The Eureka Gambit

By Philip Bosshardt

Hitler has approved a plot to abduct Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill as they arrive for the Teheran Conference in November 1943. The plot involves ransoming off the lives of the Big Three for ceasing hostilities in Europe and recognition by the Allies of current borders and military gains by the Third Reich.
The operation succeeds and Roosevelt and Churchill are abducted. Stalin escapes the attempt with injuries. Roosevelt and Churchill are spirited away by low-flying aircraft to a remote site in Turkey, then taken by train through the Balkans to a mountain hideaway in the Austrian Alps.
Now Hitler has a bargaining chip for dealing with the U.S. and the U.K. He also knows about the proposed Operation Overlord and one of his conditions is that Overlord be scrapped.
A rescue effort must be mounted. Vice President Henry A. Wallace must coordinate with King George VI of England to coordinate rescue operations.
A combined British-U.S. commando team must try to rescue them. How do you get FDR and Churchill out if you can get rescue forces in? The team must airdrop in from a base in southern Italy.
Operation Titan is formed. The special ops team will parachute into the Austrian Alps and meet up with local resistance forces, who will provide supplies, ammo, and escape transport. The plan is to take FDR and Churchill in disguise to Venice by truck (disguised as a military supply truck). They will then be extricated by British submarine.
What the commandos haven’t counted on are two obstacles that may prevent the rescue: a Resistance girl’s love for an American agent. And the resourceful Nazi commander of the hostage mission, who seems to anticipate every move the Allies make.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Philip Bosshardt
• Release date: Jan 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005960278

Philip Bosshardt

Philip Bosshardt is a native of Atlanta, Georgia. He works for a large company that makes products everyone uses...just check out the drinks aisle at your grocery store. He’s been happily married for over 20 years. He’s also a Georgia Tech graduate in Industrial Engineering. He loves water sports in any form and swims 3-4 miles a week in anything resembling water. He and his wife have no children. They do, however, have one terribly spoiled Keeshond dog named Kelsey.For details on his series Tales of the Quantum Corps, visit his blog at qcorpstimes.blogspot.com or his website at http://philbosshardt.wix.com/philip-bosshardt.

Book preview

The Eureka Gambit

Published by Philip Bosshardt at Smashwords

Copyright 2021 Philip Bosshardt

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

PROLOGUE

Dallas, Texas

7:35 p.m.

April 25, 1980

Detective Captain Rick Chesley squatted down next to the body and studied the face of the dead man, making mental notes. Caucasian male, maybe early seventies. Several days’ worth of beard. Small eyes. A few tufts of greasy almost reddish hair. Bull’s neck, thick and ropy at the jawline. Scar under the left chin. Dirty misshapen teeth, with a few gold fillings.

What’ve we got here, Captain? Lieutenant Skip Thorne was new to Investigations. A puppy with an eager face. Chesley had taken Thorney under his wing for the time being.

Chesley scowled, stood up. ME says he died of natural causes. No obvious signs of trauma I can see.

OD? Crackhead, maybe?

Chesley shook his head. No needle marks on the arms. Nostrils are clear…no heroin. West End’s thick with crack now. But, offhand, I’d say this poor sod just expired. Checked out for the duration.

Thorne was puzzled. So how’d we get called in on a vagrant death? Couldn’t South Metro or Central handle this?

Chesley didn’t reply at first. He was a senior detective with Investigations Bureau, Dallas Police Department, had been for ten years now, and he knew the Field guys sometimes got in a hurry. If they couldn’t pin down a suspicious death on a readily evident cause right away, they often signed it off to Investigations. It made their caseload look better. The Bureau officially frowned on the practice, but what could you do?

Probably… Chesley scanned the dilapidated boarding room, letting his eyes massage every corner, every shadow, every item in view. The best evidence to break a case was always in plain sight, if you knew how to look for it.

Chesley and Thorne had been working the night watch out of Investigations, manning the Im/Forn desk at Personal Crimes Division, when the call came in. Im/Forn was department slang for immigrants and foreign nationals. The dispatch sheet was devoid of anything but the barest essentials:

Jefferson Hotel, 155 North Haskell Avenue. West End district. White Caucasian male, dead in his room, found by the cleaning lady. Place stank to heaven, full of scraps of takeout food, boxes of noodles, shoeboxes of papers and maps strewn all over the place….

