The Memories of Milo Morai Page 7

  “What kind of billets are we drawing, sir?” asked the woman called Judy.

  Barstow nodded again. “There’s an old CCC-type barrack building with a detached latrine that the WAACs will have, and another which will house your subjects. There is one three-bedroom bungalow that will be the billet of the three doctors and two-bedroom ones for the rest of you; how you pair off is your business.”

  “Are we all going to be locked up day and night in that compound, too, general?” Hugo demanded in his thick Westphalian accent.

  Barstow shook his head. “No, not at all, Hugo. Mjlo, Schrader and Sergeant Stupsnasig will have keys to the gate and to the control box for the fence power. The compound is designed more with the aim of keeping unauthorized people out of it than of keeping you all in. But, Hugo, and all the rest of you, too, hear me and hear me well. No one of you will have fire­arms, while the outside guards will have them, along with the orders to use them should any person try to go over or under or through the wire or the gate. This is no makework we’re doing here, it is an operation of earthshaking importance to the Army, the nation and the world.”

  Barstow’s voice had risen, become quite adamant, as he spoke the last sentence. Now he lowered his speaking voice. “There are going to be, as I said, similarities in the conduct of this operation to our previous operation in Munich, but there are going to be glaring dissimilarities, too. In Munich, one of our primary functions was that of finding out, of unmask­ing, former SS, members of the Nazi Party, bureau­crats, non-German collaborators and the like who were trying to pass themselves off as innocent, abused displaced persons.

  “In this operation, on the other hand, it will not be up to any of the military interviewers to make value judgments on the interviewees. The doctors, alone, will make the decisions as to just how useful the individuals will be, and their decisions will be all based upon other things than the politics or the former military activities or affiliations of the subjects in question.

  . “Those of you who were combat officers or active operatives with General Donovan may dislike some of our new subjects instantly, on first meeting, subcon­sciously recognizing them as the Enemy. But you all are just going to have to force your conscious to override your subconscious, for the old war is done and now a new one has begun for our nation, our way of life, and, like it or not, these subjects will be allies in this new war, potentially very valuable allies indeed, and they must at all times be treated as such, no matter how they may have behaved in the past, how they behave now or how you may feel about them and their past deeds, gutwise.”

  “In other, plainer words, general,” said the man called Buck, dryly, “you are setting us up here to coddle and kowtow to a passel of Nazi and quisling war criminals, right? Men who would likely be, rightly be, shot or hung or at least imprisoned did they remain in Europe, right?”

  Barstow shook his head. “You’re not very good at following orders, Buck, are you? Didn’t I just say that none of you are to make any value judgments based upon the supposed deeds or misdeeds of our incoming subjects? You’ve been with me for some time, and, frankly, I’d expected more professional conduct from you.

  “I reiterate, ladies and gentlemen: the Second World War is over, done; the initial skirmishings of the new war are already commencing, but not easily visible yet. The subjects who are coming in to us have the potential, many of them, to be extremely valuable to us, to the United States of America and all other free people everywhere, to be of great help in thwarting or defeating the totalitarian aims of the new enemy.

  “It has been said that the art of politics makes for exceedingly strange bedfellows. Well, the art of modern warfare makes for even stranger ones, I assure you all. Believe me, I was shocked, too—shocked to the very core of my being—when my superiors gave me this assignment and told me what my people and I would be doing on this Operation Newhaven, but as I already knew and knew well, the danger, the deadly peril, we all face whether or not we know it, I could immediately grasp the necessity of salving over old prejudices and accepting former enemies as respected allies if not as friends. You, Buck, and all the rest of you must follow my lead and do the same. If any of you feel that you cannot, for whatever reason or none, tell me now and I will replace you before any of the operation has started. Well … ?”

  Milo and Betty wound up sharing a bungalow with Buck and Judy. Buck was a compact, wiry man a bit under average height, with thin, brown hair and gray eyes flecked with green. Always graceful, he was capable of moving as silently and as swiftly as a cat, in some of his ways reminding Milo of certain of the traits of Jethro Stiles. His English had aspects and sounds of Britain, but his Hochdeutsch and his French were both flawless and accentless.

