by Dan Simmons
Eventually the Coast Guard did send Cullen and a patrol back to check on things. The agents were gone and the submarine had escaped, but they found signs of recent digging in the dunes and excavated a cache of high explosives, blasting caps, timers, fuses, and incendiary devices in the form of gift pen-and-pencil sets. There were also crates of German uniforms, brandy, and cigarettes. The Coast Guard officials responded to their years of training, put their heads together, and decided that these details were inconclusive. They would wait to report them.
Later that same day, the FBI learned of the landing from a Long Island police chief who had been watching the Coast Guard dig things up all morning. By mid-afternoon, the Bureau had sprung into action, sending half a dozen crack special agents to the beach to carry out a “discreet surveillance.” Their discreet surveillance of the area was joined by that of approximately thirty civilians who had dragged beach chairs out to the excavation site to watch the Coast Guard finish its digging.
Meanwhile, the four German agents had taken the train to New York City and split into two pairs. They proceeded to get expensive hotel rooms and to eat expensive lunches. That same day, Director Hoover ordered a news blackout and put all of the FBI’s field offices on full alert on what turned out to be the largest manhunt in the Bureau’s history. But the Abwehr agents had disappeared without a trace.
“This,” explained Delgado later, “is where it really gets good.”
Two of the German agents—the leader, George John Dasch, and his partner, Ernst Peter Burger—had decided independently that they were not going through with their mission. Dasch had lived in the United States for almost twenty years before being enlisted by the Abwehr, and apparently his loyalty to Germany was not rock solid. Burger had just decided to take the $84,000 Admiral Canaris had provided for their mission and to make a run for it. Each had secretly decided to kill the other if he did not agree to the betrayal of the Fatherland.
The two men talked it over. Dasch took the money and went out to call the Bureau’s New York field office to turn himself and his partner in. The special agent taking calls that day listened to Dasch’s detailed report of their Long Island landing, of their mission of sabotage, and of the $84,000 they were willing to turn over to the FBI if someone would come and pick them up.
“Yeah,” said the special agent, “and yesterday Napoleon called.” And he hung up on Dasch.
Insulted but not discouraged, Abwehr agent George John Dasch packed the money in a suitcase and took a train to Washington so that he could meet personally with J. Edgar Hoover. After a long afternoon at the Justice Department of being sent from one office to another, Dasch finally was given five minutes with D. M. “Mickey” Ladd. Evidently, Ladd was as unimpressed as the New York field office agent had been and was in the process of leading Dasch to the door when the German agent dumped his suitcase of money all over Ladd’s floor.
“Holy cow,” J. Edgar Hoover’s third-most-important assistant and the chief of the Domestic Intelligence Division is reported to have said. “Is this shit real?”
The Bureau interrogated Dasch for eight days. During that time, according to Delgado, the German agent spilled his guts about the Abwehr team’s contacts, codes, targets of sabotage, and timetables. When the FBI’s interest waned, Dasch went on to give extra information about Nazi war production, weapons’ plans, and details of the submarine that had brought them to Long Island. He also told the Bureau about the Jacksonville, Florida, landing which Hemingway had predicted in his report.
On June 20, Burger and the other two agents in New York were arrested. They also sang like canaries.
Hoover waited for the Florida-dropped saboteurs to meet their assigned contacts in Chicago before he arrested all four of the German agents there on June 27. On the same day, he broke the story to the press, providing no details of how the FBI had broken the case. “That will have to wait,” the FBI spokesman said officially and officiously, “until after the war.” But, as Delgado explained, in a series of memos from Hoover to President Roosevelt and in a series of “off-the-record, background-only” briefings to reporters, Hoover gave the definite impression that a specially trained FBI agent (or agents) had not only infiltrated Abwehr command—and been trained at the same school of sabotage where the hapless German saboteurs had been taught—but had also infiltrated the Gestapo and quite possibly the German High Command. Hoover also let it be understood without ever having to say it aloud that he, personally, had been on-site on Long Island and in Florida to watch the doomed German agents land.
