PROLOGUE: 1978
The black semi had been following him for the last forty miles, ever since he’d left Cyberdyne. The euphoria from his sales meeting had still not worn off. After all, it wasn’t every day one closed a five-million-dollar order. Frank Murphy allowed himself another self-satisfied grin and thought about the national sales manager job his boss had dangled in front of him. It was in the bag now. And while he loved being on the road, he wanted to be closer to home. God only knew Audrey had been begging him for years to take a desk job. Now, she would get her wish. Truth be told, Frank wanted it too. With Frank Junior turning twelve in a couple of days, Frank was all the more aware that his son’s precious childhood was slipping past him.
Frank glanced in the rearview and saw the truck had drawn closer. It was an odd duck, that was for sure. Painted completely in a light-absorbing flat black paint, the truck had no markings. No big, splashy ads along the sides, no silhouettes of naked women cut out of shiny steel riveted to the mud flaps. Not even a license plate. How in the hell the driver or his employer got away with that, Frank had no idea.
The sun had gone down about two hours before, but he knew it was the same truck... pacing him.
Up ahead, Frank saw a flood of light off to the side of the road. A rest stop. He’d pull over and let the truck go on past.
Two minutes later, Frank pulled into the nearly empty parking lot of a small Airstream-style diner and waited. Seconds later, the black behemoth rolled on past, blatting its horn as if to say, “See ya later, sucker.”
“Fat chance,” Frank said. He smiled and breathed a sigh of relief and headed into the diner. The waitress, a blowsy woman in her late forties with blonde straw for hair and a gold front tooth, served him the hot coffee he craved and a slice of heaven they were calling cherry pie.
After he finished, he found the phone booth in the back. Audrey answered on the second ring, as always.
“How did it go?” she asked.
“How did you know I wasn’t some heavy breather?”
Audrey laughed. “Because he always calls at six o’clock sharp, unlike my husband.”
“Well, there you go. What would the world be without reliable cranks? It went fine. Closed the deal in record time.”
Audrey let out a squeal of delight. “So, you’re going to take the new job?”
“And what if I said no?”
“I’d brain you.”
It was Frank’s turn to laugh. “Yes, I’m taking it. This old warhorse has had enough.”
They talked for a few more minutes about how their lives would soon change, and then Audrey said, “Frankie’s been waiting up for you. He’s so excited about his birthday, and now that you’ll be home—”
“Put him on,” Frank said, smiling again.
Frank heard the phone bonk onto the Formica counter, and his wife calling up the stairs. “Frankie? Your father’s on the phone!”
A few seconds later, the boy picked up the extension in their bedroom. “Dad?”
“How’s my number-one soldier?”
The boy laughed. “I’m fine, but Mom won’t let me work on the model without you. So, when are you coming home?”
“Should be there late tonight. We can work on it all day tomorrow, if you like.”
“That’d be great, Dad. You gonna be home for my birthday too?”
Frank smiled. “You bet. Anything you want to do?”
“Naw, we can just hang out and stuff.”
The boy’s casual tone belied his joy.
“You sure?” Frank said.
“Yeah, but I want to hear the Regensburg story again.”
Frank laughed. “You never get tired of those old war stories, do you?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Sure, I’ll tell ’em all again, if that’s what you want.”
“What about the camp?”
“You don’t want to hear about that, Frankie.”
“You promised, Dad. You promised you’d tell me someday. And I’m almost twelve.”
Frank’s smile turned bittersweet. “I know… but I’m not sure you’re ready for that. It wasn’t like on TV.”
“But Mom said you were a hero there.”
“Well, that’s what some people say. But real heroes don’t brag, Frankie, they just get the job done. I know I promised I’d tell you someday, and I will. Just not now. Okay?”
“Okay,” the boy said. Frank could hear the disappointment, and his heart ached.
“All right, I’ll see you tomorrow and we’ll get that B-17 done. Okay?”
