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turned his head as far to the left as he could, letting the man’s body fall upon him. The dying man’s momentum brought the large machete down on the right side of his face. The steel blade sank to the cheekbone and sliced cleanly through his right eye, brow, and then his scalp, knocking the fedora from his head. The pain hit immediately as he fired two more rounds into the man out of pure anger and fright.
    Lee rolled the Argentine off his body and then turned over on his back. With the smoking Colt still in his hand he reached up and covered his face. He felt the blood flowing freely through his fingers and knew he had lost his right eye. He screamed out more in rage than pain. He was angry because he had been caught off guard and then wounded so badly he would more than likely bleed to death before his men found him.
    Garrison Lee struggled to shut out the pain. He tried his best to focus on the moon above him. It flashed in and out of focus as he closed his left eye and placed pressure on his right. He tried to keep the eye open but soon allowed the blood loss to take its revenge on his stupidity. His last action for the night was to reach out and take hold of his battered fedora, his large hand crushing it to his body. He had allowed the German courier to escape with another communiqué to Ecuador. As Lee slowly lost consciousness, he kept his hand over his face and cursed out loud about the large slice the man had put through his hat.
    As he finally passed out, Garrison Lee had no way of knowing that Operation Columbus was about to receive its final orders.
    QUITO, ECUADOR, 37 HOURS LATER
     
    Benjamin Hamilton watched the train station from a small café down the block. He alternated between watching the station and looking at the eleven snowcapped volcanoes that surrounded the capital city. He wished he were skiing instead of doing the most boring job of his life. He had made choices, and this was the inglorious end of the most important choice of his life. He’d had a chance at being a Regular Army officer after his graduation from Harvard Law School, but he had opted for the OSS, the United States intelligence service, and working for one of its more persuasive minions, Colonel Garrison Lee. Now he found himself far from the exciting life he had been promised, since Lee had sent him to the slowest, albeit most beautiful, region in South America. He had hoped for duty alongside the legend, Lee himself, in the south, but instead found himself watching for the occasional Nazi who just happened to wander into his operational zone.
    As his green eyes went back to the train depot, he thought about the message he had received from the main OSS operative in Brazil, relaying the news about Lee being missing and suggesting he be on the lookout for a Nazi named Heinz Goetz, an SS general they suspected of being in this hemisphere. Goetz was possibly coming to take something out of Ecuador. Hamilton examined the only picture Washington could forward of Goetz and saw that the small SS man had cruel eyes. He figured that, between the cruel eyes and his small stature, Goetz should be easy to spot if his destination was, indeed, Quito. There was no information or even an educated guess about what this Goetz might be removing from Ecuador, just that it might be more than one item.
    Ben placed the photo back into the inside pocket of his jacket and then zipped the coat up to his throat against the chill of the day. As he watched the train that had just pulled in, he raised the cup of rich coffee and drank.
    As he sat there waiting, Ben thought about the only thing that had occupied his mind for the past three years—his new wife, Alice. He had only been with Alice for three days after their wedding before he was shipped out for training at Quantico, Virginia, and then to Fort Knox, Kentucky. He missed his eighteen-year-old bride more than anything in his own young life, and couldn’t wait for the damned war to be over so he