W E B Griffin - Honor 2 - Blood and Honor

by Blood

  W E B Griffin - Honor 2 - Blood and Honor

  I would like to thank Mr. William W. Duffy II, formerly of the United States Embassy in Buenos Aires, and Colonel Jose Manuel Menendez, Cavalry, Ar-gentine Army, Retired, who both went well beyond the call of duty in helping me in many ways as I was writing this book.

  W. E. B. Griffin

  Buenos Aires, 13 December 1995

  Foreword

  Nation at a Glance

  San Carlos de Bariloche

  A federal court will decide this week whether or not former Nazi SS Erich Priebke will be extradited to Italy. A year ago, Priebke admit-ted to having participated in the murder of 335 civilians in the Ardeatine caves in Rome during World War II. San Carlos de Bariloche Judge Le¢nidas Molde agreed to Priebke's extradition after Italian courts petitioned the Argentine government to send Priebke to Italy to face murder charges.

  Page 2

  The Buenos Aires Herald, Buenos Aires, Argentina

  July 4, 1995

  Part One

  Chapter One

  [ONE]

  Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo

  Near Pila, Buenos Aires Province

  Republic of Argentina

  2105 4 April 1943

  The concentration el Coronel Jorge Guillermo Frade was devoting to the inch-thick document on his desk was interrupted by what sounded like the death agony of a water buffalo being stomped by an elephant.

  Frade, a six-foot-one, 195-pound, fifty-one-year-old, still had all of his hair (including the full mustache he had worn since he was commissioned Sub-Teniente-Second Lieutenant-of Cavalry) and all of his teeth; but in the past five years he had found it necessary to wear corrective glasses when reading. He removed his horn-rimmed spectacles, sighed audibly, and looked across his study at the source of the noise.

  It came from the open mouth of a heavyset man in his late forties who was sitting sprawled in a leather armchair, sound asleep. He, too, wore a cavalry-man's mustache.

  He was Enrico Rodriguez, who had left Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo to enlist in the Cavalry to serve as Sub-Teniente Frade's batman. They had retired together twenty-five years later as Colonel Commanding and Suboficial Mayor (Sergeant Major) of Argentina's most prestigious cavalry regiment, the Husares de Pueyrred¢n.

  During their long service together, el Coronel Frade had grown familiar with Suboficial Mayor Rodriguez's snoring. Tonight's was spectacular, which meant that Rodriguez had been drinking beer. For some reason wine and whiskey did not seem to affect Enrico the way beer did. Wine made Enrico mel-low; whiskey very often sent him in search of feminine companionship; but beer-even two beers-made Enrico sleepy and turned on the snoring machine full blast.

  For a moment el Coronel Frade seriously considered picking up his metal wastebasket and dropping it on the tile floor of the study. That would bring En-rico out of his slumber-and the chair-as if catapulted.

  He decided against it. It had been a long day, and Enrico was tired.

  He looked at his watch, and at the inch-thick folder on his desk, and decided to hell with it. He too was tired, and they had to drive back to Buenos Aires.

  He slid his glasses into the breast pocket of his tweed jacket and stood up, then picked up the inch-thick folder and carried it to an open, wall-mounted safe. After placing the document on one of the shelves, he shut the door, then turned a chrome wheel that moved inch-wide steel pistons into corresponding holes in the frame; finally, he spun the combination dial.

  The safe itself was concealed from view by a movable section of book-shelves. When closed, these gave no indication that anything was behind them.

  Frade swung the bookcase section back in place and tiptoed out of the sim-ply furnished study, so as not to wake Enrico. He then went down a long, wide corridor to his apartment. There he sat on the bed and with a grunt removed his English-made riding boots. That done, he removed the rest of his clothing and tossed it on the large bed.

  He went into his bathroom and showered and shaved. When he went back into the bedroom, Enrico was there.

  "There is an operation, I am told," Coronel Frade said. "The surgeon goes in your throat-or maybe it's the nose-cuts something, and then you don't snore."

