Audaciter

Drew Foley, Emeritus Professor of law, receives a mysterious and cryptic invitation to attend the very last 4th of July celebration of the Berlin Brigade, before it is deactivated by President Clinton. It was finally time for the army to leave, over four years after the collapse of communism and the fall of the wall that divided the city. The letter was simply addressed to “Captain Foley (MP), 78th Light Infantry Division, Kasserne Andrews, stationed 1945/46” and franked across the top with a one DM Deutche Bundespost stamp and date marked 22. März, 1994. It was a testament to both the US army and the postal service that he ever received it. This message from another life time sets Foley’s heart racing, releasing a genie of bad memories. His service years in Berlin belonged to another version of Drew Foley, not him. He had breached the Siegfried Line in 1945 with his unit and fought his way across western Germany from Lamersdorf, Kesternich and Remagen to Berlin and along the way lost his wife, his comrades and uncovered a sickening sex crime and murder committed by a fellow soldier, Art Jensen, a well-connected ivy league junior officer. The subsequent cover up leads to Foley’s transfer to the National War Crimes Bureau where he is sent on a mission to find SS Unterscharführer Otto Phelps, the son of a once wealthy Berlin brewery owner, wanted for his participation, during the Ardennes offensive, in the massacre of eighty four US POW’s. Foley’s investigation takes him from the horrors of the Rhine meadow camps, to a black market network in Berlin which is being run by corrupt American officers and Wilburchen the displaced person and concentration camp survivor. He remembered those first weeks in the Berlin necropolis, an emasculated city of roofless buildings and rubble strewn streets populated by dazed Berliners, consisting only of old men, children and violated women. Aided by Scotland Yard’s Detective Inspector Callum Spicer they breach the black market but they need more evidence. A missing Harol Lenki is the key witness, but he has disappeared after being framed for the shooting of an elite Russian officer at Camp Cluskey, the American supply base. Otto Phelps is apprehended by Foley after he says good bye to his parents on his way to South America. Georg, Otto’s father, tipped the American off that his son would come that night. It was the only way out for him. He is tried for war crimes and convicted. Foley is then forcibly transferred out of Berlin for good, his duties with the National War Crimes Bureau complete. Jensen has tied up all the outstanding loose ends, including the silencing of witnesses to his war crime and he can be finally rid of him. Once in Bremen and reunited with the Timberwolves, a dis-heartened and psychologically damaged Foley is discharged from the army his war over. Fifty years have passed and a dying Wilburchen now seeks absolution. Foley and the terminally ill holocaust survivor put a plan together to finally get the Senator to cross the Rubicon. After WW2, Arthur Christopher Jensen stayed in the army rising to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel charged with reinterring the fallen US soldiers, post conflict, from foreign battlefields back to the US. His public profile launched his political career and he was elected to the senate in 1985. The Senator was about to get another veteran reinterred to his care by Foley, Harol Lenki’s ashes. It was never too late for justice and Wilburchen’s gift to an aging Senator Jensen would belatedly pay for his war crimes.