[ONE]
Farber Palast
Stein, near Nuremberg, American Zone of Occupation, Germany
0805 26 April 1946
“Good morning, Miss Johansen,” Father McKenna greeted her as she strode into the palace dining room.
“I hate people who are cheerful in the morning.”
“My apologies. It comes naturally. Occupational hazard, you might say.”
“Sure. The Vatican is hiding the Nazis’ dirty money and you’re a fucking choirboy of cheerfulness.”
McKenna, shocked, was speechless.
She turned to Cronley, who looked up at her from his steak-and-eggs breakfast.
“I’m afraid to ask how you slept, Janice. You should be exhausted after our long day at the castle. Buy you some breakfast?”
She ignored the offer. “Your bright idea ain’t going to work, Jimmy.”
“To which of my many bright ideas do you refer?”
“This one,” she said, and handed him a sheet of paper that had a sheet of carbon paper and another sheet of paper stapled to it.”
His eyes went to the top page:
CONSTABULARY TO OPEN NCO ACADEMY
By Janice Johansen
ASSOCIATED PRESS FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT
Berlin, April 6—
Cronley said, “There’s nothing here.”
“Nothing gets past you, does it?”
“Why won’t it work?”
“Because that’s all there is.”
“A new NCO Academy is not news?”
“If I submitted that to Stars and Stripes, they would run it on page seventeen, somewhere buried under the WAC softball tournament highlights. Not that I would submit it to Stripes. The best I could do, sweetie, wasn’t good enough. It still read like what it was, a bullshit PIO press release, and ol’ Janice does not attach her name to bullshit press releases.”
“It’s important to me, to what we’re trying to do here.”
“And for that reason I’m off to Sonthofen.”
“For what?”
“To see if I can provoke good ol’ I. D. White into saying something outrageous onto which I can hang the rest of this lousy yarn.”
“If you ask me, that’s a really lousy idea.”
Janice forced a thin smile. “I don’t recall asking you, sweetie . . . See you when Casey and I get back from Sonthofen. He’s getting the car as we speak.”
“Whoa! You want to take Casey with you? I need him here.”
“More than you need that NCO Academy yarn on the front page of Stripes?”
After a pause, during which Cronley did not reply, Janice said, “I accept your surrender,” and walked out of the dining room.
“Interesting woman,” Father McKenna said.
“I thought people in your line of work weren’t supposed to notice things like magnificent boobs,” Cronley said, mock innocent.
“Why are you so determined to insult me, to pick a fight with me, Cronley?”
“To see what’s going on behind that white collar. In my profession, it’s called knowing your enemy.”
“While I don’t think I could claim to be your friend, even your ally, I most certainly am not your enemy.”
“Your primary purpose here, what the cardinal sent you to do, is to find out as much as you can about how much of a threat my organization poses to yours.”
“My ‘organization,’ as you put it, is the Church of Rome. And—I hope this isn’t too much of a blow to your ego—I don’t think you pose as much of a threat to it as a mosquito does to an elephant by stinging its hindquarters.”
“Got to you, haven’t I? Where’s that well-known I’m a Jesuit, there’s nothing you can say that will bother me attitude?”
Father McKenna didn’t reply.
“By now, Francis, you must understand that I’ve been spending a lot of time with General Serov and Colonel Cohen . . .”
McKenna nodded.
“. . . And I think you will acknowledge that both are senior intelligence officers with a great deal of experience . . .”
McKenna nodded again.
“. . . Therefore, as a very junior, inexperienced intelligence officer, I have always paid rapt attention to whatever they had to say.”
The priest chuckled and shook his head.
“Many times,” Cronley continued, “one or the other has referred to other intelligence agencies as ‘the best in the world.’ Better, in other words, than the CIC, the DCI, and the NKGB. Sometimes, one or the other of them so described General Gehlen’s organizations over his long career. At other times, they said the Zionist organization’s Mossad was not only the best, but vastly superior to ours. And at still other times, both said, separately, that the nameless organization run by your boss, His Holiness Pope Pius XII, was unquestionably the best.”
