Part One

1945

1

The water in the estuary had been still for hours, as still as a sheet of black glass, for there was no wind to stir it.

Then suddenly, as if violated by a great beast rising from the depths, the water bulged, heaved up, threatening to explode.

At first, the man watching from the hillside dismissed the sight as yet another illusion caused by his fatigue and the flickering light from the cloud-shrouded moon.

But as he stared, the bulge grew and grew and finally burst, pierced by a monstrous head, barely visible, black on black, distinguishable from the water around it only by the gleaming droplets shed from its sleek skin.

More of the leviathan broke through — a pointed snout, a smooth cylindrical body — and then silently it settled back and floated motionless on the silky surface, waiting, waiting for the man.

From the darkness a light flashed three times:  short, long, long; dot, dash, dash — the international Morse signal for W.  The man replied by lighting three matches in the same sequence.  Then he picked up his satchel and started down the hill.

He stank, he itched, he chafed.  The clothing he had taken days ago from a roadside corpse — burying his own tailored uniform and handmade boots in a muddy shell crater — was filthy, ill fitting and vermin-infested.

At least he was no longer hungry:  earlier in the evening he had ambushed a refugee couple, crushed their skulls with a brick and gorged himself on tins of the vile processed meat they had begged from the invading Americans.

He had found it interesting, killing the two people.  He had ordered many deaths, and caused countless more, but he had never done the actual killing.  It had been surprisingly easy.

*          *          *          *          *

He had been traveling — fleeing — for days.  Five?  Seven?  He had no idea, for stolen moments of sleep in sodden haystacks had blended seamlessly with hours of slogging along shattered roads, in company with the wretched refuse of weak-willed nations.

Exhaustion had become his companion and his plague.  Dozens of times he had collapsed in ditches or flopped in patches of tall grass and lain, panting, till he felt himself revive.  There was no mystery to his fatigue:  he was fifty years old, and fat, and the only exercise he had in the past ten years was bending his elbow to sip from a glass.

Still, it was infuriating, a betrayal.  He shouldn't have to be in good shape; he wasn't supposed to be running.  He wasn't an athlete or a warrior, he was a genius who had accomplished something unprecedented in the history of mankind.  His destiny had always been to lead, to teach, to inspire, not to run like a frightened rat.

Once or twice he had nearly been seduced by exhaustion into succumbing, surrendering, but he had resisted, for he was determined to fulfill his destiny.  He had a mission, assigned to him on direct orders from the Fuehrer the day before he had shot himself, and he would complete that mission, whatever it cost, however long it took.

For though he was not a man of politics or world vision, though he was a scientist, he knew that his mission had significance far beyond science.

*          *          *          *          *

Now exhaustion, fear and hunger had all vanished, and as he made his way carefully down the steep hillside, Ernst Kruger smiled to himself.  His years of work would bear fruit; his faith had been rewarded.

He had never really doubted that they would come, not once in the endless days of flight nor in the endless hours of waiting.  He had known they would not fail him.  They might not be clever like the Jews, but Germans were dependable.  They did what they were told.