The One Man by Andrew Gross

Author:Andrew Gross
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466892187
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

THIRTY-EIGHT

WEDNESDAY.

At dawn, the Daimler personnel car with the swastika under the war eagle on its door sped through the Polish countryside, its headlights flashing through the fog.

Colonel Martin Franke sat in the back.

His still-wet-behind-the-ears driver wore the Abwehr insignia on his collar but was just months out of whatever they were putting the new call-ups through these days as training and clearly didn’t know his way behind a wheel. It was over three hundred kilometers from Warsaw to Oswiecim, four hours in good weather along the rutted S8, longer in this soup.

“Please, faster, Corporal,” Franke said impatiently. “Go around that truck.” A supply truck had slowed in front of them.

“Yes, Colonel,” the corporal answered, hitting the gas.

Franke had persuaded his superior, General Graebner, to authorize him to go to the camp. The call had gone to Berlin, where the camp commander, SS Colonel Hoss, was in conference with Reichsführer Himmler and Reinhart Heydrich he was told. A Major Ackermann had been left in charge. So Franke knew he had better be right on this; the showdown between Canaris and Himmler for the Führer’s favor was not a secret. To embarrass either of them would mean nothing but the Eastern Front for him.

But Franke felt certain, more so each time he went through it, that his instincts were correct. That the camp there had to be the target of whatever was being planned. The cable “the truffle hunter is en route.” The local report of the sighting of a plane. The parachuter who’d been spotted. The birchwood forest. The region was thinly populated and there were no known troop activities or items of any strategic interest that would point to anything else.

It made Franke’s blood stir. Blood that had long sat dormant. For the past year he’d been underused and pushed aside. Someone was definitely here. From where? England, perhaps. And what for? An attack? An escape? An act of sabotage?

Now he just had to find out the who and the why.

If he was successful, Franke could almost taste how all his past shame would finally be put behind him. Himmler himself would be watching now. His wife would take him back, and with it, his position, the comfortable schloss in Rottach-Egern.

Everything depended on him rooting out this man.

Three more hours. He glanced at his watch. “It would be good to arrive today,” he called to the driver, who had now slowed for a herd of goats crossing the road. The Polish roads were all oxen paths. The driver hit the horn loudly.

A hunger churned inside Franke. Someone was clearly here. He just had to find him. This man. Wherever he had come from.

This truffle hunter.

It was a match of wits, Franke said to himself. A chess match.

You think you are alone. You think you are under the net. But you are wrong.

There is my net. My nose that will smell you when I see you.

Now it is just you and me.

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