Heroes by David Hagberg (reading cloud ebooks TXT) 📗

relieve the tightness in his chest, and then let it out.

“What I am about to tell you must be considered top secret.”

“Then don’t tell me,” Deland said, suddenly angry. “I put in my stint over there. I did my thing. I don’t want to know any more.”

Donovan looked at him for a very long time, his eyes penetrating, sad, weary. The weight of the world was in them. He nodded.

“All right, David. I guess 1 understand.” He started to rise, but Deland shook his head.

“I’ll listen, sir, but I’m not guaranteeing a thing.”

“That’s good enough for me,” Donovan said too quickly. He sat down again.

“By rights, I could walk out of here right now.”

Donovan nodded. “We have been working for several years on a weapons project in this country. The British are in on it, but no one else.”

“Has it anything to do with the Manhattan Project, sir?”

“Your department is working on it?”

“We’ve done some of the math. Pump designs. Things like that. Westinghouse and Allis-Chalmers have been up here. Their engineers got themselves backed into a corner.”

“It’s the same project,” Donovan said. He ran a hand tiredly through his hair. “For at least three years Germany had a spy here in this country. He was very good. So good, in fact, that he managed to gather an awful lot of information that would really hurt our position if it ever got out.”

“He’s still here? Running around loose?”

“No,” Donovan said. “Some months ago he managed to get back to Germany.”

“Good Lord,” Deland said. “He brought his information back for Hitler?”

“We’re not worried about that.”

“You’re not?”

“No. The … project is so vast, requires so much industrial potential, that there is no danger Nazi Germany would ever manage to duplicate our work. No chance.”

Deland waited. He couldn’t imagine what Donovan wanted.

“The Russians are very close now to Berlin, where this Dieter Schey is presently stationed.”

“The Russians?”

“Yes.” Donovan licked his lips. “It’s possible that Schey, knowing the end is coming, will bargain with his information.

Bargain with the Russians. We never thought it would come to this.”

“There is no love lost between the Russians and the Germans.

Wouldn’t this Schey come back to us instead?”

“No,” Donovan said, emphatically. “While he was here, he married. His wife … was killed in a shootout with some of our people.”

“I see.”

“Less than a year later, he had taken up with another woman, one the FBI had its eyes on in Washington. There was another shootout.”

“She was killed too?”

Donovan nodded. “In each case, Schey did a lot of damage to us. He’s killed at least seven people, possibly more. He won’t come back to us. If anything, he’ll go to the Russians.”

“How soon?”

“He may have gone already. But surely Berlin will fall within two or three weeks. If it’s not already too late … we have to put someone inside Germany. Someone who knows Berlin. Someone who is intimately familiar with the city the way it has become. Someone who has field experience. Someone to go in there and find Schey.”

“And kill him?”

“Before it’s too late,” Donovan said. “Before he turns himself and his information over to the Russians.”

Deland thought a moment, his insides boiling. “How do we know he’ll go to the Russians?”

“We don’t, of course,” Donovan admitted. “In fact, there are some indications he would not. But it is a risk we simply cannot take. He must be eliminated. He must! I came here to ask you to take on the job.”

Deland had been perched on the edge of his chair. He slumped back now, nearly everything going out of him. It was all coming back to him in a rush. It was the oddest of sensations. He I remembered Berlin, and Dannsiger, and Marti Zimmer. He I remembered Peenemunde and Major Preuser, and Von Braun himself. And he vividly saw in his mind’s eye Wolgast and I Katrina Mueller. His heart ached. He could sense her skin, smell her lovely, clean odor, feel her caresses as they made love.

i In Bern, Dulles and his interrogators had dwelled for an inordil nately long time on Katrina and his relationship with her. Back in the States, in Virginia, the same thing had happened. They seemed less interested in Dannsiger and the business with the underground than they did about poor little Katy in Wolgast.

By now she was probably dead. The Gestapo almost certainly had gone after her. She could not have held out all this time. He was going to have to put her out of his mind, but God in heaven, he was tied up in knots.

“I would have to know this morning,” Donovan was saying.

“You would fly back to Washington with me. Immediately.

From there you’d take a transport across to London. You’d be I there by tomorrow afternoon. You’d be briefed on the run and parachuted into Berlin by tomorrow night or very early the next morning—still in the dark, of course—at the very latest. You’d be expected to find and take out Schey very quickly. Twenty-four hours would be optimum.”

“Berlin is a very big city, sir,” Deland said, but he was still thinking about Wolgast, about Katy.

“Schey’s presence has been confirmed. He was on the radio.

The Fiihrer awarded him the Iron Cross, in gold. He was promoted to SS-Colonel, as a hero of the Reich. He’s a symbol over there now. And he’s become Hitler’s lapdog. He’ll almost certainly be somewhere around the Chancellery or the Reichs Bunker.

He won’t be far.”

“What sort of cover would I have, and how about afterwards?

What arrangements would be made for me to get out?”

“You would be an SS colonel with a letter of passage signed by Hitler himself. Your mission is to inspect every aspect of the preparations for the defense of Berlin. You could go anywhere, commandeer any vehicle, any soldier, any supply. Your word would be next to that of the Fuhrer’s.”

That brought Deland out of his thoughts. He sat forward again.

“My God. a simple call to the bunker and I would be exposed as an imposter.”

“You