How wintry the weather was, like early March, even though it was mid April.   Everything was gray, and that seemed inauspicious for his return to Europe.   Low clouds scudded a few hundred feet overhead, peevishly carrying their moisture inland.   Dull river water flowed past the hull, too cold to do much more than make a couple of small waves from the bow and languid eddies when it passed the conning tower, as U-70 moved slowly up the river to the St. Nazaire pens, still under construction.   On its deck, trying to keep out of the way of scurrying sailors, Joachim Theiss stood contemplating his future.   Across the water lay the wreckage of the huge floating dock that the French had built for the Normandie.   In the gateswere wedged the remains of a destroyer, her bows were missing, the steel plates of her sides bent outward from the fo’c’sle forward.   Elsewhere on the dock, contorted railings, broken pipes and warped steel bore further testament of explosive blasts and gun damage.   His mind began cataloging everything the eyes saw, a habit born of nine months training, then a year in the field.   Scanning the vast structure, his analytical brain noted and recorded all the pertinent facts, making assessments of how severe the destruction had been, how feasible repairs were, how long the dock would be out of commission.   The outline of the destroyer’s superstructure looked like one of the Kriegsmarine class of ships, yet he had to assume that the havoc had been the result of a British raid.   

The few French working in the harbor area seemed sullen, none looked at the boat — at least not openly — probably fearing arrest by the Gestapo as spies.   But the soldiers manning the anti-aircraft guns, huddled behind the sandbags to ward off the biting wind, Germans, some away from the Fatherland for the first time and excited by the quick victories thus far achieved, waved eager greetings to the returning submarine heroes.   He should have felt happy:  his mission had been successful.   He had remained undetected for the year he had spent in the United States — even during the hysteria that followed Pearl Harbor.   In spite of being injured, he had set up a vital beacon for U-boats that would help them ravage the Eastern Seaboard sea routes of the Americans.   And he had returned, almost unscathed, to Europe.   Yet ever since they had surfaced and the kapitan had allowed him to come on deck, the return to a continent that had been at war for over a year left him strangely disconsolate.   It wasn’t just the prospect of returning to rationing, to trains crowded with soldiers, to nights huddled in air-raid shelters that smelled like sewers:  he had seen the Americans prepare for the fight ahead, their determination showing through the patina of the semi-organized chaos with which they did everything.   The High Command, the Fuehrer, should not have permitted the Japanese to antagonize the Americans.   It might take a long time, but Joachim believed the Americans and English would eventually prevail.   His training had honed his analytical nature, cold dissection of the news had stripped him of any belief he had ever held of Party dogma.   Yet these were thoughts he couldn’t share with his commander — not even with his friends or family.   In these times you never knew who would betray you.   

As he stood against the base of the conning tower, the bleak damp being preferable to the narrow confines of the submarine, he let his mind recollect the last five months.   

It had been November when he had first seen her.   The orders had come a month earlier:  he was to leave New Jersey, where he had been monitoring the shipping activity, and head down to the southeastern coast.    >From there, he would report on conditions at the port of Savannah, it’s preparedness for war as well as any increased capacity for shipbuilding.   At the embassy in Washington, he had exchanged his disguise of the British naval attaché working from their New York consulate, for the lighter blue uniform of a squadron leader in the Royal Air Force, ostensibly on a good will tour of the United States after surviving the Battle of Britain.   The disguise effectively explained the dialect-free English he spoke, learned in the four years he had spent at Harrow when his father had been working in England.   No one had ever questioned him about his cover — if anything, the friendly Americans had opened up and become even less security conscious when they imagined the heroic lives of his supposed countrymen.   

Within an hour of stepping down from the train in Savannah, he had settled into a modest boarding house recommended by the taxi — the cab:  he had to remember the correct American word — driver.   

He spent a few days getting his bearings, then approached the MacEvoy Shipbuilding Corporation with a faked letter of introduction from the Palmers Shipbuilding Company in Newcastle.   The Americans were only too willing for him to speak to their workers at a lunch-hour rally, a manager even took Joachim, or James as he called himself in English, on an extensive tour of the dockyard.   A week later he spoke to workers at the Government’s dry dock, and again, received a thorough pass-through of that facility.   

Then, almost ten days later, a blustery November afternoon, when he was walking back to the boarding house from addressing workers at the Savannah Machine and Foundry works, he bumped into Margaret.    To be more accurate, it had been she who had bumped into him.   His mind had been elsewhere, mentally filing away everything he had seen and heard on the walk-through of the factory he had just been given, and he had stepped into the street without looking.   A sudden shriek of brakes and the loud braying of a horn had called him back to reality and he jumped back a half second before the fender of the car impacted with his calf.   

He recalled lying on the ground as a crowd gathered.   The driver of the car, a young woman in a gray suit, was bending over him asking him if he was all right.   The pain in his leg was intense, yet he assured her he was fine and tried to get up.   There was sudden, searing agony and then blackness.   

Consciousness came as he was lifted off the litter onto an operating table.   Driven by instincts sharpened by over half a year of living a clandestine life, he struggled to escape.   What had he said while he was unconscious?   Had he spoken in English or had German phrases, cursing the pain, been shouted from his lips?   

A burly nurse restrained him with firm arms.   "Just lie there and let us have a look at that leg," she instructed in the slow drawl of The South that still sometimes mystified him.   

He lay back, pulse racing, his eyes scanning every person that came into the room, expecting at any second for someone in a khaki uniform to enter.   These fears, however, proved to be ungrounded and, an hour later, his leg encased in plaster, he was wheeled into a private ward.   "I think I am OK to go home," he told the nurse.   

"You won’t be walking on that leg for a week or two," she laughed as she straightened the bed.   She looked up at him, "And if it’s the money you’re worried about, don’t be.   The lady who ran you down is taking care of that."   

The lady referred to had walked into the ward the following morning, bearing a bulging paper sack of fruit.    Almost shyly she told him who she was then, having ascertained the state of his health, she introduced the man who had accompanied her as her father.   

"I am so sorry for what happened," she said, her gloved hand resting on the white sheet next to him.   "I just couldn’t stop in time."   

"No, not at all," Joachim had replied.   "It was entirely my fault.   I didn’t look before stepping onto the street."   

They spoke about the accident and his health for a while.   She apologized for bringing only fruit, but in November fresh flowers were hard to come by.   But after they ran out of small talk, the subject of convalescence came up.   "We were wondering," the older man spoke slowly, almost diffidently, "if you would come down to our home while your leg heals.   It’s on the coast and it’s quiet.   And we would feel we were doing something to help your country in their very gallant fight against that Hitler man."   

The two visitors were persuasive, and thus, in the mid afternoon, and after they had helped him collect his clothes and suitcase from the boarding house, he found himself in the back seat of the very car that had caused his injury, headed for a place he had never heard of.   

Kirkhall Island, where their home proved to be, was rather desolate.   The house itself, was one of three situated on the wildest part of the beach on the outskirts of what they called the town.   In fact, Joachim ruminated, Inverness was little more than a fishing village and a not very prosperous one at that.   But what had immediately entered his mind was the obvious suitability of the beach for unobserved landings from the sea.   

Joachim fitted in well with this family.   The father would leave every morning to manage the small boat repair and ship chandlery business in the town.   He would return home at midday for dinner, and then again, usually after dark, for supper.   When Joachim was not sitting, leg propped up on a chair, reading on the wide verandah or in the spacious living room, he would be with Margaret and her mother, who would sit and talk to him for hours, hanging attentively on his stories of England and Europe.   Margaret’s mother’s name was Lucy Edith, yet for some strange reason everyone seemed to call her Rabbit.   In spite of her urgings, Joachim could not get his European upbringing to stoop to calling her that, and to her amusement, always addressed her using both her names, pronouncing each separately and not eliding the y as her family would do when they decided to forego the more common sobriquet.   From the two women he gleaned scraps of information that might be worth his further scrutiny, but more importantly, he noted names of their relatives in Charleston and Galveston where he could, perhaps, go, seeking additional harbor and shipping information that would be useful to the Abwehr and the Naval High Command.   

It was sitting in the same living room with the family that he heard the fateful news of Pearl Harbor on the radio, and listened to the measured tones of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s speech.   Over the next months he would, time and again, recall the words, ‘the unbounded determination of the American people’ with some misgiving for his own country’s future.   

On the Tuesday following the Day of Infamy, a letter arrived for him.   It was in code and instructed him to stay where he was for the next fortnight until a courier could bring him further instructions.   It gave him an uneasy presentiment of the second shoe being about to drop, and sure enough, on the Thursday, it was announced that Germany had declared war on the United States.   

This announcement caused a great flurry of activity on Kirkhall Island.   George Seaburn, by position the mayor of the village, but by action and attitude the Laird of the area, had been in the Navy in the Great War.   Thus he, like Joachim, was uneasily aware of the potential threat Kirkhall’s isolated beaches presented.   He bustled around and by the Saturday he had those males who were too young or too old for active service, as well as several able-bodied women, formed into squads to enforce the nighttime blackout he had imposed, patrol the beach and harbor, and to watch out for enemy aircraft.   This last-mentioned activity caused several major upsets, since U.S. airplanes began to fly over the island with great frequency.    Most of the inhabitants had only the vaguest notion of aircraft recognition, and each flight caused growing consternation.   This frenzy peaked on the day a formation of seven Grumman Wildcat’s flew in low from the ocean.   Major panic ensued in the village, and the inhabitants gathered at the harbor, with hastily grabbed weapons ranging from shotguns to boat hooks, to repel a blitzkrieg.   

In the end, it was Joachim who restored some sanity to the situation.   This was not due to any less of an awareness of his duty to The Fatherland, but for the fear that the longer this hysteria was allowed to continue, the greater was the likelihood of his exposure.   Calling on Mr. Seaburn at his home, he persuaded him that, firstly, the Luftwaffe did not have any aircraft with adequate range to attack the United States and, secondly, with cities such as Boston, New York and Washington on or near the coast, an attack on Savannah, Macon or even Atlanta was probably an unlikely event.   

And so, after some ten days, life returned almost to normal.   Increasingly, the younger men began to leave the island for active service, and Seaburn ran periodic beach defense drills at night, but other than that, in Inverness it was hard to recognize that the country was at war.   

The drafting of young men gave the perfect cover for Joachim to travel around the southeastern seaboard.    When asked by Margaret and her mother about his forays to other parts of the Southeast, his explanation was that he had been asked to speak to the new servicemen about his war experiences.   In reality he was gathering information on troop strengths, rail traffic, airfield preparations and harbor defenses.   But while he was preoccupied with working against the Allies’ cause, a second enemy crept in.   Eros, perhaps envious of the handsome young German, had, in perverse delight, spun a web of charms over the eighteen year old Margaret, and she became smitten with the tall, blond man who was their guest.   

