Curtain of Death

by W. E. B Griffin

  McMullen granted his approval of that scenario with a grunt.

  “Your call, Jim,” Wallace said.

  He’s asking me. Again. Not telling me.

  What’s going on?

  “Florence, call the Military Air Transport Service and make reservations for Major Wallace and Miss Johansen on every Berlin courier flight starting at fifteen hundred.”

  “If they give you any trouble,” Wallace said, “get Colonel Aaron of MATS on the line, and tell them the reservations we’re asking for are for me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And, Florence, call the Maison Rouge hotel in Strasbourg and make reservations for Colonel McMullen and me,” Cronley said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And nobody but General Gehlen, Colonel Mannberg, and, if he calls, Mr. Schultz is to know where we are.”

  “Keeping the mole in his hole?”

  “Well, I don’t think the mole is either Gehlen or Mannberg. So maybe this will make him stick his head out to see what’s going on, and we can lop it off.”

  He looked at McMullen.

  “Let’s have a late lunch in Strasbourg, sir.”

  “Why not? The food’s probably better there than it is in the Vier Jahreszeiten,” he said, and stood up.

  “Which one of us is going with you?” Ziegler asked.

  “Everybody’s going,” Cronley said. “Florence, find Kurt Schröder. Tell him we’re on our way and to have both Storches ready.”

  “And call that hotel and make sure we get rooms, too,” Ziegler said.

  [ SIX ]

  Hotel Maison Rouge

  Rue Des Francs-Bourgeois 101

  Strasbourg, France

  1620 5 February 1946

  Commandant Jean-Paul Fortin and Sergeant Henri Deladier walked into the alcove off the main dining room in the basement of the hotel.

  Seated at a long table on which were several bottles of Crémant d’Alsace and an impressive array of hors d’oeuvres were Lieutenant Colonel McMullen, Captain Pierre DuPres, Sergent-chef Ibn Tufail, and DCI agents Wagner, Finney, Ziegler, Schröder, and Cronley.

  The Frenchmen and Wagner stood up.

  “Clever fellow that I am,” Fortin greeted them, “when I saw those illegal airplanes at the airfield, I intuited that you, Cronley, would be here trying to subvert my staff. But I didn’t expect to see you, Mon Colonel.”

  He walked to McMullen and shook his hand, and asked, “Whatever is a fine officer such as yourself doing with these disreputable people?”

  “Well, I figured the food would be better here than in Wissembourg,” McMullen said. “How are you, Jean-Paul?”

  “Fine, and at the moment both hungry and thirsty, both of which hungers I will be delighted to satisfy at the expense of Jim Cronley.”

  He sat down at the head of the table and reached for a bottle of the Crémant d’Alsace.

  “Capitaine Big Mouth here told you I was in Wissembourg?” Fortin said, pointing at DuPres.

  “Only after I gave him a heads-up that I was thinking of going there,” Finney said.

  Fortin raised his champagne flute in salute.

  “Looking for Cousin Luther?” he said.

  “Actually, no. I wanted to have a look at the place. Wagner”—Finney pointed at Wagner—“thinks it’s Odessa’s preferred point to smuggle people across the border into France.”

  “While I am wholly convinced that great minds travel the same roads, frankly I’m surprised to be walking along with someone so young. May I ask how you came to this conclusion, young man?”

  Wagner told him.

  “General Gehlen, Jean-Paul, referred to this as ‘wisdom from the mouth of babes,’” McMullen said.

  “How old are you?” Fortin asked.

  “Seventeen, sir.”

  “When I was seventeen, I was in my first year at Saint-Cyr,” Fortin said. “Well, gentlemen, I have reached the same conclusion about Wissembourg, but I reached it not by logical conclusion but by following your cousin Luther there, Jim, from the Spanish border. Which brings us to him. Or which has brought him to us.”

  “Brought him to us?” Cronley asked.

  “I have him confined here. I’m about to have to turn him over to Capitaine DuPres and Sergent-chef Ibn Tufail for interrogation.”

