Victory and Honor (Honor Bound 6)

“I’ll save the outrageous for later,” Dulles said. “But I will say now that it fits with some of what you’ve already dealt with—specifically the Phoenix program, which of course we know existed and therefore lends some credibility to the wildest of scenarios. And it shares the common thread of U-boats still at sea—possibly as many as sixty submarines, but maybe only twenty. Our intelligence, as I said, is all over the chart. We know a great deal about some of these subs, almost nothing about others. And knowing nothing means we haven’t the first idea if their crews plan to follow orders to surrender their vessels and crews—or if they have their own plans, either missions meant to be executed at war’s end, or perhaps instances of every man for himself—or, in this case, every vessel for itself. Of all these U-boats, however, we are particularly interested in two, U-234 and U-977.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Dulles,” Boltitz interrupted. “With regard to U-234, if memory serves, she’s a Type XB U-boot, a minelayer pressed into service as a cargo carrier—long range, able to cover more than eighteen thousand nautical miles if running on the surface. And I know that U-977 is a Type VIIC.”

Dulles grinned. “I take it you have a connection with submarines, Karl?”

Boltitz nodded. “Peter and I. We know Kapitänleutnant Wilhelm von Dattenberg well. He was master of U-405, also a VIIC.”

“The last information I have,” Dulles said, “is that von Dattenberg still is her captain. How do you two know him?”

Von Wachtstein offered: “Peter and I were together in school at Philipps University in Marburg an der Lahn.”

“And,” Boltitz added, “I served five patrols under von Dattenberg.”

“I wasn’t aware that you had been a submarine officer, Kar

l,” Dulles said.

“I went from U-boots to Admiral Canaris’s staff. I thought at the time that my father was responsible. I now believe Willi von Dattenberg was. I found out that he was—he and his father were—close to Canaris. But if that’s the case, how did Willi escape the SS after the failure at Wolfsschanze?”

“Karl,” Dulles said, his tone almost that of a kindly schoolmaster, “the SS isn’t—wasn’t—nearly as infallible as they would have people believe.”

“I’ve had that thought, too, sir,” Boltitz said. “It’s what permits me to think that the possibility my father may have escaped their net isn’t for certain pissing into the wind.”

“We all devoutly pray the same, and that you’re standing at the rail with your back to the wind,” Dulles said. “I think your submarine experience may prove to be quite valuable. It might well be something Colonel Frade’s defense counsel can use when he is court-martialed for breaking you out of Fort Hunt.”

This produced a round of chuckles and laughter.

“All right,” Dulles went on, “I was about to say, ‘Talking about submarines, starting at the beginning,’ but I just realized I don’t know where the beginning is. So, starting with what we do know: We know with some certainty that when Grand Admiral Doenitz issued the cease hostilities order on May fourth, sixty-three U-boats were at sea. Five of them complied with their orders to hoist a black flag and proceed to an enemy port to surrender, or to a neutral port to be interned.

“We have unreliable information that forty-one of them have been scuttled by their crews, possibly to prevent the capture of whatever may be onboard in something called Operation Deadlight. We don’t know how many were actually sunk, and we have no boat identification.

“Assuming these subs were either surrendered and/or sunk, that means forty-six from sixty-three leaves us seventeen U-boats unaccounted for.

“These could be part of another intel report—one of somewhat dubious reliability—that says a total of twenty submarines sailed from ports in Norway, primarily Bergen, for Argentina, between May first and May sixth.”

“That many?” Frade said. “And we know nothing about them?”

Dulles shook his head. “Not really. We have no identification of which boats are supposed to have done this. And if true, that’s quite a sizable operation.

“But what we do know with some certainty is that U-234 sailed from Narvik on April sixteenth, two weeks before these twenty are supposed to have headed for Argentina. The mission of U-234 was a special one”—he glanced at Karl—“and I think it may explain the presence of Vizeadmiral Boltitz in Norway.”

“Mr. Dulles, can you elaborate on that?” Karl said.

“We suspect your father may have gone there to take control of the U-boat—and particularly its cargo—to keep her from sailing after the bomb took out Hitler.”

“What the hell is aboard that sub?” Frade said.

“According to our information, U-234 was bound for Japan with a varied and very interesting cargo, some of which was either not listed on the manifest at all or listed under a false description. That is to say, in addition to a ton of mail—which, of course, almost certainly includes cash and diamonds—we’re told that U-234 took aboard five hundred sixty kilograms of uranium oxide. And passengers included both Nazi and Japanese officers, as well as certain scientists, two of whom the OSS was actively pursuing prior to the German surrender.”

“What’s that about?” Ashton asked. “That uranium?”

Dulles met Frade’s eyes for a moment before replying, “German scientists have been working on what might be called ‘an explosives amplifier.’ I don’t know much more than that about it . . .”

The hell you don’t! Frade thought.

You told me that uranium is what’s in the atom bomb.

“. . . except that we really don’t want the Japanese to get their hands on it. What I do know is that we can’t permit U-234 to get to Japan. And General Smith and I are agreed that it can’t get there.”