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“We’re saying that both of them, the IG, too, were NKGB agents,” Dunwiddie said.
“And the water heater explosion?”
“My orders from Colonel Frade, about finding and dealing with the leak, were to get out of General Gehlen’s way when he was dealing with it. I complied with that order.”
“And didn’t tell Mattingly, or Greene—for that matter, Frade—about your suspicions?”
“They weren’t suspicions. The only way the NKGB could have learned about our sending Likharev to Argentina, and when and how, was from my loving Rachel,” Cronley said.
“And, as the general pointed out,” Dunwiddie said, “a day or two after we caught Likharev sneaking out of here, Colonel Schumann showed up here and demanded to be let in. It took shooting his engine out with a .50 caliber Browning to keep him out. The general suggested Colonel Schumann’s interest in Kloster Grünau was because he suspected we had Orlovsky/Likharev.”
“My God!” Ashton said.
“Gehlen further suggested that how Jim planned to deal with the situation wasn’t practical.”
“He said it was childish,” Cronley corrected him.
“And this impractical, childish situation was?” Ashton asked.
“I was going to shoot both of them and then go tell Mattingly why.”
“General Gehlen said Jim going to the stockade . . .”
“Or the hangman’s noose,” Cronley interjected.
“. . . made no sense.”
“You didn’t even consider going to Mattingly and telling him what you suspected? You just—”
“You’re going to have to learn that when you tell Mattingly anything . . .” Cronley interrupted.
“I’m going to have to learn?” Ashton interrupted. “I don’t think I like you telling me anything I have to do.”
“. . . Mattingly will look at it through the prism of what’s good for Colonel Robert Mattingly,” Cronley finished.
“Did you just hear what I said, Captain Cronley?”
“Yeah, Colonel Ashton, I heard. But you better get used to it. That won’t be the last time I’ll tell you what I think you have to do. Don’t get blinded by those silver oak leaves. What the hell makes you think you can get off the plane and start telling us what to do? You don’t know enough of what’s going—”
“Enough,” Tiny boomed. “Goddamn it! Both of you, stop right there!”
He sounded like the first sergeant he had so recently been, counseling two PFCs who were doing something really stupid.
And then, as if he had heard what he said, and was now cognizant that captains cannot talk to lieutenant colonels as if they are PFCs doing something really stupid, he went on jocularly, “In the immortal words of the great lover of our revolutionary era, the revered Benjamin Franklin, ‘We must hang together, gentlemen, else, we shall most assuredly hang separately.’”
Ashton glowered at him for a long moment.
Finally he said, “Actually, Jim, I must admit the little fellow has a point.”
“Every once in a great while, he’s right about something,” Cronley said, and then added, “I was out of line. I apologize.”
“Apology rejected as absolutely unnecessary,” Ashton said.
After a moment, he went on. “So what’s next?”
“Before we get to what’s next,” El Jefe said, “I have a request.”
“For what?”
