Sleeper Agent (17 page)

Ilse gave a little moan. “No!” she cried. “The general has told you nothing! Nor will he ever do so!” She sobbed. “But
I
will! I do not have
his
courage.
His
strength. What you learn you will learn from me!”

She turned to Colonel Cornelius. She was suddenly calm. “Colonel Cornelius was working on a special Luftwaffe project.
The Collection and Evaluation of Information for Future War.”

For a moment there was total silence in the room. Tom sat frozen.

It was big. And it was not at all what he had expected.

Suddenly Ilse fell to her knees. She buried her face in Beigel’s lap. She cried. “I had to tell them, Anton. . . . Please understand. I . . . had to.” She wept uncontrollably.

The general said nothing. Slowly he raised his hand. Without looking at the girl he began to stroke her hair gently. He seemed oblivious to the others.

Tom turned to Cornelius. “You brought the documents with you? From Prague?”

The colonel nodded.

“You were under orders to preserve them?”

“Yes.”

“You concealed them?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

Cornelius looked at Beigel. For a moment the eyes of the two German officers were locked together. Then the general turned aside. Cornelius sighed. He turned to Tom. “They are buried.” He fell silent.

He thought for a while. He was shaken. How had he come to this? He had been so determined not to give away any military information. Only what was required. Name. Rank. Serial number. As his oath as an officer dictated. And now he suddenly found himself debating with himself how much to tell. Or not to tell. Neither he nor Beigel—nor the girl for that matter—had given away any concrete information. They could still revert to their posture of silence. Or could they? Perhaps they should never have let themselves be drawn into discussions with the Americans at all. About anything. But they had. It was too late. They
had
revealed that they were involved in a very special project of the Oberkommando der Luftwaffe. No longer were they merely ordinary officer prisoners. They were
special.
Very special. Ultimately their secret did indeed exist And they
had
been talking. Talking freely. About many things. Somehow it did not seem so inconceivable to go on.

He did.

“We had orders to deliver our documents to a certain organization in the area. They were to be buried in a specially prepared concealment pit with the records of that organization. Once we had turned over our documents, we had orders to remain in the general area in concealment and to avoid capture and interrogation for as long as possible.” He stopped.

Tom felt a rising excitement He had difficulty keeping it out of his voice when he asked tensely, “Did your project have a code name, Colonel?”

Cornelius hesitated. Again he glanced at Beigel. The general remained silent Cornelius nodded. “Yes.”

“What was it?”

“FENIX.”

Tom could taste his disappointment. But it was a fitting code name for the project that sought to aid the Third Reich to rise from defeat and explode in war once again. The Fourth Reich? Yes. It was not the code name he had hoped to hear. But it was fitting.
Fenix
—the fabulous bird that rose from its own ashes. The
Phoenix.

“The organization you brought your documents to,” he asked. “What kind of organization was it?”

Cornelius shook his head. “I do not know.”

“You must have
some
idea.” Tom’s voice took on a hard edge.

Cornelius shrugged. “It was probably the Ordensburg. I am not certain.”

Tom had heard of the Ordensburg—a Nazi party academy to train special young men for leading positions in the party. He filed away the information that the records of the organization were preserved. They should make interesting reading.

“Where exactly were the documents buried?” he asked.

Again Cornelius shook his head. “I do not know that either,” he said. “The pit is somewhere on the estate of the Ordensburg. And it is a very large estate.”

“Where?”

“Twelve kilometers north of Straubing. Overlooking the Danube River. On the east bank.”

“Does the estate have a name?”

“Yes. Schloss Ehrenstein.”

Tom went straight to the leather-cased field telephone installed in the
Bauernstube.
He lifted the receiver off the hook and turned the handle. “Iceberg Forward. Major Lee. CIC,” he said briskly. He waited. Then: “Herb? This is Tom. Listen. What’s the situation along the Danube about ten miles north of Straubing? . . . The east bank.”

Larry had quickly brought out a map. He showed it to Tom, placing a finger on it.

