As I mentioned I'm currently working on the next book featuring the characters introduced in The Undesirables. Here is a sample first chapter of a sequel, The Provocateurs:
CHAPTER 1: The Correspondent
The Iron Cross was, perhaps, the Wehrmacht's most revered symbol. The emblem dated all the way back to the middle-ages, when it was worn by Teutonic Knights fighting pagans in the name of Christianity. It was not the more recent and menacing Nazi swastika. But neither was it the simple wooden symbol of Christ's suffering.
It was black, representing God's iron will. The Son may have preached turning the other cheek, Jesus Christ may have counseled against warfare and violence, but His father was a more vengeful God. Teutonic Knights believed they were instruments of that vengeance during the middle-ages, and the German Army still believed they were doing God's work in the summer of 1942.
That's when a titanic iron cross hung over the Russian city of Stalingrad. It was made of smoke, smoke generated by the roaring fires of that burning city.
Jillian had seen cities burn before. She'd been in London during the blitz. She'd met Ernie Pyle there and his reports were what made her decide to change her career and become a war correspondent. But when London burned its smoke rose in a great pillar.
It didn't form a cross.
Russians could see the titanic emblem from hundreds of miles away. Trains and trucks were rushing soldiers to the eastern bank of the river Volga, where they were to take ferries across and into Stalingrad's inferno. The Russian soldiers were told by their leaders that they were destined to finally stop the Germans at Stalingrad.
But the sight of that cross staining the sky had to be as demoralizing to them as it was to Jillian. God had chosen sides, it seemed, and unfortunately He had chosen Germany.
Jillian had to admit it made a sort of morbid sense. Officially, after all, the Russians were communists and atheists. Didn't it stand to reason that God would hate atheists?
A shiver went down Jillian's spine and she felt like throwing up. She, herself, was Jewish. She didn't consider herself a "good" Jew; she didn't regularly practice her religion. But it was still, fundamentally, a part of her.
She was a member of the first tribe chosen by God. But was God so fickle that he had now chosen the Germans? She knew that couldn't be true, but the smoke hanging over that German city was a Christian and German symbol, not a Jewish one. It was no Star of David.
It was clearly a cross, a black cross, the iron cross.
Jillian should have been writing about the bombing. Audiences back home wanted to read about how courageously the Russians were defending their city. Americans wanted to believe that the Germans could be stopped.
But Jillian couldn't write that, because she couldn't believe it herself. The iron cross told her otherwise. Stalingrad, like every other Russian city, was doomed.
So Jillian gave up. She stopped staring at her typewriter and shoved the whole machine, loaded paper and all, into her duffle bag. Then she stood up and pushed her way into line.
"Where are you going?" The question came from Stepan, Jillian's babysitter. Stalin and his Politburo didn't trust foreign journalists, so they assigned "advisors" to watch over them. Really they were there to make sure Jillian didn't write anything that would embarrass the Communist Party.
"Into the city," Jillian said back to him. "You'd better hurry, the ferry won't wait for stragglers."
Stepan only hesitated for a moment before standing up and following Jillian. Jillian was impressed. Most political appointees would be too afraid to join her in the burning city.
Despite the crowd, Jillian and Stepan had little difficulty shouldering their way to the front. The Russian conscript soldiers looked none too anxious to cross the Volga and enter that cauldron of fire that had once been a city. So they willingly let her and her babysitter cut in front of them.
As she reached the edge of the dock, Jillian noticed that the sailors onboard hadn't bothered to moor the vessel. They didn't want to be trapped on the dock, and as Jillian showed her authorization papers to a young Naval Infantry officer, she discovered why. Suddenly a flight of German Stuka dive-bombers emerged from the smoke across the river and rolled in the air right toward them.
Fortunately for Jillian and the others crowding the dock, the warplanes had already dropped their bombs on Stalingrad's Tractor Factory. Otherwise they could have sunk the ferry and obliterated the harbor. Instead, the best they could do was strafe the dock with their machineguns.
Even before the first tracer bullets flashed through the sky, everyone around Jillian hit the deck.
Then the planes were almost directly overhead, their thundering guns ripping through the cowering bodies in fountains of gore.
Stepan was one of the first to die.
Jillian didn't hit the deck. Instead she grabbed her authorization papers from the Naval Infantry Officer's cowering hands and leapt aboard.