Shoeboxes of papers. It hit Chesley like a hammer. Where were these damned shoeboxes?

Cautiously, Chesley circled the room, carefully noting positions and angles. Everything was a clue. Small brown table, thick with coffee cup stains. A chest top drawer half open, gray T-shirts and underwear spilling out. A metal trunk next to it.

Chesley eased the lid of the trunk back with the toe of his shoe. Inside were boxes. Shoeboxes. The investigating officers had mentioned them. Chesley pulled out a few, untied the cord securing one, and emptied the contents onto the floor. Thorne watched, from somewhere behind, while Lieutenant Shriver showed up at the door.

Shriver was a five-year man, transferred over from South Metro Division. He was a good detective, to Chesley’s way of thinking, if a bit stiff. Bag boys are here, Captain. ME wants to claim the body…get an autopsy started tonight.

Chesley nodded, now kneeling over the contents of the shoebox. Hold up a sec, boys…let’s just see what this crap’s all about. He picked gingerly through the papers.

Some were in English. There were references to the Army. To the Office of Strategic Services. Fading Army letterhead…official-looking letters. Drawings and sketches too. A few papers were in other languages. Chesley recognized one of them. It was German.

He dug into other boxes, while Thorne and Shriver readied the corpse for removal. More papers. More sketches. Some of them were stamped SECRET, the red stamp ink now faded into the brown of dried blood. Chesley spread out a few of the larger sheets…they were maps, pieces of maps. By the corner of the trunk, a shriveled carton of half-eaten meat and bean stew lay on its side. The carton had a cross emblem on the side…our boy’s been taking his meals at St. Vincent’s lately, he realized. St. Vincent’s was a Franciscan mission around the corner.

What is all that stuff, Captain? Thorne bent down beside the detective.

Chesley rifled quickly through several sheafs of fading pages, bound with twine. Sketches and details. His eyes caught odd words, snatches of official phraseology.

Tehran…Long Jump… SS Friedenthal. Orianenberg. Schellenberg. Reisenhof.

One word in German stood out, scribbled along a few of the margins. Working for DPD, you picked up stuff over the years. He knew a smattering of Spanish and Chinese, a few words of German, some gutter Russian, even a little Ukrainian. He could curse like a sailor in five languages.

Weitsprung. The writer—was it the deceased slob behind them?—had scribbled it all over several pages. Weitsprung…WEITSPRUNG…weitsprung….

Born Austrian, Chesley knew German. He racked his brain. Long Jump…something like that.

He felt a nudge from Thorne. Hey, Captain…what’s got you so spooked? What the hell is that stuff?

Chesley shook his head. I don’t know exactly.

You look kinda pale…seen a ghost around here? Thorne chuckled, got up as the Medical Examiner’s staff swished into the walkup room to retrieve the dead derelict.

Chesley didn’t answer. Something…was it the guy’s face?—all beaten-down, like leather left out in the sun too long. The papers…some of them classified material. Maybe from a special mission long ago. Operation Titan. Chesley watched as the techs grunted and struggled, lifting the heavy body into a bag, finally zipping it up.

Something was bugging him. A connection not quite there. He squinted, jammed his hands into his coat pockets. Turned back to the papers he had spilled all over the floor.

Thorne and Shriver helped the techs work the vagrant’s stiff body through the door. Chesley stared back at the trunk, filled with papers and old shoeboxes.

Mom does the same damn thing, he muttered. They were about the same age. Mid to late seventies. Same generation. The Greatest Generation, Tom Brokaw had called them. Saved the world and all that. They saved everything, every little scrap. Hoarded papers and stuff like precious stones. Maybe they were precious, at that. He hadn’t seen Mom for a couple of weeks now. Every time he crossed into Fort Worth, driving the 183 over to Manor Vista, Mom had been worse. The docs tried to be sympathetic. Alzheimer’s is a progressive disease, you understand. Plaque builds up around the brain’s neurons. More and more memory loss every month. Subtle at times, but progressive. It made Chesley depressed.