Father McKenna raised his eyebrows. “But the Church does not have an intelligence service like the NKGB or the DCI.”
“Hear me out. The entire Church is an intelligence service far more extensive and effective than any other.”
“We are agreeing to disagree,” the priest said.
“Intelligence is dumped in your lap, Francis, if you think about it. You don’t have to look for it. But intelligence is intelligence no matter where it comes from. I speak, of course, of the confessional.”
“What is spoken in the confessional remains in the confessional,” the priest said, coldly.
Cronley was undeterred. “Okay, fine. Let’s leave the confessional out of this. But the fact remains that Holy Mother Church has assets in place around the world, as well as a communications system from bottom to top. I don’t know the exact numbers here, but let’s say there is no other population in the world where, conservatively, one-third of the citizenry meets regularly with its officials. And the worst sin of all is action contrary to the best interests of Holy Mother Church.”
“This conversation is beginning to really offend me.”
“I’m simply trying to explain my position. So, let’s turn to Mossad. Why are they so efficient? Well, when they go somewhere—anywhere—the Hebrew population is already on their side—”
“Where are you going with this, James?”
“It’s quite simple: The reason we can’t find von Dietelburg and Burgdorf is because something like ninety-nine percent of the Germans are rooting for them—and against our success in returning them to prison and, ultimately, putting them on trial.”
“But it has to be common knowledge among the Germans that those two are really despicable people. And I’m not even getting into the Church of Saint Heinrich.”
“Francis, I don’t think it’s got anything to do with right or wrong.”
“What, then?”
“How about humiliation? Maybe even the humiliation of humiliation?”
“Now it sounds like you’re babbling again. What is your point?”
“Germany didn’t lose the First World War. They lost War Two.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Germany didn’t surrender in World War One. They came to an armistice with the Allies. The terms of the armistice, and of the Versailles Treaty which followed, were humiliating. They lost territory in Europe. They lost their foreign colonies.”
“We know that. Get to your point, if you have one.”
“They lost World War Two. They were forced to surrender unconditionally. That was even more humiliating than being forced to seek an armistice.”
“I still don’t get your point.”
“The best way to counter the depression that comes with humiliation is to give whoever is humiliating you the finger.”
He demonstrated, making a fist with middle finger extended. McKenna’s expression was one of mild displeasure.
“By doing nothing to help us bag von Dietelburg,” Cronley went on, dropping his hand, “or, even better, doing something that actually helps them avoid getting bagged, they have the satisfaction of giving the finger to the people that are humiliating them.”
“That’s possibly, even probably, true. But, so what?”
“The point is, if we want to bag von Dietelburg and Burgdorf, we’re going to have to do it ourselves, as no one is going to help us. At least, not help us intentionally.”
“Any ideas on how you’re going to do that?”
“I’m headed into Nuremberg. Do you want to tag along?”
“What are we going to do in Nuremberg?”
“Try something I admit is desperate.”
[TWO]
“This is a magnificent automobile,” Father McKenna said as they cruised in the Horch Sport Cabriolet with its canvas top folded down. “I have never been in one.”
“I liked it better before Justice Jackson said he doesn’t care to ride in it because it makes him look like a Nazi big shot en route to a party rally.”
Cronley raised his right hand over his head and rotated it back and forth as if waving to the masses. The priest chuckled.
“That thought occurred to me, too. Where’d you get it?”
“It used to belong to a DCI colonel who got himself kidnapped by Serov. When I got him back, they sent him to the States, and I grabbed the car.”
“Why don’t you get rid of it?”
“That would be admitting I made a mistake. Like you Jesuits, I never admit to making a mistake.”
The priest ignored that.
“What are we going to do in Nuremberg?”
“We’re not going to do anything. I’m going to try to talk Justice Jackson into letting me take SS-Standartenführer Oskar Müller and SS-Brigadeführer Wilhelm Heimstadter out of their cells for a few days.”
Cronley looked at the priest as if trying to judge his reaction. When there was none, he said nothing.
