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“So long as your orders are lawful, sir.”
“Meaning what?”
“That I don’t think you have the authority to grant authority to Gehlen to take prisoners, to interrogate prisoners, and certainly not to shoot them.”
“Maybe you do belong in the EUCOM stockade. For disobedience to my orders to you to let Sergeant Dunwiddie deal with the NKGB problem.”
“If you put me in the stockade, sir . . .” Cronley began, then hesitated.
“Finish what you started to say,” Mattingly ordered coldly.
“. . . or if I should drop out of contact for more than a day or two . . . or should something happen to me, Colonel Frade would want, would demand, an explanation.”
“You’ve got it all figured out, haven’t you? God damn you!”
Cronley didn’t reply.
Mattingly tugged a silver cigarette case from his tunic pocket, took a cigarette from it, and then lit it with a Zippo lighter.
He exhaled the smoke.
“This has gone far enough,” he announced.
He took another puff and exhaled it through pursed lips.
“My mistake was in taking you into the OSS in the first place,” he said thoughtfully, almost as if talking to himself. “I should have known your relationship with Colonel Frade was going to cause me problems. And which I compounded by sending you to Argentina with those files.”
He looked into Cronley’s eyes.
“So, what do I do with you, Captain Cronley? I can’t leave you at Kloster Grünau thinking you’re not subject to my orders.”
“Was that a question, sir?”
“Consider it one.”
“You can let me deal with the problem of Major Orlovsky.”
“What does that mean?”
“Let me see if I can get the names of Gehlen’s people who gave him those rosters.”
“And how are you going to do that?”
“I don’t know. But I’d like to try. And, sir, I don’t think that I’m not subject to your orders. I just think you’re wrong for wanting to turn the problem over to Gehlen.”
“Don’t you mean ‘General Gehlen,’ Captain?”
“Herr Gehlen has been run through a De-Nazification Court and released from POW status to civilian life. He no longer has military rank, and I think it’s a mistake to let him pretend he does.”
“It makes it easier for him to control his people, wouldn’t you say?”
“I don’t care if they call him Der Führer. I am not going to treat him as a general in a position to give me orders. It has to be the other way around.”
“Or what?”
“You have to go along with that, or relieve me.”
“Whereupon you would tell Colonel Frade why I relieved you?”
