The First Team

12

Colonel Gregor Rostovitch was in a sustained rage that not even the passage of the long hours of the night had been able to mitigate. His frustration was rekindled every time that he allowed himself to think once more of the setback that had been thrust upon him, and the added fact that he had an enemy who had not yet been totally liquidated.

Ever since his late teens he had been accustomed to giving the orders and having them obeyed. Blinding ambition had been the beacon of his life — that and his intense hatred of the Jews. He was a man of violence; both his hands were heavily scarred from having been smashed into men’s faces and his body bore the marks of two unsuccessful attempts at assassination. By the time he had reached the rank of colonel in his nation’s army he had a reputation so fearsome that he had chosen to remain known by that title.

When he had been appointed head of the secret police he had made results his one objective; the methods of obtaining them were evaluated by him from a practical standpoint and no other. Scott, the American, had been a good case in point. He had first appeared in a certain vital location in Europe at a time when the plans for the overthrow of the United States were well advanced. Not even the premier knew as much about them as did Colonel Rostovitch, who was himself their principal author. There were certain things, the colonel had decided, that the premier would be better off not knowing. The premier had continued with his playacting while the colonel had done the hard core work. One minor piece of information which he desired and did not have was known to Lieutenant Scott; he therefore set out to get it.

Scott had been probed to find out where his weakness lay. It lay in immaturity and the earnest desire to love someone and to be loved in return. That called for a woman of singular talents, of which the colonel had a number available. He made a shrewd choice and then waited for the inevitable results; every man had his price, despite the fact that he might not know it himself.

Scott had been completely determined to be loyal to his country and to his military obligations, but he had been broken down with ruthless efficiency. Misleading information had been fed to him and then what had appeared to be supporting evidence. Convinced that his superiors had already openly discussed certain information which had been entrusted to them, and by then almost blindly in love with the highly skilled and extraordinarily lovely young woman who had been assigned to the job, he had unknowingly yielded to the expert questioning which had been concealed in her apparently idle, devoted conversation.

Just before the matter was to have been concluded, the lieutenant had been promoted and assigned to an even more sensitive area. The colonel had changed the instructions immediately and ordered him kept on the string. During the next few months he had been so carefully manipulated that he had gradually become truly convinced that the best hope for humanity, including that segment of it in his own country, lay in overcoming the aggressive lust and ruthless demand for profits that motivated the capitalistic system. His reward for this eventual conversion had been a physical and emotional ecstasy beyond anything he had conceived of as possible.

When it had been at its apex it had been snatched from him by the inhuman action of a high military superior, or so he had been made to believe. Rage had destroyed his reason and he had crossed over the line. He had been kept there by a firm promise — that the girl around whom the earth and all of the other planets now revolved would in one way or another be found and restored to him.

Scott had rationalized, as many other men had done before him, that he was fighting for the woman who was to be his wife and for the right to live with her in a finer and better world. On his own he had done his utmost, looking for her whenever and wherever he could, but he had been many thousands of miles removed from the Hong Kong dance hall which had been the scene of her next assignment.

The colonel was furious because Scott, whose unexpected position right in the White House had already been highly useful, had been shot dead literally on his own doorstep. One of his secret operating bases would now have to be abandoned; but that was nothing compared to the intolerable fact that his enemy had scored a decisive, if small, victory over him. Not since he had lost the most ruthless and efficient agent he had ever had in an alley in Port Said had he known a similar frustration. Scott had represented a heavy investment, and a successful one. Furthermore, he had been bearing some kind of important information or he would never have risked coming to the place he had at that hour of the night.

Also extremely aggravating to the colonel was the lack of any clue to the identity of the person or persons who had scored on him. His people had located the place from which the shot had come, but a thorough shakedown of the premises a few minutes after Scott had died had turned up nothing.

His instructions, which had been relayed to Scott, had been merely to probe the translator Hewlitt for a possible lead into the underground. The fact that he had come down to report in person clearly indicated that Scott had discovered something of real importance. In that deduction the colonel was correct; his agent had discovered that Raleigh Hewlitt, who worked in Zalinsky’s own immediate proximity, was himself a member of the underground organization and had tried to feed him a preposterous story during the tete-a-tete in the bar. That piece of information had died with the man who had detected it — as it had been intended to do. The cock and bull story about the Baltimore Bay Tunnel would never have brought him to the house at any such hour, but the knowledge that Zalinsky was being directly observed by an underground agent would. Scott had been, for the most part, highly intelligent as well as sensitive, and it had been his undoing.

