Lett nodded, and a smile broke out. Godfrey grinned.
“Good. That’s good. Better news to me than those headlines.”
Back in his wall tent, Lett fired up the stove and gave sleep a shot. He must have slept fifteen minutes before his dead buddies visited him. They sat around a fire, roasting something on a spit. Shells were shrieking in on them but no one was ducking. On the spit, revolving and smoking, its skin blackening, was a creature the size of a dog but unknowable. The shells pounded down. Lett pleaded with all to take cover, with Sheridan, Tower, Mancuso, Bartley and all the rest. They only laughed at him.
Lett woke whimpering and sat in the darkness, expecting to get the business from the others in the tent. Nothing doing. The rest were snoring, or whimpering too in their sleep. From his breast pocket, Lett pulled out his photo of Heloise, a younger Heloise with fuller cheeks and brighter eyes. He didn’t need to turn on the lantern. He had her face memorized. He cradled her in his hands, and winced at the thought that her dead fiancé who’d fought for the Resistance had probably once done the same, with the identical photo.
***
Lieutenant Colonel Lucien “Archie” Archibald of S-2 (intelligence) assumed his latest divisional post after a delightful leave in Paris. It was December 10. His new war room was once an ornate throne hall, in a lavish 18th-century villa that topped a hill just west of Belgium’s Ardennes Forest. Aides carried in maps and file cabinets as local workers removed wondrous paintings, antique books, and all that Archie deemed superfluous decoration. The aides and workers did their best to avoid Archie’s squinting stare; Archie squinted always, it seemed to many he met, making his large yet compact face resemble the grotesque visage of a stage mask.
“Selfer? Selfer?” Archie said.
“Coming, sir.” Captain Charlie Selfer sauntered in around the room’s frantic redesign, calm as ever, files neat under his arm. His smooth good looks with a hint of dimples suggested he was a singer or actor attached to the USO rather than Archie’s steady right hand. Selfer had even perfected the mid-Atlantic accent popular with entertainment types.
Archie stood behind his expansive metal desk. Selfer passed him a folder that read, “Strictly Confidential.” Archie, smirking, flipped it open.
It was empty. Archie closed it, opened it, his smirk gone. He clapped his hands in machine-gun rhythm.
“That means out, everyone,” Selfer said to the aides and befuddled workers. “Five minutes. Thank you.”
The aides and workers filed out mumbling as Archie stared at Selfer for an answer.
“Well? Where are they?” Archie said.
“It’s quite simple. The enemy intercept reports are unavailable, sir,” Selfer said.
“Unavailable? How can that be? They’re top secret. Inside information. No one even knows we have them.”
“Unavailable only in the sense that there’s no data. Possibly from here on out. It seems the Germans—the krauts, I mean, have stopped using their special ciphers,” Selfer said. Archie insisted Selfer say “krauts” like the front-line boys. It played well.
“Ciphers that our code breakers were intercepting. The damn krauts can’t stop now.”
“It’s unfortunate, but true. Once they retreated over their borders, the krauts can now use their normal telephone lines, and any old code they well wish.”
Archie squinted at his empty outbox. “Well, did it go out? Tell me. It go already?”
Selfer nodded. He knew where this is leading but he would let Archie tell him, as always:
“In Archie’s latest issue, Archie maintains that the krauts are done for,” Archie said. “And it was those top secret intercepts we had our hands on that told us just that.”
Selfer nodded again. This was the game they played, like a grumpy old radio duo, especially when it came to something as vital as “Archie’s Account.” Nicknamed “AA,” Archie’s self-styled independent field reports gave away no top secrets. Rather, as his promo copy described: Archie “makes his bold predictions and shares his wise hunches. Yes, friends, Archie’s got the wits and tells it like it is.” It had become the one bulletin every freethinking staffer on every keen rear-line staff had to have, like that novel everyone bought because the ads in Colliers told them to. Few noticed that Archie’s previous division had been decimated in the Hürtgen Forest. The bulletins never had as much pull as they did now, with the final push into Germany coming in the new year.
