Page 170

PRIORITY

TOP SECRET LINDBERGH

DUPLICATION FORBIDDEN

FROM BEERMUG

TO VINT HILL TANGO NET

THAT’S IT MANY THANKS

BEERMUG OFF

TOP SECRET LINDBERGH

—

Everybody in the room was looking at him, wondering what was to come next.

If you don’t know what you’re doing, plunge ahead.

He looked at his watch.

It’s quarter to twelve.

Oh, shit!

“Okay. This will be quick, as I have a social engagement—taking a lady to lunch—that I can’t get out of.

“First things first. From this moment, whenever I’m not here, there will be somebody in this room. Somebody with a pistol. No one is to get into this closet except you three, Special Agent Hessinger, First Sergeant Dunwiddie, Lieutenant Stratford, and me. Plus whoever Dunwiddie or the lieutenant thinks should be allowed in here. Understood?”

There was another chorus of “Yes, sir.”

“Captain,” Sergeant Mitchell asked, “you going to tell us who those other people on the net are?”

“Absolutely,” Cronley said. “Vatican is the monastery. Tex is Colonel Cletus Frade, USMC, our commanding officer and the officer in charge of Operation Ost, and that station is in Buenos Aires. Polo is Major Maxwell Ashton the Third, Frade’s deputy, and that station is in Mendoza, which is in the foothills of the Andes Mountains on the border between Argentina and Chile, where we operate the relocation program. Major Ashton will shortly—I hope within a matter of days—be coming here to take over command of the compound. Sailor is in Berlin, in what used to be Admiral Canaris’s home until the Nazis found out we had turned him. You should know—everyone should, for that matter—that the Nazis sent Canaris to a concentration camp, tortured him, hung him dead, leaving his naked corpse to rot. They confiscated all his property. When Second Armored went into Berlin, the OSS took over his house. And, finally, Ranger is Frade when he has this system mounted in whatever airplane he’s flying.”

He looked around. “Any questions?”

“Sir, this Marine colonel has got a Collins/SIGABA on his airplane?” Staff Sergeant Kramer asked dubiously. “It’s not an aircraft system.”

If I answer that question, there will be more, and I will be late for my lunch with Rachel and the bloom will really be off our rose.

On the other hand, if I don’t answer it, or answer it less than fully, these guys—and they’re all smart, they wouldn’t be in ASA unless they were—will decide I’m handing them a line of bullshit. And I can’t afford that.

So fuck Rachel. Figuratively speaking, of course.

“At Polo is a guy, Master Sergeant Siggie Stein, who is not only Major Ashton’s deputy but our commo chief. He figured out a way to install the Collins/SIGABA system on aircraft.”

“Sir, this sergeant is this major’s deputy?”

“The way things work around here is the best man for a job gets it, regardless of his rank . . .”

—

Fifteen minutes later, he decided that for once he might have made the right decision.

What I had was a lieutenant and three sergeants—all good people; McClung sent me the best he had—who had suddenly been put on indefinite Temporary Duty doing they knew not what in the middle of nowhere.