“Sir, General Greene is in the lobby. He’s in charge. I suggest you ask him.”
“Do I still have to move the car?” Cronley asked.
“No, sir. If you’re CIC, you’re fine. We’re just saving these parking spaces for people involved in the investigation.”
—
Brigadier General Homer P. Greene, chief of USFET Counter Intelligence, saw Cronley and Janice as soon as they walked into the lobby. Greene was standing with a major general in MP regalia—the first time Cronley had ever seen a general officer so uniformed—and two full colonels.
“Good evening, sir,” Cronley said.
“Major Wallace said he thought you would be coming here, Mr. Cronley,” Greene said. “But he didn’t suggest you would have Miss Johansen with you.”
“Is that a polite way of telling me to get lost, General?” Janice asked.
“No.”
“What the hell is going on?” Janice asked.
“Do you know General Schwarzkopf, Miss Johansen?” Greene asked.
“I have that privilege,” General H. Norman Schwarzkopf said. “But not this gentleman.”
“General, this is Mr. James D. Cronley, the chief, DCI-Europe. Jim, this is General Schwarzkopf, the USFET provost marshal.”
They shook hands. The two colonels were not introduced, but their curiosity about Cronley was visible on their faces.
“Just before you walked in, Miss Johansen,” Greene said, “General Schwarzkopf and I agreed that what happened here should be released to the press. We made that recommendation to General Bull and he agreed.”
“And what happened here?” Janice said.
“Colonel Robert Mattingly, my deputy, had an 0900 appointment with General Seidel. When he did not make that appointment, General Seidel’s aide called my office to inquire. I tried to telephone Colonel Mattingly here—he is quartered here—and there was no answer. His car—that enormous Horch he drives—was not in the Farben Building parking lot, or in the parking lot here at the Schlosshotel. I called General Schwarzkopf and requested him to ask the MPs to look for it. I came out here and had the manager let me into Colonel Mattingly’s room. There was nothing out of the ordinary, and we confirmed he had spent the night here.
“A little after two o’clock, a Constabulary road patrol was directed by a German forest master to a wooded area about two miles from Eschborn Army Airfield. There they found Colonel Mattingly’s Horch. There were three bullet punctures in the interior of the driver’s door, and two fired bullets—later confirmed to be nine-millimeter Parabellum—were later recovered. As were three fired .45 ACP cases, suggesting Colonel Mattingly resisted whatever happened to him. There was blood, which has been determined to be of the same blood type as Colonel Mattingly’s, on the car upholstery.”
“Jesus Christ!” Cronley said.
“Can I write this?” Janice asked.
“General Greene told you that you could, Miss Johansen,” General Schwarzkopf said.
“I was asking Mr. Cronley,” she said.
“Why do you want the story out?” Cronley asked General Greene.
“Maybe somebody—German, American, anybody—saw something. We’re going to put out a press release asking the public to come forward. It will be in Stars and Stripes and broadcast over AFN. And of course in the German press and radio. We’re determined to find out what has happened.”
“The NKGB got him,” Cronley said matter-of-factly. “For some reason, probably to make a prisoner swap, they grabbed Mattingly. The silver lining is he’s probably still alive. If they killed him, they’d have just left the body.”
“About Mr. Cronley’s mention of the NKGB, Miss Johansen,” General Schwarzkopf began. “It might not be a good idea—”
“I already figured that out, General,” Janice interrupted him.
“Or maybe he is dead and they want us to think he’s alive,” Cronley said. “The more I think about it, what those NKGB bastards are after is a prisoner swap.”
“What prisoners are we talking about, Mr. Cronley?” one of the colonels asked.
Cronley ignored him.