“Is there a .45 around here that I can have?”
“Why do you want a .45?” Dunwiddie asked.
“Well, when people try to kill me, I like to have something to defend myself.”
When there was no reply, El Jefe went on.
“This Colonel Mattingly of yours may think a gas leak took out this CIC colonel and his wife, but I don’t think the NKGB is swallowing that line. I think they may want to come back here and play tit for tat.”
“They already have,” Cronley said. “A week ago, Ostrowski killed two of them. They already had a wire garrote around Sergeant Tedworth’s neck.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” El Jefe said, “but following that, it was really heads-up around here, right? Double the guard, that sort of thing?”
Cronley and Dunwiddie nodded.
“So I think what these Communists will do is wait until you relax a little, and then try it again. At least that’s what the Chinese Communists did.”
“The Chinese?” Ashton and Cronley said on top of one another.
“When I was a young sailor, I did two hitches with the Yangtze River Patrol. The Chinese Communists were always trying to kill us. What they did was try. If that failed, they waited patiently until we relaxed a little and then tried again. And again. Most of the time, that worked. We used to say we got double time for retirement because the Navy knew most of us wouldn’t live long enough to retire.”
“Interesting,” Dunwiddie said. “That’s how the Apaches operated.”
“Two things, Captain Cronley,” Ashton said. “When you get Lieutenant Schultz a .45, would you get me one, too?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And one last question. If you didn’t want to go to Colonel Mattingly with it, why didn’t you go to General Greene and tell him what you suspected—all right, knew—about Colonel Whatsisname and his wife?”
Dunwiddie answered for him: “General Gehlen said that the Schumanns were sure to have contingency plans—ranging from denial through disappearing—in case they were exposed. He said he didn’t think we could afford to take the chance they were outwitting us. Jim and I agreed with him.”
“So you went along with having Gehlen clip them,” Ashton said.
“We don’t know that Gehlen had them clipped,” Cronley said.
“You don’t know the sun will come up in the morning, either. But you would agree it’s likely, right?”
When Cronley didn’t reply, Ashton said, “I suggest, operative word, ‘suggest,’ that our next step is to meet with General Gehlen.”
“I respectfully suggest our next step is getting the .45s,” El Jefe said. “Then we can go talk to this general.”
“Every once in a great while, the chief’s right about something,” Ashton said.
[THREE]
Kloster Grünau
Schollbrunn, Bavaria
American Zone of Occupation, Germany
1520 2 January 1946
CIC Special Agent Friedrich Hessinger and a very large, very black sergeant with a Thompson submachine gun cradled in his arms like a hunter’s shotgun walked into the officers’ mess.
Captain J. D. Cronley, Captain Chauncey L. Dunwiddie, First Sergeant Abraham Lincoln Tedworth, and a man in a naval officer’s uniform were sitting at the bar drinking coffee. A lieutenant colonel sitting in a chair, with his en-casted leg resting on a small table, also held a coffee cup.
The sergeant smiled and, without disturbing the Thompson, saluted.