Joachim cursed this, but was sage enough to realize that the role of beau provided better cover and more believable excuses for odd behavior than merely being an Englishman did, and thus the end of each mission found him returning to Kirkhall Island.   

In late February, a courier delivered a small suitcase to him.   Inside was a new Telefunken radio beacon, an improved design that would hopefully avoid detection by the Allies’ Signal Corps.   Instead of broadcasting a continuous signal that could easily be pinpointed by direction-finding equipment, the Telefunken would sit dormant, listening on a set frequency until it received a transmission.   When it did, it would activate and send a ten second steady signal on one frequency, then switch to another preset frequency and send out another ten second tone.   It would then go back to its dormant state and wait.   The apparatus was ideal for submarines or aircraft to obtain a bearing when blackout conditions were in effect.   

And Joachim had the ideal spot for the radio.   The room he had moved to since his leg had healed was at the top of the house and, from the cupboard in his room, a small trap-door led into the attic.   On the couple of occasions he had been alone in the home, he had crept through this hole to explore the spaces at the very top of the house.    Thick dust and a smell of mustiness told him that no-one ever ventured here, and thus he busied himself setting up the radio in a corner closest to the beach.   As luck would have it, part of the house’s wiring passed nearby, and gingerly sitting on dry newspaper to insulate his naked butt (he felt it would be impolite to ask his hosts to pull the fuse) he peeled back the cotton and rubber insulation and connected up a small transformer with which to power the set, instead of the cumbersome batteries.   

And during the following month he saw the harvest that he had helped to sow.   At least twice a week, he would stand together with the locals on the dunes above the beach and watch the columns of flames as some torpedoed freighter, some tanker split in two, burned and sank not very far out at sea.   But before he had time to dwell too deeply on the sight of injured and soggy sailors coming ashore, orders came from the Abwehr:  a submarine would be offshore Kirkhall Island on the night of the 23rd March, and he would be brought back to Germany.   

That night after dinner, he broke the news to his hosts of his departure.   In a few days, he said, he would be leaving for Canada to be taken back to Britain.   This was somber news for the family, who had grown fond of the young man.   Margaret felt it keenly.   Long after the others had retired to bed, she and Joachim sat up late discussing his supposed future in the Royal Air Force.   In the midnight hours, as the house slept, she tiptoed to his room, emerging only shortly before Lucy Edith got up to prepare breakfast.   With his impending departure causing caution to be disregarded, these trysts occurred late every night, until the night before he left.   The following afternoon, after lunch, Margaret drove him up to Savannah.   They had a cup of tea together in a restaurant, and then he kissed her goodbye and walked into the station.   She had wanted to come with him, to wave farewell as the train pulled out as she had seen so many young girls do on the newsreels at the movies, but he had said no.   Partings were best kept short, he told her.   It was not being together that was stretched out, he gently explained, but the pain of the adieu.   And so she stood next to her father’s car and waved until the light blue uniform disappeared into the building, but then, instead of turning southward toward home, she drove out of town a short distance to where the tracks ran close to the road and parked.   

Within half an hour she heard the panting sound of a locomotive and within a minute saw it round the distant curve.   The P-2 Pacific wasn’t going very fast, and she jumped up and down next to the car waving at the carriages that followed it.   But while the train was going slowly enough that she could see several passengers return her wave, she couldn’t make out the figure she sought through the passing windows.    With tears flowing through the makeup on her face, she clambered back into the car and set out for Kirkhall.   

With downcast spirits, she kept her eyes on the road.   Had she chanced to look into the bus she overtook just outside Savannah, she would have seen the figure she was looking for.   He was no longer in the smart Royal Air Force uniform, which was now wrapped in brown paper and stuffed into a trash can in a back street of the city.   The man in the bus looked older than his twenty-two years.   The dark brown slacks and jacket that smelled of mothballs, the hat pulled down over his brow, helped Joachim blend into the background of the group of aspirant workers and intrepid soldiers who rode with him.   Well after dark, the bus chugged into Inverness.   No one was around to recognize him as he stepped down to the sidewalk, and quietly he disappeared into the night.   Carefully avoiding the few dwellings, he made his way to the dunes and nestled down amongst the sea-oats to wait.   The night was cold, and he pulled the thin jacket around his shoulders, remembering wistfully the warm house not half a mile away where Margaret would be sitting in comfortable warmth.   

At precisely one in the morning, he removed the heavy flashlight from his small suitcase.   Sliding a long cardboard tube over the lens so the light would not be visible from the side, he cautiously aimed it due East and began to flash the letter J in Morse code.   Four times the short flash followed by three longer pulses went out before he saw a brief response:  long, long, short, short — the answering Z.   He began to breathe more easily:  the submarine was there.   The tide had ebbed, the water at the far end of the beach lapped calmly, waiting to begin, with increasing urgency, its pounding thrusts across the sand.   Each minute, as arranged, he repeated the J to guide the dinghy to the beach.   

A gentle breeze was blowing in from the sea, wafting in the smells of marine life that existed without care of what the master species of the earth were doing.   Overhead, a layer of clouds moved monotonously across the sky obscuring what little moon there was.   But, as Joachim estimated that the rubber raft should be approaching the beach, a small rent appeared in the overcast, allowing the lunar nimbus to throw a little light onto the water and the beach.   The pallid illumination lasted for, at most, ten seconds.   Ten seconds was enough for Joachim to spot the little boat about fifty yards out.   He breathed a sigh of relief.   He blinked a final J seawards, then discarded the cardboard tube and unrolled a prophylactic over the flashlight to keep it waterproof for the trip out to the submarine.   As he pushed the flashlight into a pocket of the jacket, his peripheral vision picked up a movement.   A dark figure was making its way across the beach toward the water line.   

"Scheisse!"   the expletive came out of his mouth as a whisper.   It must be some local on one of Seaburn’s patrols.   The figure moved slowly, staring out to sea, and Joachim guessed that, in the brief period of light, he had seen the boat.   Either because he was lower on the beach than Joachim on the dunes, or because he was not expecting to see anything out there, the lookout was uncertain so, instead of raising the alarm as he had been instructed, he was hesitating, wanting to investigate.   Joachim picked up his case and walked down to the beach, his rubber-soled shoes making barely audible creaks as they compressed the sand underneath.   

"Hello, there!   Nice night for a beach stroll isn’t it?"   he called out in English.   

"Halt!   Who’s that?"   called the startled figure spinning around and leveling an aged rifle in Joachim’s direction.   

"It’s only me.   James."   He recognized the man from the village.   He must be well over 60, maybe over 70, and his name was something like Edwards or Edmunds.   "Margaret and I decided to take a walk on the beach."   

The rifle was lowered.   "Oh.   You gave me a fright.   Come here, will you.   I think there’s something floating in the water just off the beach over there."   The man turned toward the sea again and adjusted his focus just as the dinghy came into view.   

"It’s OK," said Joachim as he came up to the figure.   His hand moved forward and the thin blade of the knife in his hand entered the old man’s back, just below the shoulder blade and to the right of the spine.    With a stifled groan, the figure sagged against the German who slowly lowered the body onto the wet sand where a dark patch was already spreading out and moving slowly seaward.   

"Our ship has been sunk," the words came from the boat, "Can you help?"   It was the challenge Joachim had been expecting, designed to give the men in the boat a chance, if it should happen that the person on the beach was not the one they expected.   

"Wer anderen eine Grube gräbt, fällt selbst hinein," he responded.   ‘My God!’ thought Joachim, ‘only someone in Berlin could have thought of such inappropriate phrases.   Probably drunk from one of their parties.’ Who digs a ditch for others, falls into it himself.   

"Kom!   Schnell!"   one of the two seamen in the boat called.   

"I need some help here," Joachim spoke, the German words sounding strange after using English almost continuously for over a year.   "There’s a problem."   

The two men in the boat spoke briefly to each other, and then sprang lightly into the water and dragged the dinghy up onto the sand.   

"What’s wrong?"   asked the taller in the dialect of Nordfriesland, as he came up to Joachim.   

"It was a man on beach patrol.   He saw your boat.   I killed him, I think."   

‘The milchbubi thinks he’s killed him,’ the leutnant zur see thought to himself.   ‘What the fuck does he want me to do about it?’ Aloud he said, "Leave him.   Let’s get out of here."   

Joachim was from Bavaria and had a congenital doubt about the intelligence of the folk who lived on the cold shores of the North Sea.   "We have to take the body with us.   We can sink it further out.    Otherwise someone’ll find it and we’ll have the destroyers and planes after us in no time."   

The second man from the boat, with the sailor’s traditional superstitious fear of dead men, immediately voiced his disapproval to this idea.   The leutnant zur see, however, gave some credence to Joachim’s explanation.   He bent down and grasped the body under its arms and started to drag it toward the boat.    "Bring the rifle," he instructed Joachim.   

The dinghy was cramped and the dead man hung over the back, his feet trailing in the water.   The two sailors paddled hard, yet the shore seemed to slip away only slowly.   Once the sailor muttered, "The hurensohn will probably bring the sharks from kilometers around!"   Joachim supposed he was talking about the bleeding corpse, but the sailor’s glance had been directed at him.   The leutnant zur see merely grunted and they kept on paddling.   

The trip to the submarine took forever.   Toward the end, the sailors would stop paddling periodically and listen, then one or other would point in some direction and they would take up paddling again.   It was only at the fourth such hiatus that Joachim picked up the muffled sound of a rumbling diesel and shortly after that, the small hump of the submarine’s deck was next to them and lines were being passed in silence to men who secured them.   

"Pass some rope.   And I need some heavy pieces of iron," the leutnant zur see called in a low voice as Joachim was hauled up the wet hull and bustled toward a hatch.   "We’ve got a body here that we need to sink."   

"Was there trouble?"   Joachim heard a voice address the officer.   He grabbed the ladder and descended unsteadily into the interior of the boat before the answer came.   A young sailor followed him with his little case, the boy’s free hand barely seeming to touch the rungs as he came down.   The interior of the submarine was lit with dim lights so as not to interfere with everyone’s night vision, and Joachim had to take care so as not to fall, or bump into any of the myriads of pipes and valves that sprouted everywhere.   

A young officer came up to him as he stood unsure of what to do next.   "Come this way, please."   Past the dials and pipes in the forward compartments, aware of the stares of the crewmen, Joachim followed his guide aft, until they reached a cramped area which, Joachim guessed, served as the captain’s room — cabin would be too grand a word.   "Wait here.   Do not move from here without an officer, until the captain has spoken to you."   

