Winner Lose All Read online

  Scanlon herded everyone back into the vehicles and they drove out of town, heading south using the same seating arrangement. Raeder, his daughter, and Otto Dietrich sat in the rear seat of the Maybach, while Scanlon and Paul Von Lindemann took turns driving and keeping a pistol pointed at the back seat. They divided the rest of the crew from Volkenrode between the two heavy trucks, each having its own Luftwaffe driver behind the wheel.

  “Some trip,” Ed Scanlon thought to himself as the soft, green spring landscape rolled past the car windows. Leipzig to Bayreuth to Nuremberg was a journey that could be measured in more than just miles. Like Leipzig, Bayreuth had been a center of German music and culture for decades, but it projected the darker side. While Leipzig in nearby Saxony had been the home of Bach, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Schiller and Goethe, its smaller Bavarian neighbor became the shrine to just one man — Richard Wagner. He was the patron saint of Aryan and Norse mythology, German nationalism, and blatant anti-Semitism, making him Adolf Hitler’s favorite composer. Torch-lit formations of men marching in huge geometric patterns in the stadium at Nuremberg gave the Nazi party a powerful image, but Wagner gave it its voice and rhythm. He was so popular with the Nazi leadership that they named SS divisions after characters in his operas; and the city, the man, and his message became part of a vicious national ethos. Still, the music of a long-dead opera composer was only music. On that lovely spring afternoon in April 1945, with the sun shining, the bright-green leaves unfolding on the trees, and the fields full of wildflowers in bloom, it was hard for Ed Scanlon to imagine that men were actually killing each other to defend that perverted ideal, until Wolfe Raeder managed to break the spell.

  “Kidnapping me like this will gain you nothing,” he announced indignantly. “This entire episode is merely a temporary setback, nothing more.”

  “We’ll see how temporary it is, Herr Doktor,” Scanlon answered.

  “It is silly and ineffective. In the end, I shall do whatever I wish; I shall go where I wish; I shall work for whomever I wish; and you cannot stop me,” he said, his voice beaming with confidence.

  “You are a disgusting fraud, Herr Raeder,” Paul Von Lindemann said angrily.

  “I did not start this war, Von Lindemann. It was you Prussians who brought this ruin on our people, just as the Führer told us. Look at you,” Raeder sneered. “You are nothing but a whore, a hopeless cripple who is selling my work to the highest bidder.”

  “Papa, that was cruel!” Christina scolded him. She looked at Paul Von Lindemann and made eye contact, but she did not look away this time.

  “Cruel, Christina?” her father asked. “Who was it who said, ‘And not one of the wicked nation shall escape their just punishment.’ Was that not what your Norma sang on the opera recording? So do not lecture me, young lady.”

  “Let her talk,” Scanlon warned. “You’ve kept her bottled up far too long already.”

  “This is a family matter. How dare you interfere!” Raeder’s face grew red.

  “It’s high time someone did,” Scanlon shot back. “A life in Moscow is one hell of a price to make anyone pay for loyalty.”

  “Loyalty? Who are you to lecture me on loyalty?” Raeder sneered. “You are a thief and a traitor, like that parade-ground martinet sitting next to you. So, tell me, Captain Thief, what is your real name?”

  “His name is Scanlon, Captain Edward Scanlon,” Otto Dietrich said, his slow, sullen voice muffled by his swollen jaw. “Do not let his fluent German fool you, Herr Doktor. He is in the American Army where he is a spy in their OSS. He flies over here to Germany every few months to take the waters with me and get a massage and manicure in my basement beauty parlor. Is that not why you graced us with your presence, Edward, my boy?”

  “And to take out the trash,” Scanlon answered, catching Dietrich’s eyes in the rear view mirror. There was hatred and anger penned up inside the Chief Inspector, and Scanlon took careful note of it. “However, if Major Von Lindemann is a traitor, Herr Doktor, what would your precious Führer think about you selling out to the Russians?”

  Wolfe Raeder’s eyes flashed. “The sun is setting on the west. You Americans are ample proof enough of that. It is rising in the east, because the Soviets have brought something new and fresh into this world. Socialism is the only hope for the next generation.”

  “Personally, I don’t care what you believe in, Herr Doktor,” the Major told him, “but don’t infect the girl with that nonsense.”

