TWO SUDDEN!: A Pair of Cole Sudden C.I.A. Thrillers

by Lawrence de Maria

  Sudden laughed.

  “Sure.” He paused. “You old softy.”

  The C.I.A. plane pulled into the hanger.

  “How’s your new thriller coming?”

  “Slowly. Plot isn’t where it should be.”

  “Why don’t you write about what you’ve just been through? Change it around a little.”

  Sudden looked at Buss.

  “Come on, Nigel. Who the hell would believe a story like that?” He laughed. “You want me to lose all my credibility?”

  They stopped talking for a moment until the engine noise from the plane moderated.

  “I may have something for you in a couple of weeks,” Buss finally said. “It could be a tough one. Make sure you get plenty of rest.”

  Sudden didn’t want to imagine what might be tougher than what he just went through. The men shook hands and he got out of the SUV and walked toward the plane just then rolling to a stop. It was a sleek Piaggio Avanti P180 turbo with rear-facing propellers. He knew it well. It had been confiscated by his unit after the dispatch of a Mafia turncoat in Milan. Sudden didn’t like it. He preferred his propellers in the proper place. Every time he flew in the Piaggio he expected it to go backwards.

  The door to the plane opened and the small ramp slid down. Rebecca Soul appeared in the doorway and smiled down to him. She was wearing a simple black cocktail dress with matching sling-back high heels. When the ex-Mossad agent met him at the bottom of the stairs, she surprised him with a small peck on the cheek. He winced.

  “Oh, Cole, I’m sorry. Still a little bruised, aren’t you?”

  There was but the slightest trace of a foreign accent. He recognized the Cartier necklace that dipped between her breasts. Apparently not all the bling from one of his missions had been fenced. He wondered if she was coming from a job, and how that had worked out for whomever she had been with. Then again, she looked so fresh and inviting, it was possible she was headed to an assignment.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “It’s nice to see you, Rebecca. I might have known Nigel wouldn’t waste a trip to the airport just on me.”

  She laughed.

  “Sure, he would. You are becoming a legend. Maybe we can get together and you can tell me about Florida. I’m going to be around for a few weeks. I’m taking some vacation. I have family to visit in New York.”

  “I’d like that. I’m due time off myself and may be in New York as well. Soon as the swelling goes down in enough spots I’ll give you a call. There should be another Bourne movie or two out by then.”

  “Wonderful.”

  He watched her as she walked to Nigel’s vehicle. Rebecca had a fine figure, from all angles, but the rear view might have been the best. Her legs were long, muscular and tanned. Sudden tried, but failed, to suppress the inevitable thought: What a waste.

  It was almost as if she had read his mind, because she turned just as she reached the SUV, her hand on the door.

  “Cole.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m not really a lesbian. I only told you that because I try to keep my professional and personal life separate. I don’t normally get involved with people in my team. But I occasionally make exceptions for legends.”

  She smiled and got in the SUV with Buss. Sudden climbed up into the Piaggio. This airplane really isn’t all that bad, he thought.

  After he was seated the flight attendant asked him if he wanted a drink. It was the same woman who was on the agency jet he flew on after he got back from the Tucci job.

  “Scotch, rocks, and thanks.”

  She brought him his drink and a bag of cashews.

  “The captain says you owe him $100 from the Yankee series,” she said.

  THE END

  ***

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  ***

  The next Cole Sudden thriller takes our stalwart C.I.A. operative and his colleague, Rebecca Soul, far afield from their normal assignments.

  THE HADRON ESCAPE, a tale that mixes science and fiction, begins in World War II and ends in modern-day Europe. The two spy/assassins are pitted against enemies both inside and outside (to say the least!) their own agency.

  THE HADRON ESCAPE

  (A Cole Sudden CIA Thriller)

  A Novel By

  Lawrence De Maria

  Copyright © Lawrence De Maria 2014

  PROLOGUE

  Verblinka, Poland — January 1945

  “You don’t understand,” Zyster said. “This isn’t just another Jew. He’s something else.”