Certain facts revealed by Scott’s death caused the colonel to do some hard thinking. First, the shot had been fired by an expert marksman, not by an amateur, and with sophisticated equipment. Casual assassins do not have sniperscopes available. Secondly, it had taken some competent work to uncover the carefully concealed intelligence center and it had been done so well that the colonel had had no inkling that his private location had been blown until the news had been delivered by the cadaver on his doorstep. Thirdly, and most significant of all, he had been challenged. Challenged by a totally invisible adversary who obviously knew what he was doing.

The colonel smashed one mauled fist against the top of his desk: he would answer that challenge and he would answer it in language that would bring his opposition to its knees in short order! He had plenty of people and more were coming; he would stop the general surveillance and similar activities in order to direct all of his resources squarely against whatever underground there was that had flung this defiance into his face. Every person on his staff had been hand-picked and then toughened to be a totally relentless, utterly effective weapon. They had done little so far in the United States except for those who had been operating in the theater for some time; now they would do a great deal. A very great deal.

The colonel slammed his other fist down. It was total war and in that heartless game he was the deadliest player there was. At that moment he dedicated himself to total success and nothing else. He knew that he was to be the next premier of his country, but his ambition did not stop at that. The biggest obstacle was all but out of the way now — one more victory over what had to be a puny opponent and then…

He blocked the rest of it out of his mind. He did not want to dwell on it — he had other things to do first.

At her berth in the San Pedro harbor the fishing vessel Dolly was being prepared for sea. She had a new crew and a new skipper this time, which was not unusual. She was, if anything, too large for her job, and as a result the cost of operating her had discouraged several previous owners. In addition, her speed was a knot or two less than it would have been if her lines had been a little more skillfully laid out. She was sturdy, there was no denying that, and she could withstand the roughest weather she was likely ever to see, but her efficiency as a working vessel was a few notches lower than most of the other craft engaged in the same line of activity.

It did not take the experienced Japanese-American fishermen who were berthed next to her very long to size up the man who proposed to take her to sea this time. He was experienced around the waterfront, that was clear; he had a fair knowledge of commercial fishing operations, and he was obviously determined to do his best. If he did very well, and if luck was with him and his crew, it was quite possible that he might have a profitable first voyage. But it was quite clear that he had never been at sea before in command of a vessel such as the Dolly; it was a new venture for him — possibly his effort to establish himself independently so that he could be his own boss henceforth. He was a nice guy and the crew of the neighboring vessel wished him good luck.

In all probability the Dolly would be out for some time. It was possible that she could hit a run of fish and be back in port again in a matter of days, but it was also unlikely. Wisely her new captain was provisioning her well; in that he showed evidence of some sound experience, since well-fed men work much better at sea and it is extremely costly to have to put into port for resupply if the luck runs bad or the weather turns foul for extended periods of time.

Whoever the new owners of the Dolly were, they had proper consideration for their vessel and her crew; for once a chief engineer had an ample supply of spare parts to stock and enough money to spend to make all necessary and advisable repairs. The men who were to go to sea on her obviously appreciated the fact that the port work was being well done. It was also clear to the old hands nearby that they were being well paid, because many of them were young and seemed capable; crewmen like that could have their pick of the available jobs, and the Dolly, while sound and well built, was no particular prize on which to be sailing. That was their business, however, and no one interfered. It could be a cooperative venture with a good bonus available if all went well.

When the time came, the Dolly cast off and moved through the harbor at the prescribed five knots with more dignity than she had displayed for some time. She went past the breakwater as a Japanese freighter was coming in and an hour later was no longer visible. The last pleasure boat to sight her saw her headed off in a northwesterly direction.

When she was completely by herself at sea, her captain summoned his first mate to the bridge. “Have you been over her thoroughly?” he asked.

“Yes, sir, every inch. We’ve checked and double-checked. Also our final security report was go. One item: Lieutenant Hanson speaks fluent Japanese.”

“I know that.”

“Of course, sir. What I was going to say was, he tuned in on the crew next to us while we were being discussed; they did notice the nature of our personnel, but attributed it to the fact that we are paying well. From the way they spoke Lieutenant Hanson doubts very much that they will talk about the matter with anyone.”

