Read Stallion Gate for Free Online Page A

heavily as the sun was covered, packing on the wipers and coating the headlights.
    “If Hitler has the bomb …” Groves was saying. “We get reports that this winter offensive of the Germans is just to stall while he finishes some secret weapon.Suddenly he has jet-propelled planes, new rockets.”
    “If Hitler has the device, he’ll use it on the Russians,” Oppy said.
    “Is that a bad idea?” Groves asked.
    Joe swung off the road and stopped the car, its nose pointed at barbed-wire fence and white flakes. The fence posts were split pine as gray as bones, spaced eight feet apart and leaning by habit away from the wind. There was no proper crossarm or hinges, just a section with two strands of barbed wire stretched to a stick hung by plain wire to the far post, so stick and section could simply be unhung and dragged out of the way. Inside the fence was meager grazing land, chamiza and sage flattened by the headlights. Yucca spines dipped and waved in the snow.
    “Stallion Gate,” Joe announced.
    “There’s no one here.” Groves looked up and down the road. “There’s supposed to be a half-track and two jeeps waiting for us.”
    “Yes, sir. They would have come through the gate.”
    “You’re sure this is it?”
    “Yes, sir.” Joe pointed to the slightly whiter double track of an access road that ran under the bottom wire. “I’ll see if I can raise them.”
    The field radio was a prewar crank model with a range in good weather of forty miles, and the answer, when it came, hovered on static. The party from the Alamogordo base had lost a track and lost time, but would still meet them at the fence.
    As Groves slumped back in his seat the entire carmoved on its springs. “I’m supposed to be in Washington tomorrow and here we are twiddling our thumbs at a barbed-wire gate.”
    “Joe, you’re the only one who’s ever been here before,” Oppy said. “What’s your advice?”
    “The weather’s getting worse. I suggest we wait.”
    “Sergeant, I have never accomplished anything by standing still.” Groves sat forward, decision made. “There’s no more than an inch on the ground. We’ll meet them en route.”
    It took ten minutes for Joe to put chains on the rear tires, untie the gate, drive through and, for etiquette’s sake, tie it back up. Back in the car, slapping flakes from their coats, they started off on the faint trail that wandered across the field.
    Joe drove in second gear, trying to keep his lights on the ruts without getting his wheels into them. Fuchs studied a grazing service map.
    “How do you think they lost a track?” Oppy asked.
    “Link pins,” Groves said. “Tanks, half-tracks, bulldozers—same thing. If they had trouble with a drive wheel, they’d be stopped dead.”
    Joe shifted to low as the road vanished.
    “We’re almost in Mexico. How much snow can there be?” Fuchs wiped condensation from the windshield. “They said they were coming to meet us, yes? We should be seeing them any minute.”
    After a long silence Joe said, “We should have seen them half an hour ago.”
    Snow rushed in sheets against the car as it pushedover the rise and fall of the ground. When he found the road again, Joe was happy to lay his wheels in the ruts and try to stay in them. He put his head out the window to avoid Fuchs’ urgent wiping. There were signs of humped earth, craters frozen in the snow.
    “It’s like sailing.” Oppy was delighted. “Same dark sky, same white, same swells.”
    “I remember my first time at sea,” Fuchs said. “It was when the British shipped us to Canada as enemy aliens at the start of the war. U-boats attacked the convoy. They sank the ship just before us.”
    “I didn’t know you were an enemy alien,” Groves said.
    “I’m British now,” Fuchs assured him.
    “German and British,” Groves added it up dryly.
    Implode. Explode. Two events at the same time. On the troopship to Manila, Joe had watched the ocean. For lack of anything else to