December, 1978 — Schweinfurt, West Germany

  “Fifty cents for a pack of cigarettes,” Tisk compined. “Fucking highway robbery.”

  “You go over your ration again?” Sergeant Housewright asked him.

  “Yes. Again. Why can’t they bump up our ration? Third month in a row.”

  “Here,” Aric said as he handed his squad leader his ration card. “Take mine. I’m trying to quit. The added cost will help.”

  “Thanks, Ammo,” Nick said as he pocketed the small square of paper. “Ada on your back about smoking in bed?”

  Aric smiled at the running joke. “No. I’d just decided that I’d like to live to see at least fifty. Sixty if I’m lucky.”

  Ada hadn’t blinked at the opportunity to act as his accomplice in sharing the information he’d pulled from the minds of the Red Army Faction terrorists. Not that there was a lot to share. An address. A voice on the phone. The area where they’d done their weapons training. A couple of dead drop locations. She’d called it in from the train station during a busy period, and picked a phone with plenty of background noise. She read every John Le Carre novel she could get her hands on, and had jumped at the chance of pying spy.

  “I’m just gd you’re OK,” She’d said when he’d shared the news. “You’re not bulletproof. What if you’d been the one asleep? Would you still have known?”

  It was a fair question.

  “I’ve been woken up by things before, but nothing like this. If they’d got lucky and put a round through my head quickly I don’t think I could have done anything about it.”

  She been sitting on the bed, her knees pulled up to her chest and her arms wrapped tightly around them after he’d finished telling her what happened. He wanted to reach out to her, wrap his own arms around her, take away some of her fear, or anxiety—whatever it was that had her so drawn into herself. But her words—that she’d spoken in this very room—came back to him.

  I don’t want to live in a bubble, yours or anybody else

  “So it was just blind luck that you survived,” she said finally, her voice still muffled by her legs.

  Aric nodded his agreement. In a way he took an odd amount of comfort in the fact.

  “Like it is for most people going through life. We leave the house five minutes earlier or ter, and step into the road, or drive through an intersection, and live or die by inches.”

  When she picked her head up he saw that she’d been crying. But her voice was steady when she spoke. She unfurled herself and rolled onto her side, and into his arms.

  “So,” she said as she pced her head on his chest, “we have that in common at least.”

  He kissed her forehead before massaging it with his rough cheek.

  “That, and a whole lot more. Remember, I’m just as human as anybody.”

  She raised up on her elbows so she could kiss his soft lips. He returned the favor, and the fire began to grow inside her. She straddled him and pulled her sweater over her head and tossed it to one side before leaning down to kiss him again.

  “Prove it,” she said warmly as his hands found her breasts.

  February, 1979 — GDR Permanent Mission, Bonn, West Germany

  “How many men?” Erich Venske asked. Surely he’d counted wrong.

  “Sixteen,” said the assistant deputy chief of mission. Erich had a persistent mental block where it came to the man’s st name. His face was just as unmemorable as his name. Erich thought he’d make a good covert agent.

  Officially speaking the man outranked him. Unofficially there were only two men in the entire mission that Erich answered to, and Frank something that had an L in it was not one of them. “Four for the barracks, eight for the airbase, and two teams on the outside to breach the fences and open their escape routes.”

  So I didn’t miscount.

  Sixteen men—probably men and women. It’s a big operation for the Baader–Meinhof Gang—the biggest, assuming they pulled the dual attack off.

  Oberstleutnant Erich Venske turned to the st pages of the pn—the ones that showed maps of the two locations, and how the attack would progress if all went well.

  “And they started training when?”

  “Right after the first of the new year. It took that long for us to come up with the pn, and for them to assemble their teams and travel to the training sites.”

  Venske could find out the locations where the two teams were training. If he was the least bit interested. Which he wasn’t. It was none of his business. This operation—this pair of operations—was developed by his superiors in Berlin, and none of them had felt the need to ask his opinion. He was promised forty-eight hours notice prior to the attacks so he, and anyone else in the mission that needed one, could arrange to be somewhere with enough witnesses of sufficient caliber that no suspicion would fall on them. Erich questioned the logic of such things. Looking like you’d arranged an ironcd alibi was just as bad as having none at all in his opinion. He’d decide what to do when the notice came.

  It was an overreaction in his opinion. And a mistake. Someone was compensating for the failed attack at the ammo dump. Collecting resources for a massive strike when they should have broken those sixteen men into small teams for targeted hit and run assaults. Keep the Americans off bance. And definitely don’t hit them at their strongest points.

  But no one had asked his opinion.

  February, 1979 — Somewhere in East Germany

  “Does it get colder the further east you travel?” The man named Paul asked him.

