He had walked two blocks when his ears picked up the sound of a light aircraft. A very low-flying light aircraft. He looked up in the sky, trying-without success-to spot it.
And then it came from behind him, very low. It was a Piper Cub, wearing the insignia of the Argentine Army. It was no more than a hundred feet over the roofs of the buildings lining both sides of Avenida Cordoba.
I wonder what the hell that's about?
Chapter Twenty-Three
[ONE]
Office of the Naval Attach‚
The Embassy of the United States
The Bank of Boston Building
Avenida Bartolome Mitre
Buenos Aires, Argentina
0555 19 April 1943
The event that became known in history books as the Argentine Revolution of 1943 first came to the attention of Lieutenant Commander Frederico Delojo, USN, Naval Attach‚ (and, covertly, OSS representative) of the Embassy of the United States of America at 0452 19 April 1943.
He was later to remember the precise time and circumstances because he not only made a note of the time but also because he was wakened from a sound sleep in his apartment by a horrendous squealing of tortured tires, followed im-mediately by the scream of metal tearing asunder.
He jumped out of bed and went to the balcony of his apartment. As he sus-pected, there'd been one hell of an accident, involving a truck and an automo-bile. The automobile was a police vehicle. It was equipped with a large chrome-plated (and probably American) siren mounted on the roof. And it had collided with an Army truck, striking the truck as it moved through the inter-section.
Then Commander Delojo noticed something odd. There was not just one Army truck, but a number of them, a convoy, presumably under the command of the officer who now appeared, wearing a sword, and accompanied by four soldiers in German-style helmets and field gear. As the officer directed the re-moval of the injured driver of the police vehicle from his crushed vehicle, an-other police vehicle, with siren screaming, came racing down the street and very narrowly avoided colliding with the two vehicles now blocking the inter-section.
It was followed almost immediately by another police car, siren screaming, which could not stop in time and collided with what Delojo now thought of as Police Vehicle Two.
&n
bsp; The intersection was now effectively blocked by the truck and three police vehicles. An Army car, a 1941 Chevrolet four-door sedan, now appeared, and a lieutenant colonel hurried out of the backseat and, with some excitement and waving of his arms, began to order the clearing of the intersection.
Moments later, two sergeants appeared with twenty soldiers in field gear and directed their pushing of the disabled vehicles off the intersection.
As soon as that was accomplished, the convoy of army trucks began to move again. Without thinking about it. Commander Delojo began to count them. Twenty-six trucks passed through the intersection. Each of them was loaded with infantryman in German-style steel helmets sitting shoulder to shoulder and holding their rifles erect between their knees.
This was possibly a routine maneuver, Commander Delojo decided. But on the other hand, it was also possible that the troops were somehow connected with the coup d'‚tat that everybody expected.
It was worth calling the duty officer at the Embassy, Delojo decided. His telephone was dead.
At that point, Commander Delojo put on his uniform, checked to see that he had both his diplomatic passport and the carnet issued to diplomats by the Argentine Foreign Ministry, and left his apartment. Obviously it was his duty to notify the OSS as soon as possible that the long-expected coup d'‚tat was fi-nally taking place.
Nothing now on the street indicated what had roused him from his sound sleep but the first police car. The other police cars and the convoy were nowhere in sight.
A taxi came down the street. He flagged it and ordered the driver to take him to the United States Embassy.
En route to the Embassy the taxi was stopped twice by roadblocks, one manned by half a dozen members of the Corps of Mounted Police and the other by a platoon of soldiers of an Engineer Battalion. The Mounted Police passed him through immediately, but the two Engineer lieutenants held a whispered discussion that lasted ten minutes before deciding they should pass the Ameri-can diplomat.
While he was waiting for their discussion to conclude, Delojo reconsidered his original idea to urgently message the OSS in Washington that the coup d'‚tat was now taking place.
For one thing, he did not know for a fact that it was. He really should not message Washington unless he could transmit facts. And prudence suggested that just sitting on the nest waiting to see what breed of chick emerged from the egg was the proper course of action.
Yesterday, Vacuum-Mr. Milton Leibermann of the Federal Bureau of In-vestigation-put his head in the door and in an unexpected and frankly unwel-come spirit of interagency cooperation informed him that he had just learned that one of Frade's enlisted men, Sergeant David Ettinger, was missing from Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo and was very possibly in great danger, and that he thought Delojo should know about it.
Oracle would certainly want to know about that. Theoretically, Frade or his parachutist deputy would have relayed that information to Washington. But that was a dangerous presumption to make. Perhaps Frade didn't know about it, and Lieutenant Whatsisname-Pelosi-could not be relied upon to act in a respon-sible manner. He was, in fact, a demolitions man, not an intelligence officer.