“Good. It appears then that everything is A.O.K. Set up the radio watches and break out the long-range radar. You know what else to do.”

“Ay, ay, sir.”

The captain reached out and laid his hand on his mate’s arm. “One thing more before you go, Jimmy. Things may look tough, and they are, but the Navy is at sea.”

A grin broke out on the mate’s face. “Right you are, sir! As of this moment I’m peculiarly happy. Think of all of the guys left back on the beach.”

“I am. You are now the best executive officer at sea with the United States Navy and I expect you to live up to it.”

The lieutenant was a young man and full of vitality. “Let me know if you have any complaints, sir.”

As the dusk fell on the Dolly she kept on her steady course toward the fishing grounds south of the Aleutians. In the wheel-house standard navigational methods were keeping her on course; the chart was in plain view. Deep in her hold, in a location almost impossible for any ordinary inspection to find, a highly sophisticated inertial platform was in operation. There was also much other equipment which had come on board in a series of disguises — obtained, packaged, and delivered under the personal direction of Stanley Cumberland. It had been stockpiled very carefully, and very secretly, weeks before the disaster to the country had struck. Admiral Haymarket had selected most of it himself with its eventual purpose clearly in mind. He had also made a personal selection of the crew that was to use and maintain it; when Lieutenant James Morton, Jr., of the United States Navy had been described as the best executive officer at sea, his qualifications for that distinction had not rested solely on the fact that he happened to be the only one. He was gifted with enormous resourcefulness and was something of a mechanical genius. In addition to that he was a damn fine sailor, which was what the admiral had * looked for first.

A great deal was resting on the Dolly now, on every member of her crew, and particularly on her captain. In his selection the admiral had gone the limit. He had had more or less the pick of the entire Navy, barring a few men who had already been selected for even more important duties and responsibilities. The man he had chosen knew the very grave risk that faced him and every member of his crew, and he had welcomed it.

Hopefully, the Dolly was about to write a few fresh paragraphs in naval history.

When Raleigh Hewlitt seated himself at his desk on the morning after he had witnessed the shooting of Philip Scott, he felt himself a different person. He was not happy that he had seen a man die, but there were other considerations, one of them being some millions of other Americans who were also people of value and whose lives and futures had been betrayed by the man who had paid with his life for what he had done.

His manner was a little firmer than it had been; he felt a certain increase of confidence. He had helped to make possible a counterthrust against the enemies who were now occupying his country. Mr. Zalinsky would have given a good deal, he knew, to share the information that was locked in his brain.

Then Zalinsky rang. Hewlitt went into the Oval Office with his usual paper and pencils to see what it was this time.

Zalinsky motioned him toward a chair without looking up. Hewlitt sat down and relaxed — he felt that he had earned the right to do that now. The administrator affixed his signature to a document before him and then gave him his attention. “I extend to you my deepest regrets,” he said.

Hewlitt looked properly surprised. “Concerning what?” he asked. “Captain Scott.”

Hewlitt lifted himself slightly out of his chair and then sank back down again. “What’s happened to him?”

Zalinsky gave him the X-ray eye treatment. “You do not know?” “No — please tell me.”

“He is dead.”

Hewlitt sat in silence for a moment, his head down. Then he blinked his eyes and pressed his teeth together before he spoke. “You shot him.” He made it both a question and an accusation.

Zalinsky shook his head. “No, I did not shoot him. Somebody did, but for yet I myself do not know who is responsible.”

“But I saw him,” Hewlitt protested. “It was just last night…” “In this city you have much crime upon the streets,” Zalinsky said, “and I have not had time to adjust it yet. He was out late and encountered death.”

Hewlitt wondered how much of that Zalinsky believed, then knew that he did not believe it at all. “Captain Scott was a fine officer,” he said, as though he were still stunned and thinking aloud. “What have they done with his body?”

“I am uncertain; I have not been told. It is now time to pass to another matter, have you preparation?”

“Yes, go ahead.” He swallowed hard and gave just enough indication of trying to get himself under control.

“Our premier has given a new order which all must obey, I myself also.” He stopped and waited, possibly measuring Hewlitt’s reaction and he surveyed him with solid appraisal.

“What is the order?” Hewlitt asked, knowing that he was expected to do so.

