The Enemy of My Enemy
Page 30
And the hangman just now broke the neck.
That’s why he grinned?
He caused the extra suffering on purpose?
When von Dietelburg was marched past Cohen and Cronley, he made eye contact with them. But this time Cronley refrained from saying anything.
As von Dietelburg ascended the wooden stairs, Cronley looked up at the hangman. There was no question in his mind that he detected a trace of a grin. Additional confirmation came when the master sergeant had to repeat going beneath the gallows to complete the execution.
The group of witnesses waited for the doctors to pronounce Franz von Dietelburg and Wilhelm Burgdorf dead, but one by one they began to leave before Master Sergeant Woods cut their ropes free of the gallows.
* * *
—
Jim Cronley knew what would happen now.
Colonel Cohen had explained to him that the bodies of those hanged would be transported—as had been the body of Hermann Göring and those hanged on the 16th of October—to a crematorium. Their ashes would be loaded into a fifty-five-gallon barrel and stirred to comingle them. The barrel of ashes would then be loaded into a three-quarter-ton weapons carrier.
At this point, Brigadier General Homer P. Greene and Colonel Mortimer Cohen would take over. Two more weapons carriers, each carrying a decoy fifty-five-gallon barrel and driven by a senior CIC agent, would be added.
With Colonel Cohen at the wheel and General Greene in the passenger seat of the first weapons carrier, all three vehicles would leave simultaneously. A half dozen MP jeeps mounted with .50 caliber Browning machine guns would follow.
Immediately upon leaving the Compound, each weapons carrier would drive in a different direction through the streets, passing the city’s bombed-out buildings. A pair of MP jeeps would trail each, preventing anyone from following.
Colonel Cohen and General Greene would continue to the center of a bridge crossing one of the five rivers in the area. They would unload the barrel, move it to the edge of the bridge, and remove its lid before pushing it onto its side. After the ashes flowed into the dark green waters of the river, they would shove the barrel over, too.
By a circuitous route that gave no hint where they had been, they then would return to the Tribunal Compound. There, they would go to the office of Mr. Justice Jackson and report what they had done by SIGABA to the President of the United States.
* * *
—
Cronley glanced around the emptying gymnasium. He turned and began walking to the double steel doors to leave.
As he went, he was surprised at his emotional reaction to the hangings.
Actually, he thought, the damn absence of any emotional reaction.
The only thing he could compare it to, he decided, was the shooting of a rabid dog by a neighborhood cop. Not pretty, but necessary.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
W. E. B. Griffin is the author of seven bestselling series: The Corps, Brotherhood of War, Badge of Honor, Men at War, Honor Bound, Presidential Agent, and Clandestine Operations. He lives in Fairhope, Alabama, and Buenos Aires, Argentina.
William E. Butterworth IV has been a writer and editor for major newspapers and magazines for more than thirty years, has worked closely with his father for several years on the editing and writing of the Griffin books, and is the coauthor with him of eighteen novels, most recently Broken Trust and Death at Nuremberg. He lives in St. Petersburg, Florida.
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