Less than a week after he’d written, he received a note acknowledging his letter. It said: “This will acknowledge receipt of your recent application for Military Intelligence work.” It was on impressive stationery, headed “
WAR DEPARTMENT GENERAL STAFF,
Military Intelligence Division, G-2.” It was signed by a captain in MIS.
A few days later he got another letter of acknowledgment saying substantially the same thing, but signed by a lieutenant commander, USNR. And the next day a third letter, this time signed by a civilian. He was by now totally perplexed, and his confusion was not diminished when, during the next couple of months, he got strange looks from his friends and acquaintances—including his barber—and even an occasional concerned postcard from people in places he’d visited. Finally, the direct query: “Hey! What’ve you been up to? The FBI was around asking questions about you!” made him realize he was being investigated thoroughly.
One day he got a phone call from a young woman. She referred to his letter to the War Department and asked him to meet with two officers, a colonel and a captain, for a personal interview. Strangely, she set up the meeting at an obscure little hotel in downtown Rochester. Erik went, of course. The two men, both in civilian clothes, were friendly and relaxed. They offered him a good stiff drink before getting down to their talk—and Erik remembered very little after that. There was one thing he recalled quite clearly. A question. Perhaps the nature of it had startled him enough to make an impression. The colonel had casually asked, “Tell me, Larsen, how would you feel about sticking a knife in a man’s back?” But try as he would, he wasn’t able to remember what he’d replied. He vaguely remembered mentioning a local hardware store owned by a good friend and feeling very loyal to that store, insisting that his friend supply the knife! He returned to the hotel the next day to apologize for his peculiar performance, but the two men were not there. In fact, the hotel management protested they’d never heard of them. And Erik never heard from them either.
But after three months he received another letter, this time signed by a Navy lieutenant. It contained a questionnaire the length of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
for him to fill out, and the letter asked when, at his earliest convenience, he could put his personal affairs in order and report for duty. It didn’t say what duty. He wrote back: “You name the place and the time, and I’ll be there,” and he received a wire, stamped with the little red wartime star of officialdom, asking him to call a certain executive number in Washington, D.C. He did. He had a very nice conversation with a sexy-voiced girl, who instructed him to report a week later to Temporary Building Q. “Be prepared to remain out of communication with anyone for at least three months,” she said sweetly, “and bring nothing but your toothbrush!”
When he reported to Temporary Building Q in Washington on the specified date he was shown to the office of the Navy lieutenant who had written to him earlier, Lieutenant Martin Harris. Harris occupied a long, narrow office. He was a stern-faced man with a great mane of prematurely gray hair. He looked up when Erik entered. “Come in, Larsen,” he said. “And close the door behind you.”
Erik did. Lieutenant Harris studied him searchingly. “When you stepped across that threshold,” he said dramatically, “you lost your identity!” Erik almost turned around to look, but he caught himself in time. Harris pulled a piece of paper from his desk drawer and held it out to Erik. “Did you write this?” he asked. Erik looked at the paper. Indeed he’d written it. It was his own letter to the War Department. “Fine,” said Harris. He shoved another paper toward Erik. “Sign this.”
It was a simple document, brief and to the point: “I hereby volunteer for hazardous duty, no questions asked,” and there was a space for his signature and that of a witness. Harris, presumably.
Startled, Erik wondered exactly what he was getting himself into. Harris glared at him, and he was thoroughly intimidated. He didn’t have the nerve to refuse. He signed.
Harris witnessed his signature. He looked up at Erik. “About your identity,” he said. “From now on you will be known as Lars G-8. That and
nothing
else! Your true identity must not become known to anyone through you. Is that clear?”
Erik understood what Harris was saying—but clear? He nodded. Harris told him that for the next three months he would be in special training, incommunicado. “The others will try to find out who you are,” he cautioned. “Don’t let them. You try to find out who
they
are instead.”
The whole rigmarole made not the slightest sense to Erik, but he dutifully nodded his head.
