A Man Called Milo Morai

XII

Stiles gasped, grimaced, then his legs flexed, and he would have fallen save for Milo’s grip on his hand. The second shot was fired, and Milo felt something tear through the left shoulder of his Ike jacket. Almost at the same time, there was a third shot that struck the muddy boot-cover of the automobile and caromed off, whining.

Webber had stood for a bare moment in shock, then he had sunk to his knees beside the door. As he slid forward on his face, Milo saw the red-welling hole drilled into the back of his neck, just at the base of the skull.

Forcibly pulling his hand free from the powerful grasp of his friend, Milo reached for his pistol, slapped his hip and cursed; his pistol belt still hung on a hook beside his desk.

“Berniel” he roared, “Get me a fucking weapon of some kind out here, and some grenades, too. Snipers. Snipers in the big front upstairs window of that house two doors up on the other side of the street. At least two of the Kraut fuckers. And get Nicely to see to the general —he’s been hit.”

Stiles lay quietly, his face whiter than pale and his breathing ragged. Milo could see no wound on the front, so he gently eased the man partially over. Then he could see it, and it looked far from good—a rapidly growing blotch of blood at just about the center of the left shoulder blade. With a retching, tearing sound, Stiles coughed up a thick spray of red blood, then, with the blood still dribbling from his mouth and nose and down his chin, he spoke, hoarsely.

“Milo … for the love of God, prop me up … can’t breathe!”

Milo saw the long barrel of a Mauser K98 poke out of the window opening once again, and he ducked down, shielding Jethro as much as he could with his own body. But the shot was obviously aimed elsewhere, at another target. Milo heard it hit something more solid than flesh and bone, though it did elicit a vile curse from someone who sounded like Master Sergeant Chamberlin.

Sure enough, as he looked up at a nearby scuffling sound, it was to see the hulking Chamberlin belly-crawling toward him, a Thompson cradled in his thick arms.

When the noncom had come close enough, Milo grabbed the submachine gun from him. “Give me the magazine pouch, too. I’ll keep the fuckers down. You hightail it back and get some more men, good ones, too, not any of these fucking johnny-come-latelies. See if you can run down an M7 launcher or at least some hand grenades.”

The rifle barrel had withdrawn into the darkened room behind the window, but still Milo took no chances. Using the boot of the Mercedes for both cover and a shooting rest, he sprayed half a magazine of big .45 caliber slugs across the window, parallel to the sill. From the first-floor window came a flash and the booming sound of a pistol and the simultaneous smack of the bullet into the far side of the tire beside which Milo crouched. With a drawn-out hissing the tire began to flatten. But he didn’t flinch, he just lowered the muzzle of the smoking Thompson and put the other half of the magazine across the width of the lower window; his reward was a high-pitched scream.

As Milo leaned back against the shot-out tire, ejecting the spent magazine and replacing it with a fresh one from Chamberlin’s pouch, Jethro, now sitting propped against the side of the auto, extended a hand to grip his arm … very weakly.

He opened his mouth, then closed it long enough to feebly spit out a mouthful of blood. In a voice so faint that at times Milo could not hear it at all, he said, “… long, long road, for me. Martine and you … the last few years of it much happier … more real happiness than I ever deserved.

“… see things now, Milo, You, you …like us but not really us … ageless, timeless, immortal. You and … people like you … rule an empire … different world, then. You will keep … promise, see you keep … ing it. Then fight a … nother war … many other wars. Savior of a race … little children. New world … talk to … cats, horses, other animals.

“Be good . . , Martine, Milo, buddy … know you will… .”

Then the rifle was firing again and Chamberlin shouted, “Keep that Kraut bastard down, Milo, he just got Jackson in the leg. Medic!”

Again taking his position behind the boot of the Mercedes, Milo feathered the trigger, firing bursts of three or four shots each at the window. By the time the magazine was empty, Master Sergeant Chamberlin and four other men were crouching behind the bulk of the automobile— three, with Garands, one with a BAR, the sergeant bearing another Thompson and a bag of grenades.

“Foun’ two M7s, Milo, but not one fuckin’ grenade cartridge in the whole fuckin’ pl’toon. Would you b’lieve it? Shit!”

Before Milo could speak, First Sergeant Bernie Cohen came crawling out from the company CP, a carbine slung across his back and a bazooka in his arms, with a rocket for it in each hand.

