Free The Rhinemann Exchange by Robert Ludlum

his left, into the tall grass toward the remains of a dying pear orchard. Two men in mudcaked clothes, rifles at their sides, were sitting on the ground playing trick knife, passing the time in silence. They snapped their heads up, their hands reaching for their guns.
    Spaulding gestured to them to remain on the ground. He approached and spoke quietly in Spanish.
    “Do either of you know who’s on the team coming in?”
    “Bergeron, I think,” said the man on the right. “And probably Chivier. That old man has a way with patrols; forty years he’s peddled across the border.”
    “Then it’s Bergeron,” said Spaulding.
    “What is?” asked the second man.
    “We’re being signaled. They’re late and someone is using what’s left of the sun to get our attention.”
    “Perhaps to tell you they’re on their way.” The first man put the knife back in his scabbard as he spoke.
    “Possible but not likely. We wouldn’t go anywhere. Not for a couple of hours yet.” Spaulding raised himself partially off the ground and looked eastward. “Come on! We’ll head down past the rim of the orchard. We can get a cross view there.”
    The three men in single file, separated but within hearing of each other, raced across the field below the high ground for nearly four hundred yards. Spaulding positioned himself behind a low rock that jutted over the edge of the ravine. He waited for the other two. The waters below were about a hundred feet straight down, he judged. The team from San Sebastián would cross them approximately two hundred yards west, through the shallow, narrow passage they always used.
    The two other men arrived within seconds of each other.
    “The old tree where you stood was the mark, wasn’t it?” asked the first man.
    “Yes,” answered Spaulding, removing his binoculars from a case opposite his belt holster. They were powerful, with Zeiss Ikon lenses, the best Germany produced. Taken from a dead German at the Tejo River.
    “Then why come down here? If there’s a problem, your line of vision was best where you were. It’s more direct.”
    “If there’s a problem, they’ll know that. They’ll flank to their left. East. To the west the ravine heads
away
from the mark. Maybe it’s nothing. Perhaps you were right; they just want us to know they’re coming.”
    A little more than two hundred yards away, just west of the shallow passage, two men came into view. The Spaniard who knelt on Spaulding’s left touched the American’s shoulder.
    “It’s Bergeron and Chivier,” he said quietly.
    Spaulding held up his hand for silence and scanned the area with the binoculars. Abruptly he fixed them in one position. With his left hand he directed the attention of his subordinates to the spot.
    Below them, perhaps fifty yards, four soldiers in Wehrmacht uniforms were struggling with the foliage, approaching the waters of the ravine.
    Spaulding moved his binoculars back to the two Frenchmen, now crossing the water. He held the glasses steady against the rock until he could see in the woods behind the two men what he knew was there.
    A fifth German, an officer, was half concealed in the tangled mass of weeds and low branches. He held a rifle on the two Frenchmen crossing the ravine.
    Spaulding passed the binoculars quickly to the first Spaniard. He whispered, “Behind Chivier.”
    The man looked, then gave the glasses to his countryman.
    Each knew what had to be done; even the methods were clear. It was merely a question of timing, precision. From a scabbard behind his right hip, Spaulding withdrew a short carbine bayonet, shortened further by grinding. His two associates did the same. Each peered over the rock at the Wehrmacht men below.
    The four Germans, faced with waters waist high and a current—though not excessively strong, nevertheless considerable—strapped their rifles across their shoulders laterally and separated in a downstream column. The lead man started across, testing the depths as he did