In a little while, they would also have to contend with the swarms of refugees who clogged every road. They seemed to emerge from every rock and would be drawn to the new bridge like flies to garbage in their haste to get away from the advancing Russians. The human refuse was pathetic, but they could not spend time with them. They had a war to end.

Like a dog, Logan sniffed the air. There was no smell of smoke and death. American artillery chose that moment to open up. Shells shrieked overhead and hit something a few miles away. They waited for return fire, but nothing happened. It was weird. Where the hell were the Germans!

• • •

Harry Truman paced angrily around his desk in the Oval Office which, until recently, belonged to his late predecessor. He needed fresh air and a drink, some bourbon and water, light on the water. Real light on the water. He was being lied to and condescended to and it galled him all to hell.

At least he was making some headway with his so-called key advisers. They were Roosevelt’s men and were only gradually coming to the reality that their loyalty was to the office of the president and not a dead man. Truman was a small man physically, but a terrier when it came to temperament. He was always being underestimated since, unlike some of the dandies from the State Department and the graduates of West Point and Annapolis, he’d never been to college. They didn’t know all the time he’d spent reading and learning, acquiring a superb but informal education.

He’d also been annoyed that secrets, such as the atomic bomb and the Yalta agreements, had been kept from him, but that was the way FDR operated.