Part I:

South Atlantic, Western African Coast, 1942

Six killers appeared on a South Atlantic beach one late afternoon in 1942. A pride of Barbary lions, they were the last of their kind, a few survivors whom the chaos and opportunities of war had flushed out of the hinterlands of the Atlas and Chouf Mountains. They were the biggest, most beautiful subspecies of lions, hunted to the verge of extinction even in ancient Roman times. They had killed and been killed for centuries in Roman arenas around the Mediterranean. In the Coliseum they had been the fabled eaters of Christians. Of all lions, they had the fullest, darkest, thickest manes, which covered not only their necks but also the forward part of the torso, and reached deep down along their bellies. They had distinctive angular faces and large amber eyes that lent them heightened nobility even among lions. It was thought the last of these Barbary lions had been shot in the 1920s. Were anyone on this deserted West African beach today, he would not know it to see these six.

The lions strode at their own confident, unhurried pace, looking about for lunch, trouble, or whatever aroused their interest. Being cats, they communicated with one another by subtle body language--like closing the eyes to signal assurance, pleasure in one another's company, contentment that things were as they should be. The late afternoon air was alive with buzzing insects, and the lions flicked their tails in testy zigzags as they blinked at each other.

The sandy coast stretched 2,000 miles south from Gibraltar, around the marshy bend of Abidjan in Ghana, to the tropical jungles of equatorial Africa. In the east, over the rips and tears of the rocky Sahel, black night rose out of Trab el-Hajra, the 'Country of Stone.' In the west, the sky was still as blue as the ocean rolling underneath it. High in the powder-blue sky, a full moon presented its own ghostly cameo of deserts and mists. On the beach, where the lions paraded on their evening hunt, a fine haze rolled in, and the sand smelled of dying mussels and drying kelp--the tide was ebbing. Huge breakers crashed and groaned on forlorn hooks and sweeps while gulls wheeled, cawing. The tawny squiggle of sand was the same color as the slowly padding lions--beach and lions were made for each other eons ago. This world was theirs, though they were the last few of their kind.

New predators had arrived, and these new predators were at war with each other. Off on the South Atlantic, explosions were audible. Flashes of light tore through the red and orange sunset on the ocean horizon, but the lions barely took notice--only sniffing briefly with a widening of the nostrils, a challenging growl, a glance from cold golden eyes, to question whether those low boxing thunders meant rain was coming. But there was no rain smell, just a tinge of burning oil smoke carrying more odors of the new predators who now ruled the earth. Sometimes, faint screams of their dying warriors echoed across the sea. The cats did not blink for them.

Berlin, 1991.

The old U-boot warrior was always punctual, and the Countess had a reputation for always being late.

Knowing this, he was not surprised when he found himself waiting in the 20th floor sky-dining room of the Hotel Magdeburg late one evening. In any case, the view was lovely, and he had his 24-year old granddaughter Bernadette with him. The girl was a tall, lovely brunette with wide blue eyes and creamy skin. She was studying medicine at the Free University of Berlin, Benjamin Franklin Klinikum, and he was proud of her; for that, and because she took good care of him. She was a good girl. She had driven him here, parked the car, patiently walked to the elevator with him, and now sat close by him plaudernd--chatting. He kept one hand on his cane, and the other linked with hers, as they admired how the high 19th Century rooftops all around were stippled with a fine lacing of early snow.

Seidlitz and Berna had already eaten one marzipan torte each, and had drunk one cup of hot coffee, when Madame Didier finally strode in from the elevator.

The restaurant was nearly empty, waiting out the last hour before closing for the night. It occupied an entire floor in the office tower, with a well-lit glass and aluminum snack bar in the middle and elegant little tables with white linen cloths overlooking the charms of Charlottenburg on all sides. The only sounds were the occasional sweeping sound of the kitchen door opening and falling shut as the sole waiter on duty passed through; or the cleaning lady complaining about her ankles in the kitchen; or the steady whoosh of the central air system blowing in a clean dry warmth.

"Bitte," said Madame Didier as she hurried across the carpeted floor extending her hand. "Entschuldigen sie doch. I'm so sorry."

"It's nothing at all," said Seidlitz, as he and Berna rose and they three shook hands before sitting down at the small table again with its rose in a glass, its old mustard stain on the linen, its half-full coffee cups and smeared cake plates.

"Thank you for agreeing to meet with me," she said.

Seidlitz nodded sharply, with a snappy bow of the head, to show that he was entirely at her service. She was every bit as lovely as the tabloids tattled she was. He'd seen pictures of her in a bikini at Cannes, or in a turtleneck at Davos, or with an actor in sunglasses on the Étoile in Paris, the city where she now lived. How could anyone be impatient with a woman like this? She was 45, still fresh and crisp if only more ripe and worldly, and wore her golden-brunette hair stiffly teased up into a white band that crossed from ear to ear. Her clothing and jewelry were understated and pricey. Her perfume painted a light violet mood with just the right after-note.

She bit her lip and got right to it. "I wrote to you at some length about my problem."

Berna spoke up, stirring a spoonful of sugar in to her grandfather's tea. "If you don't mind, I will be bold and interrupt. My grandfather and I have been very anxious to meet with you, and we want to help as best we can. But so many years have passed now."

Madame Didier acknowledged this. "Bit by bit, I am trying to narrow down my search for my real father. Luckily I am in a position and can afford the travel and expense. If I am in the least causing you any expense--" She produced a wallet full of credit cards.

Seidlitz laughed gently. "No, no, Madame."

"Very well." She put the wallet away, but left one card to pay for everyone. She spoke more delicately and sensitively than he felt she needed to: "I understand that after the war you did meet with the families of the Sturmer men." He could picture them, sturdy British sailors in their old World War II warship named after a coastal city with such a Germanic sounding name--the sort of irony a hunched and bleary Hitler had been fond of wistfully remarking about to his field marshals, while poring over maps of his crumbling empire--that his enemies had good Germanic names like Eisenhower (Eisenhauer, a smith, one who smashes iron), Nimitz (nice Prussian Junker name), even the Dutch or Flemish Roosevelt, 'Field of Roses'.

"Oh yes," Seidlitz said, leaning both hands on the cane between his knees. Berna leaned against him, putting one arm protectively over his shoulder and the other on his forearm. Her long blonde hair hung down over her light blue sweater.

"I can imagine how sensitive it is."

He touched the corner of his eye, where a tear always sprang up at the long-ago memory. "It is unimaginable," he said in a strangled voice. "At first it was unbearable to see them. Then I was surprised that they understood that that was war and now is peace. We were on warships and both did what we had to do at the time. I did not want to take their sons and husbands and brothers from them. I learned that they understood this and respected me for coming to them after the war."

"It must be very difficult for everyone," she said.

"You have your own problems," he said. Berna squeezed his hand, warning him not to say too much. His knowledge came mainly from those grocery store scandal sheets and the gossip hour on television.

She nodded. "I did not know my father was not my father until I was your age, Berna. My mother married a poor man who drowned off a fishing boat. We lived in Siberia when I was a baby. My mother, who loved me very much and used to sing lullabies to me and call me Umnitsa, Good Girl--she died of it soon after in 1948. I have only vague memories of life in Vladivostok as a small child. Mostly it seems it was always dark and cold and we had not enough to eat. Then I was one of a hundred little orphans adopted by Westerners. My luck was to be taken in by a wealthy French family. The tabloids tell the rest."

Berna stirred her coffee with a kind, practical hand. She would make a fair-minded doctor, her grandfather thought as he listened attentively. Berna said: "I have never known deprivation, so it is all foreign to me, but I imagine your mother suffered considerably."

"Everyone did," Madame Didier said in her German, which had a strong French accent.

"You must have a beautiful home in Neuilly," Berna said with innocent admiration. She could have added others, all well-known to paparazzi, on Lake Constance, in Provence, on the Riviera, in Israel, and more.

Madame Didier nodded with a certain mixture of sad pride. "I have three boys, who are all doing very well. One is in Israel, one is in the French Navy, and one is an atomic scientist. But I always wanted a lovely girl like you, and now it is a bit late for me."

Berna impulsively reached out and took the woman's hand. That is the doctor in her, Seidlitz thought. "Maybe I can visit with you on my next trip to Paris. I sometimes make a holiday there."

"By all means, come see us and we'll take you for a drive to Versailles or maybe we'll stroll in the Luxembourg Gardens and see the Orsay."

"I'd love that!"

"Are the alligators still so big in the Berlin Zoo?" the Countess asked.

Seidlitz and Berna both laughed. "They feed them so much!"

Berna said: "Your mother now, she had a lovely daughter."

Madame Didier beamed. "You say the right things, Berna."

Seidlitz tapped his cane lightly on the carpet, thinking about H.M.S. Sturmer. "I was filled with the utmost anxiety when I received your letter saying that possibly your real father might have survived the sinking. The official report was that she went down with all hands, and that is what the plaque in Canterbury says, as well as the records at the Royal Navy Museum in London, which I have visited from time to time." He kept tapping that cane. "When you are an old man, and you killed many beautiful young men in your youth, you go with old blind eyes to run your fingers over their names as if you and they could have a conversation. But my tongue wanders. So you think your real father survived the sinking?"

Madame Didier sighed deeply, folding her hands on her lap. "That is one of the many mysteries about this, Herr Seidlitz. I am hoping that we will see some light as we put the many tiny pieces of this puzzle together."

Berna added: "And the atomic espionage?"

Seidlitz said: "We'll get to that in good time, Kindl. That's another matter and another time, in the last days of the war--Fehler's boat, U-234, which he surrendered to the Allies in May of 45. He was carrying a load of atomic bomb materials, and a Luftwaffe general, and a couple of Messerschmidt jets to Japan for bombing Los Angeles and San Francisco. The war could have turned out quite differently. I have spoken with him a number of times. He is an old man of 80 now, living here with his wife and children. What an adventure he had! What a bold and humorous man!" He tapped his cane again, and leaned on it with the weight of terrible memories that never went away.

South Atlantic Ocean, 1942.

H.M.S. Sturmer, a British destroyer escort, rose and fell in mild summer seas while pouring out a long, thick banner of black smoke from her single stack.

A thirty-year-old U.S. naval officer and, by turns, his top secret Huff Duff equipment, sailed unceremoniously through the air in a bosun's chair from a U.S. destroyer. A young clockmaker and trainee teacher from New England, he'd never been farther from home than a two-hour train ride to New York City or Boston. He'd been commissioned in the U.S. Navy only a year ago, and found global warfare a breathtaking adventure. Bloody and scary though it be, the war took him far from his land of quiet village greens and white-steepled churches. It also took him from a future he found stifling, with a beautiful but root-bound high school sweetheart and a choice of equally grim careers--either continuing to make clocks in a brick, Victorian-era factory on a Dickensian-turgid river, or teaching science and engineering in a similar building once he finished his four year degree at Teacher's College. The future yawned before him, dark and mysterious, and he somehow felt there must be something more than what New Haven had to offer.