Three minutes later—which seemed much longer—Father McKenna said, “I’m getting the impression that’s all you’re going to tell me. Can I get you to change your mind? Curiosity is killing me.”
“Okay. I don’t think it will work, but I’m going to make clear that their only chance to dodge the hangman—and instead win a trip to Argentina—is if they roll over on von Dietelburg and Burgdorf. I don’t expect them to, but I want to judge their reaction. To see if it’s as strong as it was the last time I offered them a deal.”
“Where are you going to put them when they’re out of their cells?”
“One of them I can stash in the Mansion—DCI headquarters—downtown. I don’t know about the other. Maybe put him in Strasbourg with my friend Colonel Jean-Paul Fortin.”
“Cronley, I’ve spent a lot of time in prisons.”
“I’m shocked! What did they get you for?”
“As a chaplain,” McKenna said, tiredly.
“And?”
“Cronley, if I offer an observation and then a suggestion, will you think about it before you immediately issue a withering opinion of it?”
“Have at it.”
“Prisoners have nothing to do all day and all night but think. As a result, they are usually able to outwit their guards. I’m not talking about escaping, obviously, but communicating with other prisoners, for example.”
“I’ve heard that, but so what?”
“Another thing I noticed is that prisoners don’t trust each other and are thus prone to suspect that prisoner A is a snitch, that prisoner B is getting special treatment for some nefarious reason, et cetera. Still with me?”
Cronley nodded.
“You don’t think you’re going to get anywhere with these two today because you didn’t get very far with them the last time you tried. Correct?”
“Go on. You have my attention.”
McKenna patted the back of the front seat.
“If either one of them was seen riding through the streets of Nuremberg in the backseat of your Nazimobile, it would be all over the prison within hours.”
“I see where you’re going. You are a devious sonofabitch, Father McKenna—I say that with admiration.”
“There are a number of other possibilities that I see.”
“Such as?”
McKenna told him.
[THREE]
Palace of Justice
Nuremberg, American Zone of Occupation, Germany
1135 26 April 1946
“You sure you know what to do?” Max Ostrowski, standing next to the Horch, asked of DCI Agent Cyril Kochanski, who was in the front passenger seat, the car’s roof still folded down. DCI Agent Basil Frankowski was behind the wheel.
Kochanski nodded. “First, I load the Nazi bastard—”
“SS-Brigadeführer Wilhelm Heimstadter,” Ostrowski furnished.
“SS-Brigadeführer Wilhelm Heimstadter,” Kochanski dutifully repeated. “First, I load him in the backseat of the Nazimobile, then get in beside him, and we take off. Then, as soon as we’re out of sight of the Tribunal, I get out of the backseat and climb up front.”
“After telling the general what?”
“That if he even looks like he’s thinking of running off, I’m going to shoot him in the knees.”
“And then?”
“And then Basil takes us on a fifteen-minute tour of Nuremberg, finally ending up at the Mansion.”
“Correct.”
“Are you going to tell me what this is all about?”
“If I told you, I’d have to kill you,” Ostrowski said, smiling.
Cyril Kochanski gave Max Ostrowski the finger and then signaled Basil Frankowski to get moving.
Forty-five minutes later, the Horch turned off Offenbach Platz and stopped before the twelve-foot-tall gate in the Compound wall. Frankowski tapped the horn to get inside.
Kochanski turned in his seat so that he could keep an eye on SS-Brigadeführer Wilhelm Heimstadter. He grunted. Heimstadter, riding alone in back, looked much like a Nazi big shot en route to a rally that Kochanski had heard Captain Cronley mention.
The gate opened inward, and the Horch drove through and up to the front of the large, luxurious house. Kochanski gestured with his fist for Heimstadter to get out. His massive hand almost completely hid the full-size Colt .45 ACP semi-automatic pistol it held.
Then Kochanski got out of the Horch and gestured for Heimstadter to enter the Mansion.
Once inside, he led the German to closed double doors off the foyer.
