Heroes, David Hagberg [me reader .txt] 📗

he didn’t want to antagonize the kid. Maybe start a fight or something. He wanted the kid to understand. That’s all. Just understand.

But then he had to laugh. The kid at least had Vietnam. He had actually fought over there. Pleiku or someplace that sounded like that. But the older man had missed it all: He had not been born until 1943. He had been too young for Korea, and somehow he had missed Vietnam. The kid had his war fresh in his mind.

The older man had only the stories from his father and, of course, his collection.

—You started out by telling me about some heroes from the big war.

The older man looked up. Would the kid understand? Could he?

PART ONE.

SPIES

January-February 1944

The weather was very bad, even for this time of the year, and Dieter Schey, alias Robert Mordley, was more than a little concerned about the rendezvous. The wind blew snow from the northeast, and he had to bend forward against it as he trudged along the beach at the head of Frenchman’s Bay, south of Bangor.

He hadn’t heard a thing from his control at Hamburg for three and a half weeks now. Twenty-seven days of wondering what the hell would happen if the sub could not get here. If the FBI closed in. If he could not get away from Oak Ridge long enough to make the drop.

They were asking a lot.

Schey was a ruggedly good-looking man, who at thirty-three could pass, and often had, for ten years younger or ten years older, depending upon the clothing he wore, the way he parted his hair, the expression on his face, and how he held himself. He was blond, and fair of skin, his eyes a deep blue that, he was told, turned almost steel-gray when he was angry. This evening, however, he didn’t give a damn what image he projected. Not out here. Not in this bloody storm.

His last communications with Hamburg had been on the fifth and sixth of December, when he’d reported that he had important films to send out. The reply came back the next evening:

U293 TO GRID 158-277 2.1.44 2300 UNTIL 0400 REGARDS That had been it. A simple rendezvous order giving the time, the date, and the grid reference, which was here, on the Maine coast.

Three times since then he had driven out of town, back up into the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee, had set up the portable transmitter, and had sent out messages. But Hamburg had not replied. It was as if they no longer existed.

“Most of the time you will be very much alone, very much on your own resources,” his instructors at A-Schule West, in Park Zorgvliet, had drilled into his head. “Never rely on your cover identity friends. They’ll betray you the moment they suspect who you really are. Even your wife, if you follow our advice and take one, must be guarded against. Vigilance is the price of freedom.”

He stopped again to peer into the darkness out to sea, but in this weather he could not even make out the lights of Bar Harbor, four miles to the south on Mount Desert Island, nor the Naval Reserve Station across the way at Winter Harbor. But the U293 and her officers and men would have to make it undetected between the two. So it was just as well the weather was bad.

Three miles back, Catherine and the baby were sleeping. They had had a tiring three days getting here by train and then by bus.

Catherine had not even moved when he had carefully climbed out of bed, got dressed, and left the cabin.

He touched his pocket. The film was there. A thousand miles to the southwest his job as a machinist at the Oak Ridge Manhattan District project was waiting for him.

“Damned funny time to take a vacation, if you ask me,” Tom Riley, his foreman, had said. It was the only difficult moment. If too much of a fuss was made, someone would be coming around to take a closer look at him.

“I have nowhere to go in the summer that I like any better than here,” Schey said. His English was so Oxford-perfect that he had to work constantly to inject a nasal twang into it, an accent that most people suspected was Connecticut Yankee.

“Where’re you going, anyway? Don’t you know there’s a war on?” Riley had complained. He was from Biloxi, Mississippi.

Everyone working on the huge project was from somewhere else.

It was what had attracted German intelligence to Oak Ridge in the first place.

Schey shrugged. “Maine. I just want to get away with my wife and kid. Haven’t had a vacation in eighteen months.”

“You know people up there?”

“No. Just heard it was a nice place. Got cabins for rent. Cheap this time of year. It’ll be just me and the family.”

They were in the main machine shop to the southwest of the gigantic gas diffusion building with its miles of piping. There was a lot of noise. Riley looked around at the work going on.

Everyone seemed to be racing at a feverish pace. He resented being pulled away like this.

“What the hell am I supposed to do without you?” Schey laughed with just the right inflection. If worse came to worst, he’d have to quit. It would cause a lot of suspicion, but he was going to have to make the rendezvous. No matter what. It was vital that the photographs and drawings get out. The Americans were not too far now from their new bomb.

“If it wasn’t for the board, I’d hit you up for a raise after a remark like that.”

Again Riley shook his head.

“Well? Do I get my ten days or do I have to arm wrestle you for it?”

“Go on,” the burly foreman had said finally. “Get the hell out of here before I find my overtime board and sign you on.”

He came to the frozen creek that crossed under the highway a few hundred yards upstream, then looked at his