The Berets

by W. E. B Griffin

  “Nothing for me, thank you,” she said in a German accent, confirming Porter’s suspicion that she was a foreigner. That wasn’t surprising, he realized. Craig’s wife had been German. While it lasted, Craig had been happy, and now he’d found himself another German girl. It was really about time, and if there was a considerable difference in their ages, that was their business.

  “Nonsense,” Lowell said. “We have a family rule that no one ever has to face Porter completely sober. You’re soon going to be a member of the family, so you might as well take advantage of it. At least have a glass of wine? Or a beer?”

  “If you insist,” Ursula said.

  He browbeat her into that, Porter thought angrily. He should not treat a nice young woman like this one that way.

  “What about Geoff?” Porter asked.

  “What about him?” Lowell asked.

  “You said you had something to tell me about him,” Porter said.

  “Oh, yes, I did say that, didn’t I?” Lowell said. “I saw him yesterday, as a matter of fact.”

  “And you are going to tell me how he is?”

  “Fit,” Lowell said. “Very fit. They’ve had him running around in the woods and sleeping on the ground. I understand that’s supposed to be good for you.”

  “What do they have him doing?”

  “He’s on his way to Fort Belvoir.”

  “What’s at Fort Belvoir?”

  “The Engineers.”

  “He’s in the Engineers?”

  “Actually, he’s a Green Beret,” Lowell said.

  “Is that some sort of a joke?” Porter asked.

  “Not at all,” Lowell said. “He has a green beret and shiny jump boots and everything. He looks quite good in a uniform, actually. He’s a sergeant now, you know.”

  “What the hell is this?” Porter said. “Forgive me, Miss…”

  “Ursula,” Lowell corrected him. “Now that she’s going to be in the family, you’re just going to have to learn her name.”

  “Craig!” the girl said, embarrassed.

  “What the hell is what, Porter?” Craig asked.

  “How can Geoff possibly be a Green Beret and a sergeant? Three months ago…You know where he was three months ago.”

  “I don’t think it was easy,” Lowell said. “But blood tells, I suppose. There is a strain of warrior in the clan, you know.”

  “Why is he going to…where did you say?”

  “Fort Belvoir.”

  “Why is he going to Fort Belvoir?”

  “They are, I suppose, going to teach him to blow things up,” Lowell said. “We Green Berets do a lot of that sort of thing, you know.”

  “Where is this place?” Porter Craig demanded.

  “In Virginia,” Lowell said, “not far from Washington. You could go see him, I suppose, if you wanted, instead of spending your weekends in a smelly apartment.”

  “Why couldn’t he come home?” Porter demanded. “Is he on some kind of restriction or something?”

  “The thing is, he’s got himself a girl,” Craig said. “Actually, she’s a bit more than just a pretty face. He says he’s going to marry her.”

  “Jesus Christ! Is he out of his mind?”

  “I don’t think so. I’ve met her, and I rather like her.”

  “If she wears a skirt, you’d like her.”

  “You will be delighted to learn, I’m sure, that she didn’t know Geoff is—‘comfortable’—until the romance was in high gear. He could, in my judgment, have done a hell of a lot worse.”

  Porter Craig was not entirely a fool. His head snapped toward Ursula.

  “It’s you, isn’t it?” he challenged.

  Ursula flushed but did not avert her eyes. She nodded.

  “And you love my son?” Porter Craig asked gently.

  She nodded again.

  “You’re German?” he asked. “The accent?”

  “I’m German,” Ursula said.

  “We had another German girl in the family,” Porter said. “Unfortunately we lost her.”

  She nodded.

  “Geoff told me,” she said.

  “Geoff’s mother is not entirely the fire-breathing dragon Craig has obviously painted her to be,” Porter Craig said. “I’m sure she will be as happy to know you as I am. I suggest we get in a cab, go to the apartment, introduce you two, and then see if we can’t get Geoff on the telephone. Can we do that, Craig? Can we at least get him on the telephone?”

