Eagles fly, p.6
Eagles Fly, page 6
He edged away from the door, hurried down one flight of stairs, and then ran along the second-level ramp, turning left at the end to take the driveway up.
Someone was waiting for him near his car, he was almost certain of it. And he had survived this long by listening to his hunches.
As the ramp rose to meet the third-floor level Stornberg ran in a crouch, hiding behind the low wall that held the parking meters, until he came to the thick concrete post at the corner. He stood up and eased around the corner. There, in the shadows behind a similar concrete post about five feet from his car, a man was watching the stairwell door.
Stornberg stepped away from the post and walked directly to him, making no noise.
He stopped five feet from the man. “If you move, I’ll kill you,” he said softly.
The man stiffened but did not turn around.
“Why are you waiting for me?”
“Herr Stornberg,” the man said. “I’ve come from a friend in Miami.”
This was all wrong. Either the man was a government investigator who knew about Stornberg’s Odessa connection, or he was who he claimed to be, a messenger boy. In either event he was an amateur.
“Move your hands away from your body and turn around very slowly,” Stornberg said, and the man complied, a wide grin on his face.
“I didn’t think you were coming at first,” the man said, “I thought you were off work at six, so I was here at five forty-five, but when you didn’t show up I got worried.”
Stornberg said nothing. There was something strange about this. The man was about his height and general build, and appeared to be about the same age. But he was a fool. They would not send a fool to contact him. Yet they had.
“They told me not to go to the bookstore, so I had no other choice than to go to your apartment. I thought maybe you had left your car here for some reason and got a ride home.”
“You were at my apartment?” Stornberg asked quietly.
“Yes … sir,” the man said. “There was no answer at your door, but your landlord told me that you were probably working late at the bookstore.”
A faint flicker of surprise played across Stornberg’s features. The man was more than an amateur. He was a dangerous bungler.
“So you came back here to wait for me?”
“Yes.” The man nodded. “I have a message for you, and instructions.”
“Yes?”
“Number one: You are to destroy your identity here. Number two: I have a key for a public locker at Logan International which contains your new identity. Papers, clothes, money, and all that. Number three: You are to proceed as soon as possible to Aerie for a long-term assignment. And number four: I am at your disposal if you need help.” The man said it all as if he had learned the words by rote.
Stornberg suddenly understood why this particular man had been sent to him. “I am going to need your help.”
The man lowered his hands, his smile even more effusive. “Anything, Herr Stornberg. Anything at all. Just ask.”
For several moments Stornberg stood silent, his head cocked at a slight angle as if he were listening for something. But he was quickly going over each step he would have to take to make good his untraceable escape to Aerie. The groundwork had been laid for him; all he had to do was follow through with it.
“Where is your car parked?” he asked.
“It’s a van, actually. Upstairs on the fifth level.”
“Anyone else parked near by?”
“Not as of ten minutes ago.”
“Fine,” Stornberg said. “I’ll drive you up. Get in.”
They climbed in the car, and Stornberg drove up the two levels to where the man’s Ford Econoline van was parked. He pulled up next to it.
“Do you have a spare can of gasoline by any chance?” Stornberg asked.
The man looked slightly puzzled. “As a matter of fact, I do. They said you might need it.”
Stornberg smiled. “Not me. You’re going to need it.”
“Sir?” the man asked.
“It’s simple,” Stornberg said. “You and I are going to change clothes and IDs. I’ll take your van out to the airport to pick up my alternate identity papers and then take a flight to New York. There I’ll destroy your identity, and with my new papers I’ll take the first flight to Buenos Aires.”
“What about me?”
“Posing as Arnold Stornberg, you are going to take my Fiat and drive back to Miami tonight. You’ll carry the extra gas so that you won’t have to stop at a gas station until you’re well out of Boston. In Miami you’ll be given instructions for getting rid of the car and assuming a new identity.”
The man seemed pleased. “I’ve been a loyal supporter of the organization for a long time, but this is the first assignment of any importance I’ve ever been given. It is an honor to work with you, sir.”
Stornberg patted the man on the arm, and they got out of the car and went into the back of the van, where they quickly changed clothes, including everything in the pockets. As Stornberg suspected, the man’s clothing fit well.
“It’s been a pleasure working with you, sir,” the man said, shaking Stornberg’s hand.
“Sure,” Stornberg said. They got out of the van and Stornberg walked back to the car with the man.
“I’m glad I could be a help to the cause,” the man said, beaming.
Without warning Stornberg smashed his right fist into the side of the man’s head, knocking him unconscious across the front seat of the Fiat.
He grabbed the gas can from the back and splashed the entire five gallons in and around the car, making sure the unconscious man was soaked.
He put the gas can in the rear of the van, then climbed in behind the wheel, started the engine, and backed out of the parking spot, swinging around so that he was behind the Fiat.
The man had served the cause well, he thought as he cranked down his window and lit a book of matches. And the man would continue to serve the cause well, he thought as he flipped the burning matchbook toward the Fiat, then slammed the van in gear and took off.
An intense ball of flame lit up the entire fifth floor. A moment later the van was around the corner and headed down toward the street.