  Cronley thought: And when you’re through, are you going to shoot him in the knees and elbows before you throw him in the Rhine, like you did with the priest?

  “But I wanted to talk to you before I started that, Jim.”

  “Because he’s my cousin?”

  “Because he knows who you are.”

  “I don’t think I understand.”

  “When I arrested him, he tried to reason with me. He asked if I thought he and I couldn’t come to some sort of arrangement. He was offering, I thought, to change sides. I told him I wasn’t interested. He then suggested I think his offer over carefully. For one thing, he knew he could be useful to me, and for another, he asked if I thought it would be wise of me to endanger my present cordial relationship with DCI-Europe by refusing the chief of DCI-Europe’s cousin’s offer to realize the error of his ways and change sides.”

  “The sonofabitch!” Cronley said.

  “Of course he was—is—desperate, but I thought it interesting that he knew you were the head man of DCI.”

  “Well, we knew he knew I wasn’t Second Lieutenant Cronley of the 711th Mobile Kitchen Renovation Company when he gave Finney the cold shoulder, but . . . Jesus!”

  “Sergent Deladier found that out with a simple telephone call,” Fortin said. “But I wonder who told him who you really are. I didn’t think you or Finney let that slip.”

  “No,” Finney said. “He didn’t get that from me.”

  Cronley’s mouth went into high gear: “What I suggest you do, Jean-Paul, is let Finney help Captain DuPres and Sergent-chef Ibn Tufail in their interrogation of Herr Stauffer. He can ask him who told him about us, a name I’d really like to have, and he can ask him if the next people he hoped to help across the border, and across France to the Spanish border, are two people we’re really looking for, SS-Brigadeführer Ulrich Heimstadter and his deputy, Standartenführer Oskar Müller.”

  This time, unusually, Cronley did not regret hearing what had come automatically and without thought out of his mouth.

  “Who are they? Why do you want them?” Fortin asked.

  Cronley told him.

  “Interesting,” Fortin said.

  “And I just had one of my famous inspirations, based on a number of if’s. If Cousin Luther planned to get these two bastards across the Wissembourg border . . .”

  “I’m sure, with Finney’s help, DuPres and Sergent-chef Ibn Tufail can find that out,” Fortin said.

  “. . . and if we can lay our hands on them . . .”

  “Place your faith in the U.S. Constabulary in that regard, Jim,” McMullen said.

  “. . . and if we take them to one of the cells at Kloster Grünau and let them consider their plight overnight, and the next morning Captain Pierre DuPres and Sergent-chef Ibn Tufail interview them before movie cameras about their knowledge of who was what in Operation Paperclip, they will sing like the canaries we hear about.”

  “Why DuPres?”

  “Particularly, if they are now being guarded by half a dozen men—Ostrowski’s Poles—who chatter in Russian, and half a dozen of the largest and most menacing of Tiny’s Troopers,” Cronley continued, and then added, “DuPres because the people in the Pentagon who get to see the movie will then wonder how much our French allies know about Paperclip and how much they might tell the press if the press start asking questions.”

  “Don’t let this go to your head, Cronley,” McMullen said, “but I don’t think you’re really as much of a joke as an intelligence officer as General
Seidel thinks. You are really one devious sonofabitch.”

  “Thank you, sir,” he said, and then pointed. “And if that champagne bottle isn’t empty, would you slide it this way?”

  XII

  [ ONE ]

  The Glienicke Bridge

  Wannsee, U.S. Zone of Berlin

  0900 6 February 1946

  Right on schedule, the huge-bodied Red Army truck started backing onto the bridge.

  When it was halfway to the white line marking the center of the bridge, Ostrowski, Mannberg, Dunwiddie, and Wallace started walking onto the bridge. Janice Johansen, with two Leica 35mm cameras hung around her neck, followed them.

  When they stopped fifteen feet from the white line, Janice moved to within thirty feet of the line and started taking pictures.