  Lieutenant Colonel Craig W. Lowell raised his right hand in the air above his shoulder, made a fist, and then a pumping motion.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Porter Craig asked.

  “That is a military signal,” Lowell said, “given by a commander to order his subordinates to form on him.”

  “Geoff’s here?”

  “Uh-huh,” Lowell said.

  But it was a female, a good-looking one, who came to the table.

  “Porter, this is Captain Dr. Gillis,” Lowell said. “She has a dual role in this. She is the chaperone, for appearances’ sake, and she is a shrink, which I thought was a good safety precaution to take.”

  “I never know when to believe him,” Porter Craig said.

  “I’m here as a friend,” Barbara Gillis said, “but I am an army doctor.”

  “This is her coat,” Ursula said.

  “You didn’t have to tell him that,” Lowell said.

  And then, across the room, Porter Craig saw a soldier walking toward them. There were sergeant’s chevrons on his sleeves, silver parachutist’s wings on his breast, and a green beret on his head.

  Porter Craig’s eyes blurred with tears.

  Sergeant Geoffrey Craig reached the table and put out his hand to his father.

  “Father,” he said.

  “You’re actually a sergeant,” his father said.

  “He missed being best in his class by only two,” Ursula said, with quiet pride.

  Porter Craig saw that his son’s hand had dropped protectively to the girl’s shoulder. He reflected that he was glad that he had followed his urge to approve of the girl. To do otherwise, to judge by the look in Geoff’s eyes, would have been futile.

  “Don’t order anything,” he said. “We’re going home.”

  “Don’t look so distressed,” Lowell said. “Oddly enough, your father can handle your mother. And never forget the Green Beret psalm.”

  Geoff chuckled. Ursula looked uncomfortable.

  “I’m afraid to ask what that is,” Porter Craig said, “but curiosity overwhelms me.”

  “‘For yea,’” Colonel Lowell quoted, “‘tho I walk in the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil…””

  “‘…for I,’” Sergeant Craig joined in, “‘am the meanest sonofabitch in the valley.’”

  “That’s terrible,” Barbara Gillis and Ursula Wagner said, almost in chorus.

  Sergeant Craig and Colonel Lowell, very pleased with themselves, laughed happily.

  “What we’re going to do now,” Porter Craig said, “is go over to the apartment.”

  “You all go ahead,” Barbara Gillis said. “I don’t want to intrude.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Geoff said.

  “Craig and I will be over in a while,” Barbara said. “For one thing, we have to check out of here, and really, I don’t think—”

  “We have fourteen rooms,” Porter Craig said. “There is absolutely no reason for you to be in a hotel in the first place.”

  “I’m not even sure Craig and I will be staying over,” Barbara Gillis said firmly. “The only thing I am sure about is that I don’t belong there when you spring this on Geoff’s mother.”

  “Neither do I,” Craig said. “You go ahead. We’ll have a drink, check out, and take a cab over there in an hour or so.”

  “If you insist,” Porter Craig said.

  “I leave the coat,” Ursula said.

  “Take the coat,” Craig said.

  “I don’t want to lose it,”
she said.

  “Sit on it,” Lowell said. “Go!”

  When they were gone, he looked across the table at Barbara Gillis.

  “I owe you one,” he said.

  “Don’t be silly,” she said.

  “I don’t think we could have carried this off without you.”

  “He is not half as bad as you said he was,” Barbara said.

  “I mean loaning her the clothes and holding her hand. She was scared out of her skin.”

  “If I was able to help, I’m glad. They’re sweet, and I have the feeling they’ll make it.”

  “Yeah, I think they will,” he said.

  The waiter appeared.

  “Decision time,” Lowell said.

  “Order one of the same for me,” Barbara said.

  “If I have another, I won’t be able to fly,” Lowell said. “Which means we’ll have to spend the night.”

  “Have another, you’re entitled, Cupid. I thought you handled the whole thing very well.”

  Lowell gestured for another drink.

  “Porter has a very nice apartment,” Lowell said, “with a lovely view of the reservoir. If the moon is full, we can watch muggings in the park.”

