Winner Lose All Read online

  “Not really,” Carstairs stared down at him contemptuously. “I’d have been satisfied if God saved me Mum’s little flat in Coventry. Nonetheless, we poor Brits, as you call us, do retain a few quaint, dusty notions. We think an officer should shave in the morning, we cringe when they dress like the Polack cavalry on parade, and we would prefer they don’t reek of cheap gin.”

  Scanlon slowly shook his head. “This happens to be an incredibly good single-malt scotch whiskey, Rupert. It isn’t gin, not that you’d know the difference.”

  “I’m so glad to see you haven’t lost any of that keen Yank wit of yours, Sir. You know how much we enlisted men do enjoy your little jokes.”

  “You don’t need to stand on formality with me, Rupert,” Scanlon said as he looked around the dimly lit bar, knowing how his comments grated on the big man. “After all, you can’t stand me, and I sure as hell can’t stand you, so I figure that makes us about equal.”

  Rather than placate the big Sergeant Major, that only enraged him even more. “Equal? I am not your bleedin’ equal!” Carstairs glared down at him. “You coward. When you ran away from the hospital this morning, you should have thrown yourself off the first bridge you came to. It would have been a whole lot quicker than drink, and a whole lot cheaper.”

  Scanlon’s eyes always showed his mood like the red tube on a barometer. Today, the storm flags were up and flying. “Carstairs, it is amazing how much ignorance and stupidity you Brits can breed into one big body,” Scanlon said. “It is a bleedin’ miracle.”

  “That it is, Sir; and it’s equally amazing how one visit to the Gestapo can turn a man into a sniveling coward.” Carstairs leaned across the table and grabbed Scanlon’s left wrist. It had been hiding in his lap, out of sight and out of mind until the Sergeant Major pulled on Scanlon’s arm and twisted, bringing the badly scarred hand up between their faces.

  “What have we here, Captain? Did the manicure at the Officers’ Club get a bit close this morning?” Carstairs held the wrist in a vice-like grip despite Scanlon’s desperate attempts to pull free. The two men were alone in the dark at the back of the pub, but they both knew things had gone too far for it to matter any longer. “Oh! I forgot,” he went on. “You are a war hero now, aren’t you? Lose a few fingernails, get a few dents and dings, and suddenly there’s a new star in the firmament, a new hero for us to worship,” Carstairs said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “Who knows, if Himmler’s boys had gone to work on your other hand too, you might have got the Victoria Cross.”

  Scanlon jerked his hand free, but the Sergeant Major was not finished. He too had crossed the line, and he was not about to come back until he let it all out and vented the frustration and anger that had been building up inside him for months now. “And a right proper hero you are, Sir. You might not give this any credence, but I can tolerate your rich-boy American background, your amateur training, and even your smart mouth, because I’ve dealt with much worse in my day. No, what galls me most, is that a proper officer, a proper hero like Captain Kenyon had to go and get himself shot dead trying to save your pathetic backside. Now, there was a lad England could have put to good use; and the lad had to go throw it all away on the likes of you.”

  “Don’t you think I know that!”

  “Some job you did. The Gestapo rolled up your whole ruddy network like a cheap rug — all of it, even that raspberry-red tart of yours, the Steiner woman. A clean sweep you gave them there, Captain, a clean sweep, indeed.”

  “Carstairs, you ignorant bastard!” Scanlon screamed as he felt his fingertips burning.

  “What? No more jokes, Captain Scanlon? None of that famous Yank humor? How pathetic,” Carstairs said as he put his hands on the table and leaned forward, their faces only inches apart, taunting him. “I’ll wager the Gestapo had a jolly good laugh with her. I can picture her now, tied down to a table in one of their basement “beauty parlors.” Some joke, eh Captain Scanlon? Some big bleedin’ Yank joke, isn’t it.”

  Scanlon finally lost control. Carstairs had him by at least four inches and fifty pounds, but the American came out of his chair swinging. His fist caught the big Brit under the chin with a powerful uppercut, compact, from the shoulders and the hips, with all of his body weight behind it. It snapped the Sergeant Major’s head back and lifted him up onto his toes. He hung there, stunned, rocking back and forth for a moment, glassy-eyed.