After saying his goodbyes, Frank paid his bill and got back on the road. He kept his eyes on the rearview, and after half an hour he began to relax. So, the truck had been following him. So what? It was a narrow two-lane road, and they were both going the same direction. He’d let his imagination get the better of him, started thinking of that old TV movie with Dennis Weaver being terrorized by a crazed truck driver. Frank laughed at the absurdity of it. In two hours, he’d be home in the bosom of his family with the promise of a brighter future for all of them.
Up ahead, Frank spotted a flashing red light marking a four-way intersection. He came to a stop and looked both ways. With no moon and no streetlights, he couldn’t see anything either way, but no headlight certainly meant the way was clear.
Frank stepped on the gas and started through the intersection. A second later he was blinded by headlights snapping on, accompanied by the roar of a massive diesel engine barreling straight toward him. He had no time to react, no time to do anything before the black monster plowed into him head on. In the nanoseconds before his life ended, Frank Murphy Senior barely had time to wonder what the large “K” set into the truck’s front grill signified.
PART 1—ORPHANS OF THE STORM
Where was Dean?
It was a question Frank Murphy found himself asking far too often, lately. And now, standing outside the Bridgeport Convention Center, with his hand shading his eyes from the early morning sun, Frank found his patience wearing thin.
His best friend and business partner, Dean Seger, was late—again.
Dean was always late.
From the time they’d first met in college, Dean ran at least an hour behind the world. He’d even been late for his own wedding, leaving his tearful bride, Marge, standing at the altar for over an hour and a half.
Frank wiped the sweat from his brow and walked through the glass doors into the convention center. He bypassed the lines of attendees gathered at the ticket booths, showed his exhibitor pass and headed into the auditorium, passing under a thirty-foot banner suspended from the rafters:
10th ANNUAL WORLD WAR CONVENTION
Welcome Vets & Buffs!
He reached his booth and nodded to the security guard standing watch. “Can you give me another five minutes? I’ve got to change,” he said, grabbing his suit bag off one of his tables.
“Sure thing,” the guard said.
Frank headed for the nearest restroom and changed into his father’s old Army Air Corps uniform: khaki shirt, matching tie and olive-green trousers, and a well-worn leather A-2 flight jacket topped off with a rakish olive drab officer’s crusher cap. He studied himself in the mirror and cracked a wistful smile.
“Almost fits, Dad. Too bad the shoes are still too big.”
He sighed and gathered up his street clothes and headed back to the booth.
“Thanks for watching my stock.”
The guard smiled. “No problem. You got some cool stuff. And I love the flyboy getup too.”
The man sauntered off as Dean came running, his ever-present laptop clutched under his arm.
“Sorry, Shakespeare,” he said, trying to catch his breath.
“What took you so long?” Frank asked.
With his sandy hair and easy smile, Dean Seger had the kind of face one instantly liked and trusted, which Frank found ironic, considering that he bore a remarkable resemblance to Eddie Haskell, the impish troublemaker from that old television show: Leave it to Beaver. Often Dean deliberately put on his “Eddie” facade at parties or when he wanted to rib Frank. It was all part of his devil-may-care attitude, an attitude Frank envied and wished he could emulate. Dean knew how to grab life by the scruff and shake it for all it was worth. And though there were some who thought he was a shallow jerk, Frank knew he could count on him as a true friend.
“Don’t tell me—”
Dean shook his head. “Marge and I had a fight... I’d forgotten to tell her about the convention... What can I say? She hates it when I go to these shows, says I’m always bringing home ‘tons of crap,’ as she puts it. Had to promise her a night on the town before she’d let me out of the house. You know how it is.”
Frank smiled in spite of his mood. Dean always had a way of making the worst situations humorous. “Yeah, I do, but I’m sure she likes it when we have a good payday. Let’s finish setting up. They’ll be letting in everyone in about twenty minutes.”
They spent those minutes setting up their three tables with merchandise Frank had brought in from the van. When they were finished, Frank stood back and gave the booth a thorough inspection.