“Each person who is sent on occupation duty it is now required to explain at least one person our system and its goodness. Therefore is doubled the truthfulness. Then once again, and continuing.” “It sounds like a chain letter,” Hewlitt said.

“I am unacquainted.”

Hewlitt saw no need to explain all the details. “It’s something that doesn’t work.”

Zalinsky hardened. “This will work,” he announced. “Always what we do works — it must. Failure is not allowed. I myself personally must make intelligent one person, for this I have selected you.”

“Mr. Zalinsky,” Hewlitt said, “don’t try.”

The administrator shook his head. “I agree, it is a waste of time when I have so muchness to do. But it is required. We begin at once. Make me a question.”

Hewlitt leaned back and crossed his legs. “All right, since you put it that way. Explain to me why you are banning the Jews from public office. What do you hope to accomplish?”

Zalinsky put his fingertips together in the manner of a teacher. “I must ask from ^ou a favor; we speak my language, yes?” “Certainly.”

“It is a great relief for me,” Zalinsky admitted, at once more at ease. “I have promised myself that I will speak nothing but English, but it is a very difficult and sometimes irrational method of communication.”

“Agreed.” Hewlitt noted that it was like talking to a different man. Zalinsky’s very personality seemed to change.

“Now as to your question: in the first place, so far all that we have done is to uproot some of these people and require them to find other work. In this process we have admittedly caused some of them inconvenience and probably some financial loss as well. Do you condemn this?”

“Of course I do,” Hewlitt answered. “It is inhuman, and that is the exact word, to single out a group of people and then treat them this way solely because of their religion and racial background. And by doing this, you will cause millions of Americans who aren’t Jewish to hate you for it.”

“You consider this un-American?”

“We went to war against Hitler.”

“Yes, but it was thrust upon you — you kept more or less out of things until after Pearl Harbor. And you didn’t fight Hitler because of what he was doing to the Jews.”

Hewlitt was forced to backtrack. “You are right, but we deplored his genocide and did our utmost to stop it.”

“But would you not, under special circumstances, do what we are doing to the Jews now?”

“Never. Mr. Zalinsky, this is, or was, a free country. Perhaps you do not understand what that means.”

Zalinsky leaned forward and pointed a finger at him. “But you did; you forced people to register because of their race, then you threw them into concentration camps and kept them there for years.” Zalinsky paused for a moment, and then continued. “You forced them to dispose of their possessions for pennies, and solely because of their ethnic background you imprisoned them, your own citizens who had done nothing to deserve it, under armed guard.”

Then Hewlitt remembered. It had happened, just as Zalinsky had described it, and there was no way to refute it.

“In World War II your General DeWitt forced every one of your citizens who was of Japanese ancestry to register, then he shipped them all off like cattle. They had no choice. It is also a fact of history that you may not know that even then not one of these people ever helped your enemies.”

“That is true, Mr. Zalinsky, and it was wrong,” Hewlitt admitted. “It happened because after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese in this country, I should say the Japanese-Americans, were totally mistrusted.”

Zalinsky dismissed that with a wave of his arm. “Then in that case why didn’t you imprison the Germans and the Italians too? It would have been the logical thing to do.”

Aware that he was at a disadvantage, Hewlitt said nothing. “Returning now to the Jews,” Zalinsky went on. “They have had two thousand years in which to accommodate themselves to the rest of humanity and what have they done? Some have become like other people, yes, but most of them have demanded to remain Jews above all else. They demand to be accepted equally in every way, then also demand that they have the right to remain forever different. It is impossible. Do you believe that they are the one and only chosen people of your God?”

“No,” Hewlitt said, “but if they want to believe that, that’s their business.”

Zalinsky put his elbows on the desk that properly belonged to the President of the United States, and leaned forward. “For again two thousand years the Jews have cried that they had no homeland, and insisted upon their Jewishness. Now they have one — all right, let them go there and be as Jewish as they like. They stay here only to make money…”

“No,” Hewlitt interrupted, “I cannot agree with that. They are Americans, this is their homeland. And why don’t you allow your own Jews to go to Israel if they wish?”

Zalinsky deliberately stopped for a few seconds to let the fact sink home that he had been interrupted. “The fact that we discuss this, it is proof of the problem. If the Jews were able to integrate with other people, then you would not have in your language any such word as anti-Semitism. It exists because in twenty centuries these people have insisted in keeping themselves apart. Now we are assisting them to do just that.”