  “Oh shit,” Scanlon muttered as he shook his right hand, the knuckles screaming in pain. Worse still, like a wounded bear, the big Brit did not go down. He was still standing there. Scanlon debated whether to hit him again, but by then it was too late.

  Carstairs’s eyes cleared and he stood stock still, staring across the table at Scanlon as an expression of sublime contentment came over him. “Now you’ve really gone and done it, haven’t you, Captain,” he chuckled. “Imagine, an officer striking an enlisted man. That’ll cost you a pretty penny, lad, indeed it will. Well, the Colonel said I was to fetch you back, no matter what. You won’t mind if I go about doing just that, will you?”

  Carstairs released the hand, reached across the table, gathered up half of Scanlon’s shirt in one big paw, and lifted him off the floor. He held him there for a moment, while the other paw shot across in a powerful, straight right that caught Scanlon flush on the forehead.

  That was the last thing the American remembered.

  Carstairs tossed Scanlon over his shoulder like a rag doll and set out for the front door. “Innkeeper, a round for the house, if you please,” he said as he strode by. “Put them on the Captain’s tab. That’s a good fellow. Not to worry, though. As long as you have another bottle on the shelf, this sot will be back. You can wager on it.”

  Yanks! The Sergeant Major was not one to question orders, no matter how stupid they might seem; still, there were times that made him wonder. Anyone could see this lad was done for. He was burned-out, and would no longer be fit for fieldwork or much of anything else for that matter. Never! And wishful thinking would not make it so.

  “Captain Scanlon, I do insist that you stop abusing my enlisted men like this,” Colonel George Bromley’s voice droned on. He was a little man, Scanlon observed, the type who felt safest behind a very big desk. Safe he was, too, as long as Sergeant Major Rupert Carstairs stood in the doorway hoping the American would give him another excuse. Scanlon was not that stupid, however, at least not when he was sober. He glanced around the spacious, well-appointed office. No doubt, Bromley had commandeered the mahogany desk, the Persian carpets, crystal chandelier, oil paintings on the walls, and the rest of the expensive furnishings in the white-columned Edwardian row house he used as an office. It was located on a tree-lined square in Kensington, complete with a bay window, a flower box, and bright red geraniums. Clothes do not make the man, and an interior decorator cannot make a gentleman, Scanlon knew; but it appeared that a “national security” chit was carte-blanche to requisition anything and everything you wanted in London. Reluctantly, Scanlon turned his eyes back to Bromley. He decided that what he disliked most about the aggravating little man was his perfectly trimmed black mustache, but it was a close call. He could have just as easily chosen the pomaded hair that lay in thin, gleaming rows across the top of the Colonel’s bony head, or the way he sat in his over-sized, leather desk chair, chin up, and hands folded neatly in front of him. All things considered, Colonel George Bromley was a limited man with very limited abilities, Scanlon quickly concluded.

  “Well?” Bromley raised his chin a tad higher and began to fidget. “What do you have to say for yourself, Captain?”

  Scanlon rolled his eyes back in his head and slumped deeper into the tall, red-leather armchair, but there was no escape. Bromley had set him up too well this time, sending Carstairs into the pub and knowing how easy it would be to provoke him; and Scanlon fell for it. Now, badly hung-over and with the front of his head still throbbing from its collision with Carstairs’s fist, they had him right where they wanted him. He had struck a senio
r non-commissioned officer. Drunk or sober, that was a court martial offense, so Scanlon decided to wait until their little charade played itself out. Eventually, Bromley would get around to what he really wanted and it must be a doozie, Scanlon thought. The man would not have gone to this much trouble just to torture him, no matter how much pleasure he took in the sport.

  Finally, the silence became more painful than his throbbing head. “You said that was the last job I’d have to do for you, Colonel — the last — that meant there wouldn’t be any more.”

  “Did I?”

  “Bastard.”

  “Probably.”

  “Well, count me out; the only place I’m going is home.”