Joachim sat down and looked at his clothes.   His pants were wet from the thighs down and there were dark stains on his shirt and jacket, too.   In the dim light it was almost impossible to say whether the color was from water or from blood.   But only almost, because a couple of the stains were a shade darker then the others.   Joachim held his hands up to his face.   There was no stain on them that he could see, but the nerves from his fingers kept on resending the signals to his brain, forcing him to relive, over and over, the feeling of the steel blade entering into the body of another human being and, much worse, the reluctance of the knife to being pulled out from the already dead man.   He began to shake violently.   His mind flashed back to his school days in England.   Vividly he remembered his English teacher, the ferocious Mr.  Fredericks, with text book in one hand, the other raised to the ceiling, and the despair in his voice as he had croaked out, ‘What, will these hands ne’er be clean?   …Who would’ve thought the old man to have so much blood in him?’

The boys had ridiculed the melodrama.   Now Joachim realized that the pedagogue’s rendition had been uncannily accurate.   He clasped himself with his hands and wondered whether he would ever forget this night.   Abruptly there were shouts, the thunder of the diesels ceased, the deck tipped toward the bow and the hum of the electric motors together with the gurgle of escaping air told him they were submerging.   

A day later he awoke from the sleep induced by the pills the kapitan zur see had given him after a brief questioning.   Joachim’s eyes focused on the bracing, barely inches above him, that had once held a torpedo.   He had to use the bathroom.   Awkwardly he rolled over the metal that formed the edge of the cot and made his needs known to a young man standing nearby.   The toilet — the head — was cramped, and after completing his task, he opened the door so that the man could instruct him how to use the pumps to clear.   "You can get some food from the galley if you are hungry," he was told, and he made his way forward.   

Over the next day, the terror of the beach gradually receded, leaving in its place an oppressive despondency.   The crew, wary of his profession, and unsure of his standing in the Party, eyed him in silence when he moved about the ship.   Once or twice at the beginning, at meal times when they sat around the small table in the passage, the officers had tried to talk with him about America.   His Cassandra- like warnings of the incipient production from the war machine that was slowly starting to turn in the Western Hemisphere sounded, however, almost treasonous to them, flushed with the easy successes they had had off the American coast, and they pooh-poohed his warnings.   Thereafter the conversations became largely superficial.   

The voyage home seemed unending.   Somewhere near Bermuda they took on more fuel from U-462, a Milchkuh, as well as additional drinking water, and then began the pattern of long periods of submerged running interspersed by stints on the surface with the diesel engines recharging the batteries.   Joachim enjoyed the latter, the increased motion of the boat and the clamor of the engines being more than offset by the fresh, briny air that was sucked into the cramped compartments by the engines, yet never quite managing to rid the boat of the smell of diesel fuel mixed with odors of fifty unwashed men, nor the sickly scent of eau-de-Cologne that some used in a futile attempt to mask the stench.   He spent much of the time lying on the cramped bunk, reading a well thumbed novel that one of the men had lent him.   He kept to himself, speaking little.   

It was two days before they reached St. Nazaire, as they moved submerged south of the English coast, that Kapitan zur See Werfel came to the aft torpedo room where Joachim was trying to read.   Pulling off his cap and placing it on top of a torpedo rack, the older man pulled out a crate, a quarter full of over-ripe oranges, and sat down.   

"You cannot let this one death eat away at you.   What you did was not murder:  you had to do it, to save yourself, to save this boat, these men."   Subconsciously Joachim noted the omission of ‘for the Fuehrer’ or even ‘for The Fatherland’.   The Kriegsmarine, he recalled, was less prone to the histrionics of the other services.   "This is war," Werfel was saying, his blue eyes under the bushy, fair eyebrows holding steady on Joachim’s.   "It’s what you, I, all these men — and hundreds and thousands more — are trained, are expected, to do."   

"He was old," Joachim tried desperately to explain.   "I knew him; I knew his wife.   Because of me, there is an old woman who doesn’t know where her husband is.   She stands at a window all day, looking for him to come up the path to the door.   She fears he may be dead, but she doesn’t know.   All because of me.   

"Even if I live through this war…I doubt I shall and God knows I don’t want to…I can never tell anyone what I have done.   You, you can say with pride, ‘I commanded a submarine of the Reich.   I fought on the field of battle, against others like myself, similarly trained, taking the same chances, with the same courage I did.’

"And what can I say?   ‘I killed an old man…’"

"You cannot look at it like that."   The kapitan, a veteran of the war, yet still months short of his twenty ninth birthday, gripped Joachim’s arm.   "Had you not…done what you did…the man would have raised an alarm.   We are at war with America now:  you would have been shot, and those people, that same old man and the old woman you feel so sad for, they would have stood and cheered.   The destroyers would have come after us and possibly all these men you see around you every day, would now be lying at the bottom of the sea.   How many wives, how many mothers, would be then standing at windows awaiting their return?"   Above him in his narrow bunk that occupied the space that had, until a few nights previously, held a torpedo, a young seaman blinked quickly as he followed the discussion.   The captain knew that within a watch, everything he said would be repeated around the boat.   He didn’t mind.   A captain was like a father, lessons had to be taught, expectations set.   

Joachim didn’t speak.   Absolution can be given only when the penitent seeks it.   

"Do you know what Flotilla we belong to?   This boat?"   

Joachim shook his head.   "No."   

The captain punched the young seaman on the arm.   "Tell him!"   

"It is the Wegener Flotilla, Herr Kapitan."   

"Yes.   The Wegener Flotilla."   He looked at Joachim.   "Do you know the name Wegener?"   

"No."   Werfel made the word sound so important that Joachim felt a trifle ashamed that it did not trigger any recognition in his memory.   

"In the last war KapitanLeutnant Bernd Wegener commanded U-27.   He was very good, and sank many ships on ten patrols.   Then one day he was engaged in a surface battle with a British merchant ship.   A ship flying the American flag came up and signaled that she wanted to pick up survivors.   Wegener allowed her to come close.   As this second ship moved out of his sight, behind the ship he was fighting, she lowered the American flag and hoisted the White Ensign of the British Navy.   It had been a trap.    When this ship, it was called the Barolong, came into sight from behind the other vessel, it began firing on U-27 with twelve pounder guns.   It was hopeless — immediately the U-27 began to sink.   Wegener ordered his men to abandon ship and many of her crew escaped before the U-27 went down.   The men swam to the burning hulk of the ship they’d been firing at, but the crew of the Barolong began to shoot at them in the water.   That was where Wegener died.   Six men, though, managed to make the burning ship, and scrambled up the nets onto her deck.   Having witnessed what had happened to their comrades in the water, they fled into the interior of the ship.   And so the commander of the Barolong ordered his Marines to board the ship.   The German sailors were unarmed.   The Marines found them in the engine room, and shot them all.   

Joachim stared at him unbelievingly.   

"This is not Party propaganda.   There were dozens of neutral passengers in the lifeboats who watched this slaughter, and they all spoke of it.   Later, some of them would even testify under oath before an American judge, that this is what happened.   Yet the British won the war and were always able to deny this account.   

"I am not saying that all the English are such barbarians; nor do I say that all Germans are knights of honor.   I am just saying that these things happen in wartime.   At the time of action, a commander doesn’t always have all the facts.   Even I," his eyes became focused on some distant, imaginary point, and his voice lost some of the tone of command, "even I can imagine situations, where I would plow my submarine through lifeboats of women and children in order to destroy an English warship, or to protect my boat and my men.   And, I have no doubt, there are Captains in the Royal Navy, or the American Navy, who would make the same decision."   

Joachim looked down at his hands, examining his nails, unable to comment.   

"Do not blame yourself," the Captain said getting up, his voice confident and authoritative once again.   "If you need to assign some culpability, then blame the war.   War is too big for us mere men to resist.   All we can do is survive.   And win.   Win, so we get to tell the story this time."   

The kapitan zur see was insightful.   His words acted like a surgeon’s knife, not lessening the pain, but preventing the spread of the cancer through Joachim’s mind, and for the remainder of the voyage, he opened up and spoke to the men in his compartment.   He was also able to settle down and begin making notes for his report.   But he was an outdoors man, and the cramped confines of the steel hull had almost stifled him, so he had been grateful when the captain had offered to let him stand on deck as the boat made its way up the river to its berth, and had climbed the ladder to the aft deck eagerly.    Moving almost imperceptibly, the submarine came closer to the dock.   A large contingent of naval personnel and dock workers had braved the cold wind to meet the boat, and a Kriegsmarine band struck up a stirring march as the tapered hull inched towards its moorings.   Behind the band a group of young women huddled together, locals who knew that months at sea would leave the men, eager to brag of their success, with money to spend, searching for female company — and more.   About fifty meters away was a building with a dark red wall, the splash of color incongruent in this weather.   In front of it was parked a black Mercedes.   It bore no markings, no pennant flew from its fender, but even from that distance Joachim recognized the tall, trim figure of Korvettenkapitan Lukas Kuefer.   He was one of Canaris’ senior men in the Abwehr, and his presence at the dockside excited Joachim.   As the men on the submarine deck caught the lines thrown to them from the shore, Joachim felt completely relaxed for the first time in fourteen months.   

Once the brass had come and gone, the crew began to prepare for their stay in port.   Joachim, still in civilian clothes, slipped ashore with his suitcase, and walked over to the Mercedes.   As he approached, the officer jumped from the car and walked toward him with a smile.   

"Joachim!   Welcome home!   How are you?"   

"Well, Sir, thank you.   Better now, when I am not confined in an iron tube fifty meters under the Atlantic."   Kuefer gave a broad grin at the greeting and took his suitcase.   "What brings you down to France to meet me?"   Joachim asked as they passed the saluting guards at the gates of the base and headed toward Nantes.   

"I don’t know, something…no, seriously, I do not know what they need you for," he responded to the sardonic laugh that Joachim had uttered at the first phrase.   "I don’t know if von Lahousen even knows — I received my orders directly from the generalmajor."   

"What did Oster tell you?"   

"That you were returning from America and would be arriving at St. Nazaire.   I was to bring you back to Berlin with all possible dispatch."   

"Do they know?"   asked Joachim with some alarm.   

The other shook his head decisively.   "I don’t believe so.   My bet is that it is a very secret mission."   

