“I thought submarines were on the forbidden-to-use list too. I asked Nestor why they didn’t sink the Reine de la Mer in the middle of the Atlantic, and—”
“In the middle of the Atlantic,” Graham interrupted, “the Reine de la Mer was a peaceful merchant ship flying the flag of a neutral country. It’s not against international law for a neutral ship to carry anything it wants to—fuel, torpedoes, anything. It is only when it uses its cargo to the benefit of a belligerent power that it loses its neutral status.”
“I don’t quite follow that.”
“We routinely intercept radio messages between U-boats and the Oberkommando of the Kriegsmarine,” Graham explained. “Not without difficulty—a lot of difficulty, I was there—Donovan managed to convince the President that the Reine de la Mer has already begun to replenish German U-boats, and in so doing has lost its neutral protection.”
“The President says the Navy can send a submarine?”
“Yes. But don’t get your hopes up high. We are still forbidden to attack replenishment vessels until we have convincing proof they have supplied at least one submarine, which means they can’t be sunk on the high seas on the way here. And so far as sinking the Reine de la Mer in Samborombón Bay is concerned, the Navy says submarines can’t operate in Samborombón Bay. It’s too shallow.”
“Submarines operated in some pretty shallow waters off Guadalcanal,” Clete thought aloud. “Without any charts.”
“That’s what Admiral Leahy said,” Graham said.
“Who?”
“The President’s Chief of Staff,” Graham said. “I think what we should do now, Clete, is go take a look at the charts.”
“Where are we going to get charts?”
“According to the Navy, the Alfred Thomas has the most recent charts available.”
“She was supposed to arrive here today,” Clete said.
“She arrived at 0500 this morning,” Graham said.
Clete’s eyebrows rose, but he didn’t say anything.
“She has, under the Geneva Convention, seventy-two hours to refuel and leave Argentinean waters. If she leaves slowly, maybe she can take soundings of the Bay of Samborombón that will answer the question of whether we can bring a submarine in there or not. A submarine is on the way.”
“Jesus!”
“Is there any reason you can’t come with me to the Alfred Thomas?”
“Give me ten minutes to get dressed.”
His conversation with Colonel A. J. Graham, USMCR, so distracted First Lieutenant Cletus H. Frade, USMCR, that he completely forgot the visitor in his apartment. When he returned to his apartment and found the visitor—clad only in one of his shirts, mostly unbuttoned—sitting on his bed combing her hair, he there-upon became so distracted that he completely forgot Colonel Graham was in the foyer, expecting his momentary return. Consequently, Colonel Graham was forced to cool his heels for thirty-five minutes before Lieutenant Frade returned to the foyer, neatly dressed, though bearing on his neck what looked to Colonel Graham like the teeth marks of another human being. This is sometimes called a “love hickey.”
[TWO]
Dársena “B”
Puerto de Buenos Aires
1715 24 December 1942
Getting past the Armada Argentina and Policía Federal guards to Dársena “B”—Wharf “B”—where the USS Alfred Thomas, DD-107, was docked proved considerably easier than getting past the two U.S. Marines, in dress uniform, stationed on the wharf barring access to her gangplank.
“I’m sorry, Señores,” the Marine buck sergeant said, politely but firmly, in not bad Spanish, “but the vessel is not open to visitors.”
“It’s all right, son,” Graham said, producing an ID card. “I’m Colonel Graham, and this is Lieutenant Frade.”
“Sir, I’m sorry, but my orders are that no visitors are allowed aboard.”
“Your orders from whom, Sergeant?”
“From the officer of the deck, Sir,” the Marine said, nodding his head toward an ensign in dress whites standing by the gangway.
“Son, you think about this. Who would you rather have pissed at you? A wet-behind-the-ears ensign or a Marine colonel?”
“If the Colonel will tell the sergeant where he wishes to go aboard the vessel, Sir, the sergeant will be happy to escort him.”
“We’re here to see the Captain, Sergeant.”
“If the Colonel will follow me, Sir? The Captain is on the bridge, Sir.”
