Siberian Girl: Memories of Love and War 1942-1992: a Romantic Historical Espionage Thriller

In 1950, a hungry, frightened little girl of four stands on a desolate beach in remote, icy Siberia, looking east across the vast Pacific Ocean. Holding her tiny hand is her young European mother, who tells her stories about her handsome but vanished young father (U.S. Naval Intelligence officer Tim Nordhall) and a wondrous land called America. Her mother dies tragically, leaving the child alone in the world, but for her Russian caretaker, a kind but rough woman running a tavern in Anadyr.

With luck, she is adopted by a rich French couple. They take her to Paris, name her Marianne, and raise her as their only child in a chateau amid wealth and privilege. She grows up to marry and have children, while living a rather giddy, dissipated life. Her children grow up successful. Marianne, Countess Didier as she is now styled, harbors dark, turbulent memories of love and war that leave her no peace. When her dashing playboy husband dies in a race car wreck, Marianne's quest for truth begins.

Now early 40s, she begins a global search for answers to the mystery of who she is, who her father was, and who her mother had been. She visits places and meets persons that crossed paths with Tim Nordhall. We learn that she and her mother were kidnapped by Soviet agents and taken to Siberia as hostages. Stalin's police hoped to lure Tim Nordhall to find his wife and daughter so they could exact a cruel revenge because Tim foiled a plot by Stalin to steal an atomic bomb off a San Francisco dock in 1945-one of the weapons destined for Tinian, to be dropped on Japan.

Told in parallel (framed by Marianne's story) Tim Nordhall's danger-filled, heroic career as a young Naval Intelligence officer begins in 1942 aboard a British destroyer that is torpedoed off the South Atlantic coast near Africa. As lone survivor, he washes onto a beach amid hungry lions, is rescued by Mauritanian slavers, and sold to a wealthy man in Timbuktou, Mali.

He escapes with a pair of renegade Luftwaffe deserters, who fly him in a stolen JU-52 to the Belgian Congo. Allies recruit him as one the first U.S. atomic counterspies. His spy adventures take him to London during the Blitz, then to wartime San Francisco where he will foil Stalin's plan. Starting in London, Tim spars with a Soviet master spy code-named Jaguar, who decades later helps Marianne in her quest to find her father-the man Jaguar had been assigned by Stalin to murder.

Framed by Marianne's search, the interior story is about Tim and his adventures in war and love. The final phases take place in rainy, mysterious, jazzy San Francisco during the last months of World War II. While pursuing his secret atomic mission, he gets romantically involved with three intriguing, attractive women. Corie is a dashing U.S. WASP (Women's Airforce Service Pilots). Corie's roommate, a sultry Turkish Jewish agent named Meg, works at the newly founded UN to aid Hitler's holocaust victims in a future free nation called Israel. And a beautiful Polish army nurse Tim courted in London reappears mysteriously in San Francisco as a U.S. Navy nurse, oddly interested in all things atomic.

In 1991, as the Soviet Union collapses, it's as if a sea of time recedes, exposing the secrets of a lost century. Marianne's search frames our story, which closely follows Tim Nordhall's wartime adventures as a spy, and his women. The novel's subtitle (The World is Round) captures a key motif: the trembling little child looking east across that icy sea on a 1950s Siberian beach might one day somehow lock gazes with her future self, a wealthy, driven woman on a 1990s San Francisco beach, looking west across that same endlessly rolling dark ocean, to lock eyes with herself as a tiny child long ago. For Marianne, the world is indeed round, filled with memories of love and war.

NOTE: Same exact novel, alternate edition available as Airport Novel by John T. Cullen.