  “So! The traitor is now an expert on political science, too?” Raeder stated sarcastically as his face turned red. “What do you believe in, Herr Major?”

  “Me? I believe in Germany and the Kaiser, if the truth be known,” he answered proudly. “We Von Lindemanns have been monarchists for over four hundred years. Compared to that, your Austrian corporal is a rude, undistinguished upstart — a first-rate actor, a second-rate artist, and a third-rate dictator.”

  Scanlon watched the three faces in the rear view mirror. As the arguments clashed and the sparks flew, Christina Raeder’s eyes became more and more troubled. She looked at Von Lindemann and then at her father, her head swiveling back and forth like the umpire at a tennis match. Clearly, she had doubts about the truths her father had pounded into her head year after year. Meanwhile this reserved Luftwaffe pilot, a throwback to an era of the officers’ mess, swords, and good manners, had blown into her life like a breath of cool, fresh air, precisely at the time a young girl desperately needed to know how to become a young woman.

  “I am from East Prussia, Herr Doktor,” the Major said. “We have been fighting the Slavs for a thousand years, and we learned a few things for the effort. Your jet airplane is a wonderful machine. I flew it in combat, and I am one of the few men left alive in this world who is qualified to make that statement,” he acknowledged with a slight bow of his head. “That is why I can also state that putting it in the hands of the Russians would be a monstrous crime against the German people. We would be paying for it for the next hundred years.”

  “Is it the welfare of the German people you are so concerned about, Herr Major, or the welfare of your British masters?” Raeder crowed, leaving Von Lindemann seething.

  “Let it go, Paul,” Scanlon nudged him. “I just hope he never sees the truth.”

  It was late afternoon when they reached the outskirts of Nuremberg. A soft, golden sun threw long shadows across the road as Scanlon skirted the central city. He swung south and then east through the suburbs, hoping to intersect the main highway to Munich and the Alps without being stopped. Unfortunately, there was no way to avoid the sense of doom that hung over the city. Along the eastern side of the road, in the fields and in the woods, they passed unit after unit of the Volksturm militia. They were old men and fifteen-year-old boys for the most part, dressed in ill-fitting, second-hand uniforms. They leaned on their rifles, sat on the ground near freshly dug tank traps and makeshift barricades of tree trunks and old automobiles.

  Scanlon noted that the fortifications were all facing east, not west.

  “It would appear that the Führer’s Fortress Europe still has some cracks, Herr Doktor?” Scanlon mocked him.

  Wolfe Raeder stared at the grim scene and offered no reply.

  Along the barricades, they saw groups of haggard-looking men dressed in torn gray work clothes with closely cropped hair and thin, unshaved, emaciated faces. They labored over picks and shovels to dig still more ditches and tank traps along the side of the road.

  “Who are those wretched people?” Christina Raeder asked as she watched them through the car window. “Are they convicts?”

  “No, Fraulein,” the Major answered. “Those are prisoners, volunteer laborers as Herr Goebbels calls them, mostly Russian prisoners and forced labor conscripts from the east. It makes you wonder what they volunteered to get away from, does it not? With the SS at their backs and the Red Army in their faces, it is little wonder they look so forlorn.”

  Scanlon guessed they understood their dilemma bett
er than anyone, and they knew the long odds against surviving it. More troubling was the column of young boys they passed on the road. They were twelve to fourteen years old at the most. At another time or place, they might be a Boy Scout troop out on a nature hike were it not for the heavy rifles, the “Panzerfaust” antitank weapons slung over their shoulders, and uniforms that hung on them like children playing in their father’s clothes. Hitler Youth, Scanlon realized sadly. Ludicrous, he thought, until he saw the hard expressions on their faces. Like everything else in this madhouse, it would all come to a grim and bloody end.

  Scanlon continued to drive on, but the hour was growing late. He was exhausted and if he continued driving with his headlights off on these twisting country roads, he would wreck the car for certain. Their only choice was to hole up for the night, he concluded, as he looked for a deserted side road where they would not be bothered. When he became tired, he became irritable and was even known to lose his famous sense of humor. When he lost his sense of humor, he became junkyard mean, and it would not be a good idea to have Otto Dietrich within a hundred miles of him.

