Agent Orange Read online

  Contents

  Front Matter

  Prologue. Czechoslovakia 1964

  Chapter 1. The Missing Agent

  Chapter 2. The Cavalry

  Chapter 3. Mehr Wasser

  Chapter 4. Preparation

  Chapter 5. Rendezvous

  Chapter 6. Whisper

  Chapter 7. Ziska

  Chapter 8. Survival Kit

  Chapter 9. The Elephant

  Chapter 10. Second Chances

  Chapter 11. The Last Loving

  End Notes

  Agent Orange

  Stephen Langford

  Copyright © 2017 Stephen Langford

  All rights reserved.

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks go to my friends and family who encouraged me to follow my creative dream to write fiction, provided generous editing, and suffered through my many dramatic readings aloud; and to the CreateSpace editors who made the manuscript even better.

  This book is dedicated to Mary Langford, my mother and my first inspiration.

  Author’s Note

  Welcome to the world of the CIA’s “Cavalry” division, and its top cold war agent, Andrew Keeton—code name Orange.

  This is the first book in the Agent Orange trilogy. In order to receive news about the upcoming sequel, The Schoolboy, and to receive other free material such as Cavalry short stories, please sign up here. I look forward to building a relationship with my readers, and providing them my very best effort to entertain them through my fiction.

  Prologue. Czechoslovakia 1964

  “Nebudete na západ, kněze,” the man in the black trench coat said. He had produced a gun.

  Andrew Keeton looked up suddenly. He had just finished donning and securing his parachute and was lifting the second chute to the priest, who had gone white and taken a step back uncertainly in the bouncing airplane. Keeton’s Czech was rudimentary, so he spoke to the priest in German. “What is he doing? What did he say?”

  “Apparently we have been deceived,” the priest answered. “He said I’m not going to the West.”

  “Father Teodor is correct, I’m afraid.” The man with the gun—known to them as Dominik—spoke in German as well. “You see, although I sympathize with the persecuted religious in my country, I have my orders.”

  Together, along with the pilot, they had commandeered the old Junkers 252, one of the Nazi cargo planes recovered for the Czech Air Force, from a small airfield near Plzen, now forty miles behind them. The summer day was beautiful. The strong sun was slicing into the cabin from the east, through the half-dozen rectangular windows on their starboard. If not for the Iron Curtain that contained the country, it might have made a nice vacation spot.

  Damn, he’s been turned, Keeton thought. Or he’s been a double all along. If so, a good one. He looked up front and saw the viciously smiling face of the pilot turning back to smirk at him. Him, too. That’s just perfect.

  “What about Gregor here?” Father Teodor asked. Gregor was the temporary cover name Keeton had adopted for the extraction mission. Everyone on the plane thought he was born in Bonn. “Is he to be detained back in Plzen, too?”

  “No,” Dominik said firmly. “As a citizen of West Germany, he will be allowed to go home. Jumping, of course. And without your gun,” he said to Keeton, who complied by carefully extracting the old VZ automatic from his jacket and sliding it over to Dominik’s feet.

  “So you’re not jumping either,” Keeton said to Dominik, who simply shook his head gravely.

  “Dominik, why are you doing this?” Father Teodor asked, recovering his composure and forgetting the pistol trained on him. “You know the oppression. You know I have to say the mass in secret. You cannot go along with this.”

  “Father, you think you know me, but you really don’t. I let you think a great many things about me. The truth is I’m too far gone to work your religion on. I am a faithful citizen of the Socialist Republic of Czechoslovakia. So there, it’s done.”

  Father Teodor looked at Keeton and shrugged. “I suppose I’ll be in jail for a long time. Thank you for trying to save me.”

  The pilot called back and gave Dominik a hand signal. “OK, Gregor, time to jump.” Dominik motioned with the pistol toward the door. “Get ready.”