Wearing a yellow oilcloth jacket and boots over his dark blue uniform, Tim gripped harsh canvas straps as sailors on both sides guided him on his perilous path. More than 100 feet below were the foam-laced waters of the Atlantic. Lieutenant (j.g.) Tim Nordhall was a good swimmer, having grown up lobstering and oystering in the groins and coves of his native New Haven. He didn't fear the water but regarded with alarm the steep gray-rusty iron sides and rails of the two ships rocking in close proximity to each other on a sea that seemed to snort and buck like a nervous mustang. One hit against those steel plates, and he was as good as gone. But the ordeal was over in less than five minutes as he stepped on board and saluted the ship's colors, requesting permission to come on board in time-honored etiquette.

H.M.S. Sturmer was a 306-foot long River Class frigate--one of hundreds hastily riveted together at John Brown shipyard as U-boot kills reached frightful proportions. She was a destroyer escort, a smaller and slower version of the destroyer, intended to escort convoys through treacherous waters. Capable of making 20 knots, she carried two paired three-inch deck guns, one fore, one aft, and twin torpedo launching tubes.

The British officers welcomed Tim with grins and handshakes. Their grizzled beards and sun-reddened cheeks revealed rough humor and camaraderie. They wore tan loden overcoats and navy-gray shallow helmets, as well as binoculars and web gear. Tim's sea bag followed across. A sailor carried it below to Tim's cabin. The Brits were seasoned warriors, always looking for the slightest edge against their merciless U-boot adversaries. They pumped Tim for information about the new class of Huff Duff coming across in wooden crates. Royal Navy sailors swarmed around the equipment, and several bearded warrant officers already had technical manuals in hand as they directed the crates to be moved amidships for mounting on the small deck platform.

Tim found his hosts most congenial. A bosun's mate saw him to his small cabin near the captain's. It was something of an honor to have one's own niche in a ship this small, with 140 men jammed on her in every oily nook and cranny. The ship was a coal-burner, and when cruising at full steam she laid down a long black plume of smoke that left soot and tar on every surface.

Within a day, the warrants had Tim's new Huff Duff in its final operational shakedown phase. Tim found them to be highly competent technicians, while he himself was a two-year college man with a rudimentary engineering background that he found barely matched theirs. They were a grinning, feisty lot, these Brits. There was always someone with a joke, or a harmonica, or a story about home. The working hours were endless, and sleep came in small bursts here and there, but the men were young and would just as soon stop for a game of cards. The daily grog ration lightened things a bit, though Tim wasn't much of a drinker or smoker. He ended up telling about girls back home, particularly Sally Levesque who taught English at Hillhouse High School and lived in Hamden. In turn, he learned about Jerry Harris's blonde Edna in Manchester, who had a cage full of finches that enjoyed sitting in the window twittering to the Sunday morning church bells on a sunny day. And Ben Meyer's Shula who was already assistant bookkeeper in the family carpet business in Southwark. Or Harvey Kinnan's red-haired Nuala who was a nurse at Guy's Hospital and had lost a hand in the Blitz but was still a lovely bird in her whites. "Do you plan to go back and wed your Sally then?" Harvey would ask, his young freckled face wide with innocence and his mouth agape to reveal a missing middle tooth. Dark-bearded Jerry Harris seemed a more dour man who tended to stare, but Tim imagined Edna with her finches must keep him in line, like a sunbeam across his glowering stare. About Sally Tim did not have an honest answer, either for himself or Harv. When you got away from home, Tim was discovering, you started to change, and the ones you left behind often did not change with you. His letter exchanges with Sally had begun to wane after the first year away.

Work and war and responsibility kept Tim too busy to spend much time thinking. Many ships had the new RADARs on them, but they were limited in range and often inaccurate. Huff Duff, or High Frequency/Direction Finding (HD/HF), was an entirely different tool with over 600 miles (1000 km) range. Using an unusual cage-shaped sender/receiver mounted on a mast, Huff Duff could intercept German radio traffic and triangulate the approximate location of U-boot packs. A round picture tube similar to a RADAR screen revealed the location of the signal being sent. Already, as these units were being refined in crash R&D projects on both sides of the Atlantic, the effect on the northern convoy routes was measurable--U-boots were beginning to run for their lives. A ship with Huff Duff could use shore-based as well as ship-based Huff Duff units, some located as far away as in the Bahamas, others in newly liberated North Africa, to zero in on wolf packs and then send aerial bombers or antisubmarine ships to kill the killers. Now the latest American version was being tested in the South Atlantic as the Allies gained their balance and started hunting the enemy who had been sinking hundreds of Lend-Lease ships.

Tim felt like one of the pack as he joined his hosts on the bridge, wearing his own sandy loden coat and flat helmet. The warrants were in complete technical control of their operation. Tim's job was to compile technical statistics on the unit's performance, and to write a detailed journal over 100 pages long, with appendices. To this end, he had the relative privacy of a small cabin, and a typewriter with a supply of paper and ribbons. After a four-week cruise, they were due in the Bahamas for a well-earned and anticipated R&R, during which Tim would debrief U.S. and Commonwealth officers on the strong and weak points of the new technology.

Already, they had a possible kill a hundred miles away, off Cape Verde, and they steamed south at top speed. The warrants triangulated, using a sender at Tobruk and another at the Gambia, and a flight of Lancaster bombers had been sent to investigate a possible U-boot nest.

Then disaster struck.

On the first day of the second week of Tim's cruise aboard Sturmer, just as the ship's bell rang and the smell of tea and cakes wafted up to the bridge, a tremendous explosion rocked the tail section of the ship. Another followed immediately after, tearing off the bow.

Tim had been standing at the rail amidships, enjoying a chat with two young sailors who were telling stories of the pubs and of their families and girlfriends in Leeds, and a brisk sea breeze blew. It was a sunny day, and Tim felt as if he were on a luxury cruise, if only one could order a good cup of American coffee and maybe a handful of chocolates from home.

The next moment, Tim smashed against a bulkhead. Everything went black. He heard the truncated scream of one of the young sailors as both men disappeared in a gout of flying glass and blood and bits of flesh. By a miracle, Tim found himself intact--he'd been blown into a cavity that had once housed small collapsible life rafts but now contained only rolled-up deck canvas. Jammed awkwardly between two rolls of this sun shield, he had survived when the other two boys clearly hadn't made it. At first Tim thought he was blind, but he realized his vision was being obscured by a mix of oil and blood smeared like porridge on his face. Stunned, he at first thought he must be missing his arms, but he found them firmly attached and was able to raise his hands to wipe the gore off his face. Already, Sturmer was listing badly, and it looked as if the sea would swallow Tim when she rolled over.

The U-boot they were hunting had found them first. Two or three torpedoes, and the dirty work was done.

Now he heard men screaming as he untangled himself and got on his feet. The steel deck was listing badly, and he pulled himself up a ladder to the upper decks, straddling an upended and shattered lifeboat that would be of no use.

Events unfolded with blinding speed now, all wrapped in a white froth of thrown waves as the ship started sinking and the sea surface bubbled up closer by the minute. He caught glimpses of faces in the water, drowning men, arms reaching for ropes and hawsers and anything else to grab, mouths spitting water but taking in more water instead of the air they hoped to breathe. Wounded men, helpless, were drowning in six inches of water on the inundated decks, pinned under floating debris, and they looked up with huge imploring eyes as if it were just a shop window between themselves and the air they needed to breathe. He thought he recognized Jerry Harris's dour bearded face staring in black accusation up at Tim, at the world he was about to lose, before the sea closed over the man.

Tim slipped on the blood-smeared deck as the ship shifted, and banged his ribs on a steel mooring-winch. Doubled over, he slipped down into the boiling cold water. His breath was knocked out of him. Not a sound could escape his mouth, though he tried to scream. Then his mouth filled with harsh, salty water. He felt hands grasping at him with rubbery dying terror, cold fingers like little fish gnawing at him, trying to get under his shirt or grasp his belt.

For a minute or so, he was underwater. This was it. He was done for. He'd hold on as long as he could, in this moment between life and death, but when the pressure got too much he'd open his mouth to gasp for air and instead take in a lungful of water and black out. He heard the clanking of the ship's engines, still firing away on at least one boiler. He heard the grinding of her worm gear as it crunched away in a shaft full of abrasive seawater cutting through her packing grease. He heard the screams of trapped men who faced certain death from drowning just minutes away. He heard the tortured groan of tons of steel realigning itself now that the ship's structural integrity had been destroyed. How deep was the sea here? What would it be like to sink down as the darkness quickly took him?

Then she rolled the other way, settling by what was left of the bow, so that the stern rose momentarily.

He felt the weight of water crashing away, and got several great lungs full of cold air, all in a blur.

As the stern rose up, he spread-eagled against the aft gun turret. In that instant, he caught sight of the U-boot. She surfaced about a quarter mile away, a fish rising from the sea, streaming foam and water, with rich twirls of magnificent bottle-green sea flying around her sail. The commander might put out some rubber rafts if he had them. The Germans sometimes stayed to rescue, but nowadays the Krauts were on the run, and it was dubious the Kraut would risk his boat and complement to save enemy sailors, particularly in sight of land.

Sky and sea whirled blender-like. Tim lost consciousness again as he fell.

The way he figured it afterward, the stern had risen up, then briefly hung in the sky with him straddling a gun mount. Then she'd rocked once in a swell, throwing him clear, before sliding without another sideways motion straight down, bow-first, on the long descent a mile down to whatever slimy plain would become her eternal cemetery.

Tim had on his life vest, and that saved him. He came to, minutes after falling into the water, and found himself bobbing up and down in an oil slick among debris--a large tin of tea, some wooden crates of linen and bread, waterlogged mattresses, and motionless bodies.

Then he heard shouts. A few men had gathered around a rubber life raft from the Sturmer. Tim scissor-kicked toward them. His ribs ached, and the sea was cold, but he was alive. He was intact.

Several of the men were wounded. One died as Tim arrived--just closed his eyes, sort of let go, and disappeared under the waves. Desperately, others grasped at the rope around the dinghy. Tim smelled wet wool, old tobacco, and fresh metallic blood. There was a smell these open wounds had, like gutted fish with the salt water in them. The wounded were too weak to scream as the chemicals and oils from the ship filled their gashes; they just emitted a low moan at best and hung on. One shivered violently, so that his blackened lips flapped and threw off a spray of oil; imminent death was written in his eyes, and when Tim looked away at the blinding sun, and back, the man had disappeared as if he'd never been. How much of this was all a dazed illusion, Tim wondered, wishing he could clear his head.

The ship was gone. So was the U-boot.

There was a brief conversation amid gasps for air and wet sputters. Tim calculated that Sturmer had not had a chance to get a signal off. With luck, someone would come looking for them. It was midday, and that meant probably a good twenty-four hours bobbing through the night, maybe a day or two, if searchers came at all. It was a huge stretch of ocean, full of hostile U-boots and not enough Allied traffic to do a proper search.

Soon it was just three of them, Tim and red-haired Harvey and another sailor. All the other men were gone. Drowned. That, even though the sun was warm and the sea sparkled like gold.

They clung to the rubber dinghy until it began to deflate, becoming just another bit of debris.

Tim drifted in and out of consciousness. He expected he was at death's door like the others. Some had perished quickly from terrible wounds and burns. He and the other two would gradually weaken from thirst, hunger, despair, and exhaustion, and drift off to eternity and nothingness. Or would there be angels with trumpets? For some odd reason, the golden-red glow of the sea reminded Tim of quiet Sunday afternoons in New Haven, during Indian Summer when the rich trees were still green, and the air retained a lingering ripeness of summer, but weakly so; underneath it all something was changing, some powerful body chemistry signaled that autumn was roiling up, and the leaves were dying inwardly. One felt the very elements of one's body and blood transforming themselves in a rhythm as grand as the movement of the world around its sun and the Newtonian tick-tock of machinery in a Copernican universe.

