Excerpt from The Soldier Spies by W.E.B. Griffin, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

It was an American broadcast, probably from Gibraltar, a message from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, President of the United States, to the Arabic-speaking population of Morocco.

"Behold, the lionhearted American warriors have arrived," the announcer solemnly proclaimed. "Speak with our fighting men and you will find them pleasing to the eye and gladdening to the heart."

"You bet your ass," Fulmar said, chuckling.

"Look in their eyes and smiling faces," the announcer continued, "for they are holy warriors happy in their sacred work. If you see our German or Italian enemies marching against us, kill them with guns or knives or stones--or any other weapon that you have set your hands upon."

"Like a camel turd, for example," Fulmar offered helpfully.

"The day of freedom has come!" the announcer dramatically concluded.

"Not quite," Fulmar replied. "Almost, but not quite."

He was thinking of his own freedom. Second Lieutenant Fulmar was at the moment the bait in a trap. Well, there again, not quite. Some very responsible people considered it likely that the bait--whether through cowardice, enlightened self-interest, or simply ineptitude--would, so to speak, stand up in the trap and wave the sniffing rat away. The bait himself kind of liked that idea.

That, of course, hadn't been the way they had explained the job to him. In several little pep talks they'd assured him they were totally confident that he could carry this "responsibility" off. But Fulmar's lifelong experience with those in authority had taught him otherwise.

Fulmar had his current situation pretty well figured out. It was kind of like a chess game. From the time he had received his first chess set, a Christmas gift from his mother's employer when he was ten, he had been fascinated with the game--and intrigued by the ways it paralleled life. In life, for instance, just as in chess, pawns were cheerfully sacrificed when it seemed that would benefit the more powerful pieces.

In this game, he was a white pawn. And he was being used as bait in the capture of two of the enemy's pieces, whom Fulmar thought of as a bishop and a knight. The problem was that the black bishop and knight were accompanied by a number of other pawns both black and white.

If the game went as planned (here Life and Chess differed), the bishop and the knight would change sides. And the white pawn wearing the second lieutenant's gold bar would be promoted to knight. If something went wrong, the second lieutenant pawn and the black pawns (who didn't even know they were in play) would be swept from the board (or--according to the rules of this game--shot) and the remaining players would continue the game.

The bishop was a man named Helmut von Heurten-Mitnitz, a Pomeranian aristocrat presently serving as the senior officer of the Franco-German Armistice Commission for Morocco. His knight was Obersturmbannführer SS-SD Johann Müller, presently serving as the Security Adviser to the Franco-German Armistice Commission.

Helmut von Heurten-Mitnitz, who had been educated at Harvard and had once been the German Consul General in New Orleans, had not long before established contact with Robert Murphy, the American Consul General for Morocco.

Von Heurten-Mitnitz informed Murphy then that he was convinced Germany was in the hands of a madman and that the only salvation he saw for Germany was its quick defeat by the Western Powers. He was therefore prepared, he said, to do whatever was necessary to see that Germany lost the war as quickly as possible.

The German diplomat went on to tell Murphy that Obersturmbannführer Müller, for his own reasons, had come to the same conclusion and was similarly offering his services: Through his own "official" sources, Müller had come into knowledge of the atrocities committed by the SS "Special Squads" on the Eastern Front and of the extermination camps operated at several locations by the SS. Müller was a professional policeman, and he was shocked by what the SS was doing (it was not only inhuman, it was unprofessional).

Reprinted from THE SOLDIER SPIES by W.E.B. Griffin by permission of G. P. Putnam's Sons, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. Copyright © 1986 by W.E.B. Griffin. Originally published under the pseudonym Alex Baldwin. First G.P. Putnam's Sons edition 1999. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.