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He heard Tedworth bellow, “Halt! Hände nach oben!”

Ostrowski started running toward him, fumbling as he did to un-holster his pistol.

Another figure appeared, dressed in dark clothing, approaching Tedworth in a crouch. Before Ostrowski could shout a warning, the man was on Tedworth. Tedworth’s flashlight went flying as the man pulled him back.

Ostrowski remembered, cursing, that he had not chambered a round in the .45, and stopped running just long enough to work the action.

He could now see three men, Tedworth, now flailing around on the ground, the man who had knocked him over . . .

He looped something around Tedworth’s throat. Probably a wire ga

rrote.

. . . and another man in dark clothing who had come from the second line of wire.

Ostrowski was now ten meters from them, and was sure they hadn’t seen him. He dropped to a kneeling position and, holding the .45 with both hands, fired first at the man wrestling with Tedworth, hitting him, and then as the second man looked at him, let off a shot at his head, which missed, and then a second shot at his torso, which connected.

Then he ran the rest of the way to the three men on the ground.

The man who had been wrestling with Tedworth was now reaching for something in his clothing. Ostrowski shot him twice. The man he had shot in the torso looked up at him with surprise on his face. His eyes were open but they were no longer seeing anything.

Blood was spurting from Tedworth’s neck, and as Ostrowski watched, Tedworth finally got his fingers under the wire that had been choking him and jerked it off his body.

Tedworth looked at Ostrowski.

“Jesus H. Christ!” he said, spewing blood from his mouth.

“You’re bleeding. We’ve got to get a compress on your neck,” Ostrowski said.

Tedworth reached for his neck again and again jerked something loose. It was a Cavalry yellow scarf.

“Use this,” he said. “It probably kept me alive.”

Then he added, disgust oozing from his voice, “If you hadn’t showed up, these cocksuckers would have got me!”

“Just lie there,” Ostrowski ordered. “Hold the scarf against your neck. I’ll go for help.”

That didn’t prove to be necessary. As he stood up, he saw first the light from three flashlights heading toward him, and then the headlights of a jeep.

II

[ONE]

The South German Industrial Development Organization Compound

Pullach, Bavaria

The American Zone of Occupied Germany

1605 28 December 1945

A neat sign on the small snow-covered lawn of the small house identified it as the Military Government Liaison Office.

There were four rooms on the ground floor of the building and a large, single room on the second. The military government liaison officer—which was one of the cover titles Captain Cronley was going to use—lived there. A bathroom had been added to the second floor when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had hastily converted the village of Pullach into the South German Industrial Development Organization Compound.

The original bathroom on the ground floor and the kitchen had been upgraded to American standards at the same time. The main room on the ground floor held office furnishings. A smaller room provided a private office for the military government liaison officer. There was a small dining room next to the kitchen, and a smaller room with a sign reading LIBRARY held a substantial safe and a desk holding a SIGABA system. This was a communications device, the very existence of which was classified Secret. It provided secure, encrypted communication between Pullach, Kloster Grünau, Berlin, Washington, D.C., and Mendoza and Buenos Aires, Argentina.

There were five men in the downstairs office: Major Harold Wallace, a trim thirty-two-year-old wearing “pinks and greens”; James D. Cronley Jr.; First Sergeant Chauncey L. Dunwiddie, who like Cronley was wearing an olive-drab Ike jacket and trousers; Sergeant Friedrich Hessinger, in pinks and greens whose lapels bore small embroidered triangles with the letters US in their centers; and finally, a civilian, a slight, pale-faced forty-three-year-old with a prominent thin nose, piercing eyes, and a receding hairline. His name was Reinhard Gehlen, and he was wearing an ill-fitting, on-the-edge-of ragged suit. As a generalmajor of the Oberkommando of the Wehrmacht, Gehlen had been chief of Abwehr Ost, the German intelligence agency dealing with the “Ost,” which meant the East, and in turn the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.