“I don’t know this for sure, but I have the feeling that just as soon as I get to Germany, there will be a meeting about the submarines headed this way.”
“A meeting between whom?” Bendick asked.
“It will be under Eisenhower—probably under his G-2—but it won’t all be under SHAEF. Someone from General Marshall’s staff will probably be there, and certainly someone from Army Intelligence. And the Office of Naval Intelligence. And, of course, the OSS. And probably, come to think of it, the Secret Service agents here.”
Clete then said: “Whatever intelligence is available about the German submarines will be presented, discussed, and it will be agreed that something has to be done about them. And, finally, it will be decided who exactly will have to do something about them.
“The one thing senior brass hates to do is take on a mission that will probably end in failure. Or about which they know very little, which would cause them to fail. So they will look around for someone who is an expert in the area of dealing with German submarines in South America. There are only two people who meet that criterion, Bob. You and me.”
“I think I know where you’re going, Clete,” Bendick said, “but there is one flaw in your argument. I don’t have any idea how to find these German submarines.”
“You and I have something else in common,” Frade said. “If we can’t find the submarines, that’s not the fault of G-2, or Naval Intelligence—it’s our fault. ‘What do you expect? While we’ve been fighting the Wehrmacht across Europe, Bendick and Frade have been sitting in beautiful South America drinking rum and Coca-Cola and chasing senoritas.’”
“Do you know how many aircraft we’ve lost over the South Atlantic?” Bendick asked.
“How many were actually shot down?”
“I take your point,” Bendick said after a moment.
“I think they call that ‘pilot error,’” Clete said. “You don’t get no Air Medals or Distinguished Flying Crosses for pilot error.”
Bendick shook his head.
“Here’s how I see it,” Frade went on. “OSS will be given the mission, and your wing will be among our many assets.”
“As I said, this particular asset doesn’t have a clue where to look for these submarines.”
“Maybe we can give you a little help there. Out of school.”
“Out of school? I don’t understand.”
“I have some intel that I know is reliable, and when we get to Germany and start to talk to the crews of U-boats, I think we’re going to have some more intel, maybe a good deal more. The problem is I can’t tell G-2, or Naval Intelligence, and certainly not the Secret Service about it, because they will want to know where it came from, and I can’t do that.”
“Why not?” Bendick asked almost automatically, and then, before Frade had a chance to answer, said, “You have spies in Germany, is that what you’re saying?”
“Not spies, General,” Boltitz offered. “One is an anti-Nazi former U-boat officer.”
Bendick looked at Boltitz, then back at Frade. “And you’re going to see this anti-Nazi U-boat officer in Germany? Is that what you’re saying? And he’s going to help you find these submarines?”
“What this anti-Nazi U-boat officer is going to do, Bob, is tell you all he knows about how U-boat crews are trained to cross the South Atlantic, what courses they followed in the past and presumably will follow now, their schedules of on-the-surface and submerged operations—that sort of thing. And then, when we get to Germany, he’ll see what he can find out from U-boat crews now in POW cages.”
“I’m a little slow sometimes,” Bendick said. Then he looked at Boltitz. “Why should I trust you?”
Frade answered for him: “You’ve heard of the failed attempt by Colonel Graf von Stauffenberg to kill Adolf Hitler?”
Bendick looked at Frade, nodded, but said nothing.
“At the time, Kapitän zur See Boltitz was the German naval attaché in Buenos Aires and”—he gestured at Peter—“Major von Wachtstein was the assistant military attaché for air. The day after the bomb failed to kill Hitler, the embassy got a radio message ordering their arrest for high treason.”
“They were involved in the bombing?”
“In the plot of the bombing,” Frade explained, “as were Peter’s father, Generalleutnant Graf Karl-Friedrich von Wachtstein, and Karl’s father, Vizeadmiral Kurt Boltitz. General von Wachtstein was arrested, tried by a people’s court, and hung from a butcher’s hook.”
“My God!”
“Vizeadmiral Boltitz, who worked for Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the chief of German Military Intelligence, was not immediately arrested, nor was Admiral Canaris. We don’t know where Vizeadmiral Boltitz is, only that the SS was looking for him until the last day of the war.”
“He ran?” Bendick asked.
Frade nodded.
“On April twenty-third—just over two weeks ago—the 97th Infantry Division of the Third U.S. Army liberated the Flossenberg Concentration Camp in Bavaria. They found Admiral Canaris’s naked, decomposing body hanging from a gallows. It had been left there as a gesture of contempt following the admiral’s execution on April ninth for his role in the failed attempt to kill Hitler.”
“Jesus Christ!” Bendick said, then asked, “And these two German officers ran from the arrest order to Argentina?”
“No. What happened—both had been working for me—was that I flew them to Canoas, where they surrendered to the commanding officer. They were then flown to the senior enemy officer interrogation facility at Fort Hunt, outside Washington.”
“If they had been working for you, why didn’t you just keep them in Argentina?”
“Argentina was then neutral. Leaning strongly toward the Axis, but neutral. If von Wachtstein and Boltitz had stayed there, there was a good chance that some Argentine Nazi would learn where they were, tell the German Embassy, and the SS would go after them. Try to kill them.”
“They’d actually do something like that?”
“They already had done something like that. They tried to kill the commercial attaché of the German Embassy, who had deserted his post. Boltitz and von Wachtstein were no longer of any use to me inside the German Embassy, so getting them into a POW enclosure in the States seemed to be the right thing to do.”
“But they’re not in a POW enclosure, are they?”
“No. They are now OSS special agents—show him your ID, Hansel.”
Peter did.
Bendick nodded his acceptance.
Frade went on: “I knew I was going to need them, so last week—on May tenth—I flew to Washington and got them.”
General Bendick looked at von Wachtstein and, shaking his head in disbelief, asked, “And you were the air attaché of the German Embassy?”
“Tell him, Hansel,” Frade ordered.
“Before that,” von Wachtstein said, “I was commanding officer of Jagdstaffel 232—Focke-Wulf 190s—defending Berlin against B-17s.”
Bendick shook his head again and then asked Frade, “They were turned over to you—is that what you’re saying?”
“No, what I said was that I needed them, so I went and got them. I didn’t have the time to deal with the bureaucracy.”
“You just took them from a POW camp on your own authority?”
Frade nodded.
Bendick again shook his head in disbelief.
Frade said: “Your original question, Bob, was something like ‘Why should I trust Boltitz?’”
Bendick met Frade’s eyes. “Has it occurred to you, Colonel Frade, that the smart thing for me to do is pick up that telephone and tell my provost marshal to come running? That two escaped German POWs and the guy who helped them escape are in flight planning?”
Frade held the gaze and said, “You could do that, General. It’s known as ‘covering your ass.’ But you won’t.”