The Marine walked up the gangplank. An ensign in dress whites and a sailor stood by a table.
“Sir,” the Marine barked, “a colonel, United States Marine Corps, and a lieutenant, United States Marine Corps, request permission to come aboard, Sir.”
The Ensign looked baffled, and made no reply.
“You’re not considering withholding that permission, are you, Mister?” Graham asked.
By God, Clete thought admiringly, that sounded like a Marine colonel.
“No, Sir. Permission granted.”
Graham stepped onto the deck. The Ensign saluted him. Graham returned the salute, then faced aft and saluted the national colors.
I don’t think you’re supposed to do that in civilian clothing, Clete thought. But what the hell!
He stepped aboard, saluted the Ensign, and then, facing aft, the national colors. He was surprised at his emotional reaction.
“How may I help the Colonel, Sir?”
“We want to see the Captain,” Graham said.
“Sir, the Captain is on the bridge. I will escort you. You may return to your post, Sergeant.”
“Aye, aye, Sir.”
The Ensign led them to the bridge. A lieutenant commander, in a sleeveless white shirt and shorts, was seated in a nicely upholstered chair mounted on a pedestal, drinking a cup of coffee.
“Sir,” the Ensign said, “these officers wish to see you.”
“Good morning, Captain. I am Colonel A. F. Graham, USMC,” Graham said.
The Captain got out of his chair. “I’m Commander Jernigan,” the Captain said. “How may I help you, Sir?”
“Captain, as I understand your orders, you were, Direction of the President, ordered to proceed to Buenos Aires at maximum speed consistent with fuel exhaustion, there to hold yourself prepared to receive further orders, to be delivered by an individual who would identify himself by uttering a certain phrase.”
“The Colonel will understand that I cannot comment on a classified order.”
“Complete cooperation, Captain.”
The Captain smiled.
“That’s the phrase. I’m at your disposal, Colonel. What can the Alfred Thomas do for you?”
“I chose the phrase.” Graham smiled back. “I thought it would remove any possible misunderstanding.”
“The orders, Sir, would be hard to misunderstand. What you want, you get.”
“Captain, this is Lieutenant Cletus H. Frade, USMCR. He flew Buffaloes at Midway and Wildcats from Guadalcanal. He is down here on a mission of great importance, and our mission is to help him accomplish this. Do you understand?”
“Aye, aye, Sir.”
“Is there somewhere we can talk?”
“My cabin, Sir. But in this weather, may I suggest the chart room? My cabin is stifling.”
“The chart room is fine,” Graham said.
“Let me recap all this,” Graham said. “You can, Captain, as you exit the Río de la Plata estuary, take soundings of Samborombón Bay. But, in your professional judgment, these won’t be of much use to the skipper of the…What’s the name again?”
“The Devil Fish, Sir.”
“…of the submarine Devil Fish, because the bay is so enormous, and the Reine de la Mer can be expected to move every day or so. So we won’t know where she is.”
“Yes, Sir. I’m sorry, but that’s the way I see it. If I had a couple of weeks, I could take soundings of the whole damned bay and come up with some decent charts. But I’ll have no more than six or eight hours,
and if I start maneuvering all over the bay, it will be damned obvious what I’m doing.”
“Sir,” Clete asked, “can you find someplace out there, within, say, a fifty-mile circle of the last known sighting of the Reine de la Mer—someplace that the sub could more or less easily find, deep enough for her to lie on the bottom?”
“Frade, you probably know more about submarines than I do.”
“I know nothing about submarines, Captain, except that I’m glad I don’t have to serve on one.”
“What are you thinking, Clete?” Graham asked.
“If the Captain can find such a place, and give its location to the skipper of the submarine—”
“That won’t be a problem. I’ve made rendezvous at sea with the Devil Fish before,” the Captain interrupted.
“Then the sub could move close to the Reine de la Mer,” Clete went on, “lie on the bottom, and surface, periscope depth only, at a specified time. If we can establish radio contact with the sub—”
“And we don’t know that we can,” Graham interrupted.