A month and a half after the landings, I asked Delgado what reward George John Dasch and Ernst Peter Burger were going to receive for turning themselves in, betraying their comrades, and providing all of this information to the Bureau.
“The secret trials have already been held,” said Delgado. “All eight were sentenced to death. Six have already been electrocuted in the District of Columbia jail. For their service to the United States, Burger’s sentence was commuted to confinement at hard labor for life, Dasch’s to hard labor for thirty years.”
“The director’s getting sentimental in his old age,” I said. Then I said, “What the hell happened to our reports? Hoover could have been on the beach, waiting for those idiots to come ashore.”
Delgado shrugged, “I just pass on the shit you give me, Lucas. I can’t make anyone read it.”
EVEN THOUGH THE SOUTHERN CROSS would not be repaired and ready for sea until mid-June at the earliest, Hemingway began his patrols in the Pilar in May and began training his crew hard for longer patrols in June. Sometimes Hemingway would bring along his entire crew—his “executive officer,” Winston Guest; first mate and cook Fuentes; Sinsky the Sailor, Juan Dunabeitia; Patchi Ibarlucia; the exiled (and, I thought, unreliable) ex-Barcelona waiter Fernando Mesa; Roberto Herrera; the U.S. Marine radio operator Don Saxon; and me.
I began learning the landmarks that all fishermen use to find their way. For us, an old house on the coastline near Cojímar was the sign that we were reaching the Hondón de Cojímar, an underwater abyss that provided excellent fishing. We called our landmark the Pink House or the House of the Priest. From there it was a little more than a nautical mile—what we called “Hemingway’s Mile”—to the shooting range at La Cabaña, a fortress at the mouth of Havana Bay. Hemingway and Ibarlucia assured me that this area was thick with marlin when the current was strong, but we had no time for marlin on these “training cruises.”
The Gulf Stream flows by Havana in an easterly direction, a great river within the sea some sixty miles wide and with a current that varies between 1.2 and 2.4 knots. It picks up speed as the sea deepens, and the water of the Gulf is a much more intense blue than the coastal waters around it. Onto that blue river cruised the garbage scows of Havana, heading to deeper water to dump their reeking heaps of refuse; around and behind those scows flitted hundreds of gulls and dozens of local fishing boats, all after the fish that fed on that garbage. Sometimes Hemingway would take the Pilar out at the end of that convoy—garbage scows, gulls, fishing boats, and us—the survey vessel from the American Museum of Natural History often towing its little auxiliary, the Tin Kid. “Look at it, Lucas,” he called one hot, sunny morning. “The sea gives us everything—life, food, weather, the sound of the surf at night, hurricanes to keep things interesting—and this is how we repay her.” He gestured at the tons of garbage being dumped overboard into the deep blue waters.
I shrugged. The ocean seemed big enough to take a little garbage.
Hemingway designated an area around Cayo Paraíso—Paradise Key—as our training base. We would haul stacks of fuel drums out for target practice. Instead of just dumping the things and practicing with the Thompson submachine guns and other weapons, the writer insisted that we paint faces on the drums—usually shocks of dark hair hanging over evil eyes and a Charlie Chaplin mustache. No wonder the crew began talking about taking out a cargo of “Hitlers” to practice on.
We often tied up
near a buoy there and practiced with hand grenades. Patchi Ibarlucia and Roberto Herrera were the champions at this, throwing the heavy “pineapples” farther than I would have thought possible—and dropping them within a ten-foot circle more often than not.
“Right down the conning tower,” Hemingway would call from the flying bridge, where he was watching the explosions through his field glasses.
There was a half-sunken freighter off the north point of the key, and here Hemingway would run boarding drills, closing quickly to grappling distance of the high side of the wreck, then throwing lines, and all of us boiling up from below decks, submachine guns and grenades in hand, going hand over hand up the ropes and dropping onto the tilted, rotting cabin of the freighter shouting “Hande Hoche!” and other pertinent German phrases until the invisible Nazi crew surrendered without a fight. Sometimes, though, Hemingway would indicate that the crew wanted to resist, so we would lob grenades and dynamite down hatches and then run and slide down the ropes like bloody hell.
