Winner Lose All Page 2

  When the two-minute amber warning light flashed above the cabin door, Scanlon nudged Kenyon. With bulky “drop bags” tied to their ankles, that contained their clothes, weapons, ammunition, explosives, a radio, and other equipment they were bringing to the Resistance cell in Leipzig, they rose and wobbled to the airplane’s belly-hatch located in the floor further aft. Carstairs rose and joined them, as Scanlon and Kenyon stripped off their parkas and re-checked their gear. Carstairs straddled the hatch and pulled up on the handle until the heavy door opened onto its side and came to rest back on its hinge. With cold air now roaring in, the Sergeant Major stood at the opposite end of the hatch, hands on hips, feet spread, and toes dangling over the edge. He had an amused smirk on his face as he glared at Scanlon, confident that tonight would be the last he would ever see of this arrogant young Yank.

  Scanlon chose to ignore the big bastard as the airplane’s floor suddenly tilted upward. Scanlon knew the pilot was taking it up to jump height, so it would not be much longer now. He turned his head and looked back at the lights on the bulkhead, waiting for the jump light to turn green. Like it or not, though, his eyes were drawn back to the hatch and to the dark abyss below. Dimly, he could make out the black, empty German farm fields as they raced by beneath them. With nothing but a smattering of old men and young boys to do the work now, most farms had lain fallow all year, leaving only puddles of dark autumn mud to splash into. Still, the empty landscape appeared more friendly and inviting than the expression on Carstairs’s face.

  Scanlon felt an icy chill run down his back. He had made night jumps before, but those were at Fort Benning in Georgia or the rolling farms and forests of Sussex. This was different. That was Nazi Germany down there. The mere thought was terrifying enough, but he was not about to let that bastard Carstairs see it. The jump light on the front bulkhead flashed green, and Carstairs looked at his watch. “Time to go,” he screamed. “Uncle Adolf is waiting for the two of you, so out you go, lads.” He was addressing them both, but Carstairs was looking directly at Scanlon.

  Scanlon smiled. “Why don’t you come with us, Rupert, old man? The drop’s supposed to be a piece of cake,” he shouted as he toppled forward into the hatch. As he did, he reached out, took a firm grip on Carstairs’s pants leg, and pulled. “But mind the sudden stop.”

  The smirk on Carstairs’s face vanished as he jerked his leg back and almost lost his balance. “You bloody Yank bastard!” Carstairs screamed, but Scanlon did not let go until he had dropped through the hatch and the Sergeant Major’s bellowing was lost in the roar of the airplanes’ engines.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The first time Ed Scanlon saw Hanni Steiner was in the basement storeroom of Georg Horstmann’s boarded-up bookshop in Leipzig. It was anything but love at first sight. He and Will Kenyon had landed six miles west of the city in an area of broken forest and muddy farmland. With dawn less than an hour away, they slogged their way east until they found an abandoned hay barn where they could hide through the daylight hours, and then continue east along a series of dirt roads into the old city after dark. Months before, the OSS had stopped the practice of having the locals meet their agents at the drop zone. First, the parachute drops were rarely that accurate, especially at night. Second, far too many locals had been compromised and turned by the Gestapo. The upside was, the fewer number of people who knew their plans, the better off everyone was. The downside was they were on their own, inside the belly of the beast.

  Their contact was to be an old bookseller named Georg Horstmann, and they were to meet him in the city’s abandoned produce market. The Nazis had closed his bookshop years earlier. Somehow, the old man continued to live on in the building’s basement, where he had carefully cultivated the image of an odd, slightly mad recluse. With a single electric wire bootlegged from the nearby post office and no hot water, the basement of his derelict bookshop made the perfect base for what was left of the city’s last Communist resistance cell. The pale, bony old man had been a tough, dedicated Communist since 1912. He had been Hanni Steiner’s closest confidant and her father’s before that. A near-cripple now, he needed two canes to negotiate the dark city streets. Eight years before, he had been badly beaten and had both legs broken by the same brown-shirted SA mob that sacked his small bookshop. As Scanlon would later learn, the Brown Shirts might break his bones, but they could never break the man.

