There were telephone calls from the four monitor stations to Gestapo headquarters in a city to the northwest of Maletta. There the four lines of the four different stations were drawn on a map, and the spot at which those lines crossed was in the town of Maletta.
Before dawn two big black cars roared out of the city, toward Maletta itself. That town, now the crucial point of resistance to the American Army’s northward drive, would not have an illegal radio station for long, the Gestapo officers felt sure. It was important—so important that Colonel Klage himself led the locating party to wipe out that new station which was obviously trying to get vital information to the Americans.
At that time, Dick and Tony were asleep in the bell tower, after having eaten a light meal from their ration tins. But the first light of dawn woke them. Even if it had not, the roar of the two speeding cars stopping in front of the villa would have done so. They peered cautiously down out of the opening at the front of the tower.
Germans poured from the two big black cars, and one banged noisily on the door of the villa after showing his credentials to the sentries there. A man in a colonel’s uniform was looking over the villa and then at the houses across the street. Dick could not see his face, but he knew that the man was looking quite bewildered. He was standing at the exact spot shown on the map to be the location of the illegal transmitter—and yet it was German Army headquarters!
Two or three officers poured out of the front door of the villa, some of them still pulling on jackets. Dick and Tony saw that some were in their slippers, and they did not look at all smart. Instead they were perturbed, even though officers of rank a good deal higher than the colonel who faced them. A colonel in the Gestapo could still make an army general tremble.
Dick wished that he might have heard the conversation that was going on below: the angry statement of the colonel that an illegal transmitter had operated from that spot and the vigorous protestations of the others that such a thing was impossible. The colonel took a map from an aide and pointed out the exact spot of the radio station, proving that it was in German army headquarters in Maletta.
The army men pointed to houses across the street, and down the road to the right. They were saying, Dick knew, that the transmitter must be there, somewhere else in the neighborhood.
Then the search began. The Gestapo men went first to the small house directly across the street from the villa. They were there half an hour, and Dick and Tony knew how thoroughly they were tearing that home to pieces looking for the hidden radio.
“I hate to put these Italians through such an ordeal,” Dick whispered, “but we can’t help it.”
“In a while they will know the reason for it all,” Tony said, “and then they will not mind what they are going through now.”