Then he communicated with four other old Húsares, plus Suboficial Mayor Enrico Rodríguez, who had apparently stationed themselves in places Stein could not see, although he tried very hard.
And finally, they painted each other’s faces with the axle grease and dust compound, put on potato sack shrouds, and adorned these with dead leafy vegetation. One of them had a Mauser army rifle with a telescopic sight, and the other a Thompson submachine gun like Stein’s. They wrapped them with burlap, looked around, and then wrapped Stein’s Thompson in burlap.
Twenty minutes after that, the man who had camouflaged Stein had a conversation over the telephone, which surprised Stein since he had not heard it ring, although he was no more than four feet from it. Then he remembered watching the man disconnect the bell.
“Ten minutes, give or take,” the old Húsar said conversationally.
The first vehicle to appear, five or six minutes later, was not the army truck Stein expected from the west but a glistening, if olive-drab, Mercedes-Benz convertible sedan. And it came down the road from the east.
It slowed almost to a stop at the intersection of the road to Casa Chica. Stein saw that Colonel Juan D. Perón was in the front passenger seat, but did not think to record this photographically for posterity until after the Mercedes had suddenly sped down the road and it was too late to do so.
Both of the old Húsares looked askance at Stein.
Ten minutes after that the Mercedes came back down the road, now leading an olive-drab 1940 Chevrolet sedan and two two-ton 1940 Ford trucks, also painted olive drab, and with canvas-covered stake bodies.
Stein was ready with the Leica when Colonel Perón got out of his car and exchanged salutes with two officers in field uniforms who got out of the Chevrolet. While to Stein the sound of the shutter clicking and then the film advancing sounded like the dropping of an anvil into a fifty-five-gallon metal drum, followed by a lengthy burst of machine-gun fire, none of the people on the road apparently heard it.
Troops began getting off the trucks. One of them—probably a sergeant, Stein decided—started shouting orders. Some of the troops began to trot toward the gate, where one of them cut the chain with an enormous bolt-cutter. The gate was pushed open, and the troops spread out facing the Casa Chica hill on both sides of the road.
The sergeant looked at the old house, shouted an order, and two soldiers armed with submachine guns trotted toward it.
Stein’s heart began thumping. The old Húsares rolled onto their backs and trained their weapons at the head of the staircase. More accurately, where stairs had once led to the second floor. When Stein and the others had come to the building, they had found that the stairs were just about rotted away. They had climbed onto the second floor from the outside, using one another as human ladders.
Stein could hear movement on the lower floor, and watched the stairwell opening for a head to pop up. None came.
“Nobody’s been in here in years,” a voice said in German.
A moment later, Stein rolled back onto his stomach and saw that the soldiers were trotting back to the trucks and to the sergeant. He tried and finally got a shot of that.
And then he saw that something else was being off-loaded from the trucks.
I know what that is. That’s a Maxim Maschinengewehr. Poppa showed me one in the Krieg museum in Kassel. He told me that he’d been an ammunition bearer for a Maxim in France.
My God, there’s two of them! And there’s the ammunition bearers!
Four soldiers trotted through the gate carrying a heavy water-cooled machine gun mounted on a sort of sled. The sled had handles like a stretcher. They were followed by two soldiers, each carrying two oblong olive-drab metal cans looking very much like those used by the U.S. Army.
There’s probably two hundred rounds in each can.
But they’re in a cloth belt, not metal-linked, like ours.
What the hell are they going to do with all that ammo?
And then another Maxim crew ran through the gate with another machine gun on its sled, followed by two more ammo bearers.
Who the hell do they think is in Casa Chica? The 40th Infantry Division?
No. If they knew where to look for us, then they’d know there’s no more than a dozen men. What they are going to do with this show of force is make the point that they’re irresistible, get us to surrender without a fight.
And aren’t they going to be surprised when they go in the house and find there’s nobody there at all.
Stein had trouble with the film-advance mechanism and looked at the Leica and saw why. He’d used all of the twenty-four frames in the film cartridge.
I will be damned! I was not paralyzed by fear!
When he had changed film—which required great care so that he did not get any dust-grease inside—and rolled back into place again, he saw something else had happened. The Maxims were set up and ready to fire, but they were now each manned by a two-man crew. The four men who had carried the weapons into place and the two ammo bearers for each were now trotting back to the trucks. As Stein watched—and took their picture—they took rifles from the trucks and formed loosely into ranks.
Ah-ha. The reserve. To be thrown into the breach when the 40th Infantry valiantly refuses to surrender.