  Leipzig was a Major German rail crossing, and the Allies frequently bombed it at night. The central switchyards were their usual target, but the near misses often hit the neighborhoods around them; so old Horstmann led them on a slow, circuitous route through the blacked-out streets and alleys to the bookshop.

  “The Gestapo and their informants don’t venture out at night any longer,” he told them. “Thanks to your B-17s, we should have the city streets to ourselves.”

  “Unless we run into a stick of thousand-pounders,” Kenyon quipped.

  “I’m a very old man with too many aches and pains, Captain. I should be so lucky.”

  The mission that sent Ed Scanlon and Will Kenyon to Leipzig on that September night was to deliver detonators and explosives and coordinate with the local Underground cell. They had been having considerable success with sabotage and assassinations of prime Nazi targets. With few resources, London wanted to know how the hell they were doing it. Unfortunately, the only locals who were not long dead or rotting in a Gestapo jail cell by then were Communists, and they didn’t need or want help from anyone, least of all the British or the Americans. These were grizzled veterans of dozens of street brawls with the SA dating back to the early 1930s. The fact that they took their orders from Moscow, not London, must have completely escaped the attention of anyone in the Allied hierarchy. Oh, the locals would gladly accept the explosives and anything else Scanlon and Kenyon brought them, but they had no intention of letting these two young foreigners tell them what to do or let them coordinate much of anything.

  What an arrogant farce he and Will found themselves in, Scanlon quickly concluded. Cold, wet, and muddy, they were supposed to be the boys from London out to dazzle the locals with their deft, professional footwork. Long on ideas but short on experience, at least London did not send them in empty-handed. In each of their drop bags, they carried thirty pounds of badly needed plastique explosive and detonators, items the Russians could not supply.

  When they stepped inside the bookstore’s basement storeroom that night, they were politely directed to two rickety kitchen chairs, which sat on one side of a small table. Horstmann quickly brought them two mugs of hot but weak tea and stepped back, as Scanlon and Kenyon found themselves staring across at three scruffy-looking old men sitting on the other side of the table, who were eyeing them suspiciously. Scanlon assumed they were the leadership of the cell, hardly the dashing saboteurs and freedom fighters he and Kenyon expected to find. The leader was probably the wrinkled scarecrow in the center, with the head of operations on his right and the party chief on his left. From their appearance and manner, they could have been day laborers, hod carriers, or workers from a nearby factory who had been summoned to the foreman’s office for a good dressing down.

  Hardly noticed when he and Kenyon sat down was a young blonde woman sitting cross-legged on a coarse wool blanket in the far corner of the room, cleaning and oiling the parts of a German submachine gun, which lay in a neat semicircle around her. After a quick, indifferent glance at the two young foreigners, she resumed her work and paid no further attention to them as her fingers danced through the small metal parts. She must be someone’s daughter, Scanlon quickly concluded, come here to clean and cook for the men. A great disguise, too, he thought. With her rosy cheeks and blonde hair braided into rings above her ears, all she needed was a dirndl to pass for a Charter Member of the BDM, the Nazi League of German Girls, or a waitress in a beer hall during Oktoberfest entertaining the tourists. Soon, however, a new crowd of tourists would be arriving in Bavaria. They would be riding Sherman tanks and they were not comin
g for the beer or the wurst.

  The longer he examined the faces of the four old men who sat in that damp, cold basement, the more he could see that he and Kenyon were being played for fools. With a furtive glance here and a nervous gesture there, the old men, he realized, were taking their cues from the girl. She was not someone’s daughter sent to clean and cook. She was the boss, and that sudden revelation left Scanlon feeling incredibly stupid. While the three men asked questions and kept Scanlon and Will talking, the girl had been listening and giving away nothing while she studied them and decided for herself what they were worth and how best to use them.

  Finally, Scanlon turned and looked down at her. “Why don’t you come up here and join us?” he asked.

  “Because this is more important,” she answered as her quick fingers continued to clean and reassemble the submachine gun.

  “I thought we were working together.”

