Judgment in Berlin: A Spy Story
Author: Noel Hynd
Date: 2021-08-18 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fiction
Description: 'Judgment in Berlin' is the third book in Noel Hynd’s Berlin series. It is 1948. World War Two is over, Hitler is dead. The Nuremberg trials have concluded. The Marshall Plan attempts to rebuild Europe, though Germany remains occupied by American, British, French, and Soviet military forces. William Thomas Cochrane, an American intelligence agent, is in England with his wife, Laura, visiting friends and family. Bill Cochrane has accepted an invitation to be a guest lecturer for one year at the University of Cambridge. But when summer arrives, so does the first major international crisis of the
Publisher: Red Cat Tales LLC

JUDGMENT IN BERLIN

By Noel Hynd

© Noel Hynd 2021

Previous books in this series:

Flowers from Berlin

Return to Berlin

"What happens to Berlin, happens to Germany.

What happens to Germany, happens to Europe."

Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov

Moscow, USSR – 1948

*

“We’re staying in Berlin. Period!”

President Harry S. Truman

Washington, USA - 1948

Prologue

New York City - November 10, 1989

On the second floor of the Overseas Press Club Dining Room at a few minutes before one PM, more than a hundred and fifty foreign correspondents waited attentively for the man who had just moved before the microphone on the speaker’s dais. The club’s building stood at 40 West Forty-Fifth Street in Manhattan. The room was crowded.

The speaker was William Thomas Cochrane, banker, economist, occasional spy, occasional FBI and CIA agent, and veteran of more than one intrigue in the Nazi era and postwar Germany. The subject was Berlin, a place Cochrane knew well.

The audience included many men and women who had served in the press corps in World War II, both in the Pacific and in Europe. Some had visited Berlin since the war had ended, a few had ridden into the city on Jeeps or tanks in the 1940s. Most had not. But today they were at the club to hear from a man who had spoken to them before. And this day was different. Four thousand miles away, piece by piece, overwhelmed and overrun by joyous people seeking to destroy a symbol of repression, the Berlin Wall was coming down.

“This is a wonderful, momentous day,” Cochrane said as he began. “It is a day that will forever be looked back upon, but it is not one that happened by chance. Today I want to take you back forty-three years. You must remember that for many months after the Second World War, Berlin was a city in devastation. It was thoroughly defeated, and its population reduced to legions of walking dead. We are talking about a world capital, the pride of Goethe, Wagner, Kaiser Wilhelm, Albert Einstein, and yes, unfortunately, Adolf Hitler, that was rendered to its knees and occupied by four conquering powers. Allied bombardment had dropped sixty-seven thousand tons of bombs on the city,” he said scanning the room, “destroying six thousand acres of central Berlin. More than a hundred thousand civilians died. A hundred thousand! Please think about that. If you want to know what the legacy of Nazism is, Hitler’s so-called National Socialism, the Thousand Year Reich, look no farther than Hitler’s capital city - one of the great cities of the world – practically obliterated.”

Cochrane took a quick visual survey of the room.

“Let me ask all of you a question,” he said after a moment’s pause. “Let me see a show of hands. How many of you have ever heard of a German town named Demmin? It’s in East Germany. In Pomerania. It is still there today.”

A few hands came aloft around the room. No more than half a dozen.

Bill Cochrane continued.

“There are three parts of the story I’m going to tell you,” he said. “First, this.”

He reached into his pocket. He pulled out a small, round metal disc. He smiled. He held up a coin. It had a dull finish like an American nickel but was about the size of a U.S. quarter.

“The first part centers around a coin,” he said. “One Deutschmark. This one is from 1950, the first year the Deutschmark was minted. Odd, isn’t it? A whimsical new currency at the time of its creation. It replaced the Reichsmark, the currency of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany. The Deutschmark has flourished and is now one of the strongest currencies in the world.”

Cochrane smiled. “Because of this coin, and the East-West tensions and competitions surrounding it, there was something called ‘The Berlin Airlift.’ For most Americans now, more than forty years later, the Berlin Airlift is not even a memory, maybe just a distant skirmish in the Cold War. But for the veterans who took part in what was the greatest humanitarian airlift in history, the operation is as fresh as yesterday.”

A silence went around the hall. Cochrane had hooked his audience.

“While ‘The Big Lift’ was a British idea, I’m proud to say that Americans piloted three-quarters of those flights. At the peak of the lift, more than thirty thousand American military personnel were involved, supported by another twenty-five thousand civilians in the United States, the Allied nations, and in postwar Germany.”

Bill Cochrane flipped the coin in the air, caught it, and pocketed it. He reached to a medium-sized box that he had brought with him. From it, he withdrew a model airplane. With a smile as audience members shifted position to see, he held it aloft.

“This, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “is what former President Eisenhower referred to as one of the five greatest weapons of World War II. The Douglas C-47. The so-called ‘Gooney Bird.’ America’s do-anything, go-anywhere WWII airplane.”

With a grin, Cochrane hoisted aloft a model of the Douglas C-47. His model was eighteen inches in length but with a two-foot wingspan.

“Quite a beautiful beast, isn’t it?” he asked.  “This is only a model of the real thing, of course. Scale of one to one hundred. The real thing was about sixty-four feet in length with a ninety-six-foot wingspan. This model was created from scrap metal many years ago by a close friend.”

Cochrane turned it aloft so the audience could appreciate it from all angles.

“The C-47 was employed for troop and cargo transport, dropping paratroops, towing a glider, medical evacuation, and almost any other task assigned to it. It was a rugged, reliable warhorse. It functioned well under all weather conditions on every continent around the world, and it did so with grace. Quite a marvelous bird,” he said, setting it on a side table. “When necessary, it transformed into a troop-carrying glider by the removal of its engines. The addition of pontoons could transform it into a seaplane. Imagine that! A seaplane!” He grinned, as if primed by a specific memory.

“But there is a third element to the story I wish to tell you today,” he said. “The truth of history and the humanity of history often rest in the small supporting stories that are the foundation of the larger events. So it is with the destruction of the odious Berlin Wall. So let me transport you back to the spring of 1945 and the final weeks of fighting in Europe. It will place in full perspective why the Berlin Wall is coming down today.”

Chapter 1

Washington, D.C – 1945-1948

When Harry and Bess Truman moved into the White House following the death of Franklin Roosevelt in 1945, they heard the resident “ghosts” almost immediately. The building’s groaning floors and odd creaks that sounded like footsteps and drafts that sounded like whispering voices had been known to residents for decades.

President Truman heard "ghosts" – that was what Harry called them and that was what the press reported – roaming the halls of the second-floor residence. He complained about them to the Secret Service. Many agents had also heard the sounds. Truman didn’t expect his guards to shoo the spirits away, but he wanted to make them aware of them.

The ghost of Abraham Lincoln, previous residents had reported, still meandered through the White House. Lincoln had not died at the White House following his assassination at Ford’s Theater in 1896. He had died at Perry House across the street from the theatre. But his ghost had returned. Or so the “wisdom” went and so the sightings confirmed.

Lincoln haunted the corridors and the Lincoln Bedroom, which was now used for guests. Some claimed to have had “seen” Lincoln sit on the edge of the bed in “his” chamber and pull his boots on. Mary Eben, Eleanor Roosevelt's secretary, once ran screaming from the room after seeing Lincoln. First Lady Grace Coolidge did even better. She reported seeing the ghost of Lincoln in the Yellow Oval Room staring out over a full-length mirror over her shoulder, looking out over the murky Potomac. After a few moments in otherworldly contemplation, Abe turned to her and smiled. This wasn’t something Mrs. Coolidge liked to talk about, she being a sober, straight-laced lady. But she couldn’t forget about it, either. She insisted that it really happened.

Margaret Truman, daughter of the president, was twenty-one when her father took office. She was a smart, rational, young woman who had recently graduated from George Washington University and had commenced a career as a coloratura soprano. She frequently stayed overnight with her parents at the White House.

Margaret said she heard a specter rapping one time at the door of the Lincoln Bedroom when she stayed there. She, too, believed it was the ghost of Lincoln. President Truman himself also admitted to having once been awakened by what seemed like raps at the door while spending a night in the same Lincoln Bedroom.

Several other eyewitnesses, credible, lucid people, claimed to have seen the shadow of Abraham Lincoln stretched out on the bed in the Lincoln Bedroom. It would be there one minute, then gone seconds later.

During one of his stays at the residence in the 1940s, British Prime Minister Churchill had just finished a bath and was walking into the main bedroom. As was his habit, he was completely naked with a Scotch in one hand and a cigar in the other, when he saw Lincoln standing by the fireplace.

“Ah! Good evening, Mr. President. You seem to have me at a disadvantage,” Churchill claimed he had quipped. The specter smiled and faded out, according to Churchill, who requested different rooms on subsequent visits. Sir Winston’s anecdote might have been dismissed with a wink, except around the same time, FDR’s chauffeur, Cesar Carrera, ran from the building claiming he had encountered Lincoln’s shadow.

Ghosts. Apparitions. Unhappy spirits.

Creaking floors. Groaning ceilings. Unsteady walls.

Strange stuff that would not stop.

In early 1946, during a large formal reception in the Blue Room, Mrs. Truman noticed the crystal chandelier swaying overhead. Its crystals tinkled and clattered. Then just as suddenly as it had started, it stopped. Mrs. Truman also noticed that the floor of the Oval Study, when observed from the floor below, sagged when walked on. A valet to the president also observed with horror that the floor in the family bathroom gave way and creaked when Mr. Truman was taking a bath precisely when a convention of patriotic, gray-haired ladies of the D.A.R. was in progress directly below.

Harry Truman, who had served in combat as an artillery captain in World War I, was undeterred by such daily events. He didn’t discount them, took them somewhat seriously, and eventually made light of them.

“Imagine me in my bathtub falling through the floor into the midst of a tea for the Daughters of the American Revolution wearing nothing more than my reading glasses,” the president mused to friends and family. The comment reappeared in the newspapers, friendly and unfriendly.

Much like the United States, the White House may have gleamed on the outside after World War II, but the interior was in unsteady, questionable shape. The floors swayed as people walked on them. Joints popped and cracked. Rats brazenly scurried through holes in the walls and across the floors. Specters, noises, and apparitions aside, the official presidential residence was sorely in need of repair after twelve years of neglect during the Depression and World War II.

Things worsened as weeks passed. More creaks. More sightings. More press coverage of the “apparitions.”

There was a rational explanation, of course. Government agencies had expressed concern about the condition of the White House in the past, including a 1941 report from the Army Corps of Engineers. The study cited deteriorating masonry, failing wood structure, and more fire hazards than the corps could count. President Roosevelt had dismissed the report. He had other things on his mind in 1941. Roosevelt personally solved the problem by spending more time at his vacation home in Warm Springs, Georgia, on the presidential yacht, and at the official retreat in Maryland.

The Public Buildings Administration investigated the condition of the White House after Roosevelt’s death. No action was taken until January 1948. After the commissioner of the Public Buildings Administration, who had responsibility for the White House, also noticed the Blue Room chandelier swaying overhead during another crowded reception, the commissioner and the White House architect conducted their own on-site investigation the next day.

On January 30, 1948, the president received a confidential report from the commissioner of public buildings. The building inspectors had discovered split and gouged-out beams supporting the ceiling and second floor above. To make things complete, structural architects concluded that the entire second floor was “in danger of imminent collapse” and that "the beams are staying up there from force of habit only."

The number of occupants on the second floor was immediately restricted. Temporary fixes were made to some of the beams. Carpenters installed supports of scaffolding throughout the first family's second-floor living quarters.

Truman often commented to his inner circle that he was the one man in American history who had attained the role of president of the United States who had never sought the office. He might also have quietly wondered why fate had singled him out. First, he thought that ghosts were pursuing him. Then the explanation for the funny noises at the White House suggested something worse: imminent collapse.

Suddenly landing jaybird naked amidst the D.A.R ladies wasn’t so amusing. And it wasn’t enough that his home and his office were collapsing beneath him. So was the rest of the post-war world, as if there weren’t enough ghosts from the bloody World War to pursue him.

There was, after all, the dominant issue before the president: the uneasy ally of the United States during World War II, the Soviet Union, had turned overnight into an adversary. An “Iron Curtain” had descended, as Winston Churchill had observed in 1946.

There were now two world superpowers. The United States and The Soviet Union. Relations between the two were deteriorating day by day. It didn’t take a genius to figure out where the new East-West hostilities could create a flashpoint that could trigger a war: Berlin.

Bess Truman bailed out of Washington and went home to Missouri, leaving her husband alone and crankier and more cantankerous than ever in the crumbling White House. Harry tried to put the ghosts out of his mind and focus on Berlin. What in the hell was Joseph Stalin up to with his increasingly complicated and stubborn machinations in the occupied German capital?

Truman could have used some foreign policy advice from Lincoln, had such been possible. But in the early weeks of 1948, none had been forthcoming.

Chapter 2

Germany - 1945

The final weeks of fighting in Europe, the spring of 1945, had been structured by two events that, for the moment, drew the world’s attention away from the victorious march of the Allied armies moving eastward.

First, President Franklin Roosevelt had died at Warm Springs, Georgia on April 12. The passing of Roosevelt was momentous. Many American soldiers openly cried in their trenches. “I felt like my father had died,” one said. In Berlin, Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, rushed to Hitler. “We are saved!'” he exclaimed. “This is the miracle we have been hoping for!”

Goebbels and Hitler rejoiced. They thought that somehow the passing of the American president and his replacement by Harry Truman would help the Nazi cause. They were wrong. The Allied war machine continued. The deaths of Hitler and Goebbels followed eighteen days later.

On the next day or shortly thereafter, while the attention of the world was focused on Washington, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied commander, ordered his armies to stand on the Elbe River, approximately seventy-five miles southwest of Berlin. Ike held his position and refused to push on to the German capital.

Lt. Gen. William Simpson, in command of the U.S. Ninth Army, had reached the Elbe at Magdeburg on April 11 and secured two bridgeheads. Units of Lt. General Simpson's army took Jeeps to the outskirts of Berlin without resistance. The Germans had ceased fighting. Simpson's bridges were sixty miles from the city. But not all German units were yet ready to surrender. And the fact that the Wehrmacht allowed a few Jeeps to drive to the edge of Berlin did not prove that Simpson's Ninth Army would not have been furiously resisted.

On April 14 Simpson asked General Bradley for permission to go on to Berlin. Bradley relayed the request to General Eisenhower.

Ike gave a clear response.  ''No.''

Eisenhower had his reasons. Three days after Roosevelt’s death, war correspondents had been allowed to visit Eisenhower in his headquarters in Reims, France. Ike’s aides ushered them into his cramped office. In unison, they asked the same questions.

''Why did American troops stop on the Elbe? Why don't you capture Berlin?''

''Berlin is only a political objective,” Ike answered. “It is not a military objective.''

He then deflected further with one of his characteristically charming, non-response responses. The more complete story emerged later. Eisenhower had conferred with his field commanders.

Gen. George Patton had said, ''We had better take Berlin, and quick.'' But Gen. Omar Bradley estimated that to take Berlin would necessitate one hundred thousand Allied casualties.

Eisenhower had two larger reasons for staying in place on the Elbe.

First, his armies were already positioned well beyond the line of the Western Occupation Zones that had been agreed to with the Soviets at the Yalta conference of 1943. At war’s end, which was soon to come, the Western Allies had agreed to allow Soviet occupation of Saxony and Pomerania in exchange for a portion of Berlin. Like Germany as a whole, the city would be divided into occupied sectors: American, French, British, and Soviet. Why take a hundred thousand casualties for land that would have to be handed over?

Second, Eisenhower had always worried about his troops meeting and engaging the Red Army on the run through the German countryside. He thought it more prudent to rendezvous with a broad river as a barrier between the occupying armies.

Winston Churchill was furious. Churchill wanted every possible effort made to reach Berlin before the Red Army. He protested to Roosevelt that Ike had even informed Stalin of this decision without consulting Churchill or Roosevelt. Churchill felt that Eisenhower had grossly overstepped his authority by making the decision on his own and had thus allowed the Red Army to arrive in Berlin first.

Might things have ended differently?

Maybe. Maybe not.

At the time the Western Allies reached the Elbe, many German units were trying to surrender. Others were moving westward hoping to surrender to any Allied units they could find other than the Russians. At the time, Soviet Marshall Georgy Zhukov had not yet crossed the Oder. And the German armies had not given up in the East.

The Soviets launched their final big offensive on January 11, 1945.

By February 1945, Berlin had become what Hitler had promised that it would never be: a battle zone. The bombing and strafing of Berlin had started. Throughout that month, hundreds of British and American air raids continually pounded the city. By this time, the acting mayor of Berlin was clumsy, clubfooted Paul Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda, proponent of the Big Lie, and Gauleiter of Berlin.

Goebbels screamed over what remained of the city on the radio. “Factories will be blown up and the whole capital incinerated!” He promised the Russians a Pyrrhic Berlin. Berlin would be defended brick by brick, sidewalk by sidewalk, until there was nothing left.

Yet, through the smoke of fires set by R.A.F. and U.S. bombers, overcrowded Berlin could see the lightning and hear the thunder of guns in the distance, the artillery units of Marshal Georgy K. Zhukov’s First White Russian Army.

Tons of shells rained down on the remaining civilian residents in Berlin, descending through clouds and smoke and spraying lethal, red-hot fragments in all directions.

General Zhukov’s army never stopped moving forward. Nearly a million grimy, unshaven Russian soldiers moved forward in an enormous human wave, as gray and ceaseless as the Russian steppes. Bedraggled soldiers drove enormous tanks and mobile guns. They carried mortars, submachine guns, and grenades. They cried out Dayosh Berlin! – Give us Berlin!

Nothing was going to stand in their way. The forward wall of the Red Army moved around the clock, destroying everything and everyone in its path. Units of soldiers fought for twenty-four hours, then rested for twenty-four hours. Supply lines rolled forward a few miles behind the front, passing forward ammunition replenishment when needed, rations soon afterward if possible. Elsewhere, on still-secure airfields deep in the Reich, special long-range aircraft kept their engines running. They were waiting to take as many Nazi higher-ups as could board the flights. The destinations were Japan or South America: Montevideo, Buenos Aires, or Rio de Janeiro. Smaller planes stood by for possible escape to Spain or North Africa. Meanwhile, chaos reigned in Berlin.

The ill-trained and incompetent Volkssturm – the storm of the people – fired on a column of German refuges at night, mistaking them for Soviet invasion squads. The Volkssturm was a national militia established by the Nazi Party on the orders of Hitler in September 1944. Its members were conscripted males between the ages of fifteen and sixty-five, any males with a pulse who were not already serving in the military. The Volkssturm comprised a final component of the total war promulgated by Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, part of a Nazi endeavor to overcome their enemies' military strength through force of will. The Volkssturm had also fired on an SS unit, mistaking them for Red Army. The SS unit returned fire, killing scores of loyal old men and teenagers.

Now, in a final defense of Berlin, the conscripts of the Volkssturm dug trenches, set land mines, chopped down any tree left standing, and built barricades from bomb rubble. They were no more than terrified civilians with swastika arm bands.

At Tempelhof Airport, Berlin’s most central airfield, air traffic crews reported that Russian fighter squadrons had flown close by at dawn, low and within five hundred meters of the airport, breaking through the clouds and emerging like a swarm of angry wasps. They had taken a close aerial inspection of Tempelhof and then had disappeared toward the east, vanishing as quickly as they had appeared.

Meanwhile, workers in Berlin slept in factories and worked around the clock until each factory was blown to bits by bombs or artillery. For days on end as the final battles continued, there was not a person or place in the city that didn’t expect to be surrounded by Red Army paratroopers within the hour. A brigade of German women, mostly wives and widows of soldiers, rode on the antiaircraft guns pulling out for the Oder front, leaving their children behind. Like tens of thousands of other German females, they were captured, raped, and then slaughtered as the Red Army overwhelmed them.

During this time, Eisenhower allowed British Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery to advance his army to block the Jutland Peninsula to keep the Soviets out of Denmark. Always looming was the British inclination to complicate the war with political foresight and nonmilitary objectives. Here Eisenhower was sympathetic. It was fine with Ike to keep the Russians out of Denmark. It was also fine with the Danes.

It was the second political move in what would become the Cold War. The first had happened several months earlier in July and August 1945 at Potsdam.

The victorious Allies had carved up the remains of Germany, at least on paper. Germany would be divided into four temporary occupation zones, thus reaffirming principles laid out earlier by the Yalta Conference. These zones were located roughly around the then-current locations of the Allied armies.

In truth, Potsdam had been a disaster for Churchill. Anthony Eden, later the Prime Minister, had been on Churchill’s staff. He recalled Sir Winston’s performance as appalling. Churchill exasperated the Americans, and was easily led by Stalin, to whom he was supposed to be a counterforce.

“Sir Winston was unprepared and verbose,” Eden recalled. “And Truman was inexperienced. He had not been in office for five months and had the weight of the impending nuclear bombing of Japan on his narrow shoulders.”

Also divided into occupation zones was Berlin, the city that Ike had not seized, located a hundred miles inside Soviet-controlled Eastern Germany. A political objective and not a military one. Looked at on a new map, north to south, the British, the Americans, and the French controlled the Western Zones of the city, while Soviet troops controlled the Eastern Sector.

Ike had been right. It had all been haggled over and decided at Yalta and Potsdam. Why lose lives over something you already have?

Chapter 3

New York City - February 1948

Bill Cochrane would always remember it was on a winter Saturday, February 21, when the letter arrived that would pull him in a roundabout way not just to England but back to Berlin. Had the correspondence arrived on a weekday while he was at work at FBI headquarters in downtown Manhattan, his wife, Laura, might have phoned him and asked if she should open it and read him the contents. He would have answered yes, and she knew it.

Instead, the postman, Mr. Sonenshein, pushed the morning’s mail under the door of the Cochrane family’s sixth-floor apartment on Manhattan’s East Seventy-Second Street. Bill and Laura had for several years lived on the third floor but had moved to a larger seven-room apartment in January of 1946, following the end of the World War in 1945 and the birth of their daughter, Caroline, in 1944.

Within the morning’s mail was an airmail envelope – pale blue with bold red and blue markings on the edges – from England. It bore three attractive stamps of different denominations and colors, all of which bore the profile of King George VI, in the top right. On the top left was the address of an office at the University of Cambridge. The post had arrived a few minutes after Laura had taken Caroline out for a walk to the carousel in Central Park.

Cochrane recognized the return address and knew the envelope would contain an answer to an application he had filed before Christmas. With a deft swipe of a letter opener, he slit the paper on the envelope, opened it, and stood reading the contents.

He read the notification once in astonishment and then a second time. Only then did he allow himself a broad smile and a hoot of pleasure. He was still smiling two hours later when Laura returned with their daughter shortly before noon.

“I received an answer from Cambridge,” he said as she came in the door and found him in the library they had set up in their apartment.

“And?” she asked.

“We’re going,” he said.

Laura smiled and let out an exclamation of pleasure to match her husband’s. Bill’s application had been accepted to fill the spot of a visiting guest lecturer at the university. There had been several dozen applicants for two available spots at Cambridge. Cochrane had picked off one of them.

With the blessing of the FBI, for whom he worked in the New York office, and the intelligence agencies in Washington to whom J. Edgar Hoover occasionally “lent” him, Cochrane would be put on paid leave for fifteen months. Bill could take his family with him to England as part of a “working sabbatical,” or at least that’s what his superiors in the American post-war intelligence community called it.

Happily, the University of Cambridge in England had invited him to deliver a series of lectures and discussions commencing in the fall. His talks, based on his own experience as an intelligence officer in various positions in the American government and law enforcement, would range from postwar Western economics to political threats to the Western democracies.

Cochrane had a thorough knowledge of much of what was important in the postwar world, not the least of which was the fact that “off duty” in his situation was a subjective term. In his line of work, an agent’s eyes and ears were never completely “off duty” if he still had a pulse. Nonetheless, he had worked as an undercover agent abroad in 1943 and had participated in more than a few intelligence operations dating well back into the 1930s. While he was proud of what he had done and continued to contribute to law enforcement and intelligence activity on behalf of his country, the prospect of a year and a few months of “downtime” was more than a little attractive to him. It would also provide him some time and relaxation with the wife and family he cherished.

Chapter 4

Moscow - March 1948

As usual, Josef Stalin was looking down the road and preparing to render it as bumpy as possible for his former wartime allies, the British, the French, and the Americans. Uncle Joe had more than a few things up his rumpled sleeve.

In a June 1945 meeting in Moscow, Stalin had gleefully alerted German Communist leaders that he expected to sabotage the British within their occupation zone. He conjectured that the United States would turn inward and go home within eighteen months and that the French had no interest in rebuilding Germany. At that point, with the financially pressed British packing up and the Americans losing interest by 1947 or early 1948, Stalin guessed nothing would stand in his way of creating a united Germany under Communist control within the Soviet orbit. Twice in Stalin’s memory Germany had invaded the Soviet Union. Stalin had no interest in promoting German reunification. Yet reunification seemed to be the game plan for the United States, Great Britain, and, incredibly, France.

The Soviet Union had the largest standing army in the world. The Americans were dismantling their army for an expected “peacetime” economy. In England, Churchill had mishandled his re-election campaign by resorting to party politics and by trying to denigrate the opposition Labour Party. On June 4, 1945, Churchill had committed a serious political gaffe by saying in a radio broadcast that a Labour government would require "some form of Gestapo" to enforce its agenda.

Some form of Gestapo?

Churchill’s phraseology boomeranged. After the exchange, his challenger Clement Attlee rose in the polls. Churchill now had more to worry about in London than in Berlin. Stalin liked Attlee. He considered him a docile, potential tool for international Communism. Attlee was even an intellectual and bore a distant physical resemblance to Lenin: he had a receding hairline and a trim set of chin whiskers. How bad could the man be, Stalin asked his confidants, if he looked like Lenin? He was the type of man whom Stalin took for a pushover.

Meanwhile, also to Stalin’s liking, Roosevelt was dead, buried, and replaced – in Stalin’s calculation – by a feisty, corrupt, little machine-politician from faraway America, a man named Harry Truman, who had once run a haberdashery shop in the American hinterland. Stalin had taken Truman’s measure at Potsdam and in Uncle Joe’s opinion, he hadn’t measured much. Stalin took him to be the glorified necktie salesman that he once had been.

In the intervening time, Stalin had been on a roll.

Even though the United States and the Soviet Union had emerged from the war as the two global superpowers, Stalin had annexed the Baltic states and established Soviet-aligned governments throughout Central and Eastern Europe, China, and North Korea, all backed by local Communists or the Red Army. Through Stalin’s firm leadership, the Soviet Union had overcome the millions of casualties, deliberate starvation of its cities, and Nazi Germany's worst crimes against humanity. Stalin had industrialized and modernized Russia. When Stalin assumed power in the late 1920s after Lenin’s death, the USSR was underdeveloped and primarily agrarian. This was far less so at the end of World War II. Rumor was the USSR was working on atomic weapons and had even pilfered many American atomic secrets. If there was an imbalance, Stalin knew it would be evened out by 1950.

So now, in the Eastern Zone of defeated Germany, Soviet authorities went to work. They forcibly consolidated the Communist Party of Germany and Social Democratic Party into the Socialist Unity Party, a party with pro-Moscow leadership. Dissidents and any others who stood in the way had a funny propensity of falling from windows on high floors of mental hospitals. The new pro-Moscow leaders then called for the "establishment of an anti-Fascist, democratic regime, a parliamentary democratic republic." The Soviet Military Administration suppressed all other political activities.

There were recent precedents as to how pro-Moscow forces took care of nuisances. In Czechoslovakia after the war, Jan Masaryk served as foreign minister under President Eduard Benes. It was a dicey time in central Europe. The Red Army had occupied Czechoslovakia during World War II, and there were fears that the Soviets would try to install a Communist government in Czechoslovakia as it had in Poland, East Germany, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Masaryk, however, was skillful in dealing with the Soviets, arguing that a democratic Czechoslovakia posed no threat to the USSR.

In 1947 though, Masaryk overstepped. When the United States unveiled the Marshall Plan, the multimillion-dollar rebuilding program for postwar Europe, Masaryk indicated Czechoslovakia’s interest in being part of it. The Soviets refused to listen. This was quickly followed in February 1948, by a Communist coup in Czechoslovakia. President Benes was forced to accept a Communist-dominated government. Masaryk was one of the few non-Communists left in place. Soviet soldiers took him into custody. On March 10, 1948, Masaryk was found dead, wearing only his pajamas, in the courtyard of the Foreign Ministry below his bathroom window, three flights above. The pro-Soviet Czech government reported that Masaryk had committed suicide by “jumping” out of a window at the Foreign Ministry. In Masaryk’s case, the distinction between jumped out and pushed out was vague.

There was nothing new to the brutal touch to Soviet foreign policy. Trotsky had been murdered in Mexico by a Stalinist with an ice hatchet. Dissidents in Europe had been suspiciously flying out of windows all through the 1940s.

At the Kremlin, Stalin continued to play his cards cautiously but aggressively. So far Stalin, as befitting his name, maintained a grip of steel on postwar power. Extrajudicial assassinations eased the way, defenestration being just one method to the madness. In private, Stalin bragged to visiting Bulgarian and Yugoslavian delegations that postwar Germany would be both Marxist and pro-Soviet.

But, along with Molotov, they privately joked and drank to postwar worldwide dominion. They celebrated the absence of Roosevelt and Churchill. Stalin had spies all over the world, Russian moles burrowed deeply into the fabric of Western society, and gullible American sympathizers with Russian handlers. He had his people in America’s atomic research programs, in schools, in libraries, in the U.S. government, and in the State Department. He even had an agent in Franklin Roosevelt’s aircraft when Roosevelt returned to Washington from Yalta.

There seemed to be nothing Stalin couldn’t do. There was no reason Berlin would not be a target. And, as usual, a treaty or a verbal agreement wasn’t worth the paper that it wasn’t printed on.

“Truman is of limited vision and of nearly no intellectual capacity,” Stalin explained to Molotov one night over vodka following a party congress in Moscow, relaying what his operatives in Washington had reported. “He is not even of sound mind. His brain has apparently decayed and he entertains hallucinations.”

“This is what is reported?” asked Molotov.

“It is! The president of the United States sees disembodied spirits, specters of the non-living, ethereal representations of his predecessors.”

Molotov laughed broadly and indulgently, his boots upon a seventeenth-century ottoman that had once belonged to the last Czar.

“Ghosts,” said Stalin, who as a much younger man had once begun studies to be a priest in the Orthodox church.  “Ghosts! Imagine this! Imagine our good fortune! The man who leads the Western World believes in the afterlife!”

When Stalin thought of Truman in those terms, his respect for the American dropped even lower. It was difficult to imagine. He thanked fate once again that Roosevelt was gone. From the army purges to party purses, to the fake famine in Ukraine to the camps in the Gulag and Siberia, Stalin had murdered or brought about the demise of more than ten million people in his lifetime. And he hadn’t seen a single disembodied spirit yet.

It was clear: the leader of the Western World was a fool. Worldwide Communism would triumph. Berlin was the next prize along the road.

Chapter 5

Berlin - Spring 1948

The American at the top of the postwar military heap in Germany after World War II was General Lucius Clay. General Clay, a meticulous, workaholic Georgian who had become a general at the age of forty-three, had served as deputy to General Eisenhower in 1945, deputy military governor, Germany, in 1946, and commander in chief, United States Forces in Europe and military governor of the United States Zone, Germany, since 1947. He was a graduate of West Point who had a reputation for being so disciplined that he went long hours and even refused to stop to eat during his workdays.

In the British Zone, the man of parallel authority to General Clay was Air Commodore Reginald Newham Waite of the Royal Air Force. Waite had overseen the postwar disarming of the Luftwaffe. He had effectively done so, but in the process had been deeply moved by the plight of German refugees and disbanded German servicemen and women. A war had been won, but Waite understood that a peace needed to be won, also.

While due to be discharged after a quarter-century of service to his king and country, Waite had stayed on in Germany as head of the Air Section for the Combined Services Division, Control Commission Germany, based in Berlin. From what he had seen in the final days of the war and the first months of the peace, he had become deeply cynical about Soviet intentions.

The French controlled the northwest section of Berlin, the British the center-west zone, and the Americans the southernmost and largest section. From his command office within the British Zone, Commodore Waite quickly concluded that the most important work of his life lay right in front of him in Berlin in the postwar years.

Air Commodore Waite knew the Soviets very well. He and many British officers socialized with them, went to the same diplomatic functions, and even attended the revived Berlin opera together. None of those social events, however, blinded Waite to Soviet actions.

General Clay and Commodore Waite were men who considered each other friends, and who thought in much the same way.

There was one thing in Berlin that everyone agreed on: trouble lurked beneath the day-to day-governing of Berlin. Much of it involved the Anglo-American plan to create a new postwar currency, the Deutschmark, in the Western Zone of Germany. The new currency was one that the Soviets feared would fatally devalue the already hyperinflated Reichsmark that the Russian occupation forces used in the East. The Reichsmark wasn’t completely worthless, but it was the next worse thing and was pegged to the equally shaky Soviet ruble. But the burr that really scratched under Stalin’s saddle was that the Western Powers were also planning to put the new currency in circulation in the sectors of Berlin that they controlled.

The Russians were also concerned about a unified West Berlin: a capitalist city located right in the middle of their occupation zone, an urban center that would likely be powerfully and aggressively anti-Soviet.

Stalin decided that something needed to be done to stop the creeping reunification. For the Soviets, the creation of the Deutschmark by the West was unacceptable.

Thus, the Soviet Union withdrew from the Kommandatura, the four-power agency that had governed Berlin since June 1945. A treaty was just a piece of paper, after all. They initiated a series of steps to drive the Allied Powers out of Berlin.

On March 25, 1948, Soviet authorities issued orders restricting Western military and passenger traffic between the American, British, and French occupation zones and Berlin. The new regulations began on April first, along with an announcement that no cargo could leave Berlin by rail without the permission of the Soviet commander. The Soviets meant business.

In a rapid countermove the next day, Commodore Waite quietly ordered all supplies to the British military garrison be transported by air. This was done with no public announcement. In a parallel but independent decision, the Americans under General Clay’s command began to do the same thing. The Americans took the heat from the Soviets, but the British were on the same page. The notion of supplying the entire city by air was a nonstarter, but both Waite and Clay knew their military forces couldn’t risk an interruption of their supply lines. Both British and American sides were digging in independently and showed no desire to be pushed away from Berlin.

At the same time, Soviet military aircraft began to violate West Berlin airspace and would harass – or what the military called "buzz" – flights in and out of West Berlin.

The inevitable happened quickly. In the early afternoon of April 5, a scheduled British European Airways Vickers VC.1B Viking airliner carrying ten passengers and four crew members approached the British airfield known as Gatow. At approximately two-thirty PM, while the Viking was in the airport's safety area leveling off to land, a Soviet Yak-3 approached from behind. Witnesses saw the Viking make a left-hand turn prior to its approach to land. The Yak fighter dived beneath it, climbed sharply, and clipped the port wing of the airliner with its starboard wing. The impact ripped off both colliding wings and the Viking crashed inside the Soviet Sector and exploded in flames, incinerating all fourteen aboard. The Yak-3 crashed near a farmhouse on Heerstrasse just inside the British sector. The Soviet pilot of the Yak also died on impact.

The Gatow air disaster exacerbated tensions between the Soviets and the other Allied Powers. Not surprisingly, both sides blamed the other for the catastrophe.

Soviet officials demanded on April ninth that American military personnel maintaining communication equipment in the Eastern Zone withdraw, thus preventing the use of navigation beacons to mark air routes. The United States refused the request. The next day, unpredictable as ever, the Soviets softened the new rules on Allied military planes. But they continued periodically to harass rail, road, and water traffic.

General Clay countered by ordering U.S. Army aircraft to continue supplying its military forces around Berlin. Within another few days, Clay had two dozen flights a day going in and out of the occupied German capital, building up stocks of food against future Soviet actions.

Then on April twentieth, the Soviets demanded that all barges obtain clearance before entering the Soviet Zone.

Within the Soviet command in the Eastern Zone, the Generals gloated. The Russian brain trust had the Yanks and the Brits back on their heels, muttering about the futility and absurdity of it all.

"Our controlling and restrictive measures have dealt a strong blow to the prestige of the Americans and British in Germany," reported one diplomatic dispatch that arrived by courier in Moscow. “And the Americans have confessed and admitted that an airlift would be too costly. It is a matter of weeks or months before the Americans will be driven from Berlin. It is doubtful that they will stay past September. Of what value is Berlin to them?”

While the Soviet intelligence and dispatch were faulty, it was not difficult to understand how they had drawn their conclusions. Militarily, the Americans and British had greatly scaled back their armed forces in Europe. The United States, like other Western countries, had disbanded most of its combat troops and was largely inferior to the Red Army in Europe.

The entire United States Army had been reduced to half a million soldiers by February 1948. Soviet military forces in the Soviet sector that surrounded Berlin numbered a million and a half highly trained troops. If Russian tanks had started to roll westward, United States’ regiments in Berlin would have provided little resistance against a Soviet attack.

Because of the imbalance, American war strategy had been predicated on a nuclear deterrent: the potential use of hundreds of atomic bombs. But only about fifty Fat Man-specification bombs, the sort used against Japan and the only version available to the U.S. military, existed in the spring of 1948. Worse, or perhaps better, in March 1948, only thirty-five "Silverplate", atomic-capable, Boeing B-29 Superfortress bombers were available. A nation that had been caught unprepared at Pearl Harbor in 1941 was unprepared for war again in 1948.

General Clay understood the numbers and the strategy very well. But he also had a good idea of what he needed to do: not retreat.

He cabled James Forrestal, the new Secretary of Defense, a new cabinet-level position created by Truman in the autumn of 1947. Forrestal, who had gone to both Dartmouth and Princeton, was part of the Ivy League gaggle of “old boys from top schools” who, for better or worse, had taken over the American intelligence community under Dulles and Donovan. Like Dulles and Donovan, Forrestal had seen more than a few shots fired in combat in his earlier years.

Forrestal had been born into a strict Roman Catholic family, where harsh discipline had incubated doubts about himself that his many achievements in the military and the government had finally overcome. He had been an amateur boxer in college and then a naval aviator during the First World War. He had become secretary of the navy in May 1944, after his immediate superior, Secretary Frank Knox, died from a heart attack.

Forrestal led the navy through the closing year of World War II and the early years of demobilization that followed. Forrestal was not a tall man, but he was tough-looking, gritty, and manly in the hard-boiled style. At Princeton he had taken up boxing and he continued to box at the New York Athletic Club while he worked on Wall Street, twice breaking his nose. He looked like Jack Dempsey, the prizefighter. Forrestal's early life had been the inspiration for a character named Alfred Eaton, the protagonist in John O'Hara's novel, From the Terrace.

"There is no practicability in maintaining our position in Berlin,” General Clay wrote to Secretary Forrestal. “But I urge you to not consider the situation in that light. We are convinced that our remaining in Berlin is essential to our prestige in Germany and Europe. Whether for good or bad, America’s presence here has become a symbol of the American intent. And we should not intend to leave.”

In Washington, Forrestal received the cable, read it with approval, and passed it along to President Truman. Truman phoned Clay the next morning. Clay further explained that he felt Stalin was playing a poker game over Berlin, with the blockade being a major bluff, since they would not want to be viewed as starting a Third World War.

“It’s my opinion that the Soviets do not want a war,” Clay explained. “The way I see it, the Soviets and Stalin are attempting to exert political and military on the West to obtain diplomatic concessions. They’re relying on the West's prudence and unwillingness to trigger a war.”

“That’s what you think, General?” Truman asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“I damned well hope you’re right. Because that’s what I think, also.”

The Commander of United States Air Forces in Europe, General Curtis LeMay, had ideas how to deal with the blockade, also. General LeMay, the man who had originated and executed the firebombing of civilians in Japan, had chosen the centrally located Rhein-Main airfield to serve as headquarters for his 60th and 61st Troop Carrier Groups. Rhein-Main was the metropolitan area in Hesse around the intersection of the rivers Rhine and Main. The city of Frankfurt, the largest city in Hesse and Germany's emerging financial center, was the lynchpin of the area. Rhein-Main included Hesse's capital, Wiesbaden.

To friends and adversaries alike, LeMay was known as "Big Cigar," a nickname well earned. General LeMay always had a fat stogie stuffed in his mouth. Big Cigar suggested a more aggressive countermove than General Clay. Under LeMay’s proposed plan, his B-29s would fly with a fighter escort toward Soviet air bases while ground troops were called up and scrambled to reach Berlin. Wisely, Truman was hearing none of the LeMay approach and rejected it out of hand. Secretary Forrestal did the dirty work and spoke to LeMay personally.

Forrestal spoke calmly, concisely, and politely as he rejected LeMay’s strategy.

LeMay, who normally liked to fill the air with airplanes, filled the air with expletives instead.

“Thank you for your opinion, General,” Forrestal concluded. In Forrestal’s opinion, LeMay had never seen a potential fight that he didn’t want to start.

“LeMay is nuts. Crazy,” Forrestal reported to Truman in a memo dated that same afternoon. “All that smoke from burning Japanese flesh in Japan must have warped his mind. Or maybe it’s the cigars and the booze. Left to his own devices, he’ll provoke Stalin and start a war. He has his uses but keep a tight leash on him.”

“Thank you for your opinion, Secretary,” Truman responded, in an ironic echo of Forrestal’s sentiment hours earlier. “As it happens, I agree with you.”

Nonetheless, the commanders in the Soviet Military Administration in Germany were joyous, convinced that they had begun to push the Allies out of the German capital.

In the shady back streets of the Eastern Zone of Berlin at Mühle Strasse 49, two hundred feet south of the Schlesisches U-Bahn station, where a depraved, sleazy establishment named the Red Mill Cabaret had once stood in the Weimar years, there now existed a closed and guarded house of pleasure where Soviet officers quietly took their liberties with captive German females. There the officers partied. They celebrated the beginning of the blockade, oblivious to how badly they had underestimated the resolve of their adversaries.

Chapter 6

New York City - Spring 1948

Laura Worthington Cochrane, London-born to a successful physician and his wife, was also more than anxious to spend time back in the country of her birth.

First on her agenda was a long overdue visit to her sister, Beatrice, who lived on the outskirts of Bath, one of Laura’s favorite English cities. The trip was also an opportunity for their daughter to experience the gift of a year of childhood in such a special unique and quirky place as Cambridge.

“Cambridge is bucolic but not quite the English countryside, unless you travel ten yards beyond the city limits. Ten yards farther puts you in a sheep meadow,” Laura said, “where you must watch your step.”

Laura held a strong affection for the place. Both her parents had graduated from the university. “The city is a mixture of the poet and the peasant,” she said as her husband held her in a celebratory embrace. “Not Heaven, but it will have to do.”

“It will do splendidly,” Cochrane agreed at dinner that night after they had put Caroline to bed.

“You agree then, my dear, that intellectual ferment is always stimulating?” Laura added.

“Let’s not get carried away,” Cochrane responded with a smile.

As the next weeks went by in New York, Cochrane planned with his superiors in both the FBI and the various national intelligence agencies that were coming together in Washington and northern Virginia. A few letters across the ocean made a tentative rental of lodgings in Cambridge for their stay. Permission was granted by the appropriate people stateside for his year-plus of absence. He was to be “off duty” for a full year and had been personally ordered to enjoy every damned minute of it by Alan Dulles and J. Edgar Hoover – short of some pesky, unforeseen emergency, of course. In the postwar years, government agencies in America were trying to pare back the number of people they employed, though Cochrane would be on paid “leave.”

“You’re like a mighty battleship, my dear,” Laura said with a wink as their plans fell into place in early March. “You’ll be decommissioned for the time being but kept as part of the fleet. You’ll be kept ready for a return to high seas when needed.”

“I feel more like a tug boat,” Bill answered with the same sense of bemusement. “A small mutt in the harbor, stalwart, proud, and noble, with a keen sense of my role and limitations, but usually pressed up against an obstacle larger than himself, praying for help from the other friendly vessels.”

“No two people see the same thing exactly the same,” Laura answered. “Even us, as much as we think alike.”

The sabbatical at Cambridge presented another opportunity that the Cochranes welcomed. Trans-Atlantic steamship travel had always been a luxury that Bill and Laura had enjoyed before the World War. Yet ocean travel for pleasure had been out of the question from 1941 to 1945. Now it was available attractively priced, and free of submarines and enemy aircraft. So Bill Cochrane and his wife Laura and their five-year-old daughter, Caroline, used their family’s travel stipend, plus a little extra out of their bank account, to book passage on RMS Queen Elizabeth, one of the stars of the Cunard Line.

Their travel date would be May 14, sailing out of New York City from the West Side piers in Manhattan, headed for Southampton, England. The crossing would take five days. Laura prepared the family’s domestic details, they both obtained new passports, plus a first one for Caroline.

Bill, in turn, wrapped up as many investigations as he could from his workload in New York and gradually handed off all his cases to other agents. To everyone’s astonishment, everything went smoothly. As April passed and May approached, their happy anticipation grew. There was not a problem anywhere on the horizon. Their mood was joyous. Even if the postwar world was a caldron bubbling with turmoil and danger, their personal corner of it was remarkably insulated.

Courses at Cambridge did not start until autumn. The summer months were theirs. Nothing, Bill Cochrane promised himself, was going to interfere. Yet deep down he knew that for a professional spy, nothing was ever that easy.

Chapter 7

Washington, D.C. – Spring 1948

In the American capital, the transition of the United States into peacetime had been halting. The price of victory in Europe and Asia had been astronomical. President Truman was intent on diminishing military services as quickly as possible to curtail the government's military expenditures. But the effect of demobilization on the economy was unknown. Many Americans feared that Truman’s proposals would ease the nation back into another great depression.

Truman now faced a Congress where Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats formed a powerful voting bloc against anything he wished to propose. Hot-button political issues quickly emerged. Strikes and labor-management conflicts destabilized major industries. Housing and consumer goods prices soared. Inflation rose.

In 1945 and 1946, American farmers had refused to sell grain for months even though it was desperately needed in the United States and to stave off starvation in Europe. Unionized industrial laborers demanded wage increases.

In January 1946, less than ten months after Truman took office, a steel strike involving nearly a million workers became the largest in the nation's history. A coal miners’ strike followed in April and the railroad workers struck in May. In response, Truman seized the railroads. But two key unions struck anyway, shutting down the entire American rail system. For two days public anger raged. Truman’s anger raged equally.

Truman handwrote a belligerent, punch-in-the-mouth style message to Congress that called on military veterans to form a lynch mob and destroy the union leaders.

“Let's put transportation and production back to work, hang a few traitors, and make our own country safe for democracy,” bellowed the man known for “plain speaking.”

A top aide named Clark Clifford intercepted Truman’s incendiary message, toned it down, and convinced Truman to deliver a softened message to Congress. Truman’s second message wasn’t must cooler than the first one. He called for a new law, where any railroad strikers would be drafted into the army. As he concluded his congressional address, he received a message that the strike had been settled on presidential terms. Nevertheless, a few hours later, the House joyously voted to draft the strikers. Opposition Senator Robert Taft did everyone a favor and killed the bill in the Senate.

After the settlement of the railroad strike, labor action continued as part of daily life for Harry Truman. The president's approval rating plummeted from eighty-two percent in January 1946 to fifty-two percent by June of 1946. Then it hit thirty-two percent later in the year.

Republicans took control of Congress in 1946 for the first time since 1930. Democratic Arkansas Senator William Fulbright politely suggested that Harry Truman was in over his head and should resign. Truman was having none of it. More plain speaking followed. The president replied that “Senator Halfbright" was an “overeducated son of a bitch,” and he was going to pay him no attention.

In the spring of 1948, as he prepared for the 1948 presidential elections, Truman broke with the New Deal by initiating an aggressive civil rights program that he termed a moral priority. Truman's proposals were not well received by Congress. The “Solid South” rejected anything involving civil rights. The Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond of South Carolina prepared to run against Truman in 1948 to insure his defeat.

Meanwhile, there was a nightmare scenario for the United States in Asia. A savage civil war raged in China where the Nationalists tried to hang onto power against the Communists under Mao Zedong. The Nationalists had been major wartime allies and had large-scale, popular support in the United States, along with a powerful, noisy lobby.

At Truman’s behest, General George Marshall spent most of 1946 in China trying to negotiate a compromise. He failed. When he returned, he convinced Truman that the Nationalists would never win on their own and a very large-scale U.S. intervention to stop the Communists would significantly weaken U.S. opposition to the Soviets in Europe and would probably also fail. Already, by spring of 1948, Truman was under fire from many Americans for "losing China.” And China had not yet even been “lost.”

In Europe, the picture wasn’t much better thanks to an aggressive position by Joseph Stalin and the Red Army. Logic in the American capital suggested that withdrawing from Berlin and not issuing the Deutschmark in that city was the safe and logical thing to do. To many, withdrawing from Germany completely made even more sense.

Privately, Truman sought the council of his secretary of defense on the issue. Forrestal’s opinions were all over the place. These days, Forrestal had a couple of agendas that set many teeth to rattling. He was endlessly antagonistic toward the Soviet Union, fearing Communist expansion in Europe and the Middle East. Along with Secretary of State George C. Marshall, he strongly opposed the United States' support for the establishment of the State of Israel.

“The establishment of a Jewish state in the Middle East will alienate Arab nations for the next century,” he told anyone who would listen. “We need the Arabs as allies. T.E. Lawrence proved that did he not? The petroleum reserves in North Africa are vital for both military and civilian industrial expansion.”

A few days later at a press conference, when asked if America would risk war with the Soviet Union over Berlin, President Truman cut through the complicated maze of contingency thinking with some plain thinking and plain speaking.

“We shall stay in Berlin,” Truman declared. “Period.”

Chapter 8

England – May 1948

Bill Cochrane and his wife, Laura, and their five-year-old daughter, Caroline, arrived in Southampton, England on the brisk morning of May 19, 1948, and stepped off RMS Queen Elizabeth.  At Southampton, they hired a car, piled their suitcases into it, and set out for the West Country for a few days of touring before a rendezvous with their prospective landlady in Cambridge.

They arrived in Bath in Somerset later the same day.

Bath was still rebuilding from the war. The Luftwaffe had raided the city many times during the Blitz, the German night-bombing offensive against Britain's cities. German attackers flew overhead on their way to nearby Bristol, which was bombed severely throughout the period. Bath remained largely untouched, however, until later in the war and the start of the so-called Baedeker Blitz, named for the famous German tour guidebooks which were surely being read in Berlin. During the Baedeker Blitz, the Luftwaffe chose targets more for their cultural and historical significance than for military value. The Baedeker raids on Bath were in revenge for the bombing of Rostock by the Allies, and possibly because Hitler thought Churchill was in Bath at the time. The air attacks destroyed parts of the Royal Crescent, Circus and Paragon, the Assembly Rooms, and the main hotel, The Francis.

“The attacks came at night in three waves,” a lady in a sweet shop, the proprietress, told Bill midafternoon when she saw Bill and Laura looking out of the front window of her shop at the reconstruction.

“The first two were bombing runs, intending to destroy buildings and set us all on fire. The third strafed the civilians who had been driven from their homes with machine-gun fire.”

“Horrible,” Cochrane muttered with sincerity.

“Were you here or in America?” she asked.

“America, primarily,” Cochrane said, not mentioning his tour in Berlin in 1943.

“You were lucky.”

Caroline found a small cake she wanted. Indulgently, her father bought it for her.

Bill and Laura walked hand in hand in the main square, surveying the remaining damage and the reconstruction in progress. Caroline pranced ahead or behind her parents as she saw fit. On the English streets, the Cochranes mostly saw thin women and men with war injuries. At one point the couple stopped and bought their daughter a puzzle for entertainment that evening. The family then piled back into the car, changed directions, and headed for the home of Laura’s sister, Beatrice. They arrived at Beatrice’s place to the west of Bath early that evening. They unpacked to stay for three days.

Beatrice had a housekeeper, Mrs. Downs, who killed, cleaned, and roasted a chicken for dinner. Over the evening meal at a wooden table in an old farmhouse that dated from 1750, they chatted while Caroline played with her puzzle. The table was tucked into a nook adjacent to the kitchen.

Laura and Beatrice had never been close. Beatrice, dour and occasionally tart-tongued, was eleven years older and had been away at an oppressive boarding school in Windsor by the time Laura was five. There had been a middle brother who had died of influenza in 1940. The passing of time, and Laura’s move to the United States, had not made the relationship any warmer. The conversation was guarded and hesitant.

“So what will you be doing in England, Mr. Cochrane?” Beatrice asked, midway through a third cream sherry and halfway through the meal.

“Please call me William. Or Bill,” Cochrane answered.

“Bill,” Beatrice said.

“I’m on what I would refer to as a ‘working sabbatical’ from my position in the United States,” he explained.

“What the bloody damned hell is a ‘working sabbatical’?” Beatrice inquired.

“It means my husband is on sabbatical, but typically, he’s still working,” Laura said.

“Oh,” said Beatrice. “Work. Isn’t that what a man is supposed to do?”

“Sadly, Laura states the situation very well,” Cochrane said. “But it’s not the worst thing by any means. The lectures, the discussions if you wish to call them that, don’t start till the midpoint of the autumn semester. October. During the summer, my time is mine. Laura, Caroline, and I hope to travel from Cambridge to the north of England, down toward Bath again, and perhaps to Ireland. Neither my wife nor I have ever visited the Ring of Kerry.”

Beatrice’s eyes wandered during the conversation and settled on Caroline with a squint. The girl, in response, gripped her mother’s hand and partially hid behind the Queen Anne chair where Laura sat.

“That sounds fascinating,” Beatrice said, making it sound less than even exciting.

Beatrice then changed the direction of the conversation back to her usual subject, herself. She was the proprietress of several hundred acres of orchards – apples and pears – as well as a herd of sheep and goats. The farm, she allowed, was doing well. But a man whom she referred to as “old Cronin” had suffered a stroke in the last months. Cronin and his wife Pricilla had been live-in caretakers on the estate since 1935. The couple was no longer able to manage. They were hoping for an exit or at least for diminished duties.

Beatrice was looking for a new couple to live in and fill the void, she explained after dinner and after she and her guests repaired to a cramped library.  But Beatrice couldn’t find anyone able-bodied and suitable.

“There are stories all over the newspapers about the walking dead of France, Germany, Russia, and Belgium,” Beatrice intoned. “But no one ever speaks of our poor, lonely, old England. Unemployment soars but many excellent jobs go begging.” Her land, she complained, cost as much to maintain as it earned. “I’d sell some off but there are no buyers,” she said. “Everyone is bankrupt.”

“It’s very difficult everywhere,” Cochrane offered.

“We’ll keep our eyes open in Cambridge,” said Laura. “Perhaps there’ll be a couple who might be interested in working a farm.”

“Yes. Thank you, Laura. We’ll do that,” Cochrane said.

“That would be wonderful,” Beatrice said, brightening, “but you might as well be looking for the Holy Bloody Grail. We supposedly won the war but we don’t have heat or food. Lucky some of us even have shelter.”

On a side table by itself, there was a photograph that Bill Cochrane’s gaze involuntarily settled upon. The photo was in crisp black and white and had obviously been taken somewhere in England several years earlier. In it, a younger, prettier version of Beatrice was in a Wren’s uniform with a man in a military uniform and another woman.

“My dear departed husband,” Beatrice said when she saw Bill and Laura’s eyes flirt with the photograph. “I miss him to this day, I do admit. That is I as a Wren. I did my time and service. We all did. Proudly. The other lady is my friend Cordelia.”

“A lovely name,” Cochrane commented.

“I remember her,” Laura said. “She was your friend at university.”

“True. Her father was a Shakespearean actor in the West End. He named her for the ‘good’ daughter in King Lear.” Beatrice motioned back to the photo. “Cordelia’s husband was away in India at the time.”

“He survived the war, I hope?” Laura inquired.

“Survived the war, yes. Then just dropped dead one day last year. No warning.”

“Oh, dear. I’m sorry,” Laura said.

Beatrice’s late spouse wore the uniform of a lieutenant colonel, probably infantry, Cochrane surmised, being more than familiar with British army rankings and responsibilities. In the photo, everyone was smiling. It was probably pre-1939, Cochrane reasoned further. After the significant fighting started and the air raids became nightly events, there wasn’t so much to smile about.

A “phony war,” the British called it until it wasn’t phony. Done by Christmas. It didn’t turn out that way. Behind the people in the photograph, a long cricket ground stretched out, sunlit, unsullied, and mown. On the photo there was an inscription in faded ink, but Cochrane couldn’t read it and didn’t try. Cochrane guessed Beatrice loved the picture because it was sweet, perfect, and never changed for the worse, unlike the present.

Beatrice ripped considerably into her late husband who had mismanaged his military pension as well as the land and hadn’t left her very well off in terms of cash.

“Half the brains and a tenth of the bank account of my first husband if you ask me,” Beatrice said, a remark that both Bill and Laura chose to leave alone.

“Do you remember my first husband, Laura? Charles?”

“Never met him.”

“Oh, yes. Correct. Charles was Catholic. A ‘bead mumbler.’ Family wasn’t speaking at the time, were we?”

Laura gently shook her head. Cochrane’s eyes drifted to his daughter. Beatrice’s gaze followed Cochrane’s. “Wonderful little lady, isn’t she?” Beatrice said admiringly of Caroline. “You’re lucky people, the two of you. You survived the war and you have your little girl. You Americans are so lucky.”

“I’m still English,” Laura said.

“Like the bloody devil, you are,” snorted Beatrice.

But the stay in Somerset passed quickly and easily. In their rented car, Bill, Laura, and Caroline explored the area, driving on narrow, winding roads that they shared with tractors, past small fields and high hedge banks. They visited the stone megaliths of Stonehenge outside of Salisbury.

Both of Laura’s parents had died during the war. She wished to visit their grave site out in Devon, so they drove out farther west, found the graves at an ancient churchyard in Mortonhampstead, and spent a final day with Beatrice.

Then they packed the car again. They said their goodbyes till who knew when, exchanged too-cordial embraces, and headed to Cambridge.

Chapter 9

USA - May 1948
i

A twenty-five-year-old American pilot named Glenn Taylor spent the last two years of World War II flying C-47s and C-54s around the European theater, moving men and supplies around France, Holland, and, after the war ended, the Allied-occupied Western Zone of Germany.

Taylor had never officially flown combat missions, but he had flown in combat zones. More than a few times the aircraft he piloted had been hit by small-arms fire from the ground. Taylor had never shied away from any danger in his life, enemy bullets being just one of those daily annoyances on certain days during a previous part of his life.

After the hostilities ended in the Pacific theater, he had also been a co-pilot on thunderous four-engine B-17s that he flew over the “hump” of the Himalayas down into India. On other occasions, back in occupied Germany after the war, an RAF buddy entrusted him with a Spitfire. Taylor took a few tours with that noble British aircraft and then followed with more with a captured Messerschmitt. If it had wings, Taylor loved it.

In 1946, he was one of the thousands of American warriors demobilized. He returned home to Norfolk, Virginia, considering himself one of the “lucky ones” - those who had found excitement, had honorably served their county, and survived the war without injury. Now they felt ready to find a good wife, start a career, and a family.

But he couldn’t find the right woman. He missed his airplanes and he missed aviation. He almost longed for the daily exhilaration of being shot at and missed. In the civilian world, he tried to become an air traffic controller but there was a wait of several months for training. He attempted to secure a job as a commercial pilot or co-pilot, but there was a glut of more experienced men who had flown combat. Trying to stay in the field, he put his dreams on hold for a while and became a welder and a mechanic at Washington National Airport, maintaining and fixing new jet engines. He was extraordinary at what he did. “Just give me two strips of aluminum,” he liked to say, “and I can build a warbird from scratch.”

One evening in Washington his boss, Frank DelVecchio, came to his workstation and tapped him in the shoulder. “There’s a guy in a suit here from the government who wants to talk to you,” the boss said. The boss’s tone of voice was ominous.

“About what?” Taylor asked.

“He didn’t say. Go talk to him and you’ll find out.”

“I’m still on my shift.”

“It don’t matter none, Glenn. Go talk to him.”

“Did I screw something up?”

“Who knows? The guy’s got a burr up his ass, so I didn’t ask. He don’t look like someone we want to mess with, but if you need me to stick up for you, give me a holler. Okay?”

“Yeah. Okey-dokey,” Taylor said, setting down all his tools except one. Glenn knew how the real world worked so he tucked a steel wrench into his belt in case the proposed conversation went the wrong way.

Taylor found his visitor waiting in a small office on the second floor of the hangar. The visitor stood with his hands behind his back, looking down through a window at workers on the main floor of the hangar as they labored over engines and engine parts. The man had a military haircut but wore a plain gray suit. He didn’t look like a pencil-pusher from a desk job. The man had the presence and the physique of a bodybuilder. And, oddly, he had what Taylor recognized as a New York accent.

“You’re Glenn Taylor?” the man asked as Taylor approached.

“Yes, sir?”

The man stuck out a hand. “I’m Michael Forsythe,” the visitor said. “Please to meet you, patriot.”

Taylor accepted and they shook. The visitor announced that he worked for a civilian division of the newly formed United States Air Force. He flashed a piece of identification. But the word “Air” had already captured Taylor’s full attention.

“What can I do for you?” Taylor asked.

“Fly,” the man said.

“Sorry. Not following. I weld aircraft parts and fix engines now.”

“You flew C-47’s and C-54’s during the war. ‘Gooney Birds’ and ‘Skymasters.’’”

“That’s correct.”

“You were pretty good at it from what I hear.”

“You hear right,” said Taylor. “Brought every single one of those big silver angels home safely. Maybe a bullet hole here or there, but never anything serious.”

“I’d say you deserve a medal, but I happen to know you received three of them,” the visitor said. “Two in France and one in Holland. Impressive stuff. Congratulations.” A pause, then, “You also flew B-17s.”

“Let me make one thing as clear as God’s open sky,” Taylor said. “There’s nothing I can’t fly.”

“I know. That’s why I’m here.”

“Who the hell are you?” Taylor asked. “Let’s cut past the nonsense and talk turkey, all right?”

The visitor looked Taylor in the eye, hard and long.

Then, “There’s going to be an airlift of food and heating supplies from West Germany to Berlin, Mr. Taylor. The public is being told that it will take a few weeks. That’s a load of bullcrap. An airlift will take months.”

“Yeah. So?”

“We’re going to call up some reservists. But we’re also looking for volunteers to go over,” Forsythe said.

“Over where?”

“To Germany. Berlin.”

“And do what?”

“Those C-47s and C-54s aren’t going to fly themselves, my friend,” the visitor said with a laugh. “Here’s the deal. So-so pay. Crappy food. Lousy hours. Nose to nose with the rapacious Russian bear. Plenty of German girls who’ll turn a trick for a Hershey Bar, but they’ve all got VD. Make of that what you will. And there’s always the chance of a fatal accident.”

“At least nobody’s shooting at us.”

“Not yet. But that could change any day. Sounds great, doesn’t it?”

“Nope. I’d have to be crazy.”

“Interested?”

“I get to fly?”

“You get to fly, Glenn.”

“I’m your man,” Taylor said. “See? I’m crazy.”

“Yeah. Your file said that, too. Your peers called you ‘Nutsy Glenn’ and ‘Nutsy Taylor.’ Gifted at low altitudes, sub-radar, narrow corridors, and impossible places. Able to find landing fields where none existed. Once spotted two U.S. wounded soldiers behind enemy lines in Alsace, set down a Stinson Sentinel on a road in a wine field, and picked them up while under fire from pro-Vichy partisans.”

“Yeah, that’s me,” Glenn Taylor said. “Sounds like you read my file.”

“I liked your file so much that I memorized it,” Forsythe said.

“The Stinson Sentinel is a great airplane,” Taylor said. “I was supposed to be doing ‘recon’ only. The brass didn’t know whether to court-martial me or give me a medal.”

Taylor laughed.

“That one was a medal,” the recruiter said. “Your second one.”

“Yeah. So it was,” Taylor recalled. “The brass always felt that it looked better if a pilot under their command got a medal rather than a court-martial. You could do the same crazy shit, they just had to spin it right. So that one went in my direction.”

“Smoke?” asked the visitor, pulling a pack of Chesterfields out of his pocket.

“Sure,” said Taylor.

“By the way, meant to ask,” the visitor said. “You a married man?”

“Nope.”

“You like the ladies though, I hope.”

“Sure do. Just never met the right one. Know what I mean?”

“All too well.”

Glenn Taylor re-enlisted on the spot with his old rank of lieutenant.

ii

During the same week, two-thirds of the way westward across the forty-eight American states, Victor Marino had just happily reached two life milestones. After returning from two years in the Army Air Corps, during which he shuttled soldiers around Panama and the Caribbean, he had married his high school sweetheart. His new wife was a woman of twenty-two named Dora who had waited for him throughout the war. Victor had also just finished the academic studies he had begun before the war. He had graduated from the University of Oklahoma with a degree in business. Victor and his missus were ready for anything life could throw their way. Or at least they thought they were.

One evening at dinner Victor’s phone rang. Dora left the dining table in their Oklahoma City apartment, answered, and listened quietly to the caller for several seconds. Victor heard her say, “Just a minute.”

There was something about the stillness in Dora’s tone that bothered him. She returned to the dining room where she met her husband’s gaze. “It’s for you,” she said.

“Who is it?”

“I don’t know. Long-distance. Someone asking for ‘Captain Marino’,” she said.

A moment’s pause and then dark thoughts followed.

“Must be a prank or an old pal, honey,” Marino said, rising from the table. “Nobody’s called me ‘Captain’ since I left the service.”

“That’s what bothers me, too,” Dora said.

The caller was neither a prankster nor an old friend. The caller was a man in Langley, Virginia who went by the name of Michael Forsythe. Forsythe was working late, going through a recently updated list of Air Force reservists.

Forsythe’s message was short and sweet. Victor Marino had been reactivated for an impending air operation in Europe and this call was his initial notice. A telegram would follow, which would make it official, said the voice on the long-distance call. Marino was ordered to a base in Maryland for medical examinations, induction, orientation, and new uniforms.

Marino returned to the table dazed. He looked at his wife without speaking. Then, “I thought I was finished with all this crap,” Victor said.

“Where are you being sent?” she asked.

“First Maryland. Then probably Germany.”

“Oh, my God,” she muttered. “If a new war starts…”

A long half-minute of silence followed.

“If you go, I go,” Dora said.

Neither could finish dinner. But as promised, the telegram arrived the next morning. Whoever Mr. Forsythe was, he was a man of his unwelcome word.

iii

In another corner of the United States, a young American named Tommy Olson had grown up on a ranch in Montana. Olson was nineteen, had just completed two years of college in 1943, and had been hell-bent for adventure when a Life magazine cover story appeared addressing the shortage of aircraft transport pilots in the United States.

The pilots – men and women – were civilians who worked with the military to ferry aircraft around the country from base to base while the combat pilots served their time in Europe and Asia. Olson was instantly intrigued, read the article several dozen times, and then tore the article out of the magazine and saved it.

An older Olson brother named Max was training to be a pilot with the United States Army. Why not Tommy? Olson asked their father, Roger Olson, for the money to earn a pilot’s license without enlisting.

“That costs five hundred dollars,” Olson Senior said. “That’s crazy,” he said. “You might be crazy, but I’m not! You think I want both my kids flying around the damned sky?”

Tommy was quiet in response. Young Olson folded two strong arms and gave the old man a look. The look.

“You sure you want to do that?” Olson Senior pressed.

“I’m sure,” Tommy said. “It’s what I want to do.”

“Hell! I already got one airplane-crazy kid pilot in the family,” Roger Olson said eventually. “I suppose there ain’t nothing wrong with having two.”

“Nope,” Tommy said. “There ain’t. Thanks, Dad!”

Tommy’s dad, a cattle rancher who sometimes used a small plane to survey and watch over his two-thousand-acre spread outside of Billings, came up with the money. Tommy completed the course and was one of the best in the class, both in the sky and on the test papers.

But then there was another problem when Olson went off to join those who would fill the gap in essential wartime aviation. Tommy was half an inch shorter than the five-foot-two-inch requirement. So at the student pilot’s induction physical at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Texas, where most of the transport pilots were trained, Tommy stood on tiptoes before an amiable examiner, a woman named Carol in thick, black, horned-rimmed glasses. Carol was also the town librarian. The public library was across the street.

The height chart was painted on the wall. Even on tiptoes, Olson couldn’t crack the five-two mark.

Carol shook her head. “Certain things we cannot allow,” she said. “Rules are rules. The chart is accurate. I can’t move the paint on the wall and I have to have the right numbers on this sheet of paper.”

“So I can’t fly?”

“You’re too short. Wait here, Tommy,” the examiner suggested. “I’ll be back in a jiffy. I’m just going across the street to get a couple of books.”

Olson waited, assuming the quest to fly was at an end. Carol returned with a dictionary and a phone book from the library. The examiner placed them at the foot of the height chart, one stacked on the other.

“There! Try again,” Carol said.

Tommy stepped on the books and grew three inches.

“Five-four and a half!” Carol recorded. “Very good. On your way, Olson.”

There were many short pilots on the home front during the World War. Instructors looked the other way or found ways to tinker with shoes and height. One instructor even had a thirty-three-inch yardstick for special cases. A lot of aircraft tonnage needed to be moved. Everyone laughed. State and federal inspectors turned blind eyes.

Some of the female aviators even played little games with the official records, using androgynous names. Pilots named Patricia became Pat in the official records. Anyone named Eugenia became Gene. Harriet became Harry. Leslie became Les and Mary and Carol were accidentally misspelled as Mark and Carl.

Volunteers such as Tommy got into a division of the Air Force named The Air Transport Command, the ATC, the strategic airlift component of the United States Army Air Forces. A cottage industry developed in custom tailoring smaller-than-small parachutes and flight jackets to smaller aviators. The normal issue parachutes were too large. If used, the force of the air when leaving an aircraft would have ripped the chute and harness off a body. The ejecting pilot would slip right out.

The ATC had two vital missions. The first was the ferrying of aircraft from the factories in the United States to where they were needed for training or operational use in combat. The second was the delivery of supplies and equipment between the United States and the overseas combat theaters. The ATC also operated a worldwide air transportation system for military personnel and to feed graduates into the WASPs, the Women Air Force Service Pilots.

The ATC was an object of derision by some combat pilots. “The Army of Terrified Civilians,” the fighter pilots called it. “Allergic To Combat.”  A third of the aviators in the ATC were female and many of the males were as ragtag a collection of aviators as the United States had ever put in its skies.

Tommy Olson flew more than five hundred thousand miles for the Air Transport Command during World War II. Olson’s territory stretched across the United States but also led far into eastern Canada. Olson specialized at flying into freezing rain, ice, and snow, and having an instinct for it: Labrador, Northern Quebec, and Ontario in the dead of winter.

“I don’t mind it,” Olson said. “Snow is refreshing. Wonderful,” Tommy would explain. “I love its purity. It has a rhythm like the ocean. Go with it, not against it.”

Most of the other aviators held other opinions. A stopover in the Bahamas or Cuba was more desirable. But it took all kinds and all methods to get those silver birds around the country. The job got done. Then the end came rudely and suddenly.

On June first, 1948, the government abolished the ATC as part of the general demobilization that had been set in motion in 1946 and 1947.

Tommy Olson completed a final flight from Houston to St. Louis. From there, Olson took trains to Billings through the Upper Midwest, then a bus that completed the journey to the family ranch that Tommy Olson had left three years earlier.

There were opportunities in Montana. The sky was as big and blue from the ground as it had been when Olson had left to learn how to fly up into it. Olson’s dad looked older and wanted some help with his land. His other child, Max, had returned intact from the Pacific. Now Tommy was home, too.

Everything was copacetic for a short while. The family was happy to be together again. Then reality raised its ugly head. Tommy missed flying. So Tommy Olson was easy pickings for a smooth-talking individual who announced himself as Michael Forsythe on the phone on May second, calling long-distance from the Washington, D.C. area for Tommy Olson.

The caller hesitated for a moment when a woman’s voice – Tommy’s – came on the phone. Then, as he scanned the prospect’s experience sheet in Langley, Virginia, he was reminded of how the females with androgynous names had tweaked their names to make sure they received work and assignments.

He quickly scanned her experience in the ATC where the safety records of female pilots had been better than the hotshot males in the unit.

“What’s ‘Tommy’ from?” Forsythe asked.

“On my birth certificate, it reads Thomasina. I was named after my grandmother. She was from Abruzzo in Italy. Abruzzo is -”

“Abruzzo is on the East Coast of the boot. On the Adriatic Sea,” Mr. Forsythe said. “I traveled through there during the war. On the way to North Africa from Switzerland.”

“Wow! I hope you enjoyed it,” Tommy Olson said.

“I kept moving,” Forsythe said with a laugh. “I was protected by anti-Fascist partisans.”

“Ha!” she said. “I’m sure they got you safely to your destination.”

“I’m alive to offer you a job flying, aren’t I, Tommy?” he answered. “I can call you that, I hope. “Tommy’?”

“I’ve been called that since I was a little girl,” she answered. “I was also kind of a tomboy. I earned the nickname kind of natural.”

“I’m sure,” Forsythe said. “Want to fly again? What do you say?”

“Here’s what I have to say! I’m blessed with the American spirit, you know. I’m always ready to lift off!”

“I’ll mail you a travel allowance, special delivery, plus some paperwork. Can you be in Westover, Massachusetts in a week?”

“Sure can.”

“You might be the only woman. Or one of a very few.”

“Who the hell cares?”

“Not me and obviously not you,” Forsythe said.

The call ended. Tommy was euphoric.

Chapter 10

Cambridge, England – May and June 1948

For the better part of the 1940s, life in Cambridge had been dominated by war and its consequences: lives lost, buildings destroyed, families shattered, ordinary life disrupted. There had been shortages of everything. Beer, ale, and pubs had been viewed during the war as important for morale, but sugar, wheat, and barley had been essential for food. Pubs had had a weekly beer ration and when it was gone, they had to close. They remained open all week by severely limiting their opening times. In major cities, especially when the risk of bombing was at its highest, pubs were deserted at night as people headed for the shelters. Now, with the war over, Britain remained a dreary place compared to the United States. But just as in Bath and London, a recovery was crawling forward, fueled in part by visitors from North America.

The landlady on Orchard Street was a gentle lady named Victoria – never “Vickie” – Cameron-Butler. Mrs. Cameron-Butler, sixtyish and thin, had reconfigured her home in 1946 after the big war had ended and after the possibility of destruction by German bombs from the air was no longer a daily worry. Her home on Orchard Street was midway down a block of well-maintained row houses, taller on the north side than on the south. She, too, was a war widow.

Mrs. Cameron-Butler now resided in a modest four-room flat below street level, complete with kitchen and bathroom. Her sitting room at the front of the building had generous windows through which Victoria could gaze up at the world as it passed by, or at least as much of the world as she cared to view.

