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Summary
Summary
In April 1945, Hitler's Reich is on the verge of extinction. Assaulted by Allied bombs and Soviet shells, ruled by Nazis with nothing to lose, Berlin has become the most dangerous place on earth.
John Russell's son Paul is stationed on the Eastern Front with the German Army, awaiting the Soviets' final onslaught. In Berlin, Russell's girlfriend Effi has been living in disguise, helping fugitives to escape from Germany. With a Jewish orphan to care for, she's trying to outlast the Nazis.
Russell hasn't heard from either of them since fleeing Germany in 1941. He is desperate to find out if they're alive and to protect them from the advancing Red Army. He flies to Moscow, seeking permission to enter Berlin with the Red Army as a journalist, but when the Soviet's arrest him as a spy, things look bleak--until they find a use for him that has him parachuting into Berlin behind German lines.
Author Notes
David Downing is a noted historian of World War II.
(Publisher Provided)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Set in early 1945, Downing's gripping fourth novel featuring Anglo-American journalist John Russell (after Stettin Station) finds Russell in the Soviet Union. As the Russians approach Berlin, Russell devotes his energies to trying to reunite with his loved ones-his 18-year-old son, Paul, a member of the German army on the Eastern Front, and his lover, Effi Koenen, a former actress who now works to smuggle Jews to safety. Russell attempts to persuade the Russians that he should accompany them into Berlin, but they suspect that he's an American spy sent to sell them on the idea that the U.S. and Britain have no interest in the German capital. Meanwhile, the Nazis pick up a group of refugees Effi helped to escape, raising the prospect that one of them might disclose her involvement. Downing convincingly portrays the final days of the Nazis in power, and his characters are rich enough to warrant a continuation of their stories, even after the war. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
When we last saw American journalist John Russell, he was in Berlin in 1938 (Silesian Station, 2008), spying simultaneously for Germans, Americans, and Russians but mainly trying to stay alive and protect his German son, Paul, and film-actress girlfriend, Effi. It's seven years later now, April 1945, and the Reich is in its death throes. Having been forced years earlier to leave Germany to escape the Nazis, Russell is in Russia and, eager to reunite with his loved ones, trying to talk his way back into Berlin with the Soviet forces. Meanwhile, Effi is helping Jewish fugitives living in Berlin escape the city, while Paul, in the army, struggles to survive the Soviet onslaught ( There were too many ways to be killed and too many hours in the day ). The fate of Russell and his family drives the narrative, but our attention is held more by a succession of surreal images that tells the nightmarish story of a war's end women, taking advantage of a brief break in the bombing, frantically carving up a dead horse for food; Paul carrying two large sacks of arms, legs, and heads from an exploded building. Excruciating but gripping reading.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
I'M always stumped when someone asks me to find them "a good mystery," because I might recommend a serial killer thriller like Jo Nesbo's fiendishly clever novel THE SNOWMAN (Knopf, $25.95) to someone hankering for a civilized British detective story like Peter Lovesey's STAGESTRUCK (Soho Crime, $25). So let's play favorites - but pick your poison first. FAVORITE BOOK The final exit of a beloved sleuth is the focal point of my choice: THE TROUBLED MAN (Knopf, $26.95). Henning Mankell makes it clear that his brilliant if chronically depressed Swedish detective, Kurt Wallander, has solved his last case. In the course of investigating a political conspiracy that dates back to the cold war, Wallander comes to realize "how little he actually knew about the world he had lived in" and how inadequate his efforts to fix that broken world have proved. Although it accounts for his perpetual mood of despair, that insight also makes him a hero for this age of anxiety. FAVORITE NEW SLEUTH George Pelecanos's new protagonist. Spero Lucas, is not