  Colonel Rudolph Boltke yawned, then reached for a cigarette from the small gold Samorodok case on his desk. The Russian cigarette holder, circa 1908, with its distinctive cabochon sapphire thumb-piece, was one of his most prized possessions. Unlike the SS lieutenant who took the case off the body of a Red Army colonel, Boltke suspected the Samorodok was quite valuable. The lieutenant had traded it for one of Boltke’s many Lugers, the rare model with the distinctive “Death Head” SS emblem, before going back to the front. The poor fool had probably been mashed flat by a Russian tank by now, Boltke thought. He had been considering getting rid of the Luger anyway. It wasn’t the sort of thing he wanted to have on his person if he fell into the hands of the Russians. He sighed. Of course, that also applied to the cigarette case. Not that he had any intention of falling into anyone’s hands.

  Boltke didn’t offer a cigarette to Zyster. He loathed the man, who was always exaggerating, looking to make himself appear more important. Ridiculous. Being a doctor at Verblinka had to be the easiest job in the Reich. Just about everybody in the camp died. That was the point, after all. As for the staff, anybody with half a brain used the Luftwaffe medical services. The Luftwaffe doctors were first-rate. That fat bastard, Goering, at least got that right.

  Boltke blew out a perfect smoke ring and looked at Doktor Professor Erik Zyster, as he liked to be called. The man had as many graduate degrees as Stalin had tanks. More a scientist than a physician, the sadist had devoted himself to studying human reactions to pain and other stimuli among the thousands of unwilling subjects provided to him by the Nazi war machine.

  “What do you mean?” Boltke laughed. “Wasn’t he circumcised?”

  “That’s the point, Herr Oberst. He didn’t…”

  “Don’t tell me he was trying to pass himself off as a Jew?” Boltke stood and walked over to the window and looked out at the camp. “Rather shortsighted of him, don’t you think?”

  It had started to drizzle. Another dank, dreary day. All the days seemed like this, now. Boltke thought he saw a few snowflakes. At least he hoped they were snowflakes. In an extermination camp, flakes also fell in summer. But no, these were real; some hit the window and melted almost immediately. He thought longingly of the snow that would now be piling up in the mountains surrounding his hometown of Mittenwald on the Austrian border.

  Boltke didn’t fit the profile of the typical Konzentraionslager Commandant. Tall and well-proportioned, with chiseled Nordic features straight off a Schutzstaffel recruitment poster, he had once been a world-class skier, falling just short of making the 1936 Winter Olympics in the village of Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Bavaria. Had he joined the regular Army instead of the SS, he might have led one of Germany’s famous Gebirgstruppen battalions in Norway or the Carpathian Mountains. His idol was Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, who before winning fame with the Afrika Corps in the Second World War commanded a battalion of mountain troops as a major in the Great War. Rommel had then been awarded the Pour le Mérite, Germany’s highest medal for wartime valor, of more importance to regular soldiers than a Field Marshal’s baton, an honor Hitler gave out like candy when the Wehrmacht was winning the current conflict.

  Instead, Boltke found himself in a Waffen SS unit during the invasion of France. How he managed to get wounded in that walkover never ceased to amaze him. He must have been the on
ly officer in his division the fucking frogs managed to hit! Still, the bit of shrapnel in his knee, which for all he knew came from a misguided German munition, earned him an Iron Cross, Second Class. Of more importance, the wound also secured a desk job in Paris. Boltke pulled every string in the book to stay there. The things you could get away with in 1940! Today, an amputation was no guarantee you wouldn’t be sent to the Eastern Front.

  He looked at the gun towers shimmering in the mist. Guards walking the barbed wire were adjusting their collars against the sleet. Here and there bedraggled prisoners shuffled wearily between barracks, carrying refuse, slop pails, bodies on litters. This is not the most glamorous of assignments, but I’m alive. I wonder where you can ski in South America? The Andes, certainly.

  In the distance smoke poured from the stacks of squat, ugly buildings. They were burning those who had died “of natural causes” during the night. Boltke had ordered a halt to the regular exterminations. Not as a result of any sudden compassion, or a belated attempt to impress some inevitable Allied court of retribution. He simply didn’t have the manpower anymore. Desertions among the camp guard cadre were rising at an alarming rate. The approach of two million vengeful Russians had that effect. Only Erik Zyster was still killing intentionally, a few a week. The concentration camp was losing a thousand a day to starvation, typhus, dysentery, beri-beri and a dozen other maladies.

