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  Amongst My Enemies

  a novel by

  William F. Brown

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Also By William Brown

  Amongst My Enemies

  PART ONE | KÖNIGSBERG | GERMANY | FEBRUARY 1945

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  PART TWO | TRELLEBORG | SWEDEN | JUNE 1948

  CHAPTER TEN

  PART THREE | ROCK CREEK | SOUTH CAROLINA | OCTOBER 1948

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  PART FOUR | ROCK CREEK | SOUTH CAROLINA | JULY 1951

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  PART FIVE | NEW YORK CITY | NEW YORK | JULY 1951

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  PART SIX | TRELLEBORG | SWEDEN | 1951

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  PART SEVEN | BONN, GERMANY | AUGUST | 1951

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  PART EIGHT | SUCRE, BOLIVIA | DECEMBER | 1952

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Preview of Burke's War, | Book #1 in the author's Bob Burke action-adventure series | CHAPTER ONE

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  Also By William Brown

  In the spring of 1948, the newly created State of Israel was attacked from three sides by the regular armies of five Arab nations. The Israeli ‘army’ consisted of ill-trained militia units armed with old rifles and a handful of light machineguns. They had no tanks, no artillery, and no air force. Eight years later, in the Sinai War of 1956, the Israelis were able to field highly effective armored, mechanized infantry, airborne, artillery, and air force units in a lightning attack that crushed the Egyptians and pushed them back to the Suez Canal. How did a little country like that get all that stuff?

  PART ONE

  KÖNIGSBERG

  GERMANY

  FEBRUARY 1945

  CHAPTER ONE

  Dante had it wrong. Hell wasn’t a blazing inferno filled with the mournful cries of the damned; it was the frozen plains of northern Germany, and it could be quiet as a grave.

  That day began like all the ones before it, with Stolz, the German Kapo or head guard, pounding his meaty fist on the side of the rusty old truck as he screamed, "Raus! Raus!" Out! Up in the truck’s canvas-covered cargo bed, a mound of ragged, emaciated prisoners would shudder and shrink into the shadows; but the sad truth was there was no place to hide and they knew it. They were what was left of a forced labor battalion trapped here in the frozen rubble of Königsberg on the Baltic coast in East Prussia. Remnants of the German Army and the SS still held the old port city, surrounded, and hopelessly outnumbered by a vengeful Red Army; and life can’t get any more tenuous than that.

  Most of the prisoners huddled together in that old truck bed were Russian, with a smattering of Poles, Lithuanians, and Czechs, but no one cared. Michael Randall and Eddie Hodge were American, but no one cared about that either, Randall thought, as he rolled over and looked outside through a tear in the ragged canvas. In late winter at this latitude, the light was thin and the days pathetically short; but as he looked, he saw the first pink line of another cold, clear dawn creep over the horizon. Slowly a frozen landscape of broken buildings, bomb craters, and rubble began to emerge in tones of dirty gray on sooty black. It must be morning, he thought. Somehow, he and Eddie had survived another miserable night as they had survived the many long, painful ones that had preceded it. Not that it mattered; they were all going to die here and every poor wretch inside that truck knew it.

  Two years before, the Red Army rolled out of the steppes of Central Asia like an angry tidal wave and no force on Earth was going to stop it until it crashed down on Berlin. However, the main Russian thrust had gone much further south, through central Poland. Königsberg and the remaining German enclaves along the Baltic coast had been bypassed and there is no glory in a sideshow— no medals and nothing worth dying for. So Ivan let the cold weather, starvation, and his artillery do the killing. Each morning, he would drink his tea, eat some black bread, and lob a few shells into the rubble, leaving an acrid haze over the city that reeked of burnt wood, burnt brick, and burnt rubber. All it accomplished was to rearrange the bricks, turn the gray snow a bit darker, and kill a few more of the poor dumb bastards caught inside. Fortunately, spring was still months away. When the thaw came, the ice would slowly give up its dead and the city would really begin to stink.

