Winner Lose All

by William F. Brown

  He trained his eyes on the square and quickly detected the anomalies, such as an absence of healthy young men. It was like 1918 all over again. The few men he saw were in uniform, or they walked with a limp and a crutch or cane. Others had their heads and hands wrapped in white bandages, and if one peered around the corner, he could see the wreckage of bombed-out buildings just a few doors down. Two streets to the west, he knew an entire row of buildings had simply vanished. All of London was now like that, Bromley recalled sadly, part of the terrible price these islands had paid month after month for six long years. Men, property, and empire were gone in a cloud of dust and smoke. A once proud people had been reduced to paupers with little left to their names except a foolish pride and far too many problems. Overhead, even the city’s pigeons were gone. They had been scared off, no doubt by a flock of ill-bred American vultures, who were now circling up there, waiting for the right moment to swoop down and rip off yet another hunk of British flesh.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  That night, two burly U. S. Military Policemen stood in the hall outside Scanlon’s hotel room to ensure he enjoyed its comforts, and nothing more. The condemned man deserved a good meal and a soft bed, Scanlon assumed. True to his word, Bromley had provided both. Nonetheless, the young American found himself staring at the ceiling unable to sleep. It was around midnight when he heard a soft knock on the door. He got up and opened it wide enough to see outside. To his surprise, the two MPs were gone. In their place stood a middle-aged man in a medium gray civilian suit, dark gray tie, and light gray topcoat.

  “May I come in, Captain?” the man asked with a self-conscious smile. “My name is Allen Dulles and I think we should talk.”

  They entered the sitting room of the spacious suite and sat facing each other across a round French provincial breakfast table. Dulles left the impression of someone much older. Pale, with a slight build and thinning hair, he wore wire rimmed glasses and a soft, neatly trimmed moustache. While they had never met, like most OSS field agents, Scanlon had heard about the brilliant Station Chief in Berne, Switzerland. He was the son of a Presbyterian minister, but Scanlon thought he could pass for a banker or a literature professor at some small Midwestern college.

  “Did you make the guards disappear?” Scanlon asked.

  “Disappear? Oh, no,” he smiled. “They’ll magically return after I leave,” came the self-effacing reply. “This way, they won’t have to lie about it. No one saw me come in and no one will see me go out.”

  Scanlon appreciated the simple logic and immediately liked the man.

  “I’ve been reading your file,” Dulles began.

  “I’m honored.”

  “Well, I don’t like sending a man on a mission like this without meeting him and speaking with him personally.”

  “Why? Does it bother your conscience?”

  Dulles seemed surprised by the question. Finally, he answered with a smile. “If anyone in this business tells you it doesn’t, they’re either a liar or a sadist, and you don’t want to work for either one. Look, Captain, I know what you’ve been through. It was rough over there, and it’s going to be even rougher this time, physically and mentally.”

  “You want to know if I can handle it, or if I’ll shatter like a plate glass window, right?”

  “That’s one way of putting it.”

  “I think I’m okay now. My hands have stopped shaking, or at least the right one has; I don’t dive flat onto the sidewalk whenever I hear a car backfire; I’m starting to get a few hours of sleep at night, and I haven’t punched anyone since this afternoon.” At least no one who didn’t deserve it, he thought, remembering Carstairs. “All in all, I’d say I’m almost back to my old, adorable self. How about you?”

  “Me? It sounds like you’re doing better than I am,” Dulles laughed.

  “Then I pass?”

  “It wasn’t a test. Things are very unstable in Germany right now,” Dulles warned, choosing his words carefully, all too aware of the fragile state of the young man’s emotions. “Alliances are shifting and many things are now in motion. That makes for strange bedfellows at times, so the best advice I can give you is don’t trust anyone. As I said, I read your file. You’re smart, you think on your feet, and you have good instincts. If you use your wits and rely on your experience, you should do fine.”

  Scanlon was watching his eyes, trying to figure him out without much success. He was either a good actor or completely sincere, which in this business would be a novelty.