  Boltke ran his finger along the window sill, tracing a faint, barely noticeable path. Hopefully, just dust. The wind was coming out of the east and blowing the smoke from the crematoria away from the administration buildings. But that could change, and the little smudge was proof that his staff was getting sloppy. Understandable, he knew, because they had their eyes on more than the wind coming from the east. But he’d speak to his orderly, Hans, about it. He wiped his finger on his trousers as he turned from the window. The idiot Zyster was saying something.

  “I don’t think he was trying to pass himself off as a Jew, Colonel. I think he was trying to pass himself as a human. And he’s not!”

  Boltke let out a stream of smoke in a long, satisfying hiss. He loved these American Lucky Strikes. After years of enduring noxious Russian cigarettes confiscated from hundreds of thousands of prisoners taken in Nazi Germany’s early victories, the cartons of Ami cigarettes he bartered for from his counterparts in the Stalags holding Western prisoners of war were a welcome relief. And all they cost him were some hoarded gold rings and dental fillings. Boltke would have never thought of shorting the SS of its loot early in the war, but as the growing number of Allied troops indicated, the SS and Gestapo now had a lot more to worry about than a few missing trinkets. Still, he was careful. He only stole enough to provide some luxuries and, hopefully, to facilitate his escape when Germany collapsed.

  “My dear Doctor. Of course he isn’t human. He’s what Himmler and his lot would call a sub-human. Isn’t that the point of your experiments? Do you want to borrow my copy of Mein Kampf?”

  Boltke could barely hide his contempt. Everyone knew Zyster was a pervert. He looked much like some of his victims, cadaverously thin, with a sallow complexion. He constantly ran his tongue over his thin, wet lips. His “medical experiments” – another ruse to increase his importance – consisted mainly of forcing the camp’s healthier inmates (and there were damn few of those) to have sexual intercourse with each other. While the doctor watched and filmed, of course. What a waste of good material. All the camp’s inmates were destined for the crematorium, one way or another, but the stronger ones had jobs to do first, and Boltke didn’t like losing some of them to asinine medical experiments. And they were always lost, because Zyster’s subjects were all killed after their sexual interludes, and dissected for “science.” In one instance related to a disbelieving Boltke, a Russian prisoner had even been killed in the midst of his orgasm, to see if the ejaculatory response was interrupted. It wasn’t, not that it mattered to the dead man.

  Boltke wondered what lunatic had approved the “Empirical Study of Sub-Human Coitus” program. Another pervert, no doubt. But the funds kept coming, and Boltke, wise in the ways of Nazi bureaucracy, wouldn’t interfere with a project that had been signed off by Himmler, though he doubted that the Reichsfuhrer had any clue about what went on in the special barracks Zyster had constructed. After some initial early visits to concentration camps during the war – he almost fainted at one – good old Heinrich kept well away from the dirty stuff.

  “There was nothing to be circumcised,” Zyster said “He had no penis. No testicles, no genitals at all!”

  Boltke had enough.

  “For God’s sake, Zyster! Half the soldiers in this war have had their cocks and balls blown off. Lots of civilians, too. The poor bastard probably suffered enough before you got your hands on him. I know that might present a problem when you want inmates to fuck for you, but you really must get a grip. The Russians are only 100 kilometers away.”

  Boltke sat down and lit another Lucky Strike.

  “You don’t understand, Rudolph. There was absolutely nothing there. No scars or anything.”

  Rudolph? Now they were on a first-name basis? The Commandant was rapidly losing his patience.

  “Listen Zyster, it’s probably some kind of birth defect, or sexual aberration. Two strikes against him. A Jew and a queer to boot. I’m surprised he lasted this long.”

  Zyster stood up suddenly. He put his hands on Boltke’s desk and leaned forward, sticking his face only a few inches from the commandant’s. He started to shout.

  “He never had any sex organs! Of any kind! Male or female! Even vestigial. It’s not medically possible!”

  The door to the outer office opened. Boltke’s sergeant-orderly peered in, a concerned look on his weathered face. “Anything wrong, Herr Commandant?”