"There's land over there," Harvey said, bringing Tim out of his reverie, and they began swimming.

"If there are sharks, we're done for," said the other.

"We'd be long done if it wasn't for the oil in the sea," said Harvey.

"Let's stick together," Tim ordered. Instinctively, he towed the dinghy along, and it offered just a tiny bit of buoyancy. In it, he knew, were first aid and other emergency supplies. He was most hoping for matches.

The sound of crashing water grew louder.

"A beach!" the other man said.

"Surf," Harvey said, looking pale through his freckles.

Tim stopped and looked, feeling the water surging around him. He was tired now. They'd been shocked and in the water for a good two hours already. "Breakwater!" he shouted.

"Tired," Harvey said with a groan, closing his eyes. Tim noticed now that his friend had a wound in his side. He took Harvey by the chin and began swimming slowly and methodically toward the sound of crashing water, which could not be too far from land.

Then raging water took hold of them, spinning them in foamy, bumpy gyres.

Tim watched mutely as the other sailor was ripped away, flying down and around a barnacle-crusted rock that rose like a mushroom out of the continental shelf. The tide must be in full movement, Tim thought. Best to stay back until it crested or troughed, rather than get battered to pieces here. He heard Harvey scream and felt him torn from his grasp. Helplessly, he watched as his friend was sucked away into the maelstrom. Tim let himself go limp, lying sideways and kicking weakly. He let go and just prayed to live from one moment to the next.

Again he felt that golden glow, that presence of death, and he saw again the gleaming little New England church roofs and neo-Gothic Yale towers around his hometown. He saw himself again with his girlfriend, Sally Levesque. Maybe they were driving home from a football game, with autumn leaves rustling in the streets a foot deep in places, and they had between them the afterglow of heavy petting, maybe even of the occasional guilty sex. And yet he felt so desperate to escape, to scream, to struggle to the surface like just now. Sally Levesque almost seemed to be sitting in a convertible in the ocean, sinking while he rose, and he could sense the quiet accusation radiating from her eyes. It wasn't her fault, he realized. She was too shallow, God forgive him, too lacking in courage to escape the monotony of a life lived from crib to cemetery amid that same somber brick Colonial architecture. She was born and raised to be a good woman in that atmosphere, and he was the bad one, he was the one who should feel guilty, for throwing it all away. It was over between them now, anyway. She had been unable to handle his departure for Navy duty, and had taken up with a boy from West Haven who shared her tightly knitted French-Canadian Catholic universe, who had been rejected from active duty because of flat feet and was now a police lieutenant guarding the Green from vagrants and South Street beach from enemy submarines.

Tim cried out and raised a hand into the sky, but an undertow took him down, twirled him around so that the fine sand at the bottom polished him like a jeweler's rag on a lens. Tim gave in to his wrongs, confessed his shortcomings, and prepared to die; but it wasn't his time yet.

He did not have long to struggle. The undertow took him out another hundred feet. Then the undertow vanished, leaving him in steadily rising and falling swells. He stood treading water and gasping for breath. He had lost his shoes and clothes by now, but shreds of his shirt still clung to his shoulders along with the life jacket, shielding him from the blazing sun. He lay back and concentrated on just keeping his face out of the water, which the design of the life jacket helped him do.

He became detached, feeling as though he were floating in air rather than water. It was a curious sort of air, soapy green, but piss-yellow when the sun shone through it, and full of kelp shadows. He floated motionlessly. He was free of Sally Levesque, free of New Haven, free of the clock factory, free of whatever it might have been. The mighty summer ocean off the southern coast of Africa had cleansed him, and then put him within sight of land almost like Jonah being belched out by his whale.

Dreamlike, without being part of the scene, he watched three razor-sharp sharks tearing Harvey's body apart, the legs one way, the arms another, the russet-gold head and the torso floating downward out of sight until another shark did a magnificent hooking dive and disappeared with it.

Tim floated motionlessly amid the kelp, knowing he would not die here. Slowly, the incoming tide brought him around so that the back of his head rested on the firm sand.

Berlin, 1991.

"You have a Russian name also," Berna said looking through the photographs that Madame Didier had taken from her purse.

Outside, on the high black slate rooftops, snow created stipples and filigrees in intricate patterns under a lovely ink-blue night sky. The quarter moon looked like a gold sword out of the Arabian Nights.

"Yes, several. My mother and Auntie Dora always called me Umnitsa, which means Good Girl," Madame Didier said self-consciously. "Auntie Dora took care of me after my mother died. But Auntie Dora ran a tavern, and didn't have time for me. Then the French came. They were Jews who had suffered a great deal. They lost most of their family, though my Mum and Dad, as I called them, managed to escape to Chile for the duration. They had no children of their own, so Auntie Dora gave me to them, and I became their only child. They loved me as well as any man and woman could. They spoiled me, I'd say."

"And they are gone?" Seidlitz asked gently.

Marianne nodded. A tear ran down each cheek and she sniffled a bit. Her parents had died more than ten years earlier, and were buried in the Cimetière de Passy. She idly fingered a little cellophane book of color photos. The ever-tactful Berna took the photos and showed them to her grandfather. "Look, Opa, these are Madame Didier's three boys." He put on his reading glasses, and admired three fine young men looking out in the world with happiness and self-confidence. "Handsome young men," he said, nodding, and Berna appreciatively handed the photos back. "You should be proud, Madame."

"Thank you." She put the photos back in her purse. She changed topics as she did so. "Did you have any idea that there was a survivor?"

He shook his head. The thought upset him very much. "I had no idea until many years after the war. I feel I have lost a great opportunity in not meeting him. And you think he is your father?"

She looked pained. "Yes, I am sure of it now, at last, after many years of searching. His name was kept secret for many years, but I believe is a man named Tim Nordhall. I need to find him now, if he is still alive somewhere."

"You are traveling all over the world in search of one clue or another," Seidlitz said sympathetically and thoughtfully. "I wish I knew more. I only heard about Nordhall from Fehler, who went with me to a meeting of Sturmer next of kin in Canterbury. That would have been, oh, probably 1955 or 57, I forget--and Fehler had been talking with a man named Heyday or Highway, one of those English names, whom he met over a beer at that reunion, and who also may have been a double agent. Yes, it is all quite confusing, and still swallowed up in official secrecy even now, half a century after the war. Even now that East Germany has ceased to exist, and now even the Soviet Union is history, you would think that they would all give up their ghosts and secrets." The old captain looked around, lost in his memories, and suddenly finding himself in this place now. "Very gemütlich here," he said, looking around at the dark restaurant, its silent tables, its windows bright with a sea of city lights and neon dusted with faint traces of white that outlined the edges of black slate roof tiles. As always, a sea of traffic flowed underneath with an apparent total lack of concern--for every life was in crisis, and no stranger had time to wonder about someone else's puzzle from another time.

Berna had a silver and turquoise barrette between her lips, and used both hands to fold her long blonde hair back into a ponytail.

Madame Didier pushed a crumb around on the linen. "I have been to San Francisco, London, Berlin, Brussels, anywhere I can think of. Every time I think I am closing in on my real father, he slips away again, like a ghost."

"I am sorry to hear that," Seidlitz said.

Berna said: "You are so wealthy and beautiful, and yet unhappy. How sad."

"I have a lot to be thankful for; you are right."

Berna had finished tying her hair back and sat drumming rock rhythms on her jeans. "We can be happy sitting here, warm and dry, having coffee."

"At least we are alive, those of us who made it," Seidlitz said. He rubbed his granddaughter's back affectionately.

"Recently," Madame Didier said, "I came into possession of some papers including some diaries kept by my father. The papers were recovered from my Auntie's family in Siberia, and originally belonged to my mother. It seems she was in love with Tim Nordhall to her dying day, and wrote a stack of love letters to him that she never sent." She felt flustered. "It seems Nordhall fell in love with not one but two women, or is that just more myth like so much about him?"

"Nothing was unusual in wartime," the captain said, shrugging lightly. "Not even a man with two women."

Berna giggled. "Or two women with one husband."

Madame Didier shrugged, feeling as always the fatalistic weight of the unchangeable past. "There are still so many puzzling details, but I know for certain that the NKGB or GRU kidnapped my mother right out of her residence on Nob Hill in San Francisco when she was pregnant with me, and that's how I ended up in the Soviet Union."

"A dreadful fate," the old man said, pursing his lips as he no doubt reviewed a thousand painful memories of his own.

"Yes. My poor mother. She ended up marrying a man in Siberia who drank heavily and was mean to her, but he brought home a small paycheck and that kept us from starving to death. Those were hard years. I'm told he fell off a fishing boat in the North Pacific in 1947 and drowned. My mother never married again. Not that she had much time, because she died the next year."

There was a silence as they all digested this information from the chaotic aftermath of the world war.

"Where do you go next?" Berna said.

Outside, the wind blew a long veil of snow across the slate rooftops.

Mauritania, 1942.

I am alive, Tim thought as he felt the weight of the land assert itself. Somehow I have survived and all the others are dead.

Slowly, he rolled over onto his side, feeling sickness and grief. He lay doubled over, feeling the sun drying the shreds of his clothing. He smelled dying kelp, rotting mussels. He heard the loud buzzing of countless flies. On his sun baked, salt-crusted lips and nose, on his cracking skin, flies and ants crawled but he was too weak to swat them. He lolled dizzily as the water drained away, leaving him to dry in the sun. He was alive, at least, to smell and feel these things.

He raised himself up and looked out to sea. A smudge of black smoke stained a violet evening sky. Night was coming, and he began to feel cold. He was too weak to jump up, but he lay back and inhaled great gulps of living air as if it were some wonderful champagne. He lay gasping the marvelous near-liquid called air while the planet wheeled in the heavens and then sun began to turn large and orange on the western horizon, over the fatal sea.

He again saw Jerry Harris's dark beard and eyes fading under the waves. Again he saw red-haired Harvey Kinnan torn to pieces by sharks. He cried out "No!" and beat his forehead against the sand, sobbing. He pounded his fist down again and again, thinking of the finches and the one-handed nurse and all the aching holes this war was leaving in a billion lives around the world. These others had given their all, and he had been given a new life. He must make something of it, for his sake and theirs.

He rose, staggering, and wandered through stranded kelp until he came to the rubber dinghy. It looked inflated, but flattened when he crawled on his hands and knees into its shelter. No shelter there. He found the laces holding shut the emergency kit, and fumbled with the hard, dry strings until slowly they pried loose. He used his teeth to try and bite through them. Finally, he braced his feet against the inside of the raft and pulled with all his might, until the cabinet spilled its contents into the boat. There was a first aid kit, a flare gun, a bottle of water--he fumbled with the water, uncorking the tin lid and tilting it back to drink and spat--it was contaminated with seawater and oil. A hideous taste filled his mouth, making his thirst worse. The sea biscuits were stale, moldy, wet, ruined. The medical kit, same. Iodine and mercury and other chemicals all run together, soaking the bandages, and the small bottles of salve broken, shattered. He groaned with frustration, pawing through the wreckage. Nothing at all useful there.

