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The Spymasters: A Men at War Novel

Page 10

by Griffin, W. E. B. ; Butterworth IV, William E.


  “Look, why the hell should I take you and not someone else more experienced?”

  “Easy. Because no one else is more experienced than me. I can track Tubes’s radio.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Whoever is running his station is accustomed to me at the other end. I can keep him on the radio long enough for us to triangulate on his signal.”

  Canidy considered that.

  If we find the radio, he thought, there’s a damn good chance Tubes is nearby.

  And if he’s not, I’m sure I can get whoever is running the radio to talk.

  “Won’t they know we’re close because of your signal strength?”

  “I’ll have to dial down my transmit power, but that’s a piece of cake.” He paused, then added, “I really want to go.”

  Canidy met his eyes.

  “Why this all of a sudden, John Craig? Didn’t you hear what I said the SS is doing? If you’re captured—”

  “That’s why I want to go,” John Craig interrupted. “Because I’m the reason Tubes is there . . . out there somewhere. When I didn’t go the first time, he had to go in my place, so now it’s ‘If not now, when? If not me, who?’”

  Canidy glanced at Fine, who was looking up from the stack of messages he’d been handed. Fine made a facial expression that Canidy, having known him since the day he showed up at the boarding school in Iowa, read as Whatever you decide, I’m with you.

  Then Canidy looked away, out across the harbor, in the direction where Sicily, some six hundred miles away, would be over the horizon.

  He felt his throat tighten.

  Fine recognized what was happening, and after a long moment changed the subject: “You might want to look at a couple of these, Dick. They are all somewhat related.”

  Fine handed him the messages.

  “The top one’s from Dulles to Donovan. Dulles says Tiny is saying the Kriegsmarine is about to make major changes.”

  Canidy, who knew Allen Dulles was OSS deputy director for Europe, raised his eyebrows, then looked at the sheet and started to read.

  “Jesus!” he exclaimed after a moment.

  He looked back at Fine.

  “So, Herr Grossadmiral,” Canidy said, “is going to order all U-boats out of the North Atlantic? After a campaign of—what?—almost four years? Jesus!”

  “Good news . . . ?”

  “Damn good news,” Canidy said, looking down at the half-dozen Liberty ships at anchor in the harbor. “Especially now that we’re gearing up for invading Sicily. Can never have too heavy of a supply line.”

  “Not when, as in last year alone, some seven-point-five million tons of critical war matériel gets sent to the bottom of the ocean. Already, we’re noticing the difference. More than twice the number of Liberty ships are actually making it here.”

  The 441-foot-long vessels—known as EC2 (Emergency, Cargo, Large Capacity)—each transported the equivalent of three hundred railroad freight cars in cargo, everything from jeeps and tanks and trucks to munitions and medicine to C rations and soldiers. They were being built—the first in March 1941, with more than three thousand ordered—at eighteen shipyards on every U.S. coast.

  Before his first EC2, master engineer Henry J. Kaiser had never built a ship. But using mass-production theories—some that had helped him construct the Bonneville and Hoover dams in record time—he learned, by his seventy-fifth EC2 completed at an Oregon shipyard, how to turn out a finished vessel only ten days after the laying of her keel.

  Which became critical, because as the convoys, each with scores of ships heavy with matériel, steamed at eleven knots eastward across the Atlantic Ocean, the Nazi U-boats attacked.

  Seeking to choke off the supply line and starve England and the Allied forces, the submarines hunted down the sluggish ships in “wolfpacks,” a deadly tactic devised by Karl Dönitz, whom Hitler just months earlier had promoted to grand admiral and named commander in chief of the German Navy.

  Wolfpack torpedoes sunk hundreds upon hundreds of the Liberty ships—many within sight of the U.S. coast, made easy targets when silhouetted by the lights onshore—to the point that the Allies considered a Liberty ship had earned back her cost if she completed just one trip across the Atlantic Ocean.

  “Thanks to Ultra?” Canidy said.

  “Yeah, the tide changed, also last year, thanks to Bletchley Park finally cracking the U-boat Enigma.”

