Empire and Honor

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Empire and Honor Page 39

by W. E. B Griffin


  “You look,” she said, “like a high school sophomore wearing your big brother’s clothes about to go on a big date where you will try to seduce a cheerleader.”

  “Thank you very much.”

  “Worse, you’re still acting like a high school sophomore.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “I saw the way you looked at her, and I saw the way she looked at you. You better hope my mother didn’t.”

  “Your mother didn’t what?”

  “See the way you were looking at Frau von Wachtstein.”

  “How was I looking at Frau von Wachtstein?”

  “The way you looked at Miss Schenck.”

  “At who?”

  “Miss Schenck. The librarian. Don’t try to tell me you’ve forgotten her.”

  “No, I haven’t forgotten her,” Jimmy admitted, as he remembered.

  “The year you got yourself expelled from Saint Mark’s and came home to Midland . . .”

  “I remember that, too.”

  “. . . you followed that poor woman around like a suckling calf,” Marjorie, who was just warming up, went on.

  “Poor woman? Where’d you get that?”

  “She was just out of college. The first job she ever had was in the library. And there is this gawky fourteen-year-old with pimples hanging around the library after school every day—”

  “I did not.”

  “Yes, you did. You used to stand beside a bookcase and look at her through it.”

  After a moment, he said, “How the hell did you know that?”

  “Because I was a gawky thirteen-year-old with a crush on you. I used to hang around the library after school every day watching you watch Miss Schenck.”

  “Jesus H. Christ!”

  “But then I grew up. And, apparently, you haven’t. I told you, I saw the way you were looking at Frau von Wachtstein, and the way she was looking at you.”

  “How was she looking at me?”

  “As if she was terrified you were going to embarrass her by saying or doing something stupid. Or that people would see that suckling-calf look on your stupid face and wonder what she’d done to encourage you.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about—”

  He stopped mid-sentence.

  Frade had come back into the wardrobe.

  “What have I interrupted here?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” they both said, on top of each other.

  “Yeah. Like hell!”

  He let that sink in a moment, and then went on: “The maps and the list of rendezvous points are here. Let’s go, Jimmy.”

  [SEVEN]

  “Lieutenant, the floor—or at least the table—is yours,” Frade said. “This had better not be a waste of everybody’s time.”

  Sitting around the table were General Martín, Cletus Marcus Howell, Clete, Dorotea, von Wachtstein, von Dattenberg, Major Habanzo, and Boltitz.

  Clete’s pissed about something, Jimmy thought.

  God knows what, but what I have to do is kiss his ass, not antagonize him.

  “Sir,” Jimmy said politely, “I hope this won’t be a waste of anybody’s time.”

  “Okay then, hotshot,” Frade said. “Explain how you’ve broken the Kriegsmarine Code.”

  “Sir, I already have part of it. All I have to do is fill in the blanks.”

  “Start from scratch. I’m a little slow, and I don’t think I’m the only one who is.”

  “From scratch, sir?”

  “From scratch, Lieutenant.”

  “Yes, sir. Positions are given in east and west longitude, which means either east or west of Greenwich, England. They are also given in north and south longitude, which means north or south of the equator. They’re written like this.”

  He held up a page from the list of rendezvous points that had been removed from the U-405 safe so that everybody around the table could see it. It was a simple document.

  Rubber-stamped in red at the top and bottom of the page was GEHEIMST (“Top Secret”). The page had columns of blocks, and in the blocks were numbers giving a position—for example, S54.62785, W68.42647. There were twenty such blocks on the page.

  “Sir, there are five pages like this, a total of one hundred position blocks, one of which is the intended landfall of U-234,” Cronley said.

  “Hidden by a code which we don’t have,” Frade said.

  “Let him finish, Cletus!” General Martín ordered.

  Frade impatiently gestured, Well, go on . . .

  Cronley nodded as he thought, What the hell did I do?

  What the hell’s bothering Clete?

