“From whom?” Tiny asked, and then he understood. “If you ask Colonel Wilson about this, he’ll get right on the horn to Mattingly.”
“We don’t know that,” Cronley said. “We’ll have to see how much I can dazzle him with my DCI credentials.”
“It’s a lousy idea, Jim,” Tiny said.
“It’s a better idea than you and me trying to sneak back and forth across the border with a woman on the edge of hysteria and two frightened kids. Saddle up, Dette, I need a ride to the airport. I’m off to see Hotshot Billy Wilson.”
[FOUR]
En Route to Schleissheim Army Airfield
1255 16 January 1946
“Is there anything I should know about this Colonel Wilson you’re going to see?” Claudette asked.
“Aside from the fact that he’s twenty-five years old, you mean?”
“Twenty-five and a lieutenant colonel? You’re pulling my leg.”
“No, I’m not. Do you remember seeing that newsreel of General Mark Clark landing in a Piper Cub on the plaza by the Colosseum in the middle of Rome when he took the city?”
She nodded.
“Hotshot Billy was flying the Cub. And I guess you know that General Gehlen surrendered to the OSS on a back road here in Bavaria?”
“I heard that story.”
“Wilson flew our own Major Harold Wallace, then Mattingly’s deputy, there to accept the surrender. And Mattingly got Wilson to turn over his Storchs to me when the Air Force didn’t like the Army having any. Wilson is the aviation officer of the Constabulary. As soon as he gets here, which may be very soon, any day, Major General I.D. White, whom Tiny refers to as ‘Uncle Isaac,’ because White is his godfather, will assume command of the Constabulary. And before he went into the OSS, Mattingly was sort of a fair-haired boy in White’s Second Armored Division.”
“That’s a lot of disjointed facts.”
“That occurred to me as I sat here thinking about it. So, thinking aloud: Presuming we can find someplace to land in Thuringia, someplace being defined as a small field—the Storch can land on about fifty feet of any kind of a runway, and get off the ground in about a hundred fifty feet—near a country road, getting Mrs. Likharev and her kids out in our Storchs makes a lot more sense than sending people into East Germany on foot to try to, first, find them, and then try to walk them back across the border.”
“Storchs, plural? Who’s going to fly them?”
“I’ll fly one, and maybe Max Ostrowski the other one.”
“Maybe?”
“I won’t know if he’ll be willing to take the chance until I ask him,” Cronley said simply. “So the question is, where can I find, just over the Hesse/Thuringia border, a suitable field near a suitable country road? I don’t have a clue, but I think Colonel Wilson will not only be able to get this information for me, but have other helpful suggestions to make.
“Or he may not. He may decide to pick up the phone and call Mattingly and say, ‘You won’t believe what Loose Cannon Cronley’s up to.’
“You’re going to take that risk?”
Cronley didn’t reply directly, instead replying, “Mannberg has a saying, ‘Whenever you really want to trust your intuition, don’t.’ In this case, I’m going to trust my intuition about Colonel Wilson. I don’t see where I have any choice.”
“Where is this Colonel Wilson? At Sonthofen?”
“Yeah. It’s about a hundred miles, a hundred and fifty kilometers, from Munich. Take me about an hour to get there.”
“And then you’re coming back here?”
“If there’s enough time, I’ll go out to Kloster Grünau. I want to keep the Storch out of sight as much as possible.”
“Well, if you need anything, you know where to find me.”
Fifteen minutes later, as he began his climb-out from Schleissheim, he realized that as he climbed into the Storch, Miss Colbert had repeated the same words she had said to him in the Kapitän.