“If we can get a decent transmitter and a decent receiver from Captain Jernigan, and get it off the ship and to my father’s estancia, Ettinger will be able to talk to the submarine. All he’ll need is the frequency and the schedule.”
“My orders are to give you whatever you ask for,” Captain Jernigan said. “But—and this is probably none of my business—how are you going to operate a transmitter without being caught at it? The minute we entered Samborombón Bay, la Armada Argentina came aboard from a pilot boat and sealed our radios. I’m sure they monitor the frequencies you’ll have to use, and they’ll start looking for the transmitter. What do they call it, ‘triangulation’?”
“We’ll keep moving the transmitter,” Clete said. “Ettinger will know how to deal with that. OK, for the sake of argument. We find someplace the sub can hide on the bottom. Captain Jernigan gives the sub the precise location, plus the frequencies, the times, and the codes, when he makes the rendezvous at sea. The sub comes into Samborombón Bay, finds the place it can hide, hides, and then, at the scheduled time, surfaces to periscope depth and tells us she’s arrived.
“The next night, I go find the Reine de la Mer, radio its position to Ettinger, who relays that position to the sub. The sub goes after the Reine de la Mer either submerged or on the surface.”
“Again, I don’t know a hell of a lot about submarines,” Captain Jernigan protested, “but I don’t think it’s as easy as they make it in the movies for a submarine to hit a ship at night. I think they need more to aim at than running lights.”
“It has to be at night,” Graham said. “During the day the Argentine Coast Guard patrols the Bay, and the Air Service of the Argentine Army routinely overflies it.”
“Ships don’t enter the Bay at night?” Captain Jernigan asked.
“The channel-marking buoys are not illuminated,” Graham said. “I don’t know what they do in an emergency.”
“Put a Coast Guardsman on the buoys with a lantern?” Jernigan asked facetiously.
“So I’ll get them to light it up, turn their floodlights on,” Clete said.
“How?”
“I’ll buzz the Reine de la Mer,” Clete said. “That’ll make them turn their lights on to look for me.”
“Or off,” Graham said softly. “How about it, Captain? If you were anchored out there and heard an airplane engine, what about the lights?”
“Off,” Captain Jernigan said without hesitation. “If they can’t see you they can’t bomb you.”
“Sir, what if you were attacked by an airplane, strafed by a light airplane?” Clete asked. “Even strafed ineffectually,” he added.
“What do you mean, ‘ineffectually’?” Graham asked.
“Say with a .30-caliber Browning. That’s about all I could get into the Beechcraft.”
“One plane, even a fighter plane?” Jernigan said. “I’d try to fight. The natural instinct would be to fight.”
“And to turn on good floodlights, if you had them, right?”
“Yes,” Jernigan agreed.
“OK,” Clete said.
“It’s occurred to you, no doubt,” Graham said, “that if they put their floodlights on you, they will get the Bofors on you seconds later?”
“And if they have their floodlights on, the submarine will have a better target than running lights.”
There was no response from anyone.
“Has anybody got a better idea?” Clete said.
“I’m not sure if it’s a better idea,” Graham said, “but it’s another idea. What about a boat? If there was a boat, I’m talking about a small boat, say, twenty-five feet, running around out there.”
“The last three guys who tried that disappeared,” Clete said. “No way. They would just blow it out of the water. I’ll find the ship with the airplane and get them to turn their lights on.”
There was silence for a moment, then Graham said, “OK. The first priority is to take the transmitter and the receiver ashore. I’ll go to the U.S. Embassy and have them bring them ashore under diplomatic immunity.”
“That should be no problem, Sir,” Commander Jernigan said. “I have some crates for the Embassy. I’ll just crate up some radios and send them ashore with the other diplomatic cargo.”
“Clete, what about putting Captain Jernigan’s communications officer together with Sergeant Ettinger?”
“That would depend on the communications officer,” Clete said without thinking, then added, “Sir, no disrespect intended. But does your communications officer know radios, or is he just filling the billet?”
“I’ve got a chief radioman who knows all there is to know about radios,” Captain Jernigan said.