Wait, one thing. A web holster, an old Webley Mark IV .38 revolver, rust on the handle, six rounds. He took off the life jacket, laid it aside. He put on the web gear, first one arm then the other, so that the gun dangled loosely under his left shoulder. The straps crossed over his back and met in a clasp on his belly. At least he had that, unless it blew up in his face if he ever needed to fire it.

He rose and looked about. Where am I?

Africa.

That was all he knew.

He was someplace on the western coast of Africa. He tried to remember his geography--anything. Africa was shaped kind of like a prehistoric skull, facing east. The back of the brain case was Western Africa, and on it was what? Inland would be Mali. He was 1,000 miles of desert away from Timbuktu. The Atlas Mountain range stretched north into Morocco, amid endless desert. Hitler's adventures on the Dark Continent were almost finished. Montgomery and Eisenhower were just mopping up the last German and Italian legions in Africa, driving Rommel back to Europe. Now my adventures are just beginning, Tim thought as he slogged along. He must find shelter for the night, water, food. Next, he needed to find a U.S. consul somewhere to repatriate him.

A golden evening set in. Haze blew in off the sea, and the wet sand shone like gold. About two miles down the coast, Tim saw a building of some kind. It looked like a ruined tower. Naked except for shreds of his shirt, remnants of his pants, and the web belt with the old gun, he walked on bare feet in the sand the way he'd done in Milford or West Haven as a boy. In those days you'd get hot dogs and root beer at a stand, and the merry-go-round at Savin Rock blared with music and laughter. Here, all was silent, like the time before time when the world still stood empty, or like an empty time after the end of the world.

New Haven, 1991

The Boeing 757-300 with Marianne, Countess Didier on board approached North America on the North Atlantic route from London across Greenland.

The plane made a customs stop in Bangor, Maine and then made a hop to Bradley Field in Hartford, Connecticut. Marianne had not slept well the night before. She'd dozed on the plane and felt tired, but was anxious to meet her possible relatives in New Haven. The weather was rainy and chill, with a damp, icy wind blowing down from Canada, across the Great Lakes and upstate New York, into New England. Under a leaden sky, she took a limousine about a half hour from Hartford to New Haven. At the coast, she hardly noticed the annoying traffic, concentrating instead on the picturesque little villages visible through bare trees, and beyond them Long Island Sound, with a fuzzy, dark, misty Long Island lying in the distance.

Gino Franzese and his wife of many years, Catherine Nordhall-Franzese, came to meet her in a light blue Cadillac driven by their oldest son, Frankie. Catherine was Tim Nordhall's sister, now a woman of 72 with medical problems but a still-chipper attitude. "That would make you my aunt," Marianne told Catherine.

"I haven't seen my brother and his wife in years," Catherine said. "I don't know if I can help you at all, dear."

"I'm trying to find my father and his..." Marianne said softly. Wife or wives? she wondered, but dared not ask for fear of offending her hosts. And her hosts seemed distant for some reason. Were they afraid of strangers, or was there something to hide?

Gino was 77, heavy-set, balding, a big silent man with a dutiful expression, heavy hands that staid powerfully knitted together under an overhanging paunch, and small lips that stayed quietly pursed though his quick eyes missed nothing. Francis, Frankie, already a graying man in his mid-40s (about Marianne's age) looked sleeker and more businesslike. He was edging his father out of a lucrative construction business as Gino grew tired. "I travel a bit," Gino said humbly, "like maybe Canada or one day London. Nothing like all of your travels, I'm sure." It was practically the longest sentence he spoke during their few hours together.

"You're welcome to stay at our house if you'd like," Catherine said airily.

"That is so generous of you," Marianne said feeling a bit embarrassed. "Do you know, I have to be on a flight to San Francisco tonight for a meeting tomorrow. Why don't we make it next time when I can really enjoy your company?"

"We'd love that," Frankie said, waving his hands as he maneuvered the large car along New Haven's maze of narrow one-way streets where every parking space was taken. It was a weekday around noon, and the sidewalks were jammed with Yale University students and faculty on their lunch break--going either to some downtown restaurant for a quick bite, or to one of the college dining halls or the university Commons. The New Haven Green looked soggy, with its three old Revolutionary War churches fuzzed over by a growing haze of drizzle. New Haven was a city of umbrellas today, of early darkness inscribed with neon blurs and squiggles.

"Why do you think my brother might be your dad, sweetie?" Catherine said with a speculative glance. The calculation probably was: she's a countess with money, so it can't be about that. There was an element of mistrust, and Marianne couldn't blame the woman.

She related her story again from the kidnapping of her pregnant mother in the last days of World War 2, forced by Soviet agents aboard a Russian ship in San Francisco, and abducted by the NKGB on the Soviet freighter Kalinin to Siberia, to the death of her mother, and her adoption by a wealthy French family.

"My mother died before I could really speak with her," Marianne said as if reciting an old drama, simply because it needed to be conveyed. "I had an auntie in Novosibirsk, an old woman of Russian and Inuit stock..."

"What stock?" Gino asked politely but blankly.

"Siberian," Marianne said. "Auntie Dora. She ran a tavern in a sailors' part of town, and she took us in. My mother washed dishes and served beer and swept floors, until winter took her away. I was barely three when she died in 1948, so I never really knew her. I lived with Auntie until I was about five, and she told me my father was a wonderful adventurer in San Francisco during the war. She said he had two wives, and was handsome enough to have all the women on earth.

"Two wives!" Catherine said with a mix of displeasure and incredulity. "That doesn't sound like my brother."

Marianne realized immediately she'd gone too far. "Well, these were the stories Auntie Dora used to tell on winter nights. And what would Auntie Dora know? She lived her whole life within a few miles of where she was born."

"Was she a Communist?" Frankie asked.

Marianne shook her head. "She was just a very kind elderly woman full of stories. Anyway, this French count and his wife came looking for furs and other rich things, and Auntie gave me to them because they lacked a daughter." What more to tell them? Marianne fell silent, thinking of her life--a story of dire poverty one day, great wealth the next--adopted, living in a chateau in Alsace or a mansion in Paris or a palace in Provence. Her new family also owned a chalet in Davos; bungalow in Cannes, factories in Marseille, other industrial interests in Madrid, Turin, Vienna, and even Canada. But she always wanted to know who her real father was, and that hunger tormented her all these years. Knowing the jealousy it might raise, she glossed over her wealth.

"Well," Catherine said, reflecting on that tale of Cinderella wealth without any particular feeling for history or for the visitor's sufferings, the loss of her mother, any of it. Marianne did not hold it against her. She had known many persons of narrower experience in her time, and sometimes they even managed to quarry more richness out of a small life than some worldlier persons managed to extract over many time zones and exotically named seas or far locales. "We weren't exactly well off. Tim managed to scrimp and save and put himself through two years at Connecticut Teachers' College. It was the Depression, you know. He loved engineering. There were no jobs before the war, but he managed to get something in a clock factory down along the Quinnipiac River. The factory burned down years ago now, I forget, when, Gino?"

Gino's hands twitched dutifully. "Oh, I'd say 1975 at the latest."

"Gino says 1975," Catherine told Marianne as though people did not hear Gino when he spoke, although he'd built an impressive business with those big hands and preoccupied eyes.

Marianne nodded from her seat beside Frankie in the front. "With so many years gone by, so much evidence is washed away."

"Washed away by time," Frankie said.

"We all get washed away," Catherine said, and Gino nodded, giving a twitch of the hands, tapping bent fingers together, as if playing a chord on some invisible tiny accordion.

"I would like to know what kind of man he was. Or is. And where he is."

Catherine looked at her oddly. "I don't know where he is. I haven't seen him since right after the war. He came out to visit with a woman he said he had married. Nice looking young gal, I can't remember her name or even what she looked like. Something fishy about the whole thing, but I could never put my finger on it."

"Did you and your brother have a disagreement?"

Catherine shrugged. "We always fought, but all siblings do. No, it was something else. I never figured it out. He had something to hide. Didn't he, Gino?"

Gino nodded, gave that steepled-fingertips twitch.

"Gino agrees. There was so much going on during the war." Catherine shook her head. "I don't think we ever knew the half of it."

"I'd appreciate anything you can tell me."

Catherine said: "We were all sworn to secrecy. We knew he was in Africa for a while, then in London, and finally in San Francisco. My mom and I, rest her soul, we were the only ones who knew, and we were told he could be killed if anyone found out he was doing important work for the Government, so we kept our mouths shut. That's all I know."

Nothing but secrets, Marianne thought, and you are still keeping your mouth shut. How well they must have hidden it all these years. So many dark secrets had been born in that vast modern Iliad called World War II.

Catherine made a wry mouth, thinking dreamily of her memories. "He was always a strong, handsome boy. The girls really liked him."

"Good looking," Gino said--nod, twitch, and all.

"A handsome man," Catherine said.

They drove slowly downhill through narrow streets. "This is where the factory was where Uncle Tim worked as a boy, the clock place," Frankie said, pulling up on a licorice-colored pad of wet asphalt edged with trash and weeds. "A bunch of family members were lucky enough to get jobs there during the Depression and then after World War II."

A pea-soup East River flowed past. Raindrops pelted glassy spaces amid lacy foam circles on the river surface. In the hills huddled tight little New England houses waiting for the winter cold. The houses looked as if they were shivering behind their black windows and lace curtains. Along the river street were spots of color, where a dry cleaner and a liquor store and a check cashing place and a few other businesses advertised, colorful neon in the drabness of rain.

Catherine said: "I sometimes took the trolley down here with Tim and Sally. She was his big high school fling, Sally Levesque, nice looking redhead with pale skin and healthy lungs, if you know what I mean. Sweet girl, really, but all the other girls were jealous of her."

"Does she still live around here?"

"Sally?" Catherine shook her head and made a condolent mmm sound. "Poor Sally. She and Tim stopped writing to each when he was in London during the war. She ended up marrying a cop from West Haven and having a couple of kids, and last I heard she died of breast cancer in a rest home over in Branford. Isn't that right, Gino?"

"Right. Breasts," Gino said, nodding. His eyes looked sad at the irony. Instead of twitching, he sketched elegant loops in the air with his hands from his chest to his belly.

"Timmy always had something against his home town," Catherine said. "He took off when the war took him away, and I don't think he ever looked back. Me and the other kids kind of resented it, to be honest, but then he was the smart one, the educated one, and it was hard to think he wasn't looking down on us a little bit." She softened. "We were four of us girls, including my mother, and now I am the only one left. We were sworn to lifelong secrecy, and we knew exactly nothing to start with. We've kept our mouths shut all these years. I hope you find him, hon. Drop me a line if you do." A tear rolled down her cheek. "I might just want to visit him if he's still alive someplace. Tell him I won't ask any questions."

Mauritania, 1942.

What a strange and beautiful world, Tim thought as he made his way along the eerie coast that might be from some other age, perhaps even some other planet.

Camels trundled majestically on a distant scrub ridge hazed with mist. Beer-yellow evening haze thickened along the coast, while fierce sun still beat down inland. The tide was going out, and beach sand glowed like molten gold.

To the left rose a wall of black night, quickly enveloping Africa as the continent spun away from the sun. In the final half hour of daylight, the sea itself seemed on fire, and the sun resembled a tomato sinking into an atmosphere of colorful vegetable juice. Of course that is thirst talking, Tim thought with a faint little grin.

