The ambulance arrived next. The sergeant removed the victim’s wallet from his pants. The victim was one Siegfried Baum-wonderful, the lieutenant thought, a Jew-from the Altona district of Hamburg. The driver of the car was French. He decided he had to ride in to the hospital with the victim. An “international” accident: there’d be extra paperwork on this. The lieutenant wished he’d stayed in the Gasthaus across the street and finished his after lunch pilsener. So much for devotion to duty. Then there was his possible mobilization to worry about . . .
The ambulance crew worked quickly. A cervical collar was fitted around the victim’s neck, and a backboard brought in before they rolled him over onto the stretcher. The broken lower legs were immobilized with cardboard splints. The paramedic clucked over them. Both ankles looked to be badly crushed. The whole procedure took six minutes by the lieutenant’s watch, and he boarded the ambulance, leaving three police officers to manage the rest of the incident and clear the accident scene.
“How bad is he?”
“Probably fractured his skull. He has lost a lot of blood. What happened?”
“Walked out into traffic without watching.”
“Idiot,” the paramedic commented. “As if we don’t have work enough.”
“Will he live?”
“Depends on the head injury.” The ambulanceman shrugged. “The surgeons will be working on him within the hour. You know his name? I have a form to fill out.”
“Baum, Siegfried. Kaiserstrasse 17, Altona District, Hamburg.”
“Well, he’ll be in the hospital in four minutes.” The paramedic took his pulse and made a notation. “Doesn’t look Jewish.”
“Be careful saying things like that,” the lieutenant cautioned.
“My wife is Jewish. His blood pressure is dropping rapidly.” The ambulanceman debated starting an IV, but decided against it. Better to let the surgeons make that decision.
“Hans, have you radioed in?”
“Ja, they know what to expect,” the driver replied. “Isn’t Ziegler on duty today?”
“I hope so.”
The driver horsed the ambulance into a hard left turn, and all the while the two-tone siren cleared traffic ahead of them. One minute later he halted the Mercedes and backed it into the emergency receiving area. A doctor and two orderlies were already waiting.
German hospitals are nothing if not efficient. Within ten minutes the victim, now a patient, had been intubated to protect his airway, punctured for a unit of O-positive blood and a bottle of IV fluids, and wheeled up to neurosurgery for immediate surgery at the hands of Professor Anton Ziegler. The lieutenant had to stay in the emergency room with the registrar.
“So who was he?” the young doctor asked. The policeman gave the information over.
“A German?”
“Does that seem strange?” the lieutenant asked.
“Well, when the radio call came in, and said you were coming also, I assumed that this was, well, sensitive, as though a foreigner were injured.”
“The auto was driven by a Frenchwoman.”
“Ach, that explains it. I thought he was the foreigner.”
“Why so?”
“His dental work. I noticed when I intubated him. He has a number of cavities, and they’ve been repaired with stainless steel-sloppy work.”
“Perhaps he originally comes from the East Zone,” the lieutenant observed. The registrar snorted.
No German ever did that work! A carpenter could do better.” The doctor filled out the admission form rapidly.
“What are you telling me?”
“He has poor dental work. Strange. He is very fit. Dressed well. Jewish. But he has miserable dental work.” The doctor sat down. “We see many strange things, of course.”
“Where are his personal effects?” The lieutenant was a naturally curious type, one reason he’d become a policeman after his service in the Bundeswehr. The doctor walked the officer to a room where the personal effects were inventoried for secure storage by a hospital employee.
They found the clothing neatly arranged, with the jacket and shirt separate so that their bloodstains would not damage anything else. Pocket change, a set of keys, and a large envelope were set aside for cataloging. The orderly was filling out a form, looking up to list exactly what had come in with the patient.
The policeman lifted the manila envelope. It had been mailed from Stuttgart yesterday evening. A ten-mark stamp. On an impulse he pulled out a pocketknife and slit the top of the envelope open. Neither the doctor nor the orderly objected. This was a police officer, after all.
