Top Secret Page 15

  “Good morning,” he said cheerfully.

  “This your aircraft?” the Air Force colonel said.

  “Well, actually it belongs to the Army,” Cronley said, as he opened the rear window and tossed his overnight bag through it.

  “It’s my understanding,” the colonel announced, “that all of these former German aircraft have been ordered taken out of service.”

  “I hadn’t heard that.”

  “Well, that’s my understanding. Who are you?”

  “Why are you asking?”

  “Because I’m the commanding officer of this airbase and want to know.”

  How come this Air Force colonel is commanding an Army airfield?

  Because they’re operating C-47s out of here to train parachutists to guard the Farben Building, that’s why.

  Cronley produced his CIC credentials.

  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 ]

  Kloster Grünau

  Schollbrunn, Bavaria

  American Zone of Occupation, Germany

  1305 31 October 1945

  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 Schr
öder 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.”

  “No. They didn’t. We need to talk, and I don’t want anybody to hear what I have to say.”

  “Well, that’s why I brought the ambulance.”

  He started the engine, drove out onto the runway, and stopped.

  “Thanks to my genius,” he said, “we can sit here in comfort while you share everything, and nobody can hear what you’re saying.”

  —

  Five minutes later, Cronley finished telling Tiny everything—with the exception of the intimate acts with Mrs. Colonel Schumann—he’d been thinking, even though halfway through the recitation he realized he sounded paranoid.

  When Dunwiddie didn’t say anything, Cronley said, “What are you thinking, Tiny? That my captain’s bars have gone to my head? Or that I am paranoid? Or simply out of my mind? Or all of the above?”

  Tiny shrugged his massive shoulders.

  “What I was thinking was that I knew the first time I saw you that you were going to be trouble. To answer your questions, not in the order you asked them, Do I think you’re paranoid about Mattingly? I really wish I could, but I can’t.”

  “You don’t?” Cronley asked in surprise.

  “Did you ever wonder how he got to be commander of OSS Forward? And why Dulles, or whoever, gave him responsibility for Operation Ost?”

  “He’s good at what he does?”

  Dunwiddie did not reply directly. He instead said, “Being a colonel and Number Two to David Bruce in London is not bad for someone who before the war was a weekend warrior lieutenant in the National Guard, and made his living as a professor of languages at a university run by the Episcopal Church. And he’s a very young full colonel. You ever wonder about that?”

  “The guy who gave us the Storches made light colonel at twenty-four.”

  “General White told me about Lieutenant Colonel Hotshot Billy Wilson. Different situation from Mattingly.”

  “How different?”

  “Wilson got his silver leaf very early because even before Pearl Harbor, General White wanted small airplanes in the Army. Wilson almost single-handedly did that little chore for him. And then he did some spectacular things like flying Mark Clark into Rome the day it was declared an open city. And he’s a West Pointer. That didn’t hurt.

  “Mattingly, on the other hand, got where he is by doing, ruthlessly, whatever had to be done in the OSS. And he’ll do whatever he thinks has to be done here. I’m not sure that he’d go as far as getting you run over by a truck, or assisting your suicide, to keep it quiet. But only because he knows the OSS guy in Argentina would certainly ask questions. Mattingly didn’t get where he is because he doesn’t know how to cover his ass.”

  “You don’t like him very much, do you?” Cronley asked, gently sarcastic.

  Dunwiddie looked at Cronley as if making up his mind whether to say something. Finally, he said, “Just before General White left Germany for Fort Riley, I had a few minutes with him.”

  He saw the questioning look on Cronley’s face, and explained, “He and my father are classmates at Norwich. ’Twenty. Old friends. General White knew my father would expect him to check up on me, so he had Colonel Wilson fly him into Eschborn. OSS Forward was still alive then, in the Schlosshotel. We had a cup of coffee in the snack bar.

  “During that little conversation, the general asked, ‘Chauncey, do I tell your father you still feel you made the right decision?’ I asked, ‘Sir, what decision is that?’ And he said, ‘To pass up your commission so that you could stay with the OSS Guard Company. Colonel Mattingly told me you said you saw that as the most important service you could render for the time being and getting your commission would just have to wait.’”

  “I’ll be a sonofabitch!”

  “What I should have said was, ‘Uncle Isaac, I hate to tell you this . . .’”

  “Uncle Isaac?”

  “‘. . . but Colonel Mattingly is a lying sonofabitch. I never said anything like that. He told me not to worry about my commission, that he’d keep on you about it.’ But I didn’t. My thinking at the time was I knew Uncle Isaac thinks Mattingly is a fine officer. So he was going to be surprised and disappointed if Little Chauncey suddenly came—”

  “What’s with this ‘Little Chauncey’ and ‘Uncle Isaac’?” Cronley interrupted.

