Top Secret Part 14

"Yes, sir."

"Among other things, I was curious how your flying lesson went."

"I think it went well, sir."

"And then I can hope that sometime in the near future, we may look forward to having our own aerial taxi service?"

"Yes, sir."

"Can you give me an idea, just a ballpark estimate, of when that might be? In, say, two weeks?"

"Sir, the planes are at the monastery."

"Excuse me?"

"Sir, I have the planes here now."

"How did they get there?"

"I flew one of them and Schrder flew the other."

"I don't believe I know anyone by that name."

"He and three mechanics came with the planes, sir."

"Are you telling me you flew a German national to the monastery?"

"I wanted to run him past the general, sir. The general vouched for him. They were in the war together."

"I'm tempted to say, 'Well done,' but I'm afraid of the other shoe that's sure to drop."

"We have the planes, sir. No problem. Tiny is on his way to Sonthofen to pick up the mechanics and the spare parts."

"With great reluctance, I am going to give you the benefit of the doubt. My friend said it would probably take six or eight hours for him to properly instruct you. I'm finding it hard to understand how."

"What he did, Colonel, was take me up, and put it into a stall and took his hands off the stick. When I recovered from it, I guess I pa.s.sed his test."

"I have no idea what you're talking about, Captain Cronley. But if you have the airplanes . . ."

"I have them, sir."

"What's on your mind?"

"Our guest, sir."

"What guest is that?"

"The one Sergeant Tedworth brought home."

"I told Sergeant Dunwiddie to deal with that. Didn't he tell you?"

"That's what I want to talk to you about, sir."

There was a significant pause before Mattingly replied.

"Yeah," he said, finally and thoughtfully slow. "I think we should have-have to have-a little chat about that situation. And similar ones that will probably crop up in the future."

Mattingly paused again, then continued, now speaking more quickly, as if he had collected his thoughts.

"What I'll do, Cronley, is ask my friend if he can fly me into there for an hour or two. Him personally. We don't want any of his pilots talking about monasteries, do we? Which means he'll have to fit me into his schedule, which in turn means it's likely going to be a day or two before we can have our chat."

"Or I could fly into Eschborn first thing in the morning," Cronley said.

"Eschborn?"

"Isn't that the name of that little strip near the Schlosshotel Kronberg?"

- The Schlosshotel Kronberg in Taunus, twenty miles from Frankfurt, was now a country club and hotel for senior officers. It had been, before the demise of the OSS, home to Colonel Mattingly's OSS Forward command.

It was there that Second Lieutenant Cronley had been drafted into the OSS. At the time, he had been the newest, least qualified and thus least important agent in the XXIInd CIC Detachment in the university town of Marburg an der Lahn. His sole qualification for the CIC had been his fluent German. His sole qualification for the OSS, aside from his fluency in German, had been that it had come out that his father had served in World War I with OSS Director Major General William J. Donovan, who had told Mattingly he remembered Cronley to be a "nice, smart kid."

Mattingly had frankly told Cronley that his being taken into the OSS was less nepotism than a critical shortage of personnel. There were few officers left to sc.r.a.pe from the bottom of the barrel for OSS service-the war was over and the wartime officers had gone home-and an officer was needed for a unique position Mattingly had to fill that would require no qualifications beyond his second lieutenant's gold bar, his Top Secret security clearance, and the color of his skin.

Major General Reinhard Gehlen and what had been Abwehr Ost were being hidden from the Soviets in a former monastery-Kloster Grnau. They were being guarded by a reinforced company of 2nd Armored Division soldiers. They were all Negroes. They had no commanding officer, and one was needed. There were no Negro officers in the "intelligence pool" who spoke German, and the white officers in the pool who did were needed for more important duties.

At the time, Cronley thought that he was about to spend the foreseeable future in the middle of nowhere as the cus.h.i.+on between 256 black soldiers and about that many German intelligence officers and non-coms. The one thing he could be sure of, he had thought, was that for the rest of his military service-he was obligated to serve four years-he would be doing something even less exciting than was.h.i.+ng mud off the tracks of tanks in a motor pool somewhere.

He had quickly learned how wrong his prediction was.

- "You would feel safe flying a Storch there?" Mattingly asked.

"Yes, sir. No problem."

"I seem to recall hearing my friend say that 'there are old pilots and bold pilots, but no old bold pilots.'"

"I'm a young, very cautious pilot, sir. I can get into Eschborn with no trouble."

"Okay. I'll meet you at Eschborn at half past eleven tomorrow morning. Come as a civilian."

"Yes, sir."

[ FIVE ].

When Cronley went from his quarters to the senior officers' dining room, he saw that only one place was set at the table. Dunwiddie was on his way to Sonthofen, which meant he wouldn't be here for supper. No plates for Gehlen and Mannberg meant they had already eaten.

Without waiting for me, and thus expressing-without coming right out and saying anything-their displeasure with me for countermanding Bischoff's order about not changing Orlovsky's s.h.i.+t bucket.

And probably conferring on how they can tactfully remind Major Wallace and Colonel Mattingly of my youth and inexperience in the hope he will tell me to pay attention to my elders.

Well, f.u.c.k both of them!

Cronley went into the bar, found the Stars and Stripes where Mannberg had left it earlier, went back into the dining room, and ate alone. He refused the offer of a drink, or a beer, as he would be flying first thing in the morning.

