The Assassination Option

[ONE]

The MP at the gate did not attempt to stop the Packard Clipper when it approached the gate. He had seen enough cars from the White House pool to know one when he saw one, and this one was also displaying a blue plate with two silver stars, indicating that it was carrying a rear admiral (upper half).

The MP waved the car through, saluted crisply, and then went quickly into the guard shack — which was actually a neat little tile-roofed brick structure, not a shack — and got on the phone.

“White House car with an admiral,” he announced.

This caused activity at the main entrance. A Medical Corps lieutenant colonel, who was the Medical Officer of the Day — MOD — and a Rubenesque major of the Army Nurse Corps, who was the NOD — Nurse Officer of the Day — rushed to the lobby to greet the VIP admiral from the White House.

No Packard Clipper appeared.

“Where the hell did he go?” the MOD inquired finally.

“If it’s who I think it is,” the NOD said, “he’s done this before. He went in the side door to 233. The auto accident major they flew in from South America.”

The MOD and the NOD hurried to the stairwell and quickly climbed it in hopes of greeting the VIP admiral from the White House to offer him any assistance he might require.

They succeeded in doing so. They caught up with Rear Admiral Sidney W. Souers and his aide-de-camp, Lieutenant James L. Allred, USN, as the latter reached to push open the door to room 233.

“Good morning, Admiral,” the MOD said. “I’m Colonel Thrush, the Medical Officer of the day. May I be of service?”

“Just calling on a friend, Colonel,” the admiral replied. “But thank you, nonetheless.”

He nodded to his aide to open the door.

The NOD beat him to it, and went into the room.

There was no one in the hospital bed, whose back had been cranked nearly vertical. A bed tray to one side held a coffee thermos, a cup, and an ashtray, in which rested a partially smoked thick, dark brown cigar. The room was redolent of cigar smoke.

“He must be in the toilet,” the nurse announced, adding righteously, “He’s not supposed to do that unassisted.”

Lieutenant Allred went to the toilet door, knocked, and asked, “You okay, Major?”

“I was until you knocked at the door,” a muffled voice replied.

“Thank you for your interest, Colonel, Miss,” Admiral Souers said.

They understood they were being dismissed, said, “Yes, sir,” in chorus, and left the room.

“Who is he?” the MOD asked.

“You mean the admiral, or the major?”

“Both.”

“All I know about the admiral is that the word is that he’s a pal of President Truman. And all I know about the major is that he was medically evac’d from someplace in South America, maybe Argentina, someplace like that, and brought here. Broken leg, broken arm, broken ribs. And no papers. No Army papers. He told one of the nurses he was in a car accident.”

“I wonder why here?” the MOD asked. “There are very good hospitals in the Canal Zone, and that’s a lot closer to Argentina than Washington.”

The NOD shrugged.

“And that admiral showed up an hour after he did,” she said. “And shortly after that, the major’s family started coming. He has a large family. I think they’re Puerto Ricans. They were all speaking Spanish.”

“Interesting,” the MOD said.

Major Maxwell Ashton III, Cavalry, detail Military Intelligence, a tall, swarthy-skinned, six-foot-three twenty-six-year-old, tried to rise from the water closet in his toilet by using a chromed support mounted to the wall. The support was on the left wall. Major Ashton’s left arm was in a cast and the cast was in a sling. Using his right arm, he managed to rise about eighteen inches from the toilet seat before his hand slipped and he dropped back down.

He cursed. Loudly, colorfully, obscenely, and profanely, in Spanish, and for perhaps thirty seconds.

He then attempted to rise using the crutch he had rested against the toilet wall. On the third try, he made it. With great difficulty, he managed to get his pajama trousers up from the floor and over his right leg, which was encased in plaster of paris, and to his waist.

“Oh, you clever fucking devil, you!” he proclaimed, in English.

He unlocked the door, held it open with his forehead, and then managed to get the crutch into his armpit, which permitted him to escape the small room.

He was halfway to the bed when Lieutenant Allred attempted to come to his aid.

Ashton impatiently waved him off, made it to the bed, and, with difficulty, got in.

“You should have asked a nurse to help you,” Allred said.

“I’m sure it’s different in the Navy, but in the Cavalry, we consider it unbecoming an officer and a gentleman to ask women with whom we are not intimately acquainted to assist us in moving our bowels,” Ashton said.

Admiral Souers laughed.

“I’m delighted to find you in a good mood, Max,” he said. “How’s it going?”

“Sir, do you really want to know?”

“I really do.”

“I am torn between that proverbial rock and that hard place. On one hand, I really want to get the hell out of here. I am told that when I can successfully stagger to the end of the hall and back on my crutches, I will be considered ‘ambulatory.’ I can do that. But if I do it officially, that will mean I will pass into the hands of my Aunt Florence, who is camped out in the Hay-Adams extolling my many virtues to the parents of every unmarried Cuban female in her child-bearing years — of the proper bloodline, of course — between New York and Miami.”

“That doesn’t sound so awful to me,” Allred said.

“What you don’t understand, Jim — although I’ve told you this before — is that unmarried Cuban females of the proper bloodline do not fool around before marriage. And I am still in my fooling-around years.”

“Or might be, anyway, when you get out of that cast,” Admiral Souers said.

“Thank you, sir, for pointing that out to me,” Ashton said.

Souers chuckled, and then asked, “What do you want first, the good news or the bad?”

“Let’s start with the bad, sir. Then I will have something to look forward to.”

