Free Jacob's Oath by Martin Fletcher Page B

and blue
     eyes.
    He, too, had been part of the underground Jewish army’s determination to go down fighting.
     They had formed a secret unit of Jews in Palestine known as the German Platoon: fluent
     German-speakers who could pass as Wehrmacht soldiers if the Nazis occupied Tel Aviv.
     They learned to impersonate the enemy: to swagger like them, sing Nazi marching songs,
     give correct greetings according to rank, until they could get close enough to murder
     senior SS officers.
    In late 1944, two years after General Montgomery’s Eighth Army, the British “Desert
     Rats,” had turned the tide on Rommel, and the Nazi threat to Palestine had evaporated,
     the British army formed the Jewish Brigade. Five thousand Jews who would fight for
     the British against the Germans in Europe.
    The Haganah sent Omri Shur and Ari Levinsky, and hundreds more, to join the Brigade
     and gain experience for the next war they all saw coming: against the Arabs in Palestine.
     They didn’t get a chance to do much fighting, though. British commanders didn’t trust
     the Palestinian Jews, and the war ended too soon.
    But for a rogue handful of the Jewish Brigade, their own private war was just beginning.
     A war of revenge.
    *   *   *
    Omri and Ari trod in the shadows of trees until the track from the meadow merged with
     the lane. It was the very last street of Holzkirchen, a small market town in Bavaria,
     about thirty kilometers from Munich: Hitler country. At ten o’clock at night, most
     of the worthy burghers were fast asleep. All the houses in the street were dark, except
     for the third on the left. Upstairs, their man in British Intelligence had told them,
     at 10:00 p.m. Frau Inge Langenscheidt would be preparing to put out the light. Downstairs,
     her husband would shuffle around till the small hours of the morning, reading, writing,
     pacing.
    SS-Obersturmbannführer Uwe Langenscheidt, of the 13th Waffen Mountain Division, special
     liaison with the Croatian Ustasha, murderer, torturer, rapist, had trouble sleeping.
    “The fuck he does,” Ari had said when they were given their target, his history, his
     address, his habits, his wife’s habits, and the names and breeds of the neighborhood
     dogs. “He’s a big guy, rough, be careful,” the briefer, known to them only as Blue,
     had told them. Blue was a Jew in British Intelligence, part of a tiny underground
     within the Allied armed forces that gave the files of identified yet unpunished SS
     officers to the secret band that called themselves the Avengers. It enabled small
     units of killers to operate in the British, American, and Russian zones of occupied
     Germany.
    Omri and Ari emerged from the blue-tinged trees into pale moonlight. Now that they
     were in the open anyway, they no longer crept but walked boldly in the middle of the
     street as if they had grown up there.
    Two men and their shadows, with guns.
    At the gate to the house, Ari clicked with his tongue, and clicked again, until Topf,
     the Langenscheidts’ big mutt, appeared by the garden shed, alert and suspicious. They
     heard his low growl. Ari clicked again a few times, burrowed in his pocket, and threw
     a slice of raw meat toward the animal. “Kelev tov,” Ari murmured in Hebrew, good dog.
     As Topf leaped onto the meat and gulped it down, his tail wagging furiously, wanting
     more, the two killers quietly unlatched the gate and walked toward the front door,
     avoiding the two orange pools of light from the windows.
    Upstairs, the light went out. After five minutes, without a sound, Ari released the
     clasp on his jackknife, slid it between the lock and the door, and maneuvered and
     levered until with a pop the bolt slid back into its cylinder. He pushed the door.
     It still didn’t open. He slid the blade of the knife down to the floor and then upward
     till he found a second lock. Again, the clasp, pressure, a sudden giving, and the
     bolt moved backward.
    It was just a simple country