Those members of Team Turtle who did not grin either grunted or made some other sound of acknowledgment.
Boltitz continued: “A scenario that occurs to me as more feasible is that U-234 may be slowly making her way here at best speed for fuel efficiency. Meanwhile, the tanker submarines are making their way here at a higher rate of speed. They might be traveling in pairs, but more likely alone, to lower the chance of loss in case they were detected.
“In either event, either sailing together or rendezvousing at some prearranged point, one of them would transfer its fuel to a second, and then be scuttled, with her crew moving to the other.
“This could be repeated with other pairs of submarines, with the ultimate result being that, say, two hundred miles off the Argentine coast, there would be four—possibly more—submarines with full tanks, ready to fill the tanks of U-234. After doing so, they again would scuttle whatever empty vessels and the remainders would accompany U-234 to Japan.”
“That does make sense,” Frade thought out loud.
After a moment, Dulles said: “All right, then. Let’s put this line of thought on the back burner for the moment and discuss U-977. Most of what we have heard about her sounds like the product of fevered imaginations. About the only thing we know with absolute certainty—as Karl has confirmed—is that she is a Type VIIC—”
“Which is the same U-boot type as U-405,” Karl Boltitz offered.
Dulles motioned for him to continue.
“She’s sixty-seven meters in length,” Boltitz then said. He paused. “My apology. That’s two hundred and twenty feet. She draws fifteen feet. She carries a crew of approximately fifty, and is armed with fifteen torpedoes—four tubes forward, one aft—and a small 8.8cm deck gun. Her surface range, at twelve miles per hour, is more than eight thousand miles. Untersee—submerged, if you will—she can run only eighty miles. And to avoid detection, she would certainly run most of the distance submerged to schnorchel depth—only surfacing for a couple hours a night—meaning it could possibly take U-977 months to reach here. The snort is not strong, and thus the captain must limit her speed to six knots.”
“Schnorchel?” Frade repeated.
Boltitz nodded. “‘Snort’ for short. You would call it a snorkel. It is a tall tube that rises from the conning tower to above the surface so that the U-boot can take in fresh air while running submerged.”
“Thank you, Karl,” Dulles then said. “Okay, our information is that U-977, under command of twenty-four-year-old Oberleutnant Heinz Schäffer, left Kristiansand, Norway, to begin a routine patrol on May second. She had arrived there on April thirtieth.”
“That sounds suspicious,” Boltitz said. “It takes more than two or three days to prepare a boat for patrol. Could it be that she was made ready for sea elsewhere and went to Kristiansand to pick up something?”
Dulles looked at Boltitz, then turned to Clete Frade.
“Colonel Frade, this is where the outrageous part begins. I’m afraid that I’ve already gone on long enough, to the point where everyone not only needs a libation but, I believe, deserves one—”
“I thought you’d never ask,” Frade said.
“—but just one,” Dulles continued, “until after we have finished with the business. Which I promise won’t take long.”
[TWO]
All the men in the quincho stood at their wood-plank tables, all holding their drinks aloft in their right hand.
“In the words of Aristotle, ‘We make war that we may live in peace,’” Allen W. Dulles solemnly intoned. “To victory in Europe!”
The room filled with the parroting of “To victory in Europe!” and the chanting of “Hear, hear!”
After everyone had taken a sip of their drinks, Dulles motioned for them to take their seats.
“Drink up, gentlemen,” Dulles then said. “The alcohol should help make what I’m about to share with you seem at least a little plausible.”
“Great!” Oscar Schultz said. “Now we get the outrageous stuff.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Tony Pelosi put in, and tapped his glass to el Jefe’s.
Dulles then glanced at Karl Boltitz and said: “I take it that everyone recalls what our U-boat expert said about the short period of time that U-977 spent in dock at Kristiansand before heading to sea?”
“That she was made ready for sea elsewhere,” Pelosi offered, “and went to Norway to pick up something?”
“Yes, except not ‘something.’ Rather, ‘someone.’”
“Who?” Clete Frade said.
