Chapter One Thousand Eight Hundred Fifty-One
16th June 1968
Lichtenburg, Berlin
There came a time when the past had to be let go of, no matter how hard the act of letting it go was. The cemetery had contacted Kat and had told her that with her father now being deceased, no one had paid to renew the lease on her mother’s grave. They had wanted to know if she was interested in renewing it herself? Or if not, what did she want done with her mother’s remains if there were any? It had caused her a great deal of grief, but in the end, Kat had to admit to herself that she need to let go of the events that had occurred in the hours after she had been born. Still, she had wanted to be present for this and for some odd reason, Tatiana and Marie Alexandra had insisted that they should come. If Kat had to guess, she figured that they wanted a connection to the grandmother they had never known. Suse Rosa was curious about her namesake. Jo said that she was coming along to offer moral support and Sophie had nodded in agreement to that.
When Aunt Marcella met them at the gates of the Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery. She looked at them and said, “Suse always did end up making everything a big production.”
When they got to the plot, workers were already digging up the grave. After nearly four and a half decades buried here things were about to change. Kat stood watching as one of the workers shovels hit the rotten pinewood of Suse’s coffin. Looking down, Kat saw that there simply wasn’t much left to see besides a few scraps of decayed wood and bone fragments. For the life of her, Kat didn’t know what she had expected. Some part of her was still the little girl yearning for what she could never have.
“Probably just as well” The retired Groundskeeper who Kat had had many dealings with over the years said. “There have been a few disturbing findings when graves are opened up.”
Kat knew from a lifetime of experience just how true that was. It wasn’t something that she needed to be reminded of at this moment. The loss of the woman whose grave this had been had played a profound role in why Kat had become who she was. How much had that in turn led to Kat’s relationship with several other women starting with Gia and ending with Sophie, for now. There was also Marcella to consider. Marcella had lost her little sister at the same time she had found herself raising her sister’s children, something that no one could possibly have been prepared for.
“Goodbye Suse” Marcella said, “Dust to dust and all that.”
It was a reminder to Kat that nothing was ever truly static, not even in death.
Quito, Ecuador
The good news was that the mail had caught up with them. There was a problem that created though. Everyone in the team had seen that Ritchie had a few letters from Lucia among the usual stack he got from his mother. The result was that everyone in the team had seen the letters and they had a lot of questions. Like just who this mystery lady was and the all too expected crude questions regarding if he had done more than just go on a date with her? Ritchie had blown off the questions. The guys didn’t need to know about how he was planning on having Lucia come to visit Fort Drum when they got back to New York in a few weeks. They also had far more pressing problems in Ecuador to contend with, Parker had told them that they needed to focus on that.
On the frontier with Peru, they had been hearing alarming things. Mostly the clank and squeal that was the signature of German Panzers. Partially the result of cutting corners in wartime, there were rumors that the Germans had discovered that the noise scared the Hell out of opposing Infantry and had deliberately engineered that sound into their armored vehicles. That was especially true if the other side didn’t have tanks of their own. Ritchie had led a scouting mission across the frontier and had photographed several old Panther II tanks that must have been left over from the Second World War. The Peruvian Government would have been able to get those at fire sale prices because the Germans had sold thousands of them after the Pacific War had concluded and it was cheaper to just sell them rather than trying to take them home. It didn’t matter if they were considered obsolescent nearly everywhere else in the world if the other side didn’t exactly have effective means of countering them. They also represented just how quantitatively superior the Peruvian Army was from a material perspective. Meaning that everyone was expecting that the Ecuadorian Army would likely get overrun in the first hours of any conflict.
With any luck, the Ecuadorians and Peruvians would refrain from doing something stupid before Ritchie’s team rotated back to the States. However, the had entered the relatively cool, dry season that was considered the prime time of the year for exactly the sort of stupidity.
Into this, Parker had received one of the letters that he got through back channels. It had gone with how he had disappeared when he had gone on leave. There were rumors that he crossed into Canada or had flown down to Cuba to meet a woman. Was anyone really surprised? There had been talk for years that Parker had been Agency before he had gotten into the 1st SFG. Didn’t cloak and dagger come with the territory?