He tried to ask, "How can you be sure the baby's a him?"
But only three words came out before he lost his voice, and his chest heaved, and he realized he was crying.
Dorotea went to him, held him against her breast, and stroked his hair.
[FOUR].
Office of the Deputy Director for Western
Hemisphere Operations
Office of Strategic Services
National Institutes of Health Building
Washington, D.C.
0720 15 August 1943
A second lieutenant of the U.S. Army Signal Corps was sitting in one of the chairs in the outer office when Colonel A. F. Graham, uncommonly in uniform, came to work--as usual, before his secretary had gotten there.
Lieutenant Leonard Fischer stood and more or less came to attention. He was holding a sturdy leather briefcase. Graham saw that he was attached to the briefcase with a handcuff and chain, and that one of the lower pockets of his uniform blouse sagged--as if, for example, it held a Colt Model 1911A1 .45 ACP pistol.
"Good morning, Fischer," Graham said as he waved the young officer ahead of him into his office. "Dare I hope we have heard from Gaucholand?"
"Yes, sir," Fischer said, and held up the briefcase.
"And?"
"That Marine has landed, sir, and the situation is well in hand."
Graham smiled at him, waved him into a chair, and waited for him to detach the briefcase and unlock it. He took from it a manila envelope, stamped TOP SECRET in several places in large red letters, then got up and walked to Graham's desk and handed it to him.
"I would offer you a cup of coffee, Len, but I don't think there is any."
"Not a problem, sir."
Graham tore open the envelope, took two sheets of paper from it, and started to read from them.
From previous messages, Graham knew that BIS was Gonzalo Delgano, the Bureau of Interior Security man assigned to watch Frade and South American Airways; that Galahad (the courageous knight on the white horse) was Major von Wachtstein; that JohnPaul was Kapitan zur See Boltitz (after naval hero John Paul Jones); and that Tio Hank was Frade's Uncle Humberto Duarte, managing director of the Banco de Inglaterra y Argentina.
If Tio Hank's going to confirm Grape history--that Frogger is a South African winegrower--that means Frade probably told him what's going on. I don't know if that was smart or not.
But it's his call. I am sitting behind a desk in Washington.
Why do I think Cletus had more than a little grape when he wrote this? Because that's the code name he gave Colonel Frogger?
The question was answered in the next several paragraphs.
Graham knew the Tourists were the Froggers, Tio Juan was Juan Domingo Peron, Sidekick was Suboficial Mayor Rodriguez, and Beermug was Staff Sergeant Stein.
How in hell will he keep what must have been a hell of a firefight and six dead Germans from coming out?
Jedgar, from J. Edgar Hoover, was el Coronel Martin of the BIS.
Christ, they tried to kill him again!
And he's right. Allen will be interested in the Argentine agricultural attache in Berlin.
Unless he already knows him. Which is likely.
Not only was he half in the bag when he started to write this, he obviously had a couple of belts while he was writing it.
And the one thing I can't do is let Donovan see it.
"It strays a little from the form and substance one expects from an official after-action report, wouldn't you say, Lieutenant Fischer?"
"Just a little, sir."
"Things like that tend to upset Director Donovan. So, what I'm going to do, just as soon as my secretary gets here, is dictate a synopsis . . ."
As if on cue, the office door opened and his secretary, a gray-haired middle-aged woman, walked in.
"Good morning, Colonel," she said.
". . . and send that to him," Graham finished. "Good morning, Grace. Would you get your pad and pencil, please?"
"Before or after I get you your wake-up cup of coffee?"
"Coffee won't be necessary. Lieutenant Fischer and I are going to have breakfast at the Army-Navy Club and put to rest those nasty rumors that the Army and Marine Corps don't talk to each other."
She backed out of the office and returned a moment later with a steno graphic notepad in hand.
"Interoffice memorandum, Secret, dictated but not signed, to the director," Graham dictated. "Subject: Major Cletus Frade, After-Action Report of. The Marine has landed, situation well in hand. Respectfully submitted."
"Do I get to see it?" Grace asked.
"Not only do you get to see it, but after you have it microfilmed and send that over to State for inclusion in today's diplomatic pouch to Mr. Dulles in Berne, you get to file it someplace where it can't possibly come to the attention of the director."
She shook her head, and said, "Yes, sir."
"Give the nice lady your briefcase, Len. And the pistol. We don't want to scare people at the Army-Navy Club."
V.
[ONE].
Fuhrerhauptquartier Wolfsschanze
Near Rastenburg, Ostpreussen, Germany
0655 19 August 1943
Generalleutnant Graf Karl-Friedrich von Wachtstein--a short, slight, nearly bald, fifty-four-year-old--walked briskly down a cinder path from the Fuhrerhauptquartier bunker to the bunker in which Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel, Germany's senior military officer--he was chief of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht--had his quarters.
Wolfsschanze held fifty bunkers--ugly buildings with eight- and ten-foot-thick concrete walls and roofs. Wehrmacht engineers had begun--in great secrecy and on a cost-be-damned basis--the construction of "Wolf 's Lair" in 1940. A 3.5-square-kilometer area in the forest east of Rastenburg in East Prussia had been encircled with an electrified barbed-wire fence and minefields.
