Final impact

The sound of the jeep’s engine faded away, and he began to walk. With each step he found his throat growing tighter, and his eyes bleary with the first tears he had shed in an age. He walked slowly, taking in the magnificent view and the quiet peace that surrounded him, hoping to compose himself before meeting his wife and son. He had no idea whether they would stay here in this obscure part of Canada, no idea what the rest of their lives would bring. He had money enough to give them a new life anywhere in the free world, but perhaps, for the next little while, they might just sit quietly here by the edge of this lake and wonder at the miracle that had delivered them from evil.

Brasch was imagining long fishing trips with little Manny, and the first night he would spend in bed with his wife, when a small, piping voice brought his head up with a start.

“Papa! Papa!”

It was Manfred and Willie, both of them running up the path toward him, arms out, their cheeks red and wet with tears of joy. But there was something wrong with the boy’s face and his voice. Brasch experienced a second of free-floating panic and then realized what was so different. Manny’s voice was clear and his mouth a perfect O as he ran toward his long-lost daddy. The cleft palate with which he’d been born-the small deformity that would inevitably have seen him fed into the ovens of the Reich at some point-was gone. Fixed by surgery, he supposed.

But gone. Gone forever.

“Papa! Papa!”

Paul Brasch, the good German, dropped his duffel bag and ran toward them.

7 AUGUST 1944.

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA.

“So when are you starting work, ma’am.”

Mohr’s voice was a raspy bellow in her ear. It had to be, or she would never have heard him over the roar of the nightclub.

“Please, Eddie!” she yelled back. “Would you knock it off with the ma’am-and-skipper routine. We’re not on the quarterdeck and I’m not even a captain anymore. Karen will be fine.”

The big chief petty officer smiled and winked. “Right you are, ma’am. Karen it is, then, skipper.”

His face glistened with sweat, and stage lighting glinted off his scalp beneath the short back and sides. Karen Halabi rolled her eyes, but she, too, was smiling. She was free. She was alive. She was a little bit drunk. And she was married to the greatest guy in the world who was, at that very moment, up on stage, playing his beloved electric guitar in public for the first time in three years. Mike was a little rusty, but like everyone in the Palomino Club he was also drunk and happy and well beyond caring whether his version of “Smoke on the Water” paid sufficient homage to the original. The guys in his garage band were all uptimers and they were just loving the chance to play some old-school rock and roll for the heaving crowd of Zoners and Angelinos who gathered at the Palomino four nights a week to dance along to some kickin’ tunes.

“So, you didn’t answer my question…Karen. When d’you start?”

Halabi finished her beer and signaled an overworked bartender for two more as Mike and the boys started in on their version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

“Next Monday morning,” she shouted back at Mohr. “So Mike and I have a few days left yet. He has an extra week’s leave, so he’s going to be getting the house set up, making my dinner, ironing my shirts. All the old-fashioned corporate-wife stuff.”

Eddie Mohr, the master chief of the USS Hillary Clinton, grinned like an old fox at the henhouse door. “Will he now?”

Halabi punched him on the arm. “And you won’t be teasing him about it either, Chief. I’ve got a good housebroken man up there on that stage, and he’s going to stay broken. Understand?”

The beers arrived and Karen paid for them with her Combat Optics credit card. The guys at CO had insisted she take it as soon as she signed her employment contract. As senior vice president in charge of R D she enjoyed a generous personal expense account over and above her corporate allowance. The combined sum of the two was appreciably more than her husband pulled in as a U.S. Navy captain, and the sign-on bonus had been generous enough to pay cash for their beachfront house in San Diego. It wasn’t in-Zone, but she’d found to her delight that the U.S. West Coast felt a lot more like her sort of place than she could have hoped for back in the UK. Probably something to do with being in the New World.

The crowd roared as Mike plucked out the first notes of “Louie Louie.”

Eddie Mohr charged his glass and shouted, “To the future.”

Karen Halabi sloshed beer over her arm and his shirt as they clinked glasses, but she figured What the hell?

“To the past,” she cried back.

7 AUGUST 1944.

SANDRINGHAM HOUSE, NORFOLK, ENGLAND.