Rising Sun

CHAPTER 14

AMANDA AND TIM HEARD THE POLICE SIRENS AND THE SCREAMS as they left the little restaurant. As they turned the corner they saw a crowd of sailors and a bunch of Mexicans dressed in exaggerated outfits that were referred to as zoot suits. The two sides were brawling with fists, clubs, knives, and broken bottles. The zoot suits were a type of uniform worn by young Mexicans to show they were tough. With extremely wide lapels, stuffed shoulders, and baggy pants, they were a caricature of a man’s business suit and, in Tim’s opinion, looked ridiculous. Amanda agreed and had laughed when she’d first seen them lounging on street corners.

Dane was in uniform and had a .32 caliber revolver tucked in a shoulder holster under his jacket. The gun made the jacket bulge and the waiter at the restaurant had looked in surprise.

Before dinner they’d gone to a movie and watched John Wayne and Claire Trevor in Stagecoach. He’d seen it before, but Amanda hadn’t.

Tim and the others had taken to carrying a weapon after the several confirmed acts of sabotage that had culminated in the destruction of a passenger train a couple of days before. He’d made a quick trip to the site with Agent Harris and discovered nothing new in the saboteurs’ modus operandi, with the glaring exception of the three young men who’d been shot to death.

As they decided and as he told Amanda, he and Harris felt that the three young men had probably stumbled onto the saboteurs and paid with their lives for their bad luck. She’d earlier teased him about carrying a weapon, but now, as the rioters seemed headed toward them, it seemed like a good idea.

Dane shifted the pistol so that it was visible and he could take it out quickly. A couple of young and nervous-looking members of the Shore Patrol trotted by. Armed only with billy clubs, the Shore Patrol had a reputation for being poorly trained, and this pair looked it. Dane hurriedly grabbed the closest one, who looked angry until he saw Dane’s rank.

“What the hell’s going on, sailor?”

The young man stopped and swallowed. “Sir, a rumor’s going around that some Mexicans caused that train wreck the other day. A bunch of sailors were killed, and apparently some of these fucking zoot-suiters—sorry, ma’am—were bragging about how great it was that Americans got killed.”

The sailor turned and trotted toward the brawl, which now included more than a hundred fighters. A number of men were already on the ground, bleeding and cut. It looked like the relatively few Mexicans were getting the worst of it. Sirens were howling louder and more sailors from the Shore Patrol were arriving along with San Diego police.

Amanda grasped his arm. “I’m a nurse. I should be doing something.”

He squeezed her hand. “Wait until they stop killing each other. It looks bad, but it’s happened before and unless someone goes crazy with a knife and guts someone, or uses a gun, it’ll mainly be cuts and bruises. Most of them are probably drunk, which means you won’t be able to work with them until they are either unconscious, strapped down, or at least partly sober.”

Amanda recalled a number of frantic Saturday nights in the emergency ward of the hospital in Honolulu. She’d seen the results of bar brawls and small drunken riots, but never the fight itself. It was hypnotic to watch grown men behaving so foolishly and dangerously. And Tim was right, sometimes injured drunks had to be strapped down so they could be helped.

A rioter in a torn zoot suit emerged from the pile and staggered toward them. There was blood pouring down his face from a cut above his eye. He lurched toward them. The smell of alcohol was heavy, he was clearly drunk, and there was fury in his eyes.

Dane pulled his weapon and pointed it at the Mexican’s head. “Stop right there.”

The drunk blinked and said something in rapid Spanish. He stepped closer, lurching unsteadily.

Amanda gasped. “You’re not going to shoot him, are you?”

Dane swore. He had made a big mistake. They could have run and easily outdistanced the staggering drunk, but now it was too late and he had a gun in his hand. Shit.

The drunk took another step closer and howled in fury. A couple of his teeth were broken. Dane reversed the weapon and smashed it down on the drunk’s nose, crushing it and sending blood gushing. The zoot-suiter staggered and fell on to his hands and knees. A pair of sailors raced over, ready to finish off the drunk.

“Get back to your quarters,” Dane snapped. The two sailors saw the gun and that he was an officer. They ran off as quickly as they could.

Dane looked around and quickly holstered the pistol after wiping it off on a handkerchief.

A police officer approached and took control of the drunk, handcuffing him. “Nice job, Commander, and I didn’t see that gun. Obviously, this clown fell and hurt himself. You were leaving now anyway, weren’t you?”

Dane thought it was a great idea and led Amanda away from the scene.

“Well done,” Amanda said with an exaggerated sigh, “my hero.”

“Yeah, now let’s get far away from here.”

As they walked down the street, a score of police and shore patrol ran by them. The rioters were now outnumbered by the cops, which, they thought, was the way it should be.

“The Mexicans didn’t do it, did they?” she asked.

