Designated Targets

The titanic effort required of the Nazi superstate to rise up and throw itself across the English Channel inevitably focused the energies of the Reich in northern France. The Gestapo and the SS were both kept busy trying to suppress the French resistance, which was sacrificing itself in a desperate assault on German preparations for the invasion of Great Britain.

Thousands of Frenchmen and -women would die in the next few days to give their traditional enemies, the English, a fighting chance against Jürgen Müller’s countrymen. He pondered the ironies as he polished his great-grandfather’s war watch and wondered what role his forebear would play in the crusade of the coming days. In Müller’s universe, he’d been a company commander in the Gross Deutschland Division. His ancestor had been executed for holding a river crossing against the Red Army during the retreat from Moscow. Saving the lives of hundreds of his men was considered defeatist, and had cost Heinrich Müller his own life.

His family had gone into the camps shortly after.

This same watch still sat in his great-grandfather’s breast pocket somewhere. Probably in a forward depot near the French coastline, where the Gross Deutschland would await transport to Britain, should the airborne assault gain a foothold. Holding the watch gingerly in his “injured” hand—the one encased in a fake plaster cast—Müller rubbed at the glass face with a handkerchief. Apart from that glass face, which had been replaced sometime in the 1960s, this timepiece was the same one his ancestor carried, right down to the subatomic level.

Müller could only wish that human nature could be as constant.

He had volunteered for this mission, knowing that he would most likely not return from his personal journey into the darkness of Hitler’s Germany. But that didn’t concern him. If captured, he was wetwired, not just to resist the pain of torture, but to laugh in the face of his tormentors. However, there was no spinal insert that would dull the horror of seeing the children he had really come to save. He wasn’t supposed to seek them out—in fact, he had been specifically ordered to avoid them at all costs.

But Müller had come fully intending to disobey his controllers. He would carry out his primary mission: the capture, hostile debriefing, and termination of Colonel Paul Brasch. But once that was done, he would be a free agent. And then he intended to save his family.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t turning out to be so simple. He wasn’t concerned about Brasch. No, that would run smoothly. But as he obsessively polished Heinrich Müller’s watch, sitting in the small park across from the apartment block of his prime target, he felt like a man who was slowly being drained of life by a succubus. His eyes were hollow and his soul withdrawn. He appeared haunted and lost, which was to his advantage, in one sense. It fit perfectly with his cover.

But it wasn’t an act. For he had broken the one promise he’d made to himself—that he would execute the mission first.

Müller had been unable to resist the urge to seek out his family, just to catch a glimpse of the children. Of Hans, who would be beaten to death protecting his little brother, Erwin, from a homosexual rapist. Of little Erwin, gunned down without reason by an SS guard. He had seen them with their sisters, Lotti and Ingrid, but it had been a terrible mistake.

To his horror Hans was dressed in the uniform of the Hitler youth, and as Müller had stood there, completely numb, they had all skipped past, laughing merrily at the eldest boy’s story of having chased and kicked an old Jew, while away at camp.

Müller was so lost in his dark thoughts that he almost missed Brasch, exiting the door of his building and hurrying off to catch the tram to work.

He hadn’t needed the overcoat. It was, unfortunately, an unseasonably warm day.

Brasch had been praying for foul weather, for anything that might hinder the success of Sea Dragon. He had done what he could to, at great risk to his family’s survival. Now it was down to Providence, and the Allies.

He still found it hard to believe that he—a winner of the Iron Cross—had actually betrayed his homeland to them. As he made his way into the foyer of the Armaments Ministry, through the hive of National Socialists and their Wehrmacht mercenaries, he wondered if any of the self-doubt and fear showed on his face. He knew it was a common conceit of the treacherous that they stood at the center of events, and thought themselves to be the object of everyone’s attention. But he was a rational man, with enough strength of will to be able to avoid that potentially fatal self-absorption.