Fox at the Front (Fox on the Rhine) by Douglas Niles, Michael Dobson

were channeling the ghost of Ulysses S. Grant to Rommel’s Robert E. Lee.
    Porter stopped, typed a few lines. That would make a very interesting sidebar—how this surrender would stack up against the Allied declaration of intent, and whether Patton would find himself in trouble yet again for exceeding his mandate as a negotiator. He’d have to make a few calls as soon as he could get near a working civilian telephone.
    Another sidebar that needed telling was the story of the near assassination of Rommel only hours before the surrender was to take place, and how it was narrowly foiled by a German supply officer, of all people—Müller, his name was. It was a narrow escape from disaster for everyone concerned; if it had gone just a hair differently, there was a good chance that Patton would be dead by the same hand right now. The German intelligence officer who had first taken Porter to his own headquarters instead of a POW camp had been shot by the same SS officer, as had Rommel’s personal driver. Porter made himself a note to find out whether those two had lived or not.
    Porter continued to type, then paused as he realized that he probably would have been dead as well, shot at the hands of some Waffen-SS bastard just on general principles. The Nazis weren’t big on freedom of the press. At the start of the war, quite a few foreign correspondents had been rounded up, and some of AP’s German stringers had been arrested on loyalty charges. One American AP reporter, Joe Morton, was still in Nazi hands, in some kind of concentration camp. Porter hoped he was okay.
    He looked down at what he’d written so far. Not bad, even for a long day’s work. The wastebasket next to the desk he’d commandeered had thirty or so wadded-up sheets of typing paper in it, but that was par for the course. The classic advice for new reporters was “Don’t try to put more fire in your work; put more of your work into the fire.” The ratio of trashed pages to finished pages was fairly reasonable.
    Porter stood up, stretched, and decided to go in search of some coffee—or what passed for coffee around Rommel’s headquarters. He’d put in a long shift of work after a sleepless night; he deserved a break.
    Porter pushed a hand through his thinning hair and patted his comfortably thick belly. He was wearing American military fatigues without any insignia, and thick, heavy boots fit for an infantryman but not for a primarily deskbound reporter and editor.
    Rommel’s headquarters looked more or less the same as American headquarters he’d seen—it must be a function of how a military organization was run. Aside from the fact that most of the people wore Wehrmacht gray instead of American olive drab, it was pretty close. Clerks typed, officers scurried into and out of meetings, cigarettes were stubbed out into already overflowing ashtrays.
    Which reminded him, so he lit up a Lucky Strike and took a big drag from it. He saw another flash of olive drab, and there was General Wakefield, CO of the Nineteenth Armored Division. Wakefield was a short, squat man, built a
little like the tanks he commanded. He took his ever-present cigar out of his mouth. “Porter—just the man I’m looking for.”
    “I was just getting ready to scrounge a cup of coffee, General. What can I do for you?”
    “I need a little translation support. You available?”
    “Sure thing, General.”
    “Good. Patton stole my translator, my G-2, Sanger.”
    “I met him in the surrender talks. His German’s a lot better than mine,” Porter said.
    “Parents are German. He was there before the war. Speaks like a native.”
    “I spent a couple of years there before the war myself, but my German’s weak at best.”
    Another grunt. “Best I’ve got right now. I need to talk to some of the Krauts as well as my own men. I could use your help.”
    “Sure, General. I’m at your service.”
    Porter followed Wakefield out of the headquarters, grabbing his field jacket from