Victory and Honor hb-6
Page 29
“And you know how we need the money,” Dorotea said. “Oysters by the dozen aren’t cheap. Can I offer you a Sazerac, Commander?”
“Well, perhaps while Colonel Frade is getting into his uniform. Thank you.”
“Where are we going, Commander?” Frade asked.
“Sorry, I can’t get into that, sir.”
“I thought if we’re headed for Pensacola, I could get my records fixed.”
“We’re not going to Pensacola. I can tell you that. Colonel, the admiral doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
There was a Navy Chevrolet staff car at the curb. From it, the last thing Clete saw was Dorotea standing on the porch, holding one of their sons in her arms and holding the hand of the other. The older boy was crying.
“Okay. She can’t hear. Where are we going?”
“To the airport. I can tell you that much.”
There was a Constellation at the airport, with U.S. NAVY on the fuselage and wings, and blue plates with the silver stars of a rear admiral in holders beside the pilot’s window and the passenger door.
Portman waved Frade up a set of stairs ahead of him.
A white-jacketed steward got out of a seat and motioned for Clete to enter the passenger department.
“Welcome aboard, sir,” he said.
The interior of the passenger compartment was unlike any Clete had ever seen. It looked more like a living room than anything else, with chairs and couches facing in both directions, and tables scattered between them. There was even a small bar, tended by another white-jacketed steward.
Clete remembered hearing that “admiral” meant “prince of the sea.”
“Colonel Frade?”
Clete found himself facing an erect, middle-aged man in a white shirt, collar open and tie pulled down, no jacket, and wearing suspenders.
Clete came to attention.
“Sir, Lieutenant Colonel Frade reporting to the admiral as ordered.”
“Welcome aboard, Colonel. I’m Admiral Sourer.”
“Sir, may I ask the admiral where we’re going?”
“No. But as soon as my junior aide gets back from Arnaud’s with our dinner, we’re going wheels-up for there. Sit down, Colonel, enjoy the ride.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
The first stop was Boston. When they took off from Boston and headed just about due east, Clete first thought they were headed to Europe.
Probably Prestwick, Scotland. That’s within the Connie’s range.
Hell, the Connie could make it direct to Berlin.
Are we headed to Berlin?
Why the hell would a two-star admiral be going to Berlin?
[SEVEN]
Tempelhof Air Base Berlin, Germany 1445 19 July 1945
“Stay on board, Colonel,” Admiral Sourer said, “until we get through this arriving VIP nonsense. I’ll send Portman to fetch you.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
There was a squad of senior Army brass waiting at the foot of the stairs, and an Army band. One of the Army officers was an erect, tough-looking two-star, and Clete decided he was looking at the legendary General I. D. White.
He looked for Mattingly but didn’t see him.
Frade still had no idea what was going on. Admiral Sourer had quizzed him skillfully and at length on the flight to Boston, but had not made any accusations. Or threats of Leavenworth, either, if Clete didn’t fess up that he was smuggling Nazis from Germany to Argentina.
Admiral Sourer trooped the line of Hell on Wheels tankers, shook hands with the tough-looking two-star Clete was now pretty sure was I. D. White, and then climbed into a 1940 Packard limousine and, preceded and followed by M-8 armored cars, roared off the tarmac.
Commander Portman appeared at the passenger door and waved for Clete to debark.
A car—an Opel Kapitän, a Chevrolet-sized sedan now bearing U.S. Army markings—was waiting for them.
“Can I ask now if we’re going to Berlin?”
“Yes.”
“Can I ask where we’re going?”
“To Potsdam. To a place called Sans Souci. It means ‘without care.’ It belonged to Crown Prince Wilhelm of the Hohenzollern dynasty.”
“Can I ask why we’re going to ‘care less’?”
“I think that means more ‘care free’ than ‘care less.’ And, no, you can’t ask why we’re going there.”
It was about a twenty-minute drive from Tempelhof to Potsdam, through areas that were about equally utter destruction and seemingly untouched in any way.
They crossed a very well-guarded bridge, then entered an equally well-guarded area. Finally, they were at sort of a palace. The palace seemed surrounded by heavily armed troops.
A full colonel very carefully examined both Portman and Frade, and their identity cards, then passed them to a captain, who led them into the building and then into a small room that looked as if it had at one time been some medium-level bureaucrat’s office.
Admiral Sourer was alone in the room, sitting on a hard-backed chair by a small desk.
