Rumors were flying that an Allied invasion was imminent, perhaps on the northern coast of France in the spring, when the weather was more favorable. In March, a stroke of good luck favored Bucky when he was tapped to go along with an engineering team to check out the structural readiness of the massive Atlantic Wall, designed to protect Nazi-occupied France from an Allied invasion by sea. The sight of the 1,670-mile coastal defense system would be indelibly imprinted in his memory as long as he lived. Stretching from Norway along the Belgian and French coastline to the Spanish border were miles of barbed wire and an endless chain of impregnable bunkers from which the Germans could mow down landing forces the moment they hit the beaches with full protection from return fire. Mines by the thousands were strewn along the shoreline attached to steel-and-concrete spiked structures designed to halt tanks, troop carriers, and other amphibious landing vehicles in their tracks. At high tide the invaders would approach the beaches without seeing the traps, and at low tide the sight of their awesome and deadly numbers would dissuade even the most determined forces from launching an invasion by sea.

Sick at heart, his imagination rife with the horror of such an assault and the casualties of the brave men who might try it, Bucky recorded details of the enemy’s coastal defense fortification in a report so meticulous that it served as one of the major consultation sources to the Allied strategists planning the invasion.

On March 4, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris was put under house arrest, but weeks passed and no word came of the admiral’s out-and-out incarceration. A rumor circulated in Konrad’s office that his former chief was to be assigned a government job of minor importance in Berlin. But Konrad didn’t trust Himmler. He knew how the Nazi chief of the SS worked. Play the fish along until it was time to sink the hook deep, then yank it from the water. So Brad and Chris, unknown to Konrad, concocted a plan to keep the general safe if the worst came to Admiral Canaris. They had decided that when the time came to run, they were taking the general with them to Switzerland, where he would reunite with Wilhelm and remain until the end of the war.

By April, classified intel was dropping before the team like a windfall of apples. With tensions running high in the Vichy government and the German High Command, Chris received fewer invitations to the homes of the academy’s students, since the fathers could not be counted on to make it home for dinner, but their sons had no qualms about repeating their fathers’ explanations for the activities that kept them from the family table.