After telephoning to get an ambulance for Aaron, I drove west and north toward Frankfurt. It was a city I knew little about except that it was five hundred kilometers away and full of Amis. The Amis seemed to like Frankfurt even more than they liked Garmisch. And Frankfurt liked the Amis. Who could blame them? The Amis had brought jobs and money, and the city—once seen to be of little importance—now had the reputation of being one of the most affluent places in the Federal Republic. Rhein-Main Air Base, just a few miles south of Frankfurt, was America’s principal European air transport terminal. It was from Rhein-Main that the city of Berlin had been kept supplied during the famous “Operation Vittles” airlift from June 1948 to September 1949. Without the airlift, Berlin would have become just another city in the Russian Zone. Because of Rhein-Main’s strategic importance, all roads to and from Frankfurt had been very quickly repaired after the war, and were the best in Germany. And I made good progress as far as Stuttgart, when the fog came down, a real sea of mist that had me cursing at the top of my voice like a human foghorn, until I remembered that planes couldn’t fly in fog. Then I almost cheered. With fog like that there were was still half a chance that I could make it in time. But what was I going to do when I got there? I had the forty-five automatic of course, but my appetite for shooting people had diminished a little after what had happened at Mönch. Besides, shooting four, possibly five people in cold blood had only limited appeal. And even before I had reached the airbase just after midnight, I had already concluded I could not shoot the two women. For the others I would just have to hope they wanted to make a fight of it. I tried to banish all such considerations from my mind as I pulled the car up outside the main gatehouse to the airport. I switched off the engine, collected my paperwork, straightened my tie, and walked toward the security guard. I hoped that my English would be equal to the lie I had been rehearsing during the course of my six-hour journey.

The guard looked too warm and well fed to be alert. He wore a green gabardine coat, a beret, a muffler, and thick green woolen gloves. He was blond and blue-eyed and about six feet tall. The name plate on his coat read “Schwarz,” and for a moment, I thought he was in the wrong army. He looked more German than I did. But his spoken German was about as good as my spoken English.