  He saw a side road going into a small stand of trees so he pulled in and parked. They handcuffed Dietrich and Wolfe Raeder to the door handles in the Maybach’s rear seat. “That should do nicely. Wake me in four hours, Paul,” he mumbled as he threw a blanket on the ground, feeling the exhaustion piling on. “I’ll take the next shift.”

  Funny, Scanlon thought as a half-smile crossed his lips. It had been four days since he had a drink, a SPB, a Scanlon Personal Best, as his Ivy League father would call it. That had been surprisingly easy without Sergeant Major Rupert Carstairs and the Right Honorable Colonel Sir George Bromley to hassle with him. Maybe there was some cause and effect there, he thought as he quickly fell asleep.

  It was the bright sunlight streaming in his eyes that finally woke him. He blinked and looked at the Luftwaffe Major sitting next to him. “Why didn’t you wake me, Paul?”

  “You needed the sleep more than I,” the German answered with a pleasant smile. “Besides, they train fighter pilots to sit for hours in an uncomfortable seat with absolutely nothing to do. Frankly, I enjoyed the time to think.”

  “Come to any earth-shattering conclusions?”

  “Yes. I am hungry.”

  After a cold breakfast of canned army field rations, they continued to push south through the small towns of Roth, Weissenburg, Eichstatt, and Neuburg which lay in the rolling valleys on the way to Munich. These were picture-postcard villages at crossroads, each with narrow, twisting streets, an old stone church, and a town square with a fountain in the middle. The houses and shops along the main streets were half-timbered, with heavy overhanging roofs, exposed rough-hewn wooden beams, white plaster walls decoratively painted with flowers and farm scenes, balconies with flower boxes, and the occasional Nazi flag still hanging from the balcony. A year ago, every balcony in town would have had one. Now, the displays were a bit more tentative. In another week, Scanlon had no doubt the flags, gaudy lapel pins, and party membership cards would be buried deep in the rose garden or fed into a roaring fire.

  The drive south into Bavaria proceeded without incident until they were ten miles north of Munich and Scanlon got his first premonition of trouble. He was at the wheel on an open stretch of flat road. Empty fields lay on each side and there was no place to hide. Inexplicably, the fingers on his left hand began itching, and his stomach turned strangely sour. Through the windshield, he saw two small, black specks high in the bright blue sky ahead — airplanes! Fighters, he realized, but whose? If they were German Focke-Wulfs or Me-109s, there was no reason for them to attack two German trucks a hundred miles behind German lines. If they were American P-51 Mustangs, British Spitfires, or Hurricanes, Bromley said the pilots were to ignore any trucks with two white circles painted on the tops of their cabs. The circles were up there, so why worry? Unfortunately, the answer his stomach kept providing was the Right Honorable Bastard George Bromley.

  “Those are British Spitfires,” Paul Von Lindemann told him, sounding relieved. “God in Heaven, but I used to hate those things.”

  As Scanlon watched, the two fighters passed high overhead. Slowly they banked and made a lazy turn, dropping low as they came in for a second, closer look. Scanlon leaned out the driver’s window and waved as the two long-range fighters flashed overhead no more than a few hundred feet above the roof of the trucks and the Maybach. Paul was right. There was no mistaking these khaki brown airplanes with blue, white, and red concentric circles on their wide wings. They were British, no doubt about it, Scanlon thought, as he watched them come around for a third pass, nose down this time, head on, aiming straight at them.

  “They are going to attack!” Von Lindemann suddenly warned.

  “Yeah,” Scanlon answered, but there were no trees or cover on either side. The best he could do was to steer the Maybach onto the road shoulder, hit the brakes, and scream, “Out, everyone out and into the ditch.” Even that was too late. The two Spitfires began firing at them while the big car was still skidding to a halt. Scanlon glanced up and saw the chattering flashes of their thirty-caliber machineguns along the leading edges of the fighters’ wings, as the slugs began to shred the pavement down the center of the narrow road. It was not the Maybach they wanted, Scanlon realized. They were going for the trucks. He and Von Lindemann had gotten the others out of the car and into the ditch. When he turned his head and looked back, he saw the lead truck shudder under the hammer blows from the Spitfire’s guns. Pieces of shredded metal flew into the air, and the truck careened down the road out of control until it rolled into the muddy ditch on the other side and stopped. A dense cloud of black, oily smoke poured from beneath its hood and covered the scene.

  “Oh, my God!” Christina Raeder screamed, wide-eyed as she saw the truck burning. “Rudy is in there.”

