CORDELL HULL
SECRETARY OF STATE
* * *
“Jesus H. Christ!” Clete said.
“Rather nauseating, isn’t it?” Nestor said.
“Hundreds of thousands of people murdered?” Clete asked incredulously.
“The ambassador said he’s been led to believe it’s many more than that,” Nestor said evenly. “He thinks there was probably quite a discussion in Foggy Bottom…”
“What?”
“…at the Department of State,” Nestor explained somewhat condescendingly. “They call it ‘Foggy Bottom’ in Washington. The ambassador thinks there was probably quite a discussion—with the decision made at the highest levels, perhaps by the Secretary himself—before they came up with the ‘hundreds of thousands’ language. Even that boggles credulity. One’s mind can accept the death of one person, a hundred persons, even a thousand. Credulity is strained at tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. The death, much less the murder, of millions is simply—beyond human comprehension.”
“In other words, you believe this?”
“We know it to be a fact; our people have seen the death camps.”
“Jesus!”
“Give me a call when you return from Punta del Este. Have a good time. I’ve been there. The women on the beach are stunning; made me wish I was a bachelor.”
He put his beer bottle down on the banister.
“I can find my way out,” he said.
XI
[ONE]
La Boca
Buenos Aires
1630 3 December 1942
Second Lieutenant Anthony J. Pelosi, Corps of Engineers, Army of the United States, wearing a short-sleeved white shirt and dark-blue cotton trousers, was wet with sweat when the bus finally arrived in La Boca. The bus was old, battered, noisy, and as crowded as the El at the Loop during rush hour—more crowded; I feel like a goddamned sardine.
Lieutenant Frade had ordered him to spend as much time as possible riding the buses, “to get an idea
of the terrain.” The mentors in New Orleans had suggested the idea, and it was a good one, but Pelosi couldn’t help but notice that Frade wasn’t riding around in fucking buses himself; he was either getting chauffeured in one of Mallín’s cars or catching cabs.
Pelosi stepped off the bus, took half a dozen steps, and then pulled the sweat-soaked shirt away from his chest and back.
Lieutenant Frade had also ordered him to start “laying in whatever you think you’re going to need to blow a hole in a ship. No explosives, no detonators, they’ll be provided. Everything else.”
What the fuck is everything else? You need five things to blow something: explosives, detonators, wire, damping material—sandbags are usually best—and a source of juice to blow the detonators. A proper magneto controller is best. You hook up the wires, give it a crank, and boom!
I’m not as dumb as Lieutenant Frade—and for that matter, Ettinger—think I am. Laying in everything else does not mean I should find some engineer supply store and walk in and announce, “Hola! I’m interested in a good high-explosives controller. A Matson and Hardy Model Seven would be nice. What am I going to do with it? Why, I’m going to blow the bottom out of a ship in your harbor, that’s what I’m going to do.”
I don’t really need a controller. I can get by with a couple of six-volt dry-cell batteries; Christ knows I’ve done that often enough. So what I’m doing here is looking for wire and a half-dozen dry-cell batteries. Big fucking deal.
What I really need is a magnet, a great big fucking magnet, so I can make something like the thing Lieutenant Greene, Chief Norton, and Bo’sun Leech showed me at the shipyard in Mississippi.
That device really impressed Tony. It was designed to pierce armored steel, like on a tank; and it was improvised from a limpet mine the Navy had gotten from the English, Chief Norton told him. It was constructed of magnetized steel. Its bottom was flat and was attached to the steel of a ship’s hull. The top was of much thicker steel, and dome-shaped. The explosive went inside the dome; but the dome also served as a damper, directing the explosive force inward. Even better, the charge itself was molded—Chief Norton called it a “shaped charge”—so that it really directed all the force inward.