Sleeper Agent (9 page)

The military conference following Hitler’s birthday had not broken up until three
A.M.
Saturday. And immediately thereafter the exodus began, making it necessary for Bormann to observe and record. Like rats deserting a sinking ship they fled in the dark of night. The cream of the Thousand Year Reich: Himmler, Göring, Von Ribbentrop, Raeder, Doenitz and Speer.

Stripping their flashy badges of high rank, their glittering medals and ribbons, the gaudy golden braid from their uniforms, they fled.

Bitterly he thought how appropriate was the term he’d heard used to describe the exodus: “
Die Flucht der Gold-fasanen
—The flight of the golden pheasants.”

Then at 11:30 Saturday morning the Berlin center had been hit by the first Russian artillery barrage, forcefully bringing home how close was the enemy, how desperate the situation. The Brandenburg Gate was hit. The cupola of the burned-out Reichstag collapsed. The city’s center had become the front line.

And finally, in the evening, Hitler had ordered an all-out last-hope counterattack on the Russian forces in the northern suburbs of Berlin, an attack to be mounted by SS Obergruppenführer Felix Steiner and his group from their positions in the Eberswalde on the flank of Von Manteuffel’s Third Panzer Army.

Bormann knew it was a self-deceiving exercise in futility, but it nevertheless demanded his attention.

Finally he had been able to break free, and the young SS officer had been ushered into his presence a second time. It was late in the evening, Saturday, April 21, 1945. The final briefing of Rudi A-27 had begun.

2

The picturesque Bavarian town of Bayreuth, home of the Wagner festivals, had been taken by the 11th Armored Division, fighting with the 26th Infantry, on April 14, ten days before Tom arrived at Iceberg Forward to report to his commanding officer in the CIC, Major Lee, Herbert W. Lee. XII Corps had been in Bayreuth since the 21st

The town had been severely damaged in the fighting, and the people were having a rough time of it. The retreating Wehrmacht had stripped the town of food before pulling out.

Tom felt oddly familiar with the place as he drove through the streets. His father had been a great Wagner fan, ever since he had attended a Bayreuth Festival performance of
Parsifal
with Fritz Vogelstrom in the title role. That had been in 1909, the year before he emigrated to the United States. He’d never stopped talking about it. It had been a magnificent performance. An unforgettable experience, according to Hermann. Tom recalled how his father’s eyes had shone with remembered pleasure and excitement. The production had been under the direction of Siegfried Wagner himself. The son of Richard Wagner. Imagine! It had been breathtaking. Tom had listened to his father’s famous “Wagner Festival Story” many times. He wished he could hear it again.

He looked at the shrapnel-scarred houses, many still with their white sheets of surrender fluttering submissively from empty windows, as he drove through the shell-cratered streets. He was conscious of feeling the loss of his parents more keenly than he had in a long time.

He passed Villa Wahnfried, the home of Richard Wagner and his family. Richard was buried on the grounds, he knew. The house looked undamaged from the front, but the entire back was caved in.

He wondered about the Festspielhaus, site of the Wagner festivals. He knew all about it. His father, naturally, had been an expert on the subject. The edifice was built following Wagner’s own brilliant ideas to be the perfect showcase for his operas. And it was. Situated on a hill at the end of a broad avenue of trees, it overlooked the entire town.

He suddenly had an irresistible urge to find out if the famous opera house was still standing. He spotted a couple of MP’s, one of them a sergeant. He stopped the jeep. “Hey, Sergeant, come here a moment!” he called.

The MP’s sauntered over. “Yes, sir?”

“You know the Festpielhaus?”

“The . . . what?” The sergeant looked blank.

“The opera house on the hill. The Wagner theater.”

The sergeant saw the light. “Oh, yeah! That big barn of a place.” He frowned. “What about it, sir?”

“Is it still standing?”

The soldier looked at him, puzzled. “Sure. Not a scratch on it.”

“Thanks.”

He drove off. He felt foolish. But he also felt better. The Festspielhaus had been a sort of shrine to his father. He was glad it had not been destroyed.

The Ring,
he thought. The very first performance at the Bayreuther Festpielhaus had been
The Ring.
How strangely ironic that the last part of
The Ring
was the opera
Götterdämmerung
—“Twilight of the Gods.”

He suddenly felt depressed. It was all those damned thoughts about Wagner. About opera. That’s how he’d met
her,
after all. Julie. He felt a pang of bitterness. Then anger. Damn the woman! Why did she have to write to me? he thought. Why did she have to tell me those things about Julie? Damn her!

