Page 29 of Beehive

The West knew of the public pact and suspected private ones also existed, though it was years before they would learn the detailed agreements.

Few knew how closely our military and intelligence teams coordinated efforts.

Prior to my assignment in Poland, I worked closely with Sergei Petrovich. To most, Sergei was a political officer. I was one of the few who knew his true masters, the Soviet intelligence service.

Our partnership was designed to enhance the flow of information between our two governments. On paper, my role was to assist the Soviets in their understanding of troop positioning, aerial surveillance of Allied movements, and projections of American and British force allocations. Sergeiwould, in return, offer whatever information the vaunted Soviet secret services gathered that might impact decisions made at the highest levels of the Reich.

In practice, I was Sergei’s monitor while he worked in Berlin.

I was his babysitter.

Sergei lived and worked in Berlin, one of many foreigners camped on our doorstep to keep an eye on our progress or fulfill some other hidden purpose. We were used to spies. Our Abwehr was adept at tagging and rooting them out, usually in the form of a bullet to the back of the head.

Soviets were different.

They were never our allies, not really.

We needed them to behave while our troops replaced striped flags with bloodred ones. A tenuous partnership, if that was even the right word, was mutually beneficial. We agreed to stay out of Stalin’s backyard if he looked the other way when we marched through Europe.

Détente was a better word for our arrangement.

Tenuous was an understatement to describe how it actually functioned.

The Führer never liked Stalin much. He greeted him with a warm smile and hearty embrace, but the cameras only captured what he wanted them to. Those in the inner circle spoke of Hitler’s ambitious plans, his desire to spread the German banner across the globe. Any leader who showed the slightest inclination toward territorial domination made Hitler’s mustache twitch.

And few Russian leaders throughout history—be they communist, imperialist, or otherwise—had ever been satisfied sitting quietly behind their own borders.

Understanding this, Hitler sought to buffer our eastern border from the bear’s reach. We would eventually break our pact and roll toward Moscow; but, for the moment, we played nice and letStalin believe we saw him, and all Russians, as distant cousins whose welfare was dear to our hearts.

The thinly veiled truth was simple: We never trusted them.

We never would.

My job was to watch everything Sergei did, report back to High Command, and, if necessary, take action to prevent him from using information that might cause harm to the Fatherland or our plans.

I was his shadow.

And he was mine.

Along the way, I wouldn’t say we became close. Our business, especially during a time of war, didn’t allow for closeness, but it was impossible to spend as much time as we did together and not form some sort of bond.

I should have known something was amiss when he vanished. I should have seen the very clear writing on the wall when all his countrymen also vanished from our capital.

The Soviets knew Hitler was ordering an invasion across their blasted, frozen lands. Somehow, they knew before most of our middle ranks were informed. Looking back, they probably knew before Hitler had even dreamed up his plan.

They were frighteningly prescient in that way.

In the fall of 1944, it became painfully obvious the war was coming to a close—and not in the Führer’s favor. It was also well understood that those who wore an officer’s rank would pay for the liberation he’d inflicted on his neighbors.

With this in mind, and with a healthy concern for my own safety, I abandoned my apartment and fled to the eastern sector, taking over a cobbler’s shop, one of the few buildings on the block without damage from the rainstorm of bombs that preceded the Allied overthrow of the Reich. A small apartment above the shop gave me a comfortable place to live, andtradecraft learned in my early days kept my face unrecognizable as I worked in the shop below.

When I first arrived, the shop and apartment looked untouched, as if the prior owner and his family had simply walked away or left on holiday. Dust gathered on the long counter where the cobbler would meet with customers, and a few pair of shoes in mid-repair lay strewn about the work table.

Upstairs, clothing still hung in the armoire.

A teacup sat on a side table, where remnants of a lemon lay shriveled among the stains of a long-dried drink.

A few dishes remained in the kitchen sink, unwashed but long past the moldy stage.

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