On a much more realistic basis, we also conducted lifeboat drills—our lifeboat consisted of an inflatable raft given to us by the U.S. Navy. The raft was bright yellow and its oars were small, foldable, orange paddles. I don’t believe I’ve felt or looked more foolish than during these lifeboat drills—eight or nine of us crowding into that idiotic little raft, paddling like fools against a current dedicated to taking us to Europe, each of us wearing our “scientific sombreros,” wide-brimmed native hats that Hemingway had purchased for Operation Friendless, called “scientific” because everything aboard the Pilar those days was classified as “scientific” because of the stupid sign hanging from our bow.
“So this is where they take us prisoner and shoot us, right, Ernesto?” said Guest during one of these lifeboat drills.
Hemingway had only frowned, but once back aboard the Pilar and drinking cold beers, he showed us something. The document had been typed on thick, rich paper with an impressive letterhead:
OFFICE OF NAVAL ATTACHÉ AND ATTACHÉ FOR AIR AMERICAN EMBASSY HAVANA, CUBA
18 May, 1942
To Whom It May Concern:
While engaged in specimen fishing for the American Museum of Natural History, Sr. Ernest Hemingway, on his motor boat PILAR is making some experiments with radio apparatus which experiments are known to this Agregado Naval, and are known to be arreglado, and not subversive in any way.
[signed]
Hayne D. Boyden
Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps
Agregado Naval de los Estados Unidos, Embajada Americana
“This is our Letter of Marque,” said Hemingway. “Just like in the old days, orders of marque give us a legal status… make us something other than spies and pirates… and will keep the Germans from shooting us if luck goes against us during our attack on their sub. The Germans are bastards, but they’re finicky about legal niceties.”
Hemingway had to explain at greater length what orders of marque were back in the days of sail and buccaneers, and all the while he was explaining, all I could do was stare at the writer and wonder if he actually thought that this piece of paper would save us from 9-millimeter slugs in the backs of our skulls if and when the German submarine crew captured us in the act of trying to sink their boat. Not for the first time, I realized that Sr. Ernest Hemingway not only constructed elaborate fictional worlds for his books but tended to live in them as well.
On some days, just Hemingway and I would take the Pilar out, and these days would be given over to exercises in navigation and radio operation. Hemingway was surprised when I told him that I could operate the coded shortwave radio and the direction-finding equipment. “Hell,” he said, “we didn’t need Don Saxon.”
“You do on those days when you leave me behind to watch the Crook Factory,” I said. Those days were frequent—about every other day—and I would spend them either traveling around to meet with the writer’s “operatives” to receive their reports or sitting in the finca guest house receiving those reports from furtive visitors who arrived through the fields and hedges and departed the same way.
In the days just before the Southern Cross was due to sortie again, the Pilar’s log read like this:
June 12, 1942: Patrolled to Puerta Purgatorio…. Return 5:30.
June 13: Watch from 2 A.M. to 7. Out before daylight, patrolled 12 miles out until dark. In at 8 P.M. Win Guest went to Bahí Honda in auxiliary.
June 14: Watch from 4 A.M. Out at daylight. 7:20. Patrolled until 1 P.M., then anchored inside at 4 P.M. with supplies.
That terse entry that said “Win Guest went to Bahía Honda in auxiliary” concealed some minor drama. Six of us had been aboard that day, searching for subs in an area where Cuban fishermen had reported sightings, when a coded radio message from the U.S. Navy had arrived ordering us to a point to pick up orders. The weather was bad that day—serious storm cells to the north and west of us, the seas rough with five-foot swells—but Hemingway had dispatched Winston Guest and Gregorio Fuentes in the Tin Kid to make the crossing to Bahía Honda, where the secret orders were waiting.
“The weather’s pretty shitty, Ernest,” said Guest, bracing himself on the deck of the Pilar against the slapping waves.
Fuentes had said nothing, but his frown and squint toward the horizon conveyed the same message.
