Christ, they tried to kill him again!
And he’s right. Allen will be interested in the Argentine agricultural attaché in Berlin.
Unless he already knows him. Which is likely.
Not only was he half in the bag when he started to write this, he obviously had a couple of belts while he was writing it.
And the one thing I can’t do is let Donovan see it.
“It strays a little from the form and substance one expects from an official after-action report, wouldn’t you say, Lieutenant Fischer?”
“Just a little, sir.”
“Things like that tend to upset Director Donovan. So, what I’m going to do, just as soon as my secretary gets here, is dictate a synopsis . . .”
As if on cue, the office door opened and his secretary, a gray-haired middle-aged woman, walked in.
“Good morning, Colonel,” she said.
“. . . and send that to him,” Graham finished. “Good morning, Grace. Would you get your pad and pencil, please?”
“Before or after I get you your wake-up cup of coffee?”
“Coffee won’t be necessary. Lieutenant Fischer and I are going to have breakfast at the Army-Navy Club and put to rest those nasty rumors that the Army and Marine Corps don’t talk to each other.”
She backed out of the office and returned a moment later with a steno graphic notepad in hand.
“Interoffice memorandum, Secret, dictated but not signed, to the director,” Graham dictated. “Subject: Major Cletus Frade, After-Action Report of. The Marine has landed, situation well in hand. Respectfully submitted.”
“Do I get to see it?” Grace asked.
“Not only do you get to see it, but after you have it microfilmed and send that over to State for inclusion in today’s diplomatic pouch to Mr. Dulles in Berne, you get to file it someplace where it can’t possibly come to the attention of the director.”
She shook her head, and said, “Yes, sir.”
“Give the nice lady your briefcase, Len. And the pistol. We don’t want to scare people at the Army-Navy Club.”
V
[ONE]
Führerhauptquartier Wolfsschanze
Near Rastenburg, Ostpreussen, Germany
0655 19 August 1943
Generalleutnant Graf Karl-Friedrich von Wachtstein—a short, slight, nearly bald, fifty-four-year-old—walked briskly down a cinder path from the Führerhauptquartier bunker to the bunker in which Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel, Germany’s senior military officer—he was chief of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht—had his quarters.
Wolfsschanze held fifty bunkers—ugly buildings with eight- and ten-foot-thick concrete walls and roofs. Wehrmacht engineers had begun—in great secrecy and on a cost-be-damned basis—the construction of “Wolf ’s Lair” in 1940. A 3.5-square-kilometer area in the forest east of Rastenburg in East Prussia had been encircled with an electrified barbed-wire fence and minefields.
Next came the erection of another barbed-wire enclosure inside the outer barrier. Only then, within this interior barrier, had construction begun of the artillery-proof and aerial-bomb-proof bunkers. The compound had its own power-generating system, a railway station with a bomb-proof siding for the Führer’s private train, an airstrip (between the inner and outer fences), several mess halls, a movie theater, and a teahouse.
An SS-hauptsturmführer and two enlisted men, all armed with Schmeisser machine pistols, stood outside the heavy steel door to Keitel’s bunker.
“Generalleutnant von Wachtstein to see the generalfeldmarschall. I am ex pected.”
The hauptsturmführer clicked his heels and nodded to one of the enlisted men, who walked quickly to the steel door and pulled it open, standing to attention as von Wachtstein walked into the bunker.