Victory and Honor (Honor Bound 6)

The three stood side by side at the bar, Dooley and Frade erect, von Wachtstein still leaning on it.

After a very long moment, von Wachtstein said, without looking at either Frade or Dooley, or even raising his head, “I would really like to have a drink. But if we are flying to Berlin in the morning, I suppose that’s not a very good idea.”

“Colonel Dooley,” Frade said, “if you would be good enough to set brandy snifters on the bar, I will pour that Rémy Martin I see.”

Frade poured three-quarters of an inch of cognac into each glass.

“Hansel,” Frade said, and after a moment when von Wachtstein raised his head to look at him, Frade held up his glass and proclaimed, “To a fellow warrior I never had the privilege to know: Generalleutnant Graf Karl-Friedrich von Wachtstein.”

Von Wachtstein pushed himself erect and looked first at Clete and then at Dooley. Then he picked up his brandy snifter and lifted it.

“And since we get only one of these,” Frade said, “I suppose we better include your pal von Stauffenberg in those warriors we never got to know.”

“Yeah,” Dooley said.

“My father would have liked both of you,” von Wachtstein said. “But I’m not so sure about Claus. He was a Swabian, and they’re even stuffier than Prussians. I always had the feeling Claus thought fighter pilots should be kept with the other animals in the stables.”

He touched the rim of his glass to theirs, and then—simultaneously, as if someone had barked the command Drink!—all three raised their glasses to their mouths and drained them.

When they started to return to the table, they saw that everyone at it was standing at attention.

[THREE]

Transient Officers’ Quarters Rhein-Main Air Base Frankfurt am Main, Germany 2305 19 May 1945

Colonel Mattingly, saying that he wanted to check on what had happened at the Russian roadblock at Helmstedt on the autobahn, dropped Frade, von Wachtstein, Stein, Boltitz, and Enrico at the door to the transient officers’ quarters, then got behind the wheel of the Horch.

Accustomed to the low-range gears, he pressed heavily on the accelerator as he let out the clutch. The huge Horch, its tires squealing, jumped into motion.

There was a small foyer in the building. There was a window in one wall—now closed by a roll-down metal curtain—behind which a desk clerk had once presided. The room was now sparsely furnished with a small table—on which sat a telephone—and two small wooden armchairs.

Both chairs were occupied by men who rose to their feet when Frade and the others walked in.

They were wearing U.S. Army officer Class A uniforms, a green tunic and pink trousers. Clete first noticed there was no insignia of rank on the epaulets, and that the lapels held only the gold letters U.S. but no branch insignia below that.

Something about those gold letters triggered curiosity in Clete’s brain. Mattingly, saying they would need them in Berlin, had furnished everybody—from an astonishingly full supply room—with “Officer equivalent civilian employee uniforms” just before they had left Schlosshotel Kronberg. The green tunics had small embroidered insignia—the letters U.S. within a triangle within a square sewn to the lapels, and a larger version of that insignia sewn to the right shoulder. They were all stuffed into a U.S. Army duffel bag, which Enrico now carried hanging from his shoulder.

Why do I think the Secret Service has appeared?

“Which one of you is Cletus H. Frade?” one of the men demanded.

Whatever response he expected, he didn’t get it. Instead, he found himself looking at the muzzle of Enrico’s Remington Model 11 twelve-gauge riot gun and then listening to the metallic chunk the weapon made as a double-ought buckshot shotgun shell was chambered.

“Secret Service! Secret Service!” the man said excitedly.

“What?”

“We are special agents of the United States Secret Service!”

“Can you prove it?”

“I have credentials in my pocket.”

“Get them. Slowly,” Frade ordered, and then pointed at the second man. “And while he’s doing that, you drop to your knees and then lock your hands behind your head.”

The man, mingled concern and disbelief on his face, hesitated.

Frade snapped, “Are you deaf?”