“Have you got your toothbrush?” Harris asked. Erik showed him.
“Good. Take off your clothes.”
Erik stared at the officer.
“All of them,” Harris ordered. He got up and took out a large paper bag from a closet. He gave it to Erik. “Put everything in there,” he said. And presently Erik stood facing the Navy officer as naked as a navy bean, clutching his toothbrush.
“That’s all!” Harris dismissed him. He indicated a door. “Go through there. You’ll be told what to do.”
Erik had very little choice. He did exactly as he was ordered—and walked into a large room filled with about three hundred people, or so it seemed.
He stopped short. He held on to his toothbrush as the only link to sanity, and surveyed the situation.
There were actually about thirty men in the room. All of them stark naked. All of them more or less nonchalantly grasping a toothbrush. All of them politely bent on carrying on a stream of small talk.
Erik quickly entered into the spirit of things and was soon enagaged in an animated discussion about the life expectancy of a “temporary building” like Building Q with a young man possessed of an extremely hairy chest, and another, impressively hung young man with a prominent appendix scar. Everyone was pointedly steering away from anything remotely personal—a not inconsequential feat under the circumstances.
Nothing was settled, the fate of Building Q remained undecided, when finally everyone was issued GI fatigues and loaded onto two large trucks. The trucks were closed up—hermetically, it seemed— and during the trip, which lasted a good part of the night, no one could make out where they were going.
It wasn’t until four weeks later that Erik found out he’d ended up with the Office of Strategic Services—the OSS!
By that time he was already well into the basic training program and settled down in OSS training camp B-5, hidden away in remote, wooded hill country. His class numbered thirty-six. The morning after they arrived at the camp they’d all been herded out at 6
A.M.
They were taken to an isolated spot outside camp and found themselves in a small cemetery. There were several graves marked simply with a code-name and a number. And one open pit. Ready. Here they were introduced to their class instructor. Porter was his name. He told them that they were facing a tough course. Too tough for some. Not everyone made it, for one reason or another. And he casually indicated the graves. Then he took an Army .45 automatic from his belt holster and showed it to the group of sleepy recruits. He realized that some of them had little, if any, military training, he said. Patiently he demonstrated that one end of the gun was called the butt and the other the muzzle. “There is a big difference,” he explained, “at what end you find yourself. Like this!” And he suddenly fired the gun, emptying the clip at the group of badly startled men facing him, the bullets whizzing closely by to slam into a dirt mound behind them. Some of the men flinched but stood their ground; others hit the dirt, and a few took off. Erik was too petrified to move. The whole crazy performance was witnessed by two silent, grim-looking men, who took notes in small black books. The next day the class was down to twenty-eight.
That was the beginning of the fantastic training course given the potential OSS agents. It was designed to tear a man down and reduce him to his basic survival strength, and then build him up again to be able to face anything with confidence. It succeeded—at least temporarily. After the first month Erik got up in the morning and thought, This is the last day I’ll see alive—if I get through the whole day. After the second month he got up and thought, Okay. Bring ’em on! I can lick Germany and Japan, single-handed! The course was compact and thorough. Nothing was omitted. From communications to cryptography; from terrain orientation to silent killing, and “dirty” hand-to-hand combat taught by the fabulous, fiery Major Fairburns, late of the Hong Kong police force. The budding agents learned to fire every possible weapon, Allied and Axis, and to drive every type of vehicle. They learned breaking and entering from experts—whoever
they
were—and the handling of high explosives. And constantly the grim men with their little black books were silent observers. If a man showed reluctance to crimp a highly unstable detonator cap onto a fuse with his teeth, he was apt not to be seen in class again.
And finally there was the parachute jumping. They trained two whole days for that. And then they made their five qualifying jumps in one afternoon. They rode to Quantico Marine Base in Virginia in a truck and took off from there in a C-47 to make their jumps over a small clearing in a forest nearby. The truck would pick them up, take them back to the base for the next jump, and the procedure was repeated until all the jumps had been made. Erik remembered with amusement the guard at the gate, who checked them onto the base each time—but never out. His eyes had bugged bigger and bigger each time around.
