The Assassination Option

by W. E. B Griffin

  “Fifty thousand dollars?” Ashton asked incredulously.

  “Just for the record, I’m loaning that fifty thousand, repeat, loaning it, to the DCI. I expect it back.”

  “Cletus didn’t tell me anything about this.”

  “Maybe he thought you didn’t have to know,” Cronley replied.

  “And now this woman wants another fifty thousand. What are you going to do about that?”

  “Whatever General Gehlen thinks I should.”

  “You’ve got another fifty thousand?”

  “Father Welner brought me something over two hundred twenty thousand.”

  “Does Mattingly . . . does anybody else . . . know about this?”

  Cronley shook his head.

  “Do you realize how deep you’re in here?”

  Cronley nodded.

  “I asked before,” Ashton said. “Do you think this woman can get Likharev’s family out?”

  “Nothing is ever sure in our profession,” Gehlen replied.

  Ashton made a Come on gesture.

  Gehlen took a short moment to collect his thoughts.

  “I’ve learned, over the years, when evaluating a situation like this,” he said, “to temper my enthusiasm for a project by carefully considering the unpleasant possibilities. The worst of these here is the possibility that we are not dealing with Rahil at all. One of the reasons there was that wave of promotions to which Ludwig referred a moment ago was because there were a large number of vacancies. Fedotov purged the NKGB—”

  “Who?” Ashton interrupted.

  “Pyotr Vasileevich Fedotov, chief of counterintelligence. He purged the NKGB of everyone about whose loyalty he had the slightest doubt. Rahil certainly was someone at whom he looked carefully.

  “Now, if she was purged, we have to presume that Fedotov learned of her relationship with me.”

  “Even if she was not purged, General,” Mannberg said.

  “Even if she was not purged,” Gehlen agreed, “it is logical to presume that Fedotov knows of our past relationship.”

  “Which was?” Polo asked.

  “We got Russian Zionists out of Schutzstaffel concentration camps for her, and in turn she performed certain services for Abwehr Ost. I doubt that Rahil told Fedotov the exact nature of our relationship, certainly not during the war, or even in any postwar interrogations, if she was purged. But we have to presume he knows there was a relationship.

  “What I’m leading up to here is that even before the NKGB found us at Kloster Grünau, they suspected we were in American hands, under American protection, in other words . . .”

  “I think they knew that was your intention, General,” Mannberg said. “To place us under American protection. All they had to do was find out where we were. And I believe von Plat and Boss gave them both. We don’t know when either von Plat or Boss were turned.”

  “Who are they?” Ashton asked.

  “We’re getting off the subject,” Gehlen said.

  “Who are you talking about?” Ashton pursued.

  “Polo, are you sure you want to go there?” Cronley asked.

  Ashton nodded.

  Cronley looked at Gehlen.

  “Jim,” Ashton said, “you don’t need General Gehlen’s permission to answer any question I put to you.”

  Cronley shrugged.

  “Oberstleutnant Gunther von Plat and Major Kurt Boss of Abwehr Ost surrendered to the OSS when the general did,” Cronley replied. “Boss was SS, a dedicated Nazi. Von Plat was Wehrmacht. We were just about to load Boss on a plane for Buenos Aires when Cletus and Father Welner turned Polkóvnik Likharev. Likharev told Cletus these were the guys who’d given him the rosters he had when Tedworth caught him sneaking out of Kloster Grünau. Clete told us.”

  “Where are these guys now?” Ashton asked.

  “No one seems to know,” Cronley said.

  “You mean they got away? Or that you took them out?”

  Cronley didn’t reply.

  “Polo, the next time Cronley asks you if you want to go somewhere, why don’t you turn off your automatic mouth and think carefully before you say yes?” Schultz asked.

  Well, that’s interesting, Cronley thought. El Jefe just told Polo to shut up.

  Told. Not politely suggested.

  And Polo took it. He looked as if he was about to say something, but then changed his mind.

  And that suggests that Cletus sent El Jefe here to do more than help Polo get on and off the airplane.

  And that raises the question what did El Jefe do for Clete in Argentina?

  Once El Jefe got the SIGABA set up, it could have been maintained by some kid fresh from the ASA school. But El Jefe stayed in Argentina.

  And was directly commissioned.

  Just for running the SIGABA installation? That doesn’t make sense.

  If Clete had to take somebody out, or do something else really black, who would he ask to help?

  A nice young Cuban American polo player who had never heard a shot fired in anger, much less fired one himself?

  Or a grizzled old sailor who had served not only in the Philippines but also on the Yangtze River Patrol?

  Why didn’t Clete tell me what was El Jefe’s actual function?

  Because you don’t talk about things like that to someone who doesn’t have the need to know.

  So what’s El Jefe’s mission here?

  Whatever it is, it’s not to keep his mouth shut when Polo does, or asks, something stupid.

  He’s here to keep Polo out of trouble.

  No.

  More than that. El Jefe is here to see—and probably to report to the admiral—what’s going on here.

  So what’s he going to report?

  That Captain James D. Cronley Jr. is indeed the loose cannon everyone says he is?