Had the derelict—Chesley had mentally tagged him as German, without thinking even named him Otto, with his looks, the potatoey smell of the room, the feverish scribblings—expired the same way? What the hell was Otto doing in a trashy, flea-bitten walkup room of the Jefferson Hotel with papers and drawings from nearly forty years ago, stuff from the Office of Strategic Services, even Nazi stuff?

It gnawed at him for several more minutes, but only because Detective Captain Rick Chesley had lingered for awhile in Room 515, poking into every corner, scouring the place for clues as to what Otto was all about, like any good detective. He had to admit it…his interest had been piqued. What he didn’t admit—at least not right away, until it slammed him in the face—was the link that had been there lurking in Room 515 all along…the link between Otto, a dead German derelict and his own Mom, stuffed in a bright and airy but depressing nursing home in Arlington, Texas.

He hadn’t admitted what his eyes told him because he didn’t really want to know. But he couldn’t ignore it now. There was just one thing he had to know now. One piece of the puzzle.

What was Otto’s real name? ET’s from Metro had already lifted the man’s prints. No doubt they were already being run now. With any luck, he’d have an answer before the shift was over.

He wasn’t sure he really wanted to know.

Mom had been muttering a lot of things lately. The visits were getting harder. He could see his mother deteriorating every time he came to Arlington. Lately, he wasn’t real sure Mom knew him, knew who he was. Somehow, seeing this room, seeing the papers with the scribbled German, seeing Otto’s scarred and stubbly face, made him think of Mom. There was just something there…something Mom had been saying lately…like he knew the guy, like he should know more about the German than he did. Mom had talked about Germans a lot on the last visit. German agents…Gestapo agents…the Resistance...most of the time it made no sense.

He knew Mom had worked in the Resistance during the war. He knew she’d been involved in some big operations against the Nazis.

Captain Chesley had never been sure of what to believe. What could you believe of an aging parent with late-stage Alzheimer’s? What Mom muttered to him was sometimes so fantastic as to defy belief.

Your father…your step father…Evan…he was an OSS agent, see…he was a handler…working a half a dozen operatives...he was a packager…collecting and preparing stuff for delivery to the Americans…it’s all right there, son…all right there in black and white…I wrote it all out just last week…so you’d know the truth—

But the pages the old woman had handed to him were just doodles and illegible scribblings.

There was this German major, see. He’d seized some important people, really big people—brought them to Graz--

For the last few years, in dribs and drabs, Rick had been able to pull together a few pieces of Mom’s wartime past. And the great events his mother, Elsa Birkenau, had supposedly been involved with. It seemed almost too fantastic to be true and Rick had started a diary, taking notes and recording everything she said.

This I gotta investigate further, he told himself. The story of his mother’s wartime exploits with the Austrian Resistance became an obsession with Rick Chesley. He wanted to know the truth, had to know the full truth, before she passed on. Before, her memory dissolved completely into nonsense scraps and bits no one could connect. His step father, Evan Chesley, had already died in 1950. All very hush-hush but word still got out…some kind of botched CIA operation in East Germany. Now, more than ever, Captain Rick Chesley had to know the full story.

Mom was deteriorating fast now. He’d seen that the last time he visited Manor Vista. Getting the truth was a race against time now, with her stories becoming ever more fantastic as time went on. Rick found himself rushing to record everything, but not sure how much to believe. How much of the story was real? How much was her feverish imagination, now in the death grip of Alzheimer’s?

He knew what he needed most was real, tangible evidence.

And now, after getting the call from South Metro to investigate the mysterious death of a vagrant German immigrant at the fleabag Jefferson Hotel, Captain Chesley knew with a chilling certainty that he couldn’t explain that he had run head-on into just such evidence, headlong into the truth of his very own murky past.

For the first time, Captain Chesley realized that the story his Mom, Elsa Birkenau Chesley had been mumbling about at the Manor Vista nursing home in Arlington was probably true. Here, finally, was someone who may have actually participated in it.

Captain, the body’s in the ME’s custody now. It was Skip Thorne, returned from the street. Thorne saw the pale frown on Chesley’s face. Hey, you okay? You don’t look so hot. It is kind of ripe in here.

Chesley stood up, gathering loose papers back into a shoebox. I’ll live.

Thorne was scanning the room. You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.

