This Fog of Peace (Moon Brothers WWII Adventure Series Book 4) Read online

  THIS

  FOG OF PEACE

  A Moon Brothers WWII Adventure

  By

  William Peter Grasso

  Novels by William Peter Grasso

  Moon Brothers WW2 Adventure Series

  Moon Above, Moon Below, Book 1

  Fortress Falling, Book 2

  Our Ally, Our Enemy, Book 3

  This Fog of Peace, Book 4

  Jock Miles WW2 Adventure Series

  Long Walk to the Sun, Book 1

  Operation Long Jump, Book 2

  Operation Easy Street, Book 3

  Operation Blind Spot, Book 4

  Operation Fishwrapper, Book 5

  Unpunished

  East Wind Returns

  Kindle Edition

  Copyright 2018 William Peter Grasso

  All rights reserved

  *

  Cover design by Alyson Aversa

  Kindle Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This Fog of Peace is a work of historical fiction. Events that are common historical knowledge may not occur at their actual point in time or may not occur at all. Apart from the well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current events or locales or to living persons is purely coincidental.

  Author’s Note

  This is a work of alternative historical fiction, not a history textbook. Deviations from commonly accepted historical facts are intentional and provided only for the purposes of entertainment and stimulating the reader’s imagination.

  While the combat incidents in this work are largely fictitious, they remind us that soldiers and civilians die in undeclared wars on a regular basis in the real world. Nations taunt each other—sometimes with live fire—to the brink of war without formally declaring war or committing to all-out conflict.

  The designation of military units may be actual or fictitious.

  In no way are the fictional accounts intended to denigrate the hardships, suffering, and courage of those who served.

  Table of Contents

  Novels by William Peter Grasso

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Epilogue—Author’s Note

  More Novels by William Peter Grasso

  Chapter One

  American Zone of Occupation, Berlin.

  Tempelhof Airport

  July 9, 1945

  Staff Sergeant Horace Pickens, US Army, was going to get lucky tonight. He didn’t care one bit about Ike or his policy of non-fraternization with the citizens of postwar Germany. All he had to do was get rid of the two young PFCs who’d been assigned to him for the night shift here at the Vehicle Parts Depot. He didn’t figure that would be much of a problem. Sure, he’d have to get today’s stack of requisitions processed all by himself or the brass would be climbing all over him. But he had until his shift ended at 0600 to do it, and that, Sergeant Pickens knew, ain’t no step for a stepper. In the meantime, the hour or two he got to spend with a woman would make it all worthwhile…

  And it was only going to cost him a can of Spam, procured from a buddy at the mess hall.

  “All right, you tourists,” Pickens told the PFCs, “I’m cutting y’all loose for the rest of this shift. Scram. Just have your sweet asses back here at 1800 hours tomorrow, just like normal.”

  They didn’t need to be told twice. Leading the way out of the depot’s warehouse building was Jerry Meacham, an eighteen-year-old smartmouth from New Jersey who’d stepped off the troop ship from the States on VE Day, just two months ago. He told his partner, “I don’t know about you, Slats, but I hate like crazy being called a fucking tourist. Ain’t my damn fault Hitler caught a bullet before I could get over here and do it myself.”

  Brian Slattery, a nineteen-year-old farm boy from Ohio whose surname and gangly frame had earned him the inevitable nickname Slats a long time ago, couldn’t care less about their tourist status at the moment. He had something else on his mind. His steps slowed as he tried to make sense of why Sergeant Pickens was cutting them such a break.

  “Come on, man,” Meacham said. “Move your ass.”

  Slattery stopped, hovered in hesitation for a moment, and then started back toward the depot’s warehouse building.

  “Dammit, Slats…where the hell you think you’re going?”

  “I don’t want to be getting us or the Sarge in no trouble, Meach,” he replied. “I’m gonna ask him if he at least wants us to lock the gate.”

  “I ain’t buying that shit. He didn’t say nothing about no gate, Slats. If he’s so damned worried about it, he can lock it himself. I’m telling you…if we go back there, I got a hunch that cracker just might change his mind and put our asses back to work.”

  “I don’t think so, Jerry. He wants us out of here pretty bad. Something’s up…and I aim to find out what it is.”

  A sly smile crossed Meacham’s face. “Well, well, well. You ain’t the dumb farmer everybody thinks you are, are you? You don’t give a damn about no gate. You’re looking to get something on ol’ Pickens. Something to use for a little leverage the next time he tries to shit on us. Right?”

  “Maybe I am…maybe I ain’t. You staying or going?”

  “Are you kidding, Slats? I ain’t wasting a perfectly good night hanging around here after he told me to get lost. Best of luck, Sherlock.”

