State Of The Union

For the first time in his life, despite all his intense training, Helmut Draegar was actually terrified. His restraints wouldn’t give, the LED readout was ticking down, and had he not seen the rusted iron hinge on the door of the alcove behind him, he didn’t know what he would have done. Knowing that the hinge would not be sharp enough to cut through bone, he first had to break his own wrist. Using a small stone about the size of a baseball, he snapped the radius, then the ulna of his shackled left wrist, and then with a primitive tourniquet in place, began the unthinkable.

Überhof, concerned with the prolonged radio silence, was the first of the backup team to break cover and investigate. He found Draegar, who had dragged himself up from the crypt, missing a hand, bleeding profusely and very near death on the rain-soaked ground of what was once the monastery’s church. He was able to get Draegar away from the ruins just as the piles of plastic explosive detonated in the undercroft and destroyed what remained of the old religious structure.

Fifteen years later, driving the streets of unified Berlin in search of an all-night pharmacy, it was still hard for Draegar to relive that night. The Russians had given him sanctuary in the days and years after the event. They had made sure East German police reported finding a horribly charred body in the rubble and that it was leaked to intelligence services that one of the Stasi’s best operatives had met with foul play.

After he had recovered, the Russians had used Draegar and his exceptional skills to train not only their agents, but also the espionage agents of governments they were friendly with. Until recent events had necessitated his evacuation, he had been in Iraq, training Iraqi intelligence officers and helping them to get visas so they could travel to western countries. He had also been providing despotic leaders in the region with lists of assassins that could facilitate “hits” for them in the West, as well as introductions to Russian companies willing to provide sensitive, banned military equipment such as satellite jamming systems intended to interfere with U.S. weapons.

As far as the world was concerned, Helmut Draegar was dead. And how did he thank his benefactors for giving him a renewed chance at life? He did it by screwing up one of the most important operations they had ever undertaken. Draegar had failed to get the information he needed from Gary Lawlor, which in turn had forced General Stavropol to come to Berlin. Überhof, as good as he once was, was Draegar’s choice, but he had not only missed his opportunity to take out the men who had appeared at the Goltzstrasse apartment, he had allowed himself to be followed to theGeisterbahnhöfe, compromising all of them, and getting himself killed in the process. Not only did they lose Gary Lawlor, and Draegar’s long-awaited opportunity for revenge, but in the fury of the takedown, Stavropol, who had come to Berlin to aid in the interrogation, had dropped his most prized possession, a specially engraved pistol given to him by the Russian High Command-something he valued above all else.

Stavropol was incredibly angry and blamed Draegar. Berlin was his operation after all, but he had been given a chance to redeem himself and now he had blown that. Fearing the security he assumed had been established at the hospital, Draegar decided to follow Agent Scot Harvath. When the young American operative, whom Stavropol had filled him in on, had driven to the King George, Draegar knew that the Americans had a better handle on the situation than any of them had expected. If you were going to unravel a series of threads, it made sense to begin where the first one started, but the question still remained,what exactly was Harvath doing there? How had he discovered the place where their entire plan had been hatched?

A small-time, petty blackmailer, Gerda Putzkammer had no idea that twenty years ago Draegar and his men had not only discovered where she had hidden the information she collected on her customers, but that many nights they were creeping through the crawlspaces themselves collecting as much intelligence as possible from the higher profile clientele that patronized the King George.

The smartest move of all was when one of Draegar’s men had suggested bugging Putzkammer’s penthouse apartment. For the longest time, they went without uncovering anything of value, but finally, their efforts yielded a particularly precious gem-an American operative by the name of John Parker.