“Then he’s the man, Sir, who should get together with Sergeant Ettinger,” Clete said.
“Then that’s our first order of business,” Graham said. “Getting the Chief in here, telling him what we need, and then getting him ashore to meet Ettinger.”
“I think our first order of business is to see my father,” Clete said.
Captain Jernigan’s eyebrows rose in question, but he didn’t put the question in words.
“Do you know where he is?” Graham asked.
“By now, he should be at his house, here in Buenos Aires.”
“OK. We’ll go face the lion in his den,” Graham said. “Captain, you have my authority to make your Chief privy to your orders. When I visit the Embassy, I’ll arrange for him to call on the Naval attaché.”
[THREE]
1728 Avenida Coronel Díaz
Buenos Aires
2005 24 December 1942
“I will listen to your plans, Colonel,” el Coronel Jorge Guillermo Frade said to Colonel A. F. Graham, USMCR, “and you have my word as an officer that they will not go further than this room. But I must tell you, Sir, that I do not share my son’s confidence that you are now telling him, or me, the truth.”
They were seated around a large table in the library. A silver coffee service had just been delivered, together with a walnut cigar humidor. Having dismissed the servants, el Coronel Frade ceremoniously served the coffee and offered the cigars.
Frade was seated at the head of the table, with Clete and Graham facing each other across it. Enrico had pulled a chair up from another table, and was sitting with the Remington in his lap, five feet behind el Coronel Frade. He had declined coffee, but he now held a large, thick, black cigar in his teeth.
“If I were in your position, mi Coronel, I would feel exactly the same way,” Graham said calmly, lighting a cigar.
Frade nodded. “Proceed, Colonel. I will listen.”
“A United States submarine, the Devil Fish, which has been on patrol off the coast of Africa, has been ordered, at best speed, to rendezvous with the destroyer Alfred Thomas, which is here in Buenos Aires. The rendezvous will take place at a point one hundred nautical miles off Punta del Este, Uruguay. Her estimated time of arrival…”
Frade held up his hand. Graham stopped.
“Two things, Colonel Graham.”
“Sir?”
“I hope you are providing exact details, not details altered sufficiently to be useless in case you don’t trust me to keep them within this room.”
“You have my word as an officer, mi Coronel, that I am giving you the facts exactly as I know them.”
“Then please proceed in Spanish, mi Coronel, so that Suboficial Mayor Rodríguez may hear what you have to say. He has a nose for—to use the delightful phrase I have learned from my son—bullshit.”
Graham smiled, and went on in Spanish. “The estimated time of arrival of the Devil Fish is 0900 29 December. A U.S. Navy fleet tanker has been ordered from Panama to rendezvous as quickly as possible with the Devil Fish on her course from the African coast. Once that rendezvous has been made, and there is some question when or if this can be accomplished, the submarine can proceed without consideration of fuel exhaustion—at full speed, in other words. So her estimated time of arrival may be as much as twenty-four hours sooner. The tanker is faster than the submarine; it will accompany her to Punta del Este and refuel her again there.”
“And if the rendezvous proves impossible?”
“Then we fall back to the 0900 29 December arrival time. The submarine can make that time with available fuel on board, and be refueled by the Alfred Thomas.”
“You are confident you can accomplish this without the Germans becoming aware of it?”
“So far as we know, mi Coronel, our communications are secure.”
“As far as you know,” Frade said. “Have you considered, mi Coronel, that vessels of the Armada Argentina will almost certainly accompany your destroyer, for several hundred miles at least, when she sails from Buenos Aires?”
“The Thomas will engage in certain maneuvers, mi Coronel, to ‘test her engines and steering apparatus,’ while she is passing through the Bay of Samborombón.”
“Taking soundings?”
“Yes. Following these maneuvers, she will then test her engines in a high-speed run. She is capable of making at least thirty-five knots. The fastest vessel in the Armada Argentina, the Corvette San Martin, has a top speed of twenty-four, for limited periods. It will be difficult for the Armada Argentina to accompany the Thomas very far.”
Honor Bound Page 56
