of you trapped men.”
The blitzkrieg would resume and the American command would panic. They would rush reinforcements before him, putting them in exactly the wrong places. Why were commanding officers of armies and the leaders of countries and power blocs so obvious?
Mansfeld picked up the coffee cup and sipped. He took a deep breath afterward. He would win the war. He knew that. His true opponent wasn’t the Americans or the broken Canadians. No. Chancellor Kleist was his real foe. So far, Kleist had kept his nose out of his affairs in running the day-to-day operations. There would come a moment, however, when Kleist would interfere. The Americans were stubborn, and they would fight hard. They would produce one seeming crisis moment, and that crisis would break Kleist’s so-called steely nerves.
Clicking the half-full cup back onto its saucer, Mansfeld sat down and put his hands behind his head. He closed his eyes, and he visualized what had happened four months ago. His recall was incredibly sharp, better than anyone else’s that he knew about. His near-photographic retention was one of his secrets.
Kleist was his enemy. The reason was clear. Chancellor Kleist feared a man with such abilities as his. History supplied the reasons. No one else could outthink and outmaneuver the Chancellor except for him. Therefore, to keep himself secure as the ruler of United Europe, Kleist would believe he needed to eliminate the threat of the only other superior thinker in his midst.
With his eyes closed, Mansfeld smiled. This was a game of wits, of titans among pygmies. It would seem that Kleist held all the cards. Clearly, the Chancellor had the superior position of power.
“So it would seem,” Mansfeld whispered.
Yet it had also been that way four months ago. Kleist had summoned him back from Quebec to order him before a firing squad or lock him in with torturers. No one else had quite known that, although Mansfeld had known it with certainty. He’d faced Kleist and the GD General Staff alone in the den of lions. The Chancellor had planned to pin on him the fruits of his own—Kleist’s—mistake. The Chancellor had planned to shovel the blame and rid himself of his only true opponent. But the move had been so obvious that it had surprised Mansfeld that the Chancellor hadn’t recognized what the countermove would be.
With his hands behind his head, and with his eyes closed, General Mansfeld frowned. Kleist possessed a superior mind. Therefore—
Mansfeld opened his eyes and sat up.
The idea galled him at first. Then he shook his head. Another of his powers was the ability to admit a mistake. It was conceivable that he had made an error at the meeting four months ago.
Mansfeld peered up at the ceiling. The tiles there had thousands of indentations that almost looked like holes. He closed his eyes and once more, he put his hands behind his head. He let himself relax.
He needed to use his memory. He needed to replay the meeting and see if Kleist had outfoxed him. The Chancellor could be incredibly subtle.
“I am not invincible,” General Mansfeld whispered while in his chair.
He concentrated, and he thought back to the meeting four months ago in Berlin.
“General Mansfeld,” the Chancellor said in a dangerously silky voice, “tell us about that, won’t you?”
They met in the Defense Ministry, a midmorning meeting. Outside, cold rain pelted against the windows. At times, hail hit, sounding like pebbles as they struck.
Hostile eyes turned toward General Walther Mansfeld. He sat alone at the end of a long conference table. Along the walls, the Chancellor’s security detail watched Mansfeld with reptilian eyes. They were big men in black suits who could draw their weapons with startling speed. They wouldn’t hesitate to shoot him. Neither would they hesitate to drag him to the Chancellor’s “doctors.” There, Mansfeld knew, he would take many months dying as the specialists inflicted ever more ingenious pains. They would turn him into a mewling thing begging for death.
The thought might have weakened another man, but not Mansfeld. He played for the highest stakes in the most deadly occupation possible: political power. He was also the superior of every man he’d ever met in his life.
“Can it be you lack words, General?” Kleist asked, with a hint of his infamous gloating tingeing his speech.
The Chancellor had a strong voice and he was the same height as Mansfeld. They were two short men among physical giants—even if the others were mental pygmies compared to them. But where Mansfeld was trim like a rapier, Kleist was fat like a knotty oaken club. That was a key to understanding the man. Despite the Chancellor’s intellect, to Mansfeld Kleist seemed like a gutter-born thug. Despite his outer gloss of sophistication, Kleist was a brutal man with the instincts of an alpha wolf. All his life, the Chancellor had struck first and struck hard.
Kleist wore a brown suit and expensive Italian shoes. His chin was strong, his hands thick but small and he wore a silver wedding ring with a large diamond that seemed strangely out of place among these military men.
The General Staff members sitting along the sides of the table were large men with stiff, military postures. Each was well fed and each wore a crisp uniform, with the red General Staff stripes running down the legs of their trousers. Mansfeld wanted to sneer at them. To him, they were like Great Danes secretly quivering in fear of their master. They were also afraid of what he—Mansfeld—might say and that Kleist would hold the words against them.
Kleist stared across the conference table at him, and the gloating had reached the Chancellor’s eyes. Yes, Kleist believed himself in control of the situation.
Finally, Mansfeld saw a hint of doubt cross the Chancellor’s face. It was a subtle thing. By now, Kleist had to be wondering why his general refused to let this spectacle cow him.
“Are you tongue-tied?” Kleist asked.
“No, Excellency,” Mansfeld said in a ringing voice.
A few of the General Staff members looked at him with new eyes. It seemed their dull minds finally realized that none of this frightened him. A few frowned in puzzlement. It was clear they couldn’t fathom the source of his courage. Chancellor Kleist needed a scapegoat and the man had chosen the commanding officer of the German Expeditionary Force in Quebec, General Mansfeld.
“Well…?” Kleist asked. “What do you have to say for yourself? Come now, speak while you are able.”
“Excellency,” Mansfeld said, having waited for the moment to ripen. “My prediction concerning the Sino- American War proved incorrect in one particular only. Everything that went wrong afterward hinged upon that one fact.”
Kleist frowned, which meant the gloating had disappeared. When the man was winning at something, he became jovial. When he was losing, his bad temper was legendary. It must finally be dawning on the Chancellor that he had made a miscalculation, and he didn’t realize yet what that mistake was. It obviously troubled Kleist.
“You are free to speak, General,” Kleist said. “Please, enlighten us, if you would.”
The exquisite nature of the moment produced a churning feeling in Mansfeld’s gut. Some people referred it to as “the butterflies,” and they hated the sensation. It was otherwise with him. The churning told him he was alive, on the very knife-edge of existence.
