Curtain of Death (Clandestine Operations 3)

“Okay. I had lunch today with Commandant Jean-Paul Fortin, of the DST—”

“The Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire?” Hammersmith interrupted.

“Uh-huh. You know about it?”

“I even know about Commandant Fortin,” Hammersmith said.

“I think he’s more than a major,” Cronley said. “I think he’s a colonel.”

Hammersmith thought: So do I.

“Whatever his rank, he’s one smart sonofabitch,” Cronley went on. “And he has a personal interest in taking down Odessa. In his professional judgment, the only way to get inside Odessa is from the bottom.”

“I tend to agree,” Hammersmith said thoughtfully.

“To which end, we are about to send Sergeant Finney to Strasbourg with a load of cigarettes, canned hams, and coffee from my mother for my cousin Luther. Cousin Luther, we hope, will then skillfully put Al Finney on the slippery slope to corruption so that eventually he can—or the ambulances of the 711th Mobile Kitchen Renovation Company can—be pressured into moving people across borders as he and his men move around Germany, Austria, and Italy repairing mess hall stoves and electric potato peeling machines.”

“And get into Od

essa from the bottom,” Hammersmith said. “That just might work.”

“It probably will,” Cronley said. “But we (a) don’t know if it will work, and (b) I don’t think we have the time to wait and see if it does.”

“What other choice do you have?” Hessinger asked.

“Can I go off on a tangent here?” Hammersmith asked.

“Why not?” Cronley replied.

“I have a theory how Odessa is moving their people,” Hammersmith said. “I’ve been asking General Greene for the assets to check it out. They haven’t been available. Maybe this new situation will change that.”

‘What’s your theory?” Cronley said.

“That they’re moving them on Stars and Stripes distribution trucks,” Hammersmith said.

“On what?” Ziegler asked incredulously.

Hammersmith didn’t reply directly, instead saying, “Stars and Stripes prints more than a half-million newspapers a day . . .”

“Jesus! That many?” Ziegler said.

“Shut up, Ziegler,” Cronley snapped. “Let him finish.”

“. . . which are distributed all over the U.S. Forces European Theater, from Berlin to Italy. The printing plant is in a little dorf—Pfungstadt—twenty-five miles south of Frankfurt. Trucks set out seven days a week down the autobahns and major highways into Czechoslovakia, and down through the Brenner Pass through the Alps on the Italian-Austrian border. And into France.

“The longest hauls—the ones to Trieste, Rome, Naples, and Vienna—run as high as three hundred and eighty miles. Which means that since they can’t make a round-trip that long in a day’s time, that at any time there are maybe eight or ten trucks heading south loaded with newspapers, and that many headed back to Pfungstadt empty.

“The Constabulary’s got roadblocks all over their routes, but, human nature being human nature, I don’t think they look as closely as they should at what the Stars and Stripes trucks have in the back. They’re there every day.”

“Yeah,” Cronley said thoughtfully.

“Clever,” Hessinger said.

“And you say Greene told you . . .”

Hammersmith thought: That’s General Greene, Captain.

“. . . you couldn’t have what you needed to really check this out?”