The Undaunted (Book 2 of The Undesirables)

Prologue: The Runner

That was good, that was important. Because this afternoon Father Wynne knew he was both the hunter and the prey.

The newspaper – a copy of the London times dated August 16, 1942 – was two days old. Father Wynne wasn't really reading it. That wasn't its purpose. The newspaper's real purpose was to identify Father Wynne to a Russian defector.

Folded into the pages of the newspaper, camouflaged by it, was a dossier. The dossier, only three-pages long, had been sent via a teletype machine in Washington, D.C. Father Wynne's purpose, the reason he had been re-directed from Greece to Turkey, was to make that dossier longer. The defector Father Wynne was meeting claimed to have information that could do just that.

"Karen Hamilton" was the name on the dossier. She was an American woman, a girl, really, only eighteen years old. She was a musician, a cellist who had been, at one time, a child prodigy. She'd spent her childhood summers travelling up and down the Eastern Seaboard performing with and for adults. American audiences loved child prodigies. Youth and talent were qualities that Americans worshipped, a cultural phenomenon that had turned Shirley Temple into a national treasure. It was a trait that Karen's father, George Hamilton, had exploited, parading Karen in front of audiences like a trained monkey.

The O.S.S. wasn't interested in Karen Hamilton because of her youth. In fact, they were interested in her despite it.

The O.S.S. didn't trust young agents. By definition youth was fleeting. It was dangerous. It was inexperienced. And yet, in her eighteen years, Karen Hamilton had collected an impressive number of very unique experiences – the kinds of experiences Father Wynne's superiors at the O.S.S. wanted to know more about.

When she was fifteen years old, Karen's dossier explained, she had emigrated from the United States the Soviet Union. She and her father were guests of the Leningrad Music Conservatory, where she studied under the world famous composer Dmitri Shostakovich.

A year and a half later, when Karen was only seventeen, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. German warplanes, tanks and troops took the Soviets completely by surprise, smashing through defenses and destroying entire Russian armies. The German "Army Group North" drove relentlessly toward Leningrad, and foreigners like Karen and her father should have been evacuated.

But George Hamilton wanted to stay. He was helping Shostakovich write his 9th symphony, a masterpiece that would soon be known the world over as "The Leningrad Symphony". Karen's father didn't want to give up that work, so he did the only thing he could to stay in Leningrad. He defected and, because she was legally a minor that meant Karen defected, too. She was no longer an American citizen; she was now a citizen of the Soviet Union.

That meant she wasn't evacuated from Leningrad. That meant she was forced to stay, like all the other Russian residents of that doomed city. And it meant that when, a few weeks later, the Germans surrounded Leningrad, that Karen was trapped.

She and her father joined the Leningrad citizen's brigade. They dug trenches and prepared for Germany's attack. But that attack never came. Germany's mission wasn't one of conquest. It was of extermination. The Nazis were cleansing the land of Slavic "undesirables" in order to prepare it for German colonization. So they instigated what they called a "Starvation Plan". The Germans surrounded Leningrad, firebombed the city granaries, and waited for every Russian inside the city to starve to death.

Among the civilians that died that first winter was Karen's father. Karen should have shared his fate. But somehow, miraculously, she escaped.

And she didn't just escape Leningrad, she escaped the German Army. She somehow fought her way or snuck her way past enemy lines. Then she travelled all the way through Siberia and managed to contact an American diplomatic delegation in Chelyabinsk. They agreed to help her escape, to smuggle her out on a plane back to her remaining family in the United States.