  Keeton marched back to the door and opened it. The cooler outside air rumbled in at twenty-five hundred feet. He stuck his head out and through squinted eyes saw that they were approaching the Czech–West German border by way of the Bavarian Forest. He pulled himself back in and looked up front, to the pilot navigating them to the drop point, to Dominik covering them with the gun, to the two parachutes that would be going unused, and finally to the priest whose welfare it was his mission to ensure.

  The mission hasn’t changed. Just the tactics. They are not going to take him back to Plzen.

  “Dominik, this isn’t easy!” Keeton yelled while pointing through the open door. “I told you I haven’t done this before.”

  Two thousand feet. Basic chute. Pull the cord quickly.

  “Do it, Gregor. I mean it!” Dominik said, shifting the aim of the gun to the agent. The plane began to bank slightly so they would not cross over into West Germany.

  “All right, all right,” Keeton called back. “Can I get a blessing from the priest first? Please, Dominik!”

  Once down on the ground, head south by southeast through the forest.

  The Czech grimaced for a moment, then nodded and waved the gun. Father Teodor stepped over to Keeton, raised his hands, and began speaking some kind of prayer. Suddenly Keeton grabbed him by the shoulders and turned him around, placing himself in between the gun and the captive.

  “What are you doing, Gregor?” Dominik called out. “What are you doing?”

  “Estis parati volatus exprimitur?” Keeton whispered fiercely in Latin. The priest’s eyes bulged in surprise. Are you ready to fly?

  As the plane banked farther to port, Keeton put his arms around the priest and pushed forward so that both of them fell through the door with the fading noise of Dominik’s angry screams following them through the sky.

  With the roar of the air rushing past them, Keeton yelled into Father Teodor’s ear. “Listen, Father, hands through my chest straps, then grab the straps on the opposite side, and hold on! I’m going to pull the chute in three seconds! Hold on very tightly, or you’ll die! Understand?”

  “Yes, yes!” Teodor answered loudly, securing his arms into Keeton’s harness.

  Keeton put one arm tightly around the priest’s waist, reached in between them with his other hand, and hooked his fingers into the D ring. A quick count of three and he pulled the chute open. Then he locked his hands around Teodor’s back. As the chute inflated, the force nearly tore them apart, but they managed to hold on. Teodor exhaled through tightly gritted teeth as they decelerated.

  “You OK?” Keeton called.

  “I’m fine,” Teodor answered. “Listen, I might have failed to tell you, but I was assigned with a paratrooper unit in the Czech Air Force before the Nazis came through. I did a lot of jumps.”

  “Yes, I think you left that part out,” Keeton answered dryly. “So then you know we’re headed down too fast, and the steering’s not great.”

  “Get us near that tree line, if you can,” Teodor instructed. “It’s dangerous, but our best bet is to get tangled in the branches to break our fall. Unless…”

  “What?” Keeton asked.

  “You could drop me now and still hit slow enough to survive.”

  “The hell with that idea, Father,” Keeton answered. “No offense.” He had begun pulling on the lines above him in an effort to direct them to the trees. They did one complete circle before he managed to figure out the balance of the chute. The tree line loomed
below them. In the meantime, the Junkers had circled around and was approaching from the north.

  “Brace yourself,” he told Teodor.

  They smashed into the forest at a forty-five-degree angle, the branches punching and whipping at them as they scraped with their parachute along the punishing surface. Suddenly the fabric of the chute clutched a tree, and they snapped to a stop, Teodor crying out in pain before letting go of the harness straps and falling to the ground ten feet below. His imperfect landing, although a respectable effort given his age, left him rolling in pain from a sprained ankle. Above him, Keeton worked his way out of the harness and carefully dropped down close to him. The Junkers roared past them directly overhead.

  “We’ve got to head south to cross the border,” Keeton said. “Can you walk?”

  “Maybe, slowly,” Teodor said, pulling himself up to his feet. Their heads and hands were now a patchwork of bruises and small cuts. “I’m a mess.”

  “We both are,” Keeton said. “You’re going to make it, but we need to get moving.”

