Page 1 of Denied Access (Mitch Rapp #24)

O RANIENBURG , G ERMANY

S UBURB OF B ERLIN

S OVIET U NION S ECTOR

T HOMAS Stansfield was sick of war.

Sick of the killing, sick of the destruction, sick to death of watching friends, comrades in arms, and civilians alike rendered corpses by the giant meat grinder that was war.

Though he was barely in his mid-twenties, Stansfield knew that something inside him had prematurely aged.

Perhaps terminally so. Thomas might be sick to death of war, but now, only days after the Allies had finally captured Berlin, he was terrified that he might just be the catalyst for a new one.

“Is that the convoy?”

Though he was almost certain of his answer, Stansfield still pressed the Zeiss binoculars to his eyes before replying.

The trio of nondescript vehicles could have been among any of the hundreds currently poking through the smoking remains of the Third Reich’s capital like jackals swarming the still-cooling corpse of a wildebeest on some African plain.

They were not.

Though the day’s last light was draining away from a crimson sky, enough illumination remained for the binoculars.

BA-64 armored scout cars guarded the front and rear of the three-vehicle column, but it was the center vehicle that garnered Stansfield’s attention.

The Soviet ZIS-5 cargo truck lumbering along in a cloud of exhaust featured a single vertical scratch on the metal toolbox mounted just about the right rear wheel housing.

The scratch was jagged enough to suggest that its origin was accidental.

It was not.

A fourteen-year-old member of the Resistance had etched the mark two evenings prior at considerable risk to her life.

When he’d been fourteen, Stansfield had been focused on perfecting his curveball in the hopes of making the high school baseball team.

The notion that he and his fellow spies used children to do the work of men had appalled him at first.

No longer.

Innocence was one of the first casualties of war.

But not the last.

“ Ja ,” Stansfield said, lowering his binoculars. “Give the ready signal.”

Stansfield’s answer, as was the original question, had been spoken in German.

He had been horrified by the vicious attack against Pearl Harbor by the Imperial Japanese.

Like many of his friends, he had set off for the Army recruiting station that very day, determined to enlist and do his part to avenge his countrymen.

But unlike so many others, Thomas’s enlistment had been circumvented.

He had filled out the required paperwork and waited for the official notification that would provide the time and date of his physical exam.

It never came.

Instead, one of Thomas’s professors had requested that he come to his office to sort out an administrative detail.

Stansfield had dutifully complied, but the person waiting in his professor’s office had not been his professor.

In fact, the trim, bespectacled man wasn’t a member of the faculty at all.

He’d explained in a precise Ivy league diction that Stansfield had come to the notice of a select group of people.

A group who’d been tasked to aid America’s war effort in an unconventional manner.

Rather than enlist, Thomas was encouraged to complete his degree while incorporating two additional fields of study into his course load—French and German.

Thomas did as he was asked. A year later he graduated with honors and walked into the waiting arms of the organization that would later be known as the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS. Other men his age served as soldiers, sailors, or Marines, but Thomas became something else.

A spy.

“Moment of truth.”

Andre’s whispered comment thundered in Stansfield’s ears.

His work with the OSS had taken him the length and breadth of Europe.

From gathering information on the state of German munitions factories, to coordinating airdrops for the French Resistance, to scouting possible landing zones for D-Day paratroopers, Stansfield had interfaced with countless Allied counterparts.

As with anything else in life, the quality of agents and assets could be graded on a bell curve.

Some he would have trusted with his life, while others he’d been convinced would get him killed through pure stupidity.

And then there was Andre.

Stansfield had first made the boy’s acquaintance in Paris, where Andre had worked as a runner—someone charged with conveying messages to Resistance cells scattered throughout the city.

Though fanatical about hunting down spies and traitors, the Germans tended to ignore preadolescent boys.

Especially boys whose asthma made it difficult for them to walk any significant distance without wheezing.

This was a mistake.