She rented out the two floors above her to people associated with the University of Cambridge, “presentable, respectable people,” as she called them. The faculty office sent her tightly screened referrals. Her late husband’s father had been a don at the university, a linguistics specialist, so Victoria was well acquainted with the academic community. Cambridge treated her as well as it treated anyone.

Punctually at eleven AM, after the usual morning showers that swept through East Anglia in springtime had concluded and a bright sun swept the city, Bill Cochrane, accompanied by his family, arrived at Mrs. Cameron-Butler’s front door. He knocked twice. The Cochranes were there to inspect and hopefully execute the lease for their short-term rental.

Mrs. Cameron-Butler’s rental suite was currently unoccupied. The lady of the house was more than a little anxious to find the sought-after, presentable, respectable people who might settle into her home and stabilize her uneven finances.

She was thus delighted at first glance to open her door and find a fit, middle-aged man and his wife and a charming daughter holding her mother’s hand, half hiding behind her back.

“Mrs. Cameron-Butler?” Cochrane asked, holding a still damp, collapsed umbrella in his hand.

“Of course,” Victoria said. “Do come in.”

She ushered her visitors into the small entrance foyer and then to a large foyer on the floor above street level. She closed both doors behind her guests as they proceeded into a living room that was part of the upstairs suite.

Bill Cochrane placed his fedora on an available rack and stood his umbrella in the entrance foyer. No more than two minutes of introductory small talk followed.

Then, “Well, I’m already convinced we’ll be happy to have you,” Mrs. Cameron-Butler replied, even though she was still nursing one reservation. “Come along then. Let me show you the quarters,” Victoria said, leading her visitors farther into the sitting room.

The chamber was small with a divan, a cleaned grate for a coke fire, two chairs, a narrow table before the divan, and a bookcase packed with what appeared to be academic and military texts. The books did not look as if they had been disturbed for years.

There was a modest kitchen with a rudimentary refrigerator, a table, and a gas range. There was a washroom for laundry, adjoining a pantry. The kitchen had a narrow door that exited to a small rear garden around which rose a high brick wall, topped with broken bottles sealed in cement that added a small measure of security. The door had a flimsy lock and chain.

“Mind your head on the staircase. Low overhang,” Victoria pointed out as she guided them to a set of rickety wooden stairs that led to the top floor. “We’re going up a flight. Bear with me, I’m slow. Bad knees, you know.”

Victoria picked up a cane that had been leaning at the base of the steps.

They arrived on the upstairs landing.

There was a hallway with a musty smell, two dim sconces, and maroon-flecked wallpaper. Then there were two bedrooms. The one at the front of the building had a card table set up as a desk and two windows that overlooked Orchard Street. Both bedrooms had dressers, but no closets. The back bedroom, perfect for their daughter, had a standard bed, the large front room had a queen-size bed.

Throughout the upstairs suite, there was a unique collection of clashing and contrasting rugs, wallpapers, shades, lampshades, and curtains. There was an aura of neediness prevailing over solvency, yet a quirkiness that pulled it all together.

Cochrane quickly concluded that she had sold off her better stuff. He couldn’t blame her if she had. Laura later recalled her first view of it as reminding her of an explosion in a junk shop. Overall, the vision was both jarring and charming.

“Lovely,” Laura said as they worked their way through.

Laura held Victoria in conversation in the master bedroom while Bill paid special attention to the two windows. As he looked through them, he noted that he could see over the lower roofs of the houses across the street. More importantly, as he examined the angles, he could survey the entire block from corner to corner. Most of the doorways, except for numbers twelve and thirteen down the block to the east, were not recessed. They opened directly to the street, meaning there was no room for anyone to lurk.

He turned from the window. He gave Laura a nod.

“In any case, I hope this will be to your approval,” Victoria said. “I’m picking up highly positive feelings from you.” She eyed them back and forth. “I’ll reveal a secret. I judge a man by the woman who has married him. Mr. Cochrane, your wife is charming.”

“And I’m not?” Cochrane asked with a sly smile, making Mrs. Cameron-Butler smile for the first time.

Victoria patted his arm and withdrew her hand quickly. “Oh, you’re just fine,” she answered quickly.  “As is this lovely little lady who accompanies you,” she added, her eyes narrowing and jumping to Caroline. The child smiled and half hid behind her mother again.

“I quite agree about my wife,” Cochrane said. “Both my ladies. I’m a lucky man.”

He gave Laura a wink and a squeeze of the hand as Victoria led them room to room and then downstairs again.

“So?” Victoria asked. “Do you have other places to look at?”

Bill and Laura looked at each other. Then Cochrane looked back to Mrs. Cameron-Butler. “I don’t think we need to,” he said. “If we are acceptable to you.”

There was a pause. “Well, then. There’s one thing I must ask,” Victoria said, preparing to address her only lingering hesitation. “Please don’t disappoint me. And I hope you’ll take no offense at my inquiry.”

“Ask me anything you wish,” Bill Cochrane said.

“You’re not one of those filthy Communist-socialist Fabians, are you, Mr. Cochrane?” she inquired in a low but mellow voice.

Laura laughed.

“Oh, I can assure you that I am not,” Bill said hastily.

“Have no fear about that,” Laura added quickly. “Neither of us.”

“And my daughter hasn’t had time yet to join any political party,” Cochrane said, unleashing the warmth of his charm at Victoria. “I’d know if she had.”

“Well, that’s wonderful, Mr. Cochrane!” Victoria continued. “Had enough of them, I have,” she said sharply. “I had a Marxist economist here last term. No-good chap, name of Egon Henkel. Paid the rent late every month. Never washed. Never kept house. Australian,” she added as if that explained everything. “He used to sit all day in the back room at the Eagle Pub on Benet Street or The Witch’s Caldron or The Hero of the Thames. Wore a fisherman’s hat with a red star, he did, and chain-smoked these ghastly small cigars. An ‘intellectual’, he called himself. Whoever heard of a Marxist-Australian intellectual?”

“New one on me,” Bill Cochrane said.

“Glad to be rid of Comrade Henkel. Australians! They’re all sheep ranchers at heart,” she said. “Descendants of convicts. Fooey! I used to have a collection of prints. He stole a Jacques Callot. Wonderful etching of a dwarf with a violin. Sixteenth-century! I bloody well locked up the rest of the prints and the family silver as well after I found it missing.” She sniffed. “Moved out two weeks later. Good riddance.”

“The world is full of strange people,” Laura said to mollify her.

“Yes. It is,” she answered, cooling down. “Sometimes I think of the world as a tabletop with marbles upon it. Sometimes someone tilts it toward Cambridge and everything loose rolls in our direction.”

On a nearby table, there was a short letter of rental agreement – all three paragraphs of it – and a pristine Parker pen. Owner and tenant proceeded quickly and executed the document which had an open date of termination. Thirty days’ notice to the other party was all that was required to terminate the agreement.

Bill Cochrane took out a billfold and counted out a hundred pounds sterling in cash - new tens and twenties - as advance rental and deposit. Mrs. Cameron-Butler produced her keenest smile yet. The cash swiftly disappeared into her skirt pocket.

That easily, the Cochranes took possession of their temporary living quarters in England. It was a golden time. Their new residence was a hundred meters from a pleasant patch of a quiet park on the west side of the city, a five minute walk from the far edge of the university and less than ten minutes by foot – or three minutes by bicycle – from the hall in Magdalene College where Bill Cochrane would be delivering his discussions.

Nonetheless, there were frequent reminders that the world remained an unsettled place. Almost every day at least once, a British or American fighter jet on practice maneuvers would roar low over Orchard Street on takeoffs and landings.

From having spent ample time in England in the 1930s and 1940s, Bill and Laura knew exactly the source of the aircraft: the Allied air base a few miles north of Cambridge, named after the closest English town: Alconbury. In the late 1930s, the British Air Ministry purchased close to two hundred acres around Alconbury to use as a satellite RAF base. Intentionally, the initial construction was minimal. For the first few years, the base was nothing more than a few camouflaged hangars and some rickety huts for the men who serviced the aircraft.

The base at Alconbury was almost impossible to discern from the air but could scramble a dozen aircraft on a few minutes’ notice. Several such bases were built by the British forces in the late 1930s against the growing possibility of war in Europe. When such attacks began by the Luftwaffe in 1939, the “secret” aircraft at Alconbury were relatively far from the real bases yet stationed close to where they would be needed.

After Nazi Germany and its guiding genius, Adolf Hitler, declared war on Great Britain in 1939, British forces upgraded what was now “RAF Alconbury.” More aircraft snuggled into the hidden hangars. The RAF disguised the base to look like an abandoned industrial site. The Luftwaffe searched for the base in occasional raids and bombed the area indiscriminately but never landed knockout blows to the primary targets, though there were civilian casualties in Cambridge and the surrounding towns.

In retaliation as the war intensified, the RAF used low-altitude attack bombers to hit German industrial areas, as well as northern seaports, and territory held by the Wehrmacht in northwestern Europe following the fall of France. Most such RAF attack bombers lifted from Alconbury after dark. The night raids infuriated the Germans even more, who attacked the base several more times, always striking at night, never having the precise coordinates and never hitting more than a single aircraft each time.

In January 1942, a month after Hitler had made the stupidest move of World War II - unnecessarily declaring war on the United States - the RAF turned the base over to the United States Eighth Air Force which immediately re-established itself as the Eighth Bomber Command.

“Eight Bomber” launched its first raid in northwestern Europe on July fourth, 1942, as a twenty-year-old Captain Charles C. Kegelman led a squadron of A-20 Bostons to attack several Nazi-held airfields in the Netherlands. While over his target at De Koog, a Dutch town on the North Sea, the right propeller of Kegelman’s Douglas Boston was torn off by German anti-aircraft fire. Further hits caused damage to his right wing, and fire began on the engine.

Kegelman's aircraft lost altitude rapidly, descended to earth and even bounced twice off the terrain of Nazi-occupied Holland. While flying away from his target on one engine, Kegelman opened fire on the flak tower that had shot him. Through outstanding airmanship, Kegelman forced his aircraft to climb, nursed it to several hundred meters, flew at what seemed like barely above the treetops, made the channel, descended to a few dozen meters above water level, was astonished to see that he still had fuel, and guided his battered bomber back to Alconbury. It was a hell of a first day for his unit. Captain Kegelman was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross on a week later. It was the first DSC earned by a member of the Eighth Air Force in World War II, but far from the last.

Chapter 11

USA – June 1948

One week after her recruitment, Tommy – or Thomasina – Olson was at Westover Air Base, the sprawling facility east of Springfield, Massachusetts. The base had opened in 1940. It had become America’s busiest air terminal during the war and retained that status in 1948.

In her first twelve hours on the ground in Massachusetts, she completed her physical and met with a dozen other of Mr. Forsythe’s recruits, including Glenn Taylor and Victor Marino. There were two other female aviators. The women tended to keep to themselves.

A day later, the whole group of new recruits departed on a civilian C-54, headed for Europe. The aircraft stopped in Newfoundland and then headed out over a six-hour, fifteen-hundred mile stretch of the Atlantic Ocean until it eventually landed in the Azores.

After a one-hour rest for food and fuel, the travelers and their cargo flew two more hours to Rhein-Main, south of Frankfurt, the airfield from which the Hindenburg and other German Zeppelins had flown to and from the United States. The C-54 touched down in a violent morning electric storm during which the plane was hit by lightning. Water started leaking into the cockpit and the entire instrument panel failed. There were two dozen planes on approach and radar was intermittent because of the heavy rain. From the cockpit, visibility was zero and so was the ceiling. Radio chatter was edgy and borderline frantic as several aircraft were below three thousand feet, all converging on the same approach. All talk in the Flying Fortress ceased. Neither the pilot, USAF Captain Brian Beatty, nor the co-pilot could see the runway until the C-54’s wheels bounced on it.

There the recruited pilots were subdivided into specific assignments. Not surprisingly, Tommy was the only female in her final group. Her next stop would be Fassberg, an old Luftwaffe base in lower Saxony, now in the British Zone, that the RAF had now pressed into service.

Fassberg had its own history. An airfield was secretly established there in 1934 by Hermann Göring and camouflaged. Since Germany was not allowed to possess an air force under the rules of the Treaty of Versailles, the airfield – in the middle of a forest - was kept secret. During the World War, the Luftwaffe used the field to fly and hide Junkers, Heinkels and Messerschmitts.

In April 1945, the airfield was overrun by the British Army and subsequently used by the Royal Air Force. Because of a shortage of British personnel able to fly both C-47s and C-54s, a few American pilots were also flying British planes in and out of Germany.

Three new pilots were bound for Fassberg, at least to start their tour: Tommy Olson, Glenn Taylor, and Victor Marino. The trio bonded quickly, Olson and Taylor in particular. They arrived late on June sixth and took shifts the next morning, flying either as pilots or copilots.

Taylor drew the assignment of flying with Olson. The first time he saw a female headed toward the cockpit with him, he was skeptical. “So? How does a lady know how to fly?” he asked as they buckled in.

“I learned on airplanes,” she said. “How about you?”

“Which ones? Pipers? Crop dusters?”

“Let’s get this out of the way fast, Mr. Taylor. I flew air transport during the war. C-47s and C-54s. B-17s, B-26s and B-29s. I flew in heavy weather and I flew in God’s bright sunshine. I ferried new planes long distances from factories to military bases and departure points across the country. I tested newly overhauled planes and I towed targets over Oklahoma, Texas and Utah to give halfwit ground and air gunners training shooting. That’s with live ammunition, amigo, sometimes launched into the sky by dumb privates who couldn’t hit the ocean from the end of a pier. So when you ask me what I can fly, Mr. Taylor, hell! There’s nothing I can’t fly! Got it?”

After a moment, Taylor’s expression changed, as did his skepticism.

“Yeah. Got it,” he said. “Let’s go up!”

Sometimes the working distinction between pilot and co-pilot was vague, particularly while in the air. It was evident to all three new arrivals that the situation was hard-pressed and understaffed. There was a single mess hall at Fassberg and it ran twenty-four hours a day, staffed by German workers and “DPs,” displaced persons from the war. There were about eight million of them in the wreckage of the world war. The DP’s who worked at Fassberg and Tempelhof wore gritty old U.S. Army overalls that had been died black. The DPs had bonded into their own subgroups by language – Slovak, Hungarian, Polish, and German. Crews were flying three and four shifts a day, shuttling supplies to French, British, and American military bases in the occupied zones, barely spending a half-hour in Berlin before it was time to bring a plane back.

It was common to see an aviator come into the mess hall and fall asleep over his food. Tommy noticed two other women in the larger group that was already on duty. They, too, were ATC veterans and looked tired and haggard.

Olson, Taylor, and Marino all held junior officers’ rank. They ate together and shared notes on their flights, not the least of which were warnings about Yaks.

“The Yaks are killers. Dumbass commie cowboys in the sky,” said an American major named Elmer Haley, a U.S. Army man, who broke into their conversation. “Reckless! Stay as clear of them as you can. We already had fatalities in April when one of those Russian em-effs nicked the wing of a Limey commercial flight, a Viking, on approach to Gatow.”

“I heard about that,” Lt. Glenn Taylor said.

The major also had other stories to tell. Three weeks earlier, three Americans had died when a C-47 flew off course into a mountainside in heavy fog in the Soviet Zone. The United States was still trying to get the bodies back as well as the wreckage. The Soviets were being their usual uncooperative selves. Rumor had it that the C-47 had been harassed by a Yak, same as the Viking in April.

Further rumor had it that one of the dead Americans was a German-born civilian who had been in the employ of the CIA. Had Soviet intelligence known who was in the aircraft? The question remained unanswered.

“How the hell long can this go on?” Tommy Olson asked.

“Not long at all,” Major Haley said. “Look guys, I know you just flew in, but do the goddamn math. This can’t succeed. It’s just a bargaining chip. Doomed to failure. A publicity stunt designed to keep the newspapers and the politicians happy. It’ll all be over in a month, and you can go home.”

“I enlisted for six months, minimum,” Marino said.

“Me too,” Glenn Taylor said

“I committed for a year,” Tommy Olson said.

The major laughed. “You’ve all been snookered. Shame on you all,” he said. “Should have stayed home, the bunch of you. Washington will sell us out. You’ll be here when everyone else is gone and you’ll be learning to speak Russian.”

Major Haley eyed the pilots from one to the next. “Who recruited you gullible kiddies? A guy named ‘Forsythe’?” he asked. “Said he worked for the US Air Force?”

Taylor, Marino, and Olson admitted that had been the case.

“Yeah, right,” said Major Haley. “Listen up, there isn’t any son of a bitch named Forsythe. You might as well be flying for Air Easter Bunny. The USAF might be signing your pay stub, but you’re working for some kind of spook operation out of northern Virginia. Get it?”

The fliers looked at the major with a lack of comprehension.

“Ah, but what the hell? You’re here now,” Major Haley said.  “Do what you’ve been hired to do and try to stay alive. Make of it what you can.”

The major rose from his chair and, with a laugh, left the table, leaving the fliers to look at each other with confusion. Another incident that perplexed them followed a few nights later.

Taylor and Olson, decided to have dinner together off the Tempelhof campus. They found a restaurant that was doing business two blocks away, walked in wearing their uniforms and sat down. The place was moderately crowded and most of the diners were German.

They found a table and seated themselves, aware that the conversation level in the room had started to drop as soon as they walked in. They picked up a one-page menu that was on their table. Abruptly, two men dining at the next table put down their tableware, left money to pay, made a grand gesture of standing. Then they walked out.

Another table did the same. Then another. Many glowering, reproachful looks were thrown their way as the restaurant emptied. Within minutes, the place was empty.

Tommy Olson and Glenn Taylor exchanged a glance.

“I don’t think they like us,” Olson said with Montana understatement.

“Roger that,” Taylor said. “In fact, I’d say they hate us.”

Olson thought it through. “If we’re here to help them, why do they hate us?” she asked.

Taylor had no answer, nor did the waiter who appeared and ignored the question in favor of taking their order. “But why?” Olson asked again as they walked back to Tempelhof, still outside the secure zone within the airfield.

“It’s complicated,” Major Haley said in passing the next day when Olson posed the same question. “First we bomb ‘em, then we arrived to save them from Bolshevism. That’s a tricky one to wrap one’s head around isn’t it? Hey, you flying today?” Haley asked. The skies were turbulent with thunderstorms. Gatow was closed and half the Tempelhof runs were backed up.

“Four trips from Wiesbaden and back. My section is loading cargo now.”

“Who are you co-piloting with?”

“Taylor, sir.”

“Good, good. Keep it moving,” Haley said. “And if you know any other lady pilots back home who’d like to get in on all this fun, send ‘em a Western Union. We could use ‘em.”

Neither Olson, nor Taylor nor Marino cared for Major Haley. They weren’t unhappy or surprised when they never saw him again. General Clay didn’t like his attitude and had had him reassigned to Alaska. His duties shifted to another major, this one named Robert Pickford who had quietly arranged for the re-assignments.

Chapter 12

Cambridge, England – June 1948

Conveniently for Bill Cochrane in Cambridge, there was an active pub at each end of his block. Less conveniently, after a few weeks in the city and having explored every watering hole in the proximity of the university, both Bill and Laura settled on a favorite pub ten minutes farther afield, one named “The Hero of the Thames.”

The pub had its own quirky history. An oarsman from London had won a sculling race on the Thames before moving to Cambridge in the middle of the nineteenth century with his much younger wife who had been a model for artists in France. The rower requested all his friends’ postal items should be addressed to "The Hero of the River Thames, King Street, Cambridge.”

His friends complied.

After the man’s death, a public house – food and drink – was established at his former address. His souvenirs and oars, his trophies and clothing, plus risqué drawings of his wife never left the building. They served as décor. A century later, the pub retained its nineteenth-century interior and continued at the location where the oarsman lived.

Bill and Laura relaxed into their summer and took several local trips to see the English countryside, as well as to visit London. Cochrane became a regular at “The Hero,” especially evenings after dinner, maybe two or three times a week, for an hour or two each visit.

He fell into conversation with the locals and members of the university community, a pint or two of lager smoothing – or inciting – the conversation for all. For Bill Cochrane, it was an excellent way to get the feel of local public opinion and pick up on the latest rumors that were in the newspapers or on the BBC.

Being close to the university, the pub was a melting pot of left-wing and right-wing opinion. Taking advice from Polonius, Cochrane gave all men his ear and few men his voice. Laura knew that such activities were part of his job and gave him plenty of latitude to drink lager and listen. He frequented the bar by himself on more nights than Laura joined him. His wife was content to stay home, watch and play with their daughter, and read after their child had been put to bed.

At the pub, there was plenty to listen to. Cambridge was an epicenter of left-of-center opinion in the U.K. Cochrane was spared none of it. Nor did he wish to be. Listening and engaging in conversation with local people was an integral part of a spy’s duties, part of having his ear to the ground, even when not actually “working.”

Much of what was now discussed, amidst the fog of cigarette smoke, the clatter of glassware, the aroma of grilled sausages or shepherd’s pie, and the clank of pub glassware, was Berlin and the question of German reunification. And what better place on earth was there for people who talked too much than a pub?

The political consensus in the pub was clear: the Western Occupied Zone of Germany would become its own country, aligned with Western Europe, much as world leaders were now hinting. The Eastern Soviet-occupied Zone would become a nation to itself.  But if West Germany was to become its own country, many argued, then Berlin, located more than a hundred miles from the border between zones, could no longer be the capital of the Western entity. Instead, the smaller city of Bonn, the birthplace of Beethoven, was now discussed as a potential provisional capital. During the Second World War, Bonn had been positioned strategically on the Rhine, which formed a barrier to easy assault into Westphalia from the west. But the U.S. 1st Infantry Division captured the city in early March 1945.

“Europe should be left for the Europeans,” one pub patron informed Bill Cochrane one evening when Laura was not present. “The war has been over for three years. Time for America to go home. Cheerio!”

“Unfortunately, many of us cannot ‘go home,’ as you phrased it,” Cochrane replied. “They’re buried in European soil, the soil upon which they bled and died while pushing Naziism back to where it came from.”

“Yes, very good and I knew you’d say that,” the fellow said. “But Europe does not need to be rescued. ‘Yankee, go home,’ and all that. No hard feelings, mate. Just time for you to leave.”

“Are you talking about me personally or the influence of my country?” Cochrane asked.

“Perhaps both, old sport.”

“Only to be invited back in another twenty years for the third time in this century?” Cochrane thought to respond. Thought to respond but didn’t.

The overweight, blustery, red-cheeked barman, interceded. “Billy,” he said to the patron. “Why don’t you go over to that table with your Bolshevik friends, sit down, and for God’s sake shut up?” A beat, then, “Or do I need to come around the bar, grab you by the back of your belt and the scruff of your unwashed neck, and help you find a place to land?” the barman suggested, his dark eyes narrowing.

Cochrane smirked.  Business in the public houses had returned in the evenings, and men like the burly barman were again able to make a living, serving brews, pub grub, food for thought, and political arguments. But, as always, there were limits to any barman’s patience.

“Okay. I’m going,” the patron said after a moment’s reflection. “Cheers,” he said to Cochrane as he turned.

“Have a pleasant evening,” Cochrane answered. “Cheers to you, too.”

Bill and the barkeeper exchanged a look. The patron went to his suggested seat. The table was indeed filled with noisy, local lefties, one of whom wore a cap with a red star. Bemused, Cochrane noted it briefly, then turned away and for the first time, exchanged a conversation with the barman that extended beyond an order for food or drink. “Sorry he sat down,” the barman said sotto voce to Cochrane. “Once a week I enjoy a good fight, what?”

“Don’t let me keep you from your fun,” Cochrane said.

The barman laughed and offered a hand. “I’m Edward,” he said.

“I’m Bill,” Cochrane said. They shook.

That quickly, an acquaintance took root as a new friendship. “Don’t mind me, sir,” Edward continued. “This is my bar. I can say what I like. What can I draw for you?”

“A pint of pale ale. Whichever you like.”

“I only have one, sir,” Edward said, mustering a belated smile and a sly wink. “So that one’s my preference. Brewed locally. Try one on the house.”

“I accept your generous offer, Edward.”

And so it often went.

While the political orientation of the patrons oriented from middle left to far left, a staunch alternative point of view was frequently held by Edward.

Edward was a latter-day monarchist, a loyal Tory, and supporter of his king, George VI. He had served as a junior officer in the Royal Navy during the war and was happy to remind anyone about it. He had a portrait of George and Queen Mary behind the bar. Edward kept his views under the counter with many of the patrons, but instincts told him that since Cochrane was an American, Cochrane must have agreed with him.

“Bloody Russians,” Edward said to Cochrane one evening, glancing at a headline on a copy of that day’s Telegraph that lay on the counter of the pub. “They’ll damned well take anything you give them, and they’ll try to take anything you don’t.”

Cochrane grinned. “I can’t say I disagree with you, Edward,” Cochrane said.

Increasingly in The Hero of The Thames, the subject was Berlin and the current Russian blockade of the city. It was hard to avoid, either going forward or looking at recent postwar events. If there was a potential catalyst for another world war, this was it.

Joseph Stalin was unhappy with the terms of the Yalta agreement and was happy to let the world know it.

“Stalin’s gone loco over Berlin,” muttered Edward to Cochrane one evening in June, out of the earshot of the other paying customers. There was no shortage of Stalin apologists in the place. “Well, the old commie bastard can go bugger himself, don’t you think, sir?”

“I’m inclined to agree with you, Edward,” Cochrane answered amiably but with a perfectly dry expression. “And I do as always admire your way with words.”

“Very good, sir,” the barman answered with a laugh. “Let me draw a pint for you. On the house once again.”

By this time Cochrane had taken a measure of Edward as an impulsive and warm-hearted fellow who liked having people around him. So what if he was an intellectual primitive? Cochrane had dealt with far worse before and tended to concede that the barkeeper made valid points, even when Cochrane might not fully agree with him.

Edward didn’t even realize that Cochrane had turned him into his own small source. Often Edward tipped him off as to who among his drinking companions was pink and who was flaming crimson, who worked for the university, who was on the local police force, and who was a “visiting professor” from a Soviet bloc country.

There was no shortage of economists in The Hero: Marxists, Keynesians, primitives, socialists, post-socialists, and free-market capitalists. It made for lively arguments, at least one of which ended with a Keynesian and a capitalist stepping outside and exchanging blows on a balmy night in June. Edward followed them out with a half-bucket of dirty ice water, cursed them out with some language left over from his time in military service, and cooled them down with one accurate toss of the bucket.

Then came the announcement by Soviet authorities that the autobahn, the highway connecting Western Germany to Berlin, would be closed indefinitely.

“For long-term repairs,” said an East German spokesman.

“No way in hell the East German Communists are doing this on their own, don’t you think, sir?” Edward remarked to Cochrane on the same evening. “Closing the autobahn? They wouldn’t dare!”

“Of course not,” Cochrane agreed. “Stalin is sitting in the Kremlin pulling strings. His German puppets in the Eastern Zone do exactly as instructed.”

“A lot of them are former Nazis, the East German Reds,” Edward said in a low voice. “Flipped completely after the war. Throw away Mein Kampf and line up at the bookseller for Das Capital because some new comrade is buttering the stale bread. Disgusting, don’t you think, sir?”

Cochrane responded with a nod from his usual seat at the bar, keeping an eye on the whole place via the chipped mirror behind Edward.  For a moment Edward’s gaze drifted away. He surveyed his clientele in an unfocused way, as if deciding which ones he liked and which ones he might prefer to throw out the front door. Then his attention came back to Cochrane.

“Queer new world, what?” Edward asked.

“Indeed it is,” Cochrane allowed. “But it’s the only one we are left with.”

The next day, Russian labor crews, supervised by armed soldiers, also tore up most of the railroad tracks making them unusable, also for “repairs.” The same afternoon, the Soviet Union and their East German puppets officially barred all barge and rail traffic from entering West Berlin, a blockade quickly enforced by Soviet ships positioned at the mouths of the German rivers that led to the North Sea. The Rivers Havel and Spree flowed to Berlin, making the city accessible by water through a series of canals. Now the Russians had blocked that, too.

“Stalin must think that he can starve Berlin out,” Edward muttered at the end of the bar with Cochrane that same evening in June. “That must be what he’s thinking. There’s no way enough food gets to Berlin without trains and lorries and barges.”

“Quite right,” Cochrane said.

“The old commie bastard,” Edward said. “He figures keep the people hungry and angry and they’ll demand that Britain and American leave.”

“And the French as well,” Cochrane commiserated.

“No one gives a bloody damn about the worthless French,” Edward said. “When they return all the English bodies buried in Normandy after two wars, maybe I’ll feel sorrier for them. Starve everybody out, what?” he concluded in disgust.

“I’m sure Comrade Stalin has a lot of faith in starvation as a political hammer,” Cochrane answered, “since he starved to death two million Ukrainian peasants in the last two decades.”

“Very true, sir,” Edward said. There was a pause and then Edward continued. “I get the notion that you share my dislike of those Russian bastards,” he said.

“I’ll be clear, Edward,” Cochrane said. “I have nothing against Russia or its people. They sacrificed greatly during the war and the Russian people lead difficult lives. But a lot has changed since 1945 when they were our uneasy allies. Currently, I’m deeply suspicious and cynical about the intentions of their leaders. Let’s leave it at that.”

“We agree, sir,” Edward said. “It’s good to have you in here each evening. It would be lonely if you stopped coming.”

Chapter 13

Germany – Soviet Occupied Eastern Zone 1945 -1948

First Lieutenant Otto Kern from Leipzig served with the Wehrmacht Ninth Army from his enlistment in 1941 until 1945 when it was under the command of General Theodor Busse. Before the war, he had studied electricity and electrical engineering at Humboldt University in Berlin in the late 1930s. There he had met a young German woman from Berlin named Teresia. They drew close to each other from the first day they met. They were both quiet socialists who kept their views to themselves. Teresia had studied electricity, too.

They spent evenings in the rathskellers frequented by students, drinking and singing seditious songs. Some of their rowdier friends chanted workers’ slogans aloud in English, German, and Russian. All Hail The Great Stalin. Alle begrüßen den großen Stalin! Vse privetstvuyut velikogo stalina! – almost daring the pro-Nazi students to come and get them. After August of 1939, there were fewer such taunts until there were none. But the memory had imprinted in Otto Kern’s brain. It would stay with him throughout the war and beyond.

Teresia and Otto married in 1940. They had a son named Hans who was born in March 1941, a week before Otto reported for active duty to fight in the East against the Bolshevism he had once mocked. He was assigned to the Wehrmacht’s Ninth Army, which eventually advanced on Moscow and dug in with heavy fighting west of the Russian capital.

In 1944, after Stalingrad and after the tide of the war had turned against Nazi Germany, General Busse’s Ninth Army engaged the Soviets moving westward toward Berlin. By now the Ninth was part of Army Group Vistula and rather than attacking the Soviet capital, they were charged with defending the German capital.

This army group was put together from elements of Army Group A, which had been shattered in the Soviet Vistula-Oder Offensive; Army Group Centre, similarly pounded in the East Prussian Offensive; and a variety of ragtag formations assigned from areas considered lost. It was formed to protect Berlin from the Soviet armies advancing from the Vistula River. More than half a million soldiers were part of Army Group Vistula. Hitler personally assigned Heinrich Himmler to command the defense of Berlin. Not surprisingly, Himmler was not particularly good at a military assignment.

Troops that the Soviets did not obliterate eventually crossed the Elbe at Tangermünde and surrendered to the United States Army. Lt. Kern was among these weary soldiers; weaponless, dazed, but somehow still staggering forward, expecting to be shot at any moment. Lt. Kern lost parts of three fingers on his left hand from battlefield injuries and suffered four other wounds to his flesh and collarbone against the Red Army.

He landed in the Bad Kreuznach location of The Rheinwiesenlager, Rhine meadow camps, a group of nineteen camps built in Allied-occupied Germany by the U.S. Army. The camps held close to two million surrendered Wehrmacht and SS personnel from April until September 1945.

Prisoners were designated as “disarmed enemy forces,” not prisoners of war. General Eisenhower made the decision in March 1945. Not classifying the captured soldiers as POWs lessened the logistical problems associated with accommodating so many prisoners of war mandated by the Geneva Convention governing their treatment.

Deaths from dehydration and exposure to the weather elements were rampant. No structures stood inside the prison compounds. Rain and cold were common, as were rot, scurvy, and questionable sanitation. The delivery of food and water was haphazard.

American guards assigned Lt. Kern to a kitchen unit where he was employed cutting carrots and potatoes. He stayed out of trouble, struggling through his tasks despite his mangled left hand. Every day the Americans came and took German soldiers suspected of being in the SS and gave them to the Russians. Often they turned over prisoners who complained or were difficult. Kern lived in daily terror.

In December of 1946, the Americans transferred him to a French camp where two guards used a hammer to knock two gold teeth out of his mouth. From the dental injuries, an infection set in that was untreated. Two days later, arbitrarily, the French jettisoned hundreds of prisoners with no explanation.

French soldiers released Kern in Leipzig with several dozen other men, all still wearing their tattered uniforms from the war. They received no money and no provisions. There were just told to leave. They did. Kern still had his military papers. He folded them carefully in a piece of scrap cloth and then placed them in the pocket of his distressed Wehrmacht jacket. The papers represented his past. He tried to not lose them, but he was just as happy to try to forget about them. He had never thought of himself as a soldier. He reasoned that his skill had been survival, the innate sense to say the right thing or be in the right place, more than actual combat.

The group of Germans dispersed in different directions. On Kern’s way through the city to where his home had once been, two East German teenage soldiers, new recruits, young men too young to have served, laughed at him and called him ein Verlierer. A loser. They spit at him, beat him, and stole his overcoat.

British and American bombers had attacked Leipzig and its factories relentlessly in 1943 and 1944. The city remained partially in ruins. But the subways and trams were running and a few street markets had opened. There was a special food stop for prisoners returning from POW camps because no one wanted them in the restaurants in their dirty uniforms and emaciated appearance. Lt. Kern talked his way into this venue. He showed the tattered shreds of his military papers. This was enough to enable him to obtain food for no money.

Kern found his way home to where his mother had lived. He came to the door of what had once been her home. Half of the building seemed to have been destroyed. He knocked.

Frau Kern opened the door and stood before her son. Both mother and son thought they were seeing ghosts. They fell into each other’s arms. She brought him into the home he had left in 1940 when he had married. There were days of tears. Kern’s father had worked at a Messerschmidt factory in Leipzig. Bombs from an American air raid had killed him in 1943.

Otto Kern slowly settled in and decompressed. He realized he had a decision to make: kill himself and join so many of his friends and compatriots in death? Or pick up the few pieces that were left to him and go on? It was not an easy decision. He spent days thinking about it.

Chapter 14

Berlin - June 1948

To the Western Allies, withdrawal from Berlin was the most attractive option. Just as Eisenhower had described Berlin as a political target, not a strategic one, many in the West were ready to hand over the city to the Soviets.

Using military force to strike back against the Soviet blockade seemed unwise. Berlin, the wisdom went, was within the Soviet sphere of influence, whether the Western Allies liked it or not. It was not an area where Stalin could back down. The risk of turning the Cold War into an actual war was enormous. So, the feelings went, let Stalin have Berlin and all the responsibilities that that came with it.

Whatever the motivations, the Soviet intent was now clear. A successful blockade of Berlin would effectively starve the Western Powers out of Berlin. There was a blemish in Stalin’s plan to isolate the city, however. Although the land and water routes had never been negotiated and depended on Soviet “goodwill,” a concept that had quickly become a self-contradiction after the war, the air routes had been thoroughly hashed out. On November 30, 1945, the victorious Allies had agreed in writing that there would be three twenty-mile-wide air corridors providing free access to Berlin. Additionally, unlike a force of tanks and trucks, the Soviets could not claim that cargo aircraft was a military threat. To keep Berlin alive and part of the city free, meant taking control of the skies.

In Berlin, General Clay looked at the situation and sought to address it as best he could.

West Berlin in the fourth week of June had little more than a month’s supply of food and six weeks’ worth of coal, the fuel that generated all the electricity in the wounded city. If the supplies could not be flown in fast enough, Soviet help would eventually be needed to prevent starvation. There was one thing for certain about Soviet humanitarian assistance: it would not be forthcoming.

General Clay contacted Secretary of Defense Forrestal who told him to talk to General LeMay. “I’ll do that today, Mr. Secretary,” General Clay answered. But before talking to General LeMay, Clay phoned his friend from the war, British Air Commodore Reginald Waite. Speaking as trusted friends on a secure line, they had a constructive conversation. It was at this time that he was also delighted to learn that the Royal Air Force had already quietly been operating an airlift in support of British troops in Berlin, the same quiet behind-the-scenes thinking that had appealed to Clay, who had commenced a similar operation. So both men had “lifts” in progress to support their military teams.

“Supplying our troops is one thing, Reginald,” Clay said to his friend. “I don’t know if you’ve ever considered it but supplying the city by air would be a different beast altogether.”

“I’ve considered it,” Waite said. “We’ve discussed it for hours on this end, always trying to be ahead the Soviets. Common sense and almost all of my staff tell me it can’t be done.”

Commodore Waite then revealed something else. Two days before the total Soviet blockade began, Waite alerted RAF Transport Command to the probability that “some form of airlift” into Berlin would shortly be required. On June twenty-third, he had submitted to Major General Edwin Otway Herbert, commander of the British Sector of Berlin, a rough plan for an Anglo-American airlift to sustain the city.

General Herbert listened politely and rejected the idea as “impossible.”

There was a pause on the line as the two men weighed the variants and unpredictability of the current situation

“Reginald, does anything or anyone else tell you something different?” Clay asked.

“Yes,” Commodore Waite answered after a moment. “My guts! My guts tell me it’s not as impossible as it might appear. Let’s speak again late tonight. I want to get out and about by auto and get a gander at Berlin with my own eyes.”

“Excellent idea,” General Clay said. “I’ll do the same.”

The men rang off. After the call, Waite summoned an unmarked open Jeep and driver. He strapped on a pistol, pulled a civilian mackintosh over his uniform. His driver was a six-foot-four British sergeant who also carried a weapon and wore civilian gear. On a rainy Berlin afternoon, they toured the city.

Waite personally saw the effects of the closed canals. Through the rain showers that swept the city that afternoon, he saw that the empty Berlin to Hanover autobahn had been so thoroughly shut down that the Western Sectors of Berlin had been severed from the Allied Zones. They drove past the ruins of the opera house where young prostitutes approached American and British soldiers in uniform and past Brandenburg Gate where homeless beggars congregated. He saw masses of people gathered at the train stations because passenger trains had been stopped. He stepped out, didn’t identify himself, and spoke to average Berliners about what was happening and who was to blame. The Soviets had already begun to spread their lies that the British and the Americans were cutting off food and heat out of spite from the war.

Waite knew that there had been eighteen freight trains a day from the West that brought some coal and equipment to the city. Now they were shut down, too. The Soviets had then embargoed the rest of the needed coal, which had been supplied from the Russian Zone of Eastern Germany. On the streets, the British and the Americans took more blame than Moscow.

Waite returned to his office. He assembled everyone who worked for him. “How many weeks of reserve inventory do we have?” Waite asked his staff. “All of you. Come back with numbers from your departments.”

An answer came back within half an hour. “Three weeks, sir.”

Waite sat up all night with a slide rule and his limitless knowledge of aviation and the aircraft available to him. He calculated the theoretical availabilities of transport aircraft, cargo priorities, fuel availability, pilot access, and load factors. The next day he returned to General Herbert with a more detailed plan filled with figures. He persuaded the General to get him ten minutes with the British Military Governor, Brian Robertson. Waite may have been the top man in the British Sector in terms of military presence, but Robertson reported to the prime minister.

Robertson looked the plan over and said he still thought it impossible, but he agreed to discuss the proposals with General Clay. Waite had won a crucial victory but knew that the British and the Americans had to be on the same page if there was to be an attempt to rescue Berlin by air. An MP courier in a Jeep quickly brought the written study from the British headquarters to the American headquarters.

General Clay read through Waite’s project. He liked what he saw. He also discovered that his counterpart, General Sir Brian Robertson, was ready with some concrete numbers. Commodore Waite had calculated the resources required to support the entire city of Berlin. Thus, by the final week of June, at least eighteen days' supply per major food type, and in some types, much more, had been stockpiled. The inventory provided time to build up the ensuing airlift.  In the summer, an airlift just might work. And even if it didn’t, it would push back any retreat from the Soviets and give Western diplomats more time to address the situation in Berlin.

“Would you then be kind enough, Lucius,” Waite asked, “to get on the phone with General Robertson to help me sell him the idea.”

“Sure,” said Clay.

Clay went to work on Robertson to support Waite’s concept of a larger airlift. Waite began to refer to the April lifts as “the Little Lifts.” Now they and their taxpayers were ready for something larger.

Waite and Clay made a cogent case, summoning up much resentment from all parties on the methods the Soviet Union was using to convince Berliners that the Allies were going to abandon them and let them starve and freeze. Not only did the Allies want to move in the humanitarian direction but calling the Soviet bluff would be a bonus. Finally, General Robertson went silent on the phone. Then he said to General Clay, “Okay! I’m with you!”

He telephoned his troops and ordered them to get busy. Then Clay phoned Curtis LeMay. Clay asked General LeMay if it was possible to airlift heavy supplies.

“How heavy? What the hell sort of item?” LeMay asked in his distinctively gruff voice through his usual cloud of stogie exhaust.

“Coal,” said General Clay.

“Coal!” exclaimed LeMay. “What the hell you talking about?”

“Coal to provide electricity to the city. Ivan the Red might want the city dark, but you and I don’t. And I don’t think the American people do either. What do you think, General?”

For a moment, LeMay considered it. Then, “Goddamn! Screw the Russians! We’re American aviators. We can haul anything!” LeMay thundered.

This time, LeMay just may have been right.

Chapter 15

Cambridge – June 1948

It didn’t take long for Cochrane to be lured into matches of darts with his new acquaintances. He became quite good at it, though there were Englishmen there who had been throwing for their entire lives and could defeat him very easily, often taking great glee in doing so.

Once, shortly after arrival, Cochrane allowed himself to be foolishly goaded into an extended match and quickly seemed to be off his game. One of the opponents was a man with a Soviet star on his cap, the type of fellow Cochrane might otherwise have avoided. Bill bought him a pint each time the man won. As the evening progressed, Cochrane’s adversary was drinking for free and only grew louder and more loquacious.

Cochrane’s enthusiasm for his new sport appeared to give way to his common sense after two trips to the gentlemen’s loo and a fifth pint of lager. As it happened, it was a Wednesday. Laura was present that night, having left Caroline in the watch of Mrs. Cameron-Butler, as they did midweek and Sundays. Laura ended up helping Bill home.

Dutifully on the walk, Laura scolded him. He vowed never to again indulge in such youthful foolishness. Secretly, Laura was amused. “Five lagers!” she said to him as they turned the corner onto Orchard Street and were into a few paces of their stroll home. “So unlike you, Bill. What on earth were you thinking?”

He began to laugh. “More than you might imagine,” he said.

Laura suddenly made a realization. “You’re stark sober, aren’t you?” she said.

“Of course, I am. Did you see that fellow I was shooting darts against?”

“Of course, I did. Difficult to not see him.”

He laughed and gave her hand a squeeze.

“That was Egon Henkel, whom our landlady used to lease to,” Cochrane said. “I spotted him last week, sitting off to the side, expounding about Schopenhauer or some other such nonsense. I decided to take an up-close look at him. Draw him into my orbit and some conversation. There’s something wrong with him but I don’t know what it is just yet.”

They reached the front steps to 30 Orchard Street.

“Do you think you can stop working?” she said. “Maybe just once?”

He shrugged. “I’d sure like to try.”

A few days later, Cochrane took Laura and Caroline to lunch again at The Hero of the Thames. As they settled into their table Cochrane saw Edward at the bar in the next room. Once they ordered from the waitress, Cochrane rose to go in and say hello to his new best friend. Edward’s head popped up when he saw Cochrane and his expression changed quickly to one of alarm. Edward followed this with a beckoning gesture of the hand, luring him down to the farthest section of the bar where they might speak without being overheard.

“Are you all right, sir?” Edward asked.

“I’m fine. Is there a problem?” Cochrane answered.

“There was a man looking for you,” Edward said. “Big fellow. Rough. Had a Middle Eastern face. Dark eyes. There was a meanness to them, that and a sly glint. Looked like a security gorilla of some sort.”

“British? American?” Cochrane asked.

“American,” Edward said. “Accent. A strong one like you hear in those Leo Gorcey movies with the young hooligans. Docks of New York and all that.”

“A New York accent?”

“That might have been it.”

“Friendly? Hostile?” Cochrane asked.

“Inquisitive more than anything. A snoop. Asked about you by name. Bill Cochrane. That’s you, correct, sir?”

“That’s me,” Cochrane said.

Cochrane opened his mouth to speak again when Edward beat him to it. “This man says he needs to make contact. He checked Cambridge phone directories and you have no listing.”

“That part’s true. I’ve given my number only to those whom I wish to have it.”

“He said he’d check back with me,” Edward said, getting a little breathless now. “And he said something unusual that he said you’d understand.”

“And what was that?”

“He said you’re ‘a meatball.’”

Cochrane winced, grimaced, and felt a tumbling sensation deep in his gut.

“I know whom we are talking about,” Cochrane said. “Sturdy fellow. A formidable physique. He was once a bodybuilder in Brooklyn. Sound like the man?”

“Yes, it does, sir.” A pause, then, “He said the business was ‘urgent,’ sir.”

“When he returns tell him that he can meet me here. Anything he has to approach me about he needs to discuss in front of my wife.”

“Any danger, sir? We can take precautions as needed.”

“We’ll be fine, Edward,” Cochrane said. “Obviously, the gentleman has some business to discuss. Perhaps you could hold one of the more discreet corner tables.”

“I’d be happy to,” Edward said.

Cochrane turned and surveyed the layout of the bar and the dining area. He pointed to a table in a far corner. “Perhaps that one,” he said, indicating. “That will allow me to sit with my back to the wall, watch the bar and the door, and any other activity in the room.”

“Good choice, sir,” Edward said.

Cochrane returned to the table that he shared that evening with Laura and Caroline. He settled back into his chair. “Your barkeeper friend seemed rather animated,” Laura said, having missed little. “What was that all about?”

“I had a visitor.”

“Uh oh. Who?”

“Irv Goff,” Cochrane said.

Laura nearly choked. She set down her glass. Irv Goff and her husband had been part of a dicey operation in Berlin in 1943 to extricate a person of interest from that city well in advance of the inevitable fall of the city to the Red Army.

“Who’s Irv Goff?” Caroline asked.

“An old friend,” Cochrane said. “Nothing to worry about.”

“‘Old friend’? Ha!” said Laura. “Nothing to worry about, ha again!”

The barmaid was passing. Laura flagged her down and ordered another scotch, this one a double.

Chapter 16

Germany – Soviet Occupied Eastern Zone - June 1948

In his mother’s home, once he returned, Otto Kern slept fourteen hours a day, often waking up shivering or screaming, thinking of friends in the war whom he had seen blown apart. Each day, he and his mother would wander and scour for food, looking through dumpsters used by occupying soldiers or in buildings that had recently collapsed.

Eventually, his mother found some of his old civilian clothes. The clothes no longer fit. They were several sizes too large. Her uncle, an aging, deaf tailor in his eighties, altered Otto’s clothes for him, bringing them down several sizes. He washed his lice-infested, shredded military garb in cold water in the town square, carefully removing his papers, then storing the papers in the breast pocket when the uniform was again dry.

Then Otto went to find his wife and child whom he hasn’t seen since 1941. He brought with him the remnants of his uniform.

The apartment house where they had once lived had been destroyed by bombs and artillery. But Otto asked at several local cafes until he acquired leads. The leads brought him to the door of his wife, a few streets away from where their home had been. When he showed up at the door, Teresia, too, was astonished.

“I thought you were dead,” she said to him.

“I should be. But I’m not.”

They fell into each other’s arms and both sobbed uncontrollably.

Otto Kern now settled in to a shabby apartment where he slept on a hard floor with his wife and son. There was no electricity but they had blankets. They huddled together each night against the cold. Both his wife and son seemed at first like strangers, then as the first two weeks of his return went by, he got to know them again. He also found items in the apartment that disquieted him. One was a set of socks that belonged to a man. There was also a man’s shirt and a pair of shoes. He asked Teresia about these items.

“There was a man who lived here for a few weeks,” she explained. “He brought food and some money. He kept us alive.” She paused. “It was known that I was attached to him. So I was protected. So was your son. I always hoped you’d return,” she said. “But I didn’t think you would.”

“This other man?” Otto asked. “Russian? British? American?”

“No. German. Wehrmacht.”

“Do you wish to leave with him?”

Tearfully, she shook her head. “No,” she answered. “He’s gone. He was a good and decent man,” she said. “Educated. He was trying to get to the West.”

“I’m happy you’re alive.” Kern answered.

“Russian internal security people spotted him one day when he went out for air,” she said. “This was about a month ago. They had been looking for him. They came here and they knocked on my door. Three of them. Huge blond men. Tartars. When I didn’t open it, they kicked the door in. They dragged him downstairs and pulled him out into the street. They shot him. Twice in the head. I still hear his screams. I still hear the silence after the first shot.”

Teresia paused again.

“Then I hear the second shot. I hear the Russians laughing. I later saw pieces of his skull and his brains in the street. I assure you,” she said. “He will not be coming back.”

More weeks went by. Kern took the only job he could find. He worked as an apprentice to a baker for pennies a day and three loaves of bread. His wife, however, found a job as a “hostess” in a bar frequented mostly by East German Army officers, but also by a few noisy, boisterous Russians who talked too much and groped all the women.

Teresia had had a university friend named Nora who was in the anti-Hitler underground at Humboldt University. The two women had exchanged correspondence after the war. The friend was still alive but her husband had been killed in the war. Their home had been destroyed. She had been resettled into a small flat, ground floor, less than two rooms in the Western Sector of Berlin.

For her own safety, Nora wanted people living with her, despite the tiny quarters. With a man and a growing boy in the small quarters, everyone would be safer. The distance was under ninety miles, an easier voyage on foot than going to the Western Sector and having to cross rivers and Allied troop checkpoints.

The family planned to set out to do it on foot, each carrying a small canvas sack. They armed themselves with kitchen knives and planned to leave on a Sunday morning.

But they did not leave in time. East German police accompanied by a Soviet military officer arrived at their door the Friday before their intended departure. The security squad arrested Kern. His new clothes were confiscated. He was forced to put on his old uniform and go with them.

Otto reasoned he was going to be executed and tried to kiss his wife a final time. But the security people pulled him out of the apartment and down the front stairs before he could manage any contact. They took him to a local jail, a damaged railroad car, where he was held for two weeks. Then there was a hearing in a makeshift court in another converted railroad car that sat at the town train station.

Justice was a chancy commodity. Some men were sent back to jail. Some men were sent by train east to fulfill a sentence of hard labor. A few would be freed. Some would be executed at the police barracks across the street. The square was heavily guarded by soldiers. Wives were not allowed to attend their husband’s hearings.

Otto Kern was led into the makeshift courtroom in wrist and ankle chains.

A judge sat on a bench above him. The man looked stern. He spoke with a Russian accent. He wore a Soviet uniform with a red star. But the man was also slight of build and wore spectacles that recalled Trotsky. He wore a brushed mustache that recalled Stalin. Kern took him to be a doctrinaire apparatchik more than soldier. He had heard of the type.

Kern pleaded his case, recounting his university days, his marriage, his young family, and his six years in uniform. The man squinted through his eyeglasses. He looked impatient, disinterested.

“You have military papers?” the magistrate asked.

Kern said he did. He produced the tattered remnants of his only official record.

“Where is your discharge?” the magistrate asked.

Kern told the story of his time in camps, how the Americans had turned him over to the French and how the French had dumped him in Leipzig but were so anxious to get rid of him that they hadn’t given him official discharge papers. That made him an escapee, subject to execution.

The magistrate sniffed in apparent skepticism. He eyed the papers in front of him for several seconds. Then he laughed. Kern was shocked. If there was something humorous in these damnable records, he didn’t know what it could have been.

“You served in the Ninth Army. The Army of the Vistula?” the jurist asked.

“Yes.”

There was a slur to the Russian’s speech. Kern gradually gained the impression that the man may have been drunk.

“Who was your final general?” the judge asked.

“Theodor Busse.”

“Where did you become a prisoner?”

“We surrendered to Eisenhower at the Elbe.”

“Where did you fight earlier in the war?”

“Outside of Moscow.”

“Do you remember the fortification lines set by the Red Army?”

“Not clearly. But the talk was they stretched from Vyazma to Mozhaysk. The actual distance was more than a hundred kilometers.”

“You have an extraordinary memory, soldier.”

Danke, mein Herr.

The magistrate sniffed, blinked twice, and folded the papers. He handed them back to Kern. “I fought against you,” the Russian said. “You were a bloodthirsty and stubborn opponent. What final words do you have to say?” the magistrate asked.

Kern’s heart fell through the soles of his shoes. He was certain he would receive a death sentence. He turned to see if he could catch a glimpse of Teresia and his son outside. But the shades were drawn. He turned back and looked up into the severe, icy-blue Russian eyes.

“Well? I’m waiting! Speak! Address the court of the people,” the Russian said.

Desperately, his mind a jangle of conflicting thoughts, he looked the Russian in the eyes, through the specs, and above the facial hair.

“Alle begrüßen den wunderbaren Stalin!” Kern said. All Hail the Great Stalin. Then in Russian he added the same, “Vse privetstvuyut velikogo stalina!”

Surprised, the magistrate managed a short laugh. “Ha!” Then a second laugh. “Ha! Where did you learn that?”

“From my friends in university many years ago.”

“Which university?”

“Humboldt. In Berlin.”

“I know where Humboldt is. You had friends who were Communists?”

“Yes. Many.”

“Where are they now?”

“I assume they have all been killed. Either by Nazis or air raids. If the Nazis knew they were Communists, they would have been sent to the Russian Front. They may have all died there. I do not know.”

“The magistrate summoned a court clerk. They huddled over an official ledger. The was a low conversation in Russian, then German. Kern guessed that the magistrate was in this job because he could read and write Russian and German.

The magistrate wrote instructions on a flimsy slip of paper.

“Very good,” he said, pleased with himself.

The judge summoned a guard, a tall, thick German who carried a tremendous Luger on his belt. He towered over Kern. The guard came to where Kern stood. The German took Kern roughly by the arm.

“Unlock the prisoner,” the magistrate said.

The guard was surprised and hesitated. Then he obeyed. He removed the irons from Kern’s legs. Then he unlocked and removed the manacles from Kern’s wrists.

Kern looked back up at the bench. The magistrate peered down on him.

“The German People’s Socialist State has made its decision. All hail to our magnificent leaders of the socialist revolution. The People’s Republic of Germany hereby grants you a one-time stipend of five hundred marks, comrade,” the magistrate said. “You may take this draft to the state bank tomorrow. Present it. You will receive your cash. Otherwise, you are free to go. These are your new discharge papers verified by this court,” the judge said, handing across the desk a set of new documents. “Please leave.”

Incredulous, Kern opened his mouth to thank the judge. But the guard jerked him backward and removed him from the courtroom before he could say anything. He pushed him along in front of him and moved him through the heavily guarded front entrance to the square where Teresia waited. In his other hand, he carried the wrist and ankle chains.

There in the public square, ex-soldier Kern reunited with his wife, a comparatively free man. The next day Kern presented himself to the bank to receive his stipend, which broke down to the equivalent of twenty American dollars for each year he had served the state.

But Otto and Teresia had made their decision and knew they could not count on being so lucky again. The following day, Monday, they started out on the road that led north. They carried two bags of food and clothing and their child and they set out on foot for the long walk to Berlin.

They arrived a week later. Nora, Teresia’s old friend, welcomed them. She mentioned that a male friend of hers named Wolfgang, a former soldier, had been hired by the Americans to unload cargo at Tempelhof. Nora introduced Kern to Wolfgang. The rumor was that the Americans were engaged in some new operation that would immensely increase traffic at Tempelhof. They urgently needed more strong young men with clear and honorable discharge papers.

“I have new discharge papers,” Kern said. “The court gave me a fresh set.”

“Go tomorrow at dawn with my friend Wolfgang,” she said. “He will introduce you to the right people.”

Otto slept on the floor, huddled together with his wife and son. He rose the next morning and joined Henrik on the one-kilometer walk to the airfield. He did not return for fifteen hours. Teresia was beside herself with worry.

But when Kern did arrive, he had a bag of food and a smile. He was also covered with white powder. The Americans had hired him to unload cargo and had given him the bag of surplus food to take home. The white powder was flour. He was asked to return the next day and be part of a permanent squad of workers.

It wasn’t much, but it was enough to save three lives.

Chapter 17

Berlin - June 1948

On June 26, 1948, an American pilot in his mid-twenties, Air Force Lieutenant William Lafferty, returned to Rhein-Main from a C-47 trip to Tempelhof Airfield in Berlin. He had flown supplies to American service personnel stations in Berlin. Ordinary, good-old-USA-style stuff: food, cigarettes, American newspapers and magazines, liquor, soft drinks, snacks, and beer.

Tempelhof lay in the center of the American Zone. Big and sprawling, it had once been a bowl-shaped, grass-landing field and before that, a parade ground. It had been built by the Nazi regime in the mid-thirties. In keeping with Nazi philosophy, it later became huge and grand.

Its main building was thought to be the largest building in the world, so large that it housed all the airport facilities plus, during the war, and an underground hospital and a Messerschmitt factory. The good news was that the runway was five thousand feet. The bad news was that the runway surface was pierced steel, sometimes jagged, and always tough on tires. One project that was underway was to replace and reinforce Tempelhof’s landing strips with Marston Mat: PSP, perforated steel planking. The tough new matting material was tough enough to accommodate larger heavier planes.

Tempelhof was often beset by some of Germany’s worst weather. British and American pilots knew Gatow for its ease of access. The approach was clear, even on days with cloud cover, rain, or impaired ocular visibility. A morceau de gateau, the pilots called it, a piece of cake. Postwar, RAF flights as well as British civilian and diplomatic flights would fly from Wunstorf to the British airfield at Gatow in southwestern Berlin, west of the Havel River, in the borough of Spandau. Gatow was a former Luftwaffe training college and later a fighter base. The only quirk: right next door, after 1946, was a Russian military airfield, Staaken, with a runway of similar size and shape. A flight navigational error could drop a Western pilot down on a Soviet airstrip, with all the complications that such a misstep might include.

The shortcomings for the “piece of cake” were many. The base had never been designed for cargo. The off-loading area was no more than bricks cobbled into sand. Nor was there any rail link. But Gatow was also positioned next to the Havel Lake, which connected to the Havel River which connected to the River Spree and canals that allowed small barges to reach Berlin.

Lafferty was on the tarmac heading for some late food, a shower, and bed when he was intercepted by a highly agitated operations officer. “See that Gooney Bird over there?” the officer asked with a jerk of a thumb, indicating another C-47 being loaded.

“Yeah? What of it?”

“Command wants you to take it to Tempelhof.”

“What? I just got back from Berlin!” Lafferty protested.

“Then you’ll know the route.”

“It’s too dark.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

Lafferty continued to protest. The base commander, Colonel Walter Lee, appeared out of the stark shadows. Colonel Lee walked directly in front of Lafferty and blocked his path.

“Problem here, Lieutenant?”

“No, sir!” Lafferty answered, saluting sharply.

“Good!” The colonel informed Lafferty in no-uncertain terms that the junior officer was making a return trip as soon as a cargo entirely of food and coal was packed in the second plane.

“Now, find a co-pilot and get your ass on the move up into that pitch-black sky and wear a smile as you do it!” Lee ordered.

“Yes, sir!”

Lt. Lafferty and the operations officer quickly stepped into the canteen. There they found an aviator who had arrived in Germany days earlier. The flyer was finishing a sandwich and looked up. Lafferty and the operations officer moved to the man’s table and sat down. “Hey, flyboy,” Lafferty began. “Want to go to Berlin?”

Glenn Taylor, who had been repairing engines in Virginia two weeks earlier, looked up.

“Sure. When?”

“Right now.”

“You jerking me around?” Taylor asked, startled and with a laugh. He glanced at his Timex. It was almost ten PM. He looked back up and could see circles under Lafferty’s eyes.

“Nope,” Lafferty said.

“You know how to fly a C-47?” the operations officer asked.

Taylor leaned confidently back in his chair. “Sure do.”

“We’ll see,” Lafferty said. “Get some gear. What’s your handle, flyboy?”

“Glenn. Glenn Taylor. My friends call me ‘Nutsy.’”

A pause, then. “I just recruited a co-pilot named ‘Nutsy’?” Lafferty asked.

“Too late now, Lieutenant,” Taylor answered.

Thirty minutes later Lafferty and his excited co-pilot lifted off in the second C-47. They disappeared into the night sky over the ominously dark Soviet-controlled landscape of the Eastern Zone of Germany. Their cargo was coal for power generators and flour for bakers to provide bread for Berliners. Power and food.

They arrived in Berlin airspace in misty two-AM darkness, took a couple of bounces on the uneven runway, and came to a halt.

An all-night crew of DP’s unloaded the plane. Lafferty and Taylor stood by and watched, fueling themselves with black coffee and day-old bread. A maintenance ground crew that spoke Polish refueled the plane and checked the wheels and tires. Lafferty found a half-empty pack of Old Golds in his pocket. Ten smokes remained. He flipped the pack to the crew leader as they worked. They exchanged a thumbs-up gesture.

The American flyers took off again in the early dawn, planning to return to Rhein-Main. For the first time, Taylor saw a six-story building that they had not seen but had cleared by mere feet when they had landed.

“Was that thing there when we came in?” Taylor asked.

“If I had hit it, you wouldn’t have had to ask, brother.”

“What’s the safe clearance?”

“Between six inches and twenty-four feet.”

Taylor looked down as they passed over it.

“Great. Damn. Are those skid marks on the roof?”

“Most likely.”

“Goddamn!” said Glenn Taylor. Taylor started to laugh. “You know in ‘45 after the fighting stopped, I flew over the Himalayas a few times and didn’t come that close.”

“Smart of you.”

“I thought so.”

“I’m falling fucking asleep,” Lafferty said. “Want to take the controls while I snooze?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“Stay in the corridor. If we stray over Red territory there could be trouble. They send Yaks up sometimes. We don’t need it.”

“Yeah, sure. I’ve heard,” said Taylor. “Still got any smokes?”

“Always,” Lafferty said, handing over another half-pack. “There’s always a couple of packs that fall out of cargo, you know?”

“Got it.”

They flew for more than an hour in a freezing, droning aircraft over Soviet airspace, Taylor navigating one small morning thunderstorm and two ferocious wind shears, one each on the front end and back end of the squall. Happy to be in the air again, wide awake, it was all in a night’s work.

Soviet air traffic control was silent over Soviet-occupied territory. The next radio voice they heard was in English from the Western Zone, but it was unwelcome. USAF air traffic control had diverted their flight to Wiesbaden, the American base twenty-five miles further. A few minutes later, the sky turned pale pink with the beckoning dawn. Awake again, Lafferty tried to protest but ground control was hearing none of it.

Exhausted, both now nearly broken with cold and fatigue, they finally set down their Gooney Bird in Wiesbaden as dawn turned the tarmac pink. They stepped out and found themselves facing another colonel, another base commander.

“Welcome, men!” was the first thing the young pilots heard from Air Force Col. Bertram C. Harrison, commander of the 60th Troop Carrier Group. Harrison had a wide smile. “See any goddamn Reds up there?”

“Didn’t see anyone except my co-pilot, sir,” Lafferty said.

Nutsy Taylor kept quiet for a moment.

“No Yaks?” the colonel asked.

“None,” Lafferty affirmed.

“You? New guy, you seen any Russians?”

“Zero Yaks, sir. Just the right number.”

A pause from Colonel Harrison, then, “You guys know what you just did? Didn’t you get a briefing?”

“No. They just sent us to Tempelhof from Rhein-Main at twenty-two hundred last night.”

“You should have been briefed. The Soviets said they’d shoot down anything that flew through that center corridor.”

The two flyers looked at each other.

“Maybe the T-storm kept the Reds home in bed,” Taylor said.

The colonel looked them back and forth, then beamed again. He shook the hands of both men. “Well, congratulations again! In case you’re unaware, you just successfully flew the first mission of the Berlin Airlift!”

It took two days of sleep before Lafferty understood what his commander had been talking about. Glenn Taylor, on the other hand, wrote home immediately.

Chapter 18

Cambridge – June 1948

They met at the reserved table at The Hero of the Thames the following Sunday evening at seven, Bill and Laura Cochrane and Irv Goff, their mutual friend from the American intelligence community in New York and Washington.

Cochrane had not seen Irv in five years, not since Goff had gone a separate route at the end of an operation in Switzerland and Italy and had returned to North Africa where he remained busy fighting Nazis until the war ended. Wisely, Bill and Laura had left their daughter in the care of Victoria that evening.

Bill and Laura arrived early and seated themselves, Bill carefully taking the chair with the view and seating Laura on his left, the position affording the second-best view of the room. Goff arrived punctually at seven-thirty, bearing a smile and gifts – flowers for Laura and a bottle of good Irish whisky for Cochrane.

Everyone was smiling. Goff gave Laura an embrace as both Cochranes stood to greet him. The two men exchanged a sturdy handshake. From the corner of his eye, Cochrane could see Edward at the bar. The barman was chipping a new block of ice with a six-inch pick and was keeping an eye on Cochrane and the visitor.

American intelligence had undergone an overhaul since the end of the World War. There were those who disputed whether a democracy needed a foreign intelligence service in peacetime and felt that one should not be established. On the other extreme were those such as J. Edgar Hoover who had directed U.S. domestic counterintelligence during the war and now wanted to bring foreign intelligence-gathering under FBI control.

The situation was fluid, made more so by President Truman, who saw OSS chief William Donovan as a political rival and had no inclination to keep him in a top government post. The OSS had been abolished in 1945. Its intelligence-gathering role had been taken over by the Department of State while its analysis section went to the War Department. The latter dissolved into the Department of Defense in September of 1947.

Donovan had hoped to set up a united intelligence service, submitted a plan to Truman, and had the plan rejected quickly — most likely because it had his name on it. So now things were vague in addition to being fluid. And they were all part of the grand accumulation of circumstances that led to Irv Goff being seated in front of Bill and Laura Cochrane at a cozy pub in Cambridge.

“Hello, Irv,” Laura said to Goff.

“Hello, Laura,” Goff said. “You keep looking younger. Don’t know how you do it. Must be the company you keep.” Then, turning to Cochrane, “You don’t look so bad either, you old goat,” he said. “Dulles tells me you’re not only bulletproof but on a sabbatical. Dulles must be right.”

“Dulles is always right except when he’s mistaken,” Cochrane said.

“Ha!” Goff said. “I might have some brawn, Laura,” Goff said, preparing to sit, “but Bill here has the brains. We all know that. For a secret smart-ass, he’s pretty damned brilliant.”

“Do tell,” Laura said, settling back into her seat. The men sat after she was comfortable. Helen, the barmaid, passed by immediately. Within another two minutes, everyone had a glass of Scotch going and had placed orders for food.

Laura had mixed reactions to Irv. She wasn’t keen on his left-wing politics, but he was a trustworthy friend and she admired that. On the other hand, he was always putting her husband in danger. Someday, she feared, Irv Goff would get Bill killed. Such was her deepest dread. Then again, he hadn’t even gotten himself killed yet

“You ever hear from that girl that you rescued in 1943?” Goff asked Cochrane after several minutes of small talk. “You don’t mind me asking, do you?”

“I don’t mind at all and I heard she’s doing well.”

“Fascinating. Who do you hear from?”

“Bill Donovan. Do I hear directly from Frieda? No. And there’s no official reason why I would.”

“Just asking,” Irv said. “Impressive young lady. I’m glad it turned out okay.”

“We all are,” Cochrane said.

There was a silence at the table. Goff’s eyes traveled the room via a sideways glance. “Who’s the little geek with the wire glasses and the pseudo-Lenin cap?” Goff asked.

“His name is Egon,” Cochrane said without looking. “A local pest to be indulged. He was the previous tenant of our current landlady here in Cambridge. He stole a painting from her.”

Goff grinned. “So in addition to being a loudmouth, he’s also a thief?” Goff laughed.

“That’s never a good mix.”

“It’s something I intend to look into,” Cochrane said. Then, he turned fully upon Goff and held him in a gaze. “All right, Irv,” he said. “Something has come up or you wouldn’t be here. What is it?”

“Bill, we need you to go back to Berlin,” Goff said.

“Who is ‘we’?”

“Dulles. Donovan. Harry Truman. Jim Forrestal. The people who run things.”

“Why Berlin? Why now? I hear the place is about to explode.”

“The powers that be in Washington and at Foggy Bottom would like you to extricate a certain woman from the current hellhole. You have a certain delicate touch for that sort of thing.”

“Don’t flatter me, it won’t help. Who’s the woman?”

“An old friend of yours. The woman is Bettina Schneidhuber. She helped you, she helped us, in 1943 and -”

“I don’t need to be reminded,” Cochrane said.

Laura knew the name and the woman’s role in the success of Cochrane’s most recent visit to Berlin. Laura listened and said nothing.

“Do we know for sure that she’s still alive?” Cochrane asked. “I’ve often wondered.”

“We don’t know anything for sure.”

“Would she be in Soviet custody?”

“We don’t know anything for sure,” Goff said again. “There’s a file. Sketchy. One page. Three paragraphs. Mostly bullshit. Pardon my language, Laura.”

Laura sighed and found a moment’s solace in her Dewar’s.

“Where would I find this file?” Bill asked.

“Glad you asked,” Goff said. He reached to his inside jacket pocket and drew out an envelope. It was white, business-sized, and sealed. It bore the address of the United States Department of Defense in the top left corner, with the initials J.V.F. handwritten in blue ink above the gothic government lettering.

Cochrane accepted it, not convinced whether to move forward with or step back from Goff’s request. He set the envelope down on the table.

Irv’s gaze steadied upon him. “Bill, don’t be vulgar,” Goff said. “No good American turns down his country’s request in wartime. Open the damned thing.”

“It is no longer wartime, Irv,” Cochrane said with an edge, “and it is not the country’s request. More realistically it’s that of Allen Dulles or Bill Donovan. So let’s keep things clear from the beginning.”

“It’s always wartime, meatball,” Goff said, reaching for his pack of cigarettes and lighting another. “Listen, I carried this letter all the way from Washington for you. You should feel honored. Jim Forrestal pecked the contents out on his office typewriter. The contents aren’t even cleared for those cute typists he and Dulles always seem to find.”

Cochrane picked up the envelope and ripped it open. He read.

There was a cover note on top of the one-page status report. It made Cochrane blink. It was handwritten by the Secretary of Defense. Cochrane knew Forrestal via introductions that had led to further introductions during the war’s final weeks. Forrestal had even consulted with Cochrane over some financial developments in Germany and Austria after the fighting stopped in 1945. It was unspoken between the two men that Forrestal knew about Cochrane’s pursuit of a Nazi saboteur with the code name of Siegfried in the late 1930s, a would-be assassin who had targeted Roosevelt. Since Roosevelt had come out of New York State politics and had mentored Forrestal at one point, the Roosevelt-Cochrane-Forrestal relationship had a certain balance. If FDR owed his survival to Cochrane, then Forrestal owed his career to him, also.

The note was addressed to him personally by his first name. “Dear Bill,” it began. “My personal apologies for interrupting your much-deserved downtime in England, but we have an issue with which you may be able to help.”

Cochrane’s mind spun in many directions as he read. Forrestal was making a personal appeal to Cochrane and had used a trusted old friend, Irv Goff, as the messenger. That was significant. Cochrane processed a lot at once: Forrestal’s background, current position in the government, and access to President Truman.

The one-page status report didn’t say much. It gave Bettina Schneidhuber’s last known address in Berlin, the address where Cochrane had stayed while guiding a “person of importance” – Frieda Koehler — to a “destination of greater security.” It gave Frau Schneidhuber’s last known employment in Berlin in 1946, some sort of god-awful medical facility with a mortuary. The correspondence implied that she was still alive and strongly suggested that she was more than the sum of her parts, hence should be kept out of Soviet hands, at least if still alive. If this weren’t accurate, meaning if Bettina Schneidhuber was dead, confirmation of such would be appreciated as sort of a macabre consolation prize.

“Laura, why are you looking at me like that?” Goff asked in response to daggers that Laura, arms folded, was sending his way. Bill meanwhile was reading through the correspondence a second time.

“I fear you’ll get my husband killed someday. That’s why.”

Goff shrugged. “We all got to go sometime, Laura. We’re all on borrowed time.”

“That’s not the reassurance I was looking for, Irv.”

Cochrane’s attention rose from the truncated background page and interceded.

“All right. Let’s boil this down. You, or the powers that be, want me to go to Berlin, give my best efforts, see if I can find Frau Bettina Schneidhuber, and get her out of the area if possible. Or confirm that she’s dead. That’s it, that’s all, then I return?”

“That’s it, meatball. Should be a milk run. You either find her fast or you don’t. You find her, you scoop her up, bring her back to the Western Zone, or, if need be, to England.”

“What you’re really saying is keep her away from the Russians.”

“You could phrase it that way.”

“What if she doesn’t want to go?”

“You bring her anyway. Get it?”

Cochrane sighed and folded the letter away in his inside jacket pocket. Husband and wife exchanged a glance.

“How do I get to Berlin?

“You fly. Like a goose. There’s going to be an airlift, you know. Keep the Western Zone alive. More extension of rotten, capitalist, American influence, but I don’t make policy I just help it along, even if it’s ill-conceived and misbegotten, which most of it is.”

Before Cochrane or Laura could say anything else Irv added some details.

“I’ve recruited some special aviators. Pilots. You’ll like them. They’ll be part of your transport and backup team.”

“Do you think an airlift can succeed?”

“At pissing off Joe Stalin? Yeah, it will succeed at that. Feed Berlin and keep Berlin heated during the winter? Don’t be silly. They’re better off under Communism anyway.”

“Your opinion,” said Laura.

“That’s just looking out the window at the world today, Laura. Sorry but it is.”

“And how does my husband know that with your political orientation, Irv, you won’t be tipping off some of your Red friends about the operation?”

“That’s an obnoxious, insinuating question, Laura.”

“But it’s one that needs to be asked, so I asked it. And Bill is too much the gentleman to raise the question, so I did.”

“I hate to say it but it’s a valid question, Irv.”

“And the answer is that you know me well. I may have a worldview and a notion on world politics. Sure, I’m a lefty. Unlike some people, though, my loyalty to old friends aces everything else. If I had to shoot a Soviet colonel to protect you or Laura, I’d do it. I’d even shoot a few of them for you, meatball. And you know I would.”

“Why me?” Cochrane asked as the food arrived at their table and as they began to eat.

“You’re probably the only one in our entire service who would recognize Bettina Schneidhuber, again assuming she’s alive.”

“You wouldn’t?”

“Never met the woman in my life,” Goff said. “And I probably never will. Look, Bill. The eye-to-eye recognition is crucial. The Soviets use moles and assume identities these days.”

