Empire and Honor

by W. E. B Griffin

  “And you’re too far from Estancia Condor for this other kind of transmission to be heard?”

  “Either that, or the signal is being interfered with by some hills—mountains, really—that my map shows are between us and there. What I’m going to do is take off, climb to two thousand meters and see if I can get it there.”

  “And if you can’t?” Cronley said.

  “Then I will land and we’ll discuss what we can do. If I get a signal, I’ll make a pass over the field, and then you take off.”

  Cronley nodded, and von Wachtstein turned to go back to the red Lodestar.

  “Willi,” Cronley said, “if you’re a religious man this would be a good time to start praying.”

  —

  “Now,” Cronley said as the red Lodestar broke ground.

  “Excuse me?” von Dattenberg asked.

  “Now is the time to start praying.”

  “Would you laugh if I told you that’s just what I’ve been doing?”

  “Really?”

  “‘God, please let me live through this so that Elsa and I can start our new life.’”

  “No. I won’t laugh.”

  “You’re not praying that God will allow you to return to Cletus’s sister?”

  Cronley didn’t reply.

  “I saw the two of you saying good-bye.”

  Cronley didn’t reply immediately. Then, after a long moment, he said, “I don’t like asking God for favors. What I will do, if everything works, is say, ‘Thank you very much, God.’”

  “Interesting.”

  —

  Ten minutes later, the red Lodestar appeared approaching the runway.

  When Cronley saw that both its landing gear and the flaps were retracted, he reached for the starboard engine priming lever.

  “Starting Number One,” he announced, and a minute later announced, “Starting Number Two.”

  The red Lodestar flashed overhead, then began a climbing turn to the right.

  Cronley moved the Lodestar onto the runway and lined up with the center. He put his right hand on the throttle quadrant and advanced the throttles to TAKEOFF POWER.

  “What the fuck am I doing here?” he again wondered aloud.

  The Lodestar began accelerating.

  Dear God, he prayed silently, please get me safely back to the Squirt.

  [SIX]

  Estancia Condor

  National Route 3

  Santa Cruz Province, Argentina

  1105 23 October 1945

  Von Dattenberg had been right. About fifty kilometers south of Trelew, patches of white appeared on the ground, and by the time they were one hundred kilometers south of the airfield snow covered the ground. Even the highway—Route 3—was covered and hard to make out.

  When a collection of buildings that could be nothing else but Estancia Condor appeared on the horizon, the fuel gauges indicated a little more than half was still available. As Cronley began his descent, he decided that was enough fuel for him to make a couple of low-level passes over the runway.

  All I have to do now is find the damn runway.

  On his first pass over the estancia, Jimmy saw the Storch and a Piper Cub parked one behind the other just outside the complex of buildings and, maybe twenty-five hundred feet away, a bulldozer and a pickup truck parked one behind the other facing the airplanes. There was also a crude windsock showing that steady winds were blowing westward over the “runway,” which ran north-south between the aircraft and bulldozer.

  That’s not going to get any better, he decided, no matter how many times I fly over it.

  He made a descending turn, slow and wide, and lined up with the bulldozer.

  He lowered his flaps.

  “Put the gear down, please, Herr Ko-pilot,” Cronley ordered. “And call out our speed.”

  Von Dattenberg dropped the gear.

  “One-ten,” he called. “One hundred . . . Ninety . . . Eighty-five . . .”

  The Lodestar had now dropped so low that for a terrifying two seconds Cronley thought he wasn’t going to get over the bulldozer and the pickup. But a second after that he touched down.

  He chopped the throttles, then fought hard against—and won over—his Pavlovian reflex to apply the brakes. Any application of the brakes was likely to cause the tires to skid or the gear to break through the ice.

  Or both.

  The Lodestar slowed almost to a stop as he approached the Storch and the Cub.

  He applied just enough throttle to keep moving.

  Willi Grüner was now in front of him, giving him hand signals where to go.

  The rumble of the landing gear changed.

