“Yes, sir.”
“I hope you had a pleasant joyride through the countryside?”
“Colonel, I need to talk to you.”
“Odd, when I called before, I needed to talk to you.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Among other things, I was curious how your flying lesson went.”
“I think it went well, sir.”
“And then I can hope that sometime in the near future, we may look forward to having our own aerial taxi service?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Can you give me an idea, just a ballpark estimate, of when that might be? In, say, two weeks?”
“Sir, the planes are at the monastery.”
“Excuse me?”
“Sir, I have the planes here now.”
“How did they get there?”
“I flew one of them and Schröder flew the other.”
“I don’t believe I know anyone by that name.”
“He and three mechanics came with the planes, sir.”
“Are you telling me you flew a German national to the monastery?”
“I wanted to run him past the general, sir. The general vouched for him. They were in the war together.”
“I’m tempted to say, ‘Well done,’ but I’m afraid of the other shoe that’s sure to drop.”
“We have the planes, sir. No problem. Tiny is on his way to Sonthofen to pick up the mechanics and the spare parts.”
“With great reluctance, I am going to give you the benefit of the doubt. My friend said it would probably take six or eight hours for him to properly instruct you. I’m finding it hard to understand how.”
“What he did, Colonel, was take me up, and put it into a stall and took his hands off the stick. When I recovered from it, I guess I passed his test.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Captain Cronley. But if you have the airplanes…”
“I have them, sir.”
“What’s on your mind?”
“Our guest, sir.”
“What guest is that?”
“The one Sergeant Tedworth brought home.”
“I told Sergeant Dunwiddie to deal with that. Didn’t he tell you?”
“That’s what I want to talk to you about, sir.”
There was a significant pause before Mattingly replied.
“Yeah,” he said, finally and thoughtfully slow. “I think we should have — have to have — a little chat about that situation. And similar ones that will probably crop up in the future.”
Mattingly paused again, then continued, now speaking more quickly, as if he had collected his thoughts.
“What I’ll do, Cronley, is ask my friend if he can fly me into there for an hour or two. Him personally. We don’t want any of his pilots talking about monasteries, do we? Which means he’ll have to fit me into his schedule, which in turn means it’s likely going to be a day or two before we can have our chat.”
“Or I could fly into Eschborn first thing in the morning,” Cronley said.
“Eschborn?”
“Isn’t that the name of that little strip near the Schlosshotel Kronberg?”
The Schlosshotel Kronberg in Taunus, twenty miles from Frankfurt, was now a country club and hotel for senior officers. It had been, before the demise of the OSS, home to Colonel Mattingly’s OSS Forward command.
It was there that Second Lieutenant Cronley had been drafted into the OSS. At the time, he had been the newest, least qualified and thus least important agent in the XXIInd CIC Detachment in the university town of Marburg an der Lahn. His sole qualification for the CIC had been his fluent German. His sole qualification for the OSS, aside from his fluency in German, had been that it had come out that his father had served in World War I with OSS Director Major General William J. Donovan, who had told Mattingly he remembered Cronley to be a “nice, smart kid.”
Mattingly had frankly told Cronley that his being taken into the OSS was less nepotism than a critical shortage of personnel. There were few officers left to scrape from the bottom of the barrel for OSS service — the war was over and the wartime officers had gone home — and an officer was needed for a unique position Mattingly had to fill that would require no qualifications beyond his second lieutenant’s gold bar, his Top Secret security clearance, and the color of his skin.
Major General Reinhard Gehlen and what had been Abwehr Ost were being hidden from the Soviets in a former monastery — Kloster Grünau. They were being guarded by a reinforced company of 2nd Armored Division soldiers. They were all Negroes. They had no commanding officer, and one was needed. There were no Negro officers in the “intelligence pool” who spoke German, and the white officers in the pool who did were needed for more important duties.
At the time, Cronley thought that he was about to spend the foreseeable future in the middle of nowhere as the cushion between 256 black soldiers and about that many German intelligence officers and non-coms. The one thing he could be sure of, he had thought, was that for the rest of his military service — he was obligated to serve four years — he would be doing something even less exciting than washing mud off the tracks of tanks in a motor pool somewhere.
He had quickly learned how wrong his prediction was.
“You would feel safe flying a Storch there?” Mattingly asked.
“Yes, sir. No problem.”
“I seem to recall hearing my friend say that ‘there are old pilots and bold pilots, but no old bold pilots.’”
“I’m a young, very cautious pilot, sir. I can get into Eschborn with no trouble.”
“Okay. I’ll meet you at Eschborn at half past eleven tomorrow morning. Come as a civilian.”
“Yes, sir.”
[FIVE]
When Cronley went from his quarters to the senior officers’ dining room, he saw that only one place was set at the table. Dunwiddie was on his way to Sonthofen, which meant he wouldn’t be here for supper. No plates for Gehlen and Mannberg meant they had already eaten.
Without waiting for me, and thus expressing — without coming right out and saying anything — their displeasure with me for countermanding Bischoff’s order about not changing Orlovsky’s shit bucket.
And probably conferring on how they can tactfully remind Major Wallace and Colonel Mattingly of my youth and inexperience in the hope he will tell me to pay attention to my elders.
Well, fuck both of them!
Cronley went into the bar, found the Stars and Stripes where Mannberg had left it earlier, went back into the dining room, and ate alone. He refused the offer of a drink, or a beer, as he would be flying first thing in the morning.
The mess was run by Tiny’s mess sergeant and two of his assistants. Tiny’s mess sergeant supervised — declared — the menu, and his two sergeants drew the rations from the Quartermaster, divided them between what would be eaten in the two messes, and those to be given to the families of Gehlen’s men.
Gehlen’s men did the actual cooking and all the other work connected with the two messes and the NCO club, including the bartending.
The only news that Cronley found interesting in Stars and Stripes as he read it over his grilled pork chops, applesauce, mashed potatoes, and green beans was that the PX was about to hold a raffle, the winners of which would be entitled to purchase jeeps for $380. The vehicles, the story said, had been run through a rebuild program at the Griesheim ordnance depot and would be “as new.”
The first thing Cronley thought was that he would enter the raffle. A jeep would be nice to have on the ranch outside Midland, if he could figure a way to get one from Germany to Texas.