Empire and Honor (Honor Bound 7)

Whereupon I apparently promptly forgot it.

I can’t imagine it slipped my mind just because Welner and Martín told me that unless Cletus could fly the Storch—right then—to that island and get Perón off it to keep him from getting shot, Argentina was going to find itself in a civil war.

I can’t imagine why a little thing like that would take my mind off Willi’s sex life with my sister-in-law, except maybe watching Clete taking off—without a co-pilot—from Jorge Frade in that Lodestar while three machine guns were firing at him.

I’m just going to have to learn to concentrate on the important things.

And what, if anything, am I expected to tell Colonel Mattingly about any of this?

They walked to the Horch and got in the backseat. The sergeants got in the front. They drove through the rubble surrounding Tempelhof and finally came to Zehlendorf, the suburb that somehow had escaped massive damage, and finally to what had been Admiral Canaris’s home.

An American flag now flew where Canaris’s admiral’s flag once had flown, and a U.S. Army M-8 armored car and three jeeps carrying the markings of the Second Armored Division sat in front. The soldiers in the M-8

saluted, and von Wachtstein, in a Pavlovian reflex, returned it when Mattingly did.

Try to remember, Señor von Wachtstein, that you are now a civilian.

—

In the ten minutes it took von Wachtstein to shower, Mattingly went over again and again in his mind the problems he had faced before he learned that Frade was still in Argentina, and the additional problems both Frade being there and what was happening there posed for OPERATION OST.

His biggest problem, Mattingly recognized, was himself.

Colonel Robert Mattingly seemed to have proved beyond any reasonable doubt he was not the calm, competent, and unshakable senior intelligence officer that he previously fancied himself to be.

It was absolutely inexcusable that he had not foreseen that someone from the European Command CIC Inspector General’s office—or someone from the staff of the EUCOM Inspector General—would stumble across Kloster Grünau and insist on having a look at what was inside the concertina wire. He should have planned for something like that to happen, and he hadn’t.

And he should have foreseen that General Greene had been looking for something to hang on him from the moment General Seidel had told Greene (a) that he was getting a new deputy named Mattingly and (b) that Mattingly was going to have duties that were none of Greene’s business.

Instead of being prepared for someone stumbling on Kloster Grünau, he had been angry. So angry that when Greene had sarcastically asked if he was going to call General Eisenhower, he had dialed Eisenhower’s number like a petulant child.

If Greene hadn’t slammed his hand on the phone base, Eisenhower would have taken the call and more than likely told Greene he didn’t have the need to know about Kloster Grünau and/or OPERATION OST and to release Mattingly from arrest.

But there would have been an awful price to pay for that.

For one thing, Eisenhower would have justifiably concluded that Colonel Robert Mattingly was incompetent and shouldn’t be in charge of a project that, should it be compromised and become public, would greatly embarrass not only Eisenhower but President Truman as well.

Even worse, Eisenhower, who had a well-deserved reputation for his ability to both quickly analyze the depth and nuances of a problem and as quickly decide what to do about it, could have quietly ordered, “Shut it down, Colonel Mattingly, before it can hurt the President.”

That had been planned for.

If OPERATION OST was compromised, the members of what had been OSS Team Turtle would disappear. To a man, they had agreed to do so. Hiding them in Argentina would be no more difficult than integrating the “Good Germans” had proved to be.

But there was a price they would have to pay for that: They would be charged with being absent without leave and refusing the lawful order to return to the United States. After ninety days, the AWOL charge would automatically convert to one of desertion.

So that meant that they could not return to the United States in the foreseeable future, even, conceivably, ever. It was a price they were willing to pay. They would not turn the “Good Germans” and their families over to the Russians, after the deal had been made. And somehow they would see that intelligence produced by Gehlen’s people would reach the appropriate intelligence agencies in Washington.

Whereupon, Mattingly thought, more than a little bitterly, the FBI, the G-2, the ONI, and the State Department would probably dismiss it out of hand as propaganda trying to be foisted on them by ex-Nazis hiding out in Argentina.

Frade obviously couldn’t disappear in Argentina. But that hadn’t seemed to be a problem until Mattingly heard about the attempted assassination of Colonel Juan Domingo Perón and the very real threat of a civil war that posed.

If that had not happened, Frade would not have to try disappearing within Argentina. He was an Argentine citizen and could have thumbed his nose at a summons to return to the United States to tell a Congressional Committee, under oath, everything he knew about smuggling Nazis out of Germany and into Argentina. His status would have changed from being a highly decorated—Frade had been awarded the Navy Cross—Marine Corps lieutenant colonel to deserter.

But he could have, would have, kept the secrets of OPERATION OST.

For that reason, ever since his confrontation with General Greene, against the near certainty that Greene would overtly or covertly try to find out what he was doing, Mattingly had been removing from his office safe the most damaging material regarding OPERATION OST. This included the names both of all the “Gehlen people” who had been sent to Argentina and the Russians whom Gehlen’s agents in the Kremlin had learned the Soviets were sending to Argentina.

If there was a raid—by whatever name—on either his files or Kloster Grünau, there was nothing in either place that would expose Gehlen’s people in Argentina. He was going to turn the files over to Frade for safekeeping.