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“What’s this?” Orlovsky asked, pointing to the tray Sergeant Clark had put on a small table. “The hearty meal the condemned man gets before he’s executed?”

“You’re so good, Orlovsky,” Cronley went on, “that I don’t really know if you really would welcome a bullet in the back of the head, or whether that’s just more of your bullshit.”

“You are not going to be shot, Konstantin,” Welner said. “I promise you that. What’s going to happen to you is that you’re being sent to Argentina.”

Orlovsky looked at him with cold eyes. “You’re pretty good yourself, Father. You almost had me convinced your sole interest in this was the salvation of my soul.”

“Not my sole interest. I was, I am, also interested in the lives and souls of your wife and children. Presuming, of course, that you really have a family back in Russia.”

“We should know that soon enough,” Cronley said. “General Gehlen has already issued orders to see if there really is an Orlovsky family in Russia and, if there is—frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised either way—to get them out of Holy Mother Russia and to Argentina.”

“You would do that as a gesture of Christian charity, right?” Orlovsky asked sarcastically.

“No,” Cronley said sharply. “If there is a Mrs. Orlovsky, and if we get her to Argentina, maybe she can talk some sense into you. But enough of this. Time flies. Last chance to eat your lunch, Major Orlovsky. Or is it Colonel Orlovsky?”

Orlovsky didn’t reply.

“Okay, Sergeant Clark,” Cronley said.

The enormous non-com wrapped his arms around Orlovsky.

“Doctor!” Cronley called.

A slight German in a white coat, who looked undernourished, came into the room.

“I need his buttocks,” he said in heavily accented English.

Sergeant Clark bent Orlovsky over the small table, knocking the food tray off in the process.

Gehlen’s doctor inserted—stabbed—a hypodermic needle into Orlovsky’s buttocks, and then slowly emptied it into him.

Orlovsky almost instantly went limp.

“Do you wish that I bandage him now?” the doctor asked.

“Might as well do it now.”

As he wrapped Orlovsky’s head in white gauze, eventually covering everything but his eyes and his nostrils, the doctor explained what Lewis could expect and what he was to do.

“He will start to regain consciousness in approximately three to four hours, depending on his natural resistance to the narcotic. The sign of this will be the fluttering of his eyes. His eyelids. You will then inject him again. I have prepared ten hypodermic needles for that purpose. You understand?”

“Got it,” Lewis said.

The doctor then wrapped Orlovsky’s hands with gauze and put them in two slings across his chest.

“The greatest risk to his well-being will be during the flight to Frankfurt in the Storch. As soon as possible, get him into a horizontal position. If there are signs of distress, get him on his feet and walk him around.”

“Got it,” Lewis said.

“Okay, let’s get this show on the road,” Cronley ordered.

Staff Sergeant Clark, without apparent effort, scooped the Russian up in his arms.

Cronley had an off-the-wall thought: He looks like a bridegroom carrying his bride to the nuptial bed.

Ten minutes later the Storch carrying Cronley, Father Welner, and Orlovsky broke ground. The second Storch, carrying Kurt Schröder and Sergeants Lewis and Clark stuffed in the back, lifted off thirty seconds later.

[ TEN ]