1945 (28 page)

"Is this about China, sir?"

"No, George, I'm out of the China business."

Damn! There was no glory in China, but still it was action. Cursing silently, he leaned back in his chair. The last war had been a bust as far as armored operations went. He had been allowed a brief stint as an observer with Montgomery during the last six months of the African campaign. He'd witnessed the Second Battle of El Alamein, where Monty had stopped Rommel's '43 offensive, but that was as close as he ever got to commanding armored formations in battle. There had been the promise of an armored corps command for Operation Overlord, but- then the damned Japanese surrendered. That had been the greatest and most secret disappointment of his life.

"What can I do for you, sir?" Patton asked, trying to not let his disappointment show in his voice.

"George, I'm in Washington right now. I need a man who knows armor. My thoughts naturally turned to you."

Patton smiled sardonically at the flattery, of which he was almost as masterful a practitioner as MacArthur.

"Go on, sir. What's the problem?"

"George, the Germans are on the move again. The betting money here is still that they're going to finish off Russia."

"But some think they're going to do the Brits — and maybe us too."

"Precisely."

"What I've been saying for years, sir. That paperhanging son of a bitch won't be happy until he owns the whole shop and sooner or later we're going to have to have a showdown. Well I say—"

"We're in agreement on that, George. Let's get to the particulars."

Something else Patton did not much care for was being cut off in mid-sentence, but this time he found it easy enough to take, given the topic under discussion.

"What can I do?"

"Nothing official yet, just some preparatory moves. Now, just how combat ready are you?"

"One hundred percent, sir. And I'm the only armored commander on this continent who can say that."

"George, I know the numbers game as well as you do. With that in mind, I repeat: just how ready are you?"

"Sir. My manpower is just over ninety percent at ten thousand men. I have two battalions of Pershing tanks at full strength. The third battalion is just now getting to full operational capacity with the new Pershing-105 upgrade. My battalions of armored infantry, artillery, and engineering are on-line. The recon battalion is still saddled with Shermans, but that is neither here nor there in terms of operational readiness, just effectiveness. They're ready. We're all ready. Look at our latest efficiency report."

"I have it in front of me, but I know that game as well. I have a simple question for you, and I want an absolutely straight answer. No games. Don't play with me."

"Yes, sir. No games."

"If you were thrown into an action against a couple of German armored divisions with what you have right now, today, could you hold your own?"

"I'd kick their asses right off the map. Their King Tigers are too heavy and slow, their Panthers are pretty good, but not as good as our new stuff. We've continued improving our designs over the last couple of years while they've been locked into mass production of the models they have. That's been our one break. We weren't forced into mass-producing a stopgap machine like the horrible old Sherman. We could afford to take the time to move ahead. Get us on dry land and we'll tear them a new asshole. Sir."

MacArthur laughed sofdy. "George, I want you to — quietly—get all your people back to base. Don't make a big deal of it. Say it's part of a drill. I also want you to start preparing your gear for ocean shipment."

"Everything, sir? We have nearly three thousand vehicles."

"Everything, George."

"What about the trains? We'll need over a hundred"

"We'll make the arrangements up here. Rolling stock will start arriving within the next two days. As quickly as you fill a train it will get moved to a siding in Louisville and you will start loading another one. Mind you, we need absolute discretion on this. No public announcements, and if the press does get wind, let it 'slip' you're heading to Texas for war games, and at the same time leak that we're moving the 3rd to China to finish off Mao. They'll dismiss the Texas story, and fall for China."

"It's England, isn't it?"

"Why England?'

"If they're going to come after us they'd be fools not to take England out in the first blow. From our perspective, England is nothing but a giant unsinkable aircraft carrier anchored within range of Berlin. It will also provide a staging area just twenty miles off the French coast when it comes time to invade. They can't let us keep it, and we can't let them take it."

"George, your personal opinion is now Top Secret. You keep it to yourself, you hear?"

Patton knew he had hit the mark.

"We're hoping that the blow is going in the opposite direction. If it is, we don't want it to be obvious that we were in the middle of a war mobilization."

"Personally I hope that it is coming our way, sir. We're going to have to fight Hitler sooner or later, so let's get it over with —while Congress has still left us something to fight with."

There was a moment of silence on the other end of the line. "George, if this threat is real, we will suffer at least a million casualties, and may very well wind up fighting street-to-street in our own cities. Have you ever seen the films of Stalingrad? I pray to God that this is nothing more than a false alarm, and I hope you will do the same."

"Of course I will, sir," Patton lied.

"Good. But while we're hoping, we'll also be getting ready. I'll be calling you daily from now on. Let's get it done, and get it done right."

The line went dead. George Patton sat in delighted contemplation of his unexpected good fortune. He knew it was a character flaw, but how he would love a good war....

April 18

Norris, Tennessee

(Forty miles east-northeast of Oak Ridge)

"They're gone."

Stretching, Otto Skorzeny climbed out of the secured basement, dug in under the hangar floor, the rest of the team climbing out after him.

Bachman stared nervously down the access road in the direction they had gone, as if afraid the government car would suddenly reappear.

"It was the FBI. They were looking for you."

"Of course they were looking for me," Skorzeny replied calmly, staring straight into Friedrich's eyes. His pupils were dilated.

"They showed me your picture and asked if I'd seen you."

"And you said?"

"Nothing, of course."