“Okay. There’s a long list of the former. Where do I start? Okay. General Patton died yesterday in Germany.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. He always said he wanted to go out with the last bullet fired in the last battle.”

“And a car wreck isn’t the last battle, is it?” Souers replied.

“Unless it was an opening shot in the first of a series of new battles,” Ashton said.

“We looked into that,” Souers said. “General Greene — the European Command CIC chief?…”

Ashton nodded his understanding.

“… was all over the accident. And he told me that’s what it was, an accident. A truck pulled in front of Patton’s limousine. His driver braked hard, but ran into the truck anyway. Patton slid off the seat and it got his neck, or his spine. He was paralyzed. Greene told me when he saw Patton in the hospital, they had him stretched out with weights. Greene said it looked like something from the Spanish Inquisition.”

“And what does General Gehlen have to say about it?” Ashton asked.

“I think if he had anything to say, Cronley would have passed it on. Why do you think it could be something other than an accident?”

Before Ashton could reply, Admiral Souers added, “Dumb question. Sorry.”

Ashton answered it anyway.

“Well, sir, there are automobile accidents and then there are automobile accidents.”

“Accidents happen, Max,” Souers said.

“Sir, what happened to me was no accident,” Ashton said.

“No, I don’t think it was. And Frade agrees. But accidents do happen.”

Ashton’s face showed, Souers decided, that he thought he was being patronized.

“For example, sort of close to home, do you know who Lieutenant Colonel Schumann is? Or was?”

Ashton shook his head.

“He was Greene’s inspector general. I met him when I was over there. Good man.”

Ashton said nothing, waiting for the admiral to continue.

“More than a very good IG,” Souers continued, “a good intelligence officer. He was so curious about Kloster Grünau that Cronley had to blow the engine out of his staff car with a machine gun to keep him out.”

“That’s a story no one chose to share with me,” Ashton said drily.

“Well, we didn’t issue a press release. The only reason I’m telling you is to make my point about accidents happening. The day Patton died, Colonel Schumann went to his quarters to lunch with his wife. There was apparently a faulty gas water heater. It apparently leaked gas. Schumann got home just in time for the gas to blow up. It demolished the building.”

“Jesus!”

“Literally blowing both of them away, to leave their two kids, a boy and a girl, as orphans.”

“Jesus Christ!” Ashton said.

“Quickly changing the subject to the good news,” Souers said. “Let’s have the box, Jim.”

“Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Allred said, and handed the admiral a small blue box.

Souers snapped it open and extended it to Ashton.

“Would you like me to pin these to your jammies, Colonel, or would you rather do that yourself?”

“These are for real?” Ashton asked.

“Yes, Lieutenant Colonel Ashton, those are for real.”

“In lieu of a Purple Heart?” Ashton asked.

“Prefacing this by saying I think you well deserve the promotion, the reason you have it is because I told the adjutant general I desperately needed you, and that the only way you would even consider staying in the Army would be if your services had been rewarded with a promotion.”

Ashton didn’t reply.

“Operative words, Colonel, ‘would even consider staying.’”

Again, Ashton didn’t reply.

“If nothing else, you can now, for the rest of your life, legitimately refer to yourself as ‘colonel’ when telling tales of your valiant service in World War Two to Cuban señoritas whom you wish to despoil before marriage.”

“Sometimes it was really rough,” Ashton said. “Either the steak would be overcooked, or the wine improperly chilled. Once, I even fell off my polo pony.”

“Modesty becomes you, but we both know what you did in Argentina.”

“And once I was struck by a hit-and-run driver while getting out of a taxi.”

“That, too.”

“I really wish, Admiral, that you meant what you said to the adjutant general.”

“Excuse me?”

“That you desperately need me.”

“They say, and I believe, that no man is indispensable. But that said, I really wish you weren’t — what? — ‘champing at the bit’ to hang up your uniform. With you and Frade both getting out — and Cletus wouldn’t stay on active duty if they made him a major general — finding someone to run Operation Ost down there is going to be one hell of a problem.”

Ashton raised his hand over his head.

When Souers looked at him in curiosity, he said, nodding toward the toilet, “No, sir. I am not asking permission to go back in there.”

“This is what they call an ‘unforeseen happenstance,’” Admiral Souers said after a moment. “You’re really willing to stay on active duty?”

Ashton nodded.

“Yes, sir.”

“I have to ask why, Max.”

“When I thought about it, I realized I really don’t want to spend the rest of my life making rum, or growing sugarcane,” Ashton said. “And I really would like to get the bastards who did this to me.”

He raised both the en-casted arm resting on his chest and his en-casted broken leg.

“I was hoping you would say because you see it as your duty, or that you realize how important Operation Ost is, something along those lines.”

“Who was it who said ‘patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel’?”

“Samuel Johnson said it. I’m not sure I agree with it. And I won’t insult you, Max, by suggesting you are unaware of the importance of Operation Ost. But I have to point out Romans 12:19.” When he saw the confusion on Ashton’s face, the admiral went on: “‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.’ Or words to that effect.”

“The Lord can have his after I have mine,” Ashton said. “When do you become our nation’s spymaster?”

“That title belongs to General Donovan, and always will,” Souers said. “If you’re asking when the President will issue his Executive Order establishing the United States Directorate of Central Intelligence, January first.”

“Let me ask the rude question, sir,” Ashton said. “And how does General Donovan feel about that?”

“Well, the Directorate will be pretty much what he recommended. Starting, of course, with that it will be a separate intelligence agency answering only to the President.”

“I meant to ask, sir, how he feels about not being named director?”