The parachute jumps had been like a graduation exercise. Basic training was over. Of the class of thirty-six, six were left. “Lars G-8” was one of them.
Soon after, Erik was given his first mission to be carried out in enemy-held territory. He joined a group of eleven Norwegian commandos to be dropped in Norway to blow up a heavy water plant operated by the Nazis. Erik was the only non-Norwegian on the team and was selected only because the approach route to the plant followed a ski trail with which he was very familiar. With the Norwegians he went through the intense mission briefing, and a fiercely close relationship sprang up among the men. With them he flew to Westover AFB in Massachusetts to board the plane that would take the team to Iceland and on to the drop in Norway. And here he was literally taken off the plane and returned to Washington. No one would tell him why. No one would give him any explanation at all. For a week he was kept in strict seclusion. He was worried sick. And then, finally, the situation was explained to him. They’d found out the mission had been compromised. Someone had infiltrated the organization and given the show away. But the mission was too vital to cancel. The raid had to be carried out at the time planned, or it would be too late. In the last minute the approach route had been changed. Erik no longer would have been useful; in fact, as the only non-Norwegian he would have been a liability in a tight situation. He had consequently been taken off the team and kept incommunicado until the operation was completed. The infiltrator had been ferreted out, and the mission had been successful. But all eleven commandos had been caught trying to make good their escape after the raid. And all eleven had been executed.
Erik was shocked. His first reaction was Thank God I didn’t have to go! and then he experienced an overwhelming sense of guilt for not having been with his comrades. The organization gave him two weeks in Washington to work it out with himself. He used the time writing scripts for overseas shortwave broadcasts for the Office of War Information.
When he reported back for assignment he found that things had changed. The big powers had carved up the European Theater of Operations among themselves, and each had a separate territory in which to operate along OSS lines. The Scandinavian countries were in the British area of operations, and Erik—who had been trained for missions in those countries—was given the choice of being transferred to British authority or remaining with the U.S. Forces. He chose the latter.
Because of his knowledge of languages—particularly French and German—he was commissioned into the Counter Intelligence Corps, perhaps on the theory that “it takes a thief to catch a thief,” and he completed an exhaustive course in investigation and interrogation. He always felt grateful for the OSS training he’d received. It had stood him in good stead on many occasions. . . .
It hadn’t all been duck soup. He’d done his share of griping. And with justification. But he knew that if he had it to do again, he’d write the damned letter once more.
He got up. He went to one of the files standing along one wall. He pulled it open and started to look for the blacklist. If Colonel Gerhardt Wilke was listed, he could be crossed off.
Murphy stuck his head in the door.
“Ready for another one? We’ve got ’em stacked up out here like shit on shingles!”
Erik grinned. “Okay,” he said. “Next!”
Next. Another one. And another one. And . . .
The war was in its final weeks. Had to be. The German fronts were collapsing all over. Berlin itself was threatened. But the CIC work was really just beginning. And a lot could happen in a few weeks. A hell of a lot. Especially in a few weeks of war . . .
He rubbed his hand. That damned stubble
had
made his skin itch.
It was 0928 hrs—almost nine-thirty in the morning. In Dachau, 183 miles to the south, two Waffen SS officers were just being checked through the main gate of the concentration camp. . . .
Dachau
1634 hrs
Untersturmführer Wilhelm Richter squinted up at the smoke that belched from the tall brick chimneys. It was oily gray as it billowed into the clean blue Bavarian sky. The ovens of Dachau were roaring around the clock. There was only a little time left in which to carry out the final solution to the Jewish problem.
The young Waffen SS lieutenant leaned against the squat building hiding the infernal roots of the towering smokestacks. The bricks were warm, and discolored with greasy soot, and Willi had carefully sought out a clean spot. A dozen inmates of the concentration camp were loading a military truck parked nearby. Willi was watching them.