BOOKS BY W.E.B. GRIFFIN
HONOR BOUND
BOOK I: HONOR BOUND
BOOK II: BLOOD AND HONOR
BOOK III: SECRET HONOR
BOOK IV: DEATH AND HONOR (and William E. Butterworth IV)
BOOK V: THE HONOR OF SPIES (and William E. Butterworth IV)
BOOK VI: VICTORY AND HONOR (and William E. Butterworth IV)
BOOK VII: EMPIRE AND HONOR (and William E. Butterworth IV)
BROTHERHOOD OF WAR
BOOK I: THE LIEUTENANTS
BOOK II: THE CAPTAINS
BOOK III: THE MAJORS
BOOK IV: THE COLONELS
BOOK V: THE BERETS
BOOK VI: THE GENERALS
BOOK VII: THE NEW BREED
BOOK VIII: THE AVIATORS
BOOK IX: SPECIAL OPS
THE CORPS
BOOK I: SEMPER FI
BOOK II: CALL TO ARMS
BOOK III: COUNTERATTACK
BOOK IV: BATTLEGROUND
BOOK V: LINE OF FIRE
BOOK VI: CLOSE COMBAT
BOOK VII: BEHIND THE LINES
BOOK VIII: IN DANGER’S PATH
BOOK IX: UNDER FIRE
BOOK X: RETREAT, HELL!
BADGE OF HONOR
BOOK I: MEN IN BLUE
BOOK II: SPECIAL OPERATIONS
BOOK III: THE VICTIM
BOOK IV: THE WITNESS
BOOK V: THE ASSASSIN
BOOK VI: THE MURDERERS
BOOK VII: THE INVESTIGATORS
BOOK VIII: FINAL JUSTICE
BOOK IX: THE TRAFFICKERS (and William E. Butterworth IV)
BOOK X: THE VIGILANTES (and William E. Butterworth IV)
BOOK XI: THE LAST WITNESS (and William E. Butterworth IV)
BOOK XII: DEADLY ASSETS (and William E. Butterworth IV)
BOOK XIII: BROKEN TRUST (and William E. Butterworth IV)
MEN AT WAR
BOOK I: THE LAST HEROES
BOOK II: THE SECRET WARRIORS
BOOK III: THE SOLDIER SPIES
BOOK IV: THE FIGHTING AGENTS
BOOK V: THE SABOTEURS (and William E. Butterworth IV)
BOOK VI: THE DOUBLE AGENTS (and William E. Butterworth IV)
BOOK VII: THE SPYMASTERS (and William E. Butterworth IV)
PRESIDENTIAL AGENT
BOOK I: BY ORDER OF THE PRESIDENT
BOOK II: THE HOSTAGE
BOOK III: THE HUNTERS
BOOK IV: THE SHOOTERS
BOOK V: BLACK OPS
BOOK VI: THE OUTLAWS (and William E. Butterworth IV)
BOOK VII: COVERT WARRIORS (and William E. Butterworth IV)
BOOK VIII: HAZARDOUS DUTY (and William E. Butterworth IV)
CLANDESTINE OPERATIONS
BOOK I: TOP SECRET (and William E. Butterworth IV)
BOOK II: THE ASSASSINATION OPTION (and William E. Butterworth IV)
BOOK III: CURTAIN OF DEATH (and William E. Butterworth IV)
BOOK IV: DEATH AT NUREMBERG (and William E. Butterworth IV)
BOOK V: THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY (and William E. Butterworth IV)
AS WILLIAM E. BUTTERWORTH III
THE HUNTING TRIP
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
Publishers Since 1838
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
Copyright © 2018 by W. E. B. Griffin
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
Ebook ISBN 9780735213081
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_2
CONTENTS
Books by W.E.B. Griffin
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Dedication
Preface
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
About the Authors
26 July 1777
“The necessity of procuring good intelligence is apparent and need not be further urged.”
George Washington
General and Commander in Chief
The Continental Army
FOR THE LATE
WILLIAM E. COLBY
An OSS Jedburgh First Lieutenant who became director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
AARON BANK
An OSS Jedburgh First Lieutenant who became a colonel and the father of Special Forces.
WILLIAM R. CORSON
A legendary Marine intelligence officer whom the KGB hated more than any other U.S. intelligence officer—and not only because he wrote the definitive work on them.
RENÉ J. DÉFOURNEAUX
A U.S. Army OSS Second Lieutenant attached to the British SOE who jumped into Occupied France alone and later became a legendary U.S. Army intelligence officer.
FOR THE LIVING
BILLY WAUGH
A legendary Special Forces Command Sergeant Major who retired and then went on to hunt down the infamous Carlos the Jackal. Billy could have terminated Osama bin Laden in the early 1990s but could not get permission to do so. After fifty years in the business, Billy is still going after the bad guys.
JOHNNY REITZEL
An Army Special Operations officer who could have terminated the head terrorist of the seized cruise ship Achille Lauro but could not get permission to do so.