  Enrico looked uncomfortable.

  "I am told the operation is relatively painless," Frade went on straight-faced, "and that you don't have to spend more than a week or ten days in the hospital, and that you can eat normally within a month."

  "You should have woken me, mi Coronel," Enrico said.

  "And disturb the sleep of the innocent?"

  "I have fueled and checked the car, mi Coronel," Enrico said, changing the subject. "Rudolpho and Juan Francisco will precede us in the Ford."

  "No, they won't," Frade said. "There is no need for that."

  "It is better, mi Coronel, to be safe than sorry."

  "We will go alone," Frade said.

  "S¡, Se¤or," Enrico said.

  "Have a thermos filled with coffee, please," Frade ordered. "I don't want you to fall asleep on the way to Buenos Aires."

  "S¡, Se¤or," Enrico said.

  "Wait for me in the car," Frade said. "I won't be a minute."

  Enrico nodded and left the bedroom.

  The car was a black Horche convertible touring sedan, painstakingly and lov-ingly maintained by Enrico, often assisted by el Coronel. Some of the reason for their loving care was that parts for the Horche were not available at any price. The Horche Company was no longer making luxury automobiles, but rather tank engines for the German Army. And some of it was because el Coro-nel was extraordinarily fond of this automobile.

  He rarely let Enrico drive it. Tonight was to be an exception.

  "You drive, please," el Coronel ordered as he walked quickly down the wide steps to the verandah. "I want some of that coffee."

  "S¡, Se¤or," Enrico said.

  He opened the front passenger door, closed it after Frade stepped in, then went around the front of the car and got behind the wheel.

  "Pay attention to the road," Frade ordered. "Stay well behind anything ahead of us until you're sure you can pass without having it throw up a stone and hit our windscreen."

  Enrico had heard exactly the same order three or four hundred times.

  "S¡, Se¤or," he said.

  Enrico drove slowly until el Coronel had poured coffee into a mug, closed the thermos bottle, and put it on the floor. Then he pressed more heavily on the accelerator.

  Two miles down the road-still on estancia property-his headlights picked up an object on the road. As he took his foot from the accelerator, el Coronel ordered, "Slow down, there's a beef on the road."

  It was indeed a beef, lying crosswise in the center of the macadam.

  El Coronel swore. He could not have told anyone within five hundred head how many cattle roamed Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo, but he was always en-raged to find one of them on the road, victim of an encounter with a truck.

  Enrico applied the brakes more heavily. The Horche took some time to slow from 120 kph. And he knew that if he went on the shoulder at any pace faster than a funeral crawl, el Coronel would have something to say.

  The roof was down, and as Enrico started to pass the beef, el Coronel stood up, supporting himself on the windscreen frame to take a good look at it.

  As he did this, Enrico noticed movement on the side of the road. He was wondering if somehow his headlights had failed to pick out more beeves when he saw the muzzle flashes.

  And then something hit him in the head and he fell onto the wheel.

  The Horche veered left, crossed the road and the shoulder, and then came to a stop against a fence po
st.

  Two men ran up to the car.

  El Coronel Frade was on his knees on the front seat, searching for the.45 automatic pistol he knew Enrico carried in the small of his back.

  One of the men shot him twice, in the face and chest, with both barrels of a twelve-bore side-by-side shotgun.

  El Coronel Frade fell onto Enrico's back and then slid down it, coming to rest between Enrico's back and the seat.

  The man with the Thompson submachine gun looked at the bloody head of Suboficial Mayor Enrico Rodriguez, Cavalry, Retired, and professionally de-cided that shooting him again would be unnecessary.

  [TWO]

  Wolfsschanze

  Near Rastenburg, East Prussia

  2130 5 April 1943

  The license plates of the Mercedes sedan bore the double lightning flashes of the SS. As it approached, a Hauptsturmf�hrer (SS Captain), a Schmeisser sub-machine gun hanging from his shoulder, stepped into the floodlight-illuminated roadway and rather arrogantly, if unnecessarily-a heavy, yellow-and-black-striped barrier pole hung across the road-extended his right hand in a signal to stop.