“Nope. Somebody must’ve picked up on the police finding the three dead bodies and the story got turned around to where they were Mexicans shot by the cops for sabotaging the train. We’re trying to get the papers to run a retraction, but it’ll be on page twenty if at all.”

Sometimes he thought he told Amanda too much of what was going on, but their relationship was deepening and he felt no reason to keep secrets from her. It was almost as if they were already married. Screw the navy. He wondered what his boss, Captain Merchant, was saying to the other nurse, Grace. They were spending a lot of time together as well.

Amanda took a deep breath. “So this is what passes for normal in Southern California. Take me someplace nice and buy me a drink, Tim. After that we’ll find a place near my luxurious barracks and you can kiss me goodnight eight or ten times.”

He laughed. The thought of making out like a couple of teenagers had marvelous appeal.

Shore leave on the clean white beaches of Hawaii by the small city of Hilo was something that Masao Ikeda had only dreamed of in the past. To the average educated Japanese, Hawaii was a beautiful and exotic place that was held by the American imperialists and far out of reach. Before the war, Hilo had a population of just below twenty thousand, but most of them had departed when the Japanese arrived. Their absence didn’t matter to the Japanese conquerors. Hawaii was indeed a paradise. That a boy from a small village north of Tokyo could be in such a place was a wonder. It was marvelous to watch the waves and even better to swim in them and try to surf through them on his belly, all the while giggling and laughing like a child while his fellow pilots did the same thing.

He could see the volcano called Mauna Loa rising majestically in the distance. It wasn’t the beautiful and symmetrical sacred Mount Fuji, but it would do for today.

Even better, he was a full-fledged member of Japan’s military elite. Military intelligence had reviewed his data and the testimony of witnesses and concluded that he had shot down seven American fighters. He was truly an ace. No more teasing from his comrades. He was a warrior and his comrades accepted him as such, while the replacement pilots looked on him with awe.

Another pleasant surprise came when his squadron was assigned to the carrier Kaga, one of Japan’s largest. On it was his old friend, Tokimasa Hirota. He and Toki came from the same village and had been friends in school. Only terrible nearsightedness kept the energetic and athletic Toki from becoming a pilot like Masao Ikeda.

Toki was not jealous. That was not in his nature, and over numerous bottles of sake, they discussed families and the village. After a number of good laughs about life in the Imperial Japanese Navy, Toki grew serious.

“Masao, just how do you think the war is coming?”

Ikeda was surprised. “We are winning, of course. The Americans are everywhere on the run and will soon sue for peace. Why?”

Toki shook his head. “Do you know what I do? I am on Admiral Kurita’s staff and work as a communications expert. I see top-secret messages that no one else does. They leave me very disturbed when I read them. I code and decode them for Kurita and his staff. Sometimes I think they believe I’m either invisible or a mute and incapable of understanding what the messages say. If the Americans could decode our messages they would be gaining in confidence. Thank God they can’t.”

Masao did not like this sudden turn in their conversation. “Should you be telling me this?”

“I have to. I don’t want to, but I must. I must tell someone and you are my friend. It preys on me. I know the truth, and the truth is we are losing badly to the Americans and soon it will become apparent to all. If something dramatic doesn’t happen, Japan as we know it is doomed.”

Masao gasped in astonishment. “You’re joking. We’ve won victory after victory.”

“The battle for Midway was the last one. We are trading them carrier for carrier either sunk or too badly damaged to continue. We have sunk four of theirs, and, while only one of ours has been sunk, three are so badly damaged we may not see them for years, if ever. We have only a couple under construction while the Americans may have dozens. By the end of next year they will have far more carriers and battleships then we will.”

“Ours will be better.”

“No, the ships will be equal. They are all made of inanimate steel and we all know that the American ships will be well built and designed. Also, ships are only as good as their crews. Have you seen the replacement pilots they’ve sent out for the men we’ve lost over San Francisco and elsewhere?”

Masao grimaced. “Children, practically babies in diapers. It will take a long while to make them good pilots like me.” He laughed. “I didn’t mean that to sound so conceited, but they really aren’t good pilots yet.”

“And maybe they never will become good pilots, and that’s one of my points. The Americans are turning out pilots and planes by the hundreds, by the thousands, and we are struggling to make good the losses we took in the abortive attack on Mare Island. Or haven’t you noticed that we don’t have a full complement of either planes or pilots?”

“But we burned San Francisco.”

Toki shook his head angrily. “A handful of small fires that were put out quickly.”

The sake was making Masao even more stubborn than usual. “We destroyed ten of their planes to one of ours.”

“That data has been reviewed and it is somewhat less than three to one. Those are further losses we cannot sustain since airplane construction is very low in comparison with the Americans. And did you notice that the Americans came at us with newer and better planes? You sent shells into a P47 and it laughed them off because it is a flying tank compared with the Zero. They have that fork-tailed demon and another new carrier fighter as well. Soon the kill ratio will be one to one and that will destroy us.”