He picked his way over sand packed around the protruding ribs of a long-dead wooden ship, maybe an old whaler from the last century, or some Arab dhow. A while later, he walked past an elephant's huge skull that lay alien and staring in the sand. Its magnificent tusks lay crossed like an x, and the empty eye sockets looked haunted.

Now he could see the structure toward which he'd been walking. He could see from a distance that it was a ruined tower, and there wasn't a human being in sight--a disappointment to be sure, but maybe a blessing in that he wasn't sure who owned this area. He knew vaguely that all the major European colonial powers had historic claims in this general area, but his knowledge of African geography was embarrassingly scant. Was he anywhere near the colony of former American slaves, Liberia? Or British Gambia? French Morocco or Togoland or Mauritania? Spanish Sahara? He'd give anything for a map.

Night fell as he traversed the last quarter mile. The full moon lay low on the horizon now, brighter than ever against a starry night sky. He could have enjoyed this, were it not for the grinding thirst that sandpapered his tongue and made his palate burn as if a razor blade had made fine cuts in it.

The gun dangled heavily. He felt a cold wind starting to blow from the desert as dusk neared. He made his way to the tower ruin. He heard something in the desert--a motor! It sounded as if someone was testing a motorcycle. What a strange thing to do, so far away from civilization.

The desert sent its odd smells too, and he caught a whiff of something rank.

The ruined tower stood out bone-white in the eerie moonlight.

London, 1942.

Major Robert Malone, who was just having a cigar and brandy in his London office with Colonel Ivor Crane and Major General William "Wild Bill" Donovan, understood the strategic importance of rubber. He came from a family of rubber barons.

As his older brother Teddy had once remarked, they were born with a rubber spoon in their mouths, the Malones of South Carolina and Arizona. What neither Donovan nor Crane could know was that Rob Malone had a serious problem, and he needed a drastic solution--fast.

Donovan had recently formed the Office of Strategic Services, which he now headed under the aegis of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It was the belated United States answer to the mother country's vaunted intelligence services like MI-6. Tall, graying, priestly, with a wild but melancholy look in his eyes, he was certainly eminent and gray enough to be the pope of this new spookery.

Ivor Crane was an amateur spy master, a friend of Allen Dulles and other dabblers in the new American sophistication now that the former colonies were becoming a world power while the old countries of Europe had yet another one of their senseless bloodbaths. Also tall, but younger, darker haired, a big eager child, sincere without sacrificing a certain carefully weary worldliness, he had stocked the empty oak shelves of his Lambeth offices with at least a thousand volumes of U.S., Canadian, and British as well as Continental reference books, classics, everything from Hugo and Goethe to Twain and Hawthorne, with Rabelais and Paine in-between, and of course all the dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other reference works to populate an effective spymaster's office. Crane had been badly wounded in North Africa, and now had an artificial, wooden left forearm and hand, not to mention an achy left elbow that he rarely complained about.

Robert Malone, at 30, was the youngest of the three. He had already seen service in North Africa with Montgomery in a liaison capacity at El Alamein and Tobruk, and taken a piece of shrapnel in one shoulder. Luckily the wound had healed during a month-long convalescence behind the lines in Rabat, Morocco. The experience had given him a taste for Africa that Donovan and Crane now wanted to exploit.

Besides their tailor-fitted dark olive jackets with polished cross-shoulder leathers and expensive pistol belts, the three men offering each other a toast of pre-war French Armagnac from crystal snifters, while holding the driest and most fragrant Cuban cigars, had this in common: all three had graduated from elite colleges. Their leader, Bill Donovan, was a World War I hero and Congressional Medal of Honor recipient after being gravely wounded in battle. At least one movie ("The Fighting 69th," an acclaimed 1940 production starring Pat O'Brien and Jimmy Cagney) had been made at least indirectly about him and his Irish-American regiment. Born into an Irish family of modest means, he had put himself through Columbia University and practiced law before assuming command of the 69th. Now, as FDR's premier spymaster, he was recruiting the best and brightest from the top U.S. universities. Malone, an Irish American (Yale, '35) and Crane (Princeton, '28) were no exceptions. It earned O.S.S. the soubriquet 'Oh So Social.'

This evening, aromas of cigar smoke, brandy, and prime bluish gin for later filled the bookish London rooms housing Crane's O.S.S. division. Rain dribbled down the windows. The three men turned from their laughter and conversation about New York and Boston society to rumors about some ominous work being done on a new weapon of unimaginable destructive potential.

"It's all a theory as yet," Donovan said, sitting on the corner of Crane's desk swinging his leg.

"Sounds a bit far-fetched," Crane said. "What is this thing called?"

"An energy bomb," Donovan said. "That's all I know. Uses heavy elements somehow to release the energy in the atom. Hard to believe that a piece of it the size of a coffee can could devastate a small city, but that's what I am told." He looked at Malone. "All strictly hush-hush, mind you, though the intelligent reading man could find it in the newspapers before the War."

Robert Malone felt as if he had unfinished business in Africa. He could still hear the call of the muezzin to prayer, and see the minarets of a mosque etched against a purple desert evening sky along with camels and palm trees. Like Richard Burton and other explorers before him, he was hooked on the magic of Africa. Donovan had read Malone's file and recruited him for the job that was about to befall him. "Rob, I need you down in black Africa. Down in the Belgian Congo, in a place called Katanga Province. That's where the world's prime uranium comes from, and I need a competent man on the ground there to keep me informed."

"Uranium," Ivor Crane said with a shudder. "Sounds ghastly, doesn't it?"

Malone could see the image. "Dark, mysterious, ungodly." He held up the watch on his wrist to Donovan, asking: "Does it glow in the dark like this?"

Donovan shrugged patiently and honestly. "I don't know. I understand if it's concentrated enough it will. It's radioactive, that's for sure, so don't go bathing in it or anything."

Crane said: "I hear that those men who paint the watch dials are all getting lip and tongue tumors, have you heard that? They take their brushes like so, and rub them in their tongue to put a good point on them before dipping them in the uranium. Makes their mouths glow in the dark. Then they all get sick."

"Well," Donovan said, "it's nothing to mess around with, that's for sure. All we really need to know, Rob, is what the production statistics are and where the stuff is going. There has been a glut on the market for at least a decade--how many watch dials can there be? The Belgians own the Congo, and the Nazis own the Belgians. However, the Nazis are almost finished in Africa, and the Belgians tend to act on their own--we are getting ready to openly station troops down there, regardless of all the Nazi sympathizers, and I want you to keep an eye on them for us, Rob."

"Sure," Malone said self-confidently. He'd spent parts of his childhood in Malaya and other faraway rubber-producing tropical places that most people could only dream about. The idea of keeping tabs on yet another esoteric substance being gathered in a tropical locale seemed like more of the same to him. He would have no qualms being stationed there or anywhere else, as long as the women, the liquor, and the cigarettes were first-rate, along with the betting.

"You might," Donovan added, "keep an eye on our good friends the Soviets while you're at it. We need them almost as much as they need us, and there is one school of philosophy which says that after we beat the Nazis we'll have to watch our backs about Uncle Joe Stalin."

"I've heard that," Ivor Crane said with bland curiosity. "Anything to that, Sir?"

Donovan shrugged. "Hard to say. Russia is in ruins, almost one fifth of her population dead, her industry destroyed, rail capabilities gone, devastation everywhere. They'll need a century to recover from all the damage. I think we'd do well to focus on our primary adversaries right now, the Axis." He added. "Bob, you'll keep an eye on the uranium that Uncle Sam is lusting after. That may take you as far south as Capetown or as far north as the Kasbah. Do what you feel you have to do, get a solid foothold down there for us, and keep me informed through secure channels."

Crane snapped the fingers of his hale right hand and jiggled his hips. "Begin the Beguine!"

Malone laughed. A bachelor, he thought about the Belgian women stuck in the jungle. He'd done well with British girls stuck in places like Ghana just waiting for a fine young English-speaking fellow to come along with charm and breeding. "So when do I leave?" he asked Donovan.

The general's dour mien broke into a smile. "How about Monday?"

"That will be great with me, Sir." Rob Malone grinned back. What he doubted even Donovan knew was that he was awash in gambling debts more than ever in his life. Gambling was his passion and his weakness, more even than women. Women might come easy to him, but Lady Luck kept playing him bad. Maybe down there he'd find the angle he needed, that new spin on things, to pull out of the hole he was in and get himself flush again.

Mauritania, 1942

Tim thought the ruined tower looked dreary.

Twenty feet square, the tower overlooked the beach on one side and the desert on the other. The tower's whitewash, what was left of it, had long since gone dirty gray and was falling off, to reveal salt-stained brick underneath. From the tower's rear, a deserted road led into the desert.

As Tim approached, dazed by his hunger and thirst and by the wild beauty of this forsaken thousand-mile beach, he drew the Webley from its holster under his shoulders. He just wished it weren't so heavy, and hoped it wouldn't explode if he had to fire.

Nearby, he heard the roaring sound again, which sounded like a motorcycle revving. He conjured images of unfriendly troops, whether German or Vichy French, or the unknowns--Spanish, Moroccan, Berber, bandits--anything was possible.

The tower might once have been several stories tall, but it was now crumbling, and truncated halfway across its second story. One window had a sill of cracked mud bricks but no top, just moonlit clouds eerily drifting in a starry sky.

Tim walked around the concrete apron, holding the gun in his right hand and feeling his way along the wall with the palm of his other hand, partially for support because he felt weak and dehydrated. His lips were cracked and bleeding, his eyelids swollen. His nose felt swollen. Its surface seemed to be running with pus or fluid and wet shreds of sunburned skin that sloughed away when he brushed a hand across his face. Am I coming apart? He shuddered, seeing blood and skin shreds on his hand.

The road leading into the desert was overgrown with strange lunar-looking weeds that fit the silvery light in which they basked. Nobody had driven here in a long time, he could see. There were no tracks of any kind, and no vehicles, not even a rusty wreck. Nothing. No motorcycles either.

He came back around the front, to the open doorway whose wooden door had long ago vanished. He did notice a stenciled sign on a granite slab that had been mortised into the adobe facing, along with a faded tricolor and some sandblasted symbology referring to some obscure French army engineering unit. Faded French words looked official, but about as ludicrous as pompous edicts on shattered tablets of long-gone pharaohs along the Nile.

As he stepped across the stone threshold, a scrabbling noise caught his attention. Rats? He wished he had a flashlight.

In the next instant, something brushed past him, and he caught a clear glimpse: a large tan animal with an ungainly gait, gangling, clumsy.

A second later, he understood the roaring sound nearby.

He'd stumbled into a lion's den and he'd just scared out one of the cubs.

Something else was in the dark, barren interior, lying on the concrete floor: one or two other cubs too small to move?

He didn't have time to question. Now he understood the ear-splitting roar behind him. For an instant, he stared into the enraged face of one of nature's largest predators. It was an ancient, savage face--oddly angular, a breed of lion that wasn't quite like any he'd seen in photos or at the zoo. She was female, judging by the fact she had no mane--a primordial predator whose eyes glowed yellow in the moonlight, cold as a snake's, calculating, filled with a mix of fear and calculation, didn't matter which, and utter savage hatred because he stood between her and her cub.