Souers considered his reply before giving it.

“Not to go outside this room, I suspect he’s deeply disappointed and probably regrets taking on J. Edgar Hoover. My personal feeling is that the President would have given General Donovan the Directorate if it wasn’t for Hoover.”

“The President is afraid of Hoover?”

“The President is a very smart, arguably brilliant, politician who has learned that it’s almost always better to avoid a bitter confrontation. I think he may have decided that his establishing the Directorate of Central Intelligence over Hoover’s objections was all the bitter confrontation he could handle.”

“How does Hoover feel about you?”

“He would have preferred — would really have preferred — to have one of his own appointed director. Once the President told him that there would be a Directorate of Central Intelligence despite his objections to it, Hoover seriously proposed Clyde Tolson, his deputy, for the job. But even J. Edgar doesn’t get everything he wants.”

“That wasn’t my question, sir.”

“He’s hoping he will be able to control me.”

“What’s General Donovan going to do now?”

“You know he’s a lawyer? A very good one?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, the President, citing that, asked him to go to Nuremberg as Number Two to Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who’s going to be the chief American prosecutor.”

“He threw him a bone, in other words?”

“Now that you’re a lieutenant colonel, Colonel, you’re going to have to learn to control your tendency to ask out loud questions that should not be asked out loud.”

“Admiral, you have a meeting with the President at ten forty-five,” Allred said.

Souers walked to the bed, extending his hand.

“I’ll be in touch, Max,” he said. “Get yourself declared ambulatory. The sooner I can get you back to Argentina, the better.”

“I was thinking, sir, that I would go to Germany first, to have a look at the Pullach compound, and get with Colonel Mattingly and Lieutenant Cronley, before I go back to Buenos Aires.”

“I think that’s a very good idea, if you think you’re up to all that travel,” he said.

“I’m up to it, sir.”

“I hadn’t planned to get into this with you. That was before you agreed to stay on. But now…”

“Yes, sir?”

“Now that you’re going to have to have a commander-subordinate relationship with Captain… Captain… Cronley…”

“Sorry, sir. I knew that the President had promoted Cronley for grabbing the uranium oxide in Argentina.”

“And for his behavior — all right, his ‘valor above and beyond the call of duty.’”

“Yes, sir.”

“Prefacing this by saying I think he fully deserved the promotion, and the Distinguished Service Medal that went with it, and that I personally happen to like him very much, I have to tell you what happened after he returned to Germany.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Admiral,” Lieutenant Allred said, as he tapped his wristwatch, “the President…”

“The world won’t end if I’m ten minutes late,” Admiral Souers said. “And if it looks as if we’ll be late, get on the radio to the White House and tell them we’re stuck in traffic.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You know about those Negro troops who have been guarding Kloster Grünau? Under that enormous first sergeant they call ‘Tiny’? First Sergeant Dunwiddie?”

“Cronley talked about him. He said he comes from an Army family that goes way back. That they were Indian fighters, that two of his grandfathers beat Teddy Roosevelt up San Juan Hill in Cuba during the Spanish American War.”

“Did he mention that he almost graduated from Norwich? That his father was a Norwich classmate of Major General I.D. White, who commanded the Second Armored Division?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, when Cronley returned to Germany, to Kloster Grünau, he learned that those black soldiers — the ones he calls ‘Tiny’s Troopers’—had grabbed a man as he attempted to pass through — going outward — the barbed wire around Kloster Grünau. He had documents on him identifying him as Major Konstantin Orlovsky of the Soviet Liaison Mission. They have authority to be in the American Zone.

“On his person were three rosters. One of them was a complete roster of all of General Gehlen’s men then inside Kloster Grünau. The second was a complete roster of all of Gehlen’s men whom we have transported to Argentina, and the third was a listing of where in East Germany, Poland, Hungary, et cetera, that Gehlen believed his men who had not managed to get out were.

“It was clear that Orlovsky was an NKGB agent. It was equally clear there was at least one of Gehlen’s men — and very likely more than one — whom the NKGB had turned and who had provided Orlovsky with the rosters.

“When he was told of this man, Colonel Mattingly did what I would have done. He ordered Dunwiddie to turn the man over to Gehlen. Gehlen — or one or more of his officers — would interrogate Orlovsky to see if he’d give them the names of Gehlen’s traitors.

“Do I have to tell you what would happen to them if the interrogation was successful?”

“They would ‘go missing.’”

“As would Major Orlovsky. As cold-blooded as that sounds, it was the only solution that Mattingly could see, and he ordered it carried out. And, to repeat, I would have given the same order had I been in his shoes.

“Enter James D. Cronley Junior, who had by then been a captain for seventy-two hours. When Dunwiddie told him what had happened, he went to see the Russian. He disapproved of the psychological techniques Gehlen’s interrogator was using. Admittedly, they were nasty. They had confined him naked in a windowless cell under the Kloster Grünau chapel, no lights, suffering time disorientation and forced to smell the contents of a never-emptied canvas bucket which he was forced to use as a toilet.

“Cronley announced he was taking over the interrogation, and ordered Tiny’s Troopers to clean the cell, empty the canvas bucket, and to keep any of Gehlen’s men from having any contact whatsoever with Orlovsky.”

“What did Gehlen do about that? Mattingly?”

Souers did not answer the question.

“Cronley and Dunwiddie then began their own interrogation of Major Orlovsky. As Colonel Mattingly pointed out to me later, Orlovsky was the first Russian that either Dunwiddie or Cronley had ever seen.”