“Then what about our victory at the Panama Canal and the fighting for Alaska? We destroyed the canal and our army is advancing toward Fairbanks.”

Toki started to laugh, but stopped when he saw how serious and angry Masao was becoming. “My friend,” he said gently, “the canal is open again. We damaged it, but that’s all. As to Alaska, the army advancing toward the capital is only five or six thousand starving and poorly equipped men. Theirs is a suicide mission.”

Masao was aghast. “That cannot be. What about the supplies and troops we landed when our ships outdueled the Americans and won a great victory over a larger fleet?”

Toki shook his head sadly. “Perhaps not even the emperor knows the extent of that disaster. All the ships sent to help the army were sunk and no supplies reached the soldiers. We lost nine warships and six transports and all for nothing. It is like the recently finished series of raids along the California coast. We shelled a few towns, set a few fires that were quickly put out, scared a few thousand civilians into running for the mountains, and in return we lost four destroyers, a light cruiser, and three submarines, all ships that we cannot replace.”

Masao flipped his empty bottle into the bushes. “Are you certain that things are so bleak? If it is true, what is Admiral Yamamoto going to do?”

“He will redouble his efforts to find the Saratoga task force and destroy it. Perhaps then the Americans will be humiliated and ask to negotiate. However, I doubt it. I’ve listened to their broadcasts and their hatred of us is strong.”

“I didn’t know you spoke English.”

Toki chuckled. “One of my many skills, or faults if you prefer. One other point. Have you gotten laid since coming here?”

Masao grinned happily. Another type of virginity had been eliminated in a navy-run whorehouse in Hilo. “Several times, with maybe more to come. Why?”

“Tell me, when you fucked those Hawaiian women, did they squeal with delight? Did they writhe like snakes and wrap their legs around you and happily pull your manhood into them? Were they proud to be mounted by an Imperial Japanese eagle, or did they just lie there like a slab of meat while you pumped away? Were their eyes open? Or maybe they were open but looking aside and not into your face.”

Instead of answering, Masao found another couple of bottles of sake. He opened them and passed one to his friend. “Well, I did notice a definite lack of enthusiasm on their part, but, after all, they are whores.”

“They’re not whores, Masao, they are slaves.”

Masao nearly dropped his bottle. “What?”

“When we first set up this base, we searched for local prostitutes, but there weren’t enough of them and the few we did find ran off. Either we weren’t paying enough or they didn’t want to be identified as collaborators. So we sent out recruiting parties to kidnap young women, preferably virgins, who were then raped and made to comply. They were told that if they didn’t fuck for the emperor, their families would be killed. Even that hasn’t stopped a number of them from either running away or committing suicide.”

“I didn’t know that,” Masao said softly, wishing he’d never sat down with his old friend. Ignorance is such bliss. Nor was there any reason to doubt Toki’s version of things. He had access to so much inside information.

Toki belched. The beer was beginning to get to him. “I hope you noticed that the base is surrounded by barbed wire and watch towers. If you step outside, you would very likely be killed by angry Hawaiians. You would be chopped to pieces by their machetes, even though we would exact a terrible vengeance. You have a fifteen-year-old sister and someday I’m going to marry her. What would you do if the Americans kidnapped her and made her spread her legs for them?”

Masao felt fury growing. “I would kill and kill again until someone killed me.”

“As would I,” Toki said. “And this is what our empire has come to. We lie about battles and we rape young women. We are losing this war in more ways than one and someday the Americans will have their turn at vengeance. Yamamoto himself said we would run wild for only a while. He also said it might be necessary to take Washington in order to bring the Americans to the conference table and that is clearly impossible.”

“Toki, what do you suggest?”

His friend took a long swallow of sake and belched again. “Learn English.”

Bear Foley lay on the floor of the forest on a bed of pine needles. His large body was covered by a brown woolen army blanket with an overlay of moist leaves and twigs. As long as he didn’t move, it made him damn near invisible. It amused him that so many doubted that a man as large as he was could move like a whisper through the woods.

Well, he could. And he could lie like he was and not even quiver for as long as it took to complete his stalk. Bear had been a hunter since he could walk and quickly learned to kill game both for his own food and to satisfy wide-eyed hunters from the States down below. A number of times he’d made the big game kill and the so-called hunters from down south took home a trophy and a bunch of lies. He’d made a good living and had a great life until the damned Japs came, tearing up the land and killing his friends. Now he stalked and killed them.

Since Germany was as much an enemy as Japan, it was slightly ironic that his weapon of choice was an 1898 model German Mauser that his father had smuggled over from his stint in World War I. His daddy had told him it was one of several thousand Mausers that had been adapted by the krauts for use as a sniper rifle. Bear had practiced with it for so long it was like an extension of his arm and eye. Dad had died of the Spanish Influenza in 1918 and left the weapon to his large son who cared for it lovingly. It was his only real connection with his dead father.

