Hessinger recited: “General and Mrs. Greene, Colonel and Mrs. Schumann, Major and Mrs. McClung, Captain and Mrs. Hall, and Major Wallace, sir.”
“Wonderful!” Frade said sarcastically. “This should be lots of fun!”
Hessinger gave him a strange look.
“Lead on, Herr Hessinger,” Frade ordered.
—
“Well, everybody’s here,” General Greene greeted them cordially.
“And about time, too,” Mrs. Greene interrupted. “Mr. Hessinger and I want to get to the English Garden before everything is gone.” She smiled at Hessinger. “Don’t we, Mr. Hessinger?”
Hessinger had told Cronley about the English Garden. It was in the famous Munich park that Germans swapped silverware, crystal, paintings, et cetera, with the Americans for cartons of Chesterfields, Hershey bars, and Nescafé. It was officially illegal, but no one seemed to care.
Hessinger, who had apparently been drafted as interpreter for the general’s lady, smiled wanly back.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Everybody knows everybody else, right?” General Greene asked.
Frade did not know Major Wallace. That introduction was made.
Chairs were produced for Frade and Cronley. They sat down.
“We were beginning to worry,” General Greene went on, when they had taken their seats. “I gather you drove from the monastery?”
“No, sir,” Frade said. “We flew. I’m going to have to fly to Frankfurt first thing in the morning, so we came by Storch.”
“Mattingly and I were just discussing those German airplanes, the Storches, clearing up the mystery, so to speak,” Greene said, smiling broadly.
“What mystery is that, sir?” Frade asked.
“It was something right out of an Abbott and Costello routine. You know, ‘Who’s on first?’” Greene said. “I got a call from an Air Force colonel several days ago demanding to know why a stork with Twenty-third CIC painted on its tail had just taken off from Eschborn. I thought maybe he was drunk, so I said if this was one of those ‘Why does a chicken cross the road?’ jokes, I didn’t have the time for it.
“That pissed him off, so he said I would be hearing from someone else in the Air Force. Sure enough, fifteen minutes later an Air Force two-star is on the phone. This one I knew. Tommy Wilkins. Good guy. We were at the War College together.
“‘Paul,’ he says, ‘what’s your version of the encounter you just had with my guy?’
“So I told him, ending that with ‘Tommy, I didn’t even know what the hell he was talking about. A stork with Twenty-third CIC painted on its tail?’
“Whereupon Tommy grows very serious. ‘Hypothetical question. If I asked you why the CIC is flying Storch aircraft around after we’ve grounded them, you couldn’t answer because it’s classified and I’m not cleared for that, right?’
“That was the first I realized his colonel had been talking about an airplane, not that big bird that brings babies . . .”
Frade and McClung laughed out loud.
“. . . and the first time I realized he had said Twenty-third CIC had been painted on the tail of the big bird which had just delivered a baby to Eschborn . . .”
Everyone at the table but Mrs. Greene was now either laughing or giggling.
“. . . and that suggested our own Colonel Robert Mattingly was involved, so I rose to the occasion and said, ‘Tom, that about sums it up.’
“To which he replied, ‘I thought it had to be something like that. Sorry he bothered you. I’ll turn him off. Your storks are free to fly.’”
“General,” Frade said, “thank you very much. Cronley says he needs the Storches. What they are, sir, is sort of super Piper Cubs. Among other advantages, you can get—actually, stuff—three people in them. You can get only two in a Cub.”
“When can I go to the English Garden?” Mrs. Greene inquired.
“Well, now that Colonel Frade has flown in in his stork,” General Greene said, “we can sort things out. What I suggest, dear, is that Mr. Hessinger drop Major Wallace at the bahnhof, then take you to the English Garden. What’s departure time of the Blue Danube, Wallace?”
“Twenty-twenty, sir.”
“I figured someone should be holding down the shop in the Farben Building, since we’re all here, and Wallace volunteered,” General Greene explained.
“I’m tempted to get on the train with him,” Frade said. “But I really should have a look at Pullach, even in the dark.”
“Not a problem, Colonel,” Major Wallace said. “The engineers are working around the clock. The site is covered with floodlights.”
“How many of you ladies are going with Grace?” Greene asked.
“I’ll pass,” Rachel said. “I’m too tired to do all that walking. Can I go to Pullach?”
“Certainly.”
“And I’ll go with Rachel,” Mrs. McClung announced. “You can find some wonderful things in the English Garden but I want to see Pullach.”
“You can see Pullach in the morning,” Mrs. Greene proclaimed. “Come with me.”
So you, Mrs. McClung, Cronley thought unkindly, can carry whatever she swaps her Chesterfields and Hershey bars for that exceeds Freddy’s carrying capacity.
“What would you like Mary-Beth and me to do, General?” Captain Hall asked.
Mrs. Greene answered for her husband: “You two can come with me. There is safety in numbers.”
“To further complicate things,” Frade said, “I’d hoped to have a private word with you, General, and Colonel Mattingly. When can you fit that into our schedule?”
“Okay,” General Greene said. “Munich Military Post gave me a staff car . . .”