“What fevered imaginations have come up with is that U-977 went to Norway to pick up Adolf Hitler and his new wife, to transport them to safety in Argentina.”
“That’s ridiculous!” Jerry O’Sullivan blurted. “Everybody knows they committed suicide. Hitler married her, then shot her, then bit on a cyanide capsule.”
“On May one,” Dulles said, “Grand Admiral Doenitz went on the radio and announced that Hitler had met a hero’s death on the battlefield.”
“Oh, bullshit,” Tony Pelosi said.
“That suggests,” Dulles went on, “that Hitler died—or that Admiral Doenitz wants us to believe he died—on April thirtieth, or even earlier. We’ve heard he took his life on April twenty-eighth. Time-wise, there would have been plenty of time for him to fly to Norway and get aboard U-977.”
“Presuming he wasn’t dead,” O’Sullivan said with some sarcasm.
“According to Zhukov,” Dulles said, “he isn’t dead, and neither are Frau Hitler, Martin Bormann, Herr Doktor Goebbels, and a half dozen other important Nazis. Suggesting, if true of course, that Operation Phoenix was indeed known all the way to the top.”
“According to who did you say, Mr. Dulles?” Clete asked.
“Marshal of the Soviet Union Georgi Konstantinovich Zhukov,” Dulles said. “The victor of the Battle for Berlin. Eisenhower’s counterpart.”
“He actually said that?” Peter von Wachtstein asked.
“His interpreter told Ike he said just that, and that most of them, including Mr. and Mrs. Hitler, are on their way to a safe haven in Argentina. If nothing else, this bit of what my gut tells me is disinformation is a classic example of why our having Gehlen’s intel about the Russians is absolutely critical. They are not to be trusted.”
“Jesus!” Frade said. “It’s incredible. Ike can’t believe him, can he?”
“Ike thinks it has something to do with General I. D. White,” Dulles said.
“Who’s he?”
“The commanding general of our Second Armored Division. General White not only moved into what will be the American sector of Berlin without asking Ike, but he also ignored Zhukov’s order that he was required to wait for permission. The rape of Berlin—which has been ghastly—bothered General White. He ordered the Russians out of the American sector. When they refused to go, he issued a proclamation stating that anyone but Americans found with a weapon in the American sector would be presumed to be Germans refusing to obey the surrender order and would be shot on sight. As would rapists, armed or not.”
“Good man!” Ashton said, raising his glass in salute. “Here’s to General White.” He took a sip, then looked at Frade and added, “Colonel, no disrespect intended, but can I go work for him when we’re disbanded?”
That earned him a couple chuckles and at least one grunt of agreement.
Dulles went on: “White could have started World War Three right there, but after a half dozen of Zhukov’s troops had in fact been shot, the Russian caved in and ordered all his troops out of the American zone. Eisenhower believes, not with a great deal of conviction, that what Zhukov is up to, in case there is anything to the inevitable rumors that Hitler did not commit suicide and escaped Berlin, is to blame it on General White. In any event, Eisenhower has ordered the OSS to look into it as a high priority, and David Bruce is doing just that.”
“The OSS guy in London?” Frade asked.
Dulles nodded.
“I’m su
rprised Bruce didn’t turn that wild-goose chase over to you,” Frade said.
“It was the other way around, Clete. Unfortunately for poor David, he takes his orders from me.”
“I’m afraid to open this can of worms,” Schultz said, “but how the hell was Hitler supposed to get out of Berlin? It was surrounded, right?”
“Yes, it was, Jefe,” Dulles said. “But we’ve heard that Hanna Reitsch flew into Berlin on April twenty-eighth, just before Hitler’s suicide, and then supposedly flew out with the newly appointed chief of the Luftwaffe, General Robert Ritter von Greim, a day or two later.”
“I thought,” Ashton said, “that we had total air superiority over Berlin. How did this Hanna Reitsch manage to do that?”
“The story is that a Fieseler Storch landed on the Unter den Linden,” Dulles said. “Is that possible? Who do I ask, von Wachtstein or Frade, if that’s possible?”