  Canidy knew that the Government Code and Cypher School, the British code-breaking operation, was at Bletchley Park, forty miles northwest of London. Also known as GCCS, insiders said it stood for Golf, Cheese, and Chess Society.

  Different German services used different Enigma machines, the Kriegsmarine’s being among the hardest to decode.

  “When Bletchley Park did that,” Fine went on, “it changed everything. In November ’42, the high for our losses was seven hundred and twenty-nine thousand tons. That fell to just over two hundred thousand tons this past January—about the same time Hitler made Dönitz head of the navy.”

  “Down half a million tons. That is one helluva change.”

  “And as of this month, we’ve lost only thirty-four ships in the Atlantic. Even better, the wolfpacks are now the hunted ones. Dönitz, with his subs being targeted and blasted—he’s lost forty-three this month, which we’re told is twice the replacement rate—is pulling them all back. He’s calling this ‘Black May.’”

  Canidy looked at Fine and motioned with the message from Dulles. “And if Dulles is getting this kind of rich intel from Tiny on what the Krauts are doing next, then . . .”

  Fine nodded.

  Canidy was deep in thought for a moment, then said: “Okay, we’ve got to go in there and get Tubes the hell out. I’m not leaving him at the mercy of the SS with Husky’s D-day around the corner. We also can see if there’s anything from a pack of Hitler Youth to a half-million troops amassing. And if there’s any of that goddamn nerve gas.”

  “We?” Fine said. “And how do you plan to deal with Eisenhower?”

  “No one else has been able to find Tubes. I know my way around. And as for Ike, no one knows I’ve been there twice, so why the hell not a third time?”

  “You said ‘we.’”

  “John Craig and me and whoever we need. Right, John Craig?”

  John Craig van der Ploeg’s face brightened, and he excitedly said, “Thank you, sir!”

  Canidy’s eyes narrowed.

  “And that is the last goddamn time!” he snapped. “You call me ‘sir’ when we’re over the fence, and we’ll both get killed.”

  The look on John Craig’s face showed that he understood.

  [TWO]

  OSS Bern Station

  Herrengasse 23

  Bern, Switzerland

  2250 27 May 1943

  OSS Chief of Station Allen Welsh Dulles was in the library of his mansion in Old City Bern, sitting in one of four deep-cushioned leather armchairs. The seating was arranged in a semicircle at a low round marble table before the enormous stone fireplace.

  Dulles, who in April had turned fifty years old, had the calm, thoughtful appearance one might expect of perhaps a Presbyterian minister—warm, inquisitive eyes behind frameless round spectacles, thinning silver hair, a neatly groomed gray mustache. He was in fact the son of a Presbyterian minister and grandson of a Presbyterian missionary. He’d joined the diplomatic corps in 1916, right after graduating Princeton University.

  He was wearing what members of his social standing called a sack suit, a two-piece woolen garment with cuffed baggy pants and no padding in the shoulders of the jacket. His closet held more than a dozen such suits—all very much of the same cut, varying only in color, either gray or black, with or without pinstripes, and all from the clothier J. Press—which he invariably wore with a crisp white dress shirt and a striped bow tie.

  Herrengasse 23 was a four-story classic baroque-style residence that had been built in the seventeenth century. The richly appointed oak-paneled high
-ceiling library—dimly lit by the flickering flames of the crackling fire and a single torchiere lamp glowing in a near corner—had the comfortable smell of old leather and fine tobacco. With Bern’s blackout rules in effect, and strictly enforced to avoid aerial attacks by Axis forces, the great room’s massive crystal chandelier remained darkened and the heavy fabric draperies were pulled tightly across the tall casement windows.

  A German-manufactured Braun radio-phonograph combination was tuned to 531 kilohertz to pick up Landessender Beromünster, Switzerland’s national public station. Earlier, Dulles had been listening to a news broadcast in German, then a rebroadcast of a BBC-produced report, its reader having the markedly distinct clipped accent of the British.