  Randall nudged the pile of rags lying next to him. “Eddie, we gotta get up. Come on,” he said, but his friend did not move.

  “Mikey, I can’t,” came the weak reply. “It’s the legs, I...”

  “You gotta try; you gotta get them moving.”

  “Moving? Jeez, I can’t even feel them anymore.”

  In the dim light, Randall could barely make out Eddie’s pale, sweaty face, but he knew his friend was dying. That would be the ultimate outrage, the one he would never accept. They had been inseparable since their aircrew met at that Army Air Corps field back in West Texas early in 1943. That flight school was the first time either of them had strayed more than a hundred miles from home. Eddie came from a long line of watermen in Rock Creek, South Carolina, who spent twelve hours a day in small boats dredging clams and oysters from the heavy river muck. Mike grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin, milking cows at 5:00 AM. He was a muscular six-foot-three, two-hundred-ten-pound tight end for his high school football team while Eddie was a wrestler, maybe five foot five, one hundred thirty-five pounds, and taut as a steel cable. Now, after a year of training, nineteen combat missions over Germany, and four months trapped inside this hellhole, they had become two halves of a whole, brothers pulling, pushing, and taking turns keeping the other one alive. “Hey, what’s a pal for?” one of them would say, because without a buddy, life hung by a very thin thread in a place like that.

  Then Eddie got frostbite. First, it was his toes. Michael kept rubbing them, changing the dressings, and forcing Eddie to keep the circulation moving, but it was too damned cold. The frostbite slowly spread from the toes to his foot. Soon, the leg began to swell. Eddie grew feverish and weak, his eyes red-ringed and his skin a waxy pale. It was gangrene and everyone inside that truck knew it.

  “We’ve gotta get them moving,” he said as he reached over to rub Eddie’s legs again.

  “Mikey, stop it!” Eddie moaned and pushed him away. “It hurts too much.”

  One by one, the other prisoners slipped past them, climbed over the tailgate, and dropped to the ground, leaving the two young Americans alone in the truck bed. “I was having that dream again,” Eddie said with a thin smile. “It’s November back home, the first day of duck season. The marsh and cane fields lie all flat and brown and there’s a thin mist floating on the river, just enough so you can’t tell where the land ends and the water begins. You and me, we row my Daddy’s old skiff upriver to the duck blind. We climb up in there and have a beer and a couple of them ham sandwiches my sister Leslie made us for breakfast— country ham on homemade bread with lots of butter. I can almost taste ’em, Mikey. And when them birds finally do come over, the flock’s so thick it fills the sky. We shoot and we shoot until our shoulders ache from the kick of them shotguns. And God, it feels good, Mikey, it feels so damned good!”

  “Yeah," Michael sighed, letting Eddie stay in the dream for a few minutes, anyway.

  Four months ago, their B-17 took off into a clear, Italian sky for the long leg north to Berlin. They hit their marks and dropped their bombs, but before they could make the big turn west, the German flak guns found them. A B-17 is a tough bird and Lieutenant Jensen, their pilot, fought hard to keep it in the air as they lumbered north and east, out of control. The smoke and flames got worse and worse inside, until the plane went into a steep dive. Mike and Eddie clawed their way to a side door and bailed out, but they were the only ones who made it. They came down in a muddy wheat field somewhere in East Prussia. Long columns of refugees choked the roads heading west, desperate to stay ahead of the Russians. Discarded furniture, mattresses, pianos, steamer trunks, and suitcases lay strewn along th
e roadsides. He and Eddie found some civilian clothes and it was easy for them to blend in — not that it mattered. Two days later, they were stopped at a German Military Police roadblock, and the joke was on them. The Germans weren’t looking for American airmen. They were looking for strong backs to dig tank traps and clear rubble. Instead of a POW camp or being thrown against the closest wall and shot as spies, they were dragooned into a forced labor battalion headed north to Königsberg.