“I’ve heard the stories,” Cochrane answered.

“Of course, who knows what she looks like now,” Goff continued. “The German ladies didn’t get treated too well when the Russian soldier boys came to town. We all know what went on. Pretty revolting if you ask me.”

Bill looked at Laura in exasperation. She returned the look.

Cochrane turned back to Goff. “Irv, do me one favor,” he said.

“Sure.”

“Don’t say another damned word till we finish dinner and we’re out on the street. Or until I tell you that you may speak again. Understand?”

Goff fell silent with a nod. They finished their meal without speaking.

Chapter 19

Cambridge – June 1948

Tempers cooled over the next half-hour. Goff picked up the dinner bill, still didn’t say anything, and Cochrane broke the silence by thanking him. They were then back out on King Street walking westward town the university center. The June night was balmy and the streets were filled with students.

“So what’s it going to be, meatball?” Goff finally asked, putting out one of his cigarettes against the outer wall of a sixteenth-century building. “Do we take the next step or do I get back to Secretary Forrestal and tell him that you went belly up on us?”

“For this evening, you do neither,” Cochrane said. “I’m inclined to turn you down flat, something I would take great glee in doing. But I want a night to think it over.”

“I’m at the Regent Hotel.” He pointed up ahead. “You can probably see it from here. Phone me tomorrow before noon. I’ll need to phone the U.S. embassy in London to relay your response. They’ll phone Washington and let Secretary Forrestal know whether we have an agent or not. Keep in mind that without you, we’ll just have to leave this poor Bettina Schneidhuber woman to her fate. So let me know.”

After a pause, Goff gave Laura a polite embrace. Then he turned back to Cochrane. “Oh, and listen,” he said. “Here are a couple of background documents on postwar in the Eastern Sector. Not long, not overly complicated. Maybe another five minutes of reading. Might help you frame your response, okay?”

Goff handed a second envelope to Cochrane. Not for a moment did Cochrane flirt with the idea that Goff had almost forgotten to turn it over to him. It was all part of the pitch and all three of them knew it.

“As I said, Irv. I’m inclined to turn you down,” Cochrane said. “And thanks for the attempt to make me feel guilty if I do.”

“Any time, meatball,” Goff said. “By the way, when do your classes start? Your lectures?”

“In twelve weeks.”

“You’ll be into Berlin and back with eleven weeks to spare. Maybe eleven and a half. It’s going to be smooth as silk,” Goff promised.

“I’ve heard things like that before, Irv, and I didn’t believe them then, either. Goodnight.”

Chapter 20

Berlin – June 1948

The United States Air Force continued to launch the full-scale airlift on June 26, 1948. On the first day, American and British pilots flew thirty-two missions in and out of Tempelhof. The USAF used Douglas C-47 Skytrains to ferry eighty tons of supplies from Wiesbaden to Tempelhof Airport in Berlin. USAF-Europe headquarters rounded up more than a hundred of the Gooney Birds and readied them for the Big Lift of humanitarian aid to Berlin.

The lumbering, two-engine, crew-of-two airplane carried three tons of cargo at a cruising speed of 175 miles per hour over a range of fifteen hundred miles. Many of the aircraft pressed into service were already war-weary, still emblazoned with the three horizontal stripes which had been used to identify them as aircraft during the D-Day landings at Normandy four years earlier. But the Gooney Birds accomplished the mission.

Deliveries to Berlin on the second day increased to three hundred tons. By the third day, deliveries had soared to nearly four hundred tons. The airplanes were coming in and taking off so quickly that crews barely had time to eat and use the restroom facilities before turning around again. Tempelhof solved the turnaround problem by creating a sub-industry: food and snack trucks on wheels that could roll up to incoming and outgoing aircraft. The trucks were operated by the prettiest German girls that management could find. They were kept busy.

Inbound American cargo airplanes flying over Berlin were under the jurisdiction of the Tempelhof tower for the final twelve miles of the inbound flight. The air traffic control tower was packed so tightly that some controllers worked standing up at the Berlin Air Safety Center. Americans worked alongside British, French, and – surprisingly to some - Russian counterparts on the first days of the airlift.

The Russian controllers remained amicable despite the tensions that had provoked the crisis. The Russian air controllers knew what the Allies were doing and noted the spiked numbers on the control board. But they were surprisingly a charming and ingratiating bunch, the Russians, even though none of the other nationalities trusted them. Most were men under thirty, pilots who had been shot down and had injuries like a missing foot and could no longer fly.

Perhaps their close flirtations with death had made them more worldly. They manifested no bitterness. And there was a give and take: Bourbon from the PX was swapped for Polish vodka. American cigarettes were swapped for small packets of smoked sturgeon or caviar that the Russians had stolen from their officers’ mess.

One of the Russians turned up one day with passes to a private club for Russian officers called “Minuet” in the Eastern Zone, which now had a collection of sleazy clubs that operated during the late evening hours. “Very sexy. Very kinky. Perverted!” the Russian announced proudly. An air traffic guy obtained the passes and passed them along to a flyer. The Americans donated U.S.-made cigarettes to them. Otherwise, the Russians smoked their Belomorkanals, a cheap, unfiltered, cough-inducing brand introduced in 1932 to commemorate the construction of the White Sea–Baltic Canal. The tobacco blend was unique and unpopular among non-Russians.

“Those things smell like a mixture of sheep dung and horsehair,” Glenn Taylor remarked one day. He wasn’t far off. He brought a pack back to the barracks and passed them around. They were universally but good-naturedly panned. Tommy Olson tried one in the PX just to be one of the boys. She drew three long drags and suppressed the urge to cough.

“Whaddya think, Tommy?” asked Glenn Taylor.

“Barf!” she said snuffing it out. “It reminds me of the time I was flying from Labrador to Syracuse during the war. I land and part of the HQ building is off-limits. Quarantined. I asked why and some sergeant says the army has a couple of cases of beriberi.  Before I can say anything, some G.I. Joe says, ‘Send the cases to the Marines. They’ll drink anything’.”

So it went, with morale high in the opening days of the lift and everyone punching far above his or her listed weight.

The Germans called the operation Die Luftbruecke, or “the air bridge.” The British labeled their phase of the lift, “Operation Carter-Patterson,” named after a popular moving company back in England. Then an order came around from Air Commodore Waite to drop that nickname. The invocations of a moving company’s name suggested that the British were planning to move out of Berlin, which they weren’t. So the British settled on “Operation Plainfare.”

Weary American pilots called it “The LeMay Coal and Feed Delivery Service.” Then Brig. Gen. Joseph Smith, the first U.S. commander of the operation, grabbed the first code name that came to mind. “Hell’s fire! We’re hauling grub,” Smith told aides. “Vittles! If you must have a name, call it ‘Operation Vittles’.”

So “Operation Vittles” it became, except in the newspapers across the English-speaking world. The worldwide press had already dubbed the actions of the Soviet Union halting needed supplies to Berlin as “The Berlin Blockade.”

So it wasn’t much of a jump to call what now followed as “The Berlin Airlift.”

In truth, that’s exactly what it was.

Chapter 21

Cambridge – June 1948

Caroline Cochrane was still awake when her parents arrived home after dinner with Irv Goff at The Hero of The Thames. The little girl had insisted on staying up until her parents returned. Victoria, falling under Caroline’s charm, had acquiesced. Bill and Laura came in shortly before ten PM, however, so no lasting damage was done.

Bill paid the sitter the two pounds sterling that he had promised. Victoria disappeared downstairs to her basement apartment. Laura promised Caroline one more bedtime story from a book before she had to go to sleep. Mother and daughter repaired to a sofa in the salon area while Bill Cochrane poured himself a nightcap and sat down in the kitchen eating nook to examine the confidential pages given to him by Goff.

He reread the typed but personally signed note from Jim Forrestal and the meager one-page document on the woman who had provided a safe house and safe passage through Berlin for him in 1943. Sadly, Cochrane knew, Frau Schneidhuber by now could have been anywhere from a cemetery to an unmarked grave, a Soviet labor camp, or in the basement under a pile of rubble in her old neighborhood. Or just plain “missing.”

Cochrane reread the single page on the woman whom he remembered so favorably. While Cochrane had stayed with her while he had had young Freida in transit, Bettina’s home had been filled with seditious anti-Nazi material: works by Brecht, music by Kurt Weill, books by the great Weimar authors such as Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin. For whatever reason, the local Nazi block captain had looked the other way and never ratted her out, something that at the time seemed understandable but had still raised his suspicions.

According to the pages in front of Cochrane, in the latter days of the war, her home and everything in it had been destroyed. But she seemed to have survived. There was a link to a medical-sounding facility in 1946, presumably an employment reference, but nothing more current than that.

Nineteen forty-six. Two years ago, he pondered. A lot can happen in two minutes, much less two years. Cochrane glanced up from the page before him. He sighed. Few people wanted to admit it, but there had been no winners in the war. Only losers. Victories were measured by having taken fewer painful losses than the other side.

Across the small interior of their rented house in Cambridge, Laura sat quietly reading a bedtime story to their daughter. He held the two ladies in his life in view for a long moment, not wanting to give up the vision. How lucky he was, how lucky they were, he reminded himself, to have been in America during the war. There were no bombs falling on them from the sky, just as on this night in Cambridge there were no bombs. He glanced back down at the papers before him. Like most documents Cochrane had read in his life, the page on Bettina Schneidhuber was meaningless taken out of context and without the knowledge and worldview that he brought to it.

A feeling was brewing within him. Ne now had his own interests to protect, his own family to be with, and for whom to provide safety. On top of this, the more he considered it, locating Bettina Schneidhuber in the middle of the chaos and rubble of 1948-Berlin resembled an impossibility. Only so much could be asked of one man.

He glanced back up at Laura and Caroline. Laura must have read his mind. She often did. That or she felt his eyes upon her. She gave him a smile and a wink and gave Caroline an extra hug around her shoulders. Cochrane returned the smile and looked at the second envelope, the one thrust upon him by Goff on the sidewalk of King Street at the end of their evening.

He asked himself: why even open the second missive? He exercised a moment of caution. His decision was made. He was not going to Berlin or Moscow or Timbuktu or anywhere else. Didn’t a man deserve some downtime, a drop of peace, and some personal fulfillment in the second chapter of his life?

There was nothing dishonorable, he reminded himself, about picking up his chips and leaving life’s casino with a winning hand. Why not take up oil painting, he pondered. Why not leave the intelligence community and go into private banking? How about grabbing the wife and daughter and dragging them off to one of the prehistoric caves in the south of France and becoming a family of happy hermits?

Then, through the absurdity of all this, he recognized that it was his exhaustion and world-weariness speaking, and not his common sense. He also recognized that special sense that all professional spies are cursed with, one that usually follows them to the grave. Specifically, that at any given time an assignment will come in that may seem innocent enough at first, but which demands that spy’s personal involvement. Otherwise, his world – both in the large sense and the personal sense – would self-incinerate.

He grabbed the second envelope and tore it open.

Read it at your own risk, Bill, he told himself. This is designed to bring you into their orbit if you’re not already there.

Damn you all, he thought to Goff and Forrestal in response.

He picked up the pages and read. The additional document ran only three pages but it discussed the fate of German women upon the collapse of the Third Reich.

The postwar world in Europe had been a living hell for German women. Here before Cochrane was a subject rarely discussed but which often lurked beneath the surface of postwar German political reality.

Perhaps the most terrorizing tactic of the invading Red Army was assaulting females and rape. In the twilight of the war, women in dozens of German cities had been victimized by sexual assault, a condition that contributed severely to the widespread public panic as the Red Army had advanced from the east. Two months passed between the arrival of the Soviet Army in Berlin on May 2, 1945, and the arrival of American soldiers under General Patton the following July. During that time, there were more than a million rapes inflicted on the surviving women in the city, from girls under ten to women over eighty.

Many women found themselves forced to "concede" to one soldier in the hope that he would protect them from others. The report cited specifics. Magda Wieland, a 24-year-old actress, was dragged from a cupboard in her apartment just off the Kurfürstendamm. A young soldier from central Asia hauled her out. By sign language, she offered herself to him as a permanent girlfriend if he would protect her from other Russian soldiers. But he laughed, ravished her, and went off to boast to his comrades, whereupon another soldier raped her.

Ellen Goetz, a Jewish friend of Magda's since childhood, was also raped. When other Germans tried to explain to the Russians that she was Jewish and had been persecuted, they received the retort, “Frau ist Frau." The next day, still in custody, both Magda and Ellen used their garments to commit suicide by hanging.

Women in Berlin and the occupied territories soon learned to disappear during the "hunting hours" of the evening. Young daughters were hidden in storage lofts for days on end. Mothers emerged onto the street to fetch water only in the early morning when Soviet soldiers were sleeping off the alcohol from the night before. Sometimes the greatest danger came from one mother giving away the hiding place of another girl in a desperate bid to save her own daughter.

“In the summer, Berliners became accustomed to female screams every night,” reported an unnamed Soviet witness now in the employ of the West. “It was impossible not to hear them. It was impossible because all the windows had been blown in from British and American bombing and Russian artillery fire before the great surrender.”

Beria and Stalin, back in Moscow, received detailed reports of what their armies were “accomplishing.”  They laughed. One report stated that "many Germans declare that all German women in East Prussia who stayed behind were raped by Red Army soldiers." Numerous examples of gang rape were documented in detail: young girls and old women, often ten or twelve soldiers to a single female who was often murdered afterward.

Stalin replied with a shrug. The terror of sexual assault was a weapon the same as any other, except perhaps better, in his opinion. When Yugoslav Communist Milovan Djilas complained about rapes against the women of Yugoslavia in 1945, Stalin stated that the world should "understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometers through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle." On another occasion, when told that Red Army soldiers sexually maltreated German refugees, he replied, "We lecture our brave soldiers far too much! Let them have their initiative."

Initiative.

The report continued with the affirmation that similar activity continued into the present in the Eastern Zone. British, Canadian, and American troops were not blameless in their zones, the report acknowledged, but commanders from the top down had warned Allied officers against the practice. Court-martials had taken place and offending instances had decreased dramatically with the demilitarization after Nuremberg.

Cochrane had heard the stories of Japanese troops in Nanking, China, in the late 1930s. He was sickened every time he heard them.

Initiative. At least, he was sure, such had never been official Allied policy, such as it had been for forces coming to Germany from the east. He began to think anew about how brave men and women in the anti-Hitler underground had put their lives on the line during the war to defeat Hitler, only to have to hide from Russian troops when the German capital was overrun and as anarchy reigned in the late spring and early summer of 1945.

Cochrane folded away the papers in front of him. His eyes rose. His gaze found Laura and Caroline. The bedtime story ended. He watched Laura give her daughter a hug in the safety of Cambridge. Caroline came to him and they exchanged a good night kiss. Cochrane held his daughter more than he otherwise might have until with a giggle she struggled away. Thank God, he thought to himself, thank God a million times, his own family was safe.

Yet he was still torn about a return to Berlin.

Chapter 22

Cambridge – June 1948

After Bill and Laura put Caroline to bed, they returned to their sitting room. They sat down together. “What was in the envelopes?” Laura asked.

“More than any decent man should have to read,” Bill answered. “Nothing that’s classified, it would appear,” Cochrane said. “Want to have a look?”

“Do you want me to?”

“It’s thoroughly distasteful. But I wish you would.”

“Show me,” she requested without hesitation.

Cochrane fetched the envelopes from where he had left them. He returned, sat down next to his wife again, and handed her the correspondence. Quietly, she read and absorbed the contents. Then she folded them away and handed them back to him.

“When do you leave?” she asked. “I already know. You’re going.”

“Why do you think that?”

“I know you too well, my love. This woman. Frau Schneidhuber. She helped you. If she’s still alive, now she needs your help.” She paused. “What more is there to understand than that?”

There was a pause of many seconds before he answered.

“Frieda would not have reached safety and the United States without her and whoever was protecting her,” Cochrane said. “I may well have been captured and executed without her.” He thought of the normal execution for spies in Nazi Germany. The guillotine.

He suppressed an involuntary shudder. He thought of the White Rose victims the guillotine had claimed among hundreds of others. Involuntarily, in his mind’s eye, he could see the White Rose victims – Hans, Sophie, and Christoph – being led to their deaths. He could picture the guillotine. He could hear the blade falling.

The recollection of all that caught him in a weak moment, so much that it sent him into a maze of deep thoughts, so much so that Laura jarred him from it when she spoke again. “Bill?” she said. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” he said, yanked back into the present.

“Look,” he said. “I wish to be clear in case you’ve ever wondered. There was nothing further, nothing additional to the relationship between me and Frau Bettina Schneidhuber. You know all there is to know. I want you to be certain of that.”

“I already am certain,” she said. “A wife can tell.”

“I miss the obvious sometimes, don’t I?” he asked.

She smiled and squeezed his hand. He closed the files and resealed the envelope.

“I’ll talk to Irv tomorrow,” he said. “I won’t call. I’ll go by the Regent Hotel in person while Caroline is at the playground.”

“Final answer?” she asked.

“Final answer,” he said.

He owed it to Frau Schneidhuber to at least go back to Berlin and have a look.

What harm could it do? he asked himself.

Well, maybe plenty, he answered himself.  But that’s always the case.

Chapter 23

Cambridge - June 1948

The following noon, Cochrane had unsurprising news for Irv Goff when he met him in the dining room of the Regent Hotel in Cambridge. He agreed to go to Berlin.

Goff gave him an address in London – 15, Clare Street - where he should go and give his name as Victor Baldwin to a gentleman – Goff cautioned that he used the term

“gentleman” loosely – named Stan. There would need to be a new temporary identity, a new passport, maybe two passports, some papers to create, and some final instructions. The mission to Berlin carried its own dangers in the world of 1948. The only thing predictable about the Soviets and their East German lackeys was their unpredictability.

Cochrane would need a briefing and a knowledge of who to see and where to go once he arrived in Berlin. There would be a Major Haley Pickford who would meet him at Tempelhof. Major Pickford had a security clearance, a high one, and Cochrane could discuss aspects of his search for Frau Schneidhuber with him.

“You won’t recognize the city when you get beyond the airport,” Goff said sadly. “First we do everything we can to destroy it. Now we can’t rebuild it fast enough. Crazy, huh?”

“How soon am I off?” Cochrane asked.

“Three days. Four max. Get yourself to London. We’ll get you the rest of the way.” He paused. “You’re going by air, obviously. That’s the only way to get to Berlin. The airlift will give you good cover. You don’t mind traveling in a flying coal bin, do you?”

“What’s that mean?”

“You’ll find out when you get there.”

Goff said he would take care of notifying Secretary of Defense Forrestal of Bill’s acceptance. Goff said he had a direct line. Cochrane was not sure whether he should thank him or not. In a mood of vexation, he decided that he need not.

Chapter 24

Cambridge and London – June 1948

When Bill Cochrane left Cambridge to walk to the rail station that morning, the sky was blue with an occasional cottony cloud. Now, less than two and a half hours later, as he searched for an address on the gritty back streets to the north of Piccadilly Circus, a rough wind had come up. The morning sun was only a memory, and the sky was heavy with impending rain.

All of this fit his mood. Step by step he became more irritable. Why, he wondered as a drizzle began and he stepped widely to avoid some garbage on the side street, didn’t they get someone else? The question answered itself in a few heartbeats. They didn’t get someone else because the identification of Bettina Schneidhuber demanded his personal involvement. And worse, they didn’t get someone else because they knew he would take the bait and accept the assignment. The latter was Cochrane’s own shortcoming. At least that was how he saw it this morning. He also replayed questions in his mind too often, he reminded himself. He had come to the decision to move forward. So forward he would move.

Rain became steadier. He made his way to 15, Clare Street, which was a brick building in an industrial neighborhood. Across the façade of a storefront, there was a steel security curtain pulled down and padlocked. To the right was a door to what might have been an office. Cochrane tried the doorknob, but the door was locked. He stepped back a pace and looked to each side. To the right was a rusty iron gate that blocked an alley, but to the left of the gate was another gate that was open by about a foot.

Beyond it was a descending ramp. Cochrane eyeballed his surroundings, re-assured himself that he had no observers, and walked through. He descended the ramp and came to another door where the ramp ended. From the other side of the door, he could hear heavy equipment, drills, and hammers hitting metal.

Cochrane pushed the door open. It thudded to a stop against what turned out to be an oil drum. He heard two angry voices from within what seemed at first glance to be a garage. They were speaking something foreign. Polish, Cochrane guessed.

Cochrane slid through the gap in the partly blocked doorway, keeping his hands in front of him, open and empty. The men stopped talking in angry mid-sentences.

One, a huge bear of a man, wore an auto mechanic’s mask. The other’s face was bare and visible. He was shorter and stockier but thick with a mechanic’s vest. He wore leather gloves, big ones, as if he had been lifting heavy equipment. His arms were muscular, scarred, and huge.

“Hey! Who you?” demanded the one with the visible face and the vest.

“My name is Baldwin,” Cochrane said, using the code name Goff had provided. “Victor Baldwin. I wonder where I can find Stan.”

There was a silence. The man with the vest walked toward Cochrane, pulling off the gloves, one by one, until he stood less than a yard in front of Cochrane.

“I am Stan,” the man said in English that was heavily accented but grammatically perfect.

Stan was several inches taller than Cochrane, maybe about six feet four Cochrane assessed, and half a foot wider at the shoulders. He had the bulk of a man who had spent much of his life around heavy machinery, lifting it and moving it. Such men were invaluable in wartime. They could move other humans around just as easily. A hundred-pound oil drum was just a warm-up. A two-hundred-fifty-pound, armed foreign combatant was more of a daily challenge.

All this was coursing through Cochrane’s mind when Stan turned to his assistant, gave him a hand signal, and bellowed at him in what was now clearly Polish. The grinding of heavy machinery began again, followed by hammering as the larger man set to work again. Stan gave a nod of the head, indicating that he and Cochrane should both step through the door to the alley. “Outside,” Stan said. “We talk.”

They stepped out. The rain was bordering on heavy. They stood in it.

“I need to get to Berlin,” Cochrane said. “Unofficial.”

Stan snorted. “Of course you do,” Stan said. Like the rain, Stan’s accent was becoming steadier and heavier, too. “Passport?”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“Follow,” Stan said. Another jerk of the man’s huge head. Stan led Cochrane across the alley and around the back to a steel doorway of a neighboring building. Stan unlocked the door with a key that hung on his wrist, attached to a narrow leather watchband. The door unlocked with a crisp snap, then a groan as Stan pulled it open.

“Still follow,” Stan said. They were then in a dark hallway that led to what Cochrane presumed was a makeshift studio. A few shafts of gray light filtered from a cracked, frosted window into the walk space. Then there was another door and Stan ushered Cochrane into a small studio. Stan used a switch on the wall to snap on an overhead light that hung from the ceiling above a square steel table in the center of the chamber.

The room was narrow, cramped, and cluttered. The brick walls were mossy. There was no outside light and no outside sound once the door slammed closed. It was, Cochrane thought involuntarily, a perfect venue to chop up a body and prepare it for disposal, even if the body had walked in on its own accord. After several months of hiatus after the end of the World War, Cochrane felt many of his deplorable old instincts and insights kicking in, appreciated or not.

On the red brick wall affixed with nails were two flags: the Polish flag with the white eagle, and the American flag, all forty-eight stars and thirteen stripes of it. Near the flags was a battered china cabinet with a selection of cameras behind a locked screen. With the cameras was an assortment of flash equipment. Stan used a second key that dangled from the chain on his wrist to unlock the cabinet. He rummaged through the cameras and selected two along with a set of flash attachments.

“Before we get started,” Cochrane said, “could I see a sample of your ‘product’?”

Stan’s eyes half-closed with indignation. Then he gave a quick nod. The forger went back to the locked cabinet, reached into a drawer, and pulled out a handful of passports.

“U.S.?” he asked.

“Yes, American,” Cochrane said.

“First-class stuff,” the Pole said. “No fucking junk.”

Stan selected one at random and handed it to Cochrane. It was an American passport that purported to have been issued in New York in January of 1947. Cochrane turned the pages, slowly and saying nothing. Stan stood before him, attentive with his hands folded behind his back, like an artist at his own exhibition, which, in a broad sense, he was.

The passport had a worn feel to it and was well-thumbed. The pages were neither too cluttered nor too empty. The numbers were fraudulent, Cochrane was sure, but consistent, in his opinion and in his memory, with when it had been issued. There was no photo for a bearer and no personal information. Those details were yet to be assigned.

“This is very good work, Stan,” Cochrane said. In the center pages, the borders had been carefully created. Cochrane turned the item over and back and examined the stitching. “If it were any better, I’d start to suspect it was real. Very good, indeed.”

“I know,” Stan said.

Cochrane handed it back. Stan took it with a nervy snatch.

“I assume you can fix me up with a neutral second identity as well,” Cochrane said. “In case things get dicey, it’s always nice for the other side to not know who they’re looking for.”

Stan grunted. “Yeah, boss. Sure thing,” he said.

Stan returned to his cabinet of magic, opened a narrow drawer on the lower left, and pulled out some Canadian samples. Cochrane was again pleased with the workmanship. He dictated a name and some dates and places, keeping the new cover story similar to one he had used successfully in 1943. Everything was easier to remember that way.

Stan made written notes. Fastidiously, he replaced everything in his cabinet, carefully positioning his works in progress, Cochrane noticed, in exactly the same place in the small stack where he had found them.

“Let’s proceed,” Cochrane said.

Stan had an assortment of hair pieces and mustaches for those who wished to change an identity. Such would not be the case. Stan pointed Cochrane to a place in front of a wall where the bricks had been plastered over to provide a smooth neutral background. He guided Cochrane to the proper point to stand, went back to the table, fussed with his camera, loaded it with film, and attached a flash. On the table, there were four flashbulbs.  What was essential was a full-face portrait, printed on the same type of paper that might be used in New York.

Stan fussed for several seconds. Cochrane removed his overcoat and was down to jacket and tie for the photo. Stan took the picture and used all six bulbs. “Two days,” Stan said.

“You do your work here?” Cochrane asked.

Stan motioned to the sink with the chemicals and darkroom equipment. Cochrane, with a long experience with the FBI working against counterfeiters, recognized the printing and engraving accessories that occupied a shelf near the sink. Cochrane then noted a darkroom lamp that hung above the work space. An impressive setup.

“First-class. No junk,” Stan said again. Then there was a flicker of a smile and a wink.

“I can return on Thursday,” Cochrane said.

“Do that,” said Stan.

Chapter 25

Berlin – Late June 1948

The summer weather in northern Europe was better than the rest of the year, but that didn’t mean it was safe for aviation. The success of the airlift teetered on the precipice of early disaster. Sudden storms and occasional thunder and lightning combined with heavy rains played havoc with schedules and flying conditions, which could change from minute to minute.

Water leaked into the planes and created storage and electrical problems. On one rainy day, three dozen British Dakotas based in Gatow were down due to electrical problems and half of the rest of the fleet was unable to fly because the crews were spread so thin. Maintenance became erratic. At Gatow loading and fueling fell behind schedule while the base command tried to get flights aloft every ten minutes.

On a perfect day with no weather problems, the British and the American air crews were able to deliver fifteen hundred tons of coal, flour, clean water, and medical supplies to Berlin. Yet this was less than ten percent of what had come into the city by rail, water routes, and motor vehicles before the blockade began in June. At this rate, when the colder weather came in the autumn, the Soviets would complete their stranglehold on the city and the Allies would easily be forced into a humiliating evacuation.

The three air corridors, the highways in the sky that had been organized by the American commanders, were abruptly reorganized and reconceived overnight.  Each would handle only one-way traffic.

The middle corridor, the most critical, was reserved for flights returning from Berlin, usually empty of cargo but occasionally hauling passengers. Both British and American planes could fly in this corridor. The northern corridor was for British aircraft coming eastbound from any of the seven or eight British landing fields in Germany or even from the British home islands. The southern route was for American aircraft from Wiesbaden and Rhein-Main.

Victor Marino flew this route, often three round trips a day. Lt. William Lafferty flew it, also, the same number of round trips but occasionally a fourth, usually partnered up with “Nutsy” Glenn Taylor. Tommy Olson flew the route but was sometimes assigned to fly back to England or Belgium to pick up passengers or raw materials.

Some male pilots resented a woman in the cockpit and refused to work with Olson. She quietly seethed but didn’t want to fly with anyone so hardheaded and stubborn, not in and out of Rhein-Main, Tempelhof, Gatow, or anywhere else in the world.

Like most locations that Allied troops were dealing with in the late 1940s in occupied Germany, Rhein-Main was a relic of the pre-war era. The base had been designed in the 1930s for Zeppelins such as the Hindenburg. The Hindenburg, the largest airship ever built, was still fresh in postwar minds for its catastrophic arrival at Lakehurst, New Jersey from Frankfurt in May of 1937. The airship had been designed to be filled with helium. But due to the American export restrictions on helium, it had been filled with highly flammable hydrogen. A spark from static electricity or from nearby lighting had ignited the ship in a fiery crash landing that was recorded on film and played in movie newsreels around the world.

During the war, the Luftwaffe had used the base at Rhein-Main for its fighters and bombers. Occupied by the Americans after the fall of Berlin, the American military had taken it over by 1946. There was now a reasonably modern single landing runway of sixty-five hundred yards. It was made of a heavily worn steel mesh matting, not strong enough for the heavy use that American planes required, but which took a brutal toll on the tires of landing aircraft. Like Tempelhof, the landing strips would need urgent refurbishing.

The companion piece to Rhein-Main was the main landing field in the occupied British Zone in Saxony, now called RAF Wunstorf. Wunstorf had first been constructed, or cleared, in 1933 as a grass airfield. It became a Luftwaffe fighter station, and a remarkably busy one, during the war. The British Army overran it and captured it on April 7, 1945, following a savage battle between SS troops and elements of the 5th Parachute Brigade, 6th Airborne Division. British troops captured two dozen German aircraft when they gained the field and immediately replaced them with Spitfires.

After the British seized it in 1945, they paved over the grass landing field with macadam. The installation had a half-dozen hangars and a rail link, but parked aircraft were still relegated to grassy parking slots. There was no solid area for taxiing, meaning heavy planes wore quickly into the dirt, which needed to be replaced daily as air traffic came and went.

Postwar RAF flights, as well as British civilian and diplomatic flights, would fly from Wunstorf to the British airfield at Gatow in southwestern Berlin, west of the Havel River, in the borough of Spandau. Gatow was a former Luftwaffe training college and later a fighter base

In contrast to the easy approach that the British had to fly into Gatow, the Americans flying from Rhein-Main had a more difficult journey to Tempelhof, the principal airfield in the American Zone of Berlin. Tempelhof, big and sprawling, had been built by the Nazi regime in the mid-thirties. In keeping with Nazi philosophy, it was huge and grand. Its main building was thought to be the largest building in the world, so large that it housed all the airport facilities plus, during the war, an underground hospital and a Messerschmitt factory. The good news was that the runway was five thousand feet. The bad news was that its surface was pierced steel, sometimes jagged and tough on tires. Unlike Gatow, it was often beset by some of Germany’s worst weather.

Then there was the approach. The most common flight pattern, depending on the winds, was from the west and between a row of new apartment houses on one side and a line of damaged buildings on the other. Nestled in there was a four-hundred-foot chimney from a local brewery that was somehow still functioning. The Americans tried to pay the owner of the brewery to tear down the chimney. He refused. It shouldn’t have surprised the Americans. The same owner had turned down similar requests from Hermann Göring for years, requests that at the time had been more like threats.

If all of that could be navigated, an aircraft still needed to evade the steeple of St. Thomas’s Church, which presided at St. Thomas’s Cemetery, located on the stretch of land that had to be flown over just before setting down at Tempelhof. New buildings on one side, a brick chimney from a brewery, a church steeple, and ruined buildings on the other, all above a city block of untended graves and tombstones. That and a quirky set of crosswinds gave a pilot plenty to think about on each approach to Tempelhof. An alternative approach was to pass directly over the new buildings and then drop four times as sharply onto a longer stretch of runway. It could be done successfully but was more like divebombing than landing.

“A pilot who refuses to fly with a woman is similar to a duck,” Olson said to Major Pickford one day in front of several other pilots. “Except a duck knows how to fly. If I’m to go up in the clouds with a dumb co-pilot, I’d prefer to pick my own.”

“You’re out of order, Tommy,” the major said in response. “Knock it off, shut up, and stop creating problems.” Then he walked down a corridor, out of her sight and that of the other flyers and split up with laughter.

Duck! That was a good one.

Most of the aircraft on these routes were C-54s and the slower C-47s. Aircraft were to fly in predetermined formations depending on how many aircraft were traveling together, each formation being either C-47s or C-54s. Formations were to fly at five different altitudes spaced by fifteen minutes horizontally and five hundred feet vertically. The system worked better on paper than in the air.

In the air, there were wild cards. Each of the three corridors was only twenty miles wide as they crossed the Soviet-occupied Zone of Eastern Germany. Once over the Berlin the corridor was trickier: British and American aircraft shared airspace with seven Soviet-operated airfields surrounding Berlin, three of which had landing patterns and circuits intersecting with Tempelhof and Gatow. There was no communication between Soviet air traffic and the seven outlying airfields, and the British or American cockpit aviators had to make visual assessments. With a low cloud cover, such was impossible.

At the beginning of the airlift, a new cargo plane would appear over Berlin every six or seven minutes. When landing became difficult due to crowded runways or inclement weather, the armada of aircraft became an air traffic controller’s nightmare. Worse, there weren’t enough controllers to start with. Meanwhile, the Soviets were experimenting with new ways to slow down the airlift. First came the electronic interference or jamming of ground-to-air radio communication by Soviet transmitters hidden in buildings in East Berlin.

Next, “Yak” fighters, Yakovlev Yak-3s or Yak-9s, randomly buzzed Western flights, flying wing to wing sometimes, or cutting across a flight path, or climbing suddenly up from underneath a C-47. The Yaks were easy to control, being small and light, maneuverable, nimble, and high-speed at low and medium altitudes. The Yaks had been the best and the most mass-produced Soviet fighter of World War II. They carried a one-man crew and were lethal: like the earlier Yak-1 that had come up short against the Luftwaffe at Stalingrad, the Yak-1 had a 20-mm cannon that fired through the hollow-driveshaft nose spinner. But it also carried twin 7.62 mm synchronized machine guns in cowling mounts and a cannon in each wing.

The Soviets now had no shortage of them in the Eastern Zone and plenty of rested, hungry pilots to fly them. The Gooney Birds, lumbering buses in the sky in comparison, drew increased numbers of Yaks every day, sometimes three to six during a single flight.

Then there were the barrage balloons — large, unmanned, tethered kite balloons that during wartime had been used to defend ground targets against aircraft attack. The balloons, many of which were mini blimps, floated aloft on steel cables, which posed lethal collision risks to aircraft, effectively making the approach to Tempelhof or Gatow precarious every time. Many of the blimps were painted gray or black to make them more difficult to spot in a dark sky.

The operation may have resonated as exciting, courageous, and uplifting to the folks back home reading newspapers that framed the airlift as heroic, but in official Washington, the opinion of what was going on was much more realistic.

“The whole operation is doomed to become a disastrous failure,” one air force senior officer said in a note to President Truman. “We might stagger through the summer months. But once the German winter sets in with ice, fog, and snow, the damned Russians and their fellow travelers plus their Red sympathizers here in the U.S. will be having a hearty laugh at the expense of the American taxpayers.”

“Garbage trucks in the sky flown by airborne trash haulers,” snarled another senior officer, a former combat airman. “The whole operation is a blunder that cannot possibly end well.”

A recent high-profile screw-up in Berlin underscored the officer’s position. A jumbo cargo carrier loaded with a triple load of coal flew in low over the remains of Berlin’s Olympic Stadium, where the 1936 Jesse Owens Olympics had been held. The plan was to dump the load of coal without landing and turn around to return to Rhein-Main, thus completing what would have been three C-47 trips without taking the time to land and unload.

A group of official observers, British and American, waited on the ground to witness the event. The aircraft jettisoned its load of coal. The impact of its landing pulverized the cargo, turning it to powder that rose like a black cloud over the stadium and ruined the clothing of the spectators. Miraculously, no one was seriously injured. The plans for using this as a template for a new delivery system were quickly shelved.

Chapter 26

Washington – End of June 1948

Not fans of the airlift were many influential U.S. senators back in Washington, including Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan. Vandenberg, a Republican, had become chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1947 and supported Democratic President Harry Truman's Cold War policies, asserting that "politics stops at the water's edge." But the coal-and-black cloud kerfuffle at the old Olympic Stadium was too much for Vandenberg. He now made the argument to the president that the United States should get out of Berlin before being unceremoniously forced out.

Depressed, still sensing uneasy spirits in the White House, sweltering in the July heat, and with his wife having returned to Missouri for the summer, President Truman called a sudden meeting with James Forrestal, his secretary of defense. The meeting was quick, blunt, and grim.

“What the hell am I going to do, Jim?” Truman asked.

“You’ll need to make a decision before the fall, before the presidential election,” Forrestal advised the president.

“Would you be willing to make an unannounced visit over there to get a good look at what’s going on?”

“Certainly,” Forrestal answered. “But you’ll need to either sustain the airlift through the winter months or withdraw, somehow with honor, before the winter closes in on Berlin.”

“Is the airlift sustainable? Is there a chance it can succeed?”

“Maybe one in five hundred. And if failure happens, Berlin will freeze to death or starve to death, whichever comes first. And you will take the political hit. No one else.”

“Jim,” Truman growled, “I already know that!”

“I’m not sure which is worse. Freezing or starving.”

“Nor do I,” Truman answered. “Does it matter?”

“Well, then?” Forrestal asked. “Maybe it would be best to make a decision sooner rather than later.”

“I’ve already made it. The United States stays in Berlin.”

“How?”

“Damned, if I know, Jim!” Truman snapped. “If I goddamned well knew, don’t you think I’d tell you?”

With that, Truman rose, stalked out of the Oval Office, and retired for the night.

The next morning, the news reaching the president from Berlin was even worse. An American aircraft had wandered off course due to a violent storm and had crashed into a mountainside in Soviet-occupied Eastern Germany. There were three Americans aboard. All were dead, including one who was a CIA agent. Soviet soldiers were the first to the wreckage. So far, there was no indication that the Soviets planned to return either the wreckage of the aircraft or the bodies of the dead Americans.

Not long afterward, the most widely read political columnist in the United States, Walter Lippman, wrote of the future “exorbitant cost of lives of pilots, crews, and money of the airlift.” This was followed by a front-page article in The New York Times, which termed Operation Vittles “a losing position.”

In Washington, Truman read the newspapers, crumpled them in a fury, threw them into a wastebasket, and kicked the basket out of his office, filling the air with a barrage of profanity that was unfit to print in The New York Times or any family publication.

Failure hung over the Berlin Airlift the way specters hung over the White House. And President Truman was at a loss for a way to exorcise any of them.

Less than a day after the crash, having given preliminary orders to get the lift in motion, President Truman had a lunchtime meeting with three men representing three cabinet departments. James Forrestal was the defense secretary and Kenneth Royal was secretary of the army. George C. Marshall was ill, so the Department of State was represented by Robert Lovett, Marshall’s deputy secretary. Marshall was so severely exhausted that his undersecretary, Dean Acheson, likened Marshall to “a four-engine bomber going only on one engine."

Forrestal, Royal, and Lovett began to present options to abandon Berlin. Typed memos detailing their suggestions were on the desk in the Oval Office.

Truman listened for less than five minutes, glanced at the papers in front of him, and
quickly bristled again with the anger that Forrestal had already seen so many times.

“Maybe you fellas lost your hearing in the last few weeks,” Truman said, “but I thought I spoke very clearly! We stay in Berlin. Period!” he shouted. “You fellows are paid to be smart. Do your jobs! Figure out how we do it!”

He reached to the papers in front of them, tore them up, and stalked out of the room, once again cursing. The president couldn’t catch a break. Not only was there too much going on in the world but too much was also going on at home. That same evening in Washington, President Truman’s daughter, Margaret, was playing the piano in her second-floor sitting room when a leg of the instrument crashed through the floor in her sitting room and through the ceiling of the family dining room below.

Poltergeist activity? Well, no.

The next day, a repair team discovered that the floorboards had rotted, the main floor beam had split completely from age, and the first level ceiling below had dropped a foot and a half. But that was just the beginning. The repair workers determined that the second floor was sinking at its west end. The secret service quickly and quietly relocated the Truman family from the west to the east end of the floor.  Steel structural supports were brought in to steady the second floor and ceilings throughout the White House. An official study revealed that the White House itself was disintegrating, not just a floor. “Heroic remedies" would be required.

“What the hell does ‘heroic measures’ mean with a house?” Truman snapped when apprised of the situation. Truman was having none of it. This was an election year, he was badly behind in every credible poll, the butt of countless crude jokes, and more preoccupied with Soviet intentions in Europe and the civil war in China, not to mention his re-election — if he even survived his own convention in July.

Personally and politically, it was a nightmare. Truman feared that news of the collapsing White House would serve as a less-than-genial metaphor for his struggling administration. So, for the time being at least, he nixed the major project to save the grand old building.

Chapter 27

Cambridge and London – End of June 1948

Cochrane returned to Cambridge. He spent the next day with Laura and Caroline, then packed in the evening. Laura helped him screen his clothing, removing anything with his name or initials that might compromise his identity. They had been through this process before, didn’t like it, but they did it carefully.

A morning train from Cambridge was punctual and a subsequent taxi from Paddington Station put him at the St. Ermine Hotel by eleven-thirty. Goff had designated it as their staging area in London.

The place was banker-class and “business-y”, with a pub off from the lobby. The registration clerk was a Sikh named Ajeet who was wearing a turban.  Ajeet had deep, sad, dark eyes and a languorous voice. He had a beard and wore medals on his jacket from a British Indian regiment. His bearing and manner were impeccable. Cochrane could spot a former soldier a mile away or across a desk or counter. He spotted one here. He had a hunch that Ajeet had seen too much of the war. His hands had a nervous shake to them as he moved pencils, pens, and the pages of a registration ledger.

Cochrane felt at home and out of place at the same time. He had a light lunch in the hotel pub and returned to Stan’s place on Clare Street by two PM.

This time the weather was better and the door that led to the workroom, the one with the heavy automotive equipment, was open. Stan spotted Cochrane immediately when Bill poked his head in. This time Stan greeted him with a faint smile of semi-approval.

Cochrane guessed that someone official had spoken to him in the interim, and probably paid him with a pile of cash, which would have been the usual protocol. Bill guessed that it might have been Irv Goff but it could have been one of Dulles’s or Donovan’s or Jim Forrestal’s many anonymous minions.

Minutes later they were at the center table in Stan’s lab. Under the shaded lamp that hung down, Stan shook Cochrane’s new passports and identities out of a thin brown envelope. The documents plopped on the table.

Cochrane picked them up. He discovered that in a fresh American passport he was now William Stanley Lewis, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on April 12, 1910. He saw his likeness staring out. The passport, to anyone reading it, had been issued in New York one year earlier. The repetition of the first name William as a repetition of his own was pure coincidence. But Cochrane went with it. He hoped for a short, easy assignment and not having to hone his reactions to a different first name was acceptable.

As Cochrane flicked the pages, he saw one previous “trip” out of the U.S. to Bermuda in 1946. It was a perfect piece of work. The companion piece to the U.S. passport was a Canadian one. Cochrane felt well at home with it, having functioned many times as a spy with a fallback Canadian alias. He had rarely had to use the fallback fraudulent identification documents, but those times when he had needed to, the documents were critical.

Cochrane fingered the two pieces of work in his hands, getting the feel of them, making certain that they felt and looked right. To a capable immigration office of any country, a misplaced staple or the wrong tone of blue or red ink could be a dead giveaway.

“Excellent,” Cochrane said, looking up. “I may keep these now and put them to use?”

“Yes. Good luck,” Stan said. “Berlin horrible. No food. No water. No electricity. No heat.”

“No Hitler, either” Cochrane answered.

“Stalin worse than Hitler,” Stan growled.

Cochrane chose not to engage the statement, though he might not have disagreed with it. He shook Stan’s hand, pushed the passports back into the envelope, and tucked the envelope carefully into his jacket.

“Ha!” said Stan. “Never soft. Communists. Liars and murderers. Don’t trust. Never.”

Cochrane used a call box to contact Irv Goff, who was waiting at a phone guarded by an MI6 friend who owned a pub in Kensington. The prearranged tradecraft was uncomplicated: the connection point in London for the upcoming operation, the St. Ermine’s Hotel in Westminster, was a five-minute walk from the Houses of Parliament. Goff would come by that evening and go over some final details before Cochrane’s departure for Berlin.

Chapter 28

London – End of June 1948

That evening, Irv Goff appeared at the St. Ermine Hotel carrying a small attaché case. Once he had joined Cochrane in his room and pulled down the blinds, he dumped onto the bed a packet of currency, money in American dollars and British pounds sterling, German currency of both sorts, and three cartons of American cigarettes, Lucky Strikes.

“What’s all this?” Cochrane asked.

There was also a pistol, American-made, in the attaché case. Goff picked it up and tucked it into his belt.

“Money to keep you alive,” he said. “If you need more, talk to Major Pickford with the American military command in Berlin. He’s one of Forrestal and Dulles’s people. There’s a residential wing for our military people at Tempelhof. Major Pickford stays there and so will you. More secure than the city at large.”

“He knows of this operation? You’re sure?”

“He knows and he’s in daily contact with Washington. He’ll be able to contact me or higher up, like Forrestal, if it’s necessary. If we’re lucky it won’t be.”

“You never know,” said Cochrane. “Now. Why all the cigarettes?”

“Use them as bribes when you need to. A good smoke is a good smoke,” said Goff, suddenly a philosopher. “You can take all the currency reform and negotiations that are going on in Germany these days and drop them into one of those fetid Berlin dumpsters where you find bodies. American cigarettes are the most sought-after currency in Berlin right now. Major Pickford will resupply you as you need them. Just give a shout.”

“Don’t your Russian friends have their own cigarettes?” Cochrane asked.

“They would if they had any tobacco,” Irv said. “But the Turks and the Russians aren’t friendly these days.”

“No reason they would be,” Cochrane said. “They live in fear of Joe Stalin sending in the Red Army.”

“Oh, that’s not going to happen,” Irv said. “Joe’s got his hands full with Europe. Vienna. Berlin.”

Cochrane leaned back from the table. “You talk of cigarettes being used as currency in Berlin. You sound knowledgeable. You’ve been there recently?”

“Maybe.”

“How recently?” Cochrane pressed.

Goff said, “I’m just back.”

“What does ‘just’ mean?”

“Stopped there before I came to see you. Then again, it took me two of the three days just to scare you up in Cambridge. Ever think of getting a phone?”

“In England? These days? You must be kidding,” Cochrane scoffed.

“Not kidding,” Goff said. “Just forgetting. I thought you might be hiding from old adversaries, real and imagined.”

“Old adversaries I can deal with. People like you are more difficult,” Cochrane said. “There are times that I’d like to avoid you, like when I’m about to start a year’s sabbatical at a place I’ve always adored. Cambridge. Enemies are easy to avoid, elude, and say ‘no’ to. Old colleagues are quite another story.”

“Should I be flattered?”

“Only if you wish to be,” Cochrane said. “Do I get a weapon? I noticed you just put a Remington into your pants.”

“You’ll get a weapon in Berlin,” Goff said. “Major Pickford has everything from jet fighters to pocketknives. You’ll get what you need.”

“I assume he’s an intelligence officer,” Cochrane said.

“He’s our man at Tempelhof Airfield,” Goff confirmed. “Or one of them, anyway. And while we’re on the subject of majors, you’ll carry that rank, also. Same as you did in 1943.”

“Okay, fine,” Cochrane said, assimilating everything quickly. “Is there anything else?”

“Nope. I’m hoping you’re in and out in a couple of weeks. I have friends on both sides of the West-East frontier, so if anything goes haywire, let me know. Major Pickford will brief you on arrival. Good to go?”

“As good as ever. Just tell me one thing. Between us.”

Goff rolled his eyes. “If I can,” he said.

“What the hell is this really about?” Cochrane asked. “I’ve known Donovan, Dulles, and, for that matter, Jim Forrestal for many years. They aren’t well-known for doing things out of the goodness of their hearts.”

“You’ve turned into a jaded, old hog, Bill,” Goff responded easily. “I keep telling you. Bettina Schneidhuber was promised a route, an escape if you will, out of Germany after the war if we got that young girl to Washington. Dulles is trying to make good on the promise.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

“You asked me a question,” Goff said. “I answered it. See how it plays out in Berlin. I wouldn’t lie to you. Not knowingly, anyway.”

“Bastard,” muttered Cochran with a pained smile.

“I love you, too, Bill,” Goff said. “Travel safely.”

That evening, Cochrane repacked what he would take with him and tried to sleep. Sleep came with difficulty, however, as he kept thinking of his wife and family and how the front end of his sabbatical had been sabotaged. It was not till two AM that he slept, then he was up again at seven.

Chapter 29

London to Berlin – July 1948

By prearrangement the next morning, an unmarked car with an American driver took Cochrane to Heathrow. There, his driver guided him through a circumvention of normal exit procedures. He was handed off to two soldiers and taken to a private waiting area in a separate annex where, through a tinted window, he watched the loading of an American military transport, a C-47 that was still marked with the red, white, and blue D-day invasion paints.

Workers appeared to be loading industrial parts of some sort onto the plane. It looked as if some large machinery had been taken apart and reduced to sections, then hauled onto the plane through a cargo door. The sight perplexed Cochrane.

There was a small human figure in a flight suit and pilot’s cap supervising the loading activities and examining the propellers and undercarriage of the aircraft. The aviator eventually turned and walked back toward the annex. At this point, Cochrane realized for sure what he had suspected. The aviator was a woman. Another figure joined her. This one was a man, maybe six to eight inches taller than she was. They engaged in conversation for several seconds, laughed about something, then disappeared into the building where Cochrane waited.

The woman reappeared less than two minutes later, approaching him. There was a man with her. He wore a flight suit, also.

“Mr. Lewis?” she said.

“That’s me,” Cochrane said.

“I’m Tommy Olson,” she said. “We’ve been assigned to deliver you directly to Berlin, sir.”

“Berlin directly?” Cochrane asked, surprised. “Not Wiesbaden or Rhein-Main first?”

“No, sir,” Olson said. “We’ve got some industrial equipment to deliver. We just came from the briefing. Our instructions are to get you to Tempelhof.”

“Then I’m ready to go,” Cochrane said, rising from his seat.

“You ever fly with a lady pilot before?” she asked.

“I’d remember it if I had,” he said. “No.”

“First time for everything,” Tommy Olson said. Then, introducing the man next to her, she said, “This is my co-pilot today, Mr. Taylor.’

Cochrane offered his hand. “Call me, Glenn, sir,” Taylor said.

“Call me William,” Cochrane said.

“Come on along, Mr. Lewis, sir,” Tommy Olson said. “Let’s get up into the clouds.”

Chapter 30

Germany, Soviet Zone – 1946-48

In the Soviet POW camp where Unteroffizier Heinrich Peter Roth had been held, the Russian captors would taunt their German prisoners. The Soviets would tell the Germans they were going home, line them up to get onto trucks, and then insult, laugh at them, and throw garbage at them. Then the Russians would forcibly march the German ex-soldiers back to their barracks where they had freshly urinated on the beds or in the narrow aisles. Many prisoners would kill themselves from the mental anguish.

Roth, a native Berliner from a gritty neighborhood in the Eastern Sector, had been a gunner in a tank unit. Later, when his first unit had been destroyed, he had been a foot soldier in the infantry. As the war wound down, he heard from other soldiers that his late comrades in arms, his closest friends, had all been killed either in combat or during the air bombardment of Berlin that signaled the end of the war. The units that had engaged the Red Army had been obliterated in battles, most survivors executed with pistols.

He had heard also that his old neighborhood in Berlin had been leveled in the last months of the war. He assumed that his parents, who had run a popular neighborhood café in Freising, were dead. When he had too much time to recollect, he often remembered a young girl name Katrina, a year younger than he, who had worked at a furniture factory where Heinrich had been a carpenter’s apprentice.

He had been sweet on her, and she had been fond of him. He had been a handsome young man at the time, unscathed by battle or horror, before he had enlisted in the army. Heinrich didn’t dare to even think about her. He was sure she was dead. He hoped he would never learned the details.

When Roth had been captured in Poland, Russian soldiers had thrown him in with men from other battalions and other parts of Germany. The other prisoners were rural men who often ganged up on him and stole his rations. Roth reasoned that if he stayed in the camp, his guards or the other prisoners would eventually kill him.

Heinrich waited till the mid-spring of 1948 and walked away from his camp one morning before dawn. Roth was in East Germany, seventy miles east of the small village of Fessenden that was outside of Werneuchen, a small town in Brandenburg, in the district of Barnim northeast of Berlin. He had been born in Berlin but had had an aunt, uncle, and cousins in Fessenden. Fessenden was as good a destination as any.

One thing he had learned as a soldier: always march forward. There was no alternative other than death. At least there was honor, he reasoned, in marching forward.

Roth was twenty-four years old. It was common for men to walk away from labor camps: the guards were uncaring, drunk, and more concerned with the German girls they had captured and now held hostage in a private building, a converted church. Most escapees were quickly rounded up by Russian guards in Soviet Gaz 67s, the Russian version of the Jeep. Escapees were shot on sight, their bodies dragged to the roadside or into fields, or hung on trees and left to rot or be eaten by the wolves that emerged from the forests at night. Usually, their clothing was stolen. Mutilated naked corpses lined the dirt roads westward toward Berlin.

Soviet military patrols were frequent. Roth stayed with the roads until he heard vehicles coming closer. Then he would dive into the woods and run. Several times the patrols shot at him. Once he was fired upon by a sentry or by a German turncoat from a battered pillbox. Or maybe it was a farmer. He wasn’t sure who had fired the shots, but the bullets came close enough to hit the dirt along the road where he walked.  Roth was still wearing the tattered remnants of his uniform from the war, though he had also found a piece of canvas along the route and now wrapped it around him to alter his profile. At one point, two days into his escape, a small fighter aircraft with Soviet markings flew low overhead. The pilot saw him, turned, and came after him.

In terror, Roth ran toward a ditch as the plane strafed him. He dived into the ditch as bullets just missed him and found himself next to the remains of two corpses swarming with rats. Ready to vomit, Roth climbed to his feet and hid in the tall grass and brush. The Soviet aircraft made two more passes at him. One barrage of bullets came within ten meters of him.  Then the pilot gave up.

Roth still carried his military papers, which he knew he should not lose. The papers were the only thing he had that would establish his identity if he could get back to Berlin and could find anyone sympathetic to a returning soldier who had served the fatherland with honor. But the papers were also enough to get him shot because he had deserted from a Soviet camp.  It all depended on whom he presented the papers to.

After four days, he arrived at the village of Fessenden where his Aunt Greta and Uncle Kurt had lived. His emotions were wound up so tightly that he could not knock on the door of the house where they had lived. He hid in the woods for three days stealing root vegetables to survive.

Finally, one morning Heinrich returned to the area near his family’s old home. He saw a bent, broken woman with a yoke over her shoulder carrying two pails of milk. It was his mother’s sister, his Aunt Greta. He couldn’t stop himself. He ran from the woods toward her. She did not recognize him and screamed to her husband, Kurt, that a deranged Russian had come to rape her.

Her husband came out of the house with a military pistol and chased him down. Heinrich stumbled. The uncle pinned him down with his back to the ground and pushed the nose of the pistol to his forehead, having every intention of blowing his brains out.

Roth begged to be killed. But before his Uncle Kurt could pull the trigger, the uncle recognized him. As young Roth sobbed and as people from the village gathered, Roth’s uncle pulled the younger man to his feet, hugged him, cried, and guided him into their home.

Heinrich had returned to a world of both devastation and energy. There was some semblance of rebuilding going on, rural farms were coming to life again. The farmland had been spared much of the fighting and bombing, but that didn’t mean it had been untouched by conflict. And Heinrich Roth was obsolete, a relic of a war that had been a crushing national humiliation. The only thing Heinrich knew was soldiering and rudimentary carpentry, not farming.

He had nothing, no clothes, no property, no job, few skills.

Everything was strange. His old world no longer existed.

His two male cousins, Hans and Erik, had been killed on the Eastern Front in 1944. His female cousin, Marika, had been taken away by Soviet soldiers in 1945 after hiding in her parents’ attic for eight months. No one had seen her since.

Heinrich stayed in the old bedroom of Hans and Erik for several days. More neighbors discovered he was there. They came over, sat downstairs, and noisily discussed him. Many were bitter. They called him a shirker and a traitor because the war had been lost and their sons died. Yet Heinrich had “come home unharmed.”

After a few days, he was able to go downstairs but he could not meet the eyes of his accusers. No one talked about the war, only the current state of things. The defeat. The disgrace. The humiliation. His uncle, who had fought in World War I, said little but often supportively touched his shoulder. His uncle seemed to understand. The older man’s eyes said what his tongue couldn’t. What all the younger people had seen in 1945, Uncle Kurt had seen in 1918.

After he regained his strength, Heinrich Roth was able to visit the two local pubs. The pubs were occasionally frequented by loud Russian occupation troops passing through, talking about their heroism, their new world of socialism, and their rough aggressive conquests of the local girls.

Roth’s uncle provided him with some of Hans and Erik’s clothing, so he could jettison his tattered uniform, which would draw attention. The people of the village soon got used to him and concerned themselves with other stragglers passing through or hiding in the forests. The Russians barely noticed him. The only one outside his family who had any sympathy was the German bartender, a man named Lucas who had a hand missing but who gave him one beer an evening and scraps from the plates of the Russian soldiers.

Lucas was older also. He had lost three sons to Hitler’s madness. He, too, understood.

In time when he wasn’t kept busy, Heinrich could think only of all his dead friends and their heroic acts, none of which were worth discussing with anyone. Depression gripped him. He knew where his uncle kept his guns. He worked up the nerve to commit suicide, the honorable exit chosen by so many Germans.

One morning there was a knock on the door. It was a local woman named Carlotta, a friend of his aunt. She was a zaftig brunette, local gossip, and war widow. But she knew everything, so she was always worth listening to.

Carlotta warned Aunt Greta that someone had ratted out Heinrich to the local police. The local police were now loyal to the Soviet army. They worked with a Soviet state security service and sought out “former Nazis, deserters, and undesirables.”

There was a bounty of two hundred marks for anyone who could find and shoot a deserter. There was now, Carlotta explained excitedly, a race on to collect.

Immediately after hearing this news, Uncle Kurt gave him a change of clothes — some of Kurt’s older farmer’s wear — and a bag with bread and carrots. Kurt led his nephew to a shortcut through the woods, a winding path that was under the cover of trees and invisible to anyone who didn’t know it by heart. The two walked until Heinrich could see a break from the woods into a clearing about fifty meters in front of him.

There they stopped.

“The path will eventually come to a clearing. You will see a road. That road will lead to a road to Berlin,” his Uncle Kurt said. “The road will enter the city between Bernau and Werneuchen. You must take it.”

The older man handed Roth an old Mauser. It was from 1908 but was still working, Uncle Kurt explained. There were three bullets chambered in the weapon. Henrich’s uncle also gave him six bullets and a small compass.

“Defend yourself as you need to,” his uncle advised him. “But always save one bullet for yourself.”

Jawohl, said Heinrich.

“May God watch over you,” he says. “To me, you are much like my sons who did not survive Hitler’s madness. Go! Berlin is to the west. Take the road. Avoid anyone in the uniform of any country. They are all killers. Those who don’t kill you with a dagger or a bullet will kill you with a bomb. Whatever you do, do not ever come back here. Now be on your way. I will always think of you as a third son. Hurry! Before the Russian police arrive.”

The men embraced quickly, then Uncle Kurt pushed out of the embrace, turned, and hurried away without looking back.

Heinrich Roth turned and walked toward the clearing that led to the road. He looked back once but his uncle was already gone, having faded into the forest surrounding Fessenden.

Heinrich might have cried but he had no tears left. Once again, he marched forward. That had been his training as a soldier. It was the only thing he remembered how to do.

Chapter 31

London to Berlin 1948

Tommy Olson led Cochrane to the loaded C-47 that sat on the tarmac at Heathrow. Taylor, who would co-pilot today, walked behind them. Cochrane boarded the aircraft first. Olson pointed to a seat against the wall between two windows immediately behind the pilot’s seat.

“Grab that seat, sir,” she said, “and strap yourself in.”

Cochrane took his position as instructed. “Am I the only passenger?” he asked.

“That was our briefing,” Glenn Taylor said.

“Consider yourself special,” Olson added.

“I already do with a lady pilot,” Cochrane said. Both aviators laughed.

“That’s how I feel every time we lift off,” Taylor said.

“I flew with the Air Transport Command during the war, sir,” Olson said as she routinely checked her dashboard. “Was in the air for half a million miles. Haven’t had an incident yet.”

“They called her ‘the Lady Snowbird’,” Taylor said, buckling his seatbelt and giving Cochrane an over-the-shoulder glance.

“Really? Why’s that?” Cochrane inquired.

“I had some real hands-on experience with snow and ice, Mr. Lewis,” she said. “Did a lot of flying in it and always came back.”

“She’s being modest,” Taylor said. “She specialized at flying into freezing rain, ice, and snow.”

“Fascinating. Where?” Cochrane asked.

“Eastern Canada. Midwinter. Delivering aircraft for the RAF, then returning veteran planes to Oklahoma for maintenance.”

“Her very own version of ‘The Ice Capades’,” Taylor teased gently. “Flew in zero visibility with wipers frozen and rudders iced. Jesus!”

“Life is a balancing act,” Olson said. “Flying is instinctive. You’ve got every instrument that the designers can give you, but you fly with your heart and your gut,” she said.

“Damned fine work,” Cochrane said. “Lend Lease aircraft I would imagine, in and out of Canada. Manufactured in the U.S., provided to our British friends to fight Hitler.”

“Correct, sir,” Olson said.

“Whatever it takes to win a war,” Cochrane added.

“Absolutely the case, sir,” she said.

“I admire what you did,” Cochrane said. He leaned forward and gave the pilot a touch of approval on her shoulder.

“You’re familiar with the ATC?” Olson asked.

“Very much so. The female pilots had a better safety record than the men. Not surprising. The women had to prove they were good enough to be pilots. The men were so bad that they had to prove that they should even be at the controls of an aircraft.”

Olson smiled. Cochrane could see her in a mirror reflection amidst the controls.

“Hear that, Nutsy?” she said good-naturedly to Taylor. “‘The men.’ He’s talking about you.”

“‘Nutsy’?” Cochrane asked with a laugh.

“Yeah. My co-pilot’s nickname is ‘Nutsy.’ Remember that if you’re ever assigned to fly solo with him.”

“Is that true?” Cochrane asked.

“I have no comment on that, sir,” Taylor said.

“Well, I’ll make a point to not remember it.”

“We’re cleared for takeoff,” Olson said.

The two pilots disappeared into their headphones. The engines revved in the body of the C-47. Cochrane tightened his seat belt and removed any slack. Olson moved the Gooney Bird to the tarmac and the plane was shortly in the air bound for Berlin.

After a successful takeoff, the aircraft angled to the northeast over the Netherlands, proceeding smoothly toward Germany after some rough air over the channel. Cochrane scanned the heavy industrial equipment that the cargo plane was carrying. The cargo still befuddled him.

Cochrane tuned into the conversation between the pilot and co-pilot, to the extent that he could hear it. They were discussing how two other aviators had fallen asleep on a night flight from Wiesbaden to Tempelhof and had both awakened over the Baltic Sea, nearing an approach to Finland. The pilot and co-pilot involved, Marino and Gerstenfeld as they recalled, had pulled out just in time, opened their throttles, and arrived only eighteen minutes overdue.

The story perplexed Cochrane. He tapped Olson on the shoulder for a clarification.

“The overshoot would have been well over Soviet airspace,” he said. “I would have thought the Russians would have scrambled a fighter and forced the aircraft down.”

Taylor was already shaking his head as Cochrane leaned forward to listen over the drone of the C-47’s two engines. “They were out over no-man’s land,” Taylor said. “Russians don’t have radar set up everywhere. We’re not supposed to know that, but we do.”

“So there are radar gaps?”

“None to the west of Berlin, but plenty to the east,” Tommy Olson shouted.

“Remarkable,” said Cochrane, settling back.

“Everything’s remarkable up in the air,” Taylor said.

Olson laughed and the flight continued toward the German capital.

An hour later into their flight, Olson and Taylor opened a small bag of provisions they had brought with them. They had coffee in a Thermos, paper cups, Coca-Cola in bottles, packaged cheese, apples, chips, and chocolate bars. They offered what they had to Cochrane who indulged in Coke, chips, and a slice of English cheddar.

The flight was steady at this point with the minimal necessary contact by radio. The situation gave Cochrane the opportunity to snoop. “I thought I’d be traveling with coal and sacks of flour,” he said. “That’s what I’ve been reading about.”

“You will be eventually if you go in and out of Berlin regularly with us,” Olson said. “Just not today. Or maybe later today. We’ll see.”

“Then what’s all this stuff?” Cochrane said, indicating the cargo.

“Chopped-up machinery,” said Taylor.

“Of what sort?” Cochrane inquired amiably. “And why are we flying it to Berlin?”

“Oh, I think you can trust me,” Cochrane said. “Can’t be anymore classified cargo than your passenger today,” he said. “Plus I’m the only other person in the plane unless you’ve got a body stashed somewhere. So we’re speaking in confidence. What is all this stuff?”

“What’s it look like to you, Mr. Lewis?” Olson asked.

“Construction equipment.”

Olson and Taylor laughed.

“You got a good eye, sir,” Taylor said. Then Glenn Taylor spilled the beans.

When the Soviets arrived in Berlin in April 1945, he explained, the Soviets took apart the surviving German factories piece by piece, wall by wall, pillar by pillar, and, in some cases, brick by brick. They shipped everything back to the Soviet Union. Then they removed every bit of construction equipment they could find.

From bulldozers to hammers and nails, from tool belts to work gloves. They shipped everything back to Mother Russia. Then they came back and rounded up every German with a heartbeat who knew how to operate and reassemble the machinery and shipped them off to Russia to operate the equipment.

“If you didn’t want to go to Russia,” Taylor said. “Your other option was to be sent to a labor camp in Siberia.”

“Not too many chose that option,” Olson said.

“I imagine not,” said Cochrane. “How do you know this?”

“Well, you can’t find any equipment anywhere,” Taylor said, “and our German work crews like us. So they talk.”

“A lot of Berliners lost relatives and mates after the war,” Olson added. “The Russian soldiers would just snatch people away. Particularly women.”

“Never saw them again,” Taylor said, lighting a smoke from a pack of Old Golds. He jerked the pack so that a couple popped up. He offered them to Cochrane and Olson. Bill Cochrane declined, Olson leaned to her left and plucked a smoke from the back with her lips. Taylor produced a lighter with a USAF insignia, screaming eagle, Latin phrase and all, and lit it for her. VINCIT QUI PRIMUM GERIT. Involuntarily, the Latin processed in his teeming, overworked mind, a skill that bounced back from university days. “He conquers who gets there first.”

Something else processed also, equally involuntarily. Olson and Taylor seemed more than professionally chummy. He wondered if they were having an affair. Then a third thought processed: whether they were or not was none of his damned business.

When the British and American powers arrived, Taylor continued, not only was there no construction equipment but no factories or shops in which to build equipment. There was little to be had in England or France, either. Like the fuel to power the destroyed city and the food to feed the starving populace, everything had to be manufactured in the United States and shipped to England. Factories in the United States boomed. Convoys in the sky across the Atlantic were often like moving vans with wings.

But when the heavy equipment arrived in England, such as what Cochrane had seen on the loading docks, there was a bottleneck. Getting heavier supplies to Berlin created its own series of logistical nightmares. The runways at Gatow, Wiesbaden, Rhein-Main, and Tempelhof needed to be repaired and expanded. Otherwise, they’d be destroyed under the weight of the bigger aircraft needed to transport the new machinery.

Construction equipment needed to be flown in. Yet it couldn’t be flown in because the bulldozers, cement mixers, and steamrollers were too big and too heavy for the C-47s or C-54s. Larger cargo planes were too heavy to land and needed longer runways. Yet until the bulldozers arrived, improvements to Tempelhof could not take place. It was a chicken and egg routine, but this time the eggs and chickens were bulldozers and steamrollers.

An anonymous genius, or several of them, came up with a solution. Using acetylene torches, workers in the United States or England cut up older bulldozers and steamrollers, marked the pieces, then shipped the fragments piece by piece to England to ship to West Germany using jumbo cargo aircraft.

“Mostly C-82s,” said Taylor. “Beautiful, big, new jumbo cargo transport.”

“Sure as hell is,” said the Lady Snowbird. “Can’t wait to fly one. Four engines!”

“From there, smaller cargo C-47s and C54s ferry the pieces to Berlin,” Taylor said.

In hangars near the airport, teams of Germans and displaced persons put the equipment back together, he continued. As new equipment rolled off assembly lines, work commenced on improvements and extensions to the landing strips at Tempelhof.

“There’s going to be a new air approach to Tempelhof soon,” Olson said. “It’ll be safer and more efficient.”

“What’s wrong with the approach now?” Cochrane asked.

Both pilot and co-pilot laughed.

“You’ll find out soon enough, Mr. Lewis,” Tommy Olson said.

“Just sit back,” Nutsy Taylor said. “We’ll warn you when you need to be nervous.”

To get to Berlin during the World War had taken millions of men and tens of thousands of lives and several years. Now, after the war, it was still not easy to arrive in Berlin by air.

The flight was under three hours. On approach, Cochrane peered through the co-pilot’s window and saw Tempelhof in the near distance. He drew a breath. He had not seen the city since its defeat. And for all the time Bill Cochrane had spent in Berlin — before the war and in 1943 on a special operation — he had never flown in. He had always accessed the city by rail or by motor vehicle. Now, as the plane banked so that they could approach from the air, he could see the troubled city before him, the point where East met West in the new world of the Iron Curtain. He was transfixed, one strong emotion in revolt with the next and the next and the next.

“This is sadly far from the city I last saw,” Cochrane said as the plane descended low on the final approach part of the C-47’s approach. He looked around. “Where do people live?” he asked.

“See all those bombed-out ruins beyond the landing strip?” Taylor asked as Olson spoke with air traffic control. There was an American-accented voice on the other end of the radio contact.

“It’s impossible not to see it,” Cochrane said.

“Those ruins, that rubble? That’s where people live,” Olson said.

The aircraft came in low over the city, threading the aerial needle between the buildings. Under Tommy Olson’s guidance, the C-47 avoided the ruined spires of St. Thomas’s Church and the obstructive chimney of what appeared to Cochrane to be an abandoned brewery.

Cochrane saw the field of graves below him in St. Thomas Cemetery as they whizzed by on the ground beneath the C-47.

The approach was only fifty feet above the tombstones of the cemetery, many of which had been overturned. Cochrane moved in his seat and lifted himself up as much as safety would allow so he could see the ground below him. On the far edge of the graveyard, a gang of local children was sitting and playing. They looked up at the American C-47 and waved. They smiled and jumped and shouted. Cochrane could see no adults with them. Ahead, as he shifted his gaze to look through the plane’s front windshield, he saw the runway with its illuminated path.

It beckoned.

The day was overcast but there was visibility. The plane gave a wobble. He could see another small horde of children gathered before the runway, kids looking up, probably with mixed feelings, at the Western airpower coming into their defeated city.

“Three years ago I would have bombed these people,” Taylor added. “Now I feel sorry for them. They weren’t all Nazis. Their leaders sold them out.”

Then Cochrane suppressed a gasp and a shudder of horror. Beyond the landing field was an endless sea of urban destruction, a landscape far worse than it had seemed minutes earlier. These were the neighborhoods he had known as a younger man, before the war and as a spy. There were people he knew and cared about who had lived in these bombed-out places. Now their homes and businesses were agone and for the first time the bare-eyeball truth was upon him that all these people may also be gone, including Frau Schneidhuber, the woman he had come all this way to find.

Suddenly, Tommy Olson shouted.

“Hold on, sir!” she bellowed. Her words jolted her passenger.

The aircraft flew a few feet over the roof of a final apartment house, then took its perfunctory steep dive as a wicked downdraft rocked it and drove it into an even sharper descent. For an instant, Cochrane was sure they were going to crash. Then the aircraft leveled out. Olson grinned and Taylor laughed.

“Sorry, sir,” Olson said.

“Normal Berlin landing,” Taylor said.

“All in a day’s work,” Cochrane said. “Right?”

“Roger that,” Olson said.

Seconds later, the C-47’s wheels bounced on the runway. Then a second, a third, and a fourth time they bounced as Olson pulled her aircraft to a perfect stop fifty feet shy of the end of the bumpy runway.

Moments later, Cochrane, easing back, exhaling a sigh, his stomach still filled with several dozen butterflies, was enjoying the taxiing to the terminal. The more things changed, the more they echoed his perilous past: he was back in Berlin.

Chapter 32

Berlin – July 1948

Cochrane, carrying his two suitcases, was no sooner in the airport when a heard a voice. “Mr. Lewis? Major Lewis?” the voice asked.

Major Haley Pickford stepped out of a small crowd that was on hand to meet arrivals. He extended a hand. He introduced himself to Cochrane.

“Good to have you with us,” Pickford said. “You’ll be billeted at the airport for a short time. You’ll find it more convenient. Decent trip in the air?”

“No complaints,” Cochrane answered.

“Wouldn’t do you much good, anyway. Come along with me. I’ll give you a quick orientation.”

From behind Major Pickford appeared a uniformed private first-class, an open-faced kid named Crenshaw with a Midwestern dairy-state smile. Crenshaw took Cochrane’s bags. Small talk between the two “majors” continued until the men were in Major Pickford’s office. Pickford instructed Crenshaw to take the bags to an assigned room where Cochrane would be staying.

The private saluted, closed the door, and departed.

“Here to find trouble, huh?” Major Pickford said with a smile, leaning back at his desk, flanked by an American flag and a U.S. Army flag. A map of Berlin was on the wall behind him.

“I suppose I won’t have to look too far to find it,” Cochrane said.

“Nope. May I call you William, ‘Major Lewis’?” he asked with a knowing glint in his eye.

“Sure.”

There was a bottle of Glenlivet Scotch on the major’s desk with an odd assortment of glasses next to it. “Drink?” Pickford asked. “Join me?”

“Don’t mind if I do,” Cochrane said.

The host grabbed two whiskey tumblers and poured. There was a carafe of water near the liquor, but both men drank the liquor neat. Cochrane also noticed that to the left of where he sat there was a chunky piece of furniture which had been deliberately covered with a sheet and two army unit flags, those of a supply regiment and an artillery unit.

“I’m told you’re here to find someone of interest to Washington,” Major Pickford continued.

“Correct. Someone I knew before the fall of Germany.”

“During the war? Or before it?”

“Either. Or both,” Cochrane said. “You’ve read the file, major, and you’re the intelligence officer. You’re as up to speed as I am.”