“It’s possible,” von Wachtstein immediately replied. “No problem whatsoever.”
“What’s the Unter den Linden?” Clete asked.
“A wide boulevard near the Reichschancellery,” von Wachtstein explained. “It used to be lined with linden trees. You could get in and out of there in a Storch without much trouble at all.”
“Presuming,” Dulles said, “that there were not perhaps fifty or so Russian fighters in the area supporting the Red Army who would welcome the opportunity to shoot down such an airplane.”
“Who’s this Hanna Reitsch flying the Storch?” Frade said. “How good a pilot is he?”
Von Wachtstein laughed.
He then explained: “Hanna Reitsch is a woman, Clete. And she’s a much better pilot than you or me.”
Clete raised his eyebrows and nodded. After a moment’s thought, he offered: “And Russian fighters wouldn’t be a problem for the Storch if the pilot knew what she was doing.”
“What?” Ashton challenged. “You think a fighter couldn’t shoot down that little observation plane.”
“Once upon a time, Bacardi,” Clete said by way of explanation, “on an island far, far away called Guadalcanal, a Marine pilot was flying around over the jungle in a Piper Cub that he ‘borrowed’ from the Army. He was directing artillery fire and suddenly became aware of a string of tracers coming his way. He looked over his shoulder and saw that he had two Zeros on his tail. Not knowing what to do, he made a sharp right turn and went down on the deck. The Zeros made a three-sixty and had another go at him.
“The Marine went even lower in his humble Cub, then made another right turn. The first Zero flew over him, and the second tried to make a right turn and flew into the trees. The first Zero made two more passes at the little Piper Cub and then gave up. I tried to claim the Zero that went into the trees as a kill, but they said no dice. For one thing, you can’t claim a kill if the enemy plane went down because of pilot error, and for another, you can’t claim a kill if you are flying a Piper Cub stolen from the U.S. Army.
“So, to answer your question, Major Ashton, a female who is a better pilot than Hansel or me, flying a Storch—which stalls at about thirty miles an hour—would have no trouble avoiding Russian fighters.”
Dulles said, “You’re agreed that it’s possible that Hanna Reitsch could have flown Hitler—for that matter, any two people—from Berlin to Norway. Is that so, Peter?”
“Yes, sir. It’s possible,” von Wachtstein replied. “I submit, however, that the real question is: Is it plausible?”
Dulles looked at him a long moment. He said: “We have to proceed on that possibility. The mission obviously is to locate U-997. How nice it would be if we could capture her. And even if the outrageous tale proves to be exactly that—the Hitlers and others are not aboard—then she most certainly will be carrying other valuables.”
“How the hell can we possibly do that?” Frade said. “Definitely not with SAA’s aircraft or certainly not Peter’s Storch. We’d need heavily armed military assets in order to actually capture a sub—and certainly to sink one, if it came to that.”
“Right, Cletus. What’s been discussed is that there are enormous numbers of long-range aircraft—bombers, B-17s and B-24s—now available in Europe to search for submarines. But I don’t think that’s going to be of much help except in the waters between Norway and the English Channel. Once the submarines get into the Atlantic—as some of them probably have already—they will head southwest for the Atlantic and soon be beyond the range of any aircraft looking for them.
“Similarly, although a bomb group has already been ordered to Sidi Slimane in Morocco, I don’t think it will be of much use. As soon as they can get there, the submarines will be deep into the Atlantic, beyond the reach of aircraft.
“At some point west of Europe and North Africa, Eisenhower’s—SHAEF’s—authority ends, and the military command is that of the Navy. They will be ordered—as soon as I can get to Washington and convince Admiral Leahy of the necessity to do so—to begin searching for these submarines. I don’t think they’ll have much luck, but the effort will have to be made.
“Insofar as sending B-17s and/or B-24s here to Argentina or Brazil, that has been considered and decided against. Brazil has asked for such aircraft in the past and, in the probably justified belief that they would use them against Argentina, their request was denied. And obviously we couldn’t send them to Argentina and not to Brazil.
