1945 (5 page)

Jim looked over at Steve.

"Jim, this is Mr. Grierson. He's here to ask you some questions."

Jim sat, but otherwise ignored Grierson. "Steve, what the hell is going on here?"

"Lieutenant Commander Martel, I asked you a question," Grierson said grimly. "You would be well advised to answer it."

Still ignoring his interrogator, Jim continued to gaze levelly at his boss.

"Jim, you are to answer Mr. Grierson's question without hesitation."

Jim turned in his chair to face Grierson. "Sure. I met with von Metz. If you check the contact report that I turned in yesterday you'll see that I already had the meeting arranged."

"What did you discuss with him?"

Jim looked back at Acres.

"Sir, is there a problem here?"

"Martel, I'm asking you a question," Grierson snarled, "so stop looking to General Acres for help like you're Charlie McCarthy sitting on his knee."

Jim swung around and stood up. "Listen buddy, back off."

"Jim!"

Jim turned and looked back at Acres.

"You've been accused of a breach in security," Acres said. "Grierson came in this morning from the States to check it out. Just answer the questions."

Stunned, Jim looked back at Grierson, who now pointedly ignored him as he spoke to Harriman. "You followed Martel today?" Grierson asked.

Harriman nodded.

"After the parade he met von Metz. The two suddenly took off through the crowd and I fell behind. They talked for several minutes and then parted company."

"So? We should stand motionless, talking in loud clear voices? He had sensitive information. That was the point of the meeting!"

"And what was that information, Jim?" General Acres asked, holding his hand up for Grierson to be silent.

"Something is starting to move. Willis not sure what. Training schedules for troops inside of Russia have been stepped up. Amphibious assault rehearsals on the Black Sea coast. Internal security is tightening up, the same way it did before they went into Russia. Their coding system is scheduled for a major overhaul. Even Canaris is being kept in the dark. One hard fact: The code name for this operation is 'Arminius.'"

"Arminius,"' Acres repeated, looking back quizzically at Jim.

"You probably remember it from your Academy days. The German leader during the reign of Augustus. Annihilated Varus's legions in the Teutoburger Forest."

"What's the target?"

"Maybe us. Probably us. Von Metz wasn't sure."

Grierson laughed sarcastically. "That's it?"

Jim started to report on von Metz's personal warning, then decided to omit that for the moment. If he was suspected of a leak, then a leak there almost certainly was —somewhere. If word of a personal warning got back to German intel, it might be just what they needed to nail his cousin. "That's about it."

"Martel, we've been filtering reports like that since the war ended. Why should we take this one seriously? Hell, we're the last thing the Germans want to take on."

"What about this amphib report?" Acres asked the civilian. "Do the British know about this? With Churchill looking to be back in office the Germans might be having preemptive thoughts about England."

"We've been getting those reports as well," Grierson replied disdainfully. "Our assessment is that they're prepping a move into Kazakhstan for more oil. The amphib's for moving some divisions directly across the Caspian Sea; training in the Black Sea would be the obvious place."

Grierson turned and looked back at Jim.

"What did you and your German relative really talk about?" "I told you."

"Nothing else?"

"Nothing. I was doing my job."

"I've already looked at the initial contact report for today," Grierson said, casually revealing that he had access to General Acres's files.

Acres barely flinched.

Grierson looked over at Harriman and nodded a dismissal. Harriman stood without comment and exited. As he watched him go, Jim felt as though he were watching something wet that crawled in the dark. The worst part of it was knowing that if the tables had been turned—as they easily could have been — he would have been the one doing the tailing and reporting. Suddenly he was hip deep in the filthy reality that underlay all cloak-and-dagger games. He didn't like it, or himself, much just then. He longed to be a pilot again.

As the door closed on Harriman, Grierson burst rudely in on Jim's thoughts. "Martel, are you familiar with recent developments in radar equipment used for spotting submarine periscopes and snorkels?"

"Yes."

"How and why?"

"I was briefed on it four months ago. One of my assignments was to find out if the Germans knew about our design, the frequencies we were using, and whether they had developed radar-detection gear for their submarines."

"What about acoustically guided torpedoes?"

"I wasn't briefed on that, but I
was
supposed to find out if they were developing submarine noise makers. That made it pretty obvious that we or the Brits were working on acoustical guidance."

"Why?"

Acres interjected. "Jim, we've gotten feedback from other sources —"

"General!"

"Mr. Grierson. He's the best operative I've got. This whole thing is a bunch of crap. Chances are the Nazis got the information Stateside. Since the Pacific War ended it's become a damn sieve back there. This whole thing is most likely an FBI screw-up."

So Grierson was FBI. Very high-up FBI. No wonder Acres had hesitated to cross him.

"The leak originated here in Berlin. That points to one person. Him."

"Am I being charged with something?" Jim asked sharply. "If so I have a right to know—or are you picking up a few tricks from the Gestapo?" He regretted the words almost immediately, and not just because of what came next. He knew very well the difference between even a hardnose like Grierson and a genuine secret-police thug.

"Lieutenant Commander James Martel, under the Espionage Act of 1941 you are hereby charged with delivering classified information to a foreign power. You are under arrest. You will be escorted back to the United States where you will face a military court martial. Prior to that court martial some people in my division want to have a long, long talk with you. A plane is waiting at Templehof." Grierson went to the back door of Acres's office and, with a bit of flourish, knocked on it. The door opened and two more men in civilian garb stepped in.

"Martel, these two men will escort us to the plane and back to the States. They have been ordered to kill you rather than let you escape, and believe me, should the occasion arise they will happily carry out that order."

Stunned, Jim looked back at Acres.