  Grüner made a frantic Stop! gesture with his left hand held palm outward. His right hand simultaneously made a cutting motion across his throat with the right, gesturing Cut the engines!

  Cronley slammed on the brakes and pulled the throttle levers to idle.

  The Lodestar stopped.

  Grüner, smiling, gave him a thumbs-up.

  Cronley shut down the engines and suddenly realized that he was sweating. He slid open the side cockpit window and felt an immediate blast of icy air.

  He closed the window as quickly as he had opened it.

  He looked at von Dattenberg, and said, “God must have heard you. You’re shaking and look a little pale, but we’re still alive.”

  “I suspect He heard us both.”

  —

  Colonel Carlos Habanzo and Wilhelm Grüner were waiting for Cronley and von Dattenberg when they came through the door of the Lodestar.

  Cronley saw the airplane had stopped on some kind of a wooden structure, and after a moment he realized what it was: the wall of a building.

  “What did you do, tear down a building?” he greeted them.

  “Actually, two buildings,” Grüner answered. “You’re sitting on two walls. The other two are down there by the bulldozer. The roof is over there.”

  He pointed.

  “I thought Don Cletus would be coming,” Habanzo said in obvious disappointment.

  Shall I go back and get him? Cronley thought but did not say. His mouth ran away with him anyway. “I’m expendable, Colonel. Cletus is not.”

  That earned him a dirty look.

  Grüner picked up on that and quickly asked, “You brought your cold-weather gear?”

  Cronley nodded. “It’s in the airplane.”

  “You’re going to need it. If there’s a heater in the Cub, I couldn’t find how to turn it on.”

  “You test-flew it after you put the wings on?”

  “No. I’ve never flown one. I decided to wait for you.”

  “Well, let me take a piss and have some lunch, and then I’ll give it a test hop.”

  “Better yet, why don’t we kill two birds with one stone?”

  Where have I heard that before?

  “What two birds?”

  “We get in both airplanes, and fly to the coast and make a couple of test runs, different altitudes, different speeds, et cetera, which shouldn’t take more than an hour, and then we come back here and, over lunch, talk over how we’ll search after lunch.”

  Jimmy didn’t like it but couldn’t find the words to say why.

  “Would it be all right if I took my piss first?”

  “Take it here, on the wall.” He pointed at the material under the Lodestar. “And watch. It’s very interesting. It freezes just about as soon as it hits the ground.”

  “I gather we don’t have air-to-air radios?”

  “If we do, I don’t know to turn them on,” Grüner said. “Clete made changes to the Storch communications panel. American stuff I’ve never seen before. Have a look.”

  After seeing that his Little Yellow Stream did indeed freeze just about the instant it hit the wall, Jimmy went to the Storch. By the time he managed to get into the cockpit he regretted not putting on his Admiral Byrd gear before doing so. He was chilled and began shivering.

  But he found what he was hoping to find: A
selection switch that offered several choices.

  It’s a switch unlike any other on the panel, and labeled in English, which clearly suggests it’s Siggie Stein’s handiwork.

  One selection was labeled AG, which had to mean Air-to-Ground. Another read AA, which meant Air-to-Air. And a third reading COL.

  That has to mean the pilot of the Storch has the ability to communicate with the Collins.

  He pointed them out and explained them to Grüner and then got out of the Storch and went to the Lodestar. With some difficulty, he got the Admiral Byrd Antarctic cold-weather gear out of its bag, and then himself into the bulky gear.

  The Thompson was also in the bag, and after a moment’s thought he picked it up before he left the airplane. There he slung it over his shoulder, whereupon the canvas strap immediately slipped off. He slung it again and it slipped off again.

  It needs a button or something on the shoulder to keep the strap on.

  Von Dattenberg went into the airplane and put on a set of the gear.

  There’s no way both of us—maybe either of us—can get into the Cub wearing this stuff.

  He said so when von Dattenberg came out of the Lodestar.

