W.E.B. Griffin - Victory and Honor

Dulles met Frade’s eyes for a moment.

Clete thought: He’s talking about that superbomb, that “atomic” bomb!

“. . . in the near term, he may decide the OSS is no longer needed.”

Schultz was not satisfied with that answer.

“Time frame?” he pursued.

“From tomorrow to possibly as late as October or November. Sorry, Jefe, that’s really the best I can do.”

“And what are our priorities during that time?”

“Right now there are two. I’m not sure which priority is most important; both could be. Immediately, I would lean toward protecting the Gehlen operation. Because if President Truman hears about it—especially via Treasury Secretary Morgenthau—he will very likely order that the OSS be shut down that instant. And then probably order the arrest of everybody concerned with the Gehlen operation.

“I think that alone explains the absolute necessity for keeping it a secret. But let me express further how important it is: A moment ago, I said that you could not take out Colonel Flowers despite his having proven to be a danger to the OSS. That said, if Colonel Flowers were to learn of the Gehlen operation, and was about to pass what he had learned, or even thinks he had learned, on to anyone—”

“Then we could shoot him?” Schultz interrupted.

“That’s a very tough call to make, Jefe, and we would have to be absolutely sure the Gehlen operation was in imminent danger of being compromised. But . . .”

“Understood,” Schultz said, nodding.

Dulles added, “Colonel Frade, I think it important that you understand that.”

“I understand,” Clete said. “And what I want everyone else to understand is that we are not going to take out Colonel Flowers until I am sure we have to. I’ll make that decision. Everybody got that?”

There were nods and mumbles of “Got it” and “Okay.”

“Not good enough,” Clete said. “You will respond, Mr. Schultz, by saying, ‘Aye, aye, sir.’ Army personnel will respond by saying, ‘Yes, sir. I understand the order.’”

There was something in the tone of his voice that discouraged either wisecracks or insubordination.

“Aye, aye, sir,” Schultz said.

This was followed by multiple, overlapping, replies of “Yes, sir, I understand the order.”

“Thank you,” Frade said. “Please continue, Mr. Dulles.”

“The second problem falls under what I mentioned earlier,” Dulles said, “about the dangers unique to the end of a war. There has been a great deal of confusion—and, at times, outright chaos—leading up to the Germans agreeing to surrender unconditionally. And now afterward. Accordingly, the intelligence that we have, and continue to gather, is all over the chart. Some of it is solid and reliable. And some is so wild that it boggles the mind.”

“Let’s hear the wild stuff,” Pelosi said.

Schultz, sitting next to Pelosi, looked at him and chimed in: “Yeah, I’d like to hear something worse than the news that we’re being disbanded and taken over by our worst nightmare.”

There were a couple chuckles.

“I’ll save the outrageous for later,” Dulles said. “But I will say now that it fits with some of what you’ve already dealt with—specifically the Phoenix program, which of course we know existed and therefore lends some credibility to the wildest of scenarios. And it shares the common thread of U-boats still at sea—possibly as many as sixty submarines, but maybe only twenty. Our intelligence, as I said, is all over the chart. We know a great deal about some of these subs, almost nothing about others. And knowing nothing means we haven’t the first idea if their crews plan to follow orders to surrender their vessels and crews—or if they have their own plans, either missions meant to be executed at war’s end, or perhaps instances of every man for himself—or, in this case, every vessel for itself. Of all these U-boats, however, we are particularly interested in two, U-234 and U-977.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Dulles,” Boltitz interrupted. “With regard to U-234, if memory serves, she’s a Type XB U-boot , a minelayer pressed into service as a cargo carrier—long range, able to cover more than eighteen thousand nautical miles if running on the surface. And I know that U-977 is a Type VIIC.”

Dulles grinned. “I take it you have a connection with submarines, Karl?”

Boltitz nodded. “Peter and I. We know Kapitänleutnant Wilhelm von Dattenberg well. He was master of U-405, also a VIIC.”

“The last information I have,” Dulles said, “is that von Dattenberg still is her captain. How do you two know him?”

Von Wachtstein offered: “Peter and I were together in school at Philipps University in Marburg an der Lahn.”

“And,” Boltitz added, “I served five patrols under von Dattenberg.”

“I wasn’t aware that you had been a submarine officer, Karl,” Dulles said.

“I went from U-boots to Admiral Canaris’s staff. I thought at the time that my father was responsible. I now believe Willi von Dattenberg was. I found out that he was—he and his father were—close to Canaris. But if that’s the case, how did Willi escape the SS after the failure at Wolfsschanze?”

“Karl,” Dulles said, his tone almost that of a kindly schoolmaster, “the SS isn’t— wasn’t— nearly as infallible as they would have people believe.”

“I’ve had that thought, too, sir,” Boltitz said. “It’s what permits me to think that the possibility my father may have escaped their net isn’t for certain pissing into the wind.”

“We all devoutly pray the same, and that you’re standing at the rail with your back to the wind,” Dulles said. “I think your submarine experience may prove to be quite valuable. It might well be something Colonel Frade’s defense counsel can use when he is court-martialed for breaking you out of Fort Hunt.”

This produced a round of chuckles and laughter.

“All right,” Dulles went on, “I was about to say, ‘Talking about submarines, starting at the beginning,’ but I just realized I don’t know where the beginning is. So, starting with what we do know: We know with some certainty that when Grand Admiral Doenitz issued the cease hostilities order on May fourth, sixty-three U-boats were at sea. Five of them complied with their orders to hoist a black flag and proceed to an enemy port to surrender, or to a neutral port to be interned.

“We have unreliable information that forty-one of them have been scuttled by their crews, possibly to prevent the capture of whatever may be onboard in something called Operation Deadlight. We don’t know how many were actually sunk, and we have no boat identification.

“Assuming these subs were either surrendered and/or sunk, that means forty-six from sixty-three leaves us seventeen U-boats unaccounted for.

“These could be part of another intel report—one of somewhat dubious reliability—that says a total of twenty submarines sailed from ports in Norway, primarily Bergen , for Argentina , between May first and May sixth.”

“That many?” Frade said. “And we know nothing about them?”

Dulles shook his head. “Not really. We have no identification of which boats are supposed to have done this. And if true, that’s quite a sizable operation.

“But what we do know with some certainty is that U-234 sailed from Narvik on April sixteenth, two weeks before these twenty are supposed to have headed for Argentina. The mission of U-234 was a special one”—he glanced at Karl—“and I think it may explain the presence of Vizeadmiral Boltitz in Norway.”

“Mr. Dulles, can you elaborate on that?” Karl said.

“We suspect your father may have gone there to take control of the U-boat—and particularly its cargo—to keep her from sailing after the bomb took out Hitler.”