Hard Case Crime: Passport To Peril Read Online Free

together and shared the same room for four years.”
    There was the sound of an airplane overhead, and we could see the running lights blinking against the stars. The Russian plane which wasn’t carrying Marcel Blaye.
    “After we graduated, I came to Europe for a news agency, and Bob went on to law school. But I went home just before Pearl Harbor, and my brother and I enlisted in the Air Corps after America went into the war. We took our basic training together and went to Officer Candidate School. Then, because I had been a newspaperman, I was sent to Intelligence School while Bob became a navigator.”
    Now that the words were coming out, it was almost as if someone else were talking.
    “Strangely enough, we wound up in the same heavy-bomber outfit. I say strange because the Air Corps usually went to lengths to separate brothers. Anyway, we went through the campaign in Italy and when that was cleaned up we were assigned to help the Russians. One of our first missions was to attack the Manfried Weiss steel works—they’re on an island in the Danube at Budapest. They were producing for the Germans who had taken over Hungary.”
    I paused to relight my cigarette.
    “Six planes went on the mission, and none of them came back. Oh, they accomplished their mission all right. They blasted hell out of the steel works, which stopped working for the Germans or anybody else. But the planes never got back to base. One crashed and the entire crew was killed. The other five either crash-landed or the crews bailed out. Most of them were captured and put in prison camps. A few escaped into Yugoslavia and joined the Partisans.”
    “What was wrong with the planes?” Maria asked.
    “Nothing,” I said, “except they ran out of gas. The operations office made a stupid, inexcusable miscalculation, and the airplanes arrived over the target more than an hour before daylight. The hour they had to circle above the clouds before attacking made the difference between having enough gas and what happened.”
    “What about your brother?” the girl said.
    “He bailed out safely,” I said. “The whole crew got out all right. They started walking to Yugoslavia and they made it—all except Bob. Somewhere along the line he disappeared. Neither the Air Corps nor the State Department has ever been able to find a trace of him. He just vanished into thin air.”
    Maria said, “I know how your family must feel. It must be terrible for all of you, the dreadful uncertainty, not knowing anything for sure. For a while we didn’t know for sure about my father.”
    “Yes,” I said, “and there’s something even my family doesn’t know. I was the officer who made the fatal mistake.”
    We heard the sentry returning through the woods, whistling. I told Maria to crouch behind the rock so that she wouldn’t be seen from the road if the sentry should use a flashlight.
    I ran down the road until I was out of sight of the gate. I raised the railway guard’s carbine and squeezed three shots in quick succession. Then I ducked into the woods and doubled back to the fence as fast as I could move through the deep snow. I reached the fence in time to see the sentry open the padlock in the glare of his flashlight, slide through the gate, and run toward the spot from where I had fired. It didn’t take me long to grab Maria’s arm, hustle her through the gate, and snap the lock again.
    We ran through the snow at the side of the road until we were out of breath; I was sure the shots would bring a Russian patrol. We’d leave tracks in the snow but we’d have made more noise in the hard-packed center of the road. The end of the snowstorm had brought that still, bitter cold when a running step echoes like hammer on anvil.
    I suppose we’d put a hundred yards or so between us and the fence when we heard the guard’s carbine blast the padlock off the gate. We started to run again, and the siren went off; there must have been a switch in the sentry box. We ran