“Sir, when did Colonel Mattingly learn about this? Did General Gehlen go to him?”

After a just perceptible hesitation, Souers answered the question.

“Colonel Mattingly didn’t learn what Captain Cronley was up to until after Orlovsky was in Argentina.”

“What?” Ashton asked, shocked.

“Cronley got on the SIGABA and convinced Colonel Frade that if he got Orlovsky to Argentina, he was convinced he would be a very valuable intelligence asset in the future.”

“And Cletus agreed with this wild hair?”

“Colonel Frade sent Father Welner, at Cronley’s request, to Germany to try to convince Orlovsky that Cronley was telling the truth when he said they would not only set him up in a new life in Argentina, but that General Gehlen would make every effort to get Orlovsky’s family out of the Soviet Union and to Argentina.”

“Gehlen went along with this?”

“The officer whom many of his peers believe is a better intelligence officer than his former boss, Admiral Canaris, ever was, was in agreement with our Captain Cronley from the moment Cronley told him what he was thinking.”

“So this Russian is now in Argentina?”

“Where he will become your responsibility once you get there. At the moment, he’s in the Argerich military hospital in Buenos Aires, under the protection of the Argentine Bureau of Internal Security, recovering from injuries he received shortly after he arrived in Argentina.”

“Injuries?”

“The car in which he was riding was attacked shortly after it left the airport by parties unknown. They used machine guns and Panzerfausts—”

“What?”

“German rocket-propelled grenades.”

“Then they were Germans?”

“The BIS — and Cletus Frade — believes they were Paraguayan criminals hired by the Russians. So does Colonel Sergei Likharev of the NKGB.”

“Who?”

“When Major Orlovsky realized that the NKGB was trying to kill him, and probably would do something very unpleasant to his wife and kids if General Gehlen could not get them out of the Soviet Union, he fessed up that his name is really Likharev and that he is — or was — an NKGB colonel. And gave up the names of Gehlen’s traitors.”

“What happened to them?”

“You don’t want to know, Colonel Ashton.”

“So Cronley did the right thing.”

“I don’t think that Colonel Mattingly would agree that the ends justify the means.”

“But you do?”

“On one hand, it is inexcusable that Cronley went around Mattingly. On the other hand, we now have Colonel Likharev singing like that proverbial canary. And on the same side of that scale, General Gehlen has gone out of his way to let me know in what high regard he holds Cronley and Dunwiddie. But let me finish this.”

“Yes, sir.”

“After Frade informed me that he believed Likharev had truly seen the benefits of turning, and that he believed he would be of enormous value to us in the future, I was willing to overlook Cronley’s unorthodoxy. Then Cronley got on the SIGABA and sent me a long message stating that he considered it absolutely essential that when he is transferred to the DCI that he have another commissioned officer to back him up, and that he wanted First Sergeant Dunwiddie commissioned as a captain — he said no one pays any attention to lieutenants — to fill that role.

“My first reaction to the message, frankly, was ‘Just who the hell does he think he is?’ I decided that it probably would be unwise to leave him in command of the Pullach compound. I then telephoned General Gehlen, to ask how he would feel about Major Harold Wallace — do you know who I mean?”

Shaking his head, Ashton said, “No, sir.”

“He was Mattingly’s deputy in OSS Forward…”

“Now I do, sir.”

“And is now commanding the Twenty-seventh CIC, which is the cover for the Twenty-third CIC, to which Cronley and Dunwiddie are assigned. You are familiar with all this?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I asked General Gehlen how he would feel if I arranged for Major Wallace to take over command of the Pullach compound. He replied by asking if he could speak freely. I told him he could. He said that in the best of all possible worlds, he would prefer that Colonel Mattingly and Major Wallace have as little to do with Pullach as possible. When I asked why, he said that he regarded the greatest threat to the Pullach compound operation, in other words, to Operation Ost, was not the Russians but the U.S. Army bureaucracy.

“In case you don’t know, the Pentagon — the deputy chief of staff for intelligence — has assigned two officers, a lieutenant colonel named Parsons and a major named Ashley — to liaise with Operation Ost at Pullach.”

“Frade told me that, but not the names.”

“DCS-G2 thinks they should be running Operation Ost. Both Parsons and Ashley outrank Captain Cronley. See the problem?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I thought it could be dealt with, since Mattingly, in the Farben Building, is a full colonel and could handle Parsons, and further that Wallace could better stand up to Parsons and Ashley than Cronley could.”

Ashton nodded his understanding.

“General Gehlen disagreed. He told me something I didn’t know, that First Sergeant Dunwiddie’s godfather is General White, and that in private Dunwiddie refers to General White as ‘Uncle Isaac.’ And he reminded me of something I already knew: The President of the United States looks fondly upon Captain Cronley.”

“How did Gehlen know that?”

“I don’t know, but I have already learned not to underestimate General Reinhard Gehlen. Gehlen put it to me that he felt Parsons was under orders to somehow take control of Pullach, that Mattingly, who is interested in being taken into the Regular Army, is not going to defy the general staff of the U.S. Army.

“Gehlen put it to me that DCS-G2 taking over Operation Ost would be a disaster — reaching as far up as the President — inevitably about to happen. And I knew he was right.”

“Jesus!”

“And he said he felt that because both Dunwiddie and Cronley had friends in high places, they would be the best people to defend Operation Ost from being swallowed by DCS-G2. And I realized Gehlen was right about that, too.