RALPH PETERS
An Army intelligence officer who has written the best analysis of our war against terrorists and of our enemy that I have ever seen.
And for the New Breed
MARC L
A senior intelligence officer who, despite his youth, reminds me of Bill Colby more and more each day.
FRANK L
A legendary Defense Intelligence Agency officer who retired and now follows in Billy Waugh’s footsteps.
OUR NATION OWES THESE PATRIOTS A DEBT BEYOND REPAYMENT.
AND
In Loving Memory Of
Colonel José Manuel Menéndez
Cavalry, Argentine Army, Retired
PREFACE
In the late afternoon of April 12, 1945, a Secret Service agent on Vice President Harry S Truman’s protection detail informed him he was urgently needed at the White House. Truman was surprised. Since their i
nauguration in January, the sixty-one-year-old Vice President had seen President Franklin Delano Roosevelt only twice, and had never been alone with him.
The story went around that Truman was closer to FDR’s wife, Eleanor, than he was to the ailing sixty-three-year-old.
When Truman got to the White House, he in fact was greeted by Mrs. Roosevelt.
“Harry,” she said. “The President is dead.”
Roosevelt had died hours before in Warm Springs, Georgia, in the company of his mistress, Lucy Mercer.
It has been reliably reported that immediately after Truman was sworn in by Chief Justice Harlan Stone as the thirty-third President of the United States, his first order was: “Get Justice Jackson and Captain Souers over here right now.”
Captain Sidney W. Souers, United States Navy Reserve, and Colonel Harry S Truman, Missouri National Guard, were old and close “Weekend Warrior” buddies from Missouri.
When Souers, at the time the chairman of the board of a large insurance company, was called to active duty in Washington, he moved into the small apartment in which then–U.S. Senator Truman lived. There was room because Mrs. Bess Truman hated Washington and was seldom in the city.
Truman and Supreme Court Associate Justice Robert H. Jackson had become friends when the latter had advised the Truman Committee on how to deal with war profiteers.
The three frequently dined and had a couple of drinks together in the Truman apartment.
Truman neither liked nor trusted the people close to President Roosevelt, and knew he needed the advice of friends whom he could trust without reservation.
* * *
—
The next day, April 13th, there was proof that Roosevelt and the people around him didn’t like or trust Truman either.
U.S. Army Major General Leslie Groves—whom Truman had never met—was shown into the Oval Office by a visibly nervous Secretary of State Edward Stettinius Jr. Then Stettinius left the President alone with General Groves.
Groves told Truman America’s greatest secret: The United States had developed the most powerful weapon the world had ever known: the atomic bomb.
Truman was furious that he had been kept in the dark by Roosevelt, almost certainly at the advice of those around him.
A month after General Alfred Jodl, the chief of staff of the German Armed Forces High Command, had signed on May 7th the unconditional surrender documents ending the war in Europe, the first of Roosevelt’s cronies to go was Stettinius. Truman fired him on June 27, 1945, replacing him on July 3rd—some said at the recommendation of Justice Jackson—with James F. Byrnes.
On August 6, 1945, an American B-29 bomber dropped the world’s first deployed atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima.
Three days later, a second B-29 dropped another A-bomb on Nagasaki.
In a radio address on August 15th, citing the devastating power of “a new and most cruel bomb,” Japanese Emperor Hirohito announced his country’s unconditional surrender.
Almost immediately after the formal surrender ceremonies aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, Truman came under enormous pressure from the Army, the Navy, the State Department, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They demanded, for their own interagency rivalry reasons, that he disestablish the Office of Strategic Services—the OSS—America’s first centralized intelligence agency, which FDR had created around the start of World War II.
Reasoning that the war was over, and the OSS no longer needed, Truman did as requested.
He soon realized that that had been a serious mistake, as all the agencies that had cried for the death of the OSS now were fighting one another to take over its functions.
Truman reacted in Trumanesque fashion.
By executive order, he established the Directorate of Central Intelligence, answerable only to him, and named his crony Sid Souers, whom he promoted to rear admiral, as its director.
I
[ONE]
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C.
1415 8 April 1946
A Secret Service agent in suit and tie opened the door to the Oval Office and announced, “Mr. President, Admiral Souers.”
“Show him in, then close the door,” President Harry S Truman ordered. “No interruptions.”
Admiral Sidney W. Souers entered the room and stopped short of the coffee table in front of a couch. The stocky fifty-four-year-old was in his Navy Service Dress Blue woolen uniform, its sleeves near the cuffs bristling with gold braid. He had an intelligent face, with warm, inquisitive eyes, a headful of closely cropped graying hair, and a neatly trimmed mustache.
“Mr. President.”
“You took your sweet time getting here, Sid.”
“Harry, I hung up the phone and walked out of my office. What’s so urgent?”
Truman picked up a sheet of paper from his desk and waved it angrily.
Souers recognized it as the SIGABA message he had sent over hours earlier. He saw that the paper had his handwritten note at the top, which read “There’s more to this. Let me know when you want to discuss— SWS.”
