My ignorance is showing. And why not? A year ago, I’d never heard of the NKGB.
But now that I am, as of the day before yesterday, a captain, of military intelligence, I of course know that’s the acronym for the People’s Commissariat for State Security, the Soviet secret police, intelligence, and counterintelligence organization.
Am I really sitting here, discussing an NKGB agent with a German general who used to run the German intelligence organization dealing with the NKGB?
And have I just told him that it was “necessary” for me to shoot an SS-Oberführer so that he wouldn’t get in the way of my grabbing a half ton of the dirt from which atom bombs are made?
This would be surreal if I didn’t know it was real.
A year ago, I hadn’t even heard of the atom bomb, and the only thing I knew about the SS was what I learned from the movies.
I wonder if the writers of those Alan Ladd Against the Nazis movies knew that the way it works in real life is that when you shoot a real Nazi sonofabitch you want to throw up when you see the life going out of his eyes and his blood turning the snow red?
What did Major Derwin ask me in the O Club bar at Camp Holabird? “Did you find yourself in over your head?”
Oh, boy, am I in over my head!
“Does Colonel Mattingly know about this?” Cronley asked.
Tiny said, “He asked if I thought we could handle it, and I told him yes. He said, ‘Take care of it, and let me know what happens.’”
“There is a small chance,” Mannberg said, “that we will be able to determine whom the NKGB has turned before the move to Pullach. But we don’t have much time.”
What the hell is he talking about? “Determine whom the NKGB has turned”? Turned how?
Jesus Christ, he’s talking about his own people!
“Turned” means “switched sides.” He knows that there’s a traitor among them.
But then Gehlen has agents in the Kremlin, so why should the Soviets having agents inside Abwehr Ost be so surprising?
“How’s that going?” Cronley asked. “The move to Pullach?”
The U.S. Army Military Government had requisitioned Pullach, a village south of Munich, and moved out all of its occupants. The Corps of Engineers was preparing it for use by what they had been told was the South German Industrial Development Organization.
The engineers had been naturally curious about why a bunch of Krauts who were going to try to restart German industry needed a place surrounded by barbed wire, motion detectors, and guard towers. But when they asked, they were either ignored or told, “Who knows? USFET wants it built, so build it.”
The engineers did not have the Need to Know that when they were finished Operation Ost—now renamed the South German Industrial Development Organization—would move in.
“They’re ahead of schedule,” Dunwiddie answered. “Maybe we better start to think of not moving until we find out more about who the NKGB has in here.”
Cronley looked at Gehlen. “You have no idea who he might be?”
“No,” Gehlen said. “And it might be, almost certainly is, more than one.”
“I’m not sure we can break the Soviet,” Mannberg said. “Obviously we have to continue his interrogation until we know that it’s fruitless.”
Cronley had a quick mental image, from the Alan Ladd movies, of a bare-chested man tied to a chair, his body bloody and bruised, and his face bleeding from multiple cuts inflicted by the riding crop in the hands of a man wearing a black SS uniform.
“With respect, Herr Oberst,” Dunwiddie said, smiling, “I think you may have to reconsider your boiling pot and the beat of drums.”
Gehlen smiled. Mannberg laughed.
“Perhaps later,” Mannberg said. “There’s still time for us to see if the disorientation is working.”
“What the hell are you talking about, Tiny?” Cronley demanded.
“This guy is terrified of Tedworth, Jim,” Dunwiddie said. “I suggested to Colonel Mannberg that we use this.”