“So, what happens now is that when I get to Washington, I am going to try to get you authority to call upon the B-24s we presently have at Canoas should you need them to deal with any enemy submarines you find, either offshore or within Argentine waters.
“That brings us back to that basic premise. The best—indeed almost the only—hope we have to either sink or capture the submarines in question is Team Turtle. And in doing so, you will not only be up against the Nazis involved in Operation Phoenix but against substantial numbers of our countrymen, in and out of uniform.”
Dulles stopped, looked thoughtful as he sipped his drink, then went on:
“Considering how everyone now has the OSS in their crosshairs, I was about to make an attempt at giving you a stirring pep talk about overcoming great obstacles. Then I remembered the best pep talk I ever heard. How many of you have seen the movie Knute Rockne, All American? With Pat O’Brien playing Rockne?”
I don’t believe this! Clete thought.
Our distinguished OSS deputy director is going to inspire us by quoting from a movie?
Is that the booze talking?
Everybody indicated that they had seen the motion picture, and Clete now saw some of the men showing curious expressions.
“All right then,” Dulles went on. “There was a scene in that motion picture where Coach Rockne went to the hospital bed of one of his players who was terminally ill. At the moment, I can’t think of his name, either in the film, or in real life—”
“Gipp,” Master Sergeant William Ferris furnished. “They called him the Gipper.”
“Right,” Dulles said.
“The actor’s name was Richard Reagan,” Frade said. “He’s now the only aerial gunner in the Air Force who’s a captain.”
“His name is Ronald Reagan,” Ashton quickly corrected him. “And he’s a first lieutenant in the Signal Corps making those venereal disease movies they make everybody watch.”
“You know,” Schultz chimed in, “you pick up some dame in a bar, diddle her, and two weeks later your dick drops off.”
That produced laughter.
“Clark Gable is the only commissioned officer aerial gunner in the Air Forces,” Ferris said. He then quoted Gable’s most famous line: “‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn!’”
“You would if it was your dick about to drop off,” Schultz said.
More laughter.
Clete saw the look on Dulles’s face.
“Silence on deck!” Frade barked.
And when he had it, Clete said, “Please go on, Mr. Dulles.”
“I don’t think that would be a very goo
d idea,” Dulles said. “And it was my mistake to open the bar so soon.”
Frade said, “Inasmuch, sir, as we obviously need a pep talk, I really wish you would. Please, sir.”
After a long moment, Dulles shrugged.
“Very well,” he said. “I think I should make the point that not all motion-picture actors in uniform find safe sinecures for themselves. Jimmy Stewart is also in the Air Forces. He has led his B-17 group on twenty-odd missions over Germany and was recently promoted colonel. Closer to home, Captain Sterling Hayden, a Marine, has been infiltrating fellow members of the OSS into—and out of—Albania for some time.”
He paused to let that sink in.
Ashton then popped to his feet, stood at attention, and said, “Sir, I started that unfortunate silliness. I hope you will accept my apology.”
“We are all under something of a strain, Major,” Dulles said after a moment. “No apology is necessary. Please take your seat.”
Ashton did, and after a moment, Dulles said: “Now, where was I? Oh, yes, in the film Rockne goes to the bed of the terminally ill football player known as the Gipper. As difficult as this will obviously be, try to think of me as the character, the Gipper, that Lieutenant Ronald Reagan played.
“This is what he said to Coach Rockne: ‘Rock, sometime when the team is up against it and the breaks are beating the boys, tell them to go out there with all they’ve got and win one for the Gipper. I don’t know where I’ll be then, but I’ll know about it and I’ll be happy.’”
There was silence in the quincho.
Frade thought: The silence of embarrassment.
“The point I had hoped to make,” Dulles said, “and obviously failed so completely to make, was that I know that Team Turtle is really up against it. But I haven’t seen a suggestion that any of you are thinking of throwing in the towel. And I wanted you to know how much I appreciate that. I’m proud to be associated with all of you.”
There was a moment’s silence.
Then O’Sullivan stood up.
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