“So we start with H hour. That will be when we shoot him. In that connection, I suggest that there be three shots. With a.45 pistol. They’re very noisy. One shot to wake everybody up and, thirty seconds later, two more shots so everybody knows what they heard was shooting.
“Now, as I started to say, the next number we need, what we have to find out, is how long it is going to take to dig the grave. When you get back up there, and I suggest you do this in the dark, take the gravediggers out in the country someplace and have them dig a grave. In the dark. Simulating as much as possible what they will do when they actually dig the grave. Say that takes an hour. Add a half hour. That means the shooting would take place at H hour minus one-point-five. You understand all this?”
Cronley nodded.
“There are a lot of other blanks to fill in,” Hessinger went on. “For example, how long does it take to fly from Kloster Grünau to Eschborn?”
“We better figure on three hours.”
“Then, presuming you would take off from Eschborn as soon as you could, when you had enough light to see the runway… You understand where I’m going with this?”
“Yeah, I do. And I’m impressed, Freddy.”
“I think of it as sort of a chess game. Now, another time we need is how long it will take to drive the ambulance from Eschborn to Rhine-Main.”
“Depending on the time of day, an hour to an hour and a half.”
“And what time of day would the airplane take off?”
“That we could control,” Cronley said. “To a degree.”
“How big a degree?”
“After the airplane is refueled and the passengers loaded, we could arrange for the takeoff to be delayed, say, two hours. But we couldn’t arrange for it to take off before it was ready.”
“What about this? Could we arrange for the airplane to be ready to take off at… I don’t know what I’m asking here.”
“You mean, could we arrange for the airplane to take off at, say, ten o’clock in the morning? Make that eleven — three hours after I took off from here at, say, seven? Plus an hour to get to Rhine-Main from Eschborn. Yeah. We would just have to delay it from taking off the night before. That could be done.”
“How?”
“By getting on the Collins and talking to the SAA Constellation.”
“I didn’t know the Argentine airplanes have Collins radios. Our kind of Collins radios.”
“I’ll make sure the one that’s coming here for Orlovsky does.”
“You can see where we have a lot of work to do.”
“I think that’s what’s known as an understatement.”
“Well, we have until nine o’clock to work on it.”
“Until nine? What happens at nine?”
“You call Mrs. Colonel Schumann and say, ‘Good morning, Mrs. Schumann, what can I do for you this morning?’ That’s what happens at nine.” Hessinger stood. “Let’s go to the office and get this started.”
“What about Major Wallace? We can’t let him see what we’re doing.”
“If he went to the Signal Battalion officers’ club last night, he won’t come into work until ten, if then.” He paused. “Leave money for the waiter. I read an Army Regulation that officers aren’t supposed to take gifts from enlisted men.”
[TWO]
“Hello?”
“Good morning. How did you sleep?”
“You heard from Colonel Frade? We can go to the monastery?”
“No word from him yet. Would you like to meet in the dining room before we go to Pullach?”
“You mean for lunch?”
“I meant now, for breakfast.”
“Meet me in the dining room at twelve-thirty.”
Click.
Apparently, the bloom is even further off the rose than I originally thought.
“What I would suggest,” Sergeant Hessinger said, “is that I stay here and think about what we are going to do with the NKGB-er, and you take the Kapitän and drive out to Pullach and see the ASA lieutenant. And while you’re driving out there, and while you are driving back, you think what you can do to make Mrs. Colonel Schumann happy. Right now I have the feeling she doesn’t like you very much.”
[THREE]
Cronley’s Opel Kapitän stopped at the outer roadblock to the compound. It was guarded by three Polish guards armed with carbines and dressed in black-dyed U.S. Army fatigues.
One of them walked up to the staff car, took a good look at Cronley, then signaled to the others to move the barrier — concertina barbed wire nailed to a crude wooden framework — out of the way. When they had done so, he signaled that Cronley could enter.
That won’t do, Cronley decided as he drove slowly to the second roadblock.
That guy saw a staff car and a man in uniform and just passed me in. He should — at least — have asked me for my identification.
And that concertina wire has to go, too. If we’re going to pretend that what’s going on in here is an industrial development organization, the entrance can’t look like a POW enclosure.
And maybe get those Poles some different uniforms. So they look like cops, not soldiers.
And, obviously, the sooner I get some of Tiny’s people down here the better.
Two hundred yards down the road, there was another checkpoint. More Poles in dyed fatigues, but also an American soldier, a stocky technical sergeant armed with a.45 as well as a carbine.
He walked up to the Kapitän and waited for Cronley to roll down the window.
“You from the CIC?” the sergeant asked.
“That’s what’s painted on the bumpers, Twenty-three CIC,” Cronley replied.
“Where’s Captain Cronley?” the sergeant asked.
Obviously, the sergeant does not think I could be a captain.
Well, there are very few twenty-two-year-old captains.
“My name is Cronley.” He produced his CIC credentials.
The sergeant saluted. Cronley returned it.
“Sorry, Captain.”
“I look so young because I don’t drink, smoke, fornicate, or have impure thoughts,” Cronley said. “I’m actually thirty-six.”
The sergeant laughed.
“Yeah, you are. Sir, there’s a Signal Corps lieutenant looking for you.”
“Where is he?”
“At your quarters.”
“My quarters?”
“You’re going to be the CO of whatever this is, right?”
Cronley nodded.
“Then your quarters are right next door to the general offices. You know where that is?”
Cronley nodded again.
“There’s a sign on it. Says ‘Military Government Liaison Officer.’ In English. And in German.”
“I think I can find it. Thanks.”
Three minutes later, having passed through the third, inner checkpoint — this one manned by three Polish guards and two American soldiers — he found a Signal Corps lieutenant he thought was the one looking for him. He and three soldiers were sitting in a three-quarter-ton truck parked in front of a small house. It was next to the larger building on which was a sign identifying it as the GENERAL-BÜROS SÜD-DEUTSCHE INDUSTRIELLE ENTWICKLUNGSORGANISATION.