The Berkut (27 page)

After training and as the war progressed, Valentine successfully completed dozens of assignments everywhere, from Mexico, where he took out a German radio relay station, to Morocco, where he hunted down and choked to death the leader of an extensive Nazi intelligence network monitoring the Strait of Gibraltar.

In the summer of 1943 Valentine and twenty other agents were given parachute training at a base near Cairo, and the event became one of the many insider legends of the OSS. On the day he made his first jump from a static line, OSS people from a wide area came to witness the moment. Nobody was sure that a twenty-two-foot canopy of silk would be able to carry his weight. Those expecting failure were disappointed; his chute popped open normally and Valentine guided himself to the most accurate landing of the whole group by manipulating his risers and slipping the chute in the wind. In the fall of the year he made his first and only operational jump, dropping into Yugoslavia. From there he walked into northern Italy, which was filled with German units and a few partisan groups. Throughout 1944 he was the OSS liaison for an Italian partisan cell operating in the mountains north of Milan. From time to time, frequently against orders, he crossed into Switzerland to visit his superiors and arrange for supply drops for his partisan friends in the Italian Alps.

By the time of his assignment in Italy, Beau Valentine was known throughout the OSS as its top field man. Initially he had been assigned the code name Beefsteak, but as his reputation grew this was changed to Crawdad. He was the kind of man who did things his own way in his own time. He always listened to orders, but in doing so he focused on the desired outcome, not the specified tactics. In his view,
how
a job got done was the prerogative of the person asked to do it.

Now he was at a prison in Wiesbaden, west of Frankfurt. When the war ended in May, he'd been sent into southern Germany to "have a look." Of primary interest were German scientists, especially those who had created the Nazi rocket program. A race was beginning; Allied countries and the Russians were scouring Germany for scientific talent, and Bavaria was the home of many of the scientists and technicians. In Munich he'd stumbled onto the Russian investigating team, and when the American paratrooper captain Molanaro had told him
the Russians were interested in Otto Skorzeny, Valentine guessed there might be a connection with his mission. Eventually he'd gotten the whole story from the officer and had gone immediately to Salzburg to try to pick up the Russians' trail, but it had been a fruitless trip. Where the combat soldiers in Munich had been friendly and cooperative, the troops in Austria were tight-lipped. Even so, some well
placed cartons of cigarettes allowed him to confirm that the Russians had been there and that they had met with an important captured Nazi. He was certain it was Skorzeny, but despite a concerted effort to find out, he couldn't nail it down. Using other sources, he learned that Skorzeny had been sent to Augsburg in Germany, and he followed. But by the time he arrived it was too late; Skorzeny had been moved again, this time to Wiesbaden.

Skorzeny was a prize catch for the Americans. Through an OSS colleague, Valentine procured a thick dossier on the prisoner, and some of his colleagues told him that
virtually everyone in Army G-2
suspected that Skorzeny might have rescued Hitler at the end of April
or, at the very leas
t, had information about the Fü
hrer's demise. For the most part, the American intelligence community was wary of Skorzeny, their fears making him bigger than life. Alluding to a presidential assignment, Valentine persuaded the army to let him interrogate the man, and as sometimes happened with the people he encountered, Skorzeny took a liking to him within a few minutes after the German was brought from his cell. The Americans had installed him with Kaltenbrunner, one of the leaders of the Reich Secret Service. Their cell was wired with hidden microphones, but despite the setup, neither man revealed anything of substance.

The meeting room provided by the army was small, with a single light bulb and a narrow slit window high above them. "Our people believe you were in Berlin when it was under siege by the Russians," Valentine began.

Skorzeny smiled and sent a gust of cigarette smoke toward the ceiling. "So they tell me; they're wrong. I was in the Tauern by then. When you Americans got the bridgehead at Remagen, I was ordered to destroy it. By the time we got our torpedo mines down from the coast, you already had several makeshift bridges across the river. Some of my men were killed in the attempt; others were captured. The failure of that operation pretty much ended the need for a special commando group."

"We know."

Skorzeny tipped back the legs of his wooden chair. "I saw Hider for the final time on the twenty-seventh of March. The encounter was pure chance. I was in the Chancellery on other business; we met in a long hallway. He looked tired and weak~ like an old man. He promised me I would receive Oak Leaves on my Knight's Cross~ but I never saw him again. On the last day of April I was ordered to abandon the Oder front and relocate to the Alpine Redoubt~ but before I could leave, my orders were amended again and I was told to report to SchOmer's HQ in Silesia."

"That first order sending you to the mountains-it was because of a mission?"

Skorzeny shook his head. "All armies in crisis act the same. First they tell you to move; then~ if they remember you, they tell you what they want you to do. I assumed I was going there to organize a guerrilla movement. "

"But instead you went to Vienna to extract your family," Valentine pointed out.

"That was my first concern. The Russians were already in the city. I tried briefly to mobilize a defense~ but it was too late for that sort of thing, so I took my men to the mountains to await the surrender."

Valentine had his own feelings about Skorzeny, but he wanted to put pressure on him. "A tribunal is being established in Nuremberg; they're going to try you on war crime charges."

"To hell with them; they're wasting their time," Skorzeny said contemptuously. "I'm a simple soldier."

"Far from simple," Valentine said with a smile.

Skorzeny took this as a compliment and bowed his head slighdy.

"Thank you."

"They know that your men infiltrated our lines in American uniforms during the Ardennes offensive," Valentine pointed out.

"]awohl,
but we wore our own uniforms underneath. If you prosecute my men~ then you must also prosecute Lord Mountbatten. We did nothing the British commandos did not do. They were military actions-irregular~ to be sure~ but otherwise quite legitimate."

