#
When Henrik returned home late that afternoon, he found a blue duck feather stuffed in his mailbox, and knew immediately what it meant. Although he had not yet eaten an evening meal, he did not enter his house, nor did he knock. Instead, he waited patiently outside the front door until Heydrich’s staff car was well out of sight and then proceeded directly down the garden path to the duck pond where he had first met his mentor and guide five years ago.
As the son of a colonel, Henrik had never had what most Germans would consider a normal childhood. While Henrik and his mother lived in permanent residence in Berlin, his father spent most of his days touring airbases across the country. The only time they were together as a family was at the cottage. As one would expect, Henrik both feared and idolized his father, in equal parts, but he never really knew him.
When his mother passed away from cancer in her bowels, Henrik moved to the cottage to be raised by servants. By then, his father was already a complete stranger to him, and he to his father. Desperate to please him, Henrik followed his father into the air force as soon as he was old enough to enlist. He excelled in flight training and was well on his way to a long and honorable career in the Luftwaffe. He hoped that one day, this would make his father proud.
But Henrik had other unique talents—talents that Kessler Sr. knew nothing about—talents that would soon be considered invaluable to the Third Reich—talents that were beginning to draw the attention of a certain German spymaster.
One afternoon in late September when Henrik was on leave at the cottage, the old colonel had a discreet visit from Admiral Canaris, the semi-retired commander of the Graf Spee. Henrik thought nothing of this at first. His father was a celebrated war hero with many admirers in all branches of the military. He listened intently as the two men discussed past glories and current world events, and then the admiral asked if he might have a private conference with the young lieutenant. Kessler Sr. of course agreed and Canaris took Henrik for a leisurely walk down the garden path to the little duck pond.
For an admiral, Canaris was remarkably warm and charming. He seemed oddly intrigued by Henrik’s quirky knack for solving puzzles, sketching landscapes and picking up foreign languages. These talents were of little use to a modern aviator, so Henrik was a little embarrassed to speak of them. But then the admiral pulled out a detailed relief map of North America and showed it to Henrik.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“I don’t know. It’s very impressive.”
Canaris took back the map after only a few seconds. “Do you think you could remember it?”
“Yes,” Henrik said without any reservations.
Canaris raised an eyebrow. “Draw it for me.”
“What? Here?”
He took a step backwards, picked up a stick off the ground and handed it to Henrik. “Right here in the dirt.”
Henrik shrugged and in a few minutes he’d traced out a detailed map of North America in the rich brown soil completely from memory. The admiral studied the dirt drawing for a minute, a grave expression on his face, and then proceeded to kick it away with great vigor.
“I don’t understand. Did I make a mistake?” Henrik asked.
“No. That’s just it. There were hundreds of details on that map, and you memorized every one in a single glance,” the admiral said softly, his high-cropped riding boots rubbing out the final ridges of the eastern seaboard. “In my vast experience of the world, I’ve known of three people, perhaps four, who could do what you just did, and two of them are already dead. You must tell no one of this.”
Henrik was dumbfounded. What did it matter that he could draw a map in the dirt? It was nothing. A parlor trick. He’d always been able to do it.
“I suppose you were a good student in school?”
Henrik blanched. He was not a good student, quite the opposite in fact. He never listened, never studied and was always in trouble. When his test papers came back without a mistake, his teachers suspected him of cheating and failed him. Sometimes they even beat him. So Henrik learned early on to make mistakes.
“No, I don’t suppose you were. Learned to lie, did you? No, don’t be ashamed. You’ll find that lying is an important skill, perhaps even more important in war than flying or shooting.” Canaris lit his pipe and blew a smoke ring into the air.
“I’ve come here, Herr Kessler, to make you a proposition. There’s a war coming, a big war, bigger than the world has ever seen. I understand that you’ve had your heart set on following your father into the air force, but I believe this to be a waste of your talents, a waste of Germany’s human resources. I have it in my power to commandeer your services, but I would prefer that your participation was voluntary.”
“Participation in what?”
“The Special Forces. You have unique talents, lieutenant, and frankly, your country needs those talents if it is to survive the next few years. Despite what you’ve been taught all your life, there is no more glory in dying in the air than there is on the ground. The only glory is doing what you can for your country. The only glory is doing your duty.”
Henrik did not answer right away. In fact, it took several months for the admiral to woo the young lieutenant away from the Luftwaffe and into the Special Forces. As it turned out, the dignified, soft-spoken semi-retired admiral was also head of the Abwehr, the largest intelligence gathering organization in the Third Reich. He was Germany’s master spy. Under his tutelage, Henrik learned to put his unique talents to a very special use.
He learned to speak American English with an authentic New York accent. He memorized the batting averages of the best baseball players, popular lines from American movies and every borough and suburb of every city in the U.S. He learned to like hotdogs and bubblegum and Coca-cola. He became a real American Joe. Unlike most deep-cover operatives who required long years of training, Henrik was able to absorb the culture of the enemy in a matter of months.
And then it was time for Lieutenant Henrik Kessler to leave his old life behind—his country, his family, his fiancé, even his name, and start his new life as Lieutenant Ray Douglas of the Fighting Marines. It was his duty. It was his mission. But after three long years, his mission was finally over, and Henrik Kessler was back.
The admiral was waiting for him by the duck pond, just as Henrik knew he would be, a small loaf of bread in his hand and a large flock of ducks and starlings all around him.