“General White is about to return to Germany from Fort Riley to assume command of the Army of Occupation police force, the U.S. Constabulary. I flew out to Fort Riley on Tuesday and talked this situation over with him. He’s on board.

“On January second, the day after the Directorate of Central Intelligence is activated, certain military officers — you, for example, and Captains Cronley and Dunwiddie—”

“Captain Dunwiddie, sir?” Ashton interrupted.

“Sometime this week, First Sergeant Dunwiddie will be discharged for the convenience of the government for the purpose of accepting a commission as Captain, Cavalry, detail to Military Intelligence.

“As I was saying, Cronley and Dunwiddie — and now you — will be transferred to the Directorate. Colonel Mattingly and Major Wallace will remain assigned to Counterintelligence Corps duties. I told General Greene that Colonel Frade suggested that for the time being they would be of greater use in the CIC and that I agreed with him.”

When it looked as if Ashton was going to reply, Admiral Souers said, “Were you listening, Colonel, when I told you you’re going to have to learn to control your tendency to ask questions out loud that should not be asked out loud?”

“Yes, sir. But may I ask a question?”

Souers nodded.

“It looks to me as if the effect of all this is that in addition to all the problems Cronley’s going to have with Operation Ost, he’s going to have to deal with Colonel Parsons — the Pentagon G2—and Colonel Mattingly, and maybe this CIC general, Greene, all of whom are going to try to cut him off at the knees.”

Souers did not reply either directly or immediately, but finally he said, “I hope what you have learned in our conversation will be useful both when you go to Germany and later in Buenos Aires.”

“Yes, sir. It will be.”

Souers met Ashton’s eye for a long moment, then smiled and turned and started to walk out of the room.

[TWO]

Senior Watch Chief Maksymilian Ostrowski, a tall, blond twenty-seven-year-old, who was chief supervisor of Detachment One, Company “A,” 7002nd Provisional Security Organization, woke instantly when his wristwatch vibrated.

He had been sleeping, fully clothed in dyed-black U.S. Army “fatigues” and combat boots, atop Army olive-drab woolen blankets on his bed in his room in what had once been the priory of a medieval monastery and was now a… what?

Ostrowski wasn’t sure exactly what Kloster Grünau should be called now. It was no longer a monastery and was now occupied by Americans. He had learned that the Americans were guarding — both at Kloster Grünau and in a village, Pullach, near Munich — nearly three hundred former Wehrmacht officers and enlisted men and their families. Both the monastery and the village were under the protection of a company of heavily armed American soldiers. All of them were Negroes, and they wore the shoulder insignia of the 2nd Armored Division.

Ostrowski was no stranger to military life, and he strongly suspected that it had to do with intelligence. Just what, he didn’t know. What was important to him was his belief that if he did well what he was told to do, he wouldn’t be rounded up and forced to return to what he was sure was at best imprisonment and most likely an unmarked mass grave in his native Poland.

He sometimes thought he had lived two previous lives and was on the cusp of a third. The first had been growing up in Poland as the son of a cavalry officer. He had graduated from the Szkola Rycerska military academy in 1939. He just had time to earn his pilot’s wings in the Polish Air Force when Germany and Russia attacked Poland. That life had ended when his father died leading a heroically stupid cavalry charge against German tanks, and he and some other young pilots for whom there were no airplanes to fly had been flown to first France and then England.

Life Two had been World War II. By the time that ended, he was Kapitan Maksymilian Ostrowski, 404th Fighter Squadron, Free Polish Air Force. The watch that had woken him by vibrating on his wrist was a souvenir of that life. Fairly late in the war, he had been at a fighter base in France, waiting for the weather to clear so they could fly in support of the beleaguered 101st Airborne Division in Bastogne.

There had been a spectacular poker game with a mixed bag — Poles, Brits, and Americans — of fellow fighter pilots. He liked Americans, and not only because he could remind them that he wasn’t the first Pole to come to the Americans’ aid in a war. He’d tell them Casimir Pulaski was the first. He’d tell them Pulaski had been recruited by Benjamin Franklin in Paris, went to America, saved George Washington’s life, and became a general in the Continental Army before dying of wounds suffered in battle.

This tale of Polish-American cooperation had not been of much consolation to one of the American pilots, who, convinced the cards he held were better than proved to be the case, had thrown a spectacular watch into the pot.

It was a gold-cased civilian — not Air Corps — issued — Hamilton chronograph. It had an easily settable alarm function that caused it to vibrate at the selected time.

Ostrowski’s four jacks and a king had taken the pot.

On the flight line at daybreak the next morning, just before they took off, the American had come to him and asked, if he could come up with three hundred dollars, would Ostrowski sell him the watch?

Ostrowski was already in love with the chronograph, so he knew why the American pilot wanted it back. Reluctantly, he agreed to sell it. The pilot said he’d have the cash for him when they came back.

He didn’t come back. The American had gone in — either shot down or pilot error — just outside Bastogne.

In Life Two, Ostrowski had worn an RAF uniform with the insignia of a captain and a “Poland” patch sewn to the shoulder. As what he thought of as Life Three began, he was wearing dyed-black U.S. Army “fatigues” with shoulder patches reading Wachmann sewed to each shoulder. There was no insignia of rank, as the U.S. Army had not so far come up with rank insignia for the Provisional Security Organization.

The Provisional Security Organization was new. It had been created by the European Command for several reasons, primary among them that EUCOM had a pressing need for manpower to guard its installations — especially supply depots — against theft by the German people, and the millions of displaced persons—“DPs”—who were on the edge of starvation.