He fired the revolver, but it only made a popping noise. Despite, or because of, being packed in grease to withstand the sea, the gun misfired. It sent off a shower of sparks that momentarily made the lioness flinch back a step. The mechanism jammed, and the trigger wouldn't fire again.

Tim dodged aside, throwing the gun in the air to distract her.

The lioness hesitated, taking a step sideways as the heavy metal object thudded into the sand near her.

Tim made it another step.

The lioness hesitated again, making a slinking body language as she cast a glance at the tower, despairingly, toward her children.

Tim made it to the edge of the tower and had no place to go.

On a sandy ridge thirty feet away and twenty feet above his head, several other lion shapes appeared in a tactical formation. They would herd him down to the water, where he could not escape.

The lioness roared and started to lope toward him.

Tim froze in deadly icy fear.

At that moment, several shots rang out.

The lioness was in mid-jump when she was hit by heavy caliber bullets. She landed with a hollow slam that shook the ground near Tim's feet curled up, and died with a final, truncated rasp. The other lion shapes disappeared.

Tim heard excited voices, men babbling, feet scrambling.

He smelled gunpowder and realized he was still alive, but frozen in place and trembling.

Abruptly, through the drifting haze of gunpowder, he saw several shapes swaying toward him. The shapes scrambled down the sand dune where the lions had been arrayed moments earlier, and approached Tim on the beach sand. They were Berbers on camels, with turbans wrapped around their heads and antique flintlock muskets protruding as long elegant shadows.

Several black men in torn khakis and red fezzes blocked the doorway and held a net among them. They laughed, showing broad white teeth as they babbled happily, and Tim instantly got the picture that there was a market someplace for live cubs as well as dead lionesses.

So if the lions had not killed him, would these desert nomads?

The leader of the Barbary nomads opened his turban, revealing a fierce, dark face with curly beard and scarred nose. The man jabbered at Tim in Arabic, French, and at least one local dialect.

Tim raised his hands and said: "Friend! Allah! Friend!"

"Allah?" Two of the camel-mounted men consulted each other. They swept their face coverings aside and looked at each other in disbelief, then at Tim with evident anger. Had he committed some kind of blunder, a blasphemy perhaps?

"Islam," one man said, adding a torrent of words in Arabic while waving a small book. "Al Q'uoran," Tim understood. "Allah illoh ... " "Allah is the holy God of all things. Muhammad, Blessed Be His Holy Name, is his only Prophet. Are you a believer?"

"Whatever you say," Tim said fervently, licking dry lips and feeling faint. As he spoke, men clambered from their mounts. One wrestled with a bulky object behind his saddle, producing a hydra-like hookah for multiple users. Men came menacingly toward Tim with ropes, guns, leering faces. At that moment, the world went blank, and Tim collapsed into darkness.

Congo, 1942

Major Robert Malone had little trouble integrating himself into diplomatic life in Leopoldville.

The tropical heat took getting used to, but Malone had experienced similar extremes in Malaysia and even in Florida. One had to get used to traveling everywhere with bodyguards, given years of growing popular unrest at Belgian mistreatment of their colonial subjects. The bodyguards could be inconvenient at moments when Rob found an opportunity to gamble. The card games were a way to raise cash, keep ahead of his creditors, and listen for interesting intelligence tidbits. Among the floating crap games, he could hobnob with every official of any significance in this part of Africa.

As a cover story, Rob was supposedly a journalist for some obscure news service, drifting among Allied military officers, diplomats, and bureaucrats that swarmed around the rich province. The Belgian exile government's colonial governor Pierre Ryckmans ran the Congo. Belgian rule had never been a kindly one, though nothing on the scale of the royal depredations in the late 1800s, which had created a world outcry and caused the king's personal colony to be handed over to the Belgian people as a national fiefdom.

Dozens of miners and other local laborers had recently died in uprisings in Luluabourg and Élisabethville. Relations with the locals remained testy.

Belgium was still in name and reality a Nazi possession, while the Belgian Congo was in reality already a staging area for the Allies in their drive to retake Africa from the Axis. Under cover, Rob was the eyes and ears of Wild Bill Donovan in the Congo. His concern was less with the Nazis, whose star had already badly waned in Africa, than with the incipient efforts by Stalin's Soviets to create the first atomic bomb and make the world safe for communism.

Rob's primary technical contact was a Belgian physicist, Henri Brégel, who lived with his wife and daughter in a villa in the resort town of Boma but spent much of his working time in Leopoldville where he served as a scientific advisor to various Allied governments. From Brégel, Rob learned that the United States had interned a shipload of prime Belgian uranium-235 at a dock in New York City. Initial research into using radioactive material was being conducted at a secret facility in Manhattan. That was all Henri Brégel knew, or was willing to divulge. From the importance Donovan placed on this mysterious green glowing watch-dial paint, Rob could readily surmise Brégel knew his health was at stake if he had a loose tongue.

Rob moved easily and elegantly in the frontier society in Leopoldville. He found the wives of European and American administrators were intriguing and bored, and their daughters eager and attractive. He learned who was selling what, and who needed that, while staying as squeaky clean as possible. Most people believed he was a foreign correspondent for several U.S. weekly journals, and probably nobody knew he was a U.S. Army officer, much less an O.S.S. operative.

As far as the women went, everything was "the war." C'est la guerre. Among the dalliances Rob cultivated was one with the neglected and beautiful wife of a Belgian mining engineer named Simon Clery--a big, brutal man who was away most of the time, usually in Katanga where rubber and coal were mined, along with uranium ore, diamonds, and the other fruits of a jungle paradise spoiled by human greed. Clery's wife was of no particular intelligence value, but she was beautiful and needy--and, like Rob Malone, had a dark and terrible secret. Rob only saw her occasionally, and he hardly thought of her when they weren't together, but each time he saw her she roiled up a lot of inner turmoil in him. Their affair was going nowhere, they both knew--among other things, she was married--which made it all the more passionate and pungent between them.

Rob found himself hovering around Brégel's 23 year old daughter Astrid--no child, certainly, and surely deflowered long since, though she radiated girlish innocence--who had been studying nursing at Louvain, but had fled with her mother and siblings to join their father not long after the German invasion in 1940. Astrid was a willowy blonde with bright blue eyes, a sweet smile, and long slender arms--she looked great holding a drink, and Rob discovered she was something of a lush. That would account for that perennial reddish blush in her creamy peach fuzz cheeks, he thought.

One day, he was invited to tea at the Brégel villa near Boma. This was 60 miles inland from the mouth of the Congo River, on the last upriver tidal beaches of the Atlantic Ocean. Rob, Brégel, Astrid, and several servants and bodyguards drove down to the beach in a white convertible Peugeot driven by a local in black uniform, white billed cap, and white gloves. There were several children along, and the party frolicked down to the tumbling river water. Brégel was a stiff, somewhat dour civil servant who insisted on wearing his suit and tie, though he made a concession by removing his dress shoes and socks. He sat in a beach chair sipping a vinegary Belgian ale and wiggling bluish veiny feet. Rob sat nearby, sipping Campari and soda, while Astrid walked down to the water with several small children. The sun filled her yellow dress, barely concealing in its glow young limbs that invited being touched.

Brégel held forth about Congo politics. A loyal bureaucrat, he assumed the Belgian Congo would return to its timeless colonial torpor as soon as the current Teutonic craziness had been resolved. Rob had been briefed by a midlevel State Department official from Katanga, a gray soul named Sylvester, who, when he passed about the fourth or fifth rum cola, became lubrifaciently detached and scholarly. According to Sylvester, local agitators like Joseph Kasavubu, Patrice Lumumba, and Moise Tshombe were pressing for independence, at a time when black Congolese were considered primitives and not allowed to own land, purchase alcohol, or similar prerogatives of human dignity. The colonial military had attempted mutiny recently, and there were constant strikes and riots with many deaths across the province. Many black revolutionaries had strong ties to the international workers' movement centered in Moscow. Rob listened and nodded sympathetically to Sylvester's barroom conversations at The Yank downtown, but Rob kept his own counsel privately. He had no love for European colonial powers, and felt sympathetic to the blacks, but reflected that in the United States, particularly in the South, a black man could be lynched for looking at a white woman the wrong way. Rob had his doubts about how the black man's lot could be improved in the Congo if it was still so dreadful in the alleged homeland of modern democracy, the United States. Rob also felt uneasy about staying involved in another country's colonial morass, particularly when the Belgians had been so arrogant and cruel, and made such a mess of things. Why inherit a century of resentment? Then again, as the Old Man (Donovan) had made clear, it was all about the future world balance of power--a compelling reason to lay prudence aside.

Brégel seemed to feel at ease with Rob, and let slip information that might be considered sensitive. Or was he trying to divert Rob's attention from Astrid? The girl was on her way back from the water now, toying with a slim bit of driftwood and looking mischievous. Time for her to sneak another glass of sour lambiek.

Brégel talked about yellowcake, the refined uranium ore avidly sought by all major countries. "Down there in Katanga," he said, "uranium oxide is in the ground and you can practically dig it out by hand. We have locals down there digging day and night, now that we can be certain the Germans won't be back to take it away. Your country will want the stock that is coming out. We must be careful of the Soviets, and these local monkeys who want to sell their souls to the Communists." The wattles under his chin shook with outrage, and his bushy gray eyebrows hid glowering steel-blue eyes.

Rob sat back, squinting his eyes shut in the late afternoon sunlight and not reacting, except to swat a large, loud fly.

"How are my men doing?" Astrid said, tipping back a bottle of lambic against china teeth, and sitting down in the sand beside Rob.

"Your men are solving the world's problems," Brégel said with a brushing motion of his red and blue mottled hands.

"The men are hungering for the company of someone who walks up from the sea like a young goddess," Rob said softly.

Astrid laughed, and her father didn't hear. Madame Sylvie Brégel of course missed nothing, but appeared to aid and abet her daughter in a subversive way. Rob noticed that Sylvie rarely sat beside Henri or touched him. Rob reached languidly behind his chair and pulled a cold Alsatian beer from a cooler kept refreshed by a black valet. It would be an interesting evening, and interesting sport. After a certain amount of subtle negotiation at some telepathic level assisted by gestures and nuances, the game became clear. At the moment, Sylvie had no need of actual assistance in bed. Rather, her game was to secure a sense of approval by flaunting still attractive charms and receive signals that, if she were open, they might connect on another day. During all this, Sylvie deftly saved Astrid at the last moment, reining the girl in with the children and servants and making off to the villa. This left Rob to drive back along the river with Brégel to the capital. Madame Brégel had rewarded Rob by contacting a mutual friend that afternoon in Soyo. Rob had momentarily forgotten about Regine Clery, and looked forward to some steamy relief with her from his needs. While the limousine with Brégel and Rob rocked through the deep Congo night under rustling trees and palm fronds with the great Congo river on their left. Rob listened to Brégel's endless monologues about his home in Belgium and his ideas about white people in Africa. Rob occasionally caught glimpses of another limousine following half a kilometer behind, and he guessed that would be Madame Clery.

He was right. The parties in their two cars, separately, each caught small bumpy river planes that smelled of spicy local food. Flying via Matadi and Luozi they arrived in Leopoldville in a little over two hours. There, Brégel thanked Rob for a lovely day and had himself driven off to his hotel suite near the Belgian mining conglomerate headquarters.