only younger and friskier than most private eyes, he's also untainted by the cynicism that goes with the profession. Making his first appearance in THE CUT (Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown, $25.99), Lucas brings his lusty appetites and taste for danger to a vivid narrative about gang wars in Washington, D.C. The big question: Can Pelecanos keep his young hero from flaming out? FAVORITE DEBUT NOVEL/FAVORITE ACTION THRILLER Sebastian Rotella scores twice for TRIPLE CROSSING (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $24.99), which begins on the San Diego-Tijuana border and sends good guys from both sides of the fence to combat drug smugglers and terrorists in the badlands of South America. FAVORITE COZY That would be A TRICK OF THE LIGHT (Minotaur, $25.99), Louise Penny's mystery starring Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec and set in the enchanting village of Three Pines. FAVORITE REGIONAL MYSTERY In SHOCK WAVE (Putnam, $27.95), John Sandford drags Virgil Flowers away from an all-girls volleyball tournament and dispatches him to Butternut Falls, where a bomber is intent on keeping out a big-box store. FAVORITE SUSPENSE NOVEL Cara Hoffman takes on rural poverty, domestic abuse and teenage violence in her first novel, SO MUCH PRETTY (Simon & Schuster, $25), which watches a family of urbanites come to grief in upstate New York. Runner-up is another novel on the same theme: BENT ROAD (Dutton, $25.95), in which Lori Roy observes the breakdown of a family that has moved to Kansas to escape racial tensions in 1960s Detroit. FAVORITE MYSTERY WITH A SOCIAL CONSCIENCE A tie between THE END OF THE WASP SEASON (Reagan Arthur/ Little, Brown, $25.99), by Denise Mina, and THE BOY IN THE SUITCASE (Soho, $24), by the Danish authors Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis. Mina's gritty Glasgow procedural features a female cop who takes pity on a 15-year-old killer because she's witnessed the neglect that can produce such damaged children. The criminal mistreatment of children is also the focus of the Danish thriller, which follows the efforts of a nurse to identify the 3-year-old boy she rescues at the Copenhagen train station. FAVORITE NOIR Antiheroes don't get much darker than the protagonist of James Sallis's moody existential mystery, THE KILLER IS DYING (Walker, $24), a hit man who wants to make one last clean kill before he dies. But I have to go with the rogue Scott Phillips introduces in THE ADJUSTMENT (Counterpoint, $25). This prince of a fellow made a killing pimping and working the black market as an Army quartermaster in Rome during World War II. But peacetime life in Wichita is so dull it takes all his ingenuity to come up with a new way to make a dishonest living. FAVORITE SUPERNATURAL MYSTERY Michael Koryta easily takes top honors for two eerie novels, THE CYPRESS HOUSE (Little, Brown, $24.99), a 1930s gangster story with spooky undertones, and THE RIDGE (Little, Brown, $24.99), a ghost story set in an old mining region of Kentucky. FAVORITE HISTORICAL MYSTERY If the category were narrowed to World War II-era novels, it would be a tossup between FIELD GRAY (Marian Wood/Putnam, $26.95), the darkest of Philip Kerr's Berlin stories, and David Downing's POTSDAM STATION (Soho, $25), with its horrific scenes of Berlin falling to the Red Army. But in an open field, top honors go to C.J. Sansom for HEARTSTONE (Viking, $27.95), a Tudor mystery that captures the chaotic state of England in the aftermath of Henry VIII's ill-conceived invasion of France. FAVORITE PERFORMANCE BY AN OLD PRO That's a tough one in a year that saw top-drawer work from Michael Connelly in THE FIFTH WITNESS (Little, Brown, $27.99). James Lee Burke in FEAST DAY OF FOOLS (Simon & Schuster, $26.99) and Thomas Perry in THE INFORMANT (Otto Penzler/ Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27). Sue Grafton earns special mention for keeping Kinsey Millhone engaged and endearing through her 22nd alphabet mystery, V IS FOR VENGEANCE (Marian Wood/Putnam, $27.95). But for sentimental reasons, I'm going with Lawrence Block's nostalgic novel, A DROP OF THE HARD STUFF (Mulholland/ Little, Brown, $25.99), set in New York in the 1970s, when Matt Scudder was still a working cop and crime was still "the leading occupation" in his Hell's Kitchen neighborhood.
