“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.