“These Nazi bastards escaping in Nuremberg,” Truman blurted. “That’s urgent and goddamn unacceptable.”
Truman’s eyes went to the paper, scanning it:
TOP SECRET
URGENT
DUPLICATION FORBIDDEN
FROM: DIRECTOR DCI GERMANY
0010 GREENWICH 8 APR 1946
TO: DIRECTOR WASH DC
1—COL M COHEN, CHIEF NUREMBERG TRIBUNAL CIC, INFORMS THAT BURGDORF AND VON DIETELBURG ESCAPED TRIBUNAL PRISON INFIRMARY 5 APR. COHEN SUSPECTS ODESSA INVOLVEMENT. ESCAPE HAS NOT, REPEAT, NOT BEEN MADE PUBLIC.
2—COL WASSERMAN, CHIEF CIC VIENNA, REPORTS WALTER WANGERMANN, VIENNA POLICE CHIEF OF INTELLIGENCE, HAS INFORMED HIM BRUNO HOLZKNECHT, CHIEF OF POLICE SURVEILLANCE, IS MISSING AS OF 5 APR. WANGERMANN SUSPECTS DCI INVOLVEMENT. WASSERMAN SUSPECTS NKGB, MOSSAD, OR AVO INVOLVEMENT.
3—CONSIDERING RECENT ACTIVITIES OF CRONLEY ET AL, UNDERSIGNED CONSIDERS DCI INVOLVEMENT IN NUREMBERG AND VIENNA INCIDENTS. AN INVESTIGATION WOULD BE ILL-ADVISED AND NO ACTION IN THAT REGARD HAS BEEN UNDERTAKEN.
4—FURTHER DEVELOPMENTS WILL BE REPORTED AS THEY OCCUR.
WALLACE, COL, DIRECTOR DCI GERMANY
END
TOP SECRET
“And you say there’s more?” Truman said, tossing the sheet back to the desktop. “Jesus! It’s bad enough that this Odessa organization has been smuggling SS bastards out of Europe—and out of our grasp so we can’t prosecute them—but now, when we finally grab two of Odessa’s top leaders, they somehow snatch the sons of bitches from our prison? It’s outrageous!”
The President came out from behind his desk and walked to the couch.
“Pour yourself a drink, Sid. While you’re at it, pour one for me.”
“It’s two o’clock in the afternoon.”
“Pour the drinks. You’re going to need it,” the President said, then sat down, and while Souers was retrieving a bottle of Haig & Haig scotch from the credenza, where it was concealed from public view, he picked up the telephone. “Get Justice Jackson for me,” he ordered, then pushed the SPEAKER button and put the telephone handset back in its cradle.
When Truman had been a United States senator from Missouri, Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson would join him and Captain Souers, USNR, for dinner and drinks in Truman’s apartment—away from the prying eyes, and ears, of the Washington establishment.
Now, Truman had recently named the fifty-four-year-old Jackson—who had been FDR’s attorney general before nominating him to serve on the Supreme Court—as chief U.S. prosecutor for the Nuremberg trials.
Voices from the telephone speaker immediately began to be heard.
“Vint Hill, P
residential priority. Justice Jackson in Nuremberg on a secure line. Conversation will not, repeat, not be transcribed.”
“White House, hold one,” another voice said, then, “Fulda, Presidential priority. Justice Jackson in Nuremberg. Secure line, no transcription.”
“White House, hold one.”
“Justice Jackson’s chambers.”
“This is the White House calling. The President for Justice Jackson. The line is secure.”
“One moment, please.”
“Robert Jackson.”
“Hello, Bob.”
“Mr. President.”
“Hey, Bob,” Souers called out.
“Anchors aweigh, Sid.”
“Bob,” the President said, “Sid and I were sitting around having a little nip, and we figured, what the hell, let’s call Bob and have a little chat.”
“That’s flattering, Mr. President. What would you two like to chat about?”
“How about those Nazi bastards who escaped the Tribunal Prison? We’ve got to get them back and make damn sure it never happens again.”
“Harry, everybody’s working on it. Just a few minutes ago, I had Colonel Cohen in my office.”
“He’s the counterintelligence guy in Nuremberg?” Truman said, glancing at the SIGABA message.
“Right. Smart as they come. The only thing he had new for me was that he added the AVO to the list of suspects.”
“And what the hell is that?”
“It stands for ‘Államvedélmi Osztálya.’ It’s the Russian-controlled Secret Police in Hungary. It’s headed by a chap named Gábor Péter, who Cohen says is a real sonofabitch.”
“That’s all this Colonel Cohen had to say?” the President asked, almost incredulously, staring at the telephone.
“He said Super Spook might have some ideas. And should be involved, and I heartily agree.”
“Who the hell is Super Spook? More important, why isn’t he involved?”
“Captain Jim Cronley. The man you chose to be my bodyguard. He ran the operation in Vienna that bagged Burgdorf and von Dietelburg. I started calling him Super Spook when he figured out how Odessa managed to smuggle cyanide capsules into the Tribunal Prison.”
The Enemy of My Enemy Page 1