Skorzeny looked over at the four Piper Cubs located outside the hangar.

"Did they check the planes?"

"They went over them, but I pointed out there must be a hundred planes just like them in this part of the state."

"Anything else?"

Friedrich looked around nervously. "My cover is good. I've lived with it safely for twelve years. I was bom in this country. No one knows of my membership in the
Bund."

"Perhaps too safely," Gunther interjected calmly.

"What?"

"He thinks you're scared," Skorzeny explained, "and scared men are dangerous."

Friedrich hesitated for a moment.

"I know nothing about what you're doing here. I've done as ordered since setting up my flying school three years ago. I've done the photographs asked of me and kept my cover story intact."

"Yeah, great photos," Gunther sneered. "Taken from twenty kilometers out. My blind grandmother could have done better than that. Why? Because she has more courage. You didn't give us a damn thing till we got here."

"Maybe I haven't been as aggressive as you think I should be —but I haven't kicked up a hornets' nest like you have, either. They shoot people like me. You know that, don't you?"

"Oh, no! Not with real bullets!" Gunther laughed softly. "You would have loved it in Russia."

"Listen! I'm doing my duty for the Fatherland the same as you. It's just that my job works differently, and being careful is the first rule. You were on the radio for nearly fifteen minutes last night. Don't you think they have equipment to triangulate that?"

"We had to get the updates."

"Updates for what?"

Skorzeny held up his hand for the two to be silent.

"Friedrich, you're doing a fine job. It's just that my men and I are tense. We were down in that hole for nearly an hour. Let's just go about our business and forget about this. Don't worry, Albert's down watching the access road. If someone comes back, he'll give plenty of warning."

Friedrich looked around nervously and then, with a nod of his head, turned and walked away.

"Do you think the FBI picked anything up from their little visit?" Gunther asked.

"We have to assume so. It must have been evident to them that he was hiding something. Chances are they'll do a follow-up visit a couple of days from now. They might stake out an observation post as well. May already have done so." Skorzeny nodded to the hills surrounding the small valley containing the airport. "We'll stay in the hangar from now on. No one steps outside."

"I think little 'Fred' will crack if they talk to him again."

"For now, we need him. He owns this place. Locals know him and expect to see him. But that's becoming less important minute by minute of course; if you think he's getting erratic, you can kill him."

Gunther brightened.

Skorzeny added thoughtfully, "But not just because you don't like him. In my estimation he is still marginally more useful than dangerous to us." He grinned. "And remember: if you do kill him you will have to do all his work."

April 18 London

Winston Churchill and several of his aides, who with one exception were clustered well off to either side, looked down sourly from the balcony at the situation table set up in his old headquarters beneath Whitehall. The map, which covered a rectangle defined by Greenland to the north and west, the Ural Mountains to the east, and North Africa to the south, was covered with small chips. Most of them were black, and represented known Nazi military assets.

From Archangel in the north to Baku in the south, the Russian front showed an estimated one hundred Nazi divisions in place, but most of the intelligence data from that quarter was days, even weeks, old and had not been very reliable in the first place, being provided by contacts within Russian intelligence. But there were certain key factors that were revealing nevertheless, the most interesting being that the Germans had added only forty divisions in the last two months. Hardly what they would have done were they truly planning to invade. There was signal traffic for another hundred, but all evidence indicated that the traffic was smoke with no fire.

What was even more significant was the latest photo intel, just arrived by jet courier from Iraq: without exception, the ships in the Caspian were riding high in the water; not one of them had been loaded. Furthermore, the vehicles photographed nearby were sufficient for not much more than a single division of motorized infantry—a far cry from the three divisions of
panzer grenadier
and three divisions of armor that the signal intelligence seemed to show was in place for a cross-Caspian offensive.

And there was the other intelligence out of Russia as well—a report from Kiev concerning the transfer of the 5th SS and 7th Armor, moving by rail at night—not east but west. There was a similar report for the 23rd Panzer as it moved through Smolensk

There were clear warnings on other fronts as well. In Tunisia and Libya the 15th and 21st Panzer had gone out on "maneuvers" with the 164th Light Division. They were currently reported just a hundred and fifty miles from the Egyptian armistice line. They could be on the El Alamein front within a day.

But threatening as all the rest of it might be, the key concern was for Europe and the North Atlantic. Churchill slowly paced his way around the balcony that looked down on the situation board. Even as he watched, black chips were being nudged westward. Without Enigma, the intelligence seemed horribly spotty and shallow, but it all pointed in the same direction: west.

A report had come in just hours ago from an agent working aboard a Finnish liner that the tank regiment and antitank battalion of the 10th SS were in Hamburg, and had been partially loaded on board four transport ships. Other reports indicated movement of half a dozen more divisions toward Hamburg as well. There also seemed to be a great deal of positioning of military units along rail and Autobahn routes leading into France, and there were reports of massive buildups of aviation-fuel stocks along the French and Belgian coasts. A train had derailed near Caen the night before loaded with V-l bombs. Night train traffic throughout France was up several hundred percent, all of it moving west under heavy guard and returning east empty. A dock worker reported that the sub pens of l'Orient were empty, too.

There were also hundreds of anecdotal reports — a drunken Luftwaffe officer boasting about what he would personally do to the RAF this time, a French prostitute who had an offer to set up in London once the war was over, a deserter in Norway who couldn't face combat again____