Heroes

by David Hagberg

  “What are you doing here?” Canaris asked. He had not moved from his spot.

  “They sent me to this office to shape it up for the next man. I never dreamed …” Tears had formed in Meitner’s eyes.

  Canaris smiled. “Well, from what I can see, you’ve done a wonderful job, Hans.”

  Meitner was startled. But then he understood the joke, and he smiled. “You should have seen it last week, sir.”

  Canaris came the rest of the way into the office, and Meitner met him halfway across. They shook hands.

  “Between us this will not be so bad,” Canaris said. He felt that an impossibly heavy burden had been lifted from his shoulders.

  Meitner’s next words dashed that.

  “I’m sorry, Herr Admiral. My orders were to stand by until my replacement showed up, and then I will be reassigned back to Zossen. Either that or to a field command.”

  “I see,” Canaris said. He fought the urge to slump. “At least if you get to Zossen, we will not be so far apart. From time to time we could get together.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  Canaris stepped closer and lowered his voice. “There are a number of things I’ll need you to do for me, Hans. Things that only can be done by someone who has an unrestricted access to informational sources. If you understand what I mean.”

  “I understand, Herr Admiral,” Meitner said. He was disappointed for some reason. It was obvious from his expression.

  Canaris caught it, but he didn’t know why, nor did he feel it necessary at the moment to ask. This was wartime.

  Canaris turned to the others in the office, who had all remained standing and were watching, some of them openmouthed. He noticed for the first time that all of them, except for Bender, were either enlisted men or civilians. A pretty sad collection.

  “I assume, Bender, that you are my adjutant?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’ve had your people working six days a week?”

  “Oh no, sir,” Bender said, puffing up. “We have been working seven days per week.”

  “I see,” Canaris said. He let his eyes roam around the office.

  “You may take the remainder of this day, and all of tomorrow, off.” Bender said nothing. But his mouth dropped open.

  “The rest of you as well,” Canaris said. He wanted to laugh and cry at the same moment.

  No one moved.

  “I will expect you all back here first thing Monday morning, ready to get back to work. Now get out of here. Move! Now! Macht schnew.”

  Bender was the first to come out of it. “Jawohl, meiner Admiral,” he said. He actually clicked his heels.

  Within moments everyone had swung into action, and within two minutes flat Canaris and Meitner were alone, laughing so hard the tears were rolling down their cheeks, though neither of them thought what they had just witnessed was funny.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Meitner finally said. “I didn’t mean to laugh at those poor wretches.”

  “I understand,” Canaris replied. They were poor wretches.

  But no matter which way the war went, their lot would remain essentially the same. In a small way Canaris envied them. They had no troubles with conscience, with duty, with honor … or was he being too harsh? He thought not. Theirs was the simple, unfettered existence.

  They went into the inner office—Canaris’. Meitner had been using it, he said, for the past three weeks. It was the only room in the entire Hwk suite that was clean and in any kind of order.

  Meitner poured a cognac for him from a bottle in a desk drawer. Canaris looked at it pointedly.

  “It was the only way I could cope here at times.”

  “I understand.”

  “Pardon me for saying this, sir, but / don’t understand. I no longer have any faith in the OKW. How in God’s name could they send you to such an operation as this?”

  “In God’s name, Hans?” Canaris asked with irony. “No, in our Fiihrer’s name.” He looked around. “But even this is preferable to Burg Lauenstein.” He shook his head. “Did you know that Donitz pulled me from the active officers list? Said I was unfit for duty.” Meitner said something under his breath that Canaris couldn’t quite catch. The meaning was quite clear, though, and it was not complimentary to the high command.

  “But here I am. Back in the fray, so to speak.”

  Meitner looked toward the window. Only the bottom panes were whole. The top half was boarded over. “It certainly will not last much longer.” “No,” Canaris said.

  ‘ The Russians are coming at us from the east, and on Tuesday Cherbourg fell.”

  “Cherbourg?”

  “Yes, meiner Admiral.”

  “Then it is true, it will be over soon.”

  “By Christmas, perhaps.”

  “Our madman will not give up so easily, you know,” Canaris said. He took his drink over to the window. He looked down at the street, then over the top of the one-story building across. A smoke pall hung over the city.

  “I tried to come to see you,” Meitner said. “But I was ordered not to.”

  “By whom?”

  “Colonel Loetz.” ‘

  Canaris’ eyes narrowed. “From Hamburg Station?”

  Meitner nodded. “He managed to worm his way in with General Schellenberg himself, and had himself transferred to the SD. He’s in charge of all communications for the entire Reich.”

  “I see.”

  “He and Brigadier Reitlinger are fast and famous. All they can talk about is you.”

  Canaris smiled. “They are like jealous old women.”

  “Yes.”

  “So, Hans,” Canaris said, bucking up. “Tell me about the Hwk. What are we doing here? What does the future hold for us?”

  “There isn’t much left, I’m afraid, sir. At one time this was a very important operation. But no longer.”

  “No?”