“That’ll be all, Jack, thank you,” Sourer said.
“I’ll be outside, sir.”
He had no sooner closed that door than another door opened and a middle-aged man walked in.
“How was the flight, Sid?” the man asked.
“Eleven hours nonstop from Boston, Mr. President. You really should have taken the Connie when Hughes offered it to you.”
Harry S Truman looked at Cletus Frade.
The President said: “So, this is the guy who’s got Henry in a snit?”
“Lieutenant Colonel Frade, Mr. President,” Sourer said.
“Do you drink, Colonel?”
“Yes, sir, Mr. President.”
“Good, because the admiral is a teetotaler, and I really want a drink—I have really earned a couple of drinks in the last couple of hours—and I don’t like to drink alone. Bourbon all right, Colonel?”
“Yes, sir, Mr. President.”
“Ask the steward outside, please, Sid, if we have a time problem.”
“Certainly.”
The President looked at Frade. “I don’t have time to skirt around the edges of this, Colonel. So getting right to it: If I told you that yesterday afternoon I took Marshal Stalin aside and told him the United States has new bombs, each with the explosive power of twenty thousand tons of TNT, and I couldn’t detect an iota of surprise in him, what would you say?”
“Sir, Mr. President, what you told him wasn’t news to him. There are Soviet spies all over the Manhattan Project.”
“Where’d you get that?”
“From General Gehlen, sir.”
“From what I understand, Colonel, General Gehlen is a Nazi sonofabitch about as bad as any other, and worse than some.”
“Sir, I respectfully suggest you have been misinformed.”
“A lot of people try to misinform me. Don’t you try it when you tell me what you know of the deal Allen Dulles made with Gehlen.”
Admiral Sourer returned with a whiskey glass in each hand.
“I like it neat,” the President said as he took the glass. “Is that all right with you, Colonel?”
“Yes, sir, that’s fine.”
“Sid, he’s going to tell us what he knows of the Dulles-Gehlen deal,” Truman said, and gestured for Frade to start.
After a slight hesitation, during which he realized, almost as a surprise, that if any man had the right to know everything, it was the President of the United States, Clete related everything he knew about the deal.
The President, when Clete finished, nodded thoughtfully.
“Colonel,” he then said, “for years now—back to when I was in the Senate, I mean—officers—good, senior, experienced officers—have been coming to me to help them get the OSS shut down. When I became President, the pressure on me really built. Finally, I decided that all those officers couldn’t be wrong. I really admire General Donovan, but the bottom line was that it was Donovan versus ju
st about every senior officer except Eisenhower. And you couldn’t call Ike an enthusiastic supporter.
“So I decided the OSS had to go. On September twentieth, an Executive Order will be issued disbanding the OSS—”
“With all possible respect, Mr. President, that’d be a terrible mistake,” Clete blurted.
“Hold your horses, son. Even ‘with all possible respect,’ lieutenant colonels are not supposed to volunteer to their commander in chief that he is about to make a terrible mistake.”
Clete didn’t reply.
“Even when you’re right, Colonel,” Truman said. “Now, the minute the word got out that I was shutting down the OSS, that terrible organization that wasn’t worth the powder to blow it up, a funny thing happened. Just about everybody from J. Edgar Hoover to the secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau got me in a corner and let me know they’d be happy to take the OSS organization under their wing.
“So that started me to think. If the OSS was so useless, why did they want it? I had an idea, and I took it to Sid—Admiral Sourer—here and asked him. We’re old friends. He’s not career Navy. Like me, he was a weekend warrior in the Navy Reserve when I was making my way up to colonel in the National Guard. The admiral told me what I was beginning to suspect on my own. All the generals and admirals and diplomats and bureaucrats didn’t hate the OSS. They hated Wild Bill Donovan, and the reason they hated Donovan was that he was independent. They couldn’t control him.
“And now they want to absorb the OSS into their little empires because they think that will make them stronger.
“Well, Colonel Frade, that’s not going to happen. I am now convinced—especially because of the trouble the goddamn Russians are certain to cause us . . .”
He paused, then went on: “Let me go off on a tangent on that one. At one o’clock this afternoon, I told General Marshall to shut off all aid to the Soviets immediately, today.”
“Jesus, Harry!” Admiral Sourer said.
“The sonsof bitches have to be taught they can’t push Harry Truman around the way they pushed poor sick FDR around.”
“And that Bess isn’t Eleanor?” Sourer asked innocently.