“Coordinates Uncle 545425,” Tom continued. He listened. “Okay. . . . Good. . . . Thanks.” He started to hang up. The phone sputtered. Again he listened. Then: “The General Staff officers? . . . Yeah. Well, we’ll be—” He reached down and began to crank the telephone handle spasmodically. “Hello! Hello!” he shouted into the mouthpiece. “Herb! I can’t hear you. Bad connection. I’ll get back to you later. Out!” He hung up. He turned to Larry. “We’ll never get out of here if I have to explain to old Herb.” He grinned. “Straubing is being mopped up. The area north of the town has been pretty much secured.”

He glanced at the silent phone. “By the time Herb gets through chewing out the entire Signal Corps and gets on the horn, we’ll be off. We’ve got business at Schloss Ehrenstein!”

He walked over to the three Germans. “You will be taken to Corps Headquarters for further interrogation. Sergeant Connors will be in charge,” he informed them.

He glanced at Ilse. “You will be prisoners of war of the American armed forces—and you will be treated as such.”

The girl’s lips trembled involuntarily with her intense relief. She lowered her head.

Tom started to walk away. He stopped. He walked back to the prisoners. “One more question,” he said. “Did anyone from your command at Oberwiese fire a shot two days ago?”

Cornelius looked startled. “Yes,” he said. “I did.”

“Why?”

The colonel cast an embarrassed glance toward Beigel. “I . . . I was getting tired of the monotony of canned army rations,” he explained. “I thought rabbit stew would be a nice change.” He smiled ruefully. “I missed.”

Schloss Ehrenstein—Rock of Honor Castle—crowned a humpbacked hill overlooking the river, majestically dominating a huge forest-clad domain. Below, the famous “blue” Danube, flowing a muddy brown, washed the roots of the great estate. The Romany Gypsies coming from the Balkans called the river the “dustless highway.” For those of them who traveled it during the mastery of the Third Reich it was a highway to hell. The hell of concentration camps.

A few miles to the north, atop another wooded hill, stood the imposing edifice Valhalla, named after the Norse mythology home of the Gods and the souls of fallen heroes. Erected by King Ludwig I of Bavaria, the ersatz Pantheon held a multitude of busts representing Germany’s great, sitting perched on their shelves and pedestals timelessly staring at one another in stony silence. Here, according to the Nazi propaganda mill, the souls of those who died fighting to establish the master race would find their final hallowed resting place.

A long, winding road led to the secluded centuries-old castle itself. Along the way were signs of several abandoned guard posts and checkpoints. Whoever had occupied the mansion had obviously wanted strictly enforced privacy.

The main building of Schloss Ehrenstein was a massive edifice with a steep-backed red tile roof, several round cone-capped turrets and a large square tower topped by a squat black cupola. The spacious cobblestone-paved courtyard extending before the front entrance was surrounded by a thick, forbidding wall, and entered through a narrow tunnellike gateway.

Tom and Larry found the castle occupied by elements of an Engineer combat battalion.

A young talkative lieutenant showed them through the cavernous place. “You’re just plain SOL,” he said amiably. “There’s not a damned thing here.”

“How long have you been billeted in this godforsaken mausoleum?” Tom asked.

“Got here two days ago. The burg was deserted. The Kraut outfit that occupied the place cleared out about a week ago.”

“How do you know that?” Larry wanted to know.

“The locals. I got a sergeant who
sprechen-Sie-Deutsch.
We always try to find out a little something about the place we take over. You never know.” He led the way down a stone staircase to the castle basement. “Anyway,” he continued, “the Krauts carted off everything that wasn’t nailed down. And some that was. After that the place stood empty, and the locals went through it liberating anything that might have been overlooked. Then
we
got here.”

They were making their way through a maze of corridors and passageways. The lieutenant paused at an open door. They glanced into a dismal empty room. Windowless, walls of bare concrete, it was depressing. On the wall opposite the door hung a big round clock, its face shattered.

“There’s nothing left.” The lieutenant nodded toward the mangled clock on the wall. “Nothing but junk.” He walked on. “There’s some sort of screwy shooting range down here, too. Place must have been a training school or something like that.”

“That’s probably what it was.”

