The Saboteurs (Men at War 5)

“I’m sorry, Richard—”

Koch then remembered the car that he had seen when he walked up to Pete’s looking for his Ford. “What about what’s parked in front of the bar?”

Stevens thought for a moment. “No car that I own. Must belong to someone who got too drunk last night and left it.” He paused. “How desperate are you?”

Koch didn’t respond. He thought, I could just steal the goddamned car.

“How about a truck?” Stevens said and smiled. “I do have a truck.”

Koch considered that a short moment. “Get me the keys to it.”

“Now, I have to warn you—”

“Just get me the goddamned keys!”

Stevens looked at him a moment.

“Okay. And so there’s no bad feelings about this situation with your car, I’ll give you a deal on the truck.”

“You sure as hell will,” Koch said, and thought, You don’t know how good of one.

“It’s in the safe,” Stevens said, turning for the bedroom. “I’ll be just a moment.”

A moment later when he returned, Stevens held a chrome-plated Smith & Wesson .38 caliber revolver and had it aimed at Koch.

When Koch entered the cottage—passing Rudolf Cremer, who had gone to the door with pistol in hand when he heard the footsteps coming up the stairs—he found that one of the shutters over a window facing east had been pulled back and morning light flooded the main living area.

Rolf Grossman sat at the kitchen table, finishing the field cleaning of his Walther; he had lubricated and reassembled it after getting out the sand that seemed to have collected in its every crack and crevice.

The agents had changed out of their black clothing and now wore the light-colored, casual American-style clothing that they had brought.

Spread out on the floor were the contents of the soft bags: electric blasting caps, two-by-three-inch mechanical time-delay devices (their mechanisms built like a wrist-watch’s, with gears and springs), other slow-fuse devices disguised as pen-and-pencil sets, ampoules of sulfuric acid, boxes of 9mm ammo, bundles of currency, and more.

The men had taken it all out to ensure that it was divided up evenly between teams, then repacked the gear into olive drab canvas duffels that they had packed.

Kurt Bayer was repacking his green duffel when he glanced over at Koch and saw the bloody cloth tied around his left thigh.

“Ach!” Bayer exclaimed. “What the hell happened?”

Koch walked with scarcely a limp toward the couch and sat heavily on it.

“It’s nothing,” he said. He looked at the gear spread out. “How soon before everyone is ready to go?”

Cremer and Grossman were now moving quickly toward Koch.

“Do we need to go immediately?” Cremer said excitedly. He looked toward the cottage door. “Is anyone chasing you?”

Koch shook his head. “Relax. Everything is okay. But we should get going as soon as possible.”

Grossman pointed at the leg and, in an accusatory tone, said, “What the hell did you do?”

Koch looked at him a moment. “Fuck you. I said everything is okay.”

He untied the cloth—what Bayer now recognized had been a white T-shirt—and inspected the woun

d, a small, oozing red pulp hole on the outside of the thigh that reminded Bayer of a very wet, chewed-up pencil eraser.

“It went in,” Koch said matter-of-factly, “and it went out. No serious tissue damage. Bleeding is done. Just need to clean it up.”