  Judy was a little taller than Buck. She was round-faced, rosy-cheeked, with thick hair of a chestnut hue. Her arms and legs were thick, but her body was well proportioned, her teeth white and even and her hazel eyes thick-lashed. In a dirndl, she would have looked the very picture, thought Milo, of a strong, healthy, happy Bavarian peasant woman. And her Hochdeutsch was sprinkled well with the accents and id­ioms of Bavaria and Westphalia.

  Milo was certain that Buck and Judy were in love, but theirs was an easygoing, relaxed relationship, with little or no public traces of touchings to advertise their emotional attachment one to the other. Back in Germany, he had not known either of the two of them any better than he had then known Betty. Back in Germany, indeed, Milo had spent the most of his nonduty time alone—reading avidly of both English and German books, anything onto which he had been able to lay hands, sipping schnapps and whisky and cognac and wines, trying to wind down to near-normalcy after the long months of privation, squalor, combat, fear and sudden death. Now he was getting to know these coworkers as housemates and friends.

  The work they all were doing with the mostly German interviewees had progressed smoothly to date, sixteen men having passed through their hands thus far—fourteen Germans, one Norwegian and one of Rumanian origin. The three doctors had passed on twelve of these men to whatever came after this Operation Newhaven. Barstow had mentioned in an oblique manner that those not passed on were to be speedily repatriated to whatever internment camps they had originally been plucked from and left to whatever fates their wartime activities had earned them from the victorious allies.

  On a night when Milo and Betty and Buck and Judy sat in the parlor of the shared bungalows, chatting and drinking and smoking, three new subjects were occupying the tar-paper barrack, their screenings to begin in the morning. This was the smallest number to arrive to date, and all of this lot were German, or listed themselves as such. Earlier in this evening, the four house mates, along with Emil Schrader and Hugo, had listened for a while to the conversations of the three via the microphones well hidden in the subject barrack and latrine, now they and Schrader sat discussing what the three men had said and the thus-revealed personalities of the men, themselves.

  “This Hizinger,” asked Milo, “what do you make of him, Emil?”

  “Clearly the leader of this bunch. A born leader and accustomed to command, I’d say, too. He may well be a German intellectual, but he’s clearly not a civilian one; he walks like a soldier, he talks like a soldier and he behaves like a Prussian officer of the alte Garde. He puts me in mind of an SS Panzer officer we captured in southern France—hard as nails, tough-minded and so damned convinced that he was right that nothing would or could ever shake his beliefs. That Unter-sturmfuhrer was from the same part of Germany my own folks came from, too, and after I’d come to talk with him for a while I could almost’ve come to like him, but then he come to get ahold of a carbine, some­way, and shot Lieutenant Mallow and I had to blow his head off with my pistol. I think Hizinger over there is just the same kind of Nazi fanatic.”

  Milo nodded and turned to the others. “Betty, Buck, Judy?”

  “Emil is right,” said Betty, “Herr Hizinger has got Nazi and SS written all over him. He seems very intel­ligent, very voluble a
nd well educated, very precise and methodical, but it’s clear that he was no civilian specialist at whatever our three scientists—Smith, Jones and Doe—are interested in; no, he was a military man, all the way, probably from birth. I’d give odds that his real name, his patronymic, has a ‘von’ preceding it, Milo.”

  “Yes,” agreed Buck. “You know, what I think is that this Hizinger got wind of what was going on and thought he might have the ability to pass himself off as a scientist and thus escape Germany, Europe and his just deserts for whatever he may have done in service to Hitler, the Party and the Fatherland.”

  While Betty and the others had been talking, Judy had just sat in silence, biting her lips and wringing her hands. Now she spoke. “Look, if anyone here in this room has real reasons for hating and despising the Nazis, it’s me. But there is this, too, to be considered and not ever forgotten. Not all Germans were Nazis, not all German soldiers were Nazis, not even all German officers were Nazis. There were even SS men who were not Nazis or even Germans, for that matter. Whether this Hizinger was a scientist or a soldier or both or neither, he deserves to be judged just as ob­jectively as we judged all of the men who came before him and will come after him. If he is a Prussian—and I doubt that he is, he doesn’t have that accent—that is not at all his fault. Who has choice in where he is born?