The Murphy’s Militaria booth was fashioned from a dozen prefabricated pieces of aluminum tubing and custom-printed vinyl panels in red and black that snapped together and broke down in five minutes. It looked like it cost far more than it did, something for which Frank was grateful. He was straightening the overhead Murphy’s Militaria banner as the public address system started blaring John Phillips Sousa music. A moment later the system crackled, and a voice called out, “Welcome everyone, the Tenth Annual World War Convention is now open!”
“Here we go,” Dean said, grinning.
In moments, the room was under siege.
Never in his life had Frank seen so many people crammed into one space. Thousands choked the aisles between the hundreds of booths and stalls covering the twenty-five-thousand-square-foot expanse. The entire mass of them moved about like some giant, swarming hive, reminding Frank of the ant farm he’d had as a child.
And the noise...
The thousands of throats shouting, chattering, and laughing blended together into a deafening clamor like the roar of primeval beasts battling to the death in some forgotten rainforest, a rainforest redolent with the smells of Cosmoline, mothballs, roasting hot dogs, and stale beer.
Some of the people looked as if they belonged in a jungle: tattooed bikers strutted about in leather and denim, reeking of grease and gasoline. Their women, gum-snapping bimbos dressed in tight leather miniskirts and gobs of cheap makeup, hung on them like one of their ornamental chains. Skinheads wearing Doc Martens and nasty attitudes checked out the latest in Nazi chic. Good ol’ boys from dirt water towns somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon line, with their ubiquitous Confederate flags, gun-racked pickups and potbellies, laughed, guzzled cheap beer, and traded war stories from nonexistent campaigns. There were glassy-eyed, slope-headed weirdos walking around dressed in full SS regalia, and straight-arrow mercenaries wearing mirrored sunglasses and the tensed attitudes of wary snakes. And among them walked Mr. and Mrs. America looking like shell-shocked refugees from the Twilight Zone.
I hope I brought enough inventory.
And then the first customer approached the booth and Frank got to work.
* * *
“I’ll give you three hundred for this,” the heavyset man said, his voice hoarse from trying to yell over the noise.
After eight hours, it had become glaringly apparent to Frank that this convention was going to be a financial bust. It wasn’t for lack of foot traffic. He and Dean had been busy, but the sales were few and far between. And this one was going south too.
“Three hundred is highway robbery, Ken.”
“Not for a repaint.”
Frank managed to hold his temper in check, his smile widening.
“It’s original paint and decals, and you know it.”
“And Forman’s got a rack of these at their table for three fifty apiece. Come on, Frank, cut me some slack.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t.”
The man sighed and nodded, handing the helmet back to Frank, who watched the man head back to Forman’s crowded booth, one of the largest in the convention. He tried not to feel bitter, but it was getting harder and harder to swallow that pill.
Without taking his eyes off his laptop screen, Dean said, “Guy’s a bozo. He wouldn’t know a repaint if it was still wet, and Forman’s crap is all fake.”
“Yeah, but we could’ve used the sale.”
“Not to worry, Shakespeare. I’ve got a guy who’s drooling over that German Cross. Said he’d be back for it.”
“Was he short and bald with a big red mustache?”
“Yeah, that’s him.”
“That’s Farley Gibbons. Drool is all he’s got.”
Dean’s laptop emitted a loud explosion, and “GAME OVER” appeared on the screen.
“Shit, dead again.”
Frank laughed in spite of his sour mood. “I swear to God, you’re never going to make that beachhead.”
“It’s not me,” he said, pointing to the offending laptop. “It’s this piece of crap.”
Frank’s grin widened. Same old Dean. He squeezed his friend’s shoulder.
“I’m going to take a walk. Watch the booth, okay?”
Dean, already deep into another round of his game, gave him the thumbs up.
