“There was some doubt in your mind, Sergeant Major?”
“She told me to ask, Colonel,” Sergeant Major Dieter said.
“Inform the lady nothing would give me greater pleasure, ” Lustrous said.
Headquarters of the Eleventh Armored Cav was a three-story masonry building built—like most facilities occupied by the U.S. Army—in the years leading up to World War II for the German Army.
Stables built for the horses of the Wehrmacht now served as shops to maintain the tanks, armored personnel carriers, and wheeled vehicles used by the Blackhorse to patrol the border between East and West Germany.
Fulda traces its history to a monastery built in 744 A.D. It lies in the upper Fulda River valley, between the Vogelsberg and Rhoen mountain ranges.
Since the beginning of the Cold War, it had been an article of faith—with which Colonel Lustrous personally, if very privately, strongly disagreed—in the European Command that when Soviet tanks rolled into West Germany they would come through the “Fulda Gap.”
The mission of the Blackhorse was to patrol the border, now marked by barbed wire, observation towers, mined fields, and whatever else the East Germans and their Soviet mentors could think of to keep East Germans from fleeing the benefits of Marxist-Leninism and seeking a better life in West Germany.
It was Colonel Lustrous’s private belief—he was a student of Soviet tactics generally and of the Red Army Order of Battle in great detail—that if the Red Army did come through the Fulda Gap, they would do so in such numbers that they would cut through the Blackhorse—which was, after all, just three squadrons spread out over a very long section of the border—like a hot knife through butter.
The most the Blackhorse could do, if Soviet T-34 tanks came, would be to slow them down a little, like a speed bump on a country road. Lustrous was confident that the men of the Blackhorse would “acquit themselves well” if he was wrong and the Russians came. By that, he meant they would not run at the first sight of the Russians but fight.
Many—perhaps most—of his men would die, and the dead would be better off than those who survived and were marched off into Soviet captivity. Lustrous was a student of how the Red Army treated its prisoners, too. Lustrous knew a great deal about the Soviets and their army. He truly believed that “Know your enemy” was a military principle right up there with “Don’t drink on duty.” Failure to abide by either would very likely get you killed.
He was now on his third tour on the border between East and West Germany. He’d been a Just Out of West Point second lieutenant assigned to the Fourteenth Constabulary Squadron in Bad Hersfeld in 1948. The Fourteenth had been redesignated the Fourteenth Armored Cavalry Regiment when Captain Lustrous returned to the border after service in the Korean War. And when Colonel Lustrous returned from Vietnam, he found “the Regiment” was now the Eleventh “Blackhorse” Armored Cavalry, the colors of the Fourteenth having been furled for reasons he never really understood.
The desk behind which Colonel Lustrous now sat was the very same desk in the very same room of the very same building in the kaserne—now called “Downs Barracks”— before which Lieutenant Lustrous had once stood—literally on the carpet—while the then colonel had told him exactly how much of a disgrace he was to the Regiment, to Cavalry and Armor, and the United States Army in general.
Colonel Lustrous really didn’t remember what he had done wrong, only that if the colonel had eaten his ass out at such length and with such enthusiasm it had probably been pretty bad, and was probably alcohol induced, as Netty, whom he had married the day after he’d graduated from the Point, had not yet joined him in Germany to keep him under control.
He had served under the colonel again in the Pentagon, when there were two stars on each of the colonel’s epaulets, and he had been a light colonel, and there was no question in Lustrous’s mind that he now commanded the Blackhorse because the colonel—now with four stars on each epaulet— had told somebody he thought “giving the Blackhorse to Freddy Lustrous might be a pretty good idea.”
Lustrous, who was in well-worn but crisply starched fatigues and wearing nonauthorized tanker’s boots, stood up as his wife came in the office.
He thought, as he often did, that Netty was really a good-looking woman.
She wasn’t twenty as she had been when they had married, but three kids and all this time in the Army had not, in his judgment, attacked her appearance as much as would be expected.
“And to what do I owe this great, if unexpected, honor?” Lustrous said. “I devoutly hope it’s not to tell me that it wasn’t your fault, but that serious physical damage has happened to ‘the Investment.’ ”
He was making reference to the Mercedes 380SEL. It was far too grand an automobile for a colonel. But Lustrous found out that if you didn’t have the Army ship the battered family Buick to Germany when you were ordered there, and, instead, on arrival bought one of the larger Mercedes at the substantial discount offered by the Daimler-Benz people, you could drive the luxury car all through your tour, then have the Army ship it home for you. Then you could sell it in the States for more than you had paid in Germany. And so, to Lustrous, in that sense the family car was the Investment.
Netty was not amused.
Pissed? Or angry? Or both?
“I need to talk to you, Fr
eddy,” she said. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“You want some coffee?” he asked, sitting down and gesturing for her to take a seat.
“No,” she said and then changed her mind. “Yes, I do. Thank you.”
He spun in his chair to a table behind his desk, which held a stainless steel thermos and half a dozen white china coffee mugs bearing the regimental insignia.
He poured an inch and a half of coffee into each of them. That was the way they drank coffee: no cream, no sugar, just an inch and a half. It stayed hot that way and you tasted the coffee.
He stood up, walked to her, and handed her one of the mugs.
“How was lunch?” he asked.