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THE SABOTEURS
A Jove Book / published by arrangement with the authors
Copyright © 2006 by William E. Butterworth IV.
Excerpt from The Double Agents copyright © 2007 by W. E. B. Griffin.
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ISBN: 1-4295-3636-5
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T H E M E N AT WA R S E R I E S
I S R E S P E C T F U L LY D E D I C AT E D
I N H O N O R O F :
Lieutenant Aaron Bank, Infantry, AUS,
detailed OSS
(Later Colonel, Special Forces)
November 23, 1902April 1, 2004
Lieutenant William E. Colby, Infantry, AUS,
detailed OSS
(Later Ambassador and Director, CIA)
January 4, 1920April 28, 1996
It is no use saying,
We are doing our best.
You have got to succeed in doing
what is necessary.
Winston S. Churchill, British Prime Minister
THE
SABOTEURS
I
[ ONE ]
Villa del Archimedes
Partanna, Sicily
1215 25 February 1943
I do not want to die that way, Professor Arturo Rossi
thought as he looked through the doorway at the far end
of the tiled hallway. Its utterly terrible . . . inhuman.
His light olive skin paler than usual, the tall, slight
fifty-five-year-old felt himself swaying, faint from all he
had seen.
The bruised, disfigured bodies of four men lay strapped
to battered wooden gurneys inside the room. The an-
cient villa on the hillside overlooking the Mediterranean
Sea had six such rooms off of the common hall, three on
either side, each of cold coarse stone with the windows to
the outside boarded over. More than thirty men also lay
bound to gurneys in the other rooms, lit by harsh light
alive, but barely.
A warm hand gently gripped Rossis left upper arm,
steadying him, and he turned to look at his soft-spoken
old friend from the University of Palermo.
Dr. Giuseppe Napoli, his wild mane of white hair
flowing, had brought Rossi here to witness with his own
2
W . E . B . G R I F F I N
eyes the unspeakable acts that were being committed by
the German Schutzstaffel the SS.
Rossi had followed the elderly physicians stooped walk
down the hallway in shocked silence. He had glanced
through the staggered doorways and noticed that the
condition of the men worsened room to room, from
mildly sedated with no obvious illness to grave with as-
tonishing symptoms.
And then they had come to this last room, with its
horrid stench of death.
It was the worst of all.
The torsos were mostly covered by dirty gray sweat-
and blood-stained gowns, the arms and legs exposed,
and the wrists and ankles secured to the gurneys by
worn-leather straps. All the bodies bore some sort of
rash. The legs on a couple also showed small open
woundsinfected and festeringwhile the arms and legs
of the others were spotted with blisters filled with dark
fluid.
Rossi noticed that the smell of rotting flesh was made
worseif that was possibleby the unemptied tin buck-
ets hanging beneath the gurneys. These held what had
been the contents of the mens bowels, which with all
Teutonic efficiency had passed through a hole fashioned
in the gurneys for unattended evacuation.
Rossi quickly turned away from the doorway. His
throat contracted, and he felt his eyes moisten, then a
tear slip down his right cheek.
It was clear that these menall Sicilians, as his friend
had warned himsuffered greatly in their final weeks
T H E S A B O T E U R S
3
and days. Yet the contorted faces of the dead suggested
that not even death had brought them any real peace.
Rossi realized that what disturbed himbeyond the
obvious outrage at such atrocities against his fellow
manwas that foreigners could come in and inflict such
terrible
things upon Sicilians in their own country in a
villa named for Archimedes, perhaps the greatest of all Si-
cilians.
And that they could do it with what appeared to be
absolute impunity.
But how can anything be done about something no one
knowsor admitsis happening?
The villa, built by the Normans nine centuries earlier,
overlooked the sea a little more than ten kilometers up
the coast from Palermos Quattro Canti quarterthe