A large and two smaller envelopes were inside. He opened the large one first and extracted the contents. First he saw a diagram. It looked ordinary enough until he saw that it was a photocopy of a German Army document stamped Geheim. Secret. Then the name: Lammersdorf. He was holding a map of a NATO communications headquarters not thirty kilometers from where he stood. The police lieutenant was a captain in the German Army Reserves, and held an intelligence billet. Who was Siegfried Baum? He opened the other envelopes. Next he went to a phone.
ROTA, SPAIN
The transport jet arrived right on time. A fair breeze greeted them from the sea as Toland emerged from the cargo door. A pair of sailors was there to direct the arrivals. Toland was pointed to a helicopter a hundred yards away, its rotor already turning. He walked quickly toward it, along with four other men. Five minutes later he was airborne, his first visit to Spain having lasted exactly eleven minutes. No one attempted conversation. Toland looked out one of the small windows available. They were over a patch of blue water, evidently flying southwest. They were aboard a Sea King antisubmarine helicopter. The crew chief was also a sonar operator, and he was fiddling with his gear, evidently running some sort of test. The interior walls of the aircraft were bare. Aft was the sonobuoy storage, and the dipping sonar transducer was caged in its compartment in the floor. For all that, the aircraft was crowded, most of its space occupied by weapon and sensor instrumentation. They’d been in the air for half an hour when the helo started circling. Two minutes later, they landed on USS NIMITZ.
The flight deck was hot, noisy, and stank of jet fuel. A deck crewman motioned them toward a ladder which led down to the catwalk surrounding the deck, and into a passageway beneath it. Here they encountered air conditioning and relative quiet, sheltered from the flight operations going on overhead.
“Lieutenant Commander Toland?” a yeoman called out.
“Here.”
“Please come with me, sir.”
Toland followed the sailor through the rabbit warren of compartments below the flight deck, and was finally pointed to an open door.
“You must be Toland,” observed a somewhat frazzled officer.
“Must be-unless the time zone changes did something.”
“You want the good news or the bad news?”
“Bad.”
“Okay, you’ll have to hot-bunk. Not enough berths for all of us intel types. Shouldn’t matter much, though. I haven’t slept for three days-one of the reasons you’re here. The good news is that you just got another half a stripe. Welcome aboard, Commander. I’m Chip Bennett.” The officer handed Toland a telex sheet. “Looks as though CINCLANT likes you. Nice to have friends in high places.”
The message announced tersely that Lieutenant Commander Robert A. Toland, III, USNR, had been “frocked” as a Commander, USNR, which gave him the right to wear the three gold stripes of a commander, but not to collect a commander’s pay just yet. It was like a kiss from one’s sister. Well, he reflected, maybe a cousin.
“I guess it’s a step in the right direction. What am I going to be doing here?”
“Theoretically you’re supposed to assist me, but we’re so friggin’ overwhelmed with information at the moment that we’re divvying the territory up some. I’m going to let you handle the morning and evening briefs to the battle group commander. We do that at 0700 and 2000. Rear Admiral Samuel B. Baker, Jr. Son of a B. He’s an ex-nuc. Likes it quick and clean, with footnotes and sources on the writeup to read afterwards. He almost never sleeps. Your battle station will be in the CIC with the group tactical warfare officer.” Walker rubbed his eyes. “So what the hell is happening in this crazy world?”
“What’s it look like?” Toland answered.
“Yeah. Something new just came in. The space shuttle Atlantis was pulled off the pad at Kennedy today, supposedly for a computer glitch, right? Three newspapers just broke a story that she was taken down for payload replacement. They were supposed to loft three or four commercial communications birds. Instead, the payload is reconnaissance satellites.”
“I guess people are starting to take this seriously.”
AACHEN, FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY
“Siegfried Baum” awoke six hours later to see three men wearing surgical garb. The effect of the anesthesia still heavy on him, his eyes could not focus properly.
“How are you feeling?” one asked. In Russian.
“What happened to me?” The major answered in Russian.