“Bess keeps her nose out of politics, and you know she does,” Truman said. “And we’re getting off the subject. Getting back to it. A month or so after the OSS is shut down—as soon as I can—I am going to set up an organization, call it the Intelligence Agency or something like that, that will take the place of the OSS.
“Now, since I can’t name Wild Bill Donovan, Alec Graham, and Allen Dulles to run it, for the obvious reasons, I had to find somebody else. He didn’t have to be too smart—”
“Go to hell, Harry,” Sourer said dryly.
“—so I settled on Rear Admiral Sidney W. Sourer, United States Naval Reserve, to head the new agency. Which brings us to you, Colonel: Allen Dulles has convinced me we can’t afford to lose General Gehlen and his intelligence assets. One sure way to lose him is for Morgenthau to lay his hands on you or any of your people or—especially—any of the Nazis you have smuggled into Argentina. I want the truth now. Can you prevent that from happening in the next few months with damned little—no—help from anybody until Sid—Admiral Sourer—is up and running with the new agency?”
“I’ll do my best, Mr. President. I really think I can.”
Truman looked at him for a long moment.
“So do I. I really think you can,” the President said. Then he laughed. “When I heard you made the Secret Service take off their trousers . . . what did I say, Sid?”
“You said, ‘That young officer is apparently capable of anything.’”
“That’s what I said, and that’s what I meant.”
He put out his hand to Clete.
“Thank you, Colonel Frade. I hope to see you again, and soon.” The President paused. “But right now, the thing to do is get you back to Argentina and out of sight. Sid, can we send him in that fancy airplane of yours? Can that make it to Argentina?”
“Not a problem, Mr. President.”
“Then it’s done. Sid, you can come back to Washington with me on The Independence.”
“There’s a couple of problems with that, Mr. President, as far as I’m concerned,” Frade said. “The first is that your Connie can take us only as far as one of our air bases in Brazil; it would cause too much attention in Argentina.”
“And what else?”
“The military attaché in our embassy in Buenos Aires is not one of my admirers.”
“You’re speaking of Colonel Richmond C. Flowers?” Admiral Sourer asked. “I know a good deal about him.”
“Yes, sir. And if he finds out I’m back in Argentina, it’ll be all over Washington in a matter of hours.”
“Sid?” President Truman asked.
“By the time you get to Buenos Aires, Colonel Frade,” Admiral Sourer said, “Colonel Flowers will be en route to his new assignment. Nome, Alaska, comes to mind.”
“Anything else, son?” the President asked.
“My wife and sons are in New Orleans.”
“We can’t have that,” the President said. “Sid . . .”
“By the time you get to Brazil, Colonel, I think your family will also be there,” Admiral Sourer said.
“Is that it?” the President asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Have a nice flight, Colonel,” the President of the United States said.
He turned and, sipping his bourbon, walked out of the room.
[EIGHT]
357 Roonstrasse, Zehlendorf Berlin, Germany 1710 19 July 1945
“They’re in the garden, Colonel,” one of Tiny’s men said when Frade walked into the house.
Clete was afraid to ask just who that meant, and didn’t.
Then he saw Karl Boltitz, Siggie Stein, and Heinrich and Gerhard sitting at a small table. With Graf von Wachtstein.
Hansel’s back!
Thank you, God!
Frade announced: “Okay, everybody up. We have a plane to catch.”
“Says who?” Stein asked.
“Since you asked, says the President of the United States. Our orders are to hide in Argentina from the Secret Service until things settle down a little.”
“Why do I think he’s telling the truth?” von Wachtstein asked.
“Why is it you still have skin?”
“Because I am smarter than anyone thought I am.”
“How did you do in Bremen, Karl?”
“Pretty well, Clete,” Boltitz said. “So far as the subs are concerned, the sooner I get to Argentina the better.”
He looked at the boys, then back at Clete, and asked, “How much time do we have?”
“None. Let’s go.”
The men all stood.
Heinrich and Gerhard remained in their seats, their gazes glued to the table.
“You guys don’t want to go to Argentina and meet Uncle Siggie’s nice nun?” Clete asked.
The boys looked up at each other.
Then Heinrich looked at Clete and said, “Excuse me? We can go?”
“Of course you can go,” Frade said.
“Can you do that, Cletus?” von Wachtstein asked.
“What? Of course I can! I am the world’s greatest expert in smuggling Germans into Argentina. If you don’t believe me, just ask the secretary of the Treasury.”
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