They talked on and on as Kuefer steered the Mercedes deftly through the streets of Nantes, until the buildings gave way to the hedgerows and fields of France and he pressed the accelerator pedal down.   As the pale yellow fields, the apple trees with their buds about to burst open, the berms of the road crowned with white marguerites or blue veronica, sped by, the young agent felt the tension that had enfettered his body since the orders to leave America had reached him begin to fall away.   Here in France, even as he listened to the news from home, the assessments from headquarters, the war seemed far away.   Even the sight of a crashed English bomber, its tail sticking high in the air in the middle of a field, did little to dampen the feeling that, somehow, he was on vacation.   After about 40 kilometers, Kuefer suddenly broke off his discourse and asked, "I’m sorry, I forgot.   Are you hungry?"   

"Oh yes.   The food on the submarine was terrible.   They had been at sea a long time, and everything came from cans."   

"Well, I can fix that.   I have a basket of fresh bread, and some local cheeses as well.   Also some bottles of French wine."   

"That sounds like heaven.   I have not tasted good food since I left.   The Americans do not cook for my palate, I’m afraid."   

Kuefer laughed, and swung the car down a side road.   About a kilometer further they turned onto a track, and, after a few minutes of bumpy ride, pulled off into a field that overlooked the Loire.   Not a person was in sight; the clouds had broken up and were now scudding across a pale the sky, like the small whitecaps that danced on the surface of the river to the banks, where the hyacinths and anemones gaily pirouetted.    Kuefer cut the ignition, sat back in his seat, and turned to his companion, studying his face.   He took his hands off the steering wheel, reached over to the young man, pulled him close and kissed him.   "My God, how I have missed you, Jochen," he said earnestly, dropping into the familiar form of his first name.   "A million times I feared you dead."   For a long minute they kissed and held each other, then Joachim pulled away and held his partner at arm’s length, staring into his eyes, remembering how long it had been since he had seen them.   

"And I feared for you, too," he replied as his hand rubbed the other’s sleeve.   "The air raids:  so much for Göring and his ‘enemy bombs will never fall on Berlin!’.   God, even the Russians bombed you!"   

"You get used to it.   The sirens go, we scramble to the shelters, the sirens go again, and we come out.    Berlin isn’t too bad."   

Once again their lips touched, as their tongues eagerly expressed their passion.   "Come, get in the back," Kuefer said, swinging open the door and pulling his jacket off.   And for the next fifteen minutes, any member of the French Resistance could have killed two German officers with a single bullet from almost any angle.   

"God you stink," laughed Kuefer as eventually as they parted, panting, and he used his singlet to clean his lover’s torso.   

"I’m glad to be home again with you, too," protested Joachim, then added after a pause, "I know.   The conditions in the submarine were terrible."   

-------ooOoo-------

The five of us sat, mouths agape, on Mike’s and my deck on a late September evening, listening to the tale being recounted.   That Joachim and Lukas were there at all was nothing short of a miracle.   Months before, at a dinner we had had after Margaret’s death, I had dropped a bombshell when I opined that Eric’s father had been, in all probability, a German agent.   That simple statement had caused a furor that had had all the guests present talking and arguing until about 2:30 in the morning.   It would have probably extended until breakfast, had Carol-Anne Seaburn not phoned anxiously to make sure her mother-in-law was still all right.   As the party had broken up, Eric had paused as he got into his car.   Turning to me he asked, "Chris, do you think you could help me find out the truth about my father — and if he’s still alive?"   

I had laughed at the question and, only in the guise of gracious host, and with the bravado born of wine and port, had said that I would see what I could do.   Of course, I thought as I prepared the vital morning brew the following morning, it was an impossible task after all these years.   But as I stood on the deck, the first cup of coffee steaming in my hands, watching the pelicans skim over the waves in search of breakfast, I began to consider the idea in a more sober light.   There was the six degrees of separation thing.   Who could I contact?   The embassy?   Naah.   Career diplomats and consular staff that would venture a single pace beyond the milquetoast world of filing papers and rubber stamps had disappeared with Kipling and the far reaches of the Empire.   Were service records of spies even kept?   And even if they had been, would they have survived the collapse of the Thousand Year Reich and the Soviet occupation of Berlin?   

And so, over the next few days, each spare minute found me at my PC, Googling and probing almost any site that looked as though it might bring me nearer.   Occasionally a site looked promising, and I would send a message to the webmaster asking if he, or any of his site’s visitors, could point me towards someone who might know of a German agent who had been in the southeast United States in the early 1940s.    Twenty, maybe thirty, messages went out.   Nine, maybe ten replies came back.   Ich bedauere… regrettably, almost each began, dashing yet another hope.   

It was just short of a week later that I opened an email in my inbox, and my stomach clenched.   In the slightly stilted style of someone who didn’t use English on a regular basis, the writer told me that his son-in-law’s father had seen one of my emails and forwarded it to him.   Sepp, as my correspondent was named, had been a crewman, a Mechanikergefreiter, on U-70.   Toward the latter half of March 1942, his boat had been on the end of a patrol when they had received orders to come in close to the American coast and pick up an agent of the Abwehr.   The agent, he said, had not spoken too much, but had slept and spent much of his free time in the aft torpedo room, which was where Sepp had his station, and where he had his bunk.    As the voyage progressed, Sepp’s message revealed, the agent had relaxed more and they had had some conversations.   He couldn’t remember much of what they had said, other than the agent had come from a town somewhere near Munich.   He really couldn’t remember his name — it was a long time ago and it was, naturally, during the war, when he had met, and lost, so many friends.   However, he added, in the 1970s he had seen a picture on the television of a businessman who had done something or other, and he remembered thinking at the time that this was the same man.   That businessman’s name was Joachim Theiss.   Sepp had half thought of writing to him after seeing him on TV, but then, it had been the war, and people wanted to forget.   

I had barely finished reading the closing sentences of the email when I was opening up another window and typing the name, "Joachim Theiss" into the Google search box.   There was not too much information on the man.   It seemed as though he had retired in the 80’s, which would put his age about right.   It was when I opened about the sixth or seventh site that my blood ran cold.   There was a picture, a photograph taken several years before he stopped work, of Joachim Theiss standing in front of a row of shipping containers.   With the background of colorful logos such as Hapag-Lloyd and P&O, stood a man who, with very little imagination, bore certain striking resemblances to Eric Steeby.   The hair was the same color, the shape of the nose, the firm chin.   For some unknown reason, I felt my spine tingle.   It was that uncanny.   

That evening I sat with Mike telling him what I had discovered and exploring what my options were.   "I can’t just email him and say ‘Hi!   Do you know you have a son and grandson here?’ He might think it’s a scam to get money.   Shit, he’s old:  maybe he’ll have a heart attack!"   As we talked, Mike’s enthusiasm grew, and together we began working out a reasonable approach that might work.   

And thus, on the following morning, I sent an email to the company Joachim Theiss had once, apparently, worked for.   I mentioned the Telefunken radio I had been given and sketched the finding of it in the house of the Gallagher family.   I asked them to forward my email to Joachim Theiss and, if he had any knowledge of it, would he be kind enough to respond.   

The reply came a bare hour later.   While he didn’t brush me off, the tone was cautious at first as he queried who I was, how I had found the radio, and why I thought he might have had something to do with it.   In some detail I told him about the roof repairs and Dan’s gift to me.   I disclosed that his sudden disappearance from Kirkhall, and the denial of the British of any knowledge of him, had prompted a guess about his identity on my part.   After that, the tenor of his messages changed to eagerness.   He admitted that it was very likely a radio that he had placed in the house during the war.   He was amazed that I had been able to link it to him.   How had I found his name?   Was Margaret Gallagher still alive?   Was she married?   

Without a second thought, I put my real work to one side as I filled him in with most of the story.   I omitted any mention of the murder, I merely said that Margaret Gallagher had, indeed, married, but had died recently.   I gave him the name of the submariner and his e-dress, and described the circuitous path that I had followed to get to him.   I did not mention Eric or Glen.   

Over the next 24-hours we exchanged several emails, and I wrote about the development of Inverness, and life in general on Kirkhall Island.   The following morning, toward the end of the conversation, I mentioned that I lived with my partner, Mike, and was somewhat surprised when, in his response, he mentioned that he, too, lived with his partner, Lukas, and they had been together from the time of the war.    Well, I thought to myself with a wry smile, that takes care of any issue he might have had with Glenn’s orientation.   

That evening once again, as Mike and I sat on the deck in the darkness, his legs stretched across my lap and the sounds of La Boheme on the stereo heard softly in the background, I told him everything that had transpired in my email conversation.   Together we discussed the best way to bring Eric into the loop, and imagined the shock the revelation would be to my correspondent.   After breakfast, having got my ducks into as much of a row as I could manage, I sent a brief email to Joachim telling him that Eric was a guy I knew and that he would be contacting him at some stage.    Once those bits and bytes were headed out over the wires, I picked up the phone and called Eric Steeby’s cell.   His first reaction was one of astonished elation, but his voice soon became nervous at the prospect of contacting the father he had known nothing about for almost all his life.   Assuring him that Joachim seemed to be a person of genial demeanor, I forwarded all my email correspondence to him and then left everything in his hands.   

Much to my relief, my German correspondent didn’t drop dead when Eric broke the news to him, and on the following morning I had a very gracious, and somewhat touching in its gratitude, email in my inbox from Joachim, thanking me for bringing him and his son together.   He suggested that, since I had been so involved in this affair, that I call him by the familiar Jochen, rather than the more formal Joachim.

Things moved quickly after that.   For such important discoveries, and so much catching up, emails, or even the phone, were totally inadequate, and on both sides of the Atlantic impatience grew.   Joachim was now over eighty and thus rather keen to come to the US while he still could travel.   He had wanted for some time to show Lukas where he had spent some of his wartime service, and the present, with a new-found son and grandson living there, seemed liked the perfect time.   

Some eight or nine weeks later, I was cosseted in the comfort of Mike’s Audi as we headed up to Charleston to be Eric’s guests for the weekend, and meet the two Germans face to face.   That first evening together was a kaleidoscope of introductions, of marveling at having discovered each other, and of sharing cameos of the lives everyone had lived.   Over the weekend I found out that, after the war, Joachim and Lukas had started their own import-export business in South America, then, with the rapid rise of the European economies in the fifties and sixties, had moved back to Europe where their enterprise had flourished.   Pioneering in the container business had given them an extra boost, and their company had expanded until, in 1992, they had sold it at an enormous profit, and had lived in very comfortable retirement since.   Their appearance and energy belied their octogenarian ages, and we rarely made our ways to bed before midnight, yet it was they who were sipping coffee and reading the newspaper at eight thirty, showered, shaved and dressed, when Mike and I stumbled down, hair awry and with stubble-covered jowls to get our morning caffeine fix.   

