“Yes, I do, Colonel. Get me down there somehow so I can help Major Grüner look for her from his Storch.”
Why does he want to go down there?
“What could you do to help him? That he can’t do himself?” Frade asked.
“General Martín says he can get me nautical charts of the area—Argentine charts would be better than the ones I had on U-450—and from them I could make a better guess, I suggest, than could Grüner about where she might lie, and where she might be moving to.”
What is it the lawyers say?
“Never ask a question unless you’re sure what the answer will be.”
How the hell can I argue with what he said?
This is not the time to ask him, “How do I know that if you find the sub you won’t live up to your sacred oath to der Führer by doing whatever you can to let him know we’re onto him?
“Or that if you do see the sub, and Grüner doesn’t, that you’ll just keep your mouth shut?”
“That makes sense to me,” Nervo said.
“And to me,” Frade said. “But the only way we can get von Dattenberg down there—unless we put him in a car right now, and he drives down there—is in the Lodestar, and we won’t know if we can do that until we hear from Grüner. His convoy—the flatbed trucks carrying the Cub, Storch, and bulldozer, and the Army trucks with soldiers, heavy arms, food, and fuel—left Aeropuerto Frade yesterday afternoon. They aren’t even halfway there. And once they do get there, we don’t know how long it will take them to grade a suitable runway. So we’re going to have to wait for that.”
“When you’re thinking of sending people down there, Cletus,” the old man offered, “you’re going to have to give some thought—presuming of course you find and seize either the submarine with the uranium oxide aboard or the uranium oxide where it is being kept on land—to who will take legal possession of it.”
“I don’t follow you, Grandfather.”
“Both the Argentines—General Martín and the BIS, or the Argentine army—”
“The Ejército Argentino,” Clete furnished without thinking.
“Thank you ever so much, Cletus,” the old man said, icily sarcastic. “I’ll write that on my shirt cuff so I won’t forget it again. If I may continue?”
“Sorry.”
Where the hell did this come from?
And where the hell is he going with it?
“Both the Ejército Argentino and the U.S. Army and Navy—and I suppose the Royal Army and every other ally—have the right to seize the uranium oxide and, for that matter, the submarine itself, as property of the defeated enemy. In the same way as you acquired the Storch.
“As I understand that, a military attaché from our embassy seized the Storch in the name of the United States from an Argentine national, one Don Cletus Frade, in whose possession—illegal possession—it was.”
“What do you mean, ‘illegal possession’?” Clete protested.
“Von Wachtstein had no right to give you that airplane, which was the property of the German embassy,” the old man said. “Isn’t that right, General Martín?”
“Yes, it is,” Martín said. “The polite fiction at the time was that I believed von Wachtstein had crashed it into the River Plate, taking Boltitz with him.”
“Is there a point to this?” Clete asked.
“Oh, yes,” the old man said. “A very important point.”
Why do I think I just asked another question without knowing what the answer would be?
“Now, if General Martín seizes the uranium oxide, which he has every right to do, he would have to inform General Farrell and Coronel Perón. Is that right, General?”
“Yes, it is.”
“And we don’t want either of them—in particular Coronel Perón—to know about that, do we?”