“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 passed 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 i
s 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 scrape 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 Grünau. 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 cushion 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 washing 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.