Heroes

by David Hagberg

  HEROES by DAVID HAGBERG

  The rubber raft, with four men all dressed in black, their faces corked, materialized from the darkness, and Schey helped pull the boat up on the beach. All four of the men jumped ashore.

  “Heil Hitler,” one of the men said, raising his right arm in salute.

  Schey returned it, a sudden surge of pride coming over him. It had been a long time since he had been among friends and had been able-to use that greeting. Schey pulled the tightly wrapped package from his pocket. “This “is Very important, Lieutenant.” C .. - ‘*.

  “You don’t have to tell me, sir. We came all the way across the Atlantic to pick; it: up.”

  The three crewmen had wandered up the beach. When they returned home, they’d be able to brag to their friends that they had actually invaded the U.S. Suddenly, Schey saw the crewmen racing back, waving their hands frantically.

  “There’s someone up there,” one of the crewmen gasped.

  “Probably the coastal watcher,” Schey said. “Get the hell out of here; I’ll take care of this.”

  Look for this other TOR book by David Hagberg HEARTLAND

  ATOM DOHERTYASSOCIATES BOOK

  THIS BOOK IS FOR LAURIE

  HEROES

  Copyright Š 1985 by David Hagberg

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  First printing: January 1985 A TOR Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, 8-10 West 36 Street, New York, N.Y. 10018

  ISBN: 0-812-50409-7

  CAN. ED.: 0-812-50410-0

  Printed in the United States of America

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This is a work of fiction, based in part on fact. I must give thanks to the historians for their work: to Heinz Hohne for his perceptive book, Canaris, Doubleday; to Joseph E. Persico for Piercing the Reich, Viking; to David Kahn for Hitler’s Spies, Macmillan; to Lynn Montross for War Through the Ages, Third Edition, Harper & Row; and no novel encompassing any portion of the war in Germany would be possible without reference to William L. Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Simon and Schuster.

  —David Hagberg July, 1984

  I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

  —The United States Pledge of Allegiance

  (1944)

  I swear to Thee, Adolph Hitler, As Fvihrer and Chancellor of the German Reich, Loyalty and bravery. I vow to Thee and to the superiors Whom Thou shall appoint Obedience unto death, So help me God.

  —Nazi SS Oath to the Fiihrer

  HEROES

  Look, we had our heroes in Nam, too; so don’t ride off on your high horse. There was the kid from South Dakota Terry, I think his name was who later went to work for the Associated Press in Sioux Falls.

  Hell, he held back or something to take a piss, I guess when out of the corner of his eye he saw the little slope coming out of the hill.

  Terry spun around, scared shitless, pulled out his .45 and blew the mother away. Let me tell you, when his pals all ran back to find out what the hell was happening, they found Terry puking his guts out. He was just a green kid, but he did his job.

  Saved the entire platoon.

  The story was familiar to the older man, who at forty wasn’t really much older, actually, and he raised his beer in salute and took a deep drink. He was remembering, just like the kid was.

  Only he was going back further, when he was really just a snot-nosed kid from Wisconsin. Frightened. Unsure of himself, the way all kids are. But back then people were certainly not as I naive as the young buck seated across from him seemed to think

  everyone was. Hell, there were Benny Goodman, Ike (forget about Truman for the time being), the New York Times, and Edward R. Murrow. What’d they have nowadays: Dan Rather, Miller Lite, and Star Wars?

  The younger man brushed his long hair back. He didn’t look so good. Probably the dope he was smoking.

  Major Fisher. Now there was a bonafide hero. Even got the Medal for what he did up in the Ashau Valley. Fuckin’ A. Four thousand VC against four hundred fifty Special Forces. They were steamrolling us, when Fisher and his Air Force pals came * to the rescue in their Ale’s. Meyers went down and Fisher just went in after him. Screw the VC and their machine guns and mortars; screw the whole bunch of them. Fisher was goin’ after his buddy. He pulled it off.

  The bar was a sleazy joint, and they had to shout to hear each other over the noise of the jukebox. Normally, the older man wouldn’t have bothered, but at this juncture in his life, for some reason even he could not define, it was important for him to make the younger man understand. —How about the Viet Cong themselves?

  —Those motherfuckers? What about ‘em?

  —How about their heroes?

  The younger man looked across the table at the other, incredulously, as if he had just committed a sacrilege. —Man … oh, Jesus … man, you just don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.

  —Heroes.

  —Fuckin A—heroes, not slopes! The little bastards didn’t know what the fuck they was doing half the time. They had their sack of rice, some dried fish, and a little wine, and they was set.

  Shit.

  The older man was thinking back again to the stories he had been told, and the younger one reached across the table and punched his arm.

  —Come on now, don’t go space-city on me. I didn’t mean nothing. I just like hearing about the old days, that’s all, and you know what you’re talking about most of the time. Makes me think of the way Nam could have been.

  Heroes, the older man thought to himself. The kid had absolutely no conception of what it was all about. Oh, he had been doing a lot of talking about heroes—genuine heroes, all right— but he was just like a bird, like a parrot or something, just mouthing words that meant nothing.