There were not enough American soldiers available for such duties. Germans could not be used, as this would have meant putting weapons in the hands of the just defeated enemy. Neither, with one significant exception, could guards be recruited from the DPs.

That exception was former members of the Free Polish Army and Air Force. When they were hastily discharged after the war, so they could be returned to Poland, many — most — of them refused to go. The officers, especially, were familiar with what had happened to the Polish officer corps in the Katyn Forest. They had no intention of placing themselves at the mercy of the Red Army. So they joined the hordes of displaced persons.

When, at the demand of the Soviets, several hundred of them had been rounded up for forcible repatriation, some broke out of the transfer compounds and more than two hundred of them committed suicide. This enraged General Eisenhower, who decreed there would be no more forcible repatriations, and ordered that former Free Polish soldiers and airmen being held be released.

Then someone in the Farben Building realized that the thousands of former Free Polish military men who refused to be repatriated were the solution to the problem of providing guards for EUCOM’s supply depots.

Over the bitter objections of the State Department, which Eisenhower ignored, the Provisional Security Organization was quickly formed. Although nothing was promised but U.S. Army rations and quarters, the dyed-black fatigues and U.S. Army “combat boots,” and a small salary — paid in reichsmarks, which were all but worthless — there were so many applicants for the PSO that the recruiters could be choosy.

Training of the first batch of guards — in whose ranks was former Kapitan Maksymilian Ostrowski — was conducted by the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment in a former Wehrmacht kaserne in Griesheim, near Frankfurt am Main.

It consisted primarily in instruction in the use of the U.S. Carbine, Cal. .30 and the Model 1911A1 Pistol, caliber .45 ACP with which the PSO would be armed. There were lectures concerning the limits of their authority, the wearing of the uniform, and that sort of thing. The instruction syllabus called for seventy-four hours of classes. The classes took two weeks. There were 238 students in Class One-45.

Officers and non-coms were obviously going to be required for the PSO, and ranks were established, and then filled from the ranks of the students in the first class. Ostrowski was appointed a “watch chief”—which roughly corresponded to second lieutenant — more, he thought, because he spoke English well, rather than because he had been a captain in the Free Polish Air Force.

Company “A,” 7002nd Provisional Security Organization had then been loaded on U.S. Army six-by-six trucks and driven down the autobahn to Munich, and then along winding country roads to the village of Pullach.

There Ostrowski learned that the entire village had been commandeered by the U.S. Army for unspecified purposes. Army Engineers were installing a triple fence, topped by concertina barbed wire. The fence and the guard towers made the village look like a prison camp.

It was there that he had first seen the Negro troops assigned to guard whatever it was that needed guarding. They all seemed to be enormous. That they were really guarding something was evident. They constantly circled the village in jeeps that carried ready-to-fire .50 caliber machine guns, and there were similar weapons in the guard towers.

The initial mission of Company “A” had nothing to do with the security of the village — which the Americans called “the compound”—but rather the protection of the Engineers’ supplies — of which there were mountains — and equipment.

Company “A” was provided with U.S. Army twelve-man squad tents, a mobile mess, and went to work.

Ostrowski was not happy with his new duties — he saw himself as sergeant of the guard, which was quite a comedown from being a captain flying Spitfires and Hurricanes — but he had food to eat, clean sheets, and he thought it highly unlikely he would be rounded up for forcible repatriation.

Then, a week after they had moved to Pullach — the day he saw a GI sign painter preparing a sign that read GENERAL-BÜROS SÜD-DEUTSCHE INDUSTRIELLE ENTWICKLUNGSORGANISATION and wondered what the South German Industrial Development Organization might be — it was announced that Company “A” had been given the additional duty of guarding a monastery in Schollbrunn, in the Bavarian Alps. Promoted to senior watch chief, Ostrowski was put in charge of a sixty-man detachment, which was then trucked to Kloster Grünau.

There, he reported to the American in charge, a Mr. Cronley, who appeared to be in his early twenties, and his staff. These were two enormous black men wearing 2nd Armored Division shoulder patches. One wore the sleeve insignia of a first sergeant and the other that of a technical sergeant. There was also a plump little man who was introduced as Mr. Hessinger.

Ostrowski had thought he had solved the mystery of what was going on. Both Mr. Cronley and Mr. Hessinger were in civilian attire. That is, they were wearing U.S. Army uniforms — Cronley the standard olive-drab Ike jacket and trousers, and Hessinger the more elegant officer’s green tunic and pink trousers — but carrying no insignia of rank or branch of service. Instead, sewn to their lapels were small embroidered triangles around the letters US.

They were military policemen, Ostrowski quickly decided. More specifically, they were CID, which stood for Criminal Investigation Division, and who were, so to speak, the plainclothes detectives of the Military Police Force. What was being constructed at Pullach was to be a military prison. It all fit. The three lines of fences, the guard towers, the floodlights, and as absolute proof, all those enormous Negro troops. They practically had “Prison Guard” tattooed on their foreheads.

“If you don’t speak English,” Mr. Cronley had begun the meeting, “I’m going to have a problem telling you what’s going on here.”

“I speak English, sir,” Ostrowski said.

“And German, maybe?” the chubby little man asked in German.

He was, Ostrowski guessed, a German Jew who had somehow avoided the death camps and somehow become an American.

“Yes. And Russian. And of course, Polish.”

“That problem out of the way, what do we call you?” Mr. Cronley asked.

“My name is Maksymilian Ostrowski, sir.”

