The engines of the vintage trucks were noisy even at a slow rate of speed. It could not be helped. They traveled at one mile an hour, slow enough that two men were able to go ahead of the convoy as scouts. The three trucks made it to the point that they could see some moonlight glinting off the vehicles and weapons of the Swiss soldiers across the border. They stopped off the road in a sparse grove of evergreens and waited.
Antoine remained in his truck; and Michaele took point, walking about fifty yards ahead.
Suddenly, Michaele whirled about and ran as fast as he could back the truck, waving his arms frantically. Antoine stopped and turned off the engine.
It took a few minutes for Michaele to get full control of his breathing; then, he blurted out, “An armored car, maybe six men milling around it!”
“Arms?”
“I didn’t see any rifles or machine guns. As best as I could tell, they were taking a leak and just had their side arms. What do you want to do?”
“Grab an FN and two bandoliers of ammunition each. The sound of the truck will send them back to their vehicle for weapons that will almost surely outgun us. We’ll use the only advantage we have—the element of surprise.”
Antoine and Michaele set off at a trot, keeping to the cover of the trees along the roadside so that the moonlight would not allow them to be seen by the enemy. They were able to make it to within fifteen yards before they were almost certain to be detected.
“Crawl,” ordered Antoine. “Take out as many as possible by stealth, then we have to kill all of them even though we make a racket that will be heard for ten miles. Go.”
Michaele cut the throat of an Army PFC who was enjoying a leak and a smoke—breaking one of the cardinal rules of combat by allowing the glowing end of the cigarette to give away his position, and the smoke to interfere with his own vision and concentration.
Antoine encircled another American’s neck with his wiry but still powerful left arm, jerked the man off his feet, and shoved a combat knife into his right costovertebral angle, slicing his renal artery in half and penetrating all the way across his kidney. The sudden pain of the knife thrust is well-known by commandoes to have a paralytic effect which prevents an outcry. Even if the man had lived long enough to shout, Antoine’s arm was so tight around his neck that his vocal cords were compressed; and no sound could leave his throat. Both former SS men were able to kill one more man each, which dispatched one half of the force outside the armored car. They regrouped to whisper.
“The rest are too far away for us to get to them without them raising an alarm,” Antoine whispered. “Let’s split up and get them in a crossfire. Wait for my first burst.”
A burst of three shots from Antoine’s FN killed two American noncoms instantly. Michaele killed the remaining two before they could react. Antoine ran as hard as he could to the armed car and pulled open the door. A startled and terrified private stood in the doorway with a grenade in his hand, apparently the first piece of weaponry he could put his hands on. Antoine shot him three times in the chest; and he fell down in the entryway, dropping his grenade. Two more Americans pushed their Garands out the door, but they were too late. Antoine flipped off the grenade clip and tossed it into the interior of the car. One of the Americans fell to his knees trying to get hold of the grenade before it exploded, but he was too late. All he accomplished was to toss the grenade further back into the interior of the armed car as it exploded. Except for the open door, the car was like a heavy metal drum built to keep the force of the explosion inside. In less of a second, everyone inside was dead and scarcely recognizable as human beings.
No words needed to be spoken. Both Antoine and Michaele turned about and began running for their lives back to their truck. Although the truck was heavy and relatively slow, they had the clear advantages of speed and momentum over any pursuers. The pursuers had the added disadvantage of not knowing exactly where the fighting was taking place. By the time they arrived at the scene of the massacre and got their bearings, they were so far behind the ODESSA truck that all they saw was its taillights as it crossed the border into Switzerland. They also saw a strong force of Swiss Frontier Guards surrounding the truck and lining up at the border. The cardinal rule of the Allies was to respect Swiss neutrality at all costs. They turned back.