In fact, he laughed, the only thing he caressed more tenderly was Ruby Oliver’s luscious body.

He told himself to get back to reality. A handful of Japanese stood in plain sight only a couple of hundred yards away from where he was lying in the woods. He was on a knoll looking down through the trees to a clearing. Peering through the rifle’s scope, he could see that they were like the other Japanese soldiers he’d been observing. They were dirty, thin, and, with the exception of their officer, looked very hungry and dispirited. In the distance he heard gunfire. The first time it had happened, he’d been convinced that other scouts had been discovered, or maybe someone was shooting at him from long range. It took a while before he realized that the Japs were shooting up Alaska’s forests in search of game they could kill and eat. He thought their incessant and undisciplined firing was scaring off more potential food than they were going to kill.

In Bear’s opinion, the Japanese soldier was a major disappointment. From what he’d read in the news and heard from other people, they were supposed to be great at operating in the jungle, which meant they should be able to do well in Alaska’s forests. Since it was generally agreed that the average Jap was less than human, they should have had no problem moving like cats through rough terrain. Not the Japs he’d seen. They did not move through the forests with anywhere near that level of skill. Instead, they were downright clumsy and noisy, always talking and sometimes yelling to maintain contact with their comrades. Worse, their gear rattled. Not the thing to have happen while you are stalking big game that walked upright. He’d been told that their shooting wasn’t very accurate, though he was not going to take a chance. In his opinion the Japs would never make anything of high quality. He’d concluded that their ferocity in battle was what made them so damned dangerous, not their technology.

Colonel Gavin would be pleasantly surprised to find out that the Japs were in such bad shape physically. Bear wondered about their morale. They could be desperate, and desperate men could be very dangerous. Hell, even a cornered rabbit would bite. The Japs weren’t yet cornered, he thought, but if they were having trouble feeding themselves they could soon be as desperate as any cornered animal.

Gavin would also be surprised to find out that the enemy had managed to drive three Type 95 light tanks up the road toward Fairbanks. Where they’d gotten the fuel, he didn’t know. For that matter, he’d been told the Japs had no armor, that it had all been destroyed by the navy. These tanks must have been brought ashore with the first group, or maybe they got off the transports before they were sunk, or maybe retrieved after the ships were sunk. It didn’t matter. The only important thing was that three of the beasties were clanking toward Fairbanks. They were miserable-looking things, each had a small cannon, and they too rattled and sounded like they would fall apart if they hit a pothole in the road.

A Japanese officer was haranguing the men below him. He slapped them several times. The blows were hard enough to stagger the soldiers, but they just stood there and took it. Bear growled. Anybody do that to him and the guy would get his head stuffed up his ass along with that big sword the shit of an officer carried. It was no way to treat men, not even Japs. American officers wouldn’t dream of beating their men like that.

Bear sighed as he looked at the tableau below. Should he or shouldn’t he? What the hell, he decided. He held the Mauser to his shoulder and looked into the scope. The officer’s head was clear as a bell in the crosshairs. Normally, he’d aim for the chest, but it was obscured. He gently squeezed the trigger and, as hoped, the sound was largely muffled by the ground and the earth he’d piled around the barrel.

The officer’s head exploded and the dead man dropped like a rock. The soldiers around him ducked for cover. A couple of them returned fire, sort of, shooting in all directions. Enough fun, Bear thought as he got up and sprinted away. That was the third Jap he’d managed to kill on this patrol. He retrieved the small motorcycle that had carried him down the road and through the forest. Like his rifle, the bike’s engine was muffled. The Japs were only about seventy miles away from the American lines. It was time to talk to Gavin.

Dane and Harris looked through the one-way window at the little man in the chair. He was slight, bald, and had a pasty complexion. Not exactly an advertisement for a German superman, Dane thought. A dirty and badly scuffed briefcase lay by the German’s feet. It actually bore the emblem of the old Imperial Germany and not the swastika.

“Are we really going to make a deal with this guy?” Dane asked.

“Well now, that depends, doesn’t it? Frankly, I hope this little man does have something interesting to say. I got a telegram from J. Edgar telling me to get off my ass and get this sabotage thing solved, so I guess that gives me carte blanche to do whatever I have to.”

“You heard from Hoover himself?”

Harris chuckled. “And why the hell not? Seriously, he and I go back a long ways, even before there was an FBI for him to take over and shape into his image and likeness. You do recall that Hoover was head of the Bureau of Investigation before it became the FBI, don’t you?”

“Sort of,” Dane admitted.

“Well, I was one of his very bright young agents back when the Bureau was small. I helped him a lot and taught him a lot, and sometimes he’s a little bit grateful.”