The two were filled with bonhomie and, as Sunday evening and Mike’s and my departure approached, we extended an invitation to come and visit with us for a few days, so we could hear more of the story of their lives.   This idea was seized upon, and eagerly supported, by Glenn.   He was now spending much of his time in Inverness with Rolf, and having his grandfather in the vicinity would give him the opportunity to see him more often, and so, without hesitation, our offer of hospitality was accepted.   

Thus it came about that, one early Saturday afternoon on our deck, with an old galvanized tub filled with crushed ice and an assortment of beers to ensure we did not dehydrate placed next to the wall in the shade, the five of us sat and listened in awe to the narratives of the two men.   

There had been a somber moment when Joachim took us to the point where he had dispatched the unfortunate Mr. Edwards, but after that he returned to his tale, behind his silver and black glasses his blue eyes sometimes danced mischievously — especially when he described some time when he was with Lukas — at other times, narrowed and distant as he recalled to mind the distant past.   Laugh lines gave emphasis to his face and, when he smiled, slight dimples made an appearance at each side of the wide mouth.   Every now and then, he would make a gesture, or I would see him from a certain angle, and I could see the likeness of Eric Steeby.   Eric himself sat back relaxed, happy and content with life.   I had to take my hat off to him:  he’d lost the woman he believed was his mother, murdered by the woman whom he had suddenly found out was his mother, he had discovered he was illegitimate, he had wanted to find his father, and now he had.   He sat, the only hetero amongst a group of gay men, one his son, another his father, and it seemed as though he hadn’t a care in the world.   

As I said, the invitation to come and visit had not only been for the friendship:  I was really keen to hear more of Joachim’s and Lukas’ wartime activities, and the afternoon’s get together had been the result of some gentle prodding in that direction on my part.   After Joachim had recounted his return to Europe, there had been a general stirring for bathroom breaks and to get some chips and salsa, and as everyone was making their way back outside, Joachim touched my shoulder and pointed to the painting on my wall.    "From where do you have that painting of the flying boat, Chris?"   he asked.   

"My Grandfather flew that one in the war," I explained.   Amongst us there was no need to say which war — for them there was only one.   "He painted that himself."   

"It is good.   Where did he fly them?"   

"Out of Cattewater, near Plymouth."   

"Never in Scotland?"   

"Don’t think so.   He never mentioned it, anyway.   Why?"   

"I was in one of those aeroplanes when it crashed in Scotland."   

"No shit!   Were you hurt?"   

"A little bit, a couple of ribs, a collar bone and a dislocated shoulder.   But I was lucky.   Everyone else except one was killed, and the other man was very badly burned."   

"How in Hell’s name, had you gotten on a Sunderland?"   I asked.   "That was a British plane.   Was this more of your spy stuff?"   

"Yes.   It was, as you say, some of my spy stuff.   But it was also the end of it, because after the crash I became a prisoner of war."   

‘Fuck,’ I thought, ‘you were a goddam spy.   Being a POW was a big break.   You could have been shot!’ Aloud I asked, "What was it like?   The airplane, I mean.   I’ve never seen one in real life, and never been inside."   

"It was a big plane — for that time, anyway.   Two decks.   But it was noisy inside.   The four motors, big piston engines, thundered in your ears the whole time.   But you could walk around inside, and they didn’t fly so high, so you could see much more than nowadays."   

"What had taken you to Scotland?"   asked Mike as we took our seats.   "Or can’t you tell us that?"   

"It was long ago, and our countries are all friends now, so I don’t see why not," Joachim replied.   He gave a curious little smile and continued, "It’s going to be a long story, so I need another beer if I may, please, Chris."   

Once several brown bottles, the moist sea air already condensing on their sides and forming little rivulets, had been passed around, we sat back, agog in anticipation for the next episode.   

"Well, when Lukas and I arrived back in Berlin after I came back from America, I was told that I had to report immediately to Admiral Canaris.   I was excited, of course, because he did not often talk to the agents himself.   The admiral was an aloof man, and very aristocratic — that was what had started him on his career as a spy:  watching and noting what the members of the upper classes did.   In Section I of the Abwehr, where we served, the Admiral had recruited the smartest and most able men from all the services and he relied on his chain of command to assign us and to control our operations, and to analyze and pass our information up.   My control officer was a fregattenkapitan."   He paused, and put his hand on Lukas’s.    "Lukas was more involved in training and the technical matters — codes , radios, very small cameras — so we would interact only when I was about to leave, and he would explain whatever new equipment I might be using."   He took a sip of the beer.   

"So I changed into a clean uniform, and went to see the admiral.   He was very pleasant.   He told me to sit down and offered me a cup of coffee — proper coffee, not the terrible stuff that was what was generally available on the street in those days.   He asked me a lot about America, what they were doing, how they were reacting to the war that they found themselves in, what my impressions were.   As I spoke, he would occasionally nod at something I said, and that gave me some confidence.   When I was finished, he complimented me, and said that I had confirmed exactly what he felt.   Unfortunately, those at the top, he said, by which I felt sure he meant the Fuehrer, did not agree with his assessments.   

"Then he told me that I could have ten days leave to go home to my family.   When I came back, I was to see him again for my new assignment.   

"I was very pleased to be able to go and see my parents, because I had not been able to write to them from America, or even tell them where I was.   Then, as I got up to leave, he pulled a paper out of his drawer and said, ‘I must congratulate you, too.   You have been promoted to hauptmann.’ He handed the papers over to me, and I took them, thanking him very much.   It was a promotion I had wanted badly, and for it to be awarded by the admiral was very satisfying to me, because I saw he recognized my work."   Joachim gave a diffident smile.   "Also, now I could go home and brag a little about my rank in our town."   

We laughed along with him and he went on.   "The admiral then dismissed me and picked up some papers to read.   But as I got to the door he said quietly, ‘Now your lover is your senior by only one rank!   It is more satisfactory, no?’

"I tell you, I felt this tall," he held thumb and forefinger close together.   "I turned and looked at him, but you never knew what Canaris was thinking:  his face always looked the same.   I started to deny that Lukas was anything more than a good friend.   He listened to me with just a very little smile, and then said, ‘Whatever you say.   I suppose the roads in France are clogged with traffic, and that accounted for your slow start from the coast, and no doubt, with the bomb damage, it was necessary for you both to share a room in Frankfurt.’

"I just stood there:  I could not get a word to my mouth.   How did this scheisskerl know this?"   Joachim wagged his finger at us knowingly.   "That, my friends, is why he became the head of the greatest spy organization in the world:  it was in his nature, in his genes, to know everything about everyone.   

"The admiral just looked at me.‘All I’m saying is, be careful.   If the Gestapo finds out, you will be in a concentration camp with a pink triangle, and there will be nothing I can do.’

"I could just nod my head and assure him we would not let him down.   

"The ten days leave passed like one, then I was back in Canaris’ office in my best uniform, and he was telling me of my new assignment.   I was to go to Scotland.   He asked me if I knew of a place called Achnacarry.   I told him I had never heard of it.   So he pulled out a map, and explained that it was an estate in Scotland, on the west coast, in a very remote part of the country.   He said that in the 1920s, the leaders of the big oil companies had met there to set quotas on oil supply for the first time, due to the threat from Russia of overproduction.   But now, he said, it was being used for something else, something of military importance.   He wanted to know what was going on there.   The entire north of Scotland, north of a line from Fort William in the west to Inverness in the east, had been put off limits to anyone other than those who lived there — and they were few — and authorized military personnel.   One of the Abwehr agents in England had picked up that some Dutch soldiers were traveling up there, and the admiral wanted to know if the Dutch army was trying to re-form over in Scotland.   

"Of course I immediately saw a problem — if the area was out of bounds, how could I go looking around?   

"But, as always, the admiral was several moves ahead of me.   I was to go in as an American Air Force officer, surveying for an airfield for American planes being ferried from here to England.   He explained that the Americans were just setting up their command structure in England, so in all the chaos it would be more difficult for anyone to check up on me than if I were part of an English military unit.   When I objected that I couldn’t speak like an American, he merely said that the Scots could hardly understand the English anyway, and no one there would ever know what an American sounded like."   

We all laughed at that, and Joachim took the opportunity to wet his throat.   "There was a secondary mission, too.   The Caledonian Canal ran across Scotland in that area, almost along the line above which no one could go, and he wanted to know if it was being used for any military traffic.   If so, I was to report back on what was being transported, and also what the defenses were.   I had to decide whether there was a chance of putting the locks, which dropped the canal from the level of the Lochs to sea level, out of commission.   If I thought I could do that, explosives would be dropped to me by air.    Because I had had very little sabotage training, I had to go to Section II of the Abwehr for a month of sabotage and explosives training, and then I’d go over to Scotland by sea.   

"Once again, I promised the admiral my allegiance, and he let me go."   

-------ooOoo-------

Six weeks later, Joachim was waiting impatiently in Ijmuiden in Holland for a dark night with suitable weather for an E-boat to take him across the North Sea.   The waiting was nerve-wracking for him.   Finally the weather had changed, the moonlight would be minimal, and the E-boat was available.   Just over a week after he had reached Holland, Joachim, dressed as a Captain in the US Army Air Force, was in Aberdeen.   The E-boat had landed him on the cost of Scotland just near Lossiemouth.   In the darkness of early morning he had made his way through the forest and into the town.   From there it had been a short train ride to Aberdeen where there was a safe house — a small general store with a couple of rooms on the floor above.   The elderly man and his wife were no more or less anti-English than the rest of the Scots, but they were fiercely religious, and saw the Nazis and Fascists as the bastion against a flowing tide of Communism, which, in their opinion, had the sole aim of bringing down the Christian religion and Christian values.   They also held, they explained in a convoluted lecture to a bewildered Joachim, that it was a Jewish plot that was at the root of the Marxist concept of atheism.   As their small contribution to keep Christianity alive, these two took Joachim in until he could establish a residence of his own.   

Keen to get on with his duties, and eager to escape this dour household, Joachim searched around and, within a few days, had found a room on the outskirts of Inverness which gave him the privacy he needed.    The town — ironically with the same name as the village he had spent months in on Kirkhall Island — was at the eastern end of the canal.   Throughout June, Joachim surveyed the Caledonian Canal, its locks and the traffic that moved through them.   Gradually he worked his way westwards along its length.   By the beginning of July he saw the need to move to Fort William.   Until he was established there, he took his radio back to the safe house in Aberdeen, preferring the inconvenience of cycling the forty-something miles, plus a train trip, to the risk of having it discovered in Fort William, for, indeed, there was more military activity on this side of the country than the other.   However, much to his chagrin, he found, from his evening conversations in the pubs, that the locals appeared to be as ignorant to the goings on to the North and West of them as he was.   Finding out that much was tedious work, for even when the walls are not plastered with ‘loose lips sink ships’ posters, the Scots are not renowned as a garrulous people.   