  That I’m dealing with a Mossad/NKGB agent and haven’t told the admiral anything about it?

  “Returning to the worst possible scenario,” Gehlen said, “there is a real possibility that what the NKGB decided when we contacted Seven-K was that it might give them a chance to get their hands on me.”

  “How would they do that?” El Jefe asked.

  “In her—what we presume was her—last message, she twice referred to a Herr Weitz who was demanding more dollars.”

  “Who’s he?” Ashton asked.

  “I don’t know anyone of that name, and neither does Oberst Mannberg. But in our previous relationship I met twice with Rahil in the Café Weitz in Vienna. That’s why I suggested she may be headed for Vienna.”

  “Where Fedotov’s people may be waiting for you at the Café Weitz when you go there to give her the fifty thousand dollars,” Mannberg said.

  “Where Fedotov’s people may be waiting for me when I go there to give her the fifty thousand dollars,” Gehlen parroted in confirmation.

  “I’m just a simple sailor, General,” El Jefe said. “You’re going to have to explain that to me. Why couldn’t you get her the money through an intermediary? How’d you get her the first fifty thousand?”

  “Through an intermediary,” Gehlen said. “But we can’t do that again.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because she wants to make sure, or at least that’s what I’m expected to believe, that she is afraid this is a scheme to kidnap, or at least compromise, her. She said, to—in Jim’s charming phrase—‘cut to the chase’—”

  “To hell with Jim’s charming phrase,” Schultz cut him off. “I just told you, I’m just a simple sailor. Take it slowly, step by step.”

  Has the general picked up that El Jefe is now giving the orders?

  You can bet your ass he has!

  Gehlen nodded.

  “As I’m sure you know, one of the great advantages the Allies had over us was that you had broke
n our Enigma code. We—and I include myself in ‘we’—were simply unable to believe you could do that. I had only heard rumors of your SIGABA system, rumors I discounted until Jim showed me the one installed at Kloster Grünau. And now here.”

  He pointed to a closed door.

  “The Soviet systems are by no means as sophisticated as either,” he went on. “They have therefore to presume that whenever they send an encrypted message, someone else is going to read it. So they use what could probably be called a personal code within the encrypted message. Making reference to something only the addressee will understand. ‘Herr Weitz,’ for example, immediately translated to ‘Café Weitz’ in my mind. Sometimes it takes a half dozen messages back and forth to clarify the message, but it works.”

  “I’m with you,” El Jefe said.

  “Rahil—or whoever is using her name—expressed concern that we might be trying to entrap her, and that the only proof she would accept that we were not would be for me to personally deliver to Herr Weitz the additional fifty thousand dollars he was demanding.

  “Subsequent clarifying messages seem to confirm this interpretation. She wants me to meet with her, to give her the money, in the Café Weitz in Vienna.”

  “No way,” Cronley heard himself saying.

  “Excuse me?” Gehlen said.

  Ashton and Schultz looked at him in mingled surprise and annoyance.

  Is that my automatic mouth running away on me again?

  Or am I doing what I’m supposed to be doing, commanding Operation Ost?

  With overwhelming immodesty, the latter.

  So I have to do this.

  “The general is not going to meet with whoever’s going to be waiting for him in the Café Weitz. I’m not going to take the chance that the Russians’ll grab him.”

  “You’re not?” Ashton asked, sarcastically incredulous. “Who the hell . . .”

  El Jefe held up his hand, ordering Ashton to stop.

  “. . . do I think I am?” Cronley picked up. “Until you relieve me—and I’m not sure you have that authority—I’m chief, DCI-Europe . . .”

  And probably out of my fucking mind!

  “. . . and as long as I am, I’m not going to take any chances of losing the general.”

  “So how, hotshot, are you going to get this Russian lady the fifty thousand she wants?” El Jefe asked.

  “I’ll take it to her,” Cronley said.

  And how the hell am I going to do that?

  “How the hell are you going to do that?” Ashton demanded. “Have you ever even been to Vienna?”

  “No. But I know where the bahnhof is, and that a train called the Blue Danube goes from there to Vienna every day at 1640.”

  “Oh, shit!” Ashton said disgustedly.

  “Let him finish,” El Jefe said. “Let’s hear how the chief, DCI-Europe, wants to handle this.”

  “Ludwig, do you know what this lady looks like?”

  “I know what she looked like in 1943,” Mannberg said.

  “Okay, so Ludwig, Lieutenant Max, and I go to Vienna,” Cronley said.

  And do what?

  “Who is Max . . . what you said?” El Jefe asked. “That Polish-Englishman who flew us to the monastery?”

  “Right.”

  “And what’s he going to do?”

  “Guard Colonel Mannberg. I don’t want him grabbed by the Russians, either.”

  “Can he do that?” El Jefe asked. “More important, will he want to?”

  “He killed the two NKGB guys who had the wire around Tedworth’s neck,” Cronley said. “Yeah, he can do it. And he wants to do more than he’s doing right now.”

  “You mean, more than flying the Storch?”

  “Actually, he’s not supposed to be flying the Storch. Officially, he’s in charge of the Polish guards at Kloster Grünau.”