She was just in time. The ferry's panicking Captain, hoping that a moving ship would be a more difficult target for the German planes to hit, gunned the throttle. The ferry jerked away from the dock and began to churn through the water toward the center of the river.
Jillian lost her balance and crashed to the deck just beneath the gunwale. The German dive bombers circled around for another pass. Jillian climbed to her feet so she could watch.
The Russian soldiers on the dock were terrified, trampling each other to escape the promised renewal of carnage.
The German warplanes levelled off and dove. Jillian could hear their engines scream. Their machineguns once again began to bark and spit tracer rounds.
But this time Russian anti-aircraft guns responded. Heavy 37mm shells tore into the planes' formation, sawing through a wing and causing one Stuka to spiral uncontrollably.
Jillian instinctively ducked as the burning aircraft rocketed overhead and plummeted into the water only a few hundred yards down river.
The rest of the warplanes broke off the attack. They had gotten too greedy and it had cost them a valuable machine. They wouldn't make that same mistake again.
Russian anti-aircraft fire followed them ineffectually until they disappeared back into the iron cross of smoke.
The ferry was safe. But its Captain didn't bother turning around to pick up more passengers. He just continued, at full steam, straight for the opposite shore.
As the city grew closer Jillian could start to make out the flames. Every single building, it seemed, was alight. This wasn't a random terror blitz as the Germans had done to London. It was a coordinated and concerted effort to destroy every single building, block by block.
As usual, German reconnaissance was better than the Russian equivalent. Russian air defense headquarters had been the first building destroyed. As a result, Russian fighter planes fought back in a disorganized rabble. The German pilots tore them apart.
Now there were no Russian planes left, and no anti-aircraft guns still operational in the ruins of the city. So long as German planes remained west of the Volga, they had nothing to fear.
Jillian was beginning to have trouble breathing. It wasn't because of the smoke; it was because of the smell. Burning oil and industrial waste enveloped the city in noxious fumes. Jillian noticed that the few Russian soldiers who had made it aboard with her were reaching into their combat gear and pulling out gas masks. Jillian desperately wished she had similar equipment.
The Stalingrad docks approached. Just like the dock on the other side of the river, this one was crowded with people. But they were a different kind of people.
Whereas on the eastern side of the river soldiers were reluctant to climb onto the boat, here people were desperate to get aboard.
As the ferry approached Jillian began to pick out individual faces in the crowd pushing to the edge of the dock. The sight made her stop feeling sorry for herself. Women and old men reached out to the approaching ferry, beseeching it with wales of sorrow to take a child or baby out of Stalingrad and to the relative safety of the opposite shore.
These refugees had no gas masks, either. Some had scarves, dampened with river water, tied around their faces, but most had nothing but the clothes on their backs. All their worldly possessions had been burned by the German firebombing.
They couldn't even be properly called refugees, because they weren't allowed to leave the city – nobody was. "Not one step back," Josef Stalin had famously declared, and that didn't just apply to soldiers.
Officially, Stalin didn't want the civilians to leave the city because he believed Red Army soldiers would fight harder if they could see who they were defending. They'd be less likely to retreat if they knew that would leave women and children in the hands of the attacking Germans.
But Jillian suspected that was a lie.
Less than a year ago Jillian had been on the Northern front, just outside the besieged and starving city of Leningrad. She'd never been inside the city, but she had been given the privilege of interviewing many of the refugees that managed to escape the German encirclement.
The stories she heard were horrifying – stories of death, starvation, even cannibalism. Most of what she heard she couldn't print, not at first, anyway. Stepan wouldn't let her. The Soviet censors feared that news of starving citizens would degrade morale when it was desperately needed.
But then something unexpected happened. A famous Russian composer, Dmitri Shostakovich, wrote a symphony dedicated to the men and women dying in Leningrad. The symphony was a sensation, and it didn't lower morale, it boosted it.
When Russians understood the evil intention of the German starvation policy – to kill Russian Slavs in order to leave the land vacant for German farmers – they had something concrete to fight for. They were no longer just defending a dubious Communist government; they were now fighting for the very survival of their loved ones.
What's more, the plight of Leningrad alerted both the United States and Great Britain to the sufferings of Russia. The public in those countries began to sympathize with far off Russia, and this shift in opinion allowed their governments to spend more money and resources on lend-lease efforts. Russia received a boon in essential military equipment like Studebaker trucks and canned spam rations.