By the time August came around Joachim was dejected:  so far he had found out nothing about the military activity to his north.   In desperation he decided that bravado was the only way he was going to find out anything of value.   And thus, on a Saturday morning, he mounted his bicycle and headed westwards towards Glenfinnan.   The satchel that held the maps, which he used as his cover to search for a suitable airfield, was secured behind his saddle, and his leather USAAF flight jacket was strapped to the small pack slung on his back which contained binoculars, a compass and his lunch.   It was a sunny day.   Joachim had ridden about seven or eight miles when the warm morning air began to take its toll, and he stopped to roll his sleeves up, deciding that it was preferable to be cool, even though it meant that his unprotected arms would be relentlessly attacked by the swarms of almost invisible little bugs that seemed to permeate the Highland air.   He stood next to his cycle, rolling the khaki sleeves up as he looked out over Loch Eil, paying scant attention to the occasional rustling noises in the brush around him.   If he thought about them at all, his mind probably put the sound down to some highland sheep or other, mindlessly chewing away its day.   And then, in front of his startled eyes, a mound, a bare ten feet from where he was standing, materialized into a young man, clad in dirt-covered fatigues and with a helmet festooned with grass and leaves.   As Joachim stood dumbstruck, the apparition launched itself at him.   This movement galvanized the German into action.   His training had covered this, and he stepped back just as the other man would have made contact, allowing his momentum to carry him past Joachim to sprawl on the ground.   Joachim seized his chance and dove onto the back of his attacker.   The two were equally matched, and they rolled in the dust, neither getting a commanding hold on the other.   Then, in a sudden spasm, his attacker broke away from Joachim and scrambled to his feet.   The German rolled away from the kick which he knew was coming and, continuing the movement, sprang lithely to his feet as his hand went to his pocket and pulled out the switch blade knife he carried with him.   The knife that he had used on the Atlantic beach, the only souvenir from his stay in the United States, now lay lightly in his fingers as he crouched slightly, balancing on his toes as he faced his foe.   The man hesitated for a moment, stepped back.   Joachim noticed the foot going back, and jumped to the side to avoid the gravel kicked at his face.   

"Don’t touch it," he gasped as the soldier made a lunge for the rifle he’d dropped in the struggle.   The other man froze, his eyes not leaving the silver blade for an instant.   

There was the unmistakable sound of a rifle bolt and a voice called out, "Orr right!"   A second mound unfolded into a similarly clad soldier, this one with rifle pointed squarely at Joachim’s stomach.   "Both of ’ee back up three steps.   Drow down the knife!"   Joachim stepped back, and then laid the knife on the ground.   He held his hands out from his sides.   "Higher," yelled the second man, "Rise them ’ands right up."   

Joachim raised his hands above his head.   The first soldier bent down to pick up the knife.‘Fool,’ thought the German.   ‘Untrained.   He should have picked up his own rifle first.’   He knew for a certainty he could take him.   One step, and before the other man could fire, Joachim would be behind his comrade, shielded by his body, with his arm locked tightly around the other’s neck.   But, in the same instant he recalled that he hadn’t seen these two before they had appeared from the ground.   It was reasonable, therefore, that there could be more.   So he stood still and did nothing.   

"Whom be you?"   the first soldier asked.   

"Captain James Tise.   United States Army Air Force.   Who are you?"   

"Beresford.   Sergeant.   Somerset Light Infantry," the soldier holding the rifle answered.   "What are ’ee doing here?   This ’ole area all be off limits — casn’t ’ee read the signs?"   

"I am authorized to be here," replied Joachim.   "My orders are in my pocket.   I’ve been sent to survey a place to put a new airport for the planes coming from America."   

"You casn’t put any airport yere," growled the sergeant, "there be too many bloody great mountains around."   He nodded his head in the direction of Druim Fada.   

"That’s exactly the point.   I’ve found a site for the airfield over toward Invergarry.   Now I must see where the hills are, so we know which direction the runway must be so the planes can take off and land safely."   

The sergeant eyed him suspiciously.   "Let us see your orders."   Joachim dropped one hand to his pocket.    "Keep your ’ands up!   Tell Corporal Fletcher where they be."   

"They’re in my wallet.   In my back pocket."   The first soldier walked behind him and extricated the wallet from Joachim’s pants.   He opened it up and pulled the sheet of paper out.   Unfolding it, he read the words slowly.   

"Bugger I if it don’t say ’e can be yere!"   he exclaimed slowly, after reading it a second time.   

"Typical of them tossers in London:  make rules then straightway break them the’selves.   Orr right.’   Ee can put your ’ands down now if ’ee doan go a-fighting."   

"Thank you," Joachim said, relieved, as he lowered his arms.   "Can I have my knife back, too?"   

The young soldier held it out to him.   "If I’d a-know’d ’ee was American I wooden never a-went for ’ee" he said with a smile that made some long-forgotten urges run through Joachim’s groin.   ‘This war will turn me into a monk,’ he thought wryly.   The two soldiers talked to him briefly as he dusted off his trousers and shirt and picked up his bicycle.   He was just about to mount when a motorcycle came over the rise with a roar and lurched to a stop next to them.   The rider was a captain in the Royal Marines and, although technically the same rank as Joachim supposedly was, was adamant that Joachim could no longer be allowed to wander around the area.   Shorter than Joachim, he was nonetheless stocky and menacing, which left Joachim no choice but to ride ahead of him back to Achnacarry, their headquarters, to get the orders checked.   

Their destination was the somber, dark, stone house, obviously an ancestral home that had been taken over for some kind of military training.   Surrounding it now were the semicircular, corrugated metal Nissen huts, and soldiers in many uniforms moved everywhere.   Joachim’s guts clenched:  this was the very place that Canaris wanted to know about.   The only thing in doubt was whether he would ever leave there alive to radio what information he had back to Berlin.   The marine captain pointed to one of the huts, and Joachim pedaled slowly over, aware of the stares of dozens of military eyes following him.   Inside the hut he was shown into a makeshift office, and the marine demanded his orders.   Recalling the attitudes to authority shown by the Americans he had lived amongst only months before, and reckoning that it was, in any case, do-or-die time, Joachim refused.   No way, he said, would he hand over his orders to anyone but an officer who outranked him.   He was legitimately in Scotland on official American wartime activity, and he had so far done nothing but follow the directions given to him by his headquarters in London.   

The marine glared at him and Joachim feared that, for the second time that day, he was going to be attacked, but instead the officer abruptly turned and left the room, closing the door and locking it.   After some fifteen minutes, he heard a key turn in the lock, and the marine returned with another man whose uniform designated him as a major in the Guards.   Joachim sprang to his feet and saluted, but the major, in cordial tones, immediately told him to stand easy and, pulling up a chair, began a friendly discussion.   

Four years at a British boarding school had left the peculiarities of the inhabitants of this sceptred isle imbued in the young German.   He fully realized that this pleasant tęte-ā-tęte was, in fact, a subtle interrogation, designed to lull him into a sense of camaraderie, in which he could easily trip over a tiny fact.    Interspersed amongst chat about the progress of the war were random questions of runway lengths, thickness of concrete needed to withstand heavy landings and the layout of hardstands.   But Canaris’ Abwehr had been thorough in their briefing.   Joachim knew the service weights of the B-17s and B-24s, and even astonished the major with an estimate of the new large bomber being built by the Boeing Company.   Only at the very end, when the major had started to move towards the door, did he turn and, almost as an afterthought, ask to see Joachim’s orders.   "You know, you’d be a lot better off with a motor car than a bicycle," he said, studying them.   "Stay here a day or two and I’ll see that you get assigned one."    It wasn’t an invitation:  it was an order.   

The following evening, the major came over to Joachim in the officers’ mess where he was having a beer before dinner.   "How is it that you don’t speak like an American?"   he asked after passing the time of day.   

"I speak like any other American," Joachim replied, "whose parents sent them to a snotty, private academy in Andover, Massachusetts."   

The next day the tactic was different.   After lunch the major introduced him to an American 2nd Lieutenant.    "I know what it’s like to be far from home," the major said.   "Always nicer to meet up with someone from one’s own country."   The 2nd lieutenant was from Santa Fe, and before enlisting, had left the Land of Enchantment only twice to visit relatives in neighboring Arizona.   He knew nothing of the Atlantic States, and so, as far as verifying that Joachim was indeed an American, he was not going to be of much help to the major.   He did surprise Joachim with some discussion of baseball.   In his time in the US, Joachim had spent much time in bars trying to dig up information.   That meant getting to know people, and that meant talking sports.   He had been packing up to leave the New York / New Jersey area for the South when the World Series was being played and, remembering some of the highlights of the games.   Now, in this remote Highland spot, Joachim fabricated for the 2nd Lieutenant the scene at Ebbets Field ,when what seemed like a certain win for the Dodgers turned into a trouncing win for the Yankees, as a result of Mickey Owen’s fumble.   Joachim forcefully opined that the Yankee win was a fitting tribute to Lou Gehrig, whose death earlier in the year had cast somewhat of a pall over the Yankee fans at the beginning of the World Series.   

The 2nd Lieutenant was somewhat overawed by this deluge of knowledge, and took his leave shortly afterwards, no doubt to report favorably to the major.   But after the young officer had left, Joachim mulled over the meaning of all these questions, and the delay they were causing him.   It was only too obvious that the major was somewhat suspicious.   On the other hand, the fact that he was using varying strategies to catch him, meant that the American authorities had not yet come back denying that James Tise was in their service.   

After the conversation with the 2nd lieutenant, Joachim was left pretty much to his own devices.   There seemed to be men here from every regiment in the British military establishment, as well as soldiers from Poland, Norway and Holland who had escaped the German advances in their own countries.   All this information Joachim filed carefully away in his mind, not daring to write anything down.   

His routine changed on the Saturday, however, when an RAF officer happened to come to Achnacarry.    Unsure as to whether this was another smoke-out attempt by the major or not, Joachim decided to take the bull by the horns and struck up a conversation with the newcomer almost as soon as they met in the mess.    The RAF officer was very interested in everything Joachim told him about a new airfield and, after being plied with several pints of beer, suggested that it would be much easier for Joachim to get a good idea of the land from the air.   A Sunderland, he said, was flying up from Oban, where the officer was based, to Invergordon on the following day, and Joachim could go along for the flight if he liked.   The major, when apprised of this offer, hesitated at first, but since the Air Force wing commander outranked him and since he promised to have Joachim back by Monday, finally gave in, and, the following morning, having stopped by his room in the town to pick up some clean clothes and other necessities, Joachim and the wing commander drove into the Coastal Command base at Oban.   

