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“Yes, sir.”
“Promised him what?”
“You’ll never find out if you keep interrupting him,” Mrs. White said. “Put a cork in it!”
“Sir, we, Tiny and me, promised Likharev we would try to get his family—his wife, Natalia, and their sons, Sergei and Pavel, out of Russia. This is important because Mr. Schultz believes, and he’s right, that by now Likharev is starting to think that we lied to him about trying to get his family out—”
“Excuse me, Captain,” Mrs. White interrupted. “Mr. Schultz? You mean Lieutenant Schultz? The old CPO?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Now the admiral’s Number Two,” General White said. “You met him the first time Admiral Souers came to Fort Riley.”
“Pardon the interruption. Please go on, Captain,” Mrs. White said.
“Yes, ma’am. Well, we’ve gotten them—I should say, General Gehlen’s agents in Russia have gotten them—out of Leningrad as far as Poland. That’s what that hundred thousand is all about. It went to General Gehlen’s agents. Now we have to get them . . .
—
“. . . So when Colonel Wilson said he couldn’t help us any more without your permission, I decided I had to get your permission. And here we are.”
General White locked his fingers together and rocked his hands back and forth for a full thirty seconds.
Finally, he asked, “Bill, what are the odds Cronley could pull this off?”
“Sir, I would estimate the odds at just about fifty-fifty,” Wilson said.
General and Mrs. White exchanged a long look, after which White resumed rocking his finger-locked hands together, for about fifteen seconds.
“George Patton was always saying we’re going to have to fight the Russians sooner or later,” he said finally.
He looked at his wife again. She nodded.
“Try to not let this be the lighting of the fuse that does that,” General White said.
“Sir, does that mean . . . ?” Colonel Wilson began.
“It means, Bill, that while you are providing Captain Cronley with whatever he needs, you will try very hard not to light the fuse that starts World War Three.”
“Yes, sir.”
X
[ONE]
Conference Compartment, Car #2
Personal Train of the Commanding General, U.S. Constabulary
Approaching Hauptbahnhof
Munich, American Zone of Occupation, Germany
1615 17 January 1946
The sliding door from the corridor opened and Captain Chauncey L. Dunwiddie stepped inside.
The commanding general, United States Constabulary, was sitting at a twenty-foot-long highly polished wooden conference table around which were also seated more than a dozen officers, the junior of them a lieutenant colonel.