“I bet you also know a lot, which is why he tolerates you.”

“Damn straight. He wants agents now who are straight-arrow and wear a suit well, not some rumpled old fart like me. But he tolerates me because of our shared history. Well, at least he does so far. I’m one major screw-up away from retirement, which is beginning to look more and more attractive. Now, you want to talk to this guy or to me?”

Dane said that Harris should lead the questioning. They walked into the interrogation room and took seats across from the German. The man seemed a little surprised to see a naval officer, but quickly recovered.

Harris took out a notebook. “Let’s get through the formalities. What’s your name and occupation?”

The man was in his late forties, early fifties, and clearly uncomfortable. “My name is Johann Klaas and I work for the German embassy in Mexico City, or at least I did until the Mexican government shut it down and put us in house arrest pending travel arrangements to get us safely back to Germany. My position would best be described as an accountant. I was in charge of the embassy’s money.”

Dane thought the man’s English was excellent, but then, the man was a diplomat of sorts. He did look very much like an accountant.

“What do you want from us?” Harris asked.

Klaas took a deep breath. “Asylum.”

Harris pretended to make a note in his book. “I understand you faked a heart attack just before embassy personnel were to be repatriated back to Germany. Is that correct?”

“Yes. During my time in Mexico City I made some friends and one was a physician who detested the Nazis for what they were doing to the Jews. He gave me some medicine that made me very ill and then confirmed that I was having a heart attack when I was sent to the hospital. As a result, they left for Germany without me with the understanding that I would follow if and when I was well enough to travel. Hopefully, that will be never.”

“Why do you wish to defect?” Dane asked, earning a quick glare from Harris, who clearly wished to control the conversation.

“I am not a Nazi. This may come as a shock to you but many, many Germans are not Nazis and are horrified at what is happening to our country. It is especially true in the diplomatic corps. Yes, we applauded when Hitler gave us back our dignity and pride, but we did not desire war and we did not want the slaughter of our enemies and the massacres that are happening to the Jews.”

Harris smiled wickedly. “I dare say there will be more of you denying you were Nazis when you lose the war.”

Klaas smiled. He had bad teeth. “Of course. However, I have two other reasons for wanting to leave Germany. First, my late wife and I had two children. One is a daughter safe in Brazil. The second is a son who was an officer in the German army, what you call the Wehrmacht. He was killed just before Christmas fighting the Russians. Actually, he wasn’t fighting when he was killed. One of his comrades wrote and told me he had frozen to death because the buffoons in Berlin hadn’t planned on a long war; therefore, there were no winter uniforms for the men.”

“So you want revenge on Hitler,” Harris said.

“In a way, yes, but more than that. I want to help destroy the barbarians who’ve stolen my beloved Germany. Before he died, my son wrote several letters in which he described in vivid detail the atrocities being committed in the name of Germany and Hitler. He told me of mass rapes of scores of women at a time, and how even reluctant soldiers were required to participate, actually given orders to assault innocent women by their officers, in particular the SS. He told of systematic looting, and the indiscriminate slaughter of thousands of civilians simply for being Slavs or Jews, again with reluctant soldiers being required to participate so that none could ever be blameless.”

Klaas shook his head sadly. “The army of my beloved Germany is behaving like the most savage of barbarians because the Nazis believe that the Slavs are less than human. The Jews, of course, are being treated far worse. There are even rumors that all Jews will be exterminated, if you could believe that.”

“You’re right,” said Harris. “I’ve heard those rumors and they are a little far-fetched.”

“You are aware, aren’t you, that Jews are being imprisoned, beaten, tortured, and denied a right to earn a living?” Klaas asked.

“Yes,” Harris said.

“Well, Agent Harris, my mother was Jewish, which in the eyes of the Nazis, makes me Jewish as well, even though I know only a little of it and have never practiced the faith. My mother’s family was what was referred to assimilated Jews. We considered ourselves Germans, not Jews. Many even volunteered to fight for the Kaiser in the past war. It doesn’t matter to the Nazis. If I was to go back to Germany, I’m reasonably confident I’d be thrown into a concentration camp. You can see that I am not a strong man, so it would be a death sentence. The fact that my son was in the army might have helped me, but he is now dead. Two men on the embassy staff were Gestapo and they told me they looked forward to getting my Jewish ass back to the Reich so they could take care of me.”

Klaas shuddered. “I was a Jew who handled the Reich’s money; therefore, I was doubly cursed in their eyes.”

Dane was surprised—no, stunned. This was all new to him. What the hell was going on in the world, he asked himself. He had been concentrating on Japan and not enough on the Nazis.

Harris put down his notebook. “You’ve made a good case for letting you stay, but there’s no way I can prove anything you’ve said and it still sounds like you’re just trying to save your own skin.”