  “It is more likely you’re going to a penal battalion on the South docks, lad,” Bromley’s lips parted in a thin, bloodless smile, “and don’t think I wouldn’t do it.” He looked pleased with himself, thinking the hook was sunk and he could reel Scanlon in at his leisure like a fat brook trout on a fly line. “Fortunately for you, I do have some discretion in the matter, provided you cooperate,” Bromley droned on. “It appears we have need of you and your unique talents once again. SHAPE headquarters passed a chit to Joint Operations last night and the mission fits you to a ‘T,’ my boy. Just think, no more wasting away in the hospital with all those slackers and malcontents, and no more wasting your afternoons and evenings in a pub. You get to take another whack at Jerry and clear these unfortunate charges off your record. A stroke of luck, eh?”

  “And if I say no?”

  “Oh, then I shall have you court-martialed, of course.”

  “You mean you’ll try.”

  “No try about it, lad. I damn well will, and you know it.” Bromley’s expression turned hard and pitiless. “First, you struck a non-commissioned officer, and then there’s this little matter of desertion. Those should do for starters.”

  “Good luck making them stick.”

  “Stick? This is March 1945. Half of your Army is out chasing Germans and the rest are getting ready to have a go at the Japs. You? You will be an embarrassing afterthought. They will pass you about from hand to hand like an old fruit cake, and it will be Christmas before they figure out what to do with you. ‘Make it stick’? That’s hardly the point, is it? Your reputation will be ruined and all of your father’s Wall Street money won’t save you then.”

  Scanlon stared at him, realizing the bastard was serious.

  “So it is ‘to horse,’ as they used to say, my fine young colonial Captain,” the Colonel smiled confidently. “I’m afraid you’re off to fight the good fight on the continent once again.”

  “The war is over, for Chrissake, Colonel.”

  “Over? Perhaps, but not quite — not quite,” the Colonel was quick to correct.

  “Look at me.” Scanlon held his hands out for examination.

  Bromley’s expression did seem to soften for the briefest of moments when his eyes came to Scanlon’s hand, but then he quickly turned away. “They want you to go back in tomorrow night. It seems that some of Hermann Goering’s aeronautical engineers want to come over to our side, and SHAEF thinks they may need help finding their way out.”

  “Engineers? You’re kidding.”

  “Not in the slightest. There’s a bit more to it than that; but suffice it to say, they’re important, very important, and they are in a compound near Leipzig.”

  “Like I said, Colonel, the war is over.”

  “Ah, but you see, it is the next one that the politicians are worried about now.”

  “The next one?”

  “Against the Russians, of course. Oh, on his own, Ivan might have problems fixing the wheel on an ox cart; but give him enough of those German scientists — the ones who designed the V-2 rockets, jet airplanes, tanks, chemicals, and munitions — and even he can figure it out. That’s why we can’t let the Russians get their hands on them. It is as simple as that.” Bromley’s expression softened a bit and he leaned forward, trying to commiserate. “See here, Scanlon, I know you’ve had a bit of a rough go, but Leipzig is your old patch. You spent four months there and you know it better than any man alive. How hard could it be?”

  “Hard?” Scanlon raised both hands in front of his face so Bromley could see all ten fingers. “I still have one good set left, see? Do you know why? Because Otto Dietrich left them as a message to amateurs like you. Spend them wisely, Colonel, spend them very wisely; because they’re the last ones I have left.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Moscow

  It was 2:00 a.m. Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria’s long black ZIS sedan raced through the empty streets of Moscow, preceded and trailed by pairs of olive-drab motorcycles with their sirens screaming. When the small procession reached the Kremlin’s Borovitsky Gate, it tore on through without even slowing. The guards on the gate were NKVD. They worked for Beria and they knew his black ZIS as well as they knew Stalin’s. No one was about to stop that car.

  Beria was a nasty piece of work. Short and plump with round cheeks, he wore a pair of tiny pince-nez eyeglasses that rode the bridge of his nose and appeared to squeeze his face. With them on, he could be mistaken for a second-rate bookkeeper or a prissy librarian, but Lavrenti Beria was none of those things. For fifteen years, he had been the chief of the NKVD, Josef Stalin’s dreaded secret police, and the second most powerful man in the country. By Russian standards, this early spring night was not terribly cold, yet Beria sat in the ZIS’s rear seat trembling. He wore a thick woolen greatcoat and had the car’s heater running on high, but a summons from Josef Stalin in the middle of the night had a chilling effect on people, even a secret policeman. As Beria knew too well, each of his predecessors had ended their days propped against a brick wall, wide-eyed, shaking, and staring into the muzzles of an NKVD firing squad. He knew that, because he was usually the man who gave the order to fire. Together, Stalin, Beria, and their all-encompassing secret police network had shot, beaten, and starved to death over 20 million of their fellow citizens, but who was counting? All it took was a glance, a hushed phone call, or the slash of a pen to make a man, a family, or a whole village simply vanish.