“That’s an unworkable mouthful,” Cronley said. “It says here you’re a senior watch chief. What the hell is that?”

“I believe it is equivalent to U.S. Army first lieutenant, sir.”

Cronley had raised his right hand as a priest giving a blessing does, and announced, “Since I can pronounce this, I christen thee Lieutenant Max. Go and sin no more.”

“Jesus, Jim!” the enormous black first sergeant protested. But he was smiling.

“Any objections?” Cronley asked.

“No, sir.”

“Any other officers in your organization?”

“Yes, sir. There is one who served as a tank lieutenant with the Free French.”

“Okay. Then you and he will bunk and mess with us,” Cronley said. “Sergeant Tedworth”—Cronley pointed to the technical sergeant—“who is Number Two to First Sergeant Dunwiddie”—Cronley pointed to the first sergeant—“who is my Number Two, will show you where your men will be quartered. I hope you brought somebody who can cook with you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You will answer to Sergeant Tedworth,” Cronley went on. “You have any problems with that?”

Does he mean because I’m an officer?

“No, sir.”

“Okay. Freddy, you go with Tedworth and Lieutenant Max and show them where they’ll be. Then send Lieutenant Max back here. If you find someone who can translate for Tedworth… Abraham Lincoln speaks German, Max, but not Polish…”

“Abraham Lincoln”? Oh, he means Sergeant Tedworth.

“… Hessinger speaks Russian and tells me that’s close to Polish. If there are no translation problems, Freddy, you come back. If there are, stay and translate. But send Lieutenant Max back. I need to bring him up to speed on what’s going on around here ten minutes ago.”

Mr. Hessinger nodded.

Twenty minutes later, Hessinger and Ostrowski had come back into what Ostrowski was to learn was called the “officers’ mess.” Cronley and Dunwiddie were sitting at a bar drinking beer.

“No translation problems?” Cronley asked.

“Between the Poles who speak German and Tedworth’s guys who do likewise, no problem,” Hessinger reported.

“Do you drink beer, Max?” Cronley asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Then you better have one before I tell you how close you’ll be to getting shot working here.”

What did he say?

Cronley gestured to Hessinger, who went behind the bar, found bottles of Löwenbräu and mugs, and handed one of each to Ostrowski.

“Tell me, Max, how you came to speak the King’s English?”

“I spent the war years in England.”

“Doing what?”

“I was in the Free Polish Air Force.”

“Doing what?”

“Flying. Mostly Spitfires and Hurricanes.”

“And then they wanted you to go back to Poland and you didn’t want to go, and became a DP. Is that about it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How do you feel about Germans, Max? Straight answer, please.”

“I fought a war against them, Mr. Cronley.”

“In other words, you don’t like them very much?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And the Russians? How do feel about them?”

“I like them even less than the Germans.”

“You ever hear of the Katyn Forest?”

“That’s one of the reasons I didn’t think it was wise for me to go home.”

“What we’re running here is a classified — a highly classified — operation. I’m not supposed to tell someone like yourself anything at all about it. But I don’t see how you can do your job at all, much less well, until I tell you something about it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“So I’m going to tell you some things about it. Prefacing what I’m going to tell you by saying we’re authorized to protect the security of this operation by any means, including the taking of life. Do you understand what I’m saying? And if you do, should I continue, or would you prefer to be sent back to Pullach? There would be no shame, or whatever, if you don’t want to stay. I personally guarantee that you won’t be forcibly repatriated if you choose to go back to Pullach. Think it over carefully.”

My God, he’s serious! What the hell is going on here? What am I letting myself in for?

After a long moment, Ostrowski came to attention and said, “I am at your orders, sir.”

“Anybody got anything to say before I start this?” Cronley asked.

No one did.

“What we’re doing here is protecting a substantial number of former German officers and enlisted men from the Russians, and from those Germans and others sympathetic to the Soviet Union,” Cronley said.

When there was no reply, he went on: “Eventually, just about all of them will be moved to the Pullach compound. That process is already under way. Any questions so far?”

“May I ask why you’re protecting them from the Russians?”

“No. And don’t ask again. And make sure your men understand that asking that sort of question is something they just are not allowed to do. If they do, that will ensure immediate and drastic punishment. You can consider that your first order. Get that done as soon as possible.”

“Tedworth’s probably already done that,” Hessinger said.

“Even if Sergeant Tedworth has already gotten into the subject, I want the warning to come from Lieutenant Max.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I think I should tell you, Lieutenant,” Dunwiddie said, “without getting into details, that there already have been a number of deaths…”

“Two yesterday,” Hessinger chimed in.

Dunwiddie gave him a withering look and went on. “… directly related to security breaches, attempted and successful, of this operation,” Dunwiddie finished.

“The Russians have a very good idea of what’s going on in here,” Cronley said. “We already have caught an NKGB colonel as he tried to sneak out of here with information given to him by German traitors. Your mission will be to augment the American soldiers — we call them ‘Tiny’s Troopers’—who have been guarding Kloster Grünau and are in the process of establishing security at the Pullach compound.”

“Sir, may I ask a question?”

“Ask away, but don’t be surprised if I reply you don’t have the need to know.”

“Sir, I understand. My question — questions, actually — are can we expect further attempts by the Reds to gain entrance to either place?”

“I think you can bet your ass they will,” Cronley said.

“You said ‘questions,’ plural, Lieutenant?” Hessinger asked.

“Are there still the traitors inside you mentioned?”

Cronley answered carefully. “The NKGB colonel and the traitors he was dealing with are no longer a problem…”

My God, he means they have been “dealt with.”

