The colonel examined them, and then Cronley, carefully.
“See Eye See, eh?”
Cronley pointed to where XXIIIrd CIC was lettered on the vertical stabilizer.
“You’re not very talkative, are you?”
“Colonel, we’re trained not to be.”
“And you’re leaving now?”
“Right now.”
“Have a nice flight.”
“Thank you.”
“Get him a fire guard,” the colonel ordered, and then asked, “I presume you’ve filed your flight plan?”
Meaning you suspect if you ask me where I’m going, I’m liable to tell you that’s none of your business, right in front of your men.
But clever fellow that you are, the minute I take off, you’ll go into Weather/Flight Planning and look at my flight plan.
“Uh-huh.”
Two Germans, under the supervision of a U.S. Army corporal, trundled up a large fire extinguisher on wheels.
Cronley climbed into the cockpit and strapped himself in. When the engine was running smoothly, he called the tower for taxi and takeoff permission, then signaled for the wheel chocks to be pulled. He gave the Air Force colonel a friendly wave and put his hand to the throttle.
When he was in takeoff position, he looked at Base Operations and saw the colonel and his men marching purposefully toward it.
What I hope happens now is he’ll call the Fulda Air Strip, tell them a Storch is en route, and for them to find out what the Storch is doing there, and, if possible, keep it from leaving until he can find out why a Storch is flying when the Air Force doesn’t want Storches to fly.
When he finally realizes that the Storch is not going to land at Fulda, he may decide to call the commanding officer of the XXIIIrd CIC and ask him what’s going on. That will be difficult, as the XXIIIrd CIC is not listed in any EUCOM telephone directory.
He advanced the throttle.
“Eschborn, Army Seven-Oh-Seven rolling.”
A minute or so later, he looked down at what he presumed was Hoechst.
There was an intact factory of some sort on the bank of what he presumed was the Main River. The factory for some reason he couldn’t imagine had not been reduced to rubble by Air Force B-17s. Neither had a housing development near it.
Rachel is in one of those neat little houses down there, maybe having a cup of coffee after having fed Anton Jr. and Sarah their breakfast and loaded them on the school bus.
Jimmy boy, what the hell have you got yourself into?
He decided that there were two ways to attract the least attention to the Storch on the way to Kloster Grünau. One was to climb to, say, six thousand feet, and the other was to fly as low as he safely could. He reluctantly chose the former option, for, while “chasing cows” was always fun, he had to admit that he didn’t have enough time in the Storch to play games with it.
As he made the ascent, he remembered that Colonel Mattingly had given him a week to get from Major Konstantin Orlovsky the names of which of Gehlen’s people had been turned.
And Mattingly meant it.
What he sees as a satisfactory solution to the problem is that Gehlen and Company “without his knowledge” interrogate Orlovsky, such interrogation including anything up to and including pulling out his fingernails, or hanging him upside down over a slow Apache fire, for no more than a day or two.
Why did he give me a week? What’s that all about? Why not two days or two weeks?
He didn’t pull that from thin air; he had that time period in his mind.
And if that interrogation produces the names, fine.
And if it doesn’t, that’s fine, too.
And if the names Orlovsky gives up — and he knows everybody’s names; he had the rosters — are of innocent people, that’s one of those unfortunate things that can’t be helped.
They get shot and buried alongside Orlovsky in unmarked graves in the ancient cemetery of Kloster Grünau.
If nothing else, that will teach Gehlen’s people — and whoever controls the disappeared NKGB officer Orlovsky — that the Americans can be as ruthless as anybody.
And we keep looking for the people who really have been turned so we can shoot them and plant them in the Kloster Grünau cemetery.
What Mattingly can’t afford to have happen is for it to come out that we grabbed an NKGB officer. We are allies of the Soviet Union. We’d have to give him back, and the Russians could then, in righteous outrage, complain loudly that we are protecting two-hundred-odd Nazis from them.
So Orlovsky has to disappear. It doesn’t really matter if he gives us the names of Gehlen’s people who have been turned.
And Mattingly is right.
So why are you playing Sir Galahad?
The question now seems to be when did that week clock start ticking?
It’s ticking for me, too. Maybe Mattingly has decided he needs that much time — but no more — to come up with some way to shut me up. He can’t have me running to Clete — much less to Admiral Souers.
And if reason doesn’t work…
“What a pity. Poor Cronley was just standing there when the truck went out of control. At least, thank God, it was quick. He didn’t feel a thing.”
No. Two deaths by an out-of-control truck would be too much of a coincidence.
“Poor Jimmy. He just couldn’t handle the death of his bride. He was so young and he loved her so much. It was just too much for him. What did you expect? He put his.45 in his mouth.”
That’d work.
Well, it won’t.
Over my dead body, as the saying goes.
[TWO]
As Cronley made his approach, he saw Tiny Dunwiddie leaning on the front fender of a three-quarter-ton ambulance where the road turned. The Red Cross panels had been painted over, as the ambulance was no longer used to transport the wounded or injured.
He either heard me coming or he’s been waiting for me, possibly with good news from Mattingly.
“This is a direct order, Sergeant Dunwiddie. When Captain Cronley gets there, sit on him. By ‘sit on him’ I mean don’t let him near the man he’s been talking to or near the radio. Or leave. I’ll explain when I get there. Say, ‘Yes, sir.’”
When he taxied to the chapel to shut down the Storch, he saw that while he was gone, U.S. Army squad tents — six of them — had been converted into what was a sort of combination hangar and camouflage cover large enough for both Storches.
He wondered whose idea that had been, and who had done it.
Then he saw Kurt Schröder and two of his mechanics working on the landing gear of the other Storch, Seven-One-Seven, which explained everything.
He shut down Seven-Oh-Seven, got out, gave Schröder a smile and a thumbs-up for the hangar, and then walked to where Dunwiddie was waiting. He got in the ambulance that was no longer an ambulance.
“The look on your face, Captain, sir,” Dunwiddie greeted him, “suggests that things did not go well with Colonel Mattingly.”