"The critical charge, I believe," said Valentine, "involves the execution of prisoners of war. They believe it was murder-pure and simple homicide."

"I gave no orders to execute American prisoners, and am aware of no such orders from any of my officers. I've heard these allegations before; those atrocities were committed by an SS division~ the First
Panzer. We had no relationship with that unit, and the records will prove it without question."

"I believe you," Valentine said. Skorzeny did not strike him as a liar.

Sensing Valentine's trust, Skorzeny seized the opportunity. "I've heard that one of my officers is also here. Can you tell me what the charges are against him?"

Valentine raised a bushy eyebrow. "His name?" "Radl."

Valentine closed his eyes and watched names and faces tick by in his mind as if he were reading an encyclopedia. When he got to Radl, he stopped and dredged up what he knew about the man.

"It's in the preliminary investigation stage. They'll interrogate him as a way of cross-checking your statements. He was your second in command?"

"Yes. There were only five of us at the end. It was a miserable and inglorious end to the division."

"Five? I understood that you had transferred some of your units to Austria."

"Only companies-the remnants of our division. After the Ardennes disaster we were decommissioned. -I reported to Hitler after Christmas in Ziegenhain. I had injured my left eye, and the Fuhrer saw to it that I got first-rate medical attention. At the end of January, Himmler called me; he'd taken over Army Group Vistula and had been given the responsibility of turning back the Russian invaders at the Oder. He sent me to Schwedt to establish a bridgehead there. We made a fight of it for a while, but with what we had it was only a matter of time until we were overrun by the Ivans. In late February I was called back to Berlin and given command of a regular division, with the rank of major general. The English were broadcasting that I was to be put in charge of the defense of Berlin, but that was untrue."

"And then you left the front."

"On February twenty-eighth. It was in the early morni
ng." "You took some people with
you, but left others behind." "I went alone. Radl was already in Vienna."

"Who commanded in your absence?"

"Colonel Gü
nter Brumm-a good man, my planner." Skorzeny laughed. "The Russians asked me the same thing."

For a moment Valentine was confused. Who was Brumm? He'd seen the Friedenthal file and the division's organization chart, such as
it was, but here was a new name. He knew Radl, but Brumm? He lit a cigar and offered one to the SS officer, who refused it. The American's instinct told him to be careful. "Which Russian interrogation was this?"

Skorzeny stared at the wall, obviously tired. "The
only
one ... in Salzburg. "

"But you gave yourself up to American units."

"True, but on that first morning the Americans brought two Russians to talk to me. They didn't wear uniforms-secret police types, I think."

"And they wanted to know about Brumm?"

"They didn't say so in so many words, but that's who they were after. The Russians never say anything directly; you have to interpret what they seem to be saying. Besides, I've conducted a few interrogations in my day and I understand the techniques very well." Suddenly Skorzeny laughed out loud and slapped his leg. "You don't know Gunter
either!
I can see it in your face! This is incredible. What's he done to pique so much interest?"

Valentine smiled and made a gesture that acknowledged the truth of the Austrian's perception. "I thought our files were complete, but there is no mention of this Colonel Brumm. An oversight, I presume."

Skorzeny was greatly amused. "First the Russians, now you.
Gü
nter would be disturbed to know there was so much interest in him. That one loathed the limelight. I told the Russians he was dead."

They were beginning to connect with each other. "But you don't know that."

"Only a deduction.
The Russians overran Schwedt. Gü
nter would have stayed with his men, and they were not trained to run. Therefore he must be dead." Skorzeny gestured with his hands as if to say there was no other possibility.

"You think the Russians were NKVD?"

"Or SMERSH. They wore coveralls; whatever, they certainly were not regular military personnel. I spent two hours with them."

"And you told them what you told me?"

"Some of it. I was in no mood to be congenial. All they seemed to want
to know was Gü
nter's name, and I gave them that. Why not? They would have learned it soon enough."

Indeed, Valentine thought. His head began to ache, a sure sign that there was something grinding away in his subconscious. He'd had no concrete directive to follow in coming to Wiesbaden. He was here quite by accident, acting on instinct, and now the feeling he'd gotten at Munich was even stronger.

32 – June 3, 1945, 8:30 P.M.

The Harz Mountains are like an old man's teeth: worn, cracked, jagged, with gaps and stained by age. By most standards the mountains are not remarkable; from a distance they look inviting, almost soft. Their edges are a cruel deceit: grassy knolls with sparse vegetation, thin trees with new leaves and clouds of starlings darting overhead. From afar it looks like an ideal place for a picnic.

But the interior is quite different. The valleys and canyon walls are thin and deep, strewn with razor-sharp slate and piles of finely edged boulders. Small rivers and streams pop out of cliff
sides, gush through trenches worn over centuries and drop without warning back into the earth. Compasses are useless in the Harz; iron deposits keep needles spinning aimlessly, perpetually seeking and never finding magnetic north. The rocks that clutter some valley floors are so sharp that leather boots last no more than a few days. Other valleys are choked with double-canopy forests, assortments of gnarled pines and hundred
year-old hardwoods, with trunks that are scored and flaked. Forest floors are littered with slash, potholes ~d ferns, and wrist-thick ground vines catch the feet and make the going tough. Underneath the trees it is dark-not the normal, shadowy dusk of a forest but as black and impenetrable as the gate to Hell itself. One does not enter the region innocently. Among the many mountains and forests of Germany those of the Harz are only a wart, but to those who know about such things, the range is considered an earthly version of damnation, a place that gives comfort only to the Devil and his minions.