Something in Zalinsky’s tone warned Hewlitt that the atmosphere was changing. He had been a little too bold, and a sudden chill was developing rapidly. “I see,” he said, and was careful to sound like a dutiful student.

Zalinsky studied him for a moment, then accepted his apparent change in attitude. “We will talk more later,” he said stiffly. He hesitated and then added, “You will go.”

It was from a totally unexpected source that the colonel got the first break in his campaign. It came from Midwest America, where the true nature of what had happened to the country was just beginning to be understood. In that section, far from either of the great oceans which formerly had guarded the nation’s shores, a steady belief had prevailed that the whole thing was some kind of a political mishmash which would be straightened out eventually at the conference table. As the days passed and concrete evidence of the disaster failed to appear, an illusion arose that the United States was simply too large and too powerful to be taken over by anybody. Then the enemy began to arrive. When a police chief was forcefully ejected from his office, and when the mayor of a major city was summarily barred from the building that had been his headquarters, the reality began to sink in. And a certain small-time police informer who also gathered information for anyone who would pay decided that the coming of the new bosses could very well mean an additional source of revenue.

Colonel Rostovitch did not as yet have too many men to spare for distribution around the country, but with more arriving each day on a basis of strict priority he made a first deployment. His instructions were explicit and basic: ferret out any kind of underground activity, organized or otherwise, and deal with it summarily. Originally his plan had been far different, but the matter of the Jews could come later. He had lost a round, and in the powerconscious world in which he lived a fast and effective counter was imperative. No one had ever crossed swords with Gregor Rostovitch without paying heavily for the privilege, and that record was not about to be broken.

In a good-sized city, west of the Mississippi but east of the Rockies, a little man known only as Archie spent almost the whole of his waking time wandering about, usually in a mild state of alcoholic fog, living an apparently hand-to-mouth existence. What food he was seen buying came from the half-price bakery outlets that sold day-old merchandise and from the bargain bins in the markets where the dented and disfigured cans were dumped at marked-down rates. He was so patently impotent and unqualified for any sort of gainful employment that he became the tolerated invisible man — like Father Brown’s postman so commonplace that no one took any real notice of him.

All or much of this was window dressing, as were the threadbare clothes that he wore and the servile manner that he exhibited whenever anyone amused himself by buying him a drink or standing him a hot dog smothered in hot mustard and raw onions. While not visibly a man of property in the usual sense, Archie was not nearly as close to the extremes of mere existence as he appeared. He was a collector of information, a beachcomber who gathered his findings on the fringes of society and then sorted them out, carefully evaluating who might buy what. It was remarkable that he had been able to continue for so long without having been exposed for what he was, but he had been endowed with a near genius for footwork of the kind that skillfully avoids trouble of any kind whenever it appears in the offing. Several times he had arranged to be clapped into jail during periods when he was most anxious not to be found at his usual haunts; this had provided him with unshakable alibis as well as the proper respectability of a minor police record.

One of his steady clients was the police department — not everyone within that organization, but one or two individuals who had demonstrated over a period of time that they could be both close-mouthed and liberal in the cash they handed out. This arrangement had worked out well on both sides because of Archie’s sometimes remarkable ability to appear to sink into the woodwork or to maintain a facade of simple stupidity so effectively that he was hardly regarded as a human being. Those who knew Archie, or saw him around, had put him down long since as rum dumb with the ability to go to the men’s room on his own about the limit of his capability.

Some of Archie’s clients did not even know who he was. They were aware only that if they inserted a certain ad in the classified section, they would receive a telephone call. By phone they made their wants known and agreed upon a price. Later, if all went well, they would be called again and the details of the transfer of funds and information would be arranged. Archie did not have a social security number and the Bureau of Internal Revenue took no notice of him. Somewhere, in some forgotten corner of the nation, there was probably a record of his birth which had not been consulted since the day that it had been filed. His police record, by very special private arrangement, did not exist at all since most of his arrests had been matters of mutual convenience. Where he kept his money only Archie knew, but it was suspected in one or two quarters that the amount might be quite substantial. As indeed it was.