  The sound of the Junkers’s engines changed pitch, throttling down to near silence. The plane appeared along the tree line, with Dominik leaning out of the door with one hand holding himself in and the other pointing a submachine gun down at them. The staccato cracking was followed a moment later by the popping of dirt and tree bark as the bullets hit around them. The first strafing done, the Junkers’s engines whined as the pilot maneuvered for another run.

  “He’s going to come back around for us,” Teodor said.

  “That’s why we need to get into the forest,” Keeton told him. He followed the hobbling priest into the tree line. When they were fifty feet into the dense forest, the Junkers buzzed near them but there was no gunfire. They were hidden in the thick phalanx of trees. “Keep going,” Keeton urged. Another few hundred feet and the sounds of the patrolling plane were softer. It was obvious that Dominik wouldn’t—and couldn’t by virtue of his standing orders—risk a border violation with the West.

  “I need to rest for a minute,” Teodor said, stopping and leaning back against the thick trunk of a beech. “Dominik isn’t coming any closer. He must now realize that he’s lost, and he’ll return to Plzen.”

  “No, he won’t,” Keeton said evenly, glancing at his watch. “It’ll be any moment now.”

  “What is it, Gregor?”

  “Father, let’s just say I might have failed to tell you something,” Keeton said with a sardonic smile, continuing in English. “My name is not Gregor Ritter. It’s Andrew. And I’m not a West German policeman. I’m an American CIA agent.”

  “I see,” Teodor replied in English with a thick Slavic accent. “You certainly had me convinced you were a believer—on a mission.”

  “That’s my job. As for being on a mission, yes.”

  “Am I to go to America, then?” Teodor asked.

  “That’s up to you,” Keeton replied. “I know you have a brother who’s a priest in Regensburg—so you have options. There’s more. I didn’t know that Dominik was against us. I really thought he was going to defect with you. But I knew the pilot was part of some kind of scheme. He’s a Czech Communist Party agent known as Ivo. That’s why I placed a bomb near one of the plane’s engines.”

  “A bomb?”

  “Yes, with a special fuse that activated when the engine was started. It’s on a timer. The plan was for the three of us—you, me, and Dominik—to bail out into West Germany, and then on the return to Plzen…”

  An explosion to the north reverberated through the forest. The distant drone of the Junkers’s engines returned, but the pitch changed. Both men recognized the sound of a plane nosediving toward the ground. An even larger second explosion reached them as the Junkers crashed into the Czechoslovakian countryside. Teodor crossed himself and uttered a prayer.

  “Bringing down the plane was necessary,” Keeton said. “The plan was to make it look like you and Dominik had died in the crash.”

  “You could have let them both live.” The priest was reproachful. “You and I would have been safe either way.”

  “No, Father. It had to be this way. Otherwise they might’ve come after you. This will buy you time. After a few months, they’ll chalk it up as a loss in the bigger game, and they’ll move on. Then it’ll be safe for you to resurface.”

  “You must think of me as very naive,” Teodor said. “But I’ve seen a lot of depravity and death in my country, on this whole continent. However, I simply can’t think of all of this as a game.”

  “We saved the right man today,” Keeton said, patting the priest’s back. “Let’s get going. There’s a team waiting for us about a mile from here, in a clearing to the south. If you can’t walk, I can carry you.”

  “Thank you, no. I can manage it,” Teodor answered, pushing away from the tree trunk and beginning the hike.

  They walked single file through the forest while Teodor relayed stories of his days during the war as a Czech Air Force chaplain, of their humiliating defeat at the hands of Third Reich, and of his clandestine vocation during the occupation by the fascists and then later by their supposed liberators, the Soviets. Although there were still democratic voices in the Czech government, most of it had been suppressed in favor of the extreme dedication to modern atheistic communism. It made a priest’s life very tenuous. Midway through their journey, Keeton found a large fallen branch and quickly fashioned it into a crutch.

  “So much killing still going on,” Teodor reflected. “Systemic, and on a large scale. Not like yours, in the heat of the moment, or as part of a rescue mission.”

  “I don’t have any illusions about my profession,” Keeton replied. “Death is death. Dominik is just as dead as if the secret police had rounded him up.”

