Winner Lose All

Old friends/ new enemies.   November, 1945.   Eddie Scanlon is one of  Allen Dulles’ topOSSundercover agents.  Young, smart, and ruthless, he is dropped behind German lines into Leipzigto work with the anti-Nazi underground.  Anti-Nazi at that time and place meant Communist, and this cell is run by Hanni Steiner.  She is young, beautiful, a third-generation Party Member and  a tough, NKVD Major reporting to Beria himself inMoscow.   Allies and soon lovers, the two partner for a string of raids and sabotage that eventually find Scanlon a prisoner of the notorious Chief Inspector Otto Dietrich of the Gestapo.  Everyone eventually breaks in Dietrich’s basement, and Scanlon is no exception, but Hanni and her crew manage to break him out before it’s too late.

Broken physically and mentally, Scanlon is called on for one last job.  Germany is dying, and the sharp new focus of Beria, Stalin, Churchill, and Dulles is on the German engineers and scientists who designed and built the V-2 rocket, new heavy tanks, new submarines, missiles, and the lightening-fast ME-262 jet fighter.   Those revolutionary wonder weapons may have come too late for Hitler, but they will shape world power for decades to come.   Scanlon’s  job is to go back toLeipzigand shepherd the ME-262 designers safely west before the Red Army scoops them up.   That’s what Churchill and Dulles want; but for Scanlon, it’s his last chance to find Hanni.  All that stands between him and success is Otto Dietrich, a 200 mile run south through SS road blocks and half the German Army, marauding Allied fighters, and Hanni herself.  Her father is under Beria’s thumb inMoscow, and if she doesn’t get the aeronautical engineers east into the waiting arms of the Red Army, he will pay the price.