Empire and Honor (Honor Bound 7)

That order could mean what it implied: Shut the whole damn thing down, including the South German Industrial Development Organization in Pullach.

But more likely, Eisenhower would order that no more Gehlen people be allowed to go to Argentina, and to wait and see if shutting down Pullach would be necessary. Ike knew how important the intelligence was that would be coming from Pullach.

In either—in any—event, Colonel Robert Mattingly would have to go. When the rumors inevitably got out that the United States was not only complicit in permitting Nazis to escape to Argentina, but actively involved in getting them there, his name would come up.

If the speeding resulted in his appearing before Eisenhower, Mattingly had decided to propose that Major Harry Wallace be put in charge of the South German Industrial Development Organization and that he himself be immediately returned to the United States for separation from the service. Not released from active duty. Separated. He would resign his commission and go back to the University of the South.

If somehow they ran him down in Suwanee, he could credibly protest that the suggestion he was smuggling Nazis into Germany was absurd. He was an academic, not a spy. A professor of history and languages. He had been a technician—one of many—in the OSS. Nothing more. What he had been doing at Kloster Grünau was sorting through captured enemy records.

This would derail his plans to apply for a Regular Army commission and stay in the Army, and close forever the door to service in the New OSS—if there actually was going to be one.

But this scenario would protect the President, Eisenhower, and Gehlen’s Germans in Argentina, and ensure that the flow of intelligence from OPERATION OST was not cut off.

It was a gloomy forecas

t for the future, but that was the way—the only way—the ball seemed to be bouncing.

As far as Second Lieutenant James D. Cronley Jr. was concerned, the future looked so bright he was afraid the other shoe would fall at any moment. Something would keep him from boarding the aircraft with Colonel Mattingly’s two suitcases and flying off to be reunited with Elsa.

She had been in his thoughts constantly since Mattingly had told him he was going to Argentina. In just about all the mental images of Elsa that flooded his mind, she was wearing the see-through black brassiere and panties he had bought for her in the PX.

[TWO]

Aboard SAA Flight 2231

Altitude 20,000 feet Above Luxembourg City

0945 19 October 1945

La Ciudad de Mar del Plata had been on the ground at Rhine-Main just long enough to top off its fuel tanks and load five passengers, plus brown paper sacks containing egg sandwiches and two large thermos jugs of coffee. The passengers were two priests and two nuns traveling on Vatican passports, and of course Second Lieutenant James D. Cronley Jr., who boarded last with two canvas suitcases.

Cronley had been seated by the steward at the very rear of the passenger compartment beside a plump and balding mustachioed man who began their relationship by demanding, “Why didn’t you check those bags? They’re going to be in the way all the way to Buenos Aires.”

“Sorry,” Jimmy replied in his Texican Spanish, “I don’t speak Spanish.”

Fifteen minutes later, right after the shift in the roar of the engines told him they had reached cruising altitude, the steward came and announced, “Sorry, sir, but we must change your seat.”

Jimmy, dragging the two canvas suitcases, followed the steward up the narrow aisle to the front part of the passenger compartment. It was curtained off from the rear.

The steward held open the curtain for Cronley, and then closed it after him when he had passed through.

Cronley found himself in an area made up of the foremost two rows of double seats and—beyond an open door—an area holding a small table on one side and a rack of radios on the other. He could see all the way into the cockpit.

Von Wachtstein—whom Jimmy thought of as Elsa’s brother-in-law—was resting his rear end on the small table. In the seats were three men he didn’t know.

“Hello, Cronley,” von Wachtstein said in German. “I guess I should have told the steward to seat you up here, but I didn’t. Sorry. Anyway, you’re here.” He turned to the crew. “Gentlemen, this is Lieutenant Cronley, who found our Elsa for us. His mother is a Strasbourger, which explains why he speaks German like a Strasbourger.” He turned back. “Colonel Frade calls you Jimmy. Any objections if I do?”

“No.”

“Jimmy, these people”—he pointed to them as he named them—“are Karl Boltitz, Willi Grüner, and Dieter von und zu Aschenburg. Willi and I used to fly under Dieter when we were in the Luftwaffe. I just showed them around the cockpit, which I thought I had better do first, as otherwise they wouldn’t have paid attention to what I have to say now.

“Jimmy,” von Wachtstein went on, as Cronley went to each of the men and shook hands, “is on a mission that Colonel Mattingly tells me is none of my business. So we can’t get into that. What we can get into—what I did not get into with Colonel Mattingly—is what’s going on, and what may be going on in Argentina.

“The last time I saw Cletus Frade, who not only is my best friend, and Jimmy’s sort of big brother, but used to be the OSS’s man in Argentina—”

He interrupted himself.

“I’m getting ahead of myself,” he said. “Okay, Jimmy. Question. Prefacing this with the announcement that not only would I trust my life to Willi and Dieter but have done so more times than I like to remember, what do you think Cletus’s reaction would be if he heard I told them about Operation Ost?”