4730 Avenida Libertador
Buenos Aires
1735 26 December 1942
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Clete said, thirty-five minutes later, as he walked into the kitchen.
Chief Schultz held up both hands in a “no explanation necessary; I know how it is” gesture.
“It’s OK, Mr. Frade,” he said. He winked, and then offered Clete the bottle of beer he had been in the process of opening.
“No, thank you,” Clete said. “Enrico, would you take the Señorita to the Belgrano Athletic Club, please?”
“Sí, mi Teniente.”
“Honey!” Clete called.
The Princess marched through the kitchen and out the door to the garage without looking left or right. Enrico followed her.
“Maybe you’d want to rub your neck, Clete,” Lieutenant Pelosi said. “Up under the chin.”
Clete took out his handkerchief and rubbed his neck, up under the chin. He was not surprised when the handkerchief showed a red smear.
“I didn’t think you guys would still be here,” he said. “What’s going on?”
“Well,” Chief Schultz replied, pausing to take a pull at the neck of his beer bottle, “when we went aboard the Thomas, the Skipper was waiting for me. The local chiefs are throwing a reception for the chiefs at the Escuela de Guerra Naval”—the School of Naval Warfare—“and he thought it would look strange if I didn’t go. I’m the senior chief aboard; they would wonder where I was. So the Skipper and Mr. Pelosi talked it over, and I put on my dress whites, and at half past seven I’m gonna be at the reception.”
“What’s this about Dave not being able to take code?”
“That’s one of the two problems we have, Mr. Frade: Dave here, and Mr. Pelosi, which is why I come here.”
“Tell me about Dave first,” Clete said.
“I’m not very good at Morse code,” Ettinger confessed. “I can send maybe ten or twelve words a minute, and I’m even worse at taking it.”
“Christ, you are supposed to be a radio expert!” Clete said.
He remembered his own experience with Morse Code training. It was a required course in ground school, and he had a hell of a time acquiring the absolute minimum proficiency: sending and receiving twelve words a minute, with a ninety-percent accuracy.
“He knows radios,” Chief Schultz came to Ettinger’s defense. “With the fixes we worked out, he could probably set up the transmitter without a damn bit of trouble. But working the Thomas and the Devil Fish? With his hand? Forget it.”
“Explain that to me,” Clete said.
“You’ll be using one of the Contingency Codes,” Chief Schultz said. “There’s maybe a dozen of them in the Captain’s safe. Just for some screwy operation like this one. They’re all numbers. Numbers, for somebody like Dave, is the hardest to transmit and receive. And you get a couple of numbers wrong, maybe just one number wrong, you’re all fucked up. The codes are numerical nonrandom sequential, you know what I mean? There’s phase shift built in…”
Clete held up his hand.
“I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about, Chief.”
Chief Schultz did not seem at all surprised.
“Take my word for it, Mr. Frade,” he said. “What you need with codes like this is an operator with a pretty good hand, thirty-five, forty words a minute, with a zero error rate.”
“Like you, for example, Chief?”
“That’s what I was thinking, Mr. Frade,” Schultz said. “I wouldn’t be the first sailor in the history of the Navy to get hooked up with some local lollypop and miss his ship…” He stopped. “I didn’t mean nothing by that, Mr. Frade. I could tell right off that the one you had in here was a nice girl.”
“No offense taken, Chief,” Clete said.