Chesley snorted. Maybe I have, Lieutenant. Maybe I have. You got any evidence bags with you?

Thorne radioed down to Shriver, with the ambulance below. The radio crackled with scratchy voices. Captain wants a few more bags up here. We’re taking some homework back to the station.

Chesley stared intently at the trunk. The truth’s in there, Lieutenant. Let’s bag all of it.

Thorne just shrugged. He was a vagrant, for Christ’s sake. The ME’ll establish cause of death. What do we need all that crap for? It’ll just clutter up the evidence shelves in the basement.

Chesley was already carefully extracting the remaining shoeboxes and lining them up on the dingy bed. ’Cause I’m curious. I’m a detective. I’m nosy and I like to butt into people’s business…that’s why. You hungry?

Resigned, Lieutenant Thorne came over and started helping. I could go for some of that crumb cake and a coffee at Pano’s, since you’re offering.

Chesley snorted. I was asking, not offering. But Pano’s sounds good to me.

Thorne was curious. So what’s eating you, Captain? Something’s bugging you about this fellow. You want to spill it so we’ll all know?

Chesley took the handful of evidence bags Lieutenant Shriver had just brought up and began sealing them over each shoebox. There were nearly a dozen, each one crammed to bursting with moldy papers, letters, maps, and scraps of pages.

Let’s get this stuff down to the station and I’ll meet you two clowns at Pano’s. Eleven o’clock?

Your treat? Thorne asked hopefully.

Chesley scowled at the both of them. You guys are like my girlfriend’s kids…always wanting a handout. My treat.

Yipppeee… Thorne smiled. They slipped under the crime scene tape barrier and headed down Haskell Avenue.

Pano’s was a typical West End cop hangout in the shadow of Fair Park, vaguely Italian with the best bakery this side of Fort Worth and thankfully devoid of all the grimy flop houses and massage parlors the Im/Forn squad seemed to spend most of its time around. Normal looking people, with normal dress—or what passed for normal in the Big D—inhabited the streets and cafes and during the day, Commerce Street was thick with snorting herds of bankers and stockbrokers and other financial types.

Plus the owner, Gino Cappelletti, served the best crumb cake and cappuccino this side of the Lubbock. As a result, half the Central and South Metro Divisions could be found within five minutes-drive of the place pretty much around the clock.

Chesley came in, and found Thorne with Shriver and Lieutenant Mike Floyd, a refugee from Narcotics/Vice, there as well. The detective squeezed into the booth.

Word gets around when the old man’s buying, huh, Mike?

Floyd just winked. Gino’s whipping up a special deal for us even as we wait. Smells heavenly, don’t it?

Thorne sipped at a coffee, his face wreathed in steam. So what’s eating you, Captain? ME’s preliminary on that German vagrant was a heart attack. It’s not even a murder. Why all the sudden interest? Did you know the guy or something?

Chesley waited until he had his own coffee, black with two sugars, and a dipping doughnut on the side. He tenderly sipped the scalding liquid.

There’s a possibility I might have heard of him before, yeah.

Thorne was immediately intrigued. So talk, already. Don’t keep us in suspense. You been hanging out in the West End after hours or something?

Chesley shook his head. Nothing quite so tawdry as that. Actually, it’s kind of a long story.

We’re all ears, Mike Floyd said.

Chesley swirled a spoon through his coffee, watching a few crumbs dancing around the spoon.

Well, this is going to take some time.

Then Captain Rick Chesley proceeded to relate to his colleagues the most extraordinary tale they had ever heard.

Chapter 1

Wolf’s Lair, Rastenburg, Germany

September 23, 1943

(from the diary of Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Reichsminister of Propaganda)

I asked the Fuehrer whether he would be ready to negotiate with Churchill…He does not believe that negotiations with Churchill would lead to any result as he is too deeply wedded to his hostile views and, besides, is guided by hatred and not by reason. The Fuehrer would prefer negotiations with Stalin, but he does not believe they would be successful…whatever may be the situation, I told the Fuehrer that we must come to an arrangement with one side or the other. The Reich has never yet won a two-front war. We must therefore see how we can somehow or other get out of a two-front war.

