Page 1

Prologue

Warren

JUNE 17, 1945

BAD KÖTZTING, GERMANY

Oh no. Was it that time already?

The little gray mare bobbed her head, huffed, and pawed at the fresh straw in her stall. Her massive sides heaved, and her tail flicked as if she was in pain. She huffed again and stumbled, nearly falling to the ground in her stall. From what I’d seen of the other horses from Hostau giving birth, this didn’t look normal.

I needed to find the veterinarian, fast.

I raced through the makeshift aisles of this former Luftwaffe airfield turned horse stables.

Mira was one of the hundreds of pregnant mares we’d had to transport, and we knew it was risky to move them such a distance so late in their pregnancy. I hadn’t known anything about horses before my men and I tiptoed into Czechoslovakia and evacuated these horses so the Soviets couldn’t seize them from the now-defeated Nazis. I was a city kid from Philly. I appreciated the history and tradition of my cavalry unit but had never expected to stand beside the beasts.

“Do you know where Dr. Baumann is?” I asked Eddie as I drew near him. Sergeant Eddie Moore was lanky and had laugh lines etched in his narrow face. He held two nails in his lips as he hammered a loose board on the ramshackle stalls we’d been patching for days.

He jutted his chin to the northern barns. “Has his hands full with a foal on the way.”

My heart dropped. Mira didn’t have much time.

The airfield spanned dozens of acres, and its pavement, metal buildings, and small pens were a far cry from the lush green fields of Germany, Poland, Holland, and Austria, where so many of these priceless animals had originated.

When I reached the air hangar that housed nearly a hundred gleaming white Lipizzaner horses, I spotted a few soldiers all gathered around one stall. “Hey, Doc,” I said as I reached the stall. Inside, Dr. Baumann was bent over a white mare with a huge, heaving belly. A petite woman in a nurse’s uniform crouched next to him.

Dr. Baumann exemplified the studious veterinarian, a short man with thick black glasses and a neatly trimmed beard. He was a local civilian who had served the Germans at Hostau and helped us greatly in our evacuation. No one knew these horses better.

The woman beside him I didn’t recognize. She had wavy brown hair tied back at her neck, a straight, short nose, and lips that tilted up at the corners in a friendly, kind way. Her tan uniform sleeves were rolled up to the elbows.

“Mira is in labor,” I said.

“Bad timing,” Baumann said in his thick German accent. He wiped his brow with his forearm and turned to the woman beside him. “She’s a first-time mother?”

I answered at the same time the woman did. “Yes.” She caught my gaze with her dark brown eyebrows lifted in surprise.

The doctor nodded and motioned to the nurse. “Will you see to Mira?”

Something dipped in the pit of my stomach. Mira hadn’t had a foal yet, and from what Dr. Baumann told me before, it meant she was at far greater risk of complications. What if something happened to her?

The nurse nodded and stood. Tendrils of her brown hair framed her face, and her pale blue eyes pierced right through me as she wiped her hands on a rag and picked up a medical bag. “Let’s go.”

I hesitated and approached Dr. Baumann in the stall. I leaned down to whisper as softly as I could, “Doc, with all due respect, I think Mira needs a veterinarian, not a nurse.”

Baumann chuckled, but his focus remained on the mare before him.

The woman’s uniform revealed her last name as Bryant and her rank as a senior ward nurse—a first lieutenant. She smoothed a hand over her uniform and smiled. Her eyes sparkled as she sized me up, and I realized with a twist of guilt in my stomach that she’d caught my statement.

“Don’t worry, Captain Hayes,” Baumann said. “I assure you, I’m sending the more experienced hands with you.”

That loosened the knot in my stomach.

“Come on, Captain.” Lieutenant Bryant slipped through the soldiers around us and walked with purpose to the barns south and east of this hangar. From her answer earlier and her direction of travel, she knew exactly who and where Mira was, which inspired confidence.

Was she the more experienced hands? This woman had to be all of twenty-five years old. Though she was slender and I guessed five feet, three inches, her pace left me in the dust.

I jogged to catch up.