Black Ops (Presidential Agent 5)

"One of the prisoners in my grandfather's POW camp was Patton's son-in-law. My grandfather was ordered to take him and a bunch of other American field-grade officers, including some doctors, to the site, and proved to them that their Russian buddies were the bad guys.

"The story didn't come out for years, but the Americans who had been taken to Katyn knew about it, and remembered the German officer who had taken them to see the graves.

"Okay. So now the war is over. My grandfather and Billy are released from our POW camps and go home. Grandpa goes home and finds that all of his newspapers have been bombed and that most of his farmland is on the wrong side of the fence between the American and Russian zones. Meanwhile, Billy goes home to Vienna and finds that all of his family was killed the day we bombed Saint Stephen's Cathedral and the Opera House.

"Billy then makes his way to Fulda. My grandfather had become a father figure to him. And vice versa. The two of them dig into the rubble that had been the printing plant of the Fulda Tages Zeitung and put together one Mergenthaler Linotype machine from what was left of two dozen of them.

"That machine is now on display in the lobby of Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H. It was used to set the type for the first postwar edition of the Tages Zeitung.

"When my grandfather had applied to the American Military Government for permission to publish, he thought he had one thing going for him. A classmate at Philipps University--an American brigadier general--was military governor of Hesse and knew my grandfather was not a Nazi.

"Actually, Grandpa had three things going for him. Second was that counterintelligence had found his name on a Gestapo hit list; he was involved in the 1944 bomb plot. The only reason he hadn't been shot--or hung on a butcher's hook--was that the Gestapo thought he was already dead. And, third, the officers he'd taken to Katyn remembered him as a good guy.

"The first post-war Tages Zeitung was in Fulda. Then Kassel. Then Munich. Billy Kocian was sent to Vienna to get the presses up and running and then to look around for a staff, including editors, for my grandfather to vet. He was then twenty-one or twenty-two. The next time my grandfather heard from Billy was when Billy sent him the first edition of the Wien Tages Zeitung. The masthead read: Eric Kocian, Associate Publisher and Editor in Chief.

"My grandfather in effect said, 'What the hell, why not? Give him a chance. See if he sinks or swims.' Billy swam."

"Herr Oberst," Yung said. "Billy Kocian's history is fascinating, but is there a bigger point to all this?"

"Bear with me," Castillo said. "So things were looking up. My grandfather had two children, my Uncle Willi and my mother. Uncle Willi went to Philipps, took a degree in political science, and went to work for Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, bringing with him his buddy Otto Gorner.

"My mother was the princess in the castle. Everybody thought that as soon as she was old enough to make it socially acceptable, she would marry Otto, who was being groomed to handle the business side--as opposed to just the newspaper side--of the business.

"And then into the princess's life appeared the evil American--in the right seat of a D-model Huey--playing war with the Fourteenth Armored Cavalry, which in those days patrolled our fence line with East Germany. And three or four days later, said evil American disappeared, never again to be seen by the princess.

"The kindest thing my grandfather had to say when he was told he was going to be a grandfather was that he thanked God my grandmother wasn't alive to be shamed by my mother's blatant immorality.

"When I asked why I didn't have a daddy like the other kids, Grandpa would walk out of the room and my Uncle Willi would tell me--little Karlchen--that that was not to be discussed. All my mother would say was that my father was an American army officer who had had to go away and would not be coming back, and that I was not to talk about him to Grandpa, Uncle Willi, or 'Uncle' Otto.

"Then, when I was about eleven, Uncle Willi, with my grandfather next to him on their way home from Kassel, drove his Gullwing Mercedes off a bridge on the A7 Autobahn at an estimated one hundred thirty miles an hour.

"That left my mother and me alone in the Haus im Wald, the family castle, which actually looks more like a factory. Mother again declined Otto's offer of marriage. She inherited her one-quarter of Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, the other three-fourths going to Uncle Willi and Uncle Billy and yours truly in equal parts. Uncle Willi had left everything he owned--his quarter--to my mother in the belief that she would eventually come to her senses and marry Otto. So she got that share, too.

"But it wasn't in the cards for my mother to live happily ever after with Little Karlchen in the castle. Six months after Uncle Willi and Grandpa went off the A7 bridge, she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Terminal. Two months to live."

"Jesus!" David Yung exclaimed.

"At which point, Mother, apparently deciding that the orphan-to-be needed to establish contact with his father, whether or not the father was going to be pleased to learn that he had left a love child behind in Germany, turned to the 14th Armored Cavalry for help, giving them the father's name--Castillo--that she had steadfastly refused to give her father.

"The Fourteenth's regimental commander turned over the task of locating the father to one of his majors, one Allan B. Naylor--"

"Who now has four stars--that Naylor?" Davidson asked.

"That's the guy," Castillo confirmed. "He had a little trouble locating a Huey jockey named Castillo who had once maneuvered with the Fourteenth. Reason being: He was in San Antonio, in the National Cemetery there, with a representation of the Medal of Honor chiseled into his headstone."

"Your father won the Congressional Medal of Honor?" Yung asked softly.

"It's properly just the 'Medal of Honor,' David. And you don't win it. You receive it."

"No offense, Charley."

"None taken. Well, this changed things a good deal. The illegitimate offspring of a Medal of Honor recipient can't be treated like just one more bastard among the maybe a hundred thousand bastards spawned by the U.S. Army of Occupation. And Naylor, being Naylor, had also found out that I would own, when my mother died, all of Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft with the exception of Billy Kocian's quarter-share.

"That raised the very real possibility that a wetback Texican family living in squalor on the riverbank in San Antonio was suddenly going to get their hands on the considerable fortune of the grandchild, nephew, cousin, whatever, they didn't even know existed.

"Naylor was dispatched to reconnoiter the terrain in San Antone while the brightest Army lawyers gathered in emergency session to come up with some way to protect the kid's assets from said wetbacks.

"What Naylor found, instead, was that my so-called wetback grandfather was just about convinced that some greedy fraulein of loose morals was trying to get her hands into the Castillo cash box and he was going to do whatever had to be done to keep that from happening.