Next came the erection of another barbed-wire enclosure inside the outer barrier. Only then, within this interior barrier, had construction begun of the artillery-proof and aerial-bomb-proof bunkers. The compound had its own power-generating system, a railway station with a bomb-proof siding for the Fuhrer's private train, an airstrip (between the inner and outer fences), several mess halls, a movie theater, and a teahouse.
An SS-hauptsturmfuhrer and two enlisted men, all armed with Schmeisser machine pistols, stood outside the heavy steel door to Keitel's bunker.
"Generalleutnant von Wachtstein to see the generalfeldmarschall. I am ex pected."
The hauptsturmfuhrer clicked his heels and nodded to one of the enlisted men, who walked quickly to the steel door and pulled it open, standing to attention as von Wachtstein walked into the bunker.
Von Wachtstein found himself in a small room. An oberstleutnant, a stabsfeldwebel, and a feldwebel, who had been sitting behind a simple wooden table, jumped to their feet.
The oberstleutnant gave the straight-armed Nazi salute.
"Good morning, Herr General," he said. "You are expected. If you would be so good as to accompany the stabsfeldwebel?"
Von Wachtstein followed the warrant officer farther into the bunker to another steel door, which he pulled open just enough to admit his head. He announced, "Generalleutnant von Wachtstein, Herr Generalfeldmarschall."
"Admit him."
The door was opened wider. Von Wachtstein marched in, came to attention, and gave the Nazi salute.
Keitel, a tall erect man who was not wearing his tunic, had obviously just finished shaving; there was a blob of shaving cream next to his ear and another under his nose.
"Well?" he demanded.
"Reichsmarschall Goring, Herr Generalfeldmarschall, reports there is some mechanical difficulty with his aircraft, and there is no way he can get from Budapest here before three this afternoon, or later."
Keitel considered that a moment.
"In this regrettable circumstance, von Wachtstein, I see no alternative to you informing the Fuhrer. He will, of course, want to know of this incident as soon as possible."
"Jawohl, Herr Generalfeldmarschall."
The "incident" was the suicide of Generaloberst Hans Jeschonnek, chief of the general staff of the Luftwaffe, who had shot himself just after midnight.
Among his other duties, Jeschonnek, Goring's deputy, had been charged--personally, by the Fuhrer--with the protection of the rocket establishment at Peenemunde. Hitler believed that once rocket scientist Wernher von Braun "worked the bugs out" of the V2 missile, it would cow the English into suing for peace.
The V2, which had a speed of about a mile a second, carried 1,620 pounds of high explosive in its warhead. It had a range of two hundred miles, enough to reach large parts of England. The bugs that Hitler expected von Braun to soon work out concerned navigation. The best accuracy obtained so far was that half of all missiles launched could be reasonably expected to land within an eleven-mile circle.
The rockets considerably annoyed the British, but they didn't by any means cow them. Their solution to the problem was to ask the Americans to destroy Peenemunde with B-17 bombers, as Peenemunde was too small a target to be seen by their Lancaster bombers at night.
Jeschonnek was not only unable to stop the Americans, whose bombs just about destroyed the Peenemunde installation, but made things far worse for himself by deciding that a large formation of fighter aircraft near Berlin were American and ordering the Berlin antiaircraft to shoot them down. The attack had knocked nearly one hundred of them from the sky.
Unfortunately for the Reich, they turned out to be German fighter planes. When Jeschonnek learned of this, he put his pistol in his mouth and blew his brains all over the concrete walls of his bunker quarters.
The only question in von Wachtstein's mind about Jeschonnek's sui - cide was whether he had killed himself out of shame for failing to protect Peenemunde, or because nearly one hundred of his fighter pilots were dead because of his orders, or whether he did so rather than face Adolf Hitler's legendary wrath.
On his way back to the Fuhrerhauptquartier bunker, von Wachtstein wondered if Keitel had any inkling at all of the contempt von Wachtstein felt for him. And he felt that not only because the man--referred to by his colleagues as Lakaitel ("Little Lackey") and as the "Nodding Donkey"--was sending him to face Hitler's wrath.
Von Wachtstein considered Keitel a disgrace to the German officer corps. While Hitler had appointed himself Oberster Befehlshaber der Wehrmacht--Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces--it was still clearly the duty of his officers to advise him when they thought his judgment was wrong. Keitel never disagreed with anything Hitler decided.
Stalingrad was an example. Keitel never said a word when von Paulus, nearly out of ammunition and reduced to eating his horses, had requested permission to fight his way out of his encirclement, but Hitler instead ordered him to fight to the last man. Hitler had then promoted von Paulus to field marshal and pointedly told him that no German field marshal had ever surrendered, a clear suggestion that von Paulus was honor bound to commit suicide.
The result of that had been 150,000 German soldiers dead and 91,000 captured--von Paulus among them--when the Red Army ultimately and inevitably triumphed.
Von Wachtstein knew that not only had Keitel tacitly approved the horrors that Himmler's death squads had visited on Russian soldiers and civilians, but that he had personally ordered that French pilots flying in the Normandie-Niemen fighter regiment of the Soviet air force not be treated as prisoners of war when captured. He ordered them summarily executed.