Victory and Honor (Honor Bound 6)

“Yes.”

“Can I ask where we’re going?”

“To Potsdam. To a place called Sans Souci. It means ‘without care.’ It belonged to Crown Prince Wilhelm of the Hohenzollern dynasty.”

“Can I ask why we’re going to ‘care less’?”

“I think that means more ‘care free’ than ‘care less.’ And, no, you can’t ask why we’re going there.”

It was about a twenty-minute drive from Tempelhof to Potsdam, through areas that were about equally utter destruction and seemingly untouched in any way.

They crossed a very well-guarded bridge, then entered an equally well-guarded area. Finally, they were at sort of a palace. The palace seemed surrounded by heavily armed troops.

A full colonel very carefully examined both Portman and Frade, and their identity cards, then passed them to a captain, who led them into the building and then into a small room that looked as if it had at one time been some medium-level bureaucrat’s office.

Admiral Sourer was alone in the room, sitting on a hard-backed chair by a small desk.

“That’ll be all, Jack, thank you,” Sourer said.

“I’ll be outside, sir.”

He had no sooner closed that door than another door opened and a middle-aged man walked in.

“How was the flight, Sid?” the man asked.

“Eleven hours nonstop from Boston, Mr. President. You really should have taken the Connie when Hughes offered it to you.”

Harry S Truman looked at Cletus Frade.

The President said: “So, this is the guy who’s got Henry in a snit?”

“Lieutenant Colonel Frade, Mr. President,” Sourer said.

“Do you drink, Colonel?”

“Yes, sir, Mr. President.”

“Good, because the admiral is a teetotaler, and I really want a drink—I have really earned a couple of drinks in the last couple of hours—and I don’t like to drink alone. Bourbon all right, Colonel?”

“Yes, sir, Mr. President.”

“Ask the steward outside, please, Sid, if we have a time problem.”

“Certainly.”

The President looked at Frade. “I don’t have time to skirt around the edges of this, Colonel. So getting right to it: If I told you that yesterday afternoon I took Marshal Stalin aside and told him the United States has new bombs, each with the explosive power of twenty thousand tons of TNT, and I couldn’t detect an iota of surprise in him, what would you say?”

“Sir, Mr. President, what you told him wasn’t news to him. There are Soviet spies all over the Manhattan Project.”

“Where’d you get that?”

“From General Gehlen, sir.”

“From what I understand, Colonel, General Gehlen is a Nazi sonofabitch about as bad as any other, and worse than some.”

“Sir, I respectfully suggest you have been misinformed.”

“A lot of people try to misinform me. Don’t you try it when you tell me what you know of the deal Allen Dulles made with Gehlen.”