Milo checked the magazine of the Colt Woodsman to find three rounds left, plus the one in the chamber. Cautiously, he began to walk over to where the ambulance had slewed to a halt just beyond the gate to the smaller compound. But before he reached it, the gates of the main compound swung wide to admit a half-track and a three-quarter-ton field car—the former mounting a .50 caliber machine gun and filled with armed troops, the latter mounting a large radio set and conveying General Barstow, who held a Thompson submachine gun and wore a field jacket over his class-A uniform.
Pulling around the half-track, the driver of the field car accelerated to halt, nose to nose, with the ambulance, turned off the engine, then drew another Thompson from a holder welded to the side of the car and, after arming it, stood up and pointed it at the windshield of the ambulance. Only then did Barstow swing down from the car and walk to the ambulance, his own Thompson leveled and ready, his forefinger not quite touching the trigger.
He opened the door and stepped back, saying, “You twosoldiers, get out, now!”
When the terrorized driver and the medic had rolled out the doors, Barstow stepped back to the rear and, careful to keep his head and body shielded, banged on the nearest door with the muzzle of his weapon. Raising his voice a notch, he said, “Betty? Tatiana? Whatever your name really is, there’s no way out now, never was, actually. So you and Hugo had better just come out quietly. Otherwise I’ll have to call my other vehicle over here and turn that ambulance into a sieve.”
Milo heard the general’s words as he approached, and just as he reached the senior officer’s side, he heard Betty’s reply: “Oh, no, General Barstow, you would not dare to do such a thing, not with these two rocket scientists here with me.”
Barstow laughed loudly, to be heard. “If Russian Intelligence is this easy to fool, we should do it more often. Tatiana, Tatiana, the two men in there with you and Hugo are not rocket scientists, they’re not even Germans . . . well, at least not anymore, not for some years. Formerly they worked for OSS; now they work for me, so you have no chips with which to bargain. I give you one minute to come out, then I’ll call over the half-truck with its heavy machine gun. Come on, Tatiana, I’m counting . ..“
Suddenly, from within, there came the phuutt-phuutting of the silenced pistol firing. The vehicle began to rock on its springs; there were several gasps and groans, punctuated by the sounds of flesh hitting flesh, solidly. Then the rear doors burst open and a tangle of three bodies rolled out onto the ground, feet, fists and a gunbutt flailing. Milo dived in and grabbed Betty’s wrist, then forcibly wrenched the weapon from her hand and tucked it into his waistband alongside the one that had been dead Hugo’s.
But even lacking the pistol, Betty seemed more than a match for the two ersatz Germans. Hizinger was already bleeding heavily from nose and mouth, and a shoe toe driven into his crotch sent him rolling out of the fight, clutching at himself and retching. Gries had finally managed to encircle Betty’s throat with his hairy hands, pinning her arms with his knees, but somehow she got her left arm free and smashed the heel of her palm upward against the tip of his nose. With a gurgling, gasping cry, the man slumped to the side and lay unmoving in a limp huddle, blood pouring out to pool under his face.
Barstow feathered the trigger of his Thompson and put three big .45 caliber slugs into the ground some inches from Betty’s head. “That’s enough, Tatiana. This is the end of the road, for you, on this operation, anyway. You should be shot or hung or, at least, thrown into a federal penitentiary for a helluva long time; but to be realistic, considering the numbers of communists and fellow travelers that Roosevelt allowed to infiltrate the government and, in particular, the Department of State, you’ll most likely just be told that you were naughty and shipped back to Russia, which is why we will have a few chats with you before we turn you over to higher authority.”
He turned his head and called, “Harrigan, grab a pair of handcuffs and come back here.”
In that short moment, Betty looked up at Milo and said, in Russian, “You know, despite everything, I think I really did love you, my love.” She closed her mouth, then crunched something between her teeth, and a split second later, her entire body stiffened spasmodically. Her spine arched, higher, higher, until only her shoulders and heels were touching the ground. Unbearable, bestial noises issued from her mouth, then her body slammed back to the hard ground, her breath came out in a long, ragged gasp, and her blue eyes began to glaze over.
Barstow cursed himself, feelingly, for several minutes.
Some hours later, in his office, with a cigar going well and the whisky poured, he said, “Milo, I’m sorry as hell about putting you through all this just past, but I had no choice, no options, in the matter.”
Milo just sat silent and listened. Not the reek of Barstow’s strong cigar, not the peat-smoke odor of the whisky could make him stop smelling the odor of bitter almonds that had arisen from Betty’s slack mouth when he had lifted her body to place it in the ambulance. In a part of his mind, he still was waiting to awaken from this long, detailed, horrible nightmare.
“Milo, we knew that there were two ringers in the operation, but we had no idea who, only that one was a man and one a woman. They or rather theirsuperiors, must have learned of this assignment of mine before even I knew just why I was being brought back Stateside. I had no inkling that I had been infiltrated until a week or so before I set you up in the small compound.
“Originally, as you must have guessed, the intention had been to house and feed and interview the subjects out here, where we were better set up for it. Then, when I was apprised that a Russky team was in my unit, I decided that it was just too risky to do it all in the preplanned way.
“Now, the only things that were known about the ringers was that they had both been in my Munchen operation—for what purpose we’ll never know. It was known that at least one of them had been a sleeper in the United States even before our entry into the war. A full-steam investigation narrowed the list of suspects, here, down to Ned, Hugo, Judy, Buck, Betty and you, Milo. So it was you six I sent to the small compound, along with enough others to make it appear normal, of course. I might’ve handled it better had I had a bit more time. Maybe then we wouldn’t’ve lost Herr Gries, Ned and Vasili.”
“Ned?” asked Milo.“Vasili? They’re dead?”
Barstow nodded grimly. “Yes. Hugo apparently shot them both just before he went to meet Tatiana Nikolayev . . . our Betty.”
“When did you find out it was Betty?” said Milo dully.
“Just yesterday,” replied Barstow. “The soldier who drove our mess steward over to pick up stores has been careless from time to time in making contacts with someone over on that base. When he was given two silenced pistols, he was observed, and immediately he was back on the road headed here, the person who gave him the pistols was picked up by our people and taken away. Fortunately for us, he had a very low pain threshold, so we had most of the scheme before that day was done, but he also had a weak heart and he died on us before we got every jot and tittle out of him.
“We had sent the two men you knew as Herr Hizinger and Herr Gries through in the normal way, along with a real, if nearly useless, Nazi bureaucrat who had been a midlevel paper shuffler with the rocket projects—that is, Herr Faber. Both Hizinger and Gries were born in Germany, and both lived there until the late 1930s, so it was thought that they could give convincing performances as ex-Nazis, and they were schooled and coached at some length about the proper responses to questions thrown at them by the three doctors. They did convince the learned doctors, I presume?”