The Woman Who Loved Too Well by David Orsini

Author:David Orsini
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: love, raf, betrayal and deception, suspense action fiction
Publisher: David Orsini

Chapter Six

The Real Gerhard

From the beginning, Marc’s plan to destroy Gerhard played itself out differently from what he had anticipated. The difference shadowed not only Simone’s movements, but his own activities as well.

He had expected, first of all, to be on a week’s leave during the period when he would arrive in Lausanne to put in motion his slow killing of Gerhard. That he would be on leave at that time was not an unrealistic expectation. Flying Halifax bombers, Avro- Lancasters, and Hawker Tempest fighters, he had recently participated in eight combat missions within a span of twelve brutal days. He had earned new leave-time. At the last, though, the Alsace squadron of which he was a prominent member ordered him to additional missions over the ports, railways, airfields, and industrial districts of Berlin, Hamburg, and Cologne. The bombings of the cities were especially punishing. They caused spiraling firestorms and left tens of thousands of Germans dead.

Two weeks must pass before he received his leave.

So he told Simone when he telephoned her the news about the change in their plans.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll find a good reason for postponing Lausanne. I’ll phone Gerhard today. I’ll tell him that it will be two weeks before the hospital administrators will approve my leave from my nursing duties.”

Her brisk words carried both determination and ingenuity. He saw that she was on his side and that she was going to do everything to make their plan work. Even her parting kiss seemed more intense. They were, he felt, on their way to recovering what they had lost.

Not only Simone was on his side. Luck was there, too. Only a day later Simone telephoned him some good news. Gerhard’s own plans were changed. He, too, was being sent into more combat missions. Because the Germans were losing many pilots, the Luftwaffe was assigning him to new aerial battles. Gerhard promised to meet Simone in Lausanne in fifteen days.

“Perfect,” Marc told Simone. “Things are working just as we want them.”

“I’ll meet you in Lausanne in two weeks,” she said. “We’ll have time to review your plan before Gerhard arrives there.”

That he would have to wait fifteen days before he killed Gerhard might have unsettled a different kind of man. But Marc stayed in control. The personal disappointments that hovered about his life and the rigorous military experience that kept testing him had not only sharpened his perceptions. They had made him a hardhearted man. But those experiences did not persuade him to love Simone any less. In fact, he loved her with the same brooding passion that he had always brought to their relationship.

In fifteen days, he was going to kill the man who had slept with his wife. He could be patient when he had to be. He could wait. After he killed him, Gerhard would be dead forever.

During these intervening days, while summoning rigorous self-discipline and a clearly-focused awareness of his military mission, he did not permit himself to think of any essential

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