Martín 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, Martín lifted the flap of the briefcase and looked inside.
“¡Madre de Dios!” he softly exclaimed a moment later.
“Gotcha! Now you can apologize.”
“What’s this for?” Martín asked.
“El General Bernardo Martín, 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,” Martín said sarcastically.
The two looked at each other and smiled.
“Clete, be careful,” Martín 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 Martín’s hand and walked out of the Executive Suite of South American Airways.
[THREE]
Aboard Ciudad de Rosario Approaching Val de Cans Airfield Belém do Pará, Brazil 0135 17 May 1945
Captain Cletus Frade had been at the controls of the Constellation Ciudad de Rosario as she took off from Aeropuerto Coronel Jorge G. Frade, breaking ground at 1832. Mario Peralta was in the right seat.
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 t
o 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 think I can fix it if you can get me into the radio shop at Belém. Your call. It’ll take me a couple of hours to get another system out of the warehouse at Jorge Frade.”
“And to fix it at Belém?”
“Thirty minutes, if I’m right about what’s wrong.”
“Did Mother Superior teach you how to pray, Sergeant Stein?”