You dodged the bullet that time, Cletus, he thought. I hope it doesn’t make you cocky. Donovan’s not the kind of man to give up easily. Next time, he may not bother to ask the question at all. Next time, maybe you’ll be the one on the other end of the pistol….
And whose hand would be holding it? A German? An American? An Argentine?
He sighed and shook his head.
One more alligator, he thought. But when you are already up to your ass in alligators, what difference does one more make?
He turned back to his papers and started to read.
*Among the many ways the longtime presence of the British in Argentina was manifested was in the custom among upper-class Argentines of referring to rooms in homes by their English names. The living room, for example, was called “the living”; the dining room, “the dining”; and the foyer, or reception room, as “the reception,” et cetera.
*Ernst Röhm was a member of the Nazi party before Hitler. He formed strong-arm squads of thugs, who wore brown shirts as a uniform and had the mission of protecting Hitler, other senior Nazis, and Nazi party meetings, and of disrupting, usually violently, meetings of Socialists and Communists. In 1921 the Brown Shirts officially became the SA (Sturmabteilung), in effect the private army of the Nazi party. As their commander, Röhm became one of the most powerful and feared men in Germany. Hitler considered him, and the Brown Shirts, a threat to his own power, and in June 1934, on “The Night of the Long Knives,” he had Röhm and several hundred other people assassinated by the SS.
*The Messerschmitt ME-262, developed in great secrecy, was first flown on 18 July 1942. It was powered by two Junkers Jumo turbojet engines, each producing about 2,000 pounds of thrust, which gave it a maximum level speed of approximately 540 mph. It was armed with four 30mm MK 108 cannon and had a range of approximately 650 miles. Adolf Galland, one of the Luftwaffe’s most successful fighter pilots, and a national hero, became Germany’s youngest general officer when he was promoted in 1942 at age thirty. Shot down flying an ME-262 in the last days of the war, he was captured by the English.