Read Online The Cairo Code by Glenn Meade - Free Book Online

long.”
    Halder winked. “Me, too. But if there really is a chance for one of us, may the best letter-writer win the fair lady’s hand.”
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    Jack Halder returned home to Germany via Rome on a scheduled Italian passenger flight out of Cairo. Within a week he had been conscripted into the Wehrmacht and posted to Berlin for officer training. Although no admirer of the Nazis, he was to prove a highly capable, adventurous officer, and his sharp intellect and knowledge of languages soon came to the attention of the Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence.
    He was personally recruited by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, posted to the special operations section which dealt with the Balkans and the Mediterranean, and when the war in North Africa began in earnest, was eventually seconded to the Middle Eastern Division, working with Rommel’s Afrika Corps.
    When he didn’t hear from Rachel Stern within six months of returning home, he met and fell in love with Helga Ritter, the daughter of a Hamburg doctor. It was something he had never expected or anticipated, because part of him still loved Rachel, and there were many times when he thought of her. But his new wife was to prove as interesting a young woman, vivacious and loving. Within ten months of marriage she gave birth to a son, Pauli.
    Rachel Stern never wrote to either young man. Three days after the ambassador’s party, she and her parents sailed from Port Said on the Izmir, the only paying passengers on board the ancient Turkish-owned cargo ship bound for Istanbul. On the second night out of port she was standing at the starboard rail, still thinking about the momentous summer, when the engine room erupted in fire. The explosion that sank the Izmir killed fourteen people. Her mother was one of them.
    The surviving crew members had abandoned ship while flames raged on deck. Rachel and her father managed to scramble aboard one of the lifeboats with two badly wounded Turkish sailors, her father still clutching his briefcase containing his precious maps and notes from the Sakkara dig. They drifted away from the other lifeboats in the darkness, and a little before midnight a storm blew up. Their tiny vessel was pounded by ten-foot waves and lashed by savage winds. The weather improved by dawn, but by noon the sailors were dead and she and her father were exhausted, dehydrated, and burnt by a scorching Mediterranean sun.
    Late in the afternoon, a gray shape loomed on the horizon and cruised towards them. At first, Rachel thought it was a British naval boat searching for survivors, but when it came closer she saw the red-and-black swastika of the German Kriegsmarine. She and her father were detained on board the naval vessel after it docked in Naples for refueling, and two weeks later they arrived in Hamburg, where they were promptly met by the Gestapo.
    Harry Weaver stayed on in Egypt, and for much longer than he thought, working with an American desert exploration group searching for archeological ruins, until six months before Rommel landed in Tripoli in February 1941. Then he flew to Lisbon and on to London, returning to the United States via Southampton. He volunteered the day after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
    He had heard about the sinking of the Izmir while still at Sakkara. It was a little after midnight, and someone came to his tent with a newspaper and showed him the report, which claimed that the only survivors were four Turkish crewmen whose lifeboat had been picked up by a Maltese fishing trawler.
    When he read the news in the lamplight, he cried. He had loved Rachel deeply, and that night on the ambassador’s veranda he had so much wanted to tell her, but had never really got the chance, or had the courage. Then he did what any grief-stricken young man would have done in such circumstances. He put aside the newspaper, took a bottle of whisky from his bag, and got drunk.
    But the very last thing he did