“I’ve seen part of the file,” Major Pickford said. “I like to have as good an idea as possible as to what’s going on in my bailiwick. In case something blows up, you understand.”

“Sure,” said Cochrane. “Hopefully, nothing will.”

“It’s a season for stuff blowing up,” Pickford said. “There’s only so much we can keep a lid on.” A pause, then, “I have some associated files for you to look at,” Major Pickford continued. “Recent stuff but not much. There’s a reading room down the hall. Don’t take them beyond that. Leave them on the desk when you’re finished. Private Crenshaw will pick the files up and return them to me. This area is more secure than the billeting wing where you’ll be staying. Any questions?”

“Plenty.”

“Fire away.”

“Is there any central agency in Berlin that has a list of names of people missing from the war?” Cochrane asked. “This was a city of more than four million before the war and is down to something like two and a half million now. Is there any central accounting for all the people missing?”

Pickford shook his head. “Not really. No,” he said. “Not that we know of, and if there was, it would have the type of information we’d love to get our paws on. In another year or two, there might be. Right now the individual state governments in the occupied zones oversee the care and location of displaced persons. They keep count. Numbers. Names and addresses where possible. I’ll be blunt: it’s haphazard. And individually, these local governments can’t be trusted. Not for a moment. They lie like rugs, all of them, including ours, and if you ever quote me on that, I’ll say I never said it.”

“Why does it work that way?” Cochrane asked.

“In the Western Zone of Berlin the agencies – ours - are run by former Nazis. Not high-level, of course, but middle-level. Bureaucrats. They were administrators before the war and they’re administrators now. In the Eastern Zone, the agencies are run by Germans also, but they’re pro-Soviet ass-kissers. So don’t trust them, don’t give them any information, and don’t take anything they tell you to heart. Smoke?” Major Pickford asked, breaking out a pack of Luckies and offering them.

“No thanks.”

Pickford lit up, took another sip of Glenlivet, and continued. “If I were you, major, I wouldn’t even let them know you’re in the city, much less who you’re looking for.”

“That’s the way I’m thinking. So it’s a shoe-leather job?” Cochrane said. “Walking around the city. Snooping. Nosing around.”

“I’m told you’re good at that,” Pickford said with a snort.

“My reputation precedes me?”

“You have a reputation for getting a job done if left alone to do it and provided with the proper support. So I’ll give you what you need. Just whistle. Anything you want, within reason. I’ll make it happen.”

“Thanks.”

Pickford drained his first shot of Scotch then poured himself another.

“You’re a married man, right?” Pickford asked.

“Yes, sir. And hoping to remain so.”

“Let me tell you about the three B’s. Birds, Bees and Berlin.”

“I’m listening,” Cochrane said, sipping his Scotch. Cochrane was appreciative that, for starters, Pickford had made the Scotch happen. He settled in to listen.

“Berlin has two types of dames. First, you have the Trummerfrau — and then what the GIs refer to as Veronika Dankeschön. Of course, you cannot squeeze every female in the city into one category or the other, but they reflect what’s going on out there as soon as you get out of the airport. Trummerfrau means ‘rubble woman’,” Major Pickford explained. “You’ll see them all over, the females hammering bricks, sifting through the ruins off the streets, saving materials for reconstruction. There are probably about fifty thousand of them in the city. They do this for extra rations. A hausfrau receives a lot less to eat than the women who clear the streets. Food rations are everything, especially when the women support old people and children in the home. Their men have been killed, severely crippled from war wounds, or emotionally damaged. I hate to say it, but three years after the war, people are still starving in Berlin, something those Red bastards are trying to make worse with their goddamn blockade. This is a country and city of suicides, William, and most of the suicides after the war are likely to be men, returning soldiers. Right now the women of Berlin are working night and day to feed their families. While they’re earning their food rations, they’re also gluing the city back together.”

“After the men of Berlin destroyed it,” Cochrane observed.

“Bit of a cynic, aren’t you, major?” Pickford chuckled.

“More a realist, but also a student of history,” Cochrane said. “What is the other ‘type’?”

“The opposite of the trouser-wearing, hardworking, gritty Teutonic Trummerfrau is the dame people back in the States would call ‘loose.’ The Veronika Dankeschön, God love her.”

Cochrane worked over the double entendre and grinned. “Veronika Dankeschön. I assume the initials purposely spell ‘VD’.”

“Yup. Clap. Many different strains of it, none of it fun. It’s a serious problem in Berlin. Don’t take any home as a souvenir.”

“I wouldn’t think of it.”

“Veronicas use sex to get the basic things they need. Look, there’s a shortage of German men and a surplus of Allied men, so none of this is a surprise. Not every woman who goes out with an Allied soldier is Veronika. Plenty of young German dames just want to have some fun after the war, meet new people, get past the damned fighting. They go out with Allied soldiers for many other reasons. Food and cigarettes. Nylons.  New music in the Allied clubs. There’s even the hope of marrying and being taken to hell out of Europe and back to the States as a trophy. But keep this in mind, the Germans as a whole look warily at the girl who’s hanging around a U.S. soldier. She might be called an Ami-liebchen: an American-lover.” He paused. “There’s an implication. The term is just short of ‘prostitute’.”

“I’m not here to find forbidden romance or assignation,” Cochrane said.

“Good for you. I felt obligated to walk you through the minefield, though. Sorry.”

“No apologies necessary.”

“The thing is,” Major Pickford said, “you’re looking for an adult female. There’s a good chance that she’s dead. There’s a better chance that she’s no longer in Berlin. Maybe she fled, maybe the Soviets abducted her to a labor camp. There’s a chance she changed her name. So you got about a forty percent chance of finding her. If you do find her, it’s fifty-fifty that she’s going to turn out to be a Trummerfrau or a Veronika. If you get that far, proceed accordingly.”

Major Pickford finished his second shot. He eyed the bottle and went for a third pop while Cochrane was still on his initial pour. “There’s your afternoon orientation,” Pickford said.

“Thanks.”

“Where did this woman of interest live?” Pickford asked.

Cochrane gave the address.

Pickford considered it for a moment and made a face.

“That block was obliterated. You’ll be starting at ground zero.”

“That surprises me not at all,” Cochrane said.

“You and me both,” Pickford said. A pause, then, “Why don’t you unwind a little? Let Pfc. Crenshaw show you around Tempelhof, then we’ll meet here in my office again briefly after dinner. You might have more questions after you’ve done some reading and looked around.”

“Sounds good,” Cochrane said.

Chapter 33

Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania –   April - May 1945

A little more than three years before the Big Lift in April of 1945, both sides of the global conflict knew which side was going to lose World War II in Europe. On the Eastern Front, the momentum of the war had turned with the surrender of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad in 1943. Like a tidal wave growing in force and intensity, the Red Army began to roll eastward from Russia across devastated Poland. It continued into Eastern Germany where the Wehrmacht could slow the advancing Soviet onslaught but could not stop it.

Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had personally set in motion a competition between two Soviet marshals, Georgy Zhukov and Ivan Konev, to crush the remaining Nazi resistance and lead the first Russian troops into Berlin. The Soviet armies advanced into East Prussia in long wide columns. They were an extraordinary mixture of the modern and the medieval. There was a professional corps of officers, men who were — above all — soldiers. There were tank troops in padded black helmets manning T-34s and T-70s, probably the best tanks in the world, and the weapon that had turned the tide on the Eastern Front. There were Cossack cavalrymen on shaggy mounts with loot strapped to the saddle, lend-lease Studebakers and Dodges towing light field guns, and then a second echelon in horse-drawn carts.

The variety of characters among the soldiers was almost as great as that of their military equipment. There were freebooters who drank and raped shamelessly. There were idealistic, austere Communists and members of the intelligentsia appalled by such behavior. And there were professional soldiers who obediently served the state.

On April 28, 1945, Lena Schroeder, nineteen, and her younger sister, Anna, seventeen, awoke to the sound of heavy motor vehicles moving through the streets. It was an hour before dawn in the home they shared with their parents in the small city of Demmin, a community in Pomerania. Demmin normally had a population of sixteen thousand. But Demmin’s population had doubled. Thousands of refugees from the East were also in Demmin, living in abandoned buildings, parks, and the streets.

Lena climbed out of the bed the girls shared and went to her window. The weather had been warm in the early summer. She wore nothing but a flimsy nightgown. Anna had no night gown. The one she had owned had disintegrated from daily use and lack of washing. She wore nothing but bloomers. The girls were exhausted. In late April, as Soviet troops approached and Wehrmacht divisions prepared to withdraw, the remaining German soldiers had ordered women, children, and elderly men to dig a three-mile-long anti-tank ditch east of the city.

Lena nudged open the slatted wooden shutters outside her window, carefully holding her gown to her as well as her long blond hair so as not to attract attention. The girls had learned to be careful around soldiers.

Anna came up behind Lena and looked over her sister’s shoulder, hiding her bare breasts as she craned her neck to see outside. There were German soldiers in the street. At first, this was reassuring because Russian guns could be heard in the near distance, volley after volley, drawing closer by the hour.

Lena opened the shutters farther. She and her sister gazed down as some of the more attentive soldiers gazed appreciatively up at them and waved. Lena waved back, visible in the reflected light of headlamps on Wehrmacht troop transports. But then Lena and Anna gasped. Far from being reassured, they were horrified at what they saw. The Wehrmacht had begun an evacuation of Demmin. Hitler had promised that the Red Army would be stopped. The German generals had promised that there would be no retreat. Now, as the horizon glimmered faintly with the dawn, these promises lay broken.

The door to the sisters’ room eased open with a squeak. Fritz Schroeder, their father, entered holding a candle. “Close that window!” he said. “Now!”

They pulled in the shutters and turned. Their father was a local policeman, the second-in-command in the town. The first-in-command had not been seen for several days. One rumor was that he had fled. The other rumor was that he was dead, either from his hand or that of someone else.

“Pack one small bag each,” Fritz said. “We’re leaving.”

“Where are we going?” Lena asked.

“Berlin,” he said. “If we are lucky enough to get there. Not all of us will.”

Fritz approached his two daughters and embraced each. “My duty is to stay until the last of our soldiers departs. Then we, and the town, are on our own,” he said.

“How soon?” Anna asked.

“Within the hour.”

He looked at his daughters. Part of their beauty was their long blond hair. But it could also be a target for rape-inclined soldiers.

“Make yourselves look like boys,” he said. “Be at the barn in ninety minutes. If we don’t stay ahead of the Russians, we’re dead.”

Two weeks earlier Fritz Schroeder had anticipated this moment. He had hidden an old car between two haystacks outside an old stone barn. It was a small, gray 1934 Citroen that had been confiscated. He had repainted it and put fuel in it. The barn was on a small plot of land that bordered some woods half a kilometer down the road that went to the northwest. A circuitous route to Berlin was less obvious and worked best. He had taught his daughters how to forage and survive in the woods. The goal was to at least get to the woods on the other side of the River Peene. The girls had played there as younger children and knew the terrain well. They knew where the undergrowth of the forest was thick enough to provide cover, they knew where there was water, and they knew where berries grew wild. Their father had taught them well.

There was also an alternative destination in case of an emergency or extreme danger. Several kilometers to the north in a thick area of woods there was a small habitable ramshackle cabin against a wall of granite on a hillside thick with foliage. The family owned it. The girls called it unser geheimes Haus, our secret house. They had visited it since being children, and as recently as two months earlier. There was no distinguishable path to it. But they knew the way by heart. No one else had visited it since before the first great war.

“One other thing,” Fritz said.

He dug into a coat pocket and pulled out two Dreyse pistols. The guns were small and compact, left over from the previous World War, but they still fired. Each held seven bullets. He handed one weapon to each daughter. The girls were familiar with the pistols. In recent weeks, Fritz had taught his girls how to use them.

“Use it if you have to,” he said. “Save the last bullet for yourself if you need to. Your mother and I will probably be killed. Don’t waste your bullets defending us. Do what you must. Get to Berlin, change your names. Survive. Bear my grandchildren in a better place than this.”

As dawn broke, Lena and Anna packed. Beyond their window, chaos reigned. Hysterical Nazi party functionaries ripped off their red and black armbands, dropped them in the street, and left the city on confiscated fire engines, pushing off the firefighters. Near the town square, German personnel deserted the single town hospital. German police had disappeared from the streets. Fistfights were everywhere as citizens scrambled to get to the road that led out of town.

By the time dawn broke, there was a small armada of people on bicycles or tractors or small cars, all heading westward. Hundreds of civilians had also started to walk. Death, or a fate worse than death, surely awaited anyone who fell into Soviet captivity.

Fritz Schroeder and his wife walked as a couple. Lena and Anna stayed together, their hair tucked up under old hats that had belonged to their father, wearing drab coats and pants. They were dressed as boys. Beneath their feet, the ground shook from the movement of two enormous armies. The Wehrmacht divisions were in retreat and the Red Army was advancing, firing artillery shells that flew high above them and burst along the road ahead.

Demmin was surrounded by two rivers. To the north and the west, the River Peene enclosed Demmin. To the south, the River Tollense flowed by the city. There were bridges in three locations. All roads leaving the city crossed a bridge. Fritz Schroeder expected the bridges to be disabled by the retreating Wehrmacht as the Red Army approached the town from the east. He knew that to have any chance at survival, his family needed to cross the bridges as soon as the Wehrmacht had crossed them. There would only be a few minutes of opportunity before the fleeing German army blew up the bridges behind them.

As Lena and Anna started out of town, they were nearly run over by a speeding car. They recognized the license plate. It began with WL-602. The sisters recognized it as a police car, its markings painted over so recently that the paint was runny and wet.  They saw five men crowded within it, one man on the left side of the front seat with an upraised Mauser automatic pistol in his hands.

The two daughters made a successful rendezvous with their parents at the barn. Madly, the four family members clawed away the straw from the Citroen. They pushed and piled themselves into the vehicle. Fritz Schroeder turned the ignition. Three times it failed to turn over. His wife said a prayer aloud. Perhaps the prayer was heard, because, on the fourth try, the ignition kicked in. On the road out of town, the Schroeder family fled westward.

Fritz drove, leaving the road where necessary to make better time. His wife rode next to him. Lena and Anna crouched low as they rode in the back seat. Artillery fire was everywhere. At first, it sounded as if the big guns were behind them, then it seemed in front of them, and then the war surrounded them. To each side of the road, there were corpses. Germans who had tried to flee but hadn’t been successful. Many vehicles were on fire. Bodies of young men and women lay strewn across fields, bicycles were abandoned, frames shattered, and tires on fire.

Fritz Schroeder regained the crowded road that led to the bridge that went west. There were more casualties. In the sky, two Russian fighters strafed the Germans trying to flee.

Anna’s father weaved furiously in and out of a swarming crowd of pedestrians, bicycles, and battered cars. As they approached the single bridge, the dead and gravely wounded were even more plentiful. Suddenly Anna raised her hand and pointed.

“Look!” she said. Sieh dir das an!

She pointed out the police car with the WL-602 license plate that they had seen leave the city thirty minutes before them. It was half-overturned and on fire, its chassis pockmarked by several volleys of bullets, probably from the heavy machine gun of one of the Russian aircraft. In it, five corpses blazed, the charred skeletons of hands and heads raised as flames consumed the car and its contents.

They reached the crowded two-lane bridge that crossed the Peene. They squeezed onto it with other traffic. It took ten minutes to cross due to traffic inching off on the western side. When they neared the bridge’s western side, the sound of another Soviet fighter could be heard overhead. The plane strafed the fleeing cars and civilians. Two bullets hit their Citroen, but they remained unharmed. They finally reached the land on the other side. Fritz Schroeder drove the car across a field, driving parallel to the road.

They proceeded for a kilometer and a half. Most vehicle traffic had disappeared. Adjacent to the road, beyond the casualties that littered the landscape, were trees and heavy foliage. Many fleeing Germans had abandoned their vehicles and sought shelter in the forest. Up ahead, emerging suddenly from a bend in the road, a tank appeared.

Deutsche? asked Frau Schroeder.

Nein! Russisch! her husband said. He spoke softly and with a terror that he had never known in his life. The Russian tanks blocked their escape route.

Chapter 34

Berlin - July 1948

Pfc. Crenshaw showed Cochrane to the room in the residence wing where he would be billeted, plus where the commissary was and other points of interest, including a bar and a newspaper reading room.  After a brief tour of airport facilities, Cochrane returned to the secured reading room in the administrative wing. He engaged the files. They reinforced the former addresses of Frau Schneidhuber’s home and most recent workplace, the purported medical facility, or as it was termed in the correspondence, Die Medizinische Klinik.

Cochrane took dinner in the commissary. Tommy Olson and Glenn Taylor were sharing a quick dinner before having to turn around from Tempelhof to take a few passengers and some cargo back to Rhein-Main. They introduced Cochrane to several other pilots, including Victor Marino and two other newcomers, First Lieutenant Charles King of Aberdeen, South Dakota, and First Lieutenant Robert Stuber of Arlington, Virginia.

Cochrane sat and listened. Olson and Taylor were needling each other about who was inherently more qualified to fly, men or women. Marino was complaining about the paperwork involved with getting his wife to come over and join him. He listened to some explanations and comments about the DPs, the brigade in black. King and Stuber were complaining about inaccurate cargo weight on their C-47, as measured by the ground crews in Wiesbaden. They had reported some potentially lethal downdrafts on approach to Tempelhof – something noted by other pilots, also – and inaccurate cargo weigh-ins were not helping.

After dinner, Cochrane had a final half-hour briefing with Major Pickford.

“A couple of things you should know about,” Pickford said. “First off,” he said. “The ‘Erlking Fund’.”

“The what?”

“Have yourself a look, major,” Pickford said with a grin.

Pickford rose from behind his desk. He went to the chunky piece of furniture covered by a sheet and the unit military flags. He pulled the coverings away and revealed a wooden cabinet, or, rather, a fake one. Major Pickford swung the front of it open, crouched down, and seconds later was spinning the knob on a sturdy black safe.

There were a series of four clicks. Pickford opened the safe.

Cochrane could see the contents: files mostly, but two pistols, two boxes of bullets, and an assortment of envelopes. Pickford pulled the fattest of the envelopes from where it lay and undid the flap. He displayed an unmistakable green-and-gray collection of American currency. He ran his thumb across it, flicking the bills, showing Cochrane a mix of twenties, tens, fives, and maybe two hundred ones, sorted by denominations.

“The Erlking Fund,” Pickford announced. “Know what an Erlking is?”

“From my readings of Grimm as a kid, isn’t it an evil elf or spirit from German folklore? Nasty little bastard who stalks children who stay in the woods for too long. He kills them by a single touch, often just when their mother finds them.”

“Impressive,” Pickford said. He hefted the envelope in his hand, flipped it in the air, and caught it. “You must have spent much of your previous time in Germany accumulating a pile of useless knowledge. Anything you don’t know, Major Lewis?” Pickford asked.

“All knowledge is potentially useful,” Cochrane answered, and the location of Frau Schneidhuber is the most immediate thing I don’t know.”

“I have a feeling you’ll come across that woman eventually,” Pickford said. “Though damned if I know how.” The major fingered the currency. “The ‘Erlking Fund,’ we call it here,” Pickford explained. “It’s our funny money. The house reptile fund. Twenty-five hundred bucks off the books for bribes, big and small. If you need to access it, you ask me and give me a vague explanation that I can say yes to. I need to okay it and give it to you. Listen, take some right now for walking around the city. There are black markets all over the city, including a big one in the Soviet Sector way out at the end of the rail line. They’re officially off-limits and everyone uses them. They crawl with hookers, thugs, and pickpockets, so watch your step. Maybe take someone with you to watch your back.”

“They’re right out in the open? Who runs them?” Cochrane asked.

“What do you mean?’

“I’ve never seen a criminal enterprise in my life that didn’t have a structure to it,” Cochrane said. “Sometimes it’s loose, sometimes it’s strict. Bootlegging liquor during Prohibition in the United States was like that. A lot of Indians, but somewhere there are some chiefs. Look far enough and you’ll also find a big chief.”

“Russians mostly,” Pickford said. “A lot of ex-soldiers, including officers. Tough clever bastards or they wouldn’t even be alive. Not my territory, though, Major Lewis. Sounds like you have more of a background in that stuff than I do.”

“Maybe,” Cochrane allowed.

“The U.S. military has its hands full with Soviet aircraft, army blockades, and the diplomatic bullshit. If you go wading into the Russian criminal element, you’re on your own.”

Pickford peeled off a hundred dollars in tens, fives, and ones. He handed the walk-around bribe money to Cochrane and returned the rest of the cash to the safe. He pushed the safe closed and reassembled the sheet and the banners on top of it. He also brought up the subject of the medical facility where Frau Schneidhuber was believed to have worked. He said he was asking the Soviet authorities for permission for a relief worker named Lewis to visit. But he wasn’t optimistic about even receiving a response.

Then, “One final thing,” Major Pickford said. “And let me be clear about it. Stay away from the Berlin police as much as you can. Don’t have anything to do with them.”

“Specifics?” Cochrane asked.

“Effectively there are two city police forces, one allied with the Americans and the British, loyal to a guy named Johannes Stumm. Stumm’s been a cop here since the 1920s. Sacked by the Nazis in 1933, reinstated as commissioner by the postwar powers. But the police are headed by the SMA, the Soviet Military Authorities. The SMA says the Berlin police are now under the command of a Colonel Paul Markgraf,” Pickford said. “Markgraf is a former Nazi, became a prisoner of war when the Soviets captured him. ‘Reeducated’ in the Soviet Union, the Russians returned him and made him chief of the Berlin police. He fired Stumm but Stumm refuses to go and works out of a separate building in the Western Zone. You got to feel for the people of this city and what they would be abandoned to. The Communist police are in the majority as soon as you walk out of Tempelhof. They are as bad as the Nazis ever were. They kidnap citizens, even in the Western Zone, and no one ever sees them again. If they don’t like certain citizens or shopkeepers, bands of thugs turn up and the Red police not only protect them but facilitate the beatings. On June twenty-third, a couple of weeks ago, a commie mob attacked the city assembly that was instituting some of the new pro-Western licensing procedures. The police stood back, then helped the mob.”

Pickford paused. “Look, Major Lewis,” he continued, “the police report to Colonel Markgraf, he reports to the SMA, the Soviet Military Authority, and the SMA reports directly to Stalin. Germany is important to Stalin. Berlin is crucial to Germany. Make sense?’

“Too much sense,” Cochrane said. “I’ll stay away from them if I can.”

“You can’t always,” Pickford said. “They find you even if you don’t want to be found.”

Pickford sighed. “Okay final thing,” he said. “Personal safety. Yours.”

Major Pickford opened a side drawer on his desk and rummaged through for a few seconds. Then his hand emerged with a semi-automatic pistol, a Czechoslovakian vz27, with a small clip-on belt holster and a handful of thirty-two caliber bullets.

“This wouldn’t be a bad idea for you,” Pickford suggested. “It’s still the Wild West out there in some places.”

“I appreciate that,” Cochrane said, accepting the weapon, taking it, checking the clip, and putting it onto his belt as Pickford concluded.

“May I ask you something?” Pickford asked.  “You don’t have to answer if it’s classified."

“Try me,” Cochrane said.

“Why is this Schneidhuber woman so important that Washington sends you back here to bring her out of Germany?”

“I have no idea at all,” Cochrane said. “I wouldn’t be able to tell you if I did know, but I don’t.”

“That’s what I figured you’d say,” Pickford said. “Listen, I set up one meeting for you to get you started. U.S. Army guy named Karl Zimmerman. An ‘M and M’ guy. Munich and Milwaukee. Learned Kraut-talk as a boy, family moved from Munich to Milwaukee when he was eight. Karl was an infantry captain on our side during the war. He knows what’s going on. I’ll warn you, though, he’s a cynic. Karl’s part of my team here, been a liaison guy with the East and West German police and military since 1945.”

My team. If he was part of Pickford’s team, Zimmerman was an intelligence officer. No doubt about that, Cochrane reasoned.

“Where do I meet him? Here?”

“No. A place named the Bar Rosa. I’ll give you the address, time, and date. One of those places where East meets West and everyone goes to eavesdrop. You’re scheduled to hook up with Zimmerman two evenings from now. That okay?”

“Sounds fine,” Cochrane said.

“The Bar Rosa is in Berlin-Mitte,” Pickford added.

“I know the area. Been here in Berlin before, you know.”

“Yeah,” said Pickford. “So I hear.” A pause, then, “Anything else?”

“Not for right now,” Cochrane said. “Thank you.”

“You’re free to hit the Berlin sidewalks when you wish. I can’t stop you and wouldn’t even try. Good luck, warrior.”

Chapter 35

Berlin - July 15, 1948

Tempelhof was in the center of the city, so Cochrane set out on foot to see what he could, hoping to arrive and find the location where Frau Schneidhuber’s home had stood. But Berlin, even on the balmier days of mid-summer, was a grim, joyless place. The first thing Cochrane encountered on the streets on the day after his arrival was the beleaguered faces and thin bodies of starving women and children, many of whom were outside the airport begging to do laundry for soldiers and airport workers.

Cochrane set out to walk to the Brandenburg Gate. He estimated that the walk would take him thirty minutes to an hour. From the Gate, Cochrane would have his bearings and could find his way along on foot. As he began, carrying his Czech pistol in his belt, the rumble of planes overheard became a constant backdrop, much like the din at a carnival or a factory. It ebbed and flowed but never relented.

When the war in Europe had ended in May 1945, the severely damaged Brandenburg Gate stood over a ruined Berlin. The triumphant Soviet army paraded down Unter den Linden. Red Army soldiers invaded the half-destroyed Reichstag, killed anyone they found in it and ascended to the roof. They hauled down a shredded Nazi banner. As German war criminals fled and civilians took shelter, the Soviet flag above the Reichstag put a final punctuation point on the destruction of the Nazi regime that had brought so much suffering to all of Europe, including Germany.

Now, as Cochrane made his way toward the Gate and with the three Western Allied Powers said to be discussing withdrawal from Germany by 1950, the historic Gate served more than the Reichstag as a de facto trophy for Soviet power and the Soviet desire to extend control as far west into Europe as possible. No Soviet flag was visible, but the Gate was located within the Soviet Sector.

As Cochrane walked the streets of a city where he had once lived in the 1930s, and to which he had returned only briefly in 1943, women approached him, just as Major Pickford had warned. They offered to sell him household items for Deutschmarks, pounds sterling or dollars. Household items or sex. The solicitations were nonstop.

On almost every block, Trummerfrau, rubble women, were noisily at work. As inspiring as it was to see the renewal in progress, a deep sadness was upon him. The culture of Goethe, Thomas Mann, Shiller, and Beethoven had been transmogrified by a mad man and a mad regime and reduced to an impoverished population digging through ruins. So it went for a crackpot-fringe political party that had gained power through the ballot box, then refused to relinquish it.

Passing St. Thomas Cemetery, Cochrane managed a better look at the damaged church and the ravaged churchyard. There was a wooden fence that surrounded the yard. Just behind the lumber were the remnants of what had once been exquisite ironwork. A man given to noticing small details, he had admired the artwork many times during his time in Berlin. Elaborate and sophisticated street art had been popular in Berlin at the turn of the century and during the Weimar years but had been eradicated in favor of crude, crass, Fascist art after 1933. Then, in the late stages of World War II, desperate civilians carted off much of the iron and melted it down. He had seen the process begin during his weeks in Berlin in 1943.

He paused again. Down the block stood the remains of a barracks that had housed forced laborers from Eastern Europe who had tended Berlin's graveyards toward the end of World War II. It had often been fatal work. British and American air attacks often missed the fringes of the airports and destroyed civilian buildings.

American aircraft passed low overhead, their engines roaring. Cochrane stopped and stepped to the wooden fence of the old graveyard. He found a spot where a yard of paneling had been pushed aside. He cautiously stepped in to take a measure of the place.

He gagged. What he saw repelled him.

Many of the tombstones were overturned. Many graves had been pillaged for valuables like rings or gold fillings. The structure of the coffins had been ripped apart, smashed into pieces in some cases, probably for firewood. Walking gingerly through the uneven earth, Cochrane saw two decomposing corpses, half-buried. Emaciated dogs and rats investigated the human remains and fought with each other. Occasionally a dog would catch a rat and a horrid few seconds of squealing would precede the rat’s death. Cochrane moved along. He left the cemetery.

He continued toward Brandenburg Gate. He remembered being in Berlin when it had been attacked day after day by British air raids in the spring of 1943. He remembered air raid shelters, the claustrophobia and the terror of bombs coming closer and closer. The Luftwaffe had abandoned the skies and Allied planes had free range if they could evade the artillery from the ground. He recalled the horror of coming out and seeing the dead on the street and the buildings in flames or smoldering rubble, sometimes with the limbs of the dead or dying still protruding — much the same as now existed in the cemetery.

His mind teemed. What he couldn’t remember was anyone officially taking inventory of the damage or keeping track of the dead and mutilated. Someone must have been doing it, but Cochrane couldn’t remember from 1943. Or had the inner workings of the Nazi regime already collapsed?

And who knew where those records would have gone between 1943 and 1948, if they existed at all? Were those records, if they had ever existed, now destroyed? Shipped to Moscow? Held by East German security in some remote vault? “They could be buried in a distant forest or secured in a local bunker,” he reasoned as he walked northward from St. Thomas Church.

Moving about the city was difficult. There were few private cars. There was no gasoline available unless the buyer was military or diplomatic. Taxis, he observed quickly, were infrequent and stayed near the big hotels used by the diplomats. He assumed the drivers wanted Deutschmarks or hard Western currency. Very well. He had his supply.

He arrived at Brandenburg Gate. It was forlorn, battle-scarred, and had scaffolding holding up its eastern half. It was surrounded by homeless people, street urchins, beggars, and Soviet soldiers on patrol. He scanned and examined another set of uniformed men. They were not marked with any military brigade but they carried Russian sidearms. East German police, he guessed. Many, he knew, had been pro-Hitler before and during the war and had now been “re-educated” into the pro-Soviet system.

After he arrived at the Gate, he was weary of walking. He spotted an international hotel fifty meters from the gate. He saw a short line of taxis. The first vehicle was a battered pre-war Mercedes, which looked as if it had been cobbled together from the remains of several other vehicles. When Cochrane discreetly displayed an American five-dollar bill to the first driver in line, the driver was all smiles. He sprung from the driver’s seat and opened the door behind him before anyone else could poach his ride. He moved with a pronounced limp.

Cochrane always felt that traveling in a foreign city by cab once a day was a profitable idea. Cabbies knew everything. They saw people and had heard the latest rumors. Today was no exception. When an aircraft with British markings rumbled overhead, the driver looked cautiously up to watch it. Cochrane caught a glimpse of it as it passed. It was a commercial flight, BEA.

“Do you think the Luftbrucke will be a success?” Cochrane asked his driver.

The driver exuded a giant shrug, but then the floodgate of conversation opened. “It remains to be seen,” the driver said. “When autumn comes and winter sets in, there will be a choice between fuel and food. We will freeze or starve.”

“But if the lift gathers momentum,” Cochrane suggested, “if there are more planes, success in supplying the city could be possible.”

“I can only hope,” the driver said. “You’re British or American, mein Herr?”

Amerikaner.

“I like Americans,” the driver said. “One of you shot me in the ankle at Aachen.”

He motioned down to his left leg, which was a stump and a prosthesis.

“Sorry about that,” Cochrane said.

“I’m not. It took me off the front lines,” he said. Then, “Truman is not Roosevelt and Attlee is not Churchill,” he said continuing. “My guess is that your President Truman will be defeated, and the opposition party will abandon us. The British and Americans will go home from Berlin. And the Soviet tanks will roll west to Belgium until Germany is swallowed and Communism is forced upon us.”

“I sincerely hope not,” Cochrane said.

The driver sometimes left the road to avoid a crater or groups of ragged children playing and the rubble women clearing streets. They went around a few corners. Then they arrived at the intersection of two rubble-strewn streets. Half of the block was gone in all directions. The other half was boarded up.

The taxi stopped. “This is the destination you requested,” the driver said.

Through the front window of the Benz Cochrane could see Frau Schneidhuber’s old block. His insides tumbled, though this was close to what he had expected. “Obliterated,” Major Pickford had said casually. And obliterated was what he now saw with his own eyes.

He stepped out of the taxi and studied what was before him without closing the cab door. “May I take a closer look?” he asked the driver. “Could you wait for me?”

The driver nodded.

“A friend lived here,” he said to the driver. “A good friend,” Cochrane emphasized.

“I’m sorry,” said the driver.

As aircraft droned in the distance and rubble work continued within earshot, Cochrane walked to what had been a block of homes. He could barely make out where Bettina’s home had been, but he could approximate it from the distance he walked down the block. There were a few fragments of facades remaining, which helped him find the spot. Everything had been destroyed. He turned and looked at the intersecting streets, where the café had been where he had once bought ice cream. Where neighboring homes had once stood, there were huge piles of rubble. He could see through to the intersecting streets where shops and small stores were gone, too.

He walked back to the taxi. “Seen enough?” the driver asked.

“Take me to Tempelhof,” he said. “I’ve seen enough for one day.”

Chapter 36

Berlin – Mid-July 1948

The Bar Rosa was a hundred meters east of the Brandenburg Gate at Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, a square in Berlin-Mitte, Germany. The square was dark and quiet as dusk turned to night. It was dominated by the Volksbühne, Berlin’s most iconic theater, built in 1930 and now partially in ruins, by the Karl-Liebknecht-Haus. The headquarters of the Communist Party of Germany had opened its headquarters on the square in 1926, closed it during the ugliness of the 1940s, and had now defiantly reopened, a reminder of who was now in control in the Soviet Zone.

The Bar Rosa was dark and clammy. There was a busy bar on one side, illuminated by several candles, many protruding from empty liquor bottles and scattered around the bar. Candles also flickered in several makeshift sconces on the walls. If a drinking hole couldn’t depend on electricity, candlepower was to be reckoned with.

Cochrane arrived early so that he could survey the room. He bought a one-liter mug of beer at the bar and settled into the first empty table that he could find. He could hear other customers moving about better than he could see them. There was an ongoing racket of voices in English, German, and Russian, and a shifting-squeaking of wooden chairs on the cement floor. Everywhere at the end of the workday, there was a clinking of glasses and steins. Several tables sounded as if they were packed with embassy staffers.

As he settled into one of the few empty tables for two, his eyes adjusted and he saw many uniforms, police and military, in the glow from the candles. A thin old woman in the corner was doing a credible job with a miniature accordion. She sat on a stool. The accordion case was at her feet and open for tips. There were a few coins within.

There were some abandoned international newspapers on a side table near Cochrane. prowled through them, looking for coverage of the airlift. World opinion was ambivalent. There was plenty of Yankee-go-home stuff – he was in the Soviet Zone, after all — and a small amount of positive feedback to standing up to Stalin.

One commentator in an Italian socialist paper asserted that the Americans were trying to provoke a world war by remaining in Germany. Cochrane voiced his dissenting opinion by tearing the rag to shreds and dumping it in a trash can by the bar. Cochrane resettled at his table and saw a man whom he guessed was Zimmerman come in alone.

The man stopped at the bar and talked to the bartender. The latter set up a shot glass in front of the new arrival, poured a shot of whiskey for him, and the customer quaffed it. One shot, down the hatch. Then the ritual repeated with a second belt of booze. When that business was accomplished, the man secured his own liter-sized mug of beer and turned. Cochrane raised a hand to flag him.

Cochrane was dead center to the man’s view. The man came to Cochrane’s table and sat.

“I’m Kurt,” Zimmerman said as he sat. “Crazy of me to walk through the darkness to get here,” he grumbled. “I could have had my throat cut by one of the hundred thousand Russian deserters wandering around the city,” Zimmerman said.

“I’m told this district isn’t too bad,” Cochrane said.

“Who told you that?” Zimmerman asked with an edge.

From a gold case that bore the monogram KMZ, Zimmerman offered Cochrane a cigarette, which Cochrane declined.

“Everyone I asked. Are they wrong?” Cochrane replied.

Zimmerman sipped and smoked. “Depends how lucky you are. Or how streetwise. Make one mistake, walk past one wrong doorway, and pfffft!”

Zimmerman made a slashing gesture with his finger across his throat.

The man was jumpy this evening, Cochrane noticed. A cynic, Major Pickford had warned. So far, everything held together.

“I assume you’re carrying some artillery,” Cochrane said. “Just in case.”

“Sure. Isn’t everybody?” he patted his coat on the right side by his belt. “Colt police special. The type they carry in Chicago. Between you and me?” he asked, drawing a long swallow of beer. “Want to know something?”

“Sure,” Cochrane said. “Tell me anything you like.”

“I can’t wait to get out of Berlin,” Zimmerman said. “I’ve been in Germany since 1944. War’s over and there’s nothing but death and destruction, anyway. We no sooner end one war than another one starts. I’ve damned well had enough of it, myself. Haven’t you?”

“More than enough,” Cochrane said. “Of course. Who hasn’t?”

“The fucking Russians for one,” Zimmerman said. “They’re looking to start something.”

“Maybe,” said Cochrane.

“How long have you been here?” Zimmerman asked.

“In Berlin? This visit? Not long,” Cochrane said. “Just arrived back.”

“I mean, it never ends.” Zimmerman said. He paused. Through the shadows and the candles from the bar he spotted two WACs in tight khaki skirts and gave them a heavily lecherous eyeballing. To Cochrane’s keen eye, the women recognized Zimmerman and ignored him. Meanwhile, the voices, the rattle of glasses and plates and the woman with the accordion formed a soundtrack for the Bar Rosa.

“What rank you holding, Mr. Lewis? Tell me again.” Zimmerman asked.

“I’m a major.”

“U.S. Army? Intelligence?”

“Correct,” Cochrane said.

“Ah. Right-o.” A stillness came over Zimmerman. “Sorry. It never ends,” he said, “and this old soldier’s nerves are shot. I’m out of here in another two weeks. Finally going home.”

“Good for you. Sudden decision?”

“No.”

“That’s odd,” Cochrane said. “When I was in Major Pickford’s office, I looked at the security officers’ duty sheets and you were assigned as one of the liaisons with the East German police till the end of August.”

“Those lists are always out of date. I’m long overdue to rotate back to stateside.” He sipped his beer. “What did you want to talk about, Major Lewis?” Zimmerman asked.

“I’m told you’ve been a liaison officer between the army and the German Police, East and West since 1945. Is that correct?”

“Maybe. Depends what you want to know.”

“If you’ve been in your position for three years, that would mean you have a few contacts with the local police. Or more than a few. Still correct?”

“Cut the bullshit, man. What are you after?”

“I’m looking for a woman who disappeared sometime after 1943. Or at least that’s the initial reason I’m here,” Cochrane said.

“Fat chance with that,” Zimmerman said. “Finding anyone who’s been missing for five years is impossible. It’s tough enough after five minutes. Want a rule of thumb? If the woman survived the war, she’s either in a labor camp or was raped and murdered. If she was lucky, she got killed in an American air raid before the Russians rolled in. Blown to bits most likely. Those were the lucky ones. Cheers.”

“That’s what Major Pickford says, also. But I need to persist.” This is someone who helped me and to whom I owe a favor or two. I’d like to help her.”

“Romantic thing?” Zimmerman asked.

“No. I was on an assignment. She was a contact behind enemy lines.”

“So? A professional debt of gratitude?”

“Call it that if you wish.”

“Good intentions don’t change anything. She’d be just as dead. Hate to tell you that, Major, but dead is dead.” He sipped. “You checked her last-known address?”

“The block is rubble. I was hoping you might have a contact or two.”

“Honestly? You’re wasting your time.” Zimmerman sighed. He set down his stein with annoyance. “What exactly are you asking me for?”

“I told you. Contacts with the German police.”

“East or West?”

“Either. Or both.”

Zimmerman shook his head. “I don’t have anything,” he said. “And if I did, I’m not sure I’d give you any names. People are disappearing, being replaced by ‘Germans’ with Soviet faces and Ukrainian accents. Shills for a new battalion of secret police. If you think the Nazis were a bunch of venal bastards, wait till the world gets a load of this new crew here in the Fatherland.”

“There has to be some way around it.”

“The Easterners are uncooperative bastards,” Zimmerman said. “They’ve raised it to an art form. Be prepared to bribe people, trust no one, and don’t expect much.”

“Another question. People don’t just disappear into thin air. Buildings collapse and are blown apart. But people don’t just vanish. Do you know of any official records that were kept?”

“Of what?”

“Casualties at the end of the war. People were in those buildings. They had to go somewhere. Or their remains did.”

“I suspect there were ledgers. But when hell was breaking out at the end, there was no one to keep records. For one reason or another, everyone was running for their lives.”

“What about the clean-up squads when the war ended?” Cochrane pressed.

“Persistent, aren’t you? Here’s a phrase to remember: Gebäude zerstört. Alle Insassen gelten als tot. That means -”

“Building destroyed. All within presumed dead. My German’s good.”

“Better than your common sense,” Zimmerman said with a wink. “The Soviets went through with some local functionaries in the summer of 1945 and early 1946,” Zimmerman said. “Block after block. If a building was rubble, they assumed everyone was dead. The German and Russian squads came through after the peace and wrote down if a building was destroyed. If there was a list of who resided there, the residents were marked dead. The bodies and pieces of bodies went to mass graves, some to crematoriums first, some straight into the ground. Ugly as hell. Then came the Bulgarian and Ukrainian bulldozers and they leveled everything or dynamited it. People who were left standing, walking wounded, stunned, dazed, and mutilated, either died in makeshift hospitals or got shipped out to labor camps. Either way, they disappeared. Look, there may have been some records kept, some sporadic attempts by Berliners, but I never saw any and I never knew of any. None, okay?”

“Ever had a reason to search?”

“No. Poking around in a lot of the East German Zone and East Berlin stuff isn’t a good idea. It’s corrupt. Violent. Here’s a secret: the Red Army still has some snipers posted for curious folks who poke around in some sensitive places. Sometimes they shoot kids looking for food just for sport. Never any payback. It’s how the world turns.”

“Would there be a list of deportees somewhere?” Cochrane pressed. “The people who the Russians hauled off to work in factories?”

“I doubt it.”

“Then how do they know where someone went?”

“They don’t, from what I know. In the case of deportees, Russians assigned a gender, a name, and a number. Then they packed them off to labor camps in Czechoslovakia and Poland if not into Russian territory. The women, if they don’t work them to death or use them in brothels for the soldiers, or shoot them, die from diseases of infections from abortions or miscarriages. Then they burn the body and that’s that.”

“What are your sources?”

“Beggars. Whores. Unrepentant Nazis who have gone out an bought a Red Star for their cap and put the swastika in hiding until Germany rises for a fourth time. People who unload the dumpsters and people who work at the municipal incinerators. I’ve got my teams out on the street. I assume you will, too, eventually, unless we both get sniped first.”

Cochrane absorbed it as Zimmerman dished it out.

“Hell, your lists. Who knows?” Zimmerman continued. “Maybe some of the Germans on the clean-up squads did some paperwork. They would have kept such things away from the Soviets, though. It would have been a way to be without exactly being complicit.”

“That’s what I was hypothesizing,” Cochrane said.

“Some of the missing don’t even leave Berlin,” Zimmerman said. “Take a walk out into the woods east of here. Smell the funny stuff burning. Smells like pork, but its human flesh. Then if you poke your nose through the trees, you’ll see the crematoriums and barrels of ashes being spread into fields that used to have apple trees. Bodies of the newly murdered, bodies that have been in cellars, bodies that were covered in rubble for three years. Bodies and parts of bodies. I don’t know where you spent the war, Major Lewis, but let me politely inform you that you’re not going to succeed. You’re muddying up water that was already dark as black coffee. My advice, brother: leave it alone.”

Zimmerman set down his stein with a thud. He glanced at his watch. Cochrane wasn’t finished with the conversation, but Zimmerman was. There were no napkins, so he wiped his mouth with his sleeve.

“Hey, pal. Got to run! I got a Veronika this evening. A few more pops before I have to go back to the U.S.A. and be a devout Methodist. Hear me?”

“I hear you,” Cochrane said.

Zimmerman was on his feet and pushing through the crowd almost before Cochrane could answer. Cochrane might have persisted and thrown more questions at him, but he knew it would have been useless. He finished his beer, stopped by the old woman playing the accordion, dropped two American dollar bills in her music case and proceeded back to Tempelhof.

Chapter 37

Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania – April - May 1945

Fritz Schroeder’s only was for his wife and daughters. The Soviet tank blocked the road ahead. Fritz slowed their car, eased it to a parked position at an angle, turned in a way that allowed the girls to open a back door without being seen.

“God bless my three lovely ladies,” their father said. “Get to the woods!”

The Soviet tank stopped. A swaggering Russian officer emerged from it, carrying an automatic rifle as well as a sidearm. From behind the tank, several Russian foot soldiers appeared. They looked like a Red Army rifle squad.

Fritz reached to the box of smoke grenades at his side. He picked up four. “Now! Go!” Fritz said. “Go!” he ordered.

He emerged from the driver’s side of the Citroen, cradling the four grenades in his left arm as he moved away from the car. He suddenly pitched one grenade forward. It landed several meters in front of the Soviet tank and officer. The grenade exploded, throwing a billow of white smoke low across the road. Fritz moved as quickly as his legs would carry him, drawing attention away from the three women.

Gunfire began as the rifle squad tried to find him through the low cloud of smoke. He threw two more grenades, creating cover for his daughters who ran for the woods. Frau Schroeder made a decision. She lagged behind her daughters. Her final wish was to die with her husband and match his heroism.

Under cover of the smoke, which now made a low cloud fifty meters across, she returned to the car. Her husband, thirty meters from the Citroen, threw his final grenade, then opened fire with his police pistol in the direction of the rifle squads. Frau Schroeder found a gun on the front seat, stood behind the car door to protect herself, and opened fire through the smoke.

The Russians returned the fire. Fritz was hit first, several times in the chest and upper body. He whirled, spun, and was dead before he hit the ground. His wife screamed and ran toward him. She came to within a few meters of where Fritz had fallen when the Russian officer emerged coughing from the smoke, followed by two of his riflemen. The officer fired a volley of bullets at the German woman. The impact of several shots sent her sprawling. She came to rest a few meters from her husband’s side.

The gunfight was over within twenty seconds. But by this time, the girls had vanished into the woods, Lena first then Anna. They found a clump of trees and looked back. Anna started to scream, but her sister covered her mouth. Anna raised her hand to fire her pistol at the Russians, but Lena stopped her. She shook her head and jerked a fist with a thumb in the opposite direction.

In the distance, the Russian troops stood over the bodies of their parents. The Soviet officer fired a final shot into the head of each of the girls’ parents.

The sisters stifled their emotions and looked away, holding each other. Their parents had died to secure their escape. They both knew that they owed it to their family to run, to continue to safety if they could find it.

They proceeded farther into the woods, stopped for a moment, and looked back, taking cover in the heavy shrubbery. They saw the Russian officer. He came to the edge of the woods with two riflemen, looking for them. They could see his face and his features. They could see the three stars on his silver shoulder straps. He was a colonel or lieutenant colonel, they guessed. They could now hear the Russians talking. The two riflemen addressed him as Comrade Kovalyov. The sisters took mental pictures of him. If they ever escaped these woods, they would never forget him. Nor would they forget his name: Comrade Kovalyov.

Anna raised her pistol again with the intention of firing. She had a shot at the upper half of the Soviet commander’s head from about twenty meters through brush and branches. But her hand trembled. If she sprayed the area where he stood, there was a fair chance that she might hit him. Then he moved. Her chance was gone.

Anna glanced at Lena. With tearful terrified eyes, the girls looked deeply into each other’s souls. Lena put her hand on his sister’s gun and pushed it downward. She raised a finger of caution to her lips. They watched the Russians for a full minute. They crouched in ambush for several seconds, barely breathing.

The sisters entertained the same thoughts. If the Soviet soldiers pursued them and came within a better range, they would fire on them. But they knew the shots would attract the remaining members of the rifle squad. There were at least twenty other Russian soldiers. They knew they would die, even if they avenged their parents’ death.

The two riflemen with the Soviet officer looked to the latter for a command. Words were spoken. Now one of the riflemen addressed him as Colonel Kovalyov. The commander surveyed the situation, then signaled that they should return to the area of their tank. Then a second tank rumbled into position and joined the first.

Then a third. The tanks had effected a pincer movement around Demmin and were there to eradicate those trying to flee. Both sides knew the protocol: kill the men and boys, rape the women.

The Soviet officer and his two riflemen had a brief conversation which Anna and Lena could not hear. One of the rifle bearers, responding to his officer’s command, raised his weapon and sprayed the woods with a dozen rounds, scattering several flocks of birds.

One shot hit a tree near Anna, but no other bullet came close. The soldiers laughed, turned, lowered their weapons, and walked back to their squads. Kovalyov drew his sidearm, a Tokarev TT-33. Gingerly, he took two paces into the woods and stopped again, his pistol raised. He was no more than twenty meters from where Anna and Lena remained hidden. Again, they had a shot at him if they wished to take it and get themselves killed at the same time.

Above the girls in the branches of a tree, several birds rustled as they settled into the forest again. Then they flapped away. The noise drew the attention of the Russian commander. He took several cautious paces toward the disturbance with his weapon upraised and ready.

Anna and Lena cringed. They could hear the Soviet officer pushing ever closer through thick brush. Anna spotted a rock at her feet. Impulsively, she picked it up and hurled it. It rattled many branches as it flew through the near woods.

Lena gasped. Both girls emerged from cover and saw the Soviet officer no more than ten meters from them but looking in the direction of where the rock had landed. There was a moment that none of them would ever forget, a moment that was frozen in time when the colonel looked back and their eyes locked.

Anna was the first to raise her pistol and squeezed her trigger several times without aiming. The Soviet officer had dropped to the ground in the half-second before Anna fired her first rounds. He rolled away, sticks and branches ripping at the flesh of his arms and face, but successfully evading any bullets.

Lena fired next, shooting blindly. She sprayed the area. But none of her shots found the target she sought. At the same time, they could hear the shouts of Russian troops and knew more soldiers were rushing in their direction. The girls could also hear the rumble of one of the tanks shifting positions.

Anna turned and was the first to move, Lena behind her. They ran madly, keeping crouched and low to the ground, zigzagging along a path they knew. As their slain father had known, the two sisters knew these woods well and the Soviet invaders did not.

The Russians threw hundreds of rounds of ammunition after them, but the woods were now their protector. The foliage absorbed the shots. The shooting was so loud that it covered the sound of their escape as they pushed through dense stretches of the woods, unencumbered by equipment.

The Russian troops spent another half hour searching in vain for the girls. But they had already joined a path their knew, the one that led to the protection of their secret cabin. Unser geheimes Haus.

Colonel Kovalyov reassembled his tank and artillery unit. They left one tank and a squad of soldiers behind to block and eradicate any civilians or slower members of the German army fleeing Demmin. They continued along their path to the small rural city, killing on sight any German stragglers they saw.

They were nothing if not ruthlessly efficient.

Chapter 38

Berlin – July 1948

Cochrane spent his second, third, and fourth days in Berlin walking in his former neighborhoods. He returned to the area where Bettina had lived and wandered the streets looking for any small, old establishments that might have survived. He found little. He asked questions but no one in any surviving café, restaurant, or bake shop recognized the frau’s name or a description of her.

Racking his memory, he recalled that Bettina had been friendly with the government gauleiter in charge of her block. He returned to her block and inquired of the ladies digging through the ruins, engaging in conversations in exchange for cigarettes as the Trummerfrau continued to work and as Cochrane stepped carefully around sharp debris. No one had any information. The Trummerfrau looked at him as if he were crazy.

At one point, he climbed through the area where he believed Frau Schneidhuber’s home had once stood, a rickety but cozy place filled with music, books, and intelligence before it had been bombed into oblivion. He remembered how she had maternally nurtured young Frieda, whom Cochrane had been trying to get out of Germany, in the few days they had spent there.

Stepping through the debris, trying not to break an ankle, Cochrane overturned a few piles of bricks, hoping he would not find body parts. He saw quickly that anything of value was gone. The area had been thoroughly picked over.

“Shoe leather,” Major Pickford had called it. Shoe leather it was, this operation so far. For all his careful packing, Cochrane swore to himself that he should have brought another pair of shoes from England - something more comfortable, perhaps. His dogs were barking.

Cochrane attempted to navigate the transportation system but failed. He found a trolley that should have taken him back to Tempelhof, but it made an unexpected diversion deep into the Soviet Zone before he could jump off. Apparently, there was a schedule and a route, but the driver took it only as a suggestion. Cochrane struggled back to his home base, bribing an old German in a horse-drawn cart, a junkman, to take him back to the Western Zone in exchange for three American dollars.

The only public transportation that functioned dependably was the local inner-city S-Bahn, the electric trolley system controlled by Soviet soldiers. The Russians claimed they ran it as a public service. But Cochrane eventually found out the truth.

Cochrane had fallen into the habit, toward the end of each day, of stopping into a café called the Bar Ritter across from the main landing field at Tempelhof and engaging in conversations with other customers as well as the barman, a fortyish German, who seemed to be as close to a manager or owner as anyone on the premises. There was one skittish teenaged girl who seemed to be a waitress. The girl looked enough like the barman to be his daughter. Cochrane assumed that she was but didn’t ask. He also assumed the girl had good reason to be afraid of the world, men in particular.

When Cochrane mentioned the S-Bahn transportation to the barman, he informed him that the S-Bahn was no public service at all. “Native Berliners are harassed if they ride it,” the man explained in German. “It exists only so that Russians have cheap transit from their offices in Berlin center to Karlhorst and Potsdam.”

“What’s in Karlhorst and Potsdam?” Cochrane inquired easily over some weak coffee.

“The Soviets have their top military offices in Karlhorst and the political section in Potsdam,” the man answered.

“Oh? Is that officially known?”

“Top secret and all native Berliners know it,” the barman answered. “Now you do, too.”

“Oh. Danke,” Cochrane said.

The S-Bahn did have one purpose useful to ordinary Berliners, the barman further explained. “Hamsters,” as he called them, or hoarders, took what Western currency they could get and rode the S-Bahn trains deep into the Soviet Zone to buy from black markets and farmers, The goods on sale, other than produce, was mostly war booty from Eastern Europe, which had now landed in the hands of Russian black marketers. The food markets sold farm produce now because the final stop of the S-Bahn was in farmland. West Berlin was bordered by industrial areas. There were vice areas at the end of the S-Bahn, also, offering a variety of other ways to drop currency into Soviet hands.

Soviet soldiers patrolled the trains, however. They laughed, confiscated the newly purchased goods of private citizens and harassed the women. They were supposed to turn the booty over to their commanders, but the grunt soldiers usually skimmed a good part of it.

“So things are corrupt in the East, just as they were under the Nazis?” Cochrane asked.

“Maybe worse,” said Cochrane’s new source with an ominous laugh. “I don’t let my daughter ride that train. I’d never see her again. I wear a Mauser when I ride it, myself. It can be dangerous, the Eastern Zone.”

“I understand,” Cochrane said. Cochrane refrained from asking about the girl’s mother. He guessed she had been killed in the war or abducted in the first months of Soviet occupation.

“Very dangerous,” the man added.

“I understand,” Cochrane said. “I have a daughter myself.”

“You are British?” asked the man behind the counter.

“American,” Cochrane said, offering a handshake. “I’m William.”

“I’m Helmut,” the server said. “You’re like the old dead Kaiser. “Wilhelm. William.”

“We share a name. That is all,” Cochrane said with a laugh.

Despite adversity, the bartender continued to show a sense of humor. “Things could be worse,” he said to Cochrane when the current state of Berlin became a topic.

“You mean if the Fuhrer were still here?” Cochrane asked.

“No. What if the Yanks ran the blockade and the Russians ran running the airlift?”

Cochrane laughed. So it went for several days. Helmut even showed off his knowledge of English, something he had picked up in the last few months. There had been an increasing amount of customer traffic from the airport across the street, Anglophones who wanted to get out somewhere, anywhere, on a summer evening.

Each evening at eight in the neighborhood there was a RIAS truck at prominent street corners. It would blast out the news on a loudspeaker. Crowds would come together in the near darkness then return home for maybe one hour of electricity. The news was the same each night, almost word for word Cochrane noticed.

No political breakthrough. No chance that the blockade would be lifted. But the crowd coming together lifted many spirits. Cochrane could feel it. American soldiers mingled with Germans and DP workers mingled with everyone, standing out in their grimy black work clothes. After the sound trucks departed, some of the overflow from the crowd stopped by the Bar Ritter for a cheap glass of Moselle wine, substantially adding to Helmut’s profits for the day.

Cochrane fell into the habit of going to listen to the sound truck, eavesdropping on conversations, and then coming back to the Bar Ritter to talk and again listen. Nightly, he would survey the assemblage of people, which included Soviet soldiers in uniform and cargo-working Germans and DPs from the Tempelhof staff.

There was a lot to keep an eye on during the evenings. British, American, and Russian air traffic controllers, discouraged from fraternizing by their bosses, crowded around shared tables and swapped horror stories in English and German. There was a little group of pilots, too, though usually they were in the middle of a workday and couldn’t linger too long. He spotted Olson and Taylor, almost always together, Marino, who had turned into a lone wolf, and Lieutenants Bobby Stuber and Charley King, the guys who were frequently bitching about downdrafts and overloaded cargo. Stuber and King usually flew in tandem, also.

From Helmut, Cochrane also learned that electricity was rationed to four hours a day. Small businesses such as cafés and would-be restaurants chose to have their four hours during the evening. That meant that employees had to walk home in the dark. All public transportation ceased at six PM. For men and women going home, the trudge was long, dark, and dangerous. Bands of former soldiers who had been busted out of the Red Army had formed gangs of hold-up men. Men walking home were held up at the point of a Mauser C96 or a Tokarev TT-33.

Women were robbed, dragged into alleys, and assaulted, often at knifepoint. The gangs of dismissed Soviet soldiers – brutish men who were useful as military thugs but for whom the professional army had no use postwar - had “official” hunting hours for female victims: seven to midnight. Police were rare and American and British soldiers were advised to not get involved, no matter what they saw happening to local civilians. The Eastern Zone worse than the Western, and the gangs loved to prey after dark in the far reaches of East Berlin near the vice section and – ironically – where the rumored political prison and military headquarters were located.

The proximity of gang strongholds to the Soviet military nerve center at Karlhorst suggested to Cochrane a nefarious link: the gangs and the vice establishments had links to the Red Army military. Otherwise, why wouldn’t they crack down on them? It was something he felt in his gut but couldn’t prove because he had not seen it close-up. But from his more than two decades as a spy, a notion overtook him.

He could only wonder why it was not a topic of discussion among the Western diplomats and intelligence officers in Berlin: namely, that just as rape had been a method of warfare, conquest, and terror as the Red Army advanced across Eastern Europe, the tolerance of vice and street thuggery in the nighttime world of Soviet-occupied Berlin created a flow of Western currency into the hands of the army. It was unofficially official policy. Whether or not the money got shipped back to Moscow was a separate question.

On the Monday of his second week in Berlin, Cochrane returned to his base at Tempelhof in the evening and there was news, but of the frustrating sort.

The municipal medical facility in the Eastern Zone that had been Frau Schneidhuber’s most recent address was closed to the public. Major Pickford had requested access for a Mr. Lewis to possibly identify missing persons from the Western Zone. He had requested it three times, in fact, and the first two requests had been ignored. Now the Soviet administrator finally denied the request. No surprise there.

Chapter 39

Berlin – July 1948

As the first half of July passed in Berlin, the situation worsened. Lack of food and power threatened to bring Berlin to its knees again after the city had struggled for three years to get back up on its feet and put the war in the past. Grumbling intensified among the population, stoked by the propaganda of the Soviet regime.

Russian apologists asked in their press, “Could things be any worse under the Soviet regime?”

“They could be far worse,” Cochrane grumbled one morning.

Much went wrong. The bulldozers would return to try to flatten the landing field. After that, the rains would return, and the cycle would repeat. Aircraft and motor vehicles churned the damp grass of the airfields into mud, then sometimes became bogged down and had to be rescued by tow trucks. Sometimes the tow trucks sank in the quagmire and had to be towed by yet other tow trucks or small cranes. Crews without boots waded through rescue points in heavy sludge. Even foul weather gear was a problem. There were no raincoats and no protective clothing. Sometimes flight crews tramped to their aircraft in boots that became sodden, then froze to the surfaces of the aircraft on the freezing night flights back to the Western Zone.

Nonetheless, morale was high. On July fourth, American crews forwent their Independence Day holidays and continued to work at full pace. Ground personnel worked back-to-back eight-hour shifts. Delivery drivers, fueled by coffee and pep pills, worked twenty to twenty-two-hour shifts, then slept for seven hours, had a meal, and returned to duty. Carpenters and construction crews formed out of nowhere and rows of Nissen huts came together in a minor miracle at the edge of the airfields. Men and women slept on floors. DPs and German veterans and anyone else who had been lucky enough to be hired were constantly disturbed all night by others looking for a sliver of space to sleep. The average participant saw it as a challenge. The older recruits had been through far worse in combat and the younger recruits were there to prove how tough they were.

“Do what you can,” was the advice du jour. “Every extra sack of flour feeds a Berliner and keeps Ivan Ruskey away from the city.”

The Americans could adapt more easily to the new mindset. The French had been invaded and occupied. The English had been bombed. The Americans and Canadians, though sobered by the war and having fought heavily against valiant German defenses, had no such bitter personal memories. It was easier for the ex-warriors from North America to readjust their thinking.

“I’ve got a guy in my ground crew named Oscar,” Victor Marino said one day. “Big blond bastard. Looks like a Nazi recruiting poster. I should hate him but I don’t. He flew a Messerschmitt. He claims he had sixteen kills of American and British aircraft. Now he carries bags of flour for me and a kid-American sergeant from Podunk and repairs engines.”

The coal shortage, which the Soviets did everything possible to make worse, had the precise consequences the Soviets intended. Coal powered the electrical generators of the city, and a reduction of coal meant a reduction of power produced. Hence, trolley buses, electric trains, and the U-Bahn – the subway or underground railway – were limited to half days: from six in the morning to six in the evening for all public transit. Buses could not pick up the slack. More than half of the city buses were in repair yards or off the sides of main roads, stranded and waiting for parts that didn’t exist, tires that hadn’t yet been ordered, and repairs that no one knew how to make.

The city administration limited private homes and apartments to four hours of electricity per day. The schedule would stagger sometimes from neighborhood to neighborhood. Sometimes residences drew electricity from ten PM till two AM, meaning that cooking and heating could only take place when working people needed to be sleeping.

Power cuts also meant that radio services were cut to a few hours a day, depriving the British and the Americans of the ability to broadcast their version of world events, including those in Berlin. The temporary answer was the broadcasting vans, set in motion by the British and the Americans. The vans traveled to various neighborhoods and blared the news. But the vans ran on fuel, also, of which there was little.

Tommy Olson and Glenn Taylor spent two days working with a priority ground crew in Wiesbaden to pick up gasoline generators flown in for telephone exchanges and hospitals and shuttling them to Berlin. Olson and Taylor had become a team. They flew in and out of Gatow, the British base, as well as Tempelhof. The Brits had planes to put in the air but not as many pilots, so American cockpit crews often flew in and out of the British base.

Olson and Taylor flew C-47s almost exclusively. They worked well together. A romance developed. Tommy became “one of the guys” to the other aviators very quickly, shooting the breeze freely in the commissary and officers’ club. At least the subjects she gabbed about in the air were less anxiety-ridden than talking about the Yaks that buzzed the Americans and British several times a day or the barrage balloons with their steel wire tethers that threatened to kill them from propeller entanglement six to eight times a day.

Complaints to the Soviet administrators about the Yaks and balloons were ignored. In back-channel communication, the response was clearer. The Big Lift could not possibly keep pace with the city’s needs, so why were the Yanks and the Brits even attempting to do such a thing? And the blockade would only be lifted if the Allies began their withdrawal and abandoned their stand on the Western currency.

“You may have a legal right to be in Berlin,” a Soviet diplomat named Vassiliev said to General Lucious Clay one evening at a diplomatic function, that had become tense toward the end. “But do you have the ethical right to inflict such pain on civilians?”

“It’s not us inflicting the pain, comrade” snapped Clay in response.

“That’s a matter of opinion,” Vassiliev countered.

General Clay had to walk away to control his temper. “These fucking Russian bastards are a pain in the ass,” Clay muttered to General LeMay when they met at the punch bowl. “They’re going to start a war.”

“Fine with me,” LeMay said, puffing an Aroma de Cuba. “We’re ready to blow their nuts to kingdom come. Can’t wait to get the job done if you really want to know.”

A reporter from Time Magazine heard the comment through the cigar smoke and wrote it down but publisher Time’s publisher, Henry Luce, spiked it in the interest of world peace.

Nonetheless, there was pain in Berlin. Pain, hardship, and anxiety. And in the early days of the Big Lift, it was as difficult to see through the morass on the ground as it was to navigate through one of the thunderstorms that afflicted the city.

On the ground at Tempelhof and Gatow, the fueling sections were overworked and disorganized. Loading and servicing went on all night. Unusable Avro Yorks and Douglas C-47s cluttered the sides of runways making takeoffs and landings more difficult. Telephone service in the key operations room and air traffic tower was out of commission for hours at a time with no repair technicians available to address the situation. A goal was set to accelerate the flow of incoming and outgoing aircraft every ten minutes at night, but the lighting wouldn’t cooperate, and neither would the weather.

Sometimes the weather conditions were an even fiercer adversary than the Russians.

July should have been the best weather for flying in and out of northern Europe, but the summer of 1948 was extraordinarily unpredictable. Wild swings of temperature led to an unending series of violent thunderstorms. There was driving rain, vicious hail, and often snow and ice at higher elevations.

If the wind dropped, there was fog worthy of London’s worst. Often the ceiling was below two hundred or even one hundred fifty feet.

During rainstorms, Tempelhof was frequently closed while two bulldozers swept water from the runway. Gatow needed to shut down sporadically due to vicious, unprecedented tailwinds and billowing fog. Then the thickest fog anyone had seen since the war gripped Tempelhof for two days before it relented.

“The ghost of Hermann Göring,” remarked Nutsy Taylor one evening with a smirk. No one appreciated his sense of humor.

Taylor’s sense of humor and irony was sorely tested on the morning of July ninth from Wiesbaden to Tempelhof. He and his co-pilot on this shift, a twenty-one-year-old kid named Frasier Cole, who had been a schoolteacher in Alabama seventeen days earlier, encountered such sudden icing that they had to use full power to stay in the air.

Taylor used his deicing equipment just as the sun broke through the clouds. Minutes later, the warmed outside air combined with the deicing process. Great chunks of ice cracked off his wings and shattered against his fuselage so hard that it caused his Gooney Bird to buck, lurch, and shudder in the sky. Taylor thought for sure the fuselage had been pierced and that he was going down. But he managed to stay aloft and then hit the mess hall and officers’ club for a tall four-ounce glass of neat Scotch after he and the shaken young co-pilot successfully touched down at Tempelhof.

Live and learn. “Wow. That was something, wasn’t it?” Taylor asked.

Cole didn’t reply.

There was a knack of using the wing deicer boot and Taylor had blown it with an assist from the sudden sunshine. The deicers had to be used intermittently.  If they were left on continuously, ice could build up in front of the boot and its pulsing would be working inside a pocket, not touching the ice.  The secret was to allow just the right amount of ice to build up and then turn the boots on.  Then turn them off until enough ice had built up again.  Slightly more than six hundred Allied aircraft had been lost flying the "Hump," from India to China during the war.  Half of those that went down crashed due to severe icing conditions.

“Damn,” Taylor said again as the whiskey kicked in. “Learn something new every sortie about flying over Germany, huh? You having a drink?”

“No, but I’m stopping in at the chapel,” Frasier said.

“Suit yourself.”

Squads of American and British airmen on their off-hours led scores of German civilians out into Berlin to scrounge in stores and homes for anything that could be used: old car parts, metal bed frames, anything that could be welded into something useful. Radios, fuel lines, hoses, spare tires, car parts. Major Pickford served as the head bursar, paying a fair price in American dollars, which, in turn, fueled the black market and the vice district at the end of the S-Bahn.

At the same time, a squad of U.S. Army sergeants hit the streets of Berlin and signed on hundreds of civilians, Germans, DPs — anyone who was hanging around and wanted to work — as a laborer, cleaner, or loader. It was not unusual to see these squads of people reporting to work in suits. Often the women wore bathing suits when the warmer weather returned. It was the only clothing these people had for work.

They joined a battery of people who had been hired in the weeks and months earlier. Among those who had already become dependable workers were two blond-haired, blue-eyed sisters: Lena Schroeder, twenty-three, and her younger sister Anna, now twenty-one. They had fled from the small city of Demmin, a community in Pomerania, when it had been overrun by the Red Army in April of 1945. Educated and pretty, they were hired as female cleaning staff at the airport, though both also held evening jobs in a club in the Eastern Sector.

Also previously hired was a former German soldier named Heinrich Roth who had become a baggage laborer. Roth would work for another German, a man named Otto Kern, who in six weeks had earned the trust of the American sergeants who supervised his work crews and had made him a manager of the night-shift baggage handlers. Trained in electricity at university before the war, Kern had also graduated to being an informal electrician around Tempelhof, doing quick and efficient repairs as needed. Roth and Kern, it developed, had spent part of their childhood in pre-Hitler Berlin. They developed a friendship. A young sergeant named Jimmy Jerome Pearson from Long Island City, New York was the supervisor, age twenty-five. Kern taught Pearson the basics of electricity as he worked. A German American bond developed between the two.

So it went.

Chapter 40

Berlin - July 1948

The medical facility in question was in Hohenschönhausen at the far reaches of East Berlin. Cochrane took the S-Bahn to get there. The train was crowded and jerky as it moved through the city, taking him farther from the Western Zone than common sense would have dictated. His Czech pistol was tucked carefully under his jacket along with his William Lewis passport. On this day he wore a raincoat as well. The weather was warm but wet, with a steady rain sweeping the city. The humidity was climbing, and he had sweated through his shirt well before he arrived at an S-Bahn station two blocks from his street destination.

He traveled alone. Cochrane carried his “Lewis” passport as a precaution. But he dreaded having to present it to anyone. Major Pickford had briefed him on the location, sketched a street map on an index card from what they knew of the area from aerial photography, and had informed him that the East Berlin police, the unit led by the re-educated Colonel Markgraf, had set up a prison in the area, a place believed to be used for executions as well as incarceration.

The prison was patterned on the KGB Headquarters in Moscow. Lubyanka.

“It’s no place to be confined,” Major Pickford explained, “and I doubt whether we could get you out of it for several weeks. But if you can find out where it is, street location, address, and all entrances and exits, that’s information we could use.”

“Sure,” Cochrane had said, taking the map on the file card and placing it in his pocket. “I’ll let you know anything I find out if I happen to return.”

“You nervous about this?”

“Shouldn’t I be? Who knows what the Russians are up to these days? The Marxist regime has been hostile to the West since 1918. It just happens, as Americans, that we had a common enemy from 1933 to 1945. Now we’re back to business as usual.”

“Point taken,” Major Pickford conceded.

Cochrane took the crowded S-Bahn to the final stop in the city. He left the train station at Rentnerstrasse and walked, the day’s rain an annoyance. The streets were a rat’s warren of impasses and contradictions: they stopped, continued, twisted, and changed their names with impunity. He consulted the card twice and found it of almost no use. Most streets had no identifying signs. Some signs were flat-out wrong. He wondered if such were intentional.

As he walked, he thought he spotted the medical facility – a damaged, brown-brick edifice of four stories that had been repaired with steel frontage and odd narrow windows. When he drew closer, however, he stopped short. Three police guards at the front gate, huge men in red helmets and white flak vests, stood guard. He had heard that the Russians had brought in some Polish Communist militias – accountable now to Russian state security — to reinforce the German police.

The current administration in East Berlin did things their way, no questions asked, no local responsibility. There had already been some incidents, Helmut had explained. Berliners had already learned to hate them. Cochrane had a hunch that was what he was looking at here. The guards rudely summoned him and tried to engage him in conversation as to where he was going and what he was doing. Fortunately, they didn’t point with their rifles. Had they done so, he would have immediately stopped.

Butterflies erupted in a swarm in his guts, his heart flashed into overdrive, and his fresh shirt, already damp, was suddenly soaked. He waved off the heavily armed men, realizing that he had involuntarily found the prison – heavy guards and narrow slatted windows - that Major Pickford had mentioned. He played it dumb, gestured awkwardly that he was hard of hearing, and kept going. After half a block, he stole a look back through the rain and heaved a heavy sigh of relief: he was not being followed. The guards were instead watching a woman passing and shouting at her. She was fool enough to stop as Cochrane slipped out of their view.

A few of Helmut’s well-chosen words echoed somewhere in the back of his mind. “The Soviets have their military in Karlhorst and the political section in Potsdam,” the barman had said. Karlhorst, Cochrane recalled from the map Pickford had sketched, was the next community over, meaning that he was drawing ever closer to exactly what he wished to avoid: the epicenter of the Soviet military in Berlin. He connected that with the prison and its proximity to Karlhorst.

A Sonnenfinsternis moment played out in the darkest reaches of his psyche: Darkness at Noon. He could easily understand how a man could walk into, or be dragged into, such a Lubyanka-styled place and end up in the incinerator out back in a matter of hours.

He shuddered again, his confidence wavering, teetering. He wondered if he would ever see Laura and Caroline again. A wave of rain battered him, almost blinding him. He cursed low to himself, his head down, his arm before his face. Never again, he muttered. Never!

Where the hell, he demanded, was this medical facility and why did he have the poor judgment to attempt to find it?

There was another surge of rain. It swept across him. His common sense was in open revolt against his sense of duty. But he convinced himself to push onward for a few more minutes.

“Then, after five more minutes, turn and run!” his instincts screamed within him.

He drew a breath to steady himself. Both of his shoes were soaked. He was walking at half a mile an hour, he guessed, which today, blinded as he was by the rain, was full throttle.

“What’s happened to me?” he asked himself. “I’m over the damned hill.”

Then, as abruptly as the rain had intensified, it relented.

When he looked up again in front of him, he saw a hand-inscribed sign on a similar building to the prison, an edifice that made him wonder how it could still be standing: wrecked by air raids and repaired by a hodgepodge of Soviet steel. A dingy, perilous building on a dingy, oppressive block.

The sign read, Medizinische Klinik für die Freien Berliner.

He had arrived. The front doors were missing but there was a steel gate that was probably pulled shut after dark. It was open now. He drew a final breath, wondered if this was the biggest mistake of his life, and walked up five uneven, unsteady, wet steps.

Chapter 41

Berlin - July 1948

Inside the front entrance of the medical facility in East Berlin, there was a guard’s station, but no one was in it. Cochrane walked past it into a giant open space. Corridors spewed off to several sides, all of them unmarked. The concrete floor was rough and uneven, small bits of grit and brick reduced to pebbles. He guessed the place had been stripped of its interior but hadn’t been thoroughly rehabbed since the war. It had probably been a factory. But the Russians had done makeshift repairs to minimize the risk of collapse and put it into use anyway. That was how they were always doing things, to Cochrane’s intrusive and overeducated Western eyes.

