“Okay. I don’t have much experience in this sort of thing, and happily defer to your expertise.”
“Fortunately for you, we have an expert in this sort of thing—his name is Gehlen—at Kloster Grünau. What I propose to do is work this plan out between you and me. And then, when we agree on what we think should be done, we bring General Gehlen in on it. That okay with you, Jimmy?”
Cronley thought that it was strange—even funny—that Hessinger, whom he thought of as an overeducated clerk, had even come up with a plan. But he liked him, and didn’t want to hurt his feelings.
“Fine,” Cronley said. “Go ahead.”
“The problem is that we have to do something that will look like the real thing to different groups of people. We have to fool not only the Germans who the NKGB has turned—and since we don’t know who they are, that means all the Germans—and just about all of Dunwiddie’s men.”
“Why do we have to fool Tiny’s people?”
“Because if they know what’s really going on they will talk about it, and there goes the secret.”
“Point taken.”
“We can’t do this with just Dunwiddie and Technical Sergeant Tedworth, so the first thing we have to do—”
“Why can’t we do it with just Tiny and Tedworth?”
“Who’s going to dig the grave and carry the body to it? And then fill it up again?”
“Okay.”
“We’re going to have to get five more of Tiny’s people involved.”
“Five? Just to dig the grave and—”
“Three to dig the grave and two to drive the ambulance.”
“What ambulance?”
“The one we’re going to send to that airfield near Frankfurt, the one by the senior officers’ club.”
“Eschborn? Why are we going to send an ambulance . . . Oh, you mean one of the transport vehicles?”
“Of course. Why would we send an ambulance to Eschborn?”
“Freddy, why are we going to send anything to Eschborn?”
“Because that’s the way we’re going to get the NKGB-er onto Rhine-Main airfield. Nobody’s going to look for a Russian agent in the back of an ex-ambulance with 711TH QM MKRC painted on its bumpers. But I am getting ahead of myself. We start with H hour, like they started D-day at Normandy.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Let me explain. We have things over which we have no control. One is when the Argentine airplane will leave Frankfurt. Another is when we shoot the NKGB-er. There we have a problem, as that has to happen in the dark, after we have the grave dug. So that is one piece of information we have to have. Three pieces. One, how long it will take to dig the grave. Two, how long it will take to carry the body from the chapel to the grave. And three, how long it will take to fill in the grave.
“So we start with H hour. That will be when we shoot him. In that connection, I suggest that there be three shots. With a .45 pistol. They’re very noisy. One shot to wake everybody up and, thirty seconds later, two more shots so everybody knows what they heard was shooting.
“Now, as I started to say, the next number we need, what we have to find out, is how long it is going to take to dig the grave. When you get back up there, and I suggest you do this in the dark, take the gravediggers out in the country someplace and have them dig a grave. In the dark. Simulating as much as possible what they will do when they actually dig the grave. Say that takes an hour. Add a half hour. That means the shooting would take place at H hour minus one-point-five. You understand all this?”
Cronley nodded.
“There are a lot of other blanks to fill in,” Hessinger went on. “For example, how long does it take to fly from Kloster Grünau to Eschborn?”
“We better figure on three hours.”
“Then, presuming you would take off from Eschborn as soon as you could, when you had enough light to see the runway . . . You understand where I’m going with this?”
“Yeah, I do. And I’m impressed, Freddy.”