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“You’re a what?” Sergeant Major Whaley inquired incredulously.
“Why don’t you show Charley your credentials, Casey?” White said.
Wagner handed Whaley his credentials.
“And how old are you, son?” Whaley asked, after he had carefully examined them.
“Seventeen. I’ll be eighteen next month.”
“And even more incredible, Charley,” White said, “Casey earned those credentials. Casey is the fellow who figured out how Odessa was moving Nazis around and across borders in Stars and Stripes trucks, allowing us to bag those two bastards who massacred the slave laborers at Peenemünde.”
“I’ll be damned,” Whaley said.
Casey Wagner blushed.
“Unless we abandon our sinful ways, Sergeant Major, we all will be damned. Except for Colonel Wilson and Mr. Cronley, who have demonstrated, time and again, they can walk between the raindrops of sin and remain as pure as the driven snow.”
“No problem, General,” Whaley said. “I was about to cut the orders transferring the levy to the 26th. I’ll just put Casey on them.”
“It’s not quite that simple, Sergeant,” Cronley said. “We have to give Casey a cover. He has to know what training he would have had if he had gone through the school. And something about the regiment from which he is supposedly transferring. I mean stuff about which Gasthaus he frequented, the nickname of his first sergeant, that sort of thing.”
“I understand, sir. But unless we do that right now, I won’t be able to put him on the orders I’m about to cut. And so far as familiarizing him with a regiment—”
“Thank you, Colonel Wilson,” General White interrupted, “for volunteering to fly Casey to the 10th Constabulary Regiment in Wetzlar immediately after lunch for that background orientation you will arrange for him there with Sergeant Major Donley.”
“I hear and obey, my General,” Wilson said.
“And speaking of lunch, Charley, call Mrs. White and tell her to set places for lunch for all of us. Drop Captain Dunwiddie’s name into the conversation. That will cause her to raise her culinary standards.”
[THREE]
The Prison
The Palace of Justice
Nuremberg, American Zone of Occupation, Germany
1650 23 February 1946
It wasn’t until Cronley was actually at the prison checkpoint that a disturbing thought popped into his mind.
Cohen told me that Macher had been sent to the SS detention compound in Darmstadt.
But he knew I was coming here—“your chat with Sturmbannführer Heinz Macher can be put off until you come back from arranging to insert Casey into the 26th Infantry”—so what the hell is going on?
“If you’re going in, Mr. Cronley, I’ll have to have your weapon,” the captain in charge of the checkpoint said.
“Sorry,” Cronley said, as he hoisted his Ike jacket to gain access to his pistol. “Where have you stashed Heinz M
acher?”
“Our newest guest is in Cell 12, right upper tier,” the captain said. “I know because I had the duty when he arrived.”
“When was that?”
“The day before yesterday. They had been holding him in Darmstadt, but I guess the CIC found out he wasn’t just one more unimportant SS-Sturmbannführer.”
Thank you, Captain. You just told me what to say to this guy.