  Now, with the Braun’s volume turned low, the radio station was playing a performance of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. It had been recorded in German at the Stadttheater, which was a half-dozen blocks away, not far from the Zeitglocke, which would sound its massive bronze bell in ten minutes.

  Dulles appreciated the works of Mozart; he just could not decide which held more irony during wartime, the playing of a comic opera heavy with sex or the la folle giornata—day of madness—story line of the opera itself.

  Especially on a radio station whose signal reaches far into Nazi territory, where the penalty for listening to Beromünster’s broadcasts gets one charged with sedition—and the death sentence of getting thrown in a concentration camp.

  Dulles picked up a Zippo lighter that was on a silver tray on the marble table. The tray also held two bottles of Rémy Martin VSOP cognac and four snifters. One of the crystal glasses was nearly half-full. Beside the tray sat a large wooden humidor heavy with Honduran cigars and a thick manila envelope rubber-stamped in red ink: TOP SECRET.

  It would seem all we have now is day after day of madness—and none of it humorous.

  Today alone brings Sparrow’s killing by parties unknown and confirmation of a link between that chemist Schwartz and von Braun that can only mean more madness.

  And now this envelope of photographs showing damage from the Ruhr Valley bombings.

  He glanced at the stainless steel lighter and ran his thumb over the emblem on its case that was a miniature representation of the orange-and-black crest of Princeton. Although the dim light did not allow him to see details, he mentally recited his alma mater’s motto that was embossed in Latin on the crest: Dei sub numine viget.

  As he moved his thumb upward, flicking open the top of the lighter, he thought of its translation: “Under God’s Power She Flourishes.”

  His thumb then spun the gnarled wheel that sparked the lighter to life. With a practiced flourish, he held its flame to the tip of the foot-long straw-like stick of wood he held in his other hand, then turned the stick vertically so that the flame grew hotter as it burned upward. Then he picked up his favorite pipe, one crafted of exotic burl wood, gently tamped the tobacco in the bowl with his thumb, and finally held the flame over the tobacco.

  A purist, he used the wooden stick’s flame—and not that of the Zippo—so that the delicate flavor of the tobacco would not be affected by any taste of lighter fluid.

  He began to puff. The tobacco caught fire, glowing red. He blew out the flame on the wooden stick and placed it in the ashtray on the table.

  He breathed in the thick, sweet smell of the tobacco, put the pipe back to his lips, and took a lengthy, slow draw. After a long moment, as he exhaled appreciatively, he looked up at the oil painting of Old Glory that had recently been hung over the mantel.

  Under God’s Power She Flourishes indeed . . . he thought.

  While Dulles looked and acted every bit the Ivy League–educated diplomat—he presently was registered with the Swiss government as the special assistant to the American Minister, U.S. Legation to Switzerland, where he kept his official office—he of course was the top U.S. secret agent there, quietly conducting OSS business at the mansion on Herrengasse.

  The covert meetings Dulles held almost always at night, when the dark of blackout made surveillance of who came and went via the alley leading to the mansion’s rear entry practically impossible. The security of his residence—with the notable exception of its telephone lines being tapped, as no suspect telephone in Switzerland went unmonitored, either by the Fremdenpolizei or other organizations, authorized to do so or not—also afforded Dulles the confidence that no one saw or overheard anything said therein.

  For Dulles, such security was critical, as he devoutly believed in his mission. He genuinely feared the threat of the spreading of Fascism. He’d at times served as a League of Nations legal adviser, which had allowed him to meet world leaders, among them the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and the German chancellor Adolf Hitler. Neither man had left him with a good gut feeling then, and everything he had learned of them since only served to support what his gut had warned him.

  Dulles had watched the early years of World War Two with a professional detachment—though ultimately he not only joined those who believed the United States should intervene in the war but became a vocal proponent of it. He wrote books arguing against America’s neutrality.

  And when, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, America finally found itself fully involved, he found himself serving his country in the Office of Strategic Services, working old contacts in Switzerland and establishing new ones to find anti-Nazis—Germans especially but also anyone else—willing to do anything to stop the evil that was Adolf Hitler.

