The city sweltered under its eternal sun, golden-hazed and sluggish in the mid-afternoon heat.
Inside the fortified American consulate building, high above the street-level din, four men sat in a long, wood-paneled conference room, ceiling fans clattering overhead.
Colonel Frank Holloway of the OSS thumbed through a series of coded dispatches.
His uniform was loose, fraying, and stained with a week's worth of West African dust.
But his eyes were sharp, too sharp for a man in a supposedly "civilian advisory" role.
"The Germans aren't backing down," he muttered. "They're doing what they always do. Smiling with one hand extended while the other's loading a magazine."
A Liberian national, now on the American payroll as an intelligence asset, shifted nervously in his seat. "The Werwolf units are being reinforced, sir. More armor showed up in Lunsar last week. Heavy armor. The locals are starting to murmur that this 'transition council' is just a new mask for the old Reich."