Kirkus Review
The fourth in Downing's World War II "station" series (Stettin Station, 2010, etc.) finds journalist-spy John Russell making a Faustian pact with the Russians poised to invade Berlin, where his girlfriend Effi and son Paul struggle to survive the Reich's final days.From roving SS squads intent on preventing desertion to bombardment and imminent invasion by Russian soldiers bent on rape and revenge, Berlin is fraught with danger for average citizensfar worse for underground operatives like Effi who help smuggle Jews to safety or for German soldiers like Paul, at the front under heavy fire. All Russell knows is his family is trapped in Berlin and that Eisenhower has promised Berlin to the Russians, so if he's going to get there, it's going to be in a Russian tank. He flies to Berlin where his requests to be attached as a journalist to the Red Army unit are rebuffed, but he manages to get the authorities' attention all the same. Eventually, the Russians agree to place him on a team searching Berlin for German atomic secrets. He's parachuted into the surrounding environs with no idea how he'll find his girlfriend and son, even less how he'll avoid liquidation at the hands of the Russians once their mission ends and he represents a liability. He can't know that Effi, harboring a Jewish orphan, has run afoul of the authorities, or even whether she and Paul are alive. Downing's characters are a bit thin and given to disingenuous reflection on the history they're witnessing. Certain turns of events are a little convenient, and his true mission, to save his loved ones, without clear direction and floundering in the chaos, lacks tension. The main attraction is the tragic mis-en-scne of a once-beautiful city undergoing the ravages of modern warfare, a wide-angle synthesis of scenes and snapshots from the history books.A wide canvas painted with broad strokes. What suspense there is lies in the protagonist's endgame, with atomic secrets up his sleeve and his loved ones' lives in peril.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Franco's furniture April 6 --7 As they walked south towards Diedersdorf and the battalion command post, Paul Gehrts realised that he and his companion Gerhart Reheusser were grinning like idiots. The cloudless blue sky, warm sunshine and dust-free easterly breeze were responsible, banishing, if only for a few minutes, the grim anxiety that filled their waking hours. For the moment the occasional rattle of a distant machine-gun, the odd boom of a tank cannon or gun, could be ignored. About five kilometres behind them, the Seelow Heights fell sharply away to the Oderbruch, the meadowlands which lay between the escarpment and the Oder River. Soon--in a few days, most likely--the men and tanks of the Red Army would storm across those meadows and throw themselves at the German defences. The Russians would die in their thousands, but thousands more would follow. It would only be a matter of time. But a sunny day was a sunny day, with a power all its own. The two men were approaching the first houses of the small town when they came upon a large group of soldiers spread out along the side of the road. Few looked older than fifteen, and one boy was actually passing round his army-issue bag of sweets, as if he were at a friend's birthday party. Most had their panzerfausts lying beside them on the grass, and all looked exhausted--the disposable rocket-launchers were a crippling weight for all but the strongest children. Their troop leader, who was probably almost out of his teens, was examining a weeping blister on one of his charges' feet. As Paul and Gerhard walked past he looked up, and offered them a brief rueful smile. Almost all of Diedersdorf 's usual residents had left or been evacuated, and were now presumably clogging the roads leading westward, but the town was not being neglected--in the small central square an over-zealous staff-sergeant was supervising another band of young recruits in sweeping the cobbles. 'The madness of the military mind,' Gerhard muttered, not for the first time. As if to prove his point, a half-track drove across the square, sending eddies of dust in every direction. The sergeant endured a violent fit of coughing, then ordered his boys back to work. The division mechanics had set up shop in the goods yard of the town station, close to where a large dug-out had been excavated in the railway embankment for the battalion command post. The corporal at the improvised desk in the goods shed groaned when he saw Paul's machine-gun. 'Don't tell me--it jams.' 'It does.' 'How often?' 'Too often for comfort.' The corporal sighed. 'I'll get someone to have a look,' he said. 'Come back in an hour.' Two bench seats from the nearby railway station had been left outside the battalion command post entrance, offering a place to wait and watch the war go by. The two of them had only been sitting there a few minutes when a captured Red Army jeep pulled up. A Wehrmacht major and two NCOs leapt out, shoved their manacled Russian prisoner onto the other seat, and disappeared into the dugout. He looked like an ordinary rifleman, with dark dishevelled hair and vaguely Mongoloid features. He was wearing a bloodstained kaftan above badly frayed trousers and worse-worn boots. He sat there with his mouth slightly open, his eyes gazing blankly into space. But he wasn't stupid. Catching Paul's look he returned it, and his eyes, once focused, seemed full of intelligence. 