He looked at his watch. They would finish with the torpedoes shortly, and then they could begin loading the missiles. It was obvious that his crew would finish ahead of schedule. He stepped away from the railing, executed a precise turn to the right, and began walking with a crisp, deliberate stride.
It was time to inspect the other three submarines under his command and check the status of their weapons on loads. No doubt they would also be ahead of schedule, but probably not so far as his own crew. He had, after all, personally selected every one of his men. They were, quite literally, the best that the German Navy had to offer. And after six months of intensive pre-mission training, they meshed like the proverbial well-oiled machine.
As he walked, Groeler pulled off his officer’s cap and rubbed his fingers briskly through his blond crew cut. There was more than a little gray in his hair now. That too was a good thing. The other wolves in the pack should be reminded that the
He pulled his cap back on and straightened it with a practiced gesture: no wasted motion. Let his men see the outward evidence of his self-assurance. Let them note the steadiness of his hands and the easy grace of his movements. They would take confidence from these things, and they were going to need that confidence, along with every scrap of advantage they could get.
The mission was achievable; he was certain of that. It would require exceptional skill and more luck than he cared to think about, but it
It wasn’t failure that worried him. He had made every possible preparation. His men were handpicked and expertly trained. His boats were in superb condition. All of the necessary support mechanisms were in place. The plan could work. He would
But what about afterward? Would the Americans really react as the Bundeswehr’s military Security Council predicted? Did his superiors really understand the Americans at all? Groeler certainly didn’t, and he’d been studying them and their military tactics for his entire adult life.
The Japanese had critically misjudged the Americans in 1941, hadn’t they? Their attack on Pearl Harbor had devastated the U.S. Pacific Fleet.
The mission had succeeded. But the Americans had not sued for peace, as the expert strategists and tacticians had assured the Japanese High Command. The carnage inflicted at Pearl Harbor had enraged the normally placid Americans in ways the Japanese psyche could not even comprehend. The Americans had risen from the wreckage of the attack and crushed Japan like an insect. Finally, it had taken the nuclear extermination of over a quarter of a million Japanese citizens and the utter destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to slake the American thirst for revenge.
Japan had nearly been destroyed as a result of wishful thinking on the part of its leaders. And now, the chancellor and his cronies in the Bundeswehr seemed to be poised to make the same mistake. They were gambling the fate of Germany on their projections of how the Americans would react. What if their guesses were wrong? What if the American response was military instead of political?
Groeler shook his head. He had spent his entire life in submarines. He didn’t know much about international politics, but this whole thing struck him as the worst sort of wishful thinking. The kind by which nations were destroyed.
He had nearly turned the mission down. For the first time in his life, he had come within a centimeter of refusing to obey his orders. Only one thing had stopped him — the knowledge that the Bundeswehr would find someone else to carry out the plan. Someone less capable. Success might bring consequences that the Bundeswehr and the chancellor had not foreseen. But, if the mission was botched, the consequences would be ungodly.
Groeler shook his head again. Either his superiors had forgotten their history, or they hadn’t noticed the date. The seventh of May. The anniversary of the Nazi High Command’s unconditional surrender to the Allies at the end of the Second World War. Germany had lain in ruins then, Berlin still burning from the American fire bombs, the countryside torn by the boots of soldiers and the treads of tanks. And the Bundeswehr had selected
He sucked a last lung full of smoke from the cigarette and thumped it over the rail into the water. In the split-second before the butt left his fingers, he caught a glimpse of the brand name:
The name brought a bitter smile to Kapitan Groeler’s mouth.
CHAPTER 4
President Francis “Frank” Chandler swiveled his chair a few degrees to the left and stared out the window across the White House grounds. It was really coming down out there tonight, the rain driving across the manicured lawn in torrents. Occasionally the wind would manage to whip a burst of raindrops far enough under the edge of the colonnade to splatter on the marble flagstones of the covered walkway. But even those violent bursts fell well short of the windows.
Some small part of him wished that the wind would pick up enough to drive the rain against his windows. He loved the sound of rain on glass; it conjured up memories of boyhood summers in Iowa cornfields and of the clatter of a good spring rain on a corrugated tin roof. Of course, he probably wouldn’t have been able to hear it anyway; the windows were triple-paned bulletproof glass.
He watched for a few seconds in silent fascination. There was something strange about seeing the rain without hearing it; something vaguely disconnected: a little like the feeling that came from watching television with the sound turned down.
He leaned a little farther back, rested his elbows on the padded leather arms of the chair, and wondered for the thousandth time at the strange chain of events that had led him to the Oval Office. The thought, as always, brought an odd half-smile to his lips. There were men — powerful and influential men — who spent their entire lives fighting for a chance to sit in this office. Struggling one rung at a time up the twin ladders of politics and public opinion — waiting for a chance to sit in
He was a latecomer to politics, and he had entered the political arena by the back door. (Some of his more vocal critics preferred to say he had tunneled under the back fence.)
The son of an Iowa corn farmer, he had inherited three major things from his father: a passion for the land, an iron-hard work ethic, and the shambling big-boned frame of a farmhand. Six foot four and broad shouldered, he had a roughness about him that spoke more of flannel shirts and work-scuffed blue jeans than of suits and neckties.
His love of the land had not led him to the farm, as it had his father and grandfather before him, but to the laboratories of the University of Iowa.
Armed with a master’s degree in organic chemistry, he had climbed through the ranks of the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship, where his fierce determination to improve the lot of the American farmer had eventually earned him an appointment as the state secretary of agriculture.
With the appointment had come the realization that the future of the farmer was being decided not in the fields or in the laboratory, but in the boardrooms and on the floors of the legislature. Frank had decided to throw his hat into the political ring. After an extremely successful term as the state secretary of agriculture, he had made a dark-horse bid for governor of Iowa. He’d never really expected to win. At best, he had hoped to drag the plight of the farmer into the forefront of Iowa’s political system. To raise important issues in the hopes that more viable
