[ONE]
Aboard The Blue Danube
East–West Germany Border
2055 22 April 1946
Colonel Mortimer Cohen, tunic unbuttoned and puffing on a long, dark cigar, was sitting on one of the two small couches in what was somewhat grandly called the Drawing Room of the Senior Officer’s Compartment when Father McKenna entered.
Captain James D. Cronley Jr., who was sitting on the opposite couch, greeted him: “Father Francis, time and The Blue Danube wait for no man. I thought I told you that.”
“I had to wind up several things for the cardinal,” McKenna replied.
“He doesn’t even wind his own watch?” Cronley asked, innocently.
The priest, ignoring Cronley, set his suitcase on the floor and sat down next to him.
The three of them had spent just about all day aboard a C-47, waiting to depart Tempelhof. Permission to do so had never come.
First it was the weather, then it was the Russians flying dangerously close to American planes on purpose. And then it was the damn weather again, then the damn Russians again, all damn day.
About half past three, the priest had announced that he had promised to check in with the cardinal and that he would catch up to them later. He was out the door of the Gooney Bird before Cohen or Cronley could raise an objection.
Half an hour after that, Cohen had finally given up on flying to Munich and had ordered Cronley to get them berths on The Blue Danube, the Army train which ran every night between Berlin and Vienna.
When he tried to get the berths, though, he was told there were none available. Cronley had solved this problem by mumbling he was Colonel [inaudible] and telling the RTO that he didn’t care who got bumped, Colonel Cohen, Mr. Cronley, and “Archbishop” McKenna would be on The Blue Danube.
“Where’s General Serov?” the priest asked.
“It’s just about nine. I would guess he’s at the Four Seasons in Munich, selecting an appropriate wine to go with his dinner.”
“He’d have had to fly to be able to do that,” the priest said. It was more of a question than a statement.
“The Soviet aircraft which fly dangerously close to Allied aircraft, Francis, do not fly dangerously close to other Soviet aircraft.”
“I suppose I should have thought of that.”
A middle-aged, somewhat paunchy chief warrant officer entered the compartment without knocking. He walked to the window and pulled down the shade.
“Colonel,” he barked, “you understand that nobody touches that from now on. Got it?”
“Touches what?” Cronley asked. He was wearing ODs with lapel insignia indicating he was a civilian employee of the Army.
“The curtain! Don’t touch the goddamn curtain. It stays down. Got it?”
“How’m I going to open the window if I don’t open the curtain?” Cronley asked, innocently.
“Jesus, where the hell are you from, Mars? Especially don’t open, don’t even touch, the goddamn window.”
“Whatever you say. Ain’t that right, Father Francis?”
“Absolutely.”
Cronley saw that he had pissed off both the warrant officer and the priest. He was pleased.
“What I would like to do,” Cronley announced when the warrant officer had finally left the compartment, “is open the curtain and the window, drop my pants, and ride through East Germany with my ass hanging out the window.”
Colonel Cohen chuckled.
“It would be a little chilly,” McKenna said.
“Probably,” Cronley agreed.
“The cardinal is curious about Reverend McGrath, and, frankly, so am I. What can you tell me about him?”
“A lot,” Cohen said, “but I wonder why we should.”
“I thought we were agreed to cooperate on this business?”
“Helmut and I agreed to give you access to Castle Wewelsburg. Period. Not to brief you on our friends and associates.”
That silenced the young priest. Cronley wondered how long that would last.
Maybe ten minutes later, McKenna asked, “Is General Serov on your list of forbidden subjects?”
“That would depend, Francis, on your questions about him,” Cohen said.
“Why did he fly instead of traveling with us?”
“Flying is of course faster. But, more important, don’t you think it would arouse curiosity if a Russian general got on The Blue Danube?”
“I didn’t think about that,” McKenna said.
Cronley wondered, Is this an act or is he really that naïve?
Cohen said, “He’ll meet us at the Four Seasons. Then we’ll go to the Pullach Compound.”
“What’s the Pullach Compound?”
“A top secret intelligence operation run by General Gehlen, who used to run Abwehr Ost for the Germans.”
“What will we be doing there?”
“If we told you, Francis,” Cohen said, “we’d have to kill you.”
“I never know when you’re pulling my leg,” the priest complained.
