“It would appear that your mission of mercy and compassion is ready to go,” Martin said.
“You told me one time you had a man in Berlin,” Frade said.
Martin nodded.
“Jose Ruiz,” he said. “We were at the Academy together.”
“He’s the military attache?”
“The financial counselor,” Martin said.
“And he’ll be coming back with us?”
Martin nodded again.
“He might be useful,” Frade said.
“So I told Gonzalo,” Martin said. “Anything else I can do?”
“As a matter of fact,” Frade said, and handed him the briefcase he’d gotten from Colonel Flowers. “I forgot to leave my wife her allowance. Would you get this to her, please?”
Martin took the briefcase. It was much heavier than he expected.
“What’s in here besides her allowance—bricks?”
“Nothing. I’m probably more generous to my wife than you are to yours.”
Martin looked at the briefcase suspiciously but didn’t reply.
“Go on. Have a look. You were going to anyway, the first chance you had. If you look now, you can apologize for doubting me.”
After a moment’s hesitation, Martin lifted the flap of the briefcase and looked inside.
“Gotcha! Now you can apologize.”
“What’s this for?” Martin asked.
“El General Bernardo Martin, master of the outrageous personal question. One man should never ask another why he is giving his wife a little pocket change for her purse.”
“Forgive me,” Martin said sarcastically.
The two looked at each other and smiled.
“Clete, be careful,” Martin said. “I don’t think the most dangerous part of this will be flying across the Atlantic Ocean.”
“Great minds walk the same paths,” Frade said, then shook Martin’s hand and walked out of the Executive Suite of South American Airways.
[THREE]
Aboard
Captain Cletus Frade had been at the controls of the Constellation
As soon as the aircraft reached cruising altitude, he had turned the plane over to Peralta and sent another SAA backup pilot to the cockpit. Then he crawled into one of the two crew bunks and closed his eyes.
Three minutes later, Siggie Stein shook his shoulder.
“Don’t shoot the messenger, Colonel. Your Collins is out.”
A dozen Collins Radio Corporation Model 7.2 transceivers and SIGABA encryption systems had been acquired for Team Turtle at Stein’s suggestion—“Trust me, they’re six months ahead of state of the art”—from the Army Security Agency at Vint Hill Farms Station in Virginia. They were to provide secure communication with the ASA— and thus with the OSS—from anywhere in Argentina.
They were “installation systems,” which translated to mean they were designed for use in a communications center, rather than “mobile,” which would have meant installation in a truck.
One day at Estancia Don Guillermo, Clete had idly commented that he wished he could have the communications capability in the Red Lodestar.
“If you want to take a chance on me really blowing one up, I can have a shot at it,” Stein had replied matter-of-factly. “Maybe el Jefe will have some ideas on how to do it.”
Clete had remembered then—and only then, which embarrassed him—that Colonel Graham had told him that when being interviewed by OSS experts to see if he was qualified to be the radar man on Team Turtle, they had reported that Stein knew more about the transmission of radio waves than they did.
And that Stein and former Chief Radioman Oscar Schultz, USN, had become instant buddies when they started talking about communications equipment in a cant only the two of them understood.
Two weeks later, a SIGABA and Collins 7.2 were up and running in the Red Lodestar. Clete had not been surprised when a similar installation in SAA’s first Constellation had worked well in Argentina. But he had been surprised—perhaps awed—when the system had worked in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean and later on the ground at Lisbon.
Frade sat up in the crew bunk and said, “Siggie, I don’t want to go to Germany without it. I won’t go to Germany without it. What’s wrong with it? Belay that. I wouldn’t understand. Can you fix it, or are we going to have to go back to Buenos Aires for another one?”
“I
“And to fix it at Belem?”
“Thirty minutes, if I’m right about what’s wrong.”
“Did Mother Superior teach you how to pray, Sergeant Stein?”
“She didn’t have to. I’m a Jew. We pray a lot.”
“Start now,” Frade ordered.
He had then lain back down and closed his eyes.
Ten minutes after that, he opened them again, sat up, pushed himself off the bunk, and went looking for Stein, Boltitz, and von Wachtstein. He found them sitting in the seats for the backup crew, trying to doze.
He beckoned for them to follow him back into the sleeping section, motioned for the doors to the cockpit and the seating area to be closed, and then began, “We have a small problem. Belay that. We have a few small problems, plural.
“The Collins 7.2 is out. We can’t do without it. Siggie thinks he can fix it if he can get into the Army Air Forces’ radio maintenance facility at Val de Cans. The problem there is they may not let him in. The only reason we’re going in there is because the Argentine Foreign Ministry leaned on somebody. The Collins 7.2 is a classified American radio, and they’re going to wonder what the hell SAA is doing with one.”
“Show them the phony OSS credentials,” Stein suggested.
“The problem there—the problems—are that they
“So, what are you going to do?” von Wachtstein asked.
“Hansel, when you were a little boy back in the Schloss, did you ever act in a play?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You know, in a play, like
“Yeah. Why?”
“Try to remember what your teacher taught you. You’re going back on the stage when we get to Val de Cans. The play is called ‘Here come the mysterious, all-powerful heroes of the Office of Strategic Services.’ Starring