'Cigarette?' he asked. That, at least, was one thing the Reich wasn't short of. Gerhart got up and gave him one, placing it between the Russian's lips and offering a lighted match. 'Spasibo.' 'You're welcome, Ivan.' 'No, he fucking isn't,' another voice exploded behind them. It was one of the NCOs who had brought him in. He knocked the cigarette from the Russian's mouth, throwing sparks all over his face, and swung round on Gerhart. 'What the fuck do you think you're doing?' 'What I hope . . .' 'Shut the fuck up. And get out of my sight.' He turned away, grabbed the Russian under one arm and hustled him through the curtained door of the dug-out. 'Wonderful,' was all Gerhart said. He looked at the still-swaying curtain, as if contemplating pursuit. 'Let's try and find some hot water,' Paul suggested. 'I'm not going anywhere,' Gerhart told him. 'I'm not going to let a shit like that order me around.' Paul shrugged and sat down again. There was no use arguing with Gerhart at times like this. They'd been sitting in silence for about a quarter of an hour when shouting started inside. This went on for several more minutes, and culminated in a gunshot. A few moments later, there was another. Gerhart leapt to his feet. 'Let's go and find that hot water,' Paul said quietly. Gerhart spun round, anger in his eyes, but something in his friend's expression did the trick. He closed his eyes, breathed out heavily, and offered Paul a rueful smile. 'Okay,' he said. 'If we both take a bath, the war might stink a little less. Let's go and find one.' But they were out of luck. The only hot water in town came complete with a queue, and was already brown. A drink proved easier to come by, but the quality was equally dire, and after scorching their throats with a single glass neither felt thirsty for more. They went back to the workshop, but the mechanic still hadn't got round to checking the machine-gun. Rather than return to their seat outside the command post, they pulled a couple of armchairs out of the empty house next door, and settled down to wait. Paul thought about checking the location of the nearest basement, but found he couldn't be bothered. The sun was still shining, and it looked like the Red Air Force was having an afternoon off. If worse came to worst, they could simply throw themselves into the dugout across the yard. Gerhart was devouring a cigarette, angrily sucking in smoke and flicking off ash while he wrestled with his inner demons. He was still pissed off about the Russian prisoner, Paul realised. Which might be admirable, but was unlikely to serve any useful purpose. Paul had known him a long time. They'd been best friends at their first school, but Gerhart's father had moved his family to Hamburg when both were nine, and they'd only met up again two years ago, when both were drafted into the same flakhelfer unit at the Zoo Bunker Gun Tower. Gerhart had persuaded Paul that pre-enlistment in the Wehrmacht made sense, partly because he wanted out of the flakhelfer, partly to avoid SS recruitment. Paul had resisted for one reason--the girl he had just fallen in love with was one of those directing the neighbouring tower's searchlights. But after Madeleine's mounting took a direct hit he could hardly wait to get away. He and Gerhart had started their compulsory labour service together, and then been called up as seventeen-year-olds when the age limit was lowered early in 1944. They were still gunners, but now they were soldiers of the 20th Panzergrenadier Division. They had been with their Pak-43 88mm gun for almost a year, somehow surviving the collapse of Army Group Centre the previous summer and the winter battles in Poland. When they had left Berlin for their first Ostfront posting, Gerhart's mother had taken Paul aside and asked him to look after her son, but if anything Gerhart had looked after Paul. Gerhart's relentless negativity when it came to the war, the army and the Führer was sometimes irritating, but he never let it lessen his sense of duty toward his comrades. In fact, the one probably reinforced the other. These days, Gerhart was the closest thing Paul had to family. His father John Russell had deserted him in 1941; his mother Ilse and stepfather Matthias Gehrts had died in a car crash the previous year. His stepsisters were alive as far as he knew, but Paul hadn't seen them since their evacuation two years ago, and the relationship had never been really close. He hadn't spoken to his mother's brother Thomas since their argument about his father almost three years ago. 'Here he comes,' Gerhart interjected. A mechanic was walking towards them, the machine-gun over his shoulder. 'Is it fixed?' Paul asked. The mechanic shrugged. 