  * * *

  Allen Welsh Dulles, deep in thought as he considered what would be the course of the evening’s meeting, took another puff on his pipe, exhaled, then leaned forward for his glass of cognac. He held the snifter so that its large bowl rested in his palm, the body heat from his hand gently warming the cognac through the fine crystal.

  He started to rock the snifter, then stared at the slowly swirling cognac as he thought: The details of these bombings could cause him to tip either way—for us or against us.

  But there’s no doubt they will make him furious.

  I can only hope he blames his losses on Hitler.

  Dulles put the glass to his nose, inhaled the rich aroma of the cognac, then took a sip. As he felt the alcohol warm his throat and then his stomach, there came a tap at the solid wooden door. It began to swing inward. He set his glass back on the table and glanced at his Patek Philippe wristwatch—the elegant Swiss-made timepiece, a gift from his wife, Clover, when Dulles had first served in Switzerland, showed it was shy of 11 P.M.—then he nodded appreciatively at his guest’s punctuality and glanced toward the door.

  A serious-looking man in his late twenties with an athletic build and wearing the satin housecoat of a manservant—but who in fact was an armed OSS agent—entered the room first.

  “Mr. Dulles, may I present Herr Kappler?”

  He made a grand sweeping gesture with his right hand, and a tall, erect fifty-five-year-old man entered the library. The agent then quietly slipped back out the door, pulling it shut behind him with a solid click of its heavy metal latch.

  Wolfgang Augustus Kappler had hawk-like facial features, piercing green eyes, and short dark hair that was graying at the temples. While he carried himself with an air of unquestioned confidence, Dulles knew him to be charming and gracious—a genuinely gentle man. He also knew that he was a devout Roman Catholic and anti-Nazi, one careful to distinguish between those who committed the atrocities in pursuit of National Socialism and its Final Solution for a master race and those who quietly fought the Fascism and racism while trying to save the Fatherland from further destruction.

  At least till now maybe, Dulles thought.

  Kappler wore a solid gray three-piece suit with a stiffly starched white dress shirt and a silver necktie. The custom-cut woolen garment fit perfectly, which accentuated a bulge in the jacket’s left patch pocket.

  Dulles, with a warm smile, began to approach him.

  “It is a real pleasure to see you again, Wolffy
.”

  Kappler effortlessly strode across the room and, with both hands extended, reached out and vigorously shook Dulles’s right hand.

  “Allen,” Kappler said in his strong, deep voice, “it is always good to see an old friend.”

  The two had known each other for almost a dozen years, having first met in the Berlin office of Sullivan and Cromwell.

  Dulles, after getting his law degree at George Washington University in 1926, had been recruited by Sullivan and Cromwell, the international law firm based in New York City at which his older brother, John Foster Dulles, already had made partner. There was prestige involved with taking the position, certainly, but Dulles quietly admitted that the money was too good to turn down. And, he decided, if necessary he could always return to the diplomatic corps.

  Thus, Allen Welsh Dulles came to handle international clients for the firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, and Kappler had come to him at the suggestion of Friedrich “Fritz” Thyssen, a fellow industrialist, for help with his corporate investments.

  Like Thyssen, Kappler between world wars had been quietly looking to diversify his holdings beyond Germany and neighboring countries. His main business, Kappler Industrie GmbH, was hugely successful in the manufacture of steel and iron and other key materials for the building of automobiles, heavy trucks, trains, and aircraft. Wolfgang Kappler had sought to expand that business abroad while at the same time very quietly investing in other businesses.

  The United States of America came immediately to his mind.

  Allen Dulles oversaw for Kappler the setting up of a U.S. holding company in which Kappler, through Dulles’s investment banker connections, poured significant funds into blue-chip companies General Motors Corporation, Boeing Aircraft, International Business Machines, and E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, as well as a few smaller railroads in which Kappler hoped eventually to secure a controlling interest.

  These companies proved to be as Kappler had expected—solid investments that were not subject to the mercurial economies he suffered in Europe, Germany’s out-of-control inflation being but one problem.

 

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