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“From there we go to Dakar, Senegal, a distance of fifteen hundred nautical miles. That’s five hours. There we have dinner, take on fuel, and head for Buenos Aires. It’s thirty-eight hundred nautical miles, give or take—”
“You’re going to fly nonstop Dakar–Buenos Aires?” von und zu Aschenburg asked incredulously.
“If we’re lucky. Five hours into the flight, I’ll get our position shooting the stars. That’ll tell me if we can make Buenos Aires with available fuel. Sometimes we encounter really bad headwinds. If that happens, we’ll go to either São Paulo or Belém, Brazil, and from there to Buenos Aires.”
“At an altitude of sixty-five hundred meters, in a pressurized cabin, making three hundred knots,” von und zu Aschenburg said in awe. “This is one hell of an airplane, Hansel!”
“Yeah, it is,” von Wachtstein said.
“Peter,” Boltitz said, “what are the chances of finding U-405?”
“What?” von Wachtstein asked, visibly confused.
“I learned something when I was in Norway, and later in Bremen,” Boltitz said. “You remember hearing that before U-234 sailed from Narvik for Japan, her captain permitted a dozen of her crew to go ashore? I mean, not to sail with her.”
“What’s that got to do with U-405?” von Wachtstein asked.
“Bear with me, please, Peter. I ran down one, an old shipmate, Kurt Schrann, who had been the U-405’s second engineer. I found him in Bremen. He told me there was a contingency plan. If, when U-234 reached the South Atlantic and they hadn’t been able to take on the fuel they needed to reach Japan, they were to make for a location on the Argentine coast. It was a point south of Río Gallegas, near the Chilean-Argentina border just north of the Magellan Strait.”
Von Wachtstein nodded. “And?”
“And there they were to put ashore their passengers and cargo, bury the cargo—which is not only crates of money and jewels, but that five hundred kilos of the nuclear whatever . . .”
“Five hundred and sixty kilos of uranium oxide,” von Wachtstein furnished.
“. . . that Clete was so concerned about. The U-234 would then be scuttled, and the crew and the passengers were supposed to make their way to someplace, San Carlo
s—”
“San Carlos de Bariloche?” von Wachtstein offered.
“Right. Where there are some SS people who would take care of them. When things calmed down, they could go back and dig up the stuff they buried. That uranium oxide is apparently worth a lot of money.”
“There are several large holes in that plan that I can see,” von Wachtstein said. “For one thing, the area south of Río Gallegas—that whole area is the opposite of hospitable. For hundreds of kilometers there’s nothing but ice and snow. Year-round. It’s really part of the Antarctic. The waters close to shore are uncharted, which means getting in close enough to off-load anything would be next to impossible. And even if you managed to unload the cargo and bury it, how could you go back and find it later? In a week, it would be buried under new snow and ice.”
“So you think I should forget this, Peter?”
“I probably will tell you just that, after you explain what this has to do with Willi von Dattenberg’s U-405.”
“Maybe they knew all about that ice and snow,” Boltitz said. “That there was a possibility the crew wouldn’t make it to San Carlos Whatever. What they did was put the coordinates of where the landing would take place in a sealed envelope and put that in U-405’s safe.”
“I can’t believe that Willi wouldn’t have said something,” von Wachtstein said. “After Cletus gave him sixty seconds to forget his duty as an honorable Kriegsmarine officer and start talking or Cletus would shoot him and bury him on the Pampas, Willi was a fountain of information.”
“All I thought, Peter, is that if we knew where Willi scuttled U-405, maybe we could send a diver down and get into his safe and get these coordinates. Since we don’t want the Soviets to get their hands on that uranium oxide, the effort seems justified.”
“Well, unless Willi burned the contents of his safe before he sailed into the Port Belgrano Navy Base at Punta Alta flying a black flag and surrendered—and now that I think about it, he almost certainly did . . .”
“He didn’t scuttle U-405?”
Von Wachtstein shook his head.
“She was tied up between two old Argentine battleships, the Rivadavia and the Moreno, at Punta Alta, under the control of a vice admiral named Crater. He’s a pal of Cletus’s pal General Martín.”
“So we can get the coordinates?” Boltitz asked.
“Very possibly . . . if Willi didn’t burn them and if there is no civil war that has found Oberst Perón shot—as well as Cletus and Martín and Crater for good measure.”
Jesus! Cronley thought.