'Seems to be. I just a filed off a few micrometres. Give it a proper test in the woods--random gunfire this far behind the front makes people nervous.' Paul hoisted the gun over his own shoulder. 'Thanks.' 'No problem.' They walked back through Diedersdorf 's empty streets. The young recruits on broom duty had vanished, but a Waffen-SS staff car was sitting in the otherwise empty square, and the gruppenführer sitting in the back seat turned a surprisingly anxious pair of eyes in their direction. 'He's seen the future, and it's not looking black,' Gerhart joked. The sweet-sucking youths had also moved on, and the road running north was empty. After about a kilometre they turned off into the trees, and followed the winding track to their position on the eastern edge of the wood. The unit's two cruciform-mounted 88mm anti-tank guns were dug in twenty metres apart, covering the distant Seelow-Diedersdorf road, which curved toward and across their line of vision. The first few Soviet tanks to bypass Seelow would certainly pay for their temerity, but those coming up behind them . . . well, their fate would depend on whether or not Paul's unit received another shipment of shells. They currently had nineteen, and two of those would be needed to destroy their own guns. They'd been here for over two months, and the dug-out accommodation was as spacious as any Paul had known in his short military career, three steps leading down to a short tunnel, with a tiny command post on one side and a small room full of bunks on the other. The ceilings weren't exactly thick, but they were well buttressed, and even a direct hit should prove survivable. The halftracks they needed to move the guns were parked a hundred metres away in the forest, and heavily camouflaged against a sighting from the air. They had fuel enough for sixty miles between them, which seemed unlikely to be enough. Then again, if no more shells were delivered, the guns would become effectively useless, and they could all ride back to Berlin in a single vehicle. It had been a quiet day, Sergeant Utermann told them. The artillery barrage had been shorter than usual, and even less accurate--nothing had fallen within a hundred metres of their small clearing. There'd been no Soviet air raid, and three Messerschmitt 109s had appeared overhead, the first they'd seen for a week. Maybe things were looking up at last. 'And maybe Marlene Dietrich came home,' Gerhart added sarcastically, once they were out of earshot. Utermann was a decent man, but a bit of an idiot. Out in the clearing Hannes and Neumaier were kicking the unit'sfootball to and fro. Hannes had found it in a Diedersdorf garden the previous week, and had hardly stopped playing with it since. 'Shall we challenge them?' Gerhart asked. 'Okay,' Paul agreed without much enthusiasm. Greatcoats were found for posts, and two men from the other gun team cajoled into making it three-a-side. Paul had played a great deal as a child, and had loved watching his team Hertha. But the Hitlerjugend had turned the game into one more form of 'struggle', and he had always gone to the Plumpe stadium with his dad. A wave of anger accompanied that thought, and before he knew it he was almost breaking Neumaier's ankle with a reckless tackle. 'Sorry, sorry,' he said, offering the other boy his hand. Neumaier gave him a look. 'What happens to you on a football pitch?' 'Sorry,' Paul said again. Neumaier shook his head and smiled. The light was starting to fade, but they played on, engrossed in moving the football across the broken forest floor--until the Soviet planes swept over the trees. They were Tupolevs, although right until the last moment Paul was somehow expecting Sergeant Utermann's Messerschmitt 109s. Like everyone else he dived for the ground, instinctively clawing at the earthen floor as fire and wood exploded above him. He felt a sharp pain in his left leg, but nothing more. A single bomb, he thought. Turning his head he could see a wood splinter about ten centimetres long protruding from the back of his calf. Without really thinking, he reached back and yanked it out. His luck was in--there was no sudden gush of arterial blood. Two large trees were in flames on the western edge of the clearing, where Gerhart had gone to collect the ball. Paul counted the figures getting to their feet, and knew that one was missing. He scrambled to his own and rushed across to where his friend should be. He found Gerhart lying on his back, a shard of wood driven deep into his throat, a bib of blood spread across his chest. Sinking to his knees, Paul thought he caught a flicker in the other's eyes, but they never moved again. It seemed at first as if the DC-3 had landed in a forest clearing, but as the plane swung round John Russell caught sight of a long grey terminal building. The legend 'Moscow Airport (Vnukovo)' was emblazoned across the facade in enormous Cyrillic letters, beneath an even larger hammer and sickle. He had expected the Khodynka airfield, which he had last seen in August 1939, decked out with swastikas for the welcoming of Ribbentrop and the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. He had never heard of Vnukovo, and