  “I do not in the least like this dirty business of listening to the conversations and private acts of our subjects without their knowledge or leave, Milo. Yes, I know, you are going to say that the general says that it is necessary to do such things for the good of the nation, but reflect, if you all will—this is precisely the excuse used by Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and every other dictator to legalize even the most heinous and unspeakable acts against individuals and groups.

  “After this exchange, tonight, I suggest, in the pursuit of being fair and truly objective, that Herr Hizinger be turned over to Team Two. Let Hugo, Ned and Dr. Jones determine his true status-to-be.”

  The next morning, Milo did turn Hizinger over to Hugo, giving the subject called Faber to Team One and the one called Gries to Team Three, with Emil Schrader filling in for him in his absence. He felt a need to confer with Barstow, not because of what Judy had said as much as because of the way she had said it, and also partially because of things not heard but felt, sensed.

  Barstow ushered Milo back into the small window­less, soundproofed conference room, closed and locked the door, and offered Scotch and a cigar. When he had heard it all, he carefully nudged the ash from off the end of his puro and raised his bushy eyebrows. “Milo, in any operations of the kinds I’ve been running, the chance of innocently harboring one or more jokers in the deck is a distinct possibility, but if we do have such here, I don’t think Judy is the one. I’m going to tell you why, but what I say is for your ears alone—you don’t repeat it to anyone, not even to Betty. Verstehen?

  “Of course, you’ve noted how close Buck and Judy are? They’ve been together for a long time and through particular hell. They’re what is left of a team of three people, the third of whom was Judy’s husband. They were not really military, they worked for another group and worked in France for quite some time before D-Day and after, successfully passing themselves off as French.

  “After the landings, as the Allied armies got closer, Judy’s husband must have gotten a little too cocksure. He stayed on the air long enough one night for the Germans to finally triangulate the location of his transmitter. When the Gestapo and Wehrmacht burst in, they caught both Judy and her husband, and very nearly Buck and a member of the underground.

  “At that particular time, Milo, maquis units were shooting German soldiers in the countryside and underground types were doing the same thing in the very streets of Paris while the German Occupation Command was debating just how and when to start to demolish Paris as ordered by Hitler himself. The German forces at the front were fighting like hell and still getting pushed farther and farther back, day by day. In that aura of pessimism and facing the specter of approaching defeat, the Gestapo was become ex­ceedingly vicious, frantic to obtain information that might help to briefly stave off or even slow down Armageddon.

  “The things that were done first to Judy’s husband, then to Judy herself, were unprintable, unspeakable, almost unthinkable to any sane, normal human being. Townspeople said that their screams could be heard even through the five-foot-thick stone walls of the seventeenth-century building the Gestapo was using for a headquarters and prison in that area.

  “By the time Buck had gotten together enough men and arms, ammo and explosives, to blast his way into that complex and, after killing a number of Germans, rescue them, Judy was the only one left alive, and she was in a bad way.

  “Two days later, elements of the American Second Army liberated the town and Judy was flown to a hospital in England. Buck went back to England, too, but only long enough to be teamed up with some new people and gotten into still-occupied Elsass—Alsace, as the French call it. I understand that they did a bang-up job there, too. Buck was recommended to me when the Miinchen operation was first being planned at SHAEF, in England. When I offered him a slot, he told me flat out that he would only come with me if Judy came with him, and I’ve yet to have reason to regret that I took them both on.

  “As you’ve accurately guessed, Judy is a German. Although her family were aristocrats, the Great War transformed them into what we Americans would call ‘genteel poor.’ In her teens, she met and married the son of a wealthy, titled English house while the young man was pursuing a course of study at one of the great German universities. Despite the unholy, sophisticated barbarities committed by Gestapo perverts upon her and her Sate husband, Judy still is proud to be a German, and in light of the truly stupendous fight that Germany put up against impossible odds—a little country of only some sixty million people, total, taking on half the world … and nearly winning!—I can’t blame her, I’d guess that her outburst last night was simply an upswelling surge of national pride, Milo, nothing more sinister than that.

