“El Jefe? The Chief?”
Graham, smiling, nodded.
“Well, he’s right. Who’s liable to intercept?”
“The Germans, most likely. Others.”
“Apropos of nothing whatever, Colonel, does the term Enigma mean anything to you?”
“Yes, it does.”
“I thought it might. Well, the bad news is we don’t have anything nearly as good. The M-94 is pretty primitive. We have another one called the SIGABA, which is almost as good, as safe as the one whose name is classified.”
“We have those at several places,” Graham said. “But when I asked Colonel Lemes, he said that not only are they awfully expensive—”
“Is that a problem for you?” Scott interrupted.
Graham shook his head and went on. “—but that they are large, heavy, delicate—apparently they’ve never successfully dropped one by parachute— difficult to operate, and a mechanical nightmare.”
“Unfortunately, he’s right. About the only place they work reliably, outside of fixed bases, is aboard ship.”
“How common is that? I mean, would they have one aboard a destroyer?”
“What destroyer? Some do, some don’t.”
“The USS Alfred Thomas, DD-107,” Graham said.
“You want me to find out?”
“Could you?”
“Sir,” Lieutenant McClung boomed from the door. “I have—more precisely Lieutenant Fischer has—the information the colonel requested vis-à-vis the SIGABA aboard a Navy vessel.”
“Is he out there with you?”
“Yes, sir,” McClung boomed.
“Bring him in.”
The two young officers marched into Colonel Scott’s office.
Second Lieutenant Leonard Fischer, Signal Corps, was nowhere as large as First Lieutenant McClung.
“What did you find out, Len?” Scott asked.
“Sir, there is one aboard the Alfred Thomas. My source in the Navy says he doesn’t know if it’s operable, and probably is not, because the chief radioman who knew how to operate it and repair it was taken ill and removed from the ship somewhere in South America—Argentina or Uruguay, he wasn’t sure.”
Colonel Scott and Colonel Graham looked at each other, but neither responded directly.
“Lieutenant, let me ask you a question,” Graham said. “What would you say the chances are that a SIGABA could be shipped about five thousand miles on one airplane—I mean, it would be loaded aboard the airplane in Washington and off-loaded at its destination, not go through depots, et cetera—without suffering irreparable damage?”
“It would need a lot of work, sir,” Lieutenant Fischer said, after thinking about it. “Five thousand miles in an airplane is a lot of vibration, and there would be, I’d guess, half a dozen landings and takeoffs to make it that far. But irreparable? No, sir. Presuming the parts were available, and we know pretty well which parts will fail, and there was someone who knew what he was doing to make the repairs, it could be made operable.”
“Thank you,” Graham said, and looked at Scott.
“That’ll be all for right now, but stay close,” Scott said.
“Yes, sir,” McClung boomed, drowning out whatever Fischer replied.