“I don’t give a damn what the weather’s like,” snapped Hemingway. “These are orders, gentlemen. The first since we started this operation. Dead or alive, I want you back here before dawn with those orders.”
The rich man and the leathery Cuban had nodded, packed some water and other provisions, and scrambled into the little boat. Later, they reported that the crossing had been as miserable as they expected and that they had not gotten into Bahía Honda until almost nine that evening, when they met with their American contact and received a sealed envelope in a waterproof pouch. Not opening the envelope—that would be Hemingway’s prerogative—Guest and Fuentes had something cold to eat and slept a couple of hours before beginning the rough trip back to the Pilar.
At sunrise, Hemingway had taken the sealed orders and gone below. It was some time later that he came up and ordered Fuentes and Ibarlucia to weigh anchor.
“We’re going back to Cojímar,” he said, laying a chart across the control board on the main bridge of the Pilar. “Get some provisions. Lucas, you’ll stay at the finca and run the Crook Factory. The rest of us have been ordered… here…” His finger stabbed down on the chart.
All of us craned to see. Hemingway was pointing to a series of keys north of Camagüey, an area off the northern coast of central Cuba where we had not yet patrolled.
“Lucas,” he said during the choppy ride back to port, “besides minding the shop, you’ll have to keep an eye on the Southern Cross and radio us as soon as she shows signs of heading out.”
“Sure,” I said. Whatever the details of his “secret orders” were, Hemingway was not telling me. That did not bother me, but I was sorry that I would be sitting ashore while the Pilar headed off on a real voyage. I liked the sea better than the farm, and as silly as some of our practice runs had been, any time at sea was more real than the Crook Factory business.
DURING THE DAYS the writer was gone, I ran the spy ring, watched over the whore, and thought about Ernest Hemingway. “Find out who he is” had been Director Hoover’s order. I was not sure if I had even begun that process.
But as I waited on land, I thought of the Hemingway I had watched at sea.
There were, I thought, a few things that tested the true nature of a man. Being in a combat situation might be one, but I did not know, for I had never gone to war. My own battles had been private and hidden from sight, over in seconds or minutes, and survival had been the only award given. Dealing with a threat to one’s family was another such test, I thought, but I had never had a family to protect… or to lose—since I’d grown to manhood, at least.
But the sea… this test I understood.
Hundreds of thousands
of men go to sea, but to go out of sight of land in one’s own boat as Hemingway did regularly, this was a more rare and challenging thing. One could see a man’s mettle in whether he treated the sea with indifference or the respect it deserved, and whether his ego blinded him to the true power that surrounded a man or men alone on a wide ocean.
Hemingway treated the sea with an adult’s respect. He’d stand on the flying bridge, his bare legs apart and braced without conscious thought against the pitch and roll of his boat, his bare chest brown with the sun, the dark hair there gleaming with sweat, his face stubbled with two days’ beard, and his eyes hidden in the shadow of the long bill of his cap. Hemingway paid attention to the sea. There was none of his bully-boy bluster when it came to watching the weather, studying the currents and tides, heading in when even a hint of storm darkened the horizon or lowered the barometer, or facing that storm head-on when it was not possible to run for safe harbor. Hemingway never shirked in his boat… never failed to take the dog watch or the early watch, never begged off working in reeking bilge water or covering himself with grease at the engine or bailing shit out of the clogged head by hand if necessity demanded. He did what had to be done.
I had been six years old when my father died in Europe. He left home when I had just turned five. According to the two photographs we had of him, my father looked nothing like Hemingway. The writer was barrel-chested and bandy-legged, with a thick, bullish neck and a big head, while my father was thin and graceful, with long fingers, a narrow face, and skin that grew so dark in the summer that he was regularly called “nigger” by strangers in our Texas port.
But something about Hemingway at sea stirred up my few memories of my father and even more of my uncle. Perhaps the way he braced himself so gracefully or the way he carried on a conversation without ever relaxing his attention from the sea and weather around him. Hemingway was not a graceful man—already I had seen that he was prone to stupid accidents and that his eyesight was poor—but on the Pilar he moved with the grace given only to the true sailor.