Victory and Honor (Honor Bound 6)

“—Colonel I. D. White commanding,” Mattingly went on. “I was visiting him—by then he was a major general and commanding Hell on Wheels—when he had his bridges across the Elbe and was about to head for Berlin. Ike ordered him to hold in place. The general was slightly miffed. He kicked the windows out on his command post—you know, an office on the back of a six-by-six truck.”

“Really?”

“Hell hath no fury that remotely compares to I. D. White in a rage,” Mattingly said. “But eventually he calmed down a little. Then he looked at me and said, ‘I’d really like to know what’s going on there, but as I am under a direct order that not one man of Hell on Wheels is to go there, I can’t send somebody to find out.

“‘But it has just occurred to me, Colonel, that you are no longer under my command. If you asked to borrow one of my Piper Cubs, I would of course make one available to you. And I don’t have the authority to tell you where you can or cannot go, do I?’”

“So I said, ‘Point taken, General. General, have you got a puddle jumper you could let me use?’ And I got in it and flew over Berlin.”

“And?”

“One of the first things I saw was Red Army troops—they use Asiatics as assault troops—neatly lined up to gang-rape women in the streets. They are not very nice people, Clete.”

“Jesus Christ!”

“When we flew over the Reichstag, there was a large gasoline fire merrily burning in the inner courtyard, outside the Hitler Bunker. I can’t be sure, of course, but I suspect I was watching the incineration of Der Führer and his bride. Or perhaps the Goebbels family, Mommy, Daddy and the six children to whom Mommy had just fed cyanide pills. Whoever it was, the sickly smell of burning flesh was without question.”

“I’d heard of the burning bodies but not the gang-raping troopers,” Clete said, and once again said, “Jesus Christ!”

“At that point three MiG-3 fighters appeared and suggested, by shooting tracers in front of us, that we were not welcome, and we took the hint and flew back across the Elbe.”

“They tried to shoot you down?”

“They made it clear they were capable of doing so if we didn’t go ba

ck where we belonged.”

“They’re supposed to be our allies, for Christ’s sake.”

“General Patton suggests that we’re going to have to fight them sooner or later, and I suspect he may be right.”

“My God!”

“Quickly changing the subject,” Mattingly said. “Where we’re going now is to the Schlosshotel Kronberg, which—along with this car—I have requisitioned for the OSS. One of my guys had been there before the war, and suggested that since we could use it, we add it to the Don’t Hit Under Any Circumstances target list for the Eighth Air Force.”

“You had the authority to do that?”

“Ike now likes the OSS. Particularly Allen Dulles, David Bruce, and their underlings, including this one. Yeah, I had the authority to do that. But that’s what they call a two-edged sword. If that weren’t true, I wouldn’t have been saddled with this ‘deal with the Russians’ business.”

“I don’t understand,” Frade confessed.

“Why don’t we wait until we’re all together? Let me finish about the Schlosshotel.”

“Sure.”

“It was built in the 1890s by the Dowager Empress Victoria of the German empire, and named Schloss Friedrichshof. Her husband, Frederick III, was the emperor. Damn the expense, in other words, nothing’s too good for Ol’ Freddy.

“In 1901, the Empress’s youngest daughter, Princess Margaret of Prussia, inherited it from her mother. Margaret married Philip, Prince of Hesse, and the castle was part of her dowry.

“And now, so to speak, I have—or the OSS has—inherited it from His Highness.”

He looked at Frade.

“Did I say something amusing?”

“No. I was just thinking you sound like a history professor.”

“As a matter of fact, I was a history professor. Sewanee. The University of the South. Actually, I was professor of history and romance languages.”