“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.