hoped it was closer to the city centre than it looked. A wooden stairway on wheels was rolled out to meet the plane. It looked like something left over from the siege of Troy, and creaked alarmingly as the passengers stepped gingerly down to the tarmac. The sun was still above the tree line, and much warmer than Russell had anticipated. He joined the straggling procession towards the terminal building, a concrete edifice with all the architectural interest of a British pillbox. The constructivists would be turning in their graves, he thought, and they wouldn't be alone. As Russell had discovered in 1939, trips to Stalin's Soviet Union were guaranteed to disappoint those like himself who had welcomed the original revolution. He joined the end of the queue, thinking that on this occasion a sense of ideological let-down was the least of his worries. First and foremost was the question of whether the Soviets had forgiven him for refusing their offer of hospitality at the end of 1941. After his escape from Germany--an escape which German comrades under Soviet orders had died to make possible--Stalin's representatives in Stockholm had done their best to persuade him that Moscow was an ideal place to sit out the war. They had even plucked his old contact Yevgeny Shchepkin out of the international ether in a vain attempt to talk him round. He had explained to Shchepkin that he wasn't ungrateful, but that America had to be his first port of call. His mother and employer were there, and when it came to raising a hue and cry on behalf of Europe's Jews, the New York Times seemed a much better bet than Pravda. What he hadn't told Shchepkin was how little he trusted the Soviets. He couldn't even work out why they were so keen to have him on board. Did they still see him and his rather unusual range of connections as a potential asset, to be kept in reserve for a relevant moment? Or did he know more about their networks and ways of operating than he was supposed to? If so, did they care? Would he receive the Order of Lenin or a one-way trip to the frozen north? It was impossible to tell. Dealing with Stalin's regime was like the English game of Battleships which he and his son Paul had used to play--the only way you found out you were on the wrong square was by moving onto it, and having it blow up in your face. The queue was moving at a snail's pace, the sun now winking through the pines. Almost all the arrivals were foreigners, most of them Balkan communists, come to lay gifts at Stalin's feet. There had been a couple of Argentineans sitting across from Russell, and their only topic of conversation had been the excellent shooting in Siberia. Diplomats presumably, but who the hell knew in the violently shuffled world of April 1945? As far as Russell could tell, he was the only Western journalist seeking entry to Stalin's realm. For all his apprehensiveness, he was pleased to have got this far. It was seven days since his hurried departure from Rheims in northeast France, the location of the Western Allies' military HQ. He had left on the morning of March 29th, after receiving off-the-record confirmation that Eisenhower had written to Stalin on the previous day, promising the Red Army the sole rights to Berlin. If Russell was going to ride into his old home town on a tank, it would have to be on a Russian one. A swift exchange of cables with his editor in San Francisco had given him sanction to switch his journalistic sphere of operations, and, more importantly, some sort of semi-official fig leaf to cover up an essentially personal odyssey. Accompanying the Red Army into Hitler's capital would prove a wonderful scoop for any Western journalist, but that was not why Russell wanted to do it. Just getting to Moscow had been complicated enough, involving, as it did, a great swing round the territories occupied by the Wehrmacht, an area which still stretched from northern Norway to northern Italy. Three trains had brought him to Marseilles, and a series of flights had carried him eastwards via a succession of cities--Rome, Belgrade and Bucharest--all with the unfortunate distinction of having been bombed by both sides. He had expected difficulties everywhere, but bribery had worked in Marseilles and Rome, and broad hints that he would put Tito on the cover of Time magazine had eased his entry into Belgrade and, by default, the wider area of Soviet control. The rest had been easy. Once you were in, you were in, and the authorities in Bucharest, Odessa and Kiev had waved him on with barely a glance at his passport or papers. No doubt the various immigration bureaucracies would recover their essential nastiness in due course, but for the moment everyone seemed too exhausted by the war to care. Moscow, though, was likely to be different, and Russell was half expecting orders to leave on the next return flight. Or worse. But when his turn finally came he was let through with only the most cursory check of his documents. It was almost as if they were expecting him. Excerpted from Potsdam Station by David Downing All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.