Dasht-i-Kavir Desert, Iran

Lat. 35 North, Long 53 East

November 26, 1943

It was past midnight in the Iranian desert, some one hundred and fifty kilometers from Tehran. A convoy of trucks waited patiently alongside a cleared landing strip in the desert hardpan. There was a sound of distant aircraft. Suddenly, landing lights blazed on, outlining the crude runway. Then, one after another, three Junkers Ju-290 transports bearing no markings made bumpy landings on the strip, a location their maps called Alpen-Eins. The landing lights went out immediately and the scene was then illuminated by lights from the trucks.

The aircraft taxied one after another in swirling dust and freezing cold to a stop alongside the convoy. The lead aircraft, part of the Luftwaffe Special Operations squadron, opened its forward doors and a steady stream of soldiers emerged, making their way carefully down the portable ladders to the ground. The flight of the KG200 squadron had taken nearly ten hours, from a secret airfield in the Crimean Peninsula, near Simferopol. The aircraft were loaded with squads of soldiers from SS Battalion Friedenthal, as well as ample supplies of clothing, weapons, ammunition and rations.

SS Sturmbannfuhrer Otto Skorzeny hopped down from the ladder and stood to one side, lighting up his favorite Turkish-brand Sulima cigarettes, while the men and their equipment were offloaded from the transports and placed carefully but hurriedly aboard the trucks.

Skorzeny watched the operation, rehearsed scores of times before, with a critical eye. The night air was freezing cold and a stiff wind had fetched up. He fingered the fencing scar along his chin; dry air always made it itch terribly. It had been a long, cramped, bumpy trip from the KG200 airfield, but it had come off without incident. Skorzeny felt a strange mixture of pride, anxiety, and grim determination as he watched. He knew he’d received a great honor from the Fuhrer in being selected again for such a mission, a mission so the Fuhrer had said, that was critical to the Reich. Coming on the heels of his daring rescue of the Duce, Benito Mussolini, at the Gran Sasso hotel in Italy, the Fuhrer’s decision to mount Operation Long Jump, with he, Skorzeny, as commander was a singular honor and a sobering responsibility.

In the privacy of his own thoughts, Skorzeny had given the mission less than a fifty percent chance of being successful.

But so much was at stake and he had always been a dedicated soldat, determined to carry out his orders to the end.

The operation involved nearly fifty men in all, organized into three detachments. Their targets: Josef Stalin, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, all meeting in two days in Tehran for the Eureka Conference. Abwehr intelligence had only confirmed the details two days ago, giving Skorzeny the final green light to depart from Simferopol less than twelve hours before.

A husky lieutenant came up. It was Hans Eisler, White Detachment commander. Eisler was huddling with his back to the wind to light up a cigarette of his own. He was tall, solidly built, with a blond crew cut and a deep scar along his left chin, the result of a parachuting accident only last year. The SS Obersturmfuhrer had unusually big hands and feet, which often came in handy in field operations. His men called him Der Bar…the Bear.

"Herr Sturmbannfuhrer, we’re getting the uniforms out now…see, they’re in those crates." Eisler indicated with his cigarette several wooden crates now being laboriously slid down a loading ramp.

Skorzeny nodded approvingly, knowing how many operatives had died obtaining the Soviet Red Army uniforms and insignia.

Have your men get into them right away. And hurry— Skorzeny looked around their makeshift desert landing site. We’re exposed as hell around here. The sooner we get underway, the better.

Eisler acknowledged the orders. "At once, Sturmbannfuhrer. It’s still hard to believe, isn’t it, that we were able to obtain this gear on such short notice. Gymnastyorka, I think the Russians call them. Scratchy, ill-fitting rags, if you ask me. Most of the tunics are too tight."

A lot of brave men died to get those, Eisler. They may look ragged and fit poorly, but with any luck, they’ll get us past the checkpoints. That’s all that matters.

Eisler said, Yes, sir. I’ll see to it immediately. The commander of White Detachment hustled off to hurry his men up.

Skorzeny appraised the operation with an analytical eye, missing no detail. He had trained these men hard, for weeks, after the Fuhrer’s orders. First at the old hunting lodge at Friedenthal, near Oranienburg. Then later at special training camps in the occupied Crimea. Infantry and engineer training had come first, but each man had to be familiar with the handling of mortars, light field artillery and tank guns. It was essential that each man be able to ride a motorcycle and drive a car and a lorry as well as troubleshoot problems with a variety of specialized vehicles.