The flight in the lumbering flying boat as it followed the Caledonian Canal northeastwards, gave Joachim spectacular views of the Highland countryside and its wide-open spaces.   The landing at Invergordon was smooth.   However, on taxiing to their mooring, the waves had tipped a wingtip down just as they raised a buoy up, and the leading edge impacted with the pylon that supported the light atop the buoy.   This caused some consternation at first, since the aircraft was scheduled to fly out to Iceland within two days, but closer inspection revealed that the damage was superficial and could be easily repaired.   

The wing commander from Oban had not accompanied them on the flight, and no one at Invergordon seemed to mind the young American hanging around the base and watching the goings on.   Certainly no one shuttled him back west on the Monday, and that evening, he accompanied some of the men he had met during the day to the officers’ mess.   They were standing, beer mugs in hand, talking about airplanes, when the person behind Joachim stepped back, laughing, and knocked Joachim’s arm.   His beer sloshed all over his hands and ran down over the military shoes, splashing the cuffs of his trousers.   Angrily he turned around ready to rebuke the offender for not watching what he was doing.   However, the sleeves of the man who had bumped him caught his eye just as he was opening his mouth.   They were adorned with a light blue stripe on a broad black band.   Joachim couldn’t remember the exact rank this signified, but knew it was way, way above his, and quickly checked the oath that had been forming in his throat.   

"I am most terribly sorry," the senior officer exclaimed.   "That was terribly clumsy of me."   As a mess steward rushed over with a clean white napkin, he continued, "Not too much harm done, I hope?"   

"None at all, sir," replied Joachim.   "As the Swedes say, "En gång, ingen gång —- två gånger, en vana — once is never, twice it’s a habit."   

"You speak Swedish, do you?"   the Senior Officer asked.   

"A little, sir.   I lived briefly in Sweden when I was a boy and I picked up some then."   Joachim felt his face flush as the Station Commander and other officers accompanying the senior officer studied him.   His khaki uniform stood out amongst the light blue.   

"Interesting," said the senior officer.   "Please bring this man another beer on my tab," he said to the steward.   

"That’s not necessary, sir," said Joachim.   

"Not at all.   It’s the least I can do for my clumsiness — and for an ally in our time of need."   His eyes seemed to bore into Joachim’s, and the young German felt an uneasy panic as he looked back into the pale, handsome face, before it turned away and continued the interrupted conversation with the Station Commander.   

Much later, long after the episode with the beer had receded from Joachim’s mind, and just as he was getting into bed, there was a gentle knock on his door.   "The air commodore wondered if you could have a word with him, Captain," a young man in a Royal Navy uniform said to Joachim when he opened it.   

"Air commodore?   You mean the officer from the mess tonight was an air commodore?"   

"Yes, sir.   A brigadier general, I believe, would be the rank in your country."   

"Oh, fuck!   Let me get my uniform on.   I had no idea…" Joachim stumbled.   What could this officer want with him?   

"Very well, sir.   I’ll wait out here and take you to him."   

In three minutes, completely dressed, hair slicked back, and still knotting his tie, Joachim stepped into the passageway.   The young Naval Officer eyed him with a slight twinkle in his eye.   "You have no idea who the air commodore is, do you sir?"   

"No.   Not really.   I mean, I suppose he is a very senior person in the chain of command."   

"Actually, sir, the air commodore is His Royal Highness, the Duke of Kent.   He is the brother to His Majesty."   

"Royal Highness?"   

"Yes, sir.   But don’t worry.   I’m sure you will find him very easy to get along with."   

"I don’t know that I can meet him like this, though.   This is the only uniform I have with me.   Originally it was supposed to be only a day flight up here and then back to Oban."   

"Sir, I assure you, you will be fine."   

The statement did little to reassure Joachim as he followed the naval officer up a flight of stairs.   The young man knocked on one of the doors, waited for an invitation to enter, and then stepped inside and announced, "Captain Tise, sir," and held the door open for Joachim.   

Joachim marched in, stood at attention and saluted.   

"My dear captain, please relax.   I wanted an informal chat with you about something you said earlier in the mess.   And, in any case, it is way too late at night, and I’ve had way too much to drink, for saluting."   He turned to the naval officer.   "That will be all for tonight.   You can stand down now.   Make sure my batman wakes me at six tomorrow, would you?"   

"Yes, sir.   Very good, sir."   With a formal salute and a sharp about-turn, he left the room, closing the door behind him.   

"Sit down here, please, captain," the air commodore said indicating the place next to him on a large sofa.    "You mentioned in the mess tonight that you spoke Swedish.   Is that true?"   

"Yes, sir.   My father worked for the Kodak Company, and for a few years he was based in Sweden.    That’s how I went to school there."   

"Do you speak it well?"   

"I know enough to get around, make a casual conversation.   I couldn’t discuss anything technical, though."   

"Casual conversation would probably be sufficient."   He paused.   "Do you know where we are going tomorrow?"   

"No, sir.   I know the aircraft I flew up from Oban on is going to Reykjavik.   But I believe that that is Danish, not Swedish, sir."   

"Reykjavik is the official story — what everyone at this base is told.   But tomorrow, Captain, we are actually headed for Sweden."   

"Sweden?"   

"Yes.   Not a word to anyone.   I am going to represent this country at a meeting in Stockholm.   A very important, in fact a critical, meeting.   A meeting that will change this war, change the world.   Only a very few people know about this.   Nobody on this base does, except the wing commander.   The pilot will be told only at a briefing before we take off.   But no one on the plane knows any Swedish at all:  due to the secrecy, we could hardly go around asking for Swedish speakers.   But I think it could be a tremendous advantage to have someone along with us who did know the local language — even if only a bit — just in case, you know?   

"Would you be prepared to come with us?"   

"Well, Sir, I’ll try to help you out as best I can."   

"Good.   Good.   That’s settled then.   Only one thing:  I cannot have you asking your commanding officer for permission — that could jeopardize our security.   I’ll arrange for him to be notified after we land in Stockholm."   

"I don’t believe that will present any problem, sir" Joachim replied.   ‘Especially as my commanding officer is only imaginary,’ he thought to himself.   

"Excellent.   This is a good omen for the trip.   I think we should drink to our endeavor, then.   Would you care for a glass of champagne, or a whiskey, perhaps?"   

"Whatever you are having, sir, will be fine."   Subconsciously Joachim ran his finger under his shirt collar.    Things were moving way too fast here.   

"Whiskey it is, then.   Are you feeling the heat?   It is hot in here, Captain, I know.   The radiator valve seems to be jammed open.   I asked to get it fixed, but they tell me there’s a war on."   He laughed at his little joke.   "Why don’t you take the jacket off?   Tie, too, if you like.   This is very informal."   

"Thank you, sir."   Joachim stood up and removed his jacket and laid it carefully over the arm of the sofa.    The air commodore poured two glasses of the amber liquid from a decanter, then held one out for Joachim.    As he took it, their fingers touched briefly and as, once again, their eyes met, a jolt went through Joachim’s gut.   As they lifted their glasses, their eyes stayed locked.   

"To the success of our enterprises then!"   

"To our enterprises, sir!"   Joachim took a gulp to steady the tremors that were coursing through his abdomen.   This could not be happening.   Not here.   Not to him.   Not with this man.   

"What is your Christian name, Captain Tise?"   the air commodore asked after taking a sip.   

"James, sir"

The air commodore stretched his hand out and ran his hand through Joachim’s hair.   "You have very beautiful hair.   Do you know that, James?"   

"I’ve been told that, sir."   The hand caressed his hair and then moved down his neck.   He felt his face being gently pulled towards the officer’s.   His mind reeled.   His desires pulled him one way, his nationality another, the disparity of ranks, not to mention social standing, tugged in yet another.   Their lips met, and the primeval urges, passions rooted in the very depth of humans since they first lived together, took control.   His own hand moved around the back of the older man, drawing him close, as the two tongues wrestled in exploratory thrusts.   Not breaking lip contact, they placed their glasses unsteadily on the table and began to pull their ties, their shirts off.   Feet pushed at shoes until they fell off, hands blindly pushed socks off of feet held high.   Only when they were completely naked did they pull their mouths apart.   Standing amidst the scattered clothes, they clutched each other, driving their crazed hormones into even greater frenzy.   Unable to let go, they staggered together to the bed and, over the next hour, explored each other’s bodies with fingers, tongues and manhood, culminating with the intense sex that only the relief from months of enforced celibacy can produce.   

Almost two hours later, the rush of the evening overcoming the post-coital drowsiness that had his recent partner in a deep sleep, Joachim lay next to him taking stock of his own position.   He was a German spy in an adulterous relationship with a high-ranking officer of the enemy.   Not only high ranking, but of the Royal Family.   It was ironic, no, it was ridiculous.   He was not the seducing type, not the paramour, certainly not the Mata Hari of the next war.   What the fuck had he been thinking?   This was a catastrophe.   

Or was it?   

Carefully he rolled off the bed.   The other man didn’t move.   Joachim moved over to a side table where an attaché case lay.   From the handle a chain ran to a manacle so that the case could be attached to the bearer’s wrist.   Slowly he tried the latches.   They moved, and he lifted the lid.   Inside were sheaves of papers.   Quickly he picked up the case, moved over to his jacket and took the small box that looked like a packet of cigarettes out of the pocket, as well as what appeared to be a lighter, and padded into the bathroom, closing the door quietly behind him.   

Laying the attaché case on the basin where the light was brightest, he held the cigarette box, in reality a miniature camera, over the case and snapped the first document.   Lifting that off and placing it on the lid of the toilet, he photographed the second.   It took him fifteen minutes until the case was empty and all the sheets lay face down on the wooden seat.   He had paid only scant attention to the contents of what he had taken pictures of, but the little he had seen had made him giddy with excitement.   

This man was going to negotiate a peace with Germany.   For the return of Poland, Britain would sign a peace.   The Duke of Kent, the very man he had just fucked, was to ascend to the Polish throne.   The war would continue in the East as a fight against Bolshevism.   But there were trades, too:  the Germans could keep Silesia.   Churchill would step down in England, Hitler in Germany.   