  “Patton’s Third Army is advancing rapidly on a broad front from France and Luxembourg through Stuttgart to Munich and on to Vienna, bypassing Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig, and most of Saxony,” he said as he rolled out a map on the small table and began pointing out various routes with his finger. “When you leave Volkenrode, so long as you head southwest toward Bavaria, you can’t miss them. If you get there first, hole up in the mountains about here, south of Bad Tolz, and watch the roads. That isn’t necessarily the plan Colonel Bromley will give you, but this is the one I suggest you use,” he smiled. “Sooner or later, an American unit will come by. Nevertheless, be careful. Our infantry can get a bit edgy with strangers. Once you make contact, ask them to radio Colonel Haggarty at Patton’s Headquarters. That is Haggarty, Vincent T. He is Patton’s G-2. Every company commander in that area will have his name tattooed on the back of his hand and be on alert for you, so use it. As your entre, ask him how many points he scored in the 1915 Princeton-Yale game. He’ll answer that he scored all seven, and then he will tell you they didn’t matter, because we lost the game and he wasn’t counting. If all else fails, I am at 23 Herrengasse in Berne. Cable, phone me, or bike on in, I don’t care how you do it.”

  Scanlon nodded.

  “Good. I was told you have a photographic memory.”

  “Princeton football?” Scanlon paused. “What position did you play? Tackle?”

  “No, clipboard. I was the team manager,” Dulles answered with the same self-deprecating smile. “So, tell me, Captain; you know better than anyone how tough it’s going to be on the ground. After what happened the last time, why did you agree to go?”

  Scanlon didn’t answer.

  “Is it the woman — the Steiner woman?”

  Scanlon still did not answer.

  “I need you focused on the job, Eddy — if I may call you that — not focused somewhere else,” Dulles said, sounding concerned for him, sounding sincere.

  “I said I’d do it,” Scanlon answered sharply. “And you don’t need to warn me about trusting people. I don’t trust anyone now, not the Germans, not the damned British, not even you, Mister Dulles.”

  “Good.” Dulles almost sounded relieved. “I know your Colonel Bromley and the rest of the British MI-6 crowd think this will be a simple milk run, but they are wrong. It could be the most important and demanding mission of the war.”

  Scanlon looked at him with a blank stare. Like any veteran, the distinction between a big mission and a small one was utterly irrelevant. When you are on the ground crawling through the mud and being shot at, they all look about the same.

  “The Germans are truly amazing,” Dulles leaned back in the chair and shook his head. “Their science is years ahead of ours. Did you know they are working on a rocket that could hit New York City? New York City — Manhattan! Moreover, they could fire it from Germany, for God’s sake. They have new submarines in design that can go halfway around the world underwater, completely undetected, without coming up for air. Imagine! You already know about the jet fighters, but they’re also working on new air-to-air rockets, a jet bomber that can fly across the Atlantic and back again, huge hundred-ton tanks, new armor-piercing shells, and long-distance radar. The list of their technological brilliance goes on and on, but they chose to waste it all on things that destroy.”

  “They’re just a fun-loving bunch, aren’t they?”

  “Yes, and we can thank God that most of those things are coming too late to change the outcome. Six
more months and it could have been another story. Those weapons in any quantity would have turned the tide in their favor and revolutionized warfare. That’s why we can’t allow them to fall into Stalin’s hands,” Dulles warned. “There are some who think the Russians are too incompetent and primitive to make any use of it, but I’m not one of them. People forget the excellent workmanship that went into the T-34 tank, the Sturmovik fighter plane, and the Kalashnikov rifle. They may be very simple designs and nowhere near the sophistication of the German equipment that they defeated; but to a soldier on the front line, the Russian weapons are things of beauty. That is why we made pacts with the Luftwaffe, the Kriegsmarine, and all the rest — admittedly, pacts with the devil — but we do indeed fear the Russians. We would have a difficult enough time stopping the Red Army today. In two years or three, after we have demobilized, our odds become infinitely worse. The Germans know that, too, and they know where the next war would be fought — right through what is left of Germany. That is why they’re giving us their plans, their engineers, mathematicians, their test data, and all the rest. It is called Operation Paperclip, and you are now a key part of it.”

