"Yes, Sir," the AOD said.
Gisella Dyer, trailed by the MP sergeant, walked up.
"Good afternoon, Miss Dyer," Wilkins said to her in fluent German.
"Welcome to Egypt. We're going to go from here to a place where you'll be staying for a while. I'm afraid, for reasons of security, that you'll have to travel by ambulance.
It'll be a little warm in the back, but we don't have far to go."
Thirty minutes later, Dolan, Darmstadter, and Wilkins were in what had once been the pool house by the swimming pool of a wealthy Egyptian banker. The blue-tile-walled room now held an impressive array of communications equipment under the supervision of a gray-haired, distinguished-looking man who wore a ring, an amethyst surrounded by the legend "20 Years Service
AT&T."
Dolan seemed to be completely recovered from his "indigestion." The color was back in his face, and he was no longer tensed with pain.
Darmstadter was uncomfortable. There was no doubt in his mind that there was a hell of a lot more wrong with the old sailor than indigestion. What was his duty, to tell Wilkins--who had identified himself as Station Chief, Cairo--so that Wilkins could, by force if necessary, get him medical attention?
Or to obey Dolan's admonition to "keep in mind that the word was indigestion"?
Dolan himself answered the question.
When London acknowledged receipt of the encrypted message from Canidy and ordered Cairo to stand by while the message was decrypted, Dolan j handed the man with the AT&T ring a sheet of paper.
"Encrypt that, and send it, urgent, before they get off the air," he ordered.
When the communications officer had run the message through the encryption device and begun to transmit the encoded message, Dolan reclaimed the sheet of paper and handed it to Darmstadter.
"I
4
TO OSS LONDON STATION. EYES ONLY BRUCE AMD STEVENS.
SUFFERING SEVERE INTESTINAL DISTRESS AND FEVER. PROBABLY
RECURRENCE OF MALARIA. HAVE MA
DE DARMSTADTER AWARE OP ALL
REPEAT ALL OPERATIONAL DETAILS IN CASE HIS ASSUMPTION
COMMAND NECESSARY. DO LAS LIEUTENANT COMMANDER, USNR.
When Darmstadter looked at him, Dolan shrugged "What the hell, kid," the old sailor said.
"You didn't really want to go back to flying Gooney Birds, did you?"
[TWO]
There is a three-hour time difference between Cairo and London. The message transmitted from the pool house of the villa in Cairo at 1405 Cairo time was acknowledged by London at 1110 London time. The second acknowledgment (confirming satisfactory decryption in London) was sent to Cairo at 1124, London time, and the second acknowledgment of Dolan's message at 1141, London time.
Both encrypted messages had come out of the encryption/decryption device in Berkeley Square in the form of punched tape. It was necessary to feed the punched tape into another machine (a converted teletype machine), which then typed out a copy on paper. The messages were next entered in the Classified Documents Log, and finally they were put, separately, inside two cover sheets. The outer was the standard Top Secret cover sheet, and the inner one was stamped with both top secret and eyes only bruce and stevens.
It was by then 1158.
Rank hath its privileges, and the privilege the senior cryptographic officer of OSS London Station, twenty-six-year-old Captain Paul J. Harrison, Signal Corps, had claimed for himself was the day shift, 0800 to 1600. And just as soon as he could get the personnel section at SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force) off their ass to pin second lieutenants' bars on two of his sergeants, he intended to take no shift at all. But now, with his perfectly qualified sergeants barred from acting as cryptographic duty officer by a bullshit directive from David Bruce, he had the duty.
As was his custom with Eyes Onlys--the forty-page SOP for classified documents made no specific reference to who should physically carry messages-Capt. Harrison personally took both messages up from the cryptographic room in the subbasement to the Station Chief's office.