MATT HELM: The War Years (25 page)

I looked to the side and saw one of my backup team covering Vogelmann with his gun.  I didn’t recognize him, but I knew the other one.  We had been on two missions together.  He was still covering Price, just in case.  Like I said, they were good.  I got up and went over to him and held my hands out.  He pulled a knife from a belt sheath with one hand and cut the rope, freeing my hands.  “Thanks, Rusty,” I said. “Who’s your partner?”

“That’s Evan.  We got him a few months ago.”

I walked over to Price and kicked him over on his back. Then I bent down and reached into his right-hand pants pocket.

“What the hell are you doing, Eric?”  That came from Evan.  I pulled out my hand and showed him the Solingen knife.  “The sonofabitch took my knife and I’m kind of attached to it.”  He nodded as though it was perfectly natural for me to be thinking of my knife right after killing a man.  Hell, it was.  Back at base I had my little Colt Woodsman .22 waiting for me.  We all have our little attachments and superstitions.

“What now?” I asked.

Rusty asked, ”What kind of shape are you in?”

“I’m OK, just a few cuts and burns.  Nothing permanent.”

“Good, you ride in the van with the I-Team and keep an eye on our friend here, while Evan and I follow in our cars.  We don’t want to leave one around here.”  I  nodded.  Any professional shadow job requires multiple vehicles; even an unsuspecting target can get suspicious if he sees the same car behind him for miles.

Rusty continued, “We don’t know how much time we have before someone comes looking for …”

“His name is Heinrich Vogelman.”

He arched his eyebrows.  “Ah.  That figures.”  He had been at the briefing, too.  “Anyway, we’ll take the body and both their cars and ditch them so if anybody comes sniffing around, they’ll just think Vogelmann is out … we hope.”  He handed me his weapon.  “Here, you watch Vogelmann while Evan and I clean up and get a couple members of the I-Team to drive their cars.”

About 45 minutes later, we found a dirt road running into a mini-forest and turned onto it.  While driving, I had Vogelmann sitting on a bench seat on one side of the van while I sat across from him, holding the gun on him.  The other two I-Team members were up front, one driving and the other in the passenger seat.  They had shaken my hand and introduced themselves, but hadn’t said anything else.   As far as I knew we had two I-Teams in our little group and both had four members.  I never asked why.

All around us were interesting pieces of equipment, most of which I didn’t recognize.  Some of them, however, were very recognizable, which probably accounted for the beads of sweat on Vogelmann’s forehead and the darkening stains at his armpits.  He hadn’t said a word since Rusty and Evan had broken into his house.

Finally, we stopped.  A couple of minutes later, the back door on the van opened and the other two I-Team members motioned me out and climbed into the van.  Rusty and Evan were waiting outside.

Rusty looked a little uncomfortable.  “Eric, I have a request from Mac for you.  He said he would understand if you declined, but he would like for you to watch the I-Team at work.  He said the knowledge might come in handy some day.”

I paused for a moment and then, to buy a little more time I asked if he had witnessed an interrogation.  “No,” he replied.  “I was given a chance once, but decided not to, but that was an I-Team member asking, not Mac.”

And, of course, that was the crux.  I nodded.  “Ok, I’m in.  Where are we going?”

Rusty grinned.  “Right here, right now.  We don’t know how long we’ve got before someone finds Vogelmann missing.  Hell, he might have called someone while you were on the way to his house and they’re on the way now.  We’ve got to get the information on the moles before they’re alerted.”

“What about you and Evan?

“Evan is going to report in by radio from a safe house we have access to about 40 miles away.  I’ll stay here until they’re finished and drive us to meet Evan and relay the information.”

“What happens if they can’t break him?”

“They will.  Trust me.”

They did.  I had to leave twice to throw up and I still have nightmares…

Chapter 29

There were a lot of people - actually, most - in Mac's outfit I didn't know; and while we were vaguely aware that the British had at least one group that approximated ours, I had not been formally introduced to one before.  We didn't have cozy get-acquainted office parties, quite the contrary.  Mac operates on the principle that the fewer of your colleagues you've met, the fewer you can betray if somebody starts asking the rough way.

It was, therefore, surprising that I knew only one guy in the group assembled in Mac’s briefing room.  What was more surprising was just how many – eight in all – I
didn’t
know.  Being one of his senior operatives by then, simply by virtue of survival, I knew quite a few more of Mac’s people than most, and had worked with many of them several times.  In line with his philosophy, when teams were needed on a field operation, Mac tended to use people who already knew one another rather than unnecessarily exposing too much information about another agent, unless the agent had talents necessary to the operation.

I glanced over at Martinson, who responded by raising his eyebrows and giving a slight shrug of his shoulders.  Martinson had already been working for Mac when I first arrived and we had been on two missions together.  He was, perhaps, the deadliest fighter I had ever known, myself definitely not excepted.  Give him a rifle, a pistol, a knife, a garrote, or no weapon but his hands and feet, and his opponent was dead.  Off duty, he had a wide-ranging sense of humor and enjoyed practical jokes, which seemed a little odd, given his single-minded pursuit of mayhem in the field.  In any organization like ours, legends grow about the senior operatives who managed to survive, passed along in whispers to the new boys - Fedder and Rasmussen, who almost always worked as a team, Barnett, who moved like a ghost … and Martinson, who was rumored to have personally killed over three dozen targets, not counting collateral damage.

