About a half hour later, the Packard braked so suddenly that Cronley almost ran into it.
“What the hell?” Iron Lung McClung boomed from the backseat.
“We’ve been stopped,” Jimmy reported.
He could see there was a barrier — two-by-fours laced with concertina barbed wire — across the road. Four men armed with U.S. Army.30 caliber carbines had approached the Packard. They appeared to be wearing U.S. Army fatigue uniforms that had been dyed black.
This won’t take long, Cronley decided.
Generals generally get to go wherever they want to go.
Four minutes later — it seemed longer than that — Major McClung boomed again from the backseat: “Cronley, go up there and see what the hell’s going on.”
“Yes, sir.”
When Cronley walked to the nose of the Packard, there were now six men in black-dyed fatigues and a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers lieutenant in woolen ODs standing in front of the barrier. Plus General Greene, Colonel Mattingly, and Lieutenant Colonel Frade.
“Absolutely no one, Captain Cronley,” Frade said with amusement in his voice, “gets into the Pullach compound without the specific permission of the Engineer major in charge of this project. He is at supper and has been sent for.”
“On one hand,” Mattingly said, “I have to say I’m impressed with the security but—”
“On the other hand,” General Greene interrupted him, “I’m getting more than a little annoyed standing here in the goddamned road waiting for this goddamned major.”
“You understand, Lieutenant,” Cronley asked, “that this is a highly classified project being built for the Counterintelligence Corps?”
“We have been instructed not to get into that, sir,” the lieutenant said.
Cronley produced his CIC credentials.
The Engineer officer, who looked to be about as old as Cronley, was clearly dazzled.
“I can vouch for these officers,” Cronley said. “Move the roadblock out of the way.”
“Yes, sir,” the lieutenant said, and signaled for the men in the dyed-black uniforms to do so.
“I’m starting to like you, Cronley,” General Greene said.
“When the major comes, sir, what do I tell him?” the lieutenant asked.
“Tell him to find us and be prepared to explain to me why this project is not yet finished,” General Greene said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Let’s get this show on the road,” General Greene ordered.
Everyone got back into the cars and they drove past the roadblock.
[SIX]
Two hundred yards down the road they were stopped at another roadblock manned by carbine-armed men wearing dyed-black U.S. Army fatigues.
“Go see,” Major Iron Lung McClung bellowed from the backseat.
As Cronley walked to the old Packard limousine he sensed that McClung had also gotten out of the Kapitän and was walking behind him.
And as they reached the Packard, a jeep came racing toward the barrier.
A lieutenant colonel and a major, both in fatigues, jumped out of the jeep and approached the Packard as General Greene, Colonel Mattingly, and Lieutenant Colonel Frade emerged.
The lieutenant colonel saluted.
“Lieutenant Colonel Bristol, General. There was no heads-up that you were coming, sir.”
“They call that ‘conducting an unscheduled inspection,’ Colonel,” General Greene said. “It has been my experience that you often learn a great deal during unscheduled inspections.”
“Yes, sir. General, if you’d like to come with me to the headquarters building, there’s a plat, a map, of the compound. I could explain what we’re up to.”
“Let’s have a look at it. Lead the way, Colonel.”
They got back in their cars and followed the Engineers’ jeep past another roadblock and to a large two-story, freshly painted villa in the center of the village.
A large, also freshly painted, sign was mounted on the impressive building that was the General Offices of the South German Industrial Development Organization. It read:
GENERAL-BÜROS
SÜD-DEUTSCHE INDUSTRIELLE ENTWICKLUNGSORGANISATION
What Cronley was seeing now was so distinctly different from what he remembered of “the Pullach compound” that he actually wondered if they were in the same place.
When he had first gone to Kloster Grünau, Dunwiddie had taken him on a fifteen-minute tour of what was to be, he said, “our new home away from home.” Then they had seen no more than a dozen Engineer troops under a sergeant erecting a crude basic fence — barbed wire nailed to two-by-fours — around a block in the center of the village.
Now, that simple fence was gone. In its place were three far more substantial barriers. One was where the simple fence had been, around the center of the village. A second encircled the entire village, and a third was two hundred yards outside that. They had all been constructed of chain-link fencing suspended between ten-foot-tall concrete poles. Concertina barbed wire had been strung both along its top and on the ground.
All of the fences had signs mounted at ten-yard intervals that were stenciled with SÜD-DEUTSCHE INDUSTRIELLE ENTWICKLUNGSORGANISATION and, under that, in large red lettering, ZUTRITT VERBOTEN!
When everyone went into the building, they found that an eight-by-four-foot sheet of plywood on a tripod had been erected in the foyer. On it was a map of the compound.
“This is not what I expected,” General Greene said after taking a quick look. “There’s more here than I thought there would be.”
Mattingly spoke up: “There’s something, General, that I guess I should have told you about sooner.”
“Which is?” Greene said not very pleasantly.
“General Clay sent for me just before I went back to Washington,” Mattingly explained. “When I reported to him, he told me, in confidence, that as of January first, 1946, he was going to be relieved as Eisenhower’s deputy and appointed military governor of the American Zone of Occupied Germany.
“Then he said he was sure that I would understand that as military governor he didn’t want the Russians — he said ‘our esteemed allies the Soviets’—coming to him with some wild accusation that we were hiding Nazis in a monastery in Bavaria. He said that I would also understand that as military governor he would be very interested in German industrial development.
“General Clay then asked me why I still had a reinforced company of Second Armored Division soldiers guarding ‘God only knew what’ in my monastery and why the compound at Pullach, which was being built for the South German Industrial Development Organization, wasn’t finished.
“At this point I decided that someone had made General Clay privy to Operation Ost. I told him the reason the South German Industrial Development Organization was not up and running in Pullach was because the Engineer battalion assigned to Munich Military Post had other projects that were apparently more important than the Pullach compound. I told General Clay I had been reluctant to press the issue because, if I did, Munich Military Post would ask questions about the South German Industrial Development Organization I would not want to answer.
“General Clay then reached for his telephone and asked to be connected with the commanding officer of Munich Military Post. When he came on the line, General Clay said it had come to his attention that the Pullach project was running a little behind schedule and he had been wondering why.
“The post commander apparently replied to the effect that the Pullach compound project was lower on his list of priorities than a gymnasium and a Special Services library that the Engineers were building.