Chapter 6

It had taken a good deal of surveillance by Hans Richter to identify two of the Mossad security men who looked like taxi drivers on a break in the neighborhood of the Grossman apartment, but he had done that as a routine and not because he meant to attempt to reach the general at home. He assumed, quite correctly, that all mail and packages intended for that address would be x-rayed and thoroughly examined prior to delivery, considering the fate of the woman who had opened a package at the first-aid station, and considering that the son was still under threat. He was equally sure that any attempt to give the general his instructions for delivering the uranium by some exotic scheme such as a false milk bottle in the morning would be equally unsuccessful. He correctly calculated, in addition, that the apartment telephone would be tapped and that communication in the general’s office would be equally unsuitable for his purpose, since in his experience conversations in and out of high military offices were normally tapped. These multiple precautions, however, did not disturb Richter in the least. He cared not a whit about the telephones the Mossad tapped, because the one he had tapped belonged to a certain Sergeant Mordechai Saul.

Sergeant Saul had been the personal driver for General Grossman ever since the general had earned his latest promotion. At the moment Sergeant Saul was on a day-to-day pass, for it was assumed the general would not be going to his office for a decent period following the death of his wife. Still, Saul stayed at home and near the telephone, for he knew the general was not a religious man and would not observe the normal period for mourning. In fact, if Saul knew the general, he would try to ease his pain with work and more work. So Mordechai Saul was not surprised to receive a call from General Grossman some five days after the funeral, advising him that the general expected to be picked up and taken to his office at seven-thirty o’clock the following morning. Saul said, “Sir!” with the proper deference and went back to the television program he had been watching, but his evening was not to remain undisturbed, because less than twenty minutes later there was a knock on the door of his room and he opened it to see a fellow soldier standing there, also a sergeant, he noted.

“Yes?” Saul said, surprised at anyone calling at that late hour.

“General Grossman wishes to be sure the car has ample gasoline when you pick him up tomorrow,” the stranger said.

“I filled it yesterday and it’s still in the garage downstairs,” Saul said, irritated that anyone would think he would overlook such a detail.

“Still, he would like me to check personally,” the stranger said apologetically, and shrugged. “You know generals.”

Mordechai Saul knew only one general, and he thought it very odd for the general he knew to send someone to check the fuel in his car. Still, generals were permitted to have whatever idiosyncrasies they desired as far as sergeants were concerned, and it was possible that the murder of his wife had made the general supercautious in all matters. With a shrug, Saul flipped off the television and walked down the steps with the stranger behind him. Saul opened the garage door, then opened the front door of the car; he took out the ignition key, leaned over, and inserted it in the lock. He turned it to the right and the fuel-supply needle obediently slid to the extreme edge of the dial.

“See?” Sergeant Saul said disdainfully.

His answer was a sharp blow across the nape of his neck with the hard edge of Hans Richter’s hand. Richter bent over the body of the unconscious man, saw that he was still breathing, and instantly closed the garage door. He flipped on the headlights for illumination and disrobed Saul; he then wrapped Saul’s army blouse about the handle of the tire jack he located in the car’s trunk and proceeded to beat the sergeant to death with the muffled jack handle, the blouse absorbing most of the sound as well as a good part of the blood.

When Richter was quite sure Saul was dead, he smiled and calmly loaded Saul and the jack handle into the trunk of the car, tossed the soiled uniform on top, closed the trunk, and then opened his shirt. From about his waist he removed a thin coil of wire. One end of the wire had been divided into two strands, and each strand held an earplug similar to a doctor’s stethoscope; the other end was fitted with a small battery-operated pickup head. With patience Richter went over the car from one end to the other, from top to bottom. Taped inside the rear bumper he located the first of the signal broadcasters; a second was discovered inside the left-front hubcap. There was no third, nor did a thorough search for any possible voice pickup inside the cab reveal any further danger to his security. Richter nodded. Apparently General Grossman had gone to the authorities with some story of danger to his family and whatever had been said had aroused Mossad to the point of putting a bug on the general’s car. It really made no difference though, Richter thought as he carefully removed the two bugs and placed them on the garage floor; he would replace them in the morning when he was finished with his night’s work. Satisfied that everything was in order, he raised the garage door, backed the car out, got out to close the garage door again, got back in the car, and drove swiftly from the city.

He took the road to the airport, but turned off it after two miles, bumping over rough sand dunes, with only the aid of his parking lights, to end up in a grove of trees he had reconnoitered a few days before in a rented car. Here he switched off the headlights altogether and got out. In the distance the string of lights from cars traveling the main airport road gave sufficient glow for him to do his work. He brushed aside the sand that covered the shovel he had hidden on his previous visit and then opened the trunk and dragged out Saul’s flaccid body. Then he dug a grave and twenty feet away he dug a second one. After he had placed Saul’s body in one and the bloody uniform in the other, he filled both. Then, a shovelful at a time, he took all excess sand and walked a good distance away before scattering it to blend into the dunes. It was a hard job, but ODESSA did not train men to take the easiest path. The spot Richter had selected for the dual burial was as deserted a one as he had been able to find within a reasonable distance of the city; still, there was no sense in taking a chance simply to avoid a little labor.

