Empire and Honor Page 12

  Cronley didn’t reply.

  “We may now move into that area classified as Top Secret–Presidential, Cronley. But I think I should ask for advice. Tiny?”

  “My people have always held Aggies in high regard, Colonel,” Dunwiddie said. “I’ll vote yes. But one question for the lieutenant, sir?”

  Mattingly nodded.

  “How well do you get along with Negroes, Lieutenant?” Dunwiddie asked.

  What the hell does he mean by that?

  His mouth ran away with him.

  “When they’re as large as you, Sergeant, I try to be very obliging.”

  “That being the case, Colonel,” Dunwiddie said, “I vote yes.”

  “Harry?”

  Harry was now smiling broadly.

  “Colonel,” he said, “I would suggest that anyone who was expelled at fourteen for bootlegging and running a poker game is our kind of guy.”

  Mattingly nodded and turned to the man in the ill-fitting German suit.

  “General?”

  General?

  “I would suggest that this young officer—and not only because of his command of the German language—would be quite suitable for our needs, Colonel.”

  “The motion carries,” Mattingly said. “So, with something less than great enthusiasm, we turn to the Top Secret–Presidential area. Lieutenant, please understand that it was not hyperbole when I said before that information thus classified is so important to the security of the United States that extreme measures are authorized to prevent, or punish, its disclosure. Are you sure you understand that the definition of ‘extreme measures’ is the taking of life?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Harry,” Mattingly said, and gestured for Harry to speak.

  “During the late unpleasantness, Lieutenant,” Harry began, and then interrupted himself. “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll call you Jimmy. All right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  This guy speaks German as well as I do.

  “During the late unpleasantness, Jimmy, there was a section of the German High Command Intelligence Service known as Abwehr Ost. It dealt with the East—the Soviets. It was commanded by Colonel, later General, Reinhard Gehlen.”

  Who is probably the guy sitting across from me.

  “When it became apparent that German defeat was inevitable, just a matter of time, General Gehlen made contact with Allen Dulles, who headed the OSS in the European Theater of Operations, and proposed a deal. He would turn over to the United States all of his assets—including his human assets, which included agents in place in the Kremlin—if we promised to keep his people, and their families, out of the hands of the Russians.

  “He gave us, as proof of the value of the intelligence he was offering, the names of Soviet spies who had infiltrated our Manhattan Project, the development of the atomic bomb. We had no idea who these people were, but on investigation, learned that they were indeed Russian spies.

  “Mr. Dulles took the proposal to General Eisenhower, who authorized the deal. Neither General Donovan nor President Roosevelt were made aware of the arrangement—”

  “Why not?” Cronley blurted.

  “Because General Donovan would have felt duty bound to inform President Roosevelt, and if that had happened, the Russians would have immediately learned of it. There were people around the President—including his wife—who genuinely believed the Soviets were incapable of spying upon the United States. And there were others, including specifically the secretary of the Treasury, who were so outraged by the abominable behavior of the Nazis that they were more interested in retribution and punishment than anything else.”

  “Morgenthau,” Mattingly interjected, “formally proposed that the senior one hundred Nazis, and all SS officers, be shot out of hand—it’s understandable, he’s Jewish—on the spot wherever and whenever located.”

  “And there were Nazis, and SS, in Abwehr Ost?” Cronley asked.

  “Yes, there were,” Mattingly said, and again motioned for Harry to continue.

  Harry nodded. “When President Roosevelt died, Mr. Dulles went to President Truman and told him of the deal he’d made. Truman gave him permission to continue with the deal until he’d had time to think it—as well as the the entire question of the OSS—over.”

  “I don’t understand. . . .”

  “The OSS was not popular with either the Army establishment or with the FBI—Mr. Hoover believed the FBI should have been in charge of both intelligence and counterintelligence—or the State Department or the Navy or, as I said before, especially the Treasury Department. There had been calls for our disbandment even before the war was over. On becoming President, Truman was subjected to enormous pressure to immediately put us out of business.”

