The Assassination Option (Clandestine Operations 2)

Gehlen and Cronley were sitting in upholstered chairs, drinking coffee. Major Wallace and First Sergeant Dunwiddie were seated at one of the desks as Hessinger hovered over them, like a schoolteacher tutoring backward students, as they signed sheafs of forms.

Finally, Hessinger proclaimed, “That’s it. You are now a civilian and can no longer say cruel and unkind things to me.”

He spoke with a thick, somewhat comical German accent. A German Jew, he had escaped Nazi Germany and went to the United States in 1938. Shortly after his graduation, summa cum laude, from Harvard College, he had been drafted. Physically unable to qualify for an officer’s commission, he had been assigned to the Counterintelligence Corps and sent to Germany, where it was believed he would be very useful in running down Nazis and bringing them to trial.

He was now doing something quite different.

“Aw, come on, Fat Freddy, my little dumpling,” Dunwiddie said, skillfully mocking Hessinger’s thick accent, “when have I ever said anything cruel or unkind to you?”

Cronley laughed out loud. Major Wallace and General Gehlen tried, and failed, not to smile.

“Whenever have you not?” Hessinger said. “Now can I trust you to deliver these documents to General Greene’s sergeant? Or am I going to have to send them by courier?”

“Freddy,” Cronley asked, “why couldn’t we have done what you just did tomorrow in the Farben Building? For that matter, why does this civilian have to go to Frankfurt to have Greene pin on his bars?”

“Because you can’t be commissioned the day you get discharged as an enlisted man. That’s what the regulations say. General Greene’s sergeant was very specific about that, and when I checked, he was right. And he said General Greene thought it would be a nice thing for him to do.”

And it will also serve to remind everybody that he’s a general, and I’m a brand-new captain.

“Maybe Colonel Mattingly will be there,” Cronley said. “Maybe we can ask him to pin on your bars. I’d love to see that.”

“Let that go, Jim,” Dunwiddie said. “If it doesn’t bother me, why are you bothered?”

“Because I am a champion of the underdog, and in particular of the retarded underdog.”

“You guys better get down to the bahnhof if you’re going to catch the Blue Danube,” Major Wallace said.

The Blue Danube was the military train that ran daily in each direction between Vienna and Berlin.

“We’re not taking the Blue Danube,” Cronley said.

“Why not?”

“Two reasons. One, I can’t afford to take two days off just so this fat civilian can get his bars pinned on by General Greene.”

“And two?”

“General Gehlen cannot ride the Blue Danube. Americans only.”

“You’re taking General Gehlen?”

“We’re going to drive to Kloster Grünau, where I have some things to do. In the morning, we’re going to fly to Eschborn. There, if I can trust Freddy, we will be met by a vehicle assigned to the 711th Quartermaster Mess Kit Repair Company, which will transport us to the Farben Building. That is set in concrete, right, Freddy?”

“The ambulance will be at Eschborn,” Hessinger confirmed.

“You’re asking for trouble with those mess kit repair bumper markings on those ambulances, Jim,” Major Wallace said.

“The bumpers read MKRC. It’s not spelled out.”

“And if some MP gets first curious and then nasty?”

“Then I will dazzle him with my CIC credentials,” Cronley said. “Which is another reason I’m going to Frankfurt. I want to ask General Greene about not only keeping the credentials after January second but getting more, so I can give them to half a dozen of Tiny’s guys.”

“Does Colonel Mattingly know you’re bringing the general with you?”

“No, he doesn’t,” Cronley said simply. And then went on, “After Tiny becomes an officer, we will all get back in the ambulance, go back to Eschborn, get back in the Storch, and come back here. God willing, and if the creek don’t rise, we should be back before it gets dark.”

When Cronley, Gehlen, and Dunwiddie were in the car—an Opel Kapitän, now painted olive drab and bearing Army markings—Dunwiddie said, “You didn’t tell Major Wallace about what happened at Kloster Grünau.”