The Berets

by W. E. B Griffin

  “I don’t have much time for the movies,” Lowell said.

  “What do you do in the army, Colonel?” Brian Hayes asked.

  “I’m a paper-shuffler,” Lowell said.

  “I don’t believe that,” Georgia said. “You did something famous in Korea, a task force or something that everybody talked about.”

  “That was, as we were just discussing, a very long time ago,” Lowell said.

  “I think, Colonel,” Brian Hayes said, “we all, at one time or another, find ourselves shuffling paper.”

  That was a very kind thing to say, Lowell thought. Kind and understanding. I will not screw your wife.

  After the filet mignon and the Camembert, both washed down with a half-dozen splits of a California Cabernet Sauvignon, they had a good deal of brandy before Mr. and Mrs. Brian Hayes finally went forward again.

  Lowell got a pillow and a blanket from the stewardess, and made himself comfortable by propping the pillow in the corner between his seat and the aircraft wall.

  He had a lewd and lascivious dream. He was in the hull of an M-46 tank on the military crest of Heartbreak Ridge. He had just shown Georgia his tank, and had started to hoist her up, so that she could climb out of the commander’s cupola. But she wiggled out of his grasp and lowered herself back down, opening her khaki shirt as she did, so that he could get his mouth on her nipples.

  He woke up and shook his head. He wanted to sit up, but there was some weight on him. The weight was Georgia Paige. She had thrown a blanket over them, and her hand was in his fly.

  “They’re playing backgammon,” she said. She laughed deep in her throat, and resumed methodically pumping his organ. “You must be getting old. It took a long time to wake it up.”

  “For Christ’s sake,” he said. “Somebody’ll see us!”

  “That never bothered you before,” she said. “When we finally climbed out of the tank and your GIs applauded, you took a bow.”

  Then she put her head in his lap, pulled the blanket over her head under the blanket, and finished what she had started.

  (Four)

  Rhine-Main Airfield

  Frankfurt am Main, Germany

  0950 Hours, 29 December 1961

  Lufthansa’s Stadt Köln made its approach to Rhine-Main over the city of Frankfurt am Main. Lowell stared intently out of the window and picked out the Ninety-seventh General Hospital on the edge of the city cemetery and then the curved I. G. Farben Building, which had been intentionally spared bombing in World War II and had served continuously since as an American headquarters, and finally the Hauptbahnhof.

  Coming to Frankfurt was very much like coming home. The first time he had come to Frankfurt, he had been an eighteen-year-old private, a draftee. Six months after that, a brand-new and more-than-a-little-frightened second lieutenant, he had left Rhine-Main on a battered air corps C-47 for Greece. And he’d flown into Rhine-Main in an old three-tailed TWA Lockheed Constellation four months after that, his shirt back and sleeves stiff with the suppuration from the wounds he’d got in Greece to marry Ilse and to learn that she was pregnant.

  And with brand-new major’s leaves on his epaulets, a brand new Distinguished Service Cross in a blue box in his Valv-Pak, he’d been flown into Rhine-Main on a MATS flight, Tokyo—Rangoon—Calcutta—Cairo—Frankfurt, on an AAA priority authorized by the Supreme Commander, Allied Powers, himself. General of the Army Douglas MacArthur had wanted to do everything possible for a young officer who had suffered great personal tragedy literally at the moment when he had been displaying the “distinguished leadership and great personal valor” that had earned him the DSC. Lowell had arrived at Rhine-Main from Korea eighty hours from the moment Task Force Lowell had linked up with elements of X U.S. Corps near Suwon. And twenty-four hours after they had put Ilse into her crypt.

  Her father had simply been unable to believe that any army would fly an officer halfway around the world just to attend his wife’s funeral, so he had gone ahead with it.

  “What’s so fascinating?” Georgia Paige asked.

  “Just looking around,” Lowell said. “I used to fly in here a lot.”

  She raised her eyebrows in question.

  “I was stationed here after I knew you,” he explained.