Though he looked no older than twelve, Andre was actually sixteen.

In a sane world, this distinction might not mean much, but as Thomas knew firsthand, sanity had departed the European continent long ago.

The German forces responsible for Berlin’s final defense had consisted in large part of old men and young boys.

If he had been fighting for the Nazis, the French boy might very well be a squad leader by now.

Andre wasn’t fighting for the Nazis any more than he was plagued by debilitating asthma.

Though French by birth, he had grown up in an eastern border town and could speak German like a native.

A gifted polyglot, Andre was also fluent in Spanish, Italian, and English.

Lately he’d been honing his skills with a language that might prove even more relevant to future conflicts.

Russian.

“Come on,” Stansfield whispered. “Come on!”

He was perched atop a rocky outcropping that overlooked a small village to the east. A north–south flowing river wound past the settlement’s western edge, separating him from the village. The river’s placid surface concealed a surprisingly deep body of water.

The village itself was unremarkable. A collection of houses, a bakery, butcher shop, and the prerequisite pub.

There wasn’t much of Germany that hadn’t been ravaged by war and this went doubly so for Berlin’s suburbs.

Case in point, several of the village’s dwellings sported gaping holes hastily covered by tarps and the like.

A smoking crater denoted where another building had once stood, and the furrows torn into the fields by the metal tracks of countless armored vehicles were visible even without the aid of Stansfield’s binoculars.

Nothing that should be of interest to a Russian column.

Nothing except for the one hundred tons of uranium oxide housed in a metal barn.

This was the moment of truth in more ways than one.

The convoy had been approaching the village from the west, but the road they’d been following emptied into a north–south farm trail that paralleled the river.

The column slowed as it approached the intersection.

To the left lay a packed dirt trail that meandered north for one hundred yards past a barren field before arriving at a bridge.

The wooden span had been reinforced with metal girding, but the bridge still looked a bit rickety to Stansfield’s eye.

To reach surer footing, the convoy would need to turn right and proceed south for another two miles to where a bridge constructed of much sturdier river stone spanned the river.

Sturdiness aside, Stansfield had wagered that the shortcut would prove too tempting for the road-weary Russians. The convoy was in a race with a collection of American and British scientists and soldiers who were also intent on claiming the German uranium oxide. Time was of the essence.

“What are they doing?” Andre punctuated his question by reaching for the binoculars.

Stansfield intercepted the teen’s questing fingers and pushed them away. Though it was often easy to forget, Andre was still a boy, and boys liked to see. “No binos,” Stansfield said. “Can’t risk a glint from the glass.”

As if hearing Stansfield’s thoughts, the lead scout car’s passenger door opened and a Russian soldier exited.

A soldier with his own set of binoculars.

Though he couldn’t be sure without using his binos to check the shoulder boards on the soldier’s uniform, Stansfield was willing to bet that the man was a member of the Russian military intelligence organization known as the GRU.

Stansfield sensed motion to his left and instinctively grabbed Andre’s shoulder. “Be still. We’re well hidden. At these distances motion is easier to detect than a human form.”

Andre’s muscles stopped twitching beneath Stansfield’s grasp. “What are they doing?”

This time the question carried more frustration than curiosity. Stansfield sighed. The boy’s body might no longer be in motion, but his mind was never idle. “Trying to decide which bridge to take. Safety to the right or speed to the left.”

“Will they choose left?”

“The Russians know they’re on borrowed time. Multiple countries are looking for that uranium just like multiple countries are trying to capture Nazi nuclear scientists. If it were me, I’d turn left.”

Unfortunately, it was not up to Stansfield, and while his reasoning was tactically sound, if the intelligence was correct, the Soviet convoy was not composed of just tactical men.

Though he understood very little of the underlying science, Stansfield knew that the world’s top physicists were feverishly working to be the first to develop a weapon that unleashed unfathomable destructive power by splitting the atom.

Rare uranium oxide was critical to this endeavor.