  “I’ll take him in the Storch,” Grüner said, “and give him a quick course in aerial observation while you are determining whether or not your wings are going to stay on.”

  Cronley went to the Cub, put the Thompson in the backseat, and then, with less difficulty than he expected, got in. A man wearing SAA coveralls came to him and said that they had been running the engine for a couple of minutes every hour.

  “To keep the oil from turning to rock again,” he explained. “We had a hell of a hard time starting it the first time. But it should start fine now.”

  The engine caught on the fourth spin of the propeller, but took a long time to warm up. Cronley wondered if Grüner was having the same kind of trouble.

  He found a small commo panel, with the same selector switch he had found in the Storch. He found the microphone and earphones and learned that he could wear the earphones or the hood that came with the Admiral Byrd gear—but not both at the same time.

  He moved the switch to AA and pressed the TRANSMIT button.

  “Can you hear me, Willi?”

  There was no response.

  When he looked at the Storch he saw why. Willi did not have the earphones on.

  Finally, Grüner looked at him, saw him pointing to his ears, and put the earphones on.

  “This is working?” his voice came clearly over Jimmy’s earphones.

  “Five by five.”

  “What?”

  “Five by five” apparently is not what the Luftwaffe says when one pilot wants to tell another that he’s receiving his radio transmission “loud and clear.”

  “Loud and clear, Willi.”

  “You, also. Why don’t you go first?” Grüner asked, but Cronley understood it as an order. “Head due east at two hundred fifty meters. I’ll fly off your left wing at three hundred. Maybe we can find some kind of a landmark on the shore to help us find our way back here.”

  “Understand due east at two hundred fifty meters,” Cronley responded. “The Mighty Cub is rolling.”

  He advanced the throttle.

  If there was something special I should know about taking off, he would have said something.

  Or would he have?

  I don’t know what the fuck I am doing here.

  I’m insane.

  And flying solo.

  Shit . . .

  He lifted the tail wheel, and then edged back on the stick.

  The Mighty Cub went airborne.

  [SIX]

  South Latitude 41.205 degrees,

  West Longitude 65.114 degrees

  The Atlantic Ocean Coast of Santa Cruz Province, Argentina

  1210 23 October 1945

  If they had been flying at, say, thirty-five hundred feet and making ninety knots or better, they almost certainly wouldn’t have seen it.

  Or if they were actively looking for it, they probably wouldn’t have seen it, either.

  But what they were doing was pulling out of a forty-five-knot dive—the third dive, each one increasingly deeper, in the last forty minutes—at fifteen hundred feet (the Storch following at 1,750) to see if the wings on the Mighty Cub would stay on.

  From the first dive, Cronley figured if the wings failed, he might survive the crash that would follow, and Grüner could safely put down the Storch on what looked like a reasonably level field and give him a ride back to Estancia Condor.

  Presuming, of course, that Grüner and von Dattenberg could get close enough to the flaming wreckage of the Mighty Cub and pull Cronley’s battered body therefrom.

  And then the Mighty Cub came out of the third dive, its wings still on.

  And then Cronley leveled off—and there it was.

  I’ll be damned!

  He wasn’t looking down at U-234.

  It was right in front of him.

  Oh, shit!

  If I can’t pull up enough to get over that white camouflage net, or whatever the hell that is, I’m going to fly right into the sonofabitch!

  He cleared the camouflage net by a good ten—maybe fifteen—feet and picked up a little more altitude.

  “I guess you saw what I saw?” Cronley then said into his microphone.

  “Yeah, but in the end you missed,” Grüner replied.

  “So, what do we do now?”

  “I think we have lost the element of surprise,” von Dattenberg said. “And you saw all those, several hundred, twenty-five-liter fuel cans?”

  “I saw them,” Cronley said. “By the trucks that had to bring them.”

  “And they weren’t neatly stacked; they were tossed aside,” von Dattenberg said. “The fuel they contained has to now be in U-234’s tanks, suggesting she can go to sea to move elsewhere, or to rendezvous with a Russian ship somewhere.”

