Secret Honor (Honor Bound 3)

There was no traffic from the States for them.

He got another couple of beers from Dorotéa, mounted Julius Caesar, and started in a walk back toward the Big House.

[FOUR]

1500 Meters Above the River Plate

Near Montevideo, Uruguay

1540 2 May 1943

The coastline of Uruguay was at first just a blur on the horizon, but then it began to take form as the small airplane neared the end of its flight over the 125-mile-wide mouth of the River Plate. Major Freiherr Hans-Peter von Wachtstein turned the nose of the Fieseler slightly, to point toward a rise in the coastline that he suspected was the old-fort-on-the-hill overlooking the harbor. A minute or two later, now positively identifying the fort, he reached above his head without looking and adjusted the trim tab to put the Storch into a gentle descent, then retarded the throttle a hair.

He looked at the Feiseler’s fuel gauges and saw that he had more than an hour’s fuel remaining. He glanced at the elapsed-time dials on his wristwatch, a Hamilton chronometer that had once belonged to a B-26 pilot who had gotten unlucky over France, and saw that he had been in the air two hours and fourteen minutes.

In the detailed records of the Luftwaffe, the downing of an American B-26 aircraft over Cherbourg was Peter’s twenty-second victory. He had received the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross from the Bavarian Corporal himself after his twenty-fifth victory, and his total was now up to thirty-two downed aircraft.

An asshole from the SS had come to the airfield three days after he’d shot down the B-26 and handed him the watch. He had taken it from the pilot of the B-26, he said, and thought Herr Freiherr Wachtstein would like to have it.

Stealing from prisoners of war was a clear violation of the Rules of Land Warfare; and in a better world, the American pilot would not only have gotten his Hamilton back, with the apologies of the Luftwaffe, but the SS asshole who had stolen it from him would have been brought before a Court of Honor and stripped of his commission.

But that wasn’t going to happen, and Peter knew it. He could have told the SS asshole what he thought of him, and where he could stick the watch, but that would have meant that the SS asshole would have kept it to wear himself. So he had taken it, which at least kept it off the wrist of the SS Scheisskopf (shithead).

At the time, he had felt a little sorry for the B-26 pilot, who would have to spend the rest of the war in a POW camp. Now he was jealous. If you were a prisoner of war—and took your officer’s honor seriously—all you had to do was try to escape.

Living in a POW camp in Montana or Wyoming or some other place in the United States, with no greater problem than trying to escape, seemed to be a splendid way to spend the rest of the war—especially compared to what he was doing now.

Among other things, POWs were released at the end of a war and could go home to the women waiting for them.

Argentina had interned the German officers from the Graf Spee in hotels in Villa General Belgrano in Córdoba Province; and they—on orders from Germany—had given their word as officers and gentlemen that they would not attempt to escape. That meant that they spent their days playing cards or tennis, or watching the grass grow. Some of them had actually taken up polo. Patriotic Argentino-Germans, doing their bit for the Fatherland, regularly visited them, bringing them Apfel strudel, Knockwurst, Kassler ripchen, and other little things to remind them of home.

Once a month, an officer from the Germany Embassy went to Villa General Belgrano to settle their hotel bills and give them their pay (Peter had flown Gradny-Sawz there in the Storch ten days before).

He had made the mistake of telling Alicia about the officers in Villa General Belgrano. And she had taken from that the obvious inference: All he had to do was go to Brazil and turn himself in, and he would be out of the war. She immediately saw herself visiting him on Sunday afternoons in a Brazilian version of the internment hotels, maybe with a picnic basket full of fruit and fried chicken.

Even putting aside the question of the trouble his desertion itself would cause for his father, there were serious problems connected with the OSS.

Specifically, there was no way it would not come to their attention. And the OSS maintained an Order of Battle, knew that he was his father’s son, and would try to use that, even if they didn’t know—or suspect—that his father was part of the small group of German officers who had decided that the only solution to Germany’s problems was the assassination of Adolf Hitler.

Clete knew, of course. But Clete had given his word that he would not tell the OSS. And Peter believed him. So what did that make Clete? At least an officer willfully disobeying an order, and at worst, maybe some sort of traitor himself.

The war had once seemed so simple. When he’d been with the Condor Legion in Spain, it had been easy—and even pleasant—to think of himself as a latter-day Teutonic knight.

By day he brought death, in noble aerial combat, to godless Communists, and spent his nights half-drunk in the beds of women he now remembered only by the shape of their bodies, having long forgotten most of their names.

It had also been that way in Russia—except that there had been very few women—until he saw what the Einsatzgruppen were doing, and was shamed as an officer and as a German. (The Einsatzgruppen—literally “Task Forces”—were the SS mobile death squads that followed the German regular army into Poland and Russia and were charged with exterminating undesirables.)

Montevideo was now clearly in sight. On an impulse, he turned slightly away so that he could come in over the ship channel and maybe see the sunken hulk of the Graf Spee.

At first he thought he’d failed, but then he could make out parts of her masts rising from the murky waters where she had been scuttled.

As he turned his nose northward, he wondered why he had bothered. There was something sad about a sunken ship. And he had seen the hulk of the Graf Spee before.

He had also seen the grave of her captain. Langsdorff had put on a fresh uniform, carefully arranged the Graf Spee’s battle flag on the floor, and then stood in a position so that his corpse would fall on the flag after he had blown his brains out.

He wanted to leave the message that he had scuttled his ship to save the lives of his men, rather than because he was personally afraid of dying. The way to prove that was to kill himself.

That was something his father would understand, Peter knew…something Generalleutnant von Wachtstein would, in the same circumstances, do himself.