Kochanski knocked and was told to enter.
Beyond the double doors was the library, a large room with rich, dark leather furniture and book-lined walls. In the center was a heavy wooden table. Seated at it were four men: Colonel Mortimer Cohen, Captain James D. Cronley Jr., Captain Chauncy Dunwiddie, and Father Francis X. McKenna, S.J.
Facing the table were two wooden chairs with arms, and, nearby, four others without arms. Colonel Cohen saw that Heimstadter was trying to survey the luxurious room unnoticed. Then he tried not to stare at Dunwiddie.
“Herr SS-Brigadeführer,” Cohen announced, gesturing at one of the armchairs facing the table. “Please, have a seat.”
Then he pointed to Kochanski and directed him to post himself as guard outside the double doors. The big Pole nodded once, turned on his heels, and marched out.
“You’re lucky, Herr SS-Brigadeführer,” Cohen then said, pushing back his chair. “My august presence and commanding authority are required elsewhere. I had hoped to be part of this interview, as I consider the subject matter of great importance . . . You’ve got it, Cronley.”
Cohen then stood up, as did Cronley and Dunwiddie. Cohen then marched out of the room. Cronley sat back down. Dunwiddie then went to the armless wooden chairs, picked one up using only one hand, then placed it, backward, near Heimstadter. He sat in it, crossing his massive forearms across the top of the chairback.
This bit of theater had been at the suggestion of Father McKenna. He had announced that because Tiny Dunwiddie was not only enormous but also very black, the Germans, not accustomed to such, would be nervous in his presence.
“It therefore follows,” McKenna had added, “that they will be even more nervous being in very close proximity of a strange enormous black man with muscular arms crossed and a cold stare.”
“That’s a very good point,” Dunwiddie had replied, and looked at Cronley. “You’d think someone would have thought of that before now.”
Cronley, who had made the same observation many times at the Pullach Compound near Munich and here at the Mansion, had chosen to ignore the comment. He noted, however, that the priest now looked rather pleased with his announcement.
“And good morning to you, Herr SS-Brigadeführer,” Cronley now began, in fluent German. “How’s every little thing in your life?”
“I have reminded you several times, Captain Cronley, that my rank is generalmajor.”
“Then we have already agreed to disagree. I’ve always believed that once an SS-Brigadeführer, always an SS-Brigadeführer.”
Heimstadter gave him a look of exasperation.
Cronley, intentionally not introducing Dunwiddie, then said, “Herr SS-Brigadeführer, this gentleman is Father Francis Xavier McKenna, of the Society of Jesus. Somehow, a rumor that we were mistreating former senior Nazi officials, such as yourself, reached the Vatican. Cardinal von Hassburger sent Father McKenna to look into it. So please tell him, Herr SS-Brigadeführer, how we’ve been abusing you.”
“I would prefer, Captain, to have that conversation with the SS-Brigadeführer alone,” McKenna said.
“Certainly, Father. Anything to please the Pope’s representative.”
“That’s the purpose of this meeting?” Heimstadter asked. “To hear my complaints about my treatment?”
“That’s one of them,” Cronley said. “But the major one is to give you a chance to save your sorry ass—specifically, your neck—from the hangman’s noose.”
“You might want to consider, Captain,” McKenna said, “that my report will include a section regarding what I observed about the prison staff’s attitude toward its prisoners.”
“Well, then, I’ll have to watch myself. The last thing I need is to have the Pope pissed off at me.”
“I find your attitude toward me approaches intentional discourtesy.”
“I’m crushed,” Cronley said. “You got any more complaints or can I tell Willi here what this meeting is all about?”
“Do whatever you think you should,” McKenna said.
“Okay. So, Willi, the powers that be propose a deal. You tell us either where we can find von Dietelburg and Burgdorf or where Odessa is hiding the money and, quote, other valuables, unquote, it didn’t put in the Vatican Bank. For that information, you (a) won’t be hanged, (b) will get a new identity, and (c) will be safely transported to Argentina.”
