"

  "I'm the duty officer," said one of the sailors, who bore on his sleeve the stripes of an enlisted man.

  "The duty officer is never below the rank of a lieutenant at this station," Cochrane fumed. "Now would you call him?"

  Laura stood by, her face tight with tension.

  The MP gave Cochrane a look of extreme irritation, then disappeared into a booth and made a telephone call. He looked up twice at Cochrane as he spoke.

  "Well?" Cochrane asked when the sailor emerged.

  "Wait here," he said.

  The MP's withdrew into their regular posts behind a wire gate. Several minutes later appeared a naval lieutenant bearing the name tag of Symonds.

  Symonds was a tall, sandy-haired officer in his late twenties with an honest, open face and a soft mid- South drawl which Cochrane placed as from the Tidewater region of Virginia.

  "What can I do for you?" Lieutenant Symonds asked.

  Cochrane showed his F.B.I. identification again and mentioned a possible explosive device somewhere against the hull of The Sequoia.

  "Begging your pardon, sir," Lieutenant Symonds answered. "But the ship was thoroughly searched, both inside and outside. And the harbor's been held secure for three days."

  "Not secure enough," Laura said. "One man swam through."

  The lieutenant looked at them with narrow eyes, trying to decide. "Swam?" he asked.

  "A diver," Cochrane said. "He may have come from the other side of the Potomac. All

  I know is that the chances are excellent that The Sequoia will blow up at any minute."

  "And who are you again?" the officer asked.

  "F.B.I.," Cochrane said, increasingly vexed.

  "And who's your lady friend here?"

  "British intelligence," Laura answered.

  Lieutenant Symonds seemed to yield. "I'll radio to the two escort ships. Let me take all the information that you have. Both the PT's have frogmen aboard. They can do an extra check on the Sequoia."

  "That's fine," Cochrane said. He made a motion to step through the gate. Symonds placed a hand on his shoulder and the Sailors stepped forward again.

  "I have to take your statement here, sir," the officer said. "We're under strict orders. No one sets foot within the gate tonight without direct written permission of the Department of the Navy."

  Cochrane eyed the young officer and the two Sailors. "All right," he finally said.

  Lieutenant Symonds took a pad and pencil from a booth and took Cochrane's statement. His pencil hesitated twice when Cochrane spoke of an assassin who had been shot on the opposite bank of the river. But Lieutenant Symonds politely recorded everything. "I'll transmit this right away," he promised. "Thank you, sir."

  He saluted smartly and returned within the naval yard, leaving Cochrane and Laura outside the gate. "Now what?" she asked.

  "Now," Cochrane said, "we hope the Navy divers get to that device before it detonates."

  From within his office, Lieutenant Symonds watched the man and the woman step back into their car. He reached for a shore-to-ship telephone and the two Sailors watched him. The Hudson backed up from the gate, turned, and grew smaller as it moved toward the capital. Lieutenant Symonds put down the telephone without speaking a word.

  The sailors laughed. Lieutenant Symonds shook his head. He tore up the statement he had taken from Cochrane. He sprinkled it into an ashtray.

  "Don't think there was a chance he was for real, do you, sir?" one of the sailors asked.

  "A snowball's chance in hell, gents," drawled Symonds. "I don't think a sea trout could have swum within a knot of that yacht tonight, without being spotted. Do you?"

  "No, sir," the sailors agreed in unison.

  "See if you can get rid of the next crazy without breaking up my card game," Lieutenant Symonds said. The sailors grinned. "Carry on."

  The lieutenant saluted smartly and the Sailors returned it. There were no other "crazies" that evening.

  *

  This time Siegfried had wound the watch.

  The Sequoia was one mile off the coast of Newport News on its journey to Augusta when the two copper wires met and the electrical charge from the dry cell detonated four sticks of black dynamite.

  The Sequoia convulsed with the explosion. And while Siegfried had been correct in his estimate that he did not have enough dynamite to destroy the entire ship, he had also been correct that he had enough explosive material to do the intended job. Even the legendary steel and seaworthiness of the Bath ship works of Maine were not enough for four sticks of TNT.

