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FIELD TRIAL DISTRIBUTION, TWO (2) UNITS AUTHORIZED. UNIT DESIGNATION PANZER 101: ASSIGNED VISTULA SECTOR, ARMY GROUP CENTER. UNIT DESIGNATION PANZER 214: ASSIGNED MAAS SECTOR, ARMY GROUP B. UNITS NOT TO OPERATE WITHIN 400KM OF EACH OTHER FOR DURATION OF TRIAL. CROSS-REPORTING BETWEEN UNIT COMMANDERS PROHIBITED. EACH UNIT TO BE EVALUATED INDEPENDENTLY; RESULTS NOT TO BE CONSOLIDATED PRIOR TO FINAL REVIEW.
Panzer 214 did not exist anywhere in the file Ross had spent five weeks building. That was, by now, exactly what he would have expected. A program that had gone to the trouble of routing two crates of optical glass through non-adjacent line items on a sixty-one page manifest was not going to let its own two field units learn of each other's existence by accident. Four hundred kilometers was not a tactical decision. It was an insurance policy — if one crew talked, or was captured, or simply failed loudly enough to draw attention, the other continued in a theater far enough away that nobody assembling one report would think to ask about the other.
Not to a single enemy command. To each other. Two crews built out of the same pooled engineering, operating under the same clearance code, forbidden from ever knowing the other one was real.
Maas sector. Army Group B.
Ross sat with that longer than the sentence warranted, because he had read those two words before, in a file he had closed five weeks ago and not thought about since.
DEPOT SITE 12: RECOVERY POINT, MAAS RIVER CROSSING, VICINITY [TOWN REDACTED], NOV 1944.
He had read this line before and let it mean nothing, because five weeks ago he had not yet had a second hull to hang it on. Now it meant everything at once. Depot Site 12 was not a salvage yard that had happened to collect an unusually eclectic pile of wreckage. Depot Site 12 was where Panzer 214 had ended, on a river four hundred kilometers from the one Ross had been reconstructing for a month, in front of an American recovery unit that had done exactly what Ross was doing now — read the hull correctly, in eighteen months less time than it had taken him — and had been shut down for it by an officer in his own army, under a directive he still could not ask about by name.
Which meant the thing burying this program was not only a Swiss trading house and a filing cabinet in Zurich. It was also, somewhere above him, a man wearing the same uniform Ross wore, who had looked at the same evidence Ross was now looking at and decided the correct response was silence.
He knew, now, what had happened to one of them.
He still did not know what had happened to the other.
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