Robert Conroy - North Reich

"At least not yet," Truscott said with a touch of admiration. "Good thinking. And how's your head? It looks like you're wearing a green and purple golf ball."

"It feels like it, too. For some reason, the blow barely broke the skin and whatever pain I originally felt is receding quickly thanks to a heavy dose of aspirins. I'm ready for duty."

"Good. The package, however, hasn't shown up. It's probably in transit between us and the State Department, but I'm sure it will arrive. In the meantime, what did you find out?"

"Easy answer is that they are up to something and I think it's going to be big. One term I picked up on was North Reich, another was North Storm."

Truscott was puzzled. "I thought the first referred to their occupation of Ontario. The other one I never heard of."

"Neither did I, but now I think they both mean a whole lot more."

Captain Franz Koenig hated wearing civilian clothes. He was a German soldier and proud of that fact. He was part of an elite and magnificent force that had invaded France and devastated the Soviet Union. He would have been part of the army that invaded England but for the annoying fact that the English had, for all intents and purposes, surrendered. It didn't hurt at all that the uniform of a German officer was very dramatic and, under the right circumstances, had often induced young lovely young frauliens to toss off their clothes and joyously climb into bed with him.

But now he wore a cheap and poorly fitting civilian suit and sat in a basement office in the German Embassy in Washington, D. C. It was located in an enormous Victorian building at 1435-41 Massachusetts Avenue NW. The building contained seventy rooms and thirteen bathrooms, along with a number of radios and other apparatus necessary to set up spy operations against the Americans. It had been the German embassy since 1893, the days of Kaiser Wilhelm II.

A German uniform in Washington was as unpopular in America's capital as it had proven to be in parts of Canada where Koenig was an aide to General Hans-Jurgen von Arnim, the commanding officer of all German forces in Canada. It belatedly occurred to him that he should have insisted on meeting at a restaurant, or even a hotel room, since the FBI was sure to be watching the comings and goings at the embassy. Also, much of the espionage work done by the Reich was through apartments and offices rented by dummy corporations in the Washington area and elsewhere in the United States. There was no need to have come to the embassy.

"What happened, Heinie? Who fucked up?"

Captain Heinrich Stahl was a 'cultural attache' in the German Embassy in Washington, and was, as he liked to joke, about as cultural as a fart in church.

"Blame me if you want, but I'm like you, a soldier and not a thief in the night. I broke into this Major Grant's apartment when the idiots in Canada figured out that he might have mailed his notes to himself. They weren't there, of course and, on leaving, I saw the major himself arriving. I sneaked up on him and hit him with the flat of the pistol I'm not supposed to carry here in Washington. I was going to search him when I heard someone yelling and ran off. I don't think he had anything on him anyhow."

Koenig agreed. "If such a package existed, he probably mailed to somebody else, which is what I would have done. Any package is either sitting on a desk in the Pentagon or is at the bottom of the Niagara River. Christ, those Black Shirt fools in the Canadian Legion make rocks look smart. They almost had Grant several times while he was wandering around Ontario, but almost isn't good enough."

"Want me to try again?"

"No. Whatever he knew he has already told several times over. We don't need to verify his allegations by either hurting him or killing him."

"Fine by me," said Stahl, standing. "I don't like killing people without good reason, unless, of course, they are Russians or Jews." He was a big man, tall and burly. "So, what do we do now, and does anybody really know what the hell is going on? What is North Storm, for instance, and why is it worth trying to kill someone over?"

"I don't know either. Maybe General von Arnim does, but I even have my doubts about that. I suppose they'll tell us when it's time for us to put our lives on the line, just like they’ve always done."

Koenig stood. He was tall himself at just over six feet, but Stahl had him by a couple of inches and a number of pounds. "Tomorrow I return to that paradise up north. Tonight, you and I are going to have a few beers and talk about old times."

"Good to see you back and I hope you and the general got along," commented Colonel Mark Downing, Tom's immediate superior. Downing was in his early fifties, gray haired, and carried a paunch as testimony to his love of good food and drink. He looked like a grandfatherly type, and had a reputation for being stern but fair. He was also known to be a vicious predator when necessary.

"Good to be back, colonel. My health can't take too much more of this chasing around crap."

"Your package, by the way, has arrived. A youthful twit from the State Department delivered it and handed it to me since he could not get in to see General Marshall. Secretaries are re-typing it so it can be mimeographed and distributed to selected personages."

"Are they cleaning up my grammar and spelling?"

"I don't know if they have that much time," Downing said as he pulled himself out of his chair with effort. "I have a meeting, so look things over and familiarize yourself with what the status of the world happens to be after you disappeared for two months. I’m sure you’ve been reading newspapers and listening to the radio, but this’ll help fill in the blanks."

Downing left and Tom began poring over reports and checking on updated maps. In the Pacific, it was evident that the Japs were over-matched and retreating everywhere. They had been defeated in the Solomons and New Guinea, and the U.S. army was preparing to invade and liberate the Philippines in early 1944. This was much sooner than if the U.S. had had to fight a two front war. The poor Japs, Tom thought, had no idea what was going to hit them after they attacked Pearl Harbor. Tough shit, he thought. They deserved it after Pearl Harbor and Bataan.

The flip side of the coin was that, without the American help that had been sustaining them, both the Soviet Union and Great Britain had collapsed by late 1942. He understood that many of the people at the top, like FDR and Marshall, considered the Nazis to be the main enemy and the war against Japan a distraction that had to be endured before the real war could commence. Sometimes Tom agreed with that assessment, but, more often, was glad that such decisions were well above his pay grade.

If only England and Russia had managed to hang on, he continued to think, the map of world wouldn't look so damn strange.

What had once been the Soviet Union was now the truncated country of Russia, or more precisely, Siberia. The Russo-German lines ran up the Volga, passed a Stalingrad that had been taken by the Germans after incredibly bloody and brutal fighting, and to where it turned towards the Urals. From there on it ran northward along the roughly defined border between Germany and Russia that was the Ural Mountains. The Reds held the passes, so they were relatively safe, and the Germans seemed content to stay on their side of the Volga. The Russian capital was now at Sverdlovsk, which had previously been called Ekaterinberg and was the site of the massacre of the Czar and his family by the Bolsheviks. Grant wondered if the current communist regime saw the irony. He doubted it. Every Russian he'd met had had no sense of humor whatsoever.

After Stalin's death during a bombing raid, and an internal Communist Party bloodbath, the Red Army had taken control of what was left and Marshal Semyon Timoshenko ran the rump of the country. Rumors that Stalin had been murdered by Lavrenti Beria were flatly denied but not fully believed. Beria had been killed in another "bombing raid," which meant there would be typical Russian silence on the matter. For the time being, the Red Army was running the remnants of the Soviet Union.