To their shock, three large German troop transport trucks bore down on them at breakneck speed, coming from two directions. The Americans leaped out of their Jeep and their Alvis FV603 Saracen and formed a skirmish line behind the lightly armored personnel carrier. Clause Fischer and Willibald Movius bore down on the Jeep and smashed it into the only protection available to the master sergeant and his three PFCs. They did not have a chance. The other two trucks pulled up front to side of the Saracen; and the men rolled out firing their FNs, which forced the Americans to keep their heads down. The close proximity of the ODESSA trucks—and the fact that the Americans were not able to set up machine gun posts—evened the odds considerably.
Fischer and Jungermann were killed by an American grenade, and Jacob Bunnemann died when an American staff sergeant courageously ran around the back end of the Saracen and poured half a dozen rounds from his Bren gun. That sergeant and three other Americans were killed and three were wounded. There was still sporadic but ineffective shooting underway when—to everyone’s profound surprise—a contingent of twenty men in Swiss Frontier Guard uniforms swept across the border and pulled up behind the ODESSA trucks.
The highest ranking American soldier still alive, Corporal Dennis Smith, from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, held up a white flag.
“Come out!” the lead Swiss guardsman said. “Leave your weapons and come out with your hands above your heads.”
There were six men able to stand; two of them had minor wounds.
“We have four men in urgent need of medical attention,” Corporal Smith said as soon as he and his men were assembled in front of the ODESSA operatives, former POWs, and the men in the Swiss uniforms.
The leader of the Swiss looked hard into Antoine’s eyes, then into Michaele’s. The two high-ranking former SS officers—former POWs—did not even have to look at each other. They set their FNs to full automatic then raised them quickly and cut the Americans to pieces by firing first from left to right about navel high then by firing right to left at the level of their nipples. It was over in forty-five seconds.
Antoine gave a head jerk in the direction of Serge and Hugues. They walked around to the back side of the Saracen. Six shots rang out, and the two former 33rd Waffen-Grenadier SS officers, former Soviet, then US, then French POWs returned and took their places in the line of their comrades-in-arms.
The leader of the Swiss contingent stepped up to Antoine and said, “Gruppenführer und Generalleutnant der Waffen-SS Antoine Duvalier, I presume,” and gave a smart Hitlergruss which was promptly and precisely returned.
The Swiss officer repeated his greeting, “Oberführer SS Michaele Dupont, I presume,” and gave a second crisp Hitlergruss to Michaele who responded correctly.
“I am François Caussidière, Swiss national. I believe you have heard of me?”
“We most certainly have, and we owe you our lives. The Fourth Reich will rise out of the ashes; and you will be one of its remembered heroes, Herr Caussidière. It would be difficult to repay you for what you have done and for what you are yet to do today.”
“Ah, Mein Bruder [my brother], that is simple. I get ten percent of what you are bringing in. There are a great many people who have participated and need to be compensated.”
“Fair enough.”
“Then, it is time for us to disappear and to leave it to the Allies to figure out what happened here and how it gets reported.”
François Caussidière was dressed in a cream-colored linen suit, light beige silk shirt, an elegant Chinese red silk tie, and tan lace-up oxfords with a perfect spit-shine despite the lateness of the hour and the inappropriateness of the attire for a potential battle. But then, Caussidière was not a m
an who got his hands dirty—either literally or figuratively. He had other men to handle such things. The contingent of phony Swiss guards was one such example. He was of a fairly uncertain age—probably middle-aged—with only a few gray hairs beginning to show over his temples. His hair was ridiculously well coifed and recently cut for such an outing, but his hair grooming was an ingrained trait he had adopted so that he could always emenate a persona of importance and wealth. He was handsome in a somewhat dissolute way; he was a connoisseur of fine wine and tested more than his share. He had a fine crisp little mustache and a triangular beard the size of one Swiss franc coin located just beneath the margin of his lower lip. He put out an energetic–even theatrical–level of affability and bonhomie. Its lack of genuineness was not lost on Antoine who studied men by watching their eyes. François’s eyes were cold, calculating, and cruel—the equivalent of probing x-rays—devoid of warmth. His smile never made it to his eyes.
