“What’s so classified about this? How highly classified is it?”
“It doesn’t get any higher: Top Secret–Presidential.”
“I.D., how the hell long am I going to have to stand around with my thumb in my ass waiting for you to tell me what the hell’s going on?”
“Captain Cronley called me last night and gave me permission to tell you anything you want to know.”
“Cronley? As in, ‘You can tell Cronley’?”
“Yes. He’s the chief, DCI-Europe.”
“And he’s a captain?”
“A twenty-two-year-old captain. He didn’t make captain as soon as Billy Wilson made captain—Billy wasn’t out of West Point six months before he made captain—but he’s cast from the same mold.”
“You know I like, and respect, Billy Wilson. But I have a lot of trouble with him being a twenty-five-year-old lieutenant colonel. I was older than that when I made first lieutenant.”
“And so was I. Different Army, Ernie.”
“I sort of liked the one we had. Okay, start telling me what this twenty-two-year-old captain told you you can.”
“The question is where to begin.”
“Try the beginning.”
“All right then: How come I never told you anything about it? Because I was ordered not to.”
“By who? Harry Bull? McNarney?”
“By Admiral Souers.”
“And who the hell is Admiral Souers?”
“Souers—Sidney W., Rear Admiral, Reservist. He came to Fort Riley, where I was making plans for the Constabulary—”
“A Navy admiral—a reserve Navy admiral—went out to the plains of Kansas to see an armored general? What the hell, I.D.?”
“There I was, sitting on the porch of Quarters 24—you know, what they call ‘Custer’s House’?”
“I’ve been to Fort Riley,” Harmon said. “Jesus Christ!”
“Then I guess you already know it isn’t really Custer’s house. The house from which Lieutenant Colonel Custer actually rode forth to immortality by getting his entire command wiped out at the Little Big Horn burned down.”
“Goddammit, I.D.!”
“As I was saying, they put me in Quarters 24, Tom Davis having decided that it was appropriate accommodation for a distinguished general officer such as myself, who outranked him, and was at Riley for an unspecified purpose, but which Tom thought might have something to do with me being sent there to spy on him.”
“I didn’t think about that,” Harmon said, smiling.
“Or that I had been sent there because it was suspected I agreed with Georgie Patton that we should rearm the Wehrmacht and march on Moscow and had been sent to Riley
while they decided what to do with me.”
“That was the rumor going around.”
“So, there I was sitting on the porch of Quarters 24, innocently going over proposed Tables of Organization and Equipment for the Constab, when a staff car with a two-star plate pulled up at the curb. I presumed, of course, it was Tom.
“It wasn’t. I suspected Tom was in—or his aide was in—a staff car that seemed to be following the one that stopped at my curb.