  The truck stopped and its rear doors opened, revealing Colonel Mattingly sitting handcuffed in a chair with his shackled ankles chained to the floor.

  Janice moved closer, one of her cameras to her eye.

  The Russian officer who had directed the truck as it backed up to the line marched off and Serov appeared. He walked almost to the dividing line. The Americans did the same.

  Serov saluted. Dunwiddie returned it.

  “Good morning,” Serov said.

  “At least it’s not snowing,” Mannberg replied.

  “Who’s that woman?” Serov demanded.

  “I understand she’s from the Associated Press,” Mannberg replied.

  “I don’t like her being here,” Serov said.

  “I hear that all the time,” Janice said. “What’s your name, handsome?”

  Serov’s face tightened but he didn’t reply.

  “Where is Cronley?” he asked finally.

  “Occupied elsewhere,” Wallace said. “He asked me to give you these.”

  He handed Serov three cans of motion picture film and a large manila envelope.

  “What is this?” Serov asked as he opened the envelope.

  “Still and motion pictures of the reinterment of your people,” Wallace said.

  Serov pulled several 8×10 photos halfway out of the envelope, looked at them quickly, and then slid them back into the envelope.

  “Please tell Cronley I will look at these carefully.”

  “I’ll do that,” Mannberg said.

  “And please tell him that a week from today, at this hour, I look forward to seeing him and Polkóvnik Likharev and his family here.”

  He saluted again, waited for Dunwiddie to return it, and when he had, did an about-face and marched away. The doors to the truck closed as it drove off.

  The Americans turned and walked off the bridge.

  [ TWO ]

  U.S. Constabulary School

  Sonthofen, Bavaria

  The American Zone of Occupied Germany

  1100 8 February 1946

  Major General I. D. White, trailed by his junior aide-de-camp, Second Lieutenant Gregory Douglas, walked unannounced into his conference room. Before any of the officers sitting at a twenty-foot-long conference table could rise—jump—to their feet, he made a waving gesture and said, “At ease, gentlemen.”

  He then slipped into the ornate high-backed leather-upholstered chair at the head of the table and announced, “The major problem as I see it is that the people we are looking for will learn, either through the mole, or moles, we feel we are infected with, that we will be looking for them at Wissembourg, or they will learn because we do something stupid, especially in and around Wissembourg.

  “If this problem has not been a factor in your planning, which would deeply disappoint me, then go back, so to speak, to your drawing board. If it has, let’s hear what you’ve come up with.”

  McMullen stood up.

  “Here’s where we are, sir,” he began. “Commandant Fortin’s interrogation of Luther Stauffer was only partially successful. He was in fact at Wissembourg to arrange the movement for Odessa of two men across the Franco-German border, then across France to the Franco-Spanish border.”

  “He admitted this?”

  “Ol’ Pierre—Captain DuPres—General, began questioning him by asking what seemed to be an innocent question,” DCI agent Finney said. “‘How’s the Gasthaus Zum Adler, Luther? Comfortable? Good kitchen?’ When he saw the question made Cousin Luther uncomfortable, he sent Sergeant Deladier to the gasthaus to search his room.”

  “How did he know this fellow had a room in that particular gasthaus?” White asked.

  “It’s the only gasthaus in Wissembourg, sir.”

  “Dumb question,” White admitted. “Go on, please.”

  “That took about thirty, forty minutes. During which we left Cousin Luther alone with Sergent-chef Ibn Tufail.”

  “Who is?”

  “A Berber, sir, from Morocco. Great big mean-looking sonofabitch.”

  “I don’t think I want to hear what this man did to Mr. Stauffer,” White said. “Do I?”

  “Probably not what you’re thinking, General,” Finney said. “What he did was let Cousin Luther know that he found him . . . very attractive.”

  “Clever!” White said after a moment.