To one side there were two elevators, the doors open, no cars inside, just open, vandalized shafts. Wooden barricades blocked them, not that anyone would voluntarily step in.

Footsteps approached. Three big men in military or police uniforms approached. He didn’t recognize the uniforms and didn’t wish to arouse suspicion by taking too close a look. Cochrane steadied himself and tried to act as if he belonged. As the three drew nearer, Cochrane pegged the language: Polish. Polish always sounded to him like a melodic version of Russian. They passed him and exited behind him, giving him no notice.

It was normally Cochrane’s method when he arrived in a place like this to establish who was in charge, then decide whether that person was to be avoided or approached for assistance. In the new world he encountered here, however, it appeared that no one was in charge. Very well, he would take himself on a tour.

On the main floor, there was an assortment of administrative offices. Each of them was closed. At the back of the ground floor were steps leading up and another set leading down. A plan of investigation emerged. He would start at the top floor, see what he could find, then descend all the way down and hopefully out.

The staircase was wooden and unsteady. He walked up five floors, then did a tour of each floor. There were secondary administrative offices and medical units. Some rooms were empty and dark, a few were crowded with people who appeared to be waiting to see doctors. Windows were narrow, slatted, and high on the wall: same architecture as the prison. Cochrane saw a lot of glum faces with sad eyes, many mutilated people from the war who had climbed the stairs with one crutch or a twisted cane. There were intermittent silences, shouts, and arguments. There were yells and screams. Most conversation was in German, Russian and Polish. He passed people in hallways and open spaces. Most were women; they avoided him.

Cochrane worked his way back down to the entrance level over the next half hour. He saw no one he wanted to talk to. He caught no one’s attention, for which he was grateful. There was no directory of offices or people. Hence no Frau Schneidhuber.

In his mind, he had formed a layout of the building. Each floor had an elliptical path that came back, more or less, to where it had started. This held true when he visited the basement as well.

But the basement was the busiest of all the floors. He quickly discovered why. He was in a local morgue, one that was large and probably served the surrounding area. In some hallways, corpses were piled on shelves under blankets or in bags, feet protruding with tags on the right big toes unless the right foot was missing. The area was cool, creepy cool, like a cemetery. He was reminded of the overturned graves at St. Thomas’s near Tempelhof. Eventually, nearly finished his tour, Cochrane saw an open door and heard the last thing he expected in this place: laughter.

Male voices.

They sounded like young men. He moved to the door. The room was very cold and from the signs that he read on the door, he knew the chamber was an examination room for autopsies.

He pushed the door open and looked in. The room was poorly lit and depressing, just like the rest of the country. At the center of the room was an examination table, surrounded by a boisterous group of a dozen young German men in uniform, military and police. He had seen enough on the streets to know that these were young men of the Eastern Zone. A second glance suggested that they were cadets or trainees of some sort. He took a quick further assessment and guessed that not one of them was older than eighteen.

Someone joked about a body on the examination table. Cochrane couldn’t hear exactly what was said, but it was followed by laughter. The young men pushed at each other, another told a joke, and they all laughed again and starting shoving at each other. Then a couple of them seemed to reach out to touch and fuss with whatever was on the table.

Their German was low and peasanty. They were obviously from the rural provinces by their accent, probably too young to have been in the war. Cochrane scanned the few faces he could see and guessed that probably none of them was old enough to have served in the war.

From an angle, Cochrane could see the nearest end of the table. It stood sideways to him. Feet protruded as they would from a corpse. One of the young soldiers rustled a canvas sheet that covered the body. Cochrane saw that the ankles were those of a woman.

Losing patience, he quietly approached the table in a circular route, scanning quickly for weapons. He saw none. The boys were apparently off duty. Some sort of Communist youth military, he guessed. Plenty of dumb muscles, height, and brawn, but not much in terms of brains, and fortunately, no weapons other than fists. The same that would have been recruited for Hitler Youth ten years earlier.

Hanging around the morgue was their idea of great entertainment.

Two of the young soldiers, then a third, saw him and their smiles vanished. Then a fourth. Quickly he realized: an older man in civilian gear meant trouble more often than not for these young men. The ones who didn’t see him continued to laugh and jest.

Cochrane moved to the head of the table and looked down as his breath made a small cone of condensation in front of him.

The uncovered body was that of a young woman, very blonde, still frozen in death, her neck twisted in an impossible angle. Cochrane’s guts surged. He had seen plenty of death before – more than any decent man should have to see — in most of its horrific forms, but this one was a singular horror.

It was more heinous than usual. The woman had long hair. Very long, it had probably hung halfway down her back when she was alive. It appeared that she had been strangled with her own hair.

Cochrane gagged. Then his eyes rose angrily and slammed one by one to the gaze of each of the young pseudo-warriors.

“Which one of you is a doctor?” Cochrane demanded in German.

None answered. The conversation crashed.

The group fell silent. Two smirked.

“Which one of you is a medical technician of any sort?” Cochrane asked next.

None of them answered. Then one of the smirkers, a big thuggish one, who must have been six-three, responded in peasanty German.

Geh weg, du dummer alter Mann. Wir werden alle die Leiche ficken.

It took a moment as Cochrane interpreted.

Go away, you stupid old man. We're all going to fuck the corpse.

Denken Sie so? Cochrane asked. Do you think so?

Ja! said the kid.

They laughed, all but one who was to the side in the back, wearing a military greatcoat.

In anger and indignation, stoked by a sense of decency, Cochrane pulled the Czech pistol from his coat pocket, drew it aloft, pointing it to the ceiling first then lowering it and pointing it at the forehead of the loudmouth and evident leader of the group.

Ich glaube nicht, he said. I don’t think so.

Everyone froze.

The young German taunted. Sie würden es nicht wagen! You wouldn’t dare!

Ich würde es nicht tun? Cochrane answered. I wouldn’t?

Nein! came the response, a dare. No!

Cochrane’s hand moved slightly to the left. The sighting of the pistol found an open space between the young man’s head and that of the youth next to him.

Cochrane pulled the trigger. The room rocked with the sound of the shot and the smashing of the bullet into the cement walls behind them and then a crazy ricochet around the chamber. The young men bolted from the table. The leader staggered, expecting to have been hit, then turned, his eyes wide, and beat half of his comrades to the door. Whoever the man in the overcoat was, the boys reasoned, and none of these brats wanted any part of him.

For good measure, as they scrambled and fell over each other trying to get out the door, Cochrane fired a second shot into the cracked transom above the door. The glass shattered, the bullet went through to the brick and cement hallway and treated the escapees to a shower of shattered brick and dust that fell upon them. The gesture moved them even faster.

As the recurrent echo of the gunshots subsided, Cochrane holstered his pistol.

For a moment he stood in silence, amazed at his nerve and the depths of his indignation. A lone figure stood across the table from him. Scarf across the lower half of the head, the heavy, battered military greatcoat hanging on the body.

He realized that he was looking into female eyes. The one remaining witness to everything was a woman. Blue eyes, fierce and angry, were aimed at him.

He said nothing. He reached to the canvas blanket that had by now fallen to the floor. On one hand, twenty million people had been killed in the war in Europe: this was just one more. From his perspective of decency, one more was still one more too many.

Cochrane picked up the canvas and pulled it up across the body of the strangled woman. He pulled it carefully from the feet up. When he came to the neck and shoulders the woman across from him held out a hand and stopped the movement of his hand.

She said nothing but he did not force the issue. He held the canvas so that she could see the face of the deceased. He looked at her eyes. They were deep wells of sadness. Tears flowed. The upper portion of her face was pretty but there was a red scar across the upper part of her nose where it connected to her forehead, as if she’d been recently punched or hit.

Then her head gave a quick nod, meaning yes, Cochrane could shroud the deceased. She turned and left the room. Cochrane took a final look at the victim, her expression of torture, the bruises, and coloration at the neck. He gagged a final time. He covered the body, gathered himself, turned, and left the room. He looked in both directions but did not have to look far to locate the young woman who had just left the room.

She was in the dim side hallway, one of several, leading from the examination room. She was leaning against a wall, her face in her hand, her back against the rough cinderblocks that formed the dank corridor.

She looked at him, then allowed her body to slump to the floor. She buried her face into her hands and cried.

Cochrane went to her. He felt awkward standing over her, so he sat on the floor next to her, allowing her some space and allowing her several moments to sob deeply. He glanced around, surprised that the gunshots had not drawn police or other doctors. Maybe shots were too common or maybe everyone knew to avoid them.

He reached into his coat pocket and withdrew a pack of cigarettes. He offered her one. She took it. He lit a match and she smoked. She leaned back and stared straight ahead, the million-mile stare, the one that had seen too much death and war.

He spoke softly in German, asking if she had known the woman well. Kannten Sie die Frau auf dem Tisch?

Ja. There was a long pause and a breaking voice. meine Schwester.

The dead woman was her sister. Cochrane put a hand on her shoulder in support but removed it quickly, lest the gesture was taken the wrong way. "I’m terribly sorry,” he said. “I understand your grief.”

“How could you possibly?” she asked.

“I lost a woman I loved more than twenty years ago,” he said. “My first wife. I’ve found another woman whom I love but that doesn’t mean I love the woman who died any less.”

She looked at him as if he had lost his mind. He tried to read her thoughts. Hardened by the cruelties of war, he guessed, it was almost impossible for her to comprehend human kindness. “I know this sounds absurd. We’ve never seen each other before,” Cochrane said. “But is there anything I can do for you?”

She snorted a little bitter laughter. “What could you possibly do?” she asked.

“Less than you might need, more than you might hope for,” Cochrane said.

Sie Sind Englisch? she asked.

Ich bin Amerikaner, he answered.

She looked at him long and hard. She switched into a heavily accented version of Cochrane’s own language. “So. You want sex with me?” she asked. “Is that it?”

“No. I don’t want anything from you. I’m looking for an old friend I last saw in 1943. She used to work here, I think,” he said. “Her name is Bettina Schneidhuber,” he said. She smoked and stared straight again. “Does that name mean anything to you?” he asked.

She returned to German. Nein, she said.

Not knowing exactly what to say next, he said nothing and kept silent sitting at the bereaved woman’s side, almost like sitting a vigil or, to put a keener edge on it, a wake: a situation where it was not so important what you said or did; what was important was just being there, showing up in the first place. After many seconds, maybe a full minute, for lack of anything better, he asked, “Are you a Berliner?”

She shook her head to indicate, no. Then, sitting together, they fell into a long silence which Cochrane was disinclined to break.

Chapter 42

Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania –   April - May 1945

The Soviet Sixty-fifth Army and the First Guards Tank Corps, including Colonel Kovalyov’s unit, arrived in Demmin within the hour. Approximately a hundred Wehrmacht troops had not yet left in the city. Russian troops executed them.

The remaining citizens of Demmin hoisted a white banner of surrender on the tower of the main church. A dozen Soviet negotiators, including a captain, approached the anti-tank ditch. They promised to spare Demmin's civilian population from "harassment" and looting if the city surrendered without a fight.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Demmin had been a power center for nationalist right-wing parties. Now, however, was payback time and the town knew it.

Diehard members of the Hitler Youth secured sniping positions while the surrender was being negotiated. Several shots volleyed from within buildings. Three German soldiers, one of them an officer, died from the rifle fire. The remaining Wehrmacht units, including elements of Waffen-SS, retreated. Within the hour, German troops dynamited all three bridges leading out of Demmin. By that time, Soviet units, spearheaded by units of the Soviet Sixty-fifth Army under Colonel Kovalyov’s command, were patrolling the streets of Demmin.

The fallen bridges blocked the flight of the Demmin civilian population, which was trapped by the rivers that circled the town. While many attempted to surrender, chaos reigned.

The scattered Hitler Youth continued to snipe at the Soviet soldiers from positions where white flags had been hoisted. Soviet officers used binoculars to pinpoint the snipers’ locations. Then Russian rifle teams invaded the buildings and killed every German they saw. There were other small incidents of resistance. One Nazi loyalist schoolteacher, having slain his wife and children, used an anti-tank grenade on Soviet soldiers before hanging himself.

Where possible, Russian soldiers dragged the captured snipers out into the main square and executed them with pistol shots to the neck. Colonel Kovalyov supervised and executed the first German snipers. After neutralizing all of them, Soviet troops withdrew to a cautious distance during the late afternoon. A strange quiet descended on the city, right around the time the German citizens caught radio broadcasts of news reports that Adolf Hitler was dead, having taken his own life that afternoon. Demmin had been staunchly pro-Hitler. The death of the leader suggested a morbid finality to the war. Meanwhile, Soviet tanks that had come from the east and the west blocked all the streets.

On the evening of April 30 before darkness fell, joyous, celebratory Soviets troops flooded into Demmin and overran the town, breaking into houses for loot, taking jewelry, heirlooms, and whatever else they found valuable. They broke into the city’s significant storage of alcohol: grain distilleries and several depots and stores that sold gasoline and alcohol.

Later, angry at the unnecessary losses they had taken in seizing Demmin, they used the gasoline to incinerate buildings. In the buildings that were not on fire, they shot the men, grouped the women in specific chambers, and committed mass gang rapes of local women regardless of age. The Russians shot German men who protested the rapes and they shot women who resisted or women they were “finished with.”

Russian soldiers, most of them now drunk, laughed and set fire to large areas of the town, often with residents in the buildings and doors bolted shut from the outside. Soviet soldiers stood guard to prevent anyone from extinguishing the fires and shot anyone, including local clergy, who tried to intervene.

As the night passed and the next two days came and went, a mass panic followed among the population of Demmin. Many local and refugee families performed suicides with guns, razor blades, or poison. Several mothers killed their children before killing themselves. A local forester shot his three young children, then their mother, his wife, and then himself.

More than one thousand people took their own lives in the first seventy-two hours of Soviet occupation. Meanwhile, other units of the Soviet army rolled westward toward Berlin, in their various columns. Resistance gradually crumbled before them, the predictable waves of rapes and suicides, executions and pillaging taking place.

Closer afield, in the woods on the other side of the River Peene, Soviet infantrymen prowled the woods in lethal squads, looking for men, women, and children who had fled Demmin. All Germans were to be shot on sight. More than a hundred were killed, many left to die, half the victims dumped into a mass grave a week later. Six Soviet fighters were called in also and swept the area, picking off escapees from the village. They killed more than a hundred, leaving the corpses to litter the landscape. Colonel Kovalyov took great pleasure in this, assuming that the two troublesome girls had been killed by Soviet airpower.

It was two hundred twenty-four kilometers south to Berlin. Anna and Lena Schroeder had taken the first steps to Berlin. They knew the terrain better than anyone who was out to stop them. They had a long-shot chance to arrive in the capital, and a chance to survive was better than no chance at all. But now, Anna and Lena had disappeared. They were not seen again by anyone from their village nor accounted for either as the war concluded and as the Red Army rolled toward Berlin. It was a time when many young German women, for whatever reason, simply vanished, as if somewhere in the woods they had had a secret hiding place.

Chapter 43

Berlin - July 1948

Seated with the shattered blond girl in the medical facility and morgue, Cochrane allowed several minutes to pass. Then he repeated his question, attempting to sound more sincere than trite. “Look, please. I would love to be able to help you. Could you give me a simple answer?”

She shook her head again to indicate that she wouldn’t.

“Displaced by the war, I assume,” Cochrane said, persistent in the face of his self-doubts. “I’m sorry.” When she said nothing, he tried a long shot. “Where were you before the war displaced you?” he asked.

“A town named Demmin,” the blond woman finally said.

“Ah!” he said. “I know the town. I’ve done much reading about the war. I know what happened there. Horrible. You must believe that I’ll help you in any way I can. May I ask your name?”

For a moment, she looked at Cochrane with unfocused eyes, rather as if she were looking through him and seeing something or someone very different.

“Anna,” she said.

“I’m William,” he said. “And your sister’s name?”

“Lena,” she said with a trembling lip. Then she looked away and the tears began to roll and the sobbing deepened into wails of sorrow and hysterics.

“Lena what?” he asked.

She sobbed something that was nearly inaudible, but he took it to be Schroeder.

“So she was Lena Schroeder,” Cochrane said. “And you’re Anna Schroeder?”

There was no immediate answer. Her crying was uncontrollable. All Cochrane could do was extend an arm and hold her as her body quivered and trembled. Wanting to do something, anything, he placed the pack of cigarettes in her free hand.

She exploded, she pushed at him, shoved him away, and flailed at Cochrane with her fists. He did not fight back. She struggled to her feet. In a fury, she crunched the pack of cigarettes in his fist and threw it back to him, hitting him in the mouth and chest.

Anna turned and ran from the room. Cochrane stood and listened to her footsteps hurry away down a corridor he could not see. He pondered his next move. He heard another set of footsteps approach and an agitated conversation in working-class German and Russian. He patted his pistol and readied himself for trouble.

He reached down and picked up the bent cigarettes and the pack from the floor. The smokes weren’t pristine anymore, but they were serviceable. He stuffed them into his pocket. He emerged from the side corridor with a cover story ready, but no one wanted it.

Instead, he saw two young Red Army soldiers with sidearms, pistols in holsters on the right side of the belt, accompanied by two men speaking German. Cochrane assumed they were medical people of some sort, possibly doctors or possibly technicians, in filthy lab coats covered with dark red stains that looked like blood.

They ignored him completely, or maybe they didn’t even notice him.

They went into the room where lay the body of the girl identified as “Lena.” They stepped in a few paces and looked around, taking a quick reading of the room. Acting on impulse, Cochrane followed them in. One soldier called the attention of the other soldier to the bullet damage. They exchanged smiles and conversation in Russian that Cochrane couldn’t understand. They were surprised when they suddenly saw him.

Cochrane kept his hands visible. One of the young cherry-cheeked Russians placed a hand on his pistol and looked as if he were anxious to shoot someone.

“What happened here?” one of the Germans asked, turning to Cochrane.

Cochrane eyed the two Germans. They had nameplates. Only surnames: Vogelsang and Keller. Keller was mid-twenties. Vogelsang was ten years older, with some white in his hair, a facial scar, and a paunch. He looked like an ex-soldier. His glare wasn’t just hostile, it was belligerent.

“I have no idea,” Cochrane said. “There were some young men in the room. Big group of them. They looked like military cadets. Suddenly there were shots fired. I didn’t want to be anywhere near.”

The young Russian eased his hand away from the pistol. Cochrane guessed that the Russian understood German.

“One of those young cadets must have a weapon,” Cochrane went on. “You should look into that,” Cochrane suggested, knowing that if they followed up, which was doubtful, they’d be chasing their tail for several hours. “Damned crazy if you ask me,” he said, “firing a weapon in a small room like that!”

“Who are you?” the other German asked.

Suddenly inspired, Bill Cochrane riffed. He continued forcefully in German and was on a roll with it, exuding confidence and an aura of command. Forgetting the fact that he was desperate, he assumed the bearing not of a man whom they should interrogate, but one whom they shouldn’t question.

“Allied Command Headquarters,” he said, inventing a whopper. “It’s a Soviet-American combined agency. One of the few remaining where there’s any cooperation, I don’t mind telling you.”

“Never heard of your agency,” Vogelsang said.

Cochrane feigned indignation successfully. “Then you haven’t studied the most recent administrative codes for the city very well, Comrade,” he said. “We’re looking for people who’ve gone missing. I came here to search for a young woman I knew. I feared something had happened to her.” He sighed. “I’m heartbroken, but I’ve found her.”

He motioned to the gurney.

“You knew her?” Keller asked.

“Not well. Just in passing. You know how the city is right now. People come and go.” His eyes pounded the two Germans back and forth. “You are doctors?” he asked.

“Medical examiners.”

“How did she die?” Cochrane asked.

After a hesitant moment, Vogelsang answered. “Did you look at the body?”

Cochrane sold them a flat lie. “Only her face to be sure. I couldn’t bear to see more,” implying he had not seen the wounds.

“Accident,” Vogelsang said.

“Yes. Accident,” Keller added.

“What sort?” Cochrane asked.

“Hit by truck,” Vogelsang said.

“What a tragedy,” said Cochrane, shaking his head, and having seen enough homicides to recognize one when it was on a gurney in front of him.

The Russian soldiers drifted to the body. Cochrane’s gaze followed them. One lifted the sheet, and they shared a long look at the naked, abused female body underneath. They stood there saying nothing, just leering. Cochrane cleared his throat and shot some ocular daggers at them. When they didn’t take the hint, he barked at them.

“Hey! You two! Have some decency! Or do I have to go find your sergeant?”

The young Russians abruptly relaxed the sheet and their intrusive gawking.

The Germans didn’t appear to know what to say, so Cochrane took control of the conversation before they could ask questions.

“The young woman’s name was Lena,” he said. “That’s all I knew her as. But I believe her last name was Schroeder.”

“How did you know her?” one of them asked.

“From where she worked. A café,” he said, guessing but sounding good with it.

Before they could question him or say anything further, he forged ahead. “I’d like to make sure she gets a proper funeral,” he said, reaching for the cigarettes. “Not a cremation. Not an unmarked pauper’s grave. Something proper. Family notified. Public notice in the Berlin papers, the German ones, not the Russian or American. If you fellows could assist me and guide me through the process,” he said as he passed around the bent smokes, “I’d make it worth your while.” He paused. “I have access to Western currency. All four of you will get something. Could we do that, or do I need to speak to your superiors?”

The Russians stood by hopefully. The Germans looked at each other before the older one looked back to Cochrane. “We can arrange it,” said Vogelsang.

Cochrane withdrew four five-dollar bills from his billfold and started to hand them around. “There’s one of these for each of you,” he said. “You each get one more after things have been set up. Everyone understand?”

They said they did.

“And you’ll keep this quiet, right?” he said. “We never met.”

Of course, they all agreed.

“How long have you men worked here?” Cochrane asked the Germans, as he crossed the palms with American currency.

Vogelsang had been there since January 1946, Keller since mid-1947.

“Did you ever know a woman named Bettina Schneidhuber?” he asked casually.

Cochrane’s eyes shot back and forth quickly from Vogelsang and Keller. He saw something in the older man’s eyes. He locked in and waited.

“Used to be a woman here named that,” he said. “Not here any longer.”

“Lovely woman. I’d love to say hello while I’m passing through. Is she still in Berlin?” Cochrane asked.

Vogelsang said, “Maybe. Don’t know.”

“I remember the name. Never knew her,” Keller said.

“Know where I should look?” Cochrane asked.

“She went to work for the Russians,” Vogelsang said.

“Really! Where?”

“Some club. Russian officers and German police. Eastern Zone, farther out.”

“A club?”

“That’s what they say.”

“Military or civilian?”

They claimed to not know.

“You wouldn’t have a name, would you?” Cochrane tried. “The place she might work?” As not-so-subtle inducement, Cochrane fingered a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet. He felt confident enough to flick it.

“No. It’s not always good to know those things,” the technician said. Vogelsang’s quick glance found the Russian soldiers and bounced back as fast as it could. One of the young Russians was staring at Cochrane. The other was looking downward at his shoes.

“Of course,” Cochrane said. “The world is a rough place, isn’t it? So hard to find people after all the fighting. Discouraging is what it is.”

Jawohl, Vogelsang said.

Cochrane folded away his billfold.

Vogelsang explained the funeral procedure. They would do the paperwork and send it to Room 143-D in this same building. Cochrane should return the next day to formalize the arrangements. The official currency of the establishment was Reichsmarks, but Deutschmarks would be more useful. So bring Deutschmarks, Vogelsang recommended.

“How will we get the rest of our money?” Keller asked.

“There will be a notice about the funeral in the newspapers, correct?” Cochrane asked, giving instructions as much as asking questions. “It will contain the dead woman’s name, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Be at the funeral,” Cochrane answered. “I’ll take care of you there.”

Chapter 44

Berlin – July 1948

The next day, Cochrane returned to the clinic and visited the office that handled funeral arrangements. The entire cost was equivalent to fifty American dollars. A young man who worked there explained that the burial would be at either Zentralfriedhof Friedrichsfelde in the Berlin borough of Lichtenberg or Dorotheenstädtischer Friedhof which was in the district of Mitte. Friedhof meant graveyard. “Any preference?” the young man asked.

“None,” Cochrane answered.

The burial office was in the Eastern Zone. The office accepted only Reichsmarks, the Soviet choice. Cochrane had brought an ample amount with him. On the way out, stepping out of the building and onto the sidewalk, Cochrane ran smack into a plump man who had been lurking near the entrance. Cochrane tipped his hat to excuse himself.

The man was remarkably nimble for someone so plump. Cochrane patted himself down as he moved along, convinced that his pocket had not been picked but checking anyway.

As he walked away, he had another thought. If this man was a street surveillance agent of the East Germans, the level of street surveillance that the other side had put on him so far was so low as to be insulting.

So far, Cochrane knew he had done nothing to bring any special treatment upon himself. He decided to nurse his current escort along so as to not bring on a heavier hitter. When that happened, the game would become much more serious.

Chapter 45

Berlin – July 1948

At the end of his next day in Berlin, Cochrane stood at the crowded, noisy bar at the Helmut’s café across from Tempelhof. Helmut poured Cochrane a glass of wine and exchanged another joke and good word or two at the bar. While the waitress, who was usually untalkative, kept a certain customer engaged by the door, Cochrane noticed that two cargo handlers, the men in the black former-GI coveralls, had approached Helmut at the far end of the bar and engaged the barkeeper in a brief conversation. During their exchange, Helmut glanced Cochrane’s way, said little, but listened a lot.

Meanwhile, Cochrane glanced at the newspapers scattered around the bar and the tabletops in Helmut’s place. He scanned through stories about the airlift and the American presidential election. Worldwide, Truman was getting so-so press. The airlift was gaining a popular uptick, though a small one.

Helmut moved back in Cochrane’s direction but made a point of taking care of two other customers on the way. Helmut had his own set of troubles this evening. He was running out of Scotch whiskey and couldn’t get any. He cursed the black market and its profiteers and watched his supply diminish.

“What brand do your customers prefer?” Cochrane asked.

“Whyte and Mackay,” Helmut answered. “It’s also what I get the best price for.”

“Sorry I don’t have any with me,” Cochrane said.

“Not your fault,” Helmut said with half a growl.

As he spoke to Helmut, Cochrane kept an eye on the cargo workers, who didn’t move. They also didn’t have drinks in front of them. They were loitering. Cochrane immediately caught a shift in Helmut’s demeanor.

Helmut returned to Cochrane, lowered his head so that his lips could not be read, and spoke sotto voce to Cochrane in German. “Those two men at the end of the bar,” Helmut said. “They claim to be cargo workers from Tempelhof. Do you know them?”

“I might have seen them before. Don’t know,” Cochrane said. He folded away the newspapers. “Have you seen them before, Helmut?”

“They come in here with the cargo workers and seem to know the other ones,” he said. “I have no reason to doubt them.” He paused. “They want to talk to you, mein Herr.”

Cochrane glanced at them and did a visual frisk. Yes, bulky clothing. They could have been concealing anything from a pen knife to a truncheon or any firearm sized in between.

“Send them over,” Cochrane said.

“Should I listen in?” Helmut asked.

“If you can, why not? It wouldn’t hurt.”

Helmut winked back. He went down to the other end of his bar and conversed with the two men in black. They walked to Cochrane and found a place at the bar directly next to him, both staying on his left side. They were tall men, each of them taller than Cochrane by an inch or two. They were also bulked up, which suggested they really had been working with cargo: heavy industrial machinery, sacks of flour, and bushels of coal.

“Yes, gentlemen?” Cochrane asked.

Keeping his voice low, Heinrich Roth spoke first. He introduced himself, then indicated his companion as Otto Kern. They claimed they handled cargo at Tempelhof.

“Good for you,” Cochrane said. “We appreciate your work. Who’s your boss?”

“Sgt. Pearson,” Roth said, giving the right name.

“What can I do for you?” Cochrane asked as Helmut loitered.

“There is a man who followed you in,” Roth said. “East German security. He followed you in and I suspect he will follow you out.”

“Thank you,” Cochrane answered, without lifting his eyes from in front of him.

“The one over by the door. He’s looking at a copy of Die Abend.”

“My daughter is taking his order,” Helmut said, not looking directly in the man’s direction. Cochrane noticed how Helmut’s gaze fluttered around the room. Cochrane followed the path and saw that the barman had a system of mirrors at angles and in corners around the ceiling. At any instant, he could see who was here and what was happening in groups.

Cochrane’s gaze traveled, also. Not by chance, the man they were watching turned away to obscure his face. “Which police?” Cochrane asked either of the cargo handlers. “West Berlin or Eastern Sector?”

“Eastern,” Kern said.

“Bastard! Communist! Shouldn’t even be in here,” Helmut said. “I ought to throw him out.” He made an initial gesture to go do exactly that.

“Don’t,” Cochrane said, using a hand to hold him back. “We know who he is. If he knows we know, they’ll replace him with someone else and you’ll bring Russian trouble on yourself. Let’s see who he keeps company with.”

Helmut simmered. “One of Colonel Markgraf’s people?” Cochrane asked Kern.

Kern said, “Yes.”

“Bunch of rats,” Roth said. “Red rats.”

“I agree,” Cochrane said. “Is the man German or Russian?”

They didn’t know. They only knew who he worked for.

A short conversation followed. Both Kern and Roth confessed to being war veterans, but they had fought in the East and each in his own way had survived the long retreat after the Reich collapsed.

“If you served your nation honorably, you have nothing to be ashamed of,” Cochrane said. “Were you in SS units or Wehrmacht?”

They both said Wehrmacht. They asked if Cochrane wanted to see papers. Cochrane declined. Papers could be forged. He would make his own decision on Kern and Roth. So far, he liked what he sensed. He edged around to what he really wanted to know: where the men were from and what they had done before the war. Kern talked about being an electrical craftsman. Roth mentioned wanting to be a farmer, much like the previous generations in his family had been. But then the war had come along and changed everything. Much to his own horror, Roth said, he had become highly adept with pistols and small firearms.

“Did you kill a lot of Russians?” Cochrane asked.

Roth didn’t say anything. Kern looked away.

Cochrane shrugged. “It’s all right,” Cochrane said. “I don’t like them either.”

Cochrane was about to speak again when Roth found words. “I didn’t kill enough of them, to my mind,” he said. “My family, my girl, they were civilians. Murdered by the Soviet Army.”

Cochrane nodded. “I understand,” he said. Then, changing his tone, “Are you Berliners?” Cochrane asked.

They weren’t natively, they said, but they were now. Kern revealed he was a family man. Roth was single, the girl he had intended to marry having disappeared during the war.

Cochrane bought each man a drink, another way of directing money to Helmut. They chatted further. The surveillance man grew bored and departed. Or maybe he had been replaced, Cochrane reasoned. He scanned and scoped out the café, looking to see who looked the part. It could have been anyone.

“May I ask you a question, mein Herr?” Roth asked Cochrane out of the blue.

“Of course.”

“Were you in the war?”

Cochrane didn’t lie exactly, but he didn’t tell the whole truth, either.

“My stint in uniform was mostly before the World War,” he said. “I was an ordnance officer in the United States Army when I was young and felt that I was immortal. I defused a bomb or two. Or maybe several, truth be known. Sheer craziness. Then I was in the U.S. Army Signal Corps when I was older and wiser. The things we do as young men, right?”

He shook his head. The two Germans smiled and agreed. Cochrane felt as if he had connected. A few minutes later he made excuses and said he must be getting back to Tempelhof. Kern and Roth needed to move along to their homes, also.

Discreetly, before the two Germans departed, Cochrane found two American five-dollar bills in his pants pocket. He laid the money on the counter. He looked back to Roth and Kern and thanked them. Danke schön, he said. “Each of you take one of these greenbacks and spend it here in the future so that my friend, Helmut, and his family end up with it.”

The two Germans nodded thanked Cochrane.

“Anything else?” the American asked.

There wasn’t. Nichts anderes, Roth indicated.

The meeting concluded pleasantly. Kern and Roth rejoined their klatch of tired German working men.

Cochrane looked back to Helmut and moved closer to him. Helmut was watching his daughter, saying nothing except with his parental protective eyes.

“Pretty young girl,” Cochrane observed in German. “She okay working here? Men don’t bother her?” Cochrane asked.

Jeder weiß es, Helmut answered in a mutter.

“Everyone knows what, Helmut?”

Helmut showed Cochrane a battered Sid Gordon baseball bat that a friendly American sergeant had given to him to keep under the bar for security purposes.

“Anyone touches Elfriede and I break their skull open,” he said. Then he put the bat away. Cochrane had already noticed it under the bar. He also noticed that Helmut liked to show it every night at least once, lest any fool not get the message.

“I like your spirit, Helmut,” Cochrane said, thinking of his wife and daughter but mentioning neither. Enough of such little slips could blow a man’s cover.

Helmut stood taller on the spot and the bond between the men strengthened. Helmut even managed a smile as he tucked the bat away.

When Cochrane walked back to Tempelhof that night, the first security goon was gone, but a second picked him up. The second man looked like a larger version of the first. Obviously there had been a handoff in the café. The new man followed him only halfway, then remained at a trolley stop, apparently oblivious of the fact that Cochrane knew the trolleys didn’t run that late. One advantage Americans – some of them, anyway – often had was that their foes often took them to be stupid or ignorant. Sometimes they weren’t.

Meanwhile, C-47s and now the occasional C-54 roared overhead, coming in to land while others in the convoy were taking off. Some reinforcement of the Tempelhof landing field had been completed and bigger cargo jets could now land. The C-54 Skymasters were gradually changing the equation in the air. These large, four-engine transports carried four times the cargo capacity of a C-47, as much as ten tons of cargo. The C-54 was the military version of the DC-4. It greatly increased the ability of the U. S. Air Force to maintain the minimum of the nearly five tons of supplies needed daily to feed Berliners. Because of its massive capacity, the C-54 also now carried most of the city's coal shipments.

Cochrane looked up at the sky as he walked, watching a Gooney Bird navigate the tricky approach to Berlin. He wondered if he knew the selfless pilots who were delivering sustenance to the city. He had come to know more than a dozen of them by now. Then he felt something he hadn’t expected: a surge of pride over what his country was doing, considering all the obstacles put in its path. There was a drizzle. The sidewalks were wet, and rain splashed Cochrane’s face as he walked.

From the periphery of his view, he saw the spire of St. Thomas’s Church. There had been a discussion with city officials about removing the spire to make the air approach to Tempelhof safer. The Communists in the East had called for the destruction of all religious buildings, godless heathens that they were. Now, as a proposal circulated to remove the spire with the Christian cross on top, the same Reds who had wanted the spire and all other religious artifacts removed criticized the Western Powers for wanting “to destroy” a cherished public landmark.

A foolish urge came upon Cochrane as he pondered the far-left hypocrisy. He had a mad impulse to turn toward the man shadowing him — German? Russian? — and give him a glare. Or maybe cross the street and confront him. Or maybe just go over and give him a thuggish sucker punch.

Then, not that he had seriously considered it, Bill Cochrane’s better instincts took over. He had a personal operation rule to never let the opposition be sure of what he knew or what he was thinking. Why give them the smallest tidbit? He retreated to the strategy he had urged upon Helmut. Often the small-time pavement watchers were only in it for the money. They could easily be defeated and turned for chump change.

Cochrane continued along his way. He passed through the outer security gate to Tempelhof. His mind was alive with upbeat notions, not the least of which was an assessment of Kern and Roth. They were big men, former soldiers, disciplined and forthright. Conveniently, they manifested a dislike toward the Soviet occupiers.

Cochrane hadn’t recruited his own network for several years now, but the start of one was staring him in the face. They would make great bodyguards, these guys, and he sensed that the day when he would need them as such was not far in the future. When he checked their stories with Sgt. Pearson, he discovered something fascinating: as well as could be known, Kern and Roth had told him the absolute truth about everything. Such things were good to know when setting up one’s own network in a foreign city.

Another thing that was good to know was how and where to acquire liquor. The next morning, Cochrane stopped by the commissary, dug into his pocket, and purchased four liters of Whyte and Mackay Scotch at the cut-rate, tax-free PX price.

“Going to have quite a party, I’d say,” the clerk, a young quartermaster lieutenant from Philadelphia said. The kid must have been all of twenty-two years old.

“Oh, indeed I am! Aren’t we all?” Cochrane asked. “Berlin is nothing but a party. Say, could you put the four bottles in two bags, two in each? And close the bags so no one can see this.”

“Of course, sir.”

Cochrane traipsed the liquor out of Tempelhof and across the street to Helmut’s where he presented it to the barman.

“Ah! This is wonderful! What do I owe you?” Helmut asked.

“Nothing at all. My gift to you. Serve it with pride.”

Helmut’s gratitude was effusive, but Cochrane waved it away, saying it was nothing, a small favor to do for a man who was so effectively watching his back. Helmut, however, would not be denied some reciprocation.

From a locked cabinet under the bar, Helmut produced a cherished bottle of Asbach Uralt, a German brandy in short supply. He poured out two small glasses. Never mind that it was not yet ten AM.

“To the airlift and to America!” Helmut said in English, lifting his glass, even evoking a smile from Elfriede, his daughter, who was helping him set up for the day.

Cochrane gladly joined him in the toast. The day was off to a good start for both men.

Chapter 46

Berlin - July 1948

The following morning, and two days after the meeting in the mortuary, meticulously prowling through scores of German-language, small-font funeral notices in Die Neus Deutschland, Cochrane spotted what he had hoped to find. A three-line public notice on the classified ads pages stated that interment was scheduled for ten AM the next day at the Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery for a woman named Lena Schroeder.

The notice gave the location within the cemetery – plot and section number — of the burial for those who might wish to attend. The paper, founded two years earlier, was the official party newspaper of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. It was dependable on what was happening in the Soviet Sector.

Cochrane knew the burial ground from his previous time in Berlin.  Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery was in the borough of Lichtenberg in Soviet-administered East Berlin. The cemetery had first opened in the 1880s when all the existing cemeteries in Berlin had reached their capacity. The then-new central cemetery was open to people of all religions and social strata. The cost of the headstones was paid by the city.  It was at first a cemetery for the indigent but soon evolved into the resting place for many of the leaders and activists of Germany's Social Democratic, Socialist and Communist movements.

In 1919, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, co-founders of the Communist Party of Germany, were murdered. Liebknecht was shot in the back by a right-wing assassination squad and Luxemburg was tortured, mutilated, shot, and her remains thrown into Berlin's Landwehr Canal. Bodies identified as theirs were eventually buried in the Berliner Gemeindefriedhof Friedrichsfelde. Architect and one-time Bauhaus director, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, had designed a grand, six-meter-tall red brick “Monument to the Revolution” in 1926. Commissioned by the German Communist Party as a memorial to the 1918-19 Revolution, the monument, complete with bold star and hammer and sickle, had been conceived as a spatial reminder to the brick wall in front of which German revolutionaries had been killed by the pro-Fascist Freikorps in 1918. Every year in January throughout the days of the Weimar Republic, thousands of red carnations had lain in the snow in front of the heavy stone memorial.

The monument was no longer there. A marauding gang of National Socialist street fighters invaded the cemetery in 1935, destroyed the monument, and pillaged dozens of graves, smashing the wall brick by brick. Now, postwar, there was talk about rebuilding the socialist monument, courtesy of the new Soviet administration of the city.

Cochrane had not been to the place since he had left Berlin in haste in 1938. It was a sorrowful place, he knew, filled with its own oppressive history, political tension, and uneasy atmosphere. He looked to his imminent return two days hence with mixed emotions. He considered recruiting Kern and Roth as backups but decided against it, at least this time.

Chapter 47

Berlin – July 24, 1948

Sergeant Pearson on Major Pickford’s command met Cochrane at Pickford’s office on the morning of the funeral. Saying little, the sergeant used an unmarked U.S. Army Jeep – there were so many on Berlin’s roads that they aroused little suspicion — to take Cochrane to one of the emerging market areas along Friedrichstrasse.

The Jeep was closed with a canvas top. Cochrane had no reason to suspect that he was followed as he left Tempelhof. Wearing a dark suit jacket and carrying a brown bag, he emerged from the Jeep in front of a Hess’s department store. Inside, he went to a washroom, made a quick change from the bag, putting on a fedora and switching to a light-colored linen jacket.

He re-emerged on a different side of the store, quickly ducked into a taxi, and gave the driver the address to Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery. There were no restrictions yet on travel between the different sectors, though every day the Russians were threatening to impose them.

Cochrane arrived at the cemetery at quarter to ten in the morning. The cemetery had suffered damage and vandalism during the war, much like St. Thomas’s. But there were administrators on the premises and even some signs of maintenance and rebuilding. Cochrane found the proposed gravesite without trouble or incident.

Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery had been planned as a public park, so there was more greenery than Cochrane encountered in a typical day in Berlin. A line of fir trees formed a backdrop to the surviving tombs. There was sunshine, too, today, which helped.

But if the cemetery had been a suit of clothes, it would have been described as threadbare. Some of the grass under the trees was sodden from the recent rains, with clouds of small biting black flies hovering over tiny pools of water. Some graves were overturned and others had been overtaken by foliage. A drainage pipe was backed up and smelled of sewage.

But a stone footpath wandered through stands of linden trees and here Cochrane wandered, also, keeping his eyes open, trying to memorize his path. He did this while looking out ahead, hoping he wasn’t walking into a trap, and hoping that Anna would appear.

Mercifully, a directory and map system were intact within the cemetery. Cochrane had torn the public notice out of his copy of the Neus Deutschland because it had cited a plot number.  He carefully followed the numbers along the cemetery’s footpath and neared his destination. Finally, he saw ahead of him what had to be the site he wanted. There were people, and the people were waiting for a procedure to begin.

Gingerly, Cochrane touched his elbow to his belt on the right side where he carried his Czech revolver. At the site of the impending burial, there was a middle-aged man who was either a priest or a nonreligious civic functionary. Such was Cochrane’s guess. The man carried a notebook or a binder of some sort. There was a uniformed Berlin policeman, plus a man who turned out to be a city registrar and a small cluster of women in their twenties.

Cochrane counted five women, talking softly among themselves, each of them looking war-weary, but each woman pretty in her own battered way. Cochrane’s eyes raced across the five female faces. He found Anna dead center in the middle of the pack.

Then, from amidst the trees and the grave markers, emerged another small group. Cochrane knew them and what they were there for. There were two young Russians, soldiers without their uniforms, and the two mortuary workers, Volgelsang and Keller, who had helped arrange this.

Cochrane gave a separate nod to each pair. He knew how it worked. They could be loyal or venal, people like this, dangerous or helpful. Without even trying, he had initiated his own little network of people who could assist him if he made them want to.

There was a plain wooden coffin on supports over an open grave. The two gravediggers moved closer to the coffin and stood by, talking quietly, a mound of fresh earth behind them. The diggers were dirty with boots, heavy rubber gloves, and aprons.

Ten o’clock arrived. Cochrane removed his hat. The priest, or state functionary on second assessment, moved in close to the gravesite and beckoned everyone to pull in closer. Everyone did. No one spoke other than the man who would officiate.

For five minutes he spoke in working-class German, which Cochrane took to be not of Berlin, but probably from farther north, possibly closer to the Baltic Sea. He held no Bible and invoked no deity or religion. Cochrane had guessed right. He was a local bureaucrat and probably a Communist party member as well. Cochrane asked himself: who else got a cushy job like this these days in Soviet-occupied Germany?

As the man spoke, Cochrane scanned the other faces. The gravediggers were looking at the girls. So was the registrar. Cochrane’s gaze went to the cop, and he noticed the policeman was staring at him. Cochrane gave him a friendly nod of respect. The cop looked away quickly.

When Cochrane’s gaze went back to the girls, Anna was looking at him. Their gazes locked for one long second. Then she looked down. He could see her mutter something. The girls next to her looked up quickly to Cochrane. He gave her a very faint smile in return.

Mistake.

She looked away again quickly, possibly indignant, and feeling tricked.

Cochrane could see tears on Anna’s face as she twisted a cloth handkerchief in her overly jittery hands. The remembrance ended. The gravediggers clumsily lowered the coffin into the grave. Anna spoke to the registrar while her companions waited. The man who had performed the ceremony stood away from the registrar but was obviously waiting for him.

The policeman withdrew but didn’t leave, looking as if he couldn’t decide whether to watch the girls or Cochrane. Cochrane didn’t like the looks of him. The local cop, possibly one of Markgraf’s people sent there to watch him, was best to be avoided.

Cochrane stepped several meters away from the gravesite. He gave a head nod to the Russians and the mortuary workers, the men he had encountered at the medical clinic a few evenings earlier. They came to join him.

“I think the poor girl got a good send-off,” Cochrane said, feigning personal sadness as the four of them crowded in closer. “Thank you for your help. I have something for everyone.”

Cochrane had arranged packets of cash beforehand. Now he distributed them. He handed each Russian ten dollars in American singles. They looked at him in astonishment, grinned broadly, practically watered at the mouth, and got moving to leave the cemetery before their new best friend could change his mind. Ten bucks were probably more than a month’s wages for them, Cochrane guessed, if they were being paid at all.

He greased the palms of the mortuary workers with twenty dollars each, quickly and efficiently, distributing singles again.

“Where do I find you if I need your help again?” Cochrane asked.

“Same place,” Vogelsang said. He and Keller were suddenly anxious to leave also.

Cochrane felt like a paymaster. Then, turning, Cochrane let his gaze roam the burial grounds, looking for the local cop. He was either gone, however, or had retreated to a less conspicuous spot. That led Cochrane back to Anna. He moved to a position behind her and loitered. He stayed about ten paces behind her, close enough to be unable to avoid, far enough so as to not menace. She signed whatever she needed to sign, turned, and saw him waiting.

She walked near him. He spoke first, again in German.

“Again, my regrets. I’m very sorry.”

“Thank you for arranging this,” she said.

She tried to move past him. Carefully, he extended a hand and held her arm. “I mean you no harm. May we speak privately, you and I?” he asked. She looked at him, then looked to her friends. “I don’t care if the other women remain near you,” he said. “In fact, that would be fine.”

“Talk where?” she asked. “There are no private places near here.”

“Right here, then,” Cochrane said. “All I need is a ten-minute conversation,” he said. “That’s all. And here,” he said, motioning to the bag and showing it to her as he held it open. “I brought some things you might be able to use. Please have a look.”

Cochrane removed his extra jacket and handed her the small shopping bag. She took it and looked in it. From the commissary, he had obtained some fruit, candy, cigarettes, matches, dried milk, three cans of sardines, and three cans of soup. There was also a woman’s summer dress, thin, light blue, new and clean, which astonished her.

“I just want to talk,” he said, moving his hands to his pockets to make it more difficult for Anna to resist the gift. “I’ve brought these things in gratitude with no ulterior motive. I wish to find Frau Schneidhuber. My old friend.”

She nodded almost imperceptibly. “Ten minutes,” she agreed, relenting.

“Ten minutes,” he answered. “Thank you.”

Chapter 48

Berlin – July 24, 1948

In the central cemetery, Anna accepted the bag.

She motioned to a nearby bench nearby, but when they arrived there, the wooden seating slats had been torn up and removed. He then nodded to a raised marble tombstone, a long flat slab of memorial for a now-anonymous departed soul. They walked to it and sat down. It was chipped around its edges, but the vandals had failed to remove it.

Her four female friends gathered about twenty meters away, their eyes fixed on Cochrane like a pack of terriers. “Your ten minutes starts now,” Anna said. “Don’t waste them.”

“You know Bettina?” he asked.

“I know her.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“I know where you can find her.”

“Will you tell me? Or do you need to ask her first?”

There was a hesitation, then Anna responded. “I will tell you. I already asked her. We work at the same place,” she said.

“How did she know who I was?” he asked.

“I described you. You said you had last seen her in 1943. A foreign man. I suppose there have only been so many.”

“You supposed right,” Cochrane said.

“She had a lover in that era,” Anna said. “She was widowed from the first war, but she had a man.”

“I never met him or saw him,” Cochrane said.

“Of course not. Sure enough, though, he saw you.”

She fished into the bag he had brought. She found a pack of Chesterfield cigarettes. When she searched for matches, he found a pack in his pocket and lit her smoke for her. He wanted to keep her talking and to keep the mood going forward.

When Anna leaned forward, her light outer jacket gave way and he saw a pistol tucked into her belt: one of those small ones that women now carried, probably a Browning, six-inch barrel and three-inch stock. If used properly, a pistol like that could allow a woman to drop a large adversary with a single pop if the pop connected with the head, neck, or heart.

Cochrane had a hunch that Anna knew how to use one properly. She was alive, after all.

“Where does Bettina work?” he asked.

“A club,” Anna said.

“What sort?” he asked.

“Weimarian,” she said.

“I’m not following,” he said. When she wasn’t sure what he meant, he changed his wording. Ich verstehe nicht, he said. This elicited the tiniest of smiles from Anna. Maybe it wasn’t that easy to understand for an American, she conceded, starting to open up.

“It’s called ‘Club Weimar,’” she said.

“Please tell me about it,” the spy asked.

The club was “underground,” Anna explained further, something she meant metaphorically not physically. Club Weimar was in the dark area, she continued, the vice section way out on the end of the S-Bahn.

“Do you know where that is?” Anna asked. “The vice section of East Berlin?”

“I’ve heard of it. Near the extensive black markets and where the farm stands are during the morning and afternoon.”

“Correct,” she said.

“Tell me about the club,” he said.

Anna drew a breath. The club, she explained, sought to evoke the wicked, nasty, debauched Berlin nightlife that had flourished in the 1920s — The Roaring Twenties. Les anneés folles. Die Goldenen Zwanziger – that the Nazis had destroyed. It opened when the last S-Bahn train arrived on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings. Customers had to make their way home on their own when the activity ended, which was about one-thirty in the morning. They all had to stagger into work or church at some reasonable time the next day, she suggested through the cloud of tobacco smoke from the Chesterfield. It was suicide for a female to be on the street at that hour so it was best to have a soldier take a female employee home. Or a girl could stay over at the club. There were some private rooms with locks and bunks and blankets on the floor. The girls had their individual ways of thanking their protectors.

“So Bettina works there?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Doing what?”

“You can ask her.”

“And you work there?”

“Yes.”

He didn’t ask what she did, but she told him anyway.

“I wait tables,” Anna said. “I dance. On stage and on the floor. There are private rooms. Sometimes a man takes me to a private room. Money is money.”

“I understand,” he said. “Did your sister work there, also? Lena?”

“Yes. It’s not our choice what we do,” Anna said. “Dangerous sometimes, yes, I know. Lena made bad choices.” Her eyes flicked to the women who were with her. “These are my friends,” the mood of her voice elevating. “Three of the girls are German. One girl is Danish. Heidi, the girl on the far left.” Cochrane’s eyes shot to the females assembled, found a sad-eyed, thin blonde on the far left, and voyaged back to Anna.

“Heidi is a good woman. Her husband was killed by Gestapo in 1944. Now she has a child from the DP camp at Föhrenwald. We do what we must to survive. Okay?” She spoke in the Low German dialect of the Pomeranian region. Cochrane allowed her to talk.

“I often do things that are not my choice,” Cochrane said. “You owe me no explanation.”

“Who is the clientele at the club?” he asked.

“Diplomats. Government people,” she said. “Soldiers.”

“German? Russian?”

“Yes,” she said. “Both. It’s a den of vice for Russians and connected Germans. Important people. Who else has the money, hey?”

“True,” he said. “Gangsters? Criminals?”

“They run the place,” she said. “You’ll see. Also, many Germans from the Eastern Zone. People came from the far Eastern Zone on Saturdays. Factory managers, some of them.”

She snuffed out her cigarette and began to assemble herself, gathering the small purse she carried and the bag of goods he had given her. “Listen,” she said, “You want to see for yourself? You want to talk to Frau Bettina? I can’t stop you.”

She gave him an address. It sounded like one of those factories that had been stripped and raped by the army, but the walls and interior, some of it, left intact.

“There’s one big entrance on Blumenstrasse,” Anna said. “There will be some security people inside the door. Big, busy bar, then corridors off to the left and the right as you go past, wide corridors with tables. Buy a drink and go to a table. The corridors overlook a big open space. Music. Dancing. Drinking. It’s where the girls sell themselves.” She paused. “There’s a stage. Some of us perform. Less abuse than on the floor.”

“I get it,” he said.

She eased back for a moment, still sitting on the tomb, her bags in her hand. What she further described reminded him of the old speakeasy set-ups in the United States during Prohibition. An eye slit at the door, a couple of dumb musclebound types within.

“German Communist security police at the door,” Anna said. “Big, young, and stupid. Sometimes guns. They carry truncheons. Don’t make trouble, look like you’ve been there before and have money to spend. The door will open to the bar,” she said.

He nodded.

“The bar is not busy by Western standards,” Anna continued. “You don’t want to stand out. It’s just one big room, the residue of a bombed-out factory from an airstrike. Russians put it together. They trade black market liquor at night and have a stable of girls working in a nearby ‘hotel.’ The Veronika Dankeschöns make the money, gangsters take three-quarters of it, and the club provides the entertainment and the place to meet.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Cochrane watched the two German state workers and the policeman disappear down the same footpath that Cochrane had used to access the grave site.

“You can watch the show from the bar,” Anna said. “The bar overlooks the floor. There’s a show. Sometimes. Naked women. You can watch the show if they have one. Like the other men,” she tacked on. She shifted gears and Cochrane had the sense that she was almost talked out. “The woman you are looking for,” Anna said, “she goes by the name of Ilse Groening. She sits at her own table up to the right, reading books and overlooking everything: the girls, the money, side doors, the soldiers.”

“Why does Frau Schneidhuber have such power?”

“She worked in clubs in the 1920s in Weimar. Always talked of what a fine time she had. That sound like the same woman?”

“Yes, it does,” Cochrane answered. “Very much so! I remember her telling me about them. But I’m missing a link. Explain to me how you know her.”

“From the mortuary, you know. I worked there, too. Only job you can get when you first arrive. Handling the dead bodies. Sewing up flesh wounds. Embalming. We met there. The Russian wanted to employ someone who knew how the clubs worked. Balance sheets. Ledgers. How much alcohol? How much cocaine? How many girls? When Ilse left the medical clinic, she gave me the tip, hey? Come with her. Come work for the Russian, maybe have some fun, maybe marry a diplomat and get the hell out of Germany. My sister and me, we both left. That’s when we first saw the Russian.”

Then, failing to completely understand, “What Russian?” he asked.

Anna looked at him as if he were crazy. Then, suddenly very angry, “You’ll see,” she said. “There’s only one big Russian. Lena’s dead because of him. I’m going to kill him.”

With that, the ten minutes were up and so were an extra five.

Chapter 49

Berlin – July 1948

Cochrane stayed seated on the tombstone to watch Anna leave. The young German women, and the sad-eyed Dane, dispersed together in an eastward direction, protectively ringing Anna as they walked away. The two city functionaries plus the policeman were long gone down the footpath. The gravediggers were still at work, busy with shovels now, grunting and growling at each other, filling the vacant gaping hole above the coffin of the murdered Lena Schroeder.

Finding himself suddenly alone, Cochrane took stock. He felt he had taken a solid step forward but would only know for sure once he visited the club. He stood and retraced his path across the footpath, past the reeking, backed-up sewer pipe, and toward the gate on Gudrunstraße through which he had arrived.

He passed through the bent iron gate, and turned to his left, attempting to navigate his way back to Tempelhof. He slammed to a halt after two steps. There before him were the two functionaries and the policeman. They stopped talking the instant they saw him. They glared and stared. The policeman’s hand settled firmly on his pistol. The three East Germans formed a reception committee that Cochrane could have done without.

Cochrane’s mood and the world, which up until then was showing signs of settling into an acceptable pace, went into free fall. Seeing the three of them block his path, Cochrane froze and stood rock still. Their six unfriendly brown eyes were focused on him like three terriers, sensing battle, and ready to brawl. They did everything to indicate impending belligerence except paw the ground.

Cochrane calculated quickly.

If they were going to stop him, he wasn’t going to avoid it. There were other pedestrians in the area and presumably more police. There wasn’t an escape. Running or panicking would be foolish. He needed a great idea on the spur of the moment.

Move. Do something! You can’t just stand here grinning and gawking! he thought to himself.

Desperate for a productive move, he reached into the air and grabbed what appeared to be a good idea as it floated past.

“Comrades!” he explained, giving them a wide smile, and lifting his hands wide in a gesture of friendship. “All hail the great and powerful Stalin!”

The invocation of Stalin kept them momentarily quiet. He approached them with a friendly smile, the last thing they would expect, or so he hoped.

“Comrades, comrades!” he said.

He gave them a courteous tip of the hat. He segued immediately into a soliloquy of what a sad day it was but what a gracious public service they had performed to usher the unfortunate girl into the ground.

They stared at him without speaking. The cop blinked. Cochrane knew he had wrested the momentum of the meeting from them. “I’m grateful to you for your time today,” Cochrane continued.  They reacted as if he were the first person who had even been polite to them.

He continued with high praise in formal German, reached carefully into his jacket pocket, and brought out half a pack of cigarettes. He shook it. By the grace of fate, three smokes popped up. Three anxious hands reached toward him.

He took one cigarette himself to be part of the gang and struck a match. They were impressed with how deft he was. He moved the match around as they formed a circle with him, extending the flame to all involved. Four lights on a single match. One didn’t see such dexterity that often. Cochrane lit his smoke last.

The smokes broke an icy spell on a sunny afternoon. Then Cochrane turned the warmth of his charm upon them. He asked the officiator about the ceremony. Lying through his teeth, he said he had known the deceased casually and had been fond of her. But there had been no relationship. He knew she had had an accident, as he put it, and happened across the burial notice in the good socialist newspaper. So he had come by to pay his respects.

He was selling his story ably and they seemed to be buying it. He joshed a little with the policeman, remarking how difficult a law enforcer’s job was. “Been all over the world,” he said. “Never seen a policeman with an easy job in my life.”

His eyes bore in on the policeman. He noted the man’s rank of Polizeimeister, a lowly constable on flatfoot duty. “You are in the department headed by Colonel Markgraf, I assume,” Cochrane said.

“Correct,” the patrolman said.

“I will put in a good word for you,” Cochrane said pleasantly. “I will tell him when I see him socially that you were here, doing your duty, and performing honorably on behalf of the workers of Berlin. What is your name?”

The man hesitated.

“Speak up, young man.”

“Deiter Hoffman, mein Herr.”

“Excellent, Comrade Hoffman! I will put in the good word.”

By now the three men were back on their heels but were picking up on his non-native German. He knew the inevitable question was lurking. He was prepared for it. The registrar, the man carrying the black books, threw it at him.

“What nationality are you, mein Herr?” the registrar asked.

“American,” Cochrane said without hesitation. “If I may reach into my pocket to show you?” he asked.

The cop, with his hand still positioned on his weapon, nodded. Gingerly, Cochrane reached into his jacket. With two fingers and a flat hand, he withdrew his fraudulent passport. He made a show of opening it, showing his picture, but then stashed it quickly.

“American, yes, I am,” Cochrane said. “But I am from New York City. A fellow voyager in the cause of worldwide revolution and socialism,” he said.

“Why are you in Berlin?” the registrar asked.

“I’m an American Communist,” Cochrane said with a ton of indignation, selling them another whopper. “I am proud to say I have been hired by the new regime at the new university, the one formerly known as Humboldt. I will be giving lectures on racial oppression and the exploitation of the poor in the United States.”

They remained quiet.

“I am heading a department,” Cochrane continued, building on this lie. “I assume you are all Communist party members,” Cochrane said.

They were quick to assure him that they were. He had the impression that even if these three were former Nazis they wouldn’t admit it.

His explanation shut them down and pulled a rug out from under them at the same time. An invocation of Humboldt was a grandstand play and made no mistake in its implications.

Humboldt, which dated from the early 1800s, had been a target of the Nazis over the years of the Reich and the World War. It had been the scene of a massive book burning in 1933. From Humboldt’s main library, twenty thousand books by opponents of the regime and “other degenerates” were taken to be burned on the Opernplatz in a demonstration protected by the SA, the Sturm Sturmabteilung. That glorious day in Brownshirt history also included a speech by Joseph Goebbels, who had been last seen on a hangman’s scaffold in Nuremberg in 1946.

Humboldt had survived the World War, the bombing, and the Soviet occupation. It reopened in 1946 as the University of Berlin, but immediately faced repression from the Soviet Military Administration. Liberal and social democratic students were persecuted. Almost immediately, the Soviet occupiers suppressed academic freedom at the university, requiring lectures to be submitted for approval by Socialist Unity Party officials, and piped Soviet propaganda into the cafeteria. Vehement demonstrations followed from the students and faculty. NKVD police in plain clothes with no identification arrested scores of students in response in March 1947. The students were hauled before kangaroo tribunals, a Stalinist art form.

The Soviet Military Tribunal in Berlin-Lichtenberg ruled in private and within a matter of hours. The verdict: students and their professors had participated in “an anti-socialist resistance movement at the University of Berlin as well as espionage and sedition against the revolution of the workers.” The court sentenced them to twenty-five years of forced labor.

Between the end of the war and 1948, two dozen other students and professors were arrested or abducted by the Soviet Army, NKDV agents, or representatives of Markgraf’s glorious new East German police force — big, thick, low-browed men with massive arms, necks and shoulders, some in uniform, others in boxy, gray civilian suits. They all wore a permanent sneer and had a cloud of malice hanging above them.

Some of those arrested were gone for weeks and returned to Berlin acting as if they had taken some strange medicine that had wrecked their brains or bodies or both.

Rumors, never spoken by Berliners in more than whispers, had it that the noisier troublemakers had been bound, gagged, dragged onto small unmarked Soviet airplanes, and transported to the Mother Russia. There they were officially silenced, executed Russian style: two bullets to the back of the neck. Their families dared not ask. All hail the glorious revolution of the workers. Compared with all this, what happened to Jan Masaryk – the Czech leader who went out a third-floor window in his pajamas a few months earlier in March of 1948 — seemed warm and friendly.

The Soviet administrators targeted many young men and women active in the liberal or social democratic resistance against the Soviet-imposed Communist "dictatorship.” The German Communist Party rubberstamped the selection. The Communists had viewed the Social Democrats as their primary enemies since the time of the Weimar Republic. To have been hired as a lecturer at the new University of Berlin suggested that the man in front of them had some rapport, official or otherwise, with the current administration of the city.

Cochrane couldn’t prove it, but he felt he had sold the cover story. None of the three men confronting him were stepping forward to be the dope who challenged the wrong visiting Marxist. Keep it going, Cochrane told himself. He turned toward the registrar. “What is this book you carry?” Cochrane asked. “This black book you have in your hands?”

“Official records.”

“Such as a burial, I assume,” Cochrane said. “I saw you bear witness and enter a name and date, presumably for accuracy.”

“That is correct.”

“Are the official records available to the people?”

“Sometimes.”

“Are they then the people’s records?”

“Yes, that is true.”

“I need to witness the quality of your work.”

Cochrane snatched the volume away from the stunned functionary. He opened to the first inside page and spotted a name and office address. “Fritz Hunsicker. That’s you?”

Ja.

“The address is in Lichtenberg in Ost Berlin. That’s where your office is?”

Ja.

The American riffled through it, flipping pages. The volume also contained recent births and marriages. Cochrane found the entry for the funeral he had just witnessed. The name checked, but then again, Cochrane had provided it and paid for the service. He clapped the book shut and handed it back. “Where are books like this kept?” Cochrane asked. “Your office?”

Ja. In das Rathaus, Hunsicker said. “City Hall.”

“Which one?”

“The central one for the Eastern Zone of Berlin,” the one in Lichtenberg on Kohlerstrasse. That is the address you see there.”

“Ah. Of course. This all makes sense, doesn’t it?” Hunsicker nodded. “Where are the records kept of German persons who were displaced by the aerial bombings in 1945?”

“Same place.”

“I see,” said Cochrane. “And please satisfy my curiosity, who precisely keeps the records? Russians or Germans?”

“Germans,” said Hunsicker. With Russian oversight.”

“I see,” Cochrane continued. “Well, a good thing that is. We know who is more efficient, don’t we?” He leaned forward as if to share or even betray something in confidence. “The Soviets can be messy barbarians, can’t they?  Best to keep them an arm’s length from anything official, right?”

Without enthusiasm, they agreed. Cochrane gave Hunsicker and the other two men hearty slaps on the arms. “Good afternoon, comrades!” he exuded.

He left them the remaining smokes in his cigarette pack. He then ambled off as quickly as possible without arousing suspicion, confident that he had had a good day, much better than the unfortunate young woman who had been laid to rest.

Chapter 50

Berlin – July 1948

In the afternoon, Cochrane returned to Tempelhof and went to the office of Major Pickford. “I might have a solid lead on the woman I’m looking for,” Cochrane said.

“That was fast. You must be good at digging. Or getting lucky,” Pickford said.

“I try to make my own luck,” Cochrane said. “And I’ve been here for a few weeks. But I can use your help. And maybe some of your assets.”

“Just tell me what.”

“I could use maybe a hundred dollars out of the Erlking fund,” he said. “And I could use two men as backups when I go into the Eastern Zone tomorrow evening.”

“What’s in the Eastern Zone?”

“The woman I’m looking for. Maybe.”

“Heh,” snorted Pickford. “Good luck. Better you than me. I can’t let you take any American soldiers, though. There’d be hell to pay if there was trouble and the Soviet police arrested them in civvies. Your ass would be in a sling and so would mine and who the hell knows when we’d ever get our high school kids back.”

High school kids. The expression had first been used by General Clay to describe the young men newly in the U.S. Army and now under his command in Berlin. They were old enough to serve now but too young to have been in the war. They had a different attitude toward the Germans than some of the gnarled veterans who had fought in Normandy and at The Bulge.

“I was thinking of taking a couple of Germans,” Cochrane said.

“You’re crazy, right? Or trying to start World War III.”

“No.”

“What about DPs? They’re more expendable if trouble starts.”

“Germans would be better. I’d do better to take some Germans who know the layout and who speak natively. They’ll fit in easier than DPs or other Americans.”

“Talk to me, ‘Major Lewis’,” Pickford said.

“I have in mind a guy named Roth. He works in Tempelhof. You know him?”

“Not personally. There are so many of them. Hundreds now. Maybe more. Got new ones starting every day. Dozens of them. Where does Roth work?”

“Cargo loader and unloader. He’s been doing it for six weeks. He’s all bulked up from lifting fifty-pound bags.”

Pickford laughed. “Yeah. I can see how that would happen. Heinrich Roth? I know the name”.

“He’s the one. He’s a Berliner now and a former soldier. He tipped me off when there were SMA cops around the other day at Helmut’s café. I trust him to have my back.”

“If you say so,” Pickford said.

“Roth has a buddy named Otto Kern.  Kern’s a Berliner now, also, from the East not too far from here.”

“I know Kern. He’s a good young man. A whiz with electrical stuff. He’s got a wife and a kid.”

“I know about that.”

“How do you know?”

“He told me.”

“Don’t get him killed.”

“So I can talk to them?”

“I didn’t know you needed my permission,” Major Pickford said.

“I don’t. I just want you to have a general picture of what I’m doing and if I’m using manpower from Tempelhof. These guys could be absent for a day or two. That part would need your approval.” Cochrane paused. “Plus my guts also tell me you’re the chief intel officer here, not just one of the many. Not every major has a direct line to Washington or Northern Virginia. You’re going to find out what I’m doing anyway. No, listen. Am I right or not?”

“Broadly,” Major Pickford answered. He ran his finger through his thinning hair. “You’re not going to get these guys in any back-alley crap, are you? I mean it. Those are two good men.”

“I need good men. There shouldn’t be any trouble. But that’s why I need two good men, armed.” A pause, then, “Plus maybe a couple of Czech guns and a hundred bucks.”

“Aw, Jesus, Lewis!” Pickford blurted. “‘Shouldn’t be any trouble,’ you say. Then you ask for guns and money. What the hell you gonna do next, invade Poland?”

“Poland’s been done and you’re an intelligence officer. You’re surprised?”

“Not in the least,” Pickford said. “I can tell you work for Dulles. Do what you need to. If you need pilots to fly you somewhere, use the civilian recruits, also. Okay?”

“Roger that,” Cochrane said.

Cochrane waited. He gave Major Pickford a grin, plus a gesture with his empty hands as if he expected something.

“Ah, yeah,” Pickford said. “Guns and money. I knew you were waiting for something. I can make that appear for you right here.”

“Thanks.”

Major Pickford went to his safe and counted out the cash. Two twenties, three tens. The rest in fives and ones. From the box on the rear shelf, he pulled out two Lugers: swag from the war, and two clips. He handed everything over to Cochrane, who stuffed the money into his wallet and the extra weapons into his coat.

“Anything else?” Pickford asked.

“Got an extra vehicle we can use for a drive around the city tomorrow night?”

“If you’re talking about a U.S. Army Jeep, you can go to hell.”

“Something nondescript,” Cochrane asked. “Not even an unmarked Jeep. I’m going to the Eastern Zone at night.

Pickford thought for a moment. “We got some confiscated vehicles from the war,” he said. “Couple of Opels. Some foreign stuff. Pretty beat up. Real bangers. Rambling wrecks.” He paused. “I can make one appear for you,” he said. “Not here in the safe. Hangar Seven. Go over and ask for Sgt. Pearson. He’ll sort you out.” A beat and he added, “There’s a small motor pool there. Unofficial. No paperwork. Nothing on paper. If something disappears it was never there in the first place.”

“That’s music to my ears,” Cochrane said. “Got any airplanes like that?”

“Maybe a few. I’d have to check.”

“Sgt. Pearson? He’s one of your people? Intel division?”

“You could think that if you wanted to,” Pickford said. “Enough nosing around for one day, Lewis,” Pickford said. “And more than enough answers. Okay?”

Bill Cochrane thanked Major Pickford and was on his way.

Chapter 51

Berlin – July 1948

That evening, Cochrane found Heinrich Roth in the cargo employees’ locker room before he left after his seven-to-seven shift ended. The German was surprised to see Cochrane. They conversed in German. “Your friend Kern,” Cochrane asked, “Is he still here?”

“He’s here. We do something wrong?”

“Nothing wrong at all,” Cochrane said. “In fact, everything is all right. Want to do some extra work? It’ll earn you some extra money. Better pay than throwing around coal and sacks of flour. No harm listening is there?”

Roth shrugged. Nein.

“Look, I can give you a few dollars, let’s say five, just for coming and listening,” Cochrane said. “I’m not going to ask you to do anything illegal. Just make sure I get to the right address and guide me around the city. Sound okay?”

“So far,” said Roth, who didn’t need much convincing.

Cochrane had done the math. Five American dollars bought a month’s worth of groceries. Roth disappeared and returned with his friend Kern. It was Cochrane’s guess that the two of them would be receptive to his offer if they outnumbered him two to one.

They went across the street to a place that was patronized by Germans, not members of the occupying forces: no Americans or British. Cochrane kept his mouth shut as they went to a table so that no one would pick up his accent. He carried with him two sealed brown paper bags.

He gave each man a five-dollar bill as they sat down in a booth in the rear of the establishment.

Cochrane made his pitch, speaking in German with only a faint American accent. Cochrane had good days and bad days in the non-native languages he spoke and was having a good day in the language of Schiller. His cover story was that he needed to go to an unfamiliar place. He had heard it was an after-hours club. Loose women, liquor, maybe a stage show. He just needed to go in and talk. No extra curriculars for him and none for his two guides. He needed to feel secure, he said, and needed a couple of former soldiers whom he could trust to cover his back.

“You both fought to protect your country?” Cochrane asked, phrasing a delicate question as favorably as possible.

They both answered truthfully that they did, which was what Cochrane wanted to hear.

When Cochrane pressed for details, without flinching, Kern described the devastating destruction of his Ninth Army against the Soviet Army, how tens of thousands of his peers had died in battle or had been executed and how he had fled for his life as a last resort and was lucky to have survived.

Cochrane noted the damage to Kern’s left hand, specifically the mangled three fingers. Impassively, Kern told of the day that a round from a Soviet mortar had landed twenty meters from him. He had seen the incoming ammunition, held up his left hand to protect himself while his other hand worked a pistol, and how when he lowered his hand, it was red with the blood of two fingers gone and one hanging off by the skin.

Cochrane turned to Roth. He wanted to hear about this man’s war experience also. In the time between his decision to have a meal with these men and the actual meeting in the restaurant, Cochrane had used the resources of Major Pickford’s office to read an overview of their service to the Reich. He didn’t care so much what they had done as much as whether they would be truthful about it.  Cochrane had no tolerance for a brute or a fiend, but he had respect for an honest warrior who had answered his country’s call. He knew he would need some backup assistance in Berlin, knew he couldn’t use American or British soldiers, didn’t want to get involved with the French, and couldn’t trust the Russians.

In the back of his mind right now, he knew these men might be the solution. In the forefront of his mind, he was listening to Roth, who explained he had been in a Panzer unit that had been part of Unternehmen Barbarossa, which Cochrane knew in English as Operation Barbarossa, the ill-fated invasion by Nazi Germany of the Soviet Union which had begun in June of 1941 and crashed in failure in 1943, without capturing Moscow. The operation incorporated some of the most barbaric activity of World War II, with unspeakable atrocities on both sides.

Roth offered no excuses when Cochrane picked for details. He recalled honestly what he could and led Cochrane all the way from his exit from a POW camp to the long walk back to his uncle’s village, avoiding snipers and snitches all the way, and then the subsequent hike to Berlin where he got lucky, heard the Americans were hiring cargo crews and would hire any Germans who were able-bodied and could provide proper papers.

Cochrane listened and felt a surge of sympathy for these men who might have been his onetime adversaries on the battlefield. He respected the way they discussed their service. Above all, nothing that they had said misrepresented their service even if their accounts might have left out some of the darker deeds of their units.

“Well,” he said to them at length. “That war is over. Above all, we must avoid another. But we also need to deal with situations at hand.”

His most immediate mission, Cochrane explained, was to connect with a woman he had known in Germany before the end of the fighting. He mentioned that he had been in banking in Berlin before the war, hence his solid grasp of the language. He phrased things to suggest that the woman was a friend from that era. He didn’t mention that he knew her from an espionage situation from 1943. There was no reason to muddy the waters by revealing he had been in Germany during the war. To do so, to anyone’s thinking, would be to give him away as a professional spy.

“I’m afraid my friend is working in a deeply suspect place. We all know what many good people have been reduced to, don’t we?” Cochrane said with genuine understanding.

From their nods, he knew he had struck a chord.

“Do you know where Weinerstrasse is?” Cochrane asked.

The men looked at each other. They knew. It was in the vice area.

“The visit has Major Pickford’s blessing,” he said. “You’re free to go by his office tomorrow to hear it from him yourself. The major spoke to Sergeant Pearson. You’ll be excused from cargo duty tomorrow.”

Kern sat up straight and listened intently. Cochrane felt as if he was connecting. Roth was more of a cipher. Nonetheless, Cochrane didn’t need to do much more convincing after Roth asked the question that Cochrane had been waiting for since they sat down.

