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“A rattling good military/strategic story set in a realistic and important historical context”

                        --John Unrau, York University, Toronto

Available at iUniverse, Bloomington, Indiana or Amazon.ca

PROLOGUE (excerpt)

Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, Chief of the Abwehr, paced his office at German Military Intelligence Headquarters in Berlin. Not by nature a nervous man, he noticed his little finger twitching slightly and this annoyed him greatly. Was it a reaction to stress and the various conspiracies that cropped up within Hitler’s cabal, or was he losing his nerve?

Might it be a general breakdown of my physical condition? He considered...stopping for a moment, focusing on his finger, unnerved that he could not control it.

Then he remembered recent reports from the Luftwaffe concerning air supremacy that indicated Germany would soon lose the Battle of Britain. Very soon, he would be in ‘heisses wasser’ (hot water) over this turn of events, and he knew it!

With the Luftwaffe on a downward spiral, from their pinnacle of success in spring, 1940, someone would remember the failed attempt, in 1939, to pluck platinum and gold from the Andes.

The gold was one thing, he told himself, but the platinum was unattainable anywhere in Germany or among her Axis allies. With just 1200 kilograms of platinum the Luftwaffe could refit the carburetors in 1500 Me-109’s making them the equal of the Spitfire.

“Yes,” he reported out loud, as if his trusted aide was listening, “Very soon, Himmler will want to retrieve the sunken platinum-gold cargo from Margarita Island, and he’ll dump it right onto my list of possible feasibility projects. I’m sure of it.”

Herr Admiral had to be careful talking out loud as he knew his headquarters was likely bugged by the Gestapo. They watched his every move, he knew, and they hoped to find something to pin on him, as they had done to other individuals they considered suspicious, conspirators against the Nazis, and the German State. Himmler was sure Canaris was leaking information to the British, and his informants had warned him, he was being closely watched. He knew they followed him everywhere all the time. His trusted aide, Colonel Andres, was his one link with Lisbon and contact with Intrepid. Only William Stephenson and Winston Churchill knew the source of the information that came in just ahead of the next main Nazi strategic move.

“Yes,” he told himself half out loud, “I have to move with great care on this one, make no mistake about it!”

The Luftwaffe was licking its wounds, and they would blame the navy for not bringing the platinum to Germany, just after they managed to escape the South American mainland with it.