  “So don’t worry anymore about Judy, but still keep me informed of any odd or unusual things you notice in the conduct of any of the rest of the group over there.

  “And as far as Hizinger is concerned, that’s not his name, of course. He was one of Erwin Rommel’s favorite young officers. He was ordered back to Germany despite his and Rommel’s objections in order to do the other thing he does well, which is said to be a certain realm of higher mathematics. It’s considered that if he does agree to work with us, he’ll be a real prize.”

  Outside, in Barstow’s office, he pressed a bottle of Scotch and a handful of cigars on Milo, saying, “Don’t worry so much, major. You’re doing a splendid job. Operation Newhaven is progressing marvelously, and my superiors are very pleased. Didn’t I tell you, back in Germany, in Mlinchen, that if you stuck with me you’dhave a sky’s-the-iimit future in the Army? By the way, I’ve already put in paperwork on your lieutenant colonelcy, Milo.”

  But Milo did continue to worry. He felt a vague sense of unease. And he soon was to find that he had good reason.

  Chapter IV

  With the dawning of Sacred Sun over the vast prairie, one of the young warriors, Djessee-Kahl Staiklee, set out with several spare horses to search out and bring back Clans Staiklee and Gahdfree to the rich treasure trove of metals that awaited them all in the ruined city of ancient times. He bore written messages from both Little Djahn Staiklee and Uncle Milo, as well as oral urgings from his peers to their own chiefs, sires and siblings.

  Of course, he also bore his own eyewitness tes­timony to the lush verdancy of the well-watered prairie in the proximity of the ruins and of the profusion of the relatively unchary game animals thereabouts. All of these facts would constitute telling arguments in the favor of a movement of both clans, entire—women, children, horses, dogs, cattle, sheep, goats and all—rather than just a party of men to strip what they could from the ruins before rejoining fam­ilies and moving on.
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br />   With plenty of food in camp, Milo took Gy, Djoolya, Little Djahn Staiklee and all but two of the other young warriors back to the ruins, this time with two carts and the proper tools for more thorough delving into those ruins. They hitched up the teams, loaded the carts, mounted and rode out in an icy drizzle borne on a strong but steady wind. However, by the time they came into the far-flung outskirts of the sometime city, the wind had weakened consider­ably, the drizzle had entirely ceased and Sacred Sun was again peeking here and there through the dissipat­ing cloud cover.

  All of the young men had seen other and larger ruins before, of course, for there were many of them athwart the main migration routes that served both wild herds and nomad clans, but all of these had been stripped and picked over years agone. Gy and the young Teksikuhns were awed by the amounts and varieties of the riches of these ruins that had lain for so long untouched.

  Milo shooed them all away from the automotive hulks, saying, “Save that scrap metal for the clans to hack apart. The traders give much better barter goods for made artifacts that still are sound and usable. Let’s see if we can find a hardware or a farm-supply store.”

  They found one of each type of store a few blocks south of the tall building area and soon had both carts filled with hand tools, small items of hardware, pots and pans of steel and cast iron and copper, rolls of chain, some galvanized buckets, and two enamelware sets of cups and plates and bowls which caught Djoolya’s eye, as too did a large reflector oven. They loaded in yards of verdigrised copper tubing and hundreds of yards of copper wire of various gauges.

  Remembering the contents of the sealed fallout shelter cum tomb they had stumbled across out on the prairie, Milo was more than a little relieved to find that sometime in the distant past, the hardware store had been thoroughly stripped of firearms and ammo. Either those same looters or others of a similar bent had taken all of the bows but, strangely, had left behind nearly five dozens of fine bowstrings—indi­vidually sealed in plastic and still fresh and usable as they had been on the day they had arrived at the store, at least two centuries before Milo’s arrival. He also found a plastic box containing two dozen hunting heads of tempered bronze, the three edges of each still razor-sharp.