The Saboteurs (Men at War 5)

What the hell?

Two blocks later, the fishmonger turned east and, now driving slowly, wended his way down to dockage on the East River.

Beyond a

tall wooden piling with a sign reading PIER 10 there was moored a rusty steel-hulled vessel about seventy feet long. A cargo truck was alongside it, on the wooden finger of the dock, and what looked like stevedores were moving something off the boat.

“This is it,” the fishmonger said.

“It what?”

“The Annie,” the fishmonger said, then looked over his shoulder. “Get out.”

[ FIVE ]

Room 305

The Adolphus Hotel

1321 Commerce Street

Dallas, Texas

1540 5 March 1943

Rolf Grossman was anxious.

The German agent paced the spacious room of the downtown luxury hotel where he and Rudolf Cremer had been staying since Wednesday, when they had arrived by train from Birmingham.

All week they had been trying to keep a low profile—especially after Grossman’s screwup Sunday night when he dropped his Walther PPK somewhere in the Atlanta train station—and now that something was finally about to happen, he was unbearable.

“How much longer?” he said.

Cremer, sitting at one end of the long couch by the open window, looked casually over the top of the afternoon edition of the Dallas Daily Times-Herald.

He did not like this behavior just before they carried out an operation. Grossman always became too agitated and his heightened attitude tended to make him careless. Losing the damned pistol was an obvious example.

Both men were dressed in simple black suits, white shirts, and black leather shoes that could stand a shine.

Cremer glanced at his Hamilton wristwatch.

“Soon,” he said. “The commuter rush begins in about twenty minutes. Be patient.”

Grossman walked around the suitcases that they had bought in the second-hand store in Birmingham and that they now had placed by the door and went to the Westinghouse radio that was on a table beside one of the two beds. He turned the ON-OFF/VOLUME dial and the speaker crackled. He tried to tune in a station by turning the other dial, but all he got was static. He hit the side of the radio with the open palm of his left hand.

“I’ve hated this hotel since we got here,” Grossman said disgustedly. He almost spat out the words.

“I like it,” Cremer said in an even tone. “That beer baron—”

“A traitor to our country, if you ask me.”

Cremer shrugged. “So you keep saying. Busch began making beer in America in the middle 1800s. I don’t think it is fair to judge him now, almost a hundred years later, using your standards for this war.”

Grossman grunted. “You are either German or you’re not.”

“Remind me of your family background again?” Cremer said.

Grossman had confided during the long train trip from Birmingham to Dallas that his mother was French.