  “My papers!” Wolfe Raeder screamed even louder. “See what you have done, you fools — my papers and all of my research, they are burning!”

  After the British fighters roared past, the second truck rolled to a halt behind the first, screened by the thick cloud of oily black smoke. Its crew jumped out and ran to help the men trapped inside the first one. Scanlon and Von Lindemann did the same, reaching the passenger side first and wrenching the door open. Rudy Mannfried fell out into Scanlon’s arms, and the American half-carried and half-dragged him over to the shoulder away from the smoke and flames. The short, fat engineer’s head was bloody from a collision with the dashboard, and he had a large bullet wound in his chest. One quick look told Scanlon the man was dying. Carefully he laid Rudy on the gravel and turned back to see Paul Von Lindemann standing on the running board on the other side of the truck, trying to pull the driver out of the flames.

  “Paul, get away from there,” Scanlon screamed. “That thing’s going to blow!” he said, as the truck’s gasoline tank exploded and a loud explosion drowned out his words. The force blew the Major off the truck’s running board and tossed him on the pavement like a broken doll. Scanlon ran over, grabbed him under the arms, and dragged him the rest of the way across the road and into the ditch on the other side, away from the flames. He knew Paul was badly hurt.

  “Is he alive?” he heard a soft, troubled voice ask. It was Christina Raeder.

  “Yeah,” Scanlon answered, as he looked Von Lindemann over. The German had a lump on his forehead, probably some other bumps and bruises, but Scanlon saw no blood, and nothing appeared broken. It would take a lot more than that to kill a stubborn bastard like him.

  “You look after him, Christina, while I see to the others,” he told her.

  Scanlon got to his feet just in time to see the British fighters turn and roll in for another pass. Scanlon pulled out his Luger and took aim at the lead plane in a last, desperate act, but he did not shoot, not that he would have done much damage with a handgun. The two Spitfires stayed too high and did not come in for another strafing attack this time. From the air, with the flames and c
hoking black smoke pouring out of the lead truck and the bodies lying scattered on the road, it must have looked like a clean sweep. No sense wasting bullets on an abandoned car and a bunch of pedestrians, they were probably thinking. Not if they wanted to make it back to base for an early tea.

  The lead truck was a blazing wreck with its driver dead, but the second one appeared to have avoided any serious damage thanks to the dense smoke that screened it from the view of the pilots. Emil Nossing and its driver were using blankets to beat back the worst of the flames, while Eugen Bracht sat on the ground in shock, holding Rudy Mannfried’s head in his lap. Scanlon ran over to help and found Rudy was still alive. He knelt next to him. Rudy’s eyes were open as he recognized Scanlon, grabbed him by the front of his coat, and pulled him closer. “It is the girl…” he whispered feverishly. “It is Christina you need… Christina,” he said, as his eyes rolled back in his head and he died.

  Scanlon laid him out on the ground as Otto Dietrich walked over, straightening his suit jacket. He glanced at the bodies and the burning truck and said wistfully, “My, my, Herr Churchill has an interesting way of helping his agents, would you not agree, Edward? One truck down, one to go, and all this bloodshed. It appears the ranks are quickly thinning. Whatever will you do now?”

  “We’ll manage, Otto. We’ll manage.” Scanlon looked up at him, his eyes as cold as death as they focused on the arrogant German. “After all, you have a date with the hangman, and nothing’s going to save you from that.”

  “Nothing?” Dietrich laughed. “With Hanni on your trail like a female tiger in heat and the British giving you all this wonderful air support, it is nice to see you haven’t lost that famous American sense of humor.”

  For once, Scanlon had to agree with him. The white circles were plainly visible on the top of the trucks, and this was no accident. It was Bromley. Hanni warned him about the British the first night they met and so had Dulles. If that damned colonel was not actually flying that Spitfire, he had ordered the attack. More lies and schemes, Scanlon thought. Well, to hell with all of them, he swore. No matter what they threw at him, he would push on and make that rendezvous in Bavaria, because that was the best way he knew to even the score with Bromley, Otto Dietrich, and perhaps with Hanni Steiner, too. Yes, Dietrich was right. Hanni would not have given up that easily, not Hanni. She would keep coming after him as long as she had breath in her body. Scanlon knew she would. He was counting on it.