Rob, on the other hand, continued on with a taxi to the small but elegant Hotel Blankenberge, not far from the airport and the Congo River.

Regine Clery was in the waiting room reading a newspaper. The hotel was quiet and subdued, since it was getting late. The concierge, a gray-haired Arab, kept busy behind his counter, and the one page, a young native lad wearing white gloves and a round hat, took his time about sweeping dust out of the corners with a half-length broom.

Rob walked up and offered his arm. Regine put her paper aside and rose. She was a slim, elegant dark-haired woman of 30, wearing a crisply cut black jacket and dark dress with small flowers. Her husband, a mining engineer, was away in the field most of the time and had a black mistress in Katanga with whom he preferred to spend his free time. Regine was a French-speaking Walloon from Chimay in Hainaut. A strong touch of the Mediterranean, perhaps even Araby, ran in her veins, and her skin had a light complexion like gold tobacco, darkening around the finger joints. She said she had an ancestor who had come from France in the 1830s, with the Foreign Legion of Charles X, and married an African woman, probably an Egyptian, but she wasn't sure--it was a dark, hushed family secret. Regine had freckles the same dark color all over the sharp, exotic lines of a body perfectly made for skimpy Art Deco-style dresses. Her color made her the object of disdain (jealousy, Rob thought). She'd had a fine education in a cloister school and spoke flawless English in addition to French, Flemish, and German. The husband was an ignoramus, Rob had long since decided, and Regine needed rescuing. Her thin figure, though, came from another source.

"Hello, Regine."

"Rob, darling."

"Did you have a nice flight?" Rob said wrapping his hand over hers as she thrust her arm through his.

"I dozed," she said with a slight laugh. "Sylvie is my closest confidante. I had no idea you were in Boma."

"Does Sylvie know everything?"

"I'm sure she does. She is very tolerant. She helps me when she can." They walked arm in arm together as if they were married, a deceptive portrait. "I wish I could be like her."

"You're still young."

"A faded flower," Regine said.

"Nonsense. You just need a fresh start, that's all."

Regine looked at him sadly. There was hunger in her eyes, and he knew the routine.

"Want me to take you home?"

She shook her head.

They stepped outside for a few moments, and Rob asked: "Do you have it?"

She nodded, held up a small white packet. "Will you help me?" She handed him a tiny metal object. "Let's have just a snort and a nice drink first." This was only for starters, they both knew. Poor thing. Poor darling. Such a beautiful woman, married to a tree stump.

"My pleasure, Regine." Opening the small brown earring box inside the packet, he used the spoon she'd given him to take out a small quantum of heroin, one for each nostril. She held a finger on each opposite nostril and inhaled, quickly, violently, so that her cheekbones looked like ceramic and her eyes closed as if she were dying. He put the rest away, pressing it into her hands, and she stuffed it into her purse in the same motion. Then she leaned against the wall, face up toward the moonlight, and sighed deeply. Her breathing became relaxed and easy. "Merci."

They entered a tiny room overlooking the river with its lights, very romantic, and sat at a table with a candle. The proprietor, a tired looking old black man, shuffled out grumpily and informed them the restaurant was closed. After a bit of haggling, he left them two glasses and a bottle of Elephant palm wine. He offered to light the candle, but Rob emphatically raised his palm and shook his hand. The old man left the matches on the table and shuffled off. The wine was too sweet and too harsh and a bit warm, but they sipped it sparingly and let it wrap itself around them with its faint intoxicated aura. They held hands and laughed gently as they talked.

"Brégel was telling me about mining in Katanga," Rob said.

She laughed. "I heard enough about that when we first got here. Now I hear nothing." She shrugged. "It's just as well. After the war, c'est tout. We are finished. I go my way, he goes his way."

"He is a fool."

"We knew that long ago. And you, mon cher? You are not a fool. Will you ever marry?"

He grinned. "Probably not." Probably yes, but to a nice Virginia debutante who could fuss like a Southern lady but probably couldn't tell Angola in Africa from Angola in Louisiana. "You covered your tracks?"

She shrugged, lighting a cigarette. "I'm with Sylvie in Boma." She exhaled and he enjoyed the smells of her mouth, her tobacco, her perfume. He leaned close and kissed her. She leaned willingly, hungrily, forward. Their tongues swept silently together, in the silence of the little room where a clock ticked and out on the river a ferry whistle shrilled briefly, a steamy hiss that echoed around the hills and river bends.

"I have information for you," she said.

"Oh good. I need something to make my day interesting."

"This is good information, darling. It should get you started paying all that money you owe, and it should keep me supplied with what I need."

He held both her chill hands in his. "What, darling? Tell me."

"In the morning, sweetheart. I want to enjoy you with me tonight. In the morning, we will travel north together. You'll see." She touched his nose with the tip of her forefinger and made a naughty, promising face.

That night, Rob made love to Regine Clery in her husband's villa overlooking a bend in the Congo River.

Several times, he helped her shoot up, because she did not have the courage to face the needle herself. For his part, he licked a bit of the monkey but didn't want to get any further involved in its grip. Regine needed the stuff, but managed to get by most of the time with substitutes like cocaine and hashish brought in from the north by Arabs.

As he slipped into bed with her for the third time, she dozed off. Frustrated in his desire for her, he considered going out to find a tart on the street, but he was too tired. So he contented himself with one of her cigarettes and a tall glass of Clery's red Bordeaux. He fell asleep in bed beside her, trusting that her staff would let her know if by some astronomical chance the maitre was coming home, which he almost never did, and when he did one could tell by the bright headlights shining up the driveway and illumining the bedroom so that venetian blind shadows swam like shark gills on the wall. As Regine snored softly beside him, Rob fell asleep with one arm around her slender waist.

The next morning, while Regine was still sleeping, Rob took a taxi to his own little house in the suburbs.

There he shaved, showered, and had his maid make a solid breakfast for two, with strong black coffee. Whistling, he packed a travel bag and listened to the birds, the trees, and the street noise of Kinshasa.

Regine appeared at his house just in time as the heavyset maid--wrapped in silky white native dress, and frowning--brought their food. They ate under a large tree, at a mossy little table with two rickety wrought-iron chairs. Birds twittered loudly overhead, and every once in a while a monkey or a parrot screeched in the neighborhood.

Regine smoked a cigarette and laid her arm across the table. Rob cooked up a spoon and put a tourniquet on her. Carefully, he drew up the bubbling yellowish brown horse and injected her. She squinted and looked away, holding up fingers and cigarettes to shield herself from the view.

Rob ate heartily, while she picked at her dry toast, smoked, sipped coffee, and stared out through the hanging willow fronds. "What are you plotting, sweetheart?"

She flicked her cigarette carefully on the stones around the table. "We're going to fly up into Mauritania."

"Mauritania! That's far away!"

"Oh don't be silly. I know you go there with Willi and Walther on business."

"It's still a long way off. Why would I make the time for that?"

"To keep me company."

"I can keep you company right here."

"I know, but it will be worth it. You'll make money."

"Okay, that's interesting. How did you latch up with my old friends?"

"I watched you, darling. I was with you when you had them fly in a crate of French brandy to pay off a gambling debt. I made inquiries and found out they can hook me up with some Arabs in Mauritania who bring in my stuff from Tunisia and elsewhere. I met one of them long ago, in Belgium."

Malone considered carefully. She needed her stuff badly enough to take risks, but fortunately, he knew the two Germans well enough. They were expatriates, like so many people here. Normal Germans quickly became ex-Nazis once they got out of their toxic Hitler world. "Okay, it's a deal."

"You'll have a good time, Rob. I'll make sure of it." She puffed deeply, exhaled luxuriously as the drugs coursed through her mind. Rob, meanwhile, felt a slight sweat break out along his neck. "Regine, I wish you'd clear things like that with me first."

She sat up, looking drunk. She seemed to have trouble focusing for a second, and her lips trembled as if she wanted to speak. A minute later, she had recovered, and sat close to him. "Darling, it's the answer to all of our problems. They have a large amount of hashish and some opium that I have already agreed to buy from them, and I need you to go along to carry the cash. Plus there is supposed to be a pound of heroin and some cocaine for me. It will keep me for weeks. Bring a gun."

"How much cash exactly is that, Regine?"

"Ten thousand dollars."

He whistled. "That could get us robbed and killed along the way."

"Yes, but Willi and Walther are good men. I happen to know Willi from a sports flying club near Houffalize before the war, when the Germans still had to hide the fact that they were developing an air force. They were in thick with people from Fokker."

"Small world." Rob shook his head slowly. "You're sharp, babe."

"Intelligence, Rob. They have a connection to a Russian spy network up there. I know it because I overheard my husband talking with another Belgian last week. You can make a note of it for use in your little private business."

"Of which you must never speak," Rob said. He'd known her husband was an enthusiastic Communist, though just as much a Belgian nationalist opposed to letting the colored people steal back their own land.

"Just think," she said. "If this works out, and I'm sure it will, we can make this trip once every two months, or you could go more often. You can buy drugs from them, posing as an ex-pat. You can give me my bit, sell the rest, and pay off your debts."

"Brilliant," Rob said. It was a gamble, but he was just desperate enough to try. Besides getting some money to pay off his debts, he was developing a lead on a double agent, code-named Jaguar, playing for both Hitler and Roosevelt, which probably meant he was also in Uncle Joe's crib. That would make him a triple, but Rob was still working on that angle. He'd already hinted about it to his boss, Ivor Crane, and indications were that Donovan would look favorably on Rob if he could crack something that complicated.

Within 30 hours, they sat aboard the Märzig brothers' stolen Ju-52, headed north into Mauritania for their drug deal outside the desert city of Néma.

Mauritania, 1942

Tim Nordhall awoke feeling stiff and numb, to find that a woman sat beside him who was covered from head to foot in black robes. Over her head, she wore a black hood with gilded decorations around eerie looking eyeholes.

A fire crackled nearby, and he could smell the sea. He heard surf crashing faintly. Light wind keened through rock formations scoured by eons of blown grit. He smelled camel dung and the greasy smells that went along with camp life. He smelled charcoal and tea and tobacco. The woman looked up toward a knot of men around the fire and let out a low, quick yell. Then she spoke softly to him, offering him a broad shallow cup. He rose effortfully onto one side and accepted the cup. He sipped hot tea that tasted faintly of butter, cloves, and blood. It was salty to the taste, and he drank it in quick, short, eager sips. Anything to get salt and fluids down his throat. There had to be some food value to this stuff. "Thank you," he told her, "shukran."

"Ah," she said in the shadows of her veils, echoing: "shukran." It was about the only Arabic word he knew. She seemed appreciative, and let forth a small torrent of praise for God and kind words on Tim's head.

A man rose by the fire and came close. He was a tall and wiry mix of Negro and Caucasian, like so many North Africans. He had quick, intelligent eyes and a sharp mercenary mien, and spoke some desert dialect. Tim couldn't understand any of it, but sensed that he was in roughly the same bargaining position as the lion cub mewling in its net cage 100 feet away, or its dead mother lying beside it. Tim made beseeching sign language with his hands, with his entire body, promising peace, offering the sky if they took him to a police station.