“Only because I insisted that Captain Hall call down here and get you one,” Mrs. Greene interrupted.
“. . . a requisitioned old Packard limousine,” Greene went on. “It has a window between the front and back seats. You, Mattingly, and I can have that private chat on our way to Pullach. And back. And there’s a car here, right?”
“Two, sir,” Major Wallace said. “We have a Kapitän and an Admiral.”
“Captain Cronley’s in special agent mode,” Greene said, pointing to the blue U.S. triangles on Cronley’s lapels, “so he can drive the Schumanns in one of them. The Schumanns and Major McClung.” He paused. “Okay? The only question seems to be where are all these cars?”
“Yours is outside, General,” Major Wallace said. “The others are in the basement garage.”
“Let’s get this show on the road,” Greene said. “Otherwise it’ll be midnight before we get to eat. Go get the cars. We’ll meet in front.”
[ FIVE ]
Cronley pulled up the Opel Kapitän behind the Packard in front of the hotel as a natty sergeant took the cover off a red plate with a silver star in its center mounted on the rear bumper. The sergeant then scurried to the side of the car and opened the door for General Greene, Mattingly, and Frade.
Cronley found the limousine fascinating. He couldn’t identify the year, but guessed it was at least ten years old. It looked like something a movie star would own, and he wondered who it had belonged to, and how it had survived the war looking as if it had just come off the showroom floor.
It was only when the passenger door started to open that he wondered if he was supposed to have jumped out and opened the door as the sergeant had on the Packard. He looked to see who was getting in.
“I’ll ride in front with Jim,” Rachel announced to her husband and Major McClung, “and leave the backseat for you two.”
The Packard moved off. Jimmy followed it.
Rachel’s left hand slid from her lap and into Jimmy’s.
When she didn’t find what she was looking for, she shifted on the seat, looked into the backseat, and innocently asked, “How far is this place?”
&nbs
p; “About twenty miles,” Iron Lung McClung boomed.
Rachel’s right hand, searching for what she wanted, found it, arranged it so that she could find it again with her left hand when she had turned back on the seat, and then did so.
Two minutes later, his crotch becoming uncomfortably tight, Jimmy pushed her hand away. She caught his hand and moved it to her knee, then put her hand back on his crotch.
What the hell? Her husband’s three feet away!
If she keeps this up . . .
As if she had read his mind, she took her hand off him, then pushed his hand away from her knee, and finally folded her hands together in her lap. And then she chuckled.
—
About a half hour later, the Packard braked so suddenly that Cronley almost ran into it.
“What the hell?” Iron Lung McClung boomed from the backseat.
“We’ve been stopped,” Jimmy reported.
He could see there was a barrier—two-by-fours laced with concertina barbed wire—across the road. Four men armed with U.S. Army .30 caliber carbines had approached the Packard. They appeared to be wearing U.S. Army fatigue uniforms that had been dyed black.
This won’t take long, Cronley decided.
Generals generally get to go wherever they want to go.
Four minutes later—it seemed longer than that—Major McClung boomed again from the backseat: “Cronley, go up there and see what the hell’s going on.”
“Yes, sir.”
When Cronley walked to the nose of the Packard, there were now six men in black-dyed fatigues and a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers lieutenant in woolen ODs standing in front of the barrier. Plus General Greene, Colonel Mattingly, and Lieutenant Colonel Frade.
“Absolutely no one, Captain Cronley,” Frade said with amusement in his voice, “gets into the Pullach compound without the specific permission of the Engineer major in charge of this project. He is at supper and has been sent for.”
“On one hand,” Mattingly said, “I have to say I’m impressed with the security but—”
“On the other hand,” General Greene interrupted him, “I’m getting more than a little annoyed standing here in the goddamned road waiting for this goddamned major.”
“You understand, Lieutenant,” Cronley asked, “that this is a highly classified project being built for the Counterintelligence Corps?”
“We have been instructed not to get into that, sir,” the lieutenant said.
Cronley produced his CIC credentials.
The Engineer officer, who looked to be about as old as Cronley, was clearly dazzled.
“I can vouch for these officers,” Cronley said. “Move the roadblock out of the way.”
“Yes, sir,” the lieutenant said, and signaled for the men in the dyed-black uniforms to do so.
“I’m starting to like you, Cronley,” General Greene said.
“When the major comes, sir, what do I tell him?” the lieutenant asked.
“Tell him to find us and be prepared to explain to me why this project is not yet finished,” General Greene said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Let’s get this show on the road,” General Greene ordered.
Everyone got back into the cars and they drove past the roadblock.
[ SIX ]
Two hundred yards down the road they were stopped at another roadblock manned by carbine-armed men wearing dyed-black U.S. Army fatigues.
“Go see,” Major Iron Lung McClung bellowed from the backseat.
As Cronley walked to the old Packard limousine he sensed that McClung had also gotten out of the Kapitän and was walking behind him.
And as they reached the Packard, a jeep came racing toward the barrier.
A lieutenant colonel and a major, both in fatigues, jumped out of the jeep and approached the Packard as General Greene, Colonel Mattingly, and Lieutenant Colonel Frade emerged.
