The chair he sat in was at least two hundred years old. He had tipped it back and was balancing on its rear legs. His feet rested on the railing of the tower. Beside him on the stone floor was a graceful silver coffeepot with a long, curving spout. Beside it was a bottle of Courvoisier cognac.
His coffee was liberally braced with the cognac.
Next to the coffeepot was a pair of Ernst Leitz, Wetzlar, Spower binoculars resting on a leather case. And next to that was a Thompson 45-caliber ACP machine-pistol–which is to say, a Thompson equipped with a pair of handgrips, rather than a forearm and a stock. The Thompson had a fifty round drum magazine.
Fulmar leaned over and picked up the Ernst Leitz binoculars and carefully studied the horizon in the direction of Ourzazate. He was hoping to see the cloud of dust an automobile would raise.
When he saw nothing, he put the binoculars down, then leaned to the other side of the chair, where he’d placed a Zenith battery-powered portable radio. He turned it on, and a torrent of Arabic flowed out.
Fulmar listened a moment, then smiled and started to chuckle.
It was an American broadcast, probably from Gibraltar, a message from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, President of the United States, to the Arabicspeaking population of Morocco.
“Behold, the lionhearted American warriors have arrived,” the announcer solemnly proclaimed. “Speak with our fighting men and you will find them pleasing to the eye and gladdening to the heart.”
“You bet your ass,” Fulmar said, chuckling.
“Look in their eyes and smiling faces,” the announcer continued, “for they are holy warriors happy in their sacred work. If you see our German or Italian enemies marching against us, kill them with guns or knives or stones–or any other weapon that you have set your hands upon.”
“Like a camel turd, for example,” Fulmar offered helpfully.
“The day of freedom has come!” the announcer dramatically concluded.
“Not quite,” Fulmar replied. “Almost, but not quite.” He was thinking of his own freedom. Second Lieutenant Fulmar was at the moment the bait in a trap. Well, there again, not quite. Some very responsible people considered it likely that the bait–whether through cowardice, enlightened self-interest, or simply ineptitude–would, so to speak, stand up in the trap and wave the sniffing rat away. The bait himself kind of liked that idea.
That, of course, hadn’t been the way they had explained the job to him.
In several little pep talks they’d assured him they were totally confident that he could carry this “responsibility” off. But Fulmar’s lifelong experience with those in authority had taught him otherwise.
Fulmar had his current situation pretty well figured out. It was kind of like a chess game. From the time he had received his first chess set, a Christmas gift from his mother’s employer when he was ten, he had been fascinated with the game–and intrigued by the ways it paralleled life.
In life, for instance, just as in chess, pawns were cheerfully sacrificed when it seemed that would benefit the more powerful pieces.
In this game, he was a white pawn. And he was being used as bait in the capture of two of the enemy’s pieces, whom Fulmar thought of as a bishop and a knight. The problem was that the black bishop and knight were accompanied by a number of other pawns both black and white.
If the game went as planned (here Life and Chess differed), the bishop and the knight would change sides. And the white pawn wearing the second lieutenant’s gold bar would be promoted to knight. If something went wrong, the second lieutenant pawn and the black pawns (who didn’t even know they were in play) would be swept from the board or–according to the rules of the game–shot) and the remaining players would continue the game.
The bishop was a man named Helmut von Heurten-Mitnitz, a Pomeranian aristocrat presently serving as the senior officer of the Franco-German Armistice Commission for Morocco. His knight was Obersturmbannfuhrer SS-SD Johann Muller, presently serving as the Security Adviser to the Franco German Armistice Commission.
Helmut von Heurten-Mitnitz, who had been educated at Harvard and had once been the German Consul General in New Orleans, had not long before established contact with Robert Murphy, the American Consul General for Morocco.