The Assassination Option (Clandestine Operations 2)

“A solution had to be found, and one was. A clever sailor, one I like to think claimed my beloved Norwich as his alma mater, although I can’t prove this—”

“General,” Cronley asked, “has Captain Dunwiddie mentioned in passing that he went to Norwich University?”

“Not as often as Sergeant Hessinger has mentioned he went to Harvard, but yes, he has. No more than thirty or forty times,” Gehlen replied.

“As I was saying,” Dunwiddie went on, “a clever nautical person came up with a solution for the problem of cannonballs rolling and sometimes exploding on the deck. The balls, he concluded, had to be in some manner restrained from rolling around, and that the method of restraint had to permit getting the iron cannonballs from where they would be restrained into the mouth of the cannon quickly when that was required. And without causing the sparks which occur when steel and/or iron collide. Said sparks would tend to set off both the barrels of black powder and the explosive cannonballs.

“What he came up with were plates, into which he hammered depressions so that the cannonballs wouldn’t roll around. He made the plates from brass so they wouldn’t spark and set off the black powder. For reasons lost in the fog of history, he called these indented brass plates ‘monkeys.’ When they were getting ready to fight, they put the shells, the balls, on these monkeys until they were needed. Moving the balls, which weighed up to one hundred pounds, off the

brass monkey was recognized to be very difficult. Any further questions?”

“Interesting,” Gehlen said. “Now that you’ve brought it up, I remember seeing cannonballs stacked that way, forming sort of a pyramid, on your Old Ironsides in Boston Harbor.” He paused, and corrected himself: “The USS Constitution.”

“You’ve been on the Constitution?” Cronley blurted, in surprise.

“As a young officer,” Gehlen said. “When it seemed that I was destined to serve as an intelligence officer, I was treated to a tour of the United States.”

Sergeant Phillips announced, “We’re here.”

Cronley looked out the window and saw they were approaching the gate to the Eschborn Airfield.

“Great,” Cronley said. “And now that Professor Dunwiddie’s history lesson is over, we can return to our noble duties stemming the Red Tide. Maintaining as we do so an amicable relationship with the FBI.”

He expected a chuckle from General Gehlen, but when he looked at him, he saw a look of concern.

Jesus, what did my automatic mouth blurt out now?

“Sir, if I said something . . .”

Gehlen shook his head. “No, Jim, you didn’t say anything out of place. What popped back into my mind—I have a tendency to find a black lining in every silver cloud—when you said ‘stemming the Red Tide’ was something I thought when I was with General Smith earlier. You said it mockingly, but in fact—don’t misunderstand me, please, I know you take it as seriously as I do—that’s what we’re trying to do. But there are so very few of us who really understand the problem. And so many clever Russians.”

Cronley’s mouth went on automatic again. He regretted what he was saying as the words came out of his mouth: “Not to worry, General. One of us went to Norwich.”

There was no expression on Gehlen’s face for a long moment, but just as Cronley was trying to frame an appropriate apology, Gehlen smiled and said, “That somehow slipped my mind, but now that you’ve brought it up, it certainly does wonders dispelling my clouds of impending disaster.”

III

[ONE]

Kloster Grünau

Schollbrunn, Bavaria

American Zone of Occupation, Germany

1705 29 December 1945

When he took the Storch off from Eschborn, Cronley had been worried about the flight, although he said nothing to either General Gehlen or Tiny.

For one thing, the weather was iffy, and it gets dark early in Germany in December. If the weather got worse, he’d have to land somewhere short of Munich, which meant at an infantry regiment or artillery battalion airstrip somewhere. As far as the officers there would be concerned, in addition to wondering what he was doing flying a Kraut around in a former Luftwaffe airplane, they would be reluctant to house overnight or, for that matter, feed said seedy-looking Kraut.

Flashing the CIC credentials would overcome those problems, of course, but it would provide those officers with a great barroom story to share with the world.

You won’t believe what flew into the strip yesterday. An ex-Luftwaffe Storch, with Army markings, and carrying two CIC captains and a Kraut. Wouldn’t say what they were doing, of course. Makes you wonder.

And even if he could make it through the weather to Bavaria, by the time they got there, it might be too dark to land on the strip at the Pullach compound. That would mean he would have to go into Schleissheim—the Munich military post airfield—which had runway lights.

But there would be problems at Schleissheim, too. The Storch would attract unwanted attention, and so would General Gehlen. And they would have to ask the Schleissheim duty officer for a car to take them to the Vier Jahreszeiten as the Kapitän was at Kloster Grünau, and Major Wallace was sure to be off somewhere in their only other car, the Opel Admiral.