When at last he had scattered leaves and a few branches over the sites of the two graves, he took the shovel a fair distance in another direction, buried it under the sand, brushed it over, and then returned to the car. He climbed inside and set his wristwatch alarm to ring and wake him at six. He knew the clock in his head would wake him a minute or two before the wristwatch buzzed, but Hans Richter had not been trained to take chances.

General Benjamin Grossman had spent five days in deep thought. His son Herzl had seemed excessively withdrawn for those five days, but that was only to be expected after the death of the boy’s mother. But the boy would recover; it was the way with youth. Benjamin Grossman was not as sure that he, himself, would ever recover from the loss of his Deborah, but he supposed that in time he, too, would be able to look back on her death without that terrible pain and anger he felt at the moment. He would retire from the army as soon as the uranium was delivered; take Herzl with him to another place. Surely the boy would not object to leaving a country that now held such tragic memories for them both. They could build a new life; he could still work as an engineer and Herzl was now so wrapped up in film-making that the greater opportunities offered elsewhere should be an additional incentive. Herzl would marry and give him grandchildren, and he would be as good a grandfather to them as he had been a father to Herzl.

But that was all in the future. The thing now was to get his hands on the uranium; ODESSA wanted it in exchange for the life of Herzl Grossman and they would get it. And if they blew up half of Israel with it, he only hoped the Jew Brodsky would be directly under the fireball. Less than a week ago he had held a kinship with this country, had been happy here; the Jew Brodsky with his interminable delays during their interview had destroyed all that. The Jew Brodsky with his endless questions, stupidly wasting time while someone was delivering a package that would have been instantly stopped by a security man, had one been ordered to the first-aid station at once. Jews had cost him his father and his mother; now they had cost him his beloved Deborah. And what, exactly, did he owe to either the Jews or to Israel? Without him the Jew Brodsky would not even have been able to reach the place, nor would any of the others on the Ruth. And since then he had risked his life countless times for Israel in battle. And his thanks? The loss of his Deborah.

He forced the wormwood-bitter thought aside only to have an even more bitter one take its place. He should never have gone to the Jew Brodsky in the first place; only temporary panic, induced by that sleepless night on the plane, had made him do it. He should have gone from the airport directly to the first-aid station and taken Deborah home. Then he should have put his own troops in charge of security, and not the Jew Brodsky. Now, what was the situation? Because of his visit and his talking to the Jew Brodsky, there could be little doubt but that his telephone was tapped, and that he was undoubtedly under constant surveillance. Oh, if he ever discovered who was watching him Brodsky would claim he was mistaken, that it was all for the safety of Herzl, but now Herzl was in no immediate danger. Still, as long as Brodsky had that excuse, they would be watching Benjamin Grossman. And as long as Benjamin Grossman stayed in that apartment, it would be almost impossible for ODESSA to give him instructions for delivery of the material; and as long as he could not deliver the material, Herzl would then really be in danger. He had to get out of the apartment, back into circulation, at least give ODESSA a chance to get in touch with him. And as for any surveillance, once he had his instructions and could move ahead—well, he had no doubts at all that he would be able to handle that when the time came.

It was at that point that Brigadier General Grossman raised the telephone and called Sergeant Mordechai Saul.

“He’s left the apartment,” Herzl said into the telephone. “He said he was going to work.”

“We know,” Brodsky said. “We heard him order the car last night.”

“Will he be followed?”

“He is being followed.”

“But I didn’t see another car when his car left,” Herzl said. “I was watching from the window.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Brodsky said in a kindly tone, “and stay away from windows.”

General Grossman climbed into his car, surprised to find another soldier at the wheel other than Sergeant Saul, but at least the sergeant’s replacement held the door open for him and saluted smartly, which was not always the case with Sergeant Saul, who did these things only when he thought of it. The general settled back in his seat as the car left the curb.

“To my office …” he began.

“Yes, sir.” Richter sat ramrod straight in the driver’s seat, handling the car excellently.

“We know,” Brodsky said. “We heard him order the car last night.”

“Right after you called,” Richter said, switching from Hebrew to German, “the sergeant had an unfortunate accident.”

Grossman felt a slight shock run through him. So his driver was ODESSA! Whatever else one might think of the organization, in a way one had to admire it for the excellent German planning and execution. Richter had spoken Hebrew; Grossman was positive the man also spoke Yiddish fluently, as Eichmann had. ODESSA did things in a proper fashion, you had to give them credit for that. They were also murdering bastards, but he would handle that problem when the time came.

“Fatal?” he asked, although he was sure he knew the answer.

