Griffin W.E.B.: Honor Bound 01 - Honor Bound

1st Lieutenant, AGC

Acting Adjutant

"The National Institutes of Health?" Lieutenant Pelosi asked wonderingly.

"Well, I told you it was going to turn out to be something like that," McGuire said. "But maybe, Pelosi, just maybe, I could go to the Colonel and see if he could get you out of this."

"You think he could?" Lieutenant Pelosi asked.

"Well, it wouldn't hurt to ask. I'll have the company clerk type up a letter for you, saying that you've changed your mind."

Lieutenant Pelosi looked at Captain McGuire but said nothing.

They were approaching the small rise. A network of wires leading from the chimney, the buildings, and the tanks came together at a waist-high wall of sandbags. Two noncoms were behind it, guarding a canvas-cased detonator.

"You mean you want to go to the Army detachment at the National Institutes of Health?" McGuire asked incredulously.

"What I want to do now, Sir, is take down that chimney," Pelosi said, walking toward the firing pit. "I don't like leaving primed charges laying around any longer than I have to."

If I don't get him to change his mind now, that's the end of it. He'll be so humiliated that he'll be willing to go to the National Institutes of Health as a ward boy.

The two noncoms came to attention.

"You two join the company on the hill," McGuire ordered, and waited until they had gone.

"You didn't need them anymore, did you, Pelosi?"

"I just wanted to know where the detonator was, Sir. I didn't want one of the men to start doing this himself."

He took the detonator and began to hook wires to it.

"Pelosi, I don't like to see an officer, any officer, but especially one I like and in whom I see a good deal of potential, embarrassed in front of his men."

"Sir?"

"The charges you laid, Lieutenant," McGuire said sternly, "are wholly inadequate. When you twist that handle, all you're going to get is a large bang and a puff of smoke. Now, what I'm going to do is call this off and lay them properly."

Pelosi met his eyes.

"Sir, with respect, when I blow this, the chimney will come down. If it doesn't, I'll withdraw my application for transfer."

Better to have him here, even humiliated, than to humiliate him by relaying his charges and then see him go.

"You have a deal, Lieutenant," McGuire said.

"With your permission, Sir?"

McGuire nodded.

"Fire in the Hole!" Pelosi shouted, in a surprisingly loud voice, repeated the shout twice, and then twisted the handle of the detonator.

McGuire looked at the chimney. As he expected, there was a dull explosion, a faint suggestion of fire, and a small cloud of smoke.

He looked at Pelosi. His face bore a look neither of surprise nor embarrassment, but of satisfaction.

McGuire turned back toward the chimney. As he watched, as if in slow motion, the 150-foot-tall brick chimney shuddered, then seemed to fall in on itself, settling toward the ground erect, in an almost gentle motion.

There were shouts from the men on the rise, and then applause.

McGuire saw now a large cloud of dust at the base of the chimney as it seemed to disintegrate in front of his eyes.

Pelosi had meanwhile connected a second set of wires to the generator. McGuire watched as he twisted the handle. There was now a rumbling roar from the crashing bricks, over which nothing could be heard, and the dust cloud at the base was thick, and nothing could be seen through it.

McGuire wondered if the second set of charges had gone off. But after a moment, he judged that they had, for the cloud at the base of the chimney had grown. Pelosi was already connecting a third set of wires to the detonator.

He waited the forty-five seconds or so necessary for most of the dust cloud on the ground to disperse enough to show everybody that the walls of the buildings were down, shattered into six-foot segments, and lying on their sides. Then he twisted the handle again.

This time there was a series of small explosions. After each, one of the World War I tanks flew into the air, one of them at least fifty feet.

McGuire met Pelosi's eyes as another burst of cheers and applause came from the company on the rise.

"The First Sergeant can collect this gear and get the company back to the Post. You can ride with me, and collect your gear, at the BOQ," Captain McGuire said. "I'll see about getting you a ride into Fayetteville. With a little bit of luck, you might be able to get a berth on the 7:05 to Washington."

Chapter Two

[ONE]

Schloss Wachtstein

Pomerania

8 October 1942

"You are talking treason, you realize," Generalmajor Graf Karl-Friedrich von Wachtstein said softly, without emotion. The short, slight, nearly bald fifty-four-year-old very carefully placed his crystal cognac snifter on the heavy table in his library, men leaned back in his chair, raised his eyes to Generalmajor Dieter von Haas, and waited for his old friend to reply.

"I am talking about saving Germany, Karl," von Haas said.

"The Austrian Corporal is protected by a regiment, each of whose members devoutly believes he is the salvation of Germany."

"He will destroy Germany, and you know it."

' 'You are not the first to come to me, Dieter,'' von Wachtstein said.

"I am ashamed that I was not."

"I told them all the same thing: I believe any attempt to assassinate Hitler is doomed to failure."

"So is Freddy von Paulus's mission at Stalingrad," von Haas interrupted.

"And that in the unlikely happenstance that such an attempt did succeed," von Wachtstein went on, ignoring him, "we might not—Germany might not—be at all better off. His successor would be Hermann Goering. We would exchange a psychopath for a drug addict. And upon the death of Herr Schicklgruber, the slime around him ... and I include the entire inner circle... would immediately put into operation their own plans to get rid of Hermann. There would be chaos."

"Wouldn't anything be better than what we have now, Karl?" von Haas asked.

"I'm not at all sure," von Wachtstein said.

"I thank you for hearing me out, Karl."

"I have not turned you down," von Wachtstein said.

"That's what it sounded like."

"I have a condition ... a price."

Von Haas could not quite mask his astonishment. And obviously to find time to carefully consider his reply, he leaned forward and picked up the bottle of Remy Martin and poured from it carefully into his glass.

"There would be, of course," von Haas began carefully, "a substantial realignment of the General Staff. I feel sure..."

"My God, Dieter!" von Wachtstein flared. "Have we grown so far apart that you really believed I was thinking of a promotion?"

Von Haas met his eyes.

"Karl!" he said, and shrugged his shoulders helplessly.

"I have given two sons to this war," von Wachtstein said. "I am thinking of the third. I am thinking of the family. This insanity will pass. I want a von Wachtstein around when it does."

"Peter," von Haas said.

"Peter," von Wachtstein repeated, nodding his head. "I have been thinking about honor. As strange and alien a concept as that has become. I have concluded that Peter has made all the contribution to this war, save giving his life, that honor demands."

"The Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross," von Haas said.

"From the hands of the Austrian Corporal himself," von Wachtstein said. "He was in Spain with the Condor Legion, in Poland, Russia, and France. He has been five times shot down, and twice wounded."

"What do you want for him?"

"I want him out of the war and out of Germany."

"I don't quite understand."

"I want him assigned to some procurement mission, or some embassy as a military attach?. To some neutral country. Not Italy or Hungary or Japan. He speaks Spanish. Somewhere in Latin America."