  “Working together?” she scoffed as she oiled the mechanism on the submachine gun and let its bolt snap shut with a loud Click! “I trust this, because I know it will not quit on me,” she said as she finally glanced up at him. “You? I do not know you, and I am not certain I want to.”

  “Are those your orders from Moscow?” he asked.

  “Captain Scanlon,” she shook her head, amused at the thought. “Moscow is a thousand miles that way,” she threw a thumb over her shoulder, “and London is six hundred miles the other. This,” she patted the bare ground she was sitting on, “this is Leipzig, once a proud city in the former Free State of Saxony. Now, it is merely a painful boil on the backside of National Socialist hell. Occasionally, our little group makes it hurt a bit more for them. We do, not you, not London, and not Moscow.”

  “We came to help,” he said with a forced smile.

  “Help? Other than bringing in the plastique, what is it you think you can help us with? The men sitting at the table with you — Johannes, Peter, Franz, even old Georg — they have survived in this prison camp called the Third Reich since 1933 without help from anyone except each other. Look at them,” she said as she pointed at the three grizzled old men hunched over the table. “Your German is excellent, but is that what you and Kenyon look like? I do not think so. Anyone younger than them with even one good leg, was drafted into the army years ago or is rotting away in a labor camp. Two healthy young men like you, without a good wrinkle or scar between you, how the hell do you expect to fool the Gestapo?”

  Scanlon glanced away, feeling very foolish.

  “Do you know how they managed to survive all these years?” she asked. “By keeping their mouths shut, listening, and hating the Nazis even more than they hate us. Do you think you can help them improve on that?”

  The girl was right. He couldn’t. It was the height of arrogance for London to send him and Kenyon here. They should simply hand over the plastique and the detonators and then take off with their tails between their legs before things got any worse.

  One evening, while Kenyon was checking out the rail yard, she relented. “I suppose this is not entirely your fault, Captain,” she said as her bright blue eyes flashed and turned his knees to jelly. “You cannot possibly understand what it has been like. The Nazis have systematically destroyed this beautiful old city, its culture, and its people, leaving us to watch helplessly as they hauled friends and relatives away in the middle of the night. It only took a whisper, sometimes not even that, for people to be grabbed off the streets, arrested, and tortured at Gestapo Headquarters. That is why our work here is so deadly serious, and why you cannot expect us to place what precious time we have left into your nervous, fumbling hands.”

  “I understand. Truly, I do,” Scanlon admitted, “but we risked our lives to bring you the plastique. We are here and we are part of it now, every bit as much as you are.”

  “Ah, the plastique,” she nodded. “That is the only reason I permitted you to get within a mile of us in the first place, Captain.”

  “I guess we’ll have to earn your trust, then,” Scanlon answered confidently.

  “Trust?” she laughed and those bright blue eyes danced at the novelty of the thought. “That word has not been in my vocabulary since 1937, Captain, at least not with men.” She looked up at him and held out her hand. “Let me see your identity and travel papers, the ‘Ausweisen’ they printed for you in London.”

  Reluctantly, Scanlon pulled them out of his shirt and handed them to her.

  She held them up to the light and grunted, quickly flipping through the pages, rubbing the paper between her fingers, and closely examining the stamps, the typefaces, and the printing, and evaluating the workmanship of the British forgeries. “Is there is someone in London who wants to see you dead, Captain?” she asked with a polite smile.

  “What do you mean?” he questioned sharply.

  “These papers will get you shot as certainly as I am sitting here, that is what I mean,” she answered as she handed the papers back. “They are bad, almost amateurish, with some very obvious and very typical mistakes that wouldn’t fool a fresh Gestapo recruit. If you try them out on Otto Dietrich or his better people, you will die a slow and very painful death in one of his basement interrogation cells. Even your minders in London should know that.”

  Scanlon looked down at her in a silent rage, his steel-gray eyes flashing angrily. “Show me,” he said, “show me where they’re wrong.” He sat down next to her on the blanket, shoulder to shoulder and head to head as she slowly and patiently went through the documents with him.