  Without so much as a look back, Meacham headed across the street, toward the sprawling structure which served as Tempelhof’s terminal and hangars, curving like a giant “C” along one corner of this vast, circular airfield nestled near Berlin’s city center. He figured he could find a good card game—and plenty of liquor—among the GI aircraft mechanics working the night shift.

  Those Air Force guys always got the most booze, he told himself. The good stuff, too, from back home.

  Once Meacham had vanished into the night shadows, Slattery tucked himself out of sight behind some fifty-five-gallon drums of motor oil. It was a good vantage point to keep an eye on the long, low warehouse building and its loading dock. Through a window, he could see the top of Sergeant Pickens’ head, seated
at his desk, busy with paperwork. But after fifteen minutes of crouching in this hide, Slattery was beginning to think he was wasting his time. Nothing out of the ordinary was going on. Nothing he could tell, anyway.

  Then he heard the chain on the unlocked gate rattle.

  A woman was letting herself into the depot yard. He couldn’t see her features well in the dim light cast from the building, but she appeared taller than average, trim, with coiffed blonde hair. Not a teenager, but no more than thirty years old, he figured. There was nothing about her clothing that suggested she was military. Her simple dress appeared to have seen better days, her low-heeled cloth pumps were well worn. The sweater she wore on this cool summer night was tattered, unraveling at the edges. To his eyes, she looked just like any other German civilian, struggling to cope with the destitution of the fallen Reich and this strange, brand-new world of Allied occupation.

  Once past the gate in the tall chain-link fence—topped with barbed wire—that surrounded the depot, she seemed unsure of her bearings, like someone blundering into a place she’d never been before. But the light from Pickens’ window was like a beacon. She tapped on the glass to get his attention. Within seconds, the office door flew open and Pickens pulled her inside. Then the lights inside the warehouse went dim.

  Slattery crept toward the window, asking himself, Is that all this is about? The sarge getting himself a little nookie?

  He never got a glimpse of what was going on inside. Before he was halfway to the building, a truck—an American-made deuce-and-a-half—rolled up to the gate, testing it with a nudge from its front bumper. With a prolonged squeal, the gate swung open, and the truck roared into the yard. Slattery jumped back behind the oil drums.

  When he popped his head up for another look, the truck had backed up to the loading dock, its engine idling, a man still behind the wheel.

  Like a getaway driver, Slattery thought.

  Several other men—three, maybe four—were on the dock, trying to open the big sliding door that would let them into the building. It wouldn’t budge.

  The lights snapped back on. Slattery could see Sergeant Pickens through the window again, this time standing and seeming to be hitching up his pants. A blur of blonde hair appeared in the window and then immediately disappeared, as if someone had quickly stood up and run away.

  The men on the loading dock had made their way to the office door. When they found it locked, one of the men began to pound on it.

  It was then that Slattery could tell that each of the men carried a firearm. The way they carried them—in their hands, not slung over the shoulders as had become the custom for occupation duty—struck him as odd. Even menacing.

  Nobody ever flashed a gun to make a pickup before…or seemed so damned urgent about doing it. What the hell’s going on?

  Slattery wasn’t even carrying a weapon. His carbine was locked in the arms room of the barracks, just like those of everyone else who worked the depots and warehouses.

  Pickens opened the door. The men barged inside.

  It grew strangely quiet, the murmur of the idling truck engine the only sound. The gunshots Slattery feared never materialized.

  The sliding door to the loading dock opened. The armed men began to shove crates from the warehouse into the deuce-and-a-half. They seemed in a big hurry, shouting to each other as they worked, words Brian Slattery could not make out.

  One last crate was pushed into the truck, and all but one of the armed men climbed into the bed after it. The last man hustled to the cab, yelling something to the driver. Slattery heard the sound of the words but didn’t understand their meaning. He knew the language they were speaking wasn’t English.

  The deuce-and-a-half barreled out of the depot yard and headed into the night. Once the bellow of its engine faded, Slattery abandoned his hiding place among the oil drums and crept toward the warehouse. As he got closer to the loading dock, he could see something on the floor inside, a bundle of olive green like a crumpled tarp.

  But walking still closer, he could see the bundle was wearing GI boots. And it was lying in a pool of blood.

  Inside the building now, Slattery stood frozen over the lifeless body of Sergeant Pickens. He’d been stabbed in the torso multiple times. His throat was cut, too.

  There was so much blood.

  He had no idea what to do. Nobody in this Army ever bothered to brief newly arrived privates on things like emergency procedures. All Brian Slattery knew was what it said in the General Orders, which stated he was supposed to report any emergencies to the corporal of the guard.