“Unfortunately,” Richter said evenly. He spoke without turning his head, almost without moving his lips, nor did he make the mistake of glancing in the rearview mirror to watch the general as he spoke. To the most observant outsider watching he would have appeared at most to be mumbling to himself. “He will not be found, so that is no problem. However—your instructions, Colonel von Schraeder. Get them right the first time, because after I leave you at your office, you will not see me again until the time of delivery. Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

“Good. A week from tomorrow is the fourteenth of May. It is both the Sabbath as well as being the twenty-third anniversary of the founding of Israel. It is a day when security forces are generally more lax, with most people worrying more about celebrating than anything else. You will give your driver the weekend off; it is a time when this can be done without the slightest suspicion. You will drive yourself. We suggest you arrange matters to deliver the materials that night; at midnight to be exact. You can arrange to pick it up whenever you wish; that day or earlier. It is your problem. Is it understood?”

“Yes.” The fourteenth of May was a day that Grossman had already considered, although he obviously had been unable to finalize his plans before this meeting. They thought of everything, this ODESSA!—including how to deliver explosive packages to innocent women.

“Good. Now,” Richter said, driving expertly through the heavy morning traffic, “are you familiar with Eilat?”

“I’ve been there.”

“You may know, then, that on the road leaving Eilat to the south, you first pass the old and new ports, then the glass-boat pier, and a short distance beyond the pier you come to two hotels on your right, across from the diver’s club. A bit further along you come to the undersea observatory. At the observatory you will set your speedometer. Exactly two and three tenths miles past the observatory, you will leave the road and drive on the sand. The sand is firm; there is no problem driving on it. Exactly two miles further, on the sand, you will see a small dock. I shall be there with a speedboat. You will deliver the material to me, I shall verify it, and after that you are free. You can either go with me or stay. If you stay, we may have other work for you; if you leave with me, we can always use a man of your talents. The choice is yours.”

His tone of voice changed from the impersonal flatness to one that was more intimate.

“I should imagine your going or staying will depend upon how much exposure you suffer in getting the material, or how much you disclosed when you went to the Mossad after returning from Argentina—”

Grossman frowned. “You know that, too?”

“Not directly. It is something I deduced, you might say, from the fact that there are two bugs—signal generators—in operation on this car at this moment. One is taped inside the rear bumper; the other—”

“Is mounted with a magnet fastener in the left-front-wheel hubcap,” Grossman said. “I know.”

Richter came close to permitting himself a smile. Colonel von Schraeder had lost none of his intelligence and little of his skills in his years in Israel. It augured well for their mission.

“Very good,” he said, and pulled up before the building in which the general had his offices. He got out and opened the door, saluting smartly with his other hand. “Good luck, sir. Your car will be in the battalion garage when you want it.”

He closed the door as General Benjamin Grossman slowly mounted the steps of the building, then Richter climbed back into the front seat and drove to the battalion garage, not even now permitting himself the small smile that had almost escaped him before, not even to congratulate himself on a scheme well planned and well executed. Major Hans Richter was a well-trained soldier.

“The general has reached his office, sir,” said Brodsky’s aide, standing before him, and then in a more personal tone, he added, “We’ll see to it he’s well protected. Nobody wants anything to happen to the general, sir.”

Brodsky had instructed his men that General Grossman was being threatened, that the people who had murdered his wife were still a threat to the general. It was all he had told his men and it was all he needed to tell them.

“Good. Any stops on the way?”

“No, sir. He came directly from his apartment to the office.”

“And the signal?”

“It worked perfectly, sir. You could almost tell when the car turned a corner.”

“Very good,” Brodsky said with satisfaction. “All routine, eh?”

“Yes, sir. Except—”

Brodsky looked up. “Except what?”

“Well, sir, it’s probably of no significance, but you said you wanted complete details on the surveillance—”

“Get on with it,” Brodsky said impatiently. “Except what?”

“He had a different driver today, sir. Not the usual one.”

“What?” Brodsky frowned. “But he telephoned his regular driver last night—” His frown deepened; it seemed to puzzle his aide.

“Sir? Does the general having a different driver have any special significance?”

“Never mind,” Brodsky said. “You can go.”

As his aide walked from the office, Brodsky swiveled his chair and stared from the window. A new driver … He would give odds that this new driver was from ODESSA, and while he would put men at once onto the garage and wherever uniforms could be obtained—which in Israel was almost anywhere—the driver by this time was probably in Jordan or possibly even on his way back to Germany. He would also put men onto Sergeant Mordechai Saul, but he was fairly sure that Sergeant Saul was dead. They would not have left a loose end like that.

He swiveled back and stared down at his bare desk. So whatever instructions were to have been passed, had been passed. Well, in a way it was good. It would bring the business to a conclusion. Now they would have to keep a tighter control on Colonel von Schraeder, that was all. Give him leeway without actually giving him leeway. Let him think he’s home free. Let him lead the Mossad to his ODESSA contacts; there were others who could take over from there. But putting their hands on any ODESSA agents was only a small part of the plan. Far more important was the fact that while there might not be sufficient proof to put Colonel Helmut von Schraeder on the gallows where he belonged, catching Benjamin Grossman in an open act of treachery, of betrayal of his country, added to that other proof, should wind up the matter of Helmut von Schraeder quite satisfactorily.