Chapter 1

Mike Callahan moved quietly in the shadows next to the stone wall in Langenhagen. He saw Johnson slip around the far corner. Suddenly, there was the sound of automatic-weapons fire. Callahan could hear the muffled sounds characteristic of the MP-5 and the chatter of AK-47 assault rifles. As he slid along the wall trying to be as quiet as possible, he wondered why he was bothering. The noise from the automatic weapons was enough to awaken the dead.

As he approached the corner of the wall, two Soviet guards came around moving right into a hail of fire from his silenced MP-5. Unlike their comrades, they didn’t have a chance to fire a shot as they were cut down by a hail of 9mm bullets. Mike continued to the corner and carefully peered around it. He found Ben Johnson dead, his body riddled with bullets. Just then two more guards came running. Mike kept low in the shadows and tracked their approach. He had picked up an AK-47 from one of the downed guards and pulled its cocking lever. He waited motionless until the guards were only ten feet away. They were so close he couldn’t miss — and didn’t. They were cut to pieces by automatic weapons fire.

He moved back around the corner of the wall. From the corner of his eye he saw a shadow move. It was another guard with his weapon leveled at him. Mike’s weapon was aimed the wrong way; he was dead meat. Then there was a quick movement behind the guard. A bare arm came around his neck and there was a flash of light on polished metal. The guard collapsed to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut.

Mike was astonished to see a naked girl kneeling over the body and appearing to wipe off a knife blade on the dead man’s tunic. He could hear the sounds of running feet as more guards responded to the sounds of gunfire. While he ran towards the spot where he and Ben had left the car they had used for the night’s raid, he could hear the padding sound of the girl’s bare feet running after him.

The car was an ancient Volkswagen Beetle which was still a ubiquitous car in Langenhagen. He jumped in and started it up as the girl opened the other door and jumped into the passenger seat. The car’s interior was so dark he still couldn’t get a good look at her. He took a right turn at the first corner, followed by a left and then another right. When he came to a main artery he turned left and paced the small volume of wartime traffic heading out of town.

Stopping beside a field that was just around a bend in the road from a roadblock, Mike swallowed hard. The girl beside him had still not spoken a word. When he asked her if she were coming with him, she nodded. He realized he had spoken to her in English rather than the local language, German. She didn’t even blink.

“Okay, then,” he said pointing out the edge of a grove of trees, “run for those trees over there. But watch where you step. It’s a minefield. Try to step on clumps of grass. Incidentally, after you go a few yards, you’ll be within sight of a checkpoint up the road. They have searchlights, so don’t be surprised if bullets start humming around you. Can you do that?”

The girl nodded again and got out of the car. Mike took another clip of ammunition for his MP-5 and set it for single fire. At this range automatic fire would just make noise. The range was far too great for automatic weapons to be used with any accuracy; for that matter, his weapon’s effective range was much too short for this task at any rate of fire.

The girl started running. He could see her picking her way across the field, carefully following his instructions about placing her feet. After she had gone about twenty yards, he could hear the alarm being given at the checkpoint and then searchlights started sweeping the field. One picked up the running girl and pinned her in its beam. Strangely, there were no shots fired and she did not slow down. Mike realized the guards were taken by surprise at the sight of a naked girl running across the field.

As she reached the far edge of the field, the first shots were fired. As he expected, the guards were using automatic fire. Dirt was being kicked up in the area where the girl was running but she seemed to ignore it. In a matter of moments she was out of range.

He started sprinting after her. This time the guards were alert. After he had taken about a dozens steps he was hit but managed to stay on his feet and kept going. Soon he reached the edge of the trees and found the girl waiting for him.

“You did say that was a minefield, didn’t you?” she asked quietly.

Mike was impressed with the calmness of her voice and liked its soft musical quality. “Yes, it is, and that’s what I said. Does it make a difference?”

She just shook her head. She had seen him hit and asked, “Do you have a first-aid pack with you?” When he said he didn’t, she took her knife and slit his pants, cutting off the left trouser leg. She then rolled it around to form a bandage and placed it over the bullet hole. It was quite dark at their position so Mike still had not had a good look at the girl.

“Where do we go now?”

He led the way deep into the stand of trees to a campsite he and Ben had set up a few days earlier. Then he explained to her they had taken advantage of the minefields the East Germans and Russians had placed by moving some of their mines and adding a few of their own. After two patrols had detonated mines while proceeding on what they thought to be a safe track, they had ceased patrolling towards the woods. Fortunately, they did not suspect enemy action. Rather, they wrote it off as typically careless marking of mine locations.

Mike went into a grove of tall evergreens. As he led her to their camp he explained how the evergreens dissipated wood smoke and shielded them from view from helicopters passing overhead. Because of natural emissions from the evergreens, small amounts of wood smoke went unnoticed. As he traveled the last few feet, he started to feel dizzy as the initial shock of being hit started to wear off. As they entered the camp’s perimeter, he staggered, then collapsed to the ground.

When he recovered consciousness, he saw the girl kneeling on the floor of the tent examining his leg by the light of a gasoline lantern. She was now wearing one of Ben’s combat jackets. He had been awakened by a sharp jabbing pain in his leg which caused it to jerk under her hand. She went to the large first-aid kit she had found, took out a xylocaine ampule and gave him an injection in the leg just above the point of bullet entry.

She had been kneeling and now sat back on her heels and smiled at him. “We have to wait for the morphine to work. I suppose we should get acquainted. My name is Kelly Jackson and thank you for rescuing me,” she said.

Mike looked at her carefully. She had blonde hair and brilliant blue eyes. Remarkable for Germany, she even had a tan although it was very early spring. Mike decided she was a very lovely girl — and clearly very young. He estimated her age as being under twenty-one — probably eighteen or nineteen.

“Hello, Kelly,” he said. “I’m Mike Callahan, and I owe you. You were the one who took the guard off my back while I was standing there like a fool with my weapon pointed the wrong way. Where did you come from by the way, and what are you doing here?”