located.
“And now, if you don’t mind,” I said, “I’d like you to lead me back to the radio transmitter room.”
Norton gave me a look.
“It’s important,” I added.
“Very well, sir.”
Arriving back at the RT room, I glanced at my watch.
“Was the radio room empty upon your return here?”
“Yes, sir. You do believe me, don’t you?”
“Yes, I believe you.” I opened the door and sat down opposite the transmitting key, which wasn’t much more than a piece of black Bakelite about the size of a small doorknob attached to a metal plate screwed to the operator’s desk. “Which transmitter does this use?” I asked Cubitt.
The lieutenant pointed to the largest piece of equipment in the room, a black box measuring almost six feet high and two and a half feet wide, and on which a small sign was attached that said PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH.
“This,” said Cubitt, “is the TBL. A low-frequency, high-frequency transmitter. It’s used exclusively to provide ship-to-ship communications.” He frowned. “That’s odd.”
“What is?”
“It’s switched on.”
“Is that unusual?”
“Yes. We’re supposed to be observing radio silence. If we wanted to contact the destroyer escort in an emergency we’d use the TBS. That’s Talk Between Ships.” He touched the TBL. “It’s warm, too. It must have been on all night.” Cubitt looked at the other three men in the room. “Anyone know why this is switched on?”
The three radio seamen, including Norton, shook their heads.
I stared closely at the Westinghouse-made TBL. “Lieutenant, what band is this on?”
Cubitt leaned in close to check the dial, and I caught the smell of something nice on his hair. It made a pleasant change from sweat and body odor.
“Six hundred meters, sir. That’s what it should be on. All our coastal defenses use the six-hundred-meter band.”
“How hard would it be to retune this to another waveband?” I asked no one in particular.
“All of this stuff is a bitch to retune,” said Radio Seaman Norton, who seemed to have woken up to the fact that I was on his side. “That’s why we got the sign.”
“Pity,” I said.
“How’s that?” asked Cubitt.
“Only that it makes my theory a little harder to sustain.”
“And what theory is that, sir?”
I grinned and looked around for an ashtray. Norton grabbed one and held it in front of me. It wasn’t so much of a theory as a strong possibility. Probably I should have kept this to myself, but I wanted to help the boy they’d accused of neglecting his duty.
“That we have a German spy aboard this ship.” I shrugged off their loud guffaws. But Norton wasn’t laughing. “You see, the destroyer escort didn’t intercept a signal being broadcast from a U-boat but from the Iowa itself. A broadcast being made by the same person who lured Seaman Norton off to the radar room. It takes about twelve minutes to go there and come back here.”
“Longer in the dark, sir,” Norton added helpfully. “You kind of have to watch your footing on those stairs at night. Especially in a sea like last night.”
“Then call it fifteen minutes. More than enough time to broadcast a short message, I’d have thought.”
“But to what?” asked Cubitt. “A U-boat?”
“There’s nothing to stop the krauts tuning in to that six-hundred-meter waveband, sir,” offered one of the other radio seamen. “The U-boats used to do that a lot when we first got into the war, before we cottoned on to the fact that they were doing it and started to send our signals in code. They sank an awful lot of shipping that way.”
“So if a German spy did send a signal from here on the six-hundred-meter waveband,” I said, “the signal could have been picked up anywhere between here and the United States. By another ship. By a German U-boat. By our coastal defenses. Possibly even by another German spy tuning in to the six-hundred-meter waveband in Washington, D.C.”
“Yes, sir,” said the seaman. “That’s about the size of it.”
There was a long silence as the men in the radio room faced up to the logic of what I had established.
“A German spy, huh?” sighed Cubitt. “The captain is going to love that.”
XVI
The atmosphere around Roosevelt grew a lot more tense-certainly among the members of his Secret Service detail-when my idea about a German spy aboard the Iowa became more generally known.
On one particular occasion, however, the defensive posture assumed by FDR’s bodyguards seemed to go beyond what was reasonable. The morning of the nineteenth, the Iowa sighted the fourth escort group; it comprised the light cruiser Brooklyn and five destroyers, two of them American and three British. While watching the new escort group through binoculars on the flag bridge, FDR’s cape blew off. A young seaman fetching the cape off the air-search antenna had climbed up to return it to the president, only to find himself wrestled to the deck by Agents Pawlikowski and Rowley, guns drawn and faces contorted with alarm.
“For Christ’s sake,” yelled Admiral King, “are you two guys too dumb to see that the boy was only fetching the president his cape?”
That was the moment when Captain McCrea turned on me. “This is all your fault,” he hissed at me. “I blame you and your loose talk about German spies for this.”
It was a nice sentiment. I went back to my cabin, filled a glass with scotch, stood in front of the mirror, and toasted myself silently. “Here’s to the satisfaction of being right,” I told myself.
After that I kept to my cabin, rereading the books I had brought and drinking up much of what remained of Ted Schmidt’s supply of Mount Vernon. I even wrote the letter of condolence to his widow, and then rewrote it when I was sober, editing out all the stuff about how his last words had been about her. But that didn’t make any difference. It still left me feeling depressed as hell. I couldn’t help but let my mind’s eye picture Debbie Schmidt reading it and then, in my romantic little scenario, flagellating herself over the way she had behaved toward him. A psychiatrist would probably have told me I had in fact written another letter to Diana.
The State Department would certainly have forwarded the letter to Mrs. Schmidt. But thinking to speed its journey home by writing Schmidt’s home address on the envelope, I searched his bag, looking for his address book, only to discover it was missing. For a brief stupid moment, I considered reporting the theft to the captain, and then rejected the idea. McCrea would hardly have thanked me for alleging that yet another crime had been committed aboard his precious battleship.
It was just my luck that whoever had stolen Ted Schmidt’s address book should have ignored Donovan’s Louis Vuitton suitcase containing all those Bride intercepts.
But who had taken the address book? After all, what good was a State Department employee’s address book in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean? It looked even less useful now that we were about to land in North Africa.
At 1800 hours the combined task group reached a point about twenty miles west of Cape Spartel, not far from Tangier. All the ships went to general quarters, for now we were in range of enemy attack from the air. The voyage was almost over.
