“Why are you going to your cabin?” Hoffmann demanded.
“For my daily cup of coffee,” von Dattenberg answered. “Would you care to join me, Herr Brigadeführer?”
“I’ll stay here,” Hoffmann said.
“Very well.”
—
Von Dattenberg made his way through the boat to his cabin. It was crowded, but not nearly as crowded as it had been when they left Narvik, or after they had been replenished at sea from a Spanish merchantman just about in the center of the South Atlantic.
All the supplies with which they had sailed and with which they had augmented from the replenishment vessel—including fuel—were just about gone.
And the odds are that the SS men in Argentina aren’t going to be on the beach looking for a signal from a submarine.
Despite Hoffmann’s pissing-in-the-wind belief that they will “comply with their orders,” they will have decided that no U-boat is coming.
What they are doing is desperately trying to hide themselves in Argentina.
So, what do I do?
Von Dattenberg pushed aside the curtain that served as the door to his cabin and stepped inside. He shared his cabin with Brigadeführer Hoffmann, which meant von Dattenberg slept on a mattress on the deck, his bunk being one of the privileges that went with Brigadeführer Hoffmann’s rank.
He saw the steward had already stowed the mattress atop the bunk.
He sat at his desk, opened a drawer, and took from it a small jar of Nescafé. Just as soon as the Swiss had developed the powdered coffee, which didn’t spoil and took up very little space, it had been enthusiastically adopted by the submarine service. That was in 1936, when von Dattenberg had been a twenty-three-year-old oberleutnant zur see in submarine training at a secret base in Russia.
Von Dattenberg unscrewed the cap and peered inside the jar. He had enough coffee left for maybe a week, at a one-cup-a-day consumption rate. He wondered why Hoffmann had not stolen his coffee, and decided that Hoffmann, not wanting to unnecessarily antagonize him, had stolen Nescafé from one or more of his brother officers.
Von Dattenberg put a scanty teaspoon of Nescafé into a china mug. As he then put water into a small electric pot and plugged it in, he decided that there was a silver lining in the black cloud that was his mission: Whatever happened, this would be the last time he would ever be off the coast of Argentina looking for a signal from shore.
He had made eleven successful similar voyages. He had even smuggled other senior SS officers into Argentina, including SS-Brigadeführer Ritter Manfred von Deitzberg, who was Himmler’s first deputy adjutant.
He was certain that that was the reason—no good deed ever goes unpunished—he had been selected to make this voyage, too. He didn’t know specifically what the swine he had aboard had done for the SS to earn themselves a place on U-405, but in addition to OPERATION PHOENIX, there was no question in his mind that it had a good deal to do with another operation—a nameless, shameful one—run by senior SS officers.
By the time he learned of this operation, von Dattenberg thought he knew all there was to know about the despicable behavior of the SS and its senior officers. He had known, for example, that before joining the SS, SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler’s deputy, had been a naval officer whom Admiral Erich Raeder had forced to resign for unspecified “conduct unbecoming to an officer and a gentleman.”
And von Dattenberg had known all about the SS’s role in the “Final Solution” and their administration of the extermination camps. But he had been shocked to learn that for a stiff ransom, Jews outside Germany could buy their relatives and friends out of certain death in the konzentrationslager and have them sent to Argentina and Paraguay. The only thing he didn’t know was whether Himmler himself was involved in this obscene trade or whether it had pers
onally enriched only such high-ranking officers as Hoffmann and von Deitzberg and their immediately subordinate swine.
The water in the electric pot finally came to a boil. Von Dattenberg was carefully pouring it into his mug when a voice called through the curtain.
“Herr Kapitän, we have a signal from the shore.”
I’ll be goddamned!
“I’ll be right there,” von Dattenberg said.
After I finish my coffee . . .
—
The landing protocol went smoothly. Kapitän von Dattenberg was not surprised. It had been rehearsed dozens of times at sea, as much to give the men a chance to come on deck as because the relatively simple procedure needed practice to make its execution perfect.
When the cabin cruiser—it looked to von Dattenberg to be an American-made Chris-Craft—approached U-405, everything was in place. A line of his men, securely attached to a cable running from the conning tower to the saw-like anti-submarine net cutter on her bow, were prepared to carry out their roles. They had already opened the number three hatch and taken the crane from it. The crane would be used to hoist the five heavy crates and load them onto the cabin cruiser.
Others had already dropped cushions over the port side to protect the hull of the Chris-Craft from that of U-405. Still others were prepared to put a ladder between the submarine and the cabin cruiser. When von Dattenberg looked down from the conning tower, he saw his passengers, all wearing life jackets and civilian clothing, waiting to cross the ladder.