Stalin learned his lesson. Suffering civilians made good propaganda. It made the Russians sympathetic and it made the Germans look like brutes.
Stalin wasn't preventing Stalingrad's citizenry from leaving because he thought the soldiers would fight harder to defend them. He was doing it in order to put those citizens directly in harm's way. He wanted Stalingrad's civilian population to suffer. He wanted German soldiers to kill, starve and brutalize women and children.
He wanted it because it was good propaganda. Like everything Stalin did, it was a cynical policy designed to help keep him in power.
Jillian was, in some respects, the beneficiary of Stalin's cynical new policy. When the invasion began, she wasn't allowed to write anything negative. All of her reports had to be given a positive spin or else Stepan would confiscate them before they could be filed. It was a frustrating time in her journalistic career because she'd found it extraordinarily difficult to come up with positive spins of entire Russian armies becoming surrounded and destroyed.
But with the recent change, bad news was suddenly good news, at least as far as the Communist government was concerned. So long as she didn't openly criticize that government, she could write honestly about any suffering she encountered. The suffering was, after all, the fault of the German invaders, not the Soviet government.
The trouble was that Jillian began to experience a different kind of censorship. It wasn't dictated by a single person, or even by a government. Instead, it was dictated by free enterprise.
Her employer, The Los Angeles Times, was a business. It paid her and its other employees by selling newspapers and advertisements. Unfortunately for Jillian, the LA Times' readers didn't want bad news. The kind of stories that sold papers weren't those of horrific suffering. They were stories of heroic resistance.
Jillian had great difficulty finding stories of heroic resistance on the eastern front. But they were what the American public, and therefore what her employer, wanted. So she found herself exaggerating insignificant events, transforming them by her descriptions into exploits worthy of ancient Greek demigods. She had begun to wonder if she even was a journalist anymore. She seemed, instead, to be a writer of fiction.
She had, however, once found a true story of heroic resistance. It was about a man – no, a boy, really, he was only 19 – who had single-handedly destroyed three German tanks.
Jillian knew the story was true because she had interviewed the boy and he was remarkably humble. If he had made the story up he would have bragged about it, instead. So Jillian felt like a true journalist when she wrote the piece, which she filed under the title "The Russian John Wayne."
LA Times readers loved that story, and Jillian's editor begged her for more just like it. But there simply weren't a lot of Russian John Waynes; there was only one. And shortly after she filed the story the boy hero, Petr Chernov, went missing. He'd been part of the ill-fated Second Shock Army and, like most soldiers in that Army, was presumed dead.
But it turned out he wasn't dead. He'd re-appeared on the Russian military roster a month ago.
Like a true John Wayne, he'd fought his way free, through the German lines, and back to the Red Army, who quickly assigned him to Stalingrad.
Even more remarkably, he'd taken a lover, a girl even younger than he was who, it was said, stood beside him in every battle.
If that wasn't enough to send Jillian racing to this burning city in search of her Russian John Wayne, there was one more fact even more enticing then the others. This girl, the boy hero's lover, she wasn't even Russian.
She was American.
Stepan didn't know any of this. He didn't know the real reason Jillian wanted to come to Stalingrad. He thought it was to write propaganda pieces about the brutal Germans. Jillian kept her true purpose a secret. She knew that in order to write the story she really wanted she would have to escape Stepan's watchful eye.
Well, Stepan was dead now, killed by Stuka divebombers.
And for the first time Jillian was free to pursue a story on her own.
The crowd surged toward the ferry as it bumped against the wharf. A woman held a toddler out toward Jillian, begging her to take the child to the safe side of the river.
Jillian looked away from the desperate mother, unable to meet her gaze. Jillian felt for the woman, who wouldn't? But even if she wanted to help, she wasn't bound back for the opposite shore.
Her destination was deeper in the burning city.
Naval Infantry soldiers disembarked from the ferry and applied violence to the civilians, kicking, shoving, and even clubbing them with their rifle butts.
Their actions weren't malicious; Jillian could even read regret in the marines' faces. But their job was to clear a corridor off of the wharf, and the civilians were interfering with that job.
Despondent soldiers followed the Naval Infantry troopers to a staging area that had been formed around Barmaley Fountain, one of Stalingrad's most famous landmarks. The sculpted centerpiece depicted six children happily holding hands and performing a circle dance around a crocodile.