  Scanlon shifted uncomfortably in his chair and looked across the table. “Doesn’t say much for wartime alliances, does it.”

  “No, that spirit died several months ago at Yalta, I’m sorry to say. The Red Army is installing puppet regimes in every country they have overrun, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Hungary, Rumania, and Yugoslavia — they are completely freezing us out.”

  “Can you blame them? Every western army from Napoleon to Hitler has attacked Russia right across the central European plain and on through Poland.”

  “Neutral buffers we can accept, but these are puppets controlled by Moscow. None of the multi-party governments-in-exile can even take part, only the Communists.”

  Scanlon looked across at Dulles, reading the other man’s eyes. “If you have something you want to ask me, why don’t you go ahead and ask.”

  Dulles smiled. “All right, Eddy. You worked with the Red underground in Leipzig for four months…”

  “And you want to know if any of it rubbed off?” Scanlon finished the question himself. “I’m sure some things did. After all, we fought side by side and they saved my life several times. They are dedicated, and they are hard as nails. If I’d been through what they’d been through, I’d probably be one too; but I’m not.”

  “Good, I’m counting on that. We’ve had a few of our people in the Balkans get a little too close and ‘go native’ as they say, which is why I asked.”

  Scanlon said nothing more.

  “I need you, Eddy. I need you to make this happen,” he said as his eyes locked on the young American. “If there’s another war in Europe, with the Russians next time, we’re going to need those jet airplanes and all the rest. That is why you must remain completely focused. Go get them for us, Eddie, get them any way you can.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Chequers, outside London

  Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was not an early riser. As was his custom, he awoke just after 9:00 a.m. Dressed in a silk robe and slippers, he leaned back against a pile of feather pillows, feeling fit and rested for the first time in weeks. At 71 years of age, that was nothing to sneer at, not by him anyway. The previous evening he left London for a quiet, badly needed Easter weekend at the Prime Minister’s official country estate at Chequers in the lovely Buckinghamshire countryside forty miles west of the city.

  His preference was to work late into the evening, rise late, and spend the morning reclining in his large four-poster bed with a fresh cigar clenched between his teeth. Before he turned to the stack of official reports and correspondence, which an aide had placed on the side table, he reached for the morning newspapers. There had been another attack of German V-2 rockets on London the previous day. After six years of war, the city’s people had put up with the Blitz, the threat of invasion, food and gasoline rationing, and every other sort of privation. However, the V-1 and now V-2 weapons were another matter entirely. During the Blitz, a typical night might include an early trip to an underground station, where tens of thousands of people hid. Up above, whistles, sirens, and anti-aircraft guns would shatter the quiet London night as the wave of German Heinkel bombers finally reached the city, followed by the dull Crump, Crump, Crump of aerial bombs. Not so with a V-2 rocket. Over thirteen hundred of them had now struck London, and just one could blow a crater twenty meters wide and six meters deep, powerful enough to take out half a city block. Since the Germans fired them day or night and they flew faster than sound, there was no warning. They were fired from the Dutch low country near the coast, and the only defense against them was to push the German launch sites far enough back to put London out of their range.

  In his heart of hearts, Churchill was a nineteenth century man, perhaps even seventeenth century if he cared to admit it, but so was England. For generations she had been safeguarded by her hallowed moat, the English Channel. The V-2s, however, had changed that paradigm forever and laid all England open to destruction. War was never a pretty thing, but if these rockets and the other hellish new weapons pouring out of Nazi Germany were typical of the technological insanity now dominating warfare, Churchill wanted no part of them.