  “So, what do we do now?” Cronley repeated.

  “We land and see if Willi and I can talk some sense to Alois.”

  “You want to land? Christ, there’s fifty of them and three of us. And who the hell is Alois?”

  “Her skipper, Alois Schneider. We’re old friends.”

  “You can stay airborne if you want,” Grüner said. “That would make more sense, anyway. But von Dattenberg is right: Unless we can somehow stop it, U-234 is going to leave here, maybe within the hour.”

  —

  The Storch landed first. By the time it had, Cronley decided that he could do nothing useful staying in the air except notify Colonel Habanzo where they had located U-234, and that she appeared to be about to set sail.

  Then he pushed the nose of the Cub down and landed.

  He saw that Grüner and von Dattenberg were out of the Storch and walking toward the submarine, and that a group of people—a large group, most of the men carrying Schmeisser submachine guns—were walking toward them.

  He got out of the Cub and took the Thompson from the backseat.

  I don’t think that either Grüner or von Dattenberg has any kind of a weapon.

  I guess that makes me Wyatt Earp, or maybe Gary Cooper in High Noon.

  When the Thompson again slid off the shoulder of his jacket, he decided to carry it with the butt against his hip.

  And then he moved the lever to FIRE and racked back the bolt.

  He trotted as fast as he could through the snow to catch up with Grüner and von Dattenberg.

  He heard a crunching noise and looked around. The left gear of the Storch had broken through the ice. The airplane was now sitting crookedly.

  Damn it!

  When he looked at von Dattenberg and Grüner walking toward the U-boat, he now saw that the large group from the submarine was being led by four men in the black uniforms of the SS. The one in front, the only one without a Schmeisser, was wearing a black, ankle-length leather overcoat.

  What the hell is that all about?

  That’s not cold-weath
er gear.

  He had an epiphany.

  That’s to impress the sailors on the submarine! To dazzle them with the all-powerful SS!

  Another man caught up with the SS.

  “Wie geht’s, Alois?” von Dattenberg asked.

  “What are you doing here, Willi?” Schneider asked.

  “I’ll do the questioning!” the man in the black leather overcoat snapped.

  “I’m here, Willi and I are here, to keep you from making a very serious mistake,” von Dattenberg said.

  “I said I will ask the questions!” the man in the black overcoat again snapped.

  “You must be Lang,” Cronley suddenly heard himself saying in German. “Former Sturmbannführer Horst Lang.”

  Where the hell is this coming from? Cronley thought.

  “I am SS-Oberführer Horst Lang,” Lang corrected him furiously. “And who are you?”

  “Former SS-Brigadeführer Gerhard Körtig told us all about you, Señor Lang,” Cronley went on, uncowed, “when we arrested him this morning as he got off the train in Bariloche.”

  “And you are . . . ?” Lang demanded arrogantly.

  “My name is Cronley. I’m a special agent of the Counterintelligence Corps, U.S. Army, on detached service with the Argentine Bureau of Internal Security. You are all under arrest. Tell your men to drop their weapons and put their hands up.”

  “Willi?” Schneider asked, incredulously.

  “He is who he says,” von Dattenberg said. “Do what he says, Alois. Please.”

  They locked eyes.

  “The war’s over, Alois,” von Dattenberg added.

  Schneider glanced at Lang, then looked at von Dattenberg—and nodded. He started to turn to his sailors . . .

  “Kill him!” Lang suddenly shouted. “Kill that gottverdammt American!”

  “Nein,” Schneider said.

  “I said kill him! That is an order!” Lang screamed, almost hysterically.

  Schneider made a Put down your weapons gesture to his men.

  They did.

  The SS men looked confused. They neither put down nor raised their weapons.

  Lang fumbled as he quickly started to take a pistol from the pocket of his black leather overcoat. He had it almost out when there came a three-round burst from the Thompson.

  Lang crumpled silently to the ground.

  The SS men watched in shock as the snow around Lang became crimson stained.