Free Fox On The Rhine by Douglas Niles, Michael Dobson Page B

awkwardly as he reached for the Luger he kept there.
    Schmidt stood there for a moment, gathering his though giving Göring a quick few seconds in which to draw his gun and seconds to see the contempt, the anger, in the eyes of his erstwhile aide.
    Schmidt fired as Göring pulled his arm upward.
    The large bullets shot forth in precise cadence. The first one struck the minister’s bemedaled chest, forcing him heavily backward as a crimson stain immediately marred the powder blue uniform. Göring’s unused Luger clattered to the floor as another slug struck higher, and the third punctured the rolls fat ringing his neck, snapping the huge head backward. Other shots continued to hit, still higher, but by this time the obese reichmarshal was already dead.
     
    SHAEF, London, England, 22 July 1944, 0907 hours GMT
     
    Die Brucke ist verbrennt. Ein Gewitter nähert sich . Major F Sanger stubbed out the butt of his cigarette in the remaining half inch of cold black coffee and scratched his head. Code phrases, obviously, but whose? The first one he knew; British intelligence had provided support to the German coup plot and instantly intercepted the code message that revealed death of Adolf Hitler. The second one was a mystery, and he didn’t like mysteries. That’s why he was in military intelligence, even if other people called it an oxymoron.
    Hitler dead. It had sort of an unreal quality to it. Sanger was only a second-generation American, and his parents, among others, had worshiped the German führer when he first rose to power. So had Sanger, as a teenager, until he’d gotten a firsthand look.
    It had been the summer of his seventeenth year, and his parents scrimped and saved to give him a summer in his homeland. He’d flown the giant airship Hindenberg across the Atlantic Ocean, the majestic swastika on its tail revealing German glory and might to the entire world. His German cousins, a few years older, wore the proud uniform of Hitlerjugend--Hitler Youth. He’d joined in a burst of patriotic fervor, only to have the true nature of the Hitler mystique revealed to him on a night of atrocity and horror in which he’d been a willing participant, to his eternal shame. As the consequences of his actions set in, he turned against the Nazi Party, resigned his membership--to the dismay and disdain of his cousins. Having severed connections to that side of his family, he boarded the Hindenberg for the long and now lonely flight home, wracked with guilt and confusion.
    The day of the landing, the Hindenberg had burst into flames. Most of the passengers escaped, including him, but he would never forget the horror of the inferno that raged around him. He bore scar tissue up his right arm and shoulder, creeping up his neck, divine retribution, he believed, for his actions on that night in Germany.
    That trip had altered the destiny of his life forever. At first rated 4-F because of the fire damage, he’d finally managed to worm his way into the military with the aid of a sympathetic doctor. Because of his fluent German, he even managed to get a military intelligence post. He’d had to put up with inevitable suspicion about his background, and even now he suspected that his career was held back and his access limited for fear that he was a deep-background agent. The suspicion pained him, but it was inevitable, so he lived with it, refused to let it hurt him, and put all his energies into the war effort.
    Ein Gewitter nahert sich . A thunderstorm approaches. He reviewed the steps in the conspiracy: the assassination of Hitler according to plan. Goebbels: dead, but not a direct target of the conspirators. Interesting. Himmler: attempt failed. Well, it was a long shot to have a deep-cover agent attempt the job. The SS Reichsführer was nearly as well protected as Hitler, possibly more so. And now Göring, dead. That wasn’t part of the plan either. The logical conclusion, therefore, was that there were two conspiracies at work: the