Winnie was close to crying. “Are you saying they will break them?”
“Of course they will,” Dulles replied bluntly. “Everyone will break under torture, and the Germans are masters at it. It’s just a question of how long and how much they can tell their interrogators. I would suggest that, in very short while, the Germans will know of every one of us, where we’re quartered and anything else the missing group might have known. We will make arrangements to move immediately. I’m sorry, but this lovely little dormitory will have to cease to exist.”
Winnie bristled. “I’m far more concerned about Marie, Hans, and Sven than I am about this miserable place.”
“As am I,” Dulles snapped, “but I must be realistic. Should a miracle occur and they suddenly show up either in person on the radio, I will rejoice.”
“I would trust seeing them in person, but not on the radio,” Ernie said. “It would be possible that they had been turned and are providing us with false information.”
“Precisely. However, they have all been given different signals to indicate that they are or are not under duress. But I agree with you, Captain, anything and everything can be extorted from them under extreme torture. One of their more sadistic tools is to torture one in front of one of the others, especially if two of them are lovers as I understand Marie and Sven were.”
“What can we do?” asked Winnie, her voice breaking. Finding her friend from her teenage years had been such a wonderful surprise and now it was all ashes.
“I will be speaking with my German friend. I will see what I can find out and, more important, what he can do for me. That is, if he wants to. He could still be compromised if the wrong persons find out about our talks. In the meantime, we wait and listen.”
Ernie was sickened by what he was thinking, but he had to ask the question. “Did either of them have a poison pill to take?”
Winnie started crying. “Hans and Sven did, but Marie didn’t. She told me the afternoon before they left.”
Dulles cursed himself for his failure to realize that human nature and passions would intrude. Had he known that they were lovers, he would have broken up the team. He didn’t think that Winnie and Ernie had crossed that threshold, but, if he was any judge of character, it wouldn’t be long. Of course, he had no plans to send them across into German-held territory.
Dulles sighed. “And why didn’t Marie have a cyanide pill?”
Winnie continued to sob. “Because she’s still a Catholic and suicide is a mortal sin.”
* * *
Joey Ruffino was twenty-five and perversely proud of the old foot injury that had resulted in his being categorized as 4F and, therefore, unacceptable to the military. He walked with a noticeable limp that he sometimes exaggerated if he thought that people were wondering why an otherwise healthy young man wasn’t in the service. Well, he was, sort of. He worked in a factory that produced parts for jeeps and was making a lot of money that he couldn’t spend because of rationing.
Joey wasn’t a bad kid, far from it. If called, he would have served to the best of his abilities. But he was a realist. While he now had a high-paying job and his choice of chicks, he knew that little bit of heaven would cease as soon as the war ended and the real heroes came marching home. Therefore, he would enjoy today and let tomorrow care for itself. Thanks to rationing there was little for him to spend his wealth on. Therefore, he had decided to take college classes and was getting good grades.
All had been well until his mother died in the arms of Harry S. Truman, President of the United States. Like his late mother, he thought that Truman was an accidental president and not much of one. And, while he hadn’t given his mother’s antiwar activities much thought, her sudden death had changed his outlook. He had made himself a leader of Ruffino’s Marchers, a group dedicated to bringing the troops home. He had inherited all of his mother’s followers and added a number of his own. Mildred had gone from being a gadfly protester to a martyr. It was his fervent hope that her death would not have been in vain.
There would be another protest, but not a random one like the event that had seen his mother die. No, this one would be organized. Marchers would be grouped into companies and they would all have plenty of water and there would be doctors and nurses scattered through the crowd.
To his surprise and delight, Joey found that he could organize large numbers of people and, better, get them to follow him. When he talked, he spoke from the heart. He would not be able to bring his mother back, but it was his goal to make that Harry Truman person regret the day he’d become president.
* * *
SS General Alfonse Hahn looked up from the papers he was signing. Armies are supposed to fight, he thought, not drown in paperwork. “What is it, Diehl?”
“The prisoners have been broken, General.”
“I never doubted your abilities,” Hahn said with a smile, thinking of all the bodies, minds, and souls that Captain Rufus Diehl had destroyed.
The young people in the OSS team hadn’t been very good or very smart. They’d kept their radios too long in the same spot and it had been fairly easy to triangulate their rough location in the hills overlooking Bregenz. The fact that they were broadcasting had been noticed almost immediately by German radio experts who’d been on the lookout for just such an event. Locating them more precisely in the rough terrain had taken only a little bit longer.
Nor had they done a very good job of hiding their position. They were OSS, which meant that they were amateurs. He’d allotted one company of infantry to find them. They’d been caught in their sleeping bags. They hadn’t even set up a guard. It amused him when he was told that one of the men and a woman were sharing a sleeping bag and had been pulled naked from it. Now he knew just where and how Diehl’s interrogations would begin and he’d been right.
Hahn followed Diehl to the interrogation area. Torture chamber would have been a more accurate term, but interrogation had a more benign sound to it.
“Are all three of them alive, Captain?”
“No. The man named Hans managed to swallow a cyanide pill. The others, however, are still among the living.”
They entered a room where two people were laid out on cots. They were spread-eagled and their arms and legs were chained to the four corners of the cots. Their bodies were covered with only a sheet. Hahn pulled back the cover on the man. His body was a mass of burns caused by the electrical currents roaring through the clips and then into his body. He was unconscious and breathing shallowly.
“Will he recover?”
“If you wish him to, General.”
It was an easy decision. “I do wish it. Alive he can still be a tool. Dead he is only so much rotting meat.”
Two steps took him to the other cot. He pulled back the sheet. Despite the fact that the woman named Marie was badly bruised about the face, she was quite lovely. He was mildly annoyed that she had been beaten. Fists only cause pain, which can be tolerated. He preferred the subjects to be in agony and a state of terror. Besides, when he decided to take her, he wanted her looking as attractive as possible. He would have to wait until the swelling went down. He ran his hand down her breasts and between her legs. Her eyes opened wide with fear and horror. She closed them tightly as if doing so would make him go away.
Diehl was proud. “They told us everything they knew. We now know the names of their confederates and their locations in Arbon. We could go in and wipe them all out if that’s your wish. You said you wanted the girl totally broken so we did. Once she told us everything she knew, we told her she was a liar and that she was holding back.”