“And you feel qualified to fly one of them onto what’s almost sure to be a snow-covered and/or icy back road? Or onto a snow-covered field?”
“Well, Schröder has a lot of experience doing just that. I think Colonel Mannberg will vouch for that. And I have a little experience doing that myself.”
“The snow-covered pastures around Midland, Texas?” Wallace challenged.
“I never flew a Storch in the States,” Cronley said. “But I did fly one off of and onto the ice around the mouth of the Magellan Strait in Patagonia. Trust me, there is more snow and ice there than there is anywhere in Texas or Germany.”
“You flew a Storch down to the mouth of the Strait of Magellan?” Wallace asked dubiously.
“No. Actually I flew a Lockheed Lodestar down there. I flew Cletus’s Storch while I was down there. I also flew a Piper Cub when I was down there.” He paused and looked at Wallace. “Look, Colonel Wilson told you I’m competent to fly this mission. Isn’t that enough?”
“I’ll decide what’s—”
“Jim,” Mannberg interrupted, “you said, I think, that you and Ostrowski would fly in one Storch?”
It was a bona fide question, but everyone understood it served to prevent another angry exchange between Cronley and Wallace.
Cronley looked at Wallace.
“Answer the man,” Wallace said.
“We land. Me first,” Cronley said. “Ostrowski gets out and goes to Seven-K, or whoever is with Mrs. Likharev and the boys. He says, ‘Mrs. Likharev, we’ll have you over the border—’”
“Ostrowski speaks Russian?” Wallace challenged.
“He does, and better than Schröder,” Cronley said. “Let me finish. Ostrowski says, ‘Mrs. Likharev, we’ll have you and the boys over the border in just a few minutes. And the way we’re going to do that is put you and him’—he points to the smaller boy—‘in that airplane’—pointing to the Storch Schröder has by now landed—‘and I will take this one in that airplane’—he points to the Storch I’m flying.
“He leads Mrs. Likharev to Schröder’s Storch . . .”
“What if she doesn’t want to go? What if she’s hysterical? What if Seven-K has already tranquilized her?” Wallace challenged.
“. . . where Schröder says, in Russian, with a big smile, ‘Hi! Let’s go flying.’ They get in Schröder’s plane and he takes off. Ostrowski and the older boy get in my airplane, and I take off,” Cronley finished.
“What if she doesn’t want to go? What if she’s hysterical? What if Seven-K has already tranquilized her?” Wallace repeated.
“I thought you wanted my best-case scenario?” Cronley replied, and then went on before Wallace could reply. “But, okay. Let’s say she’s been tranquilized—let’s say they’ve all been tranquilized—then no problem getting them into the planes. If she’s hysterical, then Ostrowski tranquilizes her, and the boys, too, if necessary.”
“And how are you going to get all of them into the planes?”
“The boys are small.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because when Tiny and I were working on Likharev, he told us his son was too young to get in the Young Pioneers. That makes him less than twelve.”
“There are two boys . . .”
“If one of them was old enough to be a Young Pioneer, he would have said so. That makes both of the boys less than twelve.” He paused, then added: “Feel free to shoot holes in my scenario.”
Wallace looked as if he was about to reply, but before he could, Mannberg said, “Not a hole, but an observation: When we were doing this sort of thing in the East, whenever possible, we tried to arrange some sort of diversion.”
Wallace looked at him for a moment, considered that, but did not respond. Instead he said, “Tell me about you being able to fly a C-45.”
“My father has one,” Cronley said. “I’ve never been in a C-45, but I’m told it’s a Beech D-18. What they call a ‘Twin Beech.’”
“And Daddy let you fly his airplane?”
“Daddy did.”