Somehow the fountain had survived the German bombing. But it was black with smoke, and it was difficult to imagine the tired and terrified children crowded on the dock holding hands and dancing like those depicted by the sculpture.
Red Army officials were busy organizing the arriving conscripts into companies while a political officer, armed with a megaphone, tried to inspire them.
He assured the newly arrived conscripts that the city of Stalingrad would never fall. He insisted that the Soviet Government was committed to stopping the Germans here, and that they would provide the common soldier with anything and everything required to halt the German invaders and drive them back. He insisted that there was no greater honor for a Russian than dying in combat.
Jillian wondered if that last part should have been included in the young commissar's speech. Dying in combat, it seemed to her, didn't much help the cause. It would be better to kill the enemy than to simply die, would it not?
And, judging by the depressed expressions of the conscripts, it appeared they had already accepted that since death would be their ultimate fate, why suffer longer than necessary? Why not hurry it along? The fatalism of Russian culture was, it appeared, suddenly asserting itself. These recruits didn't look ready to fight so much as they looked ready to commit suicide. And the Political Officer's speech was simply encouraging them to kill themselves on German bayonets or machineguns.
Jillian already knew that Petr's battalion had been sent to help defend the Stalingrad Tractor Factory, so she left the staging area and set out to the northwest.
As she pushed deeper into the city, she realized that the fires weren't as bad as they had appeared to be from the river's edge. From there, it seemed as if the entire metropolis was one huge bonfire. But now Jillian saw that the smoke was caused by thousands of little fires, not one big one.
Stalingrad's factories and tenement housing was built not of wood, but of brick. As a result there wasn't much for the incendiary bombs to actually burn. Once the flames had consumed the window sills and rooftops, they became starved of fuel and eventually went out.
Some of the trees in the city parks were still burning and the occasional wooden shed or outbuilding would suddenly burst into flame, but a vast majority of Stalingrad was smashed and blackened by soot, but no longer actually on fire.
The other thing that surprised Jillian was that the streets, as well as the rubble that choked those streets, was a pale shade of pink. She had expected everything to be black and gray and as morbid as the smoky iron cross. Instead it was the same color as her childhood dollhouse.
Later she would learn that it was because of all the bricks. When the bombs struck a brick building, they shattered the red clay into a fine dust. That dust slowly settled over the city, turning everything pink.
Jillian avoided the parks. Whatever trees remained were aflame, but more importantly, the scorched fields and paths were open ground that would have made her a tempting target for German strafing runs.
The ruined buildings were, potentially, even more dangerous, since bombs could blow out walls and collapse rooves, burying Jillian under tons of rubble.
But the German pilots seemed to be ignoring the neighborhoods of worker's apartments that Jillian was currently passing through. They had already bombed most of those buildings into broken skeletons surrounded by piles of rubble, and they seemed content with that destruction. From their vantage point the buildings would have looked completely uninhabitable.
But, up close, Jillian was surprised to catch glimpses of Red Army steel helmets poking up out of shattered windows or trenches freshly dug in the concrete rubble. In fact, up close, the destroyed buildings appeared to offer more hiding places than they would have if they were still whole.
Some of the hiding soldiers had binoculars. They were tracking German planes over Stalingrad's ruined skyline. But they never fired on the aircraft; they were afraid of giving away their hidden positions. It was German infantry and tanks they were waiting for, not airplanes. They just let the warplanes fly overhead and drop their bombs so long as they were doing it somewhere else, in some other neighborhood.
It was an oddly peaceful walk. It was hot from the flames but it wasn't as hard to breath as Jillian had at first worried. Once she got used to the pervasive smell of TNT she stopped choking on the air and inhaled it fully.
There was the constant boom and flash of falling bombs, but they seemed far away, like lightning in a thunder storm. In fact, with the cloud of smoke blocking the sun, that's what it felt like to Jillian, a thunder storm. She'd grown up in Chicago, where she loved to watch the lightning through her parents' attic window. Perhaps that's why she wasn't scared.
The atmosphere changed as she approached the Tractor Factory. The bombs got louder and more frequent. And there was something else, too, the clatter of anti-aircraft machinegun and automatic cannon fire.
The factory was a priority target for the Germans and, it seemed, a strong point of defense for the Russians. Jillian wasn't sure why. She didn't understand what the Germans would find so important about shutting down tractor production.