The lieutenant colonel saluted.
“Lieutenant Colonel Bristol, General. There was no heads-up that you were coming, sir.”
“They call that ‘conducting an unscheduled inspection,’ Colonel,” General Greene said. “It has been my experience that you often learn a great deal during unscheduled inspections.”
“Yes, sir. General, if you’d like to come with me to the headquarters building, there’s a plat, a map, of the compound. I could explain what we’re up to.”
“Let’s have a look at it. Lead the way, Colonel.”
They got back in their cars and followed the Engineers’ jeep past another roadblock and to a large two-story, freshly painted villa in the center of the village.
A large, also freshly painted, sign was mounted on the impressive building that was the General Offices of the South German Industrial Development Organization. It read:
GENERAL-BÜROS
SÜD-DEUTSCHE INDUSTRIELLE ENTWICKLUNGSORGANISATION
—
What Cronley was seeing now was so distinctly different from what he remembered of “the Pullach compound” that he actually wondered if they were in the same place.
When he had first gone to Kloster Grünau, Dunwiddie had taken him on a fifteen-minute tour of what was to be, he said, “our new home away from home.” Then they had seen no more than a dozen Engineer troops under a sergeant erecting a crude basic fence—barbed wire nailed to two-by-fours—around a block in the center of the village.
Now, that simple fence was gone. In its place were three far more substantial barriers. One was where the simple fence had been, around the center of the village. A second encircled the entire village, and a third was two hundred yards outside that. They had all been constructed of chain-link fencing suspended between ten-foot-tall concrete poles. Concertina barbed wire had been strung both along its top and on the ground.
All of the fences had signs mounted at ten-yard intervals that were stenciled with SÜD-DEUTSCHE INDUSTRIELLE ENTWICKLUNGSORGANISATION and, under that, in large red lettering, ZUTRITT VERBOTEN!
When everyone went into the building, they found that an eight-by-four-foot sheet of plywood on a tripod had been erected in the foyer. On it was a map of the compound.
“This is not what I expected,” General Greene said after taking a quick look. “There’s more here than I thought there would be.”
Mattingly spoke up: “There’s something, General, that I guess I should have told you about sooner.”
“Which is?” Greene said not very pleasantly.
“General Clay sent for me just before I went back to Washington,” Mattingly explained. “When I reported to him, he told me, in confidence, that as of January first, 1946, he was going to be relieved as Eisenhower’s deputy and appointed military governor of the American Zone of Occupied Germany.
“Then he said he was sure that I would understand that as military governor he didn’t want the Russians—he said ‘our esteemed allies the Soviets’—coming to him with some wild accusation that we were hiding Nazis in a monastery in Bavaria. He said that I would also understand that as military governor he would be very interested in German industrial development.
“General Clay then asked me why I still had a reinforced company of Second Armored Division soldiers guarding ‘God only knew what’ in my monastery and why the compound at Pullach, which was being built for the South German Industrial Development Organization, wasn’t finished.
“At this point I decided that someone had made General Clay privy to Operation Ost. I told him the reason the South German Industrial Development Organization was not up and running in Pullach was because the Engineer battalion assigned to Munich Military Post had other projects that were apparently more important than the Pullach compound. I told General Clay I had been reluctant to press the issue because, if I did, Munich Military Post would ask questions about the South German Industrial Development Organizati
on I would not want to answer.
“General Clay then reached for his telephone and asked to be connected with the commanding officer of Munich Military Post. When he came on the line, General Clay said it had come to his attention that the Pullach project was running a little behind schedule and he had been wondering why.
“The post commander apparently replied to the effect that the Pullach compound project was lower on his list of priorities than a gymnasium and a Special Services library that the Engineers were building.
“General Clay replied—and this is just about verbatim—‘Screw your goddamned gymnasium and your goddamned library. Get a goddamned Engineer battalion over to Pullach today and get that goddamned compound built yesterday.’”
“Ouch,” General Greene said.
“General Clay then concluded the conversation by saying something to the effect that ‘the next time the deputy commander of European Command tells you he wants something built, it would behoove you to build it immediately, rather than when you can conveniently fit it into your schedule.’”
“Ouch, again,” General Greene said.
Mattingly turned to Bristol. “Colonel, can you pick up this narrative?”
“Yes, sir. I was at the gymnasium site when the post commander showed up and relayed General Clay’s orders to me. I said, ‘Yes, sir. I’ll go out there first thing in the morning.’
“He said, ‘You will go out there now, Colonel. And I suggest you take a cot and a sleeping bag with you, because you’re not going to leave that site until the project is completed.’ I called my wife, told her I would be out of town for a few days, went by my office and picked up the plans—your plans, I believe, Colonel . . . ?”
Mattingly nodded.
“. . . and came out here with a handful of my people. By the time we got here, it was too dark to do much of anything but set up the cots, although I did call my headquarters and told them to start moving equipment out here. Then I went to bed.
“I got up at first light and walked around the area, making up my mind what had to be done and when. Then a puddle jumper flew over, twice, and landed on that road out there.” He pointed. “I went out to ask the pilot what the hell he thought he was doing.
Top Secret Page 27