Even these stolen American Lend-Lease ‘Deuce and a Half" Jimmy trucks, Skorzeny chuckled. Other training included days of sports like football, riding, parachute jumps by the dozen, special courses in languages and surveying, tactics…the training had gone on for weeks, stretching into months. Skorzeny was proud of his men, volunteers all. Only a few had washed out of the training, most of them due to injuries and disease.

He knew he could count on their devotion and maximum effort in Operation Long Jump…the riskiest and most complicated special mission the SS or the Wehrmacht had ever undertaken…and one vital to the war and the future of the Reich.

Hurrying the loading with well-practiced efficiency, the men of Long Jump transferred scores of crates and boxes filled with all kinds of gear from the Junkers transports to the trucks. In the light of the truck headlamps and a few extra stands of lights, desert dust swirled in the icy air and the winds were made worse by the necessity of keeping the planes’ props turning, for as soon as the transfers were made, the huge Junkers transports would be taking off. Skorzeny scanned the skies and listened for the sound of any other aircraft, for if Soviet or American air patrols stumbled on the makeshift landing strip, the entire operation could be blown.

It was imperative that the commandos be loaded up and ready to shove off in less than an hour. Their safe house in Tehran was still a three-hour drive away and there would undoubtedly be numerous checkpoints to negotiate along the way. The Persian capital was inside the Soviet zone of occupation and the geniuses at Abwehr had noted caustically that a 3000-man contingent of Soviet soldiers had recently arrived in the city, ahead of the conference of the Big Three, a mix of Red Army, NKVD, Interior Ministry and Border Patrol troops.

Numerous checkpoints, Skorzeny muttered to himself, as he lit another cigarette. Any one of which could be the end of everything, if they couldn’t bluff their way through. He mentally ticked off in his mind every detail they had gone over to give them the best chance to make it through all the checkpoints: the Red Army uniforms and insignia, the Mosin-Nagant rifles, the PpSh-41 Daddy machine guns (those had been bought at a particularly high cost in blood on the Russian front), the Tokarev pistols, the special language training for select officers and soldiers, the printed orders created by the forgery specialists at G Department in Berlin.

There were so many critical points that had to be met and overcome for Long Jump to succeed. The Red Army checkpoints were among the most critical. Skorzeny spied a short, rather dumpy man in a Persian police uniform standing alone beside one of the trucks. The shurta had been a local police chief in Tehran’s Shahrbani force and he and their handful of Persian sympathizers would surely come in handy when the checkpoints were reached.

Once past the bulk of the checkpoints, life would be marginally easier for them. Skorzeny knew that an advance party of six German radio operators from the Funkabwehr should have already dropped by parachute near the town of Qom, some sixty kilometers from Tehran. They had been inserted to augment an existing Abwehr network, operating out of a villa in the outer reaches of the capital. They had come into the city, with their gear, riding camels, furnished by sympathetic Qashqai tribesmen near Qom. From this location, the observers had radioed numerous intelligence reports back to Berlin, on their long-range FuG10 receivers, radio gear scrounged from a Luftwaffe bomber in Simferopol.

The intelligence had been spotty but revealing, highlighting as it did the movement of Soviet and American forces into Tehran in great numbers, ahead of the still-unannounced conference of the Big Three. Ground intelligence had given them at least a notional idea of security arrangements around the British, Soviet and American legations and embassies.

In addition, the advance team had readied a separate safe house for Skorzeny’s men. It was a derelict rug warehouse on Mousavi Street, in east Tehran. A half hour’s drive under normal traffic conditions to the British and Soviet legations, which adjoined each other. More importantly, the advance team had reported that there were no checkpoints nearby.

As the last of the crates and gear were loaded aboard the trucks, Skorzeny called a hasty meeting with his detachment commanders, just beside the cab of the lead Jimmy. The men hustled up and all watched as, one by one, the huge Junkers transports wheeled about and began taxiing through haze and dust to takeoff positions.