As she drew nearer Jillian could see the factory's huge, sprawling complex. A series of gigantic buildings, each the size of a warehouse, were connected by narrow-gauge railroad tracks down which rolled carts filled with steel girders.
An imposing administrative building, cut stone with futurist concrete buttresses and towering walls, was the front façade of the entire complex. But the administrative building had lost its roof to German bombs and the narrow-gauge rail lines were broken and cratered.
German planes swarmed over the factory, flying sortie after sortie, twisting and diving to strafe and bomb while Red Army soldiers fired at them from behind piles of rubble or within bomb craters.
But not all the soldiers were defending the factory. Many were working on the assembly line.
Jillian was shocked to discover that even now, under constant air attack, the factory was fully operational. The shingle rooves had been shattered, but steel cranes and the gantries from which they hung were still intact.
Workers, including many soldiers in uniform, braved the bombs and machineguns in order to work the factory floor. And as Jillian watched a vehicle inch down the assembly line, she understood why: the vehicle wasn't a tractor; it was a tank.
This, then, was one of those eastern factories repurposed by Stalin to stop producing peace time tools and start producing weapons.
Jillian moved along the line, taking flash photographs of the manufacturing process, composing each shot so as to emphasize the glaring holes in the blown-out walls and smoldering fires kindled by the constant bombing.
The factory workers ignored her, focusing all their attention on ducking flying shrapnel and accomplishing their manufacturing tasks as quickly as possible.
Jillian found Petr Chernov near the end of the line. He had a rifle slung over his shoulder and was busy riveting on a tank's commander's hatch.
Jillian watched, wide-eyed, when, as soon as he finished, a crew of soldiers leapt into the newly-constructed tank, started up the engine, and drove away. The Russians were literally driving the war machines straight from the factory to the front lines.
"Are you Petr Chernov?" Jillian asked the young soldier, yelling so she could be heard over the sound of the guns and the bombs and the factory machinery.
The question was a mere formality. She recognized the boy, though she was impressed by how much he seemed to have matured in such a short time. His face was still boyish, his wispy blond whiskers almost invisible, and his blue eyes sparkling with youthful mischief. He seemed to find excitement in his work, despite the terror of the flying bombs and shrapnel.
"Who wants to know?" he responded with a wry smile.
"My name's Jillian Crooger. I spoke to you almost a year ago, outside of Leningrad."
The soldier studied Jillian's face before his grin turned into a full smile. "Oh, right, I remember now. You called me the Russian John Wayne."
"That's right."
"So, what brings you to Stalingrad? Here for another interview?"
"Yes, but this time not with you."
"Who, then?"
"Angel."
Petr looked surprised. "Angel, why?"
"I think my readers would be very interested. I was hoping you could introduce me."
Petr nodded. "I'll do it, but only under one condition."
"What's that?"
"You interview her in there!" Petr pointed out a steel cubby hole, built into the shattered wall of the factory.
"Why there?"
"It's safe in there, and she refuses to listen to me."
Jillian nodded with understanding. "I'll tell her it's less noisy, easier to talk."
Petr pointed to a group of women working further up the line. "There she is."
Five minutes later Jillian was looking up over her steno pad at at the girl everyone called Angel.
She had only just turned eighteen, but it seemed as if she'd already lived a lifetime. Her expression was somber, her dark brown, almost black eyes, sad. Raven hair peaked out from under a Red Army steel helmet, smoke and soot stained her cheeks and ran in lines where sweat trickled down to her neck.
Despite it all, the girl was pretty. Jillian felt a tinge of jealousy. Even clean, dressed in expensive fashions and full make up, Jillian never felt pretty, she felt awkward.
Jillian didn't have striking eyes or raven hair; her's were both light brown. Her face was round and cute, but her figure blossomed in the wrong places.
She'd given up trying to hide her hips and accentuate her breasts; she'd given up on make-up and fancy clothes, choosing instead to work in a man's profession that demanded more practical, manly clothing.
Nobody could look pretty in these circumstances, she re-assured herself. And yet here was this young girl, dressed in a Red Army uniform and a dark green steel helmet, filthy and sweaty without make-up of any sort, and yet beautiful.
No wonder the Russian John Wayne had fallen for her.
They sat across from each other on simple wooden worker's stools. A giant spool of steel cable had been set up on its side to form a crude table between them.
Angel didn't talk. She just waited patiently for the first question, perfectly comfortable in silence.
Jillian cleared her throat. "How did you come to Russia?"