Frank bought a bottled water at a nearby concession stand and then wandered through the hall, stopping at various booths to check out the competition. He avoided Forman’s. At the end of the room were a set of private rooms. A sign on an easel announced the times for a series of lectures. One of them caught his eye.
BERLIN: THE AFTERMATH
Lecture and Q&A at 3:00 p.m., Room 101
Frank glanced at his vintage Hamilton watch. The lecture was starting in five minutes. For a moment, he felt guilty about leaving Dean to his own devices but realized his friend would not let a potential sale escape his notice, despite his all-consuming fascination with his Normandy computer game.
“What the hell,” Frank said, and strode into the lecture room.
* * *
The black Mercedes glided down the narrow side street, pausing at each building and then resuming its stately course. A moment later the car pulled up to a seedy-looking two-story brick building nestled between a dusty furniture store and a down-at-the-heels Chinese restaurant.
The sign above the display window and the front door spanned the entire width of the building and read: MURPHY’S MILITARIA in faded red block letters.
Inside the car, two men dressed in identical black suits gave the building a once-over, their hard, chiseled faces revealing nothing. The store’s display window held all manner of militaria, with two tailor’s dummies wearing full uniforms, one American and one German, along with an array of a dozen Riker cases chocked full of military awards, including those from the Third Reich and Soviet Union.
“Someone needs to clean the window,” the man in the passenger seat commented in heavily accented English.
The man behind the wheel scowled. “Who cares about the verdammt window, Karl? Is this the last one?”
“Ja,” Karl said, reaching for a briefcase at his feet. He snapped it open and pulled out a small flat package wrapped in plain brown paper, closed the briefcase, and placed it back on the floor. He then exited the Mercedes and walked up to the door, where he slid the package through the mail slot. Satisfied, Karl returned to the car.
“Let’s go to the Hofbrau,” Karl said in German. “I need a beer.”
The other man chuckled, shook his head, and pulled away from the curb.
* * *
The elderly gentleman stood in the glaring spotlight, gnarled hands clutching a stout cane of polished oak. He looked like a shabby scarecrow with all the stuffing knocked out of him, as if one good gust of wind would carry him away. Skin the color of dry parchment hung loosely from a hangdog face that spoke volumes about the hard life he’d lived, and his hair, a grayish-yellow, had thinned to the point where—with the hot light shining down on him—you could see the curvature of his skull. It looked as fragile as an egg. Oddly enough, the old man’s eyebrows remained bushy, and shockingly black. When he spoke, his loose jowls wobbled and his voice, a reedy whisper, barely reached the back of the room. Yet the man held the audience in the palm of his hand.
“Well, enough about me,” he said, coughing thickly. “Do any of you have any questions?”
Frank finished jotting in his notepad, then looked around as several hands went up. While the old man’s stories had no bearing on his current book idea, one never knew when a tidbit of information might become useful. It was history, and history was a valuable commodity, especially for an author wanting to write historical novels about World War II. He watched the speaker point to a middle-aged man wearing a tan golf hat.
“Yes. Do you have a question?” he said.
The middle-aged man stood up, clearing his throat.
“Uh, yeah. I heard some of the German soldiers were disguising themselves as civilians in order to escape capture and prolong the street fighting. That true?”
The old man nodded slowly. “That happened, but not to a great extent. You have to realize at the war’s end, especially in Berlin, things were not so clear-cut. People were sick of the years of fighting, and the Russians were committing all kinds of atrocities. Most Germans, soldiers included, surrendered quickly.”
“We shoulda’ killed the whole mess of ’em when we had the chance!”
Everyone turned toward the sound of the voice.
Frank spotted a young man near the back of the room, his shaved head gleaming dully. He was wearing faded fatigues and a ripped T-shirt emblazoned with “Give ’em Hell, Harry” in red, white, and blue. He looked no older than eighteen, as did the other two leering jokers seated on either side of him.
The room had fallen into a hush, and all eyes returned to the small stage. The speaker’s eyes narrowed.