The Berber laughed--a knowing and dirty snort and pulled a gun out with his right hand. He bent over and in a flash had a knife at Tim's throat. He held the gun on Tim while scraping the knife's razor edge loudly through the unshaven stubble on Tim's neck. Tim felt the pressure of the blade's edge moving over his skin, just strongly enough to indent the skin without breaking it, but he could feel each tiny nick and dent on the delicate nerve endings around his carotid artery as that blade slowly moved from one side to the other. The message was clear, and he looked up into the Berber's eyes in exhaustion and submission. He had never felt so helpless in his entire life, even while nearly drowning with his shipmates a day earlier.

Two other men tied Tim's feet together at the ankles so that he could not run. They laughed as they tied a small goat-collar around his neck. Every time he moved, the unevenly shaped, hand-carved wooden balls inside those steel bells would roll around with a rattling noise. Not only was he not going anywhere, but he was noisy as a London bus every time he breathed in and out. The men laughed, and one made a bleating noise. To them, he was something of a goat. He began to get the dreadful feeling that he was about to be sold along with the lion cub. Was there still slavery in this part of the world? Would he ever see civilization again?

Stomach was full, he belched uncomfortably as he sank into an exhausted slumber. The last thing he saw was the coppery faces of the men regarding him from around the campfire. He had the twin impressions that he had been drugged, and that they were debating what price they could fetch for him.

Tim awoke, retching.

His head was filled with fumes from poorly burned gasoline fuel, and his bones ached from being banged around on the steel floor of an old, tiny Citroen truck. Only a faded, worn carpet scrap separated him from the metal floor of the truck. A canvas awning over the top shielded him from the hot sun that shone through pinholes in the canvas, blinding him and searing his skin wherever the sun's rays struck. The air was dry and hot, like inside a furnace. His stomach seemed to want to jump out through his mouth. He jerked onto all fours, retching. Already, a thin watery puddle full of clotted milk bits covered the floor near him, and the smell was like rotting baby vomit baked in animal urine and old diesel spillage. At least, that was his muddled sense of what was coming out from inside him and mingling with the already not very charming contents of the truck.

The truck, in any event, had stopped moving. He'd been dimly and sickeningly conscious of movement throughout the early dawn hours and into the ever-hotter daylight as the vehicle bumped over old French military roads.

Each time he retched, the goat collar around his neck gave a series of spastic rattles, almost in a musical rhythm. It made men laugh harshly outside the truck where he couldn't see them. He didn't need to see them. He remembered their cruel faces from the night before.

His ankles were tightly bound together, and rubbed raw where they touched. Sand had gotten in the wounds, and flies buzzed mercilessly around the serum and hopped around over his vomit, annoying his eyes. The flies buzzed hungrily around the cream stuck to his cracked lips, and he made sputtering, spitting noises to blow them away.

When the men outside heard him, their tone changed from laughter to serious haggling. One threw aside the canvas flap on the back of the cargo container, letting in harsh sunlight. There was a crash as the tailgate went down, and a common roar of disgust at the sight and smell of him. A hand reached in, grabbed him by the collar, and yanked. Half-throttled, coughing, too weak to fight, he slid out over his vomit and landed on a mixture of hot sand and gravel and sharp little protruding rocks outside.

He was in a sooq, a market square. All around, two and three story mud buildings cast merciful shade, and he crawled out of the hot sunlight into the shade of several men's hems. A stick descended on his back, in a half-hearted whipping motion, as a white-bearded man negotiated unyieldingly with a shadowy man in a gray wool robe.

He was thirsty, and tried to get the man's attention.

The man hit him sharply on the back with the stick, making him cringe with pain. He tried to double over backwards, which was physiologically impossible, but he writhed with his hands reaching behind his back and his mouth open in pain. The goat bells rattled, and people around him laughed. Drifting in and out of delirium, he saw again the shark dismembering his fellow sailor under the water. He saw again the awkward pose of body--was the man already dead, or just numb with shock?--and then the plier-like attack of that shark--the darting, snapping grab, the floating pieces of the torso...

He found himself sobbing helplessly at the loss of all his shipmates, the realization that he hated Hitler for the first time in a flesh and blood visceral way for causing all this when he could be sitting in a miserable, damp, drafty factory by the East River in Fair Haven, toiling over a Seth Thomas engine, and listening to the alcoholic shop supervisor tormenting him about not taking a full hour for lunch ... it was all jumbled together in a blender of sobs and emotions and thirst and despair...

The man who purchased Tim was a wealthy merchant from Néma, far inland in the desert from the coast. This provincial capital lay not far from Mali both west and south. The fabled city of Timbuktu lay some 600 miles east across the desert.

Tim hardly ever got to see his owner. He was kept in a big, dark room in chains. It was not as unpleasant as the truck ride, except for the pain where his ankle was chafed by the cold iron.

He woke up in Néma, chained to a wall. At least, the goat collar was gone. His hands were manacled. A skinny Arab with a French accent and graying hair came to see him. "I am the school teacher Selim Bey of Néma, Mauritanian city. I speak English. What is your name, Sir?"

"Timothy Nordhall, Lieutenant Junior Grade, U.S. Navy, serial number..."

"Very pretty. British?"

"American."

"Yes, very pretty, thank you." The schoolteacher sat on a wooden chair at a scratched dark oak table with a glass top and smoked a cigarette. His features half-stayed in amber shadows. He had pale, delicate hands and a bit of a nervous tic. He had big dark puffy eyes and a paunch. Evidently he lived fairly well, but had a lot of stress. "Mr. Omar Nasr Tandileh has paid to have you here. He is wealthy man who owns much property in Néma. We are deep in the desert and there is no place to run. You will stay here until your embassy calls."

"Calls or comes?" Tim said. He sat in a corner, leaning against the coolness of a whitewashed mud wall. The floor was hard packed dirt, but had some frayed old oriental rugs thrown haphazardly over it. Tim pulled together a kind of soft seat for himself. The chain on his ankle was attached to a wrought iron grating inset over a small fireplace. It was mortared firmly in place. A little probing told him it would not come loose. No matter--where could he go, in the middle of the desert near the Mali border not too far from Timbuktu? The idea of escape was laughable.

"Calls, comes, they will negotiate. Very pretty. You will stay here quietly and if you have any concerns you call for teacher Selim Bey, you understand?"

"I understand, Mr. Selim Bey. Thank you."

Selim Bey had a way of mugging his cigarette, getting half of it wet while it hung with a long ash under his nose. Tim, who rarely smoked, didn't understand how the man could tolerate the smoke drifting through his eyes. Selim Bey rose and hitched his white pants up. He tucked his shirt in and came close, bending down to run a speculative and feminine pair of fingers up Tim's spine. "Very pretty. You lucky, Mr. Nasr Tandileh does not like sleep with men. If you stay quiet, Mr. Tim, it will be easy. If you make trouble, Mr. Nasr Tandileh will cut your foot off, then your tongue. You won't run far." He made a horrified face and pointed his index fingers at his own eyes. "Or he take your eyes out. Be careful. Very pretty." Selim Bey tilted his head to one side, with big eyes and a protruding tongue. He ran his fingers up and down Tim's back, grunting, while holding his other hand over his own thigh. Tim recoiled, throwing himself against the wall and raising his manacled hands to ward off the dirty old man.

Bey looked at his fingers as if to inspect their tips for possible damage. Shivers ran up and down Tim's spine. Still with that cigarette dangling like a physical appendage, Selim Bey reached behind the desk for a walking stick Tim had not noticed before. He gave the desk a sharp whack, and Tim shrank back at the clear threat, the ominous sense of beatings and other abuse to come if he did not cooperate.

Bey walked to the door. "You be smart, Mr. Tim. Very still, wait until negotiations complete. Nothing happen if you stay smart." With that, he saw himself out. The door clapped shut, and a latch descended with a slam. Tim imagined that Bey was being cut in on whatever Tandileh hoped to get from the Embassy for his investment. Everything had its price.

Tim tried mentally to push away the aura of slime the man had left in the room. He reached for the tin dog bowl nearby and splashed water on his dirty, stubbled face. Warm droplets like thick blood dribbled off his chin and down his chest, into the hairs under the ragged tunic they'd given him to wear.

It was quiet in this empty room with its torn little carpets. Tim felt sick and exhausted. He rested against the wall until he slumped down and started to go to sleep on his rugs, like a dog. He heard layers of noise outside the quiet nucleus of this gloomy hall. Just beyond the confines, he heard the clatter of pots and dishes in a kitchen, and the laughter and conversation of women. Beyond that, he heard the noise of the city, the braying of camels and other animals--no dogs, for those were considered unclean--but he heard a cat meowing someplace. Those animals all had more freedom than he did, but then again he reflected, he was alive and all the men he'd served with were dead, gone painfully to a watery grave. He listened to the haunting song of the muezzin pouring like a dark and baleful river of words through the air every few hours--"God is great. There is no God but God. Mohammed is the Messenger of God. Come to prayer and be saved."

Tim dozed as much as he could, but five times a day he awoke to the nightmarish sound of that call droning away. He began to tell apart the voices of the men who made that call to prayer from the highest minaret in the city. One was a higher, brighter voice, like that of a man happy with his work; the other, a dour and gloomy voice like that of a man wanting the world to suffer under the same penances and reproaches that crushed his own heart.

Tim grew tired of waiting in his prison, and started to plot an escape. He was still shackled and chained to the wall, and his ankles had developed weeping wounds that caused him considerable pain. His legs kept growing numb, and he kept having to shift painfully around to keep them exercised. This dance of the hours coincided with the passage of shadows across the white walls like the shadows on a sundial, and kept him hypnotized.

In all of this time, he only met his owner once. Mr. Nasr Tandileh was a brown-skinned man of Egyptian origin. So said Madame Noualah, a dumpy middle-aged wife of his who came in twice a day to rub fats and oils into Tim's wounds. She spoke a little bit of English. Apparently, Selim Bey gave English lessons to Nasr Tandileh's four wives. Tandileh came in one day, wearing a khaki and brown uniform of his own design, which was a cross between that of the French Foreign Legion (Vichy) and the Spanish Foreign Legion. He wore a French-style officer's kepi, dark blue, with gold braid and red top. He wore a cape, evidently borrowed from the Spaniards not far up the line in Morocco's western Sahara district. And, on his arm, was an armband with a French tricolor but in the middle of that was a small red diamond with a white circle inscribed, and, within that, a black swastika. He wore highly polished brown boots, yellow puttees, jodhpur riding trousers, and a dark green-brown wool British battle jacket associated with Eisenhower.

Evidently weighing his loyalties, Mr. Nasr Tandileh no doubt understood the British and Americans were wresting Africa back from the fascists, but there was always the danger of Adolf and Benito's return. Besides, western Africa was largely a French operation, since the French were situated just across the Med. The French had staked their claim in North Africa around 1830, after the end of their Napoleonic follies, and Louis Philippe had created the FFL to do the heavy lifting in the invasion of Tunisia and Algeria. In the 1920s, Spain had followed with its own FL and, between the two nations, they'd broken the back of Barbary's Rif warlords.

Two swarthy thugs accompanied Nasr Tandileh during his inspection of his prisoner, while Tim lay moaning on the floor from an ankle infection he was developing from the shackles. Turning up his nose, Nasr Tandileh left the room after just five minutes with his bodyguards. Tim heard a powerful engine start up in a garage just on the other side of the wall. This got Tim using his hearing, like a kind of Huff Duff, to divine the layout of the sprawling house with its harem, and the world beyond.