Legacy (5 page)

“Before you are disposed of, may I say that you have quite an admirer in Herr Himmler, Colonel Lee?”

The American reached up and tilted back his brown fedora, making the other six men, along with Isabel, flinch. The smaller Argentines brought up their only weapons—four large machetes. All of their uneasiness at his supposed killing prowess brought a smile to the American’s lips.

“Anyway, I wanted to inform you of that fact, Mr. Garrison Lee,” the small German said with a grin. “Before you are shot.”

“That’s Colonel Lee to you, Fritz.”

“You fools, stop your playing. This man is a killer,” Isabel said. “I know. I’ve watched him do it.”

The American’s smile was infuriating to the large German who stood behind the man he was there to protect, the smaller Kraut with the satchel. “According to our reports in Berlin, you were quite a thorn in our operations here in South America, Colonel Lee. It will be a feather in our caps, so to speak, to have been the ones to eliminate such a man who has caused our organization such hardship.”

“Organization? You’re being far too kind to yourselves. You must mean the SS, or what we in the states call Murder Incorporated.”

“Witty, Colonel Lee—I hope that wit will be available to you in the moment of your death,” the small man said. He turned away and whispered something to the larger German and then turned to face the woman. “As for you my dear, we are not in the habit of rewarding spies who assist in the killing of our agents.”

The large SS man finally smiled. He brought up his submachine gun and shot three rounds into Isabel’s head and chest. She fell backward and Lee caught her before she hit the ground. As he did so, his plan was formed.

Without a second’s hesitation, Lee spun Isabel’s lifeless body and tossed her into the third German. He dove for the sandy ground, grabbing for the small .32 caliber pistol that Isabel had dropped at the moment of her death. He shot before striking the ground, hitting the German in the chest. He twisted to his backside and fired another shot, hitting the nearest of the Argentine guides, dropping him and the machete he was holding.

The small German grabbed two of the Argentine guides by the arms and started running. The larger man knew his orders, but they were shouted out anyway as the man with the satchel made his way through the beach scrub.

“Kill him!”

Lee rolled as the submachine gun opened up. One bullet struck his calf as his own bullets hit another of the Argentine men. Lee grabbed the man’s body and used it as a shield, bullets stitching the dead man’s back. Lee was momentarily stunned when the corpse reared its head as one of the heavy caliber rounds struck its face. The head hit Lee’s nose painfully, bringing a flood of tears across his vision. He fired blindly with the dead man still against his chest. One of the small bullets hit the last Argentine in the right eye, flinging him backward. Lee rolled again, knowing the last man standing, the German with the machine gun, was aiming right at him. Just as he expected several bullets to slam into him, he heard the loud click. The SS man’s weapon had jammed on him. Lee suddenly found the strength to stand. Then he realized that somewhere along the roller-coaster ride of his derring-do he had lost the small .32. He looked at the German, who was trying desperately to clear his machine gun.

“Jamming right when you don’t need it to is a common failure of that particular weapon type, isn’t it, Fritzy?” Lee swiped at his eyes and then charged the large man just as he tossed his weapon away, grinning as he too leaned forward and charged Lee.

The two large men collided like charging locomotives. Lee lost his fedora from the impact. The German was powerful, but he was like most SS officers, unused to tangling with someone who fights back, giving Lee the advantage. Several blows to the German’s back and ribs brought on a fit of coughing. Then Lee brought his hand up into the blond man’s face and pushed up on his nose, crushing it into his brow. With the German grunting in pain, Lee took the man to the ground and then just as quickly brought up his right hand with the fingers extended outward. With every ounce of strength he had remaining he brought the fingers down and into the German’s Adam’s apple, sending his fingertips into the hardened cartilage of his throat. The pressure Lee brought to bear didn’t stop until his hand had sunk to the SS officer’s spine.