“Well, they sure stripped the hell out of it. I’ve never seen a place picked as clean as this one. Like as if one of those hordes of scavenger ants had swarmed through. Not once, but a dozen times! We’ve been over every damned square inch of the place. Nothing. Believe me, when my men can’t find any loot, there’s
nothing
to find!”

“You didn’t run across any documents? Papers?”

“You kidding? Not even a used postage stamp, for crissake!”

“There was no one here at all, when you moved in?” Larry asked.

“There’s an old Frau around someplace. A sort of half-assed caretaker. Only one who didn’t scram. She has a room in one of the utility buildings. You can talk to her.” He grinned. “But you won’t get the time of day from her. She’s as tight-lipped as a spinster at an orgy!”

Frau Peukert was a short, stocky woman whose graying hair, pulled tightly back into a firm bun, and round ruddy face with its straight-lipped, turned-down mouth and small piercing eyes set in a patchwork of crow’s-feet wrinkles of the kind caused by a perpetual scowl rather than smile, fully corroborated her stated age of fifty-four.

She was demonstratively hostile and abrasively self-assured. Her sharp-pitched voice grated unpleasantly, and the young Engineer officer had been entirely wrong about her taciturnity. She talked. She talked a blue streak a minute.

Tom had no complaints on that score. It was
what
she said. She bitterly berated the Americans for overrunning the estate and despoiling it. She cursed the soldier vandals for taking over and defacing the venerable castle. She denounced the local farmers and villagers for robbing Schloss Ehrenstein of anything even remotely serviceable. She had been a housekeeper at the manor house itself for several years, a good one, ever since her late husband, the castle caretaker, had been drafted into the Wehrmacht. He had died a hero’s death on the Russian front. She had kept the estate as immaculate as the Christ Child’s crib—until foreign troops and piggish local riffraff had descended on the place.

It was not until Tom broke into her stream of vituperation and managed to ask her a direct question about the training school, which apparently had occupied Schloss Ehrenstein until recently, that she displayed her advertised reticence. Her already tight face grew tighter, and incongruously she snapped, “I have nothing to say.”

Tom and Larry took turns firing questions at her. She showed no favoritism toward either of them, her only comment being a terse “I have nothing to say.”

Finally Tom informed her that they knew certain records and documents were buried on the grounds of the estate, and that they meant to find out exactly
where
from her. He had expected some reaction to his blunt statement.

There was none. Except “I have nothing to say!”

She left little doubt as to what she really meant. Of course, she knew that. And, of course, she was not about to tell them anything.

But breaking the stubborn Frau Peukert not only would be difficult and time consuming. It would likely as not be impossible.

After instructing the Engineer officer to keep an eye on the woman and be sure she stayed put, Tom and Larry set out to track down the CIC team setting up in the nearby town of Straubing.

Straubing exhibited the usual chaotic mixture of fear and curiosity of a newly taken town. The familiar sheets of surrender fluttered from the windows, and empty flagpoles poked thin naked holes in the air. The signs “
Juden Nicht Erwünscht!
—No Jews!"—and other anti-Jewish slogans were hastily being removed by skittish shopkeepers from boarded-up stores and shops which sported sudden light-colored square patches on faded walls. Small clusters of grim white-faced people huddled in the illusory safety of doorways, bleakly watching the enemy move in and take over. Nazi edicts and proclamations tacked up in conspicuous places were being replaced by stern U.S. Army curfew regulations—1900 to 0600 hours—and travel restrictions—six kilometers from home.

The CIC team had established HQ in a small inn on the outskirts of town, Gastwirtschaft Bockelmeier.

CIC agent Irwin Buter, a young infantry noncom of German descent, Sergeant Winkler, who spoke German and had been “annexed” by the team as an interpreter, listened attentively to Tom’s account of the investigations leading to Schloss Ehrenstein and the obstinate caretaker.

Buter looked at an area map. “I’m a stranger here myself,” he said. “But I guess that is in our sector. You want us to take over?”

“No,” Tom said quickly. “No. We’ll handle it. It’s . . . part of a case we’re working on.”

Larry gave him a curious glance.

Tom continued. “We just wanted you to know that we might be dipping into your sector occasionally. And we might call on you if we need a quick assist. But we’re Staying on the case.”