“I’ve already told you, many times, that (a) I have no idea where Burgdorf or von Dietelburg might be and (b) that if I did know, I wouldn’t tell you.”
“You realize, Willi, that I’ve been ordered to offer the same deal to your pal Müller?”
“If I were a betting man, Captain Cronley, I’d wager that Standartenführer Müller’s reply will be much the same as mine.”
“Probably, but not certainly. He’s always looking on the bright side. He may decide that the sun shining on him and his family in Argentina is a more attractive prospect than it shining on an unmarked grave here.”
“I don’t think or expect you will understand this, Captain Cronley, but it’s a matter of honor.”
“Well, you heard the offer, Willi, and rejected it. I suppose you can change your mind at any time before they drop you through that hole in the gallows. I’m out of here. Father McKenna, when you’re through with Willi, raise your voice and call for the guard.”
Cronley then raised his voice, called, “Guard,” and the door opened. He looked at Dunwiddie. “Let’s go.”
As Dunwiddie stood, Cronley noticed that it caused Heimstadter discomfort.
Good, you miserable sonofabitch.
McKenna sat quietly for a minute before reaching in his pocket and removing a packet of Chesterfields. He offered it to Heimstadter, who motioned no with his hand, and said, “Danke. I gave up smoking.”
“I never took it up,” the priest said, putting the pack back in his pocket. “Well, Herr Heimstadter, how have they been treating you? Any complaints?”
“I don’t know if this qualifies as a complaint, but I was thinking there is something quite perverse in their concern for my health, mental and physical.”
“How so perverse?”
“They want to be absolutely sure that when they drop me through that hole in the gallows Cronley was talking about, I’m in perfect health and quite sane.”
Heimstadter looked at McKenna as if to determine his reaction to the comment.
“I suppose that could be considered ‘gallows humor,’ but frankly, Herr Heimstadter, I’ve never seen much to laugh about in such humor. Actually, I’m just about convinced that what you and others like you and Müller intend to do—bravely face the hangman’s noose—is a mortal sin.”
“How do you figure that?” Heimstadter flared. “We swore an oath before God! What we are doing is what we swore to do.”
“I’d prefer not getting into a philosophical argument with you. I shouldn’t have said that. I apologize.”
“My experience has been that people apologize only when they know they’re wrong,” Heimstadter said, smugly.
“You do want to argue, don’t you? My experience is that people want to argue only when they’re not at all sure of the validity of their position.”
“I’m absolutely sure of the validity of mine.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but this oath you took was to follow Adolf Hitler, right? Everybody in the SS took that oath?”
“Follow the Führer’s orders unto death, specifically.”
“But he’s dead, isn’t he? By suicide?”
“So?”
“How can you follow the orders of a dead man?”
“His orders, his plans for a Thousand-Year Reich, did not die with him.”
“Then this is about this heretical religion he was trying to start?”
“It is not a heretical religion. It is about the Thousand-Year Reich that Adolf Hitler started.”
“And you feel your oath to follow Hitler’s orders requires you to support the notion of a Thousand-Year Reich?”
“Absolutely.”
“Forgive me, but I can’t see how your committing suicide by hangman’s noose is going to help anything.”
“Our deaths on the gallows will serve as an inspiration to those following in our footsteps!”
McKenna was silent for thirty-odd seconds.
The fury was still evident in Heimstadter’s facial expression, and McKenna sought to calm it with rational discussion.
“This is what will happen on the day of your execution,” he began, in the practiced tone of one who had counseled thousands through the screen of a confessional window. “The date of the execution will not be made public. You will be awakened at the usual hour. If you normally go to mass, you will do so.
“Then, without prior notice and at a random hour, you will be led from your prison cell to the gallows. Your feet and hands will be tied. The sentence of the Tribunal will be read. The hangman will place a black bag over your head, then the noose around your neck. You may well wish to request a cigarette at that point.”
Heimstadter, wordless, stared at McKenna.
“Then without warning,” the priest went on, “the door in the floor beneath your feet will fall away, and you will be dropped through the opening. The knot in the noose may—or may not—break your neck and cause instant death.