  Boltke looked past Zyster. He could see some of the other enlisted staff at their desks craning their necks for a peek.

  “Nothing, Hans. It’s all right. Shut the door.”

  He turned back to Zyster, who was still leaning across the desk.

  “Get a hold of yourself, you fool! Who the hell do you think you are talking to!”

  The doctor sat down heavily. Boltke stood up and walked over to the cabinet where he kept his liquor. The man was obviously becoming unhinged. The Allies were talking about war crime trials, and a doctor who performed sex experiments on prisoners and then dissected them would be high on anyone’s list. Although Boltke had run the camp for only 11 months, taking over when the previous commander came apart at the seams, he harbored no illusions that his relatively short tenure at Verblinka would cut much wood with a War Crimes Commission – which was why he was building up his escape fund. The way things were going, his dreams of the Pour-le-Mérite had been supplanted by nightmares involving gallows.

  “Zyster, I’m sure there is a rational explanation.” Boltke reached behind his good Cognac – prized loot from his days rounding up Jews in occupied France – and pulled out a bottle of cheap Polish vodka. He poured the doctor a stiff drink. “Now, tell me exactly what happened.”

  Erik Zyster never touched anything stronger than wine, but he bolted down the tumbler. He coughed, but held out his glass for more. Boltke hesitated, but poured another shot. The doctor knocked that down just as quickly.

  “The Jew wouldn’t undress. The woman I paired him with got desperate. I tell them that if they perform well, they can stay in my clinic indefinitely.”

  Boltke smiled. He knew that Zyster killed all his subjects immediately after they had sexual intercourse, with an injection. He told them it was meant to protect them from venereal disease. It was a camp joke: They get screwed, and then they really get screwed.

  “She finally pulled down his trousers. Started screaming. The man tried to escape. One of your idiot guards shot him before he got out of the clinic.”

  This was getting good. Boltke could imagine the scene. Served the pervert right. Clinic, indeed.

  “What happened to the woman?”


  “Hysterical. Couldn’t calm her. I had to put her down. She would be no use to me anymore. I need stress-free subjects for my studies, otherwise the results are worthless.”

  Boltke rubbed his eyes. The man is mad. Stress-free subjects in a concentration camp, indeed! And he killed a perfectly healthy woman. Boltke knew Zyster had the pick of the female inmates for his program and gave them extra rations leading up to his experiments, to “fill them out.” Even so-called sub-humans didn’t like screwing a skeleton. Boltke had seen some of the doomed women. Quite attractive. Especially some recently captured Russians. The woman Zyster “put down” could have performed other services for the SS, even if she was a Jewess, now that discipline was breaking down and the racial laws against miscegenation were increasingly flouted. He sighed, then walked over and poured himself a brandy.

  “I’m sure when you cut him open you will find what you are looking for. I read somewhere that some men’s balls never descend. They’ll pop out when you gut him. Remember how the Brits started that rumor that the Fuhrer wasn’t a real man because he hasn’t married. They said he has only one testicle. What a joke. Hell, if anyone has balls, it’s him. Maybe too many.”

  Boltke suddenly realized that a few years earlier he never would have repeated the rumor, or the joke, to anyone. Another sign that things were falling apart.

  “I did open him up. No sex organs inside. Nothing at all. No internal sex organs, male or female. Nothing. Never had been. It’s not medically possible, I tell you. In a human, anyway.”

  That brought Boltke up short.

  “You keep saying that. What are you getting at?”

  “Come and see for yourself, Colonel.”

  ***

  It was a short walk to Zyster’s facility. They could hear Russian artillery fire in the distance. Boltke’s wife had written him that the drone of American heavy bombers was now constant background noise in the Reich as more and more German cities were flattened. It won’t be long now, Boltke thought, despite all the promises of miracle weapons. I’ll tell Hans to start destroying any files that can tie me to this place. I haven’t been here that long. The Americans — and if I surrender to anyone it will be the Yanks — will have a tough time telling me apart from the thousands of other Wehrmacht soldiers after the collapse, especially in the Luftwaffe enlisted man’s uniform I’ve procured for just such an emergency.