  He continued: “Hidden by a code we don’t have, but I don’t think we need. What’s missing on this list is the correct longitude and latitude numbers. S54, for south longitude, for example, and W68, for west latitude, are dummy figures—they don’t mean anything.

  “But the rest of one of those one hundred blocks, the five digits after the big number are right on the money. . . . The first two are called minutes and seconds. One minute means one-sixtieth of a degree, and one second means one-sixtieth of a minute. I have no idea what the last three digits are called, but they break down the same way.”

  “I’m not following you,” Frade said coldly. “Are you sure you know what you’re talking about?”

  “I think I’m starting to,” Martín said thoughtfully. “Go on.”

  “Yes, sir. Sir, if you add the correct figures for south longitude and west latitude to one of those blocks, you’ll have the intended landfall, probably within a hundred meters. Maybe two hundred meters. But close. I’m sure the Germans, what with being German, plotted it very carefully.”

  “And all we have to do is connect the correct longitude and latitude in degrees with the minutes and seconds in one of the coded blocks, correct?” Martín said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And how do we know the correct longitude and latitude is in fact correct?” Clete asked sarcastically.

  Up yours, Clete!

  “We already have it. If Karl’s friend in Bremen was telling him the truth.”

  “I’m sure he was,” Boltitz said.

  “The landfall is somewhere around here, at the mouth of the Magellan Strait,” Jimmy said, putting his finger on the map. “And the map should give us the correct longitude and latitude.”

  Clete looked at the map, then at Jimmy.

  After a long moment, he announced: “If you’re right about this, I will publicly admit you’re a lot smarter than you look. How the hell did you figure this out?”

  It’s a simple problem in logic, Colonel, sir, which posed no problem for me once I gave it a little thought, Colonel, sir.

  “Sir, it’s the way Gehlen’s people set up rendezvous points in Russia for their agents. On the Steppes.”

  “And how do you know that?” Frade asked.

  “Sir, at Kloster Grünau I got pretty close to a Gehlen officer, Ludwig Mannberg. He used to be a colonel. He showed me how it worked.”

  “And why are you so sure this former colonel isn’t pulling your chain, Lieutenant?” Frade asked.

  How are you so sure Boltitz’s guy in Bremen isn’t pulling his chain?

  And I didn’t hear you ask him about that.

  “Sir, I believe Oberst Mannberg can be trusted.”

  And you better trust Oberst Mannberg, too.

  He’s the source of the dossiers on the Nazis that von Dattenberg brought here.

  “That doesn’t answer my question,” Frade said.

  “Well, sir, his mother is a Strasbourgerin, like mine. Sons of Strasbourgerins don’t lie to each other.”

  “Spare me your wiseass wit.”

  “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

  “Okay, wiseass, put your theory to the test. What does the map say?”

  “I hope this is the one with the lowest scale,” Cronley said, looking for the legend. “Or is it the largest? The one that shows the finest details. And frankly,
I really wish I had German maps.”

  “Those are the next best thing to German maps,” General Martín said proudly. “The Wehrmacht sent their army map people here to teach the Ejército Argentino military mapmaking. But there’s one in that stack that may be just what you’re looking for.”

  Martín went through the stack of maps, selected one, and spread it out on the table.

  There was no sign of civilization on the map in the area just north of the mouth of the Magellan Strait and the international border—south of which was Chilean territory—except Argentine National Route 3 and an unnamed, unpaved road to the east of it.

  Route 3 was sixty kilometers from the coast. The unnamed, unpaved road ran off Route 3 parallel to the coast, about thirty kilometers from it to a dot on the map identified as Estancia Condor.

  Jimmy wondered what could possibly be grown on an estancia so isolated and so close to Antarctica but decided this wasn’t the time to ask.

  From the estancia the unnamed road went a few kilometers farther south, until it was close to the international border, went toward the coast parallel to the border for twenty kilometers or so, and then turned northeast until it reached a point maybe eight kilometers from the coast. After that, it turned just about dead south and continued south until it reached the border, then due east until it reached the coast, where it made a final dead south turn until it ended right at the coast.