Klaas was unperturbed. “I understand your position fully, and yes, I am trying to save myself. So let me offer you a quid pro quo. If I tell you something important, will you be willing to let me live in the United States at least until the war ends and I can get to my daughter in Brazil?”

Dane could see that Harris’s eyes were lighting up. “It sure as hell would help.”

Klaas sat back in his government-issue folding chair. “I can give you the man who is wrecking your trains.”

Harris and Dane moved Klaas to a more comfortable conference room. It was furnished with a polished wooden table and very comfortable chairs. Coffee and rolls were provided. Klaas seemed quite relieved and more comfortable with his improved status.

He set down his coffee. “A short while before Mexico declared war on Germany, I was informed by one of the resident SS officers, who was an extremely fanatic Nazi, that English-speaking Germans on the staff were going to support Japan by entering the U.S. and engaging in acts of sabotage. That these acts would also support Germany was obvious.”

“Who was the SS man?” Harris asked.

“His name is Wilhelm Braun. He’s very murderous and I’ve heard that he killed Mexicans for amusement while with the embassy. That, of course, cannot be proven. Braun required money to set up a station in Mexico City and another in Monterrey. He took just about all the cash we had on hand and drained some other bank accounts. The ambassador went along with this. He had no choice. Along with Braun, a total of six men were involved and I have no idea which of them is at what city and what their addresses are. I also have no idea who crossed into the United States, although Braun most certainly did, and I rather doubt that he’s alone.”

Harris refilled Braun’s coffee. “How is he communicating?”

“At first by mail and telephone. When that became dangerous, he began using a shortwave radio. He broadcasts pretty much in the clear since he does not have one of our encoding machines.”

Encoding machines? Dane and Harris looked at each other and wondered the same thing. Who knows about them, and could they get their hands on one?

Klaas laughed. “I can read your minds. The machine at the embassy was destroyed and they are so complex that no one will be able to replicate one or break the code. If we Germans do anything correctly, it’s devising codes.”

We’ll see, thought Dane. “So this Braun character sends messages in the clear?”

“Pretty much,” Harris said. “Although he will generally say vague things like ‘our objective is near,’ or ‘Plan A is being implemented.’ He must know that any radio message might be overheard so he might be saying things that are truly innocuous on the surface. I can give you his radio frequencies and broadcast timing schedules, and you can decide that for yourself.”

“Outstanding,” said Harris, rubbing his hands. “Now, any idea what is objective is, other than derailing trains?”

“Yes. Some of my colleagues are quite chatty when talking among themselves; ourselves, since they considered me one of them. Tokyo has pressured Berlin, who is urging Braun to find the location of the Saratoga and her task force. Germany’s little yellow allies seem to think her destruction would make the Americans think more favorably on a peace treaty.”

“What do you think?” Dane asked.

Klaas sniffed. “I think the idiots in Tokyo are as insane as Hitler and his friends.”

“Can you describe Braun for us?” Harris inquired.

Klaas reached down and put the worn briefcase on the table. “It was a gift from my daughter,” he explained wistfully as he opened it. He pulled out a file folder and a number of photographs spilled out. He picked one from the pile. “Here is Wilhelm Braun.”

The man in the picture was clean-shaven and looked perfectly ordinary. He had no distinguishing characteristics. Harris took the photo and said it would be copied and circulated. He added that Braun could easily disguise himself by changing his hair, growing a beard, or stuffing his cheeks with cotton when he went out. Klaas gave him other pictures which he said were the rest of Braun’s crew. He followed that with Braun’s radio frequencies and schedules.

“How did you get all this?” Harris asked, suspicion evident in his voice.

Klaas smiled. “When we were interned in a Mexico City hotel awaiting transportation to Germany, a number of the staffers had nothing else to do except gossip and brag. I copied down what they said, and stole the pictures from the trash. They were to be shredded and thrown out, of course.”

“Can you give us any possible aliases he might use?” Dane asked.

“No. I don’t think anyone on the staff gave him phony papers. I believe that would have been someone hired from the outside. Perhaps the Mexican police could help you.”

Harris snorted. He had a very low opinion of Mexico’s police forces. Far too many of them thought that accepting bribes was part of their job description.

Harris appeared to think about Klaas’s future, but Dane thought he’d reached a decision a long time ago. “We will grant you asylum, Herr Klaas, but with conditions.”

“Of course.”

“You will remain in San Diego with us to help in the search for this Braun person, and you will help monitor transmissions between him and his associates in Mexico. You will also assist in translating since few of my staff speak anything other than minimal German.”

“Again, of course. And when my job is done, then what?”

Harris answered. “You’ll get a new name and a place to live, unless you truly want to go to Brazil.”

Klaas’s eyes misted over. He was clearly thinking of his daughter. “Brazil. Please.”