It was incredible.   This was the mother-lode.   Carefully winding the film to the end, Joachim placed it in a cylinder in the false lighter.   He took a second roll out of its container and inserted it into the camera.    One by one he returned each sheet to the case, photographing each a second time, and making sure the distance of the camera was exactly right, just as Lukas had taught him in the Abwehr class.   Finally, when no more papers lay on the toilet lid, he closed the case carefully, and turning out the light, stood in the dark until his night vision returned, then made his way back to the room and laid the attaché case back on the table, shoving cigarette box and lighter back deep into the pocket of his jacket.   

Returning to the bed where the brother of the king lay, breathing long and deeply just as he had when Joachim left, the young German eased himself gingerly between the sheets.   The room was dark, the air temperate, the day had been long and filled with the unexpected, but sleep eluded him and he was still awake when there was a brisk rapping at the door.   

Drowsily the air commodore rolled over and blinked at Joachim, then, as the memories of the previous night flooded back, he smiled and placed a finger over his lips and pointed to the bathroom.   Joachim nodded and tip-toed into the small room, gently closing the door behind him.   He heard the older man open the door to the corridor and talk to whomever had knocked — Joachim guessed it was his batman.    The outer door clicked shut, then the bathroom one opened and his partner of the previous night padded softly in.   

"Good morning, James.   I hope you slept well."   His hands once again ruffled the blond hair as they kissed.   "I enjoyed our night together very much," he murmured into the nape of Joachim’s neck.   "I’ll have to think of a way of thanking you properly.   You were magnificent.   I had hoped that there would be an encore performance this morning, but you let me sleep too late.   Perhaps me can arrange to be together tonight again, in Stockholm?"   

"I enjoyed it too, sir.   It had been a long time.   Any time I can be of assistance to you, it would be a great honor."   

The other man laughed, and kissed Joachim lightly on the lips.   "You weren’t so formal with me last night, I seem to recall."   

Joachim gave a little laugh as he remembered holding the slender shoulders, the legs over his back as he had thrust deeply in, his raging hormones pushing discretion far from his mind.   

"Anyway, it’s probably best if you go back to your room now.   I am told we are to assemble at the boat jetty at 12:30, so I suggest you get some lunch before then, because we’ll go directly from there to the aeroplane."   

"I’ll be there, sir," Joachim replied.   Leaving the bathroom, he quickly pulled on his clothes and with a hurried, and rather formal, goodbye to the air commodore, he made his way back to his room.   

He barely spoke with anyone during the morning as he packed his few pieces of clothing into a duffel bag.    After lunch (God — the English food, even allowing for wartime, was awful) he walked across the base to the jetty where a small group of men was gathered.   An armed guard checked his identity card against a list of names, and then stood aside for him to join the group.   All eyes focused on the unfamiliar uniform, but then, recognizing the rank badges, one called the men to attention.   Joachim returned the salute and muttered a "Stand easy," embarrassed by the recognition.   Before any questions could be asked, however, a car drew up and out stepped the air commodore, a wing commander whom Joachim had not met before, and a young flight lieutenant.   Recognizing that he was the senior officer on the jetty, Joachim in turn hurriedly called the group to attention and saluted.   Was the air commodore’s smile just a little more than friendly, he wondered?   

"All right, chaps, let’s get going then," said the wing commander, and leading the way, he descended the ramp to a floating dock at which two launches were tied.   No one said anything, but Joachim noticed the split up of officers and men, and he quietly followed the naval officer whom he had met the previous evening, into the first launch.   The trip out was quick, a stiff wind blowing the little pennant at the front of the boat out to the side and the waves made chopping sounds on the side of the launch… The aircraft they were headed towards was huge:  a four engined flying boat with the red, white, blue RAF roundel on the side next to the large letters of the registration, W4026.   A young sailor deftly grabbed a line hanging from a hatch and pulled the launch up to the side of the fuselage just behind the nose

Joachim was the last from their launch to clamber aboard, and was just in time to see the pilot’s feet disappearing up the ladder to the cockpit on the upper deck, followed by those of the air commodore.   The remainder moved two compartments back, motioned by the wing commander.   Five minutes later they were joined by the non-coms and "other ranks".   The space was crowded with the fourteen people, but once everyone had squeezed in, the wing commander began to speak quickly but deliberately.   

"What I am going to tell you now is highly classified.   You may not, even when we get back, discuss this flight with anyone."   Several of the men exchanged anxious glances.   "As far as everyone knows, this is a normal flight to our base in Reykjavik.   However, gentlemen, that is not our destination.   This aeroplane will, instead, be going to Stockholm, Sweden."   He paused, and there were several audible intakes of breath.   "You will be part of a journey which is the first step of a very important plan that will hasten the end of the war, and end up not only saving many lives, but preserving the Empire, and also the European civilization you have grown up in.   

"We shall be taking off shortly, and heading inland to board one more passenger.   Other than matters pertinent to the safety of this aeroplane, you are not to attempt to speak to this person.   Nor are you to discuss amongst yourselves who he is, or might be.   Again, and I cannot stress this too strongly:  you are to consider this entire operation to be top secret, and not discuss it, or the flight, or the people on the aeroplane, with anyone else.   Nor should you talk about it amongst yourselves when we return.   

"Joining us for the flight is Captain Tise from the United States Army Air Force.   He speaks Swedish, and will thus be of use to us as far as the handling of the aircraft in Stockholm."   Everyone turned and looked at Joachim.   ‘If only you knew,’ he thought to himself as he responded silently to the nods of introduction.   

"We are not sure what the arrangements will be in Stockholm.   Certainly the air commodore and our other passenger, and at some time, Captain Tise, will be going ashore.   As for the rest, you will stay on the aircraft, supervise refueling, and stand watches until we return.   Captain Tise will assist with dealing with the local people when he is on board."   

"Thank you for your attention."   And so saying, he turned on his heel and headed forward.   

The take off was long, the engines thundering, the aircraft bouncing as it tried to break free of the water.    Once in the air, however, the flight was smooth, and Joachim climbed to the upper deck to look out through the windows.   The coast of Scotland was bleak as they flew north briefly and then banked, heading westwards and inland, entering fog as they did so.   After twenty minutes or so, the engine note changed, and the aircraft began to descend, gently, in steps as the pilot tried to feel his way down through the cloud.    The mist became wispy, and finally they broke through, barely a thousand feet up.   The Sunderland made a long circle, banking with one wing way down, over a loch and then, leveling out, flew away for a while before the flaps extended, and the flying boat turned to make a long, shallow approach.   They came in so low that Joachim at first thought the aeroplane would crash into the heather, but suddenly the scrub beneath them changed to stone, the shore passed feet under the hull, and then the airplane settled onto the water with a bang and a cloud of spray.   

"Good landing," said the air gunner standing behind Joachim.   

"Where are we?"   asked the German.   

"Don’t know for sure.   Judging by the flight time, and the size of the loch, I’d say it’s Loch More.   Lucky we had Goyen flying:  landing a fully loaded Sunderland is tricky.   It’ll be an interesting take-off for sure."   

They taxied toward a small jetty, from which a small motor boat was already putting out.   As the plane slowed, the pilot cut the port engines so that the launch could approach the hatch without danger of running into the propellers.   Joachim watched the activity intently, and then sucked his breath in sharply as he recognized the passenger in the boat.   It was the Fuehrer’s deputy, Rudolph Hess.   The official version put out in the German press was that he was a little crazy and had defected to England, but the scuttlebutt in the Abwehr was that he had flown to Scotland with the Fuehrer’s blessing, to organize a truce to take the threat from the west off the German armies, in order to free them up to fight the Russians in the east.   But what was he doing here?   

The boat bumped against the fuselage briefly and Joachim lost sight of it.   Within a minute it pulled away from the aircraft, headed back to shore, and the port inner engine kicked over.   As the propellers speeded up, the plane taxied forward to one end of the lake and then came back, slightly faster and curving from side to side.   "Goyen’s making waves," the air gunner explained to Joachim.   "The loch’s too calm.    Waves make it easier for the hull to break free from the water."   

A little knowledge is worse than none, and the take-off was alarming for Joachim, especially as the spray thrown up from the hull obscured the view, so the closeness of the approaching shore was left entirely to his imagination.   With a final bang of water hitting the hull, the jolting stopped, all was smooth and the aircraft was airborne, skimming over the gentle undulating Highlands countryside as the engines bellowed at full power.   Breathing a sigh of relief, Joachim stood up and climbed the ladder to the gun turret on the top of the fuselage.   Still over British territory, the air gunner had not yet taken up his position, and Joachim looked out over the countryside passing underneath the huge wing.   They were just under the cloud base, and the aircraft wallowed up and down gently in the updraughts.   As the roaring engines dragged them up into the white mist and the ground disappeared, Joachim remained where he was, thinking hard.   Why was Hess on this airplane, and why would they be going to Stockholm?   

He was shaken out of his meditations by a sharp report that seemed to come from just in front of him.   A puff of dark smoke and pieces of sheet metal flashed past outside, and he grabbed onto the edge of the turret as the plane lurched violently to the right and the wing dropped.   With scenes etching themselves on his mind like the frames in a slow-motion movie, Joachim watched the starboard aileron move all the way down as the pilot fought to bring the aircraft level.   There was a loud crack, and the giant wing seemed to begin to fold up and over.   High sounding screeching and tearing, a bang, and then there was sudden blackness.   

The pain was intense.   He could not move his right arm at all, breathing was difficult, his mouth was filled with dirt and blood.   He rolled over, groaning in agony.   All around him was silence.   About a hundred meters away there was a fire that he could see glimmering dimly through the mist.   Nothing moved.   He must help the others.   What in God’s name had happened?   He struggled to his knees, supporting himself on his left hand.   There was a stabbing in his side and he wondered if he’d been shot.    Maybe a German fighter had jumped their flying boat?   That would be total irony.   

He staggered toward the fire.   Nothing moved except some scraps of paper and, of course, the flames.    He stumbled forward, scanning left and right.   The aircraft was in pieces, small shards of aluminum scattered everywhere.   The smell of petrol and burning oil filled the air, and he worried about an explosion.   He couldn’t distinguish one part of the plane from another, except the black blobs of engines, with their propeller blades sticking out.   

With a huge whoomph, a ball of fire erupted about fifty feet away as a pool of fuel trickled into the arms of the flickering orange flames.   The wave of heat overwhelmed Joachim and forced him to take a step back.    He tripped over something long and metallic, and fell.   The searing pain from his shoulder shot through his neck, and the scene around him dimmed into a black void.   

When he regained consciousness for the second time, the flames were small, but scattered all around him, dancing.   The stench of burning was everywhere.   Fearing another explosion, he forced himself to his feet, pushing the pain to the back of his mind.   Lurching as though drunk, he staggered away from the wreck,