1730 31 January 1946
The flight on the Air Force C-54 from Tempelhof to Rhine-Main—some 240 miles that took almost two hours—put Cronley on the ground in Frankfurt at 1300. There had been time to call the house in Zehlendorf and tell Claudette Colbert to call Lieutenant Tom Winters in Eschborn to have him meet Cronley’s flight.
Cronley used the time on the C-54 to consider the problem of what Hans-Peter von Wachtstein was going to do in Buenos Aires. There was absolutely no question he would give Clete the message verbatim. What was not clear was what Hans-Peter, or Clete, or most likely both, would do to keep Cronley from spending the rest of his life in Leavenworth.
Cronley also considered at length how stupid it had been of him to tell Dette to have Tom meet him at Rhine-Main. Winters had one of the Storches. The Air Force did not like Storches with U.S. ARMY painted on their fuselages. The way things were going, there would be a flap at Rhine-Main, which would see the Storch impounded, sending him and Tom rushing to the Hauptbahnhof in Frankfurt to—just in time—catch the Blue Danube train to Munich.
Things began to look up when Winters met him in the Arriving Passengers Terminal.
“I hope I did the right thing,” Winters said. “I left the Storch in Eschborn. Freddy Hessinger told me landing one here might cause problems.”
They drove to Eschborn and boarded the Storch.
In the Storch, which raced through the skies at about eighty miles per hour, the approximately 190-mile flight from Eschborn to Pullach should have taken no more than two and a half hours. But the snow, which had left Berlin, had moved south. The flight took three and a quarter hours, leaving the fuel gauge needles indicating empty tanks when Cronley touched down at the Compound.
From the look on Winters’s face, Cronley saw he was unimpressed with his argument that experience had taught him that even when the needles indicated empty there was still “several” gallons of avgas remaining.
Announcing, “Looks like we cheated death again,” after shutting down the engine did not exactly help.
Cronley pushed getting to Pullach because he needed to see General Gehlen as soon as possible. He wanted to tell him what had happened in Berlin and see if he had ideas how to get Mattingly back without swapping the Likharev family for him.
Thus, when First Sergeant Abraham Lincoln Tedworth met them, Cronley was less than pleased to hear Honest Abe report that the general was taking dinner at the Vier Jahreszeiten hotel with several of his officers and had said he probably would spend the night there because of the snow.
Making matters worse, the ex-ambulance in which they then drove from Pullach to Munich had both a malfunctioning heater and a missing windshield wiper, which made the drive on the snow-covered cobblestone road slow, uncomfortable, and more than once terrifying.
[ FIVE ]
The Lobby Bar
Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten
Maximilianstrasse 178
Munich, American Zone of Occupation, Germany
1840 31 January 1946
“My friend will have a Shirley Temple,” Cronley greeted the bartender. “And I will have a little taste of that Johnnie Walker Black. Make it a double.”
Lieutenant Winters gave Captain Cronley the finger.
“I’ll have the same,” Winters announced to the bartender.
“Excuse me, sirs,” the bartender asked. “Is the Herr Captain and the other gentleman aware this is a senior officers’ establishment?”
Shit, Cronley thought, I’m wearing my captain’s bars.
What the hell else can go wrong?
“Yes, the Herr Captain and the other gentleman are,” Cronley replied. “Where’s the regular bartender?”
“It’s all right, Franz,” a female voice said. “These junior officers are with me. You can serve them.”
“Es wird mir ein Vergnügen, gnädige Frau,” the bartender said, and reached for glasses.
Cronley and Winters looked down the bar.
“Well, if it isn’t Miss Janice Johansen, of the Associated Press,” Cronley said. “You know Miss Johansen, don’t you, Lieutenant Winters?”