Witnesses would tell police they saw a van leaving the parking ramp. It would be found at the airport. But by then Stornberg, under his new identity, would be on his way to Buenos Aires. The old Stornberg would be burned beyond recognition in the Fiat.
He emerged from the parking ramp and headed in the rain toward the airport, looking forward with pleasure to whatever the long-term assignment was that awaited him, completely putting out of his mind the man he had just murdered.
TWO YEARS LATER 1981
A crowd of people had gathered in front of the American embassy near downtown Buenos Aires, and the black Cadillac limousine had to slow down to avoid hitting the Argentinian soldiers ringing the area.
Many of the protesters carried posters, shaking them angrily over their heads. Inside the bulletproof limousine the chauffeur and the two old men seated in the back could hear the shouts and chants.
“Americans go home!”
“America the backstabber!”
Sigmund Dortmund turned to his friend seated next to him and smiled, his teeth yellowed from the cigars he smoked, his breath coming in a ragged wheeze. “We never allowed such things to happen. It was one of the secrets of our success.”
Dieter Schey, a man equally as old as Dortmund and equally as frail, patted his friend’s knee. “You are living in the past, my old comrade.”
Dortmund looked beyond Schey at the crowd outside and nodded. “Perhaps,” he said thoughtfully.
Behind them traffic began to back up, and several drivers honked their horns; a number of them leaned out their windows and shouted at the soldiers to clear the way for them.
Only a few white clouds scudded across the perfectly blue sky; the sun glinted off the windows and polished bits of exposed chrome and steel throughout the great city.
It was mid-December and summer had come to the southern hemisphere, a fact of nature that neither Dortmund nor Schey had ever become accustomed to despite the fact that this had been their home since they had fled Germany early in 1945. Both men missed the dark German beer from small country towns, the knockwurst and other fat sausages from the East, the heady cheeses from the South, the rolling hills, the Autobahns, the Munich beer halls, the Schwartzwald, and most of all Nuremberg. Glorious Nuremberg.
There had been no response to the crowd from within the American embassy, and the several hundred angry students had begun to weary of their demonstration. The soldiers, who at first had been frightened that they would have to engage in a battle, had become bored with what had turned out to be nothing more than a stupid demonstration. Now the soldiers sensed the crowd’s waning enthusiasm, and they began to clear a way for the traffic to move through.
“Just a moment now, meine Herren,” the chauffeur said, glancing in the rearview mirror at the two old men in the backseat.
But Dortmund had not heard him. Instead his mind had turned inward to his memories. Nuremberg. One million troops assembled in precise orderliness for the greater glory of the Third Reich.
“Sieg Heil!” The cry had arisen simultaneously from a million pairs of lips. “Sieg Heil!” It rose up out of the stadium. It rolled across the countryside. It echoed and reechoed around a world that their Fuehrer had nearly brought to its knees.
The limousine began to move finally, the driver working his way slowly and cautiously past the soldiers, through the remnants of the departing mob.
A rock struck the side of the car. Two soldiers pounced upon the student who had thrown it and clubbed the young man to the ground with the butts of their rifles. None of the other demonstrators came to the young man’s rescue. The heart had gone out of the crowd. They wanted no trouble. Most of them wanted only to return to their homes and nap so that they would be refreshed for the dinner hour, which began at ten o’clock.
“Nuremberg?” Schey said softly.
Dortmund looked up out of his thoughts and smiled somewhat guiltily. His wife said that particular expression made him seem more like a little boy than an SS Oberst.
A few windows had been broken in the embassy building, and the iron fence had been splattered here and there with bright red spray paint. Other than that, little or no damage had been done.
By the time the limousine had made it to the end of the block, the last of the demonstrators had either scurried away or been dragged into two waiting military vans with flashing blue lights.
In Berlin in the early days such people would have been summarily shot, Dortmund thought. No. Actually such demonstrations had been impossible. Unthinkable. In those days there had been order. Purity of thought and deed. Stern purpose.
In 1937 Dortmund had been a schoolteacher in Hamburg. Schey had been the headmaster of the school. Together they had joined the Schutzstaffel. Together they had gone through officers school, had trained in intelligence together, and both of them had been transferred to the Abwher, working for Admiral Canaris.
It was not surprising this had happened, because both of them had been very good at what they did, both of them had ties, however slight, with Canaris’ family, and both had been friends in school together.
“Opportunists under the same banner,” Schey had once said.
Free of the traffic jam caused by the demonstrators, the limousine sped along the Libertador Highway to the northwest, the Rio de la Plata Estuary to their right. Dortmund put the window down a crack so that he could smell the ocean. He breathed deeply.
“It reminds me of Usedom Island when I was a boy.”
Schey laughed, and Dortmund glanced sharply at him, somewhat irritated.
“It was a resort before Peenemünde was constructed as a rocket research station.”
“You are too thin-skinned these days, Sigmund,” Schey said in a conciliatory tone. “As a boy my parents took me to Usedom one summer, and I was merely remembering with you the loveliness of a summer’s day.”
Dortmund looked out the window at the azure ocean, and for a moment he could let himself believe that he was a little boy again with no worries instead of an old man whose life was nearing an end. There had been so many plans for the future.