  “But there are moral components to these things,” Teodor replied. “I suspect you don’t kill indiscriminately.”

  “No, but it’s not always in self-defense, either,” Keeton answered. They could never have reconciled their respective vocations, although he wanted to think that words like honor and sacrifice might apply to both. “The clearing is just up ahead, Father. Let me handle the communication.”

  They walked through a tree line and saw the dirt road that cut through a divided part of the forest. From the opposite bank of trees, a voice called out. “Flash!”

  “Thunder!” Keeton replied back. Three men emerged from hidden positions. Each carried an automatic pistol. The lead man sported a thick red beard.

  “Ha. The old D-Day countersign?” Teodor asked quietly. Keeton smiled and nodded as the two groups met at the road.

  “Welcome to West Germany, Father,” the bearded man said. “We’ll tend to your leg at our safe house in Furth. Gregor, nice to see you, too. Where’s the other guy?”

  “He didn’t make it. He was dirty. Any trouble here at the border?” Keeton asked.

  “None,” one of the other men answered. “But I have a question. I was on lookout and tracked the plane coming in from Plzen. I watched you bail out, but I only saw one parachute. What the hell happened?”

  Chapter 1. The Missing Agent

  The captain of the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit casually opened a folder containing a stack of papers and photos. He was seated at a plain metal desk in an equally Spartan room of concrete block. The locked metal door was attended by an armed soldier.

  Seated opposite the Stasi captain was a man shivering from the dank cell he had inhabited for the past two days. His haggard face exhibited a week’s growth of beard. His body, while fit, already bore the evidence of dehydration and forced fasting. He was wearing only the underpants he had had on when the team of Stasi agents captured him at the seedy East Berlin bar on Metzerstraße. He was shackled to the chair by both hands and feet. Immediately behind the prisoner a lower-ranking Stasi officer loomed.

  “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” the captain asked quietly, not looking up from the packet in front of him.

  “Ja, ich spreche eine moderate Menge an
deutschen,” the prisoner answered quietly. One side of his face was heavily swollen from an earlier beating. He swallowed painfully and continued, “Ich verstehe nicht, warum…”

  “Ich bin Kapitän Franz Junger,” the captain interrupted. “Ich arbeite für das Ministerium für Staatssicherheit.” He now looked squarely into the prisoner’s eyes. “I speak your native language, if you prefer.” When the prisoner nodded weakly, Captain Junger went on in excellent English. “You were about to say that you don’t understand why you’re here. We both know this is a lie.”

  “No, Captain Junger. I really don’t know.” The prisoner’s tone was a mixture of indignation and anxiety.

  Junger affected a sigh of impatience and bemusement. “I’m going to ask you a series of questions. The first thing—the most important thing—that you must realize is that I already know the answers to these questions. You see, I have a comprehensive record of your activities while you’ve been here in Berlin: where you’ve been, whom you’ve seen, photos, even tape recordings of your conversations. It’s all right here.” He indicated the file. “So let us start with the most obvious truth about you. The name on your passport is just a…the term is cover, I believe. You are a spy.”

  “Captain, this is shameful,” the prisoner said emphatically. “Look at me, a British citizen. Held for two days in deplorable conditions, stripped virtually naked, held down and beaten, and with no opportunity to contact my government. This is not justice!”

  Junger held the prisoner’s angry gaze for a few moments and then said softly, “Gerolf.”

  The Stasi underling standing behind the chair raised the policeman’s wooden baton he had been holding in his right hand and brought it crashing down onto the prisoner’s shoulder, snapping the clavicle. The prisoner screamed in pain several times, until at last he was reduced to writhing and groaning. The shackles were tight enough that bruises and small cuts were beginning to show on his wrists and ankles.

  Junger drew a passport from beneath the photos and opened it. “Yes, you might very well be a British citizen. You have the paper work and the accent.” He read the pages of the passport slowly. “France, Spain, Italy…you do get around, don’t you…Herr Penfield? Mr. Prentis Penfield. Of course, we both know that isn’t your real name, is it…spy?”