American Zone, Occupied Germany
0915 2 January 1946
Cronley watched through the windows of the terminal building as the passengers debarked from the Military Air Transport Service Douglas C-54 “Skymaster,” which had just flown—via Gander, Newfoundland, and Prestwick, Scotland—from Washington.
The procession down the ladder and into the terminal building was led by a major general, two brigadier generals, some other brass. Then came four senior non-coms, and finally a long line of women and children. They were “dependents” joining their husbands, called “sponsors,” in the Army of Occupation.
When the dependents came into the terminal, they were emotionally greeted by the sponsors in a touching display of connubial affection.
Cronley’s mind filled with the memory of his explaining the system to the Squirt at Camp Holabird the day they were married. The day before the drunken sonofabitch in the eighteen-wheeler ran head-on into her on US-1 in Washington.
He forced his mind off the subject.
No one was coming down the stairway.
What did you do, Polo? Miss the goddamn plane?
And then Lieutenant Colonel Maxwell Ashton III appeared in the door of the aircraft. In pinks and greens. He was on crutches. His right leg and left arm were in casts.
He stared down the stairs. Then, apparently deciding the crutches would be useless, he threw them down the stairs.
Jesus, he’s going to try to hop down the stairs!
“Go get him, Tiny,” Cronley ordered. “Before he breaks his other leg.”
“They won’t let me out there,” Dunwiddie protested.
“Show them the goddamn CIC badge and go get him!”
“Right.”
“And you go with him, and get the crutches,” Cronley ordered.
“Yes, sir,” Maksymilian Ostrowski said, and headed for the door.
Ostrowski was wearing, as Cronley was, a U.S. Army woolen olive-drab Ike jacket and trousers with “civilian” triangles sewn to the lapels. Dunwiddie was in pinks and greens.
Cronley, after thinking about it overnight, had decided to have Ostrowski fly the second Storch from Kloster Grünau to Rhine-Main to meet Ashton. For one thing, Schröder had reported—not surprisingly, since Ostrowski had been flying Spitfires and Hurricanes—that it had taken less than an hour for him to be convinced the Pole could fly a Storch. For another, Ostrowski spoke “British English” fluently. When he called the Rhine-Main control tower, that would not cause suspicion, as Schröder’s heavily German-accented English would.
But the real reason he had ordered Ostrowski to fly the second Storch was to test his theory that he could—DCI-Europe could—get away with not only flying the Storchs that were supposed to be grounded, but having them flown by a German and a Pole, and hiding both behind CIC credentials to which they were not entitled.
It would either work or it wouldn’t. If they suddenly found themselves being detained by outraged Air Force officers—or for that matter, outraged Army officers—calling for somebody’s scalp, better to have that happen now, when Ashton was in Germany. A newly promoted lieutenant colonel might not be able to do much against the forces aligned against DCI-Europe, but he would have a lot more clout than a newly promoted captain.
Tiny, flashing his CIC wallet, and with Ostrowski on his heels, got past the Air Force sergeant keeping people from going onto the tarmac, and without trouble.
The young sergeant might have been dazzled by the CIC credentials, Cronley thought. But it was equally possible that he had been dazzled by an enormous, very black captain he knew he could not physically restrain from going anywhere he wanted to.
As Tiny started up the stairs, two at a time, another man appeared in the airplane door. A stocky, somewhat florid-faced man in his late forties, wearing the uniform of a U.S. Navy lieutenant.
He was somehow familiar.
Jesus Christ! That’s El Jefe!
The last time Cronley had seen Lieutenant Oscar J. Schultz, USNR, he had been wearing the full regalia of an Argentine gaucho, a billowing white shirt over billowing black trousers; a gaily printed scarf; a wide-brimmed leather hat; knee-high black leather boots; a wide, silver-coin-adorned leather belt, and, tucked into the belt, the silver scabbard of a horn-handled knife the size of a cavalry saber.
El Jefe had once been Chief Radioman Oscar Schultz of the destroyer USS Alfred Thomas, DD-107, hence the reference El Jefe, the chief. Schultz had been drafted into the OSS by then-Captain Cletus Frade, USMCR, when the Thomas had sailed into Buenos Aires on a friendly visit to the neutral Argentine Republic. And also to surreptitiously put ashore a radar set and a SIGABA communications system for the OSS.
Frade thought he needed a highly skilled, Spanish-speaking (El Jefe had done two tours at the U.S. Navy base at Cavite in the Philippines) communications and radar expert more than the Thomas did, and General William Donovan, then head of the OSS, had not only agreed, but had had a word with the chief of naval operations.