  Jimmy put his finger on the map there and looked at Willi von Dattenberg.

  “Too close, I think,” Jimmy said.

  “Too obvious,” von Dattenberg agreed. “And there would be vessels headed for the Magellan Strait.”

  “But here,” Jimmy said, laying his finger on the coast dead east of where the unnamed road came closest before turning south.

  “See what you come up with,” von Dattenberg said.

  Jimmy located lines on the map identifying south latitude, then one in particular.

  “See if you can find in south latitude point zero five something,” Jimmy ordered.

  Von Dattenberg went down the row of positions on page one and found nothing. He said so, and then went down the row of positions on page two, found nothing, said so again, and turned to page three. Near the bottom of page three, he stopped moving his finger.

  “I have a decimal zero five three nine nine,” he said.

  “And the longitude?” Jimmy asked, very softly.

  “Decimal six three zero eight eight.”

  “Bingo,” Jimmy said. He put his finger on the map. “Right in here.”

  “You’re telling me you found it?” Martín asked softly, as Frade asked incredulously, sarcastically, on top of him, “You’re telling me you found it?”

  “In my judgment, General,” von Dattenberg said, looking from the map back to the sheet, “Lieutenant Cronley has established the landfall ordered for U-234 at 52.05399 degrees south latitude, 58.63088 degrees west longitude.”

  He looked to where Jimmy pointed on the map.

  “Right there,” he said.

  “Operative phrase ‘the landfall ordered for U-234,’” Frade said. “We don’t know that the submarine even got through the English Channel, much less here.”

  “In that case, I’d like proof that it didn’t,” General Martín said. “How do we get that?”

  “Bernardo,” Frade said, “you know as well as I do that proving a negative is just about impossible.”

  “Is my opinion welcome?” von Dattenberg asked.

  “Let’s have it,” Frade said.

  “Despite what I said before—I’ve had a little time to rethink it—I would suggest you proceed on the premise that U-234 did make it here and to the landfall Cronley has come up with.”

  “What made you change your mind?” Frade asked.

  “I was following the scenario that U-234 was trying to go to Japan. There is another credible scenario—two others. I suggest that Kapitän Schneider, who had as much experience coming here and unloading cargo and personnel as I do, knew before sailing from Narvik that he couldn’t make Japan and decided on his own to come here directly. Or that the Kriegsmarine, knowing that the SS order to go to Japan was impossible to obey, quietly told Schneider he was to ignore it, or perhaps just that he was authorized, once under way, to decide that for himself.”

  “You think he made it here, in other words?” Martín asked.

  “Either here or to South Africa,” von Dattenberg said. “What I’m suggesting, General, is that it would be worth the effort to see if he did come here.”

  “Put yourself in this guy’s shoes, Willi,” Frade said. “What’s his name?”

  “Schneider, Alois Schneider.”

  “Put yourself in Schneider’s shoes. You’re commanding U-234 and decide there’s no way you can make it to Japan. Then what?”

  “Then I would come here.”

  “And then what? Just unload everything in the middle of nowhere?”

  “I see where you’re going,” von Dattenberg said. “He would have to have help from shore. He would be running very low on fuel and rations. He was probably—almost certainly—under orders to scuttle the boat, as was I.

  “My orders were to scuttle U-405 ‘on the high seas no closer than twenty-four hours full surface speed sailing time from discharge point,’ and his probably were the same. And Alois would be no more willing—less willing—to load his crew onto rubber boats on the high seas that close to the Antarctic than I was to scuttle U-405 under similar, if less hazardous, conditions.”

  “What you’re saying,” Martín asked, “is that if he did make this landfall and discharged his cargo—(a) that he could not do so without assistance from the shore, and (b) that if he scuttled his submarine, it would be close enough to shore so that his crew could make it safely to shore?”

  “There’s no question he’d have to have people onshore,” Frade said. “He just couldn’t put his crew ashore in the middle of nowhere.”