  “And I think he would have,” Mattingly spoke up again, “had his feelings not been hurt by his not having been told about the atomic bomb. If it hadn’t been for that, he would have gone along with the Army brass, Hoover, and Morgenthau.”

  “Excuse me,” Cronley said. “If it hadn’t been for what?”

  “The day after Truman became President,” Harry said, “Lieutenant General Leslie Groves, who headed the Manhattan Project, went into the Oval Office and said, in effect, ‘Mr. President, there’s something you have to know. We have a secret weapon of enormous power, an atomic bomb.’”

  “He was Vice President and didn’t know about the atomic bomb?” Cronley asked, incredulously.

  “He was Vice President and didn’t know about the atomic bomb,” Mattingly confirmed. “Roosevelt didn’t think he had the need to know. Which I believe was good for us, the OSS. Truman began to question the motives of those calling for our destruction. He did not shut us down immediately, and he gave Mr. Dulles permission to continue our arrangement with General Gehlen.”

  “But you said he did order the end of the OSS,” Cronley said.

  “He did. We’re officially shut down. But Mr. Dulles was able to convince the President that the arrangement with General Gehlen was too important not to continue. It could not be turned over to the Army or anyone else. If that had happened, it would have been exposed, and public outrage would have killed it once and for all.”

  “Public outrage about what?”

  “General Gehlen proposed the arrangement for two major reasons,” Mattingly said. “First, he genuinely believed the Soviets were evil and intended to take over all of Europe and then the world. And that the only thing that could stop them was us, the United States Army. And he knew how valuable his assets would be to us.

  “Second, Gehlen knew there would be enormous pressure on Eisenhower to turn over to the Soviets anyone connected with Abwehr Ost. He knew that that meant his people and their families would be interrogated—tortured—and then either killed or shipped off to Siberia to be worked to death.

  “So the price for his assets was the protection of his people. And we agreed to protect them.”

  “Including the Nazis?” Cronley asked softly.

  “Yes, including the Nazis. There weren’t many of them, but there were Nazis. And of course their families.”

  “How could you do that?” Cronley asked.

  Mattingly glanced at Harry, then went on: “The Nazis posed the greatest problem, still pose it. The non-Nazis—I’ll get into this in a minute—could be kept in Germany. But Nazis are—and should be—subject to arrest for investigation of what they might have done, and then be brought before a war crimes tribunal. Once they were arrested, the Russians would demand they be turned over to them.”

  “So, what did you do?”

  “We got them, are getting them, out of Germany.”

  “To Argentina,” Cronley blurted.

  Mattingly nodded. “We entered into an unholy alliance with the Vatican—how’s that for a turn of phrase?—who for their own reasons were helping Nazis—and Nazi collaborators, French, Hungarian, Czech, et cetera—escape the wrath of the victors.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Cronley said softly. />
  “Right now, the Nazis don’t concern us as much as what we’ve come to call the ‘Good Germans’—the officers and non-coms who were just soldiers doing their duty—which is where you come into the equation.”

  He motioned for Harry to resume the narration.

  Harry said, “General Gehlen—Abwehr Ost—buried all their intelligence files in steel barrels in the Bavarian Alps and then moved north. On May twenty-second, 1945, Gehlen and most of his senior officers surrendered to the CIC at Oberusel, which is not far from here. That arrest was reported to SHAEF, and SHAEF dispatched a CIC team to thoroughly interrogate them.”

  “Commanded by Major Harold N. Wallace, Signal Corps, of the OSS,” Mattingly furnished, “newly equipped with the credentials of a CIC special agent, through the courtesy of a senior SHAEF intelligence officer whose name you don’t have the need to know but probably can guess.”

  Cronley looked between Mattingly and Harry.

  In other words, you, Mattingly.

  And that means Harry is Major Wallace.

  Harry Wallace saw the look on Cronley’s face, nodded his confirmation, and then went on: “Meanwhile, our people—the OSS—were retrieving the material buried in Bavaria, and taking it to a former monastery in Grünau, Bavaria. The monastery was made available to us by the Vatican in exchange for services rendered.”

