Empire and Honor (Honor Bound 7)

“In the Brothel,” Ford interjected.

Frade nodded.

“Radioactivity?” Ford asked. “We arrive in the States—plane and crew—glowing brightly?”

“I don’t know, but it seems to me the Germans would have to have figured out how to deal with it. It took that submarine at least a month to get here from Norway.”

“Where can the Brothel land down there in all that ice and snow?” Armstrong asked.

“I doubt it can. But I’ve got a Lodestar that I can probably put on the ground and get in the air again. And then fly to Mendoza and rendezvous with the Brothel, which has been waiting patiently in Santiago, Chile, for the message to go to Mendoza.”

“I hate to piss on your parade, Colonel,” Armstrong said.

“Please do. I tend to get carried away with boyish enthusiasm.”

“Let’s say your man in the Storch finds the uranium oxide. Frankly, that seems unlikely, but let’s say he does. How are you going to get word to Santiago?”

“Are you familiar with the Collins Radio Corporation’s Model 7.2 transceiver?”

“Yeah.”

“Two of them are in the convoy I mentioned. They call that ‘redundancy.’ That means in case one breaks, you’ve got another.”

“But that’s fixed station equipment.”

“Not our 7.2s,” Frade said, just a little smugly.

“Yours are portable?”

“Not only portable but they work in airplanes. I’ve got one in my Lodestar, and if you can put the Brothel on the ground in Mendoza without breaking it, my whiz-bang commo man, Sergeant Siggie Stein, will put one in the Brothel. So you can get the message, o ye of little faith, that I have the uranium oxide and it’s time for you to leave scenic Santiago and pick it up in Mendoza. Or maybe even at the mouth of the Magellan Strait.”

Commander Armstrong shook his head in disbelief.

“And, forgive me for being of so little faith, but what are you going to do if your guy can’t find it in Antarctica?”

“I thought you might ask about Plan B,” Frade said. “Did you happen to notice as you passed through downstairs a nice-looking young man with two suitcases? He was probably looking lustfully at my baby sister.”

Both nodded.

“Well, I can understand why,” Ford said.

Frade gave him a withering look and went on: “He’s Second Lieutenant James D. Cronley Junior, Cavalry, USA, detailed to what used to be OSS in Europe. Those suitcases—brought from Germany yesterday—are full of, among other things, dossiers of high-level Nazis we’re looking for. Karl Boltitz—he’s the tall blond one downstairs looking lustfully at my older baby sister—used to be the naval attaché at the German embassy. He just brought from Germany the manifest of U-234, including the names of the Nazis aboard we didn’t have until just now.

“General Martín, who heads BIS, is going to Mendoza with us. He is bringing along his two experts in charge of ‘where are the Nazis hiding?’ Between them and the Gehlen officers who specialized in keeping an eye on the SS, we’re going to see if we can find these guys and, when we do, ask them, more or less politely, ‘Hey, Asshole, where’s the uranium oxide?’”

“I’m just a simple sailor . . .” Armstrong said.

Clete snorted.

“. . . but I don’t understand the urgency in getting the uranium oxide. It’s not an atom bomb, just the stuff from which they make the stuff that goes into atomic bombs. Right?”

“Did I mention that the Russians are sending—maybe that should be ‘have sent’—a guy down here by the name of Pavel Egorov? He was the NKVD’s man in Mexico City.”

“No, actually you didn’t,” Armstrong said. “But I can understand why an unimportant detail like that might easily slip through the cracks.”

Clete gave him the finger.

“So when do we go to work?” Armstrong asked.