He still had the letter in his pocket. Crumpled and dirty by now. He knew parts of it by heart
Those
parts. Even to the spelling errors:

. . . I am working for your wife as a cleening lady. . . . I think you should know wat sort of things do go on in your house you not beeing heer and all. . . . But I just want to say that your wife she is playing around if you know what I meen. . . . I think it is a crying shame you beeing over there fitting for us. . . . Yours truly Daisy Jones.

PS. I find your APO adres on your letter to her.

His first impulse had been to tear the letter up. Forget the whole thing. But he couldn’t. However much he wanted to ignore it, he couldn’t. He did not
want
to believe it true. But he knew it was.

Perhaps his marriage to Julie had been a mistake. Brought on by all the wrong emotions. His loss. His loneliness. His need. The hectic times of war. The fun she’d been to be with. The good times in bed. All the wrong things.

But he’d hoped to be able to make a real marriage out of their relationship once he returned home. Maybe he still could.

If he could only forget about that damned letter . . .

He pulled up at the Iceberg Forward dismount point. For a moment he sat behind the wheel of his jeep. He had to snap out of it He could not afford to dwell on his own troubles now.

Herbert Wadsworth Lee, Major, USA, commanding officer of CIC Detachment 212, was a portly man. The few fellow officers who did not like him for reasons of their own called him fat, although never to his face. Lee himself insisted it was all muscle, but he never explained to what use he put the muscle around his middle that looked like a well-stuffed ammo belt. He came from Atlanta, Georgia, and had played halfback for the Georgia Bulldogs. He spoke with a trace of a soft Southern accent.

Tom had looked him up in his office at Corps Headquarters. “What about it, Herb? Any objections?”

The CO looked at him. He frowned. “Haven’t you got anything more important to do? In your own area?”

“How do you know
this
isn’t important?”

“How do
you
know it is?”

“Fair question.” Tom contemplated his superior officer. The CO had won his promotion in the CIC by being one hell of a good agent.

“Look, Herb,” he said. “It’s a hunch. Didn’t
you
have them when you were in the field? When you were working—instead of loafing behind a desk?”

Lee looked at Tom. He envied him. He did miss the action, the feeling of excitement, of accomplishment, when a case was broken. Sure, he’d had hunches. And he’d followed them.

“Still seems like a routine operation to me, Tom,” he said. “You got all the dope needed to pick up the guy. From that girl. His sister, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Where he’d be. When. A description of the man. What else do you want? They’ll sweat his mission out of him back at AIC. Why not let the MP’s handle it? What’s so damned special?”

Tom had a fleeting vision of the Gestapo officer’s dead wife hanging on the wall. “I want to be there when they take him,” he said quietly. “I want to see the man. Hell, you know that most cases we crack we never get a chance to follow through. We don’t even know most of the time
what
happens to a case once we hand it back. Well, this one I want to know about!” He looked straight at the major. “Come on, Herb. Make the damned call!”

Lee sighed. “Okay. I guess I’ll never get rid of you if I don’t. And I’ve got to get back to my Japs.”

Tom looked startled. “Japs?”

“We’ve got thirty-five Jap prisoners here. Second Cavalry picked them up at Zwiesel.”

“
Japs?
Here?”

“Say they’re diplomats. Come complete with wives and kids. They all speak English. So damned polite they make you puke.” He picked up the phone. “Don’t know what the hell I’ll do with them. Pass them on back, I suppose.”

He spoke into the phone. “Give me Corps MP’s. Captain Forrester.” He waited. Then: “Jack? . . . On that Gestapo colonel, the Steinmetz stakeout. . . . Right. . . . One of my agents, Tom Jaeger, will call the signals. . . . Sure, Jack, I know your boys can handle it” He grinned. “I guess Tom has a personal ax to grind. . . . Good deal!”

He hung up. He turned to Tom. “You got the ball. Don’t fumble it”

Ludwigsstrasse 17 was a four-story apartment house. The building had received a direct hit, and the entire corner had collapsed, leaving a huge wedge-shaped gash that made a mockery of the sign painted in white on the still standing part of the wall:
LUFTSCHUTZ
—AIR RAID SHELTER.
The floors from the exposed rooms above hung precariously, drooping over the edges. In the rubble below, pointing in every direction but straight up, Corps signposts had already sprouted like toadstools on a rotten log:
ICEBERG FWD
. . .
IPW
79 . . . 820
MP
co . . . 461
MED COLL CO
. . . 676
EGR L EQUIP CO
. . . 93
SIGNAL BN
2
BAN
101
INF
. . . 17
ARMD GP (CADC)
. . . and the inevitable
ROCKSPRINGS, TEXAS,
5729
MILES
.