Fortunately not handicapped by any feelings of sensitivity or requirements of conscience, Archie decided very promptly that the men who had come to his city from abroad would be just as anxious for his help as any of his other clients, and they should not be adverse to making the necessary payments. The way to obtaining their trade was simple: find out something that they would like to know and then open negotiations. It might even be necessary to give one or two tidbits away, but that investment could be recovered later by adding a suitable surcharge on to some more important item.

One of Archie’s outstanding talents was an almost unerring ability to evaluate properly the worth of his stock in trade; he seldom made a mistake. But the invaders from overseas represented something new entirely and he had had no experience with similar customers to draw on. It was therefore all but impossible for him to appraise the amount of interest that would be aroused by the simple and not very spectacular fact that out at the university a small group of students was meeting secretly and probing for possible ways of frustrating the occupying forces.

Students were not very important. And Archie’s common sense told him that their efforts, after all of the mighty military forces had been rendered impotent, were meaningless. More important and significant sabotage efforts, which were quite likely to come later when the general citizenry finally woke up to what they were up against, might well bring in some good fees. He decided, therefore, that in this instance it would be politic to give away a free sample. For this he resorted to his old ally, the telephone.

He had read the paper and knew whom to ask for. When he had the man himself on the line he indicated that he had some “valuable information” and used a well-tested formula to introduce his method of operation. He was very coldly received until he stated what it was that he had to tell. The reaction to that was positive, so much so that any idea of giving it away swiftly left Archie’s mind. He arranged terms for a modest amount, which was his come-on technique that had worked out so well in the past, and then at once delivered his merchandise. He hung up the phone with a welcome sense of well-being; he had already made the transition to the new management and he was probably the first businessman in the city to do so.

Most ordinary citizens were totally unaware of the long-range listening devices which were capable of picking up a conversation held in normal tones in the middle of a deserted football field. Highly directional microphones, sound mirrors, and similar equipment, some of it artfully miniaturized, had been developed through two or three generations of design without ever receiving very much publicity. The eight undergraduate students at the university, who were meeting under the leadership of Miss Sally Bloom, might have known that such things existed, but they had never expected to encounter any of them. They were, therefore, totally unprepared when a force of eleven very tough, uniformed men broke in on them. Under the direction of one other foreigner, this one in civilian clothes, they were literally yanked out of their meeting room and hurried outside behind the building.

There was a brief, very rough, interrogation. “Who is the leader here?” the civilian demanded in guttural, heavily accented English.

Sally bravely raised her hand. “I am,” she answered. “Why does it concern you?”

The man in charge did not bother to answer her question. “You are plotting against us,” he declared instead. “You will tell me at once who directs you — everything. Otherwise…” He stopped to let his words be understood.

“We are a college drama group,” Sally said, looking her accuser in the eye. “We have been working on the outlines of a new play. One that will be about what has been happening to the country.”

The civilian took two steps forward and smashed his open hand across her face.^As a brief spurt of blood appeared at the corner of her mouth he drew his arm across his body until his hand was behind his ear, then he whipped it out and hit her again, backhand. For just a moment he kept his attention on her; he did not see the look of desperate determination on the face of the slightly built young man who was at her right. He almost missed the young man’s lunge toward him; he was too late to block effectively the untrained fist that was aimed at his jaw. As the student tried to bring his left into his middle, he raised his knee; with his two hands he rammed the youth’s face hard against the solid bone of the kneecap and then, as he fell, kicked him viciously in the groin.

He seized the Bloom girl by the arm and expertly twisted it up sharply behind her back. As he did, the men under his command formed a quick cordon around the six other students, who still did not quite realize what was going on. “Who directs you? Talk!” the leader said, and then sharply increased the pressure on the thin arm he had trapped.

Sally Bloom could not help a tight, short scream of pain, but she said nothing. For three full minutes, the longest and most fearful of her life, she endured the questions, the blows on her body, the exqusite agony in the socket of her arm. Slowly the young man who had tried to help her got back onto his feet, still doubled over with the intense agony in his groin, a fearful burning that he did not think that he would be able to endure for another hundred seconds.

Unexpectedly the leader unlocked Sally’s twisted arm and with it threw her to the ground. “You!” he said, pointing to one of the six who remained. “Come here.”

Thrust forward by one of the uniformed men, the student complied. The man in charge wasted no time in subtleties; he ripped the young man’s shirt open, took out a cigarette lighter, and directed how his victim was to be held. Locked on each side by a toughened man far stronger then himself, the youth was helpless. The man before him lit the cigarette lighter and then held it close under the student’s armpit.

