He walked the streets looking for an appropriate restaurant for lunch, studying carefully the front and back approach. He considered several before lunching on schnitzel and a Rhine wine at the Zum Noedler.
After lunch Cochrane went to a small variety store where he purchased a small 1.5-volt battery and some heavy wire for hanging pictures. Then he asked the proprietor whether he might have an ice pick. The proprietor said he did. Cochrane selected one with a seveninch blade.
Next, he went to a department store and purchased a new suitcase, an expensive steel and leather one with heavy, sturdy locks. Cochrane returned to his hotel and set to work, praying that he would not be interrupted. Sweat poured off his face. The game was life and death now.
From around his left leg, he removed four bars of hollow lead pipe, each about six inches long, that he had kept bandaged to his shin since leaving Berlin. From within a narrow sheath within his belt he removed twenty. 22-caliber bullets. He then prepared his suitcase for his next visitors, carefully closing it and leaving it on his bed.
Cochrane used his file to slit open the false side of his old suitcase. He removed a Swiss passport. He slid it into a folio. He also kept with him the photograph of the Mauer family.
He then donned his topcoat, casually strolled down the hotel stairs, and left his key with the concierge. He walked out the front door. One of his bodyguards followed. Too bad they won't all be going up to the room, he thought.
He glanced at his watch. It was ten minutes after seven. He was several minutes behind his schedule. He entered the restaurant he had studied that afternoon.
He darted past the astonished waiters, past the captains, and then out into the kitchen in front of a bewildered staff. He slipped through the back door into a quiet alley. But instead of fleeing, he moved toward the alley's closed end. There he stood, his back flat against the brick wall of the building, until his trailer appeared.
"Mein Herr?" Cochrane inquired. The man whirled, eye to eye with Bill Cochrane from a distance of five meters. "You are following someone?" Cochrane asked in German. Cochrane's adversary was a thick-browed man who stepped closer.
"You stupid fool," the man said in a guttural German that Cochrane fixed as Bremen or Leipzig. "You are playing games with us?"
But Cochrane's hand was extended to the side. "Games?" he asked. "No games. But does this bring back a memory?"
His palm opened and he unfurled Theresia's red scarf.
The German took another step. The man was easily four inches taller and four inches wider than Cochrane. "She screamed almost as much as you will," the German said. "It went on for several hours, you know. Maybe four or five before we-"
In one motion, Cochrane placed the scarf back in his pocket and groped for something. The Gestapo agent's hand went beneath his overcoat and Cochrane saw a Luger. He bolted forward and crashed into the larger man, bringing his knee upward, hard toward the man's groin.
The huge German cursed him and pushed off with his forearms. But the lessons of boxing at the National Police Academy remained with Cochrane. Always stay in close when fighting larger men. Get inside their reach. Then hurt them badly.
As the Luger came out, Cochrane smashed the man's wrist with his own left forearm. Then Cochrane's right hand came stabbing upward, thrusting the ice pick in to the German's stomach.
The man bellowed. His eyes went wide with agony. Cochrane pulled back and the men stood eye to eye. The German tried to aim the gun. Cochrane kneed the man again, harder than before. Then he knocked the gun away. He pulled back the ice pick, braced himself, and stabbed upward again, this time toward the heart. The blade of the pick broke off from the force of the blow and the American stepped away.
The Gestapo agent staggered for several feet, then Cochrane hit him hard from the back, knocking him down onto the garbage-strewn alleyway.
The man moaned horribly and cursed as he hit the ground. Cochrane felt his stomach churning and his own heart pounding. The body kicked and convulsed. Cochrane cursed the man a final time and commanded him to die.
The body went still. Cochrane picked up the Luger and tucked it into his belt. Then he stripped the dead man of his Gestapo identification and discarded his own overcoat, which was now covered with blood. He walked to the edge of the alley and moved down an adjoining side street.
He checked his watch: 8:10. He found a taxi and went to the railroad station. At 8:22 he was on the last train leaving Freiburg for Zurich. But at the same moment as Cochrane's departure, two Gestapo gorillas tired of fussing with the locks on Cochrane's new suitcase. One of them unsheathed a knife and began to force the catches open.
The blade of the knife protruded through the leather case and triggered the electric circuit that Cochrane had wound around the valise. As the case opened, the battery sent a spark throughout the wire, and the four lead pipes exploded simultaneously. The. 22-caliber bullets blew out the upper ends of the steel pipes; every round at the same moment. The two agents were hardly in position to appreciate Cochrane's makeshift machine gun. Nor were they capable of wishing they had never laid a calloused finger on Theresia Erdmann.
Two of the bullets caught one agent flush in the face, one shot blowing a hole where his eye had been and continuing through the brain. The other agent caught the force of the blast with his neck and upper chest. The small-caliber bullet tumbled when it shattered his shoulder bone, ricocheting upward and severing the jugular vein.
Unlike his cohort, the wounded German did not die instantly. He managed to crawl several feet to the door to scream for help. But he was too weak to open the door, and the door was locked from within.
Police were summoned. Within minutes all trains out of Freiburg-particularly the two that were in transit southbound for Switzerland-were ordered stopped.
Bill Cochrane sat by a window seat in the town of Mulheim, fifteen kilometers north of the frontier at Basel. He saw several dozen Wehrmacht soldiers on the station platform, carrying their automatic rifles at their waists, and knew there would be trouble.
Moments later, the soldiers were going from car to car.
Cochrane slid a hand beneath his coat to the Luger in his belt. He felt his hand wet against the weapon. He knew that if he were discovered he would have no choice but to shoot his way off the train. But he did not believe for a moment that he could escape.
He knew also that they would be looking for an American. That was in his favor. That and his experience. Then the doors to his first-class compartment flew open and he was faced with two very tall, very strong, but very young soldiers.
"Passports! Identifications!" they demanded. Their eyes drifted across the other faces in the compartment and settled suspiciously upon Cochrane.
Cochrane stared at the two young Germans, gave them a look of condescension, shook his head in irritation, and gazed out the window.
"Tell me, Sergeant," Cochrane asked in flawless German, "how much longer can we waste our time in this stinking little town?"
The corporal stepped to the sergeant's side and glared at Cochrane. "You have the insolence to ask us questions?" snapped the sergeant. "Your passport!"
The corporal made a slight gesture with his gun. Three other passengers cringed. Cochrane glared back. Then with a gesture of annoyance, he reached to his passport and tossed it contemptuously onto the floor at the sergeant's feet.
"Bavarian swine!" he snapped to them. "You don't know how to do a job correctly!"
As the corporal covered Cochrane, the sergeant opened the Swiss passport. He stared at the photograph in the passport and raised his eyes to check it against Bill Cochrane. He found a close enough match. But something was wrong with the man before him and the sergeant knew it.