“Your lifeless body will be taken from the noose and laid on the ground. Your hands will be folded across your chest holding a placard bearing your name, and a photograph taken.
“Your corpse will then be placed in the back of an Army truck. No casket. This procedure will be followed for the next four to six men scheduled for execution that day.
“All of the bodies will be covered by a tarpaulin. The truck will then drive to a crematorium, where the corpses will all be burned.
“At this point, just as soon as the ashes are cool enough to handle, a senior officer whose identity will never be made public will supervise the placement of your ashes into a fifty-five-gallon steel drum along with the ashes of the others executed.
The drum with these comingled ashes will be loaded on a truck carrying other drums holding the ashes of other Nazis, those killed after the liberation of the concentration camps.
“The truck will then be driven to any of the five rivers within a hundred miles of the Tribunal. The senior officer will give the driver directions. A jeep full of MPs will follow the truck.
“Once on a bridge over the river, the truck will stop, and the contents of six of the drums will be dumped onto the bridge. The MPs will then first shovel all the ashes into one pile, which will serve to comingle them, and then shovel the ashes off the bridge into the river. Finally, they will puncture the bottoms of the drums and throw them into the river.
“The point of all this is to make sure that the final resting place, so to speak, of those executed will never be known.”
Heimstadter cleared his throat.
“Nice try, Father. But it didn’t work.”
“Excuse me?”
“Go fuck yourself, papist!”
McKenna nodded slightly and sighed.
“I’ll talk with you again when you’ve regained your composure.”
McKenna stood up and went to the door.
“Guard!”
This time, Cyril Kochanski and Basil Frankowski appeared at the double doors, both armed.
“I thought I was getting to him,” McKenna said to Cronley five minutes later. “I was wrong.”
“You want to try Müller?”
“I will if you insist, but, frankly, my ego isn’t up to it.”
“Well, then, I think what we should do is send ol’ Willi back to his cell at the Tribunal, after another tour of the city, and then when the Horch finally comes back, we head back to Castle Wewelsburg.”
[FOUR]
Wewelsburg Castle
Near Paderborn, American Zone of Occupation, Germany
1830 26 April 1946
Cronley found Lieutenant Colonel David P. Dickinson and Major Donald G. Lomax in what he thought of as King Arthur Hall, but designated as his Court Room, with twelve doors and an enormous, circular wooden table large enough for King Arthur and his twelve Knights of the Round Table.
They went over a stack of huge sheets of parchmentlike paper, making notations on them, after consulting their notebooks.
“What did you find out about our humble home?” Cronley asked.
“It’s riddled with secret rooms, passageways, et cetera,” Dickinson replied. “What Lomax and I are trying to decide is, when were they added to the castle? In the old days or when the modifications were made ten, twenty years ago?”
“Revealing my ignorance, why does that matter?”
“We don’t want a ceiling to fall because we took out a wall. The rule of thumb is, when knocking something down, reverse the steps taken to build the building to take it down.”
“How do you know what steps somebody else followed, and in what order, building something ten years—or a hundred years—ago?”
“That’s the fun part, Captain Cronley,” Colonel Dickinson said. “But not to worry, Lomax and Dickinson, engineers extraordinary, are working on it.”
“And when do you think you’ll be finished?”
“Some time in this century, if we’re lucky,” Lomax said, and then saw the look on Cronley’s face and felt sorry for him.
“I think we can start to go through a small wall in the big round room tomorrow. One of the possibilities is different from the other eleven. It looks like that might be the place where the project was finished—ergo sum, the place to start our reverse construction.”
“What time tomorrow?”
“How does oh-nine-hundred grab you?”
“Not as tightly as oh-eight-hundred.”
“Oh-eight-hundred it is.”
[FIVE]
King Arthur’s Court
Wewelsburg Castle
Near Paderborn, American Zone of Occupation, Germany
0750 27 April 1946
When Cronley arrived, he had expected to find the “destruction” crew setting up in the big round room, with Colonel Dickinson standing at King Arthur’s huge round table, perhaps marking up with a pencil parchment sheets showing hidden rooms and passageways in the castle.