The mess was run by Tiny's mess sergeant and two of his a.s.sistants. Tiny's mess sergeant supervised-declared-the menu, and his two sergeants drew the rations from the Quartermaster, divided them between what would be eaten in the two messes, and those to be given to the families of Gehlen's men.

Gehlen's men did the actual cooking and all the other work connected with the two messes and the NCO club, including the bartending.

The only news that Cronley found interesting in Stars and Stripes as he read it over his grilled pork chops, applesauce, mashed potatoes, and green beans was that the PX was about to hold a raffle, the winners of which would be ent.i.tled to purchase jeeps for $380. The vehicles, the story said, had been run through a rebuild program at the Griesheim ordnance depot and would be "as new."

The first thing Cronley thought was that he would enter the raffle. A jeep would be nice to have on the ranch outside Midland, if he could figure a way to get one from Germany to Texas.

That thought was immediately followed by his realization that he was never going back to the ranch in Midland.

Not after what happened to the Squirt . . .

He realized he had to put the Squirt, the jeep, and Midland out of his mind.

The first thing he thought next was that while he knew he had seen a chart case in Storch Two, which meant there was probably also one in Storch One, he hadn't actually seen a chart, and a chart would be a d.a.m.ned good thing to have when trying to fly to Eschborn.

The first time he'd flown into Sonthofen he had made a straight-in approach on a heading of 270, the course Colonel Wilson had ordered him to fly. The first time he'd flown back to Kloster Grnau, he'd had Schrder with him, and since that was before Schrder had been vetted by General Gehlen and he hadn't wanted Schrder to know where they were going, Cronley simply had taken off and set a course of 90 degrees, the reciprocal of 270, and flown that until he saw Schollbrunn ahead of him. He knew where Kloster Grnau was from there. On his second flight from Sonthofen, he'd done the same thing; the second time it was easier.

Flying to Eschborn is not going to be so simple. I am going to need a chart of the route showing, among other things, the available en-route navigation aids and the Eschborn tower frequencies so I can call and get approach and landing instructions.

Come to think of it, I have never seen an Air Corps chart.

Are there Air Corps charts and Army charts? Or does the Army use Air Corps charts? And what's the difference, if any, between military charts and the civilian ones I know?

Jesus, am I going to have to call Mattingly back and tell him that on second thought I've decided to put off flying into Eschborn until I think I know what I'm doing?

He got up quickly from the table and walked out of the room and then the building. He saw one of the machine gun jeeps making its rounds and flagged it down.

"Take me to the Storches," he ordered.

"The what, sir?" the sergeant driving asked as the corporal who had been in the front seat scurried into the back.

"The airplanes," Cronley clarified.

Getting to the map cases in the airplane turned out to be a pain in the a.s.s. The troopers had done a good job putting them under tarpaulins so they would be less visible from the air. Untying the tarpaulins so that he could get under them was difficult in the dark, and once he got to the chart case and looked inside, he knew that he would not be able to examine what it contained in the light of his flashlight. Sticking the nose of the jeep under the tarpaulin to use the jeep's headlights proved to be difficult and then ineffective.

Finally, he stuffed the charts back into the case, removed it from the Storch's c.o.c.kpit, and made his way out from under the tarpaulin.

"You want us to take the tarpaulin all the way off, Captain?"

"No, thanks. Just take me back to the mess."

"Yes, sir."

"No. Take me to the chapel," he said. He thought: So I can see if they changed the s.h.i.+t bucket in Orlovsky's cell, or whether Bischoff told them to ignore me.

- Bischoff and the small, tough sergeant who had been in the room behind the altar were again sitting at the card table, playing poker with packs of cigarettes and Hershey bars for chips. There were two others at the table, both soldiers, neither of whom Cronley had seen.

The sergeant stood.

He nodded politely and said, "Captain."

"What does it smell like down there?" Cronley asked.

"Well, Captain, it don't smell like roses," the sergeant said. "But it smells better . . . scratch that. It don't smell near as bad as it did."

"Show me," Cronley said, and then added, "We won't need you down there, Herr Bischoff."

- Major Konstantin Orlovsky of the Peoples Commissariat for Internal Affairs reacted to the opening of his cell door as he had the first time. s.h.i.+elding his eyes from the headlights, he slid his back up the wall until he was standing.

"Take the light out of his eyes," Cronley ordered, and then, "If you can, turn all but one of those headlights off."

"I'll have to rip them loose," the sergeant said.

"Then do it."

"Yes, sir."

"Everybody out of here but you and me, Sergeant, and then close the door."

"Sir?"

"You heard me."

"Yes, sir."

"Thank you," Orlovsky said.

Cronley didn't reply.

When the door had creaked closed behind them, Cronley looked at the sergeant.

"I'm sorry, I don't know your name."

"Staff Sergeant Lewis, Harold Junior, Captain."

"If I hear that you have repeated to anyone but First Sergeant Dunwiddie one word of what I'm about to say in here, Staff Sergeant Harold Lewis Junior, you will be Private Lewis, was.h.i.+ng pots and pans for the Germans in the kitchen until I decide whether or not to castrate you with a dull bayonet before I send you home in a body bag. You understand me?"