“Now you’re getting it,” Cronley said.
[TWO]
Pullach Compound
Near Munich, American Zone of Occupation, Germany
1305 23 April 1946
Reinhard Gehlen, as a Wehrmacht generalmajor, had commanded Abwehr Ost, the German espionage operation dealing with the Soviet Union. He now was chief executive of the Süd-Deutsche Industrielle Entwicklungsorganisation, the South German Industrial Development Organization. It had nothing whatever to do with industrial development but rather did much the same thing vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, inside and outside the Russian border, and under the aegis of the United States Directorate of Central Intelligence, from its heavily guarded Compound in the village of Pullach.
Since setting up shop, so to speak, Gehlen had become so close to the head of the DCI, Rear Admiral Sidney W. Souers, that they were on a Sid and Rhiny nickname basis.
Gehlen also habitually called his subordinates by their nicknames or Christian names—while they addressed him as Herr General—but he was not that close to any of them at the Compound.
Gehlen attributed this to his service in the Abwehr, both before and during the war. Some of the friends he had made coming up in the German Army had been killed. Those losses hurt.
Others had betrayed him, which had been even more painful.
Nor was Gehlen close to any of the Americans at the Compound—with the notable exception of Captain James D. Cronley Jr.
Gehlen had “inherited” Cronley, as he thought of it, just as the OSS was being disestablished but the Directorate of Central Intelligence was by no means up and running. The European Command was trying to take advantage of that situation by taking over the Süd-Deutsche Industrielle Entwicklungsorganisation. Gehlen knew he could not do what was expected of him with a U.S. Army intelligence officer looking over his shoulder and offering “helpful” suggestions.
The Pullach Compound was guarded by an oversize company of American Negro soldiers. During the war, they had been in an antitank battalion and had taken pride that they indeed were fighting soldiers and not working as laborers at a quartermaster’s depot somewhere or as stevedores in one of the ports.
They originally had had black officers, but recently there had been no black officers available to assign to the duty. The first white officer assigned to it had done a good job, but, inevitably, he had gone home.
When Gehlen took one quick look at the new commanding officer, he saw cause for concern. Cronley was a second lieutenant, for one thing, and looked, despite his size and bulk, like he had just graduated high school.
But Gehlen quickly learned that his usual shrewd snap judgment of people in the case of Cronley was pretty far off the mark. Cronley was nowhere near being a just-about-useless second lieutenant. Gehlen began to realize this when he explained the problems Cronley was about to face with his black soldiers.
“I don’t see it as much of a problem, General,” Cronley said with monumental self-confidence.
“And why is that, Lieutenant?”
“A very wise man once told me that if a second lieutenant—or, for that matter, a lieutenant colonel—finds himself in a situation where he really doesn’t know what to do, he should go find a good sergeant and listen to him.”
“That’s good advice. Who was this wise man?”
“My father, sir.”
“Your father was an officer?”
“In War One, a light colonel, sir, the executive officer of Colonel Donovan—excuse me, General Donovan. Between wars, Uncle Bill was the family lawyer. I suppose that had some influence on my winding up in the DCI.”
Gehlen routinely ate breakfast, and sometimes lunch, with the officers of his staff, but now dined alone. After his first “chat” with Cronley, he started inviting him to dinner.
As this was out of character for him, he gave it considerable thought and finally concluded it was because the young and very junior officer stimulated him intellectually. And when Gehlen thought about that he was forced to conclude that Cronley’s mind was as sharp, perhaps even sharper, than his own.
More as after-dinner entertainment than anything else, Gehlen began to tell Cronley about what he thought of as his personal unsolved puzzles—personal because they had little or nothing to do with his work for the DCI and because most of them dated back to just before the surrender.
One so-called puzzle was Phoenix—Operation Phoenix—meaning that, after some time had passed, the Fourth Reich would rise, phoenixlike, from the ashes of the Third Reich.
Gehlen’s Nazis knew many details of Operation Phoenix, and given the choice between sharing those with the Office of Strategic Services or being returned to Germany to face the wrath of the Allies and the Jews, they chose to work with the OSS.
And then an American Jew, Colonel Mortimer Cohen, who provided CIC security for the War Crimes Tribunal in Nuremberg, came up with something.
