“I would not have suspected that, judging by your behavior. You seem to have a natural talent for that sort of recreation.”
[TWO]
Kloster Grünau
Schollbrunn, Bavaria, Germany
0950 11 October 1945
“Well, let’s see if it works,” Dunwiddie said.
“How do we do that?” Cronley asked.
“Pray, and then try this.”
He typed rapidly on the SIGABA keyboard. A strip of paper came out of the machine. Dunwiddie ripped it off and showed it to Cronley.
FROM TANKER TWO TO VINT HILL SPECIAL SIGNING ON NET ACKNOWLEDGE
Dunwiddie then fed the strip into the SIGABA, which swallowed it.
“Now what?”
“This is where we pray again.”
Thirty seconds later, a paper strip began to come out of the SIGABA. After thirty seconds, it stopped. Dunwiddie tore it off, read it, and handed it to Cronley.
“Thank you, God,” Dunwiddie said.
That didn’t sound sarcastic, Cronley thought.
As he began to read the strip—FROM VINT HILL TO TANKER TWO WELCOME TO THE NET MESSAGES FOLLOWING HAVE NOT REPEAT NOT BEEN ACKNOWLEDGED BY TANKER OR FLAGS PLEASE RELAY IF POSSIBLE AND ACKNOWLEDGE RECEIPT OR FAILURE—tape began to stream from the machine again.
This took about five minutes, and this time Dunwiddie didn’t even try to read it, instead feeding it back in the SIGABA machine. The teletypewriter-like keyboard began to clatter, as if invisible hands were pushing the keys.
What this produced on the teletypewriter were the two messages—TEX-0013 and TEX-0014—Frade had sent from Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo just after noon the day before.
After Dunwiddie had explained the code names and the general meaning of the message, which took more than enough time for Cronley to decide he was in way over his head with whatever this was, Dunwiddie made it worse.
“Well,” Tiny announced, “here’s where you start earning your keep, even if you are a twenty-one-year-old wet-behind-the-ears second john who can find only—and with difficulty—one cheek of his ass with both hands.”
“When you are finished with kissing said ass, First Sergeant Dunwiddie, you are going to explain that, right?”
“Well, the reason the colonel didn’t get these is because he can’t hang a Collins antenna out his office window in the Farben building—people might ask questions—any more than Major Wallace can hang one out his bedroom window in the Vier Jahreszeiten. Which means, since this is obviously important, I have to get it to them.
“The problem there is that the landlines are not secure, which means I can’t get on the telephone. The ASA—”
“The what?”
“The Army Security Agency, which not only listens to Russian radio traffic but is also charged with providing secure communications to people like us.”
“Okay.”
“The ASA is right now installing such secure communications for the South German Industrial Development Organization in Pullach.”
“That’s what we’re going to call Operation Ost, right?”
“You get a gold star to take home to Mommy for remembering that. But since that’s not yet up, and anyway we’re here, not at Pullach, that’s not a solution to our problem.