“You’d be ordered to rendezvous at Point A, or somesuch,” Cronley interrupted. “I mean, they didn’t radio you the actual coordinates, right?”
“The Atlantic Ocean, Subteniente,
is enormous,” von Dattenberg said.
“I think everyone knows that, Willi,” Frade said unpleasantly. “Answer his question.”
“Have I done something to offend you, Oberstleutnant Frade?” von Dattenberg asked.
“As a matter of fact,” Frade said evenly, “I’m having a little trouble believing that the captain of a submarine would not know that he had been given a set of coded coordinates for something as important as U-234’s Argentine landfall. And I’ve been wondering if you’re back to that officer’s honor bullshit.”
“Take it easy, Clete,” Cronley said. “Maybe he didn’t know what they were.”
“How could he not know?” Frade snapped.
“Because they didn’t want him to know unless it was necessary.”
Clete looked at Jimmy a long moment, then turned to von Dattenberg.
“Answer Cronley’s question, Willi. Now I forget what it was. . . .”
“I asked if the Kriegsmarine radioed the actual coordinates of a rendezvous point,” Cronley said. “Or whether you got a message saying ‘Rendezvous Four’ or ‘Rendezvous 219’ or something like that.”
“There were five sheets of rendezvous points,” von Dattenberg said. “Twenty rendezvous points to a page, for a total of one hundred. As I was saying before, the Atlantic Ocean is enormous—we needed that many possible rendezvous sites.”
“So the message said, in effect, ‘Rendezvous Point 55’?” Cronley said.
“Actually, the messages were in three parts,” von Dattenberg explained. “The first identified, by line number, the rendezvous point. For example, if it was Rendezvous Point 55, the first part of the message would be ‘3-15’. The ‘3’ meaning page three of the five pages, and the ‘15’ being the fifteenth set of coordinates on page three. The second part of the message would be a date and time block. That was an order to be at the rendezvous point no later than, say, seventeen hundred hours on the twentieth. In that case, the second part of the message would be 1700-20.”
“And the third part?” Cronley said.
“The third part would be the code. Are you familiar, Subteniente, with nautical map coordinates?”
“A little,” Cronley said.
“You know that longitude and latitude are written—to pull one out of the air—S50.62795, W60.56676. That means 50 degrees, 62795 seconds south latitude and 60 degrees 56676 seconds west longitude. That would be in the South Atlantic, several hundred miles north of the Falkland Islands.”
“Okay,” Cronley said.
“The code would read ‘5258.’ That would be an instruction to change the south latitude to S52 and the west longitude to W62. That would be a point—if I can still do this in my head—about one hundred miles southwest of the Falklands.”
“Do you remember, Kapitän,” Cronley asked, “getting one of these lists of rendezvous points just before you sailed from Narvik?”
Von Dattenberg nodded. “You think the landfall coordinates are on that list?”
“Did you turn it over to General Martín?” Cronley asked.
“Yes.”
“But, Jimmy, what good would it do?” Frade asked. “There was never a message about it. We don’t have any idea which of the one hundred rendezvous points it would be, and we don’t have the third part of the message, the code.”
“We do it backwards,” Cronley said.
“What the hell does that mean?” Frade demanded.
“On the airplane,” Cronley explained, “when I first heard anything about any of this, Kapitän Boltitz said—”
“Karl, please, Jimmy,” Boltitz said. “We’re all friends here.”