  “I don’t think we should stay in their apartment,” Barbara said.

  “Why not?” he asked. “It’s really quite nice. And Geoff’s mother, while a little flaky, isn’t really all that bad.”

  “A girl has to draw the line somewhere,” Barbara said.

  “Between what and what?”

  “A suite in the Plaza is one thing,” Barbara Gillis said. “Somebody’s apartment is something else.”

  “Aware that I have a lewd and lascivious mind,” Lowell said, “I’m very much afraid I have put a meaning to you that you don’t have in mind.”

  “I have in mind room service and champagne and cavorting around in my birthday suit,” Barbara Gillis said. “Since you didn’t ask, I thought I had better.”

  She stood up.

  “Are you coming, Craig? Or do I still frighten you?”

  She walked away from the table.

  He took money from his pocket, dropped it on the table, and ran after her. He caught up with her at the door, and they walked hand in hand to the elevators.

  (Seven)

  21-29 Sven-Hedin Strasse

  Lichtefelde-West

  West Berlin

  0740 Hours, 9 March 1962

  The message came in with the first batch of the day’s routines, and it was the first of these, and thus the first through the decryption process, and thus the first routine that came to the station commander’s attention. He habitually read the routines while he was having breakfast, before going to his office for the rest. The station commander read it, raised his eyebrows, and ordered its immediate delivery.

  “I mean now; don’t just put it in his box.”

  The communications officer walked across the dining room and handed Staff Sergeant Wagner the teleprinter printout.

  CIA LANGLEY 1915ZULU 8MAR62

  ROUTINE ENCRYPTED

  STATION COMMANDER FOXTROT

  DIRECTION DEPUTY DIRECTOR DELIVER FOLLOWING SOONEST S/

  SGT

  KARL-HEINZ WAGNER, USA

  SERGEANT GEOFFREY CRAIG AND URSULA MARRIED THIRTY MINUTES AGO NEW YORK CITY PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL SERVICE VESTRY SAINT BARTHOLOMEW’S CHURCH. DEPARTED IMMEDIATELY FOR STUDENT DETACHMENT USA ENGINEER SCHOOL FT BELVOIR VIRGINIA. THEY WILL ATTEMPT TELEPHONE TOMORROW. NICE WEDDING.

  REGARDS. S. T. FELTER

  LTCOL INF

  His first reaction was rage, then despair.

  They were both children, too young to get married.

  How the hell were they going to feed themselves?

  He decided he would have to think this thing through, but that he could not think it through here in the compound, which was both American and intelligence. He did not feel at all at home here.

  He went to his action officer and asked permission to take the morning off, telling him that his work was all done.

  “Go ahead, sure. Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know, for a walk.”

  “It’s cold. Too cold to walk. Take a car. If you don’t have anything better to do, go have a look at the wall.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Wear your uniform, Karl,” his action officer said.

  That was an order. The suggestion to take a car (which meant one of the chauffeured Opel Kapitans with which the station was generously equipped) to go have a look at the wall was a suggestion.

  “Yes, sir,” he said.

  He was in civilian clothing, a shirt and trousers and a sweater. He could wear whatever he wanted within the compound, but if he stepped out of the compound, he was to be in uniform. There was some sort of unwritten protocol between the West and the East that personnel in uniform were not to be molested in any way so long as they were on their side of the border. They were fair game in civilian clothing.

  He had worn his uniform very rarely since he had been in Berlin, because he had rarely left the compound. He had gone to the PX at Truman Hall and to the American movies, but mostly he had stayed in the compound or gone no farther than the gast haus on the corner, which was unofficially thought of as part of the Sven-Hedin Strasse compound and where he could go in his civilian clothing.

  What they had wanted of him was what they had said they wanted of him: technical information about the wall. He had no idea why they wanted what they did, but he gave them as much information as he could from his own memory and from examination of an incredible number of photographs.