  The first-class passengers were debarked first and loaded onto large, wide-doored buses. The tourist-class passengers were debarked next. A large number were American soldiers, officers and enlisted men, and their dependents. He had not seen them before. He had just about missed the flight at Idlewild, and the curtain separating first-class from the cheap seats had already been drawn when he got on board.

  They had been inside the terminal building no more than thirty seconds when the loudspeaker went off.

  “Herr Oberst Lowell, bitte! Herr Oberst Lowell, bitte!”

  Lowell raised his hand over his head and described a circle with his index finger.

  A stocky blond-haired man in his late twenties walked quickly over to him, trailed by a man in a gray suit and brimmed cap.

  “Colonel Lowell?” the man asked in German, and when Lowell nodded, went on: “General von Greiffenberg asked me to meet you, Colonel. If you’ll give me your baggage stubs, we’ll clear you through customs. The car is directly outside, if you’ll be good enough to wait there.”

  “Thank you,” Lowell said, handing over the baggage check stubs. “Where is the general?”

  “He will return later today, Colonel, and join you in Marburg an der Lahn,” the man said, avoiding a direct response.

  “And my son?”

  “I believe he is in Marburg, Colonel. If the colonel will excuse me, I will see to the colonel’s luggage.”

  “Thank you,” Lowell said.

  The man bobbed his head and walked away.

  “I’m impressed,” Georgia said. “I didn’t know that you were in that tight with the Gestapo.”

  “That’s not funny, Georgia,” Lowell said, more sharply than he intended.

  “Sorry,” she said, surprised at the intensity of his remark. “What was that all about?”

  “My father-in-law’s sent a car for me,” he said.

  “We’re supposed to have someone meet us,” Brian Hayes said. “I suppose I had better go look for him.”

  “You’re going on to Berlin today?” Lowell asked.

  “There’s an eleven-o’clock plane,” Hayes said. He put out his hand. “It was very good to meet you, Craig,” he said. “And I hope you’ll be able to come to Berlin. We’ll be at the Hotel am Zoo.”

  “I don’t really know—” Lowell said.

  “It would please Georgia,” Hayes said. “And when Georgia is pleased, I am.”

  “The Hotel am Zoo,” Lowell repeated. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  If you weren’t such a nice guy, I would be happy to come to Berlin and jump your wife.

  Georgia gave him her cheek to kiss and quickly groped him.

  “Make an effort, Craig,” she said.

  There was another clean-cut, well-built young German standing by a Mercedes sedan.

  “Ich bin Oberst Lowell,” Lowell said.

  “Welcome to Germany, Herr Oberst,” the young man said, held the door open for him, and then climbed in the front seat. He picked the headset of a radio telephone up and spoke into it.

  “What was all that about?” Lowell asked. “Why do I have the feeling that I’m under arrest?”

  From the look on the German’s face, it was perfectly clear that he didn’t understand the attempt at a clever remark.

  The chauffeur and the man who had met him inside appeared. The chauffeur put Lowell’s luggage into the trunk and climbed behind the wheel. The man got in beside Lowell.

  As the Mercedes drove away from the terminal, the policeman on duty to chase cars away saluted.

  “We have a little brandy, if the colonel wishes,” he said. “And we can get breakfast if the colonel has hunger?”

  “Neither, thank you,” Lowell said.

&n
bsp; “In that case, how about the Herald-Tribune?” the man said and handed him a copy of the Paris edition of the New York Herald-Tribune.

  Lowell took the thin newspaper, scanned the headlines, and flipped through it. When he looked up again, they were on the Autobahn, approaching the turn off to Frankfurt am Main. They were also, he realized, going like the hammers of hell. There was something in the German character that made them take personal affront at any car on the road ahead of them.

  XI

  (One)

  Flughafen Köln

  1550 Hours, 29 December 1961

  The airplane, a Beechcraft King Aire, a small, eight-passenger turboprop, came in ninety seconds after a British Caledonian Airways Viscount; and while the larger aircraft was still taxiing to the end of the runway, it turned off onto a taxiway and stopped near a French Alouette helicopter.

  Parked beside the Alouette were a Mercedes sedan and a yellow Volkswagen bus with the insignia of the customs service of the Federal Republic of Germany painted on its doors.

