Robert Conroy
Page 21
Her concern for him sometimes did affect her work at the State Department. On a couple of occasions her bosses had gently chided her about her lack of attention to affairs of state, and she had apologized sincerely. After all, it wasn’t as if she was the only staffer with a loved one in harm’s way.
Fortunately, most of her work was interesting enough to keep her distracted. There was an incredible amount of information surfacing from Russian émigrés in various countries, and it needed to be reviewed. It also seemed like everyone with Russian relatives wanted to be assured that they were all right, which was impossible to determine.
Like Gromyko and the rest of the Russian diplomatic corps in the United States, Ambassador Averell Harriman and his staff were confined to the embassy grounds in Moscow and dependent upon local government to provide them with food and other necessities. Consulates had been closed in both countries and a number of Soviet citizens had been detained, as had Americans in Russia.
Detained, she knew, was a euphemism for being imprisoned. Russians were being held at American military posts and were being treated well. She wondered just how Americans who weren’t ranking diplomats were faring in Russian hands. Not all American prisoners of the Russians were military or diplomatic personnel. A number of civilian American merchant marines had been either in the port of Murmansk or so close to it that they could not turn back when the war started. They too had been interned, and she did not think they were being treated gently.
Despite the constraints, both embassies were still functioning. Ever so correctly, the respective host governments did not cut off telephone or cable links and both embassies communicated with their home countries by diplomatic pouches which were carried by neutral Finnish, Swiss, or Swedish couriers. She also knew that the U.S. embassy in Moscow communicated with its counterpart in London via shortwave radio, an advantage the Soviets in North America did not have.
Of course, everything was listened to and phones were tapped, but life still went on. She understood it was because it was hoped that the presence of diplomats on one another’s soil might someday facilitate an end to the war.
Natalie prayed that it would end before something happened to poor, dear Steve.
“Miss Holt?”
Natalie looked up to see the unwelcome presence of Special Agent Tom Haven, a stocky man in his late thirties with bad breath. He also seemed to dislike everyone in the State Department and made little secret of it. He’d been heard saying everyone in State was a queer or a Commie. Haven and others from the FBI had been reviewing everyone in her group, and it was getting on their nerves. Natalie was thankful that the problem with her mother had finally been satisfactorily resolved and she no longer had to undergo interrogations by people like Haven.
“Where’s Barnes?” he asked. Walter Barnes was her immediate supervisor.
“I haven’t the foggiest idea, Agent Haven. I don’t spend my time watching him,” she snapped.
“I mean, is he on vacation today?”
Natalie checked her watch. It was already nine o’clock and Barnes, an early starter, was very late. “No, he’s not. Have you called his apartment?”
Haven nodded. “No answer. His boyfriend doesn’t know where he is either.”
This last was said with a sneer. Barnes was a frail and middle-aged homosexual. He had gone to great lengths to try to hide that fact, but everyone knew. Nobody said a word, but he always took lunch and breaks with a young man ten years his junior from Personnel. He had been a special target of ridicule and scorn by Haven ever since the agent found out. Natalie looked away so Haven would not see the look of contempt in her eyes. Why couldn’t they let the poor man live his own life and pretend that his precious secret was intact?
“We had an appointment with him this morning, Miss Holt. We were going to go over some of his conversations with a few of his friends. There are those in the FBI who think he might have discussed some very sensitive matters with people who shouldn’t have been told about them.”
Natalie folded her hands on her lap and made sure Haven didn’t see too much of her legs. “And what would you like me to do, Agent Haven?”
“Do you know anywhere else he might be?”
“No.”
“Are you certain, Miss Holt?”
Natalie stood. She was almost as tall as Haven, and he backed up a step. “Are you accusing me of lying?”
“No, ma’am. But he is your boss and your friend. You might have been tempted to do something to protect him.”
“From what?”
Haven recovered and managed a tight smile. “Maybe from being arrested, Miss Holt, if he did tell some of his queer friends about his work. Do you know where he lives?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I’m new here and not familiar with all of Washington and I’d like you to come with me.”
“No, Agent Haven, I will not. You’re a rude and bullying man and I will not take you to see where Mr. Barnes lives. You know how much you terrify and upset Barnes, and I think you take great pleasure in it.”
She was also reasonably certain Haven would make a pass at her if he got her alone in a car.
To her surprise, Haven actually laughed. Maybe he thought being disliked was a compliment. “Okay, have it your way. Will you take Forbes?”
The other agent was across the room and grinned affably upon hearing his name. Forbes was easygoing and friendly. The father of three kids, he was not always trying to mentally undress her. She quickly agreed.
Half an hour later, they pulled up in front of the undistinguished apartment building where Walter Barnes lived. Forbes used his FBI identification on the manager to gain access to the building and quickly found Barnes’s apartment. After a number of futile knocks on the door, they got the manager to give them a key.
“Should we be doing this alone?” Natalie asked.