  “Yes, sir. I thought so. Captain DuPres and Ibn Tufail make a very effective interrogation team. I don’t think the CIC School at Holabird will start teaching the ‘I think I’m in love with you’ technique, but they should.”

  Second Lieutenant Douglas’s eyes widened as comprehension dawned on him.

  White saw this and, failing to suppress a smile, said, “Get on with it, Mr. Finney.”

  “Yes, sir. Well, Sergeant Deladier came back with two Nicaraguan passports.”

  “Here you are, sir,” McMullen said, and walked down the table to White and handed him the passports.

  White examined them carefully.

  “It’s not what it says in here,” he said. “But the real names of these two are Heimstadter and Müller.”

  “SS-Brigadeführer Heimstadter seems to have grown a mustache,” McMullen said.

  “Not a Hitler mustache, but a real soup-strainer,” Cronley said. “The rest of his disguise is probably lederhosen and one of those green felt hats with a feather.”

  “Well, whatever it is, so far it’s worked,” McMullen said. “This is as close as we’ve ever gotten to the bastard.”

  “What else did you learn from Herr Stauffer?” White asked.

  “That they plan to cross the border on a Stripes truck on February tenth, two days from now. Stauffer will meet them a couple of miles inside France with the passports and a car. They will then drive to the Spanish border.”

  “Sir, the Stripes truck will leave Pfungstadt about three in the morning,” DCI agent Karl-Christoph Wagner said. “That should put them at the border at daylight.”

  Cronley saw that Wagner was no longer uncomfortable being in the presence of the august General White.

  “Anything else about the trucks we should consider, Wagner?” White asked.

  “I think I told you where these people hide on the trucks?” Wagner asked.

  “Tell me again,” White said.

  “Yes, sir. Up in front of the truck bed. They make a place for them by laying planks between stacks of Stripes. Five or six stacks. They bundle Stripes in packages about so big.”

  He demonstrated the size of the packages with his hands, and then went on: “They make sort of a cave, in other words.”

  “I get it,” White said. “And?”

  “The trucks are pretty full of newspapers. Which means that when they put these guys in the cave, first they have to unload stacks of papers to get to the back, then make the cave, and then load the newspapers back on. I don’t think they can do that in less than ten minutes, maybe fifteen.”

  “Unless they have a lot of people doing it,” White said.

  �
��You can’t get a lot of people on the truck,” Wagner argued.

  “Point taken,” White said. “So tell me what you’ve come up with, Dick.”

  “Yes, sir,” McMullen said. “If the general will have a look at the map?”

  White got out of his high-backed chair and walked to where several maps were laid out on the table.

  “This is the highway, General, Route B38, which runs from Bad Bergzabern through Oberotterbach to Wissembourg,” McMullen said, pointing it out with a pencil. “We think Heimstadter and Müller will attempt to get themselves on the truck here, somewhere along the five-kilometer stretch between Oberotterbach and Wissembourg.”

  “Why there?” White asked.

  “It’s woods most of the way on the north side of the road,” Wagner answered for him. “We figure these guys will either have spent the night in Oberotterbach or maybe be driven there in the wee hours. If they’ve been in Oberotterbach, they’ll sneak out of wherever they’ve been in the dark and walk far enough down the road so they can’t be seen and then duck into the woods and wait for the Stripes truck.

  “Or, whoever—somebody from Odessa—has driven them from wherever they’ve been will drive through Oberotterbach and down the road far enough not to be seen when they drop these two guys off.”

  White considered that for a moment.

  “It would be nice,” he said, “if, in the latter case Wagner suggests, we could lay our hands on whoever drove these people from wherever they were.”

  “Sir, we considered that possibility in planning Operation Bag the Bastards,” McMullen said.

  “Tell me.”

  “We’re going to hide six four-man teams of men in jeeps in the woods along this stretch of road, beginning here, near Oberotterbach. Between them, they can surveil the entire stretch of road. Each team will be in sight of the team on either side of it, and they will be radio-equipped. And they will be armed with Thompsons, Garands, and pistols.”