The Assassination Option Read online

  He got the dutiful chuckles he expected.

  “Colonel Frade came to see me shortly before El Jefe and I got on the airplane—” Ashton began to go on.

  “In Washington?” Cronley interrupted. “Cletus is in Washington?”

  “He was there briefly en route to Pensacola, Florida, where he will be released from active service in the United States Marine Corps. I appreciate your interest, but I would appreciate even more your permitting me to continue.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Colonel Frade was kind enough to offer a few suggestions vis-à-vis my trip here. He recommended that should Colonel Mattingly not be able to find time in his busy schedule to meet me at Frankfurt, so that I might give him Admiral Souers’s letter—”

  “Why did he think Mattingly was going to meet you at Rhine-Main?” Cronley interrupted again.

  Ashton ignored the interruption and went on, “I should ask whoever met us to take us to the Schlosshotel Kronberg, where we could rest in luxurious accommodations overnight, to recuperate from our journey. Then, the following morning, I could go to the I.G. Farben Building to meet with Colonel Mattingly, deliver the admiral’s letter to him, and perhaps meet with General Greene and possibly even General Smith.

  “Following that meeting, or meetings, Colonel Frade suggested we then reserve a compartment on a railroad train charmingly entitled ‘the Blue Danube’ and travel to Munich to meet with you, Captain Cronley, your staff, and General Gehlen, preferably at the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten, which he assured me would provide El Jefe and myself luxury accommodations equal to those of the Schlosshotel Kronberg.

  “Instead . . . as someone once said, ‘the best-laid plans gang aft agley,’ which I suspect means get royally fucked up . . . Captain Cronley meets us at the airport, tells me he has no idea where Colonel Mattingly is, but that he hopes wherever he is it is far away. He then stuffs me into the really uncomfortable backseat of a little airplane and flies me through every storm cloud he could find to a medieval monastery in the middle of fucking nowhere.”

  Cronley smiled, but he recalled seeing—a dozen times, more—Ashton wince with pain as the Storch had been tossed about by turbulence during the flight from Frankfurt.

  “Now, one would suspect,” Ashton went on, “that, in normal circumstances, this deviation from the plan would annoy, perhaps even anger, your new commanding officer. These are not normal circumstances, however.

  “I was given the opportunity, first while lying in my bed of pain in Walter Reed, and then whilst flying across the Atlantic, and finally as I flew here from Frankfurt, to consider what the circumstances really are.

  “To start, let me go back to the beginning. The admiral came to see me at Walter Reed. Bearing my new silver oak leaves. He told me they were intended more as an inducement for me to stay on active duty than a recognition of my superior leadership characteristics.

  “I then told him I didn’t need an inducement to stay on active duty, as I was determined to get the bastards who did this to me.”

  He raised his broken arm.

  “He immediately accepted my offer, which I thought surprised him more than a little. Not immediately, but right after he left, I began to wonder why. The cold facts seemed to be that not only was I going to have to hobble around on crutches for the next several months, but—more importantly—I was in fact no more qualified to take over Operation Ost from Colonel Frade than Jim was to handle Operation Ost in Germany.

  “Certainly, I reasoned, although I had heard time and again that finding experienced people for the new DCI was going to be difficult, there had to be two or three or four experienced spooks—Colonel Mattingly–like senior spooks—who had joined the ranks of the unemployed when the OSS went out of business, who would be available. And Colonel Frade had made the point over and over that not all members, just an overwhelming majority of officers of the conventional intelligence operations, were unable to find their asses using both hands.

  “I came up with a theory immediately, but dismissed it as really off the wall.

  “And then I was given the letter—the carefully sealed letter in the double envelope—to deliver to Colonel Mattingly. ‘What,’ I wondered, ‘does the admiral wish to tell Colonel Mattingly that he doesn’t want me to know?’

  “When I thought, at length, about this, my initial off-the-wall theory started coming back, and each time it did it made more sense.

  “The conclusion I reached, after considering everything, is that Admiral Souers has decided that you and I, Jim—and of course Captain Dunwiddie—are expendable. I have also concluded that Colonel Frade—whatever his limitations are, no one has ever accused him of being slow—is, if not party to this, fully aware of it.”

  “How do you mean ‘expendable,’ Colonel?” Dunwiddie asked.

  “Available for sacrifice for the greater good,” Ashton said. “Consider this, please. To whom does Admiral Souers—with absolute justification—owe his primary loyalty?”

  “The President,” Cronley said softly. “Oh, Jesus!”

  “Who must be protected whatever it takes,” Ashton said.

  “Why are you telling us this?” Dunwiddie asked.

  “Well, after thinking it over, I decided that—as far as I’m concerned—it’s all right. What we’re doing is important. But I decided that it would be dishonest of me, now that I’ve figured it out, not to tell you. Before we go further, in other words, I wanted you to have the opportunity to opt out.”

  “‘Before we go further’?” Dunwiddie parroted.

  “What I’ve decided to do is live with the possibility, actually the probability, that Operation Ost is going to blow up in my face, and that when that happens, Souers, as he should, is going to throw me to the wolves to protect the President. And for that matter, Eisenhower and Smith. That’s one of the things I’ve decided.”

  “And the others?” Cronley asked.

  “That if Operation Ost blows up in my face, it’s going to be because of a bad decision of mine. Not because Mattingly or General Greene ‘suggest’ something to me and I dutifully follow their suggestion to do—more importantly, not to do—something and it blows up.”

  “For instance?” Cronley asked softly.

  “For instance, Colonel Frade suggested to me that I should act ‘with great caution’ in dealing with our traitor. I don’t intend to heed that advice. My first priority is going to be finding out who the sonofabitch is, and then putting out his lights. I don’t care if he spent three years holding Gehlen’s hand on the Russian front, and has Joe Stalin’s girlfriend’s phone number, he’s a dead man.”

  “By traitor, you mean the man who let the NKGB know we were sending Colonel Likharev to Argentina?” Cronley asked.

  “With all the details of when and how,” Ashton confirmed. “Gehlen has to be taught that he’s working for us, and that our deal with him is to protect his people from the Russians. The deal didn’t include protecting his people from us. He has to be taught, right now, that we won’t tolerate a loose cannon.”

  “There are people in Gehlen’s organization who are working for the NKGB—”

  “You already had figured that out, huh?”

  “And we’re working on finding out who they are.”

  “‘We’re’ meaning you and Gehlen, right? Isn’t that what’s called sending the fox into the chicken coop to see what happened to the hens? Frankly, Jim, I thought you had more sense than that.”

  “You will be astonished, Colonel, when I tell you how little sense I have had.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Shortly after I returned from Argentina, I met a woman. The wife of the CIC-Europe IG. Shortly after that—”

  “Wait a minute! You’re talking about this woman whose water heater blew up?”

  Cronley nodded.

  “There has to be a point
to this narrative of your sexual exploits.”

  “I told her about Colonel Sergei Likharev, then known to us as Major Konstantin Orlovsky, about whom she had heard from her husband and was curious. And the night I put him on the plane to Buenos Aires, I told her about that.”

  “And she ran her mouth?”

  “I don’t think they call it running the mouth when an NKGB agent reports to her superiors the intelligence she was sent to get.”

  Ashton looked at Cronley for a long moment.

  “You’re saying the wife of the CIC IG was an NKGB agent?” he asked incredulously.

  “We’re saying that both of them, the IG, too, were NKGB agents,” Dunwiddie said.

  “And the water heater explosion?”

  “My orders from Colonel Frade, about finding and dealing with the leak, were to get out of General Gehlen’s way when he was dealing with it. I complied with that order.”

  “And didn’t tell Mattingly, or Greene—for that matter, Frade—about your suspicions?”

  “They weren’t suspicions. The only way the NKGB could have learned about our sending Likharev to Argentina, and when and how, was from my loving Rachel,” Cronley said.

  “And, as the general pointed out,” Dunwiddie said, “a day or two after we caught Likharev sneaking out of here, Colonel Schumann showed up here and demanded to be let in. It took shooting his engine out with a .50 caliber Browning to keep him out. The general suggested Colonel Schumann’s interest in Kloster Grünau was because he suspected we had Orlovsky/Likharev.”

  “My God!” Ashton said.

  “Gehlen further suggested that how Jim planned to deal with the situation wasn’t practical.”

  “He said it was childish,” Cronley corrected him.

  “And this impractical, childish situation was?” Ashton asked.

  “I was going to shoot both of them and then go tell Mattingly why.”

  “General Gehlen said Jim going to the stockade . . .”

  “Or the hangman’s noose,” Cronley interjected.

  “. . . made no sense.”

  “You didn’t even consider going to Mattingly and telling him what you suspected? You just—”

  “You’re going to have to learn that when you tell Mattingly anything . . .” Cronley interrupted.

  “I’m going to have to learn?” Ashton interrupted. “I don’t think I like you telling me anything I have to do.”

  “. . . Mattingly will look at it through the prism of what’s good for Colonel Robert Mattingly,” Cronley finished.

  “Did you just hear what I said, Captain Cronley?”

  “Yeah, Colonel Ashton, I heard. But you better get used to it. That won’t be the last time I’ll tell you what I think you have to do. Don’t get blinded by those silver oak leaves. What the hell makes you think you can get off the plane and start telling us what to do? You don’t know enough of what’s going—”

  “Enough,” Tiny boomed. “Goddamn it! Both of you, stop right there!”

  He sounded like the first sergeant he had so recently been, counseling two PFCs who were doing something really stupid.

  And then, as if he had heard what he said, and was now cognizant that captains cannot talk to lieutenant colonels as if they are PFCs doing something really stupid, he went on jocularly, “In the immortal words of the great lover of our revolutionary era, the revered Benjamin Franklin, ‘We must hang together, gentlemen, else, we shall most assuredly hang separately.’”

  Ashton glowered at him for a long moment.

  Finally he said, “Actually, Jim, I must admit the little fellow has a point.”

  “Every once in a great while, he’s right about something,” Cronley said, and then added, “I was out of line. I apologize.”

  “Apology rejected as absolutely unnecessary,” Ashton said.

  After a moment, he went on. “So what’s next?”

  “Before we get to what’s next,” El Jefe said, “I have a request.”

  “For what?”

  “Is there a .45 around here that I can have?”

  “Why do you want a .45?” Dunwiddie asked.

  “Well, when people try to kill me, I like to have something to defend myself.”

  When there was no reply, El Jefe went on.

  “This Colonel Mattingly of yours may think a gas leak took out this CIC colonel and his wife, but I don’t think the NKGB is swallowing that line. I think they may want to come back here and play tit for tat.”

  “They already have,” Cronley said. “A week ago, Ostrowski killed two of them. They already had a wire garrote around Sergeant Tedworth’s neck.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong,” El Jefe said, “but following that, it was really heads-up around here, right? Double the guard, that sort of thing?”

  Cronley and Dunwiddie nodded.

  “So I think what these Communists will do is wait until you relax a little, and then try it again. At least that’s what the Chinese Communists did.”

  “The Chinese?” Ashton and Cronley said on top of one another.

  “When I was a young sailor, I did two hitches with the Yangtze River Patrol. The Chinese Communists were always trying to kill us. What they did was try. If that failed, they waited patiently until we relaxed a little and then tried again. And again. Most of the time, that worked. We used to say we got double time for retirement because the Navy knew most of us wouldn’t live long enough to retire.”

  “Interesting,” Dunwiddie said. “That’s how the Apaches operated.”

  “Two things, Captain Cronley,” Ashton said. “When you get Lieutenant Schultz a .45, would you get me one, too?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And one last question. If you didn’t want to go to Colonel Mattingly with it, why didn’t you go to General Greene and tell him what you suspected—all right, knew—about Colonel Whatsisname and his wife?”

  Dunwiddie answered for him: “General Gehlen said that the Schumanns were sure to have contingency plans—ranging from denial through disappearing—in case they were exposed. He said he didn’t think we could afford to take the chance they were outwitting us. Jim and I agreed with him.”

  “So you went along with having Gehlen clip them,” Ashton said.

  “We don’t know that Gehlen had them clipped,” Cronley said.

  “You don’t know the sun will come up in the morning, either. But you would agree it’s likely, right?”

  When Cronley didn’t reply, Ashton said, “I suggest, operative word, ‘suggest,’ that our next step is to meet with General Gehlen.”

  “I respectfully suggest our next step is getting the .45s,” El Jefe said. “Then we can go talk to this general.”

  “Every once in a great while, the chief’s right about something,” Ashton said.

  [THREE]

  Kloster Grünau

  Schollbrunn, Bavaria

  American Zone of Occupation, Germany

  1520 2 January 1946

  CIC Special Agent Friedrich Hessinger and a very large, very black sergeant with a Thompson submachine gun cradled in his arms like a hunter’s shotgun walked into the officers’ mess.

  Captain J. D. Cronley, Captain Chauncey L. Dunwiddie, First Sergeant Abraham Lincoln Tedworth, and a man in a naval officer’s uniform were sitting at the bar drinking coffee. A lieutenant colonel sitting in a chair, with his en-casted leg resting on a small table, also held a coffee cup.

  The sergeant smiled and, without disturbing the Thompson, saluted.

  “Those captain’s bars look good on you, Top,” he said.

  Dunwiddie returned the salute.

  “Flattery will get you everywhere,” he said. “Thanks, Eustis.”

  “And these stripes?” Tedworth asked, pointing to his chevrons. “How do they look on me?”

 
“Every once in a while, the Army makes a really big mistake,” the sergeant said.

  “That will cost you, Eustis. Sooner or later that will really cost you,” Tedworth replied. “Now, get over to the motor pool and tell them to have an ambulance, with a couch, ready in ten minutes. We’re going into Munich.”

  “And then come back here?”

  “Wait there until I send for you.”

  “You got it, Top.”

  When he had gone, Cronley said, “Good man.”

  “Yes, he is,” Dunwiddie agreed. “When he’s told to do something, he does it. Not like some fat Kraut-Americans, like the one I’m looking at.”

  Hessinger held up both hands, a gesture that meant both that he didn’t understand and that he surrendered.

  “Captain Cronley, did you, or did you not, tell Fat Freddy to arm himself before driving out here?”

  “I recall saying something along those lines to Special Agent Hessinger, yes,” Cronley said.

  “‘Sorry, sir. No excuse, sir’ will not be a satisfactory excuse, Sergeant Hessinger,” Dunwiddie said.

  Hessinger hoisted the skirt of his tunic. The butt of a Model 1911A1 .45 ACP pistol became visible above his hip.

  “Say ‘I apologize’ to Freddy,” Cronley said, laughing. And then he added, “Come here, Freddy, I want to see that holster.”

  Hessinger complied.

  “Where the hell did you get that?”

  “I had a shoemaker make half a dozen of them,” Hessinger replied. “They call them ‘Secret Service High Rise Cross Draw Holsters.’ There was a schematic in one of the books on General Greene’s sergeant major’s shelf.”

  “Colonel Ashton, Lieutenant Schultz, meet Special Agent Hessinger, sometimes known as ‘One Surprise After Another Hessinger,’” Cronley said.

  They shook hands.

  “Your funny accent,” El Jefe said. “What are you, German?”