Milo set aside the Thompson and grabbed the rocket launcher, but Chamberlin protested, “Jesus Christ Almighty, Milo, you’ll blow that whole rickety place down, even if you don’t burn it down. A fuckin’ bazooka?”

Ignoring the admonition, Milo said, “Bernie, the minute the first one’s clear, load the second one. There’s snipers both up and down, looks like. Even if we do blow the whole house in, they’ve got it coming for hanging out white sheets, then firing on us the way they are. Okay, I’m set. Load!”

Three bodies were dug out of the tumbled wreck that once had been a house. Milo felt sick at first when he saw them, saw the faces; the eldest could not have been any more than thirteen or fourteen. But one of them—the one with a big-bore bullet hole between his neck and shoulder with the scapula brown away on that side—was still gripping in his dead hand a Mauser HCs pistol with three shots gone from its magazine. Seeing this helped him to recover quickly. In addition to the smaller pistol, they found a P38 9mm pistol, a K98 rifle and an Erma MP38/40 with a burst cartridge case in the chamber. There were in addition to the firearms two SS daggers, about two dozen more rounds for the rifle, another magazine for each of the pistols and one for the Maschinenpistole.

“Just a bunch of fuckin’ little kids.” Chamberlin shook his head in clear consternation. “Hell, the way they were shootin’, I thought we was up against SS or Wehrmacht, anyhow. Where did three little boys get aholt of stuff like that, you reckon?”

“Fuckin’-A right they was good shots,” exclaimed First Sergeant Bernie Cohen. “I’ll lay you dollars to doughnuts these three here was Hitler Youths and been learning to shoot and fight since they was five, six years old. As for the guns and all, you can bet on it that them fuckers was hid by a coupla blackshirts what all of a fuckin’ sudden come to think they didn’t want to be in no POW eamp and that they’s ackshu’ly been innocent civilians at heart all along. And you can bet its a whole lotta fuckin’ Krauts just like them in thishere town and from one end of Germany to the other end, right now.”

As he stood looking down at the body of his old friend, Milo said to no one who could hear him, “What a waste, old buddy. You got through almost all of it without a fucking scratch, only to be shot down by a fanatic little kid who wasn’t even old enough to shave, right at the tail-fucking-end of the fucking war.

“I was wrong, you Were right about knowing you were going to die soon. But, hell, if you hadn’t come up here to give me those fucking stupid envelopes, that little Kraut-ling would never have had a fucking chance to get you in the sights of that fucking rifle, either. But who’s to say, Jethro, who really knows? You could have run over a stray antitank mine on your way to or from wherever you were going after you decided not to come here today, too, or Sergeant Webber could’ve plowed that car into a half-track loaded with explosives and you’d both be just as dead. Goodbye, Jethro, goodbye, buddy. Yes, I’ll do my best for Martine and your kids … but, then, you knew I would, didn’t you?”

Old Colonel John Saxon looked his near-fifty years, every bit of that and far more, but for all his aged appearance, he still was the same tough, profane old soldier that Milo first had met back in ‘42. By May 5, 1945, with Hitler dead and the Russians fully involved in their savage, barbaric rape of the stricken, shattered capital and its surrounding areas, a staff NCO rang up Charlie Company and Milo dutifully reported to the onetime town hall, now the battalion CP.

“Milo,” said Saxon, after they two had each partaken of the powerful schnapps that the American troops called liquid barbed wire, “you ever heard tell of a Colonel Eustace Barstow, a fuckin’ counterintelligence type?”

Milo nodded. “Yes, John, he was a major back then, but he was my section chief at Fort Holabird, before I transferred down to the battalion at Jackson. Why?”

Saxon snorted. “Well, the fucker’s the full bird now. He’s runnin’ some operation down Munich way and he wants you some kinda fuckin’ bad. Was you his angelina or suthin, huh?” He grinned evilly, mock-insultingly.

The Colonel Barstow who warmly welcomed Milo was not very much different from the Major Barstow who had grudgingly approved his requested transfer to a combat-bound unit. He was become a little chubbier, perhaps, but still was very active and fit-looking in his well-tailored uniform, which latter was the old-fashioned one of long blouse, pinks and low-quarter shoes.