  Without exception—for Germany is a democracy and everyone is equally subject to its laws—every aircraft arriving from a foreign country has to pass through customs. The King Aire had just come from Helsinki, Finland, and therefore it and its passengers had to comply with the procedure prescribed in regulations.

  As Orwell pointed out, some animals are more equal than others.

  The Volkswagen carried a customs officer, who was driving. It also carried the senior supervisor of customs on duty at Flughafen Köln. When the rear door of the King Aire opened, he was standing there. He saluted.

  “How good to see you again, Herr Generalleutnant Graf von Greiffenberg,” he said to the plane’s sole passenger.

  “It’s good to see you,” Von Greiffenberg replied, offering his hand. He was a tall erect man very close to sixty. He was wearing a Homburg and a Chesterfield and was carrying a heavy briefcase.

  “If the Herr Graf will be good enough?” the senior supervisor of customs said, extending a filled-out customs declaration on a clipboard and a ball-point pen.

  Von Greiffenberg handed the briefcase to one of the two neat, stocky men who had been in the Volkswagen.

  “Put the whole thing in the safe,” he said. “I may call for it.”

  “Jawohl, Herr Generalleutnant Graf,” the man said. “Herr Oberst Lowell is at the villa, Herr Generalleutnant Graf.”

  “Good,” Peter-Paul von Greiffenberg said, and smiled as he scrawled his name on the customs declaration. “Thank you,” he said to the senior supervisor of customs.

  “It is my pleasure, Herr Generalleutnant Graf,” the senior supervisor of customs said.

  The pilot of the Alouette started the engine.

  “Thank you all for your courtesy,” Von Greiffenberg said.

  The customs officer by then had taken the Graf’s luggage from the airplane and carried it to the Alouette. As he was putting it in the backseat, the second man from the Mercedes ran to the helicopter and held open the door for the Graf.

  “Thank you,” the Graf said as he got into the helicopter and reached for the straps.

  Flughafen Köln Departure Control cleared Helicopter FR-203 for immediate takeoff to the East from the parking ramp adjacent to taxiway thirteen.

  The Graf took off his Homburg, put it on the seat beside him, and then put a headset over his head. By then they had enough altitude so that the Rhine was visible, as well as the Cologne Cathedral and the new Rhine River Bridge.

  “Nice flight, Herr Graf?” the pilot asked.

  “A little bumpy,” the Graf said.

  “A front is moving in,” the pilot said. “We were concerned that you would make it at all.”

  “God, it was cold in Helsinki,” the Graf said.

  As the crow flies, it is sixty-six miles from Flughafen Köln to Marburg an der Lahn. The route the pilot took covered about eighty miles, but from the time they left Flughafen Köln until they reached Marburg, they passed over nothing but the smallest of villages. It was a small point, but the Graf did not like to have his whereabouts known to anyone who didn’t have to know where he was.

  There was some gathering ground fog filling depressions in the terrain, and within an hour or so flight would be dangerous. Soon the medieval buildings of what had once been a cathedral and monastery—and, since the late 1600’s, Philipps-Univer-sität—appeared ahead, and a moment later, the pilot began to drop the helicopter toward the garden within the walls of Schloss Greiffenberg.

  Schloss Greiffenberg was a villa, rather than what the word Schloss (castle) calls to mind. It was called Schloss because it had been built, in 1845, within the walls of, on the foundations of, and using material from the ruins of Schloss Greiffenberg (built circa 1380–85). In World War I the seventy-room (including outbuildings) estate had served as a rest home for officers, and in World War II it had been a neuropsychiatric hospital. After the war it had served as an office building for Kries Marburg until then Colonel Graf Peter-Paul von Greiffenberg had been released from imprisonment in Siberia.

  Count von Greiffenberg had successfully sued the Kries Marburg and the state of Hesse for damages to the villa, for rent for the time the government had used the villa as offices, and for damages, alleging that the Kries and state had not met their obligation to search diligently for his surviving offspring after his death had been erroneously reported to them.