“Yes, sir, they told us a great deal,” Selfer began, “but—”
“Don’t! Do not appease me,” Archie growled. “We were coming up roses. This is my horse I rode in on, and yours too. We had an inside guy. My guy.”
Archie had never told Selfer who was passing him the top secret reports of enemy intercepts. Was it a similarly rich cousin on Supreme HQ staff? An old friend of the family in the War Department? Selfer didn’t care. All Selfer knew was, the reports made his patron Archie look like a soothsaying genius and a maverick to boot. Selfer suspected brass much higher than them were using the broken-code secrets to appear all-knowing, so why not they too? The market in military success was just as dog-eat-dog as any other.
In any case, Selfer had come up with a new ploy. All he had to do was convince Archie of it. “Indubitably,” Selfer began. “We had a swell run going. Yet, who says it’s over?” He opened his body to the room, to show Archie their large maps of the Belgium-Germany border that displayed thick and overwhelming Allied green arrows compared to a jumble of shapes in enemy red in retreat, just inside Germany. “We’re a juggernaut, as you see.”
“Which, of course, was the very point of ‘Archie’s Account’ number thirteen.” Archie nodded, with chin high—he got the drill now. “Right, yes. So what we do is, we just find a way to confirm it. We go and we reaffirm AA thirteen.”
“Indeed. We don’t need egghead data for that.”
“Indeed! I’m back at the front now,” Archie said. “I’ve got men here, a whole new division of them. They can serve as my eyes. Fine, fine! A sound investment, I say. So we will use these men, and we will only need a good few.”
***
The next morning, December 11, Wendell Lett found Godfrey in a corner of the command tent with his back to Lett, standing over maps and files. Godfrey wouldn’t turn around. Lett felt that ache low in his gut. Something had come down from a great height, he knew it.
“You called for me. What is it?” Lett said. “Please. Sir. Tom.”
Godfrey turned showing a long face that made his scar shine in the light. “S-2 has a new colonel who’s one verifiable bear of a cat, apparently. Archibald. His deputy called, a Captain Selfer.”
“Okay, just tell me what they need, I’ll run it out to them—”
“No. They want you. You is what they want. This Selfer, he asked for you by name.”
“Me?” Lett felt heavier than his hulking army motorcycle, and he didn’t have a kickstand.
Godfrey spoke with a snarl, as if he was dressing down Lett. “Well, it’s all on paper about you, isn’t it? For anyone looking. You got your Combat Infantryman Badge and then some. Proved yourself. Survived. And your name is on our interrogations, and you’re down as translator, so they know your German’s been tested.”
Lett’s pulse raced. “My German’s a crock.”
“Maybe so, but it was good enough for after-action reports.”
“What else? Tell me.”
“He asked all about you, but in the way those lawyers do in the pictures, you know, when they already know the answer? He knew you’re an orphan even. Oh, he was a smoothie, let me tell you.”
“I need a leave,” Lett blurted. Just like in combat, instincts had kicked in—the leave request had shot out his mouth before he thought it. He needed to see Heloise first.
“You know I will. When I can. Meantime, no one gets one till division says. I’m sorry, Wen. You go now.”
Lett drove west along winding roads and up hills to the rear-line villa with its wondrous v
iew, what locals called a chateau. Division HQ. The whole corps staff was there now. Lett had never been above. It was no depot up there. Trimmed hedges ringed a courtyard of staff sedans freshly washed and jeeps parked neatly. Tightlipped adjutants put him in a chamber that was like a courtroom, with wood paneling and antique portraits of grim old faces glaring.
Other front-line GIs had wandered in, eight of them total, none from his outfit and eyeing each other like low-grade gladiators thrown together before the bloodsport. Lett wondered if they were all orphans like him. He had always felt expendable as such. Surviving as a footslogger was the only thing more so.
A captain in a pressed tunic worked the room like a politician mingling with donors, shaking hands, smiling, offering cigarettes. Few of the dogfaces around Lett had saluted, and the captain didn’t seem to mind. He had the aristo’s cheekbones and jaw, not quite movie idol material but in the running. Lett planted himself away in a corner, next to a gold-adorned planter that looked like an oversized chalice. The captain made his way over to Lett, a slim French cigarette hanging from between his manicured nails. Captain smoothie.