“One race united under a common flag for a common purpose.” Poland. Czechoslovakia. Romania. Yugoslavia. Greece. Italy. Norway. France. Libya.
The flags are high …
The ranks are tightly closed …
Bits and pieces of the Horst Wessel song ran through Dortmund’s mind along with snatches of the melody of “Deutschland Uber Alles.”
To walk the streets of Paris as a conquering hero. To enter Rome a venerated ally.
Thirty-five miles north of the city, near the town of Campana, the limousine turned off the main highway onto a narrow dirt road without slowing down, and Dortmund came out of his thoughts. The thick jungle had closed in around them, and it was dark in the car.
“The Americans have gone too far with this Chinese thing,” Schey said.
Dortmund shook his head. “There will be some unrest. But we missed our golden opportunity in the sixties.”
“We made money,” Schey countered.
“Yes, but what has it done for us? Made a few old men like you and me and the others a bit more comfortable? Financed a few minor acts of retribution?” Dortmund shook his head. “Ach du lieber meiner alter Freund. But did our money keep poor old Spannau alive? Has it advanced our cause significantly?”
Schey said nothing.
“What we need is a purpose. A direction.”
“You forget the plan.”
Dortmund waved Schey’s comment away as if he were brushing an irritating insect from his face. “We have heard nothing for nearly two years. Stoeffel hides here in his fortress like some medieval king without a word to any of us until now.”
“There is the Jew.”
Dortmund laughed, the sound more like the crackle of dry branches in the wind. “Yes, our Jew watchdog. He has been to watch de Hoef in Miami, our poor little mouse Heinzman in Washington, D.C., you, Stoeffel, and me here in Buenos Aires, and everyone else. But he has accomplished nothing. He is no more than a puppy dog for Goldmann.”
Their conversation was cut short when the chauffeur stopped at a tall gate in the wire mesh fence surrounding Stoeffel’s estate. A burly man in a security guard uniform approached the car. Dortmund lowered the window.
“Dortmund and Schey.”
“Guten tag, meine Herren. Herr Stoeffel and the others are waiting for you in the house,” The guard said. Dortmund raised the window as the man stepped back and waved them through.
Half a mile later they came out of the jungle into a large clearing at the center of which was Stoeffel’s twenty-seven-room baroque mansion built with SS funds shortly after the war.
Leaded windows, stone arches, parapets, and gargoyles along the roofline made the mansion seem like something out of a fairy tale. But both men knew, despite Dortmund’s comments to the contrary, that the future of the Odessa, and therefore their hopes for a new Third Reich, lay here.
Stoeffel had been the organizer of the Odessa. He had been the most brilliant, the most wealthy, and the best connected of them. Even now, despite the occasional bickering between the old men, he held them together. In fact, the plan was his idea. And as insane as it had seemed to them, they had all gone along with it..
The limousine drew up to the mansion’s main entrance, and the chauffeur helped Dortmund and Schey out of the car. They mounted the steps as the ornately carved wooden door opened. Stoeffel’s personal secretary, a former low-ranking SS officer, took their coats and hats, and showed them to Stoeffel’s study at the rear of the house.
Kurt Stoeffel was seated at the head of a long conference table in the center of the huge, high-ceilinged room. Eight other old men were seated around the table. When Dortmund and Schey came in, they looked up, and Stoeffel got to his feet.
“We were becoming concerned. What kept you?” he said. Stoeffel’s voice was soft, but it held a note of genuine concern.
“There was a traffic tie-up near the American embassy,” Dortmund said. In front of him on the table was a single sheet of paper upon which had been typed a timetable. “Am I to assume that you are ready to proceed with this scheme?”
“It is up to this gathering to decide that,” Stoeffel said graciously. He was a tall man and very thin with intense blue eyes. He had aged better than any of them and always dressed exceedingly well. “I am merely ready to report that the first phase of the operation has been completed.”
Dortmund’s right eyebrow rose. He hadn’t thought it would have gone this far. He looked at the others around the table but could find no hint of his own skepticism in their eyes. He shook his head.
“What’s the matter, Sigmund?” Stoeffel said. “When we first began planning this operation it took three months to convince you. Have you changed your mind again?”
“On the contrary.” Dortmund fingered the piece of paper in front of him. “But this is a desperate gamble. I’ve maintained that all along.”
“There are no other alternatives.”
“I cannot believe that,” Dortmund said. He knew he was being arbitrary, but he could not help himself. “If this fails, we all may be exposed.”
Stoeffel laughed. “The youngest man in this room is sixty-nine years old, Sigmund. We have come to the end.”
“But the young men will take over from us,” Dortmund said. It was the same argument as two years ago.
“No,” Stoeffel said gently. “They have no direction. No sense of purpose.”
“For a good reason,” Thomas Heinzman said at Stoeffel’s right. Dortmund looked his way.
“What might that be, Thomas?”
“We had our Fuehrer to lead us. The new ones only have us.”
Dortmund looked around at the others, and despite himself, he had to smile. The mouse Heinzman had a point. Who would follow a group such as this for anything other than money, which was the worst of all loyalties?