  The state’s defense did not impress the Supreme Court, even though Count von Greiffenberg’s sole surviving blood kin, a daughter, could not be located after a reasonable search because she had married an American soldier and had been in the United States. Colonel (by then Generalmajor) Graf von Greiffenberg was awarded DM 870,000 for damages to the property and unpaid rent and DM 2,900,000 in punitive damages. He spent all of the money on refurbishing the villa, installing modern comforts, and in an attempt to furnish it as it had once been furnished.

  It was not a case of him simply indulging an urge to attempt to restore things to a semblance of what they had been, but his duty, as he saw it, to provide a home for a number of his late wife’s relatives (with the exception of his daughter, none of his own had survived both the Nazis and the Russians), whose property had suffered similar damage and confiscation in Pomerania, East Prussia, and Poland, and who were obviously unable to take the various People’s Democratic functionaries to court and demand justice.

  And then there was the question of Peter-Paul von Greiffenberg Lowell, who was the last male in whom there was the blood of the Von Greiffenbergs. Privately the Graf had often thought that it was rather a pity that the man who had married Ilse was so wealthy. If it had not been for that, it would have been easy to arrange for him to live in Germany and gradually instill in him the idea that the boy should take the German nationality that he could by right claim.

  It was not that Graf von Greiffenberg did not like Craig Lowell. He liked him very much, and was pleased that since the Von Greiffenberg blood had been diluted by marriage to a commoner, that commoner was at least of English stock and a gentleman warrior, much as Von Greiffenbergs had been gentlemen warriors for centuries. The only real difference Generalleutnant Graf von Greiffenberg, Retired, had with Lieutenant Colonel Lowell was that Lowell simply would not consider the merits of having Peter-Paul take German citizenship.

  While that question was still up in the air, Schloss Greiffenberg was the boy’s home. Living there could not help but teach him something of his heritage.

  The Alouette landed on a pad between the tennis courts and the apple orchard. The Graf took his luggage and started toward the villa. He had reached the tennis courts, and the Alouette had already taken off again when the butler came out to take the luggage.

  The butler informed him that the Herr Oberst was in the crypt.

  “We will not disturb him,” the Graf said. “And my grandson?”

  “He is in Kassel, Herr Graf, with his friends. Herr Ness drove them.”

  “I’d forgotten,” the Gr
af confessed. “How long has Oberst Lowell been…down there?”

  “About thirty minutes, Herr Graf,” the butler said. “I gave him lunch when he arrived, and then he said he had work to do. Half an hour ago he went to the crypt.”

  The Graf went into the library and waited for his son-in-law to appear.

  When Lowell came into the library a few minutes later, he went right to the whiskey cupboard and poured a stiff drink. He did not see the Graf as he entered, nor even when he went to the windows and looked through them, down to the ancient city of Marburg.

  But he seemed to sense the Graf’s eyes on his back and turned to look at him.

  “I didn’t know you were here,” Lowell said.

  “My dear Craig, I’m so glad to see you. Did you have a good flight?”

  Lowell snorted. “Let’s say ‘interesting,’” he said.

  “If I had known earlier when you were coming, I’d have had Peter-Paul meet you. I’ve been in Helsinki.”

  Anyone who really believed that the Graf had left the intelligence business when he had retired from the army probably believed in the Tooth Fairy and the Goodness of Man, Lowell thought.

  “What’s he doing in Kassel?”

  “Something with friends, I don’t really know.”

  “You don’t seem very surprised to see me,” Lowell said.

  “Nothing you do surprises me, Craig,” the Graf said.

  “I have been run out of the country,” Lowell said. “There are some people who are afraid I’ll say something to the Secretary of Defense I shouldn’t.”

  “And how did Mr. McNamara offend you?” the Graf asked with a laugh.

  “They’re afraid we’re going to agree,” Lowell said.

  “No wonder they banished you,” the Graf said. “For how long?”

  “For thirty days,” Lowell said.

  “Well, it will give you a nice holiday, and you can spend some time with Peter-Paul.”

  “I’ll be here about ten days if I’m welcome that long,” Lowell said. “And then I’m going on to Indochina.”