  “I guess I never got around to mentioning that General White is my godfather. In private, he calls me Chauncey and I call him Uncle Isaac. His I. D. initials stand for ‘Isaac Davis,’ his great-grandfather. Or maybe his great-great-grandfather. Anyway, since I’m sure that Texas Cow College you went to taught you at least a little history, I’m sure you know who Isaac Davis is.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Isaac Davis on Easter Sunday, April sixteenth, 1775, fired, at Concord Green, Massachusetts, that famous shot heard ’round the world. That’s who Isaac Davis is, you historically illiterate cowboy.”

  “No shit? He was General White’s great-great-grandfather?”

  “No shit. As I was saying before you so rudely interrupted me, Captain, sir, I thought that even if General White thought there had to be some reason for me to have suddenly come out of left field to call Mattingly a lying sonofabitch, he was leaving for the States the next day and he wouldn’t have time to even ask Mattingly what the hell was going on or do anything about my commission. So I kept my mouth shut.”

  “You should have told him, Tiny.”

  “I thought about that when you mentioned Mattingly being worried about this OSS pal of yours . . .”

  “Cletus Frade,” Cronley furnished.

  “. . . in Argentina.

  “But that’s what they call water under the bridge, Captain, sir. To return to your questions: Do I agree with your assessment of how he wants to handle the problem of Orlovsky? Yeah, I do. I think what Mattingly wants to do is be looking the other way while Gehlen’s people are interrogating Orlovsky and then shooting him in the back of the head.”

  “And you’re okay with that?”

  “No. For two reasons. One, it ain’t right. And two, if that happens and it comes out, the entire Judge Advocate Corps of the U.S. Army is going to come after me.”

  He met Cronley’s eyes, and then recited, “‘Article 118. Any person subject to this chapter who, without justification or excuse, unlawfully kills a human being, is guilty of murder, and shall suffer such death or such other punishment as a court-martial may direct.’ That’s not all of it, but you get the general idea.”

  “Actually, they’d come after me, Tiny. I’m in command here.”

  “That announcement answers your third question: Do I think your captain’s bars have gone to your head? Yeah, I do. But in a good sense. You’re thinking like a captain. You really grew up, Jimmy, doing whatever the hell you did in Argentina.”

  Cronley said what he was thinking: “I wish you were wearing these captain’s bars, Tiny.”

  “Yeah. But I’m not. Which brings us to what do we do about Orlovsky? Bearing in mind that whatever we do is liable to bring the Judge Advocate General’s Corps down on us, either for simple disobedience to a lawful order, or plotting mutiny—and plotting a mutiny is right up there beside Article 118 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, 1928. ‘Death or such other punishment as a court-martial may decide.’”

  “Maybe we should just cave.”

  “That’s not an option, Jim. What are you thinking?”

  “I don’t think that disorientation idea of Bischoff’s is going to work. Orlovsky is either not going to give us the names, or he’ll give us names of Germans who he hasn’t turned.”

  “Agre
ed. Got a better idea?”

  “Let’s try something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “It’s going to sound pretty far off the wall,” Cronley said, and then told him of his idea.

  “You’re right, that is off the wall. I wonder why Herr Bischoff, the Great Interrogator, didn’t think of that really nasty approach. Or, for that matter, Mattingly. I would never have suspected that you’re capable of being a bigger prick than either of them.”

  “Life is full of little surprises, isn’t it? I take it you think it might work?”

  “I don’t know. However, in the absence of any other idea, let’s give it a shot.”

  [ THREE ]

  Commanding Officer’s Quarters

  Kloster Grünau

  Schollbrunn, Bavaria

  American Zone of Occupation, Germany

  1410 31 October 1945

  Technical Sergeant Abraham L. Tedworth and Staff Sergeant Harold Lewis Jr. led Major Konstantin Orlovsky of the NKGB into the sitting room of Captain James D. Cronley Jr.’s quarters. Cronley and CIC Special Agent Chauncey Dunwiddie were seated at a table at which three places had been set.

  Orlovsky was shuffling in his bare feet. His ankles were tied together with handcuffs and a short length of rope. A GI blanket had been tied around his shoulders. His hands were handcuffed behind his back. His head was inside a GI duffel bag, closed at his neck with a GI web belt.

  “Take the bag off his head,” Cronley ordered.

  Tedworth did so.

  “Good morning, Konstantin,” Cronley said cordially, as the Russian blinked his eyes against the sudden exposure to light.

  Orlovsky looked nervously around the room but did not reply.

  “I’m sorry I had to have you trussed up like that,” Cronley went on conversationally, “but I knew General Gehlen’s people were going to see you walking over here, and we wouldn’t want them to think we’ve become friends, would we? And then I had to consider the possibility that you would try to do something foolish, like trying to get away from the sergeants.”

  Again Orlovsky didn’t reply.

  “Chauncey and I”—Cronley nodded toward Dunwiddie—“you’ve met Chauncey, I think, if only briefly—we were talking and decided that after your stay in—how shall I say this?—das Gasthaus—you’d probably like a shower and a shave and a change of linen. And afterward, that we could have a little chat over breakfast. So let’s get to that.”