Armageddon
Authors: Leon Uris
Armageddon
by Leon Uris
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1963, 1964 by Leon Uris
cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
978-1-4532-2572-1
This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media
180 Varick Street
New York, NY 10014
Contents
Part 2: The Last Days of April
Part 3: The Linden Trees Will Never Bloom Again
Part 4: The Last of the Gooney Birds
Ich Bin Ein Berliner
—John F. Kennedy
Part 1
A Meeting at the Elbe
Chapter One
January, 1944
C
APTAIN SEAN
O’S
ULLIVAN LIFTED
the blackout curtain. A burst of dull light grayed the room. Christ, he thought, doesn’t the sun ever shine in London. He heard planes droning overhead toward the English Channel but he could not see them through the thick fog. He wondered if his brother, Tim, was flying today.
“Come to breakfast, dear,” Nan called.
Sean turned into the room. It was an elegant room, the most elegant he had ever known. The photograph on the mantle of Major G. Donald Milford stared down at him particularly harshly this morning.
The dining area was an alcove of three angled windows affording a view over Bayswater Road to Kensington Gardens. It was so mucky outside, the view had vanished. Nan Milford added to the opulence of the place in a silk and lace dressing gown. She put his jacket across the back of his chair and mentioned something or other about trying to remove a spot from the sleeve.
Sean sipped the coffee, grimaced, made a mental note to bum some decent coffee from the cook. This British version of ersatz was unfit for consumption in the first place and even worse when Nan got finished overboiling it.
Nan looked pleasantly tired from love-making. She was sad because she had made love so intensely and even sadder because she had fallen in love. She watched him with obvious adoration. “How is it that a handsome Irish brute like you never married?”
“And give up all this?”
“Do be serious for once, Sean.”
“The transposition of old country traditions to San Francisco, I guess.”
“And how many girls have chased you as I did and how have you avoided them?”
He was about to make a crack about playing it safe with married women but thought better of it. “A bachelor develops a sixth sense that tells him when his sanctity is about to be invaded. All sorts of built-in warning systems send up flares and rockets and bells go off.”
She tweaked the end of his nose. “Please,” she pleaded.
“Why be serious?”
Nan stiffened. She never got overtly angry ... only straightened her back, glared, conveyed hurt. “I am sorry I asked.”
From time to time Sean was suddenly reminded that Nan could be offended easily, that he had to treat her differently than other women he had known.
“It would be hard for you to comprehend,” he said apologetically.
“Am I so without understanding?”
“You’ve had certain advantages in your life that makes understanding impossible.”
“You speak as though I’m a terrible snob.”
“You are. But you are a real snob. It is nothing you deliberately cultivated. The world is loaded with people trying to be snobs who just can’t make the grade. A genuine, unvarnished snob is a creature to be revered.”
She liked to hear Sean talk his lovely gibberish. Of course no man had ever spoken to her that way before. Dear, sweet Donnie sat where Sean sat now. My! What a difference. Nan did not know if Donnie would be more offended by the fact that Sean was in his place or that Sean had the audacity to sit at his table with his sleeves rolled up and his collar unbuttoned.
“Are you trying to say that marriage would have held you from advancing your station?”
“Not at all, Nan. The reasons were more practical.”
“Now, I’m completely intrigued.”
“I haven’t married for the same reason my parents didn’t marry until after a ten-year courtship. He was just too damned poor to support a wife.”
He gulped another swallow of the horrible coffee. Nan’s soft hand on his lightened the blow. Her fingertips played over his hands. “Please don’t stop, Sean. We know so terribly little about each other.”