“Had God intended me to wear an Ike jacket and combat boots, He’d have had me born in them,” he chuckled merrily. “But sweet Jesus Christ, old man, did you try to win the fucking war single-handedly or something? The only thing you’re lacking from that collection on your chest is a Purple Heart and the Croix de Guerre. Don’t worry about the Purple Heart—you want one, I can see that you get one. They hand them out now for bleeding piles and ingrown toenails, you know. Another thing—you give me a few good months of work, in my chaotic little hashup here, and you’ll have a pair of gold oak leaves to replace those tracks, that’s a promise, old buddy.”

“Exactly what are you doing down here, colonel?” asked Milo warily. “Or is that restricted information?”

Barstow’s eyes twinkled as he laughed. “Of course it is, Milo. It’s restricted as hell, it’s so fucking restricted that every swinging dick—American, British, French, German, Russian, Pole, Czech and, for all I know, Tonkinese, too—knows exactly what me and my boys are up to here … or so they think. But there are wheels within wheels within other wheels. I’m a fucking devious son of a bitch, Milo.

“Milo, we’ve got an unbelievably fucked-up mess in Germany just now. The Krauts brought in hundreds of thousands of so-called voluntary workers—slave laborers, actually, a page they took from the Russians— from all over the European continent. Every nationality and every race native to Europe and Russia is represented, many of them speaking outré languages we can only guess at.

“Then, there are the hordes of political prisoners freed from the various camps and prisons, the Jews and gypsies who were lucky enough to survive the death camps, the POWs of various nationalities from out of the scattered Stalagen—and it seems like five out of every six of those is a Russian whose native language is not Russian, who does not even speak Russian very well and who hates and despises Russians as much as or more than he hates and despises Germans.

“Then we’ve got the Germans—civilian Nazis, all the varieties of SS and Gestapo, Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe, Kriegsmarine, Hitler Jugend, former police of various kinds, a real hodgepodge. And, to really complicate matters, there’s too a sprinkling of the Axis countries— Eyeties, Vichy French, Hungarians, Rumanians, Albanians, Poles, Vlasoffs Cossacks, Danes, Swedes, some few of Quisling’s Norwegians, Spanish Falangists, Finns, Ukrainian nationalists, Serbs, Croatians, Dalmatians, Montenegrans, Latvians, Esthonians, Lithuanians, Dutch, Flemings, Walloons, a few Swiss nationals, Bessarabians, Turks, even one or two Syrians have turned up. Up north, the British chanced onto some Japs and a Hindu from Meerut trying to pass themselves off as Chinese and Polynesian, respectively, after having gotten out of Berlin just ahead of the Red Army.

“My present command consists of about three hundred officers and men and a few civilians and WAACs. Hell, I’ll take anybody I can sink my claws into who can cut the fucking mustard—male or female, commissioned or warranted or enlisted, white or black or yellow or polka-dot, Christian or Jew or Moslem of Buddhist or atheist, military or civilian. My work is vitally important, Milo, that’s why I’m so powerful just now. When I found out that you’d come through the war in one piece, I knew just how valuable a linguist like you would be to me, and I put things in motion to get you for my team. You can do your country and yourself a hell of a lot more fucking good working under mee, here, than you could going up against the Japs in the invasion of their home islands.

“Just how many languages do you speak, anyhow? We were only able to test you out on ten or twelve, as I recall from Holabird.”

Milo shrugged. “I really don’t know, Colonel Barstow, not for sure. It’s always only when I’m confronted with a person whose speech I can understand or a foreign book I can read that I come to know that I own yet another language. Maybe twenty, I’d say, of present knowledge.”

Barstow just grinned and rubbed his palms together in glee, saying, “Good, good, Milo, you’re an answer to prayers. I’m going to put in the paperwork on your majority today. You won’t ever be sorry you came back to work for me, I promise you.”

After so long wearing uniforms and nothing but uniforms, the civilian clothing issued by Colonel Barstow’s operation felt odd and sloppy to Milo. He was assigned an office equipped with an OD GI steel desk, a dark-oak swivel chair, a straight armless chair for interviewees, a four-drawer steel filing cabinet and three-sided length of wood on which was lettered: “MILO MORAY, CAPTAIN INF., USA.”

But he had not been a week on the job when Barstow gave him a handful of similar wooden name blocks with vastly dissimilar names. “I’ll let you know when and if to use these, Milo. Just stow them away somewhere convenient, for now. Sometimes it’s better that they don’t know they’re talking to military officers.”

