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Apparently, the bloom is even further off the rose than I originally thought.

“What I would suggest,” Sergeant Hessinger said, “is that I stay here and think about what we are going to do with the NKGB-er, and you take the Kapitän and drive out to Pullach and see the ASA lieutenant. And while you’re driving out there, and while you are driving back, you think what you can do to make Mrs. Colonel Schumann happy. Right now I have the feeling she doesn’t like you very much.”

[ THREE ]

The South German Industrial Development Organization Compound

Pullach, Bavaria

The American Zone of Occupied Germany

0935 4 November 1945

Cronley’s Opel Kapitän stopped at the outer roadblock to the compound. It was guarded by three Polish guards armed with carbines and dressed in black-dyed U.S. Army fatigues.

One of them walked up to the staff car, took a good look at Cronley, then signaled to the others to move the barrier—concertina barbed wire nailed to a crude wooden framework—out of the way. When they had done so, he signaled that Cronley could enter.

That won’t do, Cronley decided as he drove slowly to the second roadblock.

That guy saw a staff car and a man in uniform and just passed me in. He should—at least—have asked me for my identification.

And that concertina wire has to go, too. If we’re going to pretend that what’s going on in here is an industrial development organization, the entrance can’t look like a POW enclosure.

And maybe get those Poles some different uniforms. So they look like cops, not soldiers.

And, obviously, the sooner I get some of Tiny’s people down here the better.

—

Two hundred yards down the road, there was another checkpoint. More Poles in dyed fatigues, but also an American soldier, a stocky technical sergeant armed with a .45 as well as a carbine.

He walked up to the Kapitän and waited for Cronley to roll down the window.

“You from the CIC?” the sergeant asked.

“That’s what’s painted on the bumpers, Twenty-three CIC,” Cronley replied.

“Where’s Captain Cronley?” the sergeant asked.

Obviously, the sergeant does not think I could be a captain.

Well, there are very few twenty-two-year-old captains.

“My name is Cronley.” He produced his CIC credentials.

The sergeant saluted. Cronley returned it.

“Sorry, Captain.”

“I look so young because I don’t drink, smoke, fornicate, or have impure thoughts,” Cronley said. “I’m actually thirty-six.”

The sergeant laughed.

“Yeah, you are. Sir, there’s a Signal Corps lieutenant looking for you.”

“Where is he?”

“At your quarters.”