“What is the pay?” Roth asked.

“Fifty dollars apiece,” Cochrane said. “Cash in small bills. American currency. I pay well and I pay in advance. You’ll like working for me.”

Without hesitation, the two Germans agreed to the job.

Chapter 52

Philadelphia, Pa. – July 1948

During a scorching week in July in Philadelphia, the 1948 Democratic National Convention took place at an overheated, humid Convention Hall. It resulted in the nominations of President Harry S. Truman for a full term and Senator Alben W. Barkley of Kentucky for vice president in the 1948 presidential election. There was something new to the political conventions this year. Two of the new television networks, NBC and CBS, were able to televise gavel-to-gavel coverage of both conventions, whether audiences wanted it or not.

The chairman of the party, Senator Alben W. Barkley of Kentucky, presided over the convention and sought to put the diminishing political fortunes of President Truman in the best light. With delegates staggered by big Republican wins in 1946 that had given them control of Congress, Truman seemed to have one chance at re-election in his own right: slim. After having the Democrats control the White House since 1932, Republicans now frequently proposed to “clean the cobwebs from the federal government.”

Barkley gave the keynote speech and began the counterattack. "I am not an expert on cobwebs,” Barkley said. “But if my memory does not betray me, when the Democratic party was voted into office sixteen years ago, even the spiders were so weak from starvation they could not weave a cobweb in any department of the government in Washington!"

Southerners who opposed the expansion of civil rights nominated Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, a staunch segregationist, for President. But Harry Truman was easily nominated on the first ballot.

On July 14, Minneapolis Mayor Hubert Humphrey and other Northern Democrats prodded the party to adopt a bold civil rights platform and endorse President Truman's pro-civil rights advances as president. They were opposed by conservative party members who were against racial integration and by middle-of-the-roaders who feared losing Southern white voters, a bloc critical to a Democratic victory. But they were joined by Northeastern urban Democrats, who thought the plank would appeal to the growing African American vote in their cities, which had been traditionally Republican since Lincoln.

In his speech, Humphrey implored his party to march “out of the shadow of states' rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights." The convention adopted the civil rights plank. In response, the entire Mississippi delegation walked out of the convention, accompanied by thirteen members of the Alabama delegation. The disaffected Democrats and other Southerners then formed the States' Rights Democratic Party, which nominated the segregationist governor of South Carolina, Strom Thurmond, for president.

To make matters worse for Truman, another renegade Democrat, Henry Wallace, formerly FDR’s vice president from 1941 to 1945, ran far out into left field on the Progressive Party ticket.

As the convention closed, it chose its own party chairman, Alben Barkley, to run with Truman for vice president. Anxious to get out of town and back to equally hostile Washington, Truman quickly agreed to have Barkley as his running mate. The office of vice president had been empty since Roosevelt died in April of 1945 and Truman had vacated it. So anyone would certainly be better than no one. To any reasonable observer, the president’s chances for re-election in his own right had dropped a notch: from slim to none.

Chapter 53

Berlin – Late July 1948

During the same week in July, there was a tiny breakthrough that expanded the Big Lift.

Six Sunderland flying boats that took off from Brighton in England arrived on the Elbe at Finkenwerde. The landings were not easy. The planes had to come in on a low approach and the river was choppy and strewn with wreckage, tanks and rivercraft, from the war. The Sunderlands carried salt. They refueled overnight from fifty-gallon storage drums. The crews slept in a nearby home. The next afternoon they flew to the Havel and unloaded. A flotilla of small boats operated by local men and women took the salt to Berlin.

The safe and successful transportation of salt, essential to baking and food production and storage, was no small matter. C-47s and C-54s were constructed with wiring and cables in or on the floor of the fuselage. Salt spills destroyed the control lines. The gargantuan Sunderlands – they were eighty-five feet long – were constructed with their wiring and control lines along the tops of their fuselages, making them ideal transports for salt. The Soviets howled in protest, claiming accurately that the current treaty allowed them control of all Berlin waterways.

“Screw ‘em,” said Major Pickford. “Keep the damned stuff moving.”

The Sunderlands returned to England, picked up more salt, returned with it, then gradually augmented their cargo with meat, cigarettes, whiskey, towels and linens, small hand tools, and shoes and boots as needed in Berlin.

The Russians howled again. As they howled, Royal Navy seamen found an abandoned, half-sunken barge a kilometer upstream on the river, repaired it, and floated it to the location where the Sunderlands assembled. They retrofitted it with a pipeline, floated the pipeline with jerrycans, and created a mobile fueling depot. The operation came quickly to the attention of local Germans who were cheered by it. They pitched in and helped the British load and unload. Unable to leave well enough alone, one of the British seamen, who had also been an artist, painted the barge to look like a giant duck — to the amusement of local children.

The Sunderland flights then expanded to ten a day. They had their liabilities: they had to be worked into the complicated Tempelhof flight patterns. Soon the British and the Americans were flying in fuel: coal to warm the city when the autumn came and gasoline, petrol as the British called it, to power generators and motor vehicles.

The gasoline was a challenge. It was heavy, had to travel in heavy steel drums that made it even heavier, took up valuable cargo space, and had to be secured. An oil drum that broke lose in flight could kill a man. It was also a death sentence to the crew if a plane crashed.

Allied cargo figures started to rise. They still couldn’t meet quotas and could barely feed Berlin. But as the Germans watched and as the Allied crews on the ground started to notice that some problems were being resolved, a more subtle message emerged, one that the Russians picked up on eventually.

Giving fuel to Berlin suggested that the Allies were not going anywhere. It was a demonstration of resolve, although some on each side still didn’t believe it.

The United States was digging in, stubbornly as always. No one was going anywhere without a fight. Or at least that was the message.

Chapter 54

Berlin – July 1948

The car that Major Pickford made to appear was an Opel, pre-war from the late 1930s and if it could have talked, it probably could have told many exciting stories. Cochrane took Roth and Kern with him to Hangar 7 that Thursday night at nine PM. As the landing strips and the air above rumbled with American transports, and cargo flights set down and lifted off within minutes of each other, Cochrane and his two Germans pushed an Opel out the vehicle passage of the hangar to the roadway behind it.

The Opel had been sitting for months. A mechanic named Clem from Louisiana had given it the once-over that afternoon: insecticide on the interior, fresh oil, ten liters of gasoline, clean windshield, upholstery wiped down, and it was ready to go.

The three men crowded in. Otto Kern would drive and stay with the vehicle. He would deliver Cochrane and Roth to Club Weimar. Cochrane would go in first, buy a drink at the bar, and stay there. Roth would follow two minutes later. The men would not acknowledge each other. No point in indicating to anyone else that they were together. If one got in trouble, it allowed the other to coldcock the troublemaker and go find Kern with the car.

After Roth bought a drink, Cochrane would scope out the place, see what was of interest, and find out if he could spot Bettina. Anna had said she was usually visible at a regular table on an upper-right balcony. Five years had passed since Cochrane had last seen her, so who knew what shape she was in? But he would persist. Meanwhile, Cochrane and Roth would remain in each other’s sight all evening.

Both men wore hats. The hats were important. The hats were their version of semaphore flags. If a hat was removed, it was a sign of trouble. The hat held at chest level meant medium degree trouble but no need for departure. Hat in hand, held low at the side suggested that it was time to get out quick. As for the weapons, the pistols, they were to be used only to protect oneself or one another. No trawling in anyone else’s problem or fight.

As Cochrane originally conceived the evening’s doings, Kern would drive long circles around the place, sit somewhere in the car, go idle, go past the front every twenty minutes. Fallback for that was the side exit and entrance on Brectenstrasse. Above all, stay clear of the local police. They were four and a half miles from Tempelhof and taxis and public transportation didn’t run at night. No electricity for the trams and trolleys. Too dangerous for hacks. It would be a long, dangerous walk even for two men with pistols. It was not something they wanted to do.

Kern suggested a refinement on Cochrane’s plan, however.

He lived about a kilometer away, much closer to Alexanderplatz than the end of the line. The streets there were quiet at night, better lit, and safer than the combative vice zone. He would loiter there at home with Cochrane’s permission but would drive past every twenty minutes – on the hour, at twenty past, and at twenty minutes before the hour.

Cochrane admired the way Kern thought. Cochrane gave him permission.

They arrived at the club at quarter to nine that evening. The block remained battered from the war, but someone had strung police-state, Communist-industrial lighting from end to end on both sides, using poles that had once been for phones, though no phones existed now in the neighborhood. It wasn’t difficult to spot the building that housed the Club Weimar. The only building that was up and running had had another use before the war — like the medical clinic and the new Lubyanka outpost that Cochrane had also visited. Cochrane guessed that the building that was now a club had been either a factory or a warehouse. But it didn’t matter.

On arrival, they circled the block once, looked for hidden dangers, didn’t see any, and came back. “Park here, Otto,” Cochrane said softly as they moved up the block but had not yet reached the other vehicles. “Heinrich,” Cochrane said to Roth, “follow me in two minutes. Just as we planned.”

Jawohl, came a guttural response from the back seat. Roth’s voice sometimes sounded as if it were coming up from beneath the street. Cochrane stepped out of the car and walked forward without looking back.

There was a half-dozen cars in front, spread out, and none being too close to the next. A thug leaned against one, smoking a cigar, his arms folded across his chest. He stared at Cochrane because he hadn’t seen where Cochrane had come from.

The goon gave the American a cold stare as he passed. Cochrane threw it back at him and kept going. This was no place to betray timidity or indecision.

There was a burly chauffeur seated in a second car. Both the chauffeur and the standing man looked more Russian than German. Cochrane gave a careful glance as he passed each of them and saw Soviet military markings on both cars. The other cars were empty. Cochrane speculated that they were all together or maybe two groups of privileged revelers. The two caretakers looked like the security thugs the Soviets now had at most of their diplomatic functions, standing by the doors in lambskin leather, making sure no one left without permission.

There may have been no hidden dangers that Cochrane could spot, but the obvious ones were sufficient. The conversation with Anna bounced back to him.

It’s a den of vice for Russians and connected Germans,” she had said.

Cochrane reached the door to the club, feeling four eyes on his back, maybe eight if Otto and Heinrich could still see him. As he neared the entrance to the club, he could smell cigarette smoke, hear voices upraised – male and female – and hear music, 1920s-style, live from a small band.

Then there was the other noise. Almost absurdly, there was the sound of raspy, clanking motors, like a lawnmower or a threshing machine gone crazy. There were two of them, coming from both sides of the building and so loud that they gave the distant airplanes a run for their money. Cochrane could smell fumes, exhaust, and recognized the sound: they were generators, cranked up on diesel, providing the power to host the festivities within the club. In ways large and small, this was all making sense.

The front door was half-open. Cochrane pushed his way in.

Anna’s description had worked out perfectly so far. The bar was dark and crowded, maybe fifty men and a dozen females, but the bar area was lit enough so that he could see two bartenders, both men with slicked-down hair, white shirts, and ties. They were busy hustling drinks. Some men wore suits, others military uniforms. Cochrane saw an armada of gold, silver, and the red braid of the Soviet armed forces, including a few that looked more naval than army. A bunch of Red air force officers stood together.

The women who circulated liberally were dressed to evoke the Weimar years: fake pearls and flapper dresses that were cut low on the tops and high on the thighs. Plenty of red lipstick and cigarette holders. Time had stood still, then gone in reverse. It was 1928 again. The soundtrack of voices was in Russian and German. Not surprisingly the bargirls spoke both. The girls looked more Germanic than Tartar or Slavic, but the arms that were around some of them or groping some others were all Russian. Cochrane could tell by the insignias on the cuffs.

Cochrane made his way to the bar. He bought a bottle of beer. It was overpriced and warm. He paid with Deutschmarks and refrained from conversation. He knew he still had an accent. Little things like that could get a man shot in a place like this.

Before him, behind the bar, which was out in the open as Anna had said, a large room rolled out for about fifty feet. Stairs on each side led downward. There was a ragtag band playing but playing well. Downstairs there was a stage that was dimly lit with nothing transpiring on it. He didn’t know whether there would be a show tonight but thought Anna had said that there was something every night to get the guys hot and excited.

To the left, there was a seating area of table and chairs that wrapped around the room on the same level as the bar. Cochrane looked to the left and the right, scoped out the whole place, and took a close look at every woman.

No Bettina. He would have had a sinking feeling, but he had just begun his search for the evening. For that matter, he saw no Anna, either.

The bargirls might have been a distraction, but they left him alone. They were all busy. In one corner, a young man with glasses was doing a surprisingly good job with a battered accordion while the band now took a break. There was a wall of noise and voices. Cochrane was pleased. Music and noise could cover the small glitches in his accented German.

Nearby, there was a huge colonel in an East German militia uniform. He was at least six-four and louder than any other three people present. He was boisterous and drunk out of his mind. He hoisted one of the flappers, one that was well less than half his weight, maybe two hundred fifty to one ten. He spun her around like a rifle in a drill, then hoisted her onto his shoulders as she squealed and laughed as other officers applauded.  A huge Russian officer was similarly engaged with a second girl.

The girls merrily rode them as they might ride a stallion, legs around the necks from behind. The Russian’s large brown eyes were wide and jolly. His girl grabbed his colonel’s hat and plopped it on her head as the top of her dress came down to her waist and all the colonel’s friends applauded as she rode him with bare breasts.

For Cochrane, it was a perfect moment, even more perfect than it was for the giant East German officer and his Russian pal and the girls. No one was paying attention to Cochrane or Roth as the latter entered. Everyone was watching the girls and the clownish officers.

The American and his German backup made eye contact. Roth went to the bar. Cochrane, carrying a bottle of beer, moved away from the bar and slipped through a group of Russian military men who were squeezing thin, audacious German women and blocking his access to the balcony corridor to the right.

Throwing a glance to Roth every minute or so, he set his mind on finding Bettina, or as she was allegedly known here, Ilse Groening. Still, no one gave him any notice. He moved through the Russians and their girlfriends of the evening like black silk. Once he was gone from the bar, he had never been there. He exited the bottleneck of drinkers and came to a clear area just before the access to the elevated ramp above the main floor.

He looked in the right direction and scanned faces and figures and groups of people at tables. Then his eyes slammed with a jolt on a figure of a thick woman in a shapeless, black dress. She was seated sideways to him. She was at a table in the near corner, as Anna had suggested; the woman known here as Ilse Groening. She was positioned where she could see the floor below, its clients, the important tables, the band, and the small stage.

The woman looked to be in her late fifties. She smoked a cigarette in a holder. Cochrane could barely believe what he was seeing. In the compromised light and the shadows of the area where she sat, he couldn’t be sure. He thought that he recognized the characteristic crown of hair that framed her face and the way she held herself, drank, smoked, and smoldered at the world around her.

But she had lost a considerable amount of weight. Much of the large, wide frame was gone. If this was Frau Schneidhuber, she looked simultaneously much better and far worse. She had died her hair jet-black and was engaged in an animated conversation with a pretty, open-faced girl who wore a flapper-style yellow dress and a long string of fake pearls the way the adventurous young girls had worn them in the Weimar Era.

The conversation between the older woman and the younger one was one-way. The seated woman talked, the would-be flapper listened, not entirely pleased but saying nothing.

Orders dispensed. Orders taken. Obedience personified.

Cochrane approached them. The young woman scurried off in Cochrane’s direction, a flurry of bare arms and legs beneath a cloche hat, heading back to the bar.  He caught a whiff of Evening in Paris as she bumped hard into him, excused herself with a girlish grin, blew him a suggestive kiss and hurtled past. She must have been sixteen, Cochrane guessed.

The woman at the table looked up when Cochrane stood before her.

Guten abend, he said, carefully avoiding any name. Her hand was brittle with a little quiver. So were the movements of her arms. She readjusted in her seat. There was a cigarette caddy, fashioned out of a black man as a bartender working a cocktail shaker. It was probably American but also very Weimar.

Her head wobbled slightly. She squinted at him. Initially, she was startled and defensive. She wobbled again but then steadied as she peered through a fog of her own tobacco smoke.

Then, her eyes illuminated. For a few moments, the better part of a miserable decade flew away to go torment someone else.

“Why...!  Good God Almighty,” she said. “Are you a ghost or in the flesh?”

“The flesh, Bettina,” he said quietly.

Several more seconds passed as reality sunk in.

“You know, a little voice inside me always insisted you’d be back someday,” Bettina said. “Do sit down. I do believe I’m going to faint from joy.”

Chapter 55

Berlin – July 1948

Cochrane sat. Across a distance of fifty feet, his gaze found Roth at the bar. Roth’s hat was still on his head. Things were still okay. The thought of Kern nursing the Opel around late evening Berlin gave Cochrane the jitters. There were already enough moving parts to this operation to make his guts explode and take his head with them.

He sipped his beer. He drew a breath. When he looked back to her from looking for Roth, her eyes were locked onto his.

“Looking for someone, dearie?” she asked. “I see you scanning the crowd.” Eine junge Frau vielleicht? A young lady perhaps?

“Just looking around,” he said.

“Ha, ha!” she laughed. “Folks like you don’t just look around. Folks like you who walk into an illegal Tanzsaal mit Bordell in Ost-Berlin don’t walk in unaccompanied unless you’re looking for a lady.”

“Well, that would be correct,” he parried. “I came in to find you.”

“Ha!” she snorted. “Good one. You always did have a silver tongue. That’s not a bad thing.”

Several observations came upon Cochrane at once. He recalled now that Bettina spoke German with an Austrian accent, frighteningly like the way Hitler had. He could hear it again now even with the racket of voices and odds strains of entr’acte music in the club. While he had heard plenty of Austrian dialect in Berlin before and during the war, this time around he hadn’t heard more than a few utterances of it since he had landed at Tempelhof. He found it jarring.

Additionally, he now noted with sadness that Bettina was drunker than he had estimated when he sat down. And she was still sipping. How was he to coax an inebriated woman into fleeing the city when she was three sheets to the wind? Then there was her right hand, he saw.

Her fingers were bent in every direction. It looked as if she had been injured in some horrible accident. Or a bombing. He didn’t ask and didn’t need to know. There would be a time for that later. But her grip was weak. She had trouble plucking a second cigarette from a pack of English cigarettes, Player’s Navy Cuts, on the table before her next. The square pack with the British sailor lay next to a ledger that was open with a closed fountain pen lying in the binding between the two sides. She fumbled again.

“Permit me to help,” he said.

“You, mein Herr,” she answered, “may do anything to me that you wish. Anything.”

He ignored the innuendo and picked up a cigarette. She held her lips apart in a suggestive gesture, as if expecting a kiss, and closed her eyes. Cochrane didn’t hesitate. The place was a Weimar recreation, he reasoned, and he might as well go with the old-time flow. He gently placed the white-papered stick in her mouth.

“Oh, yes!” she said dreamily. “I love it when a man puts something in m y mouth. She chortled and closed her lips on the smoke, uttered a mmmmm sound, and waited as he lit it. She inhaled. Her pinkish eyes opened slowly, and she exuded the first laugh that he had received from her that evening.

“Mmmm,” she said again. “It’s not every day one of my old gentleman friends comes back to see me, you know,” she said. “What should I call you this time?”

“William,” he said.

“William,” she repeated. “William of the World War. William the Wonder of the World. Ha, listen, Herr William. I’ve had many casual friends. When I was an innocent girl I was the good time who was had by all. Berlin in the twenties and early thirties, you know. The world that recreates itself here behind heavy doors. Everyone was twenty years old and ready to play.”

“You spoke of it when I visited five years ago,” he said.

“Of course I did. Can’t take away someone’s memories, can you? Though there’s people who’ll try. I had two great loves, though. Just two.”

He let her unwind.

“One was my husband, bless his Saxon soul. Killed by the filthy French. Then my Horst who got me through the second war.”

Cochrane shook his memory while his gaze slid sideways again to the bar. Roth was doing fine and staying out of trouble. He was chatting with a flapper, which allowed him to blend in. But if he disappeared with the girl, Cochrane was going to give him holy hell. Then again, if Roth had any kind of future in this sort of business, he would have his ears open, also. Maybe he would take a turn with the flapper girl on the Russian’s shoulders and come back with a useful tidbit. But Roth stayed where he was assigned, which was the best option.

“I don’t think I met Horst when Frieda and I stayed with you,” Cochrane said, reckoning that if Horst was real, he was the man, the lover Bettina had, that Anna had referenced.

“You didn’t meet him,” Bettina said. “I made sure of that.”

She raised her battered right arm, arranged her fingers in a strained pattern, and took the cigarette from her mouth, holding it down in the joint between two fleshy fingers. She laughed, a cloud of smoke rolled out of her mouth, followed by a cough.

“How the devil did you find me?” she asked, her thoughts jumping through smoke rings. “You’re a digger, I know, so it wasn’t just luck. Do tell.”

“I started at the medical facility where you used to work. A trail that led me here.”

“Ha!” she said. “That’s Germany since the war,” she said. “Either you can’t disappear at all, or you disappear completely. Oh! Shame on me for not asking right away.”

Ever watchful, Cochrane’s eyes drifted. They had a visitor whom Cochrane recognized.

Anna. She had climbed a metal set of steps halfway down the corridor and now approached the table where Cochrane sat with Bettina. She gave him a faint smile: half-friendly, half of recognition. She went to Bettina, placed a hand on her shoulder, leaned into her, and whispered something in the older woman’s ear.

Bettina gave a slight nod. Anna straightened up again and stepped back. Her eyes found Cochrane’s. She extended a hand to him and placed it on his shoulder, as if to affirm that he was okay with her. Before he could say anything, she departed in the same direction from which she had come. Her appearance had been almost ghostly. She vanished in the space of ninety seconds.

Bettina paused for a moment. Her brow furrowed. Then she collected her thoughts.

“That girl you escorted to the United States. Pretty Frieda. She arrived safely I do hope? That’s what I hear, but I want to hear it from you. All confirmed?”

“I’m happy to say that, yes, she arrived there safely. Frieda went to live with her extended family. Far out in the middle of America.”

“She sends you love and penny-postcards, I hope.”

“I haven’t heard from her for five years now. There’s no reason I would.”

“No reason? You escorted her to safety. At no small peril to yourself.”

“I wish I did hear from her, but I don’t. Any news of her father?” Cochrane asked, changing the flow of the topic.

“Der Ubercommandant?” she answered. She shook her head sadly. “Poor man. If you want to feel sorry for a sour old Nazi, there’s one worthy of your sympathy. He was arrested after the war. Sent to a Soviet labor camp. That was the solution for any male prisoner they decided not to hang. Somewhere out near Murmansk, I hear. They work you to death, then just before you die, they shoot you. Wonderful folks, our Russian occupiers.”

“Bettina, listen,” Cochrane began. “I do not have all the time in the world, and we need to talk about something.”

“Hush, hush!” she said sharply. “In here my name is Ilse. And everything waits right now. This is my favorite part of the evening. Be quiet and enjoy die hübschen damen, the pretty ladies. Play your cards right and maybe you can take one to the alley out back and be pleasured.”

On the small platform that passed for a stage, a spotlight found its proper place. A thin man in a black suit stepped into it. He was the emcee. Behind him was a beige curtain with a Soviet hammer and sickle upon it, a bizarre makeshift seal of approval, red and gold like the flag, and like all the military ribbons and insignias in the bar. From the uniformed Russians in the audience, there was a round of heavy applause for the Soviet Union.

The emcee delivered a short introduction in German and Russian, saying that now that the Fascists were gone, Berliners could enjoy artistic performances again, much as they had in the naughty, debauched years before 1933.

“Much praise to our Russian Socialist friends who now make this possible!” the emcee exclaimed in German. “Those of us in the elite, we can again partake in our sins! And not just to be naughty! Our depravity is charming, is it not?”

With his gloved hands, he milked his audience for applause.

The audience rewarded him with shouts, whoops, and rhythmic handclapping.

“Ah, Berlin!” he exclaimed next. “As great a Slavic city as Moscow! In Berlin, all the lustful desires of Europe can be displayed on our humble stage! And tonight, all of our secret desires will be displayed, my Russian and German friends! The power of the proletariat will now be shown to the guardians of such in this room. May every man enjoy himself and indulge in dirty, disgraceful sordid bygone Berlin!”

And so the show began.

Chapter 56

Berlin – July 1948

There was scattered applause around the room as the lights went low, then faded to nothing.  The curtain drew away, opening to the sides, revealing a small, cramped stage about fifteen meters across.

Gypsy music began from a single violin player, a very pretty girl in her mid-teens. Cochrane looked more closely and realized it was the girl who had bumped into him, but she had changed into something more sheer and revealing.

A line of six young women entered. They crossed the stage in a waltz step. A rose-tinted light illuminated them. They wore short transparent dresses. They floated languidly across the performance space, then at a furious pace as the tempo of the music spiked. When the five- minute display was over, their bodies froze, silhouetted against the background of the rear curtain.

A piano interlude followed. The room lights remained low. The only movements were the waitresses, naked from the waist up, going from table to table selling drinks and cigarettes.

Then the dark stage became faintly light again. Four of the previous dancers reappeared, plus two new ones, both blonde. All six girls were barefoot in the garb of young peasant girls, each with one breast bare. They danced in homage to a wooden representation of a Soviet tank – Red star at the center, the barrel of its cannon protruding like a giant penis.

With a tumbling sensation in his gut, Cochrane recognized Anna as one of the new girls. The dance had no purpose or theme, other than titillation, but in that aspect, it succeeded with the audience. There were little klatches of men crowding closer so they could see better. From what Cochrane could observe, they were divided by tribes: Russians and Germans. Some of the Germans wore uniforms and when Cochrane looked closer, he determined that the German military stayed together and the police did, also.

This was followed by an interlude with more piano music. But the emcee appeared again after several minutes and held aloft a sign that said, Opium-Fantasie. There was some applause after the sign appeared as if this were the featured event.

When the lights came up again, a male actor was on stage, slumped to the floorboards of the stage. He wore heavy, crude make-up designed to make him look Chinese. He was smoking a pipe. After half a minute, as Cochrane watched with morbid fascination, there was a crude lighting shift as the lead female dancer reappeared. It was Anna again. Now she was crudely done up to like Marlene Dietrich in Die Blau Engel.

She went through her motions, more than she danced. As she moved around the stage, she seductively ensnared the “Chinese” opium smoker, first with her legs prominent through a slit in her gown, then with her full body as she ordered him to unzip the back of her gown and the gown slid off, effecting a complete striptease.

Cochrane could feel the spectators watching and leering with a special intensity. His gaze shifted to Bettina. She watched intently also, but he saw definite sadness in her eyes. She had given up on the booze and was drinking from a glass filled from a carafe of water.

Several lewd and degrading skits followed between the “Chinaman” and his seductive blonde muse until the opium smoker overexerted as he tried to keep a sexual pace with her in an exotic dance. In the final gasp of the skit, he lunged for her naked body, missed, tried again, and clutched his chest. He staggered and fell hard as he pursued her.

She disappeared through a black curtain as he hit the floor. She was gone, and he was presumably dead on the floor of the stage.

There followed another show called Wild West where a female marshal wearing something faintly resembling the garb of the American West captured three female outlaws in something that aspired to be a ballet, but which was actually another tacky strip show.

It had a “final act” feel to it and that’s what it was. The audience again watched with fascination as the three female dancers were led to bars descending from a curtain, meant to represent a cell. Again, other than to arouse a repressed audience, the episode was pointless.

Cochrane was relieved when it was over and the lights went up. The applause was enthusiastic. There was a rush to the bar. There was no shortage of cash being transacted over black-market liquor, beer, pretzels, and women.

Cochrane was astonished at how many uniforms he now saw. German police and Soviet army made up about half the audience. Cochrane managed a glance to the bar. Roth and his hat signaled that everything was still okay. Even so, Cochrane was anxious to get out of there and, for that matter, to get Bettina to London.

“So what did you think?” Bettina asked.

“Simply wonderful,” Cochrane said.

She laughed. “Ha! Of course,” she said.

She either missed his sarcasm or chose to ignore it. More likely, they both knew it came up short of wonderful even if it had been bizarrely entertaining.

“I suppose it’s not for everyone,” she said. “Another beer?” she asked. “On the house.”

“Sure. Then we should talk.”

She made a gesture with her disfigured hand. A waiter appeared. There was a brief parade before Bettina of men and woman who worked there, about half a dozen, who turned over invoices in paper to Bettina. They addressed her as “Frau Groening” and were respectful.

“Is this the way you remember those places during Weimar?” Cochrane asked. “The ones where you worked?”

“Hardly. Those were happy places, happy times, even with what came after them in 1933. The world was joyous. Did I ever mention that I had a small role in Brecht’s Die Dreigroschenoper when it first opened at Berlin’s Theater am Schiffbauerdamm?” She paused. “Nineteen twenty-eight, I think it was. I played a whore. Well, all the girls were whores. Had six lines and got to wear a shameless outfit. What fun!”

“At the clubs, did you keep the accounting ledgers books back then?”

“Sometimes. I made myself useful in every way.”

“I arrived in Berlin for the first time after the Nazis had taken over,” Cochrane said. “Then I didn’t return till ’43. I recall the great bars and clubs only by hearsay and reputation. At which places did you work?”

“Verona Lounge on Kleinstrasse. Topkeller on Schweinstrasse. Weisse Maus. Kakadu Café. Haus Vaterland.” She laughed. “I started on stage and met some men. I escorted. Tourists, you know. I was a dancing, bare-breasted Rhine Maiden at ‘Vaterland’ for a year. Helped relieve the tourist boys of their money. But I later took care of the books,” she said, “the finances. That’s when I met Horst, my second love. Not as much fun, the bookkeeping, but safer and cleaner, and Horst wanted me to himself, which I liked. I watched the budgets. That’s what I do here. I keep accounts. The waiters write checks for the liquor and cigarettes served. The money goes into a locked box behind the counter. After the show, someone independent, a Russian, does the final accounting. The figures better match or someone on the floor is going to get shot. Then the hoods skim every mark that they can. That’s what hasn’t changed. The clubs in Weimar days were run by gangsters.”

“And this one?”

“Same.”

“German?”

She laughed. “Russian. You knew that, correct? You just wanted to hear me say it?”

“I knew it. I’m just surprised that they got to Berlin so fast with the army here.”

“Ha! The hoodlums came with the army. They are the Red Army. Take a look around.”

She indicated the lower level.

Cochrane’s eyes drifted down to the main floor. In any room or setting like this, there was a power table, the place from which a manager or boss or whatever such a person is called, sits, simmers, shows off, flexes his power, and keeps track of the proceedings.

In places where he had been in New York or Chicago or San Francisco, sometimes the location was hidden; it was an unseen room behind a wall where the watchers kept a few eyes on the place through slits or via two-way mirrors. But that was far too sophisticated for a bombed-out warehouse and “Club Weimar” was not much more than that, plus girls, plus muscle at the door, plus a booming illegal bar, plus all the soldiers and police.

The spot here was a corner table, Cochrane saw. There were two men in coats and a gaggle of young girls – five of them, Cochrane counted – who looked to be later teens or early twenties. They still had some innocence to them. They were dressed as flappers, plenty of low necklines, plenty of legs, plenty of strands of fake pearls.

Par for the course, Cochrane concluded. Degenerate Western culture, not for the masses, but for the ruling elite: the party faithful. Far-right or hard-left, the men who ruled wanted their women served up sexy, servile, and compliant. Cochrane took the measure of the table. The two males with their backs to the wall were clean-cut and clean-shaven. They looked more military than traditional gangsters. The women formed a ring around them. One looked German, one looked Russian. The Russian had his arm around a girl, with a hand on her right breast.

The German looked to be keeping his paws to himself. Cochrane noted that there was some space between the girls and beyond that, there were four more men. Security types, Cochrane assessed quickly. They had their backs or sides to the table and watched the floor. They had drinks but weren’t bothering much with them. The two on the Russian side looked Russian, the two on the German side looked Aryan. Germans probably, Poles maybe. Big and dumb, Cochrane guessed, probably armed to the teeth, not that their arms and fists couldn’t solve most problems they would face in this place.

A man would have to be crazy to start trouble in here. Crazy. It made Cochrane wonder again why he was here. Then his eyes shifted again and crashed into Bettina’s pinkish gaze.

“What are you watching, dear William?” Bettina asked.

“I’m watching the man in the corner with the five girls,” he said. He continued to watch as the man received salutes from Russian officers in uniform as they passed.

“Don’t play around with that boy,” she said.

“Who are they?”

“Who is anyone these days? The question is impertinent. And dangerous.”

“Tell me anyway,” he said.

“Like hell, I will,” she laughed, taking another sip of water.

Cochrane took a casual glance over his shoulder and saw Roth at the bar.

Roth adjusted his hat but kept it on his head to indicate that things were okay from his perspective. Then he turned away so as not to be overly obvious with his signal. Roth was growing on him. He was already displaying a flair for this line of work. He hoped that Kern in the car was staying out of trouble with the same skill. He also hoped that Roth, faced with all these Soviets in uniform, could keep his cool. There was never a shortage of hypothetical disasters to worry about.

“You picked a strange night to wander into this place,” Bettina said when Cochrane turned back to her and their gazes locked again. “One of the girls got herself murdered a few days ago.”

“Is that right?” he asked. “That’s horrible. A girl who worked here?”

“Yes. And you’re telling me you didn’t know?” she asked. “That’s a laugh.”

“I just arrived in Berlin,” he said, sidestepping an outright lie. “If you want to know the truth, I’m more concerned with the Luftbruecke than the crime reports.”

“You’d be wise to keep it that way. Keep your eyes on the clouds, not the gutter.”

“You’re sounding like the Delphic Oracle,” he said.

She laughed. “Good one, sir. I always appreciated you as a man of culture.” She paused, gave him a long, thoughtful look, and spoke again. “Just so you don’t go nosing around the wrong places tonight and getting your nose shot off, I’ll tell you what you’re wondering, partly because I like you and partly because I know you’re wondering.” She gave a little beckoning motion with her good forefinger, the left one, indicating that he should lean forward to hear above the rattle of music.

“The goon seated against the wall is the Russian bastard who runs this place,” she said. “Ex-Soviet military. Bloodthirsty savage. There are very few people in this place who aren’t terrified of him.”

“The one in civvies? Gray suit?”

“Yes.”

“What’s his name?” Cochrane asked.

She did not look up as she spoke. “I’m not going to tell you,” she said.

“And he’s ex-military?”

“His body is but his influence is not. Follow that?”

“Sure,” Cochrane said. “Except men in uniform still salute him. Why would they do that if he’s ‘ex’?”

“Good question. Two possible explanations. One,” she said as she smoked, “old habits die hard. Two, he’s less ‘ex’ than anyone is admitting. It’s not as if every bit of corruption news appears on the front pages of the newspapers here or is blasted out nightly by the sound trucks.”

“Point taken,” Cochrane said.

A pregnant pause, then. “The brutish man with him is the police commissioner,” she said.

“Which commissioner?” he asked. “Stumm or Markgraf?”

He could see that his response registered with her and changed the tone of things. “You do know too much already, don’t you?”

“Maybe,” he said.

“I should take you to my place and finally re-educate you.”

“I’ll pass on that,” Cochrane said. “Much as it flatters me.”

“Still have a wife back home?”

“Yes, and I’m anxious to keep her.”

“Pity,” she said, still working receipts and paper. The water-instead-of-booze had caught up with her. She was sobering. Whether it was because he was there or because she had to keep the numbers straight was something he couldn’t tell. Maybe both.

She started another smoke as two waiters came by and delivered a further stack of invoices to her. She glanced at them, recorded them swiftly, and then folded them under the ledger before her. Meanwhile, his eyes wandered back to the power table. There were several sturdy bulls vying for the favored attention of the Russian.

“Which one is the police commissioner? Markgraf?” he asked.

“Take a guess.”

“The one with the narrow face and close-cut hair. He looks German. The other one is a Slav or a Tarter.”

She never turned.

He managed another look at Roth. Things were still in equilibrium.

“Ever think that your luck could run out if you pushed it too far?” she asked.

“All the time.”

“Recently?”

“About a minute ago when I was looking down at that table of goons,” he said. “That’s recent to me.”

She sighed dismally. “So I can assume if you know all about the police, you’re not a tourist,” Bettina said. “And this visit is professional?”

“Again, I’m here largely due to the airlift,” he said. “And I’m here to do an old friend a favor.”

“Who?”

“You.”

“Hell. Not sure I want it,” she said. “But since you’ve come so far, I’ll hear you out. How’s that?”

“That’s perfect. Thanks,” he said, inclining forward again. “My friends in certain corridors of American power tell me that a promise was made to you a few years ago. You’d have the opportunity to leave Germany after the war if you assisted Frieda’s escape.”
“I remember that agreement.”

“We occasionally have a sense of honor over there on the other side of the ocean,” Cochrane said. “I’m here to make good on the promise. My instructions are to escort you to London.”

She set down her pen and gave him her steeliest of steely-eyed looks. “Bully for you,” she said. “England’s broke as a taxi driver in Venice,” she said. “I might as well stay here. I have work.”

“England’s a free country,” Cochrane said. “Don’t know how long that will last in the Soviet Zone.”

“I don’t know how long I’ll last either,” she said.

Surprised at her reticence, he pushed back from the table.

“Bettina, listen to me,” he said in a low voice. “Who knows what’s going to happen to Berlin and in the Soviet Zone? Stalin hasn’t backed up one inch since the war and every move he makes pushes a little further west. I can hang around Berlin for another week,” he said. “After that, I send word back that you didn’t want to leave. It will then be out of my hands.”

“Who cares?” she asked.

Bill Cochrane finished his second beer and reached to his hat on the table. Unexpectedly, relief washed over him. He had done what he could and she had declined his help. If this was the situation, he was free to leave Germany. The prospect of getting out of postwar Berlin and returning to his family appealed to him. He was preparing to stand and leave when her gnarled hand settled on his arm. “Hear me out, William,” she said. “I mentioned a man named Horst,” she said. “The other love of my life. My second and only love after my late husband.”

“I recall,” he said, settling in again.

“He was the Nazi gauleiter on our block. We had a romance from the thirties till 1946. During the war, Hitler was in power. Horst protected me. He knew I listened to seditious music, had leftish friends, Jewish friends, foreign friends. Our romance trumped his politics.”

“Did Horst have a last name?” Cochrane asked gently.

“Horst Schmid,” she said.

“Did he have an address?”

“He did once,” she said. “Seventeen Lugeckstrasse. Right in my neighborhood. Don’t bother to look. What was left standing after American and British air raids was obliterated by Soviet artillery.” She paused. Her eyes went far away and came back. Down below a fistfight was breaking out between two Russians over one of the bargirls. The thug against the wall who ran the place clapped his big hands and made a quick motion. Four massive security gorillas came up out of nowhere and had the offending soldiers frog-marching toward the door in a matter of seconds. There was nothing subtle about Russian bouncers: they would punch or knee their victims in the testicles with the first shot, then march them out while they were still howling in agony.

“Do man carry weapons in here?” he asked.

“Fists,” she said. “They carry fists. And clubs. The security hoodlums have pistols. No one else has one. Except you, maybe.”

“Maybe,” he said.

“Don’t get caught,” she said. “I won’t be able to help you.”

Bettina gave a distracted smile and moved toward her conclusion.

“Horst was arrested after the war. He might have been shot but he knew how to manage factories and tractors. They sent him east to a labor camp, instead. I believe he is still alive.” Her eyes misted.

“Do you know which camp?” he asked. “Do you know where?”

“Somewhere in the east.”

“Russia?”

“Probably not that far. The first abductees were sent farther. By the time Horst disappeared, they were removing factories from Berlin and putting them in the northeast. That’s all I know. “Don’t ask me more.”

“Okay,” he said. Her smoke died. Cochrane lit another cigarette for her.

“How many loves do you have in a lifetime. One? Two if you’re really lucky?”

“I’ve had two,” he said. “My first wife died young.”

“I’d rather stay here and die clinging to the hope that Horst will return,” she said. “I’m an old woman. Why leave and abandon that hope? What if he returned and I was gone?”

Cochrane nodded.

“So you see,” she said. “I don’t wish to leave Berlin. I will stay and wait.”

Cochrane pondered it all very quickly.

“Is there any way,” he asked, “that the Soviet administration will at least acknowledge where Horst is and perhaps how we could barter his release?”

“Those things don’t happen,” Bettina said. “All paths are blocked. Just like the Russians blocked the land and sea in and out of Berlin.”

“But they’ve been unable to block the air,” he said.

“That’s the Soviet government,” she said. “The criminals are worse. They block everything. Imagine when you’re up against both.”

He was about to speak again when Bettina rediscovered her tongue.

“The comrade down there is the most powerful man in the Soviet underworld,” she said. “And he will be of no help. As a lesson to others, he would have Horst killed if we even inquired. Please! Leave it alone. You’re playing with hopes and lives.”

Cochrane heaved a breath and stood. “Thank you for being honest with me, Bettina,” he said. “I’ll see what my instructions are and see if there’s anything that we haven’t thought of. Is that acceptable?”

“Sure,” she said.

He leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. When he was about to lean back and head for Roth and the exit, Bettina’s tenuous hands gripped his clothing. She held him and brought her lips close to his right ear.

“The Russian. His name is Sergei Kovalyov,” she said. “Exercise extreme caution, my dear American friend. He’s already a mass murderer. To a monster like this, one more murder means nothing.”

Chapter 57

Berlin – July 1948

Out on the street minutes later, Cochrane and Roth made an easy rendezvous with Otto Kern who had parked down the block ten minutes earlier with his headlights off. Kern, as instructed, had kept the Jeep idling when on the block where Club Weimar was located, despite the shortage of gasoline. This made faster movement possible in case a sudden departure was required. Better to burn an extra gallon than fall into Soviet hands.

Kern, Cochrane noted immediately, had parked wisely. He was in the shadow of a ruined church, close to a mangled tree. Anyone surveying the block would have found it difficult to access the vehicle and discern a driver, much less recognize him at night.

Kern flashed his lights when he saw Cochrane and Roth emerge from the club. They piled quickly into the Jeep, Cochrane riding shotgun and Roth in the back. If the unmarked Jeep had been an airplane, Roth would have been the tail gunner.

“It went okay, sir?” Kern asked, exiting the block quickly and driving carefully through the uneven streets. Like the other two men in the car, he had an eye out for police or Soviet army patrols. It was past one AM. Who knew what was to be encountered on the Berlin streets?

“I think it went well,” Cochrane said. “There will be a return trip or two. I’m sure of that. Don’t know when. We’ll see.”

From the attic of his memory, Cochrane recalled a phrase often invoked by his late father, a family man. “Anyone out after one AM is usually up to no good,” he had often said.

The phrase, the memory, brought a smile to Cochrane as Kern navigated the somber streets filled with their silent army of oddly shaped rubble and indistinguishable dangers.

In the car there was silence, except for the grind of the motor and the changing of gears when Kern slapped the stick shift. Cochrane sought to break both the silence and the mood.

“How about you, Heinrich?” he asked in German. “I kept an eye on you. You seemed to do okay. Hear anything interesting?”

“The big Russian swinging the girl on his shoulders,” he said. “Tank commander.”

“Really? One of the units based out in the Northeast? Out toward Bernau?”

“No. South of here. Rehfelde. The district Märkisch-Oderland.”

“Do you know that area?” Cochrane asked Kern, the quiet driver.

“Yes. It’s in Brandenburg. Southeast of Berlin.”

“His unit recently arrived,” Roth said. “The tanks.”

“A reinforcement?”

“Maybe. Newly arrived, that’s all I know.”

“Interesting,” Cochrane said. “Thank you.”

Kern drove steadily, easing through intersections, an eye out for the usual hazards: vehicles without lights and armed hold-up men on bicycles.

They entered the Western Zone. They stopped at an American checkpoint with four military police, two with automatic rifles and two with massive sidearms. Kern produced a vehicle ID and Cochrane held aloft his ID. The lead MP checked each carefully and waved them through. After a few minutes, they were halfway back to Tempelhof and only occasionally encountered other motor vehicles, mostly British and American military, all heavily armed.

The Jeep continued.

“Lots of nice-looking women in the club,” Cochrane offered, trying to put a pleasant cap on the outing.

Roth laughed. “Many,” he said.

“Too true,” Cochrane answered. “Either of you see a girl who stood out?”

“No. I have my wife at home,” Kern said.

“Good for you. Treasure and take care of her,” Cochrane said.

There was a thoughtful silence from the tail gunner. Then Roth added, “The blonde.”

Coming more alert, “There must have been fifty blondes in there, Heinrich,” Cochrane replied. “Some via their Germanic bloodlines, some through chemicals. Which one in particular?”

Cochrane guessed it was a female Roth had encountered at the bar. There had been no shortage of them. But he was wrong. “She was on stage for a dance. Then she went over and talked to the Russian hoodlum,” Roth answered.

“Anna?”

“If that’s her name,” said Roth. A pause. “She walked by where you were sitting, too. Before the show. You and the older lady who looked like a madame.”

“That was her, the girl who came by,” Cochrane said. “Yes. Her name is Anna.”

“You know her?

“Not very well.”

“I liked her.”

Cochrane suppressed a sigh. “I think she’s a decent woman,” Cochrane said. “Very troubled history, though. I wish I could help her, but I can’t.”

“All of Germany has a troubled history,” said Kern unsolicited as they arrived at Tempelhof. “Help is not so easy when the Russians send tanks from the east. Who knows? Americans and English leave and we’re prisoners again.”

“No Churchill anymore. No Roosevelt,” said Roth, who, along with Kern and millions of other Germans, had been at war with both forty months earlier.

“I understand,” Cochrane said.

Bill Cochrane could have said more, much more, but declined to. It was very late. Or very early, depending on how one measured a day.

Cochrane’s gaze slid sideways. There was a flashing red caution light that marked the driving path for Kern to take to return the vehicle. For a moment the red glow made a hollow out of half of Kern’s face and gave him a menacing smile. It was as if for a split second it allowed a view deeper into Kern’s soul and intentions than Cochrane normally might have had. For just a flash, Cochrane saw, or sensed he saw, something he didn’t like or something he hadn’t noticed before.

It was a fatigue-juiced moment that was alive with a kaleidoscope of wild thoughts pinwheeling in more directions than Cochrane cared to count: prime among them, unassociated with Kern, he wondered how Laura and Caroline were, if they were safe, and if he would live to see them again. When he was younger, such ruminations would never have confronted him.

As the vehicle moved forward past the red flashers, the illusion, or the illumination, whatever it had been, was gone. An uneasy normal prevailed again. In the end, they were three tired warriors returning from an intense evening.

Kern parked the Jeep in Sgt. Pearson’s hangar.

The men wished each other a good night and the late evening assignment concluded.

Chapter 58

Berlin – July 27

Shortly after midnight, as July 26 turned into July 27, a C-47 flown by First Lieutenant Charles King of Aberdeen, South Dakota and First Lieutenant Robert Stuber of Arlington, California approached Tempelhof in light rain. Both men had long flying experience. They put down their landing gear, locked it, and went into their one thousand meters of flight descent onto the airfield.

Then something happened. For those listening from the control tower, their cockpit went silent. But an explosion was heard throughout Berlin. The C-47 flown by King and Stuber had come in too low: miscalculation or a lethal downdraft, no one would ever know. It whammed directly into one of the abandoned apartment buildings that littered the city under the landing pattern.

German fire crews, paid and volunteer, fought the ensuing blaze into the dawn hours. American disaster crews were on the scene as soon as the fire was under control. The crews removed the wreckage of the dead Gooney Bird and the remains of the two volunteer pilots. No civilians were killed. The plane had only carried a crew of two, plus flour and coal.

As dawn broke and the clouds cleared and the rain ceased, Berliners and Americans passed by and left flowers. By noon, as the assemblage continued to grow, the row of flowers had become a small hill.

Someone posted a hand-lettered sign in English. It read,

Two American fliers became victims of the Berlin Blockade on this site.

You gave our lives for us!

The Berliners of the West Sectors will never forget you.

There was an official memorial service at 11 AM the following morning, led by a Lutheran minister from the Berlin diocese and an American-born U.S. Army chaplain named Bryan. The service was in English and German and held near the crash site two blocks from the Tempelhof landing strip that the ill-fated, final flight of King and Stuber had missed.

Bill Cochrane attended, head respectfully bowed, standing quietly by himself, with an unshakable feeling of sorrow upon him. He couldn’t erase from his mind the sacrifice these young fliers – a pair of fine young Americans — had made for the freedom of people they didn’t know, the people of Berlin who had been “the enemy” not so long ago. He exchanged sorrowful glances with Tommy Olson and Glenn Taylor, who were between flights but skipped their lunch to attend. Vic Marino had come by earlier and had laid a bouquet of flowers. Cochrane had spotted him and commiserated with him. Vic was now in the air to Rhein-Main and was still working on a way to get his wife to come to Germany and join him.

Many German cargo workers in their black coveralls were there. Major Pickford was there, too. Cochrane saw him out of the periphery of his vision and acknowledged him with eye contact, only. The two men could feel tensions increasing, not between them but within the city; and not from the people toward them but because of the air of oppression and mendacity of Soviet forces – military and civilian – as they tried to tighten Moscow’s grip on Berlin. Cochrane arrived right when the service began and there were about fifty people gathered, most of them American, but several Germans. Cochrane took his place at the rear of the small assemblage.

Both Cochrane and Pickford assumed there were infiltrators, Colonel Markgraf’s “rats” as they called them. The professional spy knew better than to be seen in the company of the intelligence officer and vice versa. In public outside of Tempelhof, they chose not to know each other. Even in Tempelhof, it was wise to not be seen together by the German workers. There were always a few turncoats in any group, as well as professional snitches.

The service was short and poignant, no more than twenty-five minutes. When the two clerics concluded, Cochrane turned, raised his head toward the city, and stopped short. He had been paying attention to the memorial and the solemnity of it and had ignored what was transpiring behind him.

The crowd had grown. No, not grown, burgeoned. As he raised his eyes, he saw that what had been temporarily the final row of attendees had been augmented by hundreds who had stopped and joined; taking time from their daily routine, their daily quest for survival, to pay respects to Charley King and Bob Stuber who had come from four thousand miles away to help them. Several Germans waved American flags, a sight that Cochrane never thought he would see in his lifetime. He stood and observed, taken aback in amazement and appreciation at the same time.

He allowed the crowd to disperse. He thought of going to Helmut’s for a drink or a coffee but decided against it. There was another matter he wished to address as quickly as possible.

Chapter 59

Berlin – July 1948

Cochrane spotted Major Pickford half an hour later, at the edge of the tarmac conversing with Sgt. Pearson. Cochrane waited till Pickford had completed his business with the sergeant, then followed him as he entered a corridor near the officers’ club.

Cochrane fell into stride next to him.

“Nice service, wasn’t it?” Cochrane said.

“It was. Sad.”

“Did you see all those Germans?” Cochrane asked.

“Couldn’t miss them,” Pickford said. A few more steps while neither man spoke, then, “I saw you following me,” Pickford said. “What’s on your mind?”

“You have army intel files, right?”

“Enough to lay a road from here to Formosa. What do you need?”

“Whatever you have on a Soviet colonel. Sergei Kovalyov,” Cochrane said. “K-O-V-A-L-Y-O-V,” Cochrane said, softly spelling it out. “I know you have a lot on your plate. We all do. Want me to write the name down?”

“Nope. Got it. Who’s Kovalyov? One of your menacing new acquaintances?”

“More or less.”

“Figures. Don’t know whether we have anything, but I’ll look into it.”

“Thanks.”

“You really are a first-class snoop, Mr. Whatever-your-name is. It’ll take a day or two. See me the day after tomorrow. Two PM. My office.”

“Will do.”

“Do you have plans for tomorrow?”

“Glad you asked. I wonder if one of your motor-pool people could give me a lift out of Tempelhof. Low in the back of a covered Jeep. Something to keep the watchers off my back for a day.”

Pickford smiled in return. “Sgt. Pearson’s my go-to guy for anything like that. Talk to him.”

Major Pickford headed for the officers’ commissary. Cochrane peeled off in the opposite direction, found Sgt. Pearson, and made arrangements for the next morning’s transportation. Then he walked down the corridor that led eventually back out to the street, suddenly hankering for a shot of that fine German brandy that he was newly acquainted with at Helmut’s. On the way, he made a point to be spotted by the plump Eastern Sector security man who followed him to the bar as if nothing was amiss.

Chapter 60

Berlin – August 1948

The next morning, Sgt. Pearson’s Jeep rolled out of Tempelhof shortly before 9 AM. Cochrane lay low in the back cargo area of the vehicle, covered by a burlap sack. Pearson drove toward the busy market area on Friedrichstrasse but stopped short of the main thoroughfare and pulled onto a narrow side street of bombed-out buildings. On the grim street, there were no businesses or pedestrians but several emaciated stray dogs. There were also several corpses of dead dogs: small detachments of drunken, Soviet army personnel prowled the back streets at night in old American lend-lease Jeeps. They were said to use the stray animals as target practice.

On cue, Cochrane emerged from the back of the Jeep and took the seat next to Pearson.

“Any followers?” Cochrane asked.

“I didn’t see anyone, Major Lewis.”

“Well done. And just call me ‘Mr. Lewis’ when I’m in civvies, okay?”

“Well and good, Mr. Lewis.”

They proceeded to a busy open-market area. A light rain was drizzling. Pearson slowed, and Cochrane gathered himself and stepped out. He gave a wave of a hand to Pearson to indicate that he was on his way. Pearson joined the flow of traffic and began the return to Tempelhof. Cochrane fell into the flow of pedestrian traffic and walked easily through the market area where there was a cramped ghetto of outdoor stalls. Perfect. In the distance, as always, there was the roar of C-47s arriving and departing from Tempelhof, one every five minutes now.

Cochrane remembered the market area well from when he had lived in Berlin. He was nearly overcome by the destruction that still lay unaddressed. Much remained gutted. Once again, so much for Hitler’s fake “economic miracle” of the late 1930s and a war financed in part by the gold in the teeth of murdered citizens. A capital city in ruins was what the Nazis had really purchased, among other shameful accomplishments. But he had little time or inclination for such thoughts here and now. There was, after all, a new enemy emerging.

He knew the drill before him well: how to disappear in a crowd in a few steps and a few minutes. He had done this before. Someday something fluky would go wrong and his luck would run out. But that, too, was not something he now wished to consider.

“Ready,” he thought as he drew a breath. “Go!”

He bought a crushable rain hat and cloth tote to carry groceries, paying in Reichsmarks to avoid arousing the suspicion. The tote was yellow, a color meant to be cheerful, but on this tote was horrible. He had selected the color intentionally. He then stopped a few stalls away to buy the last three pears available from a farmer’s wife in a babushka, a gracious red-faced lady with no front teeth. Turning quickly, he felt his back was clear: he spotted no one standing and watching, though the area was crowded.

He popped the rain hat on his head and carried the yellow tote prominently. He had created a quick-sketch profile for any follower of a man in a hat swinging a colorful grocery tote.

There were two large stores on the street with busy entrances, mostly with lines of people hoping to buy food. He went in the main entrance of the larger store, sauntered about, and went into the most congested area where there was a line for bread. To his good fortune, the aisle was narrow, meaning anyone following would have to stay close to keep track of him. Convinced there was no one, he dispensed with his profile by stuffing the hat back in his jacket pocket as he spotted around and moved quickly toward a side exit. He stuffed the pears in his side pockets – one in one, two in the other — and crumbled the small tote and dropped it, confident that another shopper would find the lost bag in less than a minute and take it in a different direction, perhaps luring any neophyte watchers with it.

He was out the side exit cleanly within five minutes after entering the store.

Still no one following.

Relieved, he made his way to the nearest trolley stop, jumped on it just as it completed its discharge and pick up and started to move again. He took the tram seven blocks in the direction he was headed. Once there, he remembered the city hall on Kohlerstrasse in Lichtenberg from before the war. He knew the direction and how to walk there, even though some streets had been obliterated by collapsed buildings. He made his way there on foot by ten-thirty AM.

When he came to the Rathaus and first saw it, he blanched. On a flagstaff in front of the building, hanging off a balcony that showed bomb damage, flew a Soviet flag where once had flown the bold red flag with the swastika. Two Russian soldiers were at the front entrance at the top of three stone steps. One was on each side of the door.

Not police, Cochrane noted. Soldiers. Whatever was in this building, he reasoned, was of importance; otherwise, the Soviets would have allowed their German lackeys to guard it. That wasn’t happening here. They carried SKS semi-automatic carbines, not war-weary Mosin-Nagant museum pieces but spiffy new weapons. That told Cochrane something too.

The soldiers were young. They were Red Army, not KGB. They weren’t checking IDs on people going in and out. Cochrane walked boldly up the front steps. He gave them a respectful Soviet army salute. One of the heavy stones wobbled awkwardly under Cochrane’s footsteps. The soldiers smirked. He returned their smile and kept going.

He found himself in a wide-entrance rotunda. There was a sixteen-foot bust of Lenin that presided with worldwide, socialist menace in the center, a giant spider in its own lair. The walls were crumbling and cracked from bombing, but instead of repair work, the damage was covered by huge banners bearing Communist, patriotic slogans in German. Cochrane had packed a small Kodak camera with him, one that looked like a little square black box, but this was not the spot to behave like a tourist.

Instead, he took himself on a free tour of the inside of the building.

Local people wandered freely in the Rathaus, which helped Cochrane. He assessed quickly. There were stairs leading down to a basement behind Lenin’s massive stone skull. Another set of stairs led up. No directory. Neo-socialist chaos. German organization hadn’t set in yet, if it ever would. His first impression was that the building seemed more Russian-administered than German. He went down the stairs. The basement was deserted but had two windows that looked up to the alley behind the Rathaus. The windows had been painted shut and locked. He broke the dried paint and undid the locks. The panes were dusty where the locks were positioned. Probably no one ever checked them. Good.

He then walked up to the first floor above street level. He spotted the office of Fritz Hunsicker and avoided it. The second floor was mixed, closed offices with unmarked doors, open offices with administrators sitting at desks surrounded by volumes of records, no one coming or going. He went to the top floor to get a look. Years of experience told him he had hit paydirt. There were two locked doors to an adjoining room at the rear of the building. Three Russian soldiers were sitting on a bench. Their SKS carbines were lying carelessly at their sides or across their laps. They were engaged in loud conversation when Cochrane hit the top of the stairs and took a step toward them. They stopped talking immediately and grabbed their carbines. One who appeared to be a few years older than the others swung his carbine upward while still seated. He aimed it at Cochrane’s heart from a distance of fifteen feet.

He stood. Then the others stood.

Cochrane froze. He raised his hands halfway, keeping them away from his pockets. He was all too conscious of the Czech pistol at his belt. If the soldiers searched him, he was on his way to prison. He broke into a fierce sweat.

The ranking soldier spoke in German. “Who are you? What do you want?”

“I’m looking for Fritz Hunsicker. Administration.”

“There’s nothing for you on this floor. It’s private. Leave. Go to the first floor.”

“Certainly,” Cochrane said.

Easing, Cochrane returned to the first floor, where he found the German clerk in his office. Hunsicker expressed surprise when he recognized him. He expressed more surprise when Cochrane asked again where records were kept of where displaced Berliners had been relocated.

“Those records are on the top floor,” Hunsicker said.

“May I visit them?” Cochrane asked. “It would mean so much to a family I know who left Germany before the war. I can be generous.”

Hunsicker shook his head.

Cochrane reached to his billfold and took out five American ten-dollar bills.

“Out of the question,” Hunsicker said.

Cochrane said nothing but gestured with his hands. He offered a hundred.

Hunsicker became agitated. “Please leave,” he said, lowering his voice.

“Very well,” Cochrane said, picking up on the ominous air. “A pleasure to see you, however, comrade.”

Cochrane reached into his pockets and pulled out the pears he had purchased. He put them on Hunsicker’s desk, turned, and left. Two plainclothes security people were outside Hunsicker’s office. Cochrane tipped his hat to them as he avoided contact, went down the stairs, and was out of the building and hustled off the block within a minute.

Chapter 61

Berlin - August 1948

By early August, the airlift had been in effect for close to six weeks.

It had sustained more than two million Berliners with enough food, water, and heat to survive. Yet it was still on tenuous ground and flying through turbulence.

Sustaining the citizens of Berlin through the warm summer months and preparing them for the dark and cold of the impending winter were two different things. The weather would become more erratic at the beginning of October. The shorter, darker days would also be a problem. Heavy rains and ice would make flying a perilous occupation, prone to crashes and loss of life.

The Soviets were also becoming more aggressive in their harassment of British and American aircraft. The Yaks that buzzed transport craft were flying closer, sometimes crossing paths with less than a hundred feet to spare in mid-flight. The black balloons launched by the Red Army that flew and floated erratically in the murky skies would be both more difficult to spot and more numerous. And emergency quantities of water and fuel for the summer would be insufficient in the winter.

“The easiest thing to do, the best thing for the United States,” said an opposition senator on the senate floor on August tenth, “would be to walk away from this hell hole. If Stalin wants Berlin so bad, he can have it.”

The disengagement notion was more popular inside the Washington Beltway than out in the heartland of America. Trying to defend a defeated city a quarter of the way around the world, surrounded by Warsaw Pact troops, was logically a non-starter.

The tensions behind the scenes were winding ever tighter, as well.  As a countermeasure against the Soviet blockade, the British, Americans, and French had initiated a trade embargo against East Germany, cutting off any material that would allow their factories to run. The embargo also targeted other Soviet bloc countries. But more ominously, three groups of American strategic bombers had been sent to airfields in England. Whether or not the bombers could deliver a nuclear hit was not something the Russians knew or were willing to risk.

They had no sooner landed than the Red Army presence in Soviet-occupied East Germany had increased by a hundred thousand men, including state-of-the-art tank divisions.

The postwar peace hung by a thread. The Soviets remained bellicose. But no British or American aircraft had been shot down or forced down. Yet. That didn’t mean there was any shortage of people filling Truman’s ear with advice about Berlin, however.

Among them was James Forrestal, his secretary of defense. Privately, Forrestal was acting as erratically as a herd of stray cats. Increasingly anxious, day to day seemingly closer to the verge of a nervous breakdown, Forrestal focused his fears on “Communists and Zionists.” Forrestal’s lack of support for the creation of Israel was costing him and his party plenty of political capital. Truman knew he needed pro-Israel votes to win in November. Yet he valued the opinion of Forrestal and George Marshall, who agreed with Forrestal. Increasingly, Truman felt wedged into an impossible position.

Forrestal sat sullenly at a cabinet meeting with the president during the first week of August, occasionally glancing at his Rolex and staring out the window as Truman sought policy input from the room on how to proceed in Berlin. By anyone’s measure, Forrestal had a chip on his shoulder when it came to Truman.

“I don’t know why you’re even asking,” Forrestal said eventually, interrupting the secretary of state and drawing aghast glances from other cabinet members. “The Soviet Union is going to attack us. Everyone knows that. That’s Stalin’s plan.”

“So if they attack us, do we use the bomb?” asked someone else in the room.

“The American people will vote us out of office and then lynch us one by one if we don’t use it,” Forrestal answered.

Forrestal would sit at cabinet meetings and sound the same notes about “America’s enemies,” some very real and others sometimes imagined, and contribute little in the way of suggestion or promise.

Never mentioned in cabinet meetings, but always present as an undercurrent, were the public rumors about Forrestal’s personal life. Some of the details were leaking into the newspapers. Forrestal’s family was disintegrating at home. His wife, Jo, was drinking heavily. The drunkenness was sometimes public, and she would rant to anyone – reporters, strangers, opposition senators – that Communists and Zionists were after her and her family.

Paranoid fantasies?

Difficult things to believe but true?

A reflection of the things James was telling her?

No one knew. Everyone had an opinion.

A psychiatric advisor and family friends frequently called Forrestal from work to deal with his wife's bizarre behavior.

Once, Jo kicked at a child who offended her as she strolled on Connecticut Avenue. At another time, she passed out from liquor at the dinner table at a function at the British Embassy.

Forrestal's personal problems had their corrosive effects on everything he did. There was nowhere he could relax. He arrived at work early and went home late. There was no letup. Once a female assistant had been surprised to find him in his office at ten PM, looking wayward, drawn, and miserable. She suggested that he go home.

"Go home? Hell! Home to what?” he snapped.

The companion piece to the stories about Forrestal’s unsteady homelife was a different set of rumors. Namely, he was having a series of indiscreet sexual affairs with many married and single women around town. It was only a matter of time before a Russian or a Republican in a skirt gained access to sensitive information from the Truman administration. It was a disaster waiting to happen.

But most worrisome of all in these cabinet meetings, Truman not only saw ghosts, but worse, he heard rumors. He had his spies, foreign and domestic. Truman had learned all about Forrestal’s sub rosa support for the presidential candidacy of Republican Thomas E. Dewey. Dewey had even met secretly with Forrestal to discuss the possibility of retaining him in a Republican cabinet.

Truman looked around the room and seethed. He had a crisis in Europe that threatened to blow up at any moment and he had a Judas among his advisors.

“The meeting is over,” Truman said as he glared at his secretary of defense and Forrestal impassively gazed back. Truman rose and stalked out of the room.

That evening, President Truman, deeply depressed, almost as depressed as his defense secretary, withdrew to his private residence. He was alone, except for those persistent, perplexing, and annoying creaks in the floorboards and rustling in the decaying plaster.

“‘Structural flaws’ be damned! It sure as hell sounds as if something is there,” Harry growled to himself.

Bess was back in Missouri and Margaret was away on a concert tour. The president was a lonely man, surrounded by people he couldn’t trust, feeling as if the White House was the crown jewel of the American prison system.

“There is no other way to put this,” Truman wrote in his diary that evening. “I fear that we have lost the peace that our brave soldiers helped us win. Once again, we are very close to war.”

But overnight, Harry Truman had a profoundly inspired brainstorm.

He sauntered into the Oval Office the next morning at eight AM and summoned Forrestal, who had been at work since seven.

“Jim,” Truman said. “How would you like to take a trip? Get away for a while?”

“Where to?”

“London. Berlin. Talk to our British friends and get a close look at this airlift we’re maintaining. I know I can trust your judgment. Plus a change of scenery might be good. What do you say?”

Forrestal didn’t say anything. He just looked back at the president.

After nearly a quarter of a minute, “Not interested?” Truman asked.

“No,” Forestall answered, thinking. “Might be a good idea.”

“Top secret,” Truman snapped. “No press. No news coverage. Fly air force from National to Frankfurt, then take a ride with the airlift boys to Berlin. Talk to the important people. General Tunner. General Clay. General LeMay. Our intel people who are on the ground. We have a few spies there, you know? You do know because you sent them. See what the hell is really going on. Get a look at the Russians up close. See if this is a disaster in the making or if it’s really going to work. Report back in five days.”

“When would I leave?”

“How fast can you pack a damned bag?”

“I always keep one packed.”

“Tomorrow, then,” said the President.

“Might be a real good idea,” Forrestal said. “I’ll go.”

It was a double win for Truman. Not only would he get Forrestal out of Washington’s political glare, but he got him away from his toxic homelife, too. Not only was Truman wary about betrayal within his cabinet, but he worried about Forrestal’s mental balance.

Chapter 62

Berlin – August 1948

Major Pickford summoned Bill Cochrane to his office the next afternoon. When Cochrane arrived, Major Pickford handed an army intelligence file with no explanation of where he had obtained it. But no explanation was needed.

“Sorry. It’s pretty thin,” Pickford said. “This is all we have on your Russian friend.”

“Should I take it to the secure room?”

“Read it here if you like,” Pickford said, indicating a free chair in his office. “Read it aloud if you want,” Pickford said. “See if I care. I already read it. It’s mostly military. Army dossiers don’t muddy the water with the criminal stuff. You probably know more. Or will soon.”

“That’s a good bet,” Cochrane said. He opened the envelope and had a look.

Kovalyov, Sergei Russian/ Soviet Military

U.S. ARMY Intel File Ger/1948/SovMil # 6-231 (Updated 06/29/1948)

Updates requested where possible/ongoing.

Sergei (Andrei) Kovalyov is a retired Soviet colonel who most recently served during World War II and the occupation of the Eastern Zone of Germany after the collapse of the Third Reich.

During the war, Kovalyov commanded a division on the Southeastern Front, later renamed the Stalingrad Front, during the Battle of Stalingrad in summer 1942 and assisted in planning the successful defense of the city. He later led units of the Red Army responsible for the liberation of Western Hungary in 1944.

Born in Markivka in Kharkov Governorate in 1898 [Ed. Note:  today called Ukraine] to a peasant family, Kovalyov was drafted into the Imperial Army in 1915, serving on the Romanian Fronts during World War I. He joined the Red Army in 1918, where he served in the Budyonny Cavalry.  He attended the Leningrad Artillery and Tank School and then the Frunze Military Academy, graduating in 1935. In addition to his education, he was appointed to the command of an artillery regiment in Dec. 1929, then a division in 1937, and then the Sixth Tank and Artillery Corps in 1938.

On Sept. 17, 1939, Kovalyov led his Sixth Tank and Artillery Corps into eastern Poland as part of the operations agreed to between Germany and the Soviet Union under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Later, after war broke out between Germany and the Soviet Union, Kovalyov took command of a ground warfare division in the prestigious First Red Banner Far Eastern Army in eastern Siberia. He was there at the outbreak of Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941.

{Examiner’s note: U.S. Army SD/06/14/47 - The Axis fighting force assembled for Operation Barbarossa was the largest “army” assembled in military history. Combat troops included regular soldiers from Nazi Germany, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Finland, Italy, & Croatia; additionally anti-Communist volunteers from France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, & Norway, plus Polish conscripts. Later (1944) it also included White Russians, Latvians, Ukrainians, and Estonians.}

Eight days after the German invasion began, Kovalyov was recalled to Moscow, where he took command of a tank and artillery division on the Soviet Western Front.

The Nazi Blitzkrieg approach to warfare quickly dominated the Western Front, but Kovalyov motivated his battered troops. His division was the first to halt and resist the German offensive at Smolensk where Kovalyov was wounded. Because of his injuries, he was hospitalized in Moscow for more than a year.

In Jan. 1942, Kovalyov was appointed vice commander of the Fourth Shock Army, part of the Northwestern Front. During the Soviet Winter Counteroffensive, Kovalyov's army was part of the extraordinarily successful Toropets–Kholm Offensive, which liberated Toropets and much of the surrounding region, helping to create the Rzhev Salient, which became a major battlefield over the next 15 months. On Jan. 20, 1942, Kovalyov was again wounded, this time in the arm, chest, and right foot when dive bombers from an SS division attacked his headquarters. He returned to a military hospital for several more months, receiving a new command when he limped out of the hospital during the siege of Stalingrad in Dec. 1942.

During Operation Uranus, Nov. 1942, Kovalyov's forces helped to surround the German Sixth Army from the south linking up with the northern penetration at Kalach-na-Donu. Kovalyov successfully repelled weeks of attacks on his division.

On Jan. 1, 1943, the Stalingrad Front was renamed Southern Front. After the end of the winter offensive in Mar. 1943, Kovalyov was transferred north to the Kalinin Front, which remained relatively quiet until September, when Kovalyov launched a small, but successful offensive. In December, Kovalyov was once again sent south, this time to take command of the Separate Coastal Army, which was put together to retake Crimea, which was accomplished with assistance from Fyodor Tolbukhin's 4th Ukrainian Front.

In April, Kovalyov once again was sent north, to command a tank and artillery battalion under Marshall Zhukov, whose army was now pushing westward across the wasteland of Poland and eastern Germany. In the final weeks of the war, Kovalyov’s soldiers unleashed a terror upon German civilians that was excessive even for the Red Army. Their vengeful attack on Demmin and its remaining citizens punctuated their drive to Berlin. Witnesses told U.S. ARMY Intelligence units [Ref. USA 1948 -SU445-2) that Colonel Kovalyov’s command was to “kill and crush everything in our path.” The mass suicides at Demmin were no coincidence, faced with Kovalyov’s excesses. His troops arrived in Berlin one week after the advance juggernaut of Zhukov’s army, occupying a slice of the Western Sector of the city. The men under his command were rewarded with the pillaging of the city and its surrounding communities….

Kovalyov retired from the Red Army in 1947 on full medical disability. He was awarded seven military medals, including three of the two highest distinctions of the Soviet Union: the Order of Suvorov (First Class), the Order of Kutusov (First Class), and the Order of Bogdan Khmelnitsky (First Class.)

It is widely believed that Kovalyov maintains high influence among Soviet officers, indulges in criminal enterprises, traffics in women, pain drugs, and black-market items such as liquor and vodka, and has the support, when needed, from friends and associates in the NKVD, hence is well-insulated and protected.

Cochrane replaced the four pages into the file in their proper order. He handed the envelope back to Major Pickford. “Charming fellow,” Cochrane commented.

“Anything else I can do for you?” Pickford asked.

“I don’t suppose you have a subminiature camera stashed around here somewhere, would you? Plus some fine-grained film. And a lab that can do discreet processing overnight?”

“I suppose I can make all of those wishes come true,” Pickford said, not for the first time and not without a sly smile. “How much film do you need?”

“A lot maybe. Think in terms of two dozen rolls. Maybe three.”

“Anything else?”

Pickford wrote down nothing. He was memorizing. Cochrane could tell.

“Some light burglar tools and two flashlights.”

“And?”

“That will do,” Cochrane said. “For today.”

By now Major Pickford was laughing. He had become Bill Cochrane’s biggest fan.

“I can make all of that happen,” Pickford said. “I don’t get out of the office much myself, so here’s hoping you have your fun.”

“Oh, I’m sure I will,” Cochrane said. “How could I not in a place like Berlin?”

Chapter 63

Berlin – August 1949

The noise of British and American aircraft rumbling low over the city, taking off and landing twenty times an hour, might have been disquieting to the population at any other time or in any other place. The military commander of the lift was now Air Force General William Henry Tunner who had previously commanded the India-China Division of the Air Transport Command. Tunner’s command had had the responsibility of supplying China by air across the Himalayas from India through the "Hump.” The operation had also developed a daring scheme to supply anti-Maoist forces in China.

Few people involved other than the commanders knew how the Berlin lift was now simultaneously both touch-and-go and enormously complex. Spaced three minutes apart, at two hundred miles an hour, the loaded planes left Rhein-Main for Berlin and the pattern of their return was as exact. There were, most of the time, twenty-six planes in the corridor at the same time. With such a multitude of aircraft following on one another’s exhaust, landing techniques had to be faultless. Each point in the journey had to be passed at a precise height, at an exact time, and at a predetermined speed. There could be no variations, no displays of individual temperament. There were casualties, but the deliveries went on.

To Berliners, however, it was not a racket in the skies above them, even though the engines sometimes roared only a few dozen meters above their rooftops. It was a consoling, welcoming sound, an ongoing soundtrack that told them that they had not been abandoned by the victors of the World War. The continued air traffic meant supplies were arriving — food, clothing, and fuel for heating. If the weather forced empty skies, as it did when summer thunderstorms struck or when rougher, edgier, wetter weather engulfed the city as summer ended and autumn began, Berliners looked fearfully to the horizon and then took comfort when the airplanes arrived again. The air bridge meant survival.