  He wore a leather-brimmed service cap with the Totenkopf (death's-head) insignia. Behind him, wearing steel helmets, their Schmeissers in their hands, an Unterscharf�hrer (SS Sergeant) and a Rottenf�hrer (SS Corporal) backed him up. Between two narrow silver bands around the cuffs of their black uni-form sleeves, the silver-embroidered legend "Adolf Hitler" identified them all as members of the Liebstandarte (literally, "Life Guard") Adolf Hitler, Hitler's personal bodyguard.

  The Hauptsturmf�hrer approached the Mercedes, raised his arm straight out from his shoulder in salute-the passenger in the rear seat wore the uniform of a Standartenf�hrer (SS Colonel)-and barked, "Heil Hitler!"

  The Standartenf�hrer raised his right arm, bent at the elbow, to return the salute, then reached in his pocket for his credentials, which he extended to the Hauptsturmf�hrer.

  "Standartenf�hrer Goltz to visit Partieleiter Mart¡n Bormann," he announced. "I am expected." (Partieleiter-Party Leader-Bormann, as Hitler's Deputy, ran the Nazi party.)

  "Be so good as to have your driver park your car, Herr Standartenf�hrer, while I verify your appointment," the Hauptsturmf�hrer said, as he opened the rear door of the Mercedes.

  Goltz stepped out of the Mercedes. Above the two silver bands on his tunic cuffs were the silver letters SD, identifying him as a member of the Sicherheitsdienst, the security service of the SS.

  He stood waiting in the road as the Hauptsturmf�hrer went into one of the four buildings of the Guard Post South. Not even a Standartenf�hrer of the Sicherheitsdienst was passed into Wolfsschanze ("Wolf's Lair," Adolf Hitler's secret command post) without being subjected to the most thorough scrutiny.

  A minute later, the Hauptsturmf�hrer returned, and again gave the stiff-armed Nazi salute.

  "If the Standartenf�hrer will be so good as to follow me, I will escort him to his car."

  "Thank you," Goltz said, again returning the salute with his palm raised to the level of his shoulder.

  The yellow-and-black-striped barrier pole rose with a hydraulic whine, and the two passed through what was known as the "outer wire" of Wolf's Lair. The compound, four hundred miles from Berlin and about four miles from Rasten-burg, was an oblong approximately 1.5 by.9 miles. The outer wire was guarded by both machine-gun towers and machine-gun positions on the ground and by an extensive minefield.

  Just inside the outer wire perimeter-separated as far as possible from each other to reduce interference-were some of the radio shacks and antennas over which instant communication with the most remote outposts of the Thousand Year Reich was maintained.

  A Mercedes sedan, identical to the one Goltz had just left, backed out of a parking area inside the outer wire and up to the now raised barrier pole. A Rot-tenf�hrer jumped out, opened the rear door, and raised his arm in salute.

  SS officers in charge of security had decided it was more efficient to require Wolf's Lair visitors to leave their cars outside the outer wire, and transfer inside the wire to cars from the Wolf's Lair motor pool. Doing so obviated subjecting the incoming vehicle to a thorough search. It also spared the visitor the waste of time such a search would entail, not to mention the time of the SS personnel who conducted the search.

  As soon as Standartenf�hrer Goltz was seated in the back of the Mercedes, the driver closed the door, ran around the front of the car, and slipped behind the wheel.

  The road passed for three-quarters of a mile through a heavy stand of pine trees, with nothing visible on either side. Then, in the light of the full moon, be-hind a Signals Hut on the left, railroad tracks came into sight. A parallel spur, Goltz saw, held the F�hrer's eleven-car private railway train. A moment later, on the right, ringed with barbed wire and machine gun emplacements and tow-ers, the first of the two inner compounds of Wolf's Lair came into sight. This one held, essentially, the personnel charged with the administration and protec-tion of Wolfsschanze.