“Probably not,” he said. The door opened to a darkened room and he flipped on a light. “But I’m not going to phone for help for what is most likely an empty set of rooms. My money says he’s run off. The Bureau’s having a field day picking on fags in State and he probably panicked. Stay here.”
After a moment he told her to come in. The apartment had a living room, a small kitchen, and a bedroom. All three rooms were fastidiously clean. The bed was made and everything on the dresser was standing as if on display. There were no socks on the floor or anything out of place. Instinctively, she knew that Steve Burke would not be so neat. Even the closets were open and the clothes hung with care, as if their owner knew someone else was going to see them. A photo of the young man from Personnel was proudly displayed on the dresser. Forbes picked it up, looked at it for a moment, and put it down.
“Have you checked the bathroom?” she asked.
“I didn’t see one. Isn’t it a shared one down the hall?” Forbes said.
“No,” she answered, “you don’t know Barnes. He was an extremely private person, especially so about any personal ablutions. It was almost a joke. He wouldn’t clip a fingernail if he thought someone might see him doing it.”
“Aw shit,” said Forbes as he looked about the room. Something was wrong and he’d missed it. He walked to a drape on the wall and jerked it aside. A door was behind it.
“So fastidious that he even hid the entrance to his damned john? Good grief,” Forbes said with nervous laughter. He had almost made a big mistake by missing the room.
He tried the door. Both he and Natalie looked at each other in growing horror. The door was locked from the inside. Forbes was a big man and he put a shoulder to it, and the cheap wood shattered immediately. He reached in and turned the knob and opened the door.
Forbes groaned and Natalie strained to see inside the bathroom. When she realized what was lying pale and naked in the brown-red water of the bathtub, she vomited on the floor and ran into the hallway outside the apartment, where she began to cry. Behind her, she heard Forbes talking on the telephone. After a moment he came out in the hal
lway and stood beside her.
“I’m sorry you saw that, Miss Holt.”
“So am I.”
“Are you going to be okay?”
She lit a cigarette and drew heavily. Belatedly, she offered one to Forbes, who accepted. After all, it wasn’t his fault.
“I’ll make it. How did he do it?” she finally managed to ask.
“Very creatively,” Forbes said wryly. “I would say he ran the bathwater nice and warm, got in, made it as hot as he could stand it and then, as the hot water numbed his nerves, used an extremely sharp knife to slice open his wrists and then bled to death. There’s something that looks very much like a scalpel on the floor by the tub. The ancient Romans used to do something similar to commit honorable suicide.”
“Leave it to Walter to think of something like that,” she half sobbed. “He always did have a flare for the dramatic.”
“There was a suicide note,” Forbes added. “In it he said he’d been blackmailed by the Russians and he couldn’t stand the thought of being without his lover or going to prison.”
The FBI had found what they wanted, proof that there was a leak in the State Department. Now they would dig harder. She wanted to curse her poor dead boss, but couldn’t. His life must have been so tormented with the Russians coming at him from one direction and the FBI from another.
With a start, she realized that this was how Gromyko knew so much about her. Damn Barnes.
A car had pulled up outside the apartment, and she saw Agent Haven and another man come running up the stairs. Neither looked at her as they entered the apartment, and she realized she was no longer needed. She told Forbes she would take a cab and left. She would go home and not to work. Today had been long enough and she wasn’t ready for the stares and talk of the people in the office. The war had claimed another casualty and she had yet another friend to mourn.
It was time to write another letter to Steve. Of course she wouldn’t tell him about this. It might upset him and worry him, and she would never do that. Letters overseas should contain only happy news, comforting words. She could do it. She started crying again.
“Come back to me, Steve” she whispered.
CHAPTER 17
The supply trains began in the port of Cherbourg each day and originally consisted of twenty freight cars each. They ran to Paris, where they picked up more cars with more supplies and headed east. The trains were considered priority traffic and rolled along at a fairly high rate of speed. As they went, they used their whistles frequently to warn of their coming. As a result, someone with a sophomoric sense of humor had labeled the whole thing the “Toot Sweet Express.”
This time, the Toot Sweet train that swept toward Verdun and the French border with Germany also contained two squads of American soldiers under a young second lieutenant, John Travis. What used to be a milk run had turned potentially deadly, and Travis’s job was to protect the valuable train from attack by Soviet airplanes. For this purpose he had two flatcars with raised platforms carrying a pair of 20 mm antiaircraft guns each. He did not think it much of a deterrent. Darkness, he felt sincerely, was the best protection from the Reds.
Nor was Travis thrilled about the men he was commanding. Most of the ones in the security detachment had been culled from the stockades, where they had been serving time for various minor offenses, or from labor battalions where there was not a high premium paid for intelligence. Only his gunners seemed above average. He felt that all of them looked down on him.
Travis had doubts about himself. Only recently commissioned as a ninety-day wonder straight out of Officer Candidate School, he had never seen combat. Instead, he had been working in a personnel office in England when the call came for more officers to help free the truly qualified soldiers to fight the Russians.
