Hazardous Duty (Presidential Agent 8)

[ONE]

La Casa en el Bosque

San Carlos de Bariloche

Río Negro Province, Argentina

0600 7 June 2007

Sweaty woke up, sat up, and shook Charley’s shoulder.

When he looked up at her, she ordered, “You better go, and quietly, down the corridor to your room.”

“Like a thief in the night?” Charley responded.

“I don’t want His Eminence to suspect we’re sleeping together,” she said.

“His Eminence either suspects we have been sharing this prenuptial couch for some time or is about to proclaim ‘Hallelujah! A second immaculate conception.’”

“God will punish you for your blasphemy,” Sweaty announced, and, when that triggered something else on her mind, went on: “And don’t try to tell me you didn’t tell His Eminence to go fu—”

“You heard what he said, my love,” Charley argued.

“His Eminence said he ‘would remember if you said something like that.’ Not that you didn’t say it. He remembers it all right!”

“Try to remember that you’re a bride-to-be and an expectant mother, and no longer an SVR podpolkovnik, my love.”

At that point, Sweaty literally kicked him out of the bed.

Then, with Max, his 120-pound Bouvier des Flandres, trailing along after him, he went down the corridor to “his room.”

Charley had “his room” in La Casa en el Bosque from his first visit, which was to say long before Sweaty. Originally, it had then been “the Blue Room,” the one from which he had just been expelled. After Sweaty, in consideration of “what the girls”—Alek’s and Dmitri’s daughters—would think of illicit cohabitation, the Blue Room had become Svetlana’s room, and the not-nearly-as-nice room he walked into now, his.

“The trouble with getting kicked out of bed at oh-six-hundred, Max,” Charley said as the dog met his eyes and turned his head, “is that I can never get back to sleep. Is it that way with you?”

There was no question in Charley’s mind that Max understood everything he said to him.

Without realizing that he was doing so, he had spoken in Hungarian. Max had been born and raised in Budapest, where he had lived with Eric Kocian, publisher of the Budapest edition of the Tages Zeitung.

Max cocked his head the other way, and then moved it again in what might well have been a nod, signaling that he, too, had trouble getting back to sleep after having been kicked out of bed.

Eric Kocian had been an eighteen-year-old unteroffizier—corporal—in the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad. Wounded, he had sought shelter in the basement of a ruined building, where he found a seriously wounded oberst—colonel—who he knew would die unless he immediately received medical attention.

At considerable risk to his own life, Kocian had carried the officer, Oberst Hermann Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger, through heavy fire to an aid station. While doing so, he was again wounded.

At the aid station, doctors decided that the Herr Oberst be loaded onto a Junkers JU-88 for shipment out of Stalingrad. And done so immediately, as the Russians were about to take the airfield, after which there would be no more evacuation flights.

At the airstrip, Oberst von und zu Gossinger refused to allow himself to be loaded aboard “the Aunty Ju” unless Unteroffizier Kocian was allowed to go with him. There was literally no time to argue, and the young unteroffizier, dripping blood from his last wound, was hoisted aboard.

The aircraft—the last to leave Stalingrad—took off.

Surprising the medics, Oberst von und zu Gossinger lived and had recovered to the point where he was on active duty when the surrender came. Having found his name on an SS “Exterminate” list, his American captors quickly released him from the POW camp in which he and Kocian—now his orderly—were confined.

The oberst returned to the rubble of his home and business in Fulda, and Kocian went to Vienna, where he learned his family had been killed in an air raid. Kocian then went to Fulda.

It became a legend within the Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H., organization that the type for the first postwar edition of any of the Tages Zeitung newspapers had been set on a Mergenthaler Linotype machine “the Colonel” and “Billy Kocian” had themselves assembled from parts salvaged from machines destroyed in the war.

Billy Kocian began to resurrect other Tages Zeitung newspapers—starting in Vienna—as the Colonel gave his attention to resurrecting the Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H., empire in other areas.