All six ODESSA trucks were drivable, and the former POWs and their newly acquired Swiss friends crossed the putative border into Switzerland with lights on and at full speed. When they were thirty miles inside the border, Caussidière signaled a halt in a large truck farm parking lot. The “Swiss” got out of their vehicles, stripped to their skivvies, and put on civilian clothes. The uniforms were placed in a fifty-gallon barrel holding one gallon of gasoline and set ablaze. The convoy pulled into Geneva at ten in the morning. Caussidière took all of the SS officers to a Turkish bath where they were scrubbed clean, shaved, and received gentlemanly haircuts. They were then taken to a fine men’s clothing store Caussidière owned and outfitted them with fine suits, underclothing, stockings, shoes, shirts, ties, cufflinks, tie tacks, and leather belts. No one who knew any of the men two days ago would have recognized the newly transformed Swiss gentlemen.
Their next stop was significantly grander. They arrived by limousine at Rue des Noirettes, 35 Centre des Acacias 1227 Carouge, Genève—the UBS [Union Bank of Switzerland]—where they were met by liveried valets who escorted them into the top floor offices of the principal investment and savings director. Eight men had been left behind at the offices of Ganoush Enterprises International to guard the treasure trucks as a precaution.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
UBS [Union Bank of Switzerland], Rue des Noirettes, 35 Centre des Acacias 1227 Carouge, Genève, Switzerland, September 28, 1954
Not unexpectedly, François Caussidière made the introductions all around. Every man in the meeting was impressed with the man’s prodigious memory. Antoine was in the process of changing his mind about the man facet by facet as each new aspect presented itself. No longer did any of the Gebirgsjägers think of Caussidière as just an opportunist, or just a wanna-be SS officer, or just a fixer, or just the best connected man in the postwar world. He was all of those, and undoubtedly more.
“It is with pleasure that we welcome you to Switzerland and to the UBS,” Liert Beili Amstutz said with a broad smile on his face.
Antoine had to laugh inside because he knew that the man would not have met his glance had he come into the bank looking to deposit a hundred francs to his account, let alone had they met when he and the other Gebirgsjägers were in the gulag, or in Bad Kreuznach—Lager Galgenberg und Bretzenheim PWTE, or in POW camp 63.
He was also amused—and again did not show it—at the fussy little man’s appearance. He was perfect, but in miniature. Amstutz was barely over five feet tall and had tiny hands and feet. His gleaming black wingtip shoes had to have been custom-made. He had a Rolex watch that would have fit a ten-year-old and a discreet but beautiful diamond pinky ring. His suit—presumably custom-tailored—was black as coal and free of any design. It was practically an antiadvertisement for pinstripes or colored flecks in the material. He was wearing a deep maroon tie—bow tie, of course—who would have expected anything any different? He had on a freshly starched French cuff white dress shirt without so much as a spec of dust or a loose crumb from his morning coffee cake. He had a handsome—more accurately, pretty—face, and a fine-boned small one. His eyes were silver-gray and intelligent. He did not miss a thing. His nose was slender and his ears were small and attached close to his head. He had curly black hair which had obviously been cut that morning. Not a hair was out of place. He had a pencil mustache which could have been painted on by an artist and a perfect small triangle of a beard below his thin lower lip.
The effect on Antoine and his men was exactly what Liert Amstutz wanted it to be. They were immediately convinced that the man was the very definition of rectitude and safety. Their money and treasure would be safe with this man.
“Now, gentlemen, I have been given to understand that you are bringing a significant-sized set of commodities which are of rather impressive value.”
“Yes, they do,” Caussidière answered for the SS men, which annoyed Antoine and Michaele.
“Have you a round figure estimate of the value of the commodities you wish to entrust to the care and keeping of the bank?”
Caussidière opened his mouth to answer, but Michaele gave him a look that said, “Don’t.”