  When he actually appeared to be listening and learning, she wondered if there might be hope for this handsome young American after all. “Perhaps we can get you a new set,” she relented, “ones that might keep you alive for a little while longer. After that, you are on your own; and you had better be ready, because Otto Dietrich will be looking for you very soon.”

  “The Gestapo?” Scanlon asked suspiciously. “How could they know we’re here?”

  “The Gestapo? No, Otto Dietrich. That man is the devil himself. He knows, because he always knows,” she said quite matter-of-factly. “He has become our worst nightmare. He was a smart, talented police detective long before the Nazis came to power. He has eyes and ears everywhere, and he will find out. Perhaps not tonight, or even this week, but very soon he will learn that you are in Leipzig and the hunt will be on. Not to worry though,” she said as she looked into his eyes and her expression softened. “I have no intention of letting him catch you, not yet anyway, because I am even better at this game than he is. By the way, everyone calls me Hanni. What do you want me to call you?”

  “Edward. You can call me Edward.”

  “Good,” she smiled and gave him a curt nod. “You are Edward.”

  Hanni was a third-generation German Communist and a committed, highly trained NKVD officer, who the Russians sent back into Germany to run the Communist resistance cells in Saxony. She was the daughter of Max Steiner, a German Jew and one of the few surviving members of the old Central Committee of the German Communist Party in the mid-1920s. Immediately after the Reichstag fire in February 1933, Hitler’s gangs began the systematic annihilation of the Communist and Socialist party leadership. Stalin’s paranoid purges claimed most of the rest. As a pale, gangly teenager, Hanni fled with her father into exile to the Soviet Union in 1935. Some childhood, Scanlon thought. While the girls on Long Island were attending their first cotillions and giggling at boys, Hanni grew up in Red Army training camps, rising through the ranks of the army and the NKVD, as the KGB was then called, one brutal rung at a time. Detailed to the front as an infantry officer, she fought in the Ukraine, the Crimea, and in the rubble of Stalingrad before Beria picked her out for intelligence work. In early 1943, he sent her back to Leipzig as a tough, strong-willed, and superbly trained NKVD Lieutenant, complete with her own solid gold secret police officer’s shield with its hammer and sickle, red star, and sword in a black leather wallet. The mere sight of one had been known to turn a Russian General’s knees to
jelly.

  “You would like my father, Edward,” she told him days later as a rare glow came over her. “He is one of the world’s last unspoiled idealists, complete with a rumpled, threadbare suit, wire-rim glasses, and rock-hard principles. Someday, they will cost him his life, but he does not care. He battled the Nazi Brown Shirts in the streets of Berlin with bricks and bottles if that was all he could get his hands on, and he has the scars to prove it. After that, he fought in the Red volunteer brigades in Spain, and he has had his share of fights with the Comintern and the Kremlin, as well. I told him he is like Don Quixote — a magnificent old fool in a world with no shortage of windmills. However, because he is a German, the Kremlin will never trust him or any other foreigner — believe me, I know.”

  Later still, as Hanni slowly warmed to him, she said, “Edward, whatever else you do, do not trust the British. You Americans are very foolish if you do.”

  “Is that Moscow speaking?” he asked.

  “Perhaps,” she conceded, “but it is also the voice of experience. The British only care about the British. They will use you and toss you out with the trash when they are finished. And if you get in their way, they will have you killed.”

  “That’s nonsense, Hanni,” he scoffed.

  “Do you think those papers the British gave you were nonsense? If you compare them to the ones they prepared for your friend Kenyon, I am sure you will see a big difference.”

  “That’s ridiculous. Will is a friend.”

  “I did not say it was his doing. His role may be as your friend and he may not have been told, but you should remember where his orders come from. Never trust London.” She looked at him, waiting for an argument, but it did not come. “I believe that history creates destiny,” she went on. “This is all part of their game — the Great Game, as they call it — the game of espionage. It is full of spies, treachery, secrets, good men and many bad ones, and a healthy dose of double-dealing. At this game, the British are the Grand Masters. After all, they invented it, them and the Russians, so never trust either one of them. I do not.”