“We have a female passenger aboard,” Darmstadter said.
“She has to use the can.”
“I don’t know if there’s one available,” the AOD said.
“There has to be something,” Darmstadter said.
“Jesus Christ!” the AOD said in annoyance.
“Sorry as hell to inconvenience you,” Darmstadter flared.
The AOD glared at him.
“Who the hell do you think you are, Lieutenant?”
“I’m only a lieutenant,” Darmstadter said, “but I can ask Commander Dolan to come down here if you have to have that as an order.”
“Sergeant!” the AOD said, and one of the submachine-gun-armed MPs came over.
“There is a female aboard this aircraft who needs the facilities,” he said.
“Take her there and bring her back.”
Darmstadter climbed back into the aircraft.
“Would you like to…”
“I must have the ladies’ room,” Gisella Dyer said in precise, if uneasy, English.
“Come with me,” Darmstadter said.
Five minutes later, before Gisella had come out of the men’s room at the rear of the hangar, a side door opened and two men in U.S. Army civilian technician uniforms came in.
The AOD indicated Darmstadter with a nod of his head. One civilian walked up to him and held a leather folder in front of Darmstadter’s eyes.
They were OSS credentials, but Darmstadter had never seen any before, and it took him a moment to realize what they were.
The man’s name was Ernest J. Wilkins.
“You’re the flight Four Zero Five?” Wilkins asked.
“That’s right,” Darmstadter said.
“You want to tell me what this is all about? Before that, you want to show me your identification?”
“I think maybe you better go aboard and talk to Commander Dolan,” Darmstadter said.
“I’m just an airplane driver.”
“Why don’t you go aboard and ask Commander Dolan to join us?” Wilkins said sarcastically.
“He’s a little under the weather,” Darmstadter said.
“What’s wrong with him?”
“Indigestion,” Darmstadter said.
“Jesus H. Christ!” Wilkins said, but he went to the access hatch and climbed aboard the B-25.
There was a marked change in Wilkins’s attitude when he climbed back down from the airplane.
“Captain,” he said to the AOD.
“Get on the horn and get an ambulance over here. There is no medical emergency, we will not need a physician. I will require one of the MPs to come with us. This airplane is to be refueled and kept under guard in this hangar. I presume you have cautioned your men to keep their mouths shut?”
“Yes, Sir,” the AOD said.
Gisella Dyer, trailed by the MP sergeant, walked up.
“Good afternoon, Miss Dyer,” Wilkins said to her in fluent German.
“Welcome to Egypt. We’re going to go from here to a place where you’ll be staying for a while. I’m afraid, for reasons of security, that you’ll have to travel by ambulance.
It’ll be a little warm in the back, but we don’t have far to go.”
Thirty minutes later, Dolan, Darmstadter, and Wilkins were in what had once been the pool house by the swimming pool of a wealthy Egyptian banker. The blue-tile-walled room now held an impressive array of communications equipment under the supervision of a gray-haired, distinguished-looking man who wore a ring, an amethyst surrounded by the legend “20 Years Service
AT&T.”
Dolan seemed to be completely recovered from his “indigestion.” The color was back in his face, and he was no longer tensed with pain.
Darmstadter was uncomfortable. There was no doubt in his mind that there was a hell of a lot more wrong with the old sailor than indigestion. What was his duty, to tell Wilkins–who had identified himself as Station Chief, Cairo–so that Wilkins could, by force if necessary, get him medical attention?
Or to obey Dolan’s admonition to “keep in mind that the word was indigestion”?
Dolan himself answered the question.
When London acknowledged receipt of the encrypted message from Canidy and ordered Cairo to stand by while the message was decrypted, Dolan j handed the man with the AT&T ring a sheet of paper.
“Encrypt that, and send it, urgent, before they get off the air,” he ordered.
When the communications officer had run the message through the encryption device and begun to transmit the encoded message, Dolan reclaimed the sheet of paper and handed it to Darmstadter.