  He had not gone to see the wall, although they wanted him to go see it. They told him he was absolutely safe as long as he wore his uniform.

  “We’re better snatchers than they are, Karl,” his action officer told him. “They like the agreement. And you’re really not that important to them.”

  They thought he was afraid, and in a way he was, but that wasn’t the reason he hadn’t gone to see the wall. They wanted him to go to jog his memory, but they were wrong about that. He had seen more of the wall on Sven-Hedin Strasse by photograph than he had seen when he had helped build it.

  The reason he hadn’t gone to see the wall was that he didn’t want to see the wall. He thought it would trigger some kind of reaction—he didn’t know exactly what—that he didn’t want to have. He might, he thought, see someone he knew on the other side of the wall, one of his men (although his men, contaminated, had probably been sent far from Berlin the day after he’d crossed into West Berlin) or an officer that he had known, who would see that he had violated his oath and was working for the Amis.

  He had been given a small but comfortable room on the top floor of the main building. He climbed the stairs and stripped off his civilian clothing and put on his uniform.

  When he started out of the compound on foot, one of the Opel Kapitans started its engine and came after him.

  “You’re authorized a car,” the driver said to him in German, “I was told.”

  He got in. It was easier to give in than to argue with the driver.

  “Where do we go?”

  “Go to the wall,” Karl-Heinz Wagner heard himself say, “by the Brandenburg Gate.”

  As the Kapitan went down Onkle Tom Aliee (named for the American Civil War Schwartze) and onto Clay Aliee (named for the American general, Lucius D. Clay, whom the Berliners believed had kept them from being swept behind the Iron Curtain), he told himself that if he got the wall business out of the way once and for all, then his mind would be clear to deal with the immediate problem of Ursula and Geoff getting married and thus proving their mutual insanity.

  Clay Alice turned into Hohenzollern Damm, named after the ex-royal and imperial family, and then they rolled past the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedacht, the ruins of the church left in ruins as a memorial, and wound up on the Strasse des 17. Juni.

  He knew this area quite well on a map but much less so on paper. He became more and more int
erested in what was going on than he thought he would be. With the Brandenburg Gate directly ahead, the Red Army War Memorial should be right about here.

  “Stop!” he told the driver.

  “You’re going to look at the Russians?” the driver asked, and spat.

  Karl-Heinz walked across the street and looked at the Russian soldiers marching stiffly and with great precision back and forth in front of the monument.

  One part of his mind (he had marched with that stiff-legged step) approved. They could march very well. And then he had an odd thought: What else could they do?

  He watched them for ten minutes, until he became aware that he was very cold, and then he got back in the car and had himself driven to the wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate.

  “Is there some way we can follow the wall?”

  “You tell me where you want to go, we’ll go there.”

  “Find someplace you can drive along the wall,” Karl-Heinz ordered.

  Five minutes later he ordered the driver to stop again. They had come to an observation platform where the wall formed a V near Leipziger Strasse in East Berlin.

  There was a sign on the rough wooden stairs saying it was off limits except to authorized military personnel.

  He climbed over the light chain, telling himself he was both American military personnel and authorized. His action officer had told him to have a look at the wall. And that’s what he was doing.

  He had climbed to the top of the platform before he realized that was the kind of thinking he would expect from Geoff, not from himself. Geoff—my brother-in-law, Ursula’s husband, but at least he married her in a church. American GI—type thinking. Unless it is specifically forbidden, it’s authorized.

  He had been trained in the other way. Unless it was specifically authorized, it was forbidden.

  He looked down at Leipziger Strasse, and saw with his eyes the minefield he had seen in photographs late last night and would see again late tonight.

  What a stinking thing to do!

  No wonder the Americans weren’t enraged. They couldn’t believe it. He had trouble believing it, and he had helped draw the minefield plans.

  He looked across the wall at an East German observation tower.

  They were looking at him through binoculars.

  There was nothing really wrong with Geoff. He was really a nice fellow, and he would be kind to Ursula, and he had seen it coming, he might as well admit that. He should not have been surprised.