Pain was immediate and overwhelming. In a few seconds he could smell the odor of his own burning flesh and he wanted desperately to vomit.

“Tell me,” the inquisitor demanded, “who directs you?”

The blinding pain took total possession of the student, his muscles turned to jelly and his whole body became a caldron of consuming fire. His mind lost all will except to stop the terrible agony; it had no strength for anything else. “I don’t know,” he screamed. “Only she knows.” He could endure no more; the sudden shock, the things he had witnessed, his own brief but unendurable ordeal conquered him; and he went limp.

At a distance, terrified students and a few older adults were beginning to gather, but no one dared to venture closer than several hundred feet from the scene of the sudden, unexpected inquisition.

“Stand them up!” the leader directed in his own language. His command was quickly obeyed; the little group of students was lined up in a row, except for the Bloom girl, who lay where she had been thrown. The young man who had tried to attack the leader stood where he was shoved, still bent over, his hands unabashedly holding on to his cruelly injured groin through his clothing.

The man in the plain, ill-fitting business suit pulled the girl to her feet. “Tell me,” he demanded. “Tell me and save their lives!”

“I don’t know,” she sobbed. “I don’t know. He calls me by telephone.…” She was incapable of more.

The man who held her marched her forward two paces and flung her with the others. Then he barked a command in his own language.

There was a thick, ugly sound as eleven holsters were opened and the guns they contained were drawn. The only other female student in the little group began to scream; the soldier who had hold of her slapped her hard into silence. For a moment she was still, then, her eyes wild, she let out another terrified burst of sound.

One of the male students, larger and more muscular than the rest, made a sudden quick motion and broke the hold by which he was held. In a supreme burst of effort he sprinted for the corner of the building and momentary safety; the man who had been holding him laid his weapon across the elbow of his left arm, took aim, and fired. The blast of the gun reverberated in the air; the athlete jerked suddenly upright, reached out to claw at the air, and then fell forward. He lay inert and soundless where he fell.

The leader waved his arm toward the others. The screaming girl was silenced first; a bullet in her brain ended her final shriek in mid-spasm. The student next to her fell to his knees and lifted his clasped hands in supplication. He was the next to die; three quick shots in his chest cut him down.

A hoarse burst of screaming, this time from a masculine throat, pointed the next victim. The man behind him reversed his gun in his hand, then holding it by the barrel he smashed it down with vicious force onto the skull of his victim. Almost a full inch of the handgrip disappeared into the cranium with the sound of suddenly breaking ice.

A very young student, wide-eyed with horror, was frozen into immobility. Only his lips moved as he said, “Mother!” Then his staring eyes became empty as a sudden black hole in his forehead marked the end of his life.

The next of the young men stood still, speaking words of hope for a better life to come. “… Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done, on earth as it is in. The angry, violent bark of a gun ended his prayer; his body slumped very quietly to the ground.

The leader seized the blouse of Sally Bloom and in one powerful jerk ripped it from her body. Her slender torso was revealed, milky white and crossed by a small brassiere which proved that the breasts underneath were minimal. “Are you a Jew?” the man demanded.

If they were to be her last words, they were brave ones. “Yes, I am a Jew,” she declared. “God bless America!”

“No!!” The sudden outcry came from the young man who had tried to defend her. Forgetting the still frightful pain in his groin, he threw himself in front of her, offering her the protection of his own body.

The leader in the business suit produced his own gun from a concealed holster, then motioned that the student was to be moved aside. The youth’s arms were seized; he was forcefully pulled away and then turned around so that his horror-stricken eyes could witness the sight as the bullets fired in rapid succession tore the frail brassiere away, and hear the sound of the shots blasted back from the wall of the building.

In the terrible moment that followed he knew that all of the others were dead and that he himself would die within the next few seconds. He turned, faced the man he had at least struck with his fist, and said, “Pray to God, because you’re next.”

He did not feel the bullets that bit into him, only the first one that was deliberately pumped into his abdomen where it would hurt the worst. Somewhere within his expiring body he found the strength to endure it all and to face death unafraid.

So died Gary Fitzhugh, only son of Senator Solomon Fitzhugh, as his now vacant physical being collapsed to the ground next to the silent shell of the girl he had loved.