  There were buildings assigned to the Camp Commandant and his staff; the headquarters of the battalion of Liebstandarte troops, and their barracks and mess hall; a second mess hall, dubbed the Kurhaus ("Sanitarium"); and a thick-walled concrete air-raid bunker, dubbed "Heinrich," large enough to hold every-one in the compound.

  Past the first inner compound and to the right, lining the road for half a mile, were other small buildings that housed the second level of Thousand Year Reich officialdom. Here, spreading out from the Gorlitz Railway Station, were the offices of Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop; Albert Speer, Ger-many's war-production genius; GrossAdmiral Karl Doenitz, the Commander in Chief of the Navy; senior Luftwaffe officers; and another mess and another huge concrete bunker.

  Across the road, ringed by barbed wire and the heaviest concentration of machine-gun and antiaircraft weaponry, was the F�hrer's compound itself.

  Inside were no fewer than thirteen thick-walled concrete bunkers. The largest and thickest, not surprisingly, was the F�hrerbunker. Across the street from it were two other bunkers. One housed Hitler's personal aides and doctors; the second housed Wehrmacht aides, the Army personnel office, the Signal Of-ficer, and Hitler's secretaries.

  To the east Reichsmarschal Hermann Goring had both an office building and his own personal bunker. Between these and the F�hrerbunker was a VIP mess called the "Tea House." Nearby were the offices and bunker assigned to Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, titular head of the High Command of the Armed Forces (OKW). He shared his bunker with Generaloberst (Colonel General, the equivalent of a full-four-star-U.S. Army General) Alfred Jodl, the chief of the Armed Forces Operations Staff, and Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, Chief of the Abwehr, the military intelligence service of the OKW.

  Once, when they were alone, Reichsleiter Mart¡n Bormann had explained to Goltz that while Jodl was important enough to be given space inside the F�hrer's inner compound, he was not important enough to have his own bunker.

  Bormann-who was deputy only to Hitler in running the Nazi party-of course had his own bunker, as did Josef Goebbels, the diminutive, clubfooted genius of Nazi propaganda. But Bormann's staff also had their own bunker, while Goebbels's staff did not. Although bunkers were provided for servants, li-aison officers, and official visitors, Goebbels's underlings privileged to be in the Fuhrer compound had to find bunker space for themselves.

  Standartenf�hrer Goltz believed that Wolfsschanze-rather than Berlin- provided the best clues to judging who stood where in the pecking order. And nothing he had ever seen-here, or in Berlin or anywhere else-had caused him to question the very senior and very secure position of Mart¡n Bormann. That perception had provoked an interesting decision: Where did his loyalty lie? With Heinrich Himmler, who as head of the SS was his own direct superior? Or with Mart¡n Bormann, with whom he had been close since the early days?

  It would have been nice if the question had never come up. But when Himmler had assigned him as SS-SD liaison officer to th
e Office of the Party Chancellery-in other words, to Bormann-it did.

  As Goltz was aware-and Bormann was equally aware-Himmler fully expected him to study Bormann and his immediate staff for signs of anything that Himmler could report to Hitler. And Himmler trusted him to do so. Goltz went a long way back with Himmler, too.

  The question for Goltz had boiled down, finally, to what would best serve the Fuhrer himself. For one thing, Goltz understood that while the F�hrer should be above politics, this was unfortunately not possible. And he under-stood further that while Reichsprotektor Himmler certainly could not be faulted for his untiring efforts to protect the Fuhrer, Himmler was not above using the information that came his way for his own political purposes.

  Bormann was, of course, no less a political creature than Himmler, and cer-tainly just as willing to use information that came his way for political pur-poses. The difference was that Mart¡n Bormann had no purpose in life but to serve the Fuhrer, while Heinrich Himmler's basic purpose was to serve the State. Himmler would argue, of course, that Adolf Hitler and the German State were really one and the same thing, but in the final analysis, Goltz did not think that held water.