The Dark Road

Harry Benton had no choice but to take on the unpleasant Intelligence job Major Feldman offered him. The body of a murdered man in Benton's car that had smashed up on the Autobahn forced him to play things Feldman's way, or forfeit his only chance of getting back to the States.

It was a tough assignment. It needed a smart amateur, because they caught the smart pros. In a small East German village, Harry Benton had to get from a Lutheran pastor a notebook containing secrets of bacteriological warfare that, in the wrong hands, could depopulate half the globe.

Benton wasn't prepared for Pastor Daubigny's reluctance to give up the equation-scribbled notebook nor for his profound distrust of man, whatever side he represented...nor for the presence of the scarred but lovely Magda and sinister party member Stumpf.

Then Stumpf, who wanted asylum in the West, forced the issue. The four set out toward the border, with its patrols, its barbed wire, its savage Vopo-led dogs. Benton had no idea that Major Feldman, who meant safety once he reached him, lay dead on his office floor...