Martinson’s presence – and my own, to flatter myself a bit – among such a large group of unknowns being briefed by Mac personally, signaled a wide departure from our usual
modus operandi
.  Usually, in a large operation, two or three agents were briefed on the objective, allowed to formulate their own tactics, and either hand-picked or were assigned the rest of the team who were brought up to speed individually.  This had the feel of a fully-planned operation, and I started to get a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.  I just hoped it was Mac’s plan and not one passed on by the group of geniuses who had ignored all the signals of the impending
Unternehmen Wacht am Rhein
the previous December, which had come close to giving Hitler a reprieve from the seemingly inevitable defeat of Germany.  Apparently, intelligence reports, some supplied by one of Mac’s people, second hand, had been largely ignored.  Translated as Operation “The Guard on the Rhine” or Operation "Watch on the Rhine," depending upon your translation preferences, it became known to the public as “The Battle of the Bulge.”  Taken by surprise, the allies put up little resistance at first and the offensive nearly succeeded.  Only extraordinary heroism and a refusal to quit on the part of an amazingly large number of troops, both British and American, had eventually turned back the advance.  It cost us over 70,000 casualties, but Germany suffered even more.

My reverie was interrupted by Mac’s entrance.  Carrying a briefcase, he strode up to the lectern and turned to face us, setting the briefcase down beside him.  I couldn’t tell anything from his expression, but then, I never could.  Ignoring the briefcase, he started speaking to us.  “Good morning, gentlemen,” he said, “Welcome to Operation Silver Bullet.  I’m not going to make any introductions, as those of you who will need to know each other already do, and the less the rest of you know, the better.  For purposes of identification, you will be known as ‘Blue Two’” – he pointed to a blond guy on his far left – “’Blue Three’, ‘Blue Four’ …” He continued in order until all of us had been given a designation.  I was “Blue Eight” and Martinson was “Blue Five.”

After the last “Blue” had been named, he continued, “You will meet Blue One once the operation has begun.  Memorize the name and face of each member here.  You will need to know both later.  Other than that, all you need to know is that several different organizations are represented here, never mind which organization or who belongs to which.”

He paused a moment as we each looked around at the others, putting the names and faces together as we had all undoubtedly been trained to do.  I mean, “Recognition 101” or whatever you choose to call it is pretty standard fare for any intelligence organization, even a specialized unit like ours.  My stomach was not soothed by the revelation that the group included “several different organizations.”  I often had enough trouble putting up with the prima donnas that Mac had trained, let alone some unknown spymaster.

“OK,” Mac continued, “Some background first.  Has anyone here ever heard of Otto Skorzeny?” 

A couple of hands went up.  Mac nodded at Blue Nine, who asked, “Isn’t he the guy on all those ‘wanted’ posters Eisenhower papered Allied territory with?”

“Yes, that is he.”  There were a few nods around the room.  “Part of his mission was to create confusion and spread disinformation during the recent German offensive, using hand-picked German soldiers who could pass for Americans.  His people had instructions, if captured, to tell their interrogators that Skorzeny’s mission was a raid on Paris to kill or capture General Eisenhower.  It worked and, evidently, General Eisenhower was not amused by spending Christmas in a security lockdown.”

He waited for a moment as the inevitable smiles appeared on some faces, including mine.  I had heard the rumors too.  Mac continued, “General Skorzeny has been very valuable to the Fatherland in many different capacities; however, only one of those is of concern to us here and it is related to the Eisenhower incident.  A couple of years ago, Skorzeny came up with the idea of recruiting and training German soldiers to pass as Americans.  His goal was not espionage, but sabotage, spreading disinformation and generally creating havoc among the Allied troops, usually in support of German operations.”

Blue Three, obviously from another organization, interrupted, “So Skorzeny is our target?”

Mac frowned.  He liked getting to the point in his own time and wasn’t fond of interruptions, something we all learned early on.  Apparently, Mac was in a cooperative mood, so he didn’t fry the guy.  “No, Skorzeny has been promoted to bigger and better things; however, the training of American imposters continues … with a twist.

“As the defeat of Germany became more and more inevitable, the purpose of the training was changed to dealing with the eventual occupation by the Allies.  As envisioned by Himmler, it was to become a stay-behind Nazi organization, which would engage in guerrilla warfare against the occupying troops. However, the Nazi generals, including Skorzeny, soon realized that the groups of recruits were too few in number to be an effective fighting force.  It has now been decided to use them to set up systems of escape routes, called ‘Ratlines’” – Mac pronounced it correctly as “rattlins.”  The word comes from a nautical term for lines used to form a rope ladder – “a sort of secret ‘underground railroad’ to help leading Nazis escape after Germany's surrender.  These escape routes are intended mainly to lead to safe havens in South America, particularly Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil and Chile; however, there are hints that other destinations may include the United States, Canada and the Middle East.”

From the expressions around the room, this was news to everybody.  I wanted to ask where all this inside information came from, but I knew Mac too well; he would either tell us in time or simply fall back on the old “need to know” axiom.

“The organization,” Mac continued, “which is now calling the shots is called ‘Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen,’ or
ODESSA
for short.”  I assumed we all spoke German because Mac didn’t volunteer the English translation: "The Organization of Former SS-Members."  I guessed things must be pretty grim in Berlin when new secret organizations were already using “former” in their descriptions.

“Himmler’s designation for these highly-specialized agents of Skorzeny’s training course was
Werwolfs
.”  Nobody needed a translation for that one.  “Most of the new crop of
Werwolfs
are relatively inexperienced, since the main requirements are having an extensive knowledge of America and the ability to speak American English fluently.  Although they are given training in sabotage, demolitions, small arms, survival and radio-communications, their success will be largely dependent upon leadership from a small group of experienced officers, hand-picked from the ranks of the German Army and the Waffen SS. In two weeks, most of these officers will meet at
Schloss Hülchrath
; a castle near the Rhinish town of Erkelenz, to plan their final strategy before disbursing throughout Germany.  Our objective is to eliminate as many of these
Werwolfs
leaders as possible, especially their Commandant, one Colonel Franz Weiss.”