“Care for a smoke, soldier?” the captain said.
“No, thanks,” Lett said.
“Charlie Selfer,” the captain said.
Lett didn’t give his name. They already knew it.
“So, you speak German?” Selfer said.
“Not really, sir,” Lett said. “It’s like I tell everybody. Nuns in Ohio don’t speak like the Germans here. Prisoners we nab think my Deutsch sounds oddball, and I barely follow what they’re saying.”
“You sell yourself short, I’d say. Your name is Wendell Lett. From Ohio. Hometown?”
“It depends, sir. I didn’t have parents.”
“Thus the nuns,” Selfer said. “What sort of nuns again?”
“Mennonite.”
“Do tell.”
“Some get them mixed up with Amish, Quakers even,” Lett said. His implication was clear: The old sects like these raised noncombatants, conscientious objectors.
“Ah. They raised you, but you didn’t take the faith.”
Lett shrugged. “It didn’t work out that way.”
“You didn’t stick around. You wanted something bigger.”
“I had a foster home for most of high school. I liked being in a regular school. But I still felt like a boarder.”
“I think I follow. What was it like, on the front?”
Did this swell really want to know? “Up on the line, you mean. Tough. Just us dogfaces. I never saw an officer higher than lieutenant.”
“I see.” Selfer looked toward the others, and placed an index finger on his chin as if working out an exceptionally complex math question. He turned back to Lett smirking, as if ready to share gossip. “I’m not just any officer. I’m S-2, as if you couldn’t tell. I’m Archie’s aide—Archie Archibald, I mean. You’ll get to meet the man. Then you can say you did. Archie really knows his intelligence. He rode cavalry in the Great War.”
“In trenches, sir?”
“Droll, aren’t we?” Selfer smiled, a show of bright teeth. “Archie’s run oil fields, railroads, even owned thoroughbreds. Why, he’s the horseback hero. Yes, people are saying he’s right off the old Archibald family block. Heard of them?”
Lett shook his head.
“Well, you will.”
Captain Selfer clapped like a stage director for them to take their seats. Lett sat on the end of a row of fold-up chairs along with the other GIs. An easel map of the German borderlands stood on a dais. Out strode Lieutenant Colonel “Archie” Archibald, and as he spoke he strutted around the propped-up map like it was a goat he was about to throat-cut.
He announced the mission in broad strokes, and Selfer joined in to add details.
Lett couldn’t believe what he was hearing: The nine of them were going on a secret recon operation. They were going behind the enemy line and over the German border disguised as German soldiers. The goal: gain new intelligence on German troop movements, tactics, equipment and general constitution. They would be the eyes and ears of military intelligence.
Lett would do anything. He would take the next ten night patrols out. He would take a field commission as platoon leader. Anything but this. He could only imagine what Heloise would say.
Archie had come around to the front edge of the dais. “Very well, men. You head out PDQ and pronto.”
A silence had fallen where Archie had probably expected applause, cheers. He looked around, squinting.
“Questions are welcome,” Selfer added. “It’s your right, considering.”
Lett sat up, raised a hand. Selfer nodded to him. “What if we’re caught, sir?” Lett said.
Archie and Selfer exchanged glances. They had to know what Lett meant: Going on a mission in German uniforms made them spies, not Joes. Spies got shot on sight. POWs, not as much. The Geneva Convention could only save them if they played by the rules of war—and came out luckier than a straight.
“That’s a heck of a question,” Archie barked. “Let’s not be defeatist now.”
“All I mean is, have you done it like this before?” Lett said.
“Oh, so it’s ‘precedent’ he wants? The barracks lawyer,” Archie said.
Selfer gave Archie a stern look, despite his lower rank. Archie added:
“All right, all right. Men, what I’m to tell you is confidential: In October, in Aachen, crack Army Rangers—directed by OSS—did pull off something like this and well done too.”
“That’s different, sirs,” said a gruff voice. It came from one of the scruffier GIs, an older sergeant named Weber with a pockmarked face and dark bags under his eyes. “Those there are real commandos. We’re only grunts. And we got some puppies here.” Weber glared down the line of chairs. Some of the GIs had to be pretty new footsloggers, Lett saw. They didn’t have the stare, for one thing. Put them in neckerchiefs and they had themselves a boy scout troop.