  Everything in the President's bedchamber was destroyed. The dynamite blew the metal from the hull of the ship through the outer wall, then through the inner walls of the presidential cabins. A hole twenty feet wide from the waterline upward was gutted into the vessel, those near the explosion were practically deafened, and amid the smoke and shards of metal, the first seamen to make their way to President and Mrs. Roosevelt's suite found nothing but destruction, smoke, and ruin.

  U.S. Navy PT 336, the escort vessel to the rear of The Sequoia, threw its throttle forward and was first to reach the scene of the catastrophe. What they saw when they shone their floodlights on the yacht was a pleasure craft that was remarkable in that it was still afloat. The hull was warped upward to a point above the waterline.

  Several blackened crew members were picking through the rubble. Some sailors aboard The Sequoia wept openly, this being the last place that President Roosevelt had been seen alive. Others stood in a near-catatonic state, witnesses to this great disaster, unable to move or react: and, for that matter, unable to comprehend:

  November 27, 1939. Roosevelt, most assuredly, was dead.

  PART SEVEN

  Thanksgiving and Christmas

  1939

  FORTY- FOUR

  The newspapers called the explosion aboard The Sequoia a "horrible accident," but no actual explanation was ever attributed. The Hearst newspapers, which had never in Roosevelt's political lifetime been members of his fan club, hinted broadly at some evil, foreign conspiracy, and the tabloids likened the blast to the one which sunk the United States warship Maine in Havana Harbor in 1898. But those with a long memory recalled that no evidence was ever offered as to culpability in that blast, either.

  At the F.B.I. in Washington, stronger words than "conspiracy" were used. To the American public, however, jittery enough over the course of world events, nothing was ever stated to confirm that a German spy had planted a bomb against the vacationing President's yacht. The body of Stephen Fowler was returned to Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, for burial in the family churchyard. The official cause of death was listed as a motor vehicle accident.

  In the days that followed, as Peter Whiteside recovered in an Alexandria hospital, Dick Wheeler was kept under arrest at an army guardhouse at Fort Meade. This, for the safety of everyone as well as for the convenience of his in
terrogators from the F.B.I., many of whom he knew personally.

  To them, and to the world at large, Dick Wheeler had little to say. A week passed. Then he said that under certain conditions he would speak to Bill Cochrane-and him in only one session. It was Frank Lerrick who conveyed this to Cochrane. The latter said he was getting out of town anyway. Why not invest an afternoon in it? Lerrick asked Cochrane to keep his F.B.I. shield for a few days into the next month.

  *

  FortMeade was a sorry place on a gray December morning, made even more somber by the presence of truckloads of quaking new Army recruits. Cochrane drove there alone. Along the way, he was reminded of the trip to see Mauer, and he could only hope that the German, reunited with his family and now in Toronto, could find some peace.

  Cochrane used his F.B.I. identification at the gates. Two MP's in army khaki and white helmets saluted him smartly after checking his name off a list. His visit was more official than even he had thought. The Bureau was still playing games.

  "The guardhouse is along that route, sir," one of the MP's told him, giving a nod to an asphalt driveway which veered to the left-the opposite direction of the bomb disposal unit. But Cochrane could have picked out the guardhouse with his eyes closed. It was a big, dark granite bunker dating from the grimmest days of the WPA, and when his car reached it there was another team of sentries. The Hudson was to remain outside the inner fence, but he was cleared for admission.

  Cochrane found Dick Wheeler on a cot in a six-by-twelve foot cell. The walls were concrete on two sides and barred on the other two. Wheeler was hunched into a corner, a bottle of Coca-Cola in his hand, staring off into the distant space across his tiny cell.

  "Hello, Dick," Cochrane said.

  Wheeler turned and a smile flashed. Cochrane had a sense of visiting a terminally ill friend in a hospital. There was an ice bag by the cot and Cochrane could see by the large bruise across the side of Wheeler's forehead that Burns and Allen had performed a bit of their act.