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“See Eye See, eh?”

Cronley pointed to where XXIIIrd CIC was lettered on the vertical stabilizer.

“You’re not very talkative, are you?”

“Colonel, we’re trained not to be.”

“And you’re leaving now?”

“Right now.”

“Have a nice flight.”

“Thank you.”

“Get him a fire guard,” the colonel ordered, and then asked, “I presume you’ve filed your flight plan?”

Meaning you suspect if you ask me where I’m going, I’m liable to tell you that’s none of your business, right in front of your men.

But clever fellow that you are, the minute I take off, you’ll go into Weather/Flight Planning and look at my flight plan.

“Uh-huh.”

Two Germans, under the supervision of a U.S. Army corporal, trundled up a large fire extinguisher on wheels.

Cronley climbed into the cockpit and strapped himself in. When the engine was running smoothly, he called the tower for taxi and takeoff permission, then signaled for the wheel chocks to be pulled. He gave the Air Force colonel a friendly wave and put his hand to the throttle.

When he was in takeoff position, he looked at Base Operations and saw the colonel and his men marching purposefully toward it.

What I hope happens now is he’ll call the Fulda Air Strip, tell them a Storch is en route, and for them to find out what the Storch is doing there, and, if possible, keep it from leaving until he can find out why a Storch is flying when the Air Force doesn’t want Storches to fly.

When he finally realizes that the Storch is not going to land at Fulda, he may decide to call the commanding officer of the XXIIIrd CIC and ask him what’s going on. That will be difficult, as the XXIIIrd CIC is not listed in any EUCOM telephone directory.

He advanced the throttle.

“Eschborn, Army Seven-Oh-Seven rolling.”

—

A minute or so later, he looked down at what he presumed was Hoechst.

There was an intact factory of some sort on the bank of what he presumed was the Main River. The factory for some reason he couldn’t imagine had not been reduced to rubble by Air Force B-17s. Neither had a housing development near it.

Rachel is in one of those neat little houses down there, maybe having a cup of coffee after having fed Anton Jr. and Sarah their breakfast and loaded them on the school bus.

Jimmy boy, what the hell have you got yourself into?

—

He decided that there were two ways to attract the least attention to the Storch on the way to Kloster Grünau. One was to climb to, say, six thousand feet, and the other was to fly as low as he safely could. He reluctantly chose the former option, for, while “chasing cows” was always fun, he had to admit that he didn’t have enough time in the Storch to play games with it.

As he made the ascent, he remembered that Colonel Mattingly had given him a week to get from Major Konstantin Orlovsky the names of which of Gehlen’s people had been turned.

And Mattingly meant it.

What he sees as a satisfactory solution to the problem is that Gehlen and Company “without his knowledge” interrogate Orlovsky, such interrogation including anything up to and including pulling out his fingernails, or hanging him upside down over a slow Apache fire, for no more than a day or two.

Why did he give me a week? What’s that all about? Why not two days or two weeks?