  The V-2 was a pure terror weapon designed to sow random death and destruction amongst the civilian population and demonstrate the superiority of German technology. It was easy enough to blame Herr Hitler and his pack of mad scientists; but the truth was, this type of cynical, brutal behavior had been typical of the Hun for many decades. While the technology might be different, German behavior in this war was no different than it had been during the Great War or the Franco-Prussian War before that. They had a long history of bombing, shelling, and terrorizing the Belgian cities, the Dutch cities, and the French cities at will. They turned their submarines loose on commercial shipping, kidnapped thousands of innocent civilians for forced labor in Germany, and starved the populations of the countries they occupied. Churchill hated them, and he hated their so-called men of science who had designed and built all of those cruel new weapons for them. If it was his choice, he would have the lot of them taken out and shot, and he still might. This continuing escalation in terror must stop, he thought. It must, but how?

  Churchill picked up the telephone. “Get me Field Marshal Montgomery,” he said. When the connection was finally made and he had the pompous martinet on the line, Churchill demanded Montgomery’s personal assurances that he would immediately push forward and seize the remaining V-2 launch sites. It was the only way to stop the rocket attacks. They might be a minor irritant to a field commander, but they had the people of London in a near panic.

  “This is no time for caution!” he braced the Field Marshal, no longer tiptoeing around the man’s monumental ego. Monty had been frequently criticized for his lack of offensive zeal, particularly in the American press, so Churchill’s choice of words were intended to cut the little man right where it hurt the most — in his self-image. So be it! His divisions were plodding though the Dutch low country at a snail’s pace. Surely, they must be in sight of the last of the Nazi rocket sites by now. “Take them out now, General! Ignore Patton and all the rest. Destroy the last of them, and you shall have the undying gratitude of our people.”

  Churchill rang off and paused to look out his bedroom window with its panoramic view across the formal garden below. It was a lovely spring morning. Perfect. After breakfast, he might retire to the garden with his easel, his brushes, and his paints. He had not touched them in months, not since he left for Yalta and spent a week closeted with that old pirate, Josef Stalin, and his crowd of foul-smelling Bolsheviks. It soon became obvious that the only hot water in the Kremlin was in the samovars they used to heat the water for tea.

  During a tour of a defense plant in Dorset several weeks ago, a middle-aged woman inquired why he smoked his highly aromatic Havana cigars. “Madame,”
he replied with a twinkle in his eye, “it is apparent you have never been in close quarters with the Russian bear in winter. The cigar is purely for defense — purely for defense.”

  Yalta! What a disaster, Churchill grimaced. Not that it could be avoided. His dear friend Franklin Roosevelt was too ill to argue, and the Russians knew it. Like a hungry wolf, Stalin went after the weakest member of the herd, chased after it at a slow, measured pace until he had sapped its last strength, and took it down. Such was the nature of the wolf. One could hardly blame it for being what it was. In his time, Franklin had been a great man and a greater friend. No longer, though. The last time Churchill saw him, death hung on the American president like one of his heavy old Navy capes. Pale and thin, his handshake was weak and his skin had taken on a translucent, ashen hue. With victory finally on the horizon, it was tragic, truly tragic.

  When death finally does take the great American, who will step forward to fill that immense void? In the British system of parliamentary democracy, when a Prime Minister is lost, there is a political process through which the next most qualified minister is selected to replace him. That was usually the Foreign Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer, or someone else who has been at the very center of policy development and decision making. Not so with the Americans. Their system pre-ordained that the Vice President would be elevated, a man whose sole qualification for office had been some sort of electoral or geographic compromise. To compound the folly, no sooner was he elected than they invariably gave him the most inconsequential of tasks and left him out of any position of responsibility, decision making, or meaningful information flow. Such was the fate of a backwater political hack from the American hinterland named Harry S. Truman. A one-time haberdasher and reserve Captain in the horse artillery in the Great War, he came out of the political machine of a small Midwestern state. Not only did he have no experience in foreign affairs, he did not even have a middle name, only an initial.