What Cronley and Father McKenna found when they entered the room was Dickinson working, but not on any such floor plans.
He was working on King Arthur’s round table itself.
Dickinson had somehow managed to get three Dodge three-quarter-ton trucks from what had become the motor pool up onto the second floor and into the room.
Originally designed as an ammo carrier, its three-quarter-ton chassis had been quickly adapted, officially and unofficially, to other tasks. Some, for example, were combat vehicles, with a .50 caliber Browning machine gun mounted on a pedestal in the bed.
Dickinson’s trio of three-quarter-tons in the room had been converted, by the installation of a winch-and-cable mechanisms in their beds, into vehicle-recovery trucks. While these winch-and-cables could not lift an enormous GM 6×6 truck, they were more than powerful enough to pick up a jeep.
But what these “jeep wreckers” were doing now, along with an enormous crane that had its end squeezed through one of the windows, was aiding in the disassembly of King Arthur’s round table.
“Impressive, Colonel,” Cronley said as they approached.
“Don’t get too close,” Dickinson said. “The damn thing tips the scales at two tons, if it’s an ounce. And there’s always a chance that, weakened by deconstruction, the son of a bitch could let loose and crush shit out of everyone and anything in its path.”
“Duly noted,” McKenna said, wide-eyed, taking a couple steps back.
“We got started a little early,” Dickinson said to Cronley. “Didn’t think you’d mind.”
“Dumb question?” Cronley said.
“Shoot.”
“Why take apart the table? I thought we were concerned with deconstructing walls, et cetera.”
“So did I. Here, let me show you something.”
Dickinson led them over to a battered wooden chair against the wall. Leaning against it was a heavy paper tube four feet in length and three inches in diameter. He pulled from the tube a loose roll of parchmentlike papers. When he unrolled them, Cronley saw that they were the engineer’s working blueprints showing walls and measurements made the previous day.
The top sheet showed a pencil-sketched outline of what Cronley recognized as King Arthur’s Court.
“So, here,” Dickinson said, pointing, “you can see this is where we’re standing.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And this is where the round table sat. And this—”
“Oh, shit!” Cronley blurted.
“Yeah. It’s not certain, but we won’t know till that table . . .”
“Carry on, Colonel. I’m holding you up.”
Cronley and McKenna watched from a safe distance as the entire table was lifted six feet off the floor, then tilted enough by one of the three-quarter-ton wreckers so that the other two wreckers, their windshields folded down, could get underneath.
Sturdy ropes were wrapped around the table while half a dozen soldiers, some equipped with air-powered jacks and others with air-powered saws, broke the table into four roughly equal pieces.
One piece remained attached to the crane. The remaining three were held by the wreckers.
Under Dickinson’s precise—if profane, even blasphemous—direction, one by one the pieces of the table were inched through the castle wall opening and then lowered onto a waiting 6×6 in the courtyard.
Cronley was about to turn away from watching the activity in the courtyard when there came the sound of a siren, then multiple sirens.
An M8 armored car drove into the courtyard, followed by a second M8, and then three three-quarter-tons in personnel carrier mode. Each held eight Constabulary troopers.
There was blast of a whistle, and the troopers in the three-quarter-tons leapt out of them, clutching Thompson submachine guns. They acted as if they expected to be attacked at any moment.
And then there was action in the second M8.
Major General I. D. White, wearing a shiny helmet liner with the two silver stars indicating his rank gleaming on its front, leapt nimbly to the ground. Two more Thompson-armed troopers followed him. White tucked a riding crop under his arm and marched regally toward the castle entrance.
Dickinson walked up to Cronley to see the source of the sirens.
“Captain,” he said, helpfully, “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the general is looking for you. And I suggest it might be a good idea not to keep him waiting.”
Cronley met his eyes, then turned and walked quickly to the door before breaking into a trot.