“And, presumably, the weapons el Coronel Frade cached there for the coup d’état are still there?”
Martín nodded.
“You two are Saint George’s Old Boys?” Lauffer asked.
They nodded.
“Me, too.”
“I know what,” Nervo said, deeply sarcastic. “Let’s call Father Kingsley-Howard and tell him what we’re all up to these days.”
They all laughed.
“So what are we going to do?” Martín asked.
Nervo said: “I shall probably regret this as long as I live—which under the circumstances may not be long—but I vote to go along with Don Cletus. Do nothing, but keep an eye on the miserable bastards. Especially on our own miserable—and sometimes degenerate—bastards.”
No one said anything.
“The reason I say that is that I can’t think of anything else we can do,” Nervo added.
“Neither can I,” Martín admitted. Then he looked at Lauffer. “Lauffer?”
“I think we should pool our intelligence,” Lauffer sa
id. “I’m sure that each of us knows something the others should.”
Martín considered that a moment.
“You’d be the one to do that. If Santiago and I started getting chummy, people would talk.”
“Perhaps, Comisario General,” Lauffer said, “you’d be able to find time in your busy schedule to take lunch with me one day at the Círculo Militar? El Presidente eats there three or four times a week, and of course while I have to accompany him, I am rarely invited to share his table.”
“That’s very kind of you, Capitán. Call me anytime you’re free.”
X
[ONE]
The North Atlantic Ocean
North Latitude 35.42, West Longitude 11.84
1300 28 September 1943
On the night of 28 September 1943, 678 bombers of the Royal Air Force—312 Lancasters, 231 Stirlings, and 24 Wellingtons—plus five B-17s of the 8th U.S. Air Force, filled the skies over the German city of Hannover and dropped their mixed loads of high-explosive and incendiary bombs.
Halfway across the world, the Wewak area of New Guinea was attacked by forty U.S. Army Air Force B-24s. Twenty-nine P-38 Lockheed Lightning fighters accompanied the B-24s and shot down eight Japanese fighter aircraft without loss to themselves or the bombers they were protecting.
And, since just after noon on 28 September, Captain Archer C. Dooley Jr., commanding officer of the 94th Fighter Squadron, USAAF, had been flying his P-38, at an altitude of 22,000 feet, in lazy circles over the North Atlantic Ocean. He was about 100 miles south of the southern tip of Portugal and 200 miles west of the Straits of Gibraltar.
During that time, he had seen no other aircraft except the six other P-38s in the flight. Nor had he seen any ships of any kind on the ocean beneath him. Nor had he heard over his earphones what he had been told to expect: a Morse code transmission of three characters, dit dit dit, dit dah, dit dah. The code stood for S, A, A, and Captain Dooley had no idea what that meant either.
The silence in his earphones probably explained why the needle of a newly installed dial, labeled SIGNAL STRENGTH, on his instrument panel hadn’t moved off its peg. The signal-strength indicator was connected to something else newly installed on the nose of his P-38, above the 20mm cannon and four .50-caliber machine guns. It was an antenna, in the form of a twelve-inch-diameter circle.
The antenna reminded Archie Dooley of the chrome bull’s-eye mounted on the hoods of 1941 and 1942 Buick automobiles. And it caused him to think that he was now flying a Lockheed Roadmaster. Two years earlier, Archie’s idea of heaven was to get Anne-Marie Doherty, wearing her Saint Ignatius High School cheerleader outfit, into the backseat of a 1942 Buick Roadmaster convertible. Neither was available to him in this life.
A Marine full bull colonel had impressed upon Captain Dooley—as they watched a guy who looked just like Howard Hughes install the antenna on Dooley’s P-38—that the antenna was classified Top Secret, as was his mission, and that he was to take those secrets to his grave.