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“Franz Josef sent,” he reported.
And then, almost immediately, he began to type again. It took him a little longer this time, but less than five seconds had passed before he tore the sheet of paper from the machine and handed it to Mitchell.
“Able Seven,” Mitchell read, using the Army phonetic for “A.” Then he said, “Dog Tare Tare Fox One Six Oboe Oboe.”
“Meaning what?” Wallace demanded impatiently.
“Sir, the protocol is coordinates first. So Able Seven is a place. Dog is D. Tare is T, and F is Fox, so DTTF, which means Date and Time To Follow. One Six is the time, 1600. Oboe is O, so OO, which means out.”
“Acknowledge receipt of the message,” Wallace ordered.
“Not necessary. When they sent OO, that meant they were off.”
“Rahil is really clever,” Mannberg said admiringly. “By asking for the dog’s name,
she ascertained that Cronley was here—it was very unlikely that anyone else would know the dog’s name—and if Cronley was here, it was very likely that I was, too.”
“And what if I didn’t remember the dog’s name?” Cronley asked.
“Then she would have given us one more opportunity to establish our bona fides. She would have posed another question, a difficult one, the answer to which would be known only to me. And if we didn’t send the correct response to that, we would have had to start from the beginning.”
“What’s this Able Seven?” Wallace said. “How far from here is it? Where’s the maps and the aerial photos?”
“I’ve set them up in the room downstairs, sir,” Dunwiddie said.
“Why not in here?”
“There’s not room for all of them in here, sir,” Dunwiddie said.
“Dumb question,” Wallace said. “Sorry, Tiny.”
[THREE]
Hangar Two
U.S. Air Force Base, Fritzlar, Hesse
American Zone of Occupation, Germany
1225 19 January 1946
“The room downstairs” occupied all of the floor immediately below the radio room/control tower. Dunwiddie had acquired somewhere what looked like a Ping-Pong table, and it was now covered with aerial photographs. Two large maps, one of them topographical, had been taped to the walls.
Wallace first found Able Seven on the topographical map, and then went to the table and started examining the aerial photographs of the site.
Cronley looked at one of the photos and immediately recognized the site. It was a snow-covered field near a thick stand of pine trees. A narrow road ran alongside it.
He then went to the map and, using two fingers as a compass, determined that it was about thirty miles from the Fritzlar Airbase in a straight line, maybe thirty-five miles distant if he flew down the border for most of the way, and then made a ninety-degree turn to the left. Site Able Seven was about a mile, maybe a mile and a half, inside Thuringia.
He sensed that Schröder was looking over his shoulder, and turned and asked, “What do you think?”
“I think I’d like to know what the winds are going to be,” Schröder replied. “If they’re coming from the North, it means we could make a straight-in approach from our side of the border . . .”
“And if they’re from the South, we’ll have to fly another couple of miles into Thuringia,” Cronley finished for him.
“Precisely.”
“If the winds are from East or West, no problem.”