Although Amanda loved spending as much of her spare time as she could with Tim, she and the other two nurses had bonded thanks to shared experiences and looked forward to seeing each other socially. Even though they worked and bunked together, it was pleasant to just get away and talk.

Also, there was the intriguing matter of Mack’s will. In response to a message from their local attorney, Morton Zuckerman, they met at Zuckerman’s office. It turned out that Zuckerman, a heavy-set jovial man in his late forties, was related to Richard Goldman by marriage and had insisted on telling them all about it in previous meetings.

Zuckerman’s secretary, a very pleasant and attractive lady named Judith, also in her forties, told them he had a client, a tenant, and the meeting was running late. No problem, they said, and chatted in the reception area. After the meeting they would go out to dinner. Amanda would see Tim later that evening. Finally, the door opened and a solid-looking middle-aged man came out. He glared angrily around the room. He looked over the three women with ill-concealed hostility and familiarity before he stomped out, limping slightly.

Zuckerman’s secretary laughed. “Pay no attention to him. Mr. Zuckerman has to deal with all kinds of jerks. He’s a foreigner who runs a business and isn’t making much money at it. I think he thought that everyone would get rich off of government contracts, but it hasn’t happened in his case. He wants his rent reduced and Mort already did that once. I think that man just simply doesn’t like dealing with Jews.” She shrugged eloquently. “It comes with the route.”

“I thought he was undressing me,” Grace said, and the others nodded. Amanda wondered if he could mentally undress three women at the same time.

“He even does that to me,” Judith said and smiled. “Maybe he should get a girlfriend, or at least get laid.”

“Y’know,” Grace said. “Both Amanda and I have boyfriends. So why don’t we fix Sandy up with Prince Charming?”

Sandy scowled with mock anger. “Just now I am not that hard up. However, see me in a week.”

“Never would be better,” Amanda said. She was going to arrange a meeting between Sandy and Tim’s nephew. Sandy had been a little plump before crossing the Pacific and was rapidly gaining back the weight. Perhaps a boyfriend would help her keep it off.

Amanda continued. “Did you see the look in his eyes? Along with undressing us, he looked absolutely murderous.”

“I doubt that very much,” said Zuckerman, who’d heard most of the conversation. “He’s an immigrant having a tough time because of the war, which would make anyone angry.”

They entered his office and sat around his desk. Zuckerman and Grace lit up cigarettes. “As you probably guessed, I do have information regarding Mack’s will. First, advertising for heirs in the appropriate places has resulted in no one who claims any relationship to Mr. Garver, AKA Mack. Therefore, that is no longer a legal issue. He did have an ex-wife but the terms of the divorce are clear. She is owed nothing. The state of California, those greedy banditos residing in Sacramento, is another matter. Mr. Goldman has negotiated with them and they are willing to be reasonable. In return for thirty percent of anything over one hundred thousand dollars in cash, stocks, or anything else of value in the box, you three will keep the first hundred thousand, and seventy percent of anything thereafter.”

Amanda nodded. “That almost sounds fair.”

Zuckerman agreed. “Someone in Sacramento must be having a bad day. But yes, it does look like the best we can do. Nor are the police in any way interested in something that happened in the middle of the ocean. Mack’s death will be listed as accidental. More important, the next time you are in San Francisco could result in your seeing the contents of the box rather than having to wait years until a court sorts this out. Someone from the state will be watching over your shoulder, of course, but that’s life.”

They agreed that the decision was a good one. Like little kids, they wondered what was in the box. Realistically, they knew that it would be at least several weeks before they could manage to take the time off and arrange travel. While there hadn’t been any major battles recently, there were still a large number of casualties from previous engagements who needed their attention. The safe deposit box and its unknown contents would have to wait.

Krause was pleasantly surprised when Braun showed up with a Mexican woman who looked like she was in her late twenties. A little plump, but not all that bad looking, he decided. In fact, she looked better the more he stared at her. It had been a reluctantly celibate existence for both of them since moving to San Diego.

Braun grinned. “Her name is Juanita Morales and she’s going to entertain us tonight.”

Juanita looked around their apartment and decided she’d seen worse. After all, these were two men living together, so what did she expect? She’d come from Escondido in northern Mexico as a small child and recalled dirt floors and sharing them with a goat, so what did she care if the place was littered? The men did not appear queer and only wanted sex. As long as they paid, that was fine by her. They talked like they were foreign, but she’d been told by “Bill” that they were Swedes, whatever that meant.

“Okay,” she said. “Here’s what I’ll do. Normally I charge by the trick, but since there’s two of you and I’ll bet you want me to stay all night and play with you until you get tired, it’ll be thirty dollars and I’ll do anything you want, but I don’t get hurt. Oh yeah, you got to use rubbers unless I’m sucking your cock. It’s going to be more if you want all of us doing it at the same time.”