Skorzeny looked each of his Obersturmfuhrers in the face and saw what he wanted: anxiety but resolve…focus but confidence…pride but caution. Eisler was closest, the Bear rubbing his huge hands nervously. A stern glare from Skorzeny quashed that little nervous habit.

Jurgen Holtz was Gold detachment commander. He was young, and received constant ribbing from his men about a faint blond moustache that just wouldn’t come in good. He was also one of the Wehrmacht’s top marksmen, with annual awards for incredibly long-distance sniper shots.

Fritz Born was Black detachment commander. Called Die Nase, he had a big prominent nose, but he was short and stocky, with smallish hands and a small head. Today, he had a bad cough…perhaps all the desert dust was affecting him.

Skorzeny waited until the last of the planes had moved into takeoff position. Lights were being doused all around them as the last of the commandos boarded their rides.

Skorzeny waved a flimsy sheaf of papers. "Latest word from Blackbird," he reported. Blackbird was the code name of the advance team. The Russians have increased their troop numbers in the city, especially around the legations. Security is tighter than ever. Same for the Americans.

Eisler raised a point. That means important people are coming, doesn’t it? It’s good news.

Skorzeny conceded the point. "Good and bad. All intelligence indicates the leaders are definitely coming to Tehran. It seems like the Soviet legation will host the conference, as Amtsgruppe Ausland believed all along. But there are more checkpoints than before. He turned to Born. You have your produce crates deployed? Your truck has to look like a farmer’s truck."

Born nodded. Dates, figs and oranges. Seven crates and some bags of pistachios and almonds too. My men look pretty scruffy in their sirwals and kafiyahs. They itch like hell.

Tell them to bite their tongues. It’s three hours to Tehran.

Jurgen Holtz’s piercing blue eyes shone hard and bright in the truck headlamps. "Sturmbannfuhrer, should we alter our route then?"

Skorzeny shook his head. We stay on the Khavaran Highway until the first known checkpoint, as we planned. He laid out a crude map in the truck hood, with Born and Eisler holding down the edges in the wind. After that, the trucks split up, as we trained. You each have your maps?

The commanders nodded as one.

Skorzeny added, I’m riding with White detachment. I’ll be one of the Bear’s men. We arrive traveling along Khavaran, then to Khorasan Street. Turn onto Mowlavi, then turn again to Saheb Street. Mousavi Street is the warehouse, a short ride from Saheb.

My men are ready, declared Born.

Mine too, said Holtz. They’re anxious to get going…get out of here.

Skorzeny smiled for the first time. Just like Italy, eh, men? Except no gliders. I don’t want to hear of anyone throwing up this time. He looked up at the night sky. The weather forecast for the next few days is just like this…cold, clear and windy. You’ve all got your exfiltration routes?

Three heads nodded.

Skorzeny allowed himself to seem satisfied. "Good. You’ve trained well and conditions are good. Not perfect but good enough. I fully expect to be back here at Alpen-Eins in three days."

With our special ‘produce, blurted Born. They all laughed.

That’s it, then, Skorzeny told them. "Immer mit der Ruhe! It was the SS commando’s battle cry. Take it easy!"

As one, the commanders responded, "Immer mit der Ruhe!"

There was a sudden commotion from a nearby road. A voice rang out.

It’s a bus…look, just down there!

A few Black detachment commandos had spotted an old bus wheezing along a rutted road in the middle of the night.

Skorzeny froze. What the hell’s a bus doing out here at this time of night? He watched in horror as the bus slowed down negotiating all the trucks, the lights, and the taxiing aircraft. Then: Stop that bus! Get it off the road!

The commandos sprang into action, flagging down the bus and directing it off the highway onto a dusty paddock. Soldiers surrounded the bus. Shouts rang out.

"Aus! Aus! Geh raus!" Rifles waved and motioned for all the passengers to climb down. There were twelve of them, plus the driver. Mostly women and older men, with a sprinkling of young children. Several women clutched prayer shawls. The passengers stood freezing in the stiff wind, blinking hard in the lights.

Eisler looked at Skorzeny. "Herr Sturmbannfuhrer, what do we do with them?"

Skorzeny couldn’t believe their bad luck. Of all the hiccups they had trained for, this wasn’t one of them.

He growled back. Hans, we can use that bus. You know what to do.

Eisler nodded. He hustled over to