“Funny how they throw all caution to the wind for the simple taste of bread,” he said without any preamble. “For ten franks worth of flour I could have a dozen meals of roast duck. I do love duck. So much richer than chicken, don’t you think?”
“Well, I—”
“So what did they offer you to change sides, my young SS lieutenant? Something more than a few scraps of bread, I hope.”
“I haven’t changed sides,” Henrik said, suddenly defensive.
“You haven’t?” He straitened up and looked over his shoulder in the direction of the road. “But wasn’t that the Reichsprotektor’s car I saw you in?”
“Yes, but—”
“Do you not answer to him then? The head of SD, second only to Himmler and the Fuhrer himself?”
“Yes, but he’s your . . .”
“My protégé?”
“Your friend. We’re all on the same side, are we not?”
“Ah.” Canaris held up the half devoured loaf of bread as if it were a teacher’s pointer. “That’s where you are wrong. We Germans, we are a lot like these greedy little ducks.” He pointed at the ducks with his bread. The ducks followed the loaf greedily with their eyes. “See how they all congregate together like an army. But they are not an army. They are birds of a feather, yes, but each is at war with the other. Observe.” Canaris tossed what was left of his loaf onto the rocks. The ducks swarmed towards it, each duck snapping at the other duck’s behind, desperate to claim the en
tire loaf as his own.
“The SS, the Gestapo, the Wehrmacht, the Abwehr, we are all Germans, yes, but we are not all on the same side. We are all on our own side. My question, Henrik, is on which side are you?”
Henrik felt suddenly flustered. A lot had changed since he’d left for his mission three years ago. Back then the Abwehr was the most powerful arm of Germany’s vast and complex intelligence bureaucracy, and Admiral Canaris, as its head, was the tail that wagged the dog. But now Himmler’s SD was encroaching on the admiral’s territory, and Heydrich, Himmler’s rising star in the Third Reich, was threatening to usurp even the admiral’s authority.
Such things were never spoken out loud, but Henrik had surmised as much shortly after his capture in Holland. In the old days, Canaris would have snatched up a returning operative long before the SD ever caught wind of him. Was the old admiral slipping, or was there another game being played that Henrik still knew nothing about?
“There’s a girl,” Henrik began tentatively.
“A girl?” Canaris looked up from the ducks and peered at Henrik over the rim of his glasses.
“I heard . . . things in America. I figured it was just rumors, but I needed to find out. I needed to be sure.”
“What kind of things? No, wait. Let me put this in perspective.” Canaris seemed to be somehow enjoying himself. “You jeopardized your mission, recklessly risked your life, and lied about having top-secret information, all because you heard some ‘things’ about a girl? What could you possibly have heard about her in America? Was she having second thoughts? Was she pregnant? Was she flaunting her infidelity on the world stage for all to see? Why Henrik, you amaze me.”
“No. It was nothing like that.” Henrik wondered if he was making a dire mistake. How could he explain himself? “She’s a Jewish girl,” he said at last.
Canaris had never been a public advocate of Hitler’s policy against the Jews, but he was rarely a public advocate of any policy. Henrik knew he had many Jewish contacts, both in Germany and abroad, but that meant little. Before Henrik had left for America, Canaris was in regular communication with high-ranking officials in the Vatican, the Kremlin, Paris, London and even Washington, all through various aliases of course. But as for his personal feelings towards Jews, Henrik could only guess.
“I see,” he said seriously. “And her name?”
“Esther Jacobs. She’s the daughter of Eli Jacobs, a Dutch businessman and former physics professor and engineer at the University of Amsterdam.”
The admiral rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I’ll see what I can do, but I will not hold out much hope. The Jewish question.” He shook his head. “It has become troublesome.”
Henrik felt a glimmer of hope, overshadowed by a much large doubt. Did Canaris mean the Jews were troublesome or that Hitler’s policy against them was troublesome? Henrik decided not to push the issue until he knew exactly where the admiral stood. Perhaps he had said too much already.
“Admiral, what do you want me to do now?”
“What? Keep up the act, of course.” He patted Henrik on the back encouragingly, his mood suddenly jovial again. “No, I think maybe this is a good thing you’ve got going with the obergruppenfuhrer. He seems to trust you. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a date with Herr Heydrich myself.”
“You do?” Henrik said aghast.
“I ride with the man at least once a month. We are the best of friends. Didn’t you know? Keep your friends close, and your enemies . . . Well, you know the saying I’m sure. Farewell, my friend, and Godspeed.”
The admiral’s cryptic comments left Henrik plenty to ponder. Needless to say, he could not sleep that night. He saw now Hitler’s plan in all of its glory. Few people had truly envisioned the awesome potential of the atom. It was doubtful that even Canaris fully understood it. But Henrik had been at the briefing at Los Alamos when Oppenheimer explained the theoretical implications of an atomic fission or fusion device and the burning need to reach this milestone in human scientific discovery before the Nazis did.
If an atomic bomb were ever built, he said, it would dwarf all other forms of conventional warfare. It would be unlike anything the world had ever seen, capable of killing thousands, even millions of people, leveling buildings and laying waste to crops and fields for decades to come. Coupled with von Braun’s V-2 rockets, it would be a source of unspeakable power.
Henrik saw the great cities of the west—London, Paris, Washington and New York—burning beneath a Nazi flag. And he was suddenly afraid.