"Just cooperate, Jim. I'll get things moving on my end. You'll be cleared of this within a week, maybe two." In the long months to come James Martel would often recall that empty promise.

November 6 Reykjavik, Iceland

President Andrew Harrison sat in his high, straight-backed chair waiting for his undiplomatically tardy opposite number. As he stared into the fireplaces contained conflagration he unconsciously attempted to impose some sense of order on the flickering shadows capering before him, but he had no more success in that than he had ever had in imposing a pattern on the remarkable series of events that had led to this meeting and whatever would follow.

Hardly more than a year ago he had been the Junior Senator from Nebraska. Now he was President of the United States. To this day, that title—his title, President of the United States — still evoked the image of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and no other. But when the Japanese surrendered and The Great Pacific War was won at last, FDR suddenly announced his retirement and as a last exercise of his extraordinary political power had virtually anointed his own successor. Andrew Harrison III.

Right now the sitting President wished that Franklin still had his old job. The whole world might pay a terrible cost for any mistakes made here today.

There were others, seemingly better qualified, that he could have picked, Harrison mused, but I was from the West and could corral our own New Isolationists, and maybe take a little wind out of the sails of the Western Republicans. Someone from Pennsylvania, Ohio, or Missouri just would not have fit the bill. And so here he was.

Fifteen minutes past three. Forty-five minutes late. It was deliberate of course, but annoying for all that. Before long he would have to take official notice.

To distract himself, and because it stirred a memory of another clock and another mantel, Harrison stood up and examined the clock over this one. Lincoln had his log cabin, he thought, and I my sod hut on the prairie. His campaign managers had made much of that during the '44 campaign: the farmer's son versus the slick New York City lawyer. It had played very well, and rather remarkably it was all true.

This mantel clock reminded him of his mother's precious memento of her elegant life back East, one of the few heirlooms that had survived the journey to northwestern Nebraska. She had kept the brass frame of that clock polished to a shine that rivaled burnished gold, and it stood out like a diamond in their earth-walled hut. As a child he had stood before it, watching the hands trace their endless course, carrying with them a mystery of time and memory, and all the promise and pain that such mysteries held.

Before he was fully grown it had held other memories as well, of its chiming the midnight hour while tuberculosis took her from them, his father holding his hand as she slipped into the night. He could remember its chiming the next day as he and his father made her coffin and together lifted it into the wagon to take her up the knoll to the family resting place, where two sisters now had their mother back again.

That clock, so ornate and out of place with its gaudy Victorian styling, held the place of honor on the fireplace mantel in the Oval Office. He smiled at the thought. The weekly ritual of winding it always brought to him the hint of a memory of a childhood caress from a mother now fifty years at rest beneath the Nebraska sod. For those few moments it was as if she were still watching over him and demanding excellence in her stem yet gentle way. He had wound it before coming here; it would still be marking its course and his when he returned.

A door opened. Resisting a momentary impulse to behave like an ordinary mortal, Harrison deliberately kept his back turned. After several seconds a throat cleared impatiently. The President of the United States remained motionless —then finally turned and stared unwaveringly into the eyes of Adolf Hitler.

He had met him yesterday, but that was mere ritual. Even after the press had been shepherded out, there were still all the staffers, the military liaisons, the aides, and the routine of sitting at the long table exchanging genial platitudes. Now they were alone and it was for real.

He studied his enemy closely. He had aged a great deal since the accident, but his were still the cold remorseless eyes of a shark on its unceasing search for prey. His shoulders were hunched, the left side of his face bore a blaze of scars from the plane crash that had almost killed him on December 6,1941, the day before Pearl Harbor.

Neither Harrison nor the rest of the world could say for certain how different it all might have been if that plane crash had never happened. But Hitler knew. And Roosevelt had guessed about it, often speculating that if Hitler had been in charge during those crucial weeks in December of 1941 Germany might well have declared war on the United States. When Roosevelt spoke of it, it was in an almost wistful tone, as if he had actually wanted a two-front war. The thought of such a fight made Harrison shudder, but then again, things would have been settled now, one way or the other. Much as he may have wanted it, Roosevelt had not even attempted to get Congress to declare war against Germany. Congress had demanded blood in the Pacific, but thought that one war at a time was quite enough.

The plane crash had dashed Roosevelt's hope that Hitler would take care of the problem for him. Hitler had spent several weeks in a coma, during which time a triumvirate composed of Göring, Goebbels, and Haider had taken charge. Realizing that they were on the edge of disaster in Russia, far from declaring war on the USA, the three immediately declared an end to unrestricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic, thereby blocking Roosevelt's hope for a final provocation. Next they had pulled off a masterful strategic withdrawal along the entire Russia front, falling back before the offensive of the Russian Siberian divisions.

Had the German army followed the dark romanticism of Hitler's vision and never relinquished an inch of conquered territory, it was generally agreed, the
Wehrmacht
would have pretty much ceased to exist in the East. Instead, the Russians wound up exhausted and overextended, and the Nazi offensive was renewed in the spring. Meanwhile America, Russia's only real hope, had become fully committed in the Pacific. Before Hitler had recovered enough to resume power, the ruling triumvirate had managed to ameliorate and block the worst of Himmler's SS atrocities as well, committing the Reich to a quasi-independent Ukraine. Result: thirty-nine divisions of Ukrainian and anti-Communist Russians in the Nazi ranks. It did not matter that after the war the SS gained back its power in the eastern occupied lands. The war by then was already won. The result was inevitable. In '43 Russia threw in the towel, the Churchill government collapsed, and shortly thereafter England agreed to a remarkably lenient armistice.