"Ed Howdershelt - Dragonfly Run" - читать интересную книгу автора (Howdershelt Ed)

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Dragonfly Run
by Ed Howdershelt
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Copyright (c)2003 by Ed Howdershelt
First published via Abintra Press

Abintra Press
www.abintrapress.tripod.com

Fiction


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*Chapter One*
Incidents happen. My team managed to bring a family of four out of East
Germany near Fulda on 3 August 1973 with only one casualty, and that casualty
wasn't one of our team or our extractees. This was remarkable for two reasons:
first, because our teams had never had or caused anyone else to have a
casualty in three years of smuggling people; and second, because it was later
deemed a miracle that more people weren't killed or wounded during our escape.
We used the fact that it was a Friday to our advantage, timing our exit
for the late afternoon shift changes at the guard shacks. Monika, my 'client',
had the passports supplied by our employers (unnamed in this story to avoid
repercussions) ready to show as we approached the first small gate in our
decade-old Ford Taunus. Her father was in the back seat pretending to be
asleep and her two children were in the car behind us.
We had split the family to increase chances of at least partial success
if things went to hell. Splitting was a normal procedure on some of our
extraction missions and in this case also served the pretense that Monika was
my West German wife, that I was a U.S. Army sergeant stationed in
Kaiserslautern, and that we had been in East Germany to visit members of her
side of the family -- which was just about the only true part of the story.
Will and Connie were in the car behind us, doing their best to act like
typical hurried and harried middle-class American tourists who were ragingly
frustrated with both their children in the back seat and the bureaucratic
hoops of entering and leaving East Germany.
It was likely that they were only half-acting, since the kids were the
only ones in our group who'd had enough sleep in the last thirty-six hours.
The adults were all just about dead tired from preparations and waiting in a
long line of cars at the checkpoint.
Throughout the mission they'd stood out like sore thumbs in their