Victory and Honor (Honor Bound 6)

“I’ll be damned. How did you wind up as a tank battalion commander?”

“You ever hear that an officer should keep his indiscretions a hundred miles from the flagpole?”

Frade nodded.

“Same thing applies to a professor, particularly one at an institution operated by the Episcopal Church. I solved my problem once a month by driving into Memphis, where I became a second lieutenant in Tank Company A (Separate) of the Tennessee National Guard. Second lieutenants, as I’m sure you remember, are expected to drink and carouse with loose women.”

“You were a weekend warrior?” Frade said, laughing.

“Indeed I was. And when we were nationalized, Company A was sent to Fort Knox, Kentucky. They broke it up, and I found myself assigned to the 325th Mechanized Infantry, Major I. D. White Commanding. When they assigned him to Second Armored, Hell on Wheels, White took me with him.

“And then one day, in North Africa, Allen Dulles showed up at General White’s headquarters—White was then colonel commanding Combat Command A—and he asked me if I would be willing to accept an unspecified assignment involving great danger and parachuting behind enemy lines. I told him I would not. General White said, ‘Bob, I won’t order you to go, but I think you should.’

“The next thing I knew I was in Scotland learning how to jump out of airplanes and sever the carotid artery with a dagger.”

“Why did Dulles recruit you?”

“I speak Russian, German, French, Italian, Spanish, and a little Hungarian. That had a good deal to do with it. I’ve got sort of a flair for languages.”

“So do I.”

“Dulles told me,” Mattingly said.

“Did you parachute behind enemy lines?”

“Twice into France and once into Italy.”

“That’s what those stars on the jump wings mean?”

“Uh-huh. And speaking of uniforms, when we get to the castle, we’re going to have to get you some uniforms. You can’t run around Berlin looking like a doorman. And we’ll have to get you some identification.”

They were now out of Frankfurt, moving rapidly down a two-lane, tree-lined highway. The headlights picked out here and there where trees had been cut down to serve as barriers, and where wrecked American and German tanks and vehicles had been shoved off the road.

[FIVE]

Schlosshotel Kronberg Kronberg im Taunus, Hesse, Germany 1920 19 May 1945

Following Dooley’s Mercedes, Enrico steered the Horch around a final corner and suddenly the hotel was visible. The massive structure looked like a castle. It was constructed of gray fieldstone and rose, in parts, five stories high. Lights blazed from just about every window. There was no sign of damage whatever.

“Hermann the butler—I kept him on—tells me that when I ordered the lights turned on, it was the first time they’d been on since September 1939,” Mattingly said.

Frade now saw something both unexpected and somehow out of place. An Army sergeant, a great bull of a black man with a Thompson submachine gun hanging from his shoulder, was marching a file of soldiers—all black, all armed with M-1 rifles—up to the entrance. After a moment, Clete realized that the sergeant was changing the sentries on guard.

“Stop right in front, Enrico,” Mattingly ordered.

When they got out of the car, the sergeant bellowed, “Ten-hut” and saluted crisply. Mattingly returned it as crisply. Clete, at the last second, kept under control his Pavlovian urge to salute.

People in doormen’s uniforms should not salute.

Everybody got out of the two cars and started up the stairs.

As they reached the entrance, a huge door was pulled inward by a very elderly man who had trouble doing so.

“Thank you,” Mattingly said in German, then added to Frade, “Faithful retainers. There’s about two dozen of them.”

“They don’t want to leave?”

“We feed them, generously, so there’s some they can take home. There’s not much food anywhere in Germany.”