  “No, sir. No one wants to deal with us any longer,” Meitner said. “Nor can I say that I blame them. We no longer receive chrome from Turkey, and no wolfram has come from Spain or Portugal since last month.”

  “We still have Sweden and Switzerland.”

  “Probably not for long, meiner Admiral.”

  “Then there isn’t much left here for us.”

  “No, sir. Tuesday and Thursday we brief the Luftwaffe and the Navy. On Wednesdays we present our reports to the Foreign Office, and on Friday mornings we’re with the Ministry of Economic Affairs. But no one listens any longer.”

  “The weekends and Mondays are free?”

  “Not actually, sir. On those days we make ready for our briefings. It’s why Bender and the others were reluctant to leave.

  It’ll put us very short come Tuesday.”

  “No one pays any attention, you said, so it won’t really matter.”

  “No, sir.”

  “We could tell them anything. Give them any set of numbers.

  It would not matter.”

  “Practically speaking, that is correct, meiner Admiral. I am sure that the information we provide is not used, and it certainly is never checked.”

  “Which leaves us all the time we need for other, much more important activities.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “No, you don’t, Hans. But you will. You will.”

  Meitner was very loyal. “If there is anything I can do, sir.

  Anything at all.”

  “I know,” Canaris said. “There will be a lot you can and must do for me.”

  Meitner waited.

  “My movements, of necessity, will be somewhat restricted.”

  “The Gestapo?”

  Canaris nodded. “You will act as my eyes and ears. So it is very important that you be reassigned to Zossen, even if it means going back to work for Loetz.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “First off, I need to be put back on the Summary Line List.”

  “There are so many copies coming out of Schellenberg’s office that no one knows where
they all go. We can get you included, through this office.”

  “At least that way I will have some understanding of what is happening to us. Next, I will need communications. Probably the Class A line to my home could be reactivated.”

  “That can be accomplished with no real problem.”

  “Finally, I want to set up a meeting with two old friends. But it will have to be done here, in the open, for all to see, and therefore not to be suspected. Our little meeting will have to be set up so that anyone who observes us will believe that I am being granted a sympathy call. A visit to the invalid’s bed.”

  Canaris grinned.

  Meitner was heartened by the apparent turn-around in his chief’s attitude. He had seen such rapid changes before. Whenever the admiral began planning some intricate operation, he was most happy.

  “Who are these two, sir?”

  “They’re both lieutenant colonels. Werner Schrader, and Baron Wessel von Freytagloringhoven.”

  “Wasn’t the Baron the chief of Abwehr II for a time?”

  “The one, but he’s changed,” Canaris said. “I want them here. Very soon. Certainly within the next week.”

  The night had come. Canaris was alone. He had managed to lever the bottom section of his office window up a foot or two.

  He sat with his legs crossed, facing the window, smelling the damp, earthy odors of the night.

  No lights shone in the city of Potsdam. The sky was clear, which meant there would almost certainly be an air raid this evening.

  On some nights, when the Allied planes came overhead from the west, they would unload their bombs on Berlin proper, then peel off back to England. On other evenings they would drop their loads here, over Potsdam. It was like the macabre game of Russian roulette.

  The Fiihrerbunker would be busy. Communications would be coming and going. Command decisions would be in the process of being made. Exciting things would be happening throughout the night.

  God, but he missed it. His entire life had been dedicated to the bitch-goddess military and her ideals and systems. At times he wondered: Had it all been a waste? But mostly, such as at this moment, he felt a great sense of adventure.

  A military man studied the past and had a very firm understanding of the present. But it was to the future that his life was directed. When the battle was won or lost, the warrior was expected to comport himself in a manner befitting honorable men.

  After all, men worked for honor for happiness” sake, but not for reward, because that would be ambitious. Camaraderie.

  Admiration. Even medals. But never monetary gain, to put a finer point on it, though the differences were slight.

  The air raid sirens sounded, their mournful wail drifting over the city. Canaris got up, crossed the dark office, and looked across the outer office with its rows of shabby desks.

  He shook his head, turned back, poured himself another cognac, then sat down again in front of the window as the first of the evening’s Allied bombers droned in from the west.

  It was hot up in the mountains. Much hotter than Schey ever imagined it could be.

  These were the Sangre de Cristo and Jemez Mountains. At the lower elevations they rose in gentle slopes that were covered sparsely with scrub pine, low mesquite grasses, and goat droppings—everywhere, goat droppings. Higher up, the slopes became sharper, more jngular with large outcroppings of rock.

  He reined in his horse, scanned the bleak countryside, and then whistled once, twice, three times. Afterwards he cocked his head to listen for chance sounds on the breeze. But there was nothing except for the distant call of some large bird.

  There were stray cattle up here, animals that had either cut out of the herd or had gotten lost on their way down to the valley around Jemez Springs. It was his job to find them. Now that beef was at a premium, even one or two head of cattle were worth going after.

  He followed the natural fold between two hills, the land rising up toward the distant Redundo Peak at more than eleven thousand feet. The snow-capped mountain was still a long way off, at least three or four miles as the crow flew and twenty miles on horseback. He had not been up this far since he had begun his search.