Which means killed.

“… but we have to presume (a) there are more of them, and (b) that the NKGB will continue to attempt to contact them.”

“I understand,” Ostrowski said.

“I hope so,” Cronley said.

Even as he spoke the word “understand” Ostrowski had thought that he not only understood what Cronley was telling him, but that his Third Life had really begun.

I’ve stumbled onto something important.

What I will be guarding here and at Pullach is not going to be what I expected — mountains of canned tomatoes and hundred-pound bags of rice in a Quartermaster Depot — but something of great importance to the U.S. Army and by inference, the United States itself.

And, whatever it is, it’s just getting started.

And if I play my cards right, I can get my foot on the first step of that ladder of opportunity everybody’s always talking about.

And the way to start playing my cards right is to become the best lieutenant of the guard not only in Detachment One, Company “A,” 7002nd Provisional Security Organization, but in the entire goddamned Provisional Security Organization.

Each night, Senior Watch Chief Ostrowski set his Hamilton chronograph to vibrate at a different time between midnight and six in the morning. He selected the hour by throwing a die on his bedside table. The first roll last night had come up three. That meant three o’clock. The second roll had come up three again. That meant, since three-sixths of sixty minutes is thirty, that he should set the Hamilton to vibrate at 3:30.

Next came the question of whether to get undressed, and then dress when the watch vibrated, or to nap clothed on top of the blankets. He opted in favor of not getting undressed.

When he was wakened, he did not turn on the bedside lamp. He was absolutely sure that at least one, and probably three, of his guards were watching his window so they could alert the others that Maksymilian the Terrible was awake and about to inspect the guard posts.

Instead, he made his way into the bath he shared with First Sergeant Dunwiddie — they were now on a “Tiny and Max” basis — and dressed there. First he put on a dyed-black U.S. Army field jacket, around which he put on a web belt that supported a holstered Model 1911A1 pistol. Then, since it had been snowing earlier in the evening and the ground was white, he put on a white poncho.

Then, without turning on any lights, using a red-filtered U.S. Army flashlight, he made his way downstairs and out of the building.

The Poles were guarding the outer perimeter, and sharing the guarding of the area between it and the second line of fences with Tiny’s Troopers. The inner perimeter was guarded by the Americans only.

Twenty yards from the building, he saw the faint glow of another red-filtered flashlight, and quickly turned his own flashlight off. Fifty yards farther toward the inner fence, he saw that Technical Sergeant Tedworth, dressed as he was, was holding the other flashlight.

He wasn’t surprised, as he knew Tedworth habitually checked the guards in the middle of the night. He also knew that Tedworth usually went to the outer perimeter to check the Poles first. It looked as if that’s what he was up to now, so Ostrowski followed him.

If Tedworth found nothing wrong — one of the Poles, for example, hiding beside or inside something to get out of the icy winds — Ostrowski planned to do nothing. Tedworth would know the Poles were doing what they were supposed to do and that was enough.

If, however, Tedworth found a Pole seeking shelter from the cold — or worse, asleep — Ostrowski would then appear to take the proper disciplinary action himself. Tedworth would see not only that Ostrowski was on the job, but also that Maksymilian the Terrible could “eat ass” just about as well as Technical Sergeant Tedworth.

He had been following Tedworth for about ten minutes when the red glow of Tedworth’s flashlight suddenly turned white. There was now a beam of white light pointed inward from the outer perimeter fence toward the second.

Ostrowski hurried to catch up.

He heard Tedworth bellow, “Halt! Hände nach oben!”

Ostrowski started running toward him, fumbling as he did to un-holster his pistol.

Another figure appeared, dressed in dark clothing, approaching Tedworth in a crouch. Before Ostrowski could shout a warning, the man was on Tedworth. Tedworth’s flashlight went flying as the man pulled him back.

Ostrowski remembered, cursing, that he had not chambered a round in the .45, and stopped running just long enough to work the action.

He could now see three men, Tedworth, now flailing around on the ground, the man who had knocked him over…

He looped something around Tedworth’s throat. Probably a wire garrote.

… and another man in dark clothing who had come from the second line of wire.

Ostrowski was now ten meters from them, and was sure they hadn’t seen him. He dropped to a kneeling position and, holding the .45 with both hands, fired first at the man wrestling with Tedworth, hitting him, and then as the second man looked at him, let off a shot at his head, which missed, and then a second shot at his torso, which connected.

Then he ran the rest of the way to the three men on the ground.

The man who had been wrestling with Tedworth was now reaching for something in his clothing. Ostrowski shot him twice. The man he had shot in the torso looked up at him with surprise on his face. His eyes were open but they were no longer seeing anything.

Blood was spurting from Tedworth’s neck, and as Ostrowski watched, Tedworth finally got his fingers under the wire that had been choking him and jerked it off his body.

Tedworth looked at Ostrowski.

“Jesus H. Christ!” he said, spewing blood from his mouth.

“You’re bleeding. We’ve got to get a compress on your neck,” Ostrowski said.

Tedworth reached for his neck again and again jerked something loose. It was a Cavalry yellow scarf.

“Use this,” he said. “It probably kept me alive.”

Then he added, disgust oozing from his voice, “If you hadn’t showed up, these cocksuckers would have got me!”

“Just lie there,” Ostrowski ordered. “Hold the scarf against your neck. I’ll go for help.”

That didn’t prove to be necessary. As he stood up, he saw first the light from three flashlights heading toward him, and then the headlights of a jeep.