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“Or I nailed it there myself,” Wilson said.
“Your call, Lieutenant Winters,” Wallace said.
“Two things, sir,” Winters said. “First, Colonel Wilson, sir, I really appreciate your concern. Second, Captain Cronley, sir, is there anything in particular you want me to show the Storch pilot?”
“Welcome to Lunatics Anonymous, Lieutenant,” Wallace said.
“What I think we should do now is make our manners to Colonel Fishburn,” Wilson said.
“Why don’t you do that while I get on the SIGABA and have a chat with the Navy?” Wallace replied.
“I was afraid you’d say that.”
“Mitchell has problems with the SIGABA?” Cronley asked.
“No,” Wallace said. “According to Dunwiddie, Mitchell has been up and running since about nineteen hundred last night. Why do you ask?”
“I’ve been wondering why you didn’t get on the SIGABA as soon as you got here. And why you’re all sitting here in the Gooney Bird. There’s a . . . I guess you could call it a ‘lounge’ in the building. Complete with a coffee machine.”
“I was dissuaded from doing just that by Colonel Wilson,” Wallace said. “May I tell the captain why, Colonel?”
“Why not? It may add to his professional knowledge.”
“Colonel Wilson thought it was entirely likely that Colonel Fishburn would ask him if he’d seen you. And if he replied in the negative, that Colonel Fishburn would wonder why not.”
“And if that happened,” Wilson said, “and I think it would have, I would have had to tell him you were flying up and down the border in one of his airplanes, which I did not want to do, or profess innocence vis-à-vis knowledge of your whereabouts. Since I am (a) a West Pointer, and (b) not in the intelligence business, I do not knowingly make false statements to senior officers. Now when I make my manners, I can tell him truthfully, repeat, truthfully, that I came to see him immediately after getting off General White’s aircraft. I don’t expect either you or Major Wallace to understand that, but that’s the way it is.”
But deceiving him is okay, right?
“I understand, sir,” Cronley said.
“And if that question is asked,” Wilson said, “and I believe it will be, I can now reply that I had a brief word with you aboard the general’s aircraft.”
“Yes, sir,” Cronley said.
[TWO]
Hangar Two
U.S. Air Force Base, Fritzlar, Hesse
American Zone of Occupation, Germany
1150 19 January 1946
Technical Sergeant Jerry Mitchell and Sergeant Pete Fortin of the ASA started to rise when Cronley, Wallace, Dunwiddie, Mannberg, Ostrowski, and Schröder filed into what looked like it had once been a control tower and now was the radio room.
“Sit,” Wallace ordered with a smile.
“How we doing?” Cronley said.
“Waiting, sir,” Mitchell said. “They’re usually right on time. We’ve got about nine and a half minutes to wait.”
“Which gives us time to run over what’s going to happen,” Wallace said, “so let’s do that.”
“Yes, sir. Seven-K initiates the contact. They will transmit, three times, a five-number block. Pete’ll type it, and hand it to me. If it matches the number Colonel Mannberg gave us, we will reply with the five-block number he gave us. They’ll check that against their list of numbers. Then we’ll be open. Protocol is that they send, in the clear, a short phrase, a question to verify that Colonel Mannberg is on this end.”
“For example?” Wallace asked.