During the course of the six weeks that followed, Milo had pass before his desk a broad cross section of the flotsam and jetsam of the war now concluded in Europe, and he determined the most of them to be nothing more or less than just what they were purported to be: frightened, confused, often demoralized, malnourished displaced persons, frequently neurotic, sometimes psychotic. But now and then he was able to unmask a ringer, too. No big fish, just lower-ranking SS, mostly, clumsily essaying to fob themselves off as former political prisoners or nationals of other countries, all of these seemingly desirous of instant repatriation.

His majority came through. Barstow presented him with a pair of gold oak leaves and jokingly pinned them on the shoulders of his gray tweed civilian coat, before he poured them each a glass of Scotch and sat down behind his desk, waving Milo to another chair.

“Once all this is done and most of the Army has gone back home, what are your plans, Milo? Mean to stay in the Army, do you? You could do a lot worse, you know.”

“I don’t know, colonel,” said Milo honestly. “My permanent rank is tech sergeant, and that, or at most master, is probably the best I could hope for in a reduced army of Regulars. I’ve promised to care as best I can for a dead buddy’s widow and four children, and I can’t see trying to do that on a sergeant’s pay. I might do better in the civilian world—I could hardly do worse, pay-wise.”

Barstow shook his head emphatically. “You’ve obviously been talking to old soldiers who stayed in after the last war. Things are going to be very different for America and for her armed forces, once this thing is done, you know. The Powers That Be have, I think, learned a hard lesson well; I doubt that the defense establishment will ever again be allowed to wither and rot away into the near-uselessness of long neglect that it was become by the late thirties and early forties. There won’t be millions of men mantained under arms, naturally, but the defense forces will be substantial, and I’m certain that the draft is going to be maintained, which will mean a continuing recruit-training establishment and a ready-if-needed force of trained civilian reserves always on tap for any real emergency. Yes, there will probably be some reductions in rank, but nowhere nearly so many as the old soldiers think. So you really should think about staying in.”

Milo savored the Scotch, thinking that poor Jethro’s taste in whisky had been far superior. “But colonel, I don’t think that the American people are militaristic enough to put up with an Army and Navy of any real size squatting around the country.”

“Not that many will stay in the States, Milo,” replied Barstow. “Think about it a little. We’re going to have garrisons here in Germany, in Japan and probably too on the assorted chunks of real estate we’ve taken from Japan, back in the Philippine Islands, in Italy, in North Africa and other places too numerous to mention. A virtual empire has fallen into our laps, Milo, a worldwide sphere of influence, a power vacuum, as it were; if we as a nation handle things properly, act with the force we now possess, we can have peace—real peace, long-lasting peace—through our strength. If we fail to use what we have to quickly gain what we want, there are other forces waiting to fill the void, and we’ll be dragged into another war or two or three every succeeding generation forever.

“But win, lose or draw, as regards the world and power, Milo, our armed forces are going to be in need of good, intelligent, combat-proven Regular officers for a long, long time yet to come. A man with a record like yours should strongly consider a peacetime military career.”

“Do you intend to stay in after the war, colonel?” asked Milo.

Barstow laughed. “Touche! You’re direct enough, aren’t you, major? In answer: yes, for a while, at least, until I’ve made brigadier, anyway. Then I might retire to teach, maybe to go into politics. I think I’d like being a state governor or a U.S. senator, and with the right backing, who knows how much higher I might go?”

As the months rolled on, the endless parade of interviewees passed before Mile’s desk—the loud, the uncommunicative, the cowed, the arrogant, men of honor and others who never knew the meaning of the word in any language. No one of them would freely admit to ever having been Nazis, Fascists or anything approaching extreme right-wing politics, but there were adherents of virtually every other hue of the political spectrum, which often made for a difficult time in maintaining order in the displaced persons camps.

Barstow’s “command” were at best an odd bunch. As most of them—and every one of the interviewers— rambled around in civilian clothes, Milo never knew a man’s or woman’s military rank, if any. They seemed to number among them almost as many differing national origins as the populations of the DP camps. Most of them proved friendly enough to Milo; those who were not, it developed, were not friendly to any of their coworkers. They all seemed to go by first names or nicknames— Ed, Henry, Bart, Judy, Red, Mac, Tex, Bob, Ned, Baldy, Padre, Tony, Betty, Buck, Earl, Dick-and so on.

