“Yes, sir.”
“Unless you have a reason, a very good reason, to go back to Marburg, I’d like to send you to Grünau right away.”
“I have no reason to go back to Marburg, sir.”
“Okay. Major Connell will be informed that you have been transferred to the Twenty-seventh—which is in Munich—and instructed to send to you whatever property you left.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Tiny, take Lieutenant Cronley to Grünau and get him settled.”
“Yes, sir.”
“There’s no reason that I can see for you to come back here. Is there?”
“No, sir.”
“I’ll call the strip at Eschborn and have them wind up the rubber bands of one of our puddle jumpers,” Mattingly said. “You ever have a ride in an L-4, Cronley? It’s a small, high-wing single-engine Piper Cub.”
“Yes, sir. I even know how to fly one. We had Cubs on our ranches, and Clete’s . . .” He paused.
“Don’t stop,” Mattingly said, gesturing for him to continue.
“Colonel Frade’s Uncle Jim—who raised him—taught him to fly theirs, and then promised to teach me when I turned fifteen. Before I turned fifteen, Colonel Frade took me out on the prairie and taught me how to fly his. So the first time I got in our Cub for my first flying lesson, we told Uncle Jim and my father there was a phone call for one of them at the house. When they went to find out about that, Cletus spun the prop for me and I took off. My father came out and found Clete there and me and the Piper gone. He shit— He got pretty upset.”
Mattingly shook his head in wonder. “I think I should tell you, Lieutenant, that I am beginning to question the wisdom of taking you into the fold.”
“No, you’re not, Bob,” Major Wallace said. “The more you hear about him, the more you have to agree that he’s our kind of guy.”
“Anytime you’re ready, Lieutenant,” First Sergeant Tiny Dunwiddie said, getting to his feet.
—
Forty-five minutes later, sitting in an L-4 “puddle jumper” on the active runway of what had once been a German fighter aircraft base, Cronley watched as a stick of parachutists floated from a Douglas C-47.
Tiny Dunwiddie, who was in a second L-4, had told him that the field was being used to provide a crash course in parachute jumping to replacements headed for the 508th Parachute Infantry. The 508th was charged with protecting the I.G. Farben Building, which would now house Eisenhower’s Headquarters, U.S. Forces European Theater.
But Cronley wasn’t really interested. Nor was his mind full of the incredible story he had just been told at the Schlosshotel Kronberg.
What Jimmy was thinking as the parachutists came to earth, and as the pilot of his L-4 shoved the throttle forward and the Piper started roaring down the runway, was that it seemed entirely possible that his new duties would offer him the chance, sooner or later, to see Elsa again.
[THREE]
Kloster Grünau
Schollbrunn, Bavaria, Germany
1705 10 October 1945
The olive drab Piper Cub—painted with the stars-and-bars insignia of a U.S. Army war plane, and bearing the Army nomenclature L-4, was otherwise identical to the one in which Jimmy Cronley had soloed some months before he had turned fifteen—touched down somewhat roughly on a narrow strip of road.
Immediately, two jeeps, each with two large black soldiers and a pedestal-mounted Browning .50 caliber machine gun, appeared. Cronley saw that they didn’t train the weapons on the aircraft—or him—but seemed quite ready to do so if that should become necessary.
“Ok
ay, Lieutenant,” the pilot said. “Here we are. You can get out now.”
The pilot was a young staff sergeant wearing pilot’s wings superimposed with an “L,” for Liaison.