  Michael nudged him again and pleaded, “You gotta get up, Eddie. We’ve been through too much together. You can’t quit on me now.”

  “Quit?” Eddie moaned. “My legs are all froze up; they won’t move.”

  “Then let me help.” Michael tried to rub them again.

  “Oh, God!” Eddie moaned, so Michael stopped. He could see the pain was too intense now, and he didn’t know what else to do. “Eddie, if you don’t get up, they’ll kill you and this time, I won’t be able to stop them.”

  “Promise?” the little guy answered with a pleading smile. “You and me, we should’ve stayed inside that old B-17. We shoulda gone down with Jensen and the rest of them; but no, we were too smart for that, weren’t we? We went out that hatch and we thought we were safe, that we could just walk away.”

  “We still can walk away...”

  “No, you can, not me; ’cause I’m not like you, Mikey. They hit you, you bounce back up even higher. They hit me and I hurt. Besides, none of this is real,” he said, waving a limp hand toward the frozen landscape outside. “This is Saturday afternoon at the old Orpheum. Remember? Flash Gordon and Doctor Zarkov? That’s you and me, and this here is the Planet Mongo. See, it’s all pretend, Mikey. It ain’t real. It can’t be, because nobody can make up anything this crazy mean. Nobody.”

  That was when Stolz beat his fist on the side of the truck again, and Michael knew Mongo was all too real. “Raus!” Stolz bellowed. “It is a fine morning in the glorious Thousand Year Reich and the Führer wants you two American swine to earn your keep.”

  “Eddie, I can’t just leave you here to die,” Michael whispered.

  “Then don’t! Don’t leave me here to die.” Eddie grabbed Michael’s coat and pulled him closer, pleading. “You’d do it for a lame horse, wouldn’t you? You’d do it for a lame horse. Besides, what’s a pal for? Huh? What’s a pal for?”

  Stolz’s voice grew louder. “Herr Randall, you know I get cranky in the morning. You too, Hodge. If I have to roust you out, by God, I’ll thump the both of you good!”

  Michael’s stomach was tied in knots, but he knew Eddie was right. So he crawled to the back of the truck and dropped off the tailgate onto the ground. The big German stood directly in front of him, hands on hips with his usual amused, arrogant smile. Not that Stolz was all bad. He wasn’t SS or even Army. He was a civilian, a shipyard worker dressed in a threadbare infantryman’s greatcoat, a pair of knee-high Polish cavalry boots, and a knit seaman’s cap, pulled down over his ears. He could occasionally be human and he could always be bought.

  “All right, Herr Randall, where’s your little friend?” he asked, the sarcasm billowing like frozen clouds on the cold morning air. “Is he ‘sleeping in’ today? Waiting up in ‘Gasthaus Stolz’ for some room service?”

  “It’s his legs, they’ve swollen up bad.”

  Stolz shrugged with complete indifference. “So?”

  “Let him stay in the truck today, Stolz. I’ll do his share of the work. Okay? A little rest and he’ll be fine tomorrow.”

  “You know the rules,” Stolz bellowed so all the prisoners would hear. “You all do! If you don’t work you go back to the SS, where you won’t have old Stolz to wet-nurse you.”

  Michael edged closer. “The SS will shoot him; you know they will.”

  “No, no,” Stolz corrected him. “Even the SS is running out of bullets, so my guess is they’ll just break his legs and toss him off the pier. But no, I don’t think they’ll shoot him.”

  “You bastard!”

  “I don’t make the rules, and I don’t argue with the men in black who do.”

  Michael stared at him. “Will you do it then?”

  “Do it? Do what?” Stolz frowned, as if he did not understand the words. “Me? Shoot your friend? Surely, you are joking, Randall.”

  “He is dying.”

  Stolz threw a contemptuous glance toward the Russians. “Randall, I’d put a bullet in that lot without a second thought, but shoot an American? Me? I know you Yanks. The stench of a thing like that will stick to a man, and I have no interest in becoming one of Herr Roosevelt’s ‘war criminals.’ So if your friend needs killing, that is something you must do yourself.”