  Absolute power could do strange things to people, as Beria knew all too well. Like his distant predecessor Ivan the Terrible, Stalin had become a paranoid hermit who rarely ventured outside the red brick walls of the Kremlin. Built to protect medieval Czars from marauding bands of Tartars and Poles, it now protected their Communist successors from potential rivals, spies, assassins, and their own people. Not that the unwashed Russian masses would ever raise a hand against him. After centuries of oppression, that simply was not in their collective genes. The only real danger Josef Stalin faced was from dark conspiracies hatched here, inside the Kremlin, within the bowels of his own party and government. That was why he was so vigilant for the slightest whiff of disloyalty or betrayal. Better to be ruthless and stomp out a hundred innocent threats than to let a real one fester. That simple philosophy had served him well for four decades and he filled the basements of the Lubyanka prison with the results.

  Josef Stalin never spoke to strangers, only to a handful of terrorized subordinates who slavishly competed to prove their unquestioning loyalty to him. His only public appearances were in well-protected and carefully scripted settings, such as the top of Lenin’s Mausoleum in Red Square on May Day or for one of the big military parades. As the years passed, he drank more and more heavily, became nocturnal, and was now totally paranoid. One by one, he eliminated every pre-revolutionary comrade, potential rival, the entire general staff, cooks, drivers, guards, a wife, and a son. Convinced there were assassins and conspirators all around him, the truth was, there were. That was why Stalin constantly tested his underlings and challenged their loyalty in ever more bizarre ways.

  One of his favorites was a gruff summons in the middle of the night. Beria was now late and that alone could prove fatal. He had been riding the back of an enthusiastic, double-jointed ballerina from the Bolshoi when the red telephone next to his bed ran
g, and he went limp as a dishrag. There was only one man in Moscow who dared call him on that phone at any hour, and one ring was enough to cool even Beria’s legendary ardor. Staring down at the sweating blonde, he groaned. Most of the constant stream of women who came to his bed had been terrorized by blackmail or threats to themselves or their husbands, but this beauty had come voluntarily. She wanted top billing in a new show, and performing well on Beria’s private stage was the fastest way to get it. As he rolled off her and reached for the phone, she reached back between her legs and grabbed for him, refusing to stop. He had to slap her hard across the face and knock her onto the floor to get away, but Lavrenti Beria had been summoned. Like it or not, the curtain had rung down on his prima ballerina.

  The vast courtyard of the Kremlin was empty when Beria’s convoy rolled in. That meant Molotov, Mikoyan, Khrushchev, Malenkov, and Voroshilov were not already inside planting whispers in the old man’s ear, whispers that could get even Beria shot. How fortunate, he thought, as he leaped from the still-moving car and ran through the front door as fast as his stubby legs would carry him. He tossed his heavy greatcoat onto the vestibule floor, raced up the broad staircase, pushed past the last guards, and opened the door to the Chairman’s private office.

  Josef Vissarionovich Stalin was now 67 years old. He was Chairman of the Council of Ministers, General Secretary of the Communist Party, People’s Commissar, Marshal, Generalissimo, Secretary of the Politburo, Father of the Nation, the Great Architect, and dozens of other titles, but he was usually called “Boss” by his terrified inner circle or “Koba,” which was his revolutionary nom-de-guerre. The office where he spent most of his days and nights now was surprisingly small and modestly appointed. The furniture was old and the chairs almost threadbare. Thick layers of war-time blackout curtains still covered the windows and he never opened them to let in air or light. The polished marble floor from Czarist days had been covered by thick Georgian carpets, the type you might find in a lower-middle-class house in the Caucasus. Beria thought they looked pathetic, but Stalin liked them. He said they reminded him of his childhood, decades before.