Even though he had taken the express only a couple of times, the route was beginning to become familiar. He looked about through the grimy windows of the caboose and, even in the night, knew roughly where they were. He figured they were about twenty miles from the border and that the closer they came to Germany, the more danger there was from the air.
Travis put on his helmet, left the relative comfort of the caboose, and stepped over to the rearmost gun platform on the adjacent flatcar. It was also the only gun he could safely reach. He was not going to clamber over more than fifty freight cars to get to the first one just to be told that everything was fine. Instead, he depended on a walkie-talkie to communicate with both the sergeant in charge of the front gun and the train’s engineer.
Travis was about to call them when he both heard and felt the train slowing. Then the squeal of brakes became an insistent howl and he had to hang on while the train came to a complete and sudden halt. He looked around. They were out in the country.
“What the hell?” he asked. The gunners, also surprised, only shrugged. Then one pointed. The train had stopped on a curve and they could see a barricade about a hundred yards in front of the engine.
Travis picked up the walkie-talkie and called the French-speaking soldier in the old steam engine with the engineer and fireman.
“Lewis, what’s going on?”
“Sir, we got a pile of stuff on the tracks and it looks like people around it.”
Travis began to get nervous. “Well, tell them to get the hell out of our way. And tell them to move that shit off the tracks.” He wondered if the train could push its way through the barricade if it had to. If the people who manned the barricade were looters, this could get dangerous. He drew his .45 automatic.
There was silence as Lewis tried to communicate with the leaders of the crowd, who were now alongside the engine. Travis saw women as well as men. The men on the front gun platform called in and said they were being surrounded by Frenchmen, some of whom were armed.
What the hell is going on? Travis thought. Aren’t the French our friends?
Lewis’s voice, tinny and distant, came over the walkie-talkie. “Sir, they say they’re taking the train from us because we’re fighting their Communist brothers. Sir, they’re coming on board!”
“Stop them,” he yelled.
Immediately there was the sound and flash of small arms as the French and the Americans fired on each other. Then the front antiaircraft guns, depressed as low as they could be, opened up on the crowd. Because of the curve in the tracks, the rear guns could see the barricade and they began to chop it up with their weapons.
A fire quickly started, lighting up the night sky with a fierce glare. French civilians, men and women, tumbled about in death. Travis saw well-armed Frenchmen firing on the exposed American soldiers on the train. He heard screams and knew that his men were dying as well.
Thousands of feet overhead, two Yak-9 fighters saw the sudden conflagration. From the Soviet 16th Air Army, they had been part of the large fighter escort for a hundred Ilyushin bombers that had been formed to attack the railroad yards at Cologne. It was a long attack run for fighters whose range was far less than that of the bombers, and they had been worried about having enough fuel to return to their base.
Their concerns were justified. Well before Cologne, they had been jumped by a horde of American and British fighters who had pushed the fighter-bomber swarm south while they cut the bomber force to pieces. If any bombs had fallen anywhere near Cologne, it would have surprised the two pilots immensely. Their respect for the Allies’ air power increased with each day and each bloody incident.
As a result of the air battle, the two Yak fighters had been separated from the remains of their force and pushed both south and east. Petr Dankov, the senior of the two, flew close to the other plane, turned on his flashlight, and gestured with his hands. He did not want to use the radio lest it give away the fact of their existence. Dankov had flown combat against the Nazis and had shot down fourteen of them. He had a great respect for the Luftwaffe, and the actions of the Americans over Cologne and other places had shown them to be formidable enemies as well. Two American fighters had fallen to his guns.
No matter, he chuckled. If the Yanks wanted to make a gift of the train before he was forced to bail out from lack of fuel, then he would thank them. There was no way he could now make it safely back to base, so he decided to end his last flight as a free man by doing something useful.
They came on a front-to-rear pass. They had no bombs, but their 37 mm cannon chattered and the shells walked the length of the train. First the engine exploded in a billowing cloud of steam, then one of the boxcars flamed. He saw the men on the rear gun platform look for him, and he was over them before they could react.
On the train, Travis watched in horror as the first Soviet plane streaked overhead. He had seen them seconds earlier as they flew alongside. His fervent wish was that they were Americans. The dimly seen red star on the wings disposed of that wish.
As the shells ripped through the boxcars, he tried to remember the train’s manifest. There was ammo in three of the cars!
“Run for it,” he shrieked. He jumped off the train and ran across the field. He saw a couple of his men do the same thing as the second plane flew overhead. The men on the front car were ready for it and the Yak flew into a wall of shells and commenced to fall apart. Travis watched as it fell into the ground about a half mile away and explode.
Explode! He remembered the ammo. Getting to his feet, he began to ran as fast as he could. His urgency communicated itself to a couple of Frenchmen who dropped their weapons and ran with him.
The first ammunition car blew up while they were running. The force of the blast flung Travis to the ground while the shrapnel from the exploding shells ripped his body to lifeless shreds as he tried to get to his feet.