According to Cohen, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler had started a new, nameless religion at Castle Wewelsburg. Gehlen had heard only whispered rumors about it and decided to take a closer look. But it was now guarded by Cohen’s agents. Within an hour of their first meeting, Gehlen and Cohen had become fast friends and co-conspirators determined to do away with the Church of Saint Heinrich the Divine.
As soon as Cohen, Cronley, and McKenna had been passed through the outer of three checkpoints of the Compound, Gehlen had been notified. He was waiting for them when they walked into his office.
“Jim, I’m so sorry about Mrs. Moriarty.”
Cronley nodded.
“Thank you, General.”
“Who he, Morty?” Gehlen asked, pointing to the priest.
“This is Father McKenna,” Cohen replied. “He’s here to hear your confession and save your soul.”
The priest’s face showed he was not amused, but he said nothing.
“If it gets back to the Vatican, Father, that you’re running around with these two . . .” Gehlen said.
“The Vatican knows,” Cohen said. “At least, Cardinal von Hassburger does, and he and Pius XII are pals. We are in the process of establishing one of those ‘the enemy of my enemy’ relationships with the Holy Mother Church.”
“That’ll have to wait until after I deal with von Dietelburg and Burgdorf. Got any idea where they are?”
Gehlen shook his head.
“In the good old days, I could have called upon the Sicherheitsdienst and the Gestapo to find people for me. Now I have to rely on the CIC . . .”
Cohen chuckled. “I feel your pain, General.”
“Either of you have any thoughts on why they attacked the safe house?” Gehlen asked.
“Well, I suspect they don’t like me,” Cronley said.
“If I were those two,” Cohen said, “I’d be more concerned with getting my ass out of Dodge than whacking Americans.”
“That also occurred to me,” Gehlen said.
“Maybe it was staged to impress their own people,” Cronley said. “‘Hey, guys, look. We’re so sure of ourselves, we can whack Americans.’”
“That’s certainly a possibility,” Cohen said. “Carrying with it the suggestion that Odessa may be having problems of its own.”
“I wouldn’t count on that,” Gehlen said. “So, tell me about this arrangement you’re trying to reach with the Holy Mother Church.”
“With my usual eloquence,” Cohen said, “I suggested to the cardinal that the Church of Saint Heinrich is as dangerous to him, to the Vatican, as communism. I don’t think he was convinced but he sent McKenna to have a look at Wewelsburg. He admitted that he’d sent people to have a look before, but my people had kept them out.”
“I just had an idea,” Cronley said.
Cohen turned to him. “That’s always dangerous. But let’s have it.”
“We’ve been saying those death’s-head rings—and God knows what else—may have been put in a cave or a tunnel and then the opening was dynamited. And we haven’t been able to find the cave, or whatever. How about having some experts look for it? And, for that matter, have a look at Wewelsburg Castle?”
“Where are we going to get the experts?”
“You know what a Light Engineer company’s like?”
Cohen shrugged. “I can only guess that a Light Engineer company paints buildings and a Heavy Engineer company builds buildings. Or blows them up.”
“I don’t often have this opportunity, so I’m taking great pleasure in being able to say, ‘Colonel, sir, your ignorance of the function, the capabilities, of a Light Engineer company is shocking.’”
“Okay, wiseass, enlighten me.”
“There are basically three kinds of engineer companies,” Cronley said. “Combat engineers are the guys who fix roads, place and remove mines, do the dirty work of digging trenches, maintaining roads at night in the rain during an artillery barrage. Then there are the engineer companies that handle really big jobs, like keeping the Mississippi River navigable. Then there’s the third kind, Light Engineer companies.”
“Which do what?”
“Everything the other two don’t. The opposite of how it sounds, actually—they build airstrips, bridges, et cetera.”
“Presumably, there is a point to this lecture?”
“There is a Light Engineer company in the Constabulary. If we can talk General White into loaning us one of its platoons, they can do what we haven’t done—take a really close look at Castle Wewelsburg, maybe find hidden rooms, tunnels. Maybe they could even find the cave with the death’s-head rings.”
“I retract fifty percent of the unkind thoughts I’ve been having about you, Super Spook. Can we ask White on the telephone?”
“I think we have to do it face-to-face.”
“And since you don’t dare go see General White before you see Justice Jackson . . .”
“Nuremberg, here we come.”