He recalled every sensory detail of that last moment before the dream became a nightmare in crystal clear high definition—the sunlight glistening in a drop of dew on a spider’s web, the sound of the mud sucking at his boots, the sour taste of canned ham and eggs from a morning K ration lingering in his mouth, and the stone of well-justified dread sitting in his gut. And then his life changed. Jasper had relived the moments that followed a thousand times. Ten thousand times. Both waking and sleeping they had haunted him. In trying to escape them he had driven away everyone who had ever loved or cared for him, and despite his constant desire to find the courage to end the dream, he had outlived them all. That had been the cruelest fate—that his own cowardice should be accompanied by the misery of longevity. But if the man Jasper had seen following him the past few days was there for the reason Jasper suspected, tonight might finally be different. Tonight the dream might end at last.

He had woken a little after four that Sunday morning at the end of April 1945. He and the rest of his division had begun the day no more than a dozen miles from Munich, where they expected to encounter significant German resistance. After his unappetizing K-ration breakfast, Jasper, weary from a poor night’s sleep, shouldered his rifle and fell in with the rear guard. He had been in Germany over a month and in France before that, since they had landed the previous August at Sainte-Maxime. He had come under heavy fire, sustained a minor gunshot wound, watched a friend die in agony, and killed at least four of the enemy. Like the rest of the soldiers around him, he felt hardened at this point. He just wanted to get the job done and get home. Munich, they all assumed, would be no different from Aschaffenburg or Nuremberg—easier perhaps, as with each encounter the Germans seemed less organized and more resigned to the ultimate outcome of the war. Yet despite all this, Jasper felt a tightness in his stomach that hadn’t been there since his first few days in France. Then word trickled back that they would be making a slight detour. There would be another task before Munich.