Pitch 24: The Jossing Affair

Name: JL Oakley
Title: THE JOSSING AFFAIR
Genre: Historical fiction
Word Count: 160,000

A Norwegian secret agent, posing as a deaf fisherman, falls in love with a lonely German-American widow accused of betraying her husband. In wartime, love and trust are not always compatible.

 

            He found the young man lying in the snow, his battered body pushed deep under the brambles at the bottom of a ravine. If it had not been for the sound of the car door slamming, Hans Gunnerson would never have found him. Already the blanket wrapped around him was covered with down-like flakes of snow, hiding the bloodstains stiffening on the shoulders and back. Soon he would be lost forever to frost and mold.  

A snowstorm that had threatened all day had finally come off the fjord. In record time, the snowfall had gathered strength and was hissing and whirling with a vengeance. It filled up the snow-laden woods with a dull silence. All for a car door. 

            Like a ghost Gunnerson pressed back against the rock and stood still. Dead silence. Then faintly, a second and third metallic thud. Two more doors had been opened and shut. There was a car on the logging road.

            Torn between curiosity and caution, Gunnerson stayed where he was. The trail was well hidden from the road. Eight yards beyond, it switched back sharply to the right, away from the road and landslide which were down and some distance away. He crept forward in a cautious crouch. Obscured by the drooping spruce boughs, he was able to see the car, confirming his worst fears. 

            It was a black limousine, the kind favored by the Gestapo. Two officers dressed in the uniforms of the all-Norwegian SD stood beside it.