Page 9

“Jesus!”

“And he said he felt that because both Dunwiddie and Cronley had friends in high places, they would be the best people to defend Operation Ost from being swallowed by DCS-G2. And I realized Gehlen was right about that, too.

“General White is about to return to Germany from Fort Riley to assume command of the Army of Occupation police force, the U.S. Constabulary. I flew out to Fort Riley on Tuesday and talked this situation over with him. He’s on board.

“On January second, the day after the Directorate of Central Intelligence is activated, certain military officers—you, for example, and Captains Cronley and Dunwiddie—”

“Captain Dunwiddie, sir?” Ashton interrupted.

“Sometime this week, First Sergeant Dunwiddie will be discharged for the convenience of the government for the purpose of accepting a commission as Captain, Cavalry, detail to Military Intelligence.

“As I was saying, Cronley and Dunwiddie—and now you—will be transferred to the Directorate. Colonel Mattingly and Major Wallace will remain assigned to Counterintelligence Corps duties. I told General Greene that Colonel Frade suggested that for the time being they would be of greater use in the CIC and that I agreed with him.”

When it looked as if Ashton was going to reply, Admiral Souers said, “Were you listening, Colonel, when I told you you’re going to have to learn to control your tendency to ask questions out loud that should not be asked out loud?”

“Yes, sir. But may I ask a question?”

Souers nodded.

“It looks to me as if the effect of all this is that in addition to all the problems Cronley’s going to have with Operation Ost, he’s going to have to deal with Colonel Parsons—the Pentagon G2—and Colonel Mattingly, and maybe this CIC general, Greene, all of whom are going to try to cut him off at the knees.”

Souers did not reply either directly or immediately, but finally he said, “I hope what you have learned in our conversation will be useful both when you go to Germany and later in Buenos Aires.”

“Yes, sir. It will be.”

Souers met Ashton’s eye for a long moment, then smiled and turned and started to walk out of the room.

[TWO]

Kloster Grünau

Schollbrunn, Bavaria

American Zone of Occupation, Germany

0330 22 December 1945

Senior Watch Chief Maksymilian Ostrowski, a tall, blond twenty-seven-year-old, who was chief supervisor of Detachment One, Company “A,” 7002nd Provisional Security Organization, woke instantly when his wristwatch vibrated.

He had been sleeping, fully clothed in dyed-black U.S. Army “fatigues” and combat boots, atop Army olive-drab woolen blankets on his bed in his room in what had once been the priory of a medieval monastery and was now a . . . what?

Ostrowski wasn’t sure exactly what Kloster Grünau should be called now. It was no longer a monastery and was now occupied by Americans. He had learned that the Americans were guarding—both at Kloster Grünau and in a village, Pullach, near Munich—nearly three hundred former Wehrmacht officers and enlisted men and their families. Both the monastery and the village were under the protection of a company of heavily armed American soldiers. All of them were Negroes, and they wore the shoulder insignia of the 2nd Armored Division.

Ostrowski was no stranger to military life, and he strongly suspected that it had to do with intelligence. Just what, he didn’t know. What was important to him was his belief that if he did well what he was told to do, he wouldn’t be rounded up and forced to return to what he was sure was at best imprisonment and most likely an unmarked mass grave in his native Poland.

He sometimes thought he had lived two previous lives and was on the cusp of a third. The first had been growing up in Poland as the son of a cavalry officer. He had graduated from the Szkola Rycerska military academy in 1939. He just had time to earn his pilot’s wings in the Polish Air Force when Germany and Russia attacked Poland. That life had ended when his father died leading a heroically stupid cavalry charge against German tanks, and he and some other young pilots for whom there were no airplanes to fly had been flown to first France and then England.

Life Two had been World War II. By the time that ended, he was Kapitan Maksymilian Ostrowski, 404th Fighter Squadron, Free Polish Air Force. The watch that had woken him by vibrating on his wrist was a souvenir of that life. Fairly late in the war, he had been at a fighter base in France, waiting for the weather to clear so they could fly in support of the beleaguered 101st Airborne Division in Bastogne.

There had been a spectacular poker game with a mixed bag—Poles, Brits, and Americans—of fellow fighter pilots. He liked Americans, and not only because he could remind them that he wasn’t the first Pole to come to the Americans’ aid in a war. He’d tell them Casimir Pulaski was the first. He’d tell them Pulaski had been recruited by Benjamin Franklin in Paris, went to America, saved George Washington’s life, and became a general in the Continental Army before dying of wounds suffered in battle.

This tale of Polish-American cooperation had not been of much consolation to one of the American pilots, who, convinced the cards he held were better than proved to be the case, had thrown a spectacular watch into the pot.

It was a gold-cased civilian—not Air Corps–issued—Hamilton chronograph. It had an easily settable alarm function that caused it to vibrate at the selected time.

Ostrowski’s four jacks and a king had taken the pot.

On the flight line at daybreak the next morning, just before they took off, the American had come to him and asked, if he could come up with three hundred dollars, would Ostrowski sell him the watch?