After four minutes, Canidy said, “It’s seven-twenty. Try again.”
John Craig nodded and re-sent the code, and threw the switch back to RECEIVE.
Again they stared at a silent W/T.
“Maybe they’re sitting on the bottom,” Canidy offered. “Give it another shot in two hours, I guess.”
A second later, John Craig’s eyebrows went up as the receiver lit. He held the can tightly to his ear and began scribbling on the paper pad. Then he sent a short series of taps acknowledging receipt, and shut it down.
He pulled out his codebook, decrypted the message, then tore it from the pad.
As he handed it to Canidy, he said, “Does that sound good?”
* * *
31MAY 0715
To Jupiter
From Neptune
Expecting 24 hour delay of departure from Pearl Harbor.
Will send ETA when en route.
* * *
Canidy crumpled it into a ball and tossed it back to John Craig. He caught it and put it in his makeshift burn bag.
“Who knows?” Canidy said. “Maybe they just have to stay on station at Corsica another day. Doesn’t really affect us either way right now.”
John Craig then brought the radio back up, switched to SEND, and tapped out another short string of code. Almost immediately after throwing it to RECEIVE, he got a reply. Canidy saw that it was a brief one, because he didn’t bother writing anything before shutting down the W/T.
“Algiers?” Canidy said.
“Yeah. They have nothing for us now. I’ll keep checking back. And I will see what kind of traffic I can create with quote Tubes unquote so that when you bring the gear with the radio direction finder, we might have some signal to home in on.”
“The last contact with Mercury was when?”
“Last week. I think May twenty-sixth. The message that had the half-million-something troops and stuff arriving in Sicily.”
“We’re about to see how much of that is bullshit. This place should be crawling with Krauts if half of it is true. Speaking of whom . . .”
He paused, looked over at the machine guns lying by the mattresses, then walked over to them and took the Sten and put it within reach of John Craig.
“Okay,” he then said, “you should be fine until I get back. If for whatever reason I don’t come back, you’re going to have to be creative.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that because of your bad foot, you’ll have to figure out how to get the hell out of here and to the Casabianca.”
Canidy could see by the look on John Craig’s face that he had not considered that possibility.
He ran his fingers nervously through his mop of black hair as he nodded thoughtfully.
Then he softly said, “How the hell do you do . . . well, do this?” He gestured around the room and up and down. “I mean, torture, killing, living in filth, and with a corpse . . . and God knows what else. Why?”
Canidy grunted.