A young American lieutenant in the Army Air Corps named Dale Halvorsen had grown up on a farm in Utah “with my face down in the dirt all the time," as he used to tell people. He would watch planes fly overhead and wish he could up there with the other men and women flying them. Halvorsen was part of the American generation that believed in working to make his dreams come true. He studied and earned his pilot’s license. He joined the Army Air Corps in 1942. He received flight training with the Royal Air Force before returning to the Army Air Corps where the American military put him to work during World War II ferrying transport planes in England, Italy, and North Africa.

Halvorsen stayed in the military after the World War, continuing to fly transports, but was moved back stateside. He had moved up in the aviation world and was now flying four-engine C-54 Skymasters, a plane too heavy for any of the landing fields in Berlin. At the end of June 1948, he was stationed at an air force base in Mobile, Alabama. A call came for pilots to participate in the newly announced “Berlin Airlift.”

On less than sixty-minutes notice, he packed a few clothes, plus a bag full of handkerchiefs to help fight a nasty cold. He stashed his new Chevrolet under a tree near the air base and set out on a route that would take him to Berlin and the Big Lift, where he would return to flying the plane that carried him through the war. He also welcomed the idea of helping people instead of killing them.

Halvorsen thought he would return in a few weeks. He never saw his car again. The next day, he flew to Newfoundland, then to Frankfurt. The day after that, he made his first flight to Berlin. He was astonished when, on landing, his ground crew and baggage handlers – DPs all of them, lined up to shake his hand and thank him for coming. He expected animosity. He felt none coming in his direction: only gratitude for his being there.

Halvorsen began his tour in occupied Germany in early July at Rhein-Main. At that time, the Americans and the British lacked enough aircraft for round-the-clock operations, so he flew three round trips daily and had about seven hours off to sleep.

During one of his downtimes in the middle of the month, Halvorsen decided to do some sightseeing. He hitched a ride as a passenger on a C-47 to Tempelhof airport in the American Sector. Halvorsen noticed a group of children watching through barbed wire as the airplanes landed. Halvorsen loved children and during his transport days, he had often been followed by packs of them, begging for candy.

But these Berliners were quieter and more polite. Most of them didn’t know what gum or candy was. Using some German bystanders as interpreters, Halvorsen improvised a conversation. What they asked was that the Americans not abandon the airlift when the weather turned bad. They could go without enough food for a bit, the children told Halvorsen, but then they chose words that seemed to echo the thoughts of their parents.

“My mother says if we lose our freedom to the Russians,” one ten-year-old girl said, “we may never get it back."

The remark hit Halvorsen like a punch in the solar plexus. He dug in his pocket for a couple of sticks of gum and distributed them, promising to return the next day with more candy. The kids asked how they would recognize the young lieutenant’s plane.

“Don't worry,” Halvorsen said. “As I approach, I'll wiggle my wings,” the pilot replied, accompanying the explanation with a smile and a gesture of spread arms.

Later back at his base, he rounded up as many candy bars as possible from other Americans. Pilots and crew bought extra candy at the commissary with money from their own pockets. Halvorson dug up his unused handkerchiefs and created small parachutes by tying strings to their corners and then attaching those strings to candy bars.

The next day on approach to Tempelhof, he gave a signal to his onboard crew chief. He wiggled his C-47’s wings and released an invasion force of handkerchiefs as the plane passed over the edge of the cemetery where the kids were huddled. As he touched down, he and his crew managed a glimpse of the German boys and girls joyously clutching their candy. Halvorsen repeated the procedure over the next few days. Soon large crowds had gathered each day, a future generation of Berliners waiting for the American pilot known as "Uncle Wiggly Wings" and Der Shokoladen Flieger - "The Chocolate Flier.”

Word spread. Lt. Halverson’s friends chipped in with more candy and more cloth. At Rhein-Main and Tempelhof, crews ripped up old shirts and ruined sheets to create more parachutes.

Halvorsen’s activities were against air force regulations and he knew it. When his colonel found out, the young pilot got called in for a lecture and received an order to stop. But Berlin newspapers in English and German had already printed joyous pictures and stories about Halvorsen's “candy bombs” and the generous Americans. The colonel quickly issued an “as-you-were.” Privately, the Soviets were flummoxed. The Soviets had been trying to make the Americans the villains in the blockade, and Halvorson and his peers had undercut them with Baby Ruths and Milky Ways.

Airlift commander General William Tunner knew a public relations bonanza when he saw one, however, and quickly okayed the continuation of what was now officially named "Operation Little Vittles." What began with a pilot's sense of decency and generosity with spare handkerchiefs and candy his crew bought at the local commissary, soon spread throughout the airlift, with 25 participants in his squadron alone.

Within days Halvorsen's home base in Alabama got in on the act, with the commanding officer declaring any handkerchief seen would be requisitioned for Little Vittles. The American Confectioners Association donated tons of candy for the children of Berlin.

The treats arrived at Westover Air Force Base in Chicopee, Massachusetts, where local school children assembled the candy parachutes and sent them on to Germany. But it wasn’t just chocolate. It was hope and a symbol of freedom.

Chapter 64

Berlin – August 1949

On the third evening following Dale Halvorsen’s first candy bombing of Berlin, Bill Cochrane left on an important mission of his own. Major Pickford’s office had equipped Heinrich Roth with a finely forged German driver’s license. Roth tucked it into his pocket a few inches away from a Mauser as he prepared to take another lucrative night shift with Bill Cochrane. Roth had driven tractors before the war and Kubelwagens during it, the Kubelwagen being the Wehrmacht version of the Jeep.

Sgt. Pearson said he had a few Kubelwagens kicking around the hangar he ruled. Cochrane thanked him. Pearson hesitated, then continued. “One other thing, Major. Lewis. About those Germans?”

“What about them?”

“They have their own society and social order within Tempelhof,” Pearson said. “We try to keep the Nazis out of here but can’t always. There’s friction between the city Germans and the ones from the countryside, the ones who served, the ones who opposed Hitler. It’s all smooth on the surface when we look at it from the outside, but you never know what’s going on beneath the surface, who’s got a score to settle, which guy is going to suddenly go crazy, which guy’s got his own agenda.”

Cochrane nodded. He sighed. “Much like our own army, right?”

“If you want to look at it that way, sure.”

“Thanks for mentioning it,” Cochrane said.

“There’s one thing that you should keep in mind, sir. One thing to not get involved in.”

“What’s that?”

“Payback. That’s what I mean about ‘agenda.’ There’s a lot going on here. Debts that some Germans reckon are unpaid from the war. They have a way of settling things. You don’t want to get in the way of it.”

Cochrane’s eyes narrowed. “Keep talking,” he said.

“Well, I hear things here, sir. Stuff that Major Pickford doesn’t hear because he’s not here day to day, hour to hour with the men.”

“Do you report what you hear to Major Pickford?”

“Oh, sure thing. Of course. But sometimes I get the idea that Major Pickford, no disrespect intended, sir, just doesn’t get a grasp of the intensity of what I hear. It’s one thing to get it in a report, another thing to actually overhear what the men are saying.”

Cochrane processed it. “Can you give me some specifics?” he asked.

“Yes, sir, I can.” A pause then as Pearson guided Cochrane to a secluded area. “That Russian officer, the brute who runs the clubs and the black markets?”

“I know who you mean. Kovalyov?”

“That’s the one, sir. There’s going to be some fireworks there. Everybody hates the man.”

“With reason from what I hear. I also know all about Demmin.”

“Might not be till you’re back stateside,” said Pearson. “But it’s like waiting for a shoe to drop or a hammer to come down on that guy. I wouldn’t get too close. I wouldn’t be hanging out anywhere near his place more than you had to, sir.”

Cochrane patted Pearson on the shoulder.

“That’s all I got to say on that subject, sir.”

“Thank you. That says quite a bit.”

“Aside from that, if you’ll excuse my saying so, sir,” Pearson said, the mood changing abruptly, “the Germans you employ, Roth and Kern, are happy as pigs rolling in manure.”

“Why is that?”

“They like the money and they hate the Russians.”

“Sometimes life reduces to simple equations,” Cochrane replied.

“How much do you pay these guys?”

“A hundred bucks each in advance for a night like this,” Cochrane said. “And it’s not me who pays, it’s Uncle Sam. Let’s hope that nothing interferes with their enlightened point of view,” Cochrane said.

“Will do, sir,” Pearson said.  “Of course, Lt. Halvorsen is getting all the publicity now. Not much room in the paper for folks like you or me or Major Pickford.”

“Let’s hope it remains that way.”

For the rest of that evening, it did.

Roth and Kern had borrowed their Mausers out of Major Pickford’s private collection, the weapons to be returned, hopefully unused, by the end of the evening. Sgt. Pearson supplied two battered Kubelwagens. Cochrane drove one of the vans with Roth with him. Kern drove the other.

They headed toward the Eastern Sector fifty meters apart, staying within each other’s view. There was no checkpoint entering the Soviet Zone, unlike the American, British, and French Zones, but there were patrols. The streets were unlit. It wasn’t difficult to see a Soviet patrol – usually no more than two or three vehicles – approaching. Soviet headlights had a distinctive yellowish glare.

They arrived at the Rathaus in Lichtenberg shortly after two AM. Kern parked his vehicle a block and a half away and around the corner from the town hall. The neighborhood was as quiet as an undiscovered tomb. Cochrane and Roth’s vehicle crept past the town hall, which looked dark until their Kubelwagen got close. In the front entrance alcove of the town hall, there was the tiny orange glow of cigarettes. Then the forms of soldiers were visible. Two young Soviet guards were on duty, both smoking.

One was tall, one was squat. A Mutt-and-Jeff team, two mismatched tinhorns, Moscow style – except these guys had carbines and weren’t funny. They sat in front of the two large front doors, frosted as Cochrane recalled, with bars and a grate.

Cochrane kept his eyes on the uneven, pockmarked road ahead as their vehicle rattled past. Roth was the official spotter, sitting low in the back seat.

“Red Army uniforms and armed with carbines,” Roth said softly. “They look like conscripts.”

“Did they pay any attention to us as we passed?” Cochrane asked.

“None. Looks like they have a bottle, also.”

“Fine,” Cochrane said. “Too bad they don’t have two. Well, I’m not going to supply them.”

Cochrane and Roth circled the block the long way, then drove past the rear of the town hall. There was an empty half-block behind the building, heavy rubble across the lot. The obstacle course made the evening both more complicated and easier.

Cochrane pulled his vehicle to a halt behind two burned-out vehicles, unidentifiable corpses of cars, their chassis stripped down to the frames. He cut the engine. Roth got into the front seat, and they sat for two minutes to see if they drew any attention. They drew none.

Cochrane had to trust a German with his life. “Where’s your Mauser?” he asked Roth.

Without words, Roth drew the weapon from under his coat. He laid it on his lap.

“Loaded?” Cochrane asked.

“Yes.”

“How do you know?”

“I loaded it myself.”

Sehr gut, Cochrane said. “Keep it on your lap. Try not to use it. But if it’s a choice between using it and spending twenty years in a Soviet prison….”

Cochrane’s voice trailed off. Roth smiled. There could not possibly have been anything amusing about twenty years in a Soviet prison, but Roth smiled anyway.

Cochrane drew a breath. “Cover me,” he said.

Cochrane stepped quickly from the car, crouched low, and moved as swiftly through the shadows as he could. As he approached the rear of the town hall, the jagged rubble in the back lot slashed his ankles and shins. The unsteady footing nearly brought him down. Twice he went down in a hard wobble. His knees hit sharp stones and rough cement. The pain barked at him.

He came to the windows at the rear of the building, the ones he had unlatched, and forced one up from the outside. It lifted. He lifted the other. He left them both a few inches open.

He turned and signaled to Roth that he was going to enter the building. Roth drove away to get Kern, using only his dim lights. Cochrane took a place in the shadows flush against the building. Then of all things, moments after Roth had driven away, he heard voices.

Russian!

Cochrane pressed himself as hard as he could against a side wall, obscuring his silhouette by nestling behind a thick drainpipe that ran perpendicular up and down the outer east wall of the building. Under his coat, his hand found his pistol.

He drew it and held it against his chest.

The voices came closer. Either that or the soldiers were talking louder. He dared not budge. He could only slide his eyes sideways. They were about fifty feet from him. They stopped. The palm of his hand was wet against his pistol. He prayed that they would keep going and that Roth and Kern wouldn’t return and run smack into them. He did not want anyone to die this evening in this godforsaken place. For half a second, he wondered what he was doing here, then he dismissed the question. It had no good purpose. That question never did.

Nearby in the rubble, there was a rustling. Then squealing. Rats. Then there was a small explosion of movement as a gray cat leaped from hiding and took off after several rats, having dislodged the nest of vermin.

The soldiers stopped short, alerted by the noise. One of them flicked on a military torch. A beam traveled across the rubble and came within a few feet of the pipe behind which Cochrane hid. From a crack between the pipe and the cement wall, Cochrane could see the figure of the cat darting and weaving among broken concrete, bricks, and stones.

The young Russians laughed at it but suddenly there was gunfire. One of the young men tried to kill the cat, but the animal took off. One shot ricocheted near Cochrane, but two subsequent shots hit farther away.

They darted into the street and zigzagged, drawing the fire away from where Cochrane hid. One soldier aimed and fired after the fleeing feline. Cochrane had no idea whether the animal was hit or not, but by the expression of the voices, he reckoned it was a miss.

He saw the taller soldier touch the other man’s rifle, touching it downward in a gesture that advised him not to waste any more ammunition. There was more laughter and then the soldiers moved on. How Cochrane did not have heart failure right then, he didn’t know. His shirt was soaked and matted to his chest.

Cochrane held his position. Several minutes passed. His heartbeat subsided. Roth returned with Kern. The men huddled. Cochrane related what had happened. Kern and Roth reported that the guards were back in the front alcove; they had driven close by and checked.

“They’ll come around again,” Cochrane said. “We need to be in and out fast.”

No one disagreed. Using a flashlight as Roth stood guard, Kern, putting his electrical engineering background to good use, invaded the alarm box at the back of the building. There was a primitive circuit breaker. Kern killed the electricity, negated the alarm, and turned the electricity back on.

Cochrane went into the building first, then helped Roth, a larger man, through the basement window. They closed it behind them. They allowed a moment for their eyes to adjust to the darkness. Then hurrying, they ran up the stairs and passed through the first floor using only the faint light from outside. They climbed the steps in near darkness but used the flashlights with the lenses partially muffled when they reached the second floor.

The old building was alive with creaks. That was fine, Cochrane reasoned. The guards would be used to occasional building noise.

They reached the top floor where three Soviet soldiers had been stationed during Cochrane’s previous visit. Cochrane went past the benches where the soldiers had sat. He went to the window at the end of the corridor and established the rope ladders there as the escape route, if necessary, while Roth guarded the top of the stairs.

Hurrying, Cochrane used a screwdriver to pry the lock off the door to the records room. The lock gave way easily but with a creak. He pulled at the door. The door opened with a creak as well. He turned. In the reflected faint light from the flashlight, he saw Roth behind him, remaining vigilant and in place.

“Good man, good watcher,” Cochrane thought involuntarily. “I hope he doesn’t get killed.”

Cochrane pulled the door almost completely shut behind him. The records room had no full window but a narrow high air vent through which some light filtered. There were several sets of shelves. Many of the shelves were barren and dusty. Others had bound volumes. Record keeping was haphazard.

“Get going!” he told himself. “Once you take a step backward you walk away forever. Move, move!”

He swept the room with the beam from his hand torch. He went for the older volumes first. Several ledgers looked as if they were left over from prewar. Pure frustration. Nothing was what he wanted. Nothing made much sense. The books were sooty and gritty. Entries had been made in the ledgers by hand, but the handwriting was cramped, condemned, and spidery. The penmanship was just abysmal. No matter.

He went through several ledgers. Half-entered lists of people killed in air raids. Legal processes during the war. Criminal adjudication. A list of executions. He shivered. He put the ledgers back in the best order he could. Who knew how often anyone came through here? Who knew when the intrusion would be discovered?

Then fate smiled. After seven minutes of searching, Cochrane got lucky. There was one section that looked new, within the last few years. Postwar instead of prewar. He went to it. He opened the first ledger.

Years: 1945 through 1947. Bingo. A Soviet census. The census included deportations: work camps, labor camps, factories in Poland, factories in the Soviet Sector of Germany. Coal mines. Copper mines near Hettstedt, east of the Harz Mountains.

Cochrane fixed his sights on 1946, the last year of Bettina’s known whereabouts and possibly that of her man, Horst. He found the 1946 volume. Then, with a feeling of terrified elation, he figured what the damned hell, photography was impossible in here so he might as well help himself to the whole damned bunch, 1945 through 1947. He pulled a sack from under his coat. His heart was pounding like a hammer. His shirt was so wet that the sweat had soaked through to his jacket. A rough count as he started to bag them: a dozen ragged volumes.

His heart nearly stopped when Roth tapped on the door.

Cochrane moved to the door, but it was already opening. Roth ducked in, holding his pistol aloft. Cochrane cut his flashlight.

“Guards,” said Roth, perfectly calm, coming in and leaving the door slightly ajar, the Mauser still upright and ready. “Making rounds.”

Cochrane, not normally given to profanity, had to suppress a violent one.

They froze, barely breathing.

With the hand that didn’t hold the Mauser, Roth indicated the heavy padlock that they had removed. Cochrane nodded and touched it to be sure of what Roth was showing. Without words, Roth was indicating that the absence of a lock would be less conspicuous than one dangling from a latch. Roth had brains to go with his brawn. Cochrane appreciated that.

Cochrane stood back, letting Roth watch through the door that remained open a sliver. Cochrane’s gaze dropped to the floor. He saw a beam from a flashlight sweep the room. He heard footsteps. One of the guards had walked down the corridor and was giving everything a quick sweep. If the guard noticed the missing lock, they were in trouble. If he replaced the missing lock, they were in bigger trouble.

The footsteps stopped. Then they moved away, becoming fainter as they descended the wooden stairs. No more flashlight beam.

Roth pushed the door open an inch. A tiny creak split the night. Roth stared out the crack of the doorframe. Sie sind gegangen, Roth said. “They’re gone,” he announced as easily as if he were announcing that lunch was ready.

Thank God, Cochrane thought. He knew he could have been dead. He was reasonably sure that he wasn’t. Not here. Not tonight. As for Roth, he thought, this guy wasn’t cool, he was icy. Roth stepped back out to the corridor where the soldiers had sat during the day.

Cochrane flicked his torch on again. He looked around the room, up and down, forward and back, forward again, taking a quick final scan of every shelf. He listened, waited, heard nothing further amiss.

If he had heard a shot at this point his heart might have stopped. He looked at his watch. Thirteen minutes gone. Lucky thirteen. Time to scram. Time to swipe everything he could.

He stuffed as many census and deportation volumes as he could into his sack. There was nothing of further interest. He subtly rearranged the shelves to mask the fact that he had snatched a dozen volumes. Fourteen minutes gone. At least get out to the relative safety of the upstairs landing. His head was pounding. Absolutely time to scram! A little voice inside him reminded him that the exit was as dangerous as the entry.

Cochrane stepped out of the room and tapped Roth on the arm. Together, they reaffixed the lock and its bracket to the doorframe. Roth still had his Mauser in his hand. Cochrane indicated that Roth should precede him. Stealthily, Roth started down the steps.

Cochrane followed, one set of steps at a time. He carried his Czech revolver in one hand, and the sack of stolen ledgers in the other. Roth stopped at the top of the steps on the second floor, holding a hand aloft. They heard voices again. They smelled cigarettes, the cheap foul-smelling, brown ones that Russians smoked.

Cochrane stepped in front of Roth and crouched low. There was a transom above the outer entrance, and it was open. The front doors were closed again. Cochrane could see that the soldiers were sitting on the stone steps with their backs to them.

Cochrane carried the sack in a trembling hand. They arrived in the basement, still shocked to be alive. They hustled to the windows, closing one, then scrambling through the other.

Once they were out of the town hall, Roth pulled both completely shut from the outside. They moved along the side of the building to the street behind the Rathaus and looked in each direction.

No Kern. They moved eastward. Still no Kern.

They looked to the area where they expected him and saw a tall figure emerge from a doorway. The figure waved. Cochrane began to raise his revolver. But Roth said quietly, “Don’t shoot. That’s Otto.”

Kern flashed his lantern instead of his headlights. He had lurked in the doorway, Cochrane guessed, to be less conspicuous if a patrol came through.

Good enough. More than good enough. Kern jumped into the front of the Kubelwagen and started the engine, keeping the lights off, driving by instinct and the penumbra of a quarter-moon. Roth and Cochrane piled into the vehicle.

Kern crept around the corner and dropped his accomplices at Sgt. Pearson’s other evening rental. There was no time for congratulatory gestures. Every moment in the Soviet Zone was potential suicide at this hour.

They drove twenty meters apart and were at the American checkpoint within a quarter-hour. They were back safely within the busy confines of Tempelhof by ten minutes after three in the morning. The Germans handed over their weapons to Cochrane to return to Major Pickford.  They slept in a bunk room for DPs at the airport and rose at six-thirty AM to take their morning cargo shift. No point in being absent and arousing the suspicion of other workers, though Sgt. Pearson knew of their whereabouts.

Cochrane passed by the commissary to pick up two bottles of beer and a boxed sandwich. He devoured it all, returned to his residential chamber, double-locked the door, and shoved the sack with the ledgers under his cot.

He sat down on the cot and heaved an enormous sigh of relief. Once again, everything had gone more smoothly than it might have, and he had survived.

Chapter 65

Berlin – 1948

Cochrane’s private reading began the next morning and continued uneventfully for several days. He slowly began to suspect that he had burgled the town hall and risked his life for nothing. But he was not going to jump to that conclusion until he had examined every document he had extracted.

In the meantime, Major Pickford sent around some laboratory people to borrow the ledgers Cochrane wasn’t using and photograph the contents. In another office, they also searched the entries for a Horst Schmid, but their focus was on duplicating the volumes and shipping copies back to the United States for inventory and intelligence analysis.

The question arose of whether to break in again and return the ledgers. Eventually, they would be missed. Then again, there was no way for the Soviets or their East German allies to know who had pilfered them or when. And the risk of being captured on a second visit was enormous. For the time being, the idea of a second visit was nixed.

The day after the break-in passed without Cochrane finding Horst Schmid’s name and address among the thousands of entries. A second day passed. No luck. He found two entries for Lugeckstrasse, Horst’s street, but the names were not similar.

As the hours passed, they grew longer and more frustrating. He went out to Helmut’s for lunch and the Tempelhof commissary for dinner. He worked into the evening, hunched over a desk in his chamber like a monk. He bought a bottle of Irish whisky at the commissary and nursed it along. After two days and evenings, he had put a good dent in it.

Cochrane prayed for that special moment when everything would fall into place when he spotted Horst’s name and the destination where he had been sent. But that moment stubbornly resisted coming.

The records from 1946 were either very scanty or very heavy. Either the deportations were sporadic, or they had not been recorded completely. Or somewhere else, he told himself, there was another set of books.

There were huge lapses. January of 1946 was missing completely, for example. Snow? Ice? A steadier set of records picked up again in March of 1947. By this time, he knew, the Soviets had dragged the best of their factory booty all the way back to the Soviet Union by rail. By this time also, it was clear that the occupation of the Eastern Zone of Germany was going to be permanent. No point in dragging everything off to the Worker’s Paradise when the Worker’s Paradise had come to Germany.

Particularly unlucky were the captive people who had been abducted to work in the distant Soviet labor camps. Most would never be seen again. The others, even if they stood in front of mirrors, wouldn’t even recognize themselves.

With fatigue and impatience on his third day of reading and searching, Bill Cochrane turned the crinkly yellowish pages of the ledger in front of him. His mind drifted regularly. He fought sleep even in mid-afternoon. His tiredness and frustration were things he couldn’t shake. He often thought of Laura and Caroline enjoying a summer in Cambridge without him. He wondered what he had to do to buy his own freedom from this monster of an assignment. He began to think of himself as an abductee, as well.

By the time he had been going through these volumes for four days and nights, he cursed Berlin and swore to himself that much as he had liked the city when he had first arrived in the 1930s, Berlin was now a joyless, decrepit, grim place that was filled with poverty, sorrow, oppression, and broken hearts.

His mind riffed as he worked and completed a study of the ninth of the twelve hijacked volumes. He thought of Laura again, her beautiful face even back when she was married to another man before the war. In his mind, he transposed himself to ten years earlier when FDR was in his second term and when Cochrane was a younger man jumping at shadows, not the least of which was one being a Nazi assassin.

Bill Cochrane was not a smoker. But he had several packs of cigarettes scattered on his desk. In frustration, he fished a smoke out of an open pack, lit it, took a couple of puffs, and let the butt died in an ashtray.

He drank more whisky. He pondered uselessly on Fascism, Capitalism, Communism, and Democracy, convinced himself that there wasn’t a single “ism” that wasn’t a crock of bovine manure, and wondered again what in the hell he was doing in that lonely airport room in Berlin.

He demanded an answer from the back of his mind as the forefront of his mind continued its weary trek through the ledger.

True enough, he was looking for a gauleiter who had protected him and Frieda and Bettina during the war. If you couldn’t protect those who had protected you, where was personal honor over anything?

He pushed back from the volumes in front of him. It was all useless. A nest of doubts, uncertainties, and lousy penmanship!  And who knew if the records, what there was of them, were even accurate?

He looked at ledger lines forwards and backward.

He was nearly asleep when he read the last line on page 48 in volume 10.

He blinked long and hard. He looked at his watch. His watch told him it was two-thirty in the morning.

He raised a hand to slam the ledger shut.

And then there it was, right in front of him, staring him in the face so clearly that he could hardly believe it.

No alarm bells went off, there was no bolt of lightning other than the ones from the thunderstorms that had bedeviled Berlin in the last few days. But there before him occupying one line, noted in the cramped, condemned handwriting of a functionary who would forever remain anonymous, was the name Horst Schmid at 17, Lugeckstrasse, (Lichtenberg) Berlin.

Then the notation, “16-43.”

Backtracking to a different volume, Cochrane established that location 16-43 was a tractor factory in a town named Greifswald that was two hundred fifty kilometers northeast of Berlin on the Baltic Sea. The town survived World War II without much destruction, even though it housed a large army garrison. During the war, it was the site of a camp for prisoners of war held by Nazi Germany called Stalag II-C. In April 1945, Wehrmacht Colonel Rudolf Petershagen defied orders and surrendered the town to the Red Army without a fight. The town had been rewarded by the Soviets with a tractor factory after the war.

Bingo!

Cochrane looked at the line in the ledger for several long seconds, maybe a minute, much the way a man might stare at a winning lottery ticket to completely absorb the number.

But there it was, in dark blue and yellowish white.

Horst Schmid, 54 jahren, 17, Lugeckstrasse. 16-43, 27/10/46

He hunched forward, exhaled a long breath of exhaustion, spiritual and physical, and did some quick mental gymnastics. Yes, the listing interplayed nicely with what Bettina had said: time of his disappearance, age, a tractor technician, and useful to manage a factory.

Bull’s-eye. He hoped.

By this time, his beleaguered mind was out of control and doing its own sprints. He thought back to much that had transpired in 1943 and then held that up against the more recent image of “Ilse Groening” – or Bettina – sitting on an upper corridor watching everything that was going on at Club Weimar.

Watching. No one had spelled it out at the time or in the present day. Not only had Bettina been part of Dulles’s and Irv Goff’s network of subversives to transport people out of Nazi Germany but she was among his watchers at street level, also. If that had been the case with Bettina, then it had also been the case with Horst Schmid. Their postwar reward was to be evacuated to the West. Better to do that, anyway, than to let the Soviets get their hands on them and potentially turn them against the west or bury them in their camps.

Bingo, again!

Cochrane sighed. Whether his theory was true or not, it worked. He poured himself a final two fingers of whisky and closed the volume with a file card in it marking the page. He washed quickly, collapsed into bed, and fell into a deep sleep within minutes, pondering his next move with Major Pickford.

Chapter 66

Berlin – August 1948

Bill Cochrane was still sound asleep less than six hours later when a frantic knocking on his door awakened him. The sharp knocking on his door persisted, followed by an urgent voice in a modified shout. “Major Lewis, sir? You in there? Need to speak to you, sir!”

Then there was more knocking.

Cochrane emerged abruptly from a deep unsettled sleep.

He shot up quickly in his bed. He checked the pistol that he kept at his bedside. It was still there, apparently untouched. His gaze went to the door. He could tell that the bolt was still thrown, and the latch turned.

He groggily reminded himself that he was on a secure wing of an airbase secured by the U.S. Army and that it was peacetime. But what the hell? The knocking came again.

He rose quickly. As a precaution, he grabbed his pistol and went to the door. There was a peephole.

“Who is it?” he shouted.

“Sir! Sgt. Pearson, sir!” came the response. “Urgent!”

Cochrane recognized the voice and opened the door.

“Begging your pardon, sir,” Pearson said. “You have a visitor, sir!”

Cochrane glanced around and saw no one else.

“Where?”

“Command headquarters, sir. General Clay’s office. Do you need me to guide you, sir?”

“No. Been there. I know where it is.”

“Begging your pardon, sir, but the general says make double time. Right now, sir.”

“Got it,” Cochrane said.

“I’m to accompany you, sir,” Pearson said. “Important guest, sir!”

Cochrane went to his wash area and threw cold water on his face. He pulled on his suit, less a necktie, and they went out into the corridor and quickstepped to the administrative headquarters of Tempelhof, past armed MPs.

The armed MPs were not unusual. Cochrane had been in this area before and had met twice with General Clay. But when he passed several more American soldiers and civilian security people, he knew that the visitor had high rank. Less than two minutes later, Sgt. Pearson peeled away. A lieutenant colonel named Cloutier met Cochrane and escorted him past General Clay’s secretary and into the general’s office.

When Lt. Colonel Cloutier preceded Cochrane through the general’s door and held it open, Cochrane entered the room. The man at the main desk, flanked by an army flag and an American flag normally would have been General Clay. Today Clay was seated in a chair to the side. Cochrane recognized the man at the desk, one of the most powerful men in the American chain of command at that moment, a man he had known personally and socially for several years.

“Hello, Bill,” Secretary of Defense James Forrestal said.

“Hello, Jim,” Cochrane said. “Or, excuse me. ‘Mr. Secretary’,” he corrected himself.

Forrestal’s hair was immaculately combed and parted. His eyes were sharp but heavy. He looked haggard and stressed and was most likely jet-lagged. Cochrane knew that he had been in Washington as recently as two days previously. Now he was here. This had to be important.

“‘Jim,’ is fine,” Forrestal said. “Not enough people call me that anymore. Please sit,” he said, indicating a visitor’s chair before the desk. Cochrane had been in it before. He sat. He also noticed that there were no stenographers there to take notes.  Doors closed behind him, and Cochrane was alone with General Clay and the defense secretary.

“How are things? How’s your wife?” Forrestal asked.

“Fine, Jim. Thank you.”

Like everyone else, Cochrane had read the rumors circulating around the defense secretary’s personal life. He refrained from asking. Instead, “I hope you’re taking time to take care of yourself, Jim. I know things have been difficult,” Cochrane said.

“I’ll get through things,” Forrestal said. “I’ll manage.”

Forrestal looked down at some file reports on General Clay’s desk. There was a silence in the room. Forrestal had spread a two-page document in front of him and read it with heavy concentration. A thousand conflicting thoughts battered Cochrane as the silence persisted.

Forrestal's life, Cochrane mused, was pure Roaring Twenties, carrying over into the Sputtering Thirties and War-weary Forties. His world revolved around money, power, glamour, treachery, and sex. He had gone into bonds after the first World War and made a fortune. He was worth five million dollars by 1932. But Forrestal’s prominence and success also attracted the attention of a 1933 congressional panel investigating his wealth. The panel asked pointed questions about his creation of a company in 1929 into which he put $896,000 of tax-sheltered income. The insinuation was clear: he had evaded taxes. Nothing came of the charges.

Cochrane knew that savage flames burned within Forrestal. The experience before the investigators affected him for weeks afterward, weakening his confidence, triggering fights with his family, and causing him to scratch at psoriasis scabs on his neck till he drew blood.

Thoughts of Forrestal’s family triggered another story from the past in Cochrane’s mind. In 1933 Forrestal had built, at the corner of Forty-Ninth Street and Beekman Place, a five-story Georgian-style house with a brick library and circular staircase. One night during the Depression, his wife, Jo, was walking home alone from an event at the Plaza Hotel. On the street outside their home on Beekman Place, gunmen relieved her of jewelry, worth fifty thousand dollars, while Forrestal slept a few dozen feet above the scene of the crime.

The story had always stayed with Cochrane. Why had Jo been out late alone with so much jewelry? Why had her husband not had someone watching over her? Even in New York’s “good” neighborhoods, these things happened. Cochrane had only read about the incident when it was reported in The New York Times. It was his first signal that, as much as he liked Jim Forrestal, things with Jim could go haywire and become weird at any time.

Worse, anti-Forrestal gasbags on the radio used the incident to attack him, asserting, without any evidence, that he had known his wife was being robbed but “hadn’t been man enough” to come out and protect her.

Other more recent incidents played out like a newsreel before Cochrane. He had heard back-channel stories from his friends in the intelligence community that after the end of World War II, the National Security Council authorized the recruitment of members of former Ukrainian execution squads, who had worked for the Nazis exterminating Jews and Red Army supporters, to work clandestinely within the Soviet Union assassinating Communists.

The group went by a German name: Nachtigall. Or Nightingale.

Ironically, while one wing of the American intelligence community was secretly bringing Nightingale’s leaders to the United States to train them, another wing was working to bring them to trial in Nuremberg. Forrestal’s passion against worldwide Communism was so intense, that he helped bring about the program, which eventually failed. Cochrane, as he admired the Rolex on Forrestal’s wrist, wondered if his friend had any misgivings about recruiting Nazis.

Cochrane felt his mind rocketing from one epiphany to the next.

He wondered about the reality before him: a gentleman with a Rolex, a much-admired Princeton alumnus, who had come up from working-class origins, was instrumental in postwar planning and purportedly using Nazi death squads to whack Red sympathizers. But then again, as he took a second look, the man before him was his old friend, Jim, who had worked for FDR.

Cochrane was in the middle of these thoughts when Forrestal looked up.

“So, Bill?” Forrestal said tersely. “You’ve been on the ground in the Soviet Sector as much as any American operative for the past five weeks. Did you know that?”

“Not till now.”

“And you’ve seen much of the city. You’ve been in and out of the Soviet Zone, done us a little dirty work, and you’ve seen the airlift up close.”

“Correct,” Cochrane said.

“Share your thoughts with me.” There was a hint of a smile from the defense secretary. He leaned back, folded his arms, and gave Cochrane a full grin.

“My own opinion is that Soviet aggression needs to stop here and now,” Cochrane began. “Berlin is the flash point, but the airlift is working, as are the countermeasures the current administration has taken. The Russians can’t get replacement parts for their factories. We counter-embargoed them. We’re hurting them. Or more accurately, their own belligerent policy is hurting them. From what I see in the independent world press, they’re taking a beating in worldwide public opinion. Everyone here at Tempelhof is working his or her backside off. Look at the attention Lt. Halvorsen gained for this entire unit and, for that matter, for our country. In terms of public relations, we’re winning this. And most Berliners want us to stay.”

“What if they shoot down one of our planes?” Forrestal asked.

“They won’t do it,” Cochrane said.

“What if they shoot down one of our planes?” Forrestal repeated.

“They would have done it by now, Jim, if they were going to do it.”

“What if you’re wrong?”

“We’d then be obliged to shoot down one of theirs. But I don’t think they’d do that.”

“Based on what?” Forrestal demanded.

“Based on the strategic bombers we have in England,” said the spy. “Based on the fact that we have the big bomb, and they don’t. Yet. Based on the fact that their radar set-ups have lapses in eastern Europe. Some of our planes have flown off course into the Soviet Zone across the Baltic Sea, almost to Finland, and they don’t even get buzzed. Our long range bombers could hit Moscow and Stalin knows it. If they were going to shoot down one of our planes, they would have done it by now.”

Forrestal looked to General Clay. Clay looked back.

Cochrane, seeking to lighten the conversation but still punctuate his thoughts properly, continued. “The Russians also think General LeMay is a madman. They may be right. But he’s our madman and, for better or worse, they know what he did to the Japanese.”

Forrestal, Cochrane knew, had studied the intellectual underpinnings of the Russian Revolution. He was convinced that the Soviets were driven by an ideology to attempt world domination. Now he was hearing what Cochrane believed and what he wanted to hear.

Silence held the room.

Forrestal grimaced, Cochrane’s words sinking in. He turned to Clay.

“General,” he asked, “is there anything ‘Major Lewis’ here is saying that you take exception to?”

Clay shook his head. “No, sir. Nothing.”

“We’re all on the same page here then?”

“We are,” Clay responded.

Forrestal looked back to Bill Cochrane. “What would you say to Americans who feel that Berlin is none of our business and we should walk away from the city?”

“I would say that we are doing something heroic here and I’m proud to be part of it.”

Forrestal considered it for a moment. “May I tell President Truman exactly what you said?”

“Absolutely,” Cochrane said. “Please! I hope you do.”

“Then we’re finished here, Bill,” Forrestal said. “Unless there’s something else.”

“There is one thing,” Cochrane said.

Clay and Forrestal waited.

“My original mission here, to extract a wartime partner and bring her to England, has become more complicated. May I ask our intelligence chief here for what I need?”

“You’re not going to go overboard, are you, Bill?” Forrestal asked.

“Not if I can help it. Should I detail what I have in mind?”

“Give me a hint,” Forrestal said.

“I may need to bring more than one person out. And one might be an abduction. A friendly one, but an abduction, nonetheless.”

Forrestal shrugged.

“Want to know more?” Cochrane asked.

“No. Use your good judgment. You always do. If I don’t know what you’re doing, I can honestly deny knowing about it.”

“True enough,” said Cochrane.

“Arrange it through Major Pickford,” Forrestal said. “He’s the intelligence chief here, right? If Bob Pickford is good with it, I am also.”

General Clay stayed clear of it though the secretary of defense glanced his way. Forrestal’s dark hard eyes came back to Cochrane.

“Don’t kill more than a dozen Russian Communists, Bill,” Forrestal said facetiously. “I’ve had my fill of congressional hearings.”

“I’ll try to contain myself,” Cochrane said.

“Good luck,” said the secretary of defense.

“You, too, Jim,” Cochrane answered.

Cochrane stood. He shook hands with Forrestal and departed.

Chapter 67

Berlin - August 1948

Cochrane, Kern, and Roth returned to the Club Weimar on the next night it was open, the following Thursday. Kern again stayed with the Opel while Roth made himself useful as a lookout in the bar. Cochrane had no trouble finding Bettina. She was at her usual perch one flight above the floor of the club, watching, watching, watching; something she did so well.

Cochrane settled into the empty chair next to her as she eyed the stage, the management, and the ledgers.

“You’re back again?” she said to him. “I’m honored.”

“So am I,” Cochrane said.

“What’s on your mind this time?” she asked.

“A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” he said.

“Really? Then you should take it,” Bettina said.

On the stage was a lewd male clown, surrounded by two German girls in nothing but high black stockings. They were making jokes about a swastika that the girl had painted on her left buttock. Bettina was not amused and neither was Cochrane. But the Russians in the audience thought it was hilarious.

“It’s not my opportunity, it’s yours,” he said.

“Do tell,” she said. She smiled and sipped a brandy.

“I ignored what you said to me as a warning about that Russian down there,” he said, indicating Kovalyov. “I didn’t come to Berlin to be intimidated by a thug or not get my job done.”

“Continue to tell,” she said.

“Horst Schmid was taken by the Russians to help administer a factory in the northeast of the Russian Sector,” Cochrane said. “I’ve seen the deportation records. He was seized in late 1946. It’s a forced-labor camp.”

He watched her smile disappear into something more somber and fearful.

“The people I work with have sources in that camp,” he continued. “From what we know, Herr Schmid is alive. His health, his condition, we cannot be sure of. The people I work with also have what we call a ‘remote unit.’ They are men from Southeastern Europe. These are people who can find a person of interest to us and bring them to us. Safely.”

She picked up the brandy again. She drained the glass.

“My God,” she said. Her hand trembled as she sat down the glass.

“My superiors across the sea feel they owe you something. Or that your knowledge and memory may prove valuable in the future. I don’t know. They don’t tell me. I don’t ask. Secrets are best kept when fewer people know.”

He paused, almost tired of listening to himself, even though his voice was low and barely audible above the laughter, the female squeals on stage from the girlie show, and the hokey music from an off-stage piano.

“In any case,” Cochrane said, “if you give the word, I will pass the word along. The laborers are kept in a guarded barracks, but they are on grounds that can be penetrated. A remote team can go in and abduct Herr Schmid and bring him to Berlin. If that happens, you and he must agree to leave immediately. The same day perhaps. The same hour that you are reunited. You may never see Germany again. Same for Horst. That may be for the better, of course. Just look around. Soviet Communism is here and is not going away anytime soon.”

She folded one hand into another and turned fully to face him.

“What do you want me to do or say?” she asked.

“I want you to agree, to say yes,” Cochrane said. “Be ready to travel. Have a small bag packed and have it here at the club. The next time you see me, which could be as soon as two days from now, we will either have failed to rescue him or you’ll need to travel immediately.”

Bettina didn’t answer.

“Is it a yes?” he asked.

“I have no papers for travel. The Russians took them.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. Then, with a wry smile, he added. “We have our own airplanes.”

She said nothing. A distant look crossed her face. Slowly, she reached down to a bag she kept under the table. Her hand came up with a second brandy glass, then with a small bottle. She poured a drink for both of them.

“It’s yes,” she said. “Of course, it is. Just don’t get him killed. A heart can break only so often until the spirit breaks with it.”

They drank together. Then Cochrane stood, gave Roth a look to indicate his business was finished for the night. Then they were out the door.

Chapter 68

Berlin - August 1948

Dale Halverson kept dropping candy. But now he had an audience. Crowds at the landing field in Berlin had become so large waiting for Pilot Wobbly Wings that other pilots now jettisoned gentle parachutes of Butterfingers and Hershey Bars as they approached Tempelhof. The Little Lift expanded. Pilots made drops at hospitals, schools, churches, and playing fields, if not by low flying aircraft, then by Jeep. They dropped some for the children of East Berlin, too, till the Soviets howled in protest.

The howls didn’t do much good. Halverson the Candy Bomber was suddenly an international hero, making the Americans and British look humane and generous and the Russians look cold and treacherous, an image which wasn’t far from the truth.

The army gave Halvorson a small staff to deal with his mail and the press. Eventually, the army brought him back to the United States for two weeks of interviews on radio and in the large-circulation newspapers. Other forces were at work, also. The American CARE relief organization engaged aviators to drop one hundred balloons in the shape of a “Shmoo”, a popular and upbeat American cartoon character. The balloon captivated the kids but it was also redeemable at CARE headquarters in Berlin for a package of food and kitchen supplies.

Berliners sent letters to base commanders or had cockpit crews slip them onto airplanes where flight crews could read them. Some Berliners fashioned toys out of scrap metal for pilots to send home to their own children. Above all, they thanked the men and women of The Big Lift for bringing hope down from the sky and past the ring of military forces that surrounded them.

Things had changed. Tommy Olson and Glenn Taylor returned one evening to the restaurant where several Berliners had rudely walked out when they had first ventured in wearing their pilots’ uniforms with American flags on their shoulders. Olson and Taylor took their place at a table. They noticed that they were surrounded by many of the same people.

The men at the nearest table recognized the Americans. There was a brief discussion, punctuated by sidelong glances at Olson and Taylor. The foursome slowly got to their feet, conferred with other diners, and the others rose to their feet with them.

“We’ve been recognized,” Taylor said, looking back to Olson.

“Sure enough,” Tommy said. “I guess they’re going to heave us out in person.”

“Just let them try,” Taylor said.

“If you’re not going anywhere, Glenn, I’m not either.”

A waiter appeared and placed menus before them. By this time the diners, most of them, had reassembled at the bar. The man behind the bar busily filled several steins of beer. Moments later, a waitress, pushing through the crowd, made her way to the table where the Americans sat. She placed two steins on their table.

“Compliments of your new friends,” she said and quickly withdrew.

Olson and Taylor, as confused as they had been previously, looked to the bar where their adversaries had turned into admiring friends, lifting their steins in a salute, and then singing something that vaguely sounded like The Star Spangled Banner, or at least a stanza of a pleasantly corrupted version of it.

The point was clear, however. The Americans had transitioned from foreign conquerors to accepted friends.

Chapter 69

Berlin – August 1949

Orphaned children have special needs and special fears. Orphaned adults, the sole remaining members of families, react in a similar way. They react differently to strangers, sometimes with greater fear, sometimes with easier acceptance, and this affects their ability to forge new relationships. So it was with Anna.

The man who appeared at the Club Weimar and showed a special interest in her was a German, tall and good-looking. He said his name was Peter and she could call him that. He had served in the war and did not come across as a brute or a Nazi. But he did have a certain strength, mental and physical. Anna sensed that right away.

And he had money. Money from somewhere. Reichsmarks. Deutschmarks. Best of all, a fistful of hard Western currency: American dollars. At a place where so much malfeasance went on like the Club Weimar, that personal power and the handfuls of cash amounted to something special.

Peter approached her before her Thursday show. They talked at the bar. They both kept an eye on Kovalyov down on the lower level with his klatch of goons. They kept another eye on Ilse where she sat watching everything from her perch on the top right corridor.

The new man monopolized her and drove other men away. He protectively hung around her until she went on stage, then was there for her when she came off stage after the show. He had brought along a small box which he handed her at the end of the evening.

The box contained food, she found out when she went home and opened it. Dehydrated milk, some dried fruit, bread. Two American chocolate bars. The chocolates were the same type that the American pilot was dropping. The bad side of her wondered if Peter had stolen them from children or muscled them away from kids as the candies fell in their little handkerchief parachutes.

But she didn’t ask. The candies brought a smile to her face. That was unusual. She was not, till now, a woman who smiled a lot. Tragedy and brutality had done that to her.

Peter returned on Friday and stood with her again in the bar. A Russian came over and tried to pull her away. She resisted and Peter moved quickly between them. Rebuffed, the Russian became vulgar and insulting as the Russians in the club often did. The troublemaker wasn’t a soldier, he was a black-market hood. When the Russian made a vulgar remark in Russian about her body and how he wanted to abuse it, Peter switched forcefully into Russian, pushed him, and told the intruder to apologize and shut up.

The Russian retaliated by sneering, making an offensive remark about how the Hitler-worshippers had lost the war, accentuating the insult in Russian by grabbing Anna’s left breast and squeezing it.

With controlled fury, Peter picked the Russian several inches off his feet, moved him five feet through the air, and slammed him against the side of the bar. The shove brought the coccyx and lower part of the Russian’s back against the steel edge of the bar. The Russian’s face exploded in pain, and that was before the German brought his knee up into the man’s testicles, and it exploded in even more pain.

Peter could have broken the man’s nose, jaw, and skull with his powerful fists, but he didn’t. Instead, he picked him up and sent him sprawling back to his group of friends. Peter showed a certain mercy or was leaving something in reserve. Anna didn’t know which, but she liked what she was seeing. Two of the other Russians made initial gestures to come after Peter but Peter glared them down. The Russians wanted no part of him. On the floor, Peter’s victim gagged and nursed his wounds, physical and mental.

Peter stayed with Anna again till she was on stage and then off stage. He asked for nothing except permission to call her by her name. She would have given him much more, she would have gone to bed with him, but he didn’t seek it. He stayed till closing time and made sure she returned safely to the one-room bunking quarters she shared with seven other women in an adjoining building.

Peter appeared on Saturday, too. He dared to come in alone. Other men glared at him, but no one wished to engage. Rumor was that he carried a gun, but no one wished to find out. At one point, someone, a mischievous Pole, ratted him out to Kovalyov’s security people, but no one wished to engage with the dangerous German. By the end of Saturday evening, the other men steered clear. In three nights he had staked out his turf and his special interest.

Anna finally summoned the nerve to pose a question.

“How do you know how to speak Russian?” she asked.

“I was a prisoner of war in an NKVD camp.”

“Where?”

“On the Eastern Front. Near Silesia.”

“Have you heard of a town named Demmin?” she asked. “In Pomerania.”

“I’ve heard of it,” he paused. “I know what happened there.”

“That’s where I’m from. My family was murdered.”

“So you’re alone?” he asked.

“I’m alone.”

“Not anymore,” Peter said. He touched her hand.

When the club closed on Saturday, he remained there to watch over her, as he had the previous evenings. He had become her protector. Then Peter had a final surprise. He invited her outside.

He did not stray too far away from her but at one point took several steps away and went to a battered, two-door Opel that was parked against the curb. He went to it and opened the door on the passenger’s side.

Seeing the handsome man smile at her and hold the door open, she accepted his invitation and climbed in.

Heinrich Peter Roth had American dollars and plenty of them, so it was not difficult for him to rent a clean room in a respectable, small hotel in the American Sector. Anna went with him and spent the night there.

They slept together. He left early to work as a cargo handler, but she was still there when he returned late in the day. They had dinner together and she stayed for another night. They talked about the war and the many things they discovered that they had in common. He did not speak easily of the time he had spent in a prisoner of war camp but when he spoke to Anna, it came pouring out. Similarly, she felt comfortable enough with him to talk about Demmin, what had happened there, how her family had been murdered, and how the man most responsible had turned from being an ex-soldier into a gangster and ran the black markets and the clubs.

This gave them even more to talk about. The bond between them formed quickly.

Back at the rooming annex to the Club Weimar, the women she bunked with knew she sometimes went missing for overnights. But they said nothing, not even to each other. It was too easy to be overheard and ratted out.

Chapter 70

Berlin – August 1948

Horst Schmid, as he sat in a holding room at Tempelhof, did not know whether he was a hostage or an evacuee. One couldn’t have blamed him.

Otto Kern stood near Schmid, flanked by the shorter but no less authoritative figures of Sgt. Pearson and beside him, Major Pickford. Schmid was a man in manacles, his sixth decade, and shock. Fewer than twenty-four hours earlier, he had been completing his shift in a forced-labor factory in northeastern Germany well inside the Soviet Zone and not far from the Polish border.

A team of six men from Major Pickford’s “remote unit” had come together, neutralized the guards, walked into the sleeping barracks unobstructed, turned on the lights, and walked bed to bed until they had located Schmid and pulled him out of sleep. Conveniently, each bed was marked at its base with the laborer’s name. Schmid was allowed to put personal belongings in a pillowcase and was told to accompany them. Immediately.

Schmid, convinced that he was being taken to the Soviet Union to be interrogated as an ex-Nazi, tortured, and executed, put up a fight and began to scream bloody murder. One of Pickford’s people pushed a pillow over his face to shut him up and another shoved a needle through his thin sleeping gown and into his thigh. When the drugs kicked in and Schmid stopped struggling, Pickford’s team handcuffed him and placed tape across his mouth. It wasn’t pretty, but it was effective.

After that, things were simple. The few items Schmid had on his nightstand were shoved into the pillowcase. He and his belongings were carried outside where two motor vehicles waited. Schmid was an average-sized man, no more than five-nine in height. He was easy to carry as he was many pounds lighter than a two hundred forty-pound sack of coal.

The team then delivered him to a pier on the Baltic Sea ten kilometers away. A small boat took him to an unmarked C-47 with pontoons that sat on the water. Victor Moreno and a co-pilot waited. Two of Pickford’s babysitters accompanied the captive cargo. Six minutes after delivery, the plane was airborne, going out over the Baltic Sea to sea, then returning to a port in the British Zone to transfer the cargo. Eventually, the cargo landed in Wiesbaden, then transferred again to another C-47 to enter the corridor to Tempelhof.

Now Schmid sat in a wooden chair in a spartan room, waited, and warily eyed his captors. Everyone in the room fell silent as they heard footsteps approach on the tile corridor outside the room.

The door opened. Bill Cochrane entered.

Cochrane looked at Schmid. There was a blink of recognition in the former gauleiter’s eyes. But then this was quickly negated by his ongoing fear.

“You might remember me,” Cochrane said in German. “You also might not. I stayed with Bettina Schneidhuber for a week in the spring of 1943. You watched out for us.”

Schmid had a quizzical look on his face as if the drugs had not completely worn off.

He fidgeted with long dry fingers. He still wore handcuffs.

“Please release him,” Cochrane said.

The key to the cuffs passed along to Sgt. Pearson. Pearson unlocked the man’s wrists.

“No one is going to harm you,” Cochrane said, still standing. “My guess is that at some point in the past you and Bettina were promised passage from Germany. We’re here to make that happen.”

At the invocation of the woman’s name, something changed in Schmid’s eyes.

“Let me talk to Herr Schmid for a few moments,” Cochrane said to the others who stood by. He pulled a chair close to the new arrival. He suggested that Otto Kern remain, Kern being German and a native speaker if one was needed. Major Pickford and Sgt. Pearson left the room, though Cochrane could tell from the departing footsteps that Pearson had stayed on the other side of the door, just in case.

Kern stepped back a few paces and neatly folded his arms behind his back. Aside from flexing his newly freed wrists, watching the blood come back to his skin, Schmid did nothing. He simply sat there. He said nothing. He finally raised his eyes and his gaze met Cochrane’s.

“See?” Cochrane said, half-prepared for Schmid to attack him but reckoning that he wouldn’t. “We mean you no harm. But we do think you will fare better outside of Germany for the next few years, at least. You and Bettina. You would be leaving together. Very soon. To England. Within a day or two if we can manage it. Cigarette?”

Cochrane had a pack ready. He offered a smoke. To his astonishment, Schmid shook his head slowly and declined. Cochrane noticed that there was a powdery whiteness to the man’s skin. He quickly calculated that Schmid had spent more than eighteen months in a labor camp, only to be ripped away from it one night by strangers. No wonder that he was in shock. Small wonder that he wasn’t deranged. Or maybe, it suddenly occurred to Cochrane, he was.

Cochrane trotted out his analysis of events. Schneidhuber and Schmid had been part of a ground team during the war. Everyone else on it may have been blown to bits by the bombing, but the American government tried to act with compassion in those occasional cases when it could.

“Hence, things like getting Bettina and Horst out of Germany, as promised,” Cochrane said. “Hence, things like der Luftbrucke,” he added.

Schmid’s brow furrowed. Then, uttering his first words, “Was Luftbrucke?” the ex-gauleiter asked. What Airbridge?

Cochrane, sensing a moment of triumph, leaned back and turned to Otto Kern.

“Perhaps you could bring the gentleman up to date on the Big Lift,” he asked gently, thinking the explanation might ring truer from German to German.

Kern said he could.

Kern pulled up a third chair and began an explanation. Several minutes into the explanation, a dialogue developed between Kern and Schmid. At times, the German language was so rapid-fire that Cochrane was taxed to follow it. But he did follow the overall sense of the conversation.

When Kern concluded, Horst Schmid turned back toward Cochrane.

Fragen? Cochrane asked. Questions?

“Are you English or American?” Schmid finally asked.

“Would it matter?”

Nein.

“I’m American,” Cochrane said.

“Bettina will exit with me?” Schmid asked.

“She will be on the airplane with you,” Cochrane said. “You will be relocating to a university town in England. If you do not see her on the aircraft, you don’t have to board. I promise you.”

“And we will go to England?”

“You will go to England.”

Schmid turned to Kern. Kern explained that the American here could be trusted.

Schmid looked back to Cochrane. “I agree to go,” he said.

Cochrane nodded. From a nearby desk, he picked up an envelope, a paper, and a pen. He handed them to Schmid.

“Do us both a favor,” Cochrane said. “Write a note to Bettina. Tell her who you are with and where you are. I will take it to her and then I will bring her to you. How’s that?”

Schmid took the pen and paper in hand, thought for a moment, and began to write.

Chapter 71

Berlin – August 1948

Throughout July and the first half of August in Berlin, the new airlift commander, General William Tunner, gradually retired the C-47s that had initiated the airlift in favor of an augmented force of C-54s. Tunner also began to covet the airfields in the British Zone: the flying distances from Wiesbaden were a third shorter than Tempelhof and the flat landscape allowed for shorter climbs on takeoff.

British authorities agreed to make room for the more productive Skymasters, suggesting that the Americans use Fassberg, the old Luftwaffe training base. Fassberg still had solid permanent buildings, a gymnasium with an indoor swimming pool, and a visiting officers’ quarters, complete with a huge armchair. The latter was rumored to have been reserved for Hermann Göring, the former Luftwaffe chief. Göring had committed suicide in 1946 on the eve of his scheduled execution at Nuremberg. He would no longer be needing the chair.

The initial results at Fassberg were good, but as the operation lurched into day-to-day practicality, difficulties began to develop and the operation at Fassberg began to come apart.

A solution came from an unexpected source. The air force reorganized the pilots and mechanics into squadrons and started to make recreational runs to Hamburg and Copenhagen. The British turned Fassberg over to the U.S. Air Force, with Col. John Theron “Jack” Coulter in command. Colter was married to an American film actress named Constance Bennett, who had been a major star during the 1920s and 1930s. Bennett frequently played society women, people of James Forrestal’s world, focusing on melodramas and comedies. She had had a prominent supporting role in Greta Garbo's final film, Two-Faced Woman, before the World War.

Bennett was one of the most industrious scavengers ever known to any military service. Turning the heat of her charm on anyone she met, she spruced up the mess halls and the barracks with new furniture. Using her extensive Hollywood contacts, she made sure the latest American movies were flown in. In this way, Fassberg became state-of-the-art and a morale boost for the men and women who worked the Big Lift.

The RAF followed up its gift of Fassberg with an offer of another base at Celle, near Hanover. An old combat base, Celle was without runways or, it seemed, room for a runway, but the facilities were excellent. Bennet waved her magic wand here, too.

As the summer went on, the airlift began to lose the haphazard informality of its initial weeks. Then came August 13th, a Friday, when the haphazard informality collapsed completely.

The weather was horrendous, heavy rain with violent thunderstorms. General Tunner was due in Berlin. He was, in fact, overdue, bouncing around the clouds and bolts of lightning as his C-47 circled in the stack with several scores of other aircraft, all of which were running low on fuel.

Simultaneously, new arrivals were in mid-flight along the corridors, generating a chaotic condition that infuriated Tunner. The weather had been balmy when Tunner departed from Wiesbaden, but his C-47 was enveloped by black clouds as soon as it entered the corridor. As his pilot followed the prescribed flight path to Tempelhof, radioing the exact moment he passed over the Fulda low-frequency, he knew there were C-54s behind and ahead of them, each precisely three minutes apart, and each flying at a speed of 180 miles per hour.

When they arrived over Berlin, there was a heavy rainstorm. Visibility was zero. The rain also sabotaged the radar screens in Tunner’s aircraft. Ahead of them, two C-54s endured accidents on landing that tied up the Tempelhof runway. A C-54 came in behind them, had nowhere to go, and skidded to a swerving emergency halt, completely blocking any further incoming traffic.

Tunner grabbed the microphone in his C-47, identified himself, and called the Tempelhof tower. “Tell everyone in the stack above and below me to go back home,’ he demanded. “Then tell me when it’s OK to land.”

The other aircraft returned to their bases. Tunner landed. Before the day had ended, he had overhauled the rule book for instrument flying. He ordered that all flights, regardless of the weather, would follow instrument flight rules, the IFR playbook. Any pilot who missed an approach for any reason would immediately return his load to his base. No one would be given another chance to try an approach and hold up other aircraft.

Once this rule was put into effect, the tonnage to Berlin rose steadily in good weather or bad as air force crews flew the hundred plus miles in and out, round-the-clock through the three air corridors.

The flights became a steady routine. Each pilot received a precise takeoff time. At that exact moment, he or she would push the throttle forward and climb out on the prescribed flight path to the first beacon at Darmstadt and level off at the assigned altitude.

Toward the end of August, however, as things settled in the skies, there was a further bit of merriment provided by the French, who had otherwise been quiet during the Big Lift.

The British, French, and Americans had constructed a third airfield, Tegelhof, located on a former panzer drill ground in the French Sector. The labor force that carried out this project was recruited from the local populace and was made up of a most unlikely mix of women and men, young and old, most of whom gave no indication of having ever before done manual labor. However, no group had ever worked harder and with such goodwill.

Material for the runways had come from the rubble of air raids. At last, everything was ready for the start of operations, except for one thing. In the center of the air traffic pattern stood a two-hundred-foot-tall unused radio tower. The tower rose in the Soviet Sector.

British and American diplomats proposed a diplomatic solution to the problem. It called for the Soviets, in return for compensation, to dismantle the obstructing tower. Ever unhelpful, the Soviets refused to acknowledge the request.

Western diplomats continued to hector the Soviets for assistance. The Soviets had no desire to assist the Lift in any way. So one wet morning a few minutes after dawn, French Brigadier General Jean Ganeval ordered a platoon of soldiers and engineers to march to the tower, lay some dynamite charges, and blow up the tower.

Direct action, the general said, was what the Soviets understood.

Chapter 72

Berlin – August 1948

Major Pickford was in command of the operation of removing Bettina from the Club Weimar. He assigned six men. Cochrane, Roth, and Kerr were the three principles. They were joined by three men from Major Pickford’s unseen and unappreciated local army of anti-Communist thugs who had somehow landed in Berlin after the war and had found it profitable to stay. Most were Serbs or Ukrainians who were approved by a back-channel chain of command that led all the way to Washington, not that anything was on paper, or anyone could prove it.

Cochrane didn’t know the three men, but Pickford vouched for them. One went by the name of Rodzienko. There was another who called himself Stasiuk, and a final goon who was tagged with the name of Zeisel.

Cochrane didn’t care for men like this but he also knew they had their uses. Not for a minute did Cochrane believe any of these men were operating under their real names. They were local underworld and human flotsam left behind by the armies of the war. He also had nothing against them. He tried not to be judgmental against men who had lived rougher lives than he had and hadn’t enjoyed the same privileges of birth.

The three new men rallied with Cochrane, Roth, and Kern in a private staging area in a dingy warehouse on the Tempelhof grounds at 9 PM the following Saturday so that everyone could get a good look at each other and go over the script. Kern was calm and gathered, Roth had a jittery edge that Cochrane had never seen before. At least it suggested that Roth was human.

“I’ll only ask you this about them,” Cochrane said privately to Pickford as they gathered. “Does the defense secretary know who they are and does he vouch for them?”

“More or less and of course,” Pickford answered.

“Which is the answer to which question?” Cochrane asked.

“Both to both,” Pickford said with a wink. “Really, Bill. That’s all you need to know. They know the club. They know the routine and they know what we’re there to accomplish. Stasiuk has a girlfriend who works there. They speak Russian, German, Ukrainian, and God knows what else. They’re warriors. They’re steady. Balkan brotherhood, it’s Forrestal’s “in”’ thing since the war. Didn’t you get the memo? For each pistol they’re carrying, they’ve got three clips. Just stay out of the line of fire if things go off the rails. Get it?”

“That would be my priority just from common sense,” Cochrane said.

“Most times the two are interchangeable,” Pickford said.

Pickford added that the use of the professional Berlin underworld was something that his “superiors” - and by this Cochrane assumed he meant Forrestal and the people across the ocean at Foggy Bottom - insisted upon. It would be one thing if a few of the Tempelhof cargo men got into hot water at a verboten club, quite something else if there were a half-dozen of them. So Kern and Roth were okay for this operation, but beyond that, no one else from Tempelhof was to be used. Deniability, again, as a working concept. Weapons should be as untraceable as guilt, and vice versa. It was the same principle for the vehicles. The Opel could be used, as well as a pair of banged-up old French cars, two mismatched Citroens. No Jeeps, no Kubelwagens.

The six men arrived at Club Weimar in pairs, shortly after ten PM, using three vehicles from what Cochrane now laughingly referred to as Sgt. Pearson’s “fleet.” Roth drove the Opel and parked it a block away in its usual spot. Zeisel was his passenger. He was armed with a Mauser, one like most of the weapons in Sgt. Pickford’s arsenal: an untraceable, recent war relic. By ten after ten he was in the club and stationed at the bar, with one eye out for trouble and the other eye out for a certain blonde.

Kern came in with Rodzienko a few minutes later. Rodzienko bought a drink and went downstairs right away. Kern positioned himself on the right end of the bar. If things blew up he was to jump the bar, according to the advance plan, knock out the bartender, and throw the circuit breaker behind the bar. Darkness was a good cover when it came as a surprise, but the downstairs tables still had candles, so there would be some light.

Cochrane arrived five minutes later, having ridden to the block with Stasiuk, who would remain on the street, watching over the three vehicles. The cars were scattered in three different spots, each within view of the other. All were parked with their front tires turned sharply out toward the street with clearance from the cars in front of them. They were positioned for a quick getaway.  Stasiuk, Roth, and Kern were the assigned drivers. Any of the cars could carry four passengers and all four had added extra side plating, which could stop low-caliber bullets. In the event of an emergency, get to any car and get away.

Upon entering Club Weimar, Cochrane spotted Bettina in her usual perch on the upper right-hand corridor. He bought a bottle of beer, didn’t drink any of it, and went to her table. There was an empty chair beside her as if she had been expecting someone, maybe even him. Her face was toward the stage as he sat down next to her, her head upraised slightly like a middle-aged tortoise looking for the sunlight.

“How are you tonight, my dear?” she asked him without looking.

“In good spirits,” he said. “You?”

“Never better. Do you have my traveling partner?” she asked straight off.

“He’s at Tempelhof. Waiting.”

Something in her seemed to surge.

“How do I know that?” she asked. “How am I to be one hundred and ten percent certain?”

“You don’t trust me?”

“I trust you a hundred percent. It’s the extra ten percent that concerns me.”

He laughed. “I know you too well, Bettina.”

Cochrane produced the handwritten note from Horst. She unfolded it and read it. He thought he saw her eyes widen and mist for a moment. Then the vision, or the illusion, was gone.

“So kind of you,” she said. She sighed. “Mustn’t leave evidence around though, right? Not that I wouldn’t love to keep this.”

She folded the paper in two and held it to the flame of the candle on her table. The paper ignited, a large flame erupted, flared, raged, and slowly died. She gathered the embers into the ash stay.

“My God,” she said in a husky, low voice. “I’m really going to do this?”

“You’ve done more difficult things in your life, haven’t you?”

“More than a few times, my dear,” she said. “I assume you have some support on the floor?”

“More than you’ll ever know.”

“I hope to God you’re right,” she said. “Now I suppose we just need to proceed calmly and I will disappear from the face of the German earth. Correct?”

“Correct,” he said.

Two members of the waitstaff came by and turned in their final tally. She entered some numbers from some previous receipts into a ledger. Again, everything was flowing as smoothly as silk, Cochrane noticed. He relaxed, took a census of everyone in the room, saw all parties in their preassigned places, and sighed with relief.

Yes, indeed, he was convinced. It was going to go off without a hitch.

The end of the show came. Lights went up. The on-stage talent disappeared backstage. Several dozen single men, some in uniforms, some not, crowded the floor. A few pretty German girls came out to see who was paying for extra favors.

Bettina worked quickly. She was impressive with numbers. She finished her receipts within minutes. Cochrane could tell she had changed gears. She wanted to get out of here as badly as Cochrane did.

Cochrane knew the end-of-the-evening procedure. Bettina needed to get her totals right and turn the books in to the man who sat at Kovalyov’s elbow. She fussed with some final columns of figures. He was too nervous to drink more than a sip of beer. Then she was finished. Cochrane and Bettina rose from her table.

“I’ll be back in a moment,” she said.

“Ready to go?” he asked.

“After I turn in the ledgers.”

“Where’s your travel bag?” he asked.

She reached for it and set it on the table. Cagey woman. She had used a knitting bag and left wool and a half-made sweater on top. No need to attract suspicion with a travel bag.

“I’ll take it for you, so you don’t need to come back to the table,” he said. “We’ll get away faster. I’ll meet you at the door.”

“You’re an angel,” she said. “Think of everything, don’t you?”

She leaned toward him and kissed him on the cheek as she moved past him. She was on her way downstairs before he could say anything more.

Cochrane stood for a moment. He scanned the floor. He saw Anna emerge from behind the stage curtain. She wore a coat and also carried a small bag. Cochrane thought that was odd, but it was a Saturday, the end of the show week, and anything was possible.

Anna stood and looked around as if waiting for someone. She looked agitated. Alarm bells started to go off in Bill Cochrane’s head. Abruptly, he looked back to the bar area. Roth was missing. Not good. He scanned and saw Kern, loitering near the boxes of electrical connections that housed the circuit breakers and routing switches.

But Kern looked agitated, too. He was looking for Roth and couldn’t find him. Cochrane’s senses now told him that things were about to blow up, but he couldn’t fathom why. Downstairs Bettina was pushing her way through a dozen men trying to turn in her ledgers. That was fine, but when Cochrane looked back toward the bar, Kern was looking at him, motioning with his hands in a questioning manner, asking where Roth had gone.

Something was up. Cochrane couldn’t tell what.

Nearby, a noisy argument ensued at one end of the bar and spilled onto the corridor which led to where Cochrane stood. The altercation escalated to shoving and loud profanities in German and Russian. Cochrane recognized the tank commander again at the center of the dispute. The girl he had swung over his shoulders many days earlier was half-dressed and disheveled under the arm of another man and the tank commander didn’t like it. He wanted her back. A fight started. As if on cue, another one started downstairs. Two Russian officers and one girl.

The fights didn’t affect what Cochrane was there to do that night, but then again, they did. He tried to shut the noise out from what was important. He saw Bettina downstairs nearing Kovalyov. Cochrane tried to move to the bar. He would have to work around the tank commander’s argument. Then his eyes traveled downstairs again, and everything suddenly made awful sense and he knew what was about to happen, how hell was going to break out, and he was unable to stop it.

As he watched, it happened with incredible speed but seemed almost freeze-frame slow motion at the same time, like one of those tricky staccato newsreels in the movie theaters.

Anna turned from where she was standing and charged down the aisle to Kovalyov, pushing her way past Bettina. Cochrane’s eyes went wide when he saw the pistol in the blonde woman’s hand. Within two or three heartbeats, she was in front of Bettina and Roth was following her. Anna’s arm went up when she got to within two meters in front of the man who had killed her parents.

She opened fire. Her pistol exploded with three popping cracks before one of the security people hit her arm.

Kovalyov was hit, but not mortally. He screamed and clutched wounds in the upper part of his body near the shoulder. Then it was all chaos. Cochrane saw Roth draw a Mauser and fire at two of Kovalyov’s bodyguards. At least one of them was hit. The ex-colonel was screaming in agony but that was just when Kern must have jumped the bar and coldcocked the bartender because the lights went out.

Cochrane cursed wildly but rushed toward the front exit where more bedlam was breaking out. He stayed in the front entrance area long enough to spot Bettina fleeing. He called to her and she saw him. When she was close enough, he extended a hand and pulled her through the pack of bodies. Soldiers, uniformed militia and cops were running in every direction.

Cochrane arrived out on the street in front of the club. He took inventory. The Balkan bodyguards, two of them, were there and moving toward the cars. Then two uniformed Soviet soldiers emerged with guns drawn. Cochrane had one arm on Bettina, gripping her with his fist while his other arm held her bag.

“Come on! Let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s go!” he yelled.

Then, absurdly, the target of it all, Kovalyov, emerged in the doorway, staggering, covered with blood, supported by cronies, and his eyes went accusingly to Bettina. He had a pistol in his hand. He lurched but was still upright with his weapon. His eyes focused not on Bettina but Cochrane. In his pain, he must have thought that Cochrane was the instigator of all of this. His pistol came up.

Suddenly, Roth appeared from the crazed crowd of people right behind the Russian. He raised his pistol, pressed it to the side of the Russian ex-colonel’s skull, and pulled the trigger twice. There were two loud bangs. The Russian’s head exploded, and his body went down.

Cochrane had seen a lot in his life, but he stood there for too many moments, dazed, alarmed, and stupefied. He lost track of Roth and Anna Schroeder in the bedlam that continued.

He felt a hand on his shoulder, turned, and saw that it was Otto Kern, imploring him and Bettina to get to one of the French cars.

Cochrane turned and ran, pulling the German lady along with him. They piled into the ghastly old Citroen, prayed that it would start, and rejoiced when the motor turned over. Cochrane looked to where the Opel had been parked, Roth’s vehicle, and saw that it was gone. The Balkan gangsters piled into the other French car and headed in their own direction. Whether they had joined the gunplay or not, Cochrane didn’t know.

Kern was the wheelman and a good one. The tires screeched and at least two Russian bullets hit the sides of Cochrane’s vehicle but didn’t penetrate the secondary armor. The shots whacked the vehicle like blows from a hammer. Cochrane pushed Bettina downward in the cramped back of the car and covered her body as best he could with his body and arms. Then a second barrage hit the Citroen.

These whacked even louder. There were three shots. Two of them didn’t penetrate. The third one did. It came through the extra armor near the rear window, shattered the glass, and ricocheted wildly through the interior of the car.

Kern at the wheel cursed wildly and swerved. Something hot hit Cochrane in his open palm. He thought it was a piece of glass or a shard of metal from the chassis of his car. But there was no hot sticky blood, so he ignored it and kept his head low. He made a fist and held onto whatever item had struck him.

Then they were away. Kern made the first turn possible to get off the block where the Club Weimar was located. He was around the corner within another fifteen seconds. Cochrane was dumbstruck over how the evening had ended, listening to the wheels of their escaping car on the rough, dark streets of East Berlin, and praying that no Soviet patrol would stop them.

Kern zigzagged through the city toward the airport. He took a final turn on what felt like two wheels. Up ahead they could see three MPs with automatic carbines at a U.S. checkpoint and beyond that, they could see the lights of Tempelhof and an incoming flight.

“Holy hell,” Cochrane muttered.

He knew that the night and the ramifications of what had happened were just beginning. He sat back, opened his hand, and realized that what he was holding was a spent bullet: small caliber, a wild shot. Had it been larger caliber it might have killed him. He placed the spent round in his pocket and kept it as a souvenir of east Berlin.

Chapter 73

Berlin to Cambridge – August 1948

Otto Kern drove the final several hundred meters to Tempelhof, made short work of the guards on duty, and guided the rattletrap old Citroen to the hangar where the evening had started. Major Pickford was there, waiting. Someone must have phoned to let him know that things had blown up, although they had retrieved Bettina Schneidhuber. Pickford was not surprised to see the three arrivals. They pulled themselves out of the car, Bettina shaken the most, Kern hardly at all, and Cochrane somewhere in the middle.

“Where’s Roth?” Cochrane asked immediately. “There’s a blonde woman with him, also.”

“Haven’t seen him,” Pickford said.

“No call? Nothing?” Cochrane asked.

“No. Where did you see him last?”

“On the street outside the club. There was major gunplay.”

“I heard. Stasiuk called it in. The Balkan guys are good. My other sources tell me the whole quarter is alive with police and soldiers. It’s Roth and whoever is with him I’m worried about. If they didn’t get away far and fast, God help them.” Almost as an afterthought, Pickford added, “Did Roth shoot a Russian Or more than one? That’s what I heard.”

