"And I'm sure my husband," Netty continued, "would be honored to try to do whatever you asked of him."

"Thank you," Erika said. "A little over twelve years ago, it was on February thirteenth, a child, a boy, was born out of wedlock to an eighteen-year-old girl."

"That's always sad," Netty said.

Five-to-one Daddy's an American.

"The father was an American," Erika said. "A helicopter pilot."

No fooling? How many thousands of times has some GI knocked up a German girl and promptly said, "Auf wiedersehn!"

Pastor Dannberg slid an envelope across the table to Netty.

"That's the boy," he said. "He's a fine young man. Very bright."

Netty opened the envelope and took out a photograph of a skinny blond boy of, she guessed, about twelve.

Hell, she said, ": over twelve years ago."

The boy was wearing short pants, knee-high white stockings, a blue jacket with an insignia embroidered on the breast pocket, a white shirt and tie, and a cap, sort of a short-brimmed baseball cap with red-colored seams and the same insignia.

That's the uniform of Saint Johan's School, as I damn well know, for all the marks I spent sending two of mine there.

Okay. So this poor kid – not poor, unfortunate: Saint Johan's is anything but cheap – is in Saint Johan's. Which explains why Pastor Dannberg is involved.

"Handsome child," Netty said and slid the photograph to Elaine.

"Beautiful child," Elaine said.

"It has become necessary for the mother to get in contact with the boy's father," Erika said.

"A question of child support?" Netty said. "I'm sure my husband will do whatever he can:"

"No. Not of child support."

"The father's been supporting the boy?"

I'll be damned. A horny sonofabitch who's met his obligations.

"I don't think: I know: he doesn't know the boy exists," Erika said. "No effort was ever made to contact him."

My God, why not?

"May I ask why now?" Netty said.

"The boy's mother is very ill," Erika said. "And there is no other family."

"Oh, how sad!" Netty said.

And what will happen, if Freddy can track Daddy down, is that he will deny, swearing on a stack of Bibles, that he ever took a fraulein to bed all the time he was here and that he certainly has no intention of starting now to support somebody else's bastard..

Goddammit. Men should be castrated at birth.

But what did she say? It wasn't a question of child support?

Netty carefully considered her words, then continued: "As I'm sure you're aware: and you, Pastor Dannberg: I'm ashamed to say that this boy is not the first child to be abandoned by an American soldier. Do you have the father's name?"

"Jorge Castillo," Erika said. "He was a helicopter pilot and he was from Texas."

"May I speak bluntly?" Netty asked after a long moment's thought.

"Of course."

"I think my husband can probably find this man-that seems an unusual name-but I also think it's possible, even likely, that this man will be less than willing to acknowledge a child who, as you said, he doesn't even know he's had."

"We've thought about that, of course," Pastor Dannberg said.

"And, however remote," Erika added, "there is the possibility that he will be pleased to learn he has a son and be willing to assume his parental obligations."

There is also the possibility that pigs can be taught to whistle. In twelve years – if this guy wasn't already married – Poppa already has a wife and children and the last thing he wants his wife to know is he left a bastard in Germany who he is now expected to take into his happy home.

"Please believe me when I say I'm trying to be helpful," Netty said. "But there are certain questions I just have to ask."

"I understand."

"Does the mother have other children?"

"No. She never married."

Well, that answers my next question: What does Mammas husband have to say about this?

"She raised the boy by herself? And never married?"

"She never married and she raised the boy by herself," Erika said.

"This is an indelicate question," Netty said. "Forgive me for asking it. But I have to. How does she know this man is the father?"

"She knows. No other possibility exists. He was her first, and only, lover. They were: together: three times. The first night, and then the next."

"I really hate to say this, but how can we know that?"

"Because I'm telling you," Erika said.

"But, Erika, how do you know?" Netty pursued.

"Because we are talking about my son, Netty," Erika von und zu Gossinger said.

[TWO]

Headquarters

Eleventh Armored Cavalry Regiment

Downs Barracks

Fulda, Hesse, West Germany

1545 7 March 1981

The sergeant major of the Eleventh "Blackhorse" Armored Cavalry Regiment, a stocky thirty-nine-year-old from Altoona, Pennsylvania, named Rupert Dieter, put his shaven head in the door of the colonel's office.

"You have time for the colonel's lady?" Dieter asked.

Colonel Frederick J. Lustrous, Armor, a tall, muscular forty-five-year-old, was visibly surprised at the question-Netty almost never came to the office-but rose to the occasion.

"There was some doubt in your mind, Sergeant Major?"

"She told me to ask, Colonel," Sergeant Major Dieter said.

"Inform the lady nothing would give me greater pleasure," Lustrous said.

Headquarters of the Eleventh Armored Cav was a three-story masonry building built-like most facilities occupied by the U.S. Army-in the years leading up to World War II for the German Army.

Stables built for the horses of the Wehrmacht now served as shops to maintain the tanks, armored personnel carriers, and wheeled vehicles used by the Blackhorse to patrol the border between East and West Germany.

Fulda traces its history to a monastery built in 744 A.D. It lies in the upper Fulda River valley, between the Vogelsberg and Rhoen mountain ranges.

Since the beginning of the Cold War, it had been an article of faith-with which Colonel Lustrous personally, if very privately, strongly disagreed-in the European Command that when Soviet tanks rolled into West Germany they would come through the "Fulda Gap."

The mission of the Blackhorse was to patrol the border, now marked by barbed wire, observation towers, mined fields, and whatever else the East Germans and their Soviet mentors could think of to keep East Germans from fleeing the benefits of Marxist-Leninism and seeking a better life in West Germany.

It was Colonel Lustrous's private belief-he was a student of Soviet tactics generally and of the Red Army Order of Battle in great detail-that if the Red Army did come through the Fulda Gap, they would do so in such numbers that they would cut through the Blackhorse-which was, after all, just three squadrons spread out over a very lone section of the border-like a hot knife through butter.

The most the Blackhorse could do, if Soviet T-34 tanks came, would be to slow them down a little, like a speed bump on a country road. Lustrous was confident that the men of the Blackhorse would "acquit themselves well" if he was wrong and the Russians came. By that, he meant they would not run at the first sight of the Russians but fight.

Many-perhaps most-of his men would die, and the dead would be better off than those who survived and were marched off into Soviet captivity. Lustrous was a student of how the Red Army treated its prisoners, too. Lustrous knew a great deal about the Soviets and their army. He truly believed that "Know your enemy" was a military principle right up there with "Don't drink on duty." Failure to abide by either would very likely get you killed.

He was now on his third tour on the border between East and West Germany. He'd been a Just Out of West Point second lieutenant assigned to the Fourteenth Constabulary Squadron in Bad Hersfeld in 1948. The Fourteenth had been redesignated the Fourteenth Armored Cavalry Regiment when Captain Lustrous returned to the border after service in the Korean War. And when Colonel Lustrous returned from Vietnam, he found "the Regiment" was now the Eleventh "Blackhorse" Armored Cavalry, the colors of the Fourteenth having been furled for reasons he never really understood.