  Michael looked at him for a long, excruciating moment, and held out his hand. “Give me your gun, then.”

  “Give you my gun?” Stolz snorted. “You really have lost your mind!”

  Michael bent down and pulled off his boot. Reaching up into the toe, he pulled out a dirty American five-dollar bill, the last of the meager hoard he and Eddie had squirreled away for their big escape. At least it would help one of them escape, he thought.

  Stolz snatched the American money out of Michael’s hand, and jammed it into his pocket. “You’re a fool. What makes you think I’ll give you a damned thing now?”

  Michael stepped closer and locked his black eyes on the big German’s, letting them bore in. “Stolz, when the Red Army finally gets here and starts hanging Germans from the streetlamps — any German — you’re going to need every friend you can get.”

  Stolz laughed, but he wasn’t very convincing. Finally, he reached into the worn leather holster hanging on his hip and pulled out the old Czech revolver the SS had given him. “All right, my young Ami friend,” he said as he opened the breach and let the bullets drop into his hand. “You may have my pistol," he said as he pushed one bullet back into the cylinder and snapped it shut. “One shot, that’s all you get. Use it on your friend or use it on yourself, I don’t care which you do,” Stolz said, motioning toward the Russians. “But I’m the only thing standing between that lot and Herr Himmler’s men in black. Use it on me, and they’ll tear you to pieces.” That said, he handed over the pistol. “So go kill your friend, Randall. The sun is up now, and we have work to do.”

  Michael looked down at the revolver, remembering the old Greek saying, “When the Gods really want to punish a man, they grant him his wish.”

  Slowly he climbed back over the tailgate. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he realized how badly the truck stank of dirty men, rotting flesh, and death. “Oh, good,” he heard Eddie say as he saw the revolver and held out his hand, but Michael wasn’t ready for that yet. “Give it to me, Mikey, we both know you can’t do it yourself,” Eddie added, as he pulled the pistol from Michael’s hand. “Thanks. And I want you to go hunt those ducks for me, you hear? Hunt them for both of us.”

  “Yeah, the ducks, I’ll do that,” Michael mumbled.

  “You go down to South Carolina, to Rock Creek and see my Daddy. See my little sister Leslie, too. You’ll like her. Daddy, he’ll understand, but Les won’t. She didn’t want me to leave, so this is gonna be hard on her, real hard. So you go on down and tell ’em what happened here. See, it’s not the knowin’ that’s hard; it’s the not knowin.’ ”

  “Yeah, I’ll do that. I’ll do that.”

  “Promise me you will, Mikey, promise me.”

  “I will, I promise I will.”

  “Good,” he said, sounding pleased. “You’ll get out of this mess, Mikey. You’ll get out of here for the both of us, ’cause somebody’s got to. You can’t let them get away with it, not ALL this, not without somebody knowin’ what happened. It’ll make a difference. It’ll make a difference,” Eddie said as he slumped back, exhausted. “You can go now, Mikey, you can go.”

  Michael heard him cock the pistol and turned his head away. He couldn’t go and he couldn’t stay; all he could do was sit there, frozen to that spot until he heard a muffled Bam! and he jumped as if he had been the one who had been shot. It seemed like an eternity before he could reach over and pry the pistol from Eddie’s limp fingers. The blue-steel barrel was already growing cold. Hoping against hope, he opened the breach and looked inside, praying he would find another bullet, but Stolz wasn’t that careless or that kind. If there were, he would have used it on himself. If there had been a third he would have shot the big German too, but there was only the one. Damn that Stolz! Damn him to hell, he thought as he put his hand on Eddie’s shoulder for the last time and crawled away. He dropped off the tailgate onto the ground and turned his face into the bitter arctic wind. It cut into him like shards of broken glass, but the pain felt good. Damned good! It froze his tears and cleared the fog, allowing him to see things with an amazing clarity.