“Everything happened fast. The lights went out. I’m not sure what I saw.”

“Right.”

“Well, damn it, I got Frau Schneidhuber out, didn’t I?” Cochrane snapped.

“Yes. That was good of you, wasn’t it?” Pickford said with a grin. “Congratulations.”

“It was also the assignment.”

“Where’s Horst?” Bettina asked.

Pickford interceded. “Your man is waiting in the aircraft,” he answered her with surprising kindness, given the circumstances. “It will just be a few moments.”

Cochrane turned to Kern. There had been an important fallback established between the two cargo workers. In an emergency, Roth would contact Kern or it would work the other way around, addressing each other as a “cousin” as further verification of their identity.

Contact would happen either right away, when it was safe enough after, or anytime down the road that was possible. Code names would be employed, references to a birthday party would be made to mark messages of extreme significance, the original birthday party being spy-speak for the events at the Club Weimar on what turned out to be its closing night.

Kern shook his head and gestured with empty hands. He had heard nothing obviously, because he had been the wheelman for Bettina and Bill. He hadn’t seen anything, either, exiting the club. He only knew that the Opel had been gone when he last looked.

Who knew? No one in Hangar 7, obviously.

“Sir?” came a male voice from the corridor from the airfield.

Cochrane turned in the direction of the question. There was a man in a bomber jacket. Cochrane recognized the attending pilot: Victor Marino. There was a younger, fresh-faced kid with him who wore the stripes of a Second Lieutenant, obviously a prospective co-pilot. The nameplate on his flight suit gave his name as Eberle.

“We’re cleared for takeoff to England,” Marino said. “I got a Gooney Bird ready, fueled and waiting. Air Traffic says I can priority cut to the head of the takeoff queue as soon as I have the say so.”

“Fine with me,” Pickford said. “Did you talk to HQ? General Clay?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What did he say about departure? Exactly?”

Marino appreciated the question. “The general said to ‘get these people the fuck out of Tempelhof and over to Cambridge-Alconbury a.s.a.f.p. before the goddam world press and the em-fucking Russians are all over us.’ That’s what General Clay said, sir. Exact words.”

“Roger, that,” Major Pickford answered. “Sounds like him.” He turned back to Cochrane.

“I think that’s a splendid idea,” Cochrane said before Pickford could say anything else. “Get them off German soil.”

Then, “You’re going, too,” Pickford said to Bill Cochrane.

“I am?”

“The three of you. You’re welcome. Get every trace of yourself out of here, Bill, and don’t let me see you here till the next decade unless we ask for you. Got it?”

“Got it,” Cochrane said, who – for the moment at least — couldn’t have been more pleased. The notion of Roth being missing soured his mood almost immediately, however, yet he was in no position to complain or resist.

Marino and Eberle then guided Bettina to the aircraft. Cochrane shook hands with Major Pickford and then ran to retrieve all his personal items from his room at Tempelhof.

Cochrane gathered his own few things within two minutes, raced back to Hangar 7 and out onto the tarmac. There was a pink glow in the edges of the sky beyond the floodlights of the airport and the landing strips. Cochrane forged up the steps to the C-47 that waited. He was the last one to board. The passenger door slammed shut behind him and he strapped himself into a seat against the interior wall of the airplane, just behind the pilot. He was in the same seat where he had sat when he had come to Berlin a few weeks earlier. The cargo area was only half full as Cambridge-Alconbury was an unusual destination.

Bill Cochrane leaned back. He closed his eyes in relief, but again he was tormented by the vision of Roth and Anna Schroeder if the Soviets had captured them. Their fate would be unspeakable if they were prisoners. He was uneasy with what Anna had done, trying to avenge Kovalyov’s brutality in Demmin, but he understood. It was Cochrane’s opinion that too few warm criminals had been brought to justice. How could he blame Anna for exacting her revenge and who could blame Roth for coming to her defense?

Cochrane was not a religious man, but from somewhere in his childhood, a prayer came to him. His mind went on autopilot and he prayed that they had escaped or died quickly before a more horrible death could be visited upon them.

Then, remembering where he was, what the assignment had been, and how the evening had started, he flashed his eyes open again. He settled his gaze across the cargo hold.

Two figures were mysterious at first, then came into focus.

Horst and Bettina.

They were across from him, lashed into their seats as the chatter began from the flight tower to Marino and Eberle. The plane was taxiing now. With permission from the controllers, it cut in front of several others. General Tunner, be damned, but priorities were priorities. The C-47 headed for the number one spot in line for takeoff.

Bettina and Horst stared at him, both with looks that were heavy with fatigue. Her eyes were wet, and they held each other’s hands. Yes, they realized, they were really leaving Germany. Together.

Horst gave him a stiff nod, the nod of a man who had aged far beyond his years, and a small salute with his hand. Bettina dabbed at her eyes with the sleeve of her sweater. Her bag, the knitted sack that had come out of the club with her, the one that held all her worldly possessions, was wedged between her feet and the wall of the plane.

Marino in the pilot’s seat threw his throttle forward. The aircraft roared, squealed on the Marston Mat, and began to roll forward. Cochrane couldn’t hear Bettina, but he could read her lips. She mouthed the words “Thank you,” in English and the C-47, reliable as ever, began its ascent into the dawn sky above postwar Berlin.

The C-47 touched down at Alconbury two hours plus a few minutes later. A private car was waiting to take Bettina Schneidhuber and Horst Schmid to London for debriefing, new passports, and reorientation to a Western democracy. An American intelligence officer named Dickerson gave Cochrane a contact number and assured him that he, Cochrane, would have full access to what Dickerson referred to as “our new defectors.”

Dickerson offered a U.S. Jeep and a driver to return to his family at Orchard Street, but Cochrane declined. Anxious to return as quickly as possible in ways large and small to what he thought of as “civilian life,” he phoned for a taxi as any other tourist might.

The ride from the air base to Orchard Street took less than twenty minutes. En route, Cochrane reached into his pocket for some currency with which to pay the driver. When he located a pair of crumpled pound sterling notes, the bullet that had nearly killed him came out of his pocket with the money.

He sighed again and rubbed his eyes, aghast at how near the miss had been. In truth, of course, the spent bullet had hit him. Through luck, he had survived.

When he stepped out in front of his temporary home, Laura was standing in front of the house chatting with a neighbor, watching over two young girls playing hopscotch, on the sidewalk.

Laura did a double take when she saw him. He gave a slight wave. They embraced. Caroline quickly joined them. The scene was much like any other in which a man returns home by surprise after a long trip. On the surface, there was nothing unusual about it at all.

Chapter 74

Cambridge – August - September 1948

For the remaining days of the summer, Bill Cochrane attempted to regain the tranquility and relief from the cares of his profession that he had found upon arrival in England many weeks earlier. At his core, Cochrane was a professional spy. But now he took great daily pleasure in being a devoted husband and father. He went to great lengths to enjoy the companionship of Laura and Caroline. When a restlessness or wanderlust overtook him, which was not infrequent, he suggested two or three-day excursions to Wales, Scotland, out to Devonshire or even to Bath to visit Beatrice, Laura’s dotty sister.

One such visit to the latter solved several problems. The question of a safe, comfortable place to relocate Bettina and Horst had perplexed both British and American intelligence communities in London. The safety of the couple was paramount, but so was accessibility. Both had treasure troves of observations and identities, wartime and postwar information, tucked away in their memories. Friendly inquisitors would be able to keep them busy for years. As it turned out, during the war Bettina and Horst had ushered more than two dozen escapees from Nazi Germany through her home and to safety in the Western Hemisphere. Allen Dulles owed her more than anyone – including Dulles himself — was willing to admit. Nor did anyone wish her to happen onto Soviet radar and start talking to the opposition. A safe landing for the rest of her years was a fine idea.

Beatrice still needed a new couple to replace the older couple, Cronin and his wife, who had been the caretakers at her farm for years. Cochrane suggested a new couple, displaced Germans, recently arrived, who spoke acceptable English and who now went by the surname of Swenson to move in and work the farm. Courtesy of Bill’s contacts at MI6, Herr and Frau Swensen had new passports to support their new identities. All parties accepted Cochrane’s clever matching game. The Cronins retired but stayed in a drafty gardener’s cottage on the estate. The Swensens moved into the Cronins’ former cottage and worked the farm. Bettina was highly proficient with keeping accurate ledgers and managing the finances.

Pleased, Cochrane went to a bookseller in London one day and purchased thirty volumes in English and German that he remembered as some of Bettina’s favorites and had them shipped to her. For a while at least, everything seemed to be working its way favorably forward in the postwar era.

But there was something that continued to nag at Cochrane. It was a big something: the fate of Roth and Anna. Unofficial word filtered back to Cochrane as the final days of August began to drift by and he organized his notes for the seminar that he would give at the university from October to May. No one in Berlin had heard anything about the missing couple. Major Pickford had come up empty and Otto Kern had not received any whisper of a contact. Nor had Sergeant Pearson. There it remained. Cochrane tried to entertain the hopeful, wistful notion that Heinrich and Anna had survived, but as summer drifted away, he was hard-pressed to believe it.

Obviously, he concluded, this was something that he was going to have to live with. It was much like the memory of the bullet that had pierced the armor of the Citroen on the night when all hell broke out at the Club Weimar and overflowed onto the streets. The bullet might just as easily have passed through the thin glass of the rear window and then passed through his brain, had instead come to rest improbably in his hands.

Good luck, bad luck. He retained both as souvenirs of life’s vagaries.

Chapter 75

Washington, D.C. - August – September 1948

The stormy outcome of the Democratic convention in July left Truman behind in all the major American polls. Defeat seemed all but assured. Criticism of the airlift came from all the media and most of the newspapers. An avalanche of editorial opinion was against Truman and pro-Dewey.

Despite his increasingly acrimonious relationship with James Forrestal, Truman called him again to the Oval Office after his return to the United States from Europe. “Run through what you saw and who you talked to,” Truman requested. “Tell me again.”

Forrestal reiterated his concern about Communist expansion.

“And the airlift?” Truman asked.

“All our people on the ground in Berlin are for it.”

“And that spy you talked to? Whatever his name is?”

“We refer to him as ‘Lewis.’”

“Lewis is the man’s name, is it? He’s for the lift?”

“One of its biggest supporters.”

Forrestal then spent several minute reciting from memory exactly what Bill Cochrane had told him.

“Is he a Democrat or a Republican?” Truman asked.

“Don’t know, don’t care, and it doesn’t matter.”

“Like hell, it doesn’t. Is he still there?”

“He’s been withdrawn, Mr. President. Had a gunfight with a Russian gangster-soldier. Or someone working with him did. Killed the Russian, according to my reports.”

“Ha!” barked Truman. “Killed a Russian thug! That’s the best-damned thing I’ve heard today!”

The incident had been front-page stuff in Berlin, and the British and Americans had to fend off a barrage of protests from the Soviets. But the Russians had to tread lightly in public over the incident. How could they admit that so many of their people had been in the establishment without acknowledging they were profiting by the hard currency it brought in?

But time was running out for the airlift as well as Truman’s shot at re-election. After the conference with Forrestal, Truman phoned his campaign manager, Herb Ackerman.

"I’m tired of being locked up with ghosts, crumbling floors, and people I can’t trust,” Truman said. “I want to get out of Washington and talk to the people. What can we do?”

“Go for a train ride,” Ackerman said.

Truman and Ackerman devised an eye-popping schedule that would keep the rails warm for weeks. There would be three major campaign spins. The first would be clear across the country from Washington, D.C. to California. Then there would be a six-day tour of the Midwest, followed by a third and final, hard-hitting, opponent-bashing, Red-insulting ten days through the big population centers of the Northeast and then a return trip home to Missouri.

The tour began. A lot of hecklers came out. So did many opposition voters. But so did tens of thousands of ordinary Americans to see and hear their president. During the tour, a newly confident and increasingly relaxed Harry Truman presented himself to the people in August 1948. He spoke their language, had tough anti-Communist opinions, and understood their needs.

He used tough language, punched the air with his finger as he spoke, and gave voters the impression that he was on their side. He relentlessly accused the Republican Congress of being "do-nothing" and failing to meet the needs of the American people.

“Give 'em hell, Harry!" became a battle cry for the hard-fought, uphill battle of the campaign. In response, Thomas Dewey barely campaigned at all. To Dewey’s mind, there was no way in the world that he could possibly lose. So why even engage with the feisty little brawler from Missouri? All Dewey had to do to win was stay above the fray, not rock the boat, and he could coast to victory. Or so he reasoned.

Chapter 76

Cambridge and London – September 1948

Twice a week in Cambridge, usually on a Monday or a Thursday, Bill Cochrane departed from his normal daily routine with his family and with his friends at The Hero of The Thames. On these days he took the train to London.

Sometimes he would travel alone. Other times Laura and Caroline would accompany him. Then his wife and daughter would break away to do the pleasant tourist things, such as see the Tower of London, Buckingham Palace, the London Zoo, and so on. Traveling with a family was a great cover for a spy. He always knew his back was clear when he left Cambridge and boarded the train.

In London, by prearrangement he would often wander away from his family, go into Liberty’s or Selfridges or Fortum’s, move quickly out of a side exit — his specialty to elude watchers — and when he was assured his back was clear, get himself to the American embassy on Grosvenor Square.

There, in a special telex room where the operators now knew him, he communicated with Major Robert Pickford at Tempelhof.

A few things had happened since his departure. Otto Kern, in a de facto sort of way, had stepped into Cochrane’s shoes. Kern had been promoted out of cargo unloading and was an assistant to both Sgt. Pearson and Major Pickford. Kern operated under the code name of “Centerfielder,” a term Cochrane had designated for him because a German national would never have picked it. So much to befuddle any enemies.

Now Kern had assumed the management of a functioning espionage network that Cochrane had founded and initiated but had abandoned — at least for the time being — having left Berlin and along with his “Lewis” identity.

Now, recently, Kern had been discreetly showing up at the town hall offices in Lichtenberg, der Rathaus, armed with a pocketful of Deutschmarks and an assortment of American tens, fives and ones There he greased the pipeline of information from the mortician’s office, in the persons of Vogelsang and Keller, and in the town hall, represented by Fritz Hunsicker. All three men made a point of socializing with others in their professional departments and finding out what was going on in other districts. It was nuts and bolts stuff, but useful. Any little tidbit helped. Any rumor shed a ray of light. It was solid product and Kern returned it to Major Pickford. It was a micro-triumph: the Americans were gleaning day-to-day information from the pro-Russian administration without even sending another American national into the building. As for the loss of the deportation records, no one had discovered it yet. The books were rarely sought and hence not yet missed.

Usually, the news for Bill Cochrane from such visits was somewhere between meager and nonexistent. But on one of Cochrane’s visits to the telex room during the first week of September, the news was somewhere between somber and catastrophic.

The Eastern Sector police, Colonel Markgraf’s people, had fished a battered Opel from the 1930s out of one of the canals. It had been there, they reported for a couple of weeks. A few days later, a pair of decomposed bodies turned up or at least were first delivered to the coroner’s office. It was not unusual for dead people to emerge from the canals in the Eastern Sector but these were of note: the body of a woman in her twenties, blonde hair or the remnants of such, and a large man of maybe about the same age. They had been beaten and shot. The conjecture was that they had died around the same time, sometime early in the month, hence the decomposition.

The news, with officially unconfirmed identities, hit Cochrane like a kick to the gut. He winced. He grimaced. For several seconds he stared at the telex, unable to react, hoping he had misread, fighting back his emotions. But he had not misread.

Cochrane telexed back within minutes. Could any further nonofficial identification of the bodies be made? Major Pickford reported negative to that. Kern had asked the same question and had further enriched the coroner’s office, meaning he had bribed Herr Vogelsang.

Kern, or “Centerfielder,” as the report across the telex identified him, had seen the gruesome photographs. The bodies could very well have been those of Heinrich Roth and Anna Schroeder. Maybe, maybe not. The photographs were unofficial and of poor quality and the bodies had taken a horrible abusing even before going into the water.

Obliquely, Centerfielder had also sent word through Major Pickford, that he had heard nothing from “his cousin” since the “birthday party” earlier in the summer.

Sadly, the information died there along with the corpses in the canal, Pickford telexed in return. He wasn’t giving up hope and neither was Centerfielder. But that was “all she wrote” for now, Pickford said. It was all Pickford wrote, also.

Cochrane stood very still and tried to assimilate what was before him. He had been the recipient of devastating reports before and hoped to never receive one again, though he knew the sentiment was unrealistic. Nothing insulated anyone from dire news, he knew, and nothing ever would, particularly in times like this, in a misbegotten world like this. There seemed to be two eras that he was living through: wartime and not-quite-wartime. There were few rules, no morals, and great evil and brutality were rarely answered with basic justice.

But here in front of the telex machine, there was nothing he could do. Nothing. Sweat gathered in beds on his forehead, he felt a wave of nausea, and then both reactions were gone. What he had read seemed to cast an absolute silence upon the telex room, at least for a few moments. Gradually the clatter came back. So did voices from the outside corridor beyond the closed door. A girl, an embassy employee, wandered by on the other side of the door singing a Frank Sinatra tune in a merry voice.

Cochrane left the embassy and went to Hyde Park. There was a bench where he would always meet his wife and daughter near the speaker’s Sunday soapbox in the southeast corner of the park, the place where Marx and Orwell had often hectored the unwashed masses.

Today, as was the Cochrane family’s habit, Laura and Caroline were there waiting for him. He hugged them both extra hard. Laura knew immediately something was wrong. They went for an early dinner then took the evening train back to Cambridge.

Bill feigned good cheer, but Laura knew better. One look at her husband, the man beneath the smile, told her that something grave had happened, not just bad but horrible. He knew she knew. He could hide everything from the rest of the world, but nothing from the woman with whom he shared his life.

After they had put Caroline to bed that night, Bill told Laura what he had learned. She reacted with predictable horror.

After Laura was asleep, he lay next to her, deep in thought, turning over the reported events in his mind, touching her hand as she slept, and replaying everything that had happened in Berlin this year. He picked relentlessly over the pieces.

He got up, had a double whisky, and came back to bed.

He finally nailed something else that bothered him.

Normal Soviet behavior in situations such as the blowback from Club Weimar would have been to keep the car, use it, and incinerate the bodies. The reported scenario via Vogelsang’s report didn’t make complete sense.

But there was an explanation, he realized minutes later. The canal where the Opel had been ditched wasn’t far from the Club Weimar. The two escapees who had sped away in their own direction, Heinrich and Anna, might have sunk the car there on the night of Colonel Kovalyov’s slaying, then been apprehended as they tried to escape on foot.

Soviet security goons or East German police may have captured them, tortured them, executed them, and then tossed the bodies into the canal days or weeks later near the Opel as a lesson to others, knowing that the dead and dismembered would be fished out eventually along with their wrecked automobile. Any self-respecting east-west intelligence analyst could wrap a pretty pink silk bow around that one and present it to his mom on Mother’s Day.

It made perfect sense. Cochrane went to the washroom and threw up.

Returning to bed with these unlovely thoughts in his head, Cochrane disappeared into sleep around five AM, only to wake up the next morning, entertaining the same horrid visions, which persisted through the next day and, for that matter, for many months thereafter.

Chapter 77

Berlin and Washington, D.C. - September 1948

Survival of a free Berlin, at least the Western part, became precarious as the summer ended in Europe. In September, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, the pro-Soviet Communist Party in the Soviet Zone, marched on the Berlin City Council. Pro-Western council members had been elected and the Communists found the results unacceptable. Demonstrators invaded the city council and forced it to adjourn. The demonstration was seen as a victory for pro-Soviet voices.

Equally precarious was the structure of the White House. A team of architects announced that the White House's "structural nerves" had been damaged. The second floor would need to be rebuilt, but that overall the building was in "good shape.”

The repair team estimated the cost of renovations might be $1 million. Quietly, Harry Truman approved the renovations, though privately he made jokes that his own “structural nerves” had been damaged, also. The on-site forensic investigations continued while the Truman family was whistle-stopping across the United States campaigning. But Truman’s eyes were not just on his next train station and Washington. They were also on Berlin, where he had suddenly discovered a formidable ally in a man named Ernst Reuter.

Ernst Reuter, a former Communist, had been drafted during World War I and had been a Russian prisoner of war from 1916 to 1917. He joined the Bolsheviks and caught the attention of Lenin when the Bolsheviks deposed the Tsar.

Reuter was appointed to the lofty title of People's Commissioner on the Volga with the task of making Communist German colonists loyal citizens of the Soviet state that was being formed. At the end of 1918, he returned to Germany.

Lenin's assessment of the young German was insightful.

"The young Reuter is brilliant and has a clear head. But he is a little too independent,” Lenin told other party members. Reuter was also a brilliant speaker. Lenin promoted him to Communist Party secretary for Berlin to encourage him. But Reuter quit the Communists and rejoined the Social Democrats in 1922. He was elected to the Berlin city assembly in 1926, served as mayor of Magdeburg in the 1930s, and had become a member of the Reichstag the following year. After Adolf Hitler’s ascent to the chancellorship, he wisely fled to England, as Hitler wanted him slain.

He returned to Berlin in 1946 and reorganized the Social Democratic Party. He ran for mayor in 1947, but he was not allowed to take office because of Soviet opposition. Reuter had seen Communism Soviet-style, had thoroughly turned against it, and understood Stalin’s intentions. Now, along with three hundred thousand other Berliners in September of 1948, he took to the streets when the city council was disbanded.

Reuter spoke at the Reichstag and then delivered several fiery orations in public. He put forth an impassioned appeal that echoed across newspapers, newsreels, and television screens around the world.

“People of the world, look upon this city!” he raged when he spoke in front of a third of a million people in the public square in front of the battered Reichstag. “You cannot, you must not, forsake us! There is only one possibility for all of us: to stand together until this fight has been won, until the fight has finally been settled through victory over the enemies, through victory over the force of darkness."

In a hotel room in Chicago, Harry Truman listened to the speech on a new television and listened to the dubbing from German into English, just as Bill Cochrane listened to it on BBC radio during his first week of lectures at Cambridge.

Bill Cochrane agreed with Reuter completely. So did Harry Truman, who jumped to his feet and applauded.

Lenin had been correct twenty-plus years earlier. Reuther was too independent. But he had also caught the spirit of the times. Reuther’s speech and the third of a million Berliners gathered on the street created an image that could not escape millions of Western viewers.

It was almost palpable. Opinion around the world began to change. Ernst Reuter and hundreds of thousands of Berliners convinced the Western Allies not to halt the airlift during the miserable winter weather or abandon West Berlin to Soviet domination.

And Harry Truman, a cold warrior among cold warriors, had found the ally he needed as well as the issue.

The next day, Truman made staying in Berlin a central part of his re-election campaign.

“I will never abandon Berlin and I will never curtail the airlift,” Truman raged from his train as he crossed the country. Millions of Americans, who had seen enough of Communism around the globe, began to listen.

Chapter 78

Washington, D.C. – October – November 1948

In October, the ceiling of the East Room of the White House partially collapsed. It required wood supports to remain where its builders had intended it to be more than a century and a half earlier.

The structure under the main staircase was also crumbling. Mr. Truman’s bathtub had sunk further into the floor. Architects also discovered that the foundations of the interior walls supporting the upper floors and roof were all but nonexistent. As they sank into the ground, the interior walls and floors were pulling away from the exterior walls leaving large gaps. They saw no ghosts, but they determined that the interior of the house was sinking and in danger of collapsing inwards. The entire mansion was unsafe, except, oddly enough, the new Truman balcony. But the Truman family was barely affected: everyone was out campaigning.

Down in the polls and under fire within his own party, Truman alone remained confident of his victory. Even his secret service detail, looking to curry favor with Thomas Dewey, whom they expected to be elected, abandoned Truman to the backup detail and went to guard Dewey.

Bill Cochrane, registered as an independent, voted for Truman in absentia at the embassy in London. He went to bed next to Laura having heard that the early returns were going heavily against the incumbent president. The same happened across America. The anti-Truman Chicago Tribune even ran a celebratory, eight-column headline, Dewey Defeats Truman.

The headline was wishful thinking for those who opposed the feisty president. Early on Wednesday morning, the late ballots rolled in from Illinois, California, and the South.

In Missouri, Truman learned of his victory at 4:00 AM, when a secret service agent woke him. Later that day, 40,000 people jammed the town square in Independence to salute their native son. On the morning after the election, millions of Americans rose to news of the most surprising comeback in presidential election history. Hundreds of thousands of Berliners celebrated, also. They knew they had an ally they could depend on.

How had Truman done it?

The election had been a cliffhanger. Truman had won without getting a majority of the popular vote. But he had cobbled together enough of Franklin Roosevelt’s old coalition to squeak through. His civil rights program attracted Black and liberal voters. Farmers rewarded his backing of price supports. Southern states remained Democratic. Henry Wallace, FDR’s wartime vice president, had taken far-left voters with him and had the support of the American Communist Party. But in doing so, he had insulated Truman from being accused of being soft on Communism. And Tom Dewey had run a lackluster campaign. Dewey woke up on election morning thinking he was the president-elect. It took him days to understand what had hit him.

The Gallup Organization, the pollsters, did a postmortem and tried to figure out what issue had been lurking that pushed the Truman candidacy to victory.

One word was repeated over and over: Berlin.

CHAPTER 79

Cambridge – December 23-25, 1948

As the Christmas season came to Cambridge, Cochrane managed to let the events of the year recede in his mind to what he hoped would be their proper place. He often had the sense of watching events play out again, except this time in reverse, and he wondered what he could have done differently. His basic compassion continued to mourn the loss – he had by now accepted it as such – of Heinrich Roth and Anna Schroeder. No one had heard from them, and the two bodies and the Opel fished out of the canal made a strong and unpleasant circumstantial case.

Deciding that there was no good answer to the question of what he could have done differently and reminding himself that those in the intelligence community sometimes didn’t have definite answers for decades, if ever, he began to grudgingly accept the two deaths. In any operation, there were wins and losses, triumphs to be celebrated, and wounds to lick. So it was with his visit to Berlin in 1948.

At least, he told himself, he could take consolation in the grander picture. The Americans and the British were dug in for the airlift, tenacious as terriers, even though the winter was cold and rough. General Tunner’s Skymasters had increased coal and food to such a degree that the city was starting to show a surplus. The political bickering and yammering continued in Berlin, but Ernst Reuter had become the face of “Free” Berlin. In an election held in December, his popularity gave the SPD the highest win ever achieved by any party in a free election in Germany with 64.5% of the vote. The Soviets could no longer block him from becoming mayor. Nor could they get him to a tall building where he might suffer a fall.

Almost as an afterthought to his tenure in Cambridge, his lectures and discussions at the university had gone very well. He was invited to continue into the second half of his series, which would continue till April. Thereafter, the Cochrane family would return to New York, via a trans-Atlantic passage by ship in early spring; icy winds and turbulent waters not being anything that could be mistaken for enjoyable.

Laura and Bill enjoyed Christmas shopping in Cambridge, overindulging their daughter, and enjoying Christmas music, and eventually a Christmas Day service at Kings College Chapel. Occasionally, Cochrane enjoyed a pint or two at his favorite pub as well.

Two days before Christmas, on the evening of the twenty-third of December, Cochrane again found himself at the bar of The Hero of the Thames, standing sullenly at the far end, not talking to anyone, and nursing a pint of brown ale. After too many minutes he realized that he had been listening to the same windbag at a nearby table for too long, a braying colonial voice that rose above the others, a hollow vessel making the most noise.

He summoned Edward the barman, Cambridge’s version of Helmut.

“Is that my old friend Egon Henkel,” Cochrane asked.

“It is, Mr. Cochrane,” Edward answered.

“Does he still live over on Green Street?”

“As far as I know. He staggers home in that direction three or four times a week’

“Do you think you can keep him here for an hour or three?” Cochrane said, looking to serve a receipt upon at least one small part of the world that he didn’t care for. “I have some overdue business to take care of.”

“Get him drunk or pop something in his drink?” Edward asked with a mischievous wink.

“The latter, maybe.”

“Let me refresh his glass,” Edward said.

Cochrane watched while Edward went into action.

Twenty minutes later when Henkel slumped forward for a snooze at his table, Cochrane asked Edward to leave his pint right where it was. Edward was happy to.

Cochrane hustled over Henkel’s flat on Green Street. The flat was above a garage with an old door at the top of a side staircase. The lock on the doorknob virtually gave up when Cochrane gave it a sharp twist.

He entered. There was light from a street lamp and no shades. He looked in the logical place for a stolen Callot and found it braced on a ramshackle mantle above the fire grate. He grabbed it, tucked it frame and all under his coat, closed the door without touching anything else and went back to the Hero of The Thames in time to watch Henkel come to half an hour before closing time. As Cochrane left he gave Henkel a cheerful good evening.

The next morning, Victoria Cameron-Butler, the Cochrane’s landlady, found a neat package at her door marked with her name and Christmas wrapped. She opened the package and joyfully received her lost Callot, then mentioned its return to her current tenants later in the day.

“What a mystery!” Laura said. “Worthy of Agatha Christie!”

Bill agreed.

“I’ve lived in Cambridge all my life,” Victoria said. “The city is filled with brilliant people. Sometimes,” she concluded, “I just don’t question anything.”

Chapter 80

Washington, D.C. – January-March 1949

On January 11, 1949, James Forrestal met at the White House with President Truman. The meeting was short and sweet. Truman started by greeting Forrestal warmly. “You are a loyal fellow,” he said. Then he proceeded to fire the man who had built the modern United States Navy and who warned anyone who would listen about Soviet world domination.

Truman announced that Louis A. Johnson of Virginia was being appointed to succeed Forrestal as secretary of defense, effective immediately, as soon as the appointment could be approved by Congress. It was a brutal defeat for Forrestal. Johnson wanted to slash America's defense spending.

Worse, Johnson had served as chief money-raiser for President Truman's election campaign. There were allegations that his appointment was a political payoff, but his experience was solid as his work in veterans' affairs and as assistant secretary of war bolstered his c.v. In the newspapers the next day, Forrestal’s impending departure was reported as a “resignation.” Everyone in Washington knew better. In The Washington Post the next day, a front-page account of the shake-up at the White House reported the resignation "for reasons that were never entirely clear."

Nevertheless, Forrestal attended Johnson's swearing-in at the Pentagon on March 28. At the White House on his final day in the government, Truman assembled the entire Cabinet and Joint Chiefs of Staff to honor him. Forrestal was touched and moved. When the meeting was over, Forrestal prepared to drive back to a special transition office to answer congratulatory letters sent to him from across the country. His mood was good, almost as if he was relieved to be unburdened of so much official responsibility.

On the following day, he was warmly received at a special meeting of the House Armed Services Committee. Thereafter, his driver drove him back to his office. Friends followed in two other cars. One of them came to Forrestal’s office later in the day and found him sitting at his desk, staring at the wall, his hat and coat still on.

“Are you all right, Jim?” the friend asked.

Forrestal did not reply. He seemed like a man with a concussion, oblivious to events or conversation around him. “You are a loyal fellow,” he muttered over and over as if fixed on the phrase. At the time, no one knew what it meant.

Then, saying nothing to several friends and aides who had gathered, the man who had built the modern American Navy rose unsteadily to his feet, summoned his driver, and went home to Georgetown.

Over the next days and weeks, his mental and physical health went into a free fall.

Normally a meticulously dressed man, exquisitely tailored, he walked around his home and the capital with his clothes in disarray. He barely ate. Often, he didn’t shave for days at a time. Within weeks he was rail-thin and haggard. His skin lost its tone and was hanging loose at his neck.

As bad as his physical distress was, his mental disintegration was worse. Once a brilliant man, he now rambled incoherently: His home was wiretapped.  Hostile strangers were watching him from the sky. The Communists were after him and his wife. The Russians were invading. His paranoia had no limits.

Family came around to help him. So did friends who summoned mental health professionals. Forrestal resisted at first, then allowed himself to be assisted. Later rather than sooner, Forrestal agreed to be admitted for psychiatric treatment at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

It was an odd venue considering that Forrestal was no longer a government employee. Even stranger was the fact that access to him was severely limited, something the government denied, but that Forrestal’s brother, Henry, confirmed when Bill Cochrane spoke to him by a special secure long-distance telephone hookup from the embassy in London.

The phone call took place a few days after Forrestal had been admitted to Bethesda. There had been no notice of the admission in the press. It was “Top Secret” for many reasons, but word had filtered back to Cochrane through various unofficial channels.

Cochrane put down the phone after speaking to Henry Forrestal.

He stared out his apartment window in Cambridge for several seconds until Laura found him.

“Something wrong?” she asked.

“No. Yes,” he said. “There’s a lot that’s wrong. I can’t even begin to add it all up.”

Chapter 81

Soviet-occupied Germany - March 1949

They were alive.

Heinrich Peter Roth understood the remaining gritty streets and back alleys far better than the Soviet soldiers and Eastern Sector police who were looking for him. No one who was pursuing him for the shooting of ex-Colonel Sergei Kovalyov knew the name of the man they were looking for. Nor did they know the background of his companion, Anna Schroeder, as the couple eluded capture in the first days after their shooting.

They hid with friends in the Eastern Zone of Berlin for several days following the shooting. They ditched their Opel on the street and never learned what happened to it. They only knew it disappeared and had probably been stolen. Heinrich’s American dollars eventually financed a ride out of Berlin in the back of a covered truck. The driver, not knowing they were wanted, dropped the couple a kilometer from where Roth’s aunt and uncle lived.

They moved in one night with Roth’s aunt and uncle and stayed, never leaving the premises but living well outside the dragnet in Berlin during which police and soldiers went house to house. It had been dark the night of the shooting at Club Weimar. When the bullets flew, most people ran, they didn’t stop and stare or take photographs. Accounts of witnesses conflicted. From those who had been close to the shooting, Roth was either six feet or six-four. He had been blond or brown-haired. Or he had worn a hat. There had been a flurry of people running and shooting. No one knew. Same for the woman. She was a blonde and she had worked there. It turned out her papers were forged. An abused blonde with fake papers? There were as many of those in Berlin as there were soldiers. Such a description narrowed things down to more than ten thousand women in the Soviet Zone of Berlin.

There was another important factor to their escape and survival.

Kovalyov had been widely hated. Germans knew he had been one of the butchers of Demmin. Russians knew him as a thug and a gangster. For many, the world might not have been a better place without him, but it was an easier place. Sometimes military patrols looked for Anna and Heinrich and other times they didn’t. In the winter that followed, the trail froze over along with the weather.

The case remained open for Colonel Markgraf’s people. Some of the blood and particles of Kovalyov’s brain had sprayed onto his uniform. Increasingly, the police under Markgraf’s command were extended far beyond Berlin and throughout the Eastern Sector of the country, just as the Gestapo had been. So Markgraf had more than a passing interest in the case. A few pro-Soviet functionaries were sent to the local town halls to prowl through records to see what could be learned. But the ledgers were in disarray, many were missing, and the clerks and the people from the mortician’s office were not interested in assisting a Soviet inquiry.

The second week of March arrived. The brutal winter weather eased. A neighbor tipped Heinrich’s Uncle Kurt that a squad of Soviet soldiers was in the area. Someone had overheard a rumor that Kurt and Greta, his wife, had a younger couple living with them. The local police reported to the Soviet military commander now, so uniformed people were planning to visit Kurt to see what was what.

Anna and Heinrich departed that evening. One of Kurt’s friends who hated the Russians gave the couple a lift to the next town. The couple knew their next destination. Anna and Heinrich had frequently discussed their past and its sorrows. Anna often recalled fondly the remote spot in the woods that she and her sister had called unser geheimes Haus, our secret house, the obscure place in the remote woods north of Demmin where her parents had tried to get them to safety before Soviet troops had stopped them.

They set out on foot for the last fifty kilometers. They arrived at the location where Anna’s parents had been killed. She broke into tears, but they kept going. She knew the way. Roth bought food from a local farmer and Anna stayed out of sight to avoid any chance of being recognized. It was another winding, tricky route through the woods. Anna made a coded map for Heinrich so that he could come and go until he memorized the route, tree by tree, stone wall by stone wall, abandoned church by narrow stream.

They arrived there in late April, stayed, remained undiscovered, and pondered their next move. To both of them, it was clear that Soviet rule would be permanent in the Eastern Zone of Germany. To survive, they knew they would need to at least get to the Western Zone or at minimum to the Western Zone of Berlin.

“Do we know anyone there?” Anna asked.

“I knew a Major Lewis,” he said.

“I met him also,” Anna answered. “How would we contact him and would he help us?”

Roth did not know the answer to either question. But he did remember his best friend from cargo handling and hoped the man was still at Tempelhof. He would have to make the dangerous trip all the way back to Berlin to find out. Then from the deepest recesses of his memory, he remembered a single word that might be useful.

Centerfield.  He had forgotten what the term meant aside from the fact that it might be his key to survival.

Chapter 82

Bethesda, Maryland – April – May 1949

On April 2, a doctor admitted James Forrestal to Bethesda Naval Hospital with what was described formally as, “reactive depression.” News reports called him “worn out” and the diagnosis for public consumption was “operational fatigue.” As he stepped out of the limousine that had brought him, he looked like a ghost. He had lost twenty-two pounds in three months.

Forrestal looked up at the twenty-story building where he would be treated. He shook his head sadly. He spoke to a close friend and a doctor who had traveled with him. “I don’t expect to leave this place alive,” he said.

“Jim, everyone is here to help you,” his friend said.

“We’ll see,” Forrestal answered sullenly.

The administration assigned Forrestal to the VIP suite at the top of Bethesda's tower, although psychiatric patients were normally quartered in a nearby one-story building. For one who had lived in great wealth, his hospital room was simply furnished. There was a narrow bed, a straight-back chair, an Oriental carpet on the dark tile floor, a rotating fan on the wall by a closed window. Closed and locked. Three windows in the room, all securely locked. Across the hall was a tiny kitchen, with locked drawers – no knives, nothing sharp — with white tile walls, stainless steel, and sturdy glass cabinets. There, above a radiator, was a half-open window.

Naval corpsmen kept round-the-clock shifts on Forrestal in his room. Physicians also kept a regular eye on him. The doctors noted that his anxiety surged on the days when Drew Pearson, the antagonistic political commentator, had his radio show. Pearson’s show was very popular among people who agreed with it, ridiculed by those who disagreed. Pearson had been attacking Forrestal for years, often recklessly and personally.

Recently, Pearson’s attacks had increased in their savagery, even though Forrestal was out of office. Even within the walls of a psychiatric hospital, Jim Forrestal couldn’t escape his enemies, real and imagined.

The world would not leave the man alone.

Chapter 83

New York City - May 12, 1949

As the Pan American Airlines Stratocruiser from London-Heathrow approached Idlewild in New York, Bill Cochrane peered out the window at the cityscape of New York City, its skyscrapers, and its bridges. The sight always thrilled him. In the distance in the harbor, he could see the Statue of Liberty. He had known returning soldiers who had cried at the sight of “the lady in the harbor,” having never thought they would return home alive. Cochrane understood the sentiment, perhaps better than ever before.

He and his family sat three across in the roomy aircraft. They adjusted their seatbelts. Increasingly protective of his daughter, he helped Caroline buckle up. She sat between her parents. This was her first trip in an aircraft. Fortunately, the eight-hour trip had been uneventful.

Cochrane reached across Caroline and held Laura’s hand. Then he withdrew it, gave his daughter’s hand a squeeze, and let his hand eventually settle on his lap. While New York was on the other side of the window and while they were on their final approach, Berlin haunted him.               He had no right to be anything but pleased, he told himself. But the human cost, the loss of Anna and Heinrich, as far as he knew, still troubled him. Equally unsettling was the ongoing situation with Jim Forrestal, his former big boss, who had okayed his mission and his ability to operate under the cover of the airlift. Another little hitch had also developed in the weeks before departure. The physical challenges of working a farm were more than Bettina and Horst had anticipated. Beatrice, never an easy person to please, was already looking for a younger couple.

The aircraft landed. The roaring rumble of the engines, the bump of the tires on the runway, and the skidding, bouncing halt reminded him of the Big Lift. Well, he had been part of it, he reminded himself. It was ongoing and the world was rallying behind it.

He and his family passed through customs in New York. But when they reached the concourse of the airport, Cochrane saw a flurry of activity around a large newsstand.

“Wait here with Caroline,” Bill said to Laura. “Something has happened.”

Something had.

Cochrane bought a copy of the tabloid New York Mirror, the only paper remaining at the newsstand. The newsagent had otherwise been stripped clean of New York papers.

His eyes widened. While he and his family had been in flight over the Atlantic Ocean, the Soviet Union made a remarkable announcement. There it was in screaming bold letters on the front page.

The Soviet Union had badly miscalculated the will of the Western democracies working together. Stalin had abandoned its blockade of Berlin. In the German capital, people were dancing in the streets.

Cochrane turned to an inside page and read the account, though he knew the inside story probably better than the reporter. The counter-blockade had had a crippling impact on the Soviet Sector of Germany. The drying up of coal and steel shipments to the East had seriously hindered industrial development in the Soviet Zone. And by this time, the United States and Great Britain had flown in more than a quarter of a million supplies to keep Berlin alive and free. Buried in the article was something else: President Truman announced that the Lift would continue into September to make sure Berlin was well supplied for the winter. There was no point to start trusting the Russians now.

Over the next few days, the first British and American motor convoys would load quickly, arm themselves, and drive through one hundred ten miles of the Eastern Zone of Germany to reach West Berlin. They would be monitored along the way by units of the Red Army. Many of the Red Army soldiers were barely out of their teens. Some would wave at the Americans and some of the Americans would wave back. There were no serious incidents and no efforts to impede the goods brought in from the West. The world had taken a step back from a third world war.

Cochrane would forever remember this afternoon and the news that waited for them as they returned from England. He walked through the crowded airport to Laura and showed her the front page of the newspaper.

“We won,” he said.

Chapter 84

Bethesda, Maryland – May 21 & 22, 1949

James Forrestal spent a month quietly confined to the Bethesda Naval Hospital. He passed Sunday, May 21, in a tranquil state of mind, eating a large steak for lunch. Special suicide-watch restrictions had been lifted, and he had been given back his robe with a sash belt. There was even an upbeat event on the calendar that Jim Forrestal was looking forward to. Henry Forrestal was preparing to have his brother discharged and taken to a restful location in the country on May 22, the next day.

The former defense secretary’s regimen of tranquilizers had been reduced. He declined the one pill that he was offered Saturday night. He stayed up late, reading. A regular corpsman whom Forrestal liked had just gone off watch at midnight and was replaced by a new man. The new man checked in on Forrestal at 1:45 AM. Or at least that was what was on the official reports.

Who knew what really happened? Now it was Sunday, May 22, 1949, the reports continued, the day of Pearson's shrill weekly broadcast, the half-hour of radio which had become so agitating to Forrestal. According to reports in the next day’s extra editions, Forrestal was reading a poetry anthology that he had loved at Princeton. He began to copy it down from Chorus from Ajax by Sophocles.

He stopped after the first syllable of the word "nightingale" and — apparently during the guard's five-minute break — walked out of his room, across a hall, into the adjoining kitchen. He took off the sash from his robe and tied one end to the radiator under the kitchen window. He tied the other end around his neck. He undid a protective screen and climbed out the window.

There were no known witnesses.

According to the coroner's report several weeks later, Forrestal probably jumped out the window and hung for some seconds suspended. The report also notes scuff marks on the cement work underneath the window, indicating reflexive kicking, or possibly terrified second thoughts. Or perhaps a struggle of some sort, much as Jan Masaryk had once left as evidence of a struggle.

The sash ripped away. Forrestal plunged thirteen floors, landing on an asphalt-and-crushed-stone surface of a third-floor passageway roof.

When police found his bloody, battered body, the sash was still tightly tied around his neck. Odd. The front of his skull was crushed, unusual considering how he landed, his abdomen burst open, possibly from the impact, perhaps not, and his lower left leg severed, most likely from impact against the outside of the building as he plunged.

His Rolex was still running.

He would not be discharged and join his brother in the country.

Death had been instantaneous.

Chapter 85

Berlin – May 23, 1949

Sgt. Pearson was waiting for Major Pickford when the latter returned to his office from lunch. It was a busy Saturday at Tempelhof. The mood among the workers at the airport was high. They felt they deserved much of the credit for breaking the blockade and no one was in a mood to dissuade them.

Pearson saluted the major as Pickford approached. Pickford returned the salute. “Waiting for me, Sergeant?” Pickford asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Something we need to address?”

“Yes, sir. In private, sir.”

Pickford nodded toward his office door. He unlocked the door and led the sergeant in, closing the door behind him.

They entered Pickford’s office. Pickford took his place behind his desk. “At ease, Jerome,” he said.

“Thank you, sir.”

“Talk to me,” Pickford said.

A hesitation. Then, “Centerfielder, sir,” he said, giving the telex code for Otto Kern. “Kern heard from Roth.”

“Roth is alive?” Pickford said.

“Apparently, sir,” he said. “He sent a message to Kern through the café operator across the terminal. Helmut, sir. Helmut’s a conduit for a lot of the DPs and the German cargo workers.”

Pickford leaned back in his chair. In some ways, Roth was more convenient if he were dead and out of the picture. On the other hand, as Bill Cochrane always said, there were a million uses for such a man. As he thought about it while Sgt. Pearson stood silently before him, Pickford immediately warmed up to the idea of assisting Roth.

“Okay,” Pickford said. “So?”

“Roth wants to leave Germany with his woman,” Pearson said. “That’s the message Centerfielder received. He’s hiding somewhere north of here. We get the idea the location is rural.”

“Okay? So we go get him? He will be useful in the time ahead. How do we find him?”

“There’s a coded map, sir,” Pearson said. “I have a copy of part of it. Roth will only meet with his former officer here, however. He says informants are all over and he’ll only deal with Major Lewis.”

Pickford laughed, not a merry laugh, but a rueful one.

“‘Lewis’ is gone,” he said. “Not available. No longer works here.”

Sgt. Pearson stood and waited. Pickford looked him up and down.

“Jerome,” Pickford asked next. “Remind me again. Where did you grow up?”

“Long Island City, New York, sir.”

“Is that near Manhattan?”
“It’s across the East River, sir.”

“So you’re right across the water from all those big buildings with the rich people?”

“I could reach out and touch them, Major. If I wanted to.”

“You got folks back in Long Island City?”

“A mom, a dad, and two sisters.”

“Miss them?  When was the last time you were home on leave?” Pickford asked.

“Not since I got here in 1947, sir.”

“Go pack a travel bag, Jerome,” Pickford said. “I got an assignment for you.”

Chapter 86

Washington and Arlington, Va. – May 23 & 24, 1949

At the time of James Forrestal’s death, Jo Forrestal and one of her two sons were in France, looking for a favorable spot where the former secretary of defense could recuperate from his depression. Secretary of State Dean Acheson was also in France, having flown to Paris in President Truman's plane for a meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers.

The president's airplane, The Independence, was placed at the disposal of Mrs. Forrestal. She flew back to Washington with her son. They arrived at National Airport in the early morning hours of May twenty-third. Mr. Forrestal was to be given a state funeral. Secretary of Defense Johnson designated Maj. Gen. Hobart R. Gay, commander of the Military District of Washington, as his representative, responsible for planning the funeral ceremonies.

The planning took place on May 23 – the same day that the Federal Republic of Germany, later to be known as West Germany, was formally proclaimed — and May 24. The funeral was kept as simple as possible, in keeping with the wishes of the Forrestal family and those of Mr. Forrestal. Services and burial were scheduled to take place in Arlington National Cemetery. The gravesite was in Section 30, not far from the grave of William Howard Taft.

Even though attendance was to be limited to relatives, personal friends, and the official government family, the number of persons expected expanded quickly. Still in shock from Forrestal’s death, which he considered suspicious, Bill Cochrane received an invitation to attend. Laura was invited too but chose to remain with their daughter in New York.

On the morning of May 25, Rear Adm. John E. Gingrich, a long-time friend and aide to Mr. Forrestal, accompanied the former secretary's casket in the hearse from the Naval Hospital to the Memorial Gate of the cemetery. The military escort was already in position at the gate when the hearse arrived about 10:50 AM. The U.S. Navy Band was on tour, so to lead the procession, the U.S. Naval Academy Band filled in.

After the body bearers transferred the casket to the caisson, the funeral procession moved into the cemetery. The Forrestal family, clergy, and honorary pallbearers – which included President Truman, former Secretary of State George Marshall, and General of the Army Eisenhower — did not accompany the cortege but awaited the procession at the amphitheater. As the column proceeded to the slow cadence of funeral marches played by the band, the 3d Infantry Saluting Battery fired nineteen guns, spacing the rounds so that the last one was fired as the caisson reached the west entrance of the amphitheater at 11:15 AM.

All persons attending the service in the amphitheater had been seated before the procession arrived. An atmosphere of shock and sorrow gripped the proceedings. There were twenty-five hundred guests, among whom were President and Mrs. Harry S. Truman and their daughter, Margaret, Vice President Alben W. Barkley, members of the Cabinet, Congress, and Supreme Court, the highest military officials of all the armed forces, and representatives of the diplomatic corps.

Bill Cochrane found a single seat in the fifth row on the southeast side. He spotted many men and women whom he knew socially and others whom he knew from the American intelligence community. The few that he acknowledged or who acknowledged him exchanged only glances and looks, no words. Members of the public were permitted to fill unoccupied seats once all invited guests were seated. Outside the amphitheater, some five thousand additional onlookers stood behind ropes to watch the arrival of the procession, the largest seen by official Washington since the funeral of Franklin Roosevelt in 1945. The parallels were unmistakable. Jim Forrestal had been a special administrative assistant to FDR in 1940, before becoming undersecretary of the U.S. Navy. Forrestal might have become president, but it was not meant to be.

After the body bearers lifted Forrestal's casket from the caisson, Bishop Wallace Conkling of the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago and Rear Adm. William N. Thomas, the Navy Chief of Chaplains, led the way into the amphitheater.

As the Army Band played the hymn Lead Kindly Light, the clergy and body bearers escorted Mr. Forrestal's casket around the colonnade to the apse. In the apse, which was shielded from the sun by a green canopy, waited the Forrestal family, President Truman, Vice President Barkley, and the honorary pallbearers.

Bishop Conkling presided over a twenty-minute service. After the benediction, the Army Band played a hymn, God of Our Fathers, while the body bearers took the casket out the west entrance and secured it to the caisson.

As the procession formed and moved toward the gravesite for the private service, the Army Band played Onward Christian Soldiers. The audience remained in the amphitheater until the cortege had left and President Truman had departed. Bill Cochrane, with the consent of Jo Forrestal, continued with the small crowd to the graveside. Along with a small group of Forrestal’s family and friends, there were maybe fifty individuals. The Marine Band played two of Mr. Forrestal's favorite selections during the final rites: Handel's Largo and Rimsky-Korsakov's Hymn to the Sun. Cochrane couldn’t miss the irony. Two composers: a Russian and a German.

Bishop Conkling read the Episcopal service. The U.S. Army Third Infantry Battery fired a nineteen-gun salute. A U.S. Marine firing squad delivered three volleys. The ceremony concluded when one bugler blew taps, and a second bugler sounded the notes as an echo.

As the echoing notes faded, the service concluded.

Cochrane stood for several minutes. He stayed long enough to watch the casket being lowered into the ground. By that time, those gathered included only a few old Forrestal friends from Princeton and his immediate family. Cochrane turned and walked away, leaving them to their private grief.

Across the street from Union Station, he found a bar and got good and drunk - Jameson Irish whisky, twelve years old, in deference to Jim. Then he caught a late-afternoon train back to New York. Grief and anger overwhelmed him, never a healthy combination.

Chapter 87

New York – May 1949

That same evening, Bill Cochrane arrived in New York City at Pennsylvania Station at 7:12 PM, then walked all the way to his home on East Seventy-Second Street. He was fully sober again by the time he arrived at his apartment door, used his key to turn the lock, opened the door, and walked in.

The light in the foyer was on, which was unusual. The first thing he saw was an unfamiliar umbrella in the stand by the door. He also smelled dinner on the stove. Probably a roast chicken. His mind processed in overdrive. The umbrella was plain and dark, military issue, U.S. Army most likely, with a sturdy handle. It was dry. There was no accumulation of rainwater in the stand, meaning it had probably been there for a while.

He looked up. He didn’t need to sense a visitor. He knew one was there and he knew it was a man, probably a young one, by the rugged umbrella.

“Laura?” he called.

Laura came swiftly around the corner from the living area. “Ah, at last! I was worried.”

His wife came to him, embraced him, and kissed him. “We have an important visitor, Bill.”

“Who?”

“Someone you know.”

Several paces behind Laura, a sturdy man in his mid-twenties loomed into the doorway from the living room. Handsome. Sandy-brown hair. Broad shoulders. The man wore civilian clothes. Cochrane, still holding his wife, stared at the man in surprise. He recognized the face, knew it was friendly, but couldn’t immediately peg the man out of context. It had been a hell of a long day, and this was making it longer.

Then he nailed it.

“Sgt. Pearson?” he said, astonished. A beat, then, “Wonderful to see you. But what in heaven’s name are you doing here?” Cochrane asked.

“I’ve come to get you, sir. You’re needed.”

Apprehensively, “Needed where?” Cochrane asked.

“Berlin, sir.”

A heavy five seconds passed. Then, “What? You’ve got to be joking!” Cochrane answered.

“No, sir. Very serious, sir. General Clay’s orders, acting on an urgent request from Major Pickford, who assigned me to escort you, sir. Military transit from Newark tomorrow morning at oh eight hundred hours.”

“He sent you all the way from Germany?”

“Affirmative, sir. I’m carrying written correspondence from General Clay.” Then, “Centerfielder, sir,” he added.

Stupefied, Cochrane stood in the foyer of his home trying to make sense of everything. Laura spoke next. “Sgt. Pearson explained what this is all about,” she said. “He told me as much as he could reveal. I invited the sergeant to have dinner here and stay over with us. He can use the sofa. That way you’ll have an easier getaway early tomorrow morning.”

“I haven’t even read the correspondence yet,” Cochrane said.

“When you do, you’ll understand,” Laura said. “Bill, you need to go back to Berlin.”

Chapter 88

New York to Berlin – Late May 1949

Traveling in civilian attire, Bill Cochrane and Jerome Pearson, the major and the sergeant, flew from New York to London the next day, stayed over in guest quarters at the American embassy, then flew to Wiesbaden. There, they were pleased to discover that Olson and Taylor would be their pilot and co-pilot to Tempelhof. It almost seemed calm, the final leg of the journey. The Yaks no longer buzzed the American planes. An element of excitement and exhilaration had been lost, much to Cochrane’s relief.

It was an odd sort of homecoming for Bill Cochrane in Berlin. Not only did he recognize the pilots and the flight crews, but they acknowledged him as well. What he did, why he was there, was not something any of them could have readily explained.

Major Pickford didn’t receive him like a long-lost brother, but he did have a smile for him anyway and a solid handshake. So maybe he was like a long-lost cousin. While there were some Russians, Pickford explained privately in his office, who were still furious about the death of ex-Colonel Kovalyov, the angry people were the black-market people and profiteers of war surplus. While those people could be a force to be reckoned with, they did not have the punch of the Red Army behind them.

One needed to be careful with them, but they weren’t high alert. Colonel Markgraf’s people remained a different story. Illicit club, black market or not, either Anna or Heinrich or both had committed a homicide, and it fell under the jurisdiction of the police in the Soviet Sector. An arrest would be made if the perpetrators could be apprehended.

“You realize, of course, that there’s arguably another course we could take with Roth and his lady friend,” Pickford continued as he spoke to Cochrane in his office. “It’s not what I would suggest, but I know how the game is played.”

“What’s that?” Cochrane asked warily.

“We could turn them over to the Soviets,” Pickford said. “In exchange for a heavy favor, for the release of other people being held, for future considerations. It’s just a thought.”

Cochrane felt the blood rising to his face. “You’ve got to be damned well kidding me!” he said. “First, I wouldn’t be alive today if Anna and Heinrich hadn’t taken out Kovalyov.”

“You wouldn’t have been in his line of fire if the girl hadn’t shot at him.”

“All the same,” Cochrane said. “I wouldn’t sell out an agent like Roth in a million years. Let’s say it’s against my religion, all right? If we don’t protect the people on the ground who have been loyal to us, we’re no better than the damned Russians. Isn’t that why we brought Frau Schneidhuber out?” He paused. “I’m offended by your very question.”

Pickford leaned back. “Good. Glad to hear I pissed you off. I feel the same way.” He paused. “Let me just mention, if the Western Sector of Berlin remains a free city, and it appears that it might, we’re going to have to enhance our intelligence role here. Interested in coming back in the future?”

Cochrane laughed. “Keep a wife and family in an international hot spot?” he asked. “You making a joke? Is that what you’re doing?”

“More or less,” Pickford said.

“Okay, listen. There’s a new secretary of defense and who knows what will happen in Washington. So I’ll think about it. How’s that?”

“Good enough,” Pickford said. “Something else you should think about: the area where you’re going to retrieve Roth and Schroeder is crawling with local militias. Pro-Soviet and some die-hard pro-Hitlers. You and Kern will be taking three vehicles and will need to walk the final kilometer from what I know. You’ll have four of my Balkan guys with you to watch your back. Fair enough?”

“Sometimes, Pickford,” Cochrane said, “I admire the way you think.”

“Remember that in the future,” Pickford said. “It’s like the old-fashioned Indian country in Oklahoma,” he added. “Watch yourself at all times.”

“I’ll remember that.”

They departed the next morning, Kern leading the way in the advance car because he knew the route to Demmin, Cochrane following, each with a bodyguard from the southeastern section of Europe, and two thugs smoking and sipping brandy in the third car, a reinforced vehicle with rifles in the trunk. The three cars separated themselves by about fifty to seventy meters as they drove. They arrived in Demmin in the early afternoon and then continued to where the woods started in the northeast section of the city – the escape route that Anna and her sister had taken in 1945 after their parents had been executed. The bridges of the town had been rebuilt.

At the edge of the woods, Kern and Cochrane set off on foot. It struck Cochrane as odd that having flown four thousand miles from New York to Berlin, he would now finish his business on foot. But that’s how it happened. After a walk of fifty minutes, they went through a final maze of rocks, nearly invisible paths, streams, and stands of trees, and found what appeared to be the wall of a cabin, disguised by foliage, hard against the side of a rock formation.

The door opened. Roth stood before them with a pistol, then grinned.

Schließlich! he said. “Finally!”

Roth tucked the pistol in his belt. Anna appeared huddled behind him.

There were hugs all around. Then the two fugitives packed quickly and they were off before the evening gave way to night. They marched back to the three waiting cars. Kern drove the lead on the return to Berlin. Cochrane drove with Anna and Heinrich. They saw no militias and only one Soviet patrol. The patrol paid them no attention.

The four escorts left before Kern and Cochrane returned to Tempelhof, but Bill Cochrane and his partner returned with their quarry to Major Pickford. Cochrane might have preferred to stay the night in Berlin, but Pickford was insistent that the travelers keep moving.

A Gooney Bird was waiting, ready to follow what appeared to be a normal flight path out of Tempelhof but prepared to take an in-flight diversion from Wiesbaden to Cambridge.

Vic Marino was the co-pilot. The pilot was Lt. Willian Lafferty who had unknowingly flown the first flight of the Berlin Airlift almost eleven months earlier. Cochrane appreciated the irony: the man who had flown the first leg of The Big Lift, was the same aviator who would set him down gently on English soil at the end of his assignment in Berlin.

CHAPTER 89

Washington D.C. – July 1949

A week after arriving back in New York, his superiors at the FBI directed him to meet with an intelligence officer in Washington. New agencies were popping up all over the capital and those in the community wanted to know what Cochrane had to say.

Bill Cochrane’s defense department contact was an intelligence officer named Lawrence deWinter whose office was in a nondescript converted garage in Foggy Bottom, just off 17th Street NW and a few blocks west of the White House.

Bill Cochrane had been through debriefings before, and this one was as straightforward as those things went. He arrived before noon on a day for which plans included a short walk over to the Mall by two-thirty PM to meet an old friend and draw the 1948-49 assignment in Berlin to a close.

DeWinter was slim and balding, with pale skin, a thin brown beard, and an intent, intellectual manner. He met Cochrane with a handshake in a second-floor office where the shades were drawn on a window that overlooked the Potomac, a canal path, and Virginia on the other side. DeWinter came across as a little formal, slightly reserved. There was no sign on the building and no name on his office door. Cochrane knew only an address and a room number and that the man was an intelligence professional like himself. The office was as secure as any, and he could speak freely. The link had come from Forrestal’s successor, after all, and Cochrane had no choice but to react to it respectfully.

There was a handshake and some small talk with deWinter as the two men settled into deWinter’s office. Then there were some questions and answers, but by and large, the results of the operation in Berlin were laudable.

Cochrane had guided Bettina Schneidhuber to England and had brought her romantic partner of many years along in the bargain. Dulles’s debt to her – and the debt of the United States — could now be marked as paid.

The tenure in Bath of Bettina and Horst had been brief but they had now been set up in a comfortable flat in Cambridge not far from the university and not far, as it turned out, from 30 Orchard Street and The Hero of the Thames.

Through Cochrane’s contacts, Bettina did some tutoring in German language and literature for students at the university. Horst mostly stayed at home and kept his mouth shut. He had a frightened look in his eyes when he heard the planes overhead or saw military people from Alconbury. But he was getting used to his new life and was grateful for it.

The German playwright Bertolt Brecht, fresh from testifying in front of the House Unamerican Activities Committee, had made a triumphant return to East Berlin, the new worker’s paradise, earlier in 1949 where he had established his theatre company, the Berliner Ensemble, triggering a new postwar interest in his work. A theater group in Cambridge received some friendly advice from an anonymous source that one Frau Swenson, now living locally, was an expert on the German playwright and poet. The group reached out and hired her as a technical advisor for a new production of Mother Courage.

“Imagine that!” Laura said to her husband when they received the news of Bettina’s good fortune. “How lucky for Bettina.”

“And how fortunate for the people of Cambridge,” Cochrane said. “They will quickly learn how charming Herr Brecht is, as well as how didactic and boring is his work.”

Anna Schroeder and Heinrich Roth remained “disappeared” from the face of the earth, presumed dead. They might just as well have been the two corpses that were fished out of the Landwehrkanal and officially that’s what they were. But they were now Alyssa and Stefan Cerny, DPs who had come to England after the war.

They had new British passports to prove it. They married, lived quietly on Beatrice’s farm outside Bath after Horst and Bettina had moved on, and quickly became the new, efficient managers of her farm. They were known to MI5 and MI6, not by their full background and not by their real names but as Alyssa and Stefan. From time to time, agents came by with questions about East Germany and postwar Soviet military, places and people, a subject upon which they were frighteningly knowledgeable. In their new role, as well as their cover occupations, they kept busy. A modest monthly stipend from MI6 helped.

Olson and Taylor married. They and Marino rotated back stateside when their tours in Berlin were over. As for Bill Cochrane’s legacy in Berlin this time, he left Major Pickford the elements of a fine, small, postwar network of spies and intelligence gathering. Petty corruption rose to a form of art.

As American intelligence increased after the war, budgets expanded for covert activity. Five hundred dollars a month was allotted to Major Pickford’s street people. For fifty dollars a month in Deutschmarks. Vogelsang and Keller shared their access to tens of thousands of clerical records in East Germany while for the same amount each month Hunsicker and his cohorts would report on anything interesting pertaining to medical units. A few extra dollars in various directions equally corrupted the new Stasi headquarters where eavesdropping devices had been so carefully planted by a former cargo unloader with a degree in electricity.

Deiter Hoffman, the onetime bumbling street cop, rose in the East German police and was on the tab for a similar amount. Young Sgt. Pearson earned two more stripes and rose to Master Sergeant a few weeks after Cochrane’s departure. He circulated among the DPs and was a key recruiter of local talent. Kern also stayed. He was the cutout or go-to for all of Pickford’s operations, in addition to his fine work dropping electronic bugs into special places.

DeWinter was more than impressed and put forth the hope that Bill Cochrane could be talked into going back to Berlin by 1950, essentially the same suggestion put forth by Major Pickford. For the time being, however, Cochrane was having little to say about it. He was happy to be back on American soil and out of such a dangerous trade.

Or so he said.

Chapter 90

Washington D.C. – July 1949

Recalling all of this as he walked out of the sorrowful building in Foggy Bottom on that hot July day, Cochrane had the notion that this might have been his last assignment abroad and that he might never see Berlin again. If so, he reasoned, so be it. He was content to have as his main assignment in life to be a good wage earner, a faithful, dutiful husband, and a devoted father. Those assignments were no small tasks.

He was grateful to be alive. Millions of less fortunate men of his generation were not. He was grateful to be American in the middle of the twentieth century, to be blessed with good health and freedom from any of the horrible war injuries that would define the lives of so many. He felt, he realized, humbled by his many experiences and his good fortune over having survived so much.

He was still rummaging through all of this as he walked from Foggy Bottom to the Mall. But he realized that beneath the surface, something was gnawing at him, something left over and unspoken from his debriefing that morning.

It took him several minutes to pinpoint it. But it was right there in the forefront of his mind when he reached his destination, the third bench from Constitution Avenue on the north end of the Mall. A man whom he hadn’t noticed because he was mentally four thousand miles away spoke.

“Hello, Meatball,” said the man.

And there before him was his rendezvous agent, Irv Goff.

They greeted each other warmly. They began to talk as they walked eastward toward Georgetown. There was banter, stuff going back and forth, catching up on personal notes. They had not seen each other since that day in London many months ago when Cochrane had departed for occupied Berlin. Finally, noticing Cochrane’s hesitancy, Goff asked what was on his mind.

“Nothing of real interest, Irv. Just a lot going on, stuff that’s unresolved.”

“Bullshit, Meatball. There’s something. You’re holding back.”

“Okay, you’re right. There’s something that still bothers me, Irv,” he said. “Jim Forrestal.”

There was an awkward hesitation, then Goff continued. “What about him?”

“Jumped, pushed, or fell?” Cochrane said. “I’m not convinced that he actually committed suicide.”

“Well, he’s dead all the same, isn’t he?”

“No suicide note, for example,” Cochrane said. “Wouldn’t an articulate, erudite, neat man like that have left a note?”

“How can you propose logic on a mind that’s not acting rationally, Bill? Look, the official report said -”

“I don’t believe the official report,” Cochrane replied sharply. “I did some digging because the death bothered me. I liked Jim. I considered him a friend and a damned decent man, regardless of personal politics. Same as you. I think Senator Vandenberg is a gasbag, but I agree with him that politics should end at the shoreline.”

“What are you proposing with this?” Goff asked.

“There’s an explanation that Jim was reading that poem and broke off in the middle of it. He left the room, crossed to the kitchen, and tried to hang himself with the sash of the bathrobe. The sash broke and he plunged. Suicide. Very convenient.”

“What’s wrong with the story?”

“Everything, damn it! I don’t believe a word of it, and I particularly don’t believe ‘official stories’.”

Cochrane continued, unleashing a rant.

“Listen, Irv. The death was marked a suicide before there was even an investigation! The young naval kid testified that Forrestal was sleeping when he checked the room five minutes before his death,” Cochrane said. “There was nothing on his desk and he wasn’t writing anything. That’s what the kid said. That’s what he testified in the official inquiry. But what was in the newspapers was different.  Jim’s brother thinks he was murdered, and I do, too.”

“The inquiry is sealed. How did you see the testimony?”

“I went and found the hospital kid myself. That’s what he told me.”

Cochrane continued as Goff’s eyes narrowed.

Angry now, Cochrane continued. “Why is it that when Jan Masaryk goes out a window, we assume the Soviets pushed him. When Forrestal goes out one, we assume the opposite,” Cochrane said. “We also know that Jim sanctioned hit squads, eastern Europeans from what I hear, and from what I’ve seen, tried to implement pro-Western policy where necessary. There’s no damn security in the psychiatric hospital. How do we know some squad working for the other side didn’t come in and return the favor?”

“So it’s contagious, huh, Bill? The craziness?” Goff said. “You worked damned hard, your sabbatical got compromised, and now you’re spouting the same crap that Jim and his wife, Jo, kept saying.”

Cochrane stopped walking and turned sharply

“Am I? Or am I onto something, Irv? Maybe there’s something to it!” Cochrane snapped.

Goff studied his shoes for a second and didn’t respond.

Cochrane lost his temper. “Listen to me, Irv, goddamn it!” he shouted, practically nose to nose. “Trotsky finally gets it with an ice ax in 1940, after the NKVD thugs failed to find a window high enough for him. Masaryk goes out a third-story window in Prague and Jim Forrestal goes out a sixteenth-floor, narrow window in Bethesda. And another how-many-dozen anti-Soviet politicians or writers have joined them going out of windows and off balconies? No, listen!” he said as Goff tried to interrupt and calm him down. “Someone who hated Jim’s worldview murdered him! There are Red fingerprints all over this and everyone’s looking the other way. Try to convince me otherwise!”

“And maybe you’ll go out a window yourself if you don’t keep your mouth shut.”

Cochrane shoved furiously at his friend. “What the goddamned hell does that, mean, Irv?” he demanded. “Tell me that!” he barked, turning on his friend and grabbing him by the lapels of his jacket. “What the damned hell did you mean by that?”
They stood facing each other on a sunny, warm summer day in the American capital, neither backing up an inch, Bill Cochrane’s eyes alive with fire, Goff’s powerful hands on Cochrane’s wrists to restrain him.

Gradually, Cochrane relaxed his grip on Goff’s jacket.

After several seconds, Goff answered. “I didn’t mean anything by that, Bill. I made a bad joke. I apologize. In the end, Jim was a good man. A loyal American. You have a right to entertain your doubts and ask your questions. People, the FBI maybe, the intelligence community, should look hard into it. You’re right. I’m sorry, okay?”

Bill Cochrane drew a breath and backed off. He remained wordless.

“Easy, okay, Bill?” Goff said. “Easy does it. We see things. We hear things. There’s only so much we can do.”

Cochrane finally calmed.

“I’m sorry, too, Irv,” he said. “I shouldn’t have popped off. Let’s get some lunch.”

“Sounds good,” Goff said.

“But why would a man about to kill himself begin to copy an ancient Greek poem and not complete it?” Cochrane asked as they walked. “Got an answer to that?”

“Nope,” Goff said.

“I’m going to wonder about that for the rest of my life,” Cochrane said.

As they walked, Goff placed a supporting hand on Cochrane’s shoulder. Above them, the air traffic into National Airport continued. An airplane passed over them with a distinctive roar.

“That’s a DC-3 or a C-47,” Cochrane said without looking up, “depending on whether it’s civilian or military. I can tell without looking. A plane’s engine noise is like a man’s fingerprints. No two are the same. I’ll recognize that sound for the rest of my life.”

“So will the people of Berlin, Meatball,” Goff said. “So will the people of Berlin.”

Epilogue

New York City - November 10, 1989, 2:29 PM

On the speaker’s dais at New York’s Overseas Press Club, Bill Cochrane glanced into his audience. He found his wife, Laura, and his daughter seated on the aisle of the third row on the right side. Time had flown by, both today and in the recent decades. Caroline, all grown up now, had recently celebrated her twentieth-fifth-class reunion from university. As her father’s eye found her, she tapped gently at her wristwatch. It was a family joke that Bill Cochrane could talk forever given the opportunity and a choice subject.

Laura, seated next to her daughter, suppressed a smile. Her husband’s frequent mentions of Cambridge and the West Country of England had brought back many memories.

Today had given him that opportunity. The airlift brought it out of him.

He moved toward his final words.

“After eleven months, the success of the British-American mission was a continuing embarrassment to Joseph Stalin and an overwhelming triumph for the Allied forces,” Bill Cochrane declared. “President Truman, elected for a second term, emerged as the Western strong man of the Cold War. Communism in America stopped in its tracks and the Truman administration stopped it in Berlin.  All told, the airlift delivered close to two million tons of essential food and fuel to the people of West Berlin. It was impossible to do, but the Big Lift did it anyway.”

Now Laura tapped on her watch. The two women in Cochrane’s life exchanged knowing smiles.

“What could have been the start of World War III turned out to be one of history’s greatest humanitarian gestures,” Cochrane said as he moved his gaze from Laura and Caroline back to his audience. “While Berlin remained divided for four decades, the airlift remains an uplifting chapter in the city’s tumultuous past. It was the first battle of the cold war, and it was won by the West. Britain and America can be damned proud of what they did in Berlin.” He paused. “Ah,” he said, “I could tell you such great stories of what went on behind the scenes: tales, anecdotes, and intrigues within the larger picture of The Lift. But I won’t. I’m receiving important signals from the two people who matter to me most. My time for today is up.”

Cochrane’s audience rose and applauded with enthusiasm, not just for his talk but also for the Lift, itself. Laura and Caroline came to him as he stepped down from the speaker’s dais and hung around as he informally fielded questions from those who had the time to stay.

One question was tricky. He was asked, as an intelligence officer, if he had ever returned to Berlin in the years that followed, a time when the Western intelligence communities had a heavy presence in that city. He declined to answer the inquiry directly. But he did mention that Laura and Caroline, who had been with him in those ensuing years, did now speak excellent German.

They even had Berlin accents.

THE END

Author’s Note

For three hundred and twenty-two days in 1948 and 1949, the Soviet Union blocked all access to West Berlin – except the air. One hundred and one fatalities were recorded as a result of the Air Lift, which included forty British citizens and thirty-one Americans. Seventeen American and eight British aircraft crashed during the operation causing the majority of the deaths.

Regular flights to Tempelhof Airport ended in 2008, just short of sixty years after the end of the Big Lift. A few people who were children at the time, today remember the Lift and the dedicated men and women who flew it and supported it. Most of the immediate participants have receded into history along with the Lift itself.

Since 2008, the Tempelhof airfield has been a quiet, open space in the middle of Berlin. Today, the city’s free citizens go there to jog, relax in the open air, read a book, tap at their cell phones, skate, or have a picnic. The place has atmosphere as well as history.

There are three identical airlift memorials in Germany. The memorial in Berlin stands at a location named Der Platz der Luftbrücke where the Tempelhof airfield used to be. The airports in Celle and Frankfurt am Main also have memorials. The original memorial in Tempelhof was dedicated in 1951. The replicas in Frankfurt am Main and Celle, where bombers loaded with food and supplies also took off, were unveiled in 1985 and 1988.

The structures were designed by Eduard Ludwig (1906 – 1960), a German architect. He was once a student at the Bauhaus design school. He later worked with notable architects from the school. The curved concrete monuments have three claws facing westward to symbolize the three air corridors and the three Allied occupying forces. The design evokes a hungry hand reaching up toward the sky. The hand faces westward from where humanitarian help came, day and night, from the people of the Western democracies who wished to keep Berlin alive and free. The names of those who died are inscribed at the base of the structures.

Berlin Airlift Memorial at Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport.

The Airlift Monument at Frankfurt, flanked by aircraft which flew
during the Lift, a C-47 in the foreground.

Noel Hynd

August 14, 2021