“We can do better than that, Herr Amstutz. I have here an itemized list of what is in our possession. Granted, the figures are only estimates; but you will note that the value is considerable. Of course, the bank will have to have professional evaluators give you and us a more precise value.”
When he saw the figure on the well-preserved ledger sheet Michaele had prepared during his travels of the ODESSA trucks, Amstutz allowed a tiny crack to appear in his serious mask of a face. It was what passed for a smile in the austerely careful banker.
“We will be happy to provide security for your goods, gentlemen. Our director of security will discuss where the valuables are being kept for safekeeping, and how to transfer them to the UBS vaults. Our appraisers will evaluate the valuables; and after that analysis is complete, we can meet again to determine the disposition of the total assets according to your wishes. For the moment, the bank’s main question is whether or not you wish to include this set of assets in your already active account; or if you will prefer a separate account.”
Antoine answered, “Include everything in the same account with the same requirements for access, codes and passwords, and withdrawals, please, Herr Amstutz.”
“Very well. Would a meeting in a week suit your convenience?”
“Yes. However, we think it will take somewhat longer to tally the assets. We are prepared to wait in Geneva for the results.”
“Of course. How shall we contact you?”
“Through Herr Caussidière. However, one of our men will be present with the assets at all times, twenty-four hours a day, and at whatever location the assets are kept.”
“Perfectly understandable, General. In addition—per bank policy—our security staff will also be constantly present. Let me assure you that they are most capable, heavily armed, and absolutely serious about their work.”
“Thank you, Herr Amstutz. We look forward to our next meeting.”
Bank security staff escorted Antoine, Michaele, and François Caussidière out of the bank to waiting limousines.
“Where to?” asked Caussidière.
“The valuables,” Michaele answered with authority.
The men who had remained with the trucks asked a flurry of questions, most of which were premature, and for which the answers were usually, “We have to wait for the final tally. That is likely to take some time.”
Michaele set to work to organize a schedule of security responsibilities for the Gebirgsjägers for the next month, planning ahead for a longer-than-expected effort to obtain accurate appraisals in an atmosphere of almost paranoid security. Antoine gave some hard and unpopular orders: no drinking, clubbing, women, phone calls except for the business at hand, and no loose lips. Caussidière arranged for the men to stay in the elegant Hotel des Bergues, the city’s first hotel, founded in 1834 at 33 Quai des Bergues on Lake Geneva. The men laughed out loud when they hear
d the price of a night’s stay and compared the hotel accommodations to their lodgings for the past ten or so years.
Antoine asked Caussidière if he was keeping track of expenses.
“But of course Mein Freund, I am first a Nazi and second a businessman. The accounting will be complete in due time.”
Antoine thought to himself, I can just bet.
The Gebirgsjägers were famished; so, François hurried them to the Domaine de Châteauvieux in the the magnificient Satigny vineyards of the Château de Peney, fifteen minutes west of central Geneva. The ambiance was inspiring: original sixteenth century beams and paneling, cobbled walls, a period fireplace, solid wood furniture, and walls covered with expensive artwork and statuary. The place inspired a much needed atmosphere of calm and tranquility, and everyone expected it to be the perfect setting to enjoy a gourmet dîner. The maître d showed them to the Chef’s Table.
Caussidière addressed the maître d, “For starters bring us the seared force-fed duck liver Foie Gras, green tomato and strawberry chutney, caramel with spices, and mixed plate of shellfish and chanterelles.” He paused for a moment to peruse the menu before continuing. “For the entrée, let us have a family-style arrangement with the baby leek, chinese cabbage in Mount Lebanon saffron threads sauce, Zucchini flowers filled with red-clawed crayfish mousseline in almond and tarragon sauce, Ile-d’Yeu fillet of sole cooked with mushrooms crust, razor shell clams stuffed with frégola and shellfish in pink champagne, poultry jus flavoured with oxalis. It’s a celebration; so, we can be wasteful. Include the gilt head bream and the razor shell clam stuffed with frégola.”
The Charlemagne Murders Page 27