  The Romero family had been overjoyed to hire him and Eva as ranch hands. Because of the war, there was no one left except for very old people and drunken bums. Even the bums were beginning to disappear.

  An able-bodied man and his strong, willing-to-work wife were blessings that simply could not be questioned.

  He and Eva had moved into one of the out buildings behind the old bunkhouse, and they had managed to fix it up so that it was habitable. They took their meals sometimes with the other hands, most of whom were illegal Mexicans, and other times alone in their own place.

  From Santa Fe, at the end of February, they had simply checked around with the ranchers in the general direction Schey thought the American atomic bomb laboratory called Los Alamos might be located, finding their jobs with the first ranch they called at, just north of Jemez Springs.

  At first he had figured it would be fairly simple to follow the traffic to the laboratory or listen to the rumors that an installation had been constructed in the mountains.

  But it had been easier than that. The location of the lab had been published in the newspaper. A local citizens group was convinced that a gigantic submarine repair facility had been constructed in the mountains. How they ever expected the subs to be transported to the sea was anyone’s guess, but they had pinpointed the installation and had even gone up to picket the main gate.

  Another group was convinced that the government was running a home for pregnant nuns in the mountains.

  Still another organization argued that the flying saucers they believed had been landing in the mountains for years were operating from a secret base that only Roosevelt and the government knew about.

  The rumors were ridiculous, of course. The American people were so naive and gullible that they’d believe almost anything.

  Still, the base had been difficult to get to overland on horseback.

  He had come across the newly constructed dirt road in his wanderings, but he could hardly ride a horse on it right up to the front gate. Too many questions would be asked. Nor could he take a car up there. Their Hudson had finally given up the ghost and died. It was parked behind the machine shed. One of the Mexican hands tinkered with it whenever he got the chance.

  Following the road on horseback, overland, the way the countryside rose and fell, was very difficult. He had been picking his way around the mountains for weeks now, trying to find a way up to where the installation was located.

  Survey maps were no longer being sold, at least for the duration of the war, and asking one of the locals to act as a guide was totally out of the question. It would bring too much suspicion down on him.

  For a time Schey had thought about joining one of the citizens groups that had picketed the place, but he had decided against that approach as well. The FBI watched those groups very carefully.

  If someone new showed up, they’d take a great interest in him.

  After his work up in Oak Ridge, the FBI would almost certainly be looking for him down here. They’d have to suspect that he would either come down here or out to Hanford, in Washington, where another large atomic plant was located. If he became visible by joining a group or getting stopped for questions, they’d nail him immediately.

  Nothing had been in any of the national newspapers about him or about Eva and the dead FBI agent back in Washington, D.C.

  That hadn’t really surprised him, of course. The authorities could hardly advertise that they were looking for spies. It would tip them off, and it would create panic in an already nearly hysterical public.

  The path he was on ended within a narrowing box canyon. He wheeled his horse around, worked his way back out of the canyon, and then cut back toward the northeast.

  This area was at once desolate and beautiful. There was nothing like it in all of Germany, and most Germans see
ing this would be damned glad of it. This was mostly nonproductive land. Huge tracts were needed to support even the smallest of cattle herds.

  Only the rattlers and mule deer and goats thrived here. And at times, he was told, even they were at risk.

  As hot as he was, he did not feel sweaty, but he was very thirsty. He stopped and drank sparingly from his canteen. The water was warm and tested metallic.

  He looked at his watch. It was well after four in the afternoon.

  He turned in his saddle and looked back the way he had come.

  The valleys in the distance were tinged with blue. It would be at least a half-hour’s hard ride back to where he had left three stray cattle he had found, then another hard hour and a half back to the ranch.

  He gazed up toward the ridge that overlooked the box canyon.

  It was early yet, he told himself. Somewhere very near the base.

  He could feel it. Just a little farther. Just to the top of the ridge, and then, depending upon what he found up there, he’d head back.

  The horse jumped as he jabbed his heels into its flanks, and they started up. As a young man, his uncle had taught Schey to ride. He had been on the team in his Gymnasium, and finally he had been in regional competition in the one-year prep school he had attended in Switzerland.

  Eva, who had never been near a horse in her life, except for the police horses in the park in Chicago and once in Central Park when she visited New York during a Bund rally, was amazed at his skill.

  At first he had had difficulty with the western saddle. The tall horn was disconcerting. He had learned on the much smaller English riding saddle. But very quickly he got used to the working leather, and after a long day on it, he was glad for its width and bulk.

  Just to the top of the ridge, he promised himself, coming to the top and then raising up and reining in short, his breath catching in his throat.

  Below, in a flattened valley, was a large installation, its buildings, for the most part, aligned in streets and avenues like a well laid-out town or a military base. He hurriedly backed his horse down so that he would not be outlined against the horizon.

  Now that he was this close, he wanted to minimize the risk as much as possible.

  The first time he had set eyes on the vast buildings and huge machinery at Oak Ridge, he had been awed. But here they were putting the super weapon together. Here was the distillation of all the work being done at Oak Ridge and at Hanford, and some sports stadium in Chicago.