  “What are you thinking, Cletus?” Martín asked.

  “The Tenth Mountain Regiment. Argentina’s own SS Regiment.”

  “Sí,” Martín agreed.

  “May I ask what that is?” Jimmy asked.

  Martín held up his index finger in a be patient gesture.

  “They have the equipment to operate in snow and ice,” Martín said.

  “And experience in surreptitiously unloading submarines,” Frade picked up, then asked, “Who replaced el Coronel Schmidt?”

  “After you shot him, you mean?” Martín answered. “El Coronel Edmundo Wattersly. But after Wattersly had the regiment under control, President Farrell brought him back to Buenos Aires.”

  “Who took his place?”

  “President Farrell sent me to San Martín de los Andes to make sure he could rely on the regiment in the future,” Martín said.

  “That Wattersly had cleaned it up, you mean?” Frade asked.

  Martín nodded. “And he had. And I told the president he had, and he brought Wattersly back to Buenos Aires.”

  “And gave the regiment to who?”

  “El Coronel Juan Torrez, Don Cletus,” Major Habanzo furnished. “A good man. Who cleaned up the regiment further.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Frade said.

  “Excuse me?” Habanzo asked.

  “I was hoping there’d be some officers left who could tell us if the regiment took one of its famous road marches down south.”

  “Probably not,” Martín said. “But I’ll bet there are soldiers who would know, and I would be surprised if Suboficial Mayor Rodríguez, Retired, would have trouble finding them.”

  “What did Wattersly—or el Coronel Torrez—do with the Tenth’s suboficial mayor, Martinez?” Clete asked.

  “After you shot Schmidt, you mean?”

  Frade nodded.

  “Nothing. We all knew how helpful he’d been after you shot Schmidt,” Martín said. “That he took the regiment back to San Martín de los Andes.”

  “Bernardo,”
Frade said, “Martinez and Enrico are old buddies. Martinez tipped us off when the Tenth Mountain was headed to shoot up my place in Tandil.”

  “Well, getting Rodríguez together with Martinez would seem the solution to that problem,” Martín said. “But there are others.”

  “May I ask a question?” Cronley asked.

  Frade made a face, then considered the request a moment and nodded.

  “How hard would it be to send people down there? I mean, maybe they could find some sign that a submarine had landed. From what I’ve heard, there’s absolutely nothing down there for hundreds of miles except this farm, or whatever it is.”

  “Estancia Condor,” Major Habanzo furnished.

  “What the hell does Estancia Condor grow?” Cronley asked. “If it’s all ice and snow down there?”

  “I think it started, years and years ago, as a whaling station,” Martín said. “I don’t really know what I’m talking about, but I think I heard somewhere that it’s still sort of a frigorifico for seals. I mean, they kill the seals on the water, or the shore, and process the meat there.”

  “There are people at this place?” Frade asked.

  “A few people and a detachment of soldiers to operate the radio relay station and service the lighthouses,” Habanzo said.

  “And they have reported no sighting of a submarine? Or even anything out of the ordinary?” Frade asked.

  “Nothing,” Martín said. “And isn’t that interesting?”

  “Possible scenarios?” Frade asked. “Anyone?”

  There was no response.

  “Then let’s see what we have,” Martín said. “Let’s start with ‘Mountain Troops’ being something of a misnomer. We think of the Tenth repelling a Chilean invasion of Argentina in the Andes. And that was their original mission. And they are trained and equipped to fight in the Andes, which means, most of the year, in ice and snow—”

  “Which is what we have in the landfall,” Frade interjected.

  Martín nodded. “So to whom would the Edificio Libertador turn if some military action—and operating a radio relay station qualifies as a military action—was necessary in that area of Argentina? The regiment equipped to operate in frigid conditions.”

  Martín thought for a moment, then finished: “So, for the sake of argument, let us presume the operators of the radio relay station on Estancia Condor are from the Signals Company of the Tenth Mountain.”

 

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