“You know the great Teddy Roosevelt, don’t you?” Archie said. “He did more with far less. That’s war. You ride into it with the mounts you mounted.”
The GIs spoke up at once. Four hands had gone up along the row.
“No more, men,” Archie said. “That’s it. It’s heave-ho time!”
Selfer clapped twice. “You heard the colonel. You’ll be three teams of three—X, Y and Z team. Now, file on up here and exchange your ID tags.”
A bulletin board stood on the dais. Nine GI dog tags hung from pins in the cork, tags they were to use in place of their own. Lett and Weber were the last to exchange theirs, sharing the same wary look.
Back in the forest, near the front line, stood a secluded farmhouse and barn requisitioned by S-2. Lett and the other eight GIs rode in a truck there and were left to wait in the muddy courtyard. Lett had been put into Z team with Weber and the one GI of the eight who looked the least dogfaced: eighteen-year-old Auggie, fresh off the boat from an Infantry Replacement Training Center. The three stretched out on an old farm cart. Weber and Auggie chain-smoked. Lett and Weber traded unit stories. Weber’s company had seen the same blood-drenched casualty rate as Lett’s, no surprise there.
The sun had only just gone down, but here it was nearly dark. Lett peered around the perimeter, inspecting the shadows. He counted only one sentry out there between the trees, maybe two. The idea nagged at him: What if he did just walk away? In Northwest Europe tens of thousands of them had done it, from all along the line, enough to fill a few full-up regiments. Paris alone was said to harbor thousands of them. So wouldn’t a rural vanishing act be a sure bet? Only he and Tom Godfrey knew about Heloise, and Tom didn’t even know her name let alone what town.
The six GIs of X and Y teams sat around a well fountain, laughing and joking, seeing no reason why they shouldn’t shoot the shit before getting themselves killed. Auggie watched with a smile, as if wanting to join them, but soon his pug-nosed and freckled face lost its wonder look. “Some of those GIs in the other teams say we
got a real fightin’ chance,” he said, as if to convince himself.
“Chance? A fuggin’ chance?” Weber said. “On account of what? That we don’t even got no proper kraut papers to show a sentry even?”
“We could come back heroes,” Auggie said.
“Heroes? Oh, do indulge me,” Weber said. “Who you want to play you? Gary Cooper’s too old, but maybe Errol Flynn is free? Sure, we never had it so good—”
“Shut up. Both of you,” Lett said. “I’m trying to think.”
Perhaps worst of all, they weren’t getting any German papers—there was no time to work some up, Archie had said. Didn’t that make them spies all the more? They had to remain GIs first, if caught. But how?
Weber said: “Wrap your noodle around it all you want, Lett, it still don’t hold up.”
Soon after dark, S-2 sentries opened the barn for the three teams. Inside they found a long plank table of German uniforms and equipment, along with a War Department handbook on German forces. Weber stood back, eyeballing the enemy materiel as if it was booby-trapped. Lett stepped so far back his heels bumped up against the barn siding. The calm of shock was giving way to reality.
At the table, Auggie and the GIs of X and Y teams fought over the enemy swag as if it were souvenirs they could ship home APO. The more Lett watched them, he decided only he and Weber had been up on the line very long. The rest were only grimy on the outside.
Weber moved over to Lett, watching the GIs rave and haggle. “Just wait. They’ll look so much better with blood on em,” he whispered.
“If we only had more time,” Lett whispered. “Figure this out right.”
“Meanwhile? No time, like that goddamn Selfer says.”
“S-2, they just want the low-down, what the Germans are up to,” Lett said. “Am I right? It sounds simple enough.”
“Says you.”
“Well, wouldn’t you like to know, what they’re up to?”
“Sure. But facts are like pork bellies to brass wonders like those two and just as cheap. You said it. What if we get caught? What then?”
“We won’t.”
“Come off it, Lett. Just look at those ersatz GI dog tags they gives us—tags of Joes what don’t exist, or at least not anymore?”
Under False Flags Page 11