They negotiated down to twenty dollars and they each gave her ten. They also assured her that there would be no threesomes.

“Let’s get started,” she said and stepped out of her dress and underclothing. She was voluptuous and Krause stared, getting aroused. She had large, full breasts with dark nipples and he couldn’t take his eyes off them. Juanita laughed at him.

Braun had rank, so he went first while Krause went to the garage downstairs. Krause was second and was pleased that Juanita was somewhat exuberant when his turn came. He had the feeling that paying her ten dollars each for the night was an overcharge. Braun had found her at a bar frequented by sailors, and the idea of going with someone who wasn’t in the military and had his own place appealed to her. He also said there was no pimp in the picture to complicate matters.

Juanita didn’t get tired of their alternating until it was almost dawn. This was just as well since the two Germans were exhausted. She finally serviced them orally and asked to be driven home, and Braun said he would do it. She asked if she could come back some time and they both agreed.

Krause went to bed and slept in until midafternoon. Braun had gone directly to bed after returning. It had been a good night and they agreed that they needed a day off. Krause realized he’d left his cigarettes in the Ford and went down to the garage. He’d just put the pack in his shirt pocket when something on the back seat caught his eye. It was a woman’s purse. Damn it to hell, he thought as he realized the implications. He raced upstairs.

“Was it necessary to kill her?”

Braun shrugged. “I thought it best. She was a lot of fun, but she’d seen us, our place, and God only knows what else she might have noticed.”

“How did you do it?”

“Easy. I told her I’d give her five more dollars if she’d let me take pictures of her naked on the beach. When she thought she was posing, I shot her in the back of the head and left her there. Don’t worry, there was nobody around.”

Krause grudgingly accepted the need to maintain secrecy, but some aspects worried him. For instance, would anyone miss her? Or would someone recall her going off with a middle-aged white man in a Ford, which might be something unusual for a hooker who specialized in sailors?

Braun caught the worried look on Krause’s face and misunderstood. “Don’t worry, Gunther, we’ll get us another playmate sometime soon in the future. Maybe the next one I won’t bring back here. By the way, here’s your ten dollars back.”

Harris was pleased. For once his request for information and help from local police had gotten results. Generally there was no love lost between the FBI and the San Diego cops and he’d been afraid that his asking for cooperation had wound up in a waste basket. Most of the local cops were extremely territorial and he was the outsider. They even thought he talked funny, originally being from out east and all that.

He’d pressed the point with his local contact, a detective named Flaherty. He’d said he was looking for possible saboteurs and maybe that had gotten their attention and enabled them to look past their prickly pride. Or were they prideful pricks, he wondered? Flaherty said he’d keep an eye out. It helped that the cop was a good guy and that Harris was the one who’d told him about the possibility of sabotage and murder by Germans. Harris had worked with Flaherty before and there was a level of mutual respect.

The woman on the slab looked up at the ceiling through lifeless eyes. She was naked. Her body was pale and there were a number of bruises and cuts. Harris wondered if they were from crawly things gnawing on her after she died and decided he didn’t want to know.

“Where’s her clothing?” he asked and was informed that she’d been found naked on the beach yesterday morning by a couple of very surprised hikers.

Flaherty volunteered that she was probably a local whore and their immediate assumption was that she’d gotten killed by a jealous boyfriend. What had made Flaherty curious was the fact that she’d been shot by a nine-millimeter bullet to the back of the head, just what Harris had asked the locals to be on the lookout for.

Flaherty held a handkerchief to his nose. The body was getting a little ripe. “I took the liberty of circulating her photo around some areas on the assumption that, looking Mexican, she was probably a prostitute. I was right. A couple of her coworkers gave me a name, Juanita Morales, said she worked alone, and said she left with a middle-aged white guy the night before she was found.”

“Anything more about him?”

Flaherty sniffed. “Nah. They were all busy earning a living and didn’t notice anything special about her new friend. They said he was kind of nondescript, frankly.”

“Great work, detective.”

“You think the killer’s the guy who’s wrecking your trains?”

“I would put serious money on it,” Harris said. “I owe you.”

“What do you want me to do with the body?” Flaherty asked. An autopsy would be performed, but that would confirm the obvious—death by bullet to the head. The police would keep her prints and a photo on file as a matter of course.

“Just give Miss Morales a decent burial. She may have died actually helping her country.”

“She’s Mexican,” Flaherty said with a slight grin.

“Okay, helping our country.”

Harris drove away with the bullet in a paper bag. An hour later and back on base, he and another agent were peering through microscopes, comparing the bullet recovered from the woman to the bullets extracted from the border guards and the Mexican kids.

“Son of a bitch,” Harris snarled, although he was not surprised. The grooves on the bullets had all matched. Whoever the saboteur and killer was, he was still on the loose and still killing.