Now he would live with the eternal shame and horror of what he’d been forced to do and witness. A steely eye, threatening pose, and menacing tone were not the techniques he’d expected would be employed to pry information from the poor sucker strapped in the chair of an interrogation room. Pry was not the word, either. Extract was more accurate. God, the deplorable acts of inhumanity those Gestapo bastards were capable of. The worst were the times he entered a cell to find an American in restraints, the look he received when Dirk was ordered to inform him that his interpreter was a fellow countryman. The Gestapo interrogators took great pleasure in that directive. “Sergeant Drechsler is from Texas in America,” they would say, bending down to speak into the anguished face of the downed U.S. pilot or the American OSS liaison to the French Resistance. He would then repeat loudly as if his American captive was deaf, “America! Texas!”

At such times, Dirk’s entrails would twist in self-revilement and another layer would be added to the hatred he felt for the whole German war machine and the country he’d volunteered to serve.

If only he’d listened to Chris, his best friend, who had not bought into the crap of a thousand-year reign of the Third Reich. Lucky Chris, to have been born with a missing thumb that guaranteed a military deferment. He was now safe in the land of the free, cozy in his Austin apartment, enjoying his teaching job and living in the city that he loved. He could work on his PhD, attend music festivals and rodeos, date girls, see his family, and eat Mexican food whenever the mood struck him—all without a clue of the loneliness, danger, cold, and deprivation his buddy was enduring over in German-occupied Paris.

If only he could find a way to get home. He had thought and thought about it. There ought to be a way to get across the border into Switzerland or Spain or across the English Channel into England. He had money hidden away—U.S. dollars—that the Abwehr didn’t know about. At least he’d not been dumb enough to leave home without funds on hand. He was growing desperate. He couldn’t sleep at night for fantasizing what it would be like to walk up to the front door of his house in New Braunfels and ring the bell. “Mater! Vater! I’m home!”

Although now he would say Mother and Father, maybe even Daddy, like everybody else’s son in Texas. He would be through with all things German if he should ever get out of Europe. If he ever made it home, he would take whatever was coming to him, like the prodigal son, willing to eat pig swill, not expecting the fatted calf.