Jimmy looked and saw their luggage against the wall. Until just now, he and Colonel Mattingly had been worried that it had been left behind in Washington.
“That’s it, thanks,” Cronley said, and then raised his voice and called, “Colonel!”
Mattingly was across the huge room, looking at stacks of luggage. When he turned, Cronley pointed. Mattingly nodded and started toward their luggage.
When they had carried their luggage into the main terminal, Mattingly said, “The problem now is how to get you to Munich. In the good old days, one of our puddle jumpers would be waiting here.”
The Piper Cub aircraft, known as the L-4 in the U.S. Army, was universally referred to as a puddle jumper. A dozen of them had been assigned, primarily for personnel transport, to the now out-of-existence organization known as OSS Forward.
Cronley didn’t reply.
“But let me get on the horn and see if I can get a puddle jumper from the United States Constabulary,” Mattingly said.
“From whom?”
“The newly formed police force of the American Zone.”
Mattingly walked to a desk, where he commandeered a telephone. Ten minutes later, he walked back to Cronley.
“You got lucky, Jimmy,” he said. “They loaned me one. You will be spared that long ride down the autobahn to Munich. And I called Tiny and told him to meet you there at the Vier Jahreszeiten.”
The luxury hotel had been requisitioned by the Army. The XXVIIth CIC Detachment had space in the building.
“Thank you, sir.”
“You okay, Jimmy?”
“I’m fine, sir.”
“Forgive me, Captain, for not thinking so.”
“I’m really okay, sir. But thanks for getting me a ride.”
“They said within thirty minutes. We can get a cup of coffee over there”—he pointed to a PX coffee bar—“while we wait.”
“Colonel, you don’t have to wait with me.”
“Captains don’t get to tell colonels what they don’t have to do. And I just realized I have some questions for you.”
“Should I be worried?”
“That would depend on the answers I get.”
Mattingly pointed again toward the coffee bar. They walked to it and ordered coffee and doughnuts—it was all that was available—and sat at a small table.
“When Admiral Souers told me that you had found that stuff everybody was looking for, I naturally wondered how you had found it,” Mattingly began his interrogation. “When I asked him, he said something to the effect that Cletus Frade had told him that after you had come up with a pretty good idea where that vessel was, you and two of our Germans got into Clete’s Fieseler Storch and a Cub, and went looking for it.”
“Yes, sir. The Germans were Willi Grüner—he’s the Luftwaffe buddy of Clete’s buddy von Wachtstein. They found him in Berlin and took him to Argentina—and Kapitän von Dattenberg. He’s the guy who surrendered U-405 to the Argentines. He and the captain of U-234 . . . Sorry. He and the captain of the vessel we were looking for were friends, and Clete thought that might be useful—and it was—if we found what we were looking for.”
Mattingly made a Keep talking gesture with his hands.
“Well, the first thing Clete did when I figured out where U-2 . . . the vessel . . . probably was, was to take the wings off his Storch and one of his Cubs. Then he had them loaded onto flatbed trucks and trucked them down to a place called Estancia Condor. He sent Grüner along to make sure the mechanics put the wings back on right. And Grüner had a lot of experience flying Storches in Russia.”
“What was that all about?”
“Well, when I say I figured out where the vessel was, I mean that I thought it was way down south, within fifty miles of the mouth of the Magellan Straits. There’s not much but mountains and snow and ice down there. To find anything, we knew we would have to fly low and slow. The only way to do that was with little airplanes—you can’t do that in, say, a Lodestar.”
“Souers said that Commander Ford told him the material was brought to Mendoza, where it was transferred to the Constellation, on a Lodestar.”