"On a boat. From New York across the Atlantic and over the North Sea."
"No, I mean, why did you come?"
"I came to study music at the Leningrad Conservatory. My father was a composer. I was – I am – a cellist."
"How old were you?"
"Fifteen."
"So that would have been what, the summer of 1940?"
"Yes, that's right."
Jillian remembered that summer. She'd been in London, and had been shocked by the ferocity of the German bombing there. That's when she had met Ernie Pyle and the entire experience had led her to change her career. "Weren't you afraid of the war?" she asked.
"Not at the time. Everyone knew Germany and Russia had a pact. It was supposed to be a secret, but it was obvious, after all they'd divided Poland between themselves. So Russia actually seemed quite safe. Safer than England, that's for sure."
Jillian nodded in agreement. "I was in the blitz, it was..." she ducked at the sound of a nearby explosion. "Well, you know."
Angel nodded with a sarcastic laugh. "Yes, I know."
"But after the Germans invaded, what then?"
"What do you mean?"
"Didn't you try to leave?"
"Not at first, no. My father was working with Dmitri Shostakovich..."
"The composer."
"That's right. He was helping him with what would eventually become the Leningrad Symphony. So he didn't want to leave, he wanted to stay, to help the Leningraders resist."
"But why weren't you deported like the other foreigners?"
"My father officially defected.."
"What happened to your father?"
"He froze to death, or starved to death. I'm not sure which. Maybe both."
Jillian was surprised by the matter-of-fact tone Karen used in describing her father's death. The girl's face was an emotionless mask.
"After he died, what did you do then?"
"Then I tried to go home, back to New York. I escaped Leningrad, made it to Moscow, joined a Youth Orchestra travelling to Chelyabinsk, and from there I hoped to find a way across Siberia to American territory in Alaska."
"Stalingrad is southwest of Chelyabinsk, not northeast."
"I realized there was no way through Siberia, so I came here."
Jillian was impressed. Her expression hadn't changed. If Jillian didn't know Angel was lying, she never would have read it in her face.
But Angel was lying, Jillian knew. There had been a way across Siberia. An American delegation had offered to take her with them to Alaska – an offer Angel had refused. Jillian wanted to find out why. "What if I told you I could take you back to America right now?"
"I'd think you were lying."
"You wouldn't come with me?"
"No." Angel put her elbows on the wooden spool table leaned her face into her hands. "Who do you work for?"
"The Los Angeles Times."
"I don't mean the paper. I mean who do you really work for?"
"That's who I work for. I'm a reporter."
"You're not the first one I've talked to, you know."
"You've spoken to other journalists?"
"No, I mean I've spoken to other spies."
Jillian felt her heart leap in her chest but she tried to remain calm. "America doesn't have spies."
Angel laughed. "O.S.S. – Office of Strategic Services. You're right, doesn't sound like spies. Sounds like an Insurance Agency. In Russia they call them the Secret Police. They're a lot less subtle than you are."
Jillian was suddenly glad for the heat. She was sweating nervously but she knew that everyone was sweating, even calm and collected Angel. The sweat wouldn't give her away. "I told you, I'm just a reporter." But then a bomb went off nearby and the deafening explosion caused Jillian to jump out of her chair.
"You don't need to be so nervous. Then again, maybe you do. Like I said, the NKVD isn't so subtle. If they suspected you of espionage, if they thought you worked for the O.S.S., they wouldn't bother interviewing you. They'd just torture you."
"Their suspicions would be completely unfounded."
"Even if that were true it wouldn't matter. Where there's smoke, there's fire. That's their motto. You'd be dead before you could be proven innocent."
"Are you threatening me?"
"No. I'm just warning you. I fell prey to the NKVD in Leningrad. You need to be more careful."
"If I might ask...how'd you escape?"
"The NKVD?"
"That's right."
"I killed the man who arrested me." Karen stood up. "As for me, I'm going back to work. You can tell your bosses – whoever they are – I'm not interested."
"Can I ask you one more question?"
"What?"
"Why have you turned your back on your country?"
"I haven't. If Russia loses, so does America."
Jillian watched helplessly as Angel returned to the assembly line.
She knew her handler at the O.S.S. wouldn't be pleased. But at least she had the photographs of the assembly line. Perhaps analysts could use them to piece together the manufacturing process of the Russian T-34 tank.
Jillian hoped that would mitigate her boss' disappointment.