Dick and Tony felt that they had box seats at a good show that day. All morning and well into the afternoon the search went on. Houses and stores and buildings within several blocks were searched thoroughly, and finally the villa itself was gone over inch by inch, despite the protestations of the German army men that the Gestapo officer was insulting them by searching in their own headquarters for an illegal Italian radio. But the Gestapo colonel did not care how many people he insulted. He knew what would happen to him if he returned to his own headquarters without having found and destroyed that transmitter. And he knew how silly it would sound to his superior officer when he said that his locators had placed the radio in German army headquarters in Maletta.
He himself began to doubt the accuracy of his listening posts. But for four of them to go wrong at the same time—that was impossible! There was something radically wrong somewhere and the colonel didn’t like it one bit. His anger was apparent even to Tony and Dick as they watched him get into his big black car, slam the door, and pull away with tires screaming as the cars careened around the corner.
“The colonel is a bit miffed,” Tony said, with a happy smile.
“He’ll be more than miffed in a few days,” Dick said. “Before the week is out that guy’s going to be in a real predicament.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
A VISIT TO THE DAM
Although Dick and Tony had been entertained by the vain search of the Germans for their radio, they did not fail to note the increasing movement of troops and equipment into Maletta. Trucks came down both main roads into the town, and the Americans could see them both for some distance from their vantage point high in the bell tower. The road to the northeast, leading past the dam, they had already seen when they crossed it at night coming down from their cave in the hills. Now they could see where it climbed up to circle around the dam itself.
In the other direction they saw the northwest road, over which most of the supplies were now coming. It passed through a narrow gorge just outside of the little town, a pass made by the ridge of hills on the western edge of Maletta valley, and the single big hill at the head of the town, against which the villa was built. The northwest road had to climb this fairly steep hill to get through the pass.
“When we get a chance,” Dick said to Tony, “I’d like to have a look at that road up there. It looks as if it might go through a narrow pass that could easily be blown up. I’m not forgetting that Slade has a good deal of extra dynamite, and I’d like to put it to good use.”
“The dam comes first, though, doesn’t it?” Tony asked.