  Corporal of the guard: he didn’t know if such a position even existed in a maintenance company like his. If it did exist, nobody had bothered to tell him who that man was. The only authority he knew by name was Staff Sergeant Horace Pickens.

  But he was dead now…

  And seeing his body lying there made Brian Slattery sick to his stomach. He managed to back away a few steps before doubling over and spewing his supper onto the concrete floor.

  Once the nausea passed, he could think of nothing else to do but run. He stopped at the open gate to the yard—he had no idea what possessed him to do that—and then pulled it closed and snapped the lock shut. He started running again, into the darkened streets of the American zone, with no destination in mind.

  He just needed to be somewhere—anywhere—else.

  Master Sergeant Sean Moon hated pulling the assignment of Duty NCO for the American Zone of Occupation, Berlin. But every senior NCO in 3rd US Army was in the rotation, and he’d done it half a dozen times before in the two months since Germany’s surrender, one 24-hour period at a time. Each time, he’d felt less like a veteran combat leader and more like a half-assed cross between a cop, a priest, and a politician. Technically, the Duty NCO position existed to take the administrative burden off the Duty Officer, leaving that officer free to execute the occupation policies set forth by Eisenhower’s HQ. But every time he’d had the job, the assigned officer made only the briefest of appearances at the start of their watch and then skipped off to do whatever the hell he pleased, leaving a phone number or two behind where he could be reached if the need arose. This morning was no different: a half hour ago, Sean had written the two phone numbers he’d just been handed on the command post’s blackboard. Then he watched the Duty Officer—a Signal Corps captain who’d be headed back to the States within a week—saunter out the door of the CP.

  And I’ll bet he ain’t at either of these numbers if and when I call, Sean knew from hard experience. Can’t say I blame him much, though. Half the officers over here since June ’44 are either back home already or headed that way real soon. They figure they’ve done their bit and they’re just marking time, gathering up their souvenirs to show what war heroes they are for the stateside rubes.

  Like most of the other days he’d had the duty, this one was starting off with a crisis, too.

  “The MPs are on the line, Sarge,” the tech corporal manning the CP’s switchboard announced. “They’ve got two of our guys in the cooler.”

  “Only two?” Sean asked. “Sounds like a slow night.”

  “Yeah, but slow night or not, this one sounds like real big doings. Says they’re holding them for murder.”

  Sean picked up on the line. “Sergeant Moon here. Who got dead? Some Russian bastard, I hope.”

  “No such luck, I’m afraid,” the MP on the other end replied. “It was an American sergeant. Their sergeant.”

  “Ah, shit,” Sean mumbled. Then he said, “I’ll be there in about ten minutes.”

  As Sean gathered his notebook, the corporal asked, “You want me to call the Duty Officer, Sarge?”

  “Don’t bother. Probably all we’ll need him for is his signature on the incident report at the end of shift.”

  “Won’t he be mad being left in the dark, Sarge?”

  “Don’t worry about it, Corporal. His head’s already back in the States.”

  The young MP officer behind the des
k had the irritating mannerisms of a wind-up toy, all jerky motions and jutting jaw, like a brand new lieutenant fresh out of OCS. His command voice had the stridency of a shrieking teenager. But surprisingly, First Lieutenant Cheatwood was no greenhorn; Sean made note of the campaign ribbons on his khakis that marked him as a combat veteran.

  Hmm…based on what this gentleman’s wearing, I’d say he’s been over here about eight months. Didn’t seem to knock a bit of sense into him, though. This dickhead still thinks the sun rises out of his asshole.

  Maybe all he did in the shooting war was supervise traffic cops or prison guards.

  He caught the lieutenant scanning his considerably more impressive rows of ribbons.

  “That’s some bunch of fruit salad you’ve got there, Sergeant Moon,” Cheatwood said.

  “Well, that’s what happens when you’ve been overseas since Forty-Two, Lieutenant. Look, it’s gonna be a long day, so how about we get down to business here? What’ve you got on these boys?”

  “These boys, Sergeant, stabbed the NCO they were working for to death. Plain and simple.”

  “What kind of proof you got, Lieutenant?”

  Cheatwood went into his wind-up toy act again, his head and arms jerking about in protest, apparently upset that Sean had questioned him.

  “The sergeant has been murdered and they deserted their posts. Their guilt is obvious, Sergeant Moon. Not a court-martial in this man’s army wouldn’t convict them.”

  “Just wondering, Lieutenant…are you sure they didn’t desert their posts, like you say, before this murder took place?”

  Cheatwood seemed dumbstruck for a moment, as if that possibility had never occurred to him. Then Sean asked, “Do either of them have an alibi?”

  “If you want to call it that,” the lieutenant replied. “Some nonsense about the sergeant giving them the night off.”