Garrison Lee, a former lawyer, and then one-term U.S. senator from Maine, rolled free of the dying man and lay beside him. His hand moved in the sand and he soon found one of his Colt .45s lying next to Isabel’s body. Then he saw his hat and forced a smile, a tired expression that didn’t come naturally at that moment. He slammed the hat onto his head and then cocked the weapon and waited, seeing nothing more threatening at the moment than the moonlit trees around him. He lay still as he tried to get his breathing under control.

He slowly reached out with his free hand and touched the wound on his leg. He knew the bullet had gone all the way through his calf just to the left of the tibia and assessed that the blood flow was of an acceptable level. He raised himself into a sitting position and was in the process of trying to undo his belt buckle for use as a tourniquet when he heard movement to his front. The man he had hit in the face with the .32 wasn’t as dead as Lee had thought. The man was up and charging.

“This isn’t my night,” Lee said as he brought the .45 up and aimed as quickly as his adrenaline-drained body would allow. He aimed with his left hand and fired the first of three rounds into the man’s face, chest, and abdomen. Still the Argentine came on.

Lee tried to roll to his left as he once more fired the Colt, but he wasn’t fast enough as the machete arced toward his exposed face. At the last second he turned his head as far to the left as he could, letting the man’s body fall upon him. The dying man’s momentum brought the large machete down on the right side of his face. The steel blade sank to the cheekbone and sliced cleanly through his right eye, brow, and then his scalp, knocking the fedora from his head. The pain hit immediately as he fired two more rounds into the man out of pure anger and fright.

Lee rolled the Argentine off his body and then turned over on his back. With the smoking Colt still in his hand he reached up and covered his face. He felt the blood flowing freely through his fingers and knew he had lost his right eye. He screamed out more in rage than pain. He was angry because he had been caught off guard and then wounded so badly he would more than likely bleed to death before his men found him.

Garrison Lee struggled to shut out the pain. He tried his best to focus on the moon above him. It flashed in and out of focus as he closed his left eye and placed pressure on his right. He tried to keep the eye open but soon allowed the blood loss to take its revenge on his stupidity. His last action for the night was to reach out and take hold of his battered fedora, his large hand crushing it to his body. He had allowed the German courier to escape with another communiqué to Ecuador. As Lee slowly lost consciousness, he kept his hand over his face and cursed out loud about the large slice the man had put through his hat.

As he finally passed out, Garrison Lee had no way of knowing that Operation Columbus was about to receive its final orders.

QUITO, ECUADOR, 37 HOURS LATER

Benjamin Hamilton watched the train station from a small café down the block. He alternated between watching the station and looking at the eleven snowcapped volcanoes that surrounded the capital city. He wished he were skiing instead of doing the most boring job of his life. He had made choices, and this was the inglorious end of the most important choice of his life. He’d had a chance at being a Regular Army officer after his graduation from Harvard Law School, but he had opted for the OSS, the United States intelligence service, and working for one of its more persuasive minions, Colonel Garrison Lee. Now he found himself far from the exciting life he had been promised, since Lee had sent him to the slowest, albeit most beautiful, region in South America. He had hoped for duty alongside the legend, Lee himself, in the south, but instead found himself watching for the occasional Nazi who just happened to wander into his operational zone.

As his green eyes went back to the train depot, he thought about the message he had received from the main OSS operative in Brazil, relaying the news about Lee being missing and suggesting he be on the lookout for a Nazi named Heinz Goetz, an SS general they suspected of being in this hemisphere. Goetz was possibly coming to take something out of Ecuador. Hamilton examined the only picture Washington could forward of Goetz and saw that the small SS man had cruel eyes. He figured that, between the cruel eyes and his small stature, Goetz should be easy to spot if his destination was, indeed, Quito. There was no information or even an educated guess about what this Goetz might be removing from Ecuador, just that it might be more than one item.

Ben placed the photo back into the inside pocket of his jacket and then zipped the coat up to his throat against the chill of the day. As he watched the train that had just pulled in, he raised the cup of rich coffee and drank.