The building had caught fire and was gutted. Black soot fingers pointed accusingly upward from each empty window socket.

It was the place where the wife and sister of Gestapo Colonel Wolfgang Steinmetz were supposed to meet him. The time: 24 April at 1200 hours, a time selected by the colonel to avoid any possible curfew imposed on the townspeople.

Tom had requested a detail of eight MP’s and one MP noncom for the stakeout. He wanted to take no chances. Steinmetz could not be permitted to give them the slip.

He had gone over his plan of action with the men carefully. He had determined a spot for each man, out of sight, covering the entire area. Once inside the building, Steinmetz would not escape.

He himself would keep the main entrance on Ludwigsstrasse under observation. The noncom, Sergeant David Rosenfeld, would be around the corner keeping an eye on the side entrance and the side street.

It was 1000 hours. Two hours before H-hour. They were in place. They were ready. Waiting . . .

Sergeant Rosenfeld was holed up behind a shattered basement window in the house across the street from the target building. He had a clear view of the street and the side entrance to Ludwigsstrasse 17. He felt keyed up. He touched the sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve. Only yesterday he’d sewn them on! And already today he was in charge of eight men and an important mission. He, David Rosenfeld himself—in person! Sergeant David Rosenfeld, commanding! Well . . . after that CIC guy, of course.

He’d show them. He wanted desperately to carry out his first real command job without a hitch. Right down the old groove, all the way. He would, too. He shifted the walkie-talkie lying on the sill next to him. He’d checked in with the CIC agent minutes before. He knew his instructions: Report anything out of the ordinary—but stay off the button unless there is something to report. Clear enough.

He looked up and down the street. There was some civilian traffic, all on foot. Mostly women and elderly men, an occasional kid or wounded ex-Wehrmacht soldier in his stripped uniform. No one paid any attention to the gutted corner building.

He glanced at his watch. 1012 hours. He had a long wait. . . . He shifted again. He positioned himself so that he had optimum sight lines down the side street, to his left. He even thought “optimum sight lines.” He liked the word “optimum.” It sounded so . . . official. Important

He had considered it carefully. That was the direction from which the suspect would be most likely to show. Anyone coming from the other direction would have passed the CIC agent. If it was the suspect, he’d probably have been spotted.

He mentally went over the description of the German officer once more: six feet one inch tall. A hundred and eighty pounds. Blond hair. Blue eyes. Thirty-nine years old. And how many Krauts did that description fit? he thought wryly. Well, anyway, it eliminated three-foot dwarfs with triangular heads.

He settled down to wait. . . . It was 1109 hours. Sergeant Rosenfeld yawned. Gawd, being on stakeout was boring. He looked at his walkie-talkie. There hadn’t been a peep out of the damned thing. And he hadn’t used it. He peered down the street.

There were only a few Germans abroad. Half a dozen women hurrying along, heads down, carrying cloth bags; an old man making his way toward Ludwigsstrasse; and way in the distance he could make out someone pushing an old baby carriage. A man. He seemed to be wearing a woolen cap, and a Wehrmacht greatcoat flapped around his ankles. He was working his way slowly down the street, occasionally stopping to pick up something, to examine the rubble and debris lining the street and to peer into old boxes and crates and piles of trash.

Rosenfeld knew what he was searching for. Anything of use. Anything salvable. Anything to eat. And that rare treasure, a discarded GI cigarette butt In that ascending order of importance.

He was not the only one. The war had made scavengers of all.

The man with the rickety baby carriage was getting closer. He was tall. Six feet one inch? It was impossible to tell the color of his hair, but he had a dirty blond beard stubble. So . . . who didn’t? Age? Impossible to say. Could be thirty-nine. Or forty-nine. The man looked tired and worn. He limped slightly.

Sergeant Rosenfeld watched him suspiciously. Should he report him?

The German stopped almost directly opposite Rosenfeld. He hobbled to the curb and laboriously bent down to pick up something. A butt? Probably. He seemed to be looking for a match in the pockets of his ragged greatcoat. He came up empty handed.

Rosenfeld had a sudden urge to throw him a book of matches. He grinned. A great way to lose those stripes!

The German rummaged around and fished out an old tin box from a burlap bag he carried on a strap over his shoulder. Carefully he placed the butt in it. He put his hands over the small of his back and stretched painfully. Then he started off down the street again. His limp seemed more pronounced. He stopped. He looked pathetically defeated. Dejected. He pushed his baby carriage close to the wall and awkwardly eased himself down to sit on the stone step of the ruined side entrance to Ludwigsstrasse 17. He placed his face in his grimy hands, leaned his elbows on his knees and rested.