  Christ, but it made the older man mad. Yet he didn’t want to antagonize the kid. Maybe start a fight or something. He wanted the kid to understand. That’s all. Just understand.

  But then he had to laugh. The kid at least had Vietnam. He had actually fought over there. Pleiku or someplace that sounded like that. But the older man had missed it all: He had not been born until 1943. He had been too young for Korea, and somehow he had missed Vietnam. The kid had his war fresh in his mind.

  The older man had only the stories from his father and, of course, his collection.

  —You started out by telling me about some heroes from the big war.

  The older man looked up. Would the kid understand? Could he?

  PART ONE.

  SPIES

  January-February 1944

  The weather was very bad, even for this time of the year, and Dieter Schey, alias Robert Mordley, was more than a little concerned about the rendezvous. The wind blew snow from the northeast, and he had to bend forward against it as he trudged along the beach at the head of Frenchman’s Bay, south of Bangor.

  He hadn’t heard a thing from his control at Hamburg for three and a half weeks now. Twenty-seven days of wondering what the hell would happen if the sub could not get here. If the FBI closed in. If he could not get away from Oak Ridge long enough to make the drop.

  They were asking a lot.

  Schey was a ruggedly good-looking man, who at thirty-three could pass, and often had, for ten years younger or ten years older, depending upon the clothing he wore, the way he parted his hair, the expression on his face, and how he held himself. He was blond, and fair of skin, his eyes a deep blue that, he was told, turned almost steel-gray when he was angry. This evening, however, he didn’t give a damn what image he projected. Not out here. Not in this bloody storm.

  His last communic
ations with Hamburg had been on the fifth and sixth of December, when he’d reported that he had important films to send out. The reply came back the next evening:

  U293 TO GRID 158-277 2.1.44 2300 UNTIL 0400 REGARDS That had been it. A simple rendezvous order giving the time, the date, and the grid reference, which was here, on the Maine coast.

  Three times since then he had driven out of town, back up into the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee, had set up the portable transmitter, and had sent out messages. But Hamburg had not replied. It was as if they no longer existed.

  “Most of the time you will be very much alone, very much on your own resources,” his instructors at A-Schule West, in Park Zorgvliet, had drilled into his head. “Never rely on your cover identity friends. They’ll betray you the moment they suspect who you really are. Even your wife, if you follow our advice and take one, must be guarded against. Vigilance is the price of freedom.”

  He stopped again to peer into the darkness out to sea, but in this weather he could not even make out the lights of Bar Harbor, four miles to the south on Mount Desert Island, nor the Naval Reserve Station across the way at Winter Harbor. But the U293 and her officers and men would have to make it undetected between the two. So it was just as well the weather was bad.

  Three miles back, Catherine and the baby were sleeping. They had had a tiring three days getting here by train and then by bus.

  Catherine had not even moved when he had carefully climbed out of bed, got dressed, and left the cabin.

  He touched his pocket. The film was there. A thousand miles to the southwest his job as a machinist at the Oak Ridge Manhattan District project was waiting for him.

  “Damned funny time to take a vacation, if you ask me,” Tom Riley, his foreman, had said. It was the only difficult moment. If too much of a fuss was made, someone would be coming around to take a closer look at him.

  “I have nowhere to go in the summer that I like any better than here,” Schey said. His English was so Oxford-perfect that he had to work constantly to inject a nasal twang into it, an accent that most people suspected was Connecticut Yankee.

  “Where’re you going, anyway? Don’t you know there’s a war on?” Riley had complained. He was from Biloxi, Mississippi.

  Everyone working on the huge project was from somewhere else.

  It was what had attracted German intelligence to Oak Ridge in the first place.

  Schey shrugged. “Maine. I just want to get away with my wife and kid. Haven’t had a vacation in eighteen months.”

  “You know people up there?”

  “No. Just heard it was a nice place. Got cabins for rent. Cheap this time of year. It’ll be just me and the family.”

  They were in the main machine shop to the southwest of the gigantic gas diffusion building with its miles of piping. There was a lot of noise. Riley looked around at the work going on.

  Everyone seemed to be racing at a feverish pace. He resented being pulled away like this.

  “What the hell am I supposed to do without you?” Schey laughed with just the right inflection. If worse came to worst, he’d have to quit. It would cause a lot of suspicion, but he was going to have to make the rendezvous. No matter what. It was vital that the photographs and drawings get out. The Americans were not too far now from their new bomb.

  “If it wasn’t for the board, I’d hit you up for a raise after a remark like that.”

  Again Riley shook his head.

  “Well? Do I get my ten days or do I have to arm wrestle you for it?”

  “Go on,” the burly foreman had said finally. “Get the hell out of here before I find my overtime board and sign you on.”

  He came to the frozen creek that crossed under the highway a few hundred yards upstream, then looked at his watch. It was a couple of minutes after eleven. He looked out into the bay, and an almost overpowering feeling came to him that the submarine was there. He strained to listen, but he couldn’t hear a thing except for the wind in the trees and rocks behind him and the waves washing up on the beach at his feet. But the boat was out there. He could almost smell the diesel fuel.

