Chapter 7

Once General Eisenhower was done with me, I discovered that the War Department had provided for me to build a staff as large as I thought I needed and take them from wherever I felt best. They were certainly counting on me to replicate our success in the Pacific. It kind of scared me to think that so many high level officials were willing to hand me the keys to the car and tell me to drive, but wartime changes everything. We lose perspective and patience, in equal measure. Sometimes those risks pay off in spades. Sometimes they don’t.

“You won’t be here long...”

This time I bolted upright out of a deep sleep. Jenny felt the bed heave and grabbed me to calm me down and assure me that we were in bed, safe and that everything was O.K. Her gentle hands did the trick and before long I felt myself slip off.

“You won’t be here long...

“Don’t fear the inevitable. Your work has been acceptable, but your work has changed the future too much, endangering continued existence off the world...”

We were in a dark, dank place, full of flickers of light that had no genesis. The walls seemed to be made of smoke and the floor glowed like it floated above a bed of brimstone. How I knew about brimstone I couldn’t tell you, but my head told my heart that we were suspended between earth and hell, in a somewhere that was rarely visited.

The voice talked so softly that I only caught a little bit of its words.

“You endanger me ... you infuriate me ... your very life and breath is a terrible insult to me...”

The voice droned on for a long time, but I could tell you if a long time was a second, or a year. My heart was surprisingly calm as the invisible entity behind the voice continued to list my sins and how grievously they wounded him. For some unknown reason I knew I was not dying that night. The voice wanted to frighten me – terrify me – but failed to raise my blood pressure, or my heart rate.

The place ... I was in The Place. That much I was sure of. The Place was somewhere else, not of our world, but dependent upon our world to survive. It was a classic contradiction, but I stood my ground and believed what I believed. The world may have receded – taken me out of my world and brought me to his, but the voice had no power to hurt me.

“You will not be here long...”

Emboldened, I shouted, “I Won’t Be WHERE Long!!??!!”

My challenge was ignored. That told me even more about this ghastly visitation. My tormenter had no answers, yet sought to stop me from some act that would either kill him, or hurt him badly enough to keep him from his purpose for living.

“You will not be here long...”

If he thought that would strike terror into my heart, he was unsuccessful. His mantra made me madder, not scared.

“Be Gone, Ghost. You have no power over me.”

And just like that, I was back in bed, holding Jenny close while she slept.

Jenny helped me select staff that would not only do what they were told, but keep their mouths shut before, during and after. Her instincts were great and we had a staff in place long before my deadline.

It was highly unusual for a General to pick a woman for any purpose other than for secretarial and maid work. On my staff, Jenny led our non-investigative unit with a determined hand, keeping them focused on the big picture and away from rabbit trails that most often led nowhere. Any member of my team that had issues with taking orders from a woman was sent packing without a backward glance, or a second thought. What we were up against was far too dangerous for our staff to be nursing grudges about gender.

Jenny out did herself in taking care of lodging, transportation and a myriad of day to day details that freed up our investigative unit to follow up on leads, find and interview witnesses, back me up when necessary and generally make life miserable for spies, traitors and other forms of human sewage.

Our pool of suspects began to pay off almost immediately. We were in an English city, where the Luftwaffe made a habit out of hitting the most sensitive locations, night after night. There was obviously a network of spies sending information to the Nazis. Our job was to find them and make them disappear.

We caught a break when a female member of the home guard noticed an officer that was constantly in and out, instead of seeing to his assignment. She was suspicious because he seemed so determined to avoid anyone from knowing the first thing about his private life. When I tracked him into the nearby woods, I witnessed an exchange of material and sent my team to intercept them both, but separately so neither spy knew we’d captured the other one.

The capture went smoothly, if you define smoothly as the Nazi handler attempting suicide once he realized he couldn’t escape. Our interception team was ready for that and quietly put him to sleep until we could get around to interrogating him. The English Captain caved in without incident, rolled over on the Nazi’s and gave us everything he knew and everything he suspected about his handlers, knowing we would excute him as soon as we were convinced he had nothing left to give. Along the way he disclosed that the Nazi handler had his wife as a hostage, to insure his cooperation. “I know you’re goona kill me, but please try to free my wife. She did nothing wrong and those bastards claim they use her for a bed partner and love to hear her scream...”

In a funny twist of fate, the Nazi eventually gave us the location of our Captain’s wife and she confirmed every word he said. Rather than shoot him as a traitor, we took on as a member of our interception team, which was the most dangerous job in our unit.

The Nazi died begging to be allowed to give up more of his comrades, to avoid execution. We let our newest member put him down and watched to make sure we weren’t being played. He smiled the evilest smile I’ve ever seen, grabbed the pistol and shot the Nazi spy without a split second of regret. His wife spent a few weeks in the hospital recovering from her ordeal. By the time she was home, we had moved on, taking her husband with us.

Some things are just what they are.

Time passed quickly as we hunted down spy after spy and dispatched them to their eternal reward. Men and women died under our care as we sought to rid Europe of the Nazi scourge. Having no rules applied to our behavior allowed us to be as brutal as we had to be and insured no spy lived to give a report of our methods.