“We should have killed them?” he said, his voice growing surprisingly strong. “What do you know about it? What do any of you know?”
The old man scanned the crowd, his fiery gaze missing no one. He took a halting step forward.
“You all came to this convention to relive the past... Well, I’ve spent my life trying to forget it! You want to know what it was like? I’ll tell you! One day, in a suburb outside Essen, my squad charged into a basement, firing like crazy. We didn’t know what to expect. My God! We were just frightened kids. When the smoke cleared, we found we’d killed an entire family... civilians... Oh, God...”
He covered his face with his free hand and sobbed, his gaunt form trembling.
A convention staff member dressed as a WAC ran out, her walkie-talkie squawking in that awful silence.
The old man waved her off and faced the audience once more.
“You must forgive an old soldier’s anger. These events are still so fresh to me. I can’t expect you to understand. You had to be there.”
Frank stared at the old man, his heart going out to him. Growing old was such a raw deal. You spent your entire life working toward a happy old age, only to find out when you got there that you were too old to enjoy it. If the thought weren’t so tragic, it would be funny. Frank watched while the WAC helped the speaker offstage. He leaned heavily on his cane, shuffling toward the stairs leading to the floor, his face set in grim and painful determination.
And Frank realized something else. On top of it all, the old guy was right. How could Frank ever understand what it was like to have been there? How would he ever imbue the novel he’d been slaving over with that unmistakable aura of truth, when all he had were the secondhand recollections of frail old men?
Frank returned to the booth to find Dean finalizing the sale of an SS armband. When the convention closed, he and Dean broke down the booth, packed up all the stock and loaded it into the Murphy’s Militaria van, a ten-year-old Ford Econoline that had seen better days.
“How’d we do?” Frank asked, slamming the van doors shut.
“We grossed about six fifty.”
“For today?”
Dean flashed Frank a guilty look. “For the whole convention.”
Frank sighed and leaned against the dusty van. “Shit, Dean, our booth space cost two grand! We can’t keep going like this.”
“I know, but I’ve got some ideas. Including a website. You know, Frank, we’d probably do a lot better if we sold online too.” Dean paused for a moment, letting that thought sink in. “Forman’s doing it.”
Frank’s expression clouded. “Call me old-fashioned.” He shook his head, letting out a sigh of annoyance. “All right, I’ll think about it. Who would we get to create a site for us?”
“Little old me. I’ve been reading up on it. Trust me, Shakespeare, I’ll get us there.”
They said their goodbyes and Dean went to his car and drove off. Frank climbed inside the van, his gaze falling on his flip phone lying in the center console.
“Crap, no wonder I didn’t get any calls.”
He picked up the phone, dialed a number, and listened to his messages.
It was Brenda.
“Frank? Did you leave your phone in the van again? I’m here at the game. Where are you? The kids are waiting. Call me ASAP, please!”
He slammed his hand onto the steering wheel. “Damn it!”
Tossing the phone onto the passenger seat, he started the van and screeched out of the parking lot and onto I-95. If traffic was light, he’d just make the end of the game.
It wasn’t.
Frank arrived at the field as the last stragglers were leaving and the grounds crew were relining the field. Feeling like a prized jackass, Frank drove home, pulling the van into the driveway. He shut off the engine and tried to think of what he could say. As if it would make any difference anyway. Things were already about as bad as they could get. That wasn’t quite true, though. Brenda had not yet uttered the “D” word.
He stared out the windshield, watching his family around the dinner table.
Brenda, her shoulder-length blonde hair framing that heart-shaped face he couldn’t imagine living without—and yet he was—was serving Uncle John what was no doubt a second helping. Pete still wore his Pop Warner football uniform and was laughing at something John was saying, while baby Julie squealed in her highchair.
All in all, it was the quintessential scene of domestic bliss, and he missed it so much it fucking hurt.
Steeling his nerves, he climbed out of the car and trudged into the house.
At least his key still worked.
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