The huge German cursed him and pushed off with his forearms. But the lessons of boxing at the National Police Academy remained with Cochrane. Always stay in close when fighting larger men. Get inside their reach. Then hurt them badly.
As the Luger came out, Cochrane smashed the man's wrist with his own left forearm. Then Cochrane's right hand came stabbing upward, thrusting the ice pick in to the German's stomach.
The man bellowed. His eyes went wide with agony. Cochrane pulled back and the men stood eye to eye. The German tried to aim the gun. Cochrane kneed the man again, harder than before. Then he knocked the gun away. He pulled back the ice pick, braced himself, and stabbed upward again, this time toward the heart. The blade of the pick broke off from the force of the blow and the American stepped away.
The Gestapo agent staggered for several feet, then Cochrane hit him hard from the back, knocking him down onto the garbage-strewn alleyway.
The man moaned horribly and cursed as he hit the ground. Cochrane felt his stomach churning and his own heart pounding. The body kicked and convulsed. Cochrane cursed the man a final time and commanded him to die.
The body went still. Cochrane picked up the Luger and tucked it into his belt. Then he stripped the dead man of his Gestapo identification and discarded his own overcoat, which was now covered with blood. He walked to the edge of the alley and moved down an adjoining side street.
He checked his watch: 8:10. He found a taxi and went to the railroad station. At 8:22 he was on the last train leaving Freiburg for Zurich. But at the same moment as Cochrane's departure, two Gestapo gorillas tired of fussing with the locks on Cochrane's new suitcase. One of them unsheathed a knife and began to force the catches open.
The blade of the knife protruded through the leather case and triggered the electric circuit that Cochrane had wound around the valise. As the case opened, the battery sent a spark throughout the wire, and the four lead pipes exploded simultaneously. The. 22-caliber bullets blew out the upper ends of the steel pipes; every round at the same moment. The two agents were hardly in position to appreciate Cochrane's makeshift machine gun. Nor were they capable of wishing they had never laid a calloused finger on Theresia Erdmann.
Two of the bullets caught one agent flush in the face, one shot blowing a hole where his eye had been and continuing through the brain. The other agent caught the force of the blast with his neck and upper chest. The small-caliber bullet tumbled when it shattered his shoulder bone, ricocheting upward and severing the jugular vein.
Unlike his cohort, the wounded German did not die instantly. He managed to crawl several feet to the door to scream for help. But he was too weak to open the door, and the door was locked from within.
Police were summoned. Within minutes all trains out of Freiburg-particularly the two that were in transit southbound for Switzerland-were ordered stopped.
Bill Cochrane sat by a window seat in the town of Mulheim, fifteen kilometers north of the frontier at Basel. He saw several dozen Wehrmacht soldiers on the station platform, carrying their automatic rifles at their waists, and knew there would be trouble.
Moments later, the soldiers were going from car to car.
Cochrane slid a hand beneath his coat to the Luger in his belt. He felt his hand wet against the weapon. He knew that if he were discovered he would have no choice but to shoot his way off the train. But he did not believe for a moment that he could escape.
He knew also that they would be looking for an American. That was in his favor. That and his experience. Then the doors to his first-class compartment flew open and he was faced with two very tall, very strong, but very young soldiers.
'Passports! Identifications!' they demanded. Their eyes drifted across the other faces in the compartment and settled suspiciously upon Cochrane.
Cochrane stared at the two young Germans, gave them a look of condescension, shook his head in irritation, and gazed out the window.
'Tell me, Sergeant,' Cochrane asked in flawless German, 'how much longer can we waste our time in this stinking little town?'
The corporal stepped to the sergeant's side and glared at Cochrane. 'You have the insolence to ask us questions?' snapped the sergeant. 'Your passport!'
The corporal made a slight gesture with his gun. Three other passengers cringed. Cochrane glared back. Then with a gesture of annoyance, he reached to his passport and tossed it contemptuously onto the floor at the sergeant's feet.
'Bavarian swine!' he snapped to them. 'You don't know how to do a job correctly!'
As the corporal covered Cochrane, the sergeant opened the Swiss passport. He stared at the photograph in the passport and raised his eyes to check it against Bill Cochrane. He found a close enough match. But something was wrong with the man before him and the sergeant knew it.
Cochrane's hand went slowly to his breast pocket. The corporal eyed him.
'At ease, Corporal!' Cochrane muttered sourly.
Cochrane withdrew the Gestapo shield from his breast pocket. The eyes of the two soldiers went wide with terror.
'Now would you kindly hand me back my passport and get your asses moving through this train!'
Cochrane's other hand remained within his coat, the palm pressed against the handle of the pistol, the forefinger on the trigger. The Luger was Cochrane's only remaining hope if the bluff failed. But the two soldiers were frozen.
“Come on, Sergeant! Get on with it! Or you'll be at a garrison on the Polish border within one week.' Only a second more passed.
'Thank you, sir!' blurted the sergeant. He fumbled the passport back into Cochrane's hands. The American snatched it furiously and drove the two soldiers from the compartment with a withering stare. Cochrane thanked a beneficent God that the young sergeant had rattled too easily to obey army protocol-checking the name on the Gestapo shield against the passport. Had either soldier taken that simple measure, all three of them would have died.
NINE
In Zurich, Cochrane scanned streets before he walked them and searched crowded places for faces he might have seen before. He sat in cafes with one arm to the wall and facing the entrances, and he walked only on sidewalks that could take him down one-way streets against the traffic.
When he was certain that the Gestapo was not on his back, he looked for an address that he had memorized months previously in Washington: a print shop in a prosperous residential neighborhood five minutes' walk from the lake. From the flowers and public gardens still in bloom at lakeside, a man might never suspect that all hell was breaking loose in every neighboring nation. But Cochrane knew that Gestapo agents made regular forays into Switzerland, primarily to snoop on German Jews with foreign bank accounts. Cochrane's sense of being followed had been honed to a gleaming edge over the last weeks. He never ceased to wonder when he would unexpectedly see the same face twice.
It was almost the Eleventh Commandment: In this line of work, there is no such thing as coincidence. He knew somewhere they were behind him.
The print shop was on a side street, nestled between an antique dealer and a dressmaker. The proprietor, according to the window, was a man named Engle. Cochrane entered and found a diminutive man with white hair, wire glasses, and a sallow complexion. The man, he learned upon initial inquiry in German, was Herr Engle. Conveniently, the shop was empty. So Cochrane switched to English.
'I have some friends who wish to travel abroad,' Cochrane said, slipping into a prearranged patter.
'But, Mein Herr,' Engle replied with a sorrowful smile, 'I do not handle travelers. I am an engraver.'
'I must be mistaken then.' Cochrane smiled, knowing he was not mistaken at all. 'My Uncle Edgar tells me he has an account here.'