As he sat there waiting, Ben thought about the only thing that had occupied his mind for the past three years—his new wife, Alice. He had only been with Alice for three days after their wedding before he was shipped out for training at Quantico, Virginia, and then to Fort Knox, Kentucky. He missed his eighteen-year-old bride more than anything in his own young life, and couldn’t wait for the damned war to be over so he could get back to her. No matter what Garrison Lee said or how much he begged, the OSS was not the life for him, not if it meant being away from Alice.

His thoughts were interrupted by two large trucks speeding down the street. He half turned and watched as they pulled up to the loading platform at the station. He looked around, trying not to move his head, as though the trucks were of no interest to him. He saw three large Western-looking men start shouting orders in broken English to fifteen Ecuadorian workers as they piled out of the back of the first vehicle. They all ran for the covered bed of the second and started unloading crate after crate. Ben turned to his left and whistled. A man who was sitting at a shoeshine stand lowered his newspaper with the banner headline,
HITLER DEAD!
The medium-sized man saw Ben nod his head toward the trucks.

The man stood, tossing the boy shining his shoes a quarter, a real prize for the kid or for almost anyone else in the country. He stepped down and then gestured to his right. Three men joined him. They walked to a car parked along the street and opened the trunk. As Hamilton watched, he unzipped his coat and made sure the Colt .45 he had was there along with his spare clips of ammunition. He zipped the jacket back up as the four men removed two Thompson submachine guns and two large shotguns. They double-checked their loads and then the lead man walked casually over to the train station. Hamilton stood and tossed a dollar on the table, then slowly made his way out of the café, electing to go around the far side of the small station and its loading platform.

“One more mission, Alice, then your husband is coming home,” he said to himself with a smile as he dodged the few cars along the main thoroughfare of Quito.

The four men approached the truck that was being loaded. Two men split off and checked the back of the first truck. Four wooden crates had already been placed on the platform. The first two approached a large blond man who was laughing with another European-looking man as they leaned against the back of the truck being unloaded. The third was in the back supervising the work.

The sound of a shotgun being charged with a lethal round brought all the activity around the trucks to a halt.

“Gentlemen, we are the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation. We need to see a bill of lading before you transport these items out of Quito.”

The two men at the back of the truck straightened and the third poked his head out of the back and smiled.

“The FBI, in Ecuador?” the large man asked, hopping expertly down from the bed of the truck. The speaker’s words were in very passable English.

“We’re here at the invitation of the local government and the people of Ecuador, sir. Now, the bill of lading, please.”

The third man kept smiling as he took in the guns and the other two men who came up from the first truck on either side. The Ecuadorian laborers stepped back as the confrontation ensued. The blond started removing a thick pair of gloves.

“Would you mind if I saw some identification, gentlemen?” The man’s smile broadened as he shot a quick glance at the train station.

The lead agent slowly lowered his shotgun and reached into his leather field jacket. He brought out a green ID card with “FBI” written in bold, golden letters.

“Looks real enough,” the man said, leaning closer to the ID card, “Agent Ferguson.”

Two of the agents suddenly turned as the doors to the station house opened and a small man with a long black leather coat emerged. He carried a satchel and his glasses reflected the light of the afternoon sun.

“Is there a problem, gentlemen?”

As Ben rounded the far side of the platform, he saw the small man who stood on it looking down at the scene below. Hamilton fumbled for his .45 and at the same time he brought out the picture the OSS in Brazil had forwarded to him a day earlier. Ben smiled as he recognized General Heinz Goetz. The SS officer was even shorter than his description.

“No problems here, Mac, as long as you have the proper paperwork for these crates,” the lead agent said, placing his ID back into his jacket. “Why, you boys didn’t even have these things weighed in. I believe the Ecuadorian government requires the weigh-in of all freight.”