He looked around. “Any questions?”
“Sir, this Marine colonel has got a Collins/SIGABA on his airplane?” Staff Sergeant Kramer asked dubiously. “It’s not an aircraft system.”
If I answer that question, there will be more, and I will be late for my lunch with Rachel and the bloom will really be off our rose.
On the other hand, if I don’t answer it, or answer it less than fully, these guys — and they’re all smart, they wouldn’t be in ASA unless they were — will decide I’m handing them a line of bullshit. And I can’t afford that.
So fuck Rachel. Figuratively speaking, of course.
“At Polo is a guy, Master Sergeant Siggie Stein, who is not only Major Ashton’s deputy but our commo chief. He figured out a way to install the Collins/SIGABA system on aircraft.”
“Sir, this sergeant is this major’s deputy?”
“The way things work around here is the best man for a job gets it, regardless of his rank…”
Fifteen minutes later, he decided that for once he might have made the right decision.
What I had was a lieutenant and three sergeants — all good people; McClung sent me the best he had — who had suddenly been put on indefinite Temporary Duty doing they knew not what in the middle of nowhere.
They were understandably less than thrilled.
After telling them everything, I now have, I think, a lieutenant and three good non-coms who are looking forward to being part of Operation Ost.
And maybe, just maybe, they may have decided that the baby-faced captain isn’t such a candy-ass after all.
PART XI
[ONE]
There was a colonel and a formidable-looking woman almost certainly his wife sitting at the table next to where Rachel had been waiting for him for almost an hour.
When Rachel blows up — and why else would she still be waiting for me, if not to blow up? — the colonel and his lady are going to get an earful.
“Mrs. Schumann, I’m so sorry to be late—”
“Don’t be silly, Special Agent Cronley,” Rachel said. “Special Agent Hessinger was kind enough to come by and tell me you were unavoidably detained. And the colonel made it perfectly clear to me that your entertaining me until he gets here depended on the press of your duties. Say no more. Please sit down.”
That was obviously intended for the ears of the colonel and his formidable lady.
Rachel is, after all — maybe above all — a colonel’s lady. Like Caesar’s wife, colonels’ ladies have to be above suspicion. They shouldn’t be suspected of, for example, fucking young officers.
Maybe that’s what’s behind the bloom coming off the rose. Rachel has had time to think about what we’ve been up to. And wants to stop.
That’s what it has to be. I got lucky again.
“Thank you,” Cronley said, and sat down.
He had just adjusted his chair and reached for the napkin when he felt her foot searching his crotch.
[TWO]
“Sweetheart,” Mrs. Rachel Schumann said to Captain James D. Cronley Jr., “don’t be offended, but you need a shower.”
They had been in Suite 527 perhaps two minutes, just long enough for them to be partially disrobed. That was, Rachel had pulled her dress over her head, and then pulled Jimmy’s trousers and shorts down to his ankles. She was now on her knees, with his member in her hand.
It was the smell, or perhaps the taste, of the latter that she apparently found offensive.
“Go on,” Rachel went on. “I don’t know what you were doing all morning with that Russian of yours, but you smell like him. Don’t worry. I’ll be here when you come out.”
Obviously, his naïve hope of an hour before that he had gotten lucky again and was going to be able to get out of their relationship before it exploded in his face was just that, a naïve hope born of desperation.
Rachel got to her feet. Jimmy stepped out of the trousers and shorts gathered at his ankles. He walked to the bathroom, shedding his Ike jacket as he reached it. He went into the bathroom, took off the rest of his clothing, and got into the shower.
As the cold water poured down on him, the conclusion he was forced to draw was that Rachel was bonkers.
There were a number of facts to support this theory, starting of course with the simple fact that she had enticed him into the relationship. It was not his Errol Flynn — type woman-dazzling persona that had made him irresistible to her, which would have been nice to believe, but something else, and that something else was that she was not playing with all the cards normally found in a deck.
Now that he thought about it, he had known that something was wrong from the beginning. He had again thought of this — that Rachel was irresponsible, which is a polite way to say bonkers — at lunch.
Shortly after his lunch had been laid before him, the colonel and his formidable lady who had been at the adjacent table finished their lunch and left. With no others close to them, Rachel decided she could speak freely.
“I suppose it’s too much to hope that when you were at the Pullach compound with your Russian friend, you found someplace we can go?”
“I was out there alone, Rachel. Major McClung sent an officer down with some communications equipment and I had to show him where it was to be installed.”
“Then I guess we’ll have to go to your room here. Do you always eat so slowly?”
“Going to my room would be dangerous. Maybe we could go to yours.”
“What are you talking about, dangerous?”
He had then explained, in great detail, why going to his room would be dangerous, and to her room, only slightly less so:
His room, Suite 527, was at the far end of the fifth-floor corridor, the interior end, so to speak. Away from the front of the hotel. The rooms at that end of the corridor, suites 501 and 502, the windows of which looked out upon Maximilianplatz, were permanently reserved for the use of Brigadier General H. Paul Greene, chief, Counterintelligence, European Command, and Colonel Robert Mattingly, his deputy. Neither officer was in Munich.