  Jorge was pretty sure the man’s name was actually Pavel. He knew a Czech accent when he heard one. But Paul/Pavel spoke excellent German, and he wouldn’t be the first man to change his name to fit into a new country.

  “It doesn’t get colder in the East. The heating just gets worse.”

  Jorge had no idea where they were. None of them did. Deutsche Demokratische Republik—that’s all they knew. Probably an old Soviet training facility. Wherever it was, it had been mocked up to simute the main American airbase in Frankfurt. The main gate. The route that led to the enormous pnes carrying tactical nuclear bombs. And their escape route after they’d pnted their satchel and blown up the American bombers. Jorge had no idea if the explosions would spread contamination, or how far. Far enough to put him in danger? Who knew? The danger from American automatic weapons was already high enough that it trumped everything else. If he survived long enough to worry about radioactive contamination he’d worry about it then.

  February, 1979 — Somewhere Else in East Germany

  Sabine watched as the local workmen—as regur as any Swiss watch— stopped what they were doing as the clock struck 10:00 AM. They retrieved bottles of beer from their square lunch boxes and then used the metal containers as stools as they sat, drank, smoked or read the newspaper. One or two munched on a bratwurst shrouded in a roll. She’d lost count of the number of days she watched them—the passage of time only marked by the two consecutive days those men were absent marking the end of another week.

  The surrounding buildings were meant to simute those they would encounter immediately after breaching the gate, a hastily constructed version of which the workmen had assembled the week before.

  The GDR officer in charge of their training and well being told them it was an urban warfare training site built in the fifties by the Soviet Union. It must have been something else before then because of the number of permanent structures, one of which they were using as living quarters. It had running water and electricity and at least some heat.

  That officer had taken her physical measurements, as he had everyone who would enter the barracks, so that they would all be properly disguised as American soldiers. At least the first set of measurements. His second set had been an excuse to see her almost naked (again). She was sure of it. His eyes had been all over her. As had his hands.

  Lonely, she’d thought afterward. Probably an Eastern thing. She didn’t consider herself particurly attractive. She didn’t garner much attention in the West. She’d almost felt fttered by his attention. Almost.

  In truth, Sabine had had enough of it. All of it. They were too small of a group. Little better than a gang if she was being honest. They were a fly attacking an elephant. They’d released an ultimatum threatening to erase the American presence from German soil. And what had they done afterwards? Killed a young American nurse as she sat in a cafe. A non combatant, not even in uniform. Sabine had been physically ill afterward, even though she’d been no where near the event, had nothing to do with it. Killing defenseless girls wasn’t what she’d signed up for.

  This assault was more like it, or at least it had the potential to be. Hit them where they lived. Target front line troops, not nurses or cooks. There would be no paper pushers in their sights if everything went according to pn. Get in, kill as many Americans as possible, and get out again.

  Then she would call it quits. Find a pce to live her life. That thought was foremost in her mind as she looked around at the streets and buildings around her.

  But not a pce in the East.

  7:30 PM 22 March, 1979 — The Majestic Hotel, Bonn, West Germany

  “Hello, Carl. Nice to see you again,” the bright redheaded woman said as she stepped into the hotel room.

  “Good evening, Elke. Thank you for coming by on such short notice,” Erich Venske replied.

  He knew her name wasn’t Elke. In fact, he knew a great deal about her. She’d worked as a prostitute for seven years, supporting herself and her mother by working in the world’s oldest profession.

  “No, Frank,” Erich had corrected the man whose st name he still could not remember, “not a bakery. The world’s other oldest profession.”

  Elke, on the other hand, knew nothing about him. She assumed (correctly) that Carl wasn’t his real name. Few of her clients ever trusted her with that information. But she charged—and they paid—enough that they could call themselves Mona Lisa for all she cared.

  She hadn’t seen Carl for some time, and was surprised when he called two days ago and asked to book her for the entire night. This night in particur. She naturally assumed his wife was out of town on short notice, and he wanted to make the most of the occasion.

  The hotel he’d chosen was more upscale than usual, which only cemented the idea in her mind that he wanted the evening to feel special—for both of them. She found it rather sweet, and the smile she gave him—right before kissing him—was, for a change, genuine.

  Erich had actually chosen the hotel because he knew the man at the front desk would remember his face, as well as the unnatural titian hair of the tall, buxom woman who had sauntered past without so much as a gnce.

  “I’m expecting company,” Erich had said as he signed Carl Heinz in the register. He’d winked at the young clerk, giving him a hint as to what kind of company he meant.

  If it came to it, he would admit—shamefully, even—that he’d spent the entire night of the two attacks in the arms of a rented woman.

  There were no lengths to which Erich Venske would not go in the service of his country.