The office abutting Milo’s office on the left side was that of a short, swarthy, black-haired man who, despite his name, Kelly, was clearly no Irishman of any description. The office on the right was that of a vaguely familiar, patently Germanic, serious-seeming young man called Padre. When he had time, Milo racked his brain in vain attempts to recall just where he had seen Padre before, and all that he could dredge up was the thought that it had not been within a military setting, but the when and the where always seemed to elude him.

Finally, one evening, when late interviews had seen both Milo and Padre arrive very late at the command mess hall, Milo seated himself across from the fair-skinned young man with the close-cropped blond hair and gray eyes. When he had eaten his food and was puffing at a cigarette while he stirred his coffee, he spoke.

“Padre, why are you called that? You’re no Spaniard, are you?”

Setting down his own china mug carefully, the young man said, “No, not a Spaniard, Milo, but truly a padre. I am a Roman Catholic priest, a chaplain in the U.S. Army. And yes, to anticipate your next question, you have seen me before. It was in Chicago. Do you recall Father Rüstung?”

Milo nodded. Now he remembered. “You’re the younger priest, then, Father Karl, wasn’t it? Someone wrote me that you’d joined the Army after Rüstung was arrested for his Bund activities.”

The blond man sighed. “Yes, the bishop felt that, under the understandable suspicion that I then was, it would be better for both me and Holy Mother Church if I indicated where lay my true loyalties by making this martial gesture. I acquiesced, of course. But the military is not my true vocation, I fear; I never have risen above the rank of first lieutenant, and I doubt that I ever will, either.”

“Hmmph,” grunted Milo. “You lucked into the right outfit, then. Tell Barstow you want rank and you’ll be a captain practically overnight, Padre. He hands out promotions as if they were candy bars, that man does.”

Padre smiled coolly. “No, I think not, Milo, though I thank you for thinking of me. But rank should be the reward of service and dedication to the military; I am definitely not dedicated to the Army, nor have I, I admit, served it very well in this war.

“But how have you fared, Milo, since Father Rustung forced you to leave Illinois?”

“Well enough, Padre, well enough, thank you. I joined the Army within a couple of days after I left Chicago, of course, and I had risen pretty far—I was a senior NCO— by the time the U.S. entered the war.”

The priest nodded. “So then they made you an officer.”

“Not quite,” Milo answered him. “I still was a tech sergeant when we landed in Normandy on D-Day. My promotions all were of the battlefield variety up until I joined Colonel Barstow. I was a captain of infantry when I came here; now, lo and behold, Barstow has waved his magic wand and I’m a major.”

Padre looked sympathetic. “And you feel a bit guilty, eh? You feel that, unlike your earlier advancements in rank, this present one was not fairly earned? Disabuse yourself of so silly a notion, Milo. Aside from the fact that because you fought and no doubt bled on occasion across a third of France and half of Germany you fully earned what little the military has grudgingly given you, were your talents not of inestimable value to Colonel Eustace Barstow, he would not have dragooned you from the infantry and installed you here and given you higher rank.”

“Well, if that’s the case, Padre,” demanded Milo, “then how is it you’re still a first John? You’ve been with Barstow longer than I have.”

A silent DP mess orderly approached and refilled their cups from a steaming two-quart stainless-steel pitcher. He was closely followed by another, who took away their trays, and Padre did not answer until they again were alone at their table.

“Colonel Barstow only bestows rank and perquisites upon those who serve him and his ends well, that or those he feels he may in future be able to use. He is a devious and, quite possibly, a very evil man, Milo. Moreover, I am firmly convinced that there is a great deal more to what he is doing here than appears on the surface, so I do my job and no more, flatly refusing to involve myself in any scheme that is not fully explained to me in advance. This attitude does not please Colonel Barstow.

“In addition, our two philosophies are diametrically opposed. Barstow envisions a worldwide empire controlled by the United States of America and policed by a huge American Army. He sees the seas and the oceans commanded by fleets of American warships, all bristling with guns, while vast aerodromes full of warplanes lie as an ever-present threat to any who would in any way resist American hegemony. He sees the entire earth, eventually, ruled under the blade of a ‘Made in USA’ sword. I find the entire premise obscene, and I have so informed him on more than one occasion, for should so capitalistic, so biantantly materialistic a nation as America seize and wield so much undeserved raw power over others for as long a time as he envisions, there would be only a long succession of nationalistically motivated wars and rebellions, uprisings and partisan activity in every part of the world for generations to come.”