  “Just so I have things straight in my mind, Captain Cronley,” Ashton said. “You have this guy who’s not in the service—technically, he’s a displaced person, employed as a quasi–military watchman, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Flying an airplane you’re not supposed to have?”

  “Right.”

  “And now you want to involve him in a delicate, top secret DCI operation?” Ashton asked. And then he went on, “Why are you smiling, Schultz? You think this is funny? Cronley doing this, doing any of this, on his own—which means absolutely no . . . authority? You think that’s funny?”

  “I was thinking it reminded me of when we were starting up in Argentina,” Schultz said. “When Clete realized we needed some shooters to protect us from the Nazis, what he did was ask Colonel Graham to send some Marines down from the States. Graham told him to write up a formal request and send it to General Donovan.

  “Clete never wrote a formal request, of course. What he did do was put gauchos—most of them had been in the cavalry, I’ll admit—from Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo on the job. Then he sent the OSS a bill. Nine dollars a day, plus three dollars for rations and quarters, per man. The OSS paid without asking him a question. By the time the war was over, we had three hundred some gauchos in ‘Frade’s Private Army’ on the payroll. If the OSS was willing to pay for hiring necessary civilian employees in Argentina, more than three hundred of them, I don’t think the admiral will much care if Jim hires a few here.”

  “Are you telling me you’re in agreement with what he’s proposing?”

  “I haven’t heard everything he’s proposing, but so far he’s making a lot of sense,” Schultz said. Then he turned to Cronley: “Okay, you, the colonel here, and that Polish-Englishman are in Vienna. Where did he learn English like that, by the way?”

  “He was in England with the Free Polish Air Force. They were sort of in the RAF.”

  “So that’s where he learned to fly?” El Jefe said. “So what do you do in Vienna?”

  I’m making this up as I go along. Doesn’t he see that?

  “We go to the Café Weitz. Colonel Mannberg by himself, Max and me together.”

  “Why?”

  “Mannberg so he can see Rahil, or she him. Max to protect Mannberg in case it is the NKGB waiting for him. After that, we play it by ear.”

  “Wrong,” El Jefe said with finality.

  Uh-oh.

  Well, I got pretty far for somebody who is making it up as he goes along.

  “You can’t go, because by now the NKGB knows what you look like,” El Jefe said. “I don’t want to have to tell the admiral that you’re on your way to Siberia. Or send you home in a body bag. So I’ll tell you what we’ll do. I’ll go with the Polish-Englishman. Or the English-Polack. Whatever he is. And then we’ll play it by ear.”

  “Oscar, I was there when the admiral told you he didn’t want you getting into anything you shouldn’t,” Ashton said.

  “Then you must have been there when he said I was running things but not to tell anybody unless I decided we had to,” Schultz said. “And when the admiral said you were not to even think about running the whole operation until you were off those crutches. I’m going to Vienna. Period. Okay?”

  “You know the admiral’ll be furious when he hears about this.”

  “Then let’s make sure he doesn’t hear about it until after we pull it off, and Mrs. Whatsername and the kids are in Argentina. Then we’ll tell him and maybe he won’t be so furious.”

  “My God!” Ashton said.

  “How do we get to Vienna?” Schultz asked.

  “On the train,” Cronley said.

  “Is it too far to drive? I’d like to have wheels in Vienna.”

  “It’s not far, Lieutenant Schultz,” Gehlen said. “It’s about a six-hour drive. The problem is—”

  “Why don’t you try calling me ‘Chief,’ General? I’m more comfortable with that.”

  “Cer
tainly. Chief, the problem is crossing the borders. Austria has been divided among the Allies. The American Zone of Austria abuts the American Zone of Germany. Permission, even for Americans, is required to move across that border. And then, like Berlin, Vienna is an island within the Russian Zone of Austria. Permission is required to cross the Russian Zone.”

  “Permission from who?” El Jefe asked. “The Russians?”

  “Freddy?” Cronley said.

  “I don’t know if this applies here,” Hessinger said, “but if someone from the Twenty-third CIC wants to go to Vienna, I would cut travel orders. Major Wallace went there a couple of weeks ago. I cut travel orders for him, and then took them to Munich Military Post, who stamped them approved. You need that to get on the train. That would work for Captain Cronley, but Oberst Mannberg and Ostrowski?”

  “Because they’re not American, you mean?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Not a problem,” Schultz said.

  “Not a problem?” Cronley parroted.

  “I have goodies in my briefcase, in addition to the start-up money,” Schultz said. He went into his briefcase and rummaged through it. He came up with a plastic-covered identity card and handed it to Cronley.

  On one side was Schultz’s photo. Above it were the letters DCI. Below it was the number 77, printed in red. On the other side was the legend:

  Office of the President of the United States

  Directorate of Central Intelligence

  Washington, D.C.

  The Bearer of This Identity Document

  Oscar J. Schultz

  Is acting with the authority of the President of the United States as an officer of the Directorate of Central Intelligence. Any questions regarding him or his activities should be addressed to the undersigned only.

  Sidney W. Souers

  Sidney W. Souers, Rear Admiral

  Director, U.S. Directorate of Central Intelligence