  He pulled a large flashlight out of one of the pockets in his dark pea coat, pointed it directly south, and sent four flashes. He waited thirty seconds, then sent four more flashes, and followed them one minute later with a final four.

  The answering sequence came almost immediately. Perhaps no more than a couple of hundred yards offshore. It was possible they had come that close. The water was very deep here. He had heard the local fisherman talking about it this afternoon, when he had gone into the country store for some food.

  From the charts he had seen back at the cabin (he supposed they had been left there by the previous tenant, a fisherman), the sub would probably have come up the east side of the bay, well away from Bar Harbor itself, before angling back to the west to Peck’s Point.

  There was a very brief flash of red light, as if someone had opened the wrong hatch or something, and then, over the wind, Schey was certain he could hear the sounds of oars dipping in the water, and someone grunted.

  He looked both ways along the beach. There were coastal watchers here. Or at least along a lot of coastline there were old men with nothing better to do than snoop around at night. He wasn’t really afraid of them; he just didn’t want the nuisance.

  The sounds of someone rowing a boat came much clearer now, and Schey flashed his light a couple of times for them to home in on as he waited impatiently. Every minute he was here like this, he risked exposure. There was too much work yet to be done for him to have to run. There was another reason he did not want his life turned upside down at this moment, but he pushed that thought to the back of his head.

  He had not had enough time to find out for sure if beach patrols were maintained on a regular basis in these parts. A mistake on his part, he thought with recrimination, but it was too late now to do anything about it.

  The rubber raft, with four men all dressed in black, their faces corked, materialized from the darkness, and Schey helped pull the boat up on the beach. All four of the men jumped ashore.

  They had huge grins on their faces.

  “Die Vereinigten Staaten. Wir sind hier!”

  “Welkommen,” Schey replied.

  “Heil Hitler,” one of the men said, raising his right arm in salute.

  Schey returned it, a sudden surge of pride coming over him. It had been a long time since he had been among friends and had been able to use that greeting. Power. The destiny of Germany.

  Brotherhood. Authority. It bespoke a rich patina of all those feelings and more for him.

  “Hamburg sent us. You must be Captain Schey,” the naval officer said. He was young, probably twenty-five, and wore a short, well-trimmed beard.

  Schey nodded. “U293?”

  “Right. Lieutenant Kurt Voster, communications and security officer. You have something for me, sir?”

  Schey pulled the tightly wrapped package from his pocket.

  “This is very important, Lieutenant.”

  “You don’t have to tell me, sir,” Voster said, taking the package and pocketing it. “We came all the way across the Atlantic to pick it up. Do you realize what that means these days?”

  “Sorry,” Schey said, and he meant it. “How are things at home?” He did not trust the news he was getting here from the radio and the newspapers. There was too much propaganda.

  “Not good, let me tell you.”

  The three crewmen had wandered up the beach. When they returned home, they’d be able to brag to their friends that they had actually invaded the U.S. “They talk about bombing. Is it true?”

  “Unfortunately,” Voster said. “The bastard Americans come over by day, and then at night the British come. We have the Norden bombsight—or at least that’s the rumor going around— but that doesn’t do us any good.”

  Schey was sick at heart. “Berlin, too?”

  Voster nodded. “Dresden. Koln. Munich. No place is safe.”


  He looked over toward the diminishing figures of his men.

  “There’s a gag going around. I heard it when I was home on leave for Christmas.”

  It hurt hearing this, but Schey said nothing, letting the man go on.

  “They’re asking what’s the shortest joke. When you say you don’t know, they answer: ‘We’re winning the war.’ “

  “That bad?”

  “I’m afraid so, sir. What about you here? How much longer will you be able to hold out?”

  “That depends upon the photographs and drawings. It’s up to the Admiral.”

  An odd expression came over Voster’s face. “Perhaps not,” he said enigmatically.

  Schey was about to ask him what he meant by that, when the crewmen raced back, waving their arms frantically, but making absolutely no noise.

  Voster spun around and pulled out his pistol. Schey held him back.

  “No!” he whispered urgently.

  “There’s someone up there,” one of the crewmen gasped, out of breath.

  The other two were pushing the rubber raft off the beach.

  “Probably the coastal watcher,” Schey said. “Get the hell out of here; I’ll take care of this.” He looked into Voster’s eyes.

  “The photographs and the drawings are important, Lieutenant!

  Very important! Verstehen She?”

  “Ja, und Gott She dank,” Voster said. He jumped in the raft with the others, and as Schey hurried back up the beach, they disappeared into the darkness.

  Almost immediately he could hear someone above in the rocks, on the west side of the creek. He froze in his tracks as a powerful beam of light flashed on the beach behind him. When it swung out to sea, he raced across to a long, low outcropping of rock.

  “Here, what’s this?” someone shouted from just a few yards off the beach.

  The beam of the light shone on the skidmarks from the raft and the footprints in the sand. The light flashed out to sea again.

  “Holy Mother of God!” the man shouted. “The Nazis!”