“Then what is the answer, Padre? Should we just sit back and let the Russians have the rest of Europe, with maybe China and India thrown in? D’you think Pope Pius will enjoy taking orders from a Red commissar?” questioned Milo.

The priest smiled knowingly; patronizingly, he replied, “Milo, you have clearly been propagandized by the capitalist Red-baiters. There is not and there never has been any real conflict between the Church and the enlightened rulers of Russia, nor are churchmen and laity persecuted in Russia so long as they devote their religions and churches to God and remain apolitical.

“The cold facts are these, Milo: this must be absolutely the last war fought in the world. Love of God and love of mankind must in future rule the world, not Barstow’s American sword. I am not a Communist, but I recognize that Russia at least fought this war for nobler motives than did America and is, therefore, more deserving of world rule than is the United States, morally speaking. America’s obsession with making obscene amounts of profit for greedy merchants and businessmen and industrialists at any activity damns the nation and its people. On the other hand, were it properly and fairly presented to them, I feel certain that the vast majority of the world’s common people would prefer the rule of a secular government of their fellow common people like Premier Josef Stalin and a true—rather than a distorted or derivative—religion to spiritually sustain them in a world of peace and order. Barstow, of course, does not agree, but he is a self-serving lackey of the Washington power-hungry, profit-hungry, war-mongering, capitalist Jews and Protestants. You can see the truth of my words, can’t you, Milo? Of course, you can—you’re an intelligent man.”

Milo stubbed out his cigarette, drank down the last of the coffee, then leaned forward and said, “What I can see is that you, Padre, are as nutty as the proverbial fruitcake. Your old mentor, Father Rüstung, was a hellish mixture of religious fanaticism, anti-Semitism and Nazism. Well, you saw what happened to him, and it scared the shit out of you, so you went to the opposite extreme. You have become an equally hellish mixture of Catholic fanaticism, anti-Americanism and Communism. I can’t imagine why Barstow keeps a nut like you around. In his place, I’d ship you off to a room with soft walls. If you really, truly believe in this internationalist shit, Padre, you’d better keep your mouth shut around anybody with two brain cells to rub together, because your presentation of the wonderful world tomorrow and what it will be like will drive them straight into the arms of Colonel Barstow’s variety of American supernationalist.”

After that late-evening exchange, Milo took pains to avoid further one-on-ones with Father Karl, nor did the priest ever again try to speak with him alone. When, years later, he saw Padre again, Milo was to wish he had found a way to kill him quietly in Munich. But more than two decades was to trickle away before that meeting.

In August of 1945, the world entered into the Atomic Age, a deeply shocked, stunned, terrified Japanese Empire surrendered unconditionally, and the main event of what history was to call by the name of World War Two was concluded. That is to say, the real fighting was concluded, but not the vengeance-taking against the prostrate, disarmed and helpless Germans, Japanese, Italians, Austrians, Hungarians, Rumanians, Vichy French, anti-Communist Russians, Ukrainians and Albanians. Many heinous injustices were perpetrated in that brief spate of quasi-legal revenge, but those nations who came to be known as Western Powers were not to realize just how unjust they had been, just how much they had been misled by certain of their own leftist leaders and by the self-serving Russians until it was far too late.

On an icy January morning of 1946* Barstow called Milo to his office and said without preamble, “You’ve done good work for me, and this is reward time. Think you can get back to wearing uniforms again, Major Moray?”

“You’re sending me back to my unit, then, colonel?” asked Milo.

Barstow’s burgeoning potbelly jiggled as he laughed. “Not a bit of it, old bean. No, I’ve just been given my first star—Brigadier General Eustace Barstow now sits before you. Raaay!—and an immediate reassignment to Holabird. I’ll be taking along some of the personnel. Would you like to be one of my jolly crew?”

“You’re goddamn right I would, col … uhh, general, but I don’t want to accept under false pretenses, either. For reasons I explained to you shortly after I arrived here and for others as well, there is an even chance that I won’t stay in the Army at all, whenever the Powers That May Be decide that my hitch is up,” Milo told Barstow in complete sincerity. The new-made general’s reply almost floored him.

“Aside from your desire to fulfill your pledge to the late General Stiles and take care of his widow and their children, which pledge I assume you have translated into marriage to her and the Stiles fortune, what other pressing reasons have you to leave the Army, Milo?”

Milo just stared at the pudgy officer across the desk from him. Then, finally, he demanded, “General, are you some kind of fucking telepath? Have you been reading my mind? I’ve never once so much as mentioned Mrs. Stiles to you or to anyone else here in Munich, and to damned few back in my battalion.”

Barstow showed several gold dental inlays in a broad grin. “Heh, heh, heh, Milo, you forget, this is an intelligence operation, and I feel the need to know everything I can dig up about everyone connected with it and me. Not that I had to go any further than to certain files to find out about you and your rich widow lady.”

“What is that supposed to mean, general? Why should there have been a file on me? I was nothing more or less than a simple captain of infantry before you had me transferred in here,” said Milo in obvious puzzlement.

In place of an immediate answer, Barstow just looked at Milo in silence for a long moment, nodded brusquely, then got up and strode to the office door and opened it. To the uniformed first lieutenant behind the desk in the outer office, he said only, “Condition Four-Oh.”

In silence, the junior officer opened a drawer of his desk to reveal an array of buttons. He pressed one of them and a succession of metallic slamming noises from the direction of the door to the reception office told of a number of bolts now in place. The pressing of another button brought forth a deep-toned humming noise that pervaded the room. Then the lieutenant opened the cabinet behind him, took out a civilian-model Thompson with no shoulder stock and a drum rather than the military box magazine, armed it and laid it on the desktop before him. Then and only then he spoke.

“Condition Four-Oh, sir.”

When once more Barstow had closed and, this time, multiply bolted his office door and resumed his seat, Milo said, “Jesus fucking Christ, general, what are you expecting? The survivors of the Das Reich SS-Panzer Division to assault this place?”

“As I said earlier, Milo, you forget that this is a counter-intelligence operation, but you can bet your bottom dollar on the fact that the NKVD and Red Army intelligence don’t forget just what we have here. And the real pity of it all is that certain persons in very highly placed offices in Washington have allowed our armed services to become so infiltrated with Uncle Joe Stalin’s agents that it sometimes is difficult to be sure of the motives of anyone. But, for now, let’s get your question out of the way. I can’t maintain Condition Four-Oh for any length of time without arousing comment.

“Why were your name and other facts about you in a certain file? For this reason, Milo: your involvement with Brigadier General Jethro Stiles, deceased.”

“Oh, come on, general, I knew Jethro from my basic training days on. He was no fucking spy for the Red Army, the Nazis or any fucking body else, and you’re not going to convince me that he was!” Milo exploded with heat.

“Please keep your voice down,” said Barstow mildly. “The device we activated only mutes out normal, conversational speech. You are quite correct, Milo, Stiles was not a spy, not in the ordinary sense of that word. But still we felt it well advised to keep an eye on him and any of his friends who spent time alone with him. We also had in his quarters microphones connected to a listening post and a wire-recording instrument.”

“Well, you’re sweet, trusting bastards, aren’t you?” Milo said bitterly. “And why all of this shit, just because he was buying a few things from Nazis who were due to lose everything soon anyway?”

Barstow smiled thinly. “That operation was nothing more than what we in the intelligence community call a cover, Milo. It gave him a reason for being in touch with the still-unconquered portions of Germany, a reason even for occasional trips behind German lines. The few who knew aught about his clandestine ‘purchasing trips’ were of the consensus that he was representing and given protection by a clique of greedy general officers at corps or possibly army level, and he himself enhanced that impression by allowing the commander of your division to buy in on the operation.

“In reality, of course, General Stiles was performing something of inestimable importance for the United States and the future. It was something that is still too highly classified to tell you about. But we are certain that sudden realization of the truth, the real purposes of his activities, was what got General Stiles and ..Captain Wesley killed that day in Delitzsch.”

“General, I was there, remember? Jethro was killed by three Hitler Youth amateur snipers. And who the hell is Captain Wesley?” Milo tersely informed and demanded.

“Wesley? Oh, you knew him as Sergeant Webber, his cover name for that operation. He was a loan from another agency. And yes, the shootings were very cut-and dried, but only on the surface, Milo. And I cannot impart any more information on that subject to you, not now. Should you decide to remain in the Army and should you be cleared to work for me in my new assignment, I might be able to tell you more, someday.

“But for now, Milo, the war is over. You’ve done all that you can in Europe, so why not take this opportunity to go home?”