Free The Rhinemann Exchange by Robert Ludlum Page B

back and we’ll get out. If not, I’ll try to grab him.… If anything goes wrong, if he hears me, he’ll probably head for the water. Take him.”
    The Spaniard nodded. Spaulding checked the tautness of his rifle strap, giving it a last-second hitch. He gave his subordinate a tentative smile and saw that the man’s hands—huge, calloused—were spread on the ground like claws. If the Wehrmacht officer headed this way, he’d never get by those hands, thought David.
    He crept swiftly, silently into the woods, his arms and feet working like a primitive hunter’s, warding off branches, sidestepping rocks and tangled foliage.
    In less than three minutes he had gone thirty yards behind the German on the Nazi’s left flank. He stood immobile and withdrew his binoculars. He scanned the forest and the trail. There were no other patrols. He doubled back cautiously, blending every movement of his body with his surroundings.
    When he was within ten feet of the German, who was kneeling on the ground, David silently unlatched his holster and withdrew his pistol. He spoke sharply, though not impolitely, in German.
    “Stay where you are or I’ll blow your head off.”
    The Nazi whipped around and awkwardly fumbled for his weapon. Spaulding took several rapid steps and kicked it out of his hands. The man started to rise, and David brought his heavy leather boot up into the side of the German’s head. The officer’s visor hat fell to the ground; blood poured out of the man’s temple, spreading throughout the hairline, streaking down across his face. He was unconscious.
    Spaulding reached down and tore at the Nazi’s tunic. Strapped across the Oberleutnant’s chest was a travelingpouch. David pulled the steel zipper laterally over the waterproofed canvas and found what he was sure he would find.
    The photographs of the hidden Luftwaffe installations north of Mont-de-Marsan. Along with the photographs were amateurish drawings that were, in essence, basic blueprints. At least, schematics. Taken from Bergeron, who had then led the German into the trap.
    If he could make sense out of them—along with the photographs—he would alert London that sabotage units could inflict the necessary destruction, immobilizing the Luftwaffe complex. He would send in the units himself.
    The Allied air strategists were manic when it came to bombing runs. The planes dove from the skies, reducing to rubble and crater everything that was—and was not—a target, taking as much innocent life as enemy. If Spaulding could prevent air strikes north of Mont-de-Marsan, it might somehow … abstractly … make up for the decision he now had to face.
    There were no prisoners of war in the Galician hills, no internment centers in the Basque country.
    The Wehrmacht lieutenant, who was so ineffectual in his role of the hunter … who might have had a life in some peaceful German town in a peaceful world … had to die. And he, the man from Lisbon, would be the executioner. He would revive the young officer, interrogate him at the point of a knife to learn how deeply the Nazis had penetrated the underground in San Sebastián. Then kill him.
    For the Wehrmacht officer had seen the man from Lisbon; he could identify that man as David Spaulding.
    The fact that the execution would be mercifully quick—unlike a death in partisan hands—was of small comfort to David. He knew that at the instant he pulled the trigger, the world would spin insanely for a moment or two. He would be sick to his stomach and want to vomit, his whole being in a state of revulsion.
    But he would not show these things. He would say nothing, indicate nothing … silence. And so the legend would continue to grow. For that was part of the treadmill.
    The man in Lisbon was a killer.

4
SEPTEMBER 20, 1943, MANNHEIM, GERMANY
    Wilhelm Zangen brought the handkerchief to his chin, and then to the skin beneath his nostrils, and finally to the border of his receding hairline. The sweat was