“Allen, I must be that someone we discussed who does something. I must escape these invisible shackles that Hitler has put on me and bring honor and sanity back to my country.”
Dulles nodded, then sipped his cognac.
Kappler finished: “I am willing to devote everything I have left.”
He looked at Gisevius and added: “Just as Thyssen and I funded the resistance that gave rise to Hitler and, as you say, his goons—”
“I also said thugs.”
“—goons and thugs of his High Command, so shall I fund the resistance that now takes him down.”
Dulles looked at Gisevius.
“Well, Hans, do you still believe Wolfgang not to be our man?”
Gisevius looked between them, grunted, then refilled his snifter.
Kappler looked at Dulles and said, “I’ve about had enough of this man’s arrogance. I’m asking you, Allen, as a friend, what are you talking about? What is it that I’m to do beyond what I’ve offered?”
Dulles let out a long sigh.
“We need you to reach out to Krupp,” he began, “and convince him that he has a choice.”
“Which is?”
“To join those of you working to bring down Hitler.”
“But I told you that he’s an über-Nazi! He’s not even a Krupp by blood—Hitler allowed him to change his name when he married that idiot Krupp girl. That’s how crazy this all is.”
Dulles nodded.
He said, “I understand the odds are indeed great—”
“They are impossible!”
“—but what harm is there suggesting to him that he can quietly sabotage his own facilities that are building weapons and know that they will survive the war or”—Dulles tossed the photographs of the flooded Ruhr Valley on the table—“he can do nothing and watch them be destroyed now.”
Wolfgang Kappler met Allen Dulles’s eyes for a long moment, then nodded.
Dulles watched as Kappler then took the bottle of cognac that Gisevius had, refilled his snifter, and took a healthy gulp.
Dulles wasn’t certain due to the dim lighting, but he thought that he saw Kappler’s hands shaking.
[FOUR]
OSS Dellys Station
Dellys, Algeria
1750 30 May 1943
“Mother Roo One,” First Lieutenant Hank Darmstadter said after touching his AIR-TO-AIR microphone switch, “this is Joey.”
“Go ahead, Joey,” the male pilot’s voice replied.
Dick Canidy, who was hearing the radio traffic in his headset, grinned at the mother and baby kangaroo code names.
“Mother Roo One” and “Mother Roo Two” were the olive drab C-47s at the threshold of the Dellys dirt strip. Aboard each plane were two dozen OSS agents from the Sandbox in parachute gear. “Joey” was the number three aircraft—a matte black C-47—waiting just off the dirt strip.