  Mattingly, glancing at Tiny, added: “Enter First Sergeant Dunwiddie and Company C, 203rd Tank Destroyer Battalion, Second Armored Division, which, less officers, had been placed on temporary duty with the OSS sometime before to provide security for OSS Forward. No officers because we didn’t want a captain and four lieutenants about to be returned to the United States for discharge or reassignment to regale the fellows in the Fort Knox officers’ club, or their hometown VFW, with tales of the interesting things they saw here at Kronberg Castle or at a monastery in Bavaria.

  “When Tiny said that ‘his people’ have always held Aggies in high regard, he was referring not only to his family but to other black soldiers, cavalrymen, who have a proud and extensive history of service to the U.S. Army. The Ninth and Tenth Cavalry—black soldiers led, as was the 203rd Tank Destroyer, by white officers—did most of the Indian fighting on the plains after the Civil War. As Tiny will tell you—probably frequently—the Tenth Cavalry beat Teddy Roosevelt to the top of San Juan Hill in Cuba during the Spanish-American War.”

  “The Buffalo Soldiers,” Cronley said.

  “You know about them, Lieutenant?” Dunwiddie asked, as he patted the tight black curls of hair on his head. The Indians had thought the hair of the black soldiers they were fighting was like the hair on buffalo.

  Cronley nodded and smiled. Dunwiddie smiled back.

  “Most of Tiny’s men are already at the Grünau monastery, as are just about all of General Gehlen’s officers and some of their families,” Major Wallace then went on. “Good Germans and some Nazis that we haven’t yet been able to get to Argentina. The rest of Charley Company will move there in the next couple of days, when OSS Forward goes out of business and this place becomes a senior officers’ club.

  “Ultimately, the South German Industrial Development Organization, which is our new name for Abwehr Ost, will set up in a little dorf called Pullach, south of Munich. The engineers are now erecting a double fence around a twenty-five-acre compound, and rehabilitating the houses inside. And the barracks, just inside the outer fence, to house Company ‘C,’ which has just been placed on indefinite temporary duty with the newly formed Twenty-seventh CIC Detachment, Major Harold Wallace commanding.”

  Wallace then looked at Mattingly, who said: “Tiny has pointed out that a company of black soldiers with no visible white officers is liable to make people curious, and that’s the last thing we want. My problem in that regard is that I have no one to fill that role.”

  “Which is where I fit it?” Cronley said.

  Mattingly nodded. “Almost all of my people are going home, and in any event, most of them are senior captains and better, and wouldn’t want the job anyway. So, yes, Lieutenant Cronley, that’s where you come in. Interested?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Right now—Tiny will fill you in on the details—what we’re doing at the monastery is trying to stay inconspicuous—keeping the Nazis inside in case they decide to leave before we can get them out of Germany, and keeping out everybody else in the world.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Unless you have a reason, a very good reason, to go back to Marburg, I’d like to send you to Grünau right away.”

  “I have no reason to go back to Marburg, sir.”

  “Okay. Major Connell will be informed that you have been transferred to the Twenty-seventh—which is in Munich—and instructed to send to you whatever property you left.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Tiny, take Lieutenant Cronley to Grünau and get him settled.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “There’s no reason that I can see for you to come back here. Is there?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I’ll call the strip at Eschborn and have them wind up the rubber bands of one of our puddle jumpers,” Mattingly said. “You ever have a ride in an L-4, Cronley? It’s a small, high-wing single-engine Piper Cub.”

  “Yes, sir. I even know how to fly one. We had Cubs on our ranches, and Clete’s . . .” He paused.

  “Don’t stop,” Mattingly said, gesturing for him to continue.

  “Colonel Frade’s Uncle Jim—who raised him—taught him to fly theirs, and then promised to teach me when I turned fifteen. Before I turned fifteen, Colonel Frade took me out on the prairie and taught me how to fly his. So the first time I got in our Cub for my first flying lesson, we told Uncle Jim and my father there was a phone call for one of them at the house. When they went to find out about that, Cletus spun the prop for me and I took off. My father came out and found Clete there and me and the Piper gone. He shit— He got pretty upset.”

  Mattingly shook his head in wonder. “I think I should tell you, Lieutenant, that I am beginning to question the wisdom of taking you into the fold.”

  “No, you’re not, Bob,” Major Wallace said. “The more you hear about him, the more you have to agree that he’s our kind of guy.”

  “Anytime you’re ready, Lieutenant,” First Sergeant Tiny Dunwiddie said, getting to his feet.

  —

  Forty-five minutes later, sitting in an L-4 “puddle jumper” on the active runway of what had once been a German fighter aircraft base, Cronley watched as a stick of parachutists floated from a Douglas C-47.

  Tiny Dunwiddie, who was in a second L-4, had told him that the field was being used to provide a crash course in parachute jumping to replacements headed for the 508th Parachute Infantry. The 508th was charged with protecting the I.G. Farben Building, which would now house Eisenhower’s Headquarters, U.S. Forces European Theater.

  But Cronley wasn’t really interested. Nor was his mind full of the incredible story he had just been told at the Schlosshotel Kronberg.

  What Jimmy was thinking as the parachutists came to earth, and as the pilot of his L-4 shoved the throttle forward and the Piper started roaring down the runway, was that it seemed entirely possible that his new duties would offer him the chance, sooner or later, to see Elsa again.

  [THREE]

  Kloster Grünau

  Schollbrunn, Bavaria, Germany

  1705 10 October 1945

  The olive drab Piper Cub—painted with the stars-and-bars insignia of a U.S. Army war plane, and bearing the Army nomenclature L-4, was otherwise identical to the one in which Jimmy Cronley had soloed some months before he had turned fifteen—touched down somewhat roughly on a narrow strip of road.

  Immediately, two jeeps, each with two large black soldiers and a pedestal-mounted Browning .50 caliber machine gun, appeared. Cronley saw that they didn’t train the weapons on the aircraft—or him—but seemed quite ready to do so if that should become necessary.

  “Ok
ay, Lieutenant,” the pilot said. “Here we are. You can get out now.”

  The pilot was a young staff sergeant wearing pilot’s wings superimposed with an “L,” for Liaison.

  Cronley, taking his canvas suitcase with him, got out of the airplane and stood on the road. The puddle jumper turned, taxied back down the road, turned again, and immediately roared toward him and took off.

  As soon as that aircraft was airborne, the L-4 with First Sergeant Tiny Dunwiddie aboard came in and landed. It came to a stop, its engine still turning, near Cronley.

  Dunwiddie squeezed himself out of the airplane, and it immediately turned and taxied back down the road and turned again and took off.

  “Did those clowns salute you, Lieutenant?” Tiny asked.

  Cronley shook his head.

  “Salute Lieutenant Cronley!” Dunwiddie ordered. “And say, ‘Welcome to Grünau, sir,’ to your new commanding officer.”

  The sergeants standing by the pedestal-mounted Brownings saluted, and all four soldiers repeated, “Welcome to Grünau, sir.”

  Cronley returned their salutes.

  “You,” First Sergeant Dunwiddie said, pointing to the sergeant at the Browning in the nearest jeep, “get our luggage and put it and you in the other jeep.” He next pointed to the driver. “And you get in the back of this one.”

  The driver hurriedly complied with his orders.

  Dunwiddie waved Cronley into the passenger seat of the jeep, got behind the wheel, and headed down the road.

  On hearing that they were headed to “the Grünau Monastery,” Cronley’s mind filled with images of ancient heavy stone monasteries, most of which he’d acquired from motion pictures starring Errol Flynn in tights.

  What he found, instead, was a large tent city surrounded by two lines of barbed wire enclosing what he guessed to be at least five, maybe more, acres. Hung on the wire, spaced at twenty-five-yard intervals, were signs reading EINGANG VERBOTEN!

  In the center of the tent city was a masonry building. An American flag flew from a pole in front of it